Happy New Year

So I’m a few hours early (it’s only just coming up to 7 pm here), but Happy New Year to everyone anyway.

I’ve spent a pretty constructive day today – the morning was spent in town, carrying out a few errands:first to the post office to post Stiff to Sherlockfan in Wellington (finally), then to the bank to give a donation for the tsunami fund (like many people, we’ve been wanting to do something to help out, but haven’t got a lot of money to spare at the moment – however, last night I hit on a solution: we’ve got a bowl in the bedroom which we drop “shrapnel” into – those little coins you always end up with that weigh down your pockets but aren’t worth enough to buy anything with. So it all goes into the bowl, and every so often we empty it out and take it in to the bank to change into “real” money. It always seems like bonus money, so we tend to use it to buy ourselves some sort of treat. So I suggested to MrPloppy that as the bowl was filling up a bit, we should donate whatever was in it to the tsunami fund as our little contribution. Much to my surprise, when we counted it there was over $50 in there! Amazing how small change mounts up! So our contribution wasn’t as small as we thought it might be – lets just hope it can do some good in one of the disaster areas). Having done our good deed for the day, we went to Whitcoulls to spend some serious money. Yes, I know I’ve been going on about how poor we are, but just about everyone we know seems to have given us either cash or vouchers for Christmas, and we’re both great beleivers that money you get as a present like that shouldn’t be used for practical stuff like paying bills, it should be for something fun. And it just happened that Whitcoulls (where most of the vouchers were from) had a 20% off sale on DVDs, so we’ve now significantly added to our DVD collection! We bought:

• The Star Wars box set (episodes IV, V, and VI)
• Bright Young Things
• Reservoir Dogs
• The Princess Bride
• Men in Black
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Pretty eclectic bunch of films 🙂

This afternoon was mostly spent rearranging furniture and computers – we’ve moved the computers into the spare room, which is a bit bigger than the study, so actually has room for two full-size computer desks and for us both to work in there without getting in each others’ way. So that will now be the study, and what was the study will be the spare room (which will probably end up with a computer in it too, because MrPloppy is planning on using our really old computer for playing round with Linux and things). The change-over also meant having to run an extension cable for the phone down the length of the hallway, so we spent quite a while this afternoon tacking it up along the ceiling out of the way. I think we did a pretty good job – you hardly even notice it’s there.

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The very professional looking setup of computer #1 (don’t worry, it won’t stay this tidy for long – I predict within days it will be covered in disks, computer parts, bits of paper with useful information on them, and the other detritis of any computer desk in the universe)

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The not-so-professional setup of computer #2, which will have to wait until we can afford it to get to live on a real desk with a decent chair – in the meantime, it gets our old dining table (yes, we did once have a dining room that suited a bright pink table!). That’s Ming sitting at the computer, in case you were wondering.

No big party plans for tonight – we’ll probably just watch one of our new DVDs and maybe have a quiet glass of wine or two. New Years has always been more of a family thing for me, and MrPloppy hates pubs at the best of times, so we’ll be a lot happier staying at home with a good movie!

Currently reading: Dreaming Down Under edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb