Results matching “Life”

2020.

Oh my.

We started the year at EffanC's, suffocating in bushfire smoke. We didn't go out to the club because I was too nervous about bushfires, and in fact even suburban fires. In 1994 I saw spotfires go a full kilometre from the bush, just a couple of hundred metres from our house. So I wanted to stay close. The bushfire smoke hung around for much of January and the devastation the fires caused was just heartbreaking.

The bushfires ended, then we got a massive hail storm that wrote off thousands of cars. I know *lots* of people that had their cars written off. And then it rained. And rained. And rained. Just a few weeks after the fires finished, much of the landscape was flooded. Which apparently is exactly what the river ecosystems *don't* need. Coastal communities begged Canberrans to come down and spend some money to help them recover. So we did. Although just an overnighter for Pete's 40th.

But then.

The C word.

As it hit, coastal communities begged Canberrans to stay away. When we got back from the coast, we dropped into Coles at Gungahlin to pick up a few supplies, including toilet paper (we were down to our last roll at home). We managed to get one of the last packets of toilet paper on the shelves. It was the last time I was to see toilet paper in Coles for about six or seven weeks. Fortunately I was able to get it at Chris's, otherwise things would have been pretty messy. The panic buying extended to all paper products that could be used in lieu of toilet paper - all the tissues and paper towel was gone for weeks as well. Pasta, pasta sauce, rice and even flour and yeast all disappeared off the shelves. I really didn't understand the flour/yeast thing - bread was still freshly available throughout the whole thing. In the second week even fresh food was mostly gone. Long lasting vegetables such as potatoes were nearly all gone, as was most fresh meat. One day (22 March) we went to the Belconnen markets and all three butchers had closed by lunch time Sunday because they'd simply run out of meat to sell.

On Monday 16 March I had the slightest hint of a sore throat and a cough. So Tuesday 17 March I stayed at home. And there I stayed. For six months. Other than a couple of odd days, and dropping in on a couple of weekends to swap out my backup hard drives, I didn't work in the office in any regular fashion until September. As it turns out I love working from home. Who knew. Previously I didn't really like it, partly because of my monitor setup is a bit backwards, but also because if I didn't go into the office every day I would lose the claim to "my" desk. But with everyone else working from home as well, and in fact they had a sticker on my desk for most of that six months saying don't work here (trying to keep people further apart), it wasn't an issue. And I got somewhat used to the monitors being backwards.

By 22 March, most flights around the world had been cancelled. The government imposed a travel ban. For every country they said "Do not travel". Restaurants, bars, cinemas and anything "non-essential" was shut down. I was quite upset by the impact that would have on low income earners. And then I raged at people whinging about their pay raise getting delayed six months. My holiday to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play got postponed two years. They started doing that play to thank God for saving them from the plague. And this year they had to postpone. Because of a plague. There's got to be some irony there somewhere. Qantas grounded all their 747s - forever. I was super sad about this.

In late March I went out at lunch time on a Monday to do the food shopping, when Jamo was a lot less crowded, and did that a couple of times. Still not much in the way of pasta/rice etc. We did big shops fortnightly to minimise having to go out. And I did the shopping by myself for a while too which was no fun because I like going with the sweetie. Every time I went shopping I swore I was getting a sore throat straight after. It was late April before I saw toilet paper again in Coles. June saw an outbreak in Melbourne, and panic buying started up again. In July I finally got my money back from Emirates for my Europe trip, although not the extra I paid for seat allocations.

Things eased up a lot in the second half of the year with no community transmission in Canberra since March. Restaurants opened and stayed open. We were able to start seeing our friends again. It hit Melbourne pretty hard in the middle of the year.  By December it looked like Australia was getting on top of things again. But then a driver of international flight crews got it in December and started spreading it around Sydney. Sydney went into lockdown of sorts and Mum couldn't come visit us after Christmas.

So a pretty wild year on that front.

Very little travel this year, for obvious reasons. I flew up to Sydney in February for Ryan's 21st birthday. But with all the delays it would have been quicker to take the coach. And that turned out to be my only flight for the year. I stayed with Mum and went to the 21st, where I put up a video of all the photos I'd taken of Ryan every week/fortnight/month/year since he was born. Caught the coach back the next morning. In March we went down the coast to stay with Kit and Pete for a surprise party for Pete's 40th. That was a bit of fun. Came home the next day. Did a quick trip to Sydney in late June to inspect my flat after the previous tenants decided to move out. We also dropped in to visit Luc and Lizzi, and on the way back I saw Nepean Dam. My flat ended up being empty for a month, and I had to drop the rent *a lot* which was pretty sad. In late August we wandered around the Snowy Mountains to Tumut, visited several dams and had a lovely afternoon at the Tumut River Brewing Company for Stu's 50th. In November Stu's brother convinced us to go up to Port Macquarie and South West Rocks to visit him and his father.

In lieu of actual travel, I did a *lot* of work on my travel photos. Throughout last year I'd gotten our Hong Kong/Singapore 2016 trip labelled, and had the blog ready for the fourth anniversary since we went. I geotagged my USA 2000 trip, fixed up all the labels, and got photos into the blog. I started geotagging my USA 2004 photos in February, but ran out of steam with that after about a week's worth, because it's *really* hard to geotag photos taken out of a moving car in the middle of outback USA. Next I labelled all twelve and a half thousand UK 2010 photos, finishing in December. I registered a Geonames account, and a Google Cloud account so I could use the Google Maps API in Geosetter.

Work was work. Still doing mostly internetty type stuff like firewalls and proxies. As mentioned previously, it turns out introverts like me like working from home. It's just so much more flexible and it *feels* like I'm home, even though I'm working. It means I can pop something in the slow cooker at lunch time, or something in the oven a bit earlier than I would if I got home at nearly 6pm. Or if it's a quiet Friday afternoon I can flex off for a bit without having to wait for the sweetie to go home or catch a bus. I got a bunch of our gear finally converted over to SNMP v3. I shut off access to an entire old environment. I fought with a particular firewall for months, including spending three hours on the phone to support one weekend trying to fix it. Still no resolution in sight on that one, but Wardie, bestest guy ever, has basically taken over, because he's awesome. Did a bit of training here and there, mostly free stuff. Got a new service desk tool in December, and had a lot of fun making shiny dashboards for it, which a bunch of other sections copied for themselves!  Socially, we had a gin night in early March, just before the lockdown. I actually missed the last work drinks before shutdown because of the slight sore throat I had. In August the guys started going to the Pot Belly for drinks, which we did for a little while before actual work drinks started up again. And I got to run my Christmas barbeque at the lake for over forty people. It was a lovely cool day, which made nice change from so many years where it's been crazy hot or shrouded in bushfire smoke.

