Kazza the Blank One

Monday.  13th.  Slept ok.  Not much useful in the morning.  In the afternoon I settled down to get some real work done but then the non stop interruptions.  Sigh.  Tried the cooler again in the afternoon.  This time it worked!!!!  Must have just gotten stuck.  Will ask them about it next time we get it serviced.  Leftover beef for dinner then Twin Peaks 1.3.  Man, David Lynch is weird..   @phonakins posted that it was 42 days til Christmas which freaked me out slightly haha.  This year has gone way too fast.  I might need to put my tree up soon.. ;)

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Cooked gnocchi and salad for dinner then Twin Peaks 1.4.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Went to pick up the sweetie, although he only had one drink so I had one as well then we went to Happy's for dinner.  We were the only couple for a while with like four other single guys.  It was 20:00 by the time we got home.  But nicely, during the day I checked if my cgi scripts were working and discovered they were!  Nothing from Vodien to say they'd fixed things though.  Hopeless.  Blogged the other week because I could.

Thursday.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Drinks/pizza.  Started watching Futurama with dinner but then started talking to Kit and ended up facetiming her for a while.  In other news.. Stu messaged during the day that he felt like he was having an immune reaction.  Hrmmm.

Friday.  Busy day.  Managed a bit of decom work and some Splunk training in between everything else and All The People wanting All The Things.  Kiev Friday!  

Then Death in Paradise 6.8.  The tune for the theme song is actually from a song called You're Wondering Now, by the Specials.  Which they actually had a version of at the end of the show.  Cool!  Even cooler.. Stu has it on CD :)  Afterwards I watched Turning Red which I had no idea what it was about.  For some reason it kind of annoyed me the pushing of western values, but the director was Chinese-Canadian so there's that.. 

In other news, Stu was definitely feeling sick today.  I told him to go back to bed but he was too busy with work.  He took a RAT but it was negative.  His boss on the other hand.. yeah no... 

Saturday.  Slept in the other room so Stu could cough and splutter in peace.  House stuff in the morning.   

I've gotten a few paver weed strawberries.  I've lost a few others to snails.

Stu took another RAT.

Welp.  Guess it had to happen eventually.  First positive RAT we've had in our house.  Decided to mask up and go do food shopping in case I get it too and neither of us can go out.  Put up the Christmas tree in the afternoon.  A week earlier than I normally would, because at my age the weeks fly by so quickly that I wanted an extra week to enjoy it :)  I just did the tree and will decorate it and the house over the course of the week.

Cooked up some mince with ragatoni for dinner, then we finished season 1 of The Orville.  Afterwards I watched The Movies that Made Us on Pretty Woman.  I saw that movie at the movies but don't know if I've actually seen it since.. may have done once.  

Sunday. 

Got a bit of house stuff done and some catch up blogging (RecipeTin Eats!!) but mostly trying to figure out what minifig heads I have.  Split out my hymns into batches so I don't need to do all of them every week.  Downloaded my photos.  Apple has decided to present HEIC files to windoze instead of JPGs like it usualy does.  EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING!!!  Far out I hate Apple. So. Much.

Star!  I'll be very sad when this thing dies

I made this in early October the same night I marinated the chicken for the butter chicken.

Everything laid out, 17:55.

I used vermicelli, some wholemeal variety, because Woollies doesn't have short-cut angel hair pasta and couldn't find the long variety (the next time we were at Woollies I did find the long stuff).  Turns out Coles has short-cut stuff. 
Then there's bacon, garlic, onion, cabbage, butter, parmesan, salt and pepper.

Everything prepped.  18:30.

Nagi says to cook the pasta and then make the rest of it.  Here's the bacon going.

The noodles are done already, so toss with some oil and set aside.  Add some onions and garlic.

Add the cabbage and some butter.

Yeah this was dumb.  I'd just time it so the pasta was ready around this point so it wasn't some massive clump.

Add in cheese, salt and pepper and lemon juice.

All done, 19:05 - an hour and ten minutes.

Serve with more parmesan cheese.  There's enough vegegation in this to have it as a main.

It was quite nice and worked well as leftovers.  I'm not entirely convinced about the parmesan cheese in this.  I mean it's good and all, but takes away from the Asian vibe of the dish.  

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: sure, with modifications to procedure.
Stu: sure.

