For the Benefit of Mr Kite

It's sold!, originally uploaded by amandainthecorner.

Yesterday the contract on our unit became unconditional. This means that we get a big sold sticker on the For Sale sign. It also means that we need to start looking for somewhere to live pronto.

Is a cat.

Solomon has always held a special spot for Tom, but since we've been looking after them for the past couple of days, she has increased her affection for him.

No longer can I sit next to him on the couch, she must sit between us and if I get up, she quickly takes my place. No longer can I lounge my legs over his, she is already there. No longer can we enjoy a peaceful night's sleep together, she finds her way into our bed.

I wonder how disappointed she will be tomorrow when we return home. No doubt their love affair will rekindle next time we visit.

I must confess though. As I type, I have the other man in my life on my lap dribbling all over me. Yes, the other man in my life is also a cat, Q.

Before anyone jumps to any conclusions I am not talking about the musical genre here. I am talking about the web browser. Get it?

Now we've established that we can move on.

1. Smarter tabs. Opera kicks Firefox's bottom with its tabbed browsing. Firstly and most importantly, when you go to a website that contains a hyperlink that opens in a new page, Opera is smart. It opens that link in a new tab unless you tell it not to. Clever Opera. Secondly, you can navigate through the tabs easily. All you need to do is hold shift and scroll the mouse well. Clever Opera. Thirdly, each tab has its own close button - no more accidentally closing the browser again for me.

2. Gesture browsing. Opera has done something very funky here. With a swoosh of your mouse, you can reload a page, go back or forward in your history, stop the page loading and even go up to the parent directory of the page. So much faster. So much more fun.

3. Trashcan and history. Rather than store your history in it's own special place. Opera has a trashcan that contains a drop-down list with your recently viewed sites in it. Also, when you are typing in an address into the address bar, Opera will, of course, suggest URLs for you like the other browsers but it goes one step further. Opera tells you when you last went to that page and sorts them by time, but alphabetically. Finally Opera remembers what you were doing when you last closed the browser and starts up with the pages loaded into the same tabs for you.

4. Integrated search. In the pre-Opera days, I used to do my Google searching like the rest of you. I would go to the google home page and type in my search. Now those days are behind me. All I need to is type: g followed by my search criteria and Opera sends me to my search results page. This also works with eBay and Amazon but I don't use those sites at work.

5. Speed. Opera is really quick to render pages. It's also really quick to start up. So two ticks for speed.

6. Look and feel. It looks good and it is easily customisable.

Now for things that I don't like about Opera.

1. No extensions. Yet. The new version of Opera supports widgets (Opera speak for extensions). To make the browser perfect, I'd like to see some extensions especially web development ones. Even IE has a developer tool bar.

2. Gmail. Opera and gmail don't get along perfectly.

Other than that - I love Opera.

Tomas and I had a more eventful than usual weekend this weekend. So here's the run down.

Firstly, we had dinner at Mum and Dad's on Friday night. Everyone came over (i.e. Ben, Vanessa and Cameron) and the newlyweds (I am no longer a newlywed - my position has been usurped by my sister) opened the remainder of their presents. I was really happy that they liked what we got them. We got some Marimeko fabric and stretched it across three canvases (one big one and two smaller ones of different sizes) and finished it off by framing it with some nice wood (when I say we here - I do really mean Tom and Dad. I chose the fabric and found the right size canvases but after that my contribution ended. I supervised the stretching and the framing). It looks really good.

After dinner and sleeping, Tom and I got up on Saturday morning and proceeded to clean the house for its first showing in the real estate market (didn't go to bootcamp was still sick). The house was tidy from the clean-up we did so that the pictures could be taken so it wasn't hard to get it all clean. We even cleaned all of the windows, the balcony bit off the kitchen, and scrubbed the front door. All in all about three years worth of cleaning has been done to our place in the past week. The open house went well. There were three people who came through and showed interest in the place but more about that later.

Next, I napped. Got woken up twice during the nap so it wasn't a good one. Once, was to check with Tom that he'd bought us flights back from Sydney (we are going there over Easter to visit my Dad's side of the family) and once because my phone rang. It was a wrong number. I cannot describe the annoyance I felt over that phone call.

Post-napping in the evening, Tom and I went to a friend's housewarming (lovely house) but had to leave early as we had a prior engagement to see Suicide Girl Live - a modern burlesque show. It was a really interesting show - the support acts were very ordinary buy the actual show itself was really well done. Lots of good choreography and music. My favourites were the Napoleon Dynamite act and the Alice in Wonderland one.

Sunday was our Spanish lesson. We are learning how to say more and more things. This week we learnt the alphabet and the verb estar - to be. I also have another word to add to my list of favourite Spanish word - doble uve - it means w.

Sunday was also Palm Sunday, the end of lent. For those of you who don't know, Tom and I both gave up stuff for lent this year. Tomas went without coffee for 40 days and I went without sweet things - chocolate, lollies, cakes, biscuits and ice-cream. I was expecting a bit of a celebration on Sunday but we were restrained and rather than go a gorge ourselves on the previously forbidden treats, we napped instead.

Tom played basketball on Sunday night against the biggest team I've ever seen him play. There were HUGE. However, Tom's team played really well and only lost by two points. It could have been a draw but one of the players on Tom's team shot the ball when they needed to hold onto it at the end of the game and the other team got possession.

Anyway, back to the house thing. This morning I was late to work. Why? Because I had to let the real estate agent to so that someone could have a second look at our unit. As I write, Tom is probably meeting with the agent to discuss an offer that has been made. Fingers crossed its a good one!

After four years of living in our little unit at Newmarket, Tom and I
have decided its time to move on and sell it.

On Saturday we met with an agent who seemed very enthusiastic and
confident about being able to sell the unit in its present condition
so we decided to put it up on the market.

Today, it went up on realestate.com.au - very exciting. Here is the
link: Aj and Tom's Unit

The photos aren't the best - but you get the general idea and last I
heard the agent was planning an open house(unit) on Saturday.