Kazza the Blank One

Sunday.  26th.  Cooked up some leftover lamb? pork? and a heap of veggies for dinner.

Futurama 13.6.  Then I started watching You are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment on Netflix.

Monday.  Slept like crap. Had an early night but took forever to get to sleep, restless, then awake from like 4. Busy day achieving not much.

Cooked up two pasta bakes with pasta leftover from the weekend - a red one and a white one.

Futurama 13.7. Photo picking and filing. Watched the second episode of You are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, which had little to do with the twins and more on deforestation and climate change and other such fun problems caused by the food industry.

Still grunty about an interaction I had today. This dude, who I've literally never talked to before, messages me and says "Hey mechanic, I'm trying to go somewhere but my car doesn't work, what's wrong?" Ok not in those words, but that exact scenario. No self introduction, nothing about what he was doing, where he was doing it, any errors, or ANYTHING that would actually, you know, give me anything useful to go on. So I ignored the message for a while because I couldn't deal. Eventually he messaged again and starts complaining about it holding up some release or something, and I went through what I went through just there. Never heard back from him. Clearly it was a massive problem. Either that or he found someone nicer to annoy.

Tuesday.  Slept somewhat better maybe.

It was 0.0 degrees outside according to BOM. 12.4 inside according to my Ali Express thermometer. Ran the heater for a while today because it was COLD. I was cranky all day. Being NEIL is super distracting and I have too much to do and too distracted to do it. Then after work had to cook dinner (a bunch of mince and a heap of leftover pasta). Futurama 13.8. Then photo picking while half watching/listening to Half-Life Histories (a rabbit hole I went down after seeing a video on Therac-25 incidents). I blame Dave2 :)

Wednesday.  Woke up at like 4:00 and never got back to sleep. Sigh. Busy distracted day again, and achieving nothing. Well almost nothing. I did get one thing setup for the new proxies. Hanging out for Neil to get back so I can concentrate on other stuff.

Last of the leftover pork for dinner. Futurama 13.9. Another lame episode.  Went for a little walk with the sweetie after dinner.

I'm going to have to ask Damien if I can steal a few heads of these things when they're done

Thursday.  NEIL and proxy stuff mostly.  Had a farewell lunch for Imaar at Ikko.  I had slow cooked beef, it was very nice.

Got a message from Neil in the afternoon that he won't be back til the 17th!! arrgghhh!!  Good drinks though.  Tried the new orange flavoured Hard Rated - alcoholic Fanta!

Made pizzas with a heap of the leftover cheese from the club function last weekend.

Futurama 13.10 (end of season 13 .. hurray that's over and done with .. for now .. )

Friday.  Restless sleep.  NEIL and proxy stuff mostly.  

Got this cool eyeball from the oncologist centre

Kievs for dinner

Then we watched The Last Emperor.  I really didn't know the story at all.  It was kind of sad (and kinda weird it being in English).  I read afterwards what happened to his "main" wife, it was pretty awful.

Saturday.  Restless sleep.

Got ready and headed out to the club (Stu for a committee meeting, me to do more priming, which I forgot to document).  

Came home and picked our first strawberries

Only had like an hour at home before it was time to think about dinner.  I'd found a *heap* of leftovers in the club fridge, so I "dealt with it".  A heap more cheese and pasta, and some sliced up bread rolls.  Given it really wasn't going to last, I cooked up a heap of it.  Dinner of champions!

Then we watched Back to the Future.  Forty years after the events of the "present" time, seventy years after the events of the 1955 time.  Cool stuff.  Oh we ran the cooler when we got home today too.  So in the space of like a week and a half we've run the cooler, the heater, and the cooler again.  Silly really.

Sunday.  Restless sleep.  Panicking slightly over my todo list and losing half my weekend.  Spent a couple of hours in the morning doing gardening and housework and getting grunty about it.  Didn't achieve as much as I wanted.  And there goes the weekend...

For my birthday in 2015 the sweetie got me a 1000 piece jigsaw which was a gradient of all different colours.  Loved it!!  It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it.

