Sunday.  8th.  Filling in the evening after I blogged :)  Cooked All The Veggies for dinner.  Had all the roasted veggies, with mince and cheese and sour cream on the potato wedges.  Yumminess.

Simpsons, X Files, Air Crash Investigations.

Monday.  Ok day.  Got practise looking at traffic spikes and figuring out what they were.  Labelled 182 photos - have finished Egypt and onto London, day 28.

Tuesday.  Pretty quiet day, although didn't get much done.  Leftovers/Simpsons/jigsaw/cleaned kitchen/backed up computer and suddenly it's 8pm.  Hrmm.  And labelling goes super slowly when you need to identify every building in Legoland Miniland (eg Covent Garden, which I'd never been to before, so that took a bit of flying around Google Maps trying to find it).  So I only managed to label 26 photos before dinner, did a few more while watching tv, managing 48 all up for the evening.  hrmmm.

Wednesday.  Started off ok, but then felt like a failure because I couldn't solve some stoopid problems with stoopid firewalls and stoopid proxies.  Then arguments with people who made me feel like everything I do is wrong.  Sigh.  It was a wine and scotch and no photo labelling kind of an evening.  

Thursday.  Woke up at 3am but didn't get back to sleep ~5am :(  So I was tired and grumpy.  The bathroom sealer people called me in the morning - the asbestos test came back positive (duh) so they won't do minor works, they'll only do a complete bathroom renovation so the asbestos can all be removed.  Sigh.  More fighting with stoopid firewalls and feeling like a failure and people hate me cause I hate everything.  Felt miserable all afternoon.  

But on a lighter note, before lunch it was announced Canberra would go into a snap seven day lockdown due to our first local cases of covid in over a year (it finally happened).  And my first reaction was woohoo.  I mean literally.  To just stay at home and not have to deal with people (at least directly) for a week - heaven.  I mean don't get me wrong, I do actually feel really bad for peeps in the hospitality and "non-essential" retail whose anxiety levels will go through the roof not knowing where their next pay check will come from, or anyone that had a wedding or something planned for this weekend - that'd be pretty devastating for them.  Neil and I had lunch at the mall as usual, then we went for a walk through the fresh food section to laugh at all the people panic buying milk and toilet paper.  About half the trolleys we saw had toilet paper in them.

I should point out that after all the panic buying of toilet paper finished last year and it was readily available again, I bought a pack of 24 and put it downstairs.  Then I've continued to buy it normally ever since, knowing that if we ever did have a snap lockdown, we'd be set.  In fact we'd just opened a pack of 12, so won't need any in the short term.

At 12:49pm there was already a queue to get into Woollies

And there was a queue at Baker's Delight too

HBZ also went shopping just after lunch, and already all the toilet paper was gone, and it took him an hour and a half to get through the checkouts.  Yikes!

On the way home we stopped for essentials - read - beer! ;)  Although tragically, Chris had sold out of Corona! *gasp*  ;)

Beer and pizza for dinner.  This is why I'm going to die young:

Friday the 13th.  Got somewhat better sleep, and actually managed to achieve some stuff at work.  Went for a walk at lunch and saw my birds. 

In the afternoon I went to check the mailbox and this daisy was there to greet me

So I got photos of some of the other flowers out already as well

Picked up TV dinners from Chris's (we actually have a freezer full of leftovers, but I really didn't feel like cooking) - he said it had been pretty quiet. 

Watched the 2008 Get Smart with the sweetie, which was completely ridiculous but I was snorting all through it - just a bit of fun :)

Saturday.  I'd had an early night, but woke up a bit before 5 and never got back to sleep.  Turned 30.  I'll let you figure out what base (thanks DC :) ).  Stu cooked breakfast of Pialligo bacon and cheesy hash browns. So brown but so good!!!!

Then had a lovely day just pottering around the house, doing jigsaw and the like.  Stu also had fun, building his little morse code thingie...

At lunch we went for a walk to see the birds, and saw this very smelly burnt out car.

And the sweetie took a photo of me in front of the same wattle tree I had photos of the other day.

In the afternoon I did a 500 piece jigsaw as a break from the agonisingly slow Dumbo.  Sadly it was missing a piece, but that's what you get for Green Shed jigsaws.  The sky was pretty at dusk too.

We may have shared some bubbles.

We got Chong Co delivered for dinner!

