Aussie Bloggers

Even though I am not thinking of moving right now I often browse the real estate sites looking at houses for sale, I hope to make my “sea change” in the not too distant future. If you are planning on moving house or just enjoy checking out what is available you may find these sites of use.

Suburb View

This site aggregates the properties for sale or rent which are listed on the major Australian Real Estate sites, including Real Estate Agents, domain.com.au and realestate.com.au.Suburb View allows you to perform comprehensive searches of properties for sale or rent, in the areas you are interested in. Rather than just visiting one site to look for houses, you can search all sites at once. Search results are viewable on a map and also in Google Earth. Further classification is immediately viewable on the map with different colored markers for the type of property (house, unit etc) and the number of bedrooms. Hovering over the markers show the property price, if available. Clicking on the link pops up information including links to the Real Estate site or sites that are advertising the property.

Old Listings

Old Listings is a sister site to Suburb View which gives you details of properties that have been sold.. Properties are searchable by suburb and by street name. Results show the list price, type of property and number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

StreetAdvisor

StreetAdvisor is intended to help people find the best place to live via user submitted reviews, photos and videos of streets, cities and neighbourhoods. Search features, which include Google Maps, allow readers to find reviews of streets and areas they are interested in. They can also participate in the forums and read the. guidebooks. There are incentives for posting reviews. Those who have added the most valuable contributions in a city or town can become “Local Experts”. This creates exposure for those who want to generate leads for their business or traffic to their website.. Prizes are offered from time to time.

When I actually come to making my move these sites may come in handy.

PTY Property Auctions

You do not even need to attend an auction to purchase a property these days. At PTY Property Auctions you can bid on properties and watch auctions online.

Connect Now

I have not needed to use this service but will do so when I finally make my “Sea Change”. Connect Now is a free service that organises your gas, electricity, water, telephone, internet and pay TV to be connected on your behalf. You are free to choose your providers, apart from for your water. Connect Now then liaises with your chosen service providers to organise connection.

However modern, well maintained or renovated a house is there there is always something that needs to be done to get it the way you like it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself you could give the following a try.

Service Central

If you need a tradesman or professional service you can list your requirements on Service Central, which then connects you with people in your area who are qualified to do your job. Having recently needed to fixi my roof and replace fencing I have found this service very handy.

Archicentre Repair and Maintenance Service (Melbourne Only)

An Archicentre service that offers guidance in what needs to be done and which tradespeople you should speak to. If you don’t have the time to manage the work yourself they can co-ordinate and manage repairs and maintenance for you.

The step from browsing for interest and settling into a new place now seems daunting. You have to go and look at properties, make your current home and garden pristine for selling and even consider home staging. Then there is all the packing and unpacking. Perhaps I will stay where I am a little while longer.

Image by Mushroom and Rooster

Having made my Melbourne my home for the last 20 years, there are many things that I love about this great city. Its unpredictable weather I could definitely live without, but on the whole it has so much to offer that I can tolerate this!

A definite attraction of Melbourne that is the plethora of festivals and major events that the city has. There is often so much going on it is difficult to choose where to spend your time and dollars.

This started me thinking about whether it would be possible to get to a major event or festival in Melbourne for every month of the year? Well it is certainly possible! Many months there are a number to choose from. For the sake of brevity I have only chosen one per month and created a year of Melbourne Festivals!

January: Midsumma Festival

February: Sustainable Living Festival

March: Melbourne Food and Wine Festival

April: Melbourne International Comedy Festival

May: Melbourne International Jazz Festival

June: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces (Dali this winter)

July: Melbourne International Film Festival

August: Melbourne Writers Festival

September: AFL Grand Final (Australian Rules Football)

October: Melbourne International Arts Festival

November: Melbourne Cup Carnival (Horse racing)

December: Boxing Day Test (Cricket)

I would love to try attending all of these events one year. It would be exhausting and cash depleting but lots of fun! What is your favourite Melbourne Festival?

Image via Wikipedia

Those of you who know me may be aware that later on this year, my husband and I are taking 3 months with our children to see more of this great country of ours. Our plans at this stage will be to spend around a month of that time in the Northern half of Queensland, a month in the southern half of Queensland and a month in various parts of New South Wales (broken into the first part and the last part of our trip).

Wanting to make the best use of our time, I’ve been busy doing some research into places we might like to visit. One thing I have discovered as part of this research is that the more you research, the more things you find to do. It’s like there is an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to interesting things to see and do in Australia.

