Bunny's New Playpen

Bunny (my pet rabbit), has a physical attachment to all of Pete's architectural models. He loves to nibble off their corners, remove columns and walls so that he could turn it into his new cubby house. So when it was time to find Bunny and to put him back to his sleeping hutch for the night, we weren't all that surprised to find him enjoying himself in this....

Somehow he managed to find a nice cosy spot on the supposed 2nd level of the model.. he looked so cute hiding in there I couldn't resist not taking out my camera phone to snap up some quick shots.

This is Pete's model from his design of a 5 lvl apartment. (although with some parts chewed off).

*sigh.. Bunny looks so chubby now.

Probably should try and put him on a diet. His favorite past-time used to be crawling underneath our couch and nibbling and scratching the pieces of corrugated cardboard we put there for him. He used to be able to stay there for hours, until we lured him out with a carrot. Now he struggles to get his bum through the gap between the couch and the floor.

The model was from one of Pete's ex-projects (he has learned the hard way to keep things out of Bunny's reach). At the current rate of destruction, it would probably take Bunny another week or so to turn it into something which will no longer resemble a model.

That Dreaded Letter

Finally got the letter I've been dreading about for a year now.

What dreaded letter you ask ?! ....... No.. its not a letter saying I've been fired. People don't do that over here. Its Australia. We can go sue their butts off if they do something like that. And I would probably get enough compensation to ensure I wont ever need to find a job again.

Its a letter from my real estate agent. Advising us that they will come and do their routine inspection this Tuesday. Tomorrow.

Its Tomorrow !!!

Well, we actually got the letter three days ago. (We aren't really that diligent when it comes to checking our mailbox).

No prizes for guessing what I would be doing tonight. The state of the apartment, to put it in better words, is a Pigsty. Well its not dirty. It just isn't very tidy.

I'll need to vacuum the apartment, wash bathroom, mop kitchen and generally just tidy and re-organise everything. Everything is just everwhere at the moment. Thinking about it gives me a headache.

I'm lucky that I actually went to wash the toilet last week. Atleast thats one thing I don't have to clean by tomorrow afternoon.

And Bunny ? (see the cute white blob on my flickr) .. I'm pretty sure that although my rental lease agreement specified no dogs and cats, I doubt my Agent would be very happy to find a rabbit sharing the premises.

Now to find a temporary home for Bunny ... any volunteers ?!

Move In - Complete

I have finally moved everything from my old placed into my new place !

Believe me. It was no easy feat. The white goods turned out to be the nightmare of the whole ordeal. It took us about 30 minutes to get the fridge from the ground floor to the apartment (on the 3rd floor - no lift). And from the bottom floor of our split level apartment to the kitchen. The staircase was so narrow that my housemate's bf had to take out his power tool and undo the screws of the rail and take the whole staircase hand rail off. But still the guys, managed to take out a piece of the wall.

Oh well... but its nothing that a little bit of putty wont be able to fix. I just hope the Agent wont notice it on the next inspection.

Last night, I came out of my shower and counted 6 new bruises on my arms and legs. When I showed Pete, he said he would have to bubble-wrap me and put a fragile sticker on my forehead. Sigh. A simple... "Ok Dear.. I do all the moving and carrying of heavy stuff from now on", was all I was looking for.

We've also finished cleaning up our old place. I so regret having the cake\shaving cream fight we had during my housemate's birthday party. We gave up on the carpet, so will be getting professional carpet cleaners in to steam clean it.

I swear, that the next time we move, I will get removalists !!

Bandwidth War

Yeah !!! It's the 1st of the month ! ...... YES ! Finally ! No more 56k modem speed !!

My Internet connection at home had been slowed to 56k for the past 10 days now.

10 agonising days. No Warcraft for 10 days already...

A couple of days ago, I deliberately stayed back to checked up on what my housemates were downloading on to their PCs that managed to hog up all the bandwidth allocation by mid-month.

I found out that one had BitTorrent running, downloading all the current episodes of this Taiwanese talk show.

The other had LimeWire, and was downloading what looked like Japanese porno clips.

All of this downloading was still happening when our Internet had been capped to 56k.

What should I say to make them a bit more considerate of the other person in the household that uses and pays for the Internet connection ?

Better still, how do you approach someone and tell them to stop downloading porno ?!

In my last job, as a Systems Administrator, I found out that this guy in Finance was downloading porn, but I wasn't sure how to deal with it. It took a lot of determination to not go and report it to his manager or my manager, as I knew he would definitely lose his job. In the end, I went and had a short chat to him and mention the name of the website that showed up on my ISA logs and he knew he was caught. I told him, if it never turned up in my logs again, I wouldn't do anything about it. Sure enough, the downloading stopped and he apologised to me for his actions and the whole affair was never mentioned again.

But this is a entirely different matter. It is happening in my own home, not my workplace. I don't have jurisdiction over him. And there is no 'manager' there to fire his butt.

This whole bandwidth issue is really starting to piss me off. Short of actually going to both of my housemates' rooms and disconnecting their cables, is there anything else I can do ?

Is there any tools out there that I can download to limit the amount of bandwidth a program is sucking ?!

Anyone know some discreet ones.. Or something I can put on their PCs that they wont notice ?

Any ideas ?!

Housemates...

One of my housemates has gone back to Taiwan for a 3 week holiday. Which leaves her other half (my two housemates are a couple) free to do whatever he wants. Which isn't too bad. But she has always been the clean, neat (painstakingly neat) housemate. I can only image what the state of the apartment is going to be like in another week. Already, I have my washing (from the dryer - so it is clean) hogging up one side of the sofa bed in the living room. But my other housemate isn't alot better.. he has his laundry hogging up the other side of the sofa.

My other housemate has quite an impressive fighting fish collection. About two month ago he successfully bred a new batch of baby fighting fish. We currently have about 170 baby fighting fishes. Actually they aren't really 'baby' anymore. My housemate has been frantically trying to find enough containers to house all his precious fish separately. (Before they all fight each other to the DEATH !).

He already has one side of the living room dedicated to his fishes.

So far he has settled for the 375ml spring water bottles from Woolworths. So everyday he has been drinking natural spring water from Woolworths (probably the cheapest you can find). Wash and clean the bottles. Then cutting the top off them so that he can put one fighting fish into it. Thus separating that fish from the rest of the gang in the tank.

Its a painstaking task.

Feeding them is still going to be relatively easy.

I wonder how he is going to clean all the separate bottles and containers later on...