We had the wagyu salad and the duck salad (I asked for everything "medium" but the beef was a bit hot for me - endorphins!)

As well as the pork belly prik pao (not crispy anymore from being in transit) and satay chicken

Delicious!

After dinner we put on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which we enjoyed with heated Gluhwein and candles.

And all through the day (except the 10 second blackout and time taken for the router to reconnect) Stu put on a John Williams playlist which added a wonderful soundtrack to actually quite a wonderful day.

Sunday.  Another nice quiet day.  Took ages to do slide fixup scanning because every time I rescanned a bunch of slides, they'd get dust in different positions :(  

Late in the morning we went for a walk and saw these tiny flowers

With bee!

For lunch I made salami and olive pizza scrolls

My lockdown lunch is better than yours!

In the afternoon I alternated between Dumbo jigsaw and Legoland photo labelling (including geotagging a bunch I'd taken on the train but hadn't set the location) - managed 113 photos - so I'm still *way* behind where I need to be.  I also pulled everything out of the freezer and did an audit of what we have.  There's quite a bit of leftover meat (including a bunch of food from various club nights), and some frozen veggies.  I'm thinking I might do an early morning shopping trip one day this week to get more fresh food.

Then put on dinner (all the veggies, with some pulled pork from the freezer) - finished off most of our fresh vegetables, and blogged.

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).

Monday.  24th.  Not backdating ;)  Slept ok I think.  Had an ok day.  Updated our network diagram because it was WRONG, and we can't have that!  (discovered while trying to fix some monitoring dashboards).  Got 174 photos labelled before dinner and another hundred after dinner - past 10000!!!  Also downloaded and processed my phone photos from last week but didn't have time/energy to blog.

Tuesday.  Couldn't get to sleep for *ages* stressing about All The Things.  Had a big lunch (oops - people kept telling me to eat their chips! .. and I'm a seagull.. soo..)  Connor helped me take home three pallets from downstairs - just so that I can store some boxes in the garage without worrying about them getting water damaged for the once every year or two flood that we get through the garage.  

Wednesday.  Woke up at 5:30 from a dream where the sweetie had died during brain surgery.  I was so upset I couldn't get back to sleep.  Spent hours and hours during the day in meetings. Fun. Not.  Super late home but still managed to label all Dad's day 16 photos (nearly two hundred of them), even while watching Aircrash Confidential (watched all six episodes on 9Now this week).  Only a hundred behind in the photo labelling now, should be able to catch those up on the weekend.

Thursday.  More meetings.  Neil's beer(s) of the week this week were two from Moondog - the white chocolate white ale I first tried at Herbert's the other week, and a chilli vanilla stout (which didn't taste like chilli or vanilla or stout!).  

Friday.  Hurrah for working from home!!  Did a bit of cleaning, pretty quiet day.  Watched Gallipoli in the evening - forty years old this year and yet I've never actually seen it.  Hurrah for peeps uploading stuff to Youtube!

Saturday.  Had a pretty relaxing day.  ie, got practically nothing done around the house/computer.  Stu had a migraine in the morning so it was a pretty quiet day all round.  Headed out to the club in the afternoon and lit the fire and it was all very cosy, then we headed up for the evening's events - an Italian themed night.  All the food!

Sunday was pretty much just *work*, almost no fun.  Feel like I'm drowing in housework.  Did a couple of loads of washing, fish tank stuff, clothes sorting and a bunch of blogging.  Started watching the remake of Rebecca in the afternoon (I saw the Alfred Hitchcock version on the plane from New York to Singapore in early 2019).  Watched Lucy with the sweetie in the evening.

Today was much of the same.  All these boxes had been up in my "hobby" room until Stu converted it into his man cave, so they got moved downstairs, but it blocked up the whole dungeon room so we couldn't move in there, so now I had those pallets I could move them onto them in the garage.

Other than that just food shopping, all the work, caught up with photo labelling (finished day 16, into day 17), cooking an epic dinner of almost all veggies (ok so also a bit of leftover lamb i pulled out of the freezer) and some tv with the sweetie.  Finished up watching Rebecca in the evening.  Not entirely sure if I liked it or not.  It had more modern "values" but they could have written Maxim a bit better, altho apparently it did have Daphne du Maurier's ending not Alfred Hitchcock's censored version (I can't remember the book it was like thirty years ago).  