Reading travel brochures and browsing websites, I am amazed by how diverse and beautiful this wonderful country of ours is.

I’m slowly coming to a couple of conclusions in regard to our trip:

1. We’re NOT going to have time to see EVERYTHING.

There is just so much we could spend our time seeing and I can see us running ourselves ragged trying to see it all.

2. It’s not going to really matter where we spend our time.

Where we are heading, I’m not sure there is any place we WOULDN’T want to see. Such is the beauty of this nation.

One of the things I’m really enjoying about planning this trip is how much my appreciation for this beautiful nation of ours has grown. That and my knowledge and awareness of various places has grown greatly. I’m really looking forward to the improvement in my Geography skills once we’ve taken this trip (it never was one of my better subjects – but there’s nothing like actually visiting a place to entrench it firmly in one’s mind).

Now I’d like to pick your brains. I’m interested in hearing of your favourite places in New South Wales and Queensland. Is there any particular places you LOVE and think we shouldn’t miss? It would be awful to get back and have someone say “did you see ……” and for us not to have even known about it.

One of the most helpful tips I’ve discovered during the litany of writing courses I’ve undertaken is to write every day. Even if you’re not writing what you’re supposed to be writing (uh, yeah, about those uni assignments . . . ) writing anything can help.

The same goes for your blog. I’m not suggesting you post every day, unless you want to, but writing every day is a must.

I call it motivation momentum. When you’re writing every day, you’re motivated to write every day. You don’t fall out of the groove. How many blogs have you noticed with reduced posts these days? Yes, mine included. People took time off “writing” over Christmas and are now struggling to get back their motivation momentum.

I can sit and stare at my blog for days, watching my stats diminish by the hour, knowing that if I just wrote a post they would go back up. After a few days I throw one together and my stats rise – briefly. Then they go back down, and I’m back to square one. Clearly stats aren’t why I started my blog. I started my blog to help me focus on writing every day. The positive stats flow from that.

This desire for motivation momentum helps explain the popularity of such insanity as NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo as people struggle to gain momentum on their own. And for November I write furiously. In fact last November I wrote some 70,000 words including 3 university assignments, a 50,000 word novel and some 19 blog posts. Most days I wrote for five hours a day. At least 2 a day.

But where is this momentum now? I lost it somewhere around Christmas. The tempting distractions of shopping, parties and friends proved too much for me and now while I can sit at a computer for hours a day, my writing is virtually zero. I wrote 14 blog posts in January. Less in February. My average last year was between 20 and 25 posts a month. And here I am writing less than half that. I’ve lost my momentum.

This doesn’t just apply for writing. I lost my exercise momentum as well, somewhere around uni exams last year I stopped going to the pool to study, and never went back.

What about you? Have you lost your motivation momentum when it comes to writing, your blog, or some other part of your life? How do you get it back?

Image by safaris

I grew up in Mildura and still have a lot of family who live there, so I visit Mildura on a regular basis. We took our young family to Mildura for Christmas in December and spent a lovely week holidaying. We left Melbourne and it was grey and cool and then returned a week later to Melbourne, again grey and cool! For those of you who are not aware, Melbourne is having an exceptionally cool start to this year’s summer.

Mildura is located 550km north west of Melbourne. The weather in Mildura over Christmas was beautiful, sunny and hot. I at last could feel that summer has arrived. Mildura prides itself on its beautiful weather. I love visiting in summer, where the average temperature for these months is in excess of 30 degrees Celcius.

October and November maybe a more preferably time to visit for others, with temperatures averaging mid 20s for those months, but still filled with plenty of beautiful sunshine. It is during these months that there is a number of special events in the town as well:

Mildura Country Music Festival
The town claims this festival to be up there with the other big country music festivals, Tamworth and Gympie. The distinction with the Mildura festival is that it is Australia’s biggest showcase of Independent entertainers. The event will be held from 25 September until 4 October 2009.

Mildura Jazz, Food and Wine Festival
To be held from Fri 30 Oct – Mon 2 Nov 2009 (the weekend before Melbourne Cup), this festival sees jazz in the streets, the restaurants & wineries, by the river and on the paddleboats.

But to me regardless of when I go or what festival is on, I love the slower pace, the beautiful sunshine and the friendly people of Mildura, which makes my old home town such a lovely place to visit and take the children.