Ouch!

The photo there is of a sign just down the road from our apartment. I know it really shouldn't be funny, but it makes me laugh every time I see it.

Everything with the house seems to be progressing well, which is great. Hopefully we should go unconditional by the end of the week, now all our cash has been transferred from the UK, and we're still on schedule for taking possession next Friday. It's so exciting. All being well, we're going shopping for furniture this weekend, to order all the stuff we've been looking at over the past week or so. Setting up a home completely from scratch is a great thing to be able to do, but it's also so daunting. It's a completely blank canvas and the choice of shops and furniture in each shop is really quite overwhelming. We've done our research though and, with a little help from Wendy, weeded out the wheat from the chaff in terms of quality. We're fairly close to being done in terms of choosing what we would like to buy.

The sky was blue again today and cloudless. I've been told it's a good winter so far. I can stand winter like this, I can tell you. This afternoon I went for a walk into the city, and by a roundabout route found myself in Hagley Park. After wandering round that for a while, and being amazed at the numbers of people jogging after work, I headed back to the apartment and decided to take a shortcut through the Botanic Gardens. That was both a good decision and simultaneously a mistake. It's a lovely place, away from the traffic (or what there is of it) of the city, full of nature, and very beautiful in the late afternoon sun. However, it is full of winding paths meandering around the place, and with the sun heading down below the treeline it was really quite difficult to work out which way I was headed. I'm sure I passed the same tree at least three times. Luckily Google Mobile Maps and GPS came to my aid and I was home in time for tea.

Tomorrow I'm intending to head over to the Ravensdown office to hand over all the forms they needed me to fill in before I begin work on Monday. I thought I might as well take a walk down there, rather than posting the forms. The exercise is good for me. And speaking of exercise, football starts tomorrow night. Al from church has entered a team into an indoor 5-a-side league and it all kicks off tomorrow. I'm a bit out of shape though. And I'm not sure of the standard of the rest of the team, or the teams we'll be playing against. But it's all good fun.