The Mystery of the Shrinking Crocs

Karyn almost ruined my Crocs the other day.

I left them strategically placed in the family room in just the right place for me to find the next time I needed them. She obviously disagreed with my positioning and put them outside.

The next day when I tried to put them on, I found that they were too tight. I reckoned that because they'd been sitting in the sun for the morning they must have shrunk. Believe me, the hot summer sun in Canberra can be pretty fierce.

I was devastated. They'd cost me around $50.

I googled "crocs" and "shrunk" and found lots of cases where people's crocs had shrunk when exposed to heat; even those just left in hot cars. There were stories about how people had contacted the manufacturer who refused to help. The common estimate was that they shrink 2 sizes. There were also a few suggestions on how to stretch them back again.

So, throwing caution to the winds, I put them in a hot clothes drier for 10 minutes and then put them on my feet which were wearing 2 pairs of socks. I walked around for a few minutes, and to my surprise they were wearable again, maybe even larger than before. It seems that heat makes them, what would be the word - "malleable"?

Hooray!


Now all I have to do is work out how to fix my Crocs thongs that have also shrunk and because the front is curled upwards, they look like they are designed for pixies to wear.

New Year motivation

I've been a bit motivated in the past few weeks to fix the steps to the spa.

The existing steps had reached the stage of actually rotting.  It all seemed to happen pretty quickly.  When I looked at them underneath I realised that there was a lot of raw timber underneath that general dirt had built up against over the years.  Being untreated pine didn't help either.

Anyway, two full days work resulted in some new steps.   It was a lot harder than I thought because the ground around the spa isn't level, so I had to make the steps correspondingly uneven so that they'd sit straight on the concrete.

The real problem was that every day was very hot, around 32 degrees C.  And every time I lifted my head this is what I saw.

At least the steps work.  Here are two votes of confidence.

New Year's Eve & New Year's Day

For NYE Karyn, her mother, and I went to the restaurant where Matthew works.

No chance of getting served by him though.   Whenever we go there he stays as far away from us as possible.  Generally he works behind the bar, making up drinks, making coffees, and organising the bills.

This year the restaurant had a 4-course dinner menu.  And of course we ate too much.  I went for a walk after the first 3 courses to get some fresh air and help the food go down.   Karyn and her mother stayed behind and made sure that the wine had no chance of evaporating.

We went home before midnight because Karyn's mother was yawning so much that she couldn't talk.  In hindsight, we should have stayed longer.

Matthew arranged to get a lift home, which was great, I thought.  Until I realised that Matthew didn't have any keys with him so I would have to stay up anyway and let him in.  I had to play Farcry for hours just to stay awake.

He finally got home at about 2:15AM.  He then decided that he was hungry and so made a meal out of the food that Karyn brought home from the restaurant because she couldn't eat it as she was too full.  It was actually her main course (course #3 of 4).  I think that he actually went to bed at around 4AM after playing some more World of Warcraft.

The next day we had a BBQ'd leg of lamb with roast vegetables.  It was a great meal, but my undoing was a bucket of pina colada mix that Karyn made that had half a bottle of white rum in it.   The mix was put into the freezer until it became slushy.  It was so easy to drink a person could lose track of how much that had actually drunk.  I think that we all had a sleep that afternoon except Matt who was doing something vital in World of Warcraft.

Here is a picture of Karyn wearing one of the silk tops that I got her in India.  It's the first time that she's worn one, so I guess she may have troubles coping with my superior sense of style and fashion.

Post-Christmas shopping

I'm tired of shopping now.  I hope Karyn is too.

Today, in search of further sales, we went to the local Factory Outlet centre (Direct Factory Outlet in Fyshwick).  Fortunately DFO now has a few electronic stores that I can spend my time in instead of clothing and footware stores.  Hey, I only need 3 pairs of shoes in total, so the need for new shoes only occurs once a year or so.

So far, at the sales I've picked up a neat LCD desk light and some iPod speakers (below) that were a present from Matt.  I wanted some speakers so that I could listen to podcasts while I exercise on my treadmill.  I've been using earbuds for a while now, but I keep catching the earbud cord and pulling the iPod off the shelf next to me.

It was a bit bizzare evaluating the various speakers.  I took my iPod shopping with me so I could check out the various products by listening to how they play what I listen to, so while other people are blasting out their music, I was blasting out Buzz Out Loud and the ABC Science podcast.  I had to test them out relatively loud because I want to listen to podcasts while using the treadmill, and I needed to make sure that I could hear it over the sound of the treadmill motor.

I selected the Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2 because it seemed to have the best quality sound at high volume.  Its remote control of the iPod works a treat as well.

