This was about half done at the hospital while I was getting nuked.  I didn't get too much time to work on it because even though I was a bit early to appointments they were almost always ready for me straight away.  A couple of days I had time to work on it, and stayed late on the penultimate nuking day to finish it.

Another Neuschwanstein jigsaw.  I found there was a 6x9 repeating rectangle pattern which made it easier to figure out which shaped piece I would need next for any given space.  Which sure was handy in all that shrubbery!  You could also tell which way up pieces went.  Still undecided whether to keep this one.

A fun 1500 piece jigsaw from the Green Shed 

Supposedly you can use the backing colours to make sorting easier, but that's a bit dumb because then you have to turn over all the pieces twice.  The coloured backing had come off a bunch of the pieces, but they were still in the box, so we reglued them back on after this was taken.

The guys did this while I was WFH for months.  Or rather they sorted it but didn't get very far with it, just some of the sky and head and yellow bits.  I finished it for them when I came back to work.

Sunday.  16th.  Stu cooked up a pasta bake and a cabbage bake to use up a bunch of things in the fridge that needed using up.  

Then some Stranger Things (I think).  

Monday.  Logged onto work to be NEIL for the morning and did a handover after lunch. Got paperwork done for the proxy cutover change that I'd prepped but would be leaving to Con/Ward to do.  

Tuesday.  Holidays!

Thursday.  27th.  Got home around lunch time.  Lost one potted strawberry plant due to the heat and epic WIND.  But look at the haul!!  

Thanks Tony for looking after all our plants and animals :)  Spent some time unpacking, downloading GPS and photos etc.  Later in the afternoon the sweetie dropped me off so I could get a blood test done, then I dropped into work drinks.  KFC for dinner then Stranger Things 4.3.

Friday.   Got to sleep briefly but then awake for a while because I was HOT. Was looking at Kiama temperatures before bed, so didn't realise it was actually going to get *cold* overnight, but it was lovely! Had a busy day just trying to get caught up with life, including taking last year's Christmas party cans for recycling (finally!!) and getting a bone density scan (which they could do *today* which was pretty impressive.. I thought I'd have to wait weeks).

Kievs and some garlic bread I made with bread from the last club function leftovers. Stranger Things 4.4.

Saturday.  Slept like crap. Took ages to get to sleep, then awake from 1 for ages then awake from 4 for ages. Sigh. Got ready and headed out to the club.

John had cut a Christmas tree which we setup and then I spent an hour or so decorating. Good fun and it looked super cool.

Then R&F turned up and I helped all afternoon with the cooking. The night went really well.

Sunday.  Slept okish (mostly ok til around 4:45 then awake for a while). Went up to the shed and spent an hour or so tidying up and washing up.

Had to evict this five-legged grasshopper first..

Then home. And spent much of the afternoon putting up our Christmas tree and decorations.

Last weekend was the ABC Classic 100 Piano.

When this first came up a while back I listed the first things that popped into my head.  All but one of them were listed:

Rhapsody in Blue - yes
Jessica's Theme (Man from Snowy River) - yes
Ice Castles soundtrack - no (this has a nice piano opening but not sure it's really a piano piece anyway)
Pride and Prejudice soundtrack - yes
The Entertainer - yes

They had a few novelty pieces too - Chopsticks and "Heart and soul" as well.. I never even knew it was called that.

In the end these were my votes and their places.  I wasn't really expecting the Shostakovich to get up, but I do like that piece from Fantasia 2000.

4 Rhapsody in Blue -- Gershwin, George
  (robbed!!!! this should have been number one!!)
18 The Man from Snowy River (incl. Jessica's Theme) -- Rowland, Bruce
22 Le Carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals, incl. The Swan) -- Saint-Saëns, Camille
25 The Entertainer -- Joplin, Scott
28 Pride & Prejudice Soundtrack (1995 TV) -- Davis, Carl
30 Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565 -- Bach, Johann Sebastian
32 Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K331 'Rondo alla Turca' -- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
46 Up Soundtrack -- Giacchino, Michael
78 Lyric Pieces (incl. Wedding Day at Troldhaugen) -- Grieg, Edvard
Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102 -- Shostakovich, Dmitri

I actually listened to every piece they had open for voting.  Because most pieces I literally have no idea what they're called.  I pretty much added anything I'd ever heard of to my short list, then whittled them down from there.