I made this in early October.  I was going to do it one evening but Nagi wants you to marinade the chicken for quite a while, so I did that one night and cooked it the next.

Everything laid out.  17:16 day 1.

Into the marinade goes chilli powder, turmeric, cumin, garam masala, grated ginger, garlic, lemon juice, yoghurt.

Mix it all up

And coat the chopped up chicken.  17:48 on day 1.

So 18:01 day 2.  She says to fry the chicken (not wiping off the marinade but reserving it to add back in later).

Then she says to make the sauce, which is passata, cream, sugar and salt.  I took that to mean make it in a different saucepan.  But she probably meant the big frying pan.  Whoops.  But it did mean I could reduce it a bit faster as it was a bit watery if memory serves.  Also add back in the rest of the marinade.

If you did it right it would have all been done in the one pan.  But I had to mix them.  Shrug.

I served with rice, peas/corn, pappadams, spring onion and a really nice raita that was also in her book but I didn't document.  Served at 18:48 day 2. 

So 32 minutes day 1 and 47 minutes day 2.  Definitely could do it faster if I was more efficient.

It was quite nice, and the raita was really good too.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: yes, with modifications to instructions to make it more efficient.
Stu: he thinks so (he care barely remember with his covid addled brain haha).

Oof I made this back in September but only just got around to blogging it.  I've been wanting a goto recipe for Mac&Cheese and what should come along for my birthday but a book with a recipe in it!  

Everything ready to go.  17:32.

Macaroni pasta.
Cheese sauce of butter, flour, milk, gruyere and mozzarella, with seasoning of garlic power, onion powder, mustard powder and salt.
Topping of panko, butter and salt.

Everything measured out.  18:08.  Yeah the mise en place for all these recipes takes forever.  

Cooking the pasta and starting on the roux.  I was thinking I'd be able to make it all up in the fritatta pan and just stick in the oven.  But there was going to be way too much volume for that.  So I should have made the sauce in a saucepan which is less messy when you're whisking flour and butter together.  She also wanted to mix butter through the pasta when it was done before mixing it with the sauce.  I think I'd just time it so I could mix the pasta into the sauce straight away in the baking dish.

Once you've cooked the roux and added a bunch of hot milk, start to mix in all the cheese, then add the seasoning mix.

Looks nice and cheesy!

Mix the whole lot together in a big baking dish.

Top with the panko topping.  18:47.  So an hour and a quarter to get to this point.

Bake for 25 minutes or so.  

Top with parsley to serve.

Nom nom nom.

The recipe turned out really well, but there's definitely things I'd do to streamline preparation time.  Not measuring out every little thing to start with.  

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: Yes, with modifications to the procedure
Stu: Yes

This Wasgij from Jo was cool because they actually included both sides of the picture - what's on the box as well as what they're looking at.

This was a Green Shed jigsaw but it was missing like 27 pieces.  I've read the story that came with it (Death by Diet) but haven't spent much time trying to figure out whodunnit.  I have a couple of thoughts on the clues.  Maybe one day I'll think about it again so I can give the thing away.

Another Green Shed jigsaw of Hong Kong.

I think Neil actually did as much on this as I did which is somewhat unusual.  Another one from Jo.

Another from Jo that Neil and Duncan helped with.

And the last one from Jo this quarter.  It was cool because I walked across that bridge in Florence (Ponte Vecchio) exactly a year ago while we were doing it - in fact the jigsaw was out on the one year anniversary of me walking across it :)

Here is one of my shots of it (I didn't have nearly as nice lighting, oh well).

Monday.  6th.  Backdating because of the Second Great Vodien Outage of 2023.

Slept ok.  Urgghh they forced me to start using Windoze 11 at work.  I hate Windoze 11. So. Much.  Even worse is that notifications are all but invisible.  Skype changes the colour of its icon ever so subtly and there's a tiny red dot under the icon instead of a tiny blue dot.  So I'm missing stuff all the time.  And don't even get me started on not being able to ungroup task bar icons.  Crap in the morning and proxy trialling in the afternoon.  Cooked green spaghetti from RecipeTin Eats for dinner.  I wish books like this would use "real world" measurements, like two or three cloves of garlic, instead of a teaspoon or whatever.  Or the juice zest of one lemon instead of a tablespoon and x mL.  That sort of thing.  It was quite nice though.  Evening was filing "Canberra Life" photos.

