Wow. So 2025. It sure was a year!

Travel

I went to Adelaide with Mum in late February to visit my Uncle Graham who was in hospital for three months being treated for a lymphoma. He was doing really well at the time (he'd really only just started treatment). Good news is he's done with treatment and is (so far) cancer free. We went down the coast to visit Kit and Pete in March for Pete's birthday and I went to the Milton Show with Kit. I didn't go to Europe with Mum, even after spending months planning it. At least David got to go instead. I did go up to Sydney the day before they left to go through everything I'd prepared with them. In November the sweetie and I took ten days off and headed down the coast, staying in Narooma and Kiama. Didn't get to spend as much time as we would have liked in Narooma due to reasons, so we hope to go back again some time soon. Did a day trip to Sydney in December to see Back to the Future the Musical.

Work

At work I was the Naughty Email Intervention Layer (NEIL) a few times while Neil took leave. We're not sure what's going to happen to his position when he retires next year (after 50 years!!!!). I got to do a bunch of work on some of our management scripts to get them working in the new environment. Learnt a lot, which I've now completely forgotten. Did scripts to check on the quality of objects/rules, backup configs, look for orphaned objects, print out our rules in a friendly format, delete crap. I love those delete scripts whenever I use them - they save So. Much. Time..!! Used Copilot (and Google AI) to help me with regex and Powershell (the regex stuff was pretty cool - I gave it a problem and it found me a solution - that worked!). Did lots of decommission work in the first two thirds of the year, ran out of time with everything else going to do much in the last third of the year. I still think my job description is mostly "Sadie". Helped Neil build and cut over to some new mail servers (which took months to finally get to do after they were like, oh, yeah there's a bug, soz). Ray brought in his pizza oven in February for a team lunch which was quite fun. We farewelled HBZ in February which was a bit sad, also farewelled Julian and Bruce in March and Imaar in October. There were trivia nights in March (a bit trash), June (a lot of fun, and we actually won, but luckily didn't have to run the next one - they decided in advance that the last place getters would run it) and October (a bit trash). Had a small "anti ball" in April but it was a bit of a fizzer and I don't think I'd bother trying to organise another one. Used "New" Outlook for only a couple of days in April because it was trash. The dealbreaker was shared calendars which just wouldn't render properly. Did a massive cleanup of our main dev environment, which I've been wanting to do for literally seven years. It makes me so happy that it's *clean* now! Worked on policy for our new cloud proxies, but even though I've been using myself for months we're still not really any closer to getting it released to everyone. In November it suddenly became crunch time on our existing proxies - the old hardware (which we've been using for TEN YEARS) was going EOL and we didn't want to renew the licence and we weren't ready to cut over to our new proxies, so I spent a few days migrating the policy to other equivalent but newer hardware, doing all the paperwork, and prepping it all so Con/Ward could cut it over while I was on holidays. It went mostly smoothly which was epic awesome. Spent a heap of time looking at what talks to some legacy domain controllers so could replicate their rules to new ones. Broke something during a transition though sadly. It was fixed super quickly once they told me though. Had to rework our ticket dashboards when they upgraded versions and our originals were done so long ago they were "legacy" and didn't work properly. Had various Christmas parties in December, including my annual bbq at the lake attended by over 40 people.

Health

I had a bit of a sore throat in February. Spent two days in bed and pretty sure I beat it off because I didn't seem to get fully sick. Mainly I was paranoid about getting sick because if I did I wouldn't have been able to see Uncle Graham in Adelaide. Ongoing bouts of insomnia and thermoregulation issues throughout the year (thanks menopause). Oh, and the minor inconvenience of the C-word. Not that C-word. The other C-word.

Family and Friends

We started the year (almost) with some of the n-gang (we left at 11:30 and got home just before midnight). Mum and D/K/S came for the family Christmas lunch in early January for last year, and a week before Christmas for this year. I definitely like doing an early family Christmas. Went to see Lily for her 21st in January. Had EffanC over for dinner in February, and also my birthday, and went over to theirs for dinner in May. David came to visit in March to install a new light fitting in the kitchen. Because the old one died. It was only six years old. Hating on how crap everything is nowadays. Mum tripped over just inside her village entrance in March and was knocked out and broke her collar bone. She went to hospital and they did a bunch of scans because they didn't know if she'd passed out and then fell, or got knocked out from the fall. Passing out first would have been super worrying. Fortunately there was security camera footage and you can clearly see she just tripped (she was power walking and was just moving off the main path when she tripped on a raised bit of concrete). Had Jenn over for dinner in March. It had been two years since we saw her last. Whoops! Caught up with Luc for drinks/dinner in May and December. Fiona came over with a care package in May, and visited again July. Tony also dropped in a care package in May, and we went to the arboretum in July, as well as had a couple of movie nights. Had lunch at the Burns Club with the Chrises and Tony in June and the Chrises and Glenda and Neil in December. Kit came to visit in August for Ben and Sarah's baby shower (which I would have loved to have gone to, but, people). Went and saw Annie and the family in August. Had Friday afternoon drinks with T/J in October - we really must do that more often! David and Kellie came to stay in November when they went and saw Ricky Martin. Went to Rob and Fiona's in November for a deck warming. Had Mishi's 60th in December. Had a super quiet Christmas Day, but Stu did got to see his family (and we'll hopefully catch up with them on New Years').  New Years Eve Eve party at M&M's with some of the n-gang.

The Social Club

We went out in June for Ian and Chris's 10th wedding anniversary formal night which was lovely. I did our annual Christmas in July by remote control this year - the sweetie did all the shopping for me, I did as much prep work as I could either at home or in the van, then got the sweetie and helpers to cook it all on the night (with lots of printed out instructions!). Went out again in September - Stu for a committee meeting, and I did some priming of cabinetry. Went to the Halloween Spooktacular night in October which was fun. Went out again in early November for a committee meeting for Stu, and I continued priming cabinetry. Then there was R&F's Christmas party in late November.

Photos

Spent ages picking out photos for Mum's funeral (on account of she wants to see it and I want to get it done in advance should the worst happen and then it would be one less thing I would need to think about). Spent chunks of time here and there tagging people in Picasa. I figured out how to have different databases for different people groups and even wrote a startup script to make it easy to switch between them. Jumped in to finally getting my Europe 2016 photos online - spent ages and ages culling culling culling, then labelling them and getting them online. I still have to make panoramas and get them online. Also filed a lot of photos into directories with more descriptive folder names. Re-scanned all of Mum's slides at the highest resolution my scanner would go (the first time I did them very quickly at a medium resolution). Then rescanned the ones with fluff on them, sometimes over and over and over again. I've geotagged our south coast trip from November, but that's all I've done so far.

Fish and Stumpy

Stumpy's UV light died at the end of last year, but I couldn't find anywhere that sold a 48" 10% UV light, so had to make do with an incandescent bulb which does heat *and* UV in one. He'd been pretty lethargic at the beginning of the year, possibly because of the lack of UV light. He perked up again with the new light, and got really quite tanned over the course of the year. My AquaOne 620T tank leaked in February because the filter wool drifted over and blocked the outlet, backing everything up. Whoever thought using chipboard to make fish tank stands would be a good idea should be shot. Lost the sucking catfish in the two foot downstairs in February - it was happy then was dead. Towards the end of the year I thought I was losing the clown loaches - they both hid in a corner and wouldn't come out. But in the last week or two they've been behaving more normally.

Our current fish inventory:
* upstairs two foot - a whole heap of guppies at various ages
* four foot - nine congo tetras, one lone male guppy (I'll get him some friends when others in the other tanks get big enough), and an enormous fat loach
* Chrissie's tank - two clown loaches
* angel tank - a whole heap of guppies at various ages
* downstairs two foot - a whole heap of guppies at various ages

Lego

Spent ages of time (and money) on Vic's Lego. Bought a crazy number of loose pieces to complete some sets. I managed to complete all the Creator and City sets. I built and photographed the Creator sets and have been building the City sets. Still a long way to go though. The LEGO Group is taking over Bricklink more and more. This year they forced you to use your Lego account to sign into Bricklink and later in the year they gave two weeks notice they were going to suspend trading in a whole heap of countries (which they then pushed back til next year). I'm just waiting for them to enshittify it completely. The only set I built new was 31134 - Space Shuttle, which I got for my birthday, but haven't had a chance to build the other two sets I got for my birthday.

Jigsaws

A little bit quiet on the jigsaw front, especially at work. Bought two jigsaws with a voucher from my 50th birthday, but have only done one of them so far.

