Sunday.  7th.  Not backdating for a change ;)  This was the slow cooker turkey we had.  I literally just plonked the thing in the slow cooker all afternoon, but it was a bit dry.  Will add some stock next time I think, and turn/submerge it half way through.  Had it with potato bake and veggies.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Spent the morning patching stuff we'd upgraded the other week.  The fighting with the proxy in the afternoon.  No music practise (still giving the wrist a rest), so labelled over 200 photos - the ones I was behind in from last week because I had no time on the weekend to catch up.  That was all of day 50.  Then Lie to Me and You Can't Ask That.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Last week I said I thought I'd finished rescanning Dad's slides, but I'm still finding a lot of fluffy ones at the beginning where I wasn't diligent/fussy/perfectionist enough.  I can't help myself, I *need* to rescan them to make them better.  Sadly these are ones I'd already processed as well, so that means I'll have to reprocess *again*.  Sad times. Busy busy day, too much stoopid.  Fun episode of The Simpsons in the evening (The Poseidon Adventure one).  Still managed 167 photos, into day 51.

Wednesday.  Another busy day.  Only 128 photos labelled - day 52 in Hokkaido.  Finished the week still 182 behind.  

This is me cheating on Mickey - doing one half literally on top of the other half.

Thursday.  Dropped into work to swap out my hard drives.  Then did our food shopping.  Coles was definitely quieter at 7am than it has been previously during lockdown.  I guess more people are relaxed about going at a more normal time and not sparrows fart.  Couldn't log into work for over an hour because the auth app on my phone had a spaz, then I got locked out, then I had to wait for the service desk.  It did make the morning pass a bit quicker though :)  Tacos for dinner.  Finished watching the Jim Carrey version of Fun With Dick and Jane that I started the other day/week.  Well half watched it really, it was a bit silly.  Rain!

Friday.  Rain! 

One of the baby magpie larks that's been hanging around our yard for a while.

Picked up the clarinet for the first time in a week.  I really need to get a neck strap to save my wrist.  XL was headed off to Sydney for the weekend, and Ward said something about getting her to eat something for him, and I was like, I want Din Tai Fung!  Of course then I had cravings for dumplings, so the sweetie had some delivered from Charnie's Noodle and Dumplings.  It was all nice enough, nothing super special though.

Watched Red Sparrow in the evening, but it was very violent, making it quite unpleasant.  I also get annoyed at spy movies because you can never know what side someone is really on, and quite often it's both.  Probably like real life, but still annoying to watch.

Saturday.  Got housework done first thing, then doing upgrades all morning.  But I'm dumb and don't know how to fix anything when it breaks.  Sigh.  Didn't get much done in the afternoon other than geotagging some of Dad's photos from sixty years ago.  !!  Did a bit of jigsaw and music practise and then suddenly it's nearly dinner time.  hmmm.

Moved the stuff on the left aside to take a progress photo

Finished season 3 of You Can't Ask That, then leftover dumplings for dinner, then watched Hachi: A Dog's Tale, an Americanised version of the story of Hachiko.  I think I started crying when Hachiko tried to stop him getting on the train that last time, and then for much of the rest of the movie.  hrmmm.

Sunday.  Today.  Wrote a massive long todo list for the day.  Did a small fraction of it.  I'm going to be dead before I finish my todo list.

Got the internal "edges" done today, and the left bubbles are back on top of the right side.  This weekend I also finished laying out *every* piece on boards, so all the pieces are on six boards for the six different shapes (plus one board of leftover twinklies).  So now every piece has to be there to find and put in.

Started photo processing and blogging early enough today to get it done, because now I need to go cook dinner for tonight and a few other nights this week.

Stop the world, I want to get off!

Whoops I never posted these!

One from the Green Shed (third of three), done at work

Oh gosh I don't remember where this one came from!  Dementia is really kicking in.  A fun jigsaw though.

