So last weekend was the Classic 100.

All of my favourite instruments got up!

78 Carillon - Percussion (pitched)
62 Tubular Bells - Percussion (pitched)
51 Celesta - Keyboard (Harry Potter!!)
41 Synthesizer (including Moog) - Electronic, Keyboard
25 Recorder - Wind
9 Voice / Singing (Choir) - Voice (they played Ode to Joy but not the Hallelujah Chorus :( )
7 Organ - Keyboard, Wind (they're playing our song!!)
5 Clarinet - Wind
2 Piano - Keyboard
1 Cello - String (bowed)

And so did a couple I would have voted for if I'd had more votes

77 Ocarina
48 Theremin

Stu never got around to voting, but some of his got up, while others didn't

x Cornetto
x Crumhorn
x Sackbut
84 Contrabassoon
56 Flugelhorn
30 Trombone
22 Bassoon

Fun weekend, although it was a bit distracting and had to do different things that didn't require too much concentration.  So I culled holiday photos haha.

I'm not entirely sure they meant to post this graphic at the end though..!

Sunday.  28th.  Not backdating for a change!  Roast turkey and all the veggies for dinner.  Then Futurama/Crown.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Day of trying to do All The Things - cleaning, photo culling, etc.  Also went into battle with the Dodgy Dyson.  Cleaned everything out, and reseated the battery.  No luck.  Fricken POS.  It's like Dyson programme these things to just stop working after a couple of years to force you to buy new stuff, even when the old stuff is perfectly fine.  Cooked a very nice tuna casserole for dinner.  Also, it was 18 years ago tonight that I met the sweetie in person!

Cutest bassoon player in the world?

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Filled with rage that the Electrolux cordless vacuum cleaner we have as backup has also decided its battery is no good.  So now we have no working cordless vacuum cleaners.  Sigh.  Ok day.  I think.  I forget.  Creamy fettuccini for dinner.  Finished first pass cull of cruise photos, and into final culls.

Not convinced by this Hutwoods candle.  It sure smells nice, but this huge reed wick burns funny and then splits

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Quiet morning.  Then found MESS - someone had put some test servers in a prod group, so I HAD to fix it. 

New Hardly Normal coming to the mall

Chicken and egg rice bowl from KSK

Leftovers for dinner, and finished final culls up to day 6.  Then watched the Lego Grandmasters final.  OMFG such amazing builds!!

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep but then slept ok.  More mess cleaning, and generally catching up.  Super quiet drinks.  Pizza.  Watched John Oliver's take on AI, which has foibles such as deciding that images of skin cancer with rulers in them are much more likely to be malignant.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  My birds didn't come to see me.  Chicken kiev for dinner, then watched My Octopus Teacher which was beautiful.

Saturday.  Sneaky trip to Wagga Wagga to see the Lego brick show (might get a selection of the 600-odd photos online one day).  Stopped at the Bethungra Spiral but the lighting wasn't great.  

These carriages were being transported from South Australia to Goulburn and the trainspotters were out in force

Had lunch with David at the Junee Hotel.

And there were also planes to be seen

Sunday.  Nothing much.  Did start a jigsaw and get a quarter of the way through it.  Then the usual Sunday afternoon crap, including feeling that life and weekends are far too short.

Sunday.  21st.  Had yummy basa bake for dinner, then Futurama, The Crown (Charles and Di's engagement and wedding) and Lego Grandmasters.

Monday.  Slept okish.  Cleaning and tidying day.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters in the evening.  The sweetie was having a day so we ended up getting pizza for dinner, including vomit pizza!

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - stressing about All The Things and restless.  Cleaning and decommissioning day.  Six magpies came to see me at lunch - three from either side of the ant hill demarcation line.  

Skipped doing any music to get an early start on culling.  Leftover butt beef cheeks for dinner.  Still took til 20:00 to cull three days of photos.  hmm.  

Wednesday.  Late getting to sleep, slept ok but woke up around 5.  Sick of the stoopid by 9am.  Sigh.  Did a cleaning change in prod which noone has yelled about so far.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  

Ok day I think.  After work went with the hills to the Hellenic Club for dinner and AWS show with Emma Pask and Ed Wilson (I'll put pics in another post).  I had veal scallopene for dinner which wasn't on the menu but I saw the dude next to us eating it and asked for it.  It was yummy!

Friday.  Took me a while to get to sleep even though it was very late.  And then woke up early.  Sigh.  Surprisingly not a zombie day though so that was nice.  Lots of cleaning and decommissioning work.  Did some weeding at lunch.  A currawong was closely monitoring the situation and even came down right next to me to pick up a big juicy worm I must have dislodged.  After work was Whisky Live which was fun as always.  