I'll be giving it a for-real workout tomorrow morning while Karyn and her mother go shopping again (without me !!).

Canberra Races

We went to the races today.

There weren't many people there.

Most of the people were up in the Members Stand, where we were.

However the number of people did pick up as the day progressed. Maybe a lot of people were down at the coast after Christmas.

I took my small digital camera to experiment with. It's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS5. I bought this one for my recent trip to India, as a small camera that I could keep in my pocket in case unexpected photo opportunities arose (which they did). This one has lots of clever options that I wanted to experiment with. One of these was the speed burst mode that seemed to capture a frame every tenth of a second. In this mode the camera switches to a 2M pixel image with the option of continuous firing (until you run out of storage). Here is the quality of picture that it took in this mode.

Unfortunately the camera doesn't allow you to manually set the speed, only select "SPORT" mode. As you can see from this photo, it didn't set the speed up to about 1/1000 of a second or above to eliminate the blur. THis means that I'll have to stay with my Kodak digital camera for horse work.

Christmas Day

Today got off to a really good start.  At 3AM actually.  This is when my mother-in-law's dog decided to get sick and spew all over the carpet in her bedroom.

I decided that I would only get in the way if I got out of bed, so I turned over and went back to sleep.

At 5AM her dog got up onto our bed and was sick again.  Over our quilt this time.

Because my previous reasoning was so successful, I again feigned sleep and turned over and tried to go back to sleep.  This wasn't so easy with my wife taking the quilt cover off, but I finally managed it.

I surfaced again at about 8AM,  fortunately to the sound of my mother-in-law delivering a cup of coffee.  Perhaps she felt guilty.  The coffee was too sweet.  But I struggled through it.

We all went downstairs and opened our presents.  We all agreed that we had all received great presents, and that we had done our duty in contributing to fix the global financial crisis by spending so much money.

I then sneaked outside to have a quick swim before getting sidetracked into getting lunch ready.  Although the day started a bit dull, the clouds disappeared and the day was warming up to about 30 degrees C.  I wondered what it was like today in the northern hemisphere.

This year we tried our first baked ham, glazing it with cinnimon, apricot jam, and brown sugar.  It was yum.

We roasted pork, turkey and chicken in the barbeque, and baked the vegetables in the oven.  We cooked far too much food for one day, so it looks like we'll be having left-overs for the next few days.  I reckon that rather than have every chef on TV present their own Christmas recipes, they should have them present good recipes for left-overs instead.

We all ate too much (a family tradition, I reckon).  I decided to have a quick power-nap, Karyn decided to float around the pool in her boat, and Fay had a big snooze to compensate for her 3AM start.  Matt, of course, played World of Warcraft all afternoon and got one of his characters up to level 70.  Or was that 80?  Anyway, he seemed quite pleased with himself.  He got a new netbook for Christmas, so he could play WoW on one computer and chat on MSN at the same time on his new netbook.  He'll probably want a dual-screen setup next.

I spent a while chatting with Cherie, Richard and Lynne in Sydney while looking at my treadmill and thinking that I really should get some exercise.  But everybody said that I should have a day off, so I decided not to.  I did some sit-ups and went for a swim instead.  I still have 8 kg to lose to get to my target.

Karyn retired to the bedroom to watch some TV, Matt stayed in his study and played WoW, Fay went to bed, and I played a few levels of Far Cry.  Just to maintain my lightening-fast reaction times, you understand.   Since I've got myself a new quad-core computer, I've got back into playing some games that my previous machine was just too underpowered to play.

Here is Matt trying to show Fay which way to point the camera.

Anyway, its time for bed now.  It's 1AM now, and Fay has just come down to rinse out some towels that her dog has just soiled.  I took some more old towels up there to find that she's covered the whole floor with them.  Maybe in the morning I should get her a plastic drop sheet that we use for painting.

Karyn is excited about the Boxing Day sales tomorrow (or in about 8 hours).  So it looks like more help for the global financial crisis.

Bye for now.

Christmas Shopping at Hall Markets

This weekend we went shopping at the Hall country markets. Hall is a small township just outside Canberra (but still in the ACT).

It's better going there in Summer because you are just stomping around on hard dirt or clay. In Winter it gets pretty muddy with all the people walking around. The weather was pretty good, as it was sunny but only about 26 degrees C.

Karyn was looking for some hand-made wooden butterflies to decorate the brick wall outside the dining room window, but we couldn't find any on sale.  We already have a colourful orange one and a green one attached to a tree in the back garden.  She consoled herself with buying some fresh liquorice instead.

I took the following photos with my camera just to see how they turn out.