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Monday, 10 January 2011

Making progress

I feel I had a fairly productive weekend - I started assembling the six 'cube' bookcases I bought from Aldi 18 months ago, and so far things are going OK (the first two packs went together easily and the finished product looks even better than I expected). Next weekend I'll need to assemble and then cut in half two of the remaining bookcases, so that the resulting 'L-shaped' bookcases can fit either side of a large, teak carved panel that is the feature piece of our lounge room. I visited the local hardware 'superstore' today to buy the few planks of DAR lumber I'll need for installing the wood carving and putting ends onto the four half-bookcases, a small tin of varnish/stain, a paint brush, some removable picture hooks and an el-cheapo jig-saw for cutting the bookcases... total cost just under $150! The timber was quite expensive considering it was only cheap plantation pine (and full of knots), whereas the jig-saw for less than $20 was a bargain. I paid the hardware store $4 to have the timber cut up into the required lengths as I'm not sure exactly where my circular saw has gone. I'll varnish the raw pine pieces after work this week and should be able to assemble, cut-down and install the corner book cases around the teak carving next weekend. That will leave one more weekend to finish off the project while DS1 is still visiting my parent's farm.

I've made progress with a couple of my other goals - sticking to my diet (lost 2kg in the first week - mostly water I expect), and also making it down to the air pistol range yesterday and shooting a decent score (533/600). Not quite 'A grade' (540), but close enough considering I hadn't done any target practice for nearly 12 months.

I also finished off my 'final' draft of the application for an AAO student fellowship position and sent it to my MAstron lecturer at JCU for some review.

All in all, decent progress on 3 of my 12 goals. I've decided to change on of my goals though - after installing Quicken 2008 on my 'new' laptop on Friday, today when I launched Quicken a message popped up saying that it had been previously installed on a different computer (my old desktop), so I'd have to phone the Quicken support (toll charge) number to be able to use it on my new PC. Instead I've uninstalled Quicken and decided to track my expenses using an excel spreadsheet this year. It's much easier to keep a spreadsheet on my USB stick so I can update it at home or at work than try entering everything in Quicken at home, and Quicken was over-kill for my needs this year anyhow.

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