Saturday.  Some cleaning of the bedroom in the morning, and did a sort of Dad's Tasmania photos (this time he'd only smooshed together two trips).  I also found a whole heap more photos of the Lego Brickshow from last year.  I swear I'd taken more photos than I had seen on the Canon and iPhone.  Yeah - they were on the G5X - over 500 of them!  So might post some more of those at some point.  Headed out to the club in the late afternoon for an "M" themed night, which I used as a good excuse to trot out my Minifig costume!

Marcanna and Greg did an amazing Mexican feast!

It was also the club's birthday this week, so they had a big cake.  John and Shirley told a heap of stuff about the early history of the club, would have been nice to get it on video actually.  Doh.

Sunday.  Somewhat broken sleep (the sweetie couldn't sleep and I was actually a bit hot under a couple of doonas even though it was literally freezing - our water pipes actually froze solid overnight).  Came home and put all the Tasmania slides away and finished the second section of the Titanic, and did some computer stuff.

Here's a couple of photos of a hot air balloon a couple of weeks ago that were in the wrong directory so got missed...

Monday.  15th.  Woke up around dentist time and only got less than an hours more sleep between 5-6.  Sigh.  Trying to get stuff done in between distractions and having to play mediator (sooo not in my job description!!!).  Culled some more people photos from the cruise then uploaded them to Dropbox for people to grab.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok, although woke up a bit after 5.  Meh day, don't really even know what I did.  Made a slow cooker apricot chicken dish which was quite nice.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters, nothing very exciting this 16 May.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  Nothing exciting at work.  FFS Windows 11 sux donkey balls.  If you open a .txt file (or anything that opens in a browser) it'll open on whichever desktop it feels like.  Even if you haven't even been using that desktop for anything lately.  And I found a new bug ("feature") of Notepad.  If you have two large text files open and you're at the bottom of them both, if you then switch between them you won't actually stay at the bottom of the files, you'll be taken to somewhere random in the file and have to scroll or control-end to get to the bottom again.  Or another one - if you search for some text in a file and it takes you to that text, if you then close the search box you'll be taken to some random point in the file, not where you actually just were with the found text.  So hopeless.  Seriously considering uninstalling "new" Notepad and just going back to the good old Notepad that's like thirty years old and still works perfectly fine as designed thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep but then slept ok. Quietish day, quiet drinks, pizza, Mandalorian, Lego.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Dropped off the car for service in the morning.  They reckoned it'd probably be ready by 14:00.  Had Kingsleys for lunch!!  First time there since November 21.  At 16:00 I went to get the car.  Oh, it's not ready yet, it's still over at Bob Jane.  WTF??  Still, but the time he'd spent like ten minutes sorting out all the paperwork they'd actually finished so I went and got it, came home then headed to the coast, but I'll save that for another post.

Sunday.  Got home and then had to do all my weekend todos in just a few hours.  As much as I like going away for weekends I also hate going away for weekends because it chews up so much of my down time.  I only had time for some essentials of cleaning and photos/blogging.  The only fun I had was doing a section of the Titanic.  No time for music or any other projects or hobbies.  I was going to vacuum the ensuite but came across the next problem with the Dodgy Dyson.  This time when I pulled the trigger nothing happened.  And I noticed a red flashing light on the battery pack.  32 red flashes before it stops.  Fricken great.  It worked just fine on Friday.  Now nothing.  I found one page which suggested a "reset" of the battery, but that didn't work.  Dyson is seriously Dodgy.  Sigh.  Basa bake in the oven for dinner.

Monday.  8th.  Backdating because spent too much time last week blogging the week before.  Took a while to get to sleep Sunday night, woke up a bit early.  Ok day I guess.  Cooked creamy mushroom fettuccini for dinner, but it took over an hour.  Sigh.  Not enough TIME.  Cruise photo culling and Lego Grandmasters.

We caught this in the lounge room on the weekend

There's snow on them thar hills!

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Started off fresh and getting things done, then the hassling started, one thing after another after another.  I never did get item 2 of my todo list done.  Such a busy day.  Logged off, then five minutes later Con messaged me that work that had originally been planned for the night and had since been cancelled, had been uncancelled but noone bothered to tell me.  Brisket for dinner (the thing was making me hungry all afternoon.  

