Below the waterline.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new camera lately – yes, I know, another one… but one that can be used underwater when snorkelling or sailing etc.  Mostly I am keen to acquire one because I missed some great opportunities for beautiful photographs when I was up in the Whitsundays recently… but what is putting me off is that the underwater digital camera feels like the waffle iron of the photographic world – the single use appliance that will rarely get used, which, when weighed up against the cost, turns out to be a rather poor consumer decision.  Then I saw all these gorgeous photos on Distractify (No, I will not link to it – ridiculous, bullshit click bait website that it is!) and it is rapidly stiffening my resolve to acquire my own waterproof camera…

 

Underwater fishes off Sipadan Island, MalaysiaUnderwater Sipadan Island Malaysia Underwater in IcelandUnderwater Iceland Underwater in CubaUnderwater Cuba Underwater in the Caribbean Sea, off MexicoUnderwater Caribean Mexico Underwater in the Flores Sea, IndonesiaUnderwater Flores Sea Indonesia Underwater ice in SwitzerlandUnderwater Switzerland Underwater in BrazilUnderwater Brazil Underwater diver off the coast of SpainUnderwater Spain Underwater at the Palawan Islands, PhilippinesUnderwater Palawan Islands Philipines Underwater in the Blue Grotto, Isle of Capri, ItalyUnderwater Blue Grotto Capri Italy Underwater at Pig Beach, BahamasUnderwater Pig Beach Bahamas Underwater in Green Lake, AustriaUnderwater Green Lake Aust Underwater in The Everglades, FloridaUnderwater Everglades Florida Underwater in Bora Bora, TahitiUnderwater Bora Bora Underwater bathing elephants in Andaman Islands, IndiaUnderwater Andaman Is India Underwater Mystery?Underwater Mystery2 Underwater seal in the Magdalen Islands, CanadaUnderwater Magalen Islands Canada Underwater trout in the Smalblaar River, South AfricaUnderwater Smalblaar Rv Sth Africa Underwater diver in FijiUnderwater Fiji Underwater fishes at Raja Ampat, IndonesiaUnderwater Raja Ampat Indonesia Underwater at Crystal River, FloridaUnderwater Crystal River Florida Underwater Mystery Underwater in Zanzibar, TanzaniaUnderwater Zanzibar TanzaniaUnderwater in Mare, New CaledoniaUnderwater Mare New Caledonia Underwater off a jetty at Nuweiba, Egypt.Underwater Neweba Egypt Underwater off Eilat, IsraelUnderwater Eilat Israel

Underwater in ArgentinaUnderwater Argentina

Underwater at Laguna de los Burros, MexicoUnderwater Laguna de los Burros Mexico Underwater in the Mediterranean Sea, FranceUnderwater Mediterranean France Underwater in Jellyfish Lake in PalauUnderwater Jellyfish Lake Palau Underwater off Danko Island, AntarcticaUnderwater Danko Island Antarctica Underwater in a French LakeUnderwater France Underwater sharks off South AfricaUnderwater South Africa Underwater in Papua New GuineaUnderwater Papua New Guinea

As someone who travels as much as they can (see tag: ‘twavel’ on the right) I think that maybe I might be able to get some good use out of it after all.  I’m off to New Zealand at the end of this year and hopefully off to Japan in the middle of next year… so maybe it would be a good time to buy a photographic waffle iron.

Birthday Bait and Switch

Last week, the Small Child thought he’d make himself some Mac ‘n’ Cheese.  You know, the horrid microwave kind, which passes itself off as food and has very doubtful nutritional properties.  It’s stupidly easy to make, full of MSG goodness and the kid loves it, (though god knows why), all you have to do is tip the sachet of macaroni into a bowl, add water, heat for three minutes on high and then stir through the pretend reconstituted cheesy stuff.  Simple right?

Unless of course you miss a vital step, like oh… I don’t know – adding water.

Then what you get, instead of Mac ‘n’ Cheese, is a house full of acrid black smoke, a useless microwave with burnt plastic walls, which now is only suitable for use as a temporary garden ornament until next kerbside pick up day.  I really wasn’t planning on replacing the microwave any time soon… but can not go putting fabric wheat packs in the (vaguely still functioning) machine twice a day, because they’ll end up reeking of charred acrid smoke and shortly after, so too, will the couch.  Yuk.

As luck would have it, it was the Small Child’s birthday in a week or so, and I decided to teach him a lesson about forgetfulness, by telling that he was getting a new microwave for his birthday as a result of the Greatly Offensive and Injurious Mac ‘n’ Cheese Incident of 2014.  I let him do the retail research and he got to put together a purchase proposal, so you know, I kindly allowed him to choose which one we needed (much to his disgust), and then we duly went out and purchased it.  Poor little guy was quiet and resigned throughout, feeling equal parts guilty at destroying the old microwave and despondent at the concept that the new one was to constitute his birthday gift.  We then got a week of telling him that his birthday present was all sorted but that he needed some new slippers, so he might get some of those too.  Little did he know, his actual birthday present had been ordered weeks ago…

As an avid young gamer, his eight year old hand me down laptop was his most prized possession and while it was okay for some things, it wasn’t really wasn’t cutting the mustard.  So we had decided it was a good time to replace and we arranged for the whole family to chip in and help us buy him a new one – one that would hopefully see him through the next four years or so.  Hopefully by that time, when he needs another upgrade – he can damn well get a job and save for it himself!  But it served our purposes at the moment to let him think that a shiny new microwave was all that birthday had in store for him… it significantly reduced the ‘I wants’ in the lead up to said birthday, that’s for sure.