Other Hobbies

My favourite hobby at the moment is diamond painting. I find it super quieting for my brain (which always seems to be overstimulated). After the little Christmas tree I did on Christmas/Boxing Day last year, I've done Green Eyed Beauty, Pink Galah and Banksia, White Cockatoo and Waratahs, and started on Oh Christmas Tree (which Dave2 very kindly bought and posted to me, on account of not being able to find anywhere in Australia that still had it). I did an Anko miniblocks Owl in Tree that I got for Christmas from Kellie and David which was very cute. I also did a Nanoblocks Church I got from the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction in March. It wasn't quite complete but it was mostly there and is very cute. And there was also a Petit Blocks fox I got at Daiso for at work. It's very cute. I bought a brand-new-second-hand saxophone from the Young Music School sale in February. Had it serviced and got it back in August. I've done a little bit of playing on it but not as much as I would have liked. I did find some easy Christmas music for it which was fun and have been on the hunt for other music for it.

Weather

We had hail in January, August, September, November and December. There were various rainbows throughout the year. In October/November it went from needing the heater, the cooler, the heater, the cooler, the heater (although didn't actually run it that time) in the space of two weeks. Had lots of storms in November and December. Had an overnight low of 0C on 2 December.

Toys / Purchases / Techie Stuff

I bought a new camera in January because my old one (Dad's old one) had some dead pixels and just isn't as good as newer cameras in low light. But I got super frustrated at the 24-105mm lens which didn't have the range of my old camera/lens. I also got frustrated at how dull and lifeless the photos are from it. Did a bunch of testing comparing the new camera, the old 600D, my G5X and my iPhone. Also played with user mode settings to increase saturation and contrast, which has made a difference. In July I got a 24-240mm lens, much happier with it than the 24-105mm. The 24-105mm is still great for people photos and low light, but the 24-240mm is my general usage lens. I'm totally hating on Windoze 11 which does utterly daft things. Like if I open a text document on one desktop, it'll open it IN ANOTHER DESKTOP!!! Even if just a moment ago I'd opened and closed another text file on the original desktop. Or that it NEVER remembers folder settings. There's a few folders that I have specific settings (sorting by reverse date order, details instead of large icons etc..) and it resets them every fricken time I use them. HATE. There were a couple of times this year it remembered the settings, but mostly it just reset them. Or that sometimes when I unlock in the morning, windows that I've had on the right screen (my main screen) will randomly be moved to my left screen (which I don't use all the time) and I have to turn on that screen and move them back. Or that notepad is so trash now. If you have a large text file it becomes unusable due to the lag of it trying to do spell checks or whatever. Or it'll literally just not enter keystrokes and just skip one or more letters that you've typed. Or that Windoze will reboot AGAINST YOUR WILL when it feels like it. Or that whenever I attach a USB device it takes a full minute for windoze to recognise it. Or that whenever I attach or remove a USB device, explorer collapses what directories I have open, so I have to re-navigate to them all to get back into folder context. Or that when I open a command prompt (which I have pinned to my task bar), the command prompt doesn't open where the pinned icon is, it opens all the way over on the right of whatever else I have open. I got a new desktop at work and it's doing the same thing. Yet the Azure ones didn't do this. Or it'll just randomly jump to the top of the explorer window and I have scroll back down to find where I was working. Or it changed how folders are displayed by date. My computer crashed earlier in the year and in October as well. Frustration with Apple. If you let it automatically set the time zone, it'll just change the time zone on you randomly. It stuffed up a bunch of photos in Adelaide with its nonsense. Apple also merges timelines from different numbers into one message thread. So you reply to a message in the thread, but it goes to the home number not the mobile number and is never received. Apple is so stoopid. I had to split out Mum's mobile number into a different contact to stop that happening. Google broke Chromecast because they didn't renew a certificate. Eventually after a week or so they fixed it. OneNote threatened to force me into an Office365 subscription, but didn't end up doing it. I finally got around to setting up my phone to use my own hosted SMTP service because Optus was getting super flaky for trying to send mail. Raged at Optus who now FORCE you into using $5/day roaming unless you pull the sim out of your phone. BOM updated their website in October and half the country screamed at them for ruining things. Pretty sure CloudLoop made some change to email headers in mid to late November which means that mails from some places aren't rendering properly. I downloaded (and paid a little) for Thunderbird to handle mail from the problematic senders. Might one day copy everything across, but for now the way of filtering mail is super annoying.

House stuff

I spent ages in the first part of the year trying to get the back yard under control. Our lemon tree dropped probably about a thousand lemons over summer. I'm not even exaggerating - a branch fell off that had 110 lemons on it, and that was just one branch out of the whole huge tree. I juiced most of them and was drinking homemade lemonade for months. I grew a bunch of mini capsicums which I could harvest in April. Such a lot of effort (and having to water every single day) for so little reward (but a nice reward!). We tried to turn the heater on in April but either the controller or the heater was having a spaz and kept rebooting. In May we managed to get it to work and didn't turn it off for literally two weeks straight. After that we managed to operate it normally for the rest of the winter. But in spring, after being off for a few days, it got the crazy behaviour again. Potted a chrysanthemum that I'd accidentally uprooted out the front and it's been thriving. I still need to find a permanent home for it. Frustration the Mirabella Genio lights and app, terrible user interface and annoying to try and get them to repair. Started picking strawberries from the weeds in the back yard at the beginning of November and continued through early December. Not nearly as many poppies this year, must have been too dry for them.

Restaurants

We had Quan's Kitchen delivery in January (because Dumpling Inn presumably wasn't open yet). We went to Bar 59 a few times in January for work drinks, and again in April. Dumpling Inn is a continuing favourite, with deliveries in January, June (x2), July, August, September, October and December. So is Chong Co, with deliveries in March, April, May (x2), June, August and October. McGriddles at Maccas finally arrived in Australia! I had one in July but my sense of taste was shot at the time so couldn't judge it. Have had a few more since October though. Went to Ikko again for a work farewell in October. Went to Stellas by the Lake for brunch in November with David and Kellie, nominally for his 50th. Tried out Bamiyan with Luc in December which was really good. Tried out Grease Monkey in the mall in December. Went out to Four Winds for pizza lunch with Tony in December for our annual lunch out there. Went to the Labor Club with Mum and Stu in December. And to the Old Canberra Inn for Tony's birthday.

Food / Cooking

Our first meal of the new year was cheesy hash browns cooked on New Years Day. We usually have pizzas every Thursday night, mostly made ourself, but occasionally a commercial one. We often have Ingham's chicken Kievs on Friday nights. And we often have a roast dinner on Sunday nights. Made lemon pepper dill chicken a few times (with all that lemon juice!) and creamy lemon dill sauce with either chicken or fish a few times. Luv-a-duck Peking duck is a favourite, had that a few times. Did a pork neck in the slow cooker in February which was *amazing* and again in April. Tried Microwave Pork Crackle in February which was actually pretty good! Had steak a few times earlier in the year (we never get steak at home because Stu is usually meh about it). Had NQN's butt sorry beef cheeks in May. Stu cooked a little bit in April/May when he was on leave. Made a potato, blue cheese, and rosemary pizza in July. I couldn't taste it at the time, need to do it again. Did slow cooker lamb shanks in August. Tried a cheats mac & cheese with just a bit of water and cheese (and a bit of milk in one version, cream in another). Made a couple of coconut cakes - once in the microwave and once in the oven in August. Did slow cooker beef brisket in August. Baked a plain cake and icing in August from the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday cake book to test the recipe. Officially started cooking cakes out of it in September (just one so far!). Made puff pastry scrolls a few times - vegemite or pizza flavoured. Cooked some crackling by itself in November which turned out pretty well. Made some gingerbread biscuits in December. Made a peppermint slice in December.

Theatre / Shows / Exhibitions

* Pompeii at the National Museum in January with Mum which was really good
* AI in Science talk in April with T/J, but missed the rest due to avoiding people and being busy
* Constellations at the NFSA in April with Tony which was amazing
* Back to the Future - The Musical with the sweetie in December which was a bit of fun

Movies (at the movies)

None. *gasp*

Movies (TV)

* Heaven is for Real
* Die Hard 3
* Darkest Hour
* Star Trek: Generations (after seeing the Duras sisters in DS9 1.3)
* Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
* Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
* Blackberry
* The Princess Bride
* Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I
* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
* Fantasia 2000
* Perfect Days
* Inglorious Basterds
* The Holdovers
* Jaws
* Flying High
* Rogue One
* Star Wars (A New Hope)
* The Empire Strikes Back
* Return of the Jedi
* The Post
* Cruella
* Forgetting Sarah Marshall
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
* Terms of Endearment
* Lego Batman Movie
* Lilo and Stitch (the original animated one, and the live action remake)
* The Green Mile
* Passengers
* The Last Emperor
* Back to the Future, I, II and III
* V for Vendetta
* The China Syndrome
* Die Hard and Die Hard 2
* Birdman
* The Neverending Story
* Love Actually
* Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2

TV

* Death in Paradise - seasons 11, 12, 13, 14
* Wednesday - seasons 1, 2
* Beyond Paradise - Death in Paradise but back in the UK
* Stranger Things - season 1 early in the year, then 2/3/4/5 later on
* Return to Paradise - a spinoff of Death in Paradise set on the south coast of NSW
* Meltdown: Three Mile Island
* Deep Space Nine - seasons 1-7
* Air Crash Investigations on Disney+
* Andor - season 2
* How to Change your Mind
* Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War
* Lego Grand Masters of the Galaxy
* Trainwreck: Poop Cruise
* Black Mirror - season 7
* Tokyo Trial
* Trainwreck: Storm Area 51
* The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
* Futurama - season 13
* You Are What You Eat
* The Simpsons - bit of season 36
* Lost Melbourne documentary
* GameStop documentary
* Pirates: Behind the Legends - a couple of episodes

Books

None. Although I did get some way through The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Reading is just so *hard*.

