Winter has come to Melbourne... the last few weeks we have had 12-15 degrees during the day, and between 2-5 at night, so quite cold! And in June we got more rain than in the same period the previous 3 years, so good news for our lawn and water storages.
Our garden make-over is slowly taking shape. Even though it looks like it's Kasper doing all the work in the pictures, I actually moved 1 ton of pavers from the nature strip out front to the back yard on Thursday afternoon!!!! And I've been sore in my back and hamstrings up until today...
As you can see in the pictures, it is looking good, and we are looking forward to the weather getting a bit warmer so we can get into the garden and enjoy the fruits of our hard labour!
I'd thought that you might want to see a few images of my "new office", so here you are. I sold my first house last weekend - wuuuhuuu, and have a couple of other good leads, so hopefully I can make it two in my first month! :-)
The scissors came out the other day at the hairdressers.... my hair was looking like something belonging to a person stranded on a deserted island for 6 months, so a good 30 cm was chopped off!!! What a great feeling - I had been sick of the long hair for a good 4-5 months, so it was about time too... Here's the result :-)
WOW, time flies when you are having fun!!
We have been really busy since last post, but of course that's no excuse for not posting on the blog... so here's a bit of news on what's been going on since last post.
First of all, we picked up our new car :-)
It is quite big, as you can see on the picture below...
In the last couple of months, I (Yasmin) spent some time considering what to do with my career, and I decided to try to change industry and go into real estate, which I have been considering a few times before. This time, I decided to try to get into the New House sales area, as we have quite a few Display Villages around this area where we live where they sell new house & land packages. So essentially, you work for a builder who builds new houses according to the client's specifications.
I sent off 3-4 applications, and luckily I was invited to two interviews. The first interview was with a recruitment agent, sort of a preliminary interview which only lasted 15 min, and the main activity was filling out an application form. I managed to get the client details out of the recruitment agent,... Mimosa Homes, to where I had also sent an application directly, as they also advertised directly. The day after, the recruitment agent emailed me and said I had been unsuccessful :-( so you can imagine my surprise when I received a call the same afternoon directly from Mimosa wanting to see me for an interview!!!
The interview with Mimosa went well, and I had a 2 hour trial working in one of the display homes with the sales manager on Sunday 13th June, which went so well that they offered me a job :-)So now I am a Sales Consultant at Mimosa Homes!!! You can check out their website here: www.mimosahomes.com.au At the moment they are still building the website, so they want more content there, but it gives you an idea. Because it is real estate, and most clients only have time to look around on weekends, my working hours at the display homes are 12 - 5 PM Saturday to Wednesday, and a few meetings/activities in the office on some mornings, which means I have my "weekend" on Thursday and Friday. But with those working hours, I'm pretty happy with that! :-)
Kasper also picked up a new contract - at Woolsworth (one of Australia's biggest supermarkets) in Sydney!!! So starting this week he works in Sydney Monday to Wednesday, and then at Transurban in Melbourne Thursdays and Fridays.
In our "spare time" we have been getting on with our garden project. Not only do we have a proper lawn now :-)
... we have also started construction on a patio area, so we can enjoy the outside a bit more when it gets warmer again. Kasper has been doing most of the work, even though I have helped a bit with raking the base and sand to level. See images below.
Another big weekend!
First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY LISE for Saturday!!Friday I called the furniture store where we bought our new lounges to hear when they expected to deliver our lounges. As all things down under, someone had messed up at the store, so the "delivery order" had not been put in the system...However, we were able to schedule delivery for yesterday (Saturday), so the driver of the delivery truck would call us Saturday morning and give us a 2 hour window where we could expect delivery. Call came mid morning... delivery would be between 3.15 and 5.15 PM. Excellent.Thus Saturday morning/afternoon was spent re-locating our current lounge arrangement to the family room, where we now have reading/sun room. Here are a few images:
At around 5 PM we then received another call, the delivery truck had been delayed, so new arrival time would be 7.15PM. Alrighty then....
We reached 7.15, 7.30, 7.45, 8.00 PM, still no sign of the delivery truck... at 8.15 PM we received another call, "you are next, we'll be there in 45 min." OKI-DOKI.
Unbelievable.... anyways, they finally arrived at 9 PM with our lounges and our coffee table. And their truck was still half full.... so they still had more deliveries. Glad I'm not in that job.
Below are the images of unpacking and setting up our new lounge room :-)
Job done @ 10.30 PM. Different way to spend a Saturday night for sure....
We have had a busy couple of weeks.
My car, the Golf, had been for sale for approximately 2 months with only 1 interested person looking at it, so last week I decided to drop the price a little, -- and hey presto -- all of a sudden there were heaps of interest!!!
We had 2 sets of people looking at it Saturday, and the 2nd person bought the car!!! :-) On one hand, I am happy I got a good price for it, on the other hand I am sad to see my beloved Golf go... :-(
The roadworthy test has been done today, and the new owner will pick up his car tonight, so I've said my goodbyes by giving it its last clean and wash, and removed my St Kilda member stickers (new owner is a Geelong supporter (Australian Football teams)).
Saying goodbye to my Golf.
Kasper has also put his car up for sale. When it sells the plan is to get 1 new car - possibly a Honda CRV. So that means I am car-less :-( However, we will probably arrange it so that I will have the car 1 day a week for shopping etc. and Kasper will take the train to work that day.
We have also been cleaning out some of our old exercise gear, so both my crosstrainer and Kasper's racing bike + indoor trainer have been sold on Ebay. 
Last weekend we went shopping for new lounges (couches) and coffee table, as there are a lot of "end of financial year" deals going on at the moment. Our new lounges and coffee table will probably be delivered in a week or two, but I have included an image of one of the lounges below.
Colour is charcoal or "liquorice" so quite a different look to our current white lounges. Our white lounges will probably take new residence in our family room, as this room is currently very empty :-)
For the month of May, we decided to extend our monthly Kiva loan to a group of entrepreneurs in Peru, the Los Alegres De Anyaypampa Group lead by Margarita, who raise trout in their community river. They began with one deep pool and now they have 18. They first started selling their trout in the city of Ayacucho but now sell in their own community because the buyers come to them. Margarita formed a group with some of her relatives and they hope to keep growing the business. Her loan will be used to buy balanced feed for the trout.
The Los Alegres De Anyaypampa Group
If you want to help entrepreneurs through Kiva, go to their website: http://www.kiva.org/lend/198692
As you can see in the pictures, it is looking good, and we are looking forward to the weather getting a bit warmer so we can get into the garden and enjoy the fruits of our hard labour!
