Kazza the Blank One

Monday.  3rd.  Not backdating for a change ;)  Did the usual morning stuff, then Damien came over.  The boys had a coffee and a chat, then Damien saw my Queen Mary 2 in New York photo and was asking about it, and we ended up subjecting him to the slideshow of that trip ;)  I put out a bunch of nibblies (we've not really done much entertaining this break so we still had lots of junk food in the house) and the boys played Glory Recalled, which went all afternoon until Damien had to go home (I think Damien was winning). 

Meanwhile I did a few months worth of This Day in History posts.  Then.  STORM!!  We basically only got the side of it, but there was hail and so much rain and it was SO LOUD!!  Had to close all the windows on the south side of the house because rain was pouring in.  The backyard actually flooded at the lowest part.  And I put out two buckets to collect some free rainwater, and they both filled in just a few minutes.  

We didn't lose power during the storm itself, but we did have power fluctuations which confused a few things - the garage door thought it lost power and the cooler needed a full hard reboot to start working again, but the computer was ok (which I didn't shut down cause it needed updates and that'd take too long). 

We did lose power just before bed time but only for a few minutes.  The ESA website was just madness!

Ended up getting pizza for dinner.  

Tuesday.  Slept relatively well.  A day of All The Things.  Power went out again in the afternoon for like an hour or so.  Did some paint by numbers for a bit, and separated the plants that were going into each other by the front door.  Do you think I maybe should have pruned this plant a bit earlier? :)

I was blogging more This Day in History posts and realised I'd missed a *whole heap* of my own photos from 2020/2021 that need to be processed and added in.  I was hoping to get 2021 finished this break, but that put me in a bad mood about it all and I haven't been back since.  

Wednesday.  Went early to do our food shopping at Coles.  They lost power Monday night all night, and so lost all their fridge and freezer stock!! OMFG such a waste!!  So sad.  I was lucky I was able to mostly get the fresh/frozen stuff that I wanted.  I was hoping to pickup any leftover eggnog, but if there was any left it would have been lost.  Then home to tetris it all into the fridge (I primarily went for pantry stuff as there was a bunch of things we'd run out of, but I picked up some fresh stuff as well, because I was there, but we still have a lot of leftovers, so it was tricky to fit it all in).  By the time I'd gone through my weekly morning routine it was nearly lunch time.  Hmmmmmm.  Then spent most of the afternoon pulling out the computer desk and cleaning it all up and setting everything up again.  I bought a dvi to display port adapter in the morning at Officeworks, but it turns out the old HP second monitor I have (an old one of Stu's) doesn't work with Windows 11, so that was a waste of money.  But then I'd also pulled everything off my computer desk and made an epic mess of the study, so will probably spend the rest of the break trying to tidy up the mess I just made.. hrmmm.  And no weeding or music either.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Hating on Windows 11 - you can't ungroup taskbar windows anymore, and you can't have additional toolbars - two things I really need/want/use.  I find I can't *see* what I'm doing because Microsoft in its wisdom thinks it knows best, and wants you to look at a clutter-free taskbar.  They're trying to be like Apple or something.  Hate hate hate.  Eudora won't work in Windows 11 either - it loads ok, but can't connect to the servers.  Probably some sort of trust issue, but I don't know how to solve it (I tried turning off AV, compatibility mode and running as administrator).  Ended up cranky that I'd spent all day fighting with technology.  But we did have a nice stir fry with some leftover pork for dinner.

My Christmas present from Annie - the 12 beers of Christmas? :)

As part of the desk cleanup, I figured it was probably time to eat this wedding candy from Andy and Crystal's wedding in 2012.  On account of they're broken up now anyway.  hrmm.

And I should probably give these birds away too .. I mean they're super cute and all, but don't really mean anything to me..

As a "temporary" measure I moved all the ornaments and knick-knacks that were on top of my computer desk into the cubes in the spare room.  Yeah right.  Temporary.  haha.

The pork stir fry

Friday.  Woke up early hungry and needing to pee.  Tried do more tidying up in the study, but then ended up making more of a mess of the spare room too.  Sigh.  1246 covid cases in Canberra today.  That's ~25 times the peak of Delta.  We finished season 3 of Sex Education.  I actually had a dream a couple of nights ago that Jean had died, and so when we got to the end of episode 7 I was like *I NEED to know what happened* so we watched the final episode that night as well.  

Saturday.  Woke up early again.  But Stu hadn't slept pretty much all night!! Poor thing!  I reverted my monitor setup (I'd had a go at putting the secondary monitor on the right side, but ended up not liking it).  Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even that is not the primary monitor.  So fricken DUMB.  Just a day of more tidying - both on the computer and off.  Had an idea to see how many words are on my blog, and found this site which admittedly did timeout, but not until after it had counted all the monthly archives, which I could easily add up in Excel.  As of this week there's 935200 words on my blog!  Insanity!  Had salmon and salad for dinner and watched The Courier in the evening (it was the sweetie's turn to choose a movie so he chose a spy movie and/or true story movie .. in this case "and" :) )

Sunday.  Today!  Ok sleep (although not for Stu again :( ).  Today was fighting with Excel.  I don't know if it's just Windows 11 or one of the updates I did, but dates don't work in Excel anymore.  Yeah yeah I know, Office 2003 isn't supported anymore, but that's the version I own.  I tried Office 2013 that Stu got in Technet at one point, but I think he'd used up the licences, and it just crashed as soon as you tried to agree to the terms and conditions.  Tried reinstalling 2003 just in case, but no luck.  So I installed LibreOffice, which works just fine thankyouverymuch.  But in other news, I could copy a time-lapse video off my phone without explorer crashing, so that's a win, I guess.  But in a case of you win some, you lose some, you can't drag an icon onto an app on the task bar and have it pop up the app and open the file.  So lame.  Why do they have to *break* everything??

Stuffed capsicums for dinner, which will be in next week's post.  Covid cases are down today as well - "only" 30000 in NSW and 1000 in ACT (down from like 35000 for a couple of days in NSW and ~1200 in the ACT).