Aside from the finals above, these were my maybes and their positions.  I did consider 4'33" too haha

17 Bagatelle in A minor, WoO59 'Für Elise' - Beethoven, Ludwig van
35 Flight of the Bumblebee - Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai (arr. Rachmaninov)
67 Forrest Gump Soundtrack - Silvestri, Alan
75 My Neighbour Totoro - Hisaishi, Joe
Chopsticks - Allen, Euphemia
  (just for the novelty factor)
Heart and Soul - Carmichael, Hoagy
  (again for the novelty factor)
Minuet No. 1 in G major - Petzold, Christian (formerly attributed to JS Bach)
Waltzing Matilda - Traditional (Australian) arr. Cowan, Marie

And these were my probably nots and their positions:

1 Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73 'Emperor' - Beethoven, Ludwig van
2 Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 'Moonlight' - Beethoven, Ludwig van
7 Gymnopédies - Satie, Erik
8 Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 - Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
  (this was the onlyTchaikovsky)
9 Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 - Rachmaninov, Sergei
10 Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K467 'Elvira Madigan' - Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
12 Variations on 'Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman', K265 (aka Twinkle Twinkle - Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
15 Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring - Bach, Johann Sebastian
19 The Piano Soundtrack (incl. The Heart Asks Pleasure First) - Nyman, Michael
21 Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 - Rachmaninov, Sergei
26 Howl's Moving Castle Soundtrack (incl. Merry-Go-Round of Life) - Hisaishi, Joe
29 I giorni - Einaudi, Ludovico
34 Peer Gynt, Op. 23 (incl. Morning Mood) - Grieg, Edvard
  (this might have gone into my maybes if I'd realised this was also Into the hall of the mountain king)
37 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence - Sakamoto, Ryuichi
41 Spirited Away (incl. One Summer's Day) - Hisaishi, Joe
42 Pictures at an Exhibition - Mussorgsky, Modest
61 The Pink Panther - Mancini, Henry
71 Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major, K545 'Sonata facile' - Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
74 Maple Leaf Rag - Joplin, Scott
85 American Beauty Soundtrack - Newman, Thomas
89 Waltzes (incl. 'Minute') - Chopin, Frédéric
Je te veux - Satie, Erik
Rondo a Capriccio in G major, Op. 129 'Rage over a Lost Penny' - Beethoven, Ludwig van

So most of the stuff I might have voted for got up.  Guess that says something about "popular" music.  ie, crap that people have actually heard of got voted for haha.

A fun weekend!

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.  

Friday night I got home from work, chucked everything in the car, and headed straight out again to go down the coast.  We nearly hit a kangaroo on Macs Reef Road.  Stoopid things.  Took it a bit slow and arrived about 19:45.  Had bbq chicken and salad for dinner and then just chatted for a bit.  Little bit of a late night but not too bad.

I slept like crap - woke up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  So a slow start.  Followed Kit around like these ducks as she did the morning animal routine.

These guys will be a lot of dinners one day

There's like eight or nine new lambs under a couple of weeks old which are so cute!

I don't even know how many birds she has.  There's ten ducks, one large male turkey (Nigel), a female turkey and a young turkey, as well as about ten guinea fowl, and countless chickens.

She still has Scout and Ricky

Biscuit has as much fun jumping into the creek as Vicky does

Chatted for a while before we headed into Bateman's Bay for lunch.  We were going to go to the Mariner's, but it was closed til early June.  So went to Catalina, which we've driven past heaps of times but never been in.  I had quite a nice pork belly salad.

Went back to Kit's and everyone else had a nap while I did a jigsaw.  Only 250 pieces but quite tricky - basically just had to pick up a piece, figure out where it went, rinse and repeat 250 times.

Then Kit and Pete and I played a couple of games.  First What Next? (The Skyscraper Caper) which is kinda like a choose your own adventure, but we failed on pretty much everything.  Then Dragonworld which was decent enough and I actually managed to win it.