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Well other than waking up from a traumatic dream where I couldn't get my Subway lunch.  The dude serving me was speaking jibberish and also couldn't understand me.  I begged for someone else to help.  The manager tried but he made a footlong sub that also had seafood in it.  And I'm like, I'm not paying for a footlong with seafood because it'll be soggy and disgusting by the time I get to the second half later.  So he went to start a new one but then wandered off half way through and I'm getting super upset because I'm hungry and just want my lunch and noone else would help either and I was trying to come around to make it myself.  Silly really.  Another day of people coming to me with problems and not able to get my own work done.  But did have a good documentation session while waiting for the sweetie.  Leftover curry for dinner and photo culling.

This is a fun pic - the count of blog entries I've made per month over the past twenty years.  I used to blog more frequently back in the day, but didn't include photos nearly as much.  It's the downloading and processing of the photos that takes the most time and energy and was always the barrier to posting them more often.  And why I mostly only blog weekly now, so I only have to download and process my photos once a week.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Woke up to the news that Heather Armstrong of dooce.com had died.  Literally the first thing I saw on Instagram, and somehow I just knew it would be suicide.. the Black Dog finally caught up with her.  I feel bad for Leta, Marlo, Pete and all her family and friends, pretty awful thing for them to go through.  Rest in Peace.  Work/drinks, then mostly reading about Heather and some of the comments on her last post.

Friday.  Slept ok other than waking up a bit early.  I think.  Ok day.  I think.  Sigh.

Saturday.  Did a few things at home before we went out for breakfast and food shopping.

This overpass in Gungahlin wasn't here last time

Coffee Club brekkie burger

I'm a sweet pickle? what?

Of course it was nearly midday by the time we got home.  Then it was mostly cleaning the house all afternoon.  Sigh.  Had Nick and Tab over for butt beef cheeks for dinner which was nice.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Did a bottle/tip/Green Shed run.  At least it didn't take too long.  But then spent the entire rest of the day sorting out Dad's photos of various Queensland and northern NSW trips.  He'd mixed up like four entirely separate holidays all together into ten boxes of slides.  Oddly he'd also included some from a 1978 trip, but not all, and he'd also put some of the slides from one of the earlier trips into the 1978 trip.  Such a mess.  But think I got it all sorted out in the end.

But by the time I'd done that it was after 15:00 and I hadn't done anything else on the todo list and then I started freaking out how short weekends are and I how much I have to do.  I did some music, then photo downloading and processing.  But it takes like an hour to blog each week and I still hadn't blogged last week.  Sigh.  And I also think I might have accidentally found out the winners of Lego Grandmasters.  hrmm.  Stu cooked some mince for dinner, then Futurama/Crown.

The original plan for our 15th wedding anniversary was to have a long weekend in Hobart.  But then life got in the way and we never organised anything and then Stu wouldn't have been able to take the time off from work anyway.

So plan B was organised a lot closer to the date, and we decided to just do a quick overnighter somewhere nearby.

So last Saturday we got ready and headed off.  We stopped at the Scottish Restaurant for breakfast.

Then out through Bungendore to Tarago.  Just a quick stop there because it was raining, and we'd stopped there before recently, and there's not much there anyway.

"The Morass" lakes are very full at the moment.

Next stop was Bungonia.  It was market day so there were *people* around.  There's a lot of historic buildings there so it would be interesting to take more time to explore there.  We didn't see much this time because it was raining.

We had to stop at the railway viaduct near Tallong.  Because bridge!

There was even a train!

At Tallong I had a look at the station, and had a WTF moment when Stu pointed this out!!  Stu stayed in the car.  Because it was raining.

We also found the Big Apple

Wingello station wasn't very interesting, but walking on the tracks is still kinda cool.  Stu stayed in the car.  Because it was raining.

We stopped in Bundanoon and had pies for lunch.

I went to find a loo, and went for a wander, while Stu sheltered from the rain.

Abbey Road, Bundanoon?

We didn't even stop in Sutton Forest.  Because it was raining.

We missed Exeter because the sweetie accidentally turned where he shouldn't have at Bundanoon and we ended up taking a different back way.

We continued past the centre of Berrima and out to the Berkelouw Book Barn.  Stu had been here once years and years ago when the Old Hume Highway was the Hume Highway.  But it was chaos because there was a wedding on the grounds, and the cafe area was *full* of annoying people that thought that congregrating next to doorways was a good idea (the place was emptying out while we were there).  I dunno if they were all part of the wedding or not (maybe waiting while photos were being taken??), but it seemed like a lot of people knew each other.  So the place was crowded and annoying.  Stu did buy a book on the art of war though.

