Just Like Being At Home

Here we are enjoying the 38 degree heat at lunchtime on Tuesday.  We are in Melbourne in the midst of a heatwave.  They expect today it to be over 40 degrees.  It is just one of those dreadful Melbourne summer days with a strong northerly blowing and a cloudless sky.  It is going to get hotter and hotter and it will be around midnight before the temp gets under 30 degrees.

Kate and Arj have headed to a show in the city today and will stay overnight so we are baby sitting.  We expect them home around lunchtime tomorrow (Weds).

Thank heavens for the evaporative cooling which is installed here at their home.  It keeps the temperature at least 10 degrees lower than what it is outside.  Then if you have a fan it will feel even cooler.  It is not at all uncomfortable inside the house as long as you are below a ceiling vent or near a fan of some sort.

Kate bought an extra pedestal fan for us to use overnight.  It makes a huge difference to being able to sleep.  We have always had ceiling fans in our homes ever since we returned from Penang all those years ago.  Ceiling fans were the major cooling device back in those days in Malaysia and we have them installed thoughout our current home and previously when we lived here in Melbourne.

This trip to Melbourne we decided not to bring the laptop.  It is not the most modern of laptops and is heavy to cart around.  Being a 'shorter' stay I decided to bring just my hard drive (in the photo it is the black blob with a blue light and a "Z" marked on it).

Onto the portable hard disk drive I loaded several "Portable Apps" versions of my most used programs from home.  These are the full program but setup in such a way they only 'install' into a bare minimum of folders (usually just two) and not across the complete computer operating system.

I have loaded Firefox, Thunderbird, a mail preview program called MailWasher and a couple of other programs I use for discovering and processing movies which I download.

Then I copied the 'profile' (or all MY info) for both Firefox and Thunderbird (an email program) from my home PC into the portable programs.  So for all intents and purposes I have the laprop with me.  I open a folder with shortcuts to my Portable apps Programs, click on the shortcut I want and I using exactly the same program and settings that I would have done when home.

This process is working very well.  Not only do I have 'my stuff' but all my passwords etc are working as well.

We are out with Kim tomorrow night.  I will update her movies for her and set up the second of my Media Players for her as well.  We are out for an evening meal with Pat and Graeme on Thursday and Trish has her eye on the big shopping centre at Chadstone for Friday.

The hot weather has cancelled any idea Trish had of heading to the tennis any time this week.  A cooler southerly change is expected for Friday afternoon.

This will be just in time for Kate's birthday party on Saturday night.  A cooler but fine night is tipped for Saturday!