Healthwise I was generally pretty good. Bouts of insomnia came and went a few times. Completely frustrating and debilitating. From mid March I felt like I had a permanently sore throat and slight cough for like a month or two. It was likely all in my head though. Got a flu vaccination in April. David came home with a cold in late August. He went home but it was too late - Stu caught it about a week later, and I caught it about five days after that. I was sick for a weekend. Stu was sick for a month. At least. I decided to go on short walks around the neighbourhood every day at lunch to get a little bit of exercise and vitamin D. I passed a lot of magpies, and decided to bribe them to not swoop me in spring by feeding them little bits of roast meat. All through winter they would see me coming and fly over. So cool! But come spring time they lost interest - there was obviously plenty of their own food around which they were more interested in. I also never got swooped :) Went up Mt Rogers once with David. Got some new reading glasses in December (should NOT have gone to Specsavers).

On the friends front, really things only went quiet for about two months from mid March to May. Other than that it was actually pretty much business as usual. We saw our fair share of EffanC at ours or theirs, including drinks over Zoom. We caught up with Kit and Pete when they came up in January to avoid the fires, and in February when they came up again, as well as Pete's 40th at their place in March. Had a few games of Kismet with them as well. We went to Rob and Lynne's with a bunch of peeps in January and again in December, and had them over in May. Went to a bbq at Brett and Sharon's in January, and the middle of the year we saw quite a bit of the A/M/C group, including some dinners, parties and walks. Got to see Rob and Fiona a couple of times too which was nice, as they really went into hibernation during the lockdown. Unfortunately didn't see much of Scott. Also didn't see much of Chrissie. Saw her on her birthday in January and I think that was it. Doesn't help that they are all always either crazy busy or sick. We didn't end up having a hanami lunch with Nat and Andrew.  I invited them but never heard back.  I would have chased them up but Stu was too busy and stressed with a uni assignment.  Had a lovely time at Aquila's 60th in January. Had Nelson and Susan over in August for vegan lasagna and games. Had drinks with Damien in September, I think that was the only time I saw him all year. We were supposed to go to Ben and Sarah's wedding in Queensland in October. Yeah that didn't happen. But Ben was able to have a nice 40th at Gungahlin Lakes on the day. We also had them over for dinner in December. And Doc organised drinks at the George for a bunch of work peeps between Christmas and New Year which was nice.

On the family side, well my family has been here the whole time! David has been living with us for a little over a year. While it can be challenging sometimes (mainly menu planning and trying to remember to vacuum around a shiftworker) it's generally been pretty good. And he fixes things! While he was here he replaced the light fitting in our ceiling fan (I think that might have been before he moved here), fixed the leaky ensuite toilet, installed new taps in the bathroom, installed LEDs everywhere, including some smartlights in the loungeroom that are pretty cool, installed a new extentible clothes line, installed a new oven, fixed the display on Stu's CD player, fixed the frequency on our digital radios, fixed up the bedroom curtain string which had come off the rails, fixed our back fence which had been pushed out by vines and photinia and finally broken in strong winds, phoned up and ordered and picked up a new fix tank lid for me, installed a bracket for the clothes line so we can extend it half way instead of the whole way, helped Stu build his new shelves, rewired the LEDs in Stu's four foot tank so it'd work with a standard transformer, installed a couple of new smoke detectors, fixed my scanner (cable had come loose, and I would have eventually figured this out because I would have moved it to test it on another computer). And he mowed the lawns. Seriously, most awesomest brother ever!!! And super handy having a qualified electrician in the family! About the best we could do to thank him was cook lots of roasts. Including roast lamb on his birthday, and he had a few friends over to help celebrate. I stayed with Mum in Sydney a couple of times - when I went up for Ryan's 21st, and when I inspected my flat in June. We saw a bit of Stu's family as well. Went and visited a few times in August, October and Christmas.  And we saw Scott and Kerry and the family and Jeff and Ruth in November.

Our social club events had to be curtailed somewhat, and I missed out on doing Christmas in July which I've done for a few years in a row now, but at least I got to do Christmas for something like fifty people (a whole bunch had to stay outside due to capacity restrictions). We had a few weekends out there while Stu was on the committee, including in January where I did some cleaning out of the "tool shed", a night in June, our first since February, where we really appreciated the little wood fireplace, and in July where I stared priming the cabinetry. Also had some time in early October. We went out for the last event before lockdown - an epic Mexican feast in February. One of the raffle prizes that night was a six pack of Corona beer with an attached N95 mask. There was a working bee in July where I scraped concrete off a glass door. That night would have been the Christmas in July night, and the alternative was going to be a bonfire, but it rained, so we cooked marshmallows in the wood heater in the shed. The first event post lockdown was a halloween party where I got to be Lego 80s Classic Space guy again. And then my Christmas party. And we finished the year there with a few friends and a lot of bubbles.

Another fairly quiet year with the fish. I bought ten zebra danios in April and put a few in my three tanks. Half of them died, some fairly quickly. I lost the angel in my 620T tank in September, and Chrissie's catfish was looking super depressed. I stuck my hand in to see if it was still alive, and the water was COLD. The heater had died, taking my angel with it. Pretty upset about that. I took a random day off in September, thinking I'd do some fish stuff in the morning and other things in the afternoon. But I ended up doing fish stuff *all day*. And I managed to break the lid of the upstairs two foot while I was trying to clean it. Stu got some little sucking catfish and some guppies at the end of the year. So Stu's four foot has ten congo tetras, one loach, one siamensis and four tiny sucking catfish. My 620T has Chrissie's huge sucking catfish, a huge old cory and two female danios. My upstairs two foot has two male danios, one who has been sick since shortly after I got him, but refuses to die. Little trooper. It also has a sucking catfish, and six of the guppies Stu got at the end of the year. My downstairs two foot has four of the male guppies and two sucking catfish from Stu's purchase. Also downstairs are five little tanks, all with two or three guppies in them to cycle the tanks.  No change with Stumpy.  He's just as much a gumby as ever.

Not much going on with the Lego. I'm still sporadically sorting Vic's Lego but it's just so painful. If sets were complete it would be a joy, but none of them are, so it's just depressing. I think the only sets I built all year were the set of Shanghai Stu got me for Christmas, and Neil's International Space Station.

The year started slowly with jigsaws - most of the first quarter was taken up with a three thousand piece jigsaw of The Bombing of Algiers. I did two sections of the forty two thousand piece Disney behemoth - Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid. Very few at work thanks to the lockdown, and not too many at home because I'm just too damned busy all the time.