This was from the Green Shed.  It was 3D, done with corrugated plastic so the picture would move if you moved your head side to side.  It was a bit tricky because a lot of it was fairly dark, but mainly because the picture didn't line up at all until the piece was in place.

This was a set of three jigsaws I got from the Green Shed.  For these three little ones in the first picture, someone had separated each one into separate bags, but they'd done it wrong and so edges didn't match up.  Once all three were done we could sort it out.  There were also a few pieces mixed up between the three main jigsaws as well.  Done at work.

David might have brought this home at some point.  He certainly did it first while he was living with us.  I eventually got around to doing it.

XL started this even though I'd done it the year before, so it took ages because I had little interest in doing it again.  

Monday.  27th.  Slept ok, and an ok day, more playing with proxies.  The magpie chicks have hatched.  Managed 48 photos before dinner (last of the san choy bow mince with brisket rice and shredded cabbage).  Into season 16 of The Simpons and day 39 of Eurasia labelling.

Also, I truly hate people.  Some low life bastard stole the ruffled tulip bulbs!

Tuesday.  Much the same really, started looking at some more cleanup work.  Leftover pork and veggies for dinner (fried in jelly).  Got 182 photos labelled.  

Wednesday.  Awake in the middle of the night for an hour because I was hot.  Hrmmm.  More documenting of things that need cleaning up.  Creamy fettuccini for dinner.  Finished day 39 labelling, into day 40.  Stopped when I couldn't decide how to label Miniatur Wunderland - should I do a quick summary of the scene, or just label it all "Miniatur Wunderland".  hrmm.  Finished watching Love on the Spectrum.  I reckon rather than one-on-one dates, they should have double dates, with or without "normal" people to add conversation direction.  One of the problems with aspergers/autism is difficulty socialising, and I myself find it a lot easier in a small group situation (three to four is ideal) than one-on-one.  I wonder if these guys would have any more luck like that.  My favourite guy in the series was Andrew - into jigsaws and K'nex connector toys, and not a tea-totaller :)  (another side note: dopamine makes it a helluva lot easier to relate to people, ask me how I know).

Thursday.  Updated my doco on change management for the new system, and some people who hadn't seen it before were very excited that there was a nice document they could pass round/follow.  Had virtual drinks in the afternoon which was a bit fun.  Had about eleven people connect in.  Watched the third episode of Connected - Dust.  And I watched the pilot of Lie to Me.  We'd seen a bunch of episodes of this like ten years ago, but there's plenty I still haven't seen, and because I have dementia I won't remember the ones I have seen heh.  

Friday.  Made pretty tables in Splunk for our firewall logs which are pretty hard to read in it.  OMFG what a crazy news day though!  52 covid cases recorded - highest ever in Canberra for one day.  ScoMo announced opening of international borders a lot sooner than we first thought.  Gladys resigned.  

From ABC News:

I was pretty impressed with the distribution of chocolates in the Favourites box I won for best dressed individual back in July for work Christmas in July.

And how pretty are thyme flowers?

Leftover pork and veggies fried in jelly for dinner.  Watched Ocean Waves in the evening.  This wasn't even in the list of Ghibli movies on Wikipedia when we were going through them last year, and not sure if it was online at the time either.  It was a bit lame, and the girl in it was actually pretty horrible.  

Saturday.  Awake for hours in the middle of the night :(:(  Talked to Zac for a little bit of it.  Total zombie in the morning.  Then the mother type person called which took out another half an hour, so it took all morning to get through my Saturday morning routine (that I usually have done by about 9am).  So it was pretty much a write off of a day.  Did get some jigsaw done though, and some music practise (I've been practising most days and learning new notes and getting better at blowing).  

Put on American Pie while I blogged last week.  Never seen it before, wouldn't have missed anything if I'd never seen it.  But I knew that going in, hence why I wasn't really watching it.  Chicken Kiev and veggies for dinner (Stu needed to go to the chemist, so he did some veggie shopping as well). 

