New year, New house

At last were in the new house. Most of the boxes are unpacked, a few of the pictures are hung up, and its starting to look like a home. Thanks heaps to Lynette who helped clean both houses - no mean feat.
Shelley spent the first week as she does in every new house - ripping out all the overgrown trees and plants. When we first viewed the place it had a beaut simple garden. We've now found out that the previous owners hated gardening and simply stick a few plants into the ground for the open home. They havent't watered the garden since, and so most of the plants are now dead. What had survived was an overgrown Wisteria plant, which had taken over most of the back deck and BBQ area and was threatening to destroy the spouting.

Shelley also got in touch with her creative side, ripping out the old pond and giving it a face lift, complete with waterfall. My job is to source a suitable pump - which is not as simple as I thought. I decided to go solar - for two reasons, but mainly beacuse of the cost involved in getting a power socket fitted outside near the pond. There was one there previously, but the previous owners have ripped all that up and just left the wires sticking out of the ground - too short to do any thing with.
It seems that most of the low voltage water pumps available on the market at this time are 12V AC, what I need is some 12V DC pumps to work with the solar panel. The only thing I can source is one by a company called OASE, there are a couple of suppliers, mostly in SA or WA - they must have better rebates for Solar than in VIC. (http://www.creativepumps.com.au/Pumps/Oase/Solar%20pump/Solar_pump.htm).

Optus let us down big time - All my pre-planning fell through with trying to get the phone and internet set up in advance. To cut a long story short, our internet is now with Telstra, and we are using SKYPE for our phone calls. Skype has made a few improvements since we last used it on Shelley's iMac. The audio quality with the built in mic used to be shit, but now it's really good. 2 cents a minute to call NZ is pretty goo as well. Skype still crashes Shelley's mac when it goes to sleep though. I think this might be related to bonjour not working properly if the airport doesn't connect quick enough when it wakes. We get the same thing with iChat crashing, but that seems to be stable since I disabled bonjour. Perhaps it will be ok with a wired connection.

On the plus side, we've got to meet most of the neibours already. Everyone seems really nice and we've already had one offer for babysitting. (Fantastic!!) At the end of the court is a nice common with a play ground, and not far (within walking distance) are some wetlands - fun for Eli to explore.