So for Christmas 2015 I asked for the 5000 piece version of the same picture.

I spread all the pieces out and arranged by colour.

There was a lot of green!!

And finished!

This wasn't grid cut, it was random cut, which made it quite tricky

The problem was.. 

IT WAS UTTER TRASH!!!  Absolutely crap.  Terrible quality.  Clemens Habicht 5000 Colours Jigsaw Puzzle by Lamington Drive Editions was a TERRIBLE jigsaw.

Here's why.

The printing was crap.  LIke this is not a nice gradient.  It's like they printed the different sections of the jigsaw separately.

It was not even applied to the cardboard very well

The printing was bad enough.  The cutting was SHOCKING.

Pieces weren't cut through properly

Or they were damaged

And that wasn't even the worst part of the poor cutting.

Look at this trash.  They didn't bother to line up the sections after the first cut so things don't align

And another side effect of the poor alignment was that pieces were actually broken!!!

And even completely missing parts!

And the final insult.  There was a piece actually missing!!! (sorry about the out of focus photo I never got a closeup)

Now if this had been a regular jigsaw I might have given this company the benefit of the doubt and assumed I had lost it *somehow* .. even when you look at the space I was working on it.. there's nowhere it could have disappeared to..

But due to all the other problems with this terrible quality jigsaw, I guarantee it was never there.

I was so upset by this jigsaw I couldn't blog about it.  For nearly ten years.  If I had bought it myself I absolutely would have demanded a refund for it.  But the sweetie bought it, and he's allergic to confrontation.  So I have $150 worth of rubbish sitting on a shelf downstairs.  I doubt I could even sell it.  Maybe will just have to donate it to Vinnies or something.  With a warning how bad it is. 

Do not buy Clemens Habicht 5000 Colours Jigsaw Puzzle by Lamington Drive Editions.

Last night was an early Halloween night at the club.  

G/M and Bec went all out with decorations

Eyeballs!

Cheese skulls!

How amazing does this look!?

Hey look!  My sweet potato salad (they asked me for the recipe :) )

Other dinner noms

Brains!!

So yeah was a pretty fun night

Sunday.  19th.  Super yummy roast pork for dinner.  2.5kg so barely fit in my baking dish.  There may have been a lot of fat..!

Because it was so big, the crackling turned out really well, but the meat stayed nice and tender.  It was awesome!

Stu decided we should watch Futurama.  They're into season 13.  But honestly they should just STOP.  It's done its dash.  13.1 was pretty dumb too.  Then I finished watching The Green Mile.

Monday.  Slept like crap - awake for ages because I was hot.  Another disjointed distracted day at work. The temperature today got to like 32C! Turned the cooler on for the first time this year. Yeah last week we had the heater on (briefly), this week we had the cooler on. That's Canberra for you. Leftover pork for dinner. Futurama 13.2 then blog reading and photo filing.

Tuesday.  1 Timothy 2:11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing--if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. .... yeah hmmm.  Again, makes you wonder how much of this is cultural.  

Slept like crap again - awake for ages because I was hot. Even with the cooler fan going.

Busy being NEIL in the morning and not getting any other work done. My Christmas present arrived! ;) To be revealed.. one day..!  Penultimate nuking session, finished the Wasgij jigsaw, then walked up and visited Neil.

Then battled peak hour traffic to get home. Canberra has peak hour traffic.. who knew!? Leftover pork and veggies (refried in the "aspic" - I don't know why you'd want to eat that stuff cold anyway - just use it as a kind of "stock" to fry stuff in - much more yummierer!) for dinner, Futurama 13.3, blogged my last two Diamond Dotz birds sets.

Wednesday.  

Last nuking!!!!!!

Got conflicting advice about my skin.  They're all like.. keep it moisturised.. but those bits, keep them dry.  Like make up your mind.  Rang the bell though hurray!

Got home and had a couple of beers and got Chong Co delivered for dinner then Futurama 13.4

Thursday.  1 Timothy 4:10 That is why we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.  .. "all people" .. and "especially"..? what does that even mean?

