Help, I'm drowning in Etsy!

The combination of Etsy and one-click Paypal purchasing is a dangerous one, Internet.  I basically did absolutely nothing at work yesterday, except for browsing unusual and interesting homewares.

I ended up getting this cushion cover, mostly because I just kept clicking 'next' on the purchasing screens and there was nobody to tell me to stop (I think I need adult supervision sometimes...):

It's a tea-towel from the 1967 Montréal World's Fair, recycled into a cushion cover.  The colours aren't necessarily in whatever scheme we're going to have going at the apartment, but I liked the Montréal connection and the hipster in me can't resist something old and weird turned into something new.

Today, Dan and I drove up to The Entrance to pick up a kitchen knife that we'd forgotten up there when we stayed over Easter.  It was a relatively expensive knife so it was worth the hour-and-a-half round trip.  The Entrance is full of weird junk stores, so we stopped into a few of them to see if there was anything worth picking up.  I found a little ceramic inkpot from the 1800s that I would have liked, but I ended up leaving it behind because there's only so many ceramic and glass decorative objects you can have in one tiny apartment and I already have way too many.  Plus, when I moved into our current place I rapidly boxed up all his Mum's china figurines and Swarovski animals and declared I would not live in a house filled with pointless ceramic shit.

Now for a night on the couch.  After a week working in Melbourne and an overnight trip to Brisbane for the same client over the last two weeks, I'm stoked just to be home.

A list of bridges that I will never again set foot upon.

I am terrified of bridges.  There, I said it.   And there's a special place in my cold, dead heart for the following  structures in particular...

1. The Jacques Cartier Bridge, Montreal

If you've ever been to Quebec, you'll know that most of their infrastructure is held together with sticky tape and Clag glue.  Overpasses are literally stapled together and held up with chicken wire, while roof collapses are basically a weekly occurence. So it's no surprise that the beautiful Jacques Cartier Bridge (designer of Eiffel Tower fame) is the diciest structure on the planet.  The whole thing jiggles like the San Andreas fault every time a semi-trailer drives over it.  I made the mistake of walking across it once and declared never again, after I more or less ended up crawling on all fours along the pedestrian walkway, hoping to god that the floor wouldn't give way.

2. The Brooklyn Bridge, New York City.

I don't care that it's stood faithfully since time immemorial.  I don't care that they used revolutionary building methods to sink its foundations metres into the murky bottom of the Hudson.  The pedestrian walkway is made of wooden boards, and you can see your swirling doom right underfoot as you walk.  As far as I'm concerned, it's a death trap and I shan't go near it again.

3. The Westgate Bridge, Melbourne

This beast is the worst of them all.  It snuck up on me this afternoon as I drove, blissfully unaware, into Melbourne and before I knew it, it was looming up ahead.  Not only does it look terrifyingly under-engineered and minimalist, do you see how it slopes horribly upwards? This is so when you're driving on it you feel like any second you'll just reach the end of the roadway and tumble down into the river below.  There's also no pedestrian walkway and those assholes have fenced the sides with what is essentially chicken wire, so you can see with absolute clarity the abyss that's roughly twenty centimetres to the left of your vehicle.  Never again.

I love bridges as engineering marvels, as innovative feats of design and architecture, and I freaking love looking at pictures of them.  I would dearly love to visit the Oresund Bridge and the Milau Viaduct, but (and particularly with the Milau), I just know that I'll wet myself with fear at the same time.  I'll leave you with a photograph of my Everest...

Holy shit.

We bought an apartment!

It was actually the first place we looked at, and after walking through about twelve properties there were two that we could actually see ourselves living in.  The first one, a two-bedder, ended up going at Auction for about $60k over our maximum budget (and about $90k over what we paid for this place).  The second one was this one.  It's in a large-ish block and has everything we had to have in an apartment (balcony, nice aspect) and a few things we decided were 'nice to have' (rooftop with swimming pool, heyooooo).

So, now the bank owns both our asses.  Settlement on 25 June!