Sunday.  Didn't post a pic of the pork roast..

Monday.  Busy day, trying to clean all the things, but getting deeper and deeper into the mess the deeper I go.  Leftover pork for dinner, photo labelling (into Jordan in Eursasia photo labelling), Lego Masters.

Tuesday.  Rinse and repeat of Monday really.

Wednesday.  Busy day.  XL has been off on training or sick all week so super busy with tickets.  This week we finished the Puntasic Musicians jigsaw so people had a lot of fun trying to find the musicians/bands.  Labelled 82 photos.  So 208 photos behind to keep up the schedule for the year.  Manageable.

Thursday.  Went with the sweetie to our doctor who has moved to a suburban location, maybe wanting to get into aged care much??  After a couple of days of people guessing musicians, we did the big reveal of the answers just before drinks.  Had pizza for the first time in a month.  

Dominos Florey is still advertising The Big One, but I asked and they're not selling them anymore

Watched several episodes of the Antarctica anime (Singapore been-theres!!!) then the second episode of The Surgeon's Cut (watched the first one the other day, not sure when).  

Friday.  Was helping out Aquila with some DNS stuff and he put a beer emoji in the chat, and that was enough of a trigger to suggest a Herbert's lunch.  @CLBradley couldn't make it, but Tony could so that was nice.  Had some of the Moon Dog white chocolate white ale which was amazing, and had the Mac and Cheese which was delish.  

Went down after work to help with Tony and Jess's horrible Bach jigsaw.  It's all black and white, but the worst thing about it is if you put two pieces together you can't actually tell if they're right or not.  Worst jigsaw in history, they may not ever finish it. 

Watched Nomadland with the sweetie in the evening.  It was pretty slow, but somehow still interesting.

Saturday.  A day of all the things.  Alternating between physical stuff (houseworky type stuff), photo stuff (Dubbo photo culling) and fun (playing with my digital Lego house model).  Stu had the oven on in the morning to make some baked eggs in an attempt to get through the epic jar of salsa we have, so at lunch I had a go at making a Dominos puff pastry pepperoni and feta pizza.  It actually worked really well, except for it being a little soggy in the middle, and it also blew up a bit.. maybe pricking the surface would have helped?  I'll post most of the pics in its own post.

Pretended to be healthy for dinner - cooked up some leftover pork with some shallot, garlic and cabbage, on rice, with dried fried onion on top.

Stu must have liked it - he went back for seconds!  After some Antarctica anime I watched the third episode of The Surgeon's Cut, about a transplant surgeon.  She talked about the liver being the centre of the body - where the soul is.. and all I could think about was alcohol making the soul happy .. only it doesn't.. haha

Sunday.  Got some stuff done in the morning, then headed out for brunch, a Bunnings run and some food shopping.  Spent the majority of the afternoon blogging - our Dubbo trip from 1981 (check it out!!), the Dubbo This Day in History posts from the past week, and downloading and processing photos for this week's blog.  Stu cooked a pea and ham soup for dinner.  Finished up with Lego Masters and this blog entry.

Today was 16 May, a day which has had various significant events over the years, but this year we didn't do anything of any particular note.  Oh well.  

Sunday.  Blogged on time for once!!  Leftover lemon chicken for dinner.  Lego Masters in the evening.  Think the new neighbours might be knocking out another wall - lots of banging today and tonight.

Monday.  Ok day, mostly cleaning, although very slow progress with it.  Leftover pasta for dinner.  Labelled 232 photos, some while watching Lego Masters.  *Finally* got some rain, with added storm.

Tuesday.  Vicki was in town this week, so I took it as golden opportunity to work from home all week so she could have the same desk every day, and I wouldn't have to deal with being in people's meetings.  Tried to clean stuff but too many people wanting stuff.  We're into season 10 of The Simpsons.  Then Lego Masters.

Wednesday.  Much the same as Tuesday really.  Didn't get quite caught up with photo labelling from last week, but at least didn't get any further behind.  

Most of the leaves fell off the cherry tree in just a few days!

Thursday.  Worked from home again, although did go in for drinks.  Started watching a Netflix documentary on Mercury 13, a story I'd never heard before.

Friday.  More cleaning.  Renamed over eight hundred objects on the CLI and deleted a few hundred unused objects as well.  Stu came home then we headed out - to Chong Co for dinner, then food shopping (had to wave to the seven peeps up in the space station as it flew over Jamo).

