Day 20 - Visiting the Kids

It's the middle of the school holidays, and the girls have elected to stay with their grandparents, just outside of Bacchus Marsh, so every weekend Hubby & I have been coming up to visit them and see if they want to come home - which they never do... I'm not taking that personally... Anyway, today being a Saturday, we hopped in the car and headed up to Bacchus (only about a 40min drive from Melbourne) for lunch. I was a really nice suprise to see Hubby's sister and family there too.

--- interruption - laptop battery is about to go flat & I don't have the charger with me ---

OK, so I'm back home and the laptop is happily plugged in and charging, so where was I... Oh yeah, heading to Bacchus...

We made a couple of stops on the way. First was at Urban Salvage - the place to go if you want wood for flooring, decking - the stuff you use wood for... In our case, for my parent's deck that hubby is helping design and once designed, will be helping build. So, of to choose some wood. As soon as I saw the sample of the wood that, unknown to me, would be recommended for their deck, I knew it would look fantastic for their deck! I took some pics with my iPhone, but with the lighting in there you will have to excuse the crap quality of the photos...

the untreated wood

the sample deck @ Urban Salvage

We then popped in to Officeworks and Rudi bought me a Boxee :) What's a Boxee you ask... well, I asked that too as I have never heard of them before. But they're really cool! A Boxee...

...is a cool looking, mostly cube-shaped "black box" that is kinda pretty much like an Apple TV only (a) a hell of a lot cheaper (iTunes content is so ridiculously overpriced!!!) and (b) mostly Open Source, so two thumbs up from me! Oh, and [a little hypocritically] there is an iPhone app that makes your iPhone a remote control for your Boxee. So, Boxee has been taken out of it's box and that's about it so far... I'm sure it will be plugged in to a huge hard drive so we play all we want :) I  do know for sure that it will get a lot more use than our Apple TV2!

THEN we finally got on the highway and drove out to Bacchus. God I miss my girls! It was fantastic to see them, play with them and just generally hang out and have fun.

the garage - a cave of wonders!

cheeky monkeys!