Cyclone season ahoy!

I may as well stick this here too rather than keeping it on my hard drive - I know how that turns out from my experiences over the last month! When I took the kids to school this morning and came back through the security gate the Cyclone Watch board was up for the first time this cyclone season so it's definitely time for me to start thinking about what to do.

Since this will be my first full cyclone season in Darwin I have had a bit of time to think about it. I also need to think about the fact that for most of December there will be no-one in my house since I am staying with the in-laws for about 3.5 weeks. So far, this is what I've come up with to do before I go away in early December:

1. Bring outdoor furniture inside


2. Put bikes in shed


3. Bins inside shed or filled with water


4. All windows and blinds closed


5. All external doors closed and locked


6. All internal doors closed


7. Fridge and freezer empty


8. All electrical appliances switched off and unplugged,
   including dishwasher
   excluding telephone

Now I have to remember to add to this list as more ideas occur to me.

Swimming lessons, aka the military don't love children

One of the more interesting parts of moving to Darwin was that our house is on a Defence base. There aren't too many Australian Defence bases that have housing and this is very likely to be the last time we get to live on a base, but it's a kind of cool place. The housing itself is pretty shoddy, despite our actual house having won design awards about 15 years ago, but the community on base is good and the fact that we know we will not have to worry about someone breaking into our house is great.

For the first month or so after we moved here, my oldest son's head was pretty much on a swivel looking out for people wearing camouflage, people carrying guns, APCs driving down the road - you name it, he loved it. Then it all became a bit passe as he gradually realised that he was seeing stuff like this pretty much every day. What he hasn't experienced before today was swimming lessons run by an actual Navy PTI (physical training instructor). The usual swimming teacher is on holidays this week and this guy is filling in for her. He assured me he is AustSwim qualified but it was very obvious that even though he is qualified, he's very underexperienced.

So although Olly was great and he does know his stuff, lessons for the toddlers this week was a bit hit and miss because he didn't quite know what he wanted to achieve or how to get them to listen. Lessons for the bigger boys were more constructive, although the slight case of hero-worship my boys had for him probably meant they weren't listening as well as they should either.

I'm convinced this house is cursed

So, the desktop computer went belly-up and I needed to reinstall Windows XP on it to make it work again. This of course means that all the other programs that used to be installed no longer have registry files associated with them so they all need to be reinstalled. I decided that was all too hard and it could wait a while, so I didn't bother setting up much more than FireFox on the desktop, thinking I could use my laptop which was all set up the way I liked it.

Perfect plan, right? Keep everything in the one place, don't have to worry about forgetting passwords or usernames.......Perfect plan right up until a Vista update coincides with the fingerprint security device magically disconnecting itself, requiring me to suddenly remember a password again (luckily I did, DH doesn't so he can't use the laptop anymore) and then last night the power supply in the laptop stopped working. Unlike all the other power supplies in the house that have stopped working (TV, DVR, desktop computer) there is an identifiable reason for the laptop to stop working and it is a glass of water which was "by accident!" knocked over next to the laptop - by the oldest child, who is nearly 10 years old.

So this morning was spent firstly on the phone to HP support, then trying to find their registered repairer after being given the wrong street address. This afternoon was spent on the desktop computer, reinstalling certain programs that are necessary and finding that I've completely forgotten my email password.

Luckily today is Friday which means wine o'clock comes earlier. Unluckily the kids want to go trick-or-treating so wine o'clock will have to be postponed until after we've finished that.

If anything else powered by electrickery stops working I may go completely insane. And if the laptop takes longer than a week to repair I will be furious.

Fish-killer

A few weeks back we went to a BBQ at a friend's house, where they had recently had fish that all died. Somehow I was rail-roaded into taking their fish tank and stuff home while their neighbour gave us 4 goldfish from their apparently abundant supply. It took 4 days for the first one to die, followed by the second last Friday and the third on Saturday. I don't know for sure what's killing them but it could be me. It could also be the fact that our house is just too damn hot for keeping even tropical fish alive, there is a thermometer inside the tank which sits consistently up around the top of the red zone (which I believe is the ideal temperature for this type of fish) and sometimes goes over the top, despite me trying to keep the house no warmer than around 29C. Or it could just be luck - I also can't keep plants alive. Maybe I'm lucky the kids have become somewhat self-sufficient and can feed themselves at need.

The jury is still out

Back when we first moved away from Sydney, my husband suggested I do "something" constructive with my time while we are living in Darwin for 2 years. He told me he didn't care much what I did as long as I wasn't bored and lonely while he was at sea. I kind of poked around a little and decided to enrol in some university studies externally, which is why this blog started, as a requirement of the first unit I was studying.

In order to keep both myself and my husband happy this meant that we needed another computer. We only had 3 ;) One of them is a very old laptop with about 40mb of internal memory, one of them is a fairly old desktop that won't run certain games that my husband likes to play (such as Star Wars: Empire at War), and one of them is the desktop that does play the games and was connected to the Internet. It sounds like a lot, but it's not enough - the old laptop crashed, the old desktop is used by three of the four children, and the other desktop didn't work as a time share arrangement. So we got a new laptop, one the kids aren't allowed to touch, has wireless internet (yay!) and can be used when we're travelling.

Which is a good thing, as it turns out. Two nights ago I turned the desktop computer off before I went to bed, wondering what was causing it to be so slow at opening up FireFox and if there was a virus or something I needed to scan for again. Yesterday morning I turned it on and found out what was wrong - BSOD! Apparently something went wrong with creating or saving a registry entry and now the computer needs to be fixed. Given that I am in the middle of a study period for uni that is delivered completely online and my husband is in the middle of a sea-going period that requires him to spend most of his time, funnily enough, at sea, the new laptop is a real life saver. If my desktop computer had crashed and we had no other computer capable of connecting to the internet I would have to withdraw from the uni unit which would be both a) bad for my study record and b) bad for the hip pocket as I think we've passed the census date for the study period so I wouldn't be able to withdraw without paying for the unit. It's also really lucky that part of the last unit taught me the value of Delicious so I have all my bookmarks.

So now I get to find out how good I really am at following instructions. I Googled the failure notice my BSOD gave me and found out what it is plus a way of fixing it. This fix is slightly risky in that I may lose all the data on that computer but hey, it probably needed a new install anyway. And at least I still have my laptop. The bad thing is that the current work I was doing for the study period was on the desktop which means I can't access it before it is due to be submitted on Monday, so I'm hoping to be granted the extension I requested.

And let that be a lesson to me - always keep your work on a second computer, online server or flash drive, just in case of Microsoft living up to it's reputation.