Saturday.  Cooked dinner (honey mustard chicken and rice) then we picked up CRD and headed out to the club.  Chatted for a bit and had some lunch, then I got stuck into priming more cabinets.  Had drinks and snackages by the fire and an early night.

Excuse the primer on my fingers!

Sunday.  Slept reasonably well (I thought) but felt pretty tired all day. 

Stopped via Chemist Warehouse on the way home.  I'd already put an order through the app for my script refill, probably half an hour before I got there, but they still said it was going to be "ten minutes".  We waited a full half hour but still no sms, so went in again, and they're like, oh we were busy so some of the app orders were missed.  Fricken hopeless.  Next time I should put the order in a couple of hours in advance.  So didn't get home til after lunch time (although didn't actually have any lunch, because we had bacon and eggs for breakfast).  Didn't really feel like doing anything useful, so thought I'd do something a bit fun - play with the Lego house model I started one day when I was off sick in November 2016!  Sadly Lego have pulled support for Lego Digital Designer, which is a shame, because it's actually a really good program. I got the floors sorted and some more interior details added, but there's still a lot of detail (and all the furniture!) still to go.  This is just the main floor so far.  Then I have start on downstairs.  And the yard.  ;)

Roast pork for dinner (all the crackling!) and Lego Masters.  And blogging.

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

Not backdating ;)  Watching Encore and blogging.

Monday.  15th.  Started back at the beginning with Dad's slides, starting to rescan all the ones that had lots of fluff on them from the scanner.  Probably redoing about a third of them per box.  Had a disjointed/distracted morning at work, not much better in the afternoon, but then lots of complicated and time consuming stuff came in late in the afternoon, hrmm.  Finished off the beef brisket we cooked the other week, and did some weeding.  Also managed to label four hundred photos!! (some in the morning, some before dinner, the rest after, including some during last night's Amazing Race).  Didn't blog though, had to backdate that ;)  Had to LOL at YouTube putting up ads for mens anti-chaffing underwear.. clearly Google thinks I'm a guy..

Also, these little buggers are everywhere at the moment, epic grunt

Tuesday.  Slept in a bit, whoops.  I just don't have enough time to do all the things in the morning.  Didn't finish scanning the box of slides for the day.  Another disjointed day, also it was very loud on account of being in the office.  Home late, but did manage to fill the green bin and clean the kitchen.  But then had to try and finish scanning slides (eventually did), label photos (didn't really get done, good thing I did so many last night), and watch last night's Amazing Race.  Need All The Time.  Really.  Had to LOL when a tv ad called out Hey Siri, and my phone answered!

Also, just on our way to work and there's a hot air balloon above our heads

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep last night til well past midnight.  Then broken sleep til 2am.  Sigh.  Ok day I think.  Rinse and repeat of morning and evenings, nearly 8pm by the time I got to sit down at the computer.  Did get some photos labelled though and watched last night's Amazing Race.

Thursday.  Ok day I think?  Drinks and pizza, Simpsons/Laid Back Camp/X Files as per usual Thursday night TV.  

At drinks some guys brought some games along.  One was Tsuro which I played two games of.  I drew on the first game I played, and got booted off in the second.  Fun game.

This is why I'm fat, so much garlicy oily goodness!

Friday.  Hurrah for being at home.  Although did have to be on the phone half the day, blerf.  Leftovers of chicken and rice for dinner, some TV and Cool Runnings which I've never actually seen before, and an episode of Encore.

Saturday.  Got the housework done pretty early, then started work on processing Dad's slides.  I figured out how to add the shutter speed, aperture and focal length data of all Dad's slides into the files with excel to generate cli stuff to use exiftool to add it all.  Worked with all the processing of the photos, and got all the exif data added to all the files I'd rescanned in the past week.  Had cajun potato wedges for dinner, and then watched Seven Years in Tibet (which we'd never seen before) with the sweetie.

Should be fine right?

Sunday.  Another day of powering through getting the processing of Dad's slides up to date.  Ok so I didn't do much else all weekend, but I'm in a pretty good position to keep up with Dad's slides as I rescan them over the next couple of months, and then I'll be all done.  At least with his slides ;)  I might have also spent a bunch of time geotagging his photos from his holiday to Narooma in 1960.  And made a lemon cheesecake.  And planted some lemon seeds (that were sprouting inside the lemons).  And blogged.  And had some chicken from Robert's feast I defrosted and reheated.  And watched some more Simpsons, Laid Back Camp and Encore.  And blogged some more.  