Okish sleep.  Opened the door under the "angel" tank to get the food out and it was tougher to open than usual.  Which usually means swollen chipboard from a leak.  Except I couldn't find where the leak was coming from.  hrmmmm.  

NEIL for a bit in the morning then fighting with new proxies. If you turn off inspection on a site it can't figure out what browser you're using, and so it blocks you (we block Firefox from general browsing and only allow it to some sites). But it won't give you an error, you just get a connection reset. So dumb. Then fighting with the test mail servers after someone spammed the hell out of them.

Went into drinks for the first time in months. Then it was a trivia night. It was one of THOSE trivia nights - stoopidly complicated question/marking setup (like three parts to an answer, each with two parts, and if you get one out of the two you get half a point, but if you get both parts right you get two points, oh and you have to mark each others, it's not marked centrally so there's no consistency in the scoring). Yeah so fricken dumb. One round wasn't even trivia, it was look at this picture for 10 seconds, then answer the crappiest stuff, like how many ears were in this picture, or how many feet were in this other picture. Not even trivia. Dumb dumb dumb. But my expecations for these trivia nights are so low now that I just didn't care. And I had bubbles. I don't even know what the final scores were, I didn't get a photo. I think we came third. They spun a wheel to determine who'd run the next one, and it missed us by one. Winning!  Also, Gin picked me up some Subway to have for dinner.. first Subway in like three months!!

Friday.  1 Timothy 5:23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.  Yeah cause fresh water back in the day was usually contaminated, and alcohol killed a lot of the germs.

Logged onto work briefly to be NEIL for the overnight stuff, then took an RDO.

Did some washing, did some weeding, went shopping (actually had fairly successful shopping mission.  Was chatting to Faye at Subway at lunch about how I'd been away with the C word, and she gave me a free cookie! So sweet :) ), took some cans for recycling and suddenly it's 15:45. And nowhere near enough done on my todo list. hrmmm.

I've missed Subway so much..!!  So much that I had it for dinner last night then lunch today haha

Drinks at Jo's in the afternoon and Tony came too so that was a nice catchup.

Cooked up some veggies to go with some leftover pork. Futurama 13.5.  Then I watched "Apollo 13: Survival" documentary on Netflix which was pretty interesting.  Jim Lovell only died a couple of months ago, and Marilyn only a couple of years ago.

Saturday.  1 Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.  .. not necessarily "money".. but the "love of money".  

Got a few things done in the morning then we headed out. First up to "The Shed", an offshoot of the Green Shed. Quite a bit smaller than the old shed, but he only has the lease til December so he may find something bigger (and with better parking would be nice!). They still charged me $3 for jigsaws, although I have a feeling they only did that after I asked (they revised the total down). They charged $2 each for some plates which I thought was a little high. Oh well.

This would fit in nicely with Mum's collection :)

Then next door to the other second hand place there (Down Memory Lane, I think??).  Mum would definitely recognise this ;)

Then out to the club for the "Spooktacular" halloween night. But first up went for a wander with the sweetie.

Then had a good long chat to Chris and Geoff. Then it was up to the shed for drinks and a spectacular charcuterie board, and an amazing dinner with lots of different things. Little bit of a late night but not too bad.

Sunday.  Got up and went and tidied up the shed a bit, with a bit of help from Brenton. Then home via the Scottish Restaurant, which took them 18 MINUTES to deliver our food from when we first arrived. So much for FAST food. Also. BOM updated their website a few days ago, and in the process shut down the APIs used by third party apps for the radar. TWITTER MUCH??? I'm so pissed off that RainRadarAU doesn't work anymore - I always preferred it to the BOM app. Hopefully there will be enough backlash/complaints and they'll restore them. Got a few things done in the afternoon and pfft, there goes the weekend. Sigh.