Since we'd had a big lunch, dinner was just ham and cheese toasted sandwiches.  Then listening to music on YouTube.

Slept ok Saturday night.  Pete cooked us breakfast while I followed Kit around doing the animals.

Had our breakfast then we came home.  Was 12:30 by the time we got home, and I was stressed most of the way home about losing so much time out of my weekend.  Not sure how long I can keep up this work nonsense, it just takes up too much damned time..

Sunday.  8th.  Backdated.  Had pork and turkey fried in pork jelly with salad for dinner.  Then The Simpsons and The Crown.

I actually forgot to get these shapes out for Christmas.  This to me is the flavour of Christmas - Savoury Shapes with french onion dip.  Yum yum yum!

Compare the pair!  No forced perspective here - these are side by side!

Monday.  Got the house down to 16C with just the fan running overnight.  The blog publish was still going.  Did half an hour of weeding before work.  That makes it beer o'clock right??  Oh, did I mention I cleaned out the Dyson?  Pulled it apart and cleaned everything I could.  And it worked again!  Hurray!!  Cleaning at work.  Basa bake for dinner.  Then started watching A Christmas Karen.  This came on after the carols on Christmas Eve but it was way too late to start watching it then.  

Tuesday.  More weeding in the morning (pruning out the front).  Went back to my work on certificate management.  There was an email from Digicert the other day that said something like 80% of companies have had outages because of expired certificates.  And I'm like.. pfft.. more like 100%.  If 80% were true it'd mean the other 20% don't use certificates for anything.  Anyways, I'm working on not letting it happen to our team.  Sure we have tools, but they don't cover everything so it's good for a human to just keep an eye on things.  I made a tuna casserole for dinner using up stuff in the pantry and freezer that needed using up.  I'll post that separately I think.  We also started a new anime series - Bocchi the Rock.  And then I finished A Christmas Karen.  Which I actually thought was rather sweet.  As well as filing of photos.  Also, the blog publish finished.  This is why I hate doing any sort of design changes that require republishes of the whole site.

Wednesday.  Mostly finished my certificate management stuff.  Music after work.  Dug out some leftover chicken out of the freezer for dinner.  Also the ftp backup I did of the snapshot of my blog finished (that took multiple goes as well cause the ftp client would grind to a halt).  

Thursday.  Working through the test plan for the weekend's work.  Went looking for a drink after work with Dave 5 and Neil, but the Pot Belly was closed so we went to the Bavarian.  Because it was closest.  Because it was HOT.  Bavarian wasn't too bad.  I'd never actually been in before.  Had a couple of German beers which was nice.  Into season 32 of The Simpsons.

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am and couldn't get back to sleep until like 4:30 then kept waking up.  Sigh.  Which was a bit of a shame because I had an RDO.  Went and did a bottle and cardboard recycling run first thing.  Then dropped into Bing Lee to ask about the oven (whenever you turn the dial past a setting that has the top element, even when it's cold and there's no power otherwise, it trips the entire circuit).  They reckon there's only a two year warranty.  The thing is nearly three years old.  Epic #grunt.  Spent the entire rest of the day pulling out all the fish tank stuff downstairs, sorting it all out, pulling out stuff to give away or throw out, and putting it all back together again.  The corner looks pretty good now, but I didn't do some of the work I really wanted to do, and ended up hot and sweaty.  More leftover chicken for dinner, then watched The Social Network, which I hadn't seen since i saw it on a plane somewhere.

Before I stated

Everything spread out for sorting

Part way through

Finished!  

The pile of stuff to give/throw away

Saturday.  Loaded Echofon and got a popup saying I needed to authenticate with Twitter.  But that brought up an error page.  hmmmm.  Went into work to do some firewall upgrades.  Went fairly smoothly but took all morning.  Pattysmiths again for lunch.  Then spent most of the afternoon looking at all the shore excursions for my cruise.  And only looked at three ports.  Sigh.  Lamb for dinner then more of Origins of Us - on Guts.  Only they didn't mention what I thought they would - that our guts are shorter than a lot of animals because we cook our food.  And started on Brains as well.