Monday.  8th.  Woke up at 4am-ish for a while.  A day of cleaning and creating a bunch of new objects on various firewalls, fixing up all the problems I found along the way. 

I tried the cheesecake for morning tea.  It turned out quite well!  The base is 250g pack Nice biscuits and 125g butter.  The filling is 2x 250g packets cream cheese, vanilla essence, 1/2 cup caster sugar, 300mL thickened cream (whipped), gelatine, and the juice (~200mL) and zest of four lemons.  I was going to use the bigger tray but I was using that for roasting some veggies.  So the whole thing is quite *thick*.  It was also quite soft.  I have another recipe I want to try before I publish the final results.

Sausages and salad for dinner.  Got pretty much caught up with Eurasia photo labelling.  By 20:30!  So watched another episode of Encore.  Had to put a blankie around me because it was so cold!  Although I did forget to do the dusting/vacuuming and my washing in the morning.

Tuesday.  Had a very early start because Stu needed to be at work early.  So no scanning although I did manage the dusting and vacuuming.  And I bought a bed.  More cleaning work in the morning.  Went jeans shopping again at Target at lunch but that was an epic fail.  Either too skinny or too much room in the crotch.  And something popped in my knee which hurt a bit, but nothing too crazy.  I did manage to find some more sheets for our bed though.  Leftover lamb and greek salad for dinner.  Had all my photo labelling done by 20:10 so watched the first episode of the new season of The Amazing Race.  I actually tried to watch this on the weekend, but Channel 10 stuffed up, and the episode they'd labelled as episode 1 was episode 3.  Buttheads.  But they'd fixed it by Tuesday.  This season was filmed last year, but because of covid they stayed in Australia.  But it still must have been a logistical nightmare with various state border closures.  

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep til after midnight, then woke up before 6am.  hrmm.  Finished prep work on some tidy up work, awaiting feedback so I don't break anything.  Tried again jeans shopping, this time at Best & Less.  I did find one pair that at least fitted without even needing to be taken up.  But of course the pockets are way too small - even smaller than what I have now.  I'm going to have to invite Sarah over for dinner and ask her to make me a bigger pocket!  They also have a button up fly which is a big poo.  But they only had one pair in stock, so I still need to keep going.  Sigh.  Just before 5pm our bed arrived.  They said three to five business days.  That was next day.  I'll save that for another post though.  Saw the second episode of The Amazing Race.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep again, then woke up at 4am with hurty.  Sigh.  When I was getting some painkillers I thought I heard a plop.  Kept getting stuff out of the fridge but I thought I heard another plop.  So I turned the lights on and looked behind the digital radio, and there was a fish.  Not in its tank.  Stoopid fish.  I must have freaked it out moving around in the near darkness and it zoomed out of the tank and onto the bench.  Lucky I heard it otherwise there'd have been a dried out fish by morning :(  Drinks, Dr Oc pizzas, Hibike Euphonium and Encore.

Friday.  Hurty again.  In the evening we had C over for dinner.  She tries to be gluten free, but we didn't have any gluten free pasta and Chris doesn't sell it either.  So my solution was to use an epic zucchini Connor brought in on Thursday.  I used the mandolin to slice it up thin and mixed in with bolognase sauce.  It actually turned out really well!  Except I forgot to take an after photo.  Whoops.

Saturday. 

A day of All The Things.  I tried to have a bit of fun, but mostly just tidied the house.  And we made the bed.  Jenn came over for dinner (Stu had Turkish feast delivered).  Then we played Carcassonne, which I just won.

Sunday.  Valetines Day.  I'd have wished the mother and the brother happy anniversaries, but, well .. Went for a walk in the morning.  Tried to count the species of birds I saw.  Magpies, currawongs, cockatoos, galahs, crested pigeons, rosellas, wattle birds, an lbb.. heard a raven and peewees but didn't see those.  They've also blocked the direct route up to try and restore the slope from erosion, and diverted the path a bit to the side.