In the evening watched The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  It started off very silly, with unnecessary love triangles all round, but it did improve a lot in the second half.  

Sunday.  Slept somewhat better.  Got a bit more done during the day.  Feeling anxious about our cruise next year.  Even though we might be able to travel in time for it, I really don't want to be going on a cruise out of Florida early next year.  I still don't think they're going to be at herd immunity status by the time we get there, even if all the idiots that aren't getting vaccinated actually get covid.  And if we get exposed and get it, we could miss out on the cruise entirely, or worse, could be hospitalised (can happen, even for the fully vaccinated).  And insurance certainly wouldn't cover that.  And there's no way in hell I'd ever want to be hospitalised in America without insurance.  

Arribbiata bake and roasted tomatoes for dinner (photos to be added next week).  I watched The Color of Money in the evening because I'd never actually seen it.  It was pretty meh actually.  

Monday.  Today.  I might have photos to add to this later, dunno.  Feeling out of sorts all day that I just don't have enough time to get everything done.  I mean it's not unreasonable that I want to finish the Disney jigsaw, finish scanning and processing all Dad's slides, file all this year's photos, file all my club photos, label my Eurasia 2012 trip, get through the backlog of This Day in History posts, and get all images for next years' posts set aside.. all by Christmas.. is it .. ??  And that's not even mentioning finishing the paint by numbers before the paint dries up, doing daily music practise, trying to stay on top of housework and the jungle that is our garden (and let's not forget being the sole chef and waitress), and who even knows where I'd fit in exercise into that punishing schedule.  I'm just depressed that work takes so much time out of my life that I could be doing other things.  And it's not like I don't like work, I actually do, it just takes up too much damned *time*.  *sigh*

Monday.  2nd.  Not backdating this for a change ;)  Ok day.  Spent entirely too long trying to figure out what was causing a spike in traffic somewhere.  Really really need to relearn Splunk.  Saw eight of my birds at lunch!  Leftovers for dinner (Dinner Winner with veggies from the club night).  Managed to label 285 photos.  Found some new episodes of Air Crash investigations on Disney+, and blogged the week before last while watching an episode.  

Tuesday.  Ok day.  Lots of looking at traffic graphs and discovering new (and bad) things about one of our firewalls.  Managed to label 50 photos before dinner (turkey burnt ends and veggies from the club).  Ended up labelling 199 photos all up, and blogged last week while watching another episode of Air Crash Investigations.

Wednesday.  Restless sleep.  I like *going* to sleep on my belly, but my neck still hurts a bit from my Covid jab, but that's no so bad, I get more pain later after I wake up with an aching lower back.  If I lie on my sides my hands will go numb which is super annoying, and if I lie on my back I can't breathe.  So I really can't win.  Only managed to finish yesterday's slide fixup scanning (story of my life this week).  Decent day though - learnt *heaps* about our network, and organised a bunch more traffic graphs.  Leftovers for dinner.  Only managed to label 54 photos though.  Another episde of Air Crash Investigations while blogging the penne bake.

Thursday.  Another day of working on traffic graphs and dashboards.  

Friday.  Too busy dealing with All The Things to play with Splunk like I really wanted to.  Popped out for an impromptu Herbert's lunch with Tony and the Chrises.

Shared some loaded fries and skewers with Tony

Leftover pizza for dinner (fried of course, but a little over done because we used the bigger pan to fit it all in, but we don't have a big lid to cover it).  Watched In the Heart of the Sea, essentially about the sinking of the Essex and the survival story of the crew.  I felt quite tense watching most of it.  Pretty well done.  Interesting and quite tragic story too.

Saturday.  Fairly quiet day.  Did a bit of stuff around the house and some jigsaw (making agonisingly slow progress on that).  For dinner I used up some of the mince from the other week - heated with a leftover half punnet of tomato paste, some Worcestershire sauce, half a litre of stock with about a third to a half a packet of macaraoni, some leftover peas/corn/carrots, and cheese.  Basically my own One Pan Dinner.