I had the Crispy Chicken burger at Pattysmiths this time which was quite nice

Stu might have also bought himself a new toy!  Just so long as he lets me play it too haha

This is three seconds hand held on the phone.  I really need to try and find a tripod mount and test it out properly

Sunday.  Spent most of the morning looking at shore excursions.  Then we did our food shopping.  Then some music.  Then All The Cooking.  And suddenly the weekend is over.  Sigh.

For dinner I cooked roast chicken.  Except as an experiment I decided to cook it "upside down".  That, is, with the breast down and the back up.  I really don't know why this way isn't the preferred way to roast chickens.  This way all the little fatty bits on the back render down, while the breast stays moist at the bottom.  I reckon it turned out better than the traditional way.  Although it does look rather disturbing in photos.

Sunday.  17th.  Lamb roast and drinks with Kit.

Monday.  A fair bit of inbox tidying and decommission cleaning.  Got travel insurance for the cruise next year, but trying to get an ESTA was a pain in the poo poo hole.  When it came to putting through payment I clicked on the link and got a browser pop up saying it was going to leave the page.  Which I clearly didn't want to do.  So tried again and this time got a popup from the site saying I was going to leave the page.  So went "back" to see if there was something I missed but then it complained I already had an application in process.  So got to the end again and it was all "THE PAYMENT STATUS COULD NOT BE DETERMINED AT THIS TIME. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER FOR THE PAYMENT STATUS."  and literally no way to pay.  Tried different browsers with no luck.  #grunt.  So that was a waste of a good chunk of the evening.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Reloaded my ESTA application and it came straight up with the option to pay.  So just needed to wait for it to sort itself out.  Fighting with all the stoopid.  Had some mulled wine, and cooked sausages, cauliflower, bacon and these little kale sprouts I got off Tony which were fricken *amazing* - little crunchy leafy balls of goodness.  Also blogged last week.

Lunch: toasted cheese sandwich with pizza blend cheese to take it to next level

This photo cannot possibly capture how awesome those little sprouts of kale were!

Wednesday.  More dealing with all the stoopid, and frustration with people that don't respond to messages and/or disappear for hours at a time.  Also had to finally start using Outlook for the first time, ever.  And my welcome to it was a two hour delay in mails arriving because of "issues".  Seriously whoever thought that cloud would be a good idea for this crap??  Was watching stoopid crap on the internet in the evening and backing up my computer when I found out my desktop no longer existed (I have robocopy scripts that save the output to a folder on my desktop).  And I'm like WTF??  I had actually noticed the other day that everything on my desktop had little OneDrive icons.  Turns out Microsoft had taken upon itself to backup my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive.  EXCEPT IT HADN'T!!!  Half the files were actually missing.  I even looked online and they simply weren't there.  It had badly synced my files and chunks of them were missing.  So I turned off backup, at least for desktop, and will need to restore my files from last week's backup.  Fricken HATE.  Microsoft is doing an Apple and doing things of its own accord WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.  HATE HATE HATE.  Literally the second time this week my files have been screwed with by others (last time was on Friday when a rogue backup script deleted everything at work).  

Thursday.  Farewell for Casey who's moving to Melbourne, then Christmas in July drinks at work.  There were so many snackages I didn't need dinner, and in fact brought home all the leftovers that were going to be thrown out otherwise.  

Friday.  I dunno.  Mostly trying to get organised.  Declared POETS and we headed down the coast to see Kit and Pete.  The top of Clyde Mountain was pretty foggy, but it cleared up lower down.  I really wanted to get there by dark, but that didn't work out.  Oh well.  Had steak and salad for dinner and had a few drinks and chatted.  

Arthur, King of the Britons

Saturday.  I went to bed relatively early (altho an hour later than usual) but didn't get to sleep til like super super late (like after everyone else went to bed haha).  Had a bit of a sleepin though so wasn't tooo bad.  Watched Kit feed all the animals. 

Al and Kerry Paca

Kit and Pete hand-raised Lolly when she was abandoned.  She's very friendly and so damned cute!

Ricky the tiny horse

Then we had breakfast which was at nearly lunch time. 