Other Stuff

* Got frustrated at the lack of response from Access Canberra in January over the new MyWay+ issues
* Got some ok photos Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) in January
* Got our Queensland holiday from 2004 and Col and Sandra's wedding blogged. Only took 21 years to get online..
* Took some Cousin Itt photos in February
* Remembered 11 years since Dad carked it in February
* The Green Shed closed down booooo and was replaced by "Goodies Junction" run by Vinnies. Definitely preferred the Green Shed. Later in the year found out the owner of the Green Shed started a spinoff in Fyshwick.
* Did a keto diet for a few weeks in February to lose a few kilos. It was pretty effective! And mostly kept the weight off too.
* Neighbours moved to New Zealand in April
* Climbed Mt Rogers a bunch of times in April while I was trying to get a bit fitter for my holiday
* Did low carb again for a little while in April. Gave up when it became apparent I wasn't going overseas.
* Had a lovely drive around Canberra on our wedding anniversary in April
* Saw the Giant Crane in May
* Listened to the Classic 100 Piano in June
* Went to the Handmade Markets at EPIC in June
* Neighbours house was finally rented out in June
* Watched all of Jamie's Anti-Chef videos from the very beginning in order from August. Still only about two thirds of the way through them.
* A red-back spider took up residence in our letter box in August. She was spray-and-wiped.
* Crimson rosellas returned to chew on the beams supporting the roof
* Stu rage-retired in September. Then spent the better part of a month in agony from his back. Recovered from that only to have hearing problems and nausea.
* Saw comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN), but only barely
* Visited the new "Green" Shed (The Shed) in October
* Stu more or less took over some cooking and some basic housework in October or November
* Plucked a number out of the air to go for in the Melbourne Cup (my birthday), and that horse won!
* Got frustrated at MyWay+ which doesn't work properly. Got one free ride out of it, but then figured out a fix.
* Got some photos of the aurora in November, although I never actually saw it
* Made a beer advent calendar out of beers I missed from work drinks that Neil saved for me
* Found a 2011 10c coin!!
* Chipped one of my front teeth
* Neighbours got a new barky dog
* Reread the second half of the New Testament

So there we have it.  I guess a fairly quiet year in a lot of ways.  We're both hoping 2026 will be better, especially health-wise.

Happy New Year!!!

On our anniversary last weekend we did a bit of a magical mystery tour of Canberra.  We went to a heap of "our" places (mostly friends/family).  

We drove past Annie and Stu's, Mishi's and our old place

Through Gungahlin

Past Scott and Kerry's old house and Flemington Road

Through Dickson

Past Scott and Kerry's old old house (which has been demolished and replaced with two townhouses)

And into Ainslie

Where we returned to the scene of the crime!

Had a long chat with the lady cleaning the church.

Then into Ainslie shops.

Past the War Memorial

And up Mount Ainslie

Then we headed for home

It was a lovely way to spend a couple of hours with the sweetie!

Sunday.  6th. 

Had some leftover lamb which I dug out of the freezer for dinner.  DS9 2.13.  20:00 is bed time right?  Well that's 21:00 in old time so I guess that counts.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got like 9 hours sleep or something. Hurray. Still woke up early though. Went to take out the recycling this morning and saw all the neighbours' cars were gone and everything looked neat and tidy. Yup, they'd moved out. They're off to New Zealand. Maybe for just a year. Unless they love it and stay haha. Spent half the day (it felt like) on the phone today blerf. Cooked sausages and two big zucchinis I got at Chris' yesterday for dinner, then watched DS9 2.14. Interesting episode, but it's never answered how they know right from the beginning.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly okish, but still woke up before 5:30 (at one point I guessed 5:30 - it was 5:26!). Busy day evaluating doco and rules for a big change. Neighbours' friends came over to put the bins out. I'll still take the rubbish that's in their recycling bin and put it in our rubbish bin haha.  Went with T/J to the Shine Dome for the AI Science talk which was quite interesting.  What we heard of it.  For the start of the second speaker (which was recorded) they couldn't figure out the audio so it was super quiet, and they couldn't figure out how to take it back to the beginning.  So missed like a quarter of the second talk.  

Wednesday. Slept mostly ok I think. 

Almost there!

Busy day, including being NEIL for some of it.  Late home, DS9 2.15, backing up the NAS to one of my lesser used drives - backed up more stuff from Mum's computer from the last time I was there.  Also started backing up David's America masters again.  I have them on my little holiday drive but that's raw, not rotated or renamed, and I might need space on that drive for the next trip.  Only got up to about day 9.

Thursday.  Restless sleep.

Super excited to pick the first two of the mini capsicums!!

Pretty busy day I think.  Super quiet drinks sadly - just our group and two others.  Pizzas for dinner.  DS9 2.16.  You'd think they would have learnt from literally the last episode not to both beam down to a planet by yourselves.  Odo said noone was interested in him, clearly he forgot about Lwaxana Troi just a few episodes ago.  And I was thinking the little kid looked familiar - she played Dylan's little sister in 90210.. haven't seen her in thirty years but still recognised her!!!  Early night.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.

Got pissed at the ANIMAL that ripped off the third mini capsicum which was not quite ripe.  Didn't even eat it, just put claw/teeth marks on it and left it on the ground.  #grunt.

Day of all the crap and all the interruptions.  Did get some documentation done though.  Leftovers for dinner - finished up the leftovers in the fridge.  DS9 2.17 and Death in Paradise 14.5.  Why didn't they just test them all for GSR?  Would have saved them all a heap of time.  Sheesh.

Saturday.  Woke up at Dentist Time, only got maybe 3/4 hour more sleep.  Sigh.  Climbed Mt Rogers.  In a vain attempt to be healthier.  Sigh.

Black and white on blue

Brown

Didn't end up going to Cypher at lunch, which was a bit of a relief, on account if it would have taken up much of the day, plus trying to be healthier and all that crap.  Instead I spent much of the day doing holiday planning.  Also food shopping. 

We won't mention the "breakfast raclette" I had for lunch - leftover roast potato with raclette that I bought like two months ago and really needed to be used!

Steak and salad for dinner.  Pretty much one of my favourite easy meals - just make a salad and fry some meat.  I might even convince the sweetie that steak is good m'kay? ;)

I would like to point out that I only ate half of this rather huge steak - the rest I sliced up for cold meat snackages.

Then watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Sunday.  Slept fairly well.  Climbed Mt Rogers again.

Grey

Spent the rest of the day on holiday planning.  Up to Slano.  Did put on some pork at lunch and a heap of veggies for dinner...  while the sweetie is on holidays.. hrmmm... 

Sunday.  30th.  Had Jenn over for dinner, wherein we cooked up a huge vegetarian feast.  Stu cooked his miso mushrooms.  I did a potato bake, a blue cheese broccoli/cauliflower/onion bake and brussels sprouts with hazelnuts.

We debated how long it had been since we saw Jenn last.  I looked up my blog and said April 2023, which seemed way too long, but I do remember taking a photo of her hair, and the date on that was April 2023, which pretty much confirms it.  We're such slackers at keeping up with people.  Watched DS9 2.7 after Jenn left.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Got to hand back over the NEIL job back to Neil hurray!!!  Leftovers for dinner then DS9 2.8.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep #grunt.  Did a bunch of analysis of some catchall rules so I can put in some more specific ones so we can get rid of the catchall.  

I tried feeding Stumpy today.  He's still being lethargic and not basking, but he did eat a blueberry and some food which was good.

I'm always suprised how quickly the COLD hits in Canberra.  It'll be 30C for days on end, and suddenly it's 5C overnight and leaving the windows open makes for a very cold house.  Decided April 1 should be close up all the windows day (several are left permanently locked open over summer).  In the afternoon I was cold and hungry so had a cup of tea in our fancy Cunard tea cups.