Then headed back into Berrima and checked into the motel - the Bakehouse Motel.  It was just lovely.  I dunno why but Australian motels are often better/more comfortable/much better equiped than fancy hotels.  It almost seems standard that they have decent fridges and glasses and crockery.  This one didn't have a microwave in the room, but it had one in a common area, and you could also pick up cereal and milk for breakfast from there.  Plenty of power points around, and plenty of luggage rack space.  There was also aircon *and* a fan, although we didn't need either.  Just lovely.

The sweetie crashed for a bit and I did a sudoku.  Then I went out for a little wander around town.  In the rain.

I came back to the room and we had some wine and cheese (finished off a bottle we started last weekend).  All very civilised.

Then we went across the road to the Surveyor General Inn - Australia's Oldest Continuously Licened Inn - for a beer.

Then up past the gaol again.

And up to Escalot for dinner.  We were in the early sitting (17:45) and of course so everyone else in the same sitting all turn up at once and we're all waiting outside the door heh.  

We decided to go with the "Chef's feed me" ($95pp), which aligns with my usual philosophy of eating out - "bring food and I'll eat it".  

When they brought out All The Starters, I was like, we're going to need a doggy bag.  Or five.  Because look at this!!

So top left was cheese croquettes, then kingfish, and flatbread, with zucchini flowers bottom left and sweet potato on the right.  I don't know if the serving sizes are the same as the menu or just tasters, but here's the menu for them (I think, assuming they actually did the menu and not just made something up):

* actually I'm not sure about the croquette on the menu - might have been "manchego, leek and jalapeno croquette, yuzu aiolo, wakame" ($25)
* I think then "kingfish ceviche, cucumber consomme, sherry escalot, citrius, yoghurt" ($37)
* also not sure about the bread
* "zucchini flowers, smoked ricotta, honey, turffle pecorino" ($28)
* "dry aged sweet potato, almod, labneh and pomegranate ($25)

The mains were similarly amazing!

Up the back was fried chicken, then across the middle pork belly, salmon and carrots, and potato and salad at the front.  Possibly from the menu they were:

* "southern fried chicken, honey & sriracha glaze" ($35)
* "mead and miso glazed pork belly, pickled cucumber, caramelised radish" ($46)
* "sous vide king salmon, shoyu glaze, pickled radish, kimchi, rye" ($48)
* "local carrots, truffle honey, shaved manchego" ($18)
* "crispy chat potatoes, gochujang mayo" ($15)
* "eschalot garden salad, tomatoes, olives, white balsamic" ($15)

Dessert I'm not sure about, but I think it was a lemon tart, but doesn't line up entirely with either the example feed me menu online, or the general menu online (and didn't get a photo of the menu we saw).  She did say it had "fence berries" on it, and I'm like what, and she's like, yeah they're berries that grow on their fence.  haha!  It was nice though.  Although we probably would have enjoyed it more if we hadn't been stuffed silly with food.

My only complaint was that the pork belly skin wasn't crispy.  They didn't say it would be, so can't "complain", but I did say that it would have been sooooo much better if it was :)

Absolutely lovely meal, although we were both hurting from eating too much!!

Went back to the motel and crashed in a heap.

I actually slept reasonably well.  We had cereal from the motel for breakfast.

Then I went for another walk.  In the rain.

I went up to find the courthouse (right next to the gaol, easy)

And Harper's Mansion

And saw other cute buildings as well

But I didn't go to the south side of town.  Because it was raining.

Then we packed up and went home via the Hume.  

So yeah.  Lovely weekend.  But it did rain.  The. Entire. Weekend.  Maybe next time we'll have more luck with the weather..

Sunday.  23rd.  All the blogging!!  Even got caught up.  Stu cooked a vegetable "tagine" in the slow cooker, and we had Jenn over.  We played Carcassonne after dinner and Stu won by a point.  Watched some Crown, and could hear Groovin the Moo all the way from EPIC.  Stayed up way too late waiting for the candles to finish.

Monday.  Slept ok (other than the slightly late night).  Working on more cleaning.  Honey mustard chicken for dinner (desperately trying to use up the like three bottles of mustard we have in the fridge).  Watched the last episode of The Simpsons online.  We're actually caught up!!  Thirty four odd seasons of The Simpsons in a couple of years.  I think we started into Futurama tonight too.  So much for letting me pick the next series.  

Tuesday.  Crap sleep.  Hurray.  A day of All The Things.  There's just not enough TIME!!  And I forgot to cook some Anzac Biscuits.  Roast lamb for dinner.  

Wednesday.  Ok sleep. 

