I’m a big fan of draughts/checkers/chequers… call it what you will. It’s a game of infinite complexity – but slightly more simple than chess. Infinite in that statement is apparently figurative. There are in fact 500 billion possible combinations of moves that make up a game of checkers. History was made today – when a computer program finished working its way through all of them and announced that the perfect game of checkers ends in a draw.
You can play against a computer with almost all the answers here.
It’s now nine weeks (and a few hours) until Robyn and I get married. We’ve almost got our invitations sorted out. We’ve almost got a lot of things sorted out. But there are thousands of little things like table decorations and stuff that I just didn’t ever imagine having to think about.
My current idea for a table decoration is to have a toffee apple bouquet as the centrepiece. These will double as bombonieres (they’re the little presents you give people to take home/eat – another stupid wedding tradition).
With nine weeks to go we’ve also started trying to figure out where to live. I can truly understand why housing affordability is an election issue – the rent/buy debate is something we haven’t really come to terms with yet. The idea of spending 35% of our income on paying off a house is less than appealing. But the idea of pouring 10% of our income down the drain in rent is an equal turn off. Living in the car might work.
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If you think about it, the 10% of your income going towards rent isn’t pouring it down the drain. It’s keeping a roof over your head.
Says a girl who lives with her parents…
I wasn’t saying it’s not expensive. I was saying it’s not a waste.
Actually this led me to ask Dad about housing prices and how they’ve changed in Tville. The house we live in (which is big compared to the standard houses you see going up in places like Riverside or Greenwood) cost approx $100,000 when my parents built (that’s land + building house). Dad reckons that’d be about $250,000 these days. My parents completely paid off the mortgage in 16 years.
Which leads me to kind of scratch my head and wonder why people think a $300,000 house is so far out of reach. Now, I realise many houses in Tville are way over 300k, and that a 300k house would be smaller, but Dad also reckons that if people built houses like they “used to” (ie. like JJs or the house on the other side of the church) it wouldn’t be as expensive as what you’d otherwise pay these days, plus you’d be getting extra space (upstairs AND downstairs).
Anyway. Totally not directed at you, just the ranting you read in the papers about housing prices sky-rocketing.
300,000 = approx 10 times the starting wage of a journalist or PR person.
Try paying that back in 16 years.