Luv-a-duck for dinner which was very nice.  All. The. Garlic.  !!

DS9 2.9.  After dinner was watching a video Dave2 linked to on living without a smartphone.  Yeah I literally can't even remember how friends and I would meet up without being able to text each other updates or issues.  Like what if a train was late, how would you tell who you were meeting?  Navigation is another big thing.  Nowadays I can turn up anywhere and use GPS on my phone to navigate (except that one time in Switzerland when I had to pay more for a car with satnav because the esim I got didn't work in Switzerland).  I can't even imagine the paperwork you'd need to cart around to try and do the same thing with maps.  Don't get me wrong, I love maps, and I like navigating, but they're damned heavy and more often than not I'm doing the driving not the navigating, and I can't imagine Mum would have much luck navigating me around European cities.  Having said that, we did manage to navigate our way around the USA and Canada in 1983 and 2004 before phones.  But for the most part we stayed out of big cities.  And the USA is literally designed for road tripping.  Signage is way way better there than in Australia or Europe.

Wednesday.  Second night in a row dreaming about toilets.  I have this bizarre thing where I stress about finding a clean/usable toilet.  And not even when I need to actually pee in the middle of the night, it's just this weird obsession I have.  Bizarre.  

Somewhat busy day.  Late home.  Stu had had a day so we got KFC hmmm.  DS9 2.10.  

OneNote is trying to force me to upgrade to Office 365.  It's already upgraded itself from the old Technet version I've been using for years AGAINST MY WILL I might add (apparently there's a way to turn off automatic updates so I might try reinstalling it and do that).  So now it says I have 90 days of free usage.  Well I can tell you that there is no way in HELL I'm going to pay to use it.  I will NEVER get an Office 365 subscription.  I'll rip everything out of it and use LibreOffice and Notepad if it comes down to it.  Which is a shame, because OneNote is actually quite a good product.  I like how it keeps different groupings of notes together and you can easily password protect sections.

Thursday.  Late getting to sleep, then awake from 5:30 sigh.  Went out to put a few things in the recycling bin before it got collected, only to find two big bags of RUBBISH in it!?!  WTF!?!  I pulled them out and raged for a while.  Messaged the neighbours but didn't get a response.  In the end put out our bin (which only had one bag of rubbish in it so wasn't worth putting out) and put their rubbish in it.  As we were leaving for work neighbour's Dad was out there and I asked him and he said he did it.  Sigh.  Simon was sick at drinks so if I get sick early next week we'll know why.  Pizzas for dinner then DS9 2.11.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day - put in a heap of those firewall rules which took me all afternoon to do.  Kievs and veggies for dinner then DS9 2.12.

Saturday.  Awake from like maybe 1 til 4.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Spent a chunk of the day photo picking from "other peoples photos" and trying to sort out what backups I have of Mum's computer. I'm definitely missing a few years worth from 2015-2017 where I just haven't had the time during visits to get it all copied. Debating a trip to Sydney to do that, as well as sort out the mess they made when they built her a new computer and didn't transfer all the files. Luckily she has all the photos (I hope!) on an external hard drive that has a snapshot backup I made her do some years back. In the evening we went to Bar 59 for an "antiball" but it was a bit of a fizzer really. People forgot or double booked or just didn't turn up, so there was only seven of us there in the end. I tried a few cocktails just for a bit of fun. So it was nice enough night, but dunno if I could be bothered trying to organise another one. Neil very kindly gave us a lift home.

Sunday.  Awake for maybe an hour or so in the middle of the night - from 2:27, but the new 2:27, so didn't get to watch the clock go from 2:59 to 2:00. Still pretty tired though. Finally managed to setup SMTP on my iPhone using CloudLoop. Optus is flaky as hell for sending SMTP mail through, plus I get SPF softfails with them because I don't have their mail servers in my SPF records. Did a bit of house stuff, and started thinking about some holiday stuff. Tried again to add my Qantas frequent flier number to my Emirates flights, but I kept getting the error:

Warning:
Sorry, we`re unable to save the changes. Please check all the information and try again.

So I tried their online chat. It was quick and they just did it for me. Unexpectedly quick and painless! Not that I know why I bother really - Qantas expire all my points before I can use them. Then did some other holiday planning.

The Windows 11 Explorer trash is really pissing me off.  I have an in tray where I have all the photos that I post to this blog.  I update it every week when I'm processing my photos, and when I've posted them they get moved to Done.  I sort this folder by date (in reverse to what windows likes to set it to) so that when I'm blogging them I can see and post the photos in order.  Every time my computer reboots this setting is lost.  I have to go Sort By -> Date (twice to get it in the right order) not just in Explorer, but in Chrome as well.  Every damned time.  But lately it's gotten worse.   Tonight I did an experiment.  I had the folder set the way I wanted it, and copied the path to clipboard.  I closed explorer on this desktop.  Opened up again and pasted the path.  Folder view was reset to default.  So did it again, this time by navigating manually to the folder.  In this method the folder view is retained.  And it's repeatable. 

I also epic hate how Explorer collapses all explorer folders that you've had expanded whenever you insert or eject removable media.  Like WHYYYYYYYY????

I hate Windoze SO MUCH!!

And suddenly the weekend is over. hrmmm.

Sunday.  16th.  After blogging we had leftover lamb I dug out of the freezer and cabbage.  DS9 1.16 then finished Stranger Things season 1.  

Extra Hard Rated!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

Had to stake the capsicum plant because it was falling over underneath its own weight

NEIL at work.  Spent some time deleting old spam addresses that Neil put in, but aren't in use anymore.  DS9 1.17 - Lwaxana Troi! heh.  Then watched Labyrinth - 35 years to the day that I first watched it.  Oh, and was going through Adelaide photos and found the ones of the odometer on the car - we did 106km on it.. and put a whole $6 worth of petrol in it.  !!

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - was actually cold!  NEIL again at work.  They're talking about doing some fundamental changes to the way we do things with mail.  May or may not be a bad thing.  Finished off the last of the pulled pork from the freezer with some cabbage.  DS9 1.14.  Had to do some stuff for oncall.  Tried to find where I took a photo in like 2010.  The mother called for an hour.  Then it was bed time.  Annoyingly I've been feeling a day out all week - like Tuesday felt like Wednesday.

Wednesday.  Took a little while to get to sleep.  NEIL again.  But also so fricken busy with All The People wanting All The Things.  Also found out I'd split my jeans right across my butt.  Hurray.  Wonder if anyone noticed.  Stu had had a day, so we had KFC for dinner.  hmmm.  The mother messaged.  She'd had a fall (probably fainted from her heart condition) and broken her collar bone.  !!

Thursday.  Had just gone to bed when got an alert.  So had to get back up again to check it out.  Everything seemed fine and even Jim didn't know what it alerted.  But it was like midnight before I got to sleep.  NEIL again, and another busy day of All The Things.  Deleted lots of spam list entries.  After drinks was trivia night.  Except it was ANOTHER one of THOSE trivia nights.  Where there were so many words on the slides that they went so low as to not be readable.  Where they read through the questions so damned fast I literally couldn't keep up with writing answers.  Where they asked questions about work that even people that worked there wouldn't know, let alone friends and family.  Where questions had an answer, with bonus points for fleshing out the answer, never mind that they didn't consider all possibilities so their answers were actually wrong.  Where answers were in fact wrong (we Googled afterwards).  Where they didn't mark things centrally, but got us to mark each others, which meant all the nonsense with the multipart and incorrect answers made it impossible to score properly.  I delegated marking because it would have made me too angry otherwise.  So, me being me, I started complaining loudly.  I could hear myself doing it and knew I should stop, but I just couldn't.  DC threatened to leave at one point.  Hell *I* almost left at one point.  Things did pick up a bit after the first couple of rounds and it did get more fun.  We were even winning at one point.  Ended up coming equal third, two points behind the winner.

Friday.  Awake for several hours in the middle of the night.  Partly stressing about the fact I'm such a Karen.  Sigh.  I should probably not go to trivia nights anymore - they bring out the worst in me.  NEIL again, but hardly anyone bothered me most of the day, so had quite a peaceful day Getting Things Done.  Got a dump of all the domains we'd had email from in the past six months, and used that to cross reference addresses in our spam lists.  Anything not used in the past six months could be deleted.  Also wrote up a change to do more mail policy rearranging next week.  Sorry Neil! ;)  Pizzas for dinner since we didn't get them last night.  Tried to watch DS9 but it was like double zoomed in - worse than even pan and scan that we had to watch Mash in.  It was literally unwatchable.  So watched Death in Paradise 14.3.