We were going to go to Broaster Chicken at lunch, but even though they were supposed to be open, well, they weren't.  Lame.  So we went to Canberra Cafe and Burgers, so I could get some loaded fries.  On the condition that the others would help me.  Which they did.  Because this stuff is epic!

Deleted a whole heap of stuff with Neil after lunch which is always fun.  

After work went into town.  Had a drink with the sweetie at Dolly's, or whatever they're called now, used to be Shorty's. 

Then we went to Taki for dinner.  We got the Taki Signature Platter ($139) which had four cuts of beef (A5 Japanese wagyu striploin, finger rib, thin karubi and diamond cut inside), as well as pumpkin, onion and two kinds of mushroom.  The beef was *divine*, but the vegetables were a bit meh.  They burn before they cook through, and really really need the dipping sauce because they're too dry otherwise.  But the meat!! OMFG so good!!!

Got home and found a HARD COPY Yellow/White Pages.  How totally bizarre, we haven't had one of those in years.  I wonder if they delivered it to our place by accident.  

Thursday.  Ok sleep.  But then I didn't write down any notes so can't remember what I did all day.  Drinks then Taco Thursday, and more Futurama.

Friday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  Another day with no notes.  Whoops.

Saturday.  Got ready then headed to Berrima!  But I'll save that for another post.  Which I might eventually get around to doing.  After I choose photos from the nearly 500 I took.  In the rain.

Sunday.  After we got home I mailed some cruise photos to someone, then finally finished putting together our tax.  Got most of it printed before the printer started jamming.  Also decided I'm not convinced by the output of movie files from iMazing.  If you use the defaults you get an MP4 which is smaller in dimensions than the original.  If you export without the conversion to MP4 you get a MOV file which is the right dimensions (1920p) and a smaller file size, but it's quite "enhanced" - it's brighter and looks over processed compared to if you just download from windoze.  hmmmmmm.  Did some music and blogging and suddenly it's dinner time.  Sigh.  

Sunday.  16th.  Not backdating for a change :)  Pic of the kale chips I made as part of dinner.  This was 15 minutes, some bits were a little overdone.

Monday.  17th.  Woke up around dentist time for like an hour and a half.  On the weekend I got back into collecting some extra data from Dad's slides, to help organise them better.  Because he would mix up rolls to put things together by subject.  Which is fair enough, but some slides don't have dates (I still need to find out if he ever digitised his slide labels from the books he had which have been lost) but do have processing dates sometimes, or can be linked together by the type of slide etc.  He also mixed like three trips up north into one collection, and bushwalks to the same area together.  I want to be able to get them back into chronological order for filing.  So more of that before work.  Tried to do one thing, which took all day because of everything else I had to deal with.  I tried to talk to the optometrist about whether the strain for distance is good strain (help reverse the myopia) or bad strain (make it worse).  But the receptionist called me back, not the optometrist, and said the optometrist said just not to do it.  And I'm like that doesn't answer the question, but of course she didn't have the answer, and wouldn't find out because he'd just said Don't.  Fricken sigh.  Hate.  Cranky all afternoon.  And I was cold and hungry ALL DAY (well except for briefly after lunch of nice warm noodles and a walk in the sun).  Leftovers for dinner.  Tried emailing some peeps to confirm their email addresses before I emailed photos, but Gmail intermittently wouldn't accept mail from Internode:

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 550-' This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for [kazza.id.au] did not pass with ip: [--]. The sender should visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for instructions on setting up authentication.

Some went through but others bounced.  So then I had to fight with Vodien to get an SPF record setup.  Internode is super helpful (https://www.internode.on.net/support/guides/email/spf_records/) providing the text to use for their mail servers.  But Vodien support was like, do it through cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't "own" the domain per se.  Of course that didn't work.  Then the actual Vodien DNS manager kept complaining about an invalid name.  They actually want you to put a name which is daft because TXT records don't have them.  I hate EVERYTHING.  Too cranky and depressed to do any Titanic.

Tuesday.  Slept okish I guess.  Well, after I finally got to sleep, which took like two hours because my feet were cold and wouldn't warm up.  Mail policy staring day.  Weeding at lunch.  Music, cheese kransky and cabbage for dinner (finally finished the cabbage that's been in the fridge since probably January - that stuff just never goes off!!).

Blogged the week before last, which took up most of the evening.  Then finally finished watching Avatar.  Only took like two weeks hehe.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep again because my feet were cold.  Lots of work with Neil.  We're probably going to end up deleting half the ruleset on one server because of things either no longer in use or things can be combined.  

Saw these at the chicken place and drooled.. but didn't buy any.. this time..

