Friday, February 17, 2006

The Ice Cold Kitchen Evolution

Here are pictures, in chronological order, of the renovation of my kitchen. All parts are from IKEA in Melbourne.


The kitchen before we started. Notice the annoying breakfast-bar thing that halves the size of the whole room.


Breakfast bar knocked out, cabinets being removed.


Cabinets fully removed and plumber fixing the hot water system (which we broke in trying to move ourselves!)


New tiles, one IKEA cabinet built and positioned. Notice the forty-year-old galvanised iron pipe in the wall.


Cabinets being assembled, pipe now cut short.


The shit that fell out of that forty-year-old pipe when we cut it off!


More cabinets assembled, now standing on legs and fixed to the wall.


All cabinets now fixed to wall. The cool metal things you see in the middle of the picture are actually rotating baskets - they pull out and you can store heaps of stuff in them.


New wall cabinets! My world record time in assembling one of these cabinets - 9 minutes.


Cool laminex benchtops!


New carpets! Sink and hotplates! Extra cabinet at front left!


New tiles! It's nearly done!

And finally, the completed kitchen and living room. Drum roll please.



Total cost (including plumbers' fees, sinks, hotplates and all the other stuff that didn't come from IKEA): ~$6000. Not bad considering the next door neighbours spent over $15,000 for a kitchen not bigger nor better!

Total time taken: 22 days (but we had about 4 days off in the process).

Total impressiveness: 5000 points plus the new ability to make girls 'drop trou' on entry.

Awesome!

JET Programme Part 1 - Interview

Went today to the Japanese embassy for the JET interview. Got up nice and early (9:30am (hehe)), donned my shirt, tie, nice pants and nice shoes and off I went expecting to be grilled and questioned for ages. How wrong I was!!

After waiting in the foyer for 5 minutes, I am called in to see the panel. Entered a nice room with plush leather couches and marble coffee tables. Four people are in the room, one the First Secretary of Cultural Affairs (the only Japanese person in the room), one ex-JET, one of the JET coordinators, and some other guy who for whatever reason, I can't remember very well! I think he said his name was Jasper Jasperiton or something equally bizarre. That's why I can't remember it!

So I sat down and they started asking me questions in turn. They were pretty easy actually and I was feeling OK about everything. Questions like "Why are you interested in the JET program?" were very simple to answer. Some of the later questions were a bit tricky though - "How would you characterise the Australian identity in Japan?" or "How would you deal with a situation where you are not being informed of important school events because you are not Japanese?" I answered with suitably 'Australian' answers and I felt like I did ok.

One of the questions towards the end was "Why did you choose Chiba city as your first preference?" I answered truthfully - that I have a friend who lives in Tokyo, but moreover, I have already spent over a year living in the Kansai region of Japan, and am interested in the Kantou region for a change! The First Secretary then replies: "Actuarry, you made a good choice - my home shitty (city) is Chiba shitty!" Perfect.

In the end, the whole thing only lasted about 10-15 minutes! I was out of there lickety split. Now I just have to wait till April for them to tell me whether I'm in or out. I feel pretty good and I meet all the qualifications and more - if they don't take me, they're crazy!!

Saturday, February 11, 2006

A New Beginning...?

Well, it's been a long time since I made any posts here. I guess things were getting a little crazy for a while! Let's try and summate what's been going down:

1. I moved out of the share-house I was living in (see this post to know why that was such a good thing) I moved into a 40 year old apartment a bit further north of the Canberra city centre. It looks a bit like this:



At least it DID look like that soon after I moved in! At the moment, my father is here renovating. It looks like this right now:



The stupid barricade that separates the two halves of the room in that photo above is now gone, and a new kitchen is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION. (I'll post pics when it's done.)

2. I ran out of money. In fact, I'm STILL out of money. After graduating and losing my student payments from Centrelink, and my job at the hotel on summer holidays, I had to take another job at an Italian cafe/restaurant in the city. It's not so bad - I get free lunch for one thing. But I don't get nearly enough shifts and it's still fucking waitering work. I spend most of my free time applying for full-time jobs on the internet but to no avail so far. However, I have the interview for the 2006 JET program in 5 days time, so hopefully that'll go alright. Last night I was offered a temporary job as a tradesman's assistant working on a massive highway extension in Canberra, and that a 40-50 hour week would net me $1500. Well, anyone who knows me knows how I feel about tradesmen, but it's hard to argue with $1500 a week. More news as it happens.

3. I had an interview for one of the branches of the Department of Defence. I had to go out-of-town for testing and then have a psychological test. I shouldn't really say anymore about that. But I'll tell you that according to the psychologist I am "manic" (i think that means excited and bursting with energy for stuff), I have a "sense of grandiosity", am a "stimulus-seeker", have an "inflated sense of self-esteem", and am not very 'tender-minded' or empathetic. Tell me something I don't know, bitches!

4. As of last week I am going out with a nice girl! It's still early days yet so I won't say too much. Again, more news as it comes to hand.

5. Haha! Most people I know have to go back to uni again next week. That's what they get for dilly-dallying and failing classes. Not like yours truly, who completed the entire degree at maximum speed without failing anything, and I didn't even borrow a book from the library the entire time! That's something to be proud of :)

6. My mother tripped over while at a tap-dancing class, shattering her elbow. Damn those slick shoes!

7. I joined two bands as a keyboard player. Well, it's really just a group of people having a jam at the moment. I've had two jam sessions, both were pretty fun. But I think i might've underestimated the amount of practice and dedication that are required. Actually, that might be bullshit. The annoying thing is that not many other people can just play things by sound. They are very focused on handwriting (sigh!) these scores of music with ridiculous chords and strange rhythms. I just want to do it by the sound, man! I mean, i know what an A-flat-minor-9th chord is, but it feels like having it written down and then being expected to make the most of it in someone else's style seems counter-intuitive. Who knows. I think I should just concentrate on making my own.

Hmm, I can't think of anything else... At the moment my house is a total pigsty because of the renovations. It'll be fantastic when it's done but until then it's a bit hard to call up the usual 20 hot chicks for the weekly naked fiesta party held on my balcony. That's right, you heard me correctly - i said 'balcony'.

So, now that my life has progressed from uni-student, to 'summer-holidays party-animal' to 'get-down-to-business man', I feel like I might have some more interesting things to write about - the crazy stuff that happens and my thoughts about it. Perhaps not for anyone but myself to read, but at least it provides an outlet for the large number of things that swim in my head all day. Hmm, maybe that's what the psychologist was on about...

Anyway, back to assembling IKEA cabinets for now... I'll sign out by posting some random pictures.

Scarlett Johansson AND Keira Knightley naked. Does it get any better?


3D porn! Can you see it?


A freakin' laser


Me discovering that my tongue isn't quite long enough to reach the fat belly dancer. Taken yesterday at the Canberra Multicultural Festival.


Look at this! The sun was fucking RED! And the air smelt like bushfires:


See you soon!