Saturday.  Early night and slept well hurray! 

House stuff mostly, and some tagging of travel photos in Picasa.  Quicker to find photos of Mum that way - software does all the hard work.  Cooked an epic feast for dinner - creamy lemon pepper dill chicken, cauliflower blue cheese bake, brussels sprouts with bacon and hazelnuts, capsicum and garlic.

Stu had a fiddle with Amazon Prime on the Chromecast, but it was still doubly zoomed in and he couldn't figure out how to change it.  After Googling he found it's just a "thing" that Amazon Prime does.  So we watched DS9 1.20 on Netflix.  Screw you Jeff.  Then watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, so slightly late night.

Sunday.  Awake from before 2 til after 4.  Sigh.  Not too zombie though.  Mostly photo tagging/picking.  While David was here last week we discussed our backup strategies for our phones.  Lately I've only been backing up MOV files using iMazing.  It will download the HDR versions from the phone.  Since I first started using iMazing they've (dunno who) made it so the HDR videos will play *ok* on Windows, not completely washed out like they used to.  But they're still a bit over exposed.  So tonight I decided to try and grab them again in Windows.  Some time in the last year or so Apple has stopped messing with the timestamps on the files that it presents to windows, so all the timestamps are correct which is nice.  I guess enough people complained about it.  So grabbing everything I've still got on this phone.

But I am still PISSED that Windoze resets the sort order and view settings on my folders EVERY DAMEND TIME IT REBOOTS.  #hate #grunt

Back in 2020 I used Picasa to do a face slideshow for Ryan's 21st.  

Afterwards I put that install aside and used it on my old computer to tag work people.  This worked really well and I tagged the faces in thousands of photos.

But I never got around to migrating the install to my new computer.  I still had the database directories backed up, just had never used them.

The problem with Picasa is that it's only setup to run one database per user.  But I don't want the several hundred people in my work database mixed up with people in my friends and family directories.

So recently I fired up Picasa on my new computer.  Because I hadn't run it before (as a bonus you don't need to "install" it, you can just run it) it started a fresh database.  I pointed it at my family and friends folder and let it do its thing for a while.  Then I shut it down and moved aside the two Picasa folders in my user directory.  I copied across the work database folders and fired up Picasa again.  This worked beautifully and loaded straight into my work database.

So switching between Picasa databases is as simple is swapping out the two folders - 

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums

Apparently there's utilities out there that will swap them around for you.

And this dude even figured out you can just run Picasa as a different user, so the <user> directory will be different, but there's no fussing around moving directories around.

This is what I've currently got setup.  I've created a folder for each database I want to use, and move the Picasa2 and Picasa2Albums in and out.  You could keep these anywhere, but I keep them in the same place for convenience.  

If I could be bothered I could write a script to move them around automatically, but this will do for now.

It's such a shame Google is utter trash at maintaining support for their products.  Some of them were awesome (Google Reader, Chromecast come to mind).  They might fix Chromecast. 

To find Picasa nowadays you have to find it on old repositories.  I'd lay a flower on its grave if that page was still being maintained...

Edit 16.3.25.  I wrote a script. 
It's pretty trash, I'm very much a novice coder.  Sue me.  ;)
Also sorry about the lack of indents, the copy paste didn't work so well.

# A script to swap out Picasa3 database folders
# Kazza the Blank One, March 2025

#### Section 1 - Getting Started ####

# Set the Google Picasa local directory
$GoogleDir = "$env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Local\Google"

# Define folder options
$PicasaFolderList = @{
"1" = "Work"
"2" = "Friends and Family"
"3" = "Church"
"4" = "Europe 2016"
}

# Check if Picasa is running first - we don't want to be moving folders around while it's running!
if (Get-Process Picasa3) {
write-host "Error: Picasa3 is running, exiting"
sleep 5 # So you can see the error message before it closes the window
exit
}
else {
write-host "Picasa3 is not running - this is a good thing! Don't worry about that scary error above!"
}

#### Section 2 - Select which folder you want to use ####

# This bit from https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/1cu8e62/multiple_choice_for_readhost_input/

# Display the list of folders to choose from
Write-Host "Enter the number for the folder you wish to select:"
foreach ($folder in ($PicasaFolderList.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name)) {
Write-Host "[$($folder.Name)] $($folder.Value)"
}

# Prompt the user to enter the number of the folder
$folderNumber = Read-Host "Enter the number of the folder you wish to select"

# Get the selected folder based on the number entered by the user
$folderPath = $PicasaFolderList[$folderNumber]

# Check if the path was found
if (-not $folderPath) {
Write-Host "Path not found. Please enter a valid number. Exiting."
sleep 5 # So you can see the error message before it closes the window
exit
}

# Display the selected folder path
Write-Host "You selected $folderPath"

#### Section 3 - Check for preexisting runs ####

# Check to see if you've left folders lying around from a previous run of Picasa
# Assume that if any of the database folder directories are empty, then put the database folders back in them
# If none of those folders are empty, exit (haven't done code for that heh)

# Check for the existence of Picasa2 or Picasa2Albums folders
if ((Test-Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2") -or (Test-Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2Albums")) {
write-host "Picasa database directories exist, checking for an empty folder to move them to"

# Check the list of folders provided for an empty one. It'll stop after the first one and move the folders there.
foreach ($folder in ($PicasaFolderList.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name)) {
$databasedir = "$GoogleDir\Picasa - $($folder.Value)"

# If a directory is empty we'll use that
if (-Not (Test-Path "$databasedir\*")) {
$emptydir = $databasedir
write-host "Found empty directory - $emptydir"
# Move the database folders to the empty directory
Move-Item -Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2" -Destination $emptydir
Move-Item -Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2Albums" -Destination $emptydir
# Wait five seconds to make sure the folders have moved
write-host "Waiting 5 seconds to make sure folders have moved"
sleep 5
# Stop after the first empty directory
continue
}
# You really should have some code here to exit out if none of the folders are empty.
# Although it doesn't matter too much, as the next check will fail out if the directories exist in the root
}
}

#### Section 4 - Move folders around ####

# Check again to make sure the folders are gone before moving things around
if ((Test-Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2") -or (Test-Path "$GoogleDir\Picasa2Albums")) {
write-host "Error: Picasa database directories still exist, something has gone wrong, exiting"
sleep 5 # So you can see the error message before it closes the window
exit
}

# Set the full working directory path based on the user selected folder
# Note the "Picasa - " prefix on the directory names. The $folderPath should match your actual folder paths.
$databasedir = "$GoogleDir\Picasa - $folderPath"

# Check the database directories exist within the working directory, then move them
# yeah yeah you could probably do this with a try/catch, I never said my code was any good
if (Test-Path "$databasedir\Picasa2") {
Move-Item -Path "$databasedir\Picasa2" -Destination $GoogleDir
}
else { write-host "$databasedir\Picasa2 didn't exist, exit"; exit}

if (Test-Path "$databasedir\Picasa2Albums") {
Move-Item -Path "$databasedir\Picasa2Albums" -Destination $GoogleDir
}
else { write-host "$databasedir\Picasa2Albums didn't exist, exit"; exit}

#### Section 5 - Start Picasa ####

# Launch Picasa
Start-Process "C:\PROGRAMMES\Graphics\Picasa3\Picasa3.exe"

Saturday Kit and I went to the Milton Show.  She had a free ticket because she'd been doing an agility demonstration with Biscuit the day before.  Mine was $17.35.

It was a bit noisy and confronting at the start, because you walk into sideshow alley and showbag stands, and they had chainsaws going to chop up wood for the woodchopping demos.  So that was a bit stressful for all of us (we took Mr Floofy).  

Walked past all the bright coloured noisy things, and I went in to see the chookens.

Including this hilariously dyed one

There was a sculptor there selling big metal sculptures which were pretty cool.

We could hear them talking about a bullock train but the speaker was coming out nowhere near where they were.  Did see some off-duty brahman bulls though.

And I did get stopped by the reptile show.  The dude brought out all these venomous snakes which was pretty cool.  They were all very sluggish, I wonder if they keep them in a cool box so they're docile when they bring them out.

Common death adder

Tiger snake

Eastern brown snake

King brown snake

Baby salt water crocodile

We got to pat the baby saltie

Then saw the end of a motorcycle show

Wandered down to the Puzzle Art Australia tent which had a lot of very cool jigsaws.

Past a bunch of emergency vehicles.

Said hi to Kit's friends at the My Wife's Hot Sauce tent

Marvelled at all the Lego Minifigs.  I have a bunch of these!

Went into one of the pavilions and looked at all the flowers and veggies and cakes and craft and art which was pretty cool.

Then went down to watch the Milton Ulladulla Dog Training Club's demonstrations on obedience.

