After Mee and I came back from Greece, we kind of decided not to go to hot countries during hot weather for our next break. Well, we said the same when we came back from New York too. Hmm… we are thinking of Switzerland or Sweden for our next break. I guess we need to look out for discount ski goggles thicker winter clothing. Might need a new piece of luggage too because winter clothing takes up a lot more space. Anyway, it is still a long way before our next break. Right now, I am busy with my work. This is the time where I keep thinking that 24 hours a day is definitely not enough. I still have two days of holiday entitlement to take. I guess they will be just my rest days as I can’t afford to go for another holiday now.

I always like to look at household products, dreaming a day when I will have my own property called home. That way, I will have some idea of what kind of household products to purchase in the future. As I am an IT person, I always look out for innovative and high tech products. Looking at my shared rented place at the moment, my housemates’ wastes are incredible. They always like to leave a bit of everything on every meal they cooked.

One day, I saw on the newspaper’s article encouraging the community to be responsible when it comes to waste and it introduced the compost tumbler. The local council charges a rental fee to anyone interested in one. I did manage to talk to my landlord about it but he said that it’s one of those things that look good on appearance but not practical. It attracts mice and insects as we have to leave the food wastes inside the tumbler for several days or weeks even for them to compost.

I just thought to myself, if there’s a problem with it, surely they could have come up with a better product to prevent the mice and insects. And today, I saw an internet advertisement about Spin Bin compost tumbler. It stays off the ground and it is made from recyclable materials. Problems solved but it comes with a price as the local council only has the standard compost tumbler. Well, it’s never easy to be environmental friendly and the cost is one of the factors that often puts people off.

Mee and I were back from Greece on Monday night. Everything turned out great while in Athens and Santorini Island. Well, there were few glitches while we were in Santorini Island but overall, it was a really nice island. To me, it seemed that Greek didn’t care about after sales service. As soon as they got hold of the money, some of them didn’t even bother to say thank you while they were all smiles when we were browsing their shops. Having said that, our hotels and the restaurants that we had been to were providing exceptional care and attention.

The demonstration activities that have become more frequent in Greece were my main worry. However, Greece travel advice website is quite good in announcing any demonstrations in advance. While we were in Athens, there were policemen everywhere and we felt safe even at night. The most spectacular sight would be at the Acropolis. The structures there were more complete unlike the others where we could only see a few pillars or only the base of the building with a board describing what the building used to be.

At Santorini Island, we rented a Smart Car. We thought it was the best way to see the island as the bus can be quite unpredictable. In addition, the weather was blazing hot and waiting for a bus in the open bus stands was certainly not an option for us. We managed to see the sunset in Fira during our first night in Santorini Island. The next day, we went to a nearby volcano island and then Oia in the late afternoon, best known for its sunset. Well, I wasn’t that impressed with the sunset and I thought watching the sunset would be quite similar anywhere in the island. However, Oia is a very beautiful town. If I am going to Santorini Island again, I will choose to stay in Oia.

The day after Oia, we drove to the Kamari Beach also known as Black Beach. We literally spent a good few hours there doing nothing at all in our beach wear. We then went to the Red Beach but we stopped half way to take picture of the whole Red Beach view. The other half way to the beach itself looked treacherous. White Beach is just next to the Red Beach but only reachable by boats.

While Athens is just another city, Santorini Island impressed us with the unique buildings only to let us down by some of the unfriendly retailers operating there. At the end of our trip, we still very much prefer our previous trip to Italy.

I recently manage to chalk up a huge bill on my Amazon credit card because of Mee and my upcoming trip to Greece. I didn’t actually think much about the amount of money that we have to pay until I printed out our travel itinerary (which has the price) yesterday. We will be going to Athens and Santorini Island and surprisingly, the flight from London to Athens is cheaper than from Athens to Santorini Island. The former will take around 3.5 hours flight time while the latter will only take an hour. Anyway, I got the credit card bill and on the last page of the bill, it has another same but different statement. The amount of money that I have to pay is the same but there’s zero interest in it. Along the bill, it states zero percent interest until end of the year. Out of curiosity, I called up the customer service and asked about the zero percent interest. After a long conversation and several on hold calls, I finally got my answer. It means that if I were to just pay the minimum payment, I will not be charged any interest until the end of the year. It will also mean that I can separate my bill into several instalments and I don’t have to resort into applying payday advance loans. Payday advance loans work as a temporary loan from the time I apply for it until my payday arrives. It’s good as a type of cash emergency but not really for long term in my opinion. Anyway, I can now enjoy my trip without worrying about the bill!

I find myself checking out Twitter almost everyday. I check tweets, follow people from around the world and not to mention I tweet too. Most of my tweets will probably bore people as I mainly tweet about free iPad apps and games as well as anything that comes across my mind. I have recently started to keep tract of my sleep time by tweeting just before I went to sleep. So far, no improvement yet especially when I have just finished typing a blog post but the system failed to save it. I am actually retyping it now. Still, I find Twitter to be a very nice tool as I am able to follow my favourite actresses, singers and well as sportsmen or sportswoman. I am also following my broadband service provider and I am able to tweet questions to them. Surprisingly, they are quite good in replying but most of their reply is redirecting us back to the rubbish call center.

Occasionally, I write articles in Hubpages. Articles are called hubs and writers are called hubbers. You can write just about anything and associate Amazon as well as Google Adsense to it. It’s a great and huge community where hubbers can share their articles, utilising the forum posts and asking questions. There are a lot of great hubbers but it is also said that many great hubbers have left due to the Google Panda Update, lack of quality control and frustration while dealing with supports.

My way of relaxation is movies and games. I have to say that I have watched a lot more movies than before. In the past, I would normally just watch one movie a week. Using the PC to watch a movie is great but to have it running at night, it will be kind of noisy. Needless to say, my Samsung NC10 screen size is too small to really enjoy a movie. Now that I’ve got my MacBook Air with a decent 13” screen, I can watch a movie anytime I want. Since I got my iPad2, downloading games and apps has become a routine. I tend to install almost every games that come across to me as free and delete them if I find them not to my liking. I wouldn’t say iPad is a gaming machine but it certainly has taken gaming to a whole new level!

With all these four things including my day job, I start to question whether or not 24-hour a day is enough. I know that it’s pointless to ask but what will happen if we do get more than 24-hour in a day?