Tuesday.  Slept okish although awak for like an hour in the middle of the night.  Proxy trialling all day.  Tony messaged me just before lunch - he was heading out to Four Winds to pick up some wine and did I wanna come with.  And I was like.. sure why not.  The last time I was out there was in 2012 for the Moving Feast.  So that was nice.

On the way back we came across this lizard with a death wish.  It clearly had no idea of what could possibly kill it, as evidenced by lack of body parts.  And it wouldn't even run away until I full on poked the thing.

In the afternoon watched a few horses run around in circles for a couple of miles.  At one point my $2 was coming second, and later my $5 was coming second.  But they finished at 20th and 7th.

Salmon, salad and leftover veggies for dinner.  Then filing house photos.  Watched Amazing Race 4.10, caught up to all aired episodes.

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot and restless.  Woke up early but managed a bit more sleep.  Nothing useful in the morning.  In the afternoon working with Wardie to document what to do in the event of him being away and us having to turn off MFA in the event of Optus being total idiots and breaking their entire network.  Leftovers for dinner then filing "Friends and Family" photos.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Good drinks - lots of people.  Popped into Tony's on the way home to pick up my old iPhone 3GS which I sold to Heather in 2012.  And since I'd sold my XS to Tony last year and I'd kept my 5, it meant I could line up every one of my iPhones!!  How cool is this!

3GS - 2010-2012, 5 - 2012 - 2018, XS - 2018-2022, 14 Pro - 2022-present.  We won't talk about the crack Tony got on the XS recently.. 

Friday.  Slept ok.  Got a "How did we do?" survey from Vodien which pissed me off because they still hadn't fixed anything and I hadn't had any contact other than first contact asking for some more information.  So let them know.  Skipped a 4pm meeting because I have zero interest in talking to Certain People at 4pm on a Friday, especially when I often log off around then for POETS.  Had Luv-a-Duck Peking Duck for dinner.  Got as good as Super Bowl obviously, but still very yummy.

Death in Paradise 6.7 and Amazing Race 4.11.

Saturday.  Hurty.  But otherwise slept ok.  Pretty much just did minifig sorting all day.  Except for taking a couple of hours out to do errands in the middle of the day. 

Apparently these are Oyster Plants

Tried to turn the cooler on when we got home but nothing happened.  It sat there for like ten minutes but it was like the pump to suck up the water hadn't run.  And then it errored out.  Sigh.

It wouldn't even run on fan mode which was very upsetting.  So we melted a bit in the afternoon.

So did the house - it even went over the top of the min/max fluid.

Watched David head off to New Zealand on Carnival Splendor.

Had dinner at R&F's with M&M and ChiliRob and Cath and Rob's mother Cath.  Too many Robs and Caths in the room hehe.

When I got home I poked the cooler control panel a bit and somehow got it to run on fan only which was a relief.

Sunday. 

Had a hare-brained idea to go climb Mount Rogers before it got too hot.  It was still too hot.

Spent all day doing minifig sorting and so got to the end of the weekend without having done any of the things I was *meant* to do.  Whoops.  Dug out some beef out of the freezer to have with some roasted veggies.  The Orville 1.11 and Amazing Race 4.12 which was the finale.  I was a bit sad that Emma and Hayley didn't win because they were just lovely people, but then Darren and Tristan decided to call it a three way tie so they split the winnings.  So awesome!!

Monday.  30th.  Backdating because of the Second Great Vodien Outage of 2023. 

Took ages to get to sleep and woke up early but otherwise slept ok.  Upset that my website was still broken.  More work on the trial proxy and another long call with them.  Sigh.  All The Leftovers for dinner.  Some of it just over two weeks old.  Whoops.  Let's see if we get food poisoning.  Went through my bank statements for first pass of America spending.  Bit of Amazing Race 4.7.

It was raining but this looked so pretty I just had to get snap of it

Double rainbow!!

Tuesday.  Um.  Work.

Wednesday.  Sneaky trip to Sydney.

Thursday.  Slept fairly well.  Fighting with proxies all day.  Decent drinks.  Made Stu a pizza and had a tv dinner for dinner (I was getting sick of pizza).  Finished Amazing Race 4.7 and watched 4.8 as well.

First pass strawberries

Friday.  Busy day but didn't achieve much.  Kiev for dinner then Death in Paradise 6.6 and Amazing Race 4.9.