I continued working on labelling and sorting photos. As mentioned above I geotagged and labelled thousands of photos. I also did a lot of filing of photos, but there's still sooo much to be done in that space. In March I started scanning Dad's slides. I started out doing a box a week, and at that rate it was going to take me four or five years. But working from home during lockdown gave me an extra half hour in the mornings that I used to scan a box a day. I managed to get all his slides scanned by Christmas, although I still had a bit of work to rescan slides that had dust on them on the first pass. Didn't quite complete that by the end of the year. In December I had a bit of a play with a gallery generator. The only reason I'm labelling all my holiday photos is because I want to get the majority of them online. I did consider Flickr, but I just have this feeling they're not going to last. Too many buyouts and changes of conditions. Most likely I'll just use S3 and pay the few cents a month it'll likely cost.

I continued to rage at Apple and the crappy things it does. It still messes with the timestamps on my files. I can't download movies first go, or second or third or fourth in a lot of cases. And can't download timelapse videos *at all* to my PC, I have to save them to Google Drive first and then if I'm lucky the encoding/dimensions will be right for me to play them on my PC. Calendar and contacts refuse to sync to Google like they used to (I don't think it's worked since I got my new phone two years ago and I've tried *everything*). The contacts don't even sync to Apple Cloud. I'm about ready to give up on Apple.

Most of the stuff around the house was done by David. Because he's awesome. Our oven element died in March. I cleaned the oven while he investigated getting a new element, but in the end we got a whole new oven. While I was on a work break. With no sleep. Yeah really not the best mental state to be buying home appliances. In April we went out to buy half turn taps. Again, while on a work break, from a situation at work I probably should not have left. The anxiety of that day was terrible!! But the new taps are amazing, I love them! Unfortunately the dripping shower was still there. Guess it's not the taps that are leaking. We had a plumber come look at it, and he did a whole heap of tests, and decided the membrane was gone (duh) and most likely just leaking through the grout. I could have saved myself four hundred dollars if I'd just done the "cover the drain and splash water on the walls" trick which I did just after and proved the same thing. We got a resealer to come have a look and give us a quote. But he was confused about why there would be so much leaking through the grout, promised to send a quote for a complete retile/reseal, but never did. Even when I mailed them again and asked. In March we cleaned out the dumping ground room so that Stu could have his own office. He'd been wanting to do that for ages. The timing was great, as it meant he had a private office during lockdown. He got new shelves later in the year and a whole heap of toys, and he really loves his little space. I spent a weekend tidying up the dungeon and under the house and rearranging everything to keep it clear of the drip. We had to get the Chinese pistachio tree removed in August because the trunks were sagging apart and it was in danger of falling down (onto Kit's garage). I was super sad about that because it was such a beautiful tree, and the birds absolutely love it, and as it turns out it was a great shade for the eastern side of the house, so our house is a lot hotter in the mornings now. We also got the tree guys to be brutal on our photinia which was getting out of control. Again. We had a roof restoration done in October and the roof looks very shiny now. Next up: solar. The garden continued to stay out of control. Although we did get a few strawberry plants off Michelle and got some very nice strawberries off them in October (the ones the slugs didn't get at).

We still managed to eat out a little bit this year. We took Kit and Pete out for dinner in January to Bella Vista. Went to Kinn Thai in January, February and March (which was our last eating out before lockdown). It's always fast service and the food really good. Had some very nice pizzas at Grease Monkey in January. Went to Grill'd with Neil in January to avoid the food court during school holidays. Tried Malatang Hotpot in January too. The one I had was fairly bland, and the one Neil had was super epic spicy, even for him. Need to try something in the middle, but then there was lockdown, and they're still not allowing you to handle the tongs to choose your own food. Tried Wild Panda in Civic when I got back from Sydney, but I don't remember it being anything special. Had lunch with the sweetie at Gus's in May - first eating out post lockdown. Had brunch at Rocksalt in June. Had some nice pork belly with crackling at the Lake George hotel a week before my birthday. It was going to be my birthday meal, but we ended up going to Chong Co on my birthday. And KFC for lunch of course. Went to Happy's a couple of times with the sweetie in September and October. Met up with a bunch of N-Gang people for dinner at Indian Pantry in October for a feast. Tried out Herbert's in November, and went there a couple of times in November and a couple in December with Tony and/or the Chrises. Had drinks a few times with the sweetie at the Beirut Bunker Bar. Had Disappointing Sushi, aka Hero Sushi in Civic in December. It lived up to expectations. It's literally a running joke with us now. You can be guaranteed that the hot food will be cold and everything has avocado in it.

As always, I do quite a bit of interesting cooking. I don't quite know how I manage that, since I'm not really a very good cook. Actually I'm basically a lazy cook. I like cooking things that don't require a lot of fiddly preparation or a lot of cleaning up. I cooked two pavlovas in January. I think this was the first time I'd ever made a full pavlova. I thought I'd have another go at Christmas and failed miserably. Twice. We had cheese and bacon sausages we got from Coles a few times. They're great to have in the fridge because they last ages, so we can use them when we've run out of other food. Made curried sausages in March to try and use up some of the many tins of curry powder we have in the house. We tried out Dominos "deep pan" pizzas a couple of times. They were pretty disappointing. Nothing like the crispy doughy deep fried goodness of pizzas in the eighties. Tried a slow cooked marinated beef in March to try and use up some of the mustard powder we have in the house. It turned out pretty well. Made nachos in late March, probably the first time I've ever made nachos myself. Several of our lunches during lockdown consisted of various types of puff pastry scrolls - cheese and vegemite and pizza scrolls being favourites. Did a coq au vin in April. Cooked a couple of "Yum! Delicious!" cakes and a cashew slice with Mum's peanut slice recipe. I also did Anzac Biscuits on Anzac Day which has become somewhat of a tradition in recent years. I did a few tomato based stews as we went into winter, and we think all the extra tomato set off David's gout, so we had to cut those right back. There was Sizzler cheesy toast a couple of times, and taco Tuesday multiple times - soooo bad but soooo good!! Did an epic lasagna in May. Tried a pulled pork in May. It was pretty amazing, but such a waste of crackling ;) David obliged me with a Country Cheese and cheese sauce craving and had quite a bit of that over winter. Whenever a packet is open it evaporates very quickly. Tried a couple of non-tomato based bakes from my gratins and bakes book - a broccoli and cheese penne with garlic and lemon crumbs, and a potato, bacon and blue cheese bake, both were very nice but also quite similar to my regular veggie bakes. Made an Irish stew in July - Stu was going to make it but life got in the way so I did it.  It was nice enough. Tried slow cooking beef brisket in July and fell in love with it, and did it several times. As well as some slow cooked pulled beef and NQN's beef cheeks as well. Slow cookers are amazing for hearty winter cooking! David reminded me of our youth and Dinner Winner, and we had Coles' One Pan Dinner a couple of times, and even had authentic Dinner Winner once. There may have been a rocky road in there at some point, and a fairly nice gingerbread cheese cake I made at Christmas. There were several weekends where I spent several hours cooking up meals for a week or more, to save cooking during the week (which is really no fun at all when you don't heat up the kitchen to save money on heating costs).

