Sunshine in February

Last week in February, and it looks like the rainy season is creeping around. I've chosen the start of the rains as the ideal time to kick off an outdoor project - replacing rotten timbers on the deck. Replacing boards on a deck 20 foot up has a whole set of interesting challenges when there's a two-year-old always eager to fall in any holes or gaps, or throw plant pots down them. Or hit me in the face with the end of the discarded boards that has the rusty nails protruding.

Of course, it wouldn't be February in Nimbin without a blackout. K loves powercuts because she gets triple bedtime stories by candlelight. I'm less keen because it makes getting my job done a real pain. I still don't have a proper UPS or generator system, but I'm now able to run my small camping inverter to power a laptop and modem, and if the phone line is out I can fail back to my WiFi modem too, so quite a few things have to fail at the same time to keep me from getting online.
We spent a quiet weekend at home, as it's Fran's last weekend with K for a long while, so it's been good to maximise play time for them. We've also finalised getting the downstairs tiled - we just have to come up with the money now, and then that's the last detail and we can start worrying about the part of the house we actually live in. Finalised is not quite true. We have a quote, and we know how long it will take, and the dimensions the tiles should be... But we have yet to actually agree on a colour.
Finally, this week marks the beginning of a long-postponed project: I'm going to abandon hotmail for gmail. I've got so many online accounts tied to hotmail, so may secondary accounts forwarding to hotmail, and so many never-check-their-email friends with my hotmail scribbled in their address book, that it's going to be a long process. The straw that broke the camel's back? The shit integration between hotmail and Outlook. If you pay hundreds of dollars for a product from the world's biggest software company, and it's crippled and missing basic functions when you hook it up to that same company's webmail offering, it's time to look elsewhere.