Watched When a Man Loves a Woman in the evening.  I'd seen this a long time ago, but Stu hadn't seen it.  Quite a powerful movie.

Sunday.  Another quiet day pottering around the house.  Finished last week's photo labelling, worked on the jigsaw, did a bit of fish tank stuff.

Notice the symmetry in the completedness.  Every time I get a piece in from one side, I find the same shaped piece and put it in on the other side too.  

Dinner tonight will be the rest of the leftover mince with a whole heap of roasted veggies.

Sunday.  18th.  Backdating.  Lamb roast for dinner.  With epic leftovers.

Monday.  Spent some time trying to get caught up with all the stuff that got dropped last week because of all the disasters.  Saw my birds at lunch which was nice.  From 5pm spent some more time working on last week's issue.  Stu was home late as well.  Finished some leftover pork for dinner and The Simpsons, but then it was only half an hour before I had to log back on to do even more work.  So no photo labelling.  

Tuesday.  Woke up at 4am to pee but never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  Managed to rescan half a dozen slides, but not the dusting and vacuuming.  Zombie day all day.  Certainly didn't feel up to any photo labelling.

Wednesday.  Even though I was zombie tired I still took an hour to get to sleep.  But slept through til 5:30 (helped by being a bit dehydrated).  Ok day.  Managed about 90 photos labelled, so a nearly a week behind now.

Thursday.  Accidentally knocked this off my desk while I was dusting and it smashed everywhere.  George gave me this years and years ago - it was sort of like a thermometer where the warmer it got the further through the piping the liquid would go.  

Ok day.  Fairly slow morning but crazy afternoon.  Dumb episode of the X Files (Ascension).  Dumb issues, like the guy had an all night head start, but they got caught up with him pretty quickly.  Or like a cable car operator being able to control the speed of the car, rather than from the terminals.  Is that even a thing?  Or being able to infinitely zoom and enhance low res pics (a pet peeve of mine).  Although it was cool to see Gillian Anderson's actual pregnant belly.

Friday.  Had a random day off which was pretty amazing.  Did all my usual "Saturday" morning stuff.  Then attacked some unpleasant stuff - organising a heater service, someone to look at the leaky shower, etc.  After lunch spent a couple of hours tidying up the garage and organising stuff to get rid of.  Fried leftover pizza for dinner, the Simpsons, and then we watched Nanette (CRD had invited us to she Hannah Gadsby's show Saturday night, but Stu had his first covid jab on Friday and we didn't want to commit).  

Saturday.  Woke up at ~3am, but didn't get back to sleep for ~2 hours :(  Slept in til 7:20 and a very slow start.  This is Dumbo progress as of Saturday morning.

This is showing how I cheat by doing one half atop the other.

Didn't get much else done in the morning.  Stu was tired too from his jab.  But we did head out - got some lunch, dumped some stuff at Lifeline and Green Shed, and did some food shopping.  But we went to Coles at Gungahlin so everything is a different place and it was super crowded and it was a pretty horrible experience.  Came home and pretty much just collapsed in a heap and didn't really get much else done all day.  Watched the last episode of Diagnosis and did a bit of photo labelling.  Watched Wild with the sweetie, based on a true story about Cheryl Strayed hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.  Even a few been-theres.

Sunday.  Slept ok for a change.  Cleaned the shower and tidied the house in the morning.  Managed to get Dad's day 25 photos labelled and a fish tank water change done. 

Mid Sunday jigsaw progress

From 3pm it was cooking non-stop for three hours.  Cooked up a kilo of mince with bacon, onion and garlic.  And made a peppermint slice.  And a penne arribbiata bake.  Listened to Fantasia 2000 soundtrack.  Twice. 