I saw exactly one movie/theatre/show/exhibition this year -
* Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

As usual for recent years I/we worked my/our way through a lot of movie series. This may have been aided *a lot* by Disney+ !
* finished up watching through all the James Bond movies
* watched Star Wars episodes VII and VIII before seeing IX at the movies
* finished up the Pixar series with Coco and Toy Story 4
* watched a *lot* of original/remakes of Disney movies - Aladdin, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Freaky Friday, The Lion King, The Parent Trap (just 1 and 2 they don't have 3 yet), 101 Dalmatians and Mulan
* saw a few "Australian classic" movies - My Brilliant Career, which I really didn't like, and Ned Kelly, which I thought was better
* in March was the 30th anniversary of seeing Labyrinth for the first time, so we watched it on David's Bluray
* we had to watch some pandemic disaster movies, so watched World War Z first up because Contagion had been pulled from Netflix, but David had Contagion on DVD so we all watched that later too
* Frozen II
* Airport series
* Naked Gun series
* Star Wars - I think we saw all nine this year
* almost all the Ghibli movies, except Grave of the Fireflies which wasn't on Netflix. Some of them are amazing. Some of them are crap.
* a few of the Herbie movies (still a couple to go, it's a bit of a struggle since they're very silly)
* Die Hard 1 and 2 and Love Actually at Christmas. David dissed Love Actually on Facebook, but he had the choice to leave but didn't and he seemed to be enjoying himself. Just sayin ;)

And again, somehow we managed to watch our way through a lot of TV. I always feel like I don't have time to watch tv/movies, and yet somehow we see a lot. Mostly from Thursday to Sunday, as Monday to Wednesday is "work" nights.
* first episode of Who is America
* Star Trek: Picard
* The Mandalorian (season 1)
* Big Bang Theory - finished mid year, took a little over year to watch all 12 seasons
* Brooklyn 99 until it ran out of episodes (up to season 6?)
* Fuller House (last seasons)
* Lego Masters (second Australian season)
* Unorthodox
* Filthy Rich
* The Dismissal
* The Miraculous Mellops
* The Simpsons (most of the way through season 5)
* High Score (documentary)
* Against the Wind
* Discovery (season 3)
* The IT Crowd (all of it)
* The Mandalorian (season 2)
* The Queen's Gambit

Not a lot of reading this year. I don't catch the bus much and I mostly feel too tired to read when I go to bed.
* Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J.K. Rowling
* Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all five books in the trilogy), by Douglas Adams
* Penguin Bloom, by Cam Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive (I also started Heartache and Birdsong)

Other stuff!
* Started "This day in history" posts
* Got Disney+ and watched a *lot* of Disney
* Got some cute "living stones" - succulent plants that grow extremelly slowly
* Played with Picasa for Ryan's 21st "morph" series
* Got our NBN fixed in January - because last time they did work they broke one of our connectors so we were only getting half the speed we should. David organised that because he's awesome.
* Used Picasa to tag people in a lot of work photos, still a long way to go on that
* Collected the next batch of Stikeez - got all but one of the specials
* Our rose bush and rhododendron out the front put out just a couple of flowers right at the end of summer when it finally rained
* Had cheese and nibbles with bubbly, and Chong Co delivered for our anniversary
* Went bed shopping in June but didn't find anything we really liked
* Went to Ikea and bought storage cubes for David and drawers for stu
* My domain - kazza.id.au turned 18
* Had a big outage of my web hosting in late June. Went looking for a new host and found VentraIP, but they didn't support Perl DBD::mysql so had to cancel it all again. But it did force me to do an upgrade of a dll in Eudora which allows secure downloads without ssl errors, so that's a win
* Had issues with the vacuum cleaner - it kept getting jammed - with my hair :(
* Got so much rain in August all creeks and rivers around Canberra flooded a bit
* The boys bought me a Dyson cordless for my birthday
* Couldn't get on the Qantas 747 joy ride flight out of Canberra, because Qantas' website sux donkey balls. So I watched it fly over central Canberra from Mt Ainslie instead (arguably better for photos anyway!)
* Listened to some podcasts with the sweetie - The Eleventh, Winds of Change, Thirteen Minutes to the Moon
* Got super sad at all the 747s around the world being retired
* A neighbourhood yappy dog pissed me off by barking non stop for literally hours at a time
* The winter was so warm our potatoes survived the whole winter without freezing
* Enjoyed Floriade in the suburbs!
* Went for a drive with the sweetie around Denman Prospect and out to Cotter
* Had a Bunnings sausage in October for first time since lockdown
* Voted in the ACT elections early so I didn't get a Democracy Sausage (most places I don't think were doing them anyway)
* Had a free run to the tip because what we took was mostly all metal
* Had to fight with windoze to maintain access to our NAS - its ancient version of SMB is making windoze super sad
* Tidied up all the packing materials in garage, with the idea to use it all to sell stuff
* Vodien moved my blog to a new host, but didn't tell me. Well, apparently they did tell me - to an email address that doesn't actually work anymore.
* Failed at jeans shopping
* Tried out Return-It's bulk facility which is only marginally better than their drop off system
* Saw the moon and Saturn and Jupiter near each other, but not at their closest point

Our year was finished off at the club. We headed out there on New Years Eve eve and stayed two nights, and had a fairly relaxed New Years.

2020 sure was one crazy year. Here's hoping 2021 settles down quickly into the "new normal".

Happy new year!! 

Not backdating for a rare change...!

Monday.  At lunch time a shower sealer dude came to look at the shower.  Basically he was stumped.  Never a good start.  Sigh.  David mowed the lawn in the afternoon - bestest brother ever!!  Spent some time in the evening dumping the sql from my old gallery apps into csv.  I dumped the two tables - one with the file names and one with the descriptions, then did vlookups in excel to merge them together.  Really I just wanted a dump of what I had since I can't get the gallery app to work (it's just too old and the mysql calls don't work in php7 - I'd basically have to convert mysql_ to mysqli_ *everywhere* and there'd still be no guarantee that it'd work).  Then I dropped the two databases and cleared out all the content.  

Tuesday.  December.  Seriously wtf?  I remember things in July being super recent, how can it possibly be December already?  Such a bizarre year.  Spent the evening doing more tidying up of my hosting.

