In that period of time, I got really active on Facebook, then I stopped about five months ago because it was taking up so much of my free time, and I wanted to spend that free time doing other things.
Friends had asked for us to keep this blog alive...to post on occasion...to do something just so that it stayed inactive rather than dead! “Dead” was a word that was used often and in all honesty, that’s what I thought would happen to this blog...that I’d stop posting altogether and let it die a slow death. That was the thought and the plan...but the lure of blogging about our mundane lives pulled me back! And here we are again.
It's the first day of Spring so it's a good time to kick this all off again, yeah?
This time around though, I’ll dispense with blogging about our dreary mundane lives on a day-to-day basis. I don’t think I’ll have the time for that anyway. One thing that hasn’t changed since I last blogged (and this probably hasn’t changed for the better part of 3 years now) is that I still have so many DVDs, movies AND series alike that haven’t been watched. Very VERY slowly getting through them, but between real life and that and other things, I don’t have time to blog that often anymore. Plus I don’t really spend much time anymore either! So I’ll contribute with an occasional blog entry when something interesting happens or when I feel like it.
I spent a lot of time on Facebook when it was really fun reconnecting with old friends, long lost classmates who I hadn’t kept in contact with and just basically catching up with friends and family alike. And using the “uploading photos” function and watching other people’s videos and photos! But then I noticed that Facebook was consuming a lot of my free time, so that went out the window too. Real life always takes precedence.
So...a number of things have actually changed in the last nine months! Here’s the quick rundown on the big things that have changed in our lives:
Aeris and I got married
Yes, Aeris and I tied the knot! We got married in Holy Saviour Church in Vermont South on 21 November. We were married by Father Minh Tran (who was introduced to us by a family friend living in Australia) and our families had come down to Singapore and Malaysia to see us get married.
Then we had the wedding reception on 22 November at Potters Receptions in Warrandyte, and it was the rainiest day in Melbourne for a very long time. But still, a good time was had by all and I will certainly remember this for the rest of my life. In Chinese culture, having lots of rain on one’s wedding day meant that you would be blessed with good fortune!
We spent a lot of time planning this wedding reception to make it as memorable as possible. Oh, and there were a couple of “surprises” I threw in that Aeris wasn’t expecting too. Ask those who attended the reception and they’ll tell you what happened (or watch the videos on Facebook). Lots of photos and videos on Facebook...you have to be either my friend or Aeris’ friend on Facebook to see all the photos and videos though!
Oh, and we returned to Singapore and Malaysia in December to have the wedding receptions there...so we had THREE wedding receptions in total, one in Australia, then in Kluang and then in Singapore. Or as my colleagues keep reminding me: “You got married thrice!”
Aeris and I now have a mortgage
After living 2 years 9 months at our rental property at Burwood, we’ve purchased our own home in Ringwood and we now have a mortgage to pay! We made our decision to Since mid-January, we were spending every weekend intensively looking for a place to call our own home. Unfortunately, it also coincided when the property market was booming and prices had skyrocketed to obscene levels. We spent four months looking without managing to find a home!
Aeris spent so much time looking at the real estate websites and the weekend newspapers for suitable properties for us to check out. We knew, having lived in a house in Burwood, that we couldn’t go back to living in units like we did back in Geelong. So much time was spent researching and then going from suburb to suburb. We even went to watch a few auctions for properties that we weren’t interested in, just to get a “feel” for what happens during an auction to prepare ourselves in case we needed to fight it out in one to get a home we really liked!
It was either a case of a property either being too expensive, or not being adequate enough (rooms not big enough, too big of a backyard with a lot of trees/plants etc, horrible location, properties in less-than-adequate condition needing a lot of work and things to be fixed etc), or us being really interested in the property but being outbid in a private sale or auction!
We were interested in one property in March that was on private sale, but after putting in our highest bid, we were politely told by the real estate agents that the offer was too low. Then we were interested in another property about a month later and we went for the auction, and we engaged in a bidding war with this other family (rich Malaysian family we were guessing) but our highest bid was negated within 2 seconds with a higher bid from that family!
