(no subject)
We had a lovely relaxing and social Saturday today, starting with a late breakfast at Relish in Bentleigh. I do like their potato and ricotta hotcakes with smoked salmon and a poached egg on rocket. Very yummy.
Then we went to Bunnings and looked at powerboards - we made the slightly alarming discovery on Thursday that our tv/video/dvd/sound system draws 45W just on standby, so just leaving it like that accounts for up to 10% of our energy bill. Ouch! We're not going to climb in amongst the cables to turn it off at the wall each time we leave, but we also desicovered there's something called a green energy saving powerboard that detects when the appliance plugged into the master switch is turned off, and automatically turns off the other appliances plugged into the slave sockets, which could be really useful. But we didn't buy one today, because it wasn't entirely clear from the packaging whether "turns off" always means "really truly off", or whether it sometimes means "puts on standby". And since a six-socket one costs nearly $60, we decided to go away and do a bit of research before we buy one. But I've been having a look at the specs on the web tonight, and it looks like it might do the job.
After that we went to catch up with some friends, a number of whom had been on a longish bike ride this morning, and were feeling a bit stiff, so we ended up with 12 of us in an 8-person spa (we hadn't been on the bike ride, but the spa was too good to pass up!) I could have stayed there all afternoon, but we had plans to meet other friends to see Terminator Salvation at 4.30, so we got dried and dressed and drove off to Chadstone
Terminator was a very silly movie, and I did get impatient with the scenes that served no plot purpose whatsoever, and were solely there for the videogame tie-in. It's a pet peeve of mine, and it's showing up in more and more movies (the idiotic blue and red monsters on the ice planet in Star Trek also made me cross) I was a bit disappointed it didn't go further into the exploration of what is the difference between a self-aware machine and a human. But possibly that was expecting a bit much from an action flick! Overall verdict: not my kind of movie, but there were some very pretty CGI effects and it was a not unpleasant way to pass the time. We finished the evening with a group dinner at Safi in Brighton - good food and plenty of it. It took a long time for the food to arrive, but there were nine of us and the conversation was flowing nicely, so I didn't really notice.
It is nice to be home again after a busy Saturday and know that I still have two more days before I have to go back to work. :-)
Then we went to Bunnings and looked at powerboards - we made the slightly alarming discovery on Thursday that our tv/video/dvd/sound system draws 45W just on standby, so just leaving it like that accounts for up to 10% of our energy bill. Ouch! We're not going to climb in amongst the cables to turn it off at the wall each time we leave, but we also desicovered there's something called a green energy saving powerboard that detects when the appliance plugged into the master switch is turned off, and automatically turns off the other appliances plugged into the slave sockets, which could be really useful. But we didn't buy one today, because it wasn't entirely clear from the packaging whether "turns off" always means "really truly off", or whether it sometimes means "puts on standby". And since a six-socket one costs nearly $60, we decided to go away and do a bit of research before we buy one. But I've been having a look at the specs on the web tonight, and it looks like it might do the job.
After that we went to catch up with some friends, a number of whom had been on a longish bike ride this morning, and were feeling a bit stiff, so we ended up with 12 of us in an 8-person spa (we hadn't been on the bike ride, but the spa was too good to pass up!) I could have stayed there all afternoon, but we had plans to meet other friends to see Terminator Salvation at 4.30, so we got dried and dressed and drove off to Chadstone
Terminator was a very silly movie, and I did get impatient with the scenes that served no plot purpose whatsoever, and were solely there for the videogame tie-in. It's a pet peeve of mine, and it's showing up in more and more movies (the idiotic blue and red monsters on the ice planet in Star Trek also made me cross) I was a bit disappointed it didn't go further into the exploration of what is the difference between a self-aware machine and a human. But possibly that was expecting a bit much from an action flick! Overall verdict: not my kind of movie, but there were some very pretty CGI effects and it was a not unpleasant way to pass the time. We finished the evening with a group dinner at Safi in Brighton - good food and plenty of it. It took a long time for the food to arrive, but there were nine of us and the conversation was flowing nicely, so I didn't really notice.
It is nice to be home again after a busy Saturday and know that I still have two more days before I have to go back to work. :-)