Then wandered out, past the bulls

Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours!

Monday.  17th.  Slept mostly ok - although took me a while to get to sleep - it's been *cold* the last two nights - like 3 or 4 C overnight.  House work before work.  Work work at work.  It was so cold in the house I had to put my jeans on!  Salad for lunch.  Salad takes a long time to prepare and eat, did you know?  Had a 45 minute lunch break, and most of that was taken up with prepping and eating.  And I still ended up hungry by like 16:30.  Booked a hotel in Adelaide.  Realised the angel tank was leaking *again*.  Even with a stone weighing it down, the filter had drifted over into the edge of its compartment into the outflow compartment, backing everything up.  Not so serious this time but sheesh.  Need a heavier stone.  Stumpy has decided he's not very hungry anymore this summer.  Salmon and salad for dinner.  More time taking prepping food and eating food.  At least the salad can be done while the meat is cooking, and the eating can be done while watching TV.  Watched Return to Paradise 1.3.  Another preposterous setup for a murder.  Reminded me a bit of Death of a Detective from season 3 of Death in Paradise.  Then a few minutes of hobbies and suddenly it's bed time.  hrmm.  Also, turns out maltitol is really bad for the sweetie's bowels.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Spent the morning going through a log of stuff other teams have deleted, so can list all the things we need to do to clean up after them.  Did some scripting in the afternoon.  Fixed my foreach statement with a where-object, because sometimes arrays are not really arrays, but you apply a where-object to them and then you can work with them.  Sheesh powershell is dumb sometimes.  Wondered if I could compile all Mum's family photos in two weeks.  So put in a start on it.  Leftovers for dinner.  Return to Paradise 1.4.  Finished a Nanoblocks set I got at Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.

Potato fruit!

Bit of decom thinking, but too many meetings to get much done.  Bit of scripting in the afternoon.  Thought it was green bin week.  The green bin is full.  But no, it's recycling week.  The recycling bin is only 1/3 full.  Sigh.  Leftovers for dinner.  Return to Paradise 1.5.  Continued frustration with Windoze which constantly opens text files ON THE OTHER DESKTOP!!  Like, I have Notepad open in my current desktop.  I open a text file and it opens in the current desktop.  But a minute later I open another text file and it opens ON THE OTHER DESKTOP.  I HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN TO THE OTHER DESKTOP!!  Sigh.  Backed up computer, washed hair, bed.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Found the lovely pleco in the downstairs two foot tank had died overnight.  I don't get it.  It seemed happy enough yesterday.  Today, dead.  Sigh.  Also a bunch of guppies in the two foot are looking sick with red gills.  I don't get that either - that's the healthiest tank we have and I even did a water change last weekend.  Lots of crap at work, feeling like not getting anything useful done. 

Jim and Ray did a pizza feast to commemorate all the shut down and decom work we've been doing (remember all those migrations I did last year?  we decommed the hardware just recently).

Then drinks and more pizzas.  Finale of Return to Paradise season 1.  Much like the other series, the setups for the murders are completely ridiculous.  

Friday.  Awake from like 3:30 or 4 or so.  Sigh.  Another day of a lot of crap and distractions and feeling like not achieving much.  Stu cooked miso mushrooms and cauliflower rice for dinner which was very nice.  

Then we started into Deep Space Nine.  Stu watched this himself years ago but I didn't watch it with him at the time.  He wanted to watch it again so we're watching it now.  Early night on account of early morning.

Saturday.  So I went to bed relatively early, but not early enough, so it took til nearly midnight for me to get to sleep.  Sigh.  Stoopid being too tired to go to sleep.  Just tired and restless. 

Mostly house stuff in the morning.  Was freaking out about my todo list.  Then spent the ENTIRE afternoon tagging people in Picasa.  Sigh.  But I did find out you can simply move out the two database directories in and out and so therefore have different databases for different folders of files.  Handy if you want to keep the tagged people in different groups.  Like I want to keep work peeps separate to friends and family.  Leftovers for dinner then Stranger Things 1.4.  Early night.

Sunday.  Early night again and then slept mostly ok which was nice.  Spent all morning on photo filing and tagging.  When I probably should have been doing crap I won't be able to do the next couple of weekends.  Bit more "productive" in the afternoon, including cooking all the food.  

2024. Pretty standard year really. Busy busy busy!

Our big trip this year was to Tasmania. So no overseas travel, but does overstrait count? We spent a month there and had a great time. We could easily do the same route around the island and see all different things if were to go again, there's that much to see. I took five days off in January so I could get a nine day break, to make up for the shortened break at Christmas (which essentially only felt like a long weekend after the whole leadup/Christmas/post Christmas family stuff). In early February we went to Tumut with Tony/Frank/Karen for the TRBC Tumut River Tap Days. The day itself was hot but it was a lovely afternoon with beer and friends. I went down to Junee/Wagga for the Lego show in Wagga Wagga which was great and uncrowded, then stayed with David the night and caught up with Kellie's family. Sydney in May for a tour of WestConnex, the Ramses Gold of the Pharaohs exhibition, and Rachel and Hayden's wedding, with a couple of days playing tourist with Mum in the middle. In September we went up to Port Macquarie for Jeff's 80th birthday party. It was a lot of driving for just a day there, but Jeff had a wonderful time with most of his family there. Stu went up again in December for Potty's 50th. In October we flew up to Queensland for Ben and Sarah's wedding. It would have been nice to stay longer and have a proper catchup with Chay and also David, but Stu was too stressed with work to think about it.

My job continues to generally be "Sadie" - lots of decom work. A couple of bouts of being the Naughty Email Intervention Layer when Neil was on leave. On one of those I did a bunch of work in the test environment to make it match prod. We setup a new notifications db and decommissioned like half a dozen others. Looked at a proxy as a POC sorry POV. Not overly impressed. Cloud stuff just really is too.. nebulous.. troubleshooting and logging is invariably crap. The biggest project of the year was migrating a couple of thousand VMs to a new environment with a new version of the firewalling software. In advance of the move I spent two days deleting 10% of the rulebase so there'd be less rules to migrate. Then we had to maintain two environments while we spent a month migrating everything. But it generally went quite well, and we did the majority of it during business hours with no outages. Of course none of Daniel's scripts work in the new environment, so with a jump start from someone in security, and a lot of help from Nick, we managed to get a bunch of them working with some new powershell modules. I've learnt a lot about powershell, but I'm still really dumb so it's a struggle. Socially, there was a gin night while I was in Tassie, but was able to have leftovers when I got back. We won a trivia night in July, but luckily someone else volunteered to run the next one, which we were in no danger of winning in October. The social club had a 70th birthday "cocktail" night although it was primarily beer, wine and bubbles. A great night anyway. A couple of work Christmas parties, then my Christmas bbq at the lake in December for 58 people. About the 11th year in a row I've run it. Good times.

I've generally been pretty healthy this year. Other than being fat. Hit the fattest I've ever been in January, so went low carb and did lots of walking up Mt Rogers and managed to lose a few kilos quickly so I didn't have to lug them up mountains in Tasmania. Had the usual bouts of insomnia here and there. Did a sleep study in September. I have a bit of sleep apnea when I sleep on my back. No surprises there, I avoid sleeping on my back, except when I'm asleep and don't notice. Had a couple of sore throats in October, but if they were colds they only lasted a day or two. Got new glasses in November. Should NOT have gone to Specsavers. This time the optometrist was like "eh close enough" with the vision check so I never got that whole "oh wow I can see moment" when I first tried on the new glasses. Also one of the pairs I got was far too small and I can't get them to fit right, so wearing the "spare" glasses that don't have the anti-reflective coating on them.

We've had a relatively quiet year with friends. Stu has simply been so stressed out by work that doing any sort of socialising is too much for him to bear a lot of the time. David came up in January to look at the oven. Met up with him and Shane and Jess for dinner in October, and he came for dinner later in October. Stayed with Mum a couple of days in May and we played tourist which was kinda cool. Kit came to visit with Oreo in February and May, and by herself in June. Had multiple visits to Herbert's with Tony/Frank/Karen as well as with the Chrises and Neil. Had Tony and Jo over for dinner in April. Had cocktails at Molly/Hippo and dinner at Molly/Bar Rochford/Akiba with Luc in April, August and October (busy year for him in Canberra! Here three times!). Picked up the sweetie a few times after drinks with Dennis. Had drinks/dinner with Ding at the Lighty in April. Went over to Nick and Tab's for dinner in May. Met up with Luc and Cynthia in Sydney for dinner in May. Had Fred's 50th at Herbert's in June. Went over to Chris and Geoff's for raclette in September. Had a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's which was a lot of fun. We caught up with Chay, Daemon and Augie in October, the first time we'd seen them since 2016! James/George/Josh/Rachel took me to afternoon tea in December on their way to Melbourne.