In the evening felt like watching something fun, so we watched an episode of the new season of The Movies that Made us - this one on Jurassic Park.  Stu said he liked the content but not the silly way it was presented.  Oh well.  Also how good are TED-Ed talks - suits my attention span (five minutes haha).

I really wish I'd kept a blog in my twenties.  How else am I meant to remember the "dark ages" of my life otherwise?

And now with dementia taking over my brain it's kind of a race against time to document my memories.

One of them is Fantasia 2000.  I (thought I had) vivid memories of watching this on Friday evenings when I was living in my flat in Marrickville.  I'd have a shot or two of Cointreau and be very happy watching it before watching something "edgier" after.  I lived there from February 2000 to May 2001.

According to IMDB it was released in Australia (presumably theatrically) in June 2000.

I also thought I saw it for the first time after November 2000 at Cynthia's place, because I thought I saw it for the first time at her place and was super excited to see the "been-there" at Times Square during the Rhapsody in Blue sequence (I was in New York in November 2000).

So the logic would be I saw it in late 2000 with Cynthia, bought the VHS tape soon after, and watched it in early 2001.  Except early 2001 was a pretty dark time after my car got kidnapped and murdered and I don't remember many happy times there before I eventually bought my place in Kogarah and moved houses.

So I dunno.  Maybe the memories were more of it at Kogarah... I didn't think so though...

It's all part of Life's Rich Tapestry..

Way back in the 90s, the only drawing application we had on our computer was MS Paint.  I used it to create a few drawings that I kept.  

One drawing I did was of sheep grazing on a hillside, with snow capped mountains in the background.  The sheep were a customised paint brush so you could paint the same thing over and over again - for a whole flock.

Last year when we went to Tumut I saw the exact scene in real life!  This inspired me to find that original picture.  

Here it is!

And this is the photo I took last year :)

Monday.  12th.  Wow over two weeks ago (backdating).  Took ages to get to sleep because I was *cold* !!  Four of my birds came to see me at lunch.  Powered off a bunch of old hardware from our old network which was pretty cool.  Filled the green bin after work.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Labelled 392 photos so somewhat caught up with last week.

Tuesday.  Took *hours* to get to sleep - freezing cold :(  Thinking I might need an electric blankie.  Did a heap of work cleaning out bits of the old network.  Had an irritated eye which lasted ages :(  Did some photo labelling in the evening.  I really don't have time to go to work - too much life to do.

Wednesday.  This time I woke up hot, and with an irritated nostril (just one, so not sick, and oddly on the other side to my sore eye from yesterday), so I was a bit of a zombie for the day.  And it meant I had a runny nose all day which was super annoying.  Had an ok day I guess, trying to plan the next round of cleaning.  Leftovers for dinner, then labelled a few hundred photos, now up to only a hundred behind..

Thursday.  Slept pretty well for a change.  

Our azaleas are pretty confused - flowering in autumn instead of spring.

Never go the mall during school holidays.  I had to wait fifteen minutes at Subway :(

More cleaning planning during the day.  Finished Laid Back Camp season 2.  Then watched New York Minute, had to laugh at Danny Tanner peering after the twins.  One of their last movies.  

Friday.  Slept ok. Had lunch with Tony at Herbert's which was nice.  Shared a few different starters.

Can't remember what flavour the skewers were - they were on the specials board, I think maybe Thai curry or something.  And the spring rolls were cheeseburger!  Which were pretty cool.

And corn and zucchini fritters

They were throwing this rose out because it was drooping, so I brought it home and it's been smelling lovely ever since.

Did a heap of cleaning in the test network in the afternoon, although didn't finish what I wanted to get done - a couple of big apps just need a bunch more work.  X Files in the evening.

Saturday.  Had brunch with Annie at The District. Good catchup, haven't seen her in months.