We finished season one of Hibike Euphonium at lunch.  In the afternoon I did quite a bit of work organising the filing cabinet and pulling out stuff to be scanned and tossed.  Downloaded and processed phone photos but only managed to get half way through blogging last week before dinner was ready (roast pork with epic crackling!!).  Simpsons and into season two of Hibike Euphonium.  Finished last week's blog entry at 9pm.  

Monday.  Today!  Ok sleep I think.  Spent ages in the morning looking at a problem that was never going to be ours but how do you prove that.  After Ward and I couldn't find anything obvious we passed it to another team who actually quite quickly figured out the problem.  Felt like I'd wasted too much of my time though hrmm.  But I did managed to cut over to the new piece of poo firewall in test in the afternoon, which was super epic awsome, on account of it's taken nearly a year to get there.  Leftover sausages and veggies for dinner, labelled over two hundred photos, and did this blog entry.  Time to collapse...

No movies this week!  Gasp!  What am I going to do for a blog title.. 

Where were we?  Epic lamb roast.  31st Jan.  Backdated.

Watched more Hibike Euphonium.  

Monday.  Spent all morning renaming firewall objects to fit our naming scheme.  And documenting a whole stack of rules that had been done that I was going to need to duplicate.  Spent the entire afternoon doing all the rules - twice - on two different firewalls.  

In the evening a storm rolled through.  I was trying to run a script to copy "recent" files to One Drive (files modified since last backup), but the thing made my computer have a sad, so I ended up just shutting it down and disconnecting it from power and network.  There might have been just a bit of rain.

So it was a bit of a scramble to move the few things in cardboard out of the way and empty a few boxes.  Desperately need to declutter.

Had lamb red curry for dinner and finished season 6 of The Simpsons (Who shot Mr Burns?).  I never watched The Simpsons, but I do remember when the episode came out at the end of 1995 in Australia.  People were talking about it and I went and use this new fandangled thing called the internet to find out who did it (because the start of season 7 had already aired in the US).  Fun stuff.  So I knew who did it twenty five years ago.  Although not having seen the episode I didn't know how/why.  

After dinner fired everything up again from shutting it down for the storm.  Except the UPS decided to be a big stinky poo.  When I turned it on it had a fast beep and "reset battery" alarm.  If I held the on button down it would reset, but then it claimed it was in overload.  Which was silly because literally nothing was trying to use it (I even disconnected everything to prove it).  And then it got into such a state that I had to turn it off at the wall.  So now my computer is on mains power which is a big poo.  So by 8pm I'd only labelled fifty photos out of the three hundred I really needed to do to catch up.  At least the sweetie did the washing up yayyy.  Had another fight with windows, which has gone back to mapping by IP address rather than dns/netbios name.

Tuesday.  Remember that stoopid firewall that was being a big poo last year?  Well Wardie upgraded it the other weekend, which fixed it.  Go fricken figure.  So did up the bunch of rules I needed to do on it.  Only took like seven months to get to that point.  Hrmm.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Did some photo labelling but ran out of steam and started looking at bed frames online.  Found one that looked promising, and found it at two different fly-by-night retailers (Eliving Furniture and MyDeal) which both got pretty scathing reviews on review sites.  

Wednesday.  I'd just gotten to sleep on Tuesday night when right on midnight there was this super loud BEEP BEEP BEEP times four.  I sat right up and saw an orange light down the hall.  But as I was sitting up I caught the cable of my phone which knocked it onto the floor which broke my brain.  By the time I looked up again the light was off.  This of course freaked me out.  Was someone in the house and they had a light on but turned it off?  I had to work hard to get the sweetie to get out of bed to come investigate with me.  We searched the whole house but didn't find anyone.  We weren't even entirely sure what made the noise and light.  But we're pretty sure it was the new smoke detector.  This is one of those ten year battery smoke detectors that you can't take the battery out of (disabling it disables it *forever*).  So we're going to be pretty pissed if it keeps generating false alarms.  There was a daddy long legs in the vicinity so we caught it, and I've been dusting around the area quite regularly in case it was simply a spider that set it off.