Saturday.  Lay in bed for an hour not sleeping and then the restless legs kicked in because I was so tired.  Gave up at 12:30 and went and slept in the other room.  Did a bunch of things in the morning so I could get them out of the way so I could do Lego inventorying.  But.  Bricklink was down.  Sigh.  Tried to file some mail in Eudora but it kept freezing up and eventually the whole thing hung.  Didn't want to kill it because that's how mailboxes get corrupted.  Did eventually kill it and had to refile a bunch of things because the mailboxes didn't save.  Looked at what else was on my todo list.  There was lots of blog entries to be posted.  But I couldn't do that either because my blog was still down.  Sigh.  So went through America spending.  What was cool was that I withdrew $80 in cash.  I spent $80.03.  Or $80.04.  Depending on whether I was plus or minus a cent.  Pretty cool that I was within one cent of documenting though.  Also did some food shopping.  Went to M&M's for dinner with R&F for some awesome seafood risotto and a yummy cheesecake, and played Five Crowns after.  I forgot what was wild at least once.  Also the pool cover I gave them didn't quite fit so said they could try and sell it and we could split the cash or something.

Round one of collecting purple poppy seeds!

Sunday.  Bit of a late night.  Bricklink was still down - seems that some accounts had been compromised so they shut the whole thing down to sort it out.  Blog was still down.  I'd put in a support email during the week but nothing back.  Tried to do some photo filing but got hung up on the "best" way to do things.  Stoopid damned perfectionism.  In the evening we started watching season 11(?? depending how Disney defines it) of Futurama.  I was wondering why the voices sounded a bit .. off.. until I realised it had been a TEN YEAR gap since the last series and everyone's in like their 60s and 70s.  Then The Orville 1.10.

Second pass strawberries

Sunday.  22nd.  Backdating because when I went to blog this a couple of weeks ago, found that Vodien had broken my CGI scripts AGAIN which meant none of my CGI scripts worked at all, and I couldn't even use the terminal shell.  More on that later.

Leftover veggies and duck sauce that I brought home from the coast for dinner, yum!  Then The Orville 1.8.

Monday.  Be early, slept fairly well.  Still woke up tired though.  And stressed about the lack of weekend.  Meetings in the morning and trial proxy working in the afternoon.  At lunch popped into the mall to get a covid booster and run some errands.  Sausages for dinner and Amazing Race 4.2.  Found myself getting super annoyed at the rich people saying like "oh I never do washing, I buy undies and tshirts and wear them once then throw them out".  People like that are everything that's wrong with the world.  

Tuesday.  Had a pretty rough night on account of vaccine reaction.  Pretty slow morning - still feeling a bit rough. 

Stu cooked gyozas for dinner.

Wednesday.  Slept somewhat better.  Fighting with frustrating trial proxy.  Then was fighting with this super weird problem with some really bizarre symptoms we'd literally never seen before.  Turned out to be assymmetric routing which I could have probably figured out quicker if I'd actually paid attention to the logs that were LITERALLY RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.  I was so upset.  That lack of situational awareness and tunnel vision is how planes crash.  Good thing I don't fly planes I guess.  

On a lighter note.

Thursday.  Awake for ages in the middle of the night.  Just restless.  Didn't take any work notes so no idea what I did.  Probably crap.  Had a sausage at drinks on a "welcome to summer" night, which was freezing cold.  Pizza for dinner (not much for me), then first episode of David Attenborough's Tasmania.

Friday.  Some cleaning in the morning, and some security talks in the afternoon.  Kiev for dinner (Kiev Fridays!!) then Death in Paradise 6.5.

Saturday.  Super productive day doing All The Things!!  Including chopping some huge branches off the photinia (thanks Tony!!), a green waste run, moving the rest of the stones (thanks Tony and F!!), and gave away our old pool cover to M&M. 

Five!!

Two fours and a five!!!

Manly men!!

This gecko ran out from under the pool cover as we moved it.  So cute!

Did some music in the afternoon as well, then pasta for dinner and then watched The War of the Roses.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Did a few bits and pieces in the morning but the mostly inventorying Vic's Lego (nearly done with the loose pieces!).  Took me about fifty minutes to play through all the hymns I've collected.  Will probably need to split them in two.  Put on dinner and then I sat down to blog.

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

FFS.  What have they done this time.  Checked my address book scripts.  Also broken.  So then tried to use the terminal to access stuff via CLI.