We went out to the club five times all up. See aforementioned notes above about Stu being stressed by work. We went out for a Remembrance dinner near Anzac Day in April. Ian and Chris's anniversary formal night in June. There was a working been in July. I did Christmas in July for like the tenth year in a row (except for 2020, stoopid covid). And Rob and Fiona's Christmas party in November.

Had another busy year of photo processing. I got my Turkey 2014 trip photos culled, labelled and blogged in time for the ten year anniversary of our departure in May. I started processing David's America 2023 photos, but didn't get very far through it because I had too many other projects I was working on. Got Tasmania photos online in time for the six month anniversary of that trip. I got our Queensland 2014 trip photos culled and labelled, but couldn't get them online on the tenth anniversary because Vodien broke my database. So they were a month late. I've also been doing a lot of filing/organising of general Canberra photos, Stu's family photos (pulled out 600 photos of Immy cause she hardly has any of her as a little kid), and pulling photos in case of having to need them for Mum's funeral one day (easier to get that done now rather than being in a hurry if things happened suddenly).

No big changes with the fish. The upstairs two foot has countless guppies, and I'm having to weed all the java fern out of it regularly. The four foot has a loach, three male guppies and two female guppies, and 11 congo tetras (I think). I still have Chrissie's two clown loaches - I've had them for nearly seven years now. The "angel" tank has maybe ten or so guppies in it. The downstairs two foot has a big sucking catfish and two female guppies. I've been meaning to give them a boyfriend for a while now... In January the filter clogged up the outlet on the "angel" tank and water backed up and leaked over the back, which was super annoying and made a big mess. In October the stone I had weighing down the filter wool to stop a repeat of January drifted over the well with the wool and got stuck in the outlet. Water backed up and leaked over the back, which was super annoying and made a big mess. Stumpy's UVB light died in December, but two pet stores and the reptile store at Gold Creek don't have them. Waiting for Gold Creek to get more stock.

I had a big Lego year this year. I've spent ages on Vic's Lego all year. I finished inventorying loose pieces so I knew what was left, then used that to pick parts for some more sets that looked somewhat completable. I then wishlisted all the missing pieces (a couple of thousand of them! eep!) and noted the average price for them (to compare seller prices). I bought a big batch off a dude in South Australia and it's taken weeks to mark everything off and file them into sets. I did build a few of the smaller sets that are complete, but was hoping to do a lot more over the break that I just didn't get the time for. I made a 31x31 mosaic of a QR code that will take you to my blog. I borrowed Jo's (originally Riley's) Winter Holiday Train (10254) and bought some missing pieces to complete it. Of my own I did Scaled-Up Lego Minifigure (40649), Minifigure (3723), Moving Truck (40586) and Notre-Dame de Paris (21061). All a lot of fun.

Jigsaws continue whenever I have time. Which is not often at home. I still haven't assembled the Disney jigsaw as I don't have anywhere I can do it.

I pulled out my Spirograph in January and had a bit of fun with it. Also had a play with my Rubik's Rings puzzles (never could solve those things). I'm still playing the clarinet. I'm still not very good at it. Spent the year working through a Crystal Creations koala. While it was all actually pretty good quality, the colours they provided were all off, so it looks dumb. I got some Diamond Dotz ones for Christmas and have done one and started on a bigger one.

It's been a warm year. Had our usual share of storms, rainbows and even some hail. It snowed out at the club in July which was pretty awesome. The humidity in January and December wasn't fun.

Windows 11 continues to piss me off with its trash - like files opening on a completely different desktop to the one you're on, even if the app is open on your current desktop; notepad search sucking donkey balls and just dumping you at random places in the file when you close the search box (but keeping unsaved files open over reboots is nice, although only at home, not at work); refusing to shut down when I tell it to; refusing to eject hard drives some times. But at the beginning of the year we found it will FINALLY let you ungroup taskbar items. Google may be improving the security of the internet by FORCING https, even without consent, but it did break my blog because Chrome refused to load the http css/js content on a https page. Vodien broke my blog/database in June - from broken CageFS file system errors and script errors, to broken cpanel passwords, to a mysql database reverted to October last year, to a completely broken website. Took weeks of yelling for them to fix it. Then in August they broke my database AGAIN, by reverting the database to the same point in October last year. Took weeks of yelling and pleading to finally get a complete export of my database taken after my last blog entry but before they broke it. I took that database and moved to CloudLoop, who have been amazing. I used the opportunity to do a massive cleanup of all my blogs. I fixed up all the things I'd been meaning to fix up for years, got my holiday blogs to a consistent design, got everything working in https, and cleared 14000 image assets so my blog entries publish in seconds instead of minutes. We bought a new printer in October (an Oki) because the old Brother one had a fault with the fuser and was smudging all the prints. Such a waste. Why is everything so crap these days? We bought a new lawn mower in November because the starter rip cord ripped right off on the old one. Stu has used it once. I've used it three times. In December I coded up some Perl to pull weather data from BOM's API and put a little widget on my blog to show the current weather. I dispute their "feels like" temperatures though!

Around the house. A second element died in our POS DeLonghi oven on New Years Day. After not being able to get a replacement for the previous dead element, we decided to piss it off and get a new oven. The old one was only four years old. Such a waste. Why is everything so crap these days? David came up in January to do the diagnosis on the old one, and did the installation on the new one. So nice to have a qualified electrician in the family! Although funnily enough the new one has a standard plug and doesn't need to be wired directly in, but it did need a new power point. I grew two mini capsicum plants out the front (the ones out the back got eaten by snails in like one night). They're stoopidly slow growing (not helped by completely infertile soil out the front and very little water) so only a few ripened by June before the frost finally got to them. The fridge made a loud clunk in April when it was turning off which sounded ominous. Sure enough the next time it ran it was a lot noisier. But it's still running, loudly, so there's that I guess. I dread having to buy a new one. This one is at least twenty years old. Anything new won't last anywhere near that long. Our Solar Edge solar system for reasons unknown didn't charge the battery at all for three days in April (it was sunny!). Our lemon tree totally went off this year. By June it was completely laden. In August I started juicing lemons that had fallen off. In November a branch with 112 lemons on it broke off. I've given away dozens of lemons and litres of juice, and made multiple lemon cheesecakes and lemon pepper chicken, and there's litres of juice in the freezer. I drink about an ice cube a day. But more lemons keep falling. All. The. Lemons. We had various problems with ancient electronic timers. Either turning on and just not turning off, or losing time. About three have had issues this year. The turdburger crimson rosellas came back again this year to eat the house. The gas heater died in August - nothing on the control panel. Fortunately a complete reboot of the whole heater at the power point fixed it. First poppy of the season flowered on 1 September. There's still one or two left. We had more purple poppies and epic dandelions. In September I planted out a stick of geranium that had been lying on the ground since January!! How is that even possible that it's still alive?? We had a scheduled power outage in October. The Solar Edge solar system dutifully kicked in and kept all the fish tanks running all day, but it didn't charge the battery. That's not what we were sold on. Annoyed. Got lots of strawberries in November/December. Although I didn't get to eat half of them - the currawongs kept stealing them. They didn't find the ones in the pool though, and neither did the snails so that was a win. In December I heard dripping in the washing machine after it was finished/emptied. Seems the thing is leaking. The first time I let it go and it leaked a *lot* into the drum over a few days. And then one day I found water all over the laundry floor. So it's leaking in two places. So now we turn the water off when we've finished washing. I dread having to buy a new one. This one is at least twenty years old. Anything new won't last anywhere near that long. Redid the silicone sealant on the shower in December - further up the wall this time. Our ExtendaLine that David installed in 2020 had another line break in December. Now I can't fully extend the thing which is super annoying.

Did a reasonable amount of eating out this year. Kinn Thai in Civic is a favourite, we went there in February, April and December. Chong Co is another favourite, with delivery in April, August, October. Same with Dumpling Inn in February, July, September and November (twice). Many visits to Herbert's with Tony/Jo/Frank/Karen/Chrises/Neil etc, including tap takeovers by TRBC (farewell tour) and Hopsters Cooperative Brewery. But they gave me grief over ordering from the kids menu the last time, so I lost it, and very likely will never go back. Dumb business decision will (and in fact already has) cost them. Dinners before/after ANU events with Tony at Badger&Co, 10 Yards, Terra. Some new lunch places with Neil at BZ Burgers, Uyghur Cuisine and No. 10, a few team lunches at Ikko (twice), Ramen-O and Vanilla Pod. Molly, Bar Rochford and Akiba with Luc the three times he was in town. Went to the Burns Club in Holt with the Chrises in January, and at Kambah with David and Kellie and some of David's friends during the Airport Open Day. Kimchi in Dickson with David/Shane/Jess and a colleague of David's in October. Cypher for Wello's birthday in October. Raku with Annie and Stu in May. Had Grease Monkey from their food truck at the Belco markets in May. Pattysmiths in January and June. Pizza at TRBC in Kingston in July, which turned out to be the one and only time I'd ever get there. Pappa Rich before Twisters in August. Returned to the Aussie Crepe House (previously Crepe Cafe) in October for the first time in a few years to avoid the mall food court during school holidays. Beess & Co in September and Gang Gang in November. Four Winds with Tony in November, repeat of the previous year. Yat Bun Tong and Kinh Do delivery/takeaways in May/July.