Christmas tree 2020

Wednesday.  Went jeans shopping at lunch.  Arrghh.  I was hoping that the trend towards bigger phones would eventually filter back into a trend for bigger pockets in jeans.  Well half the jeans I looked at didn't have any pockets at all!!  And the ones that did were that horrible fake wear style that I thought died a fashion disaster years ago.  Hate. Hate. Hate.  I'm going to have to replace them soon though as they're falling apart.  I looked up my blog to see when I bought them - September 2016!  Four pairs, which meant each pair lasted about a year's worth of wear.  Take that Jeans West with your stoopid crappy jeans that only lasted the equivalent of like six months - last half as long and pay four times the price?  I don't think so!  Apple continued to be a piece of crap, and I got the "device attached to the system is not functioning" error - while copying photos!  Piece of crap.  Worked second go through, and even got both movies off it first go.  Didn't get anything else much done though after backing up the phone and backing up my computer and paying bills.  On a lighter note, our recycling got picked up.

Thursday.  Cirrus has unveiled its west tower.

Cirrus Belconnen

In other news, it was revealed that the garbos wanted a 4% pay rise.  Per year.  For three years.  !!  Taking them up to something like $110k/year.  Which is a *lot*.  Certainly a lot more than I make.  Craziness.  Had a good long play with making dashboards in our new service desk system.  Took my notes that I'd written last week up to load a new beer into the till.  Seemed to work :)  Mandalorian in the evening.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Hurrah.  So a bit of a zombie day.  Had a bit of a play with reporting in our new service desk system.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Crazy busy productive day just getting things done, including food shopping.  Stu cooked mackerel in miso paste for dinner.  Mandalorian and then the live action Mulan in the evening.  I thought it wasn't too bad, certainly better than Aladdin (which was pretty lame) and even The Lion King (which was almost identical to the original but flat and lifeless).  

Lego nativity

Wooden nativity

Christmas tree

Sunday.  Not quite as productive a day but not too bad.  

These are nice - mini toasts (bought at Chris's for $2) with leftover cream cheese from the weekend, and blackberries we bought on Saturday.  The tomato ones were ok but a bit big to fit in my mouth and too hard to bite in half.

Blackberry and cheese toasties

Went for a walk at lunch and saw inside a mobile phone tower comms room that someone had left the door open on.

Mobile phone tower comms room

Had a huge roast beef for dinner (leftovers ftw!) and someone brought up planning Christmas, which is always .. tricky.. hrmm.

Monday.  ok day I guess.  Went for a walk and saw one of my birds (haven't seen them really at all in weeks and weeks).  Spent half an hour hacking weeds and cherry tree suckers and didn't even make a dent.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Watched the first episode of a documentary series on The Mandalorian which was interesting.  But by the time that was all done it was 8:14pm, and too late to really feel like starting anything new.  So I blogged.  Hurrah.

Christmas tree

Backdating.  Hi!

Monday.  Woke up with the storm around 1am and got up to backup my more recent files to OneDrive.  Added to a list of Robocopy commands to copy the most recent (14 days worth) of files from my most commonly used directories.  Still managed to wake up early for the daythough.  Ok day.  I'm no longer NEIL which is awesome ;)  Had roast pork for dinner and watched Mandalorian.

Tuesday.  Went with the sweetie to try out Ramen O.  It's pretty good but a bit expensive ($18 for a basic ramen) to do as a lunch all that often.  I'd love it if they did a smaller version for a cheaper price.  

Ramen O Belconnen

Then saw this flower in a whole flowerbed of them on the way to the Lighty for Anthony's farewell.

Random yellow flower

In other news, Kit and Pete finally got keys to their new house!  In the evening had leftover brisket for dinner, fixed up the morning's slide scanning, and blogged last week.

Wednesday.  Had a few hours of training on Ansible and Ansible Tower.  Some pretty cool stuff you can do with it.

Figlet Kazza

Watched Apollo 13 in the evening.  The blog title quote is the correct quote from the mission, not the one they used in the movie (which I can see why they did it, the real quote implies the problem is over and they're all cool now).

Thursday.  Busy day catching up on tickets from Wednesday.  In addition, the problem with Neil being off is that noone else knows how to do the back operations on the till for work drinks.  So I went up with Neil while he did stuff and took a bunch of notes for future reference.  Watched the start of 14 Minutes to Earth in the evening.  Also David figured out that we can in fact still access our NAS with its Netbios name (which died ages ago on my computer, and the DNS doesn't even resolve).  No idea how/why that's started working when it didn't used to work, while accessing via IP stopped working when it used to.  hrmmm.

Friday.  Took a Random Day Off with the sweetie.  I spent it doing all the things I would normally do on the weekend.  I also opened a random package I got in the mail this week - I could tell it was a jigsaw by its sound, but I had no clue who sent it.  I made a guess who sent it which turned out to be true!  So that was pretty cool.  However the quality was a bit of a disaster, but I'll leave that for another post.  Leftover lamb for dinner and watched As the Wind Rises in the evening, which I partly remembered from the last time we saw it.  I thought it was bittersweet, which was much how I described it the first time.  Most of his personal life was made up for the movie, but he did exist, and thought the war with the US was futile.

Saturday.  Out the door pretty early.  Had to do a big food shop and take it all out to the club for the club Christmas Party!  (I'd actually forgotten I'd volunteered to do this, having been quite disappointed that I didn't get to do Christmas in July this year because of Covid.  I got the reminder in the newsletter haha!)  Stopped at The Scottish Restaurant for our energy for the morning, then hit the shops.  Bought all the things from Coles, then to the markets to get the roast porks and some prawns.  Made it to the club by lunch time, then got down to cooking All The Things.  

Club Christmas

There were two four kilo pork shoulders that I did in the oven (and home made apple sauce done on the stove), four one kilo turkey roasts that I delegated to have done in the bbq oven, two epic potato bakes, two kilos of peas that I added mint to at the end, two bags of carrots that I had to chop myself because Coles and Aldi don't sell frozen carrots anymore (wtf??) and added honey to, and a bunch of bread rolls. 

I also did some finger food.  I bought a couple of packets of mini toasts, which were topped with cream cheese, and either salmon and dill or tomato or cucumber.  With cucumber/cheese/tomato only option for the gluten-free person :) (we made more than are shown in this photo ;) )

Club Christmas

And there were prawns with seafood sauce.  Whole prawns were like $30/kilo at the markets, but someone would have to shell/devein them.  For $40/kilo you could buy them shelled and deveined.  Given that whole prawns are literally half head, you're basically paying $60/kilo for the flesh, so it was a no-brainer to buy them cheaper and already processed.  And everyone loved them!

Club Christmas

Eventually all the food was cooked, and I had an army of helpers to serve.

Club Christmas

Club Christmas

Club Christmas

Apparently dinner was well appreciated, and I even got time to cool off in the pool after dinner (and avoid the secret santa cause I hate that crap haha).  Awesome evening!  Note to self:  next time find someone to do music!

Sunday.  Packed up all the leftovers (omfg there were actually some leftovers!  that never happens!) and came home.  Pretty quiet day.  Didn't do much other than put up the Christmas tree and some of the Christmas decorations.