I started a jigsaw and got a chunk done on it before we headed down to Bawley Point.  The river mouth was a bit too deep to cross, so we headed all the way down to Kioloa.  There was a fairly lethargic seal dozing on the rocks, which everyone thought was very unusual.  Walked all the way up the beach and back.  The seal was still there, but some others had already called some experts to get it checked out. 

Had a lamb roast for dinner, with one of Kit and Pete's sheep. 

Then we played a game of Squatter.  Which, like real life with sheep, is basically a case of what Bad Things will happen at every turn.  Kit won.  I think I was doing ok, but it was a bit hard to tell since it was all so random and Bad Things kept happening. 

Slightly earlier night.

Sunday.  Slept a lot better.  Bacon and eggs again for breakfast, then we watched Biscuit herding sheep which was pretty cool. 

Then headed home.  Unpacked and tidied up the house.  Did a bit more on the jigsaw.  Then put on dinner (roasted a bunch of veggies to have with leftover lamb) and did photos and blogging stuffs.  

Friday 21st.  Backdating this.

Finished up work a bit early then got packed to head down the coast.  Took me an hour and a half to get organised.  hrmmm.

The sweetie was feeling super tired so I drove.  I felt pretty tense whenever anyone was behind me, because I wanted to take things a little slow on account of kangaroos, but also didn't want to be holding up traffic.  So went quite slow whenever there was an overtaking lane so people could pass me.  

Arrived at Kit and Pete's a bit before 20:30 and had a couple of drinks then went to bed.

Slept ok I think.  In the morning went and saw all the animals.  When I went outside the turkeys and guinea fowl all came over to see if I had food, but wandered off again when they realised I didn't.

Kit fed all the birds first.

Watched by an eastern yellow robin (raw pixels from phone)

The geese have gone - Solomon got eaten by a fox so Kit sold the two girls.  The goats have also moved on because they annoyed Kit too much.

Then down to the horses.  This is Scout, her newest horse.

Then to the sheep.

These are some of the new sheep

This lamb was born just after we were down there last time

More of the lambs - so cute!!

Then continued our wander.  How spectacular is their turpentine tree!

Over to the very dewey powerline paddock (my feet got very wet) to see the neighbour's horses.

How freaky are Rocket's eyes?

Then some brunch (good thing I had a light breakfast a couple of hours ago ;) )

Then Kit did a bunch of work with Scout while I supervised and played with Elle and Ziggy.

For lunch we headed up to Mollymook and met up with Chloe and had lunch at the golf club, which has a lovely outlook over the beach.

There was some very nice cheesy garlic bread

Kit was interested in the ribs for lunch, so I asked if she wanted to split it.  Turns out that was quite a sensible idea, as we ended up full enough without being stuffed silly.

After lunch we went for a bit of a wander

Then headed back to Kit and Pete's and hung out for a bit.

Then Pete lit a fire and we had snackages and roasted some marshmallows and had a bbq for dinner and a pretty chillaxed night.

There was even cheesecake for Kit's birthday

Kit blowing out the candles with her hand - very Covid safe ;)

Went to bed around midnight, but then woke up at 5:30 and couldn't get back to sleep for ages.  So a pretty slow start.

The turkeys and guinea fowl came over again when I went out.

Did all the animals stuff, then Kit cooked up an epic breakfast of buns, eggs, bacon, garlic mushrooms and hashbrowns.

Then we all wandered off.  Went into Batemans Bay to go over the new bridge and see if we could get a last look at the old bridge (didn't get a good view because they've only got the western half of the new bridge open at the moment).  We got home mid afternoon but didn't get much done and I was pretty tired.  I did cook up a cauliflower bake, potatoes, and broccolini with facon, so a relatively healthy dinner.  

Backdating.  Oh hai.

Monday.  Scanning.  Work.  Actually wore shorts to work.  Ok so I was at home, but it still felt a little strange.  The only time I ever wear shorts to work is the day of our Christmas party at the lake.  Cooked the beef stew for dinner (I'd done all the prep on the weekend, so it was just a matter of chucking it in the slow cooker all afternoon.  Nice sunset.  Did my UK photo labelling, then caught up on RSS feeds, but no blogging.  Whoops.