After enjoying the first three Diamond Dotz kits so much, I was waiting for specials on the cockatoo set (one of the three by Carlie Edwards).  Eventually HobbySew had the cockatoo for $40, reduced from $62.50.  Of course the savings on the set got eaten up in the postage.

The canvas

This set has 35 colours, 13446 dotz.  And 10 snap-lock baggies to store them.  Dumb.

Finished!  Another glorious picture!!

I started this on 2 August (exactly six months after the galah) and finished it on 19 October (exactly six months after the galah).. I didn't even plan that, that was pure coincidence! Funny stuff!

Slight close up 

The waratahs

And the rubbish

This was one of three Diamond Dotz sets I got for Christmas, the last one I started.  It was on special from HobbySew for $40, reduced from $62.50. 

I was inspired to get this by Kit, who had the three pictures by Carlie Edwards.

This set has 39 colours and 14313 dotz.

When I opened it, I pulled it out.. and just got this .. what..?? haha

It had just separated and gotten scrunched up

Spread out

With all the colour baggies laid out

All the colour baggies. Annoyingly, even though there's 39 colours, they only give you 10 snap-lock baggies to hold them.  

The canvas

We're about half way through here

And finished!!

I started this on 2 February and finished it on 19 April - so about two and a half months.

Photos don't do it justice how pretty and sparkly it is.. love it!

Here's the rubbish - over filled drills, under filled drills, offcuts etc

Sunday.  12th.  Reheated the last of the lamb and had it with a cauliflower bake, potato, brussels sprouts and garlic.

Wednesday 2.3. Then Lilo & Stitch (the live action one from 2025). Lolz Tia Carrere as the social worker (she played Nani in the original). And Cobra Bubbles is split out into his CIA character. A lot of it is pretty similar to the original. And as live action remakes go this one was actually pretty decent. Certainly a lot better than The Lion King or Aladdin.

Monday.  Somewhat restless but slightly better sleep.  Achieved precisely nothing today. Too many interruptions and All The People wanting All The Things. Past half way through nuking.

Leftovers for dinner. Wednesday 2.4. Photo stuffs.

Tuesday.  More restless sleep. Another busy day of crap, although did manage to actually achieve a couple of things. Nuking session 9. Driving home and noticed all the fluff is out!! Too late to start studying?  Leftovers for dinner then Wednesday 2.5. Lots of photo stuff. Then tried to blog jigsaws but I kept making mistakes because it was getting late and I was tired and half watching Anti Chef videos which was distracting me.

Wednesday.  Restless sleep again (hot and sweaty every five minutes). The koels are back in town!!! They remind me of home.  Mowed the lawn when I got home from nuking (it was as tall as me (kidding .. but it was super tall)).  Then went out for petrol.  And KFC.  Whoops.  Wednesday 2.6.

Thursday.  Some turd dumped two empty rolls of fake grass on our nature strip overnight.  They're a few metres long and we have no idea what to do with them.  I fricken HATE people. 

Domino for dinner.  Whoops.  Wednesday 2.7.

Friday. 

Fighting with the stoopid new proxies.  Trying to allow encrypted files from certain sites.  But can't get it to work.  So dumb.  Kievs for dinner then the finale of Wednesday season 2. 

Then I watched the first half of The Green Mile (I'd seen a documentary on it earlier today or yesterday and was inspired).

Saturday.  Spent much of the morning doing housework and weeding.  This was not part of the plan.  Bit of photo stuff and hobbies. 

Got some sausages from Chris's and did a creamy mushroom sauce with some cream and mushrooms that really needed using up.  And frozen veggies.  Which the sweetie didn't much care for haha.  Maybe he can cook dinner next time. 

Then we watched Passengers, which we last saw on the Queen Mary 2 in 2017.

Sunday.  More nights of waking up hot and sweaty.  Woke up at 5:30 to a cacophony of birds.  A day of All The Things.  Not enough time.  Too many things to do.  Slide scanning took too long and then I had to cook dinner so no time for music.  This was not part of the plan.  On a lighter note, it smells like Christmas in here.