Anyway, birthday morning rolled around and so began the unwrapping of some underwhelming decoy birthday presents that I literally pulled out of the emergency present box (everyone has one of them right?)…

Well, Happy Birthday kiddo… I think that was exactly the reaction we were hoping for…. except for that weird, “I am victorious!”, exclamation, which mostly just tells me he’s been playing way too many video games already, and doesn’t have a suitable vocabulary to express elation!

Dell-Alienware-M17x

Tackiest Present Ever Competition

Do you have a friend or family member with whom you have this strange competitive thing going on, whereby you attempt to exchange the most odd/bizarre/tacky or just plain stupid present with?  Or maybe you have a perpetual present that keeps being re-gifted from person to person to person… and at any given point, someone is ‘stuck’ with the stupid thing.

We have a tendency to do both thanks to a slightly off kilter sense of humour that runs in my family, and it is never so apparent as when it comes to gift giving.  There was the time that Surly wrapped up a stuffed cat for the Small Child for his birthday…  And the time that we took a large unwieldy and unattractive pottery ‘pod’ thing, that some well meaning friend had given my mother, and regifted it to my younger sister 250kms away, who then regifted it to BigSal who then regifted it to us, then it was regifted back to my Mum and it was supposed to be regifted to Edouardo up in Atherton, but no one every figured out how to ship the stupidly big thing!  😀   Then there was the time I spend hours search for the perfect black velvet painted Elvis for BigSal for her birthday, and somehow ended up giving her a weirdarse Sadler teapot instead!

I mean honestly, our fall back position for people who don’t hand over decent gift ideas for Christmas presents, is to frequently threaten them with a footspa!  Because, well, everyone needs a footspa like a hole in the head!  But I digress…

This year I was trying to find MrK a Christmas present and was absolutely 100% out of ideas, let alone decent ideas.  Then I happened upon this while out shopping one day:

And I thought to myself… MrK would LOVE that!  It’s exactly what has been missing in his life  😀  And of course, I would win the Single Use Appliance Christmas Present War this year with a Rollie Vertical Egg Cooker like this!  Sheer brilliance!  So after much deliberation (about 2mins 10 secs), I decided to give him one for Christmas – thinking it would either be awesome or end up gong back to the shop as soon as the stores re-opened.

rollie egg cooker

Well, Mr K opened it and looked at me with the ‘Umm, err thanks’ of beguiled gift recipients who aren’t sure if someone is taking the piss out of them or not, familiar the world over, thanked me for the unusual gift.  But then someone incredible happened… he tried it out and LOVED it.  And it has then been quick and easy and no clean up Rollie Eggs for everyone ever since.

rollie egg master

 

I was gobsmacked, the ridiculous half joking present had indavertently turned out to be a success .  But wait… there’s more!  He told everyone at work that he had bought his wife a new iPad Air for Christmas and that she had bought him a Rollie Egg Cooker.  Which apparently piqued their interest (either that or he is one helluva salesman!) because suddenly everyone at his work wanted to try it out.  So he was going to take his Rollie Egg cooker to work and I went ‘Meh, I will go get you another one and you can have Rollie Eggs for lunch’.  I managed to pick one up and then Mr K had to spend his monrings for the following week showing everyone how to make Rollie Eggs! He had people from other divisions turning to cook vertical eggs and eventually people from different floors deciding they loved the Rollie Egg Cooker.

Sigh… guess I’ll just have to work harder on my tacky/weird present buying skills…

The Butt Plug Door Stop

A few years ago, no need to dwell on how many exactly, a girlfriend and I were in an adult store shopping (as you do) and wandering among the shelves we saw this monstrosity:

doc johnson red boy

It was a genuine Doc Johnson (no idea who he is), Red Boy Extra Large Butt Plug aka ‘The Challenge’ – a challenge the likes of which I hope I never encounter!  Naturally, we tittered like school girls and wondered who on earth would want to attempt to use such a thing, and at 4.5″ in diameter, who on earth would actually be able to?!?  Talk about abhorrent phenomena!  OMG!

Anyway, I picked it up off the shelve and damn near put my shoulder out, it was so heavy.  I laughingly said “That’s not a butt plug, it’s a fricken door stop!” and momentarily toyed with the idea of buying one for the house, and putting it to just such a purpose.  I snapped a photo on my phone, to show the boys, and we continued on our shopping.  I got home and told Mr K that I’ve found a doorstop I wanted to buy for the foyer and he looked at it, laughed at me and said, “Ahuh, yeah right!”