Tuesday.  Scanning.  Work.  Saw my birds at lunch.  David came along and we noticed a flooded pit that shouldn't be flooded, so David called Icon water to come fix.  Did my UK photo labelling.  One more night to go!  Didn't feel like doing much else.  Filed some photos.  I thought I'd download my phone photos so I can blog them at some point.  Except Apple died copying the movies, as it always does, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting it would get it to even open the phone in explorer.  *sigh*  Hate Apple.  HATE.  Wondering if my next phone will be a Samsung.  I'm sick of Apple's crapfullness.  Did some blogging.

Wednesday.  Scanning.  Work.  OMFG no recycling pickup.  Suez workers want a 4% pay rise and are striking til they get it.  4% seems a little high to me given our rate of inflation, but they're prolly paid like crap to begin with, so whatevs.  But still.  No recycling pickup!!  Gah!! 

Went to Specsavers at lunch.  Honestly should NOT have gone to Specsavers.  There's too many staff and too many people and they're just not very well organised.  The first half of the appointment was fine.  The general staff did scans of my eyes, and then I got to see the optometrist and all that was fine.  But then she said I should do a field of vision test and I could either wait and do it now or make an appointment.  I asked how long it would be and she went off and found out and said oh they can do it now, and I'll see you straight after.  Sweet.  So I went to go have it but they realised someone was in the room, and did I want to look at frames while I waited.  No that's fine, shouldn't be long, I'll just wait.  So I waited.  And waited and waited and waited.  I saw the previous patient leave, but noone bothered to come get me.  When they *finally* did the test, they said, oh your optometrist has gone on break, it'll be twenty five minutes, do you want to look at frames while you wait.  And I'm like NO, you told me I'd just do the test then get to see the optometrist.  So he goes off to try and find someone else to look at my results.  Ten minutes later and I'm waiting and fuming.  So I get up to leave and the guy goes oh did noone see you and I'm like no.  So he goes to the original optometrist and she comes out of her lunch break to tell me oh your results are fine.  Fricken I could have just left and you could have called me if any issues.  Fricken hopeless.  So I was fuming at all the stoopid by the time I got back to work and then had to deal with all the stoopid at work, which of course I couldn't because I was in a crap mental state.  Sigh. 

I left early with Stu to go pick up the car.  And had wine.  Because it was that kind of day.  The highlight of the day was that I finally finished labelling all twelve and a half thousand UK photos!  But the drama of the day was not over.  Kit and Pete had missed a document that needed to be signed for their new house to settle, and so it was all going to get delayed and cost them who knows how much money to sort out, and then they'd be homeless until it all got sorted out.  Which is never great when you've got so many animals to look after.  And have to go back to work at some point but all your clothes are packed.  

Oh, and there was also the cicada I rescued when I got back from lunch.  It was on the wall in the stairwell of our building.  So I grabbed it and took it outside and got a few photos before it flew away.

Thursday.  Scanning.  Work.  Work drinks.  Continuation of Kit's dramas.

Friday.  Hadn't gotten a new box of slides out to scan (and couldn't get at it cause David's car was in the way) so went back and fixed up a few rolls of previous boxes that needed fixing up (eg straighting or cleaning).  Work.  Discovery and Mandalorian in the evening.

Saturday.  All the things in the morning.  Super productive morning by 9:30, although didn't get as much done after that.  Had to log onto work at lunch time to try and fix a stoopid firewall problem, but the vendor couldn't figure it out either.  Even after three and a half hours on the phone.  So that was a bit of a poo.  Went over to Chris's to see if he had any veggies going.  He had some zucchinis which were looking pretty sad, so he gave them to me for free!  Win!  Cooked the whole lot of them (other than a few of the worst bits) and had them with the beef brisket that had been slow cooking all afternoon.  Watched the episode of The Simpons with Tom Jones in it, and we were like, what was that spoof movie he was in, and realised it was Mars Attacks!  So we watched that after.  Rented from Amazon Prime.