This was wayyyy back in July.  Tony dragged me out of the house kicking and screaming and took me to the Arboretum.  I used it as a good opportunity to test out my new lens.  

View towards Whitlam

View towards Denman Prospect

It was still frosty!

View towards Civic

View over the Arboretum and Black Mountain

View over the Arboretum to Lake Burley Griffin

View to Scrivener Dam

View towards Woden town centre

Offspring of the Lone Pine from Türkiye

Sun dial

Eagle and Nest by Richard Moffatt

Magpie at the Arboretum

View towards Mt Rogers (with mobile phone tower).  The two cranes in the middle are from the new apartments being built at Belconnen Markets.

The Arboretum

White-backed magpie at the Arboretum

I need to go back at a different time of day to photograph this from the other side.  I was going through Mum's photos the other night and she had a photo taken from the other side.  It actually spells out real words!  Who knew!

A magpie lark at the Arboretum

View towards Woden

View towards Government House

Wrapped trees

Cloak, by Jeremy Blincoe and Michael Van Dam

King parrots at the Arboretum

This came mostly done packaged up in another jigsaw I got at the Green Shed (two for one!).  But since there was no box, I fixed it up, took a photo, then pulled it apart to do another day.  Finally got around to doing it.  I didn't look at the picture while I was doing it, didn't really need to.  Not a great jigsaw - everything very furry and out of focus.  Printed out the photo and stuck it on a box to pack it up.

I think this was from the Green Shed from ages ago.  I've got a version of this of Sydney, so it was fun to do London.  

First there's the 1666 city map

Then the modern city map

Then you have all the little buildings!

Complete

Some closeups of the buildings.

These next three were from Crossy.

Flight of Fantasy.  Very soft

Confabulation of Dragons.  I thought it should have been called a Conflagration of Dragons.  Lots of dragons!

Lady Unicorn.  There was a lot of red in this!

This was from R&F for my birthday.  I was a bit annoyed about the edges - they were cut identically so you couldn't tell whether they were correct or not.  Which would have been fine if there was any distinguishing features, but for the most part there wasn't, they were all just dark.

Here's an example of how the edges would fit even if they were wrong

And finished!

SPOILERS!!!

Once the jigsaw is complete you then need to solve six puzzles from clues in the picture.  So three of the puzzles I got right.  One was a maths problem, but it was one of those linear arithmetic problems where if you don't do the "correct" method of multiplying first you get a different answer.  So I wasn't sure which way they'd do it so got two possible answers.  One I got with a hint, but it depended on the edge pieces being in the right position, which I wasn't sure about.  The last one I essentially got, but took myself off on a tangent because I was overthinking it.

So yeah as it turned out, you needed the edges to be the same for the "solution" to work.

Weirdly, they include all the offcuts, which they tell you you can discard.  The only reason I can think of that they'd do this is that because the edge pieces are so necessary for the solution that they don't want them to get discarded accidentally during packaging.  

We borrowed this from another floor.  I didn't do a huge amount of it, just helped out here and there.

Yeah I'm a bit behind!!

I can't remember where this came from.  Possibly Green Shed.  It was somewhat evil, but mainly because the pieces were super similar and you could put wrong ones in and they'd fit.

This I got with a voucher I gor for my 50th.  How pretty is this?  Did it quite quickly.

I think we found this on another floor at work and took it to do.

I think this was from the Green Shed.  Quite easy and I did it quite quickly, so took it to work for the guys to do.

This one T/J gave me earlier in the year

I think this was from the Green Shed.  Photomosaic jigsaws are super tricky.  The world bits were a lot easier because they weren't just dark squares.

Neuschwanstein!  I think from the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  Pretty sure this was actually sealed when I got it.  Not sure if I'll keep it though.

I think this was from the Green Shed, possibly Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction. Pity it was missing so many pieces.

A Harry Potter jigsaw from the Green Shed ages ago.  Not a fun jigsaw.  The whole thing is furry (out of focus) and very dark.  

This was the mandala jigsaw that we coloured, so I wanted to do it again with the colours.