The last section of the house in our renovation plan that has been demanding attention was the little corner under the verandah, next to the storage shed and where the rubbish bins live. As the lowest point on the property, the ground there has always had drainage issues and been damp from run off from the porch. Not particularly nice when you have to take the bins out to be collected after a night of rain. It's not an area of the house where we spend a lot of time so we've managed to ignore it up till now. Thankfully John refused to let us rest on our laurels and forced the team to regroup and roll up our collective sleeves to get stuck into fixing this problem.
Our main challenge with this mini project has always been finding a retaining wall block that looked reasonable and was easy for us to install. Numerous trips to the nearby landscaping place always ended with disappointment or uncomfortable compromises, at least until we found this little block. Simple to stack, looks the part and it didn't cost all that much either. With John's practiced method of smoothing bedding sand he and Alison had the start of a retaining wall up in no time.
Next came the paving of the area to allow us (well... me really) to take the mower and tools in and out of the storage area). We have become really familiar with these 400mm blocks by now and if I'd be quite happy if I never have to lay another one of these ever again.
All this took pretty much all of Saturday and we were stuffed by the end of it. I know I've definitely lost all my landscaping stamina in the extended break we took from manual labour. Things were looking a whole lot better at least, though we still had the steps and some tidying up to do.
How lucky are we that John and Sheena sacrificed their Sunday morning to help us finish things off. With the steps in, more mulch and a small trailer load of gravel we now have a properly tidied corner of the house that we'd be happy to show to visitors. There's even a new garden bed for us to plant where Alison has visions of a passion fruit vine, given that the one we had out the back has been ravaged by possums and never really got enough sun to begin with. Rather pleased with the results though some of the steps may need a bit of concrete later on to hold them in tightly. Hopefully our efforts will survive the first down pour we get.
The other project I had this weekend was to get my new computer setup finished. I've noticed that since I got the iPad I've been using my MacBook less and less, aside from firing up XCode every now and again to have a play. In fact, I've been using my old Toshiba a lot more, which had been relegated to Torrent duty, especially to do development work and play the odd PC game. I still needed my MacBook plugged in to sync the various iDevices around the house though, but it became pretty obvious that I was using both machines inefficiently.
Always one to try and simplify (and keen for an excuse to get a machine capable of running the recently released Starcraft 2), I decided to sell the two laptops to consolidate down to a single desktop. Portability shouldn't be as important anymore with the iPad and I know that I'll want something that's always on to serve media and download torrents. The newly revamped Mac Mini appeared to be the best choice. Now that it supports HDMI out of the box I've even been able to connect it up to the old Hitachi TV as a second monitor.
Not a bad rig really, though I've become so used to having more RAM with OSX (the machine comes with a default of 2GB installed) so I immediately placed an order for 8GB of RAM which should be arriving next week. Also picked up a 1TB Firewire 800 hard drive for a fantastic price to serve as the main media store, with my old 1TB as a secondary and the 500GB as a Time Machine drive. The internal 320GB drive is pretty slow so I'm eventually going to swap that out for a 64 or 128GB SSD to keep things running nice and smooth. All up that should serve as a pretty nice server to store content, cut some code (IntelliJ and XCode should run pretty nicely with 8GB of RAM I would hope) and play the odd game.
Of course this is even better now that we get Steam on OSX. Starcraft 2 is freaking fabulous so far and I can see myself sinking an unhealthy amount of time into it. Hopefully the machine should be grunty enough to run Diablo 3 when that comes out too. Oh, another great thing I love about this little baby is how quiet it is. I haven't heard the fan kick in once when playing games or watching YouTube. Power consumption is supposed to be brilliant too which is a great feature for a device that will be on all the time.
There was supposed to be another big purchase this week with the release of the iPhone 4 in Australia. Unfortunately I didn't attend the midnight launch this time and am now paying for that lack of commitment with a three week wait for the phone to come back into stock. I did however manage to get one month off my phone bill by signing up to the raincheck option at Optus so I guess it's not all that bad. At least I'll have my Mac Mini to keep me busy in the mean time.
That's about it from here. Alison and I will be off to Adelaide for a little holiday to see Kath and Andrew next week which we're super excited about. Can't wait to try all the food, see Frankie (the dog) and just have a chance to relax. Feel like we certainly need it.