Had an ok morning.  Did an audit of a complicated ruleset, to make sure all our firewalls are in sync.  Missed our team meeting to go to a specialist appointment.  Had to wait for ages in the waiting room, the longest I've ever waited there.  While I was there I had to a listen to a woman rabbit on about how the covid vaccine is made from aborted babies, how the news is manipulative (well duh), how Victoria shouldn't have needed to go into lockdown last year, and how is that *noone* in Victoria is accountable for the security guard hotel quarantine contract - clearly it *must* have been Daniel Andrews that authorised it, how the government in Victoria mismanaged the whole thing, because NSW was so much better at dealing with it all, how America is overreporting their covid deaths because the hospitals get paid $15000 for every covid death and so they're reporting deaths as covid deaths even if they died of something else but still tested positive for covid.... omfg I was like *get me out of here* ..!! Seriously you can't make this stuff up.  Eventually I was called up, and I was there so long because he "didn't think I'd arrived yet".  Fricken hopeless.  I was literally right on time.  I did have lunch with the sweetie afterwards so that was nice.  Did some work with Neil on our mail servers which was good.  Had Kingsley's for dinner because the sweetie wanted comfort food after his crazy busy day, and I was up for that too for the same reasons.  Simpsons and Hibike Euphonium and struggling to keep up with Eurasia photo labelling.

Thursday.  So apparently two pieces of Kingsley's southern fried chicken is actually not a lot of food, and I woke up at 3:12 hungry.  Had some cheese etc but couldn't get to back to sleep for at least an hour.  I was pretty tired in the morning with "dropsy".. including probably $15 worth of fish food pellets all over the floor :(  Should definitely not be operating heaving machinery today.  I scooped up a goodly amount of the fish food, because $15.

Had a Lighty lunch that Jim organised.  Connor and I shared the "special" pizza which was very nice.

Watched several episodes of Euphonium in the evening and then I watched the first episode of Encore by Kristin Bell.  It was Annie, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Friday.  Apparently two pieces of pizza and a garlic scroll is actually not a lot of food and I woke up a bit after 4am hungry.  Sigh.  Fairly busy day again. 

In the morning Aquila messaged me to see if I wanted to have lunch at Herbert's.   Of course!!

This time I tried the pot pie which was very nice.  I asked for a small serving of fries so I wouldn't stuff myself silly..

In the afternoon we tested the rules on the new firewall with real (testing) traffic which was pretty cool.  Didn't get the paperwork written up for it though.  In the evening went and saw Penguin Bloom with EffanC.

Saturday.  As noted in my movie review, I asked Sam Bloom whether she became friends with Bron again or not, so I was pretty stoked when she answered.  Pretty quiet day.  Didn't do too much house stuff (trying to actually enjoy weekends).  Had a bit of a play with Gimp to do Lego mosaics.  Watched Encore (The Sound of Music).  Stu cooked dinner - sausages and cabbage.  Then Simpsons, Hibike Euphonium, and Star Trek VI in memorium of Christopher Plumber (I wanted to watch The Sound of Music, but accepted Star Trek VI instead).

Sunday.  7th. 

This is why should always carry a camera on your person.  This flutterby landed near me when I was collecting lemons.  I barely had time to snap a photo before it flew away again.

Wrote out a very long todo list for the day, although forgot to add Eurasia photo labelling to it.  So I did a reasonable amount but nowhere near enough. 

I might have done some decluttering of my bedside table drawers.  Some of these soaps I've had since I was a kid.  I think it's time to use them up.

I never made it through the list as far as photo processing and blogging, so it never happened.  In fact I was still part way through the list when someone came to collect Stu's old bed.  While we were loading the trailer suddenly the lights went out.  I looked up and saw this.

Then it was time to make dinner (lots of roast veggies with leftover lamb), and I even made a cheese cake to use up some of our epic supply of lemons.  I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not, having added so much lemon juice (200mL!!).

Simpsons - You don't win friends with salad!! Euphonium and Encore.

Sunday.  24th.  Half way through our long weekend.  Watched Your Name in the evening.  Kinda like Freaky Friday meets The Lake House?  Not that I've ever actually seen The Lake House.  Nice enough, although a tad confusing.  

Monday.  We both took a random day off to have a long weekend. 

Baby guppies!!!

Did all the washing in the morning - regular clothes washing, then the curtains from the east side window of the study.  Then headed out for the day.  Dropped in at The Scottish Restaurant for brunch, then onto Ikea.  Stu wanted to get a shelf unit for his study for the inside wall.  So we found that and got a couple of bits and pieces but not too much.  Did our food shopping on the way home. 

I'd just filled his water bowl when Stumpy decided to redecorate the place.