And so I forgot about it… for a little while.  But several weeks later, I found myself in a bit of a weird mood and convinced my friend Yale into taking me shopping to go buy a door stop.  Now, Yale is 6’9″ tall and as such probably fits the ‘big boy’ stereotype better than most, so when we walked into the adult store and picked up the dirty big butt plug and thumped it down on the counter the chickie at the register actually looked up at HIM, with slightly widened eyes and very professionally said, “Do you need any lube with that, sir?”

Well, we just lost then and there… and emphatically, and laughingly, yelled out “NO!”.  “We’re not going to use it!” I said, and I explained to the chickie that it was destined to spend it’s life as a door stop at which point she kinda breathed out and said “OMG, we have never sold one of these and it was everything I could do to keep a straight face!”   LOL.

We took it home and encountered a disturbing and unexpected side effect of bringing such a thing into the house to be used an everyday object – The Small Child found it ‘interesting’ and played with the packaging for hours!  Vastly amusing at the time, though now he is turning into a typical preteen, he may not agree with me when he eventually finds out what this thing is!

It has become a bit of an odd fixture around here.  We once discovered The Small Child attempting to sit on the doorstop (very disconcerting) and upon enquiry, discovered he was “laying eggs… you know, like a chicken, Mom”.  On another occasion, we found my Mum dusting it, and asking bemusedly “What is this thing anyway?”… and subsequently dropping it like a tonne of bricks on being told it’s intended purpose (luckily it didn’t land on her foot or it might have been off to the ER for x-rays!)

The unusual doorstop has been quite a conversation piece around our place for years now… on the odd occasion it has even made it’s way to the dinner table when people who’ve walked right past it ask, “What door stop?”  Though how you miss it, I don’t know!  It’s enormous!IMG_2534

Now, because I am in the habit of posting about retail experiences, and I know that sooo many of you are going to want to rush out and buy your own Dr Johnson Red Boy Extra Large Doorstop, I thought I’d better find out if they are still available – and you’re in luck!  Amazon.com has them in stock, so you can order one here… and to be extra helpful to all you consumer types, I added a handy ‘Butt Plug As A Doorstop’ product review.

My first ever Amazon product review… :

How to: Save money on white goods.

I was out shopping a few weeks ago looking for a stove top for yale whose new house requires one that actually, well functions properly.  And naturally while I was there, I saw and immediately had to have a new fridge.  I am sure there is logic in there somewhere, but stuffed if I can ferret it out at the moment.

Anyway, we were at the Good Guys at Mt Gravatt, a chain known for their in the box/discount prices and I saw a fridge that would fit in the space in my kitchen just nicely (bit tight but will do the trick).  It was a Samsung 528L SRF527DSLS.  RRP on the Samsung website was $2,299.00 – which seemed a bit expensive for my liking (NEVER pay full retail, people!).  But I looked it up on the Choice website and it had great reviews, saying it was good for energy consumption, good range of temperatures available, good fluctuation (whatever that is) and good response to changes in room temperature… only let down according to the reviewers were that the controls were located on the top of the inside of the fridge door – but how often do you adjust the temperature of your fridge?

Anyway the Good Guys had it advertised as a significantly discounted price from the ridiculous Samsung RRP at – $1,649.00 (though pretty sure that didn’t include delivery), which made a good jumping off price point.

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 1.36.20 PM

 

I thought I’d have a hunt around for a better price.  Didn’t bother going to Hardly Normal because well, they are always more expensive than the other appliance and electronics retailers, and lately Gerry Harvey is being a complete and utter tosser in the national political arena.  And Clive Peeters seem to have fallen off the edge of the retail planet so I hit the internets and found a much better price at a company called Appliances Online – appliancesonline.com.au being $1,439.00 which included free delivery to my postcode.  Getting decidedly better… $200 less and free delivery was sounding pretty good.

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 1.37.11 PMNot too shabby.  Next best price I found was from Masters – the hardware guys who have opened up near us a while back and who are attempting to give Bunnings a run for their money.  Masters were advertising the same appliance for $1,547.00 with free delivery also.

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 1.41.29 PMBut… the best thing about the Masters mob is that they not only price match, but they have a guaranteed ‘beat any price by 10%’, including online prices.  So I had a live chat with one of their customer service representatives to ensure that when I rocked up down at the store that this would actually be the case.  And yep, sure as eggs, Masters would not only match the $1,439.00 from Appliances Onilne, but they were prepared to discount it by a further 10% bringing the price down to $1,295.10 including free delivery!  A far cry from the Samsung RRP of $2,299.00.

Now we are cooking with gas.  Just one more stop before making a decision – try the Union Shopper and see if they can beat the quoted $1,295.10.  And as it turns out… No.  No they can’t.  One of the largest buyers consortiums in the state can’t beat that price.

So, off to Masters I went.  Ordered and paid for a new fridge and arranged delivery for tomorrow… before they changed their mind!