Then an afternoon doing All The Things.  Alternating between fun stuff, house work stuff and photo work.  Got caught up with Eurasia photo labelling finally.  Watched High Fidelity in the evening which I didn't remember having seen, but turns out the sweetie and I watched it together in 2006, and some of it did seem vaguely familiar.  Hurrah for dementia.

Sunday.  Continued All The Things, again alternating between different sorts of tasks.  For dinner I made the oven baked feta pasta doing the rounds.  It wasn't too bad.  Simpsons and X Files in the evening.  I was also set to blog this, had my photos downloaded and processed and everything, but just ran out of time.  So here we are two weeks later backdating...

Twister !?

Epic mushroom cluster

Monday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Then woke up at 5am needing to pee.  Hurrah.  So tired and cranky.  Had a super crazy busy afternoon.  But did get over two hundred photos labelled and the kitchen cleaned by 20:20 so watched last night's Amazing Race.  

Tuesday.  Another super crazy busy day.  Managed to get photos labelled before dinner (of leftover pork).  Spent a fair while looking at gallery applications, but in the end decided I think I'll stick with Simple Photo Gallery.  It'll take a little bit of fiddling, but then any of them would.  But it behaves the way I want for the most part.  Then watched last night's Amazing Race.  

Wednesday.  Managed to catch up at work on some things that had dropped off from being so busy for the past two days.  At lunch the sweetie and I had our "last" lunch together.  So we went and tried out KorBQ.  

We didn't have bbq on the table, so didn't get to use the funky exhaust pipes.

Stu choose a very meaty lunch but it was pretty good.

Chicken skin crackling.  Basically deep fried chicken skin.  Pretty epic.

Crunchy octopus.  A little tough but still good.

Korean cheesy chicken - yumm

Again I managed to label my photos before dinner.  Of salad.  Because we needed it after all that meat at lunch.  Continued playing with my galleries.  Then Amazing Race.  My least two favourite teams came first and second.  Hrmm.

Thursday.  Usual Thursday.  With garlic scrolls with epic pools of oil!

Friday.  Had an ok day until I had to deal with the MESS someone had made on my firewalls and then got super cranky which is never a fun way to end a Friday afternoon.  Had a look at Star.  A tonne of new content.  I have literally a lifetime of TV I could watch .. hrmm.  Continued with Hibike season 2.  This season is a lot more soap opera than the first season.  Then watched most of the original The Poseidon Adventure.  Which was partly filmed on the Queen Mary at Long Beach.  I've seen that ship (in 1983) but haven't been on her.  One day.  The original is a whole lot better than the remake I watched recently.  Still fairly implausible, but not nearly as bad as the remake.  Had a very young Leslie Neilson in it, and music by John Williams!  (which I only found out at the end heh).  And just about the whole group, maybe actually everyone, had blue eyes!

I'm going to stop here because it's bed time, will continue the weekend in blogging tomorrow.

Last Friday night (5th) we met up with EffanC to go see Penguin Bloom.

I'd been following the Penguin movie, Cam and Sam's Instagrams for a while so was probably a bit over excited to see it (never a good start heh).

It stayed pretty close to the true story (as much of it as I know).  

If I had to complain about anything, it would be that I was hoping to see more of Sam's relationship with Penguin.  Apparently she would spend hours with Penguin and pour out her soul to the bird, but there really wasn't much of that in the movie. 

Another thing that was really only touched on peripherally was Sam's relationship with Bron.  Bron was Sam's best friend from school, and apparently a pretty awesome person.  But Sam pushed her away after her accident.  There's  awakwardness in the couple of scenes Bron's in, but it didn't go into the depth or explain it the way I was hoping it would.  After reading the book but not getting answers from the movie, I was like, did Sam and Bron ever become friends again?  Well I asked Sam that night, and it turns out they did!  So that was pretty great news.

The other remarkable thing about the movie is that they actually filmed it all at the Bloom's real house!  They redecorated it all, but that was actually where everything happened in real life.  Amazing stuff.

A lovely movie, with outstanding performances from all involved.