..of stolen wifi and furniture workouts

Greetings dear reader,
I must first apologise for the sparseness of this post, you see, I don't get the internet connected in this, my new place, for another week or so, which is simply horrible for a internet addict such as I am, but this is only made worse by the fact that I also have no television as of yet either. That's right, tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1989.

How is he sending this here email then, the more astute amongst you may ask, well, joy of small joys that it is, I have discovered that a car dealership just down the road from my house appears to have a severely restricted, but still lovingly unsecured wireless network within range of my shiny new coffee table.

The range of sites I can get to without soliciting a message recommending me contact the administrator to continue is apparently very small, but I can connect to IM, access smh.com.au and also my gmail and google calendar (but strangely not blogger, another google service). No facebook or youtube alas, but not really that much of a surprise.
What IS a bit of a surprise is that the ports for bittorrent are not blocked, so even though I cannot get to any bittorrent search engine, I can download torrents I already have the torrent files for. I can also download the torrent file using my 3.5g phone and then copy it across to my laptop, as I have just done in order to get the latest 'animal collective' album. Whimsy, persistence & the requirement for new tunes are the mothers of invention.

.. And I have a shiny new coffee table too. On saturday previous, after scouring through the catelogue, I packed my little backpack, ready for the journey down to Rhodes, the suburb two train stops away where Ikea lives. My tightass technique was to carry everything back on the train and then assemble it in my loungeroom, once I recovered.

On the way I passed a little pine funiture shop though, and while I thought they'd be too expensive, I dropped in anyway to check out their range, because if I managed to find something, it was only a block's walk back to my place.

Lo and behold they were not only reasonably priced, but midly stylish too, so I bought a raw pine wood coffee table for $160 and carted it home, then went back to the hardware store nearby and bought a stain and varnish and spent the afternoon staining my new acquisition (and my balcony and hands too).

The instructions said to wait 24 hrs between coats, but I sensibly ignore the instructions and therefore managed to have 4 coats of stain and varnish completed in about 18 hrs. I'm thinking it looks pretty good too. It certainly seems to be upholding its side of the bargain and keeping my coffee mug off the carpet.

In substantially more important news, my wife arrives from Malaysia in the morning, which is going to be brilliant. I have the day off work and a couple of bottles of wine in the fridge to celebrate.

.. Hope this finds you, and finds you well.
... More soon.