As usual I somehow ended up doing a whole lot of cooking this year. Staples included Sunday night roasts, Thursday night pizza (mostly made at home) and often Brown-Food-Fridays with chicken Kievs. Did slow cooker lamb in January which was amazing. Lemon dill chicken in January, then again in December with my own dill. Cheese mince and cheesy taco casserole in January (keto ftw!). Tried a carbonara from AntiChef in February but it didn't really work with alternative pasta. Might try it again some time though. Barramundi bake in March, although not as good as basa, and a few tuna bakes. Luv-a-duck cheats Peking duck a couple of times - pretty awesome each time. Did three Mexican things from Nagi Maehashi's Dinner book in May - slow cooker Mexican shredded beef, taco slaw, Mexican red rice which were all excellent, and beef ribs from her website in June, which would need a bit of tweaking to do again. Osso bucu on August. Lemon pepper chicken a couple of times in November. French onion soup in December. Also made Not Quite Nigella's peppermint slice a couple of times, and lemon cheesecake a few times.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions/Tours
* Canberra Airport Open Day in April. In the rain. But nice in the afternoon.
* Journey of Australian Science series at the Shine Dome
* Lego show in Wagga Wagga in April
* Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs in Sydney in May. Too many people and not enough room and no flow made it super stressful for me
* Ralph Heimans exhibition at the portrait gallery in May
* Questacon to see the Ryan "Brickman" McNaught Lego exhibition. During school holidays. Not recommended.
* Beethoven's 9th in August
* Questacon again on my birthday in August. Much quieter and more civilised.
* Dark Matter in the Pub in August
* Mint in September (and back again a week later to swap out the earrings I bought)
* Scrivener Dam tour in October

Movies (at the movies)
* Twisters

Movies (TV)
There may have been more that I forgot to blog about or forgot to add to this list
* The Queen
* Mona Lisa Smile
* Mash
* The Sound of Music
* Fantasia 2000
* The Shape of Water
* The Good Son
* Parasite
* Barbie
* A Night To Remember
* Iron Man 1/2/3
* Miss Potter
* Twister
* 9 to 5
* The Door Into Summer
* Mean Girls
* TRON / Tron: Legacy
* Freaky Friday (2018)
* South Solitary
* Wonka (2023)
* Grave of the Fireflies
* Inside Out 2
* Golden Kamuy
* Salt
* My Old Ass
* John Wick
* Die Hard / Die Hard 2
* Love Actually
* The Santa Clause / The Santa Clause 2

TV
We were getting into a good routine of Death in Paradise on Thursdays, The Orville on Friday or Saturdays, The Crown on Sundays, as well as Mash, The Simpsons and Futurama over dinner. Then they all finished and we haven't been watching as much together. There's a few things I want to watch so hopefully will get into a routine again in the new year.
* Death in Paradise - from mid season 7 to mid season 11
* The Orville from mid season 2 til the end
* Mash from mid season 2 til the end. Fun seeing various people pop up that became famous later - like Mr Miyagi, Larry Wilcox, James Cromwell, GW Bailey, Patrick Swayze, David Graf, "Larry" Fishburne
* Sex Education from mid season 4 til the end
* The Crown from mid season 6 til the end. Although there's 20 years of the Queen's life left so they may make another series.
* Some Big Bang Theory on tv in Tassie
* Shogun all of season 1
* Laid Back Camp season 3
* Start of The Apothecary Diaries. It didn't really grab me (maybe it would have gotten better) so Stu watched it by himself.
* Lego Masters Australia vs The World
* First three seasons of the American Lego Masters, and a Christmas special
* Documentaries - Brats, Pretty Baby, The Movies that Made Us (on Friday the 13th), Feminists: What were they thinking?
* Start of Girl Band Cry. Another one that really didn't grab me.
* Amazing Race season 8 (another celebrity edition)
* Black Mirror - all of it
* The Simpsons - some of season 36
* Futurama - whatever this year's season is

Weddings
* Rachel and Hayden
* Ben and Sarah

Other stuff
* late night on NYE watching the fireworks
* went out to Cotter Dam on New Years Day because it was spilling. It was quite crowded out there. Walked all the way up to the viewing spot.
* took a *lot* of photos of flowers. And food.
* remembered the January 1994 bushfires thirty years ago
* went shopping for jeans in January. Failed. Did get a bra though.
* bought some jeans at Vinnies of all places in January
* also managed to get some "skinny" jeans in January at Kmart because that's all that was left in the store. Hate.
* impressed with a Seiko battery from 1998 that was still working, and has been powering a thermometer all year
* got my first Charlie coin in April
* got grunty at Access Canberra because MyWay cards can expire and they expect you to fork out $5 for a new one (no credit on new cards) so they can transfer the balance. Decided to ignore the problem until the new MyWay+ system came along in December, and Stu could transfer his balance.
* saw a kangaroo in our driveway in May (sounded like it smacked into the fence) but it disappeared before I got outside
* ABC Classic 100 "Feel Good" in June
* had my nails "professionally" done in June
* watched the Olympics opening ceremony but nothing else
* had a play with ChatGPT. It's trash. Asked it to write a trivia night round on current events. Most of the questions couldn't actually be answered because they were wrong.
* saddened to hear that TRBC was closing down in September
* found some five leaf clovers in September
* wandered round Yarralumla in September and saw the old brick works
* saw Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in October. Well, my phone did, I didn't
* found a two leaf clover in October
* visited the Lake Ginninderra spillway and wetlands in November
* encouraged the epic dandelions around the place
* watched lots of Jamie and Julia
* booked another holiday next year with the mother type person
* did the Plonk beer advent calendar
* got a random Blue Screen of Death in December
* got to level 15000 in Candy Crush just before the end of the year
* saw a rat among the daisies under the lemon tree

My biggest stress this year is simply a lack of TIME. I desperately want to retire so I can actually slow down and enjoy life and just do my hobbies and have a quiet life. Even over the Christmas break I spent too much time trying to get All The Things done, and not nearly enough time on my hobbies. Didn't really feel relaxing at all. I have heaps of photo projects I want to work on next year as well. And I'm desperate to get Vic's Lego out of the house, but so little of it is complete. Deep breaths. It'll all be ok in the end.

Happy New Year to everyone, I'll try and have one too!

18.5.24

Back in May was Rachel and Hayden's wedding.  Not really sure why we were invited, we've barely seen them in the past 17 years.  Rachel was just a little kid when I left Sydney and I've really only seen them a few times since then.  But we were, so off we went.

It was scheduled for 11:00.  So we got there at 10:30, so we'd have plenty of time to find parking.  We ended up all the way down the street.

They were late.  So the cermony started at 12:00.

!!

It was a lovely service.

After the service was morning tea.  Even though it was 13:00 by now.  And it was raining.  And I was stressing about so many people.  And it was a dry wedding.  I did end up going and talking to a couple of my old friends.  But felt pretty uncomfortable.  And the sweetie just avoided everyone heh.

They tried to get a photo of everyone outside.  In the rain.  Yeah that didn't work.

And there was lunch.  Talked to more of my friends.  Did I mention it was a dry wedding?

There were various family/friends photo shots throughout the afternoon.

And there were speeches.

With bubbles.

Of cider.

Alan wrote a limerick!

And there was cake cutting

Photo shoots carried on

When we finally had a chance to leave Marylon said we should sign the guest book, but you were meant to do a photo booth thing and keep a copy and stick the other one in the book.  But there were lots of people and we didn't know what to do with the machine and it was all very stressful.

And then of course I couldn't think of anything useful to say in the book.  Oh well.

We finally left at nearly 16:30.  Six hours after we got there.  On the way out we saw the MASSIVE car park under the church.  Yeah that would have been nice to know about in advance.

It was a lovely day, but we were both utterly exhausted by the end of it, with a 3.5 hour drive ahead of us to get home.  I spent the next day or so *cringing* over the crap I said because I was so anxious.  This is why I don't socialise sober, people!!  But I think Rachel and Hayden had a wonderful day, so that's really all that matters!