Despite it being the coldest day of the year in Brisbane, my ride into work this morning confirmed for me that Global Warming is in effect.

It’s mid-July. It’s freezing. The trees are all bare. Michelle wears 33 coats and 6 pairs of socks to bed. Spring is still at least 6 weeks away. So it MUST be winter.

Why then did a freaken magpie swoop me this morning?

If there’s one thing I hate as much as crows it’s freaken magpies.

Our House – Before and After

After spending 2 months and all of our savings we are finally into our house and finished with the initial round of renovations that we set out to achieve.

When we bought the place in March last year I managed to take some photos showing off all aspects of the house. Today I went around and took the same photos to showcase what our house looked like when we bought and now after we have moved in.

There’s two ways to view these photos;

• you can link through and view the photos at your own pace, reading the captions explaining each photo and what we had done.
• or view the embedded slide show that follows. The embedded slideshow doesn’t have captions turned on by default and each photo only shows for 2 seconds so you may want to turn on captions and pause the slideshow to manually move through at a pace that suits you.

I haven’t gone through and done “before and after” shots of the whole house as we haven’t really done anything with downstairs other than have doors replaced and painted. We’re outta money and don’t have an immediate use for downstairs so that’s a project for another day.

It was great to get so many entries for my competition. It was fascinating to see the thought process that some people (ie. Rod) put into calculating their estimate.

Without further ado, I shall announce the winner – Kirstin

In the end the two loads combined weighed in at 520 kgs – Kirstin’s last minute guess came in at 500kg.

As you can see from the chart we had some guesses at the low end of the spectrum (37 kgs) up into the high end (1500 kgs) and then one guess that was somewhere up in the stratosphere (1 million tonnes) that I couldn’t add to the chart as it skewed it so badly.

Thanks to everyone who entered. Kirstin I’ll be sending you out a fantastic prize sometime in the near future.