Sunday.  Houseworks in the morning.  I'm having to close the blinds on the south-east side of the house in the mornings now.  Our lovely pistachio tree that used to shade the house in the morning is gone, which is super sad.  Did a bunch of poking around with my hosting trying to tidy it up a bit.  Backing up files and rearranging things and deleting things and generally tidying up.  Still a lot of work I want to do in that space.  Culled photos for our North Coast holiday, and spent *hours* blogging it.  Also did a whole bunch of backdating of other blog entries.  If you don't use an RSS feed reader you may want to go back in time a few months, there's likely all sorts of entries you may have missed ;)  Leftovers for dinner.

Backdating.. cause I'm a slacker!

Monday.  Usual Monday Stuff.  Having trouble keeping up with UK photo labelling.  Just hard work.  In the afternoon David came home with a Lego Yoda to build!  Someone at his work had conceded defeat with it and given it to David to do.  He sat down in the late afternoon and didn't move until he'd finished yet - like five hours later (I brought him dinner of leftovers).  Although the first hour was pulling apart the beginnings of the work that had been done, and finding the mistakes which would have made it very hard for his colleague to have progressed with.  

As usual, there's always a tonne of new Lego pieces I've never seen before!

Tuesday.  Leftovers for dinner.  Started watching season 12 of BBT (David brought up his Blurays).  Then watched 101 Dalmatians - the Glenn Close version, with Mr Weasley and House as the thugs :)  None of the animals speak in the live action remake so it's a little more human focussed, but not bad.  Pretty sure I've seen it before a long time ago.  Also tried out Coles shopping online which we haven't done in a few years.

Wednesday.  Catching up on photo labelling from the past couple of nights - labelled nearly four hundred photos, although over a hundred of those were of the bird of prey show at Warwick Castle.  Ended up only 67 photos behind for the week.  Also made a random gnocchi since David wasn't home and I could use tomatoes.

Thursday Stumpy was being naughty and trying to get out.  He'd actually gotten on top of the light before he slipped off when I got this picture.

Friday we had the Coles delivery.  Some of the meat I ordered wasn't available, and they gave us a block of cheese because they didn't have cubes.  Pretty sure you can set replacement options, but ultimately shopping online is a bit of a pain because if something isn't available you don't find out until they're about to deliver it.  In store you could just get something else, but online you end up going without.  

In the evening we headed out to the club.  Got the fire going, and had some drinks and snackages, which turned out to be dinner.  Whoops.

The owners of our old van were trying to burn out a big stump.

Went up to the shed and chatted to people for a bit, then went to bed.

Saturday.  Terrible sleep.  Was awake from 2-4:30 or so.  Had a bit of a sleep in and a very slow start.  Got a fire going again.

There was a working bee on the day.  I asked John for a job and he pointed me at the glass sliding door to the sun room and said see if you can get the concrete spatter off that (from when they poured the slab).  So I spent ages with a fingernail, a paint scraper and some vinegar getting it looking beautiful.

Others were redoing the pool decking that was completely rotten and very dangerous.

In the evening we were supposed to have a bonfire, but it threatened rain so we just hung out in the shed (just under the covid people limit for the space).  Didn't stop me from cooking marshmallows in the fire!

I was pretty bummed that I wasn't doing my Christmas in July dinner that night - have done it every year for quite a few years now.  I even took some roast pork and stuff for a potato bake, but I wasn't sure who was going to be using the oven so it was all too hard so we just had snackages, although did have some of Nick/Tab and Dee's food which was nice of them.

Sunday morning we came home.  I was feeling lost, after having lost over half my weekend at home.  In the afternoon cooked for several hours straight - cooked up taco mince for later in the week, the roast pork, brussels sprouts with bacon, epic potato bake, a rocky road and some cheese and bacon balls, using cream cheese that was best before May.  It was totally fine.  I'd picked the wrong thing from the Coles order (another disadvantage of shopping online - too easy to make mistakes and pick the wrong thing) - taco shells instead of a taco kit - so had to make my own taco spice.  I think I used about a teaspoon each of chili powder (bit less of that), garlic powder, herbs, paprika, cumin, corn flour, salt and pepper.  I was already feeling delicate when David snuck into the kitchen at one point and scared the hell out of me.  I might have had a meltdown on the spot.  And then everyone was sulky with each other all night.  Hurrah.