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to determine realpath of /home2/<user> (No such file or directory)

FFS.  And error logs were full of this crap

[2023-10-29 17:37:38]: CageFS jail error Unable to determine realpath of /home2/<user> (No such file or directory)
[2023-10-29 17:37:38]: uid: (1935/<user>) gid: (1937<user>) cmd: mt.cgi

Sigh.  So no blogging for me.  But did go in and backup my database just in cases.  Basa bake for dinner, then The Orville 1.9 and Amazing Race 4.6.

Friday.  Kit was desperate for some company with friends, so we headed down.  Left around 18:00, getting Scottish Restaurant drive through for dinner on the way.  

Otherwise a fairly uneventful drive and we even managed to find the driveway in the dark first go when we arrived at around 20:30.

We met Biscuit's seven new little crumbs (9 days old).

Chatted for a while, and not tooo late a night.

Saturday.

Who wouldn't want to wake up to this crap every morning?  Literally the view out the bedroom window when I woke up.

Found myself some leftovers that I'd brought down for breakfast. 

Then did all the animals.  There's still Arthur and Frankie the cats, Vicki, Biscuit and her seven crumbs, and Jasper.  Eight ducks (down from fourteen as she sold six of them that morning), about seven or eight guinea fowl, about thirty chickens and a couple of turkeys.  Then Scout and Ricky the horses, Al and Kerry the alpacas, and I dunno like twenty or thirty sheep.  And don't forget that little cow (bull) above.  There were two.  Now there's one.  And a freezer full of the other.

Headed down to the beach, walking all the way along Kioloa and part way up Shelly Beach and back.

Picked up some pies on the way home for lunch.  I started a jigsaw in the afternoon.  We found some luv-a-duck in the fridge, so had that with some spring onion and cucumber in rice paper rolls (not as good as peking duck pancakes but who cares).  Then chatted and went to bed at normal time.

Sunday.  Did the animals first up.  Then headed into Batemans Bay for brunch.  

Eventually left a bit after twelve.  Did some food shopping on the way home so didn't get home til after 15:00.  Exhausted.  And just in time to do my end of weekend routine.  

Monday.  16th.  Not backdating!  Slept ok I guess but still cranky in the morning.  Ok day I guess.  Pasta for dinner.  Tallied up all the Europe spending, Mum owes me a little bit.  Still have yet to compare how much the whole thing would have cost us doing it ourselves vs doing it with Albatross.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Had a good tidying day, planning the work I wanted to do last Friday.  Filing photos in the evening.  Also started the latest Amazing Race.  Which is a celebrity edition.  Of which I've heard of like two or three of them.  

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Turned on my computer in the morning but there was no network.  And Windows 11 is so retarded at the moment that telling it to turn off or reboot simply logs you out.  So dumb.  Pressing the power button convinced it to reboot, but had to hold it in to shut it off.  Still no network after a cold boot.  So tried it with another cable.  Worked fine.  Tried my cable on a different port.  Worked fine.  So somewhere between the wall panel and the switch.  Probably the Cisco switch just killed another port like it did with our NAS.  I'd really like to get a low power 12 port gigabit switch rather than the Cisco behemoth we have.  Also after the reboot the issue Windoze has updating the wallpaper between destkops is back.  Why is Microsoft so bad at everything whyyyyyy???

Had a slightly long lunch with Neil for his birthday.

And dinner with the sweetie in the evening.  Kinn Thai beef pad see iw and chilli jam crispy pork

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Did some work on another server migration. 

After missing out on the raspberry ones we decided to get these.  They definitely tasted cinnamoney, but these things need to be savoury not sweet.

Then meetings in the afternoon including an hour and a half one with a vendor where I had to be engaged the whole fricken time which I fricken HATE HATE HATE.  Utterly exhausted by the end of it.  Meanwhile someone broke some stuffs pretty badly but took them a few hours to make the connection between the fact that they made a change and the fact things were broken.  Even after I asked did anyone change anything.  Ok drinks, but just our group, then a quiet night.  

Friday.  Slept ok I think.  Bunch of crap in the morning then a lovely afternoon of cleaning.  We'd just settled down to share a bottle of bubbles after work when we got a somewhat desperate message from Kit, who was going through a bit of a crisis and really needed some friends.  So we packed up and headed down the coast.  Didn't get home til after 15:00 Sunday, and quite exhausted.