LED lights

Backdating.  Cause I'm a slacker.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Went to have some of the snow peas that I bought probably only two weeks ago and they were *covered* in slime.  So fricken unusual because normally they last weeks and weeks in the fridge.  Pissed as.  Then David came home and spent all afternoon swearing at the fish tank lights.  But he got them working in the end.  Bestest brother ever.  (not sure if I ever mentioned the story - a few weeks back the transformer for Stu's stoopidly expensive LED fish tank lights went POP and that was the end of that.  It was a completely non standard transformer, there was no doco anywhere online for the lights, and they were strangely wired.  David decided to get resistors and rewire the thing so it'd work with a standard transformer, and also be less likely to blow out the lights.  Just waiting for the other transformer to go next so he'll have to do it all over again.. hrmmm....).  Had sausages and salad/veggies for dinner.  Then got more grunty that Stu's sauerkraut had gone off.  And some ham we bought ages ago is also looking very strange.  I *hate* wasting food and we've wasted so much this week >:(  Feeling like I should ban perishable food that I won't eat (like ham and sauerkraut) and veggies that only I like (like snow peas).  Don't get me started on trying to find veggies that everyone likes and doesn't cause health issues in people.  Took til 8pm to get UK photo labelling done.  811 left.  And blogging.  An hour and a half later.  hrmmm.

But look!  Poppy in the staircase!

Life finds a way

Tuesday.  Ok sleep mostly.  Finished scanning Dad's WA slides.  Was good to see his photos, after only having seen Mum's very red-shifted prints for so many years.  I think I'll need to scan her negatives of those holiday trips - hopefully they fared better than the prints!  Worked from home so just watched some silly horse race on tv in the background.  David made home in time for the race but steadfastly ignored it ;)  Later in the afternoon had no tickets and not much else happening so flexed off for an hour or so and got some UK photo labelling done.  Only 581 photos left!  Leftovers from the club halloween night for dinner.  Hacked some periwinkle.  Watched random stuff on the internet in the evening.

Some silly horse race

Wednesday.  Okish sleep.  Up to 5000 of Dad's slides scanned.  I'm into Central Australia now.  I remember Mum saying a while back that Dad had issues with his camera on the WA trip, and there was a $25 camera fixing bill listed in the holiday expenses, but all the photos from that trip looked fine.  The Central Australia trip on the other hand was a disaster.  So many of the photos are over exposed, and there's *heaps* missing - obviously too bad to even keep.  I'm thinking *this* was the trip he had camera issues with.  Must have been absolutely heartbreaking for him.  I'll have to get Mum's negatives of this trip too.  Pity you can't climb Ayers Rock aka Uluru anymore.  I'm calling it though - I reckon within twenty years the local Aboriginal people will start doing guided tours to the top.  Charged of course.  I don't know how true it is, but David and Yvonne went some years ago and got the impression that the Aboriginal people didn't really care too much that people would want to climb to the top - they were much more worried about the sacred sites around the base of the rock.  I'm having to be the Naughty Email Intervention Layer (aka NEIL) at work, probably for another few weeks at least.  Which is a bit of a poo.  Cause he doesn't document anything!  Actually *going* to work sux epically - takes so much extra time out of my day.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Then it's back to "work" - finishing scanning the morning's photos (because there's not enough time in the mornings on "work" days), backing up hard drive, labelling photos etc.  Only 475 to go!!!

I don't have any notes for Thursday.  There was work drinks.  And I went with David to the mall to do some shopping.  Saw this very pretty car in the car park.

Pretty car

Friday.  I swear Dad must have had sex on the brain.  Following his Coitus Tower slides from the USA, this was the label for a thorny devil in Central Australia.

Horny devil

The evening was packing for our long weekend away...

Backdating, but only by two days ;)

Sunday.  Slow cooked some lamb shanks.  We went and visited Annie and the family in the middle, so instead of putting them in later, I put them on earlier, but at quite a low temperature.  They actually turned out really well.  But I didn't manage to get any leftovers.  Doh.  

Lamb shanks

In the evening watched the last episode of The IT Crowd (the one-off final special).

Monday.  Woke up at like 5am.  No notes for the day (it's been a bit of a nothing week).  Leftovers for dinner and watched episode 10 of Against the Wind.

Tuesday.  Better sleep.  Was scanning Dad's slides of San Francisco and came across these.  I might have LOLed.  A lot.

Coitus Tower

Noted that I had an ok day, but that I'd gone on strike house-wise.  Can't remember why.  But I was cranky at everything and so Stu cooked dinner - duck and plum gyozas with bok choy and rice.  Very nice.

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Went into town for a doctor's appointment.  Had ten minutes or so before it was due so thought I'd grab a quick lunch at KFC.  Ha.  Firstly it was *slow as*, and when I finally did get to order, they said they had no fillets.  And I'm like WTF?  And he was like, do you want a zinger.  NO, I want a fillet burger.  And this was after David the other night had tried to get a fillet burger at Gold Creek KFC and they had no fillets.  You could maybe understand that because it was very late at night, but I was in Garema Place at lunch time.  No fricken excuse KFC!  So I walked out in disgust.  And met up with the sweetie who let me have some of his KFC - Korean fried chicken - at Cocorea.

Cocorea KFC

Fighting with migrating CVS to a new server in the afternoon but I couldn't figure it out because I'm dumb.  Stu was late to pick me up because of a burst water main on Barry Drive.  So we got pizza.  Blerf.  Watched episode 11 of Against the Wind.

Thursday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  Ok day.  I think.  Work drinks were good.  

Friday.  Took a random day off.  Woke up early but got a bit more sleep, but a bit of a slow start. 

Michelle's strawberries are doing great!
Ripening strawberries

Washed the sheets.  Then we ran errands.  Took about a dozen wine boxes full of books to Lifeline.  Went to the tip to drop off the old oven, all its trays, and the old extenda-line, which turned out to be free because it was all primarily metal!  Win!  Then to the Green Shed.  I picked up a big pile of jigsaws, as well as a chest of drawers I want to use as a pantry in the van.  $15 for all the jigsaws and $10 for the drawers.  Not bad :)  Came home briefly then headed out again for Stuey R's farewell.  Didn't get much done in the afternoon - too sleepie.

So this week we had our roof restored.  Wednesday they cleaned.  Thursday they primed.  Friday morning they did the first coat.  Friday afternoon they did the second coat.  Just before the rain that was due Friday night!

Before and after roof

Friday evening met up with EffanC for drinks at the Pot Belly.  Got home minutes before the rain started.

Passionfruit flower

Saturday.  Slept fairly well.  Did heaps of things on the todo list, but nowhere near enough. 

First batch of strawberries!  Although slugs had gotten to one of them otherwise would have had four.  #grunt
Strawberry haul

Went over to EffanC's for dinner, with Robert and Ian.