Herbert's for dinner for a tap takeover by Big Shed.

I tried all six beers on tap (half pints each of four of them which were good, not much more than a taste of the Brown (too dark for me), and most of a pint of the hard lemonade which tasted like Solo - yum! dangerous!).  

This was the rep and their Golden Stout Time - which smelt exactly like Golden Gaytime - but didn't taste really like it at all.  Weird.  

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Had breakfast with the sweetie at 54.

Had a look at a routing alert from last night.  Learnt a bunch of stuff and actually got to see some OSPF which we don't have much of.  Also started thinking about some more cleanup work. 

Managed to get a photo of the eclipse.  Not helped by the iPhone not actually using the lens you tell it to.  I wanted to use the 3x lens, which works until you put something in front of it, and it's like, oh you wanted to do macro did you, and changes the lens.  So retarded.  But fought with it and managed to get a couple of pics.  It certainly wasn't very exciting from Canberra!

Quiet drinks, pizza, and finished season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett.  We didn't see who was in the tank at the end, so asked Siri, Hey Siri, who was in the tank at the end of the Book of Boba Fett?" - and she actually answered correctly!  Pretty incredible really.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Laid out all of Dad's 1969 Grampians and Great Ocean Road photos.  There's two rolls that cover that part of the trip, and you could tell from the processing date printing which were which.  You can mostly see the frame numbers (Dad wrote all over them obscuring parts of them). 

Looking at cleaning stuff.  TV dinners for dinner and Rocky Horror Picture Show (because it's fifty years since the show was first performed on stage).  Also found a bunch of Disney Singalong movies.. that could be a lot of fun hehe.

Next generation of turdburgers that will probably eat the house again over winter

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Continued sorting of the Grampians/Great Ocean Road photos.  I think I managed to get them all into the correct order.  It helped having a bit of local knowledge (from having done the exact same trip ourselves last year).  There's a few slides where the dates are clearly wrong, but not entirely sure what the correct date is.  They could have been taken late on the first day, or early on the second.  Got some house stuff done as well and got some holiday blog entries online.  Gmail is still intermittently blocking my emails.  Went out for lunch, got the loaded fries at Pattysmiths.  Their fries are actually really good, don't even need the bacon and cheese sauce

Then went to the chemist/pet store and did our food shopping and suddenly it's two and a half hours since we left home.  #grunt.  Some getting organised, music and Titanic and suddenly it's 17:00.  Sigh.  Sausages and wombok for dinner.  Then into season 3 of The Mandalorian, and some Death in Paradise.  

Sunday.  Woke up some time before 3 and stayed awake for at least two hours, then restless sleep.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Hurray.  Did mostly house cleaning stuff, bit of Titanic, and lots of blogging.  Also finally fixed my SPF record - you need to put the domain name (kazza.id.au) as the "name".  So dumb.  Also dumb: if you open a html file (that loads in Chrome), or a text file (that loads in notepad) it won't open in the desktop you're in, no no no, it opens in the default deskop, or whichever desktop you were using those apps in last (not sure which).  Windoze is so hopeless.  Is it beer o'clcok yet?

Tuesday.  11th.  Backdated.  Hurty from 3:30 til like 5:30.  Sigh.  Ok day I guess.  Some tidying.  Figuring out how to renew a certificate on one of our appliances.  Looking Back, Moving Forward night at the Shine Dome, with Bradley Moggridge (fresh water) and Mibu Fischer (marine biologist) and the work they're doing with indigenous knowledge on water management.  Interesting, and I do wonder if indigenous people have any better ideas on how to manage water, given there's 25 million people here now we need to feed and water.  I'm sure there's no easy solutions.  Short of stopping all breeding and immigration.  Dinner at 10 Yards after which was nice.

Wednesday.  Slept relatively well, but had to wake up stoopidly early cause Stu was having breakfast in town.  Did some policy work with Neil.  We started a new jigsaw which was an "Impossibles" series, but is actually super easy.  Oh, the other day I think I mentioned that windoze wall papers were doing ok between desktops.  Well after the storm and reboot on the weekend they'd been stuffed up, and only came good on Wednesday night.  

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep (like after 12:30).  And then work up at like 5:30.  Sigh.  Fought with the certificate replacement on the appliance.  Nothing is ever easy.   Especially with certificates.  Ok drinks.  Pizza and early night.

Friday.  Slept from like 20:30 til 5:45 hurray!!  Cotter Pumping Station Tour!  Will put that in another post.  Then dropped past the optometrist to pick up my new glasses.  Got there at 13:08 and there was a sign on the door: Back at 1:30pm.  Sigh. 