So just for that we gave him a bath.

Stu built his shelves and suddenly the house is a mess again.  Doh. 

It was also very hot.  All weekend.  We had the cooler going pretty much all weekend, but that did make it a bit humid in the house.  Salmon and salad for dinner, but no photo labelling.  Watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the evening.

Tuesday.  Australia Day.  Our two biggest holidays celebrate invading other countries.  David's suggestion was make New Years Eve a public holiday, so all the poor saps that have to work NYE while everyone else parties will at least get paid overtime for it.  Then Australia Day could be January 1.  That was actually the day we became Australia.  Just a thought.  The day was spent avoiding the heat, a bit of housework, labelling photos and a bit of paint by numbers.  Stu wanted to hang up an aerial for his software radio, so I hacked out all the cherry tree suckers, and pruned the geraniums quite brutally (they were bigger than me!).  Didn't take any before photos unfortunately.  

Stu really didn't like being up a ladder

I well and truly filled the green bin, with a pile still left to go.  Taco Tuesday for dinner (I'd bought the shells and was going to have them before David left but we never got a round tuit).  The ten taco shells go really well with three people (four each for the boys and two for me), so we end up with leftovers if there's just the two of us.  Then I was loading the dishwasher after dinner and one of Stu's bowls slipped out of my hand and shattered all over the floor.  I seriously had a meltdown.  I really like those bowls, I use them every day, and it was one of the few complete sets we have of anything.  I don't deserve nice things.  Sigh.  Didn't feel like doing any photo labelling, or even watching a movie, so just watched random crap on YouTube.

Wednesday.  Nothing much.  Bit of photo labelling, but not nearly enough to catch up for the week.

Thursday.  Ok day; work drinks; pizza.  Got sad that I had noone to fight with over the garlic dregs from the garlic bread.  Started watching Sound! Euphonium anime series.  Then I watched Honey I Blew Up the Kid.

Friday.  The rain!  All the rain!  In the afternoon I spent an hour and a half renaming and documenting all the objects someone else in our team had created that didn't match our naming scheme.  Le sigh.  Watched Honey We Shrunk Ourselves in the evening.  I'd never seen this one.  Silly of course, but not too bad.  Then I watched the first half of a 2016 New York production of Hamilton.  I had literally no idea what the show was about, well, other than it was an American period piece.  I have to say I struggled with it.  It's mostly all rap, and I *hate* rap.  I struggled to keep up with the pace of it and what was going on and the exposition.  I also found having African Americans playing white guys pretty distracting.  Also.  Jonathan Groff as King George III.  Completely distracted by his spagging all over the place.  Also I reckon he looks a little bit like Freddie Mercury (front teeth and cheeks), he'd look more like him if he lost a little weight..

Saturday.  Woke up at 3am for nearly two hours.  Hurrah.  Did all the hosueworks in the morning.  Did a bit of paint by numbers and photo labelling of Dad's slides in the afternoon.  I'd relied on the dust and scratch filter for the first half of the scanning of his slides, but as it turns out, the hairs that were all over the roof of the scanner were there from the beginning.  The filter doesn't remove the hairs and the slides look terrible, and I'm going to have to redo *a lot* of the first half.  Sigh.  But probably not until I've scanned more of the filing cabinet.  Had a bit of a play with Gimp to make Lego mosaics using custom palettes.  Had chicken kiev for dinner.  Watched The Garden of Words, which I saw at the movies in 2013.  I reckon they must have videoed rain falling in puddles and traced it frame by frame.  Can't see any other way it'd be *that good*.  Then I watched the second half of Hamilton.  For some reason I enjoyed the second half a lot more.  Maybe because it was a bit slower, and I had a better idea of who everyone was??  I think if I watched it again I'd pick up a helluva lot more and possibly enjoy it more.  Or maybe I could just go read a transcript.  Found out that the dude who played Hamilton actually wrote the whole thing.

Sunday.  Today.  Not backdating for a change ;)  Although I am going to need to backdate a whole bunch of This Day in History posts.  Spent the day alternating between housework, computer work (photo labelling) and fun stuff (paint by numbers and jigsaw).  Went out and did a small food shop.  Although with fragments of covid detected in Belconnen sewage, I feel like we should have done a bigger shop in case we end up in lockdown.  Roast lamb for dinner.  Or there will be.  Very shortly :)