God I Love A Long Weekend

Woohoo its Australia Day! Ahh I love a long weekend! Not that I've done anything in particular. James is at work though (he works in the mining industry on a 2 week fly in, fly out roster) and he'll get double time for working today. Yay! Two things I've done that I'm excited about are making a sort of curtain, and buying a new digital camera.

The sort of curtain is for the sidelight next to our front door, which is currently a plain piece of glass. My mother in law is a wonderful leadlight creator, but she has been flat out with many things since we moved in and we don't want to add stress to her by asking her to make a sidelight for us - she knows we want one, but we're leaving it to "whenever you have time". My nearest neighbours are 500 metres down the road, so at night time if they got their binoculars out, they could spy on us a tiny bit, but we don't generally care (the neighbours are my cousin and his fiancee who I'm sure have better things to do than watch us lol). But its a warmer day here today (max 31), and I wanted to make the house as cool as possible by doing things like putting the ceiling fans on, keeping doors shut, only opening the blinds a tiny bit etc. It helps that our house has extra insulation in the walls and ceiling! But still, the heat was coming through this exposed sidelight, so I cut up some material, put some 3M temporary hooks on the wall/door frame, sewed some buttons with a little elastic hoop to both sides of the materials, and presto - a sort of curtain!

I will be excitedly checking the mail every day this week and will hopefully find my new digital camera. Its a Canon Powershot A2000 IS and I got it for $265 on ebay with a 2gb memory card (saving about $35). I've been without a digital camera for a few months now after our last one suddenly died after 5 faithful years of service. I just can't wait to get this new one! I've missed having a camera, and the new one is a beauty that will last us for years.

As part of Better Deal month at Simple Savings, I've tried shopping around for a good insurance package over the net this weekend. We currently require home & contents, home & landlords, and car insurance for at least 2 vehicles (we have 4 - 2 are our daily drives, and the other 2 are sentimental cars which we don't register all the time - I don't think the latter are insured at the moment, but I'm thinking perhaps they should be - need to discuss with James). Anyway, I'm a 23 year old who has never been booked for anything except a few speeding tickets, have never been in a car accident, or made claims on any vehicles, so therefore have a nice clean record. I've never ever missed any insurance payments. Yet, through their online "get a quote" facility, I'm yet to find an insurer who will actually insure me. I currently have insurance for my V8 (another hurdle the insurers don't like...) through CGU who I got though a local broker. Me thinks I might have to go back to the broker to try and see what deal I can get from them by combining all our insurances. I thought perhaps the online thingos don't like me trying to get insurance for my V8, so I tried it again from scratch for our Navara, but they didn't like that either. Bloody insurance companies!

Also with Better Deal month, I've looked at www.uswitch.com.au to find a better electricity provider, and they've come up with Simply Energy. I'm a bit wary of moving to lessor known provider - I tend to think "if they're so good, how come more people don't know about them?". I dunno. I just don't want to be gypped. Speaking of electricity, I've started tracking my usage as of yesterday. Not sure how this is going to help considering I think we're pretty good with our usage, but I guess there's always room for improvement, and it'll be easier to know how much the bill will be before it comes in.

My father in law has recently started to make some homebrew, and I must say, he's getting some wonderful results! And after talking to Faye and reading some of her blog, I think I may just have to investigate more - I mean, homebrew champagne?! Wow! James can only drink beer such as Hahn Super Dry or Pure Blonde that has no additives or preservatives otherwise he gets sick - I wonder if I can make homebrew with the same stuff? I know in our tiny country town supermarket you can get the Coopers kits - time to do some investigating :) Then our bar really will be complete!!