So got some lunch at Flavours of Jiangnan.  But they only take cash.  WTF???  There may have been leftovers.

So got my glasses.  The optometrist wasn't even there, just the receptionist.  Bizarre.  So noone to adjust the glasses to fit my head.  The dude's father took a lot more care.  This one.. well.. here you go, have fun.  #grunt.  Good news is they work really really well for the screen - I can SEEEEE again!  But distance is a strain.  He said they would be, but it wasn't really noticeable when he was doing the testing.  Question is, is it "good" strain or bad?  Dropped into Frank and Karen's after work to taste a few of their growlers, and see their Titanic and Colosseum.  Epic!!  Leftover yellow curry for dinner and Fantasia 2000.

Saturday.  Slept relatively well.  Busy day doing All The Things.  Got lots done.  Did a Bunnings run and got a shiny new toilet seat.

Also started the section box of the Lego Titanic.  Probably exactly while it was sinking 111 year ago.  Episode 6 of Boba Fett and 4.5 of Death in Paradise.

Eat the fridge week dinner

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Woke up around 3 for ages, then broken sleep.  More of doing All The Things.  Mostly culling down the cruise "people" photos and sorting them out to send to people.  Did some music but for too long, which put me behind schedule for photos and blogging before dinner.  I also bought iMazing.  Purely to save me the drama of fixing the timestamps on my pngs and movs.  And it randomly not copying files.  And then found a very happy side effect.  I use IrfanView to resize my photos into a "working" copy.  Usually it takes *forever* to resize my phone photos.  Been having issues for quite a few years.  But the files copied off with iMazing resize at lightning speed - same as the Canon and phone photos from years past.  So that's nice.  Also with iMazing, looking at the "file system" view is a lot quicker than the Photos view (I have nearly 40000 photos so it takes *forever* to load), but it's not as nice to look at.  There's just not enough damned TIME.  I need to retire.  Kiev for dinner, then Crown.  Watched a bit more of Avatar, then talked to the brother type person then the mother type person, so didn't finish it.  Oh well.

Sunday.  2nd.  Backdating because life got in the way.  

Monday.  Woke up at dentist time, barely got any more sleep.  So it was a zombie day.  Went to a new optometrist at lunch.  The dude is actually the son of the optometrist I saw a couple of times when I first moved to Canberra.  He spent a good while testing my vision and coming up with a prescription, optimised for screen distance.  But parking in Dickson sure sux donkey balls.  $3/hour!  In the suburbs!!  Gross.  After the optometrist it was getting really late and I was starving, so went through maccas drive through, but there I sat.  FOR 16 MINUTES!!  Pretty much just after I got there the line just stopped.  Fricken sigh.  After work I went into town to pick up the sweetie and we had dinner at Kinn Thai which was very nice - first time in over three years - we were last there just before the pandemic hit.  

Chicken Pad See Iw and Chili jam cripsy pork at Kinn Thai

Got a couple of days of geotagging done in the evening, although was a bit dangerous doing it so tired, likely to make mistakes.

Tuesday.  So went to be early (like 20:30), but didn't get to sleep til after 22:30, and then awake from 3:45 for ages.  *sigh*  Cleaning day at work.  Cooked a salmon curry out of last month's Coles magazine which was delicious.

More geotagging in the evening (and morning too).

Wednesday.  Got to sleep ok, but then was awake half the night.  Sigh.  Spent all morning deleting things which is always fun.  And worked with Neil on some rules.  Pizza for dinner.  Fighting with my phone randomly changing time zones is making geotagging painful and is driving me mental.  And windows is dumb too.  Say I have some jpgs on my computer that I've backed up to an external drive.  If I copy those files to the NAS for storage, and then run the backup again from the NAS to the external drive, it'll recopy every single damned vertically rotated file again.  But just the vertical ones.  So fricken retarded.  

At least I can get these whenever I want now!

Although Champion Chicken and Tea is DUMB because they won't sell a single drumstick.  You have to buy two.  They have a single one on the boards for $3, but that's as an addition to a burger.  So I said screw that and went next door to KFC to get a piece of chicken.  Hate.

Thursday.  Crap sleep again.  Sigh.  But did have a somewhat productive day getting things done and having discussions with people about design decisions.  