Lola

Lola

This is the bottletop of a Great Northern beer

Great Northern bottletop

Can you see the bird?

Bird in the Great Northern bottletop

All the veggies

All the roses

Sunday.  Woke up after 3am some time and never got back to sleep.  So a very slow start.  Had brunch at The Scottish Restaurant then did our food shopping.  Too tired to do anything much.  In fact we both had a nap in the afternoon.  Well I didn't have much of a sleep - my body simply refuses to sleep, even when it's super tired.  A bit after 3pm I got up and spent the rest of the afternoon cooking.

I cooked all this (except one of the bags of potatoes).  Two trays of roast veggies.  Then roast beef with another two trays of veggies.  A kilo of mince with bacon, onion and garlic, and honey mustard chicken.

Cooking all the food

After dinner I ended up with five meals of roast beef and veggies, four of honey mustard chicken, mince in four containers to be cooked with whatever, and two extra containers of roast veggies.  Basically enough food for the entire week.  And probably even longer.  

Cooking all the food

Beef roast

Brussels sprouts

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books

Perhaps some time last year or maybe even the year before I started reading through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (in five parts).  The first book is pretty good, and parts of the second one are ok.  But ultimately it's a bit of a mess of a series.  It's very disjointed after the characters go their separate ways.  Some of them you never find out what happens to.  Poor Marvin lives for millions of years until he's killed off.  Book four tells the story of the girl who realised the meaning of life, the universe and everything at the beginning of the first book, only you barely get any story at all.  She has an affair with Arthur and forgets to hit the ground when falling.  And after the fourth book you never hear about her again.  It's all over the place in both time and space, with no explanation of how things came to be that way.  At the very end I basically felt exactly the same as the alien - welp, and put on a little light music.

I mean I really like Douglas Adams quirky writing style, but his story telling could have done with a bit of polishing.

I did snapshot a couple of funnies though.  This was a rant by Agrajag, a being that kept being reincarnated to be killed over and over again, either directly or indirectly by Arthur.  One time he was reincarnated as a bowl of petunias ;)

HHGTTG - petunias

And I know they had floppy disks back in 1984, but he was *totally* predicting usb memory sticks ;)

Memory stick prediction, 1984

OMFG!  Not backdating!! ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  In the evening I got up to labelling the photo of sad bean!  This was a baked bean Stu had at breakfast one morning on our UK 2010 holiday.  It had a crease and a couple of specks of pepper at just the right spots to make the bean look like it had a sad face.  Stu couldn't bear to eat sad bean, and I don't like baked beans, so that poor little bean didn't get eaten, which was even sadder!  I might have had a little sad ten years later just labelling the photo I took of it :(:(

Sad bean is sad!

Up to episode 7 of Against the Wind.

Tuesday.  Hurty woke me up and kept me awake for an hour and a half.  But otherwise slept ok. 

<work rant snipped>

But look!  Itty bitty Cape Weed flower!

Itty bitty Cape Weed flower

Leftovers for dinner, UK labelling and episode 8 of Against the Wind.

Wednesday.  All the stoopid.  I don't even remember what now.  I ranted to Stu over a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar and pushed it from my memory.  

Beirut Bunker Bar Canberra

Stopped in at the markets on the way home to go to the chemist, and the sweetie even cooked dinner! :)

I thought this looked pretty cool - looks a bit like the Matterhorn!
Markets Matterhorn?

Thursday.  Filled with rage at someone watching Bathurst near me at work without a headset - not even at their desk, but in our area because their own desk is outside the exec offices and that would look bad.  And three or four conversations going on around me meant for NOISE and I seriously nearly lost it.  Fortunately I have the bestest boss ever and he went and muted Bathurst for me so I didn't go postal.  Watched the second episode of the French sun documentary.

Neil and I saw these at lunch on Thursday.  Not a huge amount of information on the Beam website, you need to download the app to find out useful stuff, you know, like where you can ride them.  45c/minute introductory rate to ride one.  Wonder how well they'll last.  I wouldn't mind taking one for a trip around the lake :)
Beam scooters

Friday.  Deleting all the things!  Did a massive cleanup of routes in the morning, and cleared out a big decommissioned app in the afternoon.  In between I had lunch at Herbert's with Tony and the Chrises.  Big lunch, so dinner was a small serving of popcorn (needed some fibre to counteract all the meat I had at lunch).  Watched Arrietty in the evening, which we last (first) saw at the movies in 2012.  The movie is based on the "The Borrowers" books which really annoys me as a title because they're not borrowing, they're *stealing*.  Just sayin!

Saturday.  Slept well.  A day of All The Things.  We did do a quick Bunnings run and food shop.  I'd already voted during the week so didn't get a democracy sausage (I think a lot of places aren't doing them anyway), but Bunnings has started up their sausage sizzles again, but they load the sauces for you.  So not quite as pretty as a photo as my actual democracy sausage featured on Atlas (Gastro) Obscura :)

Bunnings sausage

Stu cooked dinner which was lovely of him - grilled eggplant with a sauce of miso, mirin, and sake.  Quite yummy.

Sweetie's eggplant

In the evening we watched the first episode of season 3 of Discovery.  I enjoyed the first season, but the second season just got way too convoluted and hard to follow.  The first episode of this season was fine, hopefully this season won't be as complicated as the last.  Up to episode 9 of Against the Wind.  

Sunday.  Today.  For once I'm not backdating.. craziness I know!  Woke up at 3:45 to go to the loo but didn't get back to sleep for hours.  At 4:51 I got up to have some cheese because I was hungry.  Apparently just a little bit of eggplant and rice isn't enough to keep me full all night.  I did eventually get a bit more sleep, including have a dream that I was staying at Dooce's house, and it was *massive* and Stu for some reason was sleeping in some other building on the *campus*, and I was talking to Leta about what life was like being the daughter of such a famous blogger.  So a pretty slow start.  Did a few things on the todo list.  I was going to do some more Lego part picking of Vic's sets, but by the time I'd gotten the files organised and found the sets and gone through them for what they had already it was after lunch.  Then we went and visited Annie/Stu/Immy, and then came home and did cooking and photo processing and blogging and suddenly it's nearly dinner time.  Hrmmmmm.

Backdating, story of my life ;)

So where were we?  I'd been sick.  Starting Friday afternoon, most of Saturday in bed or sitting in the car.  On Sunday I felt a little better although super tired on account of very little sleep.  I decided it would depend how much sleep I got whether I would feel up to going to work on Monday.

Monday.  I actually slept really well - and for nine hours!  I was feeling a lot better, so thought I'd go to work, and go have a lie down if things got too much.  But I was actually ok all day so that was nice.

