Kazza the Blank One

Sunday.  16th.  Lamb roast for dinner.  Into season 5 of The Crown.  Then finished season 3 of The Amazing Race Australia.  I was really glad that (spoiler alert!!) Heath and Toni won.  

Monday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Then kept waking up early thinking it was time to wake up.  Then people hassled me the entire fricken day and It. Did. Not. Stop. All. Day.  I hung my washing outside in the morning because it was supposed to be 16 and breezy.  Pfft, never dried.  Saw three of my birds at lunch and did some weeding.  Sausages for dinner.  Still behind on culling.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Could have had more sleep though.  Got some culling down in the morning.  Work wasn't *as* crazy as yesterday.  Pea and ham soup for dinner (took literally two minutes to make - ham hock, packet of yellow split peas, bay leaves, onions (that I cooked last night), pepper and water).  Weeding at lunch.  Got up to date with culling.  Windows 11 is so bad.  I have notepad pinned to the task bar.  And normally when it's open it's in the place I have it set.  But every so often windoze just moves notepad all the way over to the right of all my icons, and not where I'd originally pinned it.  So I have to move it back.  So damned retarded.  And don't even get me started on cmd, which is pinned right next to notepad, but when you actually start it, it leaves the pinned icon there, but opens the actual command prompt in another icon all the way to the right.  So you go looking for your open cmd window on the left but can't find it, because it's all the way over to the right.  

Wednesday.  Spent all morning on one ticket trying to figure out how we do our cloud crap.  Another crazy day.  Gave blood for the first time in about thirty two years.  The first time I gave blood I felt really quite unwell after (I felt really off in my 4 unit maths class, and Sarah F gave me a lift home).  And the second time at the Red Cross centre in Wynyard I threw up.  So I never did it again.  But I'm about a hundred kilos heavier now so thought I'd give it a go.  And I wasn't sick.  Hurray.  Met up with Dennis and the sweetie for a drink after work.  Well they had a drink.  I thought a drink might be a bit unwise with reduced blood volume.  Then we had Kinn Thai for dinner.  I had grilled beef.  Because iron.

Thursday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Another morning trying to figure out cloud crap all for one ticket.  Trivia night in the evening.  We came 5th out of 10.  And I'm pissed at myself for getting one wrong that I should have known better.  If we'd gotten that one and just one more we would have come second, it was that close.  

Friday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Sigh.  At one point in the morning I was so overwhelmed I had a full on meltdown.  Sigh.  Totally worn out by this week.  But did manage to knock off early so we could go shopping and go out to the club. Laid out all the food and prizes before holing up in the van with the fire going.  It took us both several drinks to start to feel relaxed after such an insane week.

Saturday.  Slept ok(ish) (kept waking up with numb hands).  Our feather/down doona sure is lovely.  I stoked the fire maybe a little too much in the morning, but did have a leisurely morning.  I even made a candle (which I'll put in another post).  Went and chatted to Chris and Geoff for a bit (saved them from a phone call to Chris's sister), then went up to start the dinner proceedings.  

I was pottering away almost all afternoon.   I did allow for some help making the "Christmas Skewers", and John very nicely carved the meat and I had several amazing servers as well.

Other than that, did all the prep/cooking myself. 

Eight kilos of pork (the crackling didn't turn out as well this year, probably needed to have it higher longer, but it did mean the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender)

Four kilos of turkey

Two epic potato bakes (annoyingly the baking dishes I normally use have disappeared so had to use smaller ones)

And winter salad (sweet potato, rocket, goats cheese, toasted pumpkin seeds, honey and olive oil) which I remembered to take a photo of this year (there were two of these)

Tab made some lovely Biscoff muffins and some puddings.

It seemed to go well and I think everyone enjoyed dinner.  There was just the tiniest amount of leftovers, which meant catering was perfect - anyone that wanted seconds got them and there wasn't a huge pile of leftover food.  Just enough for a meal or two for us.  And not too late a night.  

I'm always amazed at the STARS out at the club.  Being away from Canberra's light pollution is pretty cool.  On the way back to the van I could see the Milky Way and wondered if my phone could capture it.  It could!!  How amazing is this.. hand held, on a PHONE!!

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Did I mention how good feather/down doonas are?  Got up relatively early and went up and spent an hour or so tidying up the shed. 

Then we came home.  And I realised I'd left a bunch of food in the fridge in the van.  Pissed about that.  As per usual on Sundays after club nights I felt pretty flat all day.  All I managed to achieve all day was finishing the Titanic.  But hey, I guess that's a pretty cool achievement.  Because I mean look at this thing!  So cool!

Something I learnt this week: Weenus!  I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's a slang word for the flap of skin you get over your elbow (technically referred to as olecranal skin).  There you go!