In fact, our current home wasn’t even on our radar at all. We had made friends with the real estate agents who oversaw the auction which we had lost, and they recommended this house to us. On first glance on the photos, we didn’t think it was for us, because there seemed like there were a lot of plants and a really huge tree in the backyard (not in the property though, but the neighbour’s property behind) and it looked like the place needed quite a bit of work outside. The only reason we actually went to see the house was because it was later in the afternoon and we didn’t have any other house viewings at that time. So we went to see the house and we fell in love with it.
We put in a private bid (it was a private sale and not auction) which was about $15k higher than what it was listed at and had a nervous wait over the weekend. We met up with the real estate agents and found out that our bid was $5k higher than the high bid by another bidder, but because we had been searching for a while and had made friends with the real estate agents, they decided that they would sell the house to us at our bid!
So we’ve been living in our new home for two months now and we’ve had some renovations done, though not much. This really feels like a home to us now (and we can certainly call it our home!) and Kyo and Ririn, while a bit wary of being in this new home at first, are now loving it too.
Interestingly enough, I’ve been in Australia since 2002 and in the three rental properties I’ve lived at so far, the rental period has always been exactly 2 years and 9 months!
Lived in Belmont from March 2002, moved to Newtown in December 2004: 2 years 9 months
Lived in Newtown from December 2004, moved to Burwood in September 2007: 2 years 9 months
Lived in Burwood from September 2007, moved to Ringwood in June 2010: 2 years 9 months
Freaky coincidence?
The one change that needed getting used to was that I couldn’t just walk to work anymore; I had to drive. And it’s a 19km one-way to drive from home to work! Which leads us to:
New car!
This one is more recent. I traded in the old ’92 Holden Barina just this past Saturday to get a new Honda City. The Barina served us well for 7 years but it’s so old now that we were worried that it could break down at any point of time. It was still such a good car though but really, it was just something to get me from point A to point B. So we decided to get a new car...also good because of me needing to drive some distance from home to work!
We didn’t get much for the Barina, trade-in value was only a measly $250! But it was $100 more than a car wreckers offered and $50 more than Mitsubishi offered (we were looking at getting a Mitsubishi Lancer but decided against it after all because they didn’t have the colour we wanted in manual, and the auto transmission was significantly more expensive than what we budged for). No surprise though I think we may have been able to get a couple of hundred dollars more in a private sale. Too much work involved though!
The Barina was a ’92, it had in excess of 224k km on the odometer, no power steering, no air-conditioning, no central locking, no nothing really! $250 was the highest offer we received and it was a trade in with Eastern Honda, where we were getting the Honda City from (and where we purchased Aeris’ Honda Civic two years ago), so we took it.
Chris, who was the same guy from Eastern Honda who sold us the Civic two years ago, really took care of us and gave us an awesome price on the Honda City, with a lot of extras thrown in and even a good price on the rear park assist and window tinting. All in all, the car cost us less than what the manual transmission Mitsubishi Lancer would have cost on its own without any extra costs (rear parking sensors + tinting)!
Very happy with this new car...it took me one day to get used to the transmission because the clutch biting point is higher, but all is good now. My parents are here now on holiday and they’ve sat in this new car a few times and they like it! The best thing about this Honda City is that it is very similar to Aeris’ Honda Civic so if necessary, we can always just swap cars and drive each other’s cars without too much hassle.
Eastern Honda have really treated us extremely well in the past two years and the past two purchases, and I think we have now become Honda converts. Even though Ringwood Honda is significantly closer to our house, we will still go back to Eastern Honda because of Chris and his immaculate customer service. We’re pretty sure that we’ll be looking at Honda models again for any future cars we want to get; I know Aeris wants to get a Honda CRV in the future!
So that’s quite a long blog entry for the first one in nine months! Lots more to update but we’ll take this slow for now. Enjoy reading!
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