Front door view

Had all my UK photo labelling done before dinner which was good.  Had a bit more of a think about hosting and gallery apps.  Had a serious meltdown because I was feeling underappreciated for all the cooking and cleaning I do.

And the kitchen light fitting caught this epic centipede.

Centipede

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep *sigh*.  Did a bit of UK photo labelling but stopped at Stonehenge - because a couple of hundred photos will basically just be a copy/paste so will be very quick to do.  Instead I was looking at cameras (mmm Sony A7C) and playing with Geosetter (see Geosetting for Fun and Pleasure).  

Wednesday.  Slept well.  Seems I can only sleep well every other day.  Got myself a gmaps api key (see previous geosetting link).

Thursday.  Slept well.  Two nights in a row!  Went into work for the day - six months to the day that I started working from home.  Went up to Pot Belly for drinks after work.  Watched the second episode of the Netflix show "High Score" (watched the first one the other night, not sure when).

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am til well after 4am *sigh*.  I'd planned to take a random day off, which was going to be a bit sucky to be so tired through.  Had a bit of a slow start then got stuck into my day.  I thought I'd do some fish tank stuff in the morning, then maybe some tax stuff in the afternoon.  Well the fish stuff took All. Day.  I started with the upstairs two foot (and managed to smash the lid in the sink when I was cleaning it :(:(:( ), moved onto Chrissie's tank after a break, then the angel tank (with no angels in it), and finally the downstairs two foot.  With an hour at work in the afternoon for a meeting.  I had plans for the other tanks too, I just ran out of time. 

Whoopsie

I also took photos of the new bracket David installed out the back for the clothes line.  This way you can extend the line only half way out - where it's all under cover - so if it's going to be rainy it'll stay out of the elements.  Have I ever mentioned I have the bestest brother ever?  And this was after he mowed the front lawn as well.  He's just too awesome :)

Under cover line

Under cover line

Caught a bus into town (second bus in six months).  Met up with the sweetie and Damien who were having a drink, then we went to Happy's for dinner.

Stu at Happy's

Came home and watched third episode of High Score.

Saturday.  Slept well!  Hurrah!  I didn't think I would on account of all the meat I had for dinner at Happy's.  Stu was still sick though.  He had a full week at home off sick, then all this week he was still coughing and spluttering, but his work would still rather he went to the office than work from home and keep his germs to himself.  Silly people.  

Just a man and his lizard

Did quite a lot of stuff on the todo list - which worked out to mostly fixing up slide scanning (the dust and scratch filter is sometimes a bit too enthusiastic and blats out real details, so have to redo those with no filter), photo processing, and blogging.  We felt like wedgies for dinner, so that's what we had!  With lots of sour cream and sweet chili sauce.  Watched the fourth episode of High Score, then Spirited Away, which I first (and last saw) in 2005 in Brisbane.  I had no memories at all of it.  Hurrah for dementia.  Hrmm.

Home made wedgies

Sunday.  Hurty kept me awake for hours in the middle of the night so that sucked.  Bit of a nothing day in the end.  Did a bit of blogging.  

Petal snow

David brought home a packet of Dinner Winner, so I had to make that for our dinner :)  Watched a documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the evening.

Dinner Winner

COVID-19 Update

Canberra has escaped relatively unscathed from COVID-19 (so far).  We had a spate of cases right in the beginning, but almost all of them were from returning overseas travellers and their close contacts.  There was a single case in June from a diplomat returning from overseas.  And in July there was a few linked to a family returning from Melbourne during their spike in cases.

Life for us hasn't changed too much.  As I said at the beginning, for us it just meant seeing less of our friends and not eating out as much.  As those restrictions were lifted some months ago, we have been able to catch up with friends more often, and we've been out for meals more often.

We're mostly doing our shopping fortnightly so we don't need to go to the shops as often.  We've done some shopping at the markets and I get most of our milk and orange juice (and beer!) from Chris's.  And our last two big Coles shops have been delivered, so we haven't set foot in Coles in over two months.

I think I'm about the same weight as pre covid.  I would normally eat lunches at the food court every day so that hasn't been happening, but I would also get quite a bit more walking in.  I'm still going for a short walk at lunch every day and seeing three or four groups of magpies.  Lunches are either leftovers or noodles or toast or whatever.  Not terribly healthy.

Our work drinks are still closed, although that may change soon.  During the six months of the lock down we drank through eight cases of Corona beer.  In the last couple of months the guys that have been in the office have gone up to the Pot Belly for Thursday drinks.  While it's good and all, it's *very* expensive compared to drinking at home, or even at work.

We've been encouraged to come into work to work more often.  Which is a shame because I could happily work from home and *never* go into the office.  But they won't let us do that.  So on Thursday I went into work - for only the third time since March - and exactly six months to the day that I started working from home.  I'll probably go in once a week to start with, unless we get an outbreak here.

Travelwise, the trip to Europe with Mum got postponed two years.  I found it somewhat ironic that the whole reason the Passion Play in Oberammergau came to be was because of a plague.  And this year they had to cancel (postpone).  Because of a plague.

Our cruise next year has finally been called off.  But again this one has been postponed a year.  Let's just hope there's a vaccine developed in the next year otherwise even then things will be in doubt.

We missed out on going to Tasmania for Stu's 50th, but did have a nice long weekend in Tumut which was really nice.

How's everyone else's lockdowns going?

Hey!  Not backdating for a change! ;)

But I'm also not doing a full week - just last week before the weekend.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 5:57 - two minutes earlier than yesterday :)  Tried contacting the plumber again, and Sefton House in Tumut.  By Tuesday neither the caravan park or Sefton House had replied (story in previous entry).  But at least the plumber got back to me - had no idea what happened to my previous email.  Took ages in the evening to do UK photo labelling.

My little friend

Wednesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and didn't get back to sleep til well after 5am :(  Plumber came and spent ages testing stuff, and thinks it's most likely the waterproofing behind the tiles.  Which is exactly what Pete said.  I don't understand how *so much* water can leak through grout.  I mean I know it's not completely waterproof, but I thought it wouldn't leak like a sieve.  David hung around for much of the morning while I was at work.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever? :)  In the afternoon had a real estate agent over to give a bit of a valuation on the place, purely for interests sake.  Only took three goes to get all the movies off my phone in the evening.

Thursday.  Had better sleep.  Too much stoopid during the day.  Watched Whisper of the Heart in the evening. It was so real you could basically go to (almost) any of the locations and see them in real life.  Apparently one kid in a movie theatre was heard to say they could see their house!

Friday.  Tried to reboot my computer because it had run out of ram, and I wanted to do some more Tumut research.  But it sat patching for *hours* so lost the entire evening, which I really really needed.  #grunt

Short blog entry tonight, will do Tumut separately.  When I process the 940 Canon photos and 327 iPhone photos .. hrmmm!!