Friday.  Good Friday.  Well maybe not for Jesus a couple of thousand years ago.  I actually slept reasonably well for a change.  It was cold and wet and miserable and I literally didn't set foot outside the house all day.  The phone changing time zones is making me crazy.  It would often change time zones right after taking a movie file.  And the movie and png files were always correct, it was just the exif data on the photos that would be wrong.  Took All Morning just do do a few things that I had on my todo list.  Then I found the NEXT bug with Apple.  On day 23 of the trip I found the numbers of the files on my computer didn't match up with the numbers on the phones on the phone.

!!!

Apple had literally presented the wrong file names to windows.  In fact 8772 and 8773 were the exact same file.  So all the photos after that, right up til 9999, were a number out (but again, the movs and pngs were fine). 

After lunch I downloaded iMazing, which David has been recommending for ages.  I did some tests with it.  The good news is that the created/modified dates that iMazing shows for files are in fact correct.  It's literally Apple being a dick and presenting the wrong date/times to windows.  Problematic files that wouldn't copy in windows will copy off ok in iMazing.  I did tick "preserve file names" so it wouldn't make up random file names.  The bad news is the times on the files taken in a different time zone didn't transfer as is - they came across with the wrong times on them.  Well that is, the movs and pngs were wrong, photos seemed ok, go figure.  Dunno how that would work during a daylight savings change either.  

In the afternoon there was a big storm so shut everything down and disconnected the computer.  Pulled it all out, cleaned, and reconnected the UPS (the one that died a few years ago, and I tried to buy a new battery for it in February 2022, and it only arrived about a month ago after a lot of back and forth with UPS Solutions (they couldn't get stock from APC)).  Did jigsaw while waiting for storms.  And talked to Mum for a bit.  And more jigsaw.  The poor house battery never got over 25% charged all day.  Leftover chicken and veggies for dinner, Simpsons, Boba Fett, Death in Paradise.  

Oh another thing with iMazing - you can actually see the file system.  And in the photos view, you can see all the files as HEIC.  But every so often I'd see JPGs.  Turns out if you take photos while you are taking a video, they get saved as JPG :)  I couldn't tell in difference in quality between jpgs copied via windows or exported at 95% in iMazing.  Yet iMazing saved files are actually a bit smaller than those saved in windows.  

Saturday.  Awake from ~1:30 til after 5:00.  Then somewhat slept til 8.  Went out for breakfast with the sweetie.  We were going to go to Stella's but it was super crowded and there was a big queue of people and I didn't know if they were queueing for a table or to order food and there were people pushing past in all directions so I noped out of there.  We walked all the way up to 54, but it was closed, so ended up at Cup of Joy.  Which wasn't too bad for a mall cafe. 

We'd put in online orders for the chemist, but they're notorious for just not doing the online orders at all when they're busy, so we went and said, hey we're here.  Hoping to get at least put in the queue (which for the person in front of us they said half an hour).  Then did some food shopping.  We were all set to go for a drive to fill in time, but got our smses about 45 minutes after we went in.  So back to pick up our stuffs.  But it meant we didn't get home til nearly 12.  My entire morning gone :(

I recopied the 1226 misnumbered photos off my phone (this time when I attached it, the phone was presenting the correct numbers).  I finally also got around to CLI-ing exiftool to actually pull out the timezone data from the files, which made it a whole lot easier to tell which ones were wrong, rather than finding which ones were out of order and figuring it out from that.

exiftool.exe -filename -offsettime -T *.jpg > output.txt

Basa bake, potato bake, brussels sprouts for dinner, then watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was super bizarre but also kinda sweet.

Sunday.  He is risen!  Slept ok for a nice change.  Processed all the photos I'd had to recopy - resize, file, fix times, geotag.  And jigsaw.  I wasted a whole heap of time looking at the design of the Epcot ball.  It's based on a pentakis dodecahedron, like I've made here.  If you look at my little model, the Epcot ball is like that, except every one of those 60 triangles is divided into *64* little triangles!!  Actually that makes it a Class II 8 frequency icosahedron.  Like this.  You asked.  And each one of those has a three-triangle pyramid on top of it.  Total on the Epcot ball is 3840 points made up of a total of 11520 triangles.  Well it would be if there weren't supports and doors and crap cut into it.  I pointed exiftool at my iphone "masters" directory.  None of those had random time zone changes.  All perfect.  It was just the holiday photos that were all stuffed up.  Well other than the two photos I took a few days after I got home which were taken in Houston time.  Did some music for first time in a couple of months.  Chicken kiev and veggies for dinner and then watched 127 Hours.

Monday.  Woke up after 1 with hurty and stayed awake til after 4 with added insomnia, and then restless sleep til 7:30.  Bit of house stuff.  Wasted half the morning solving the maze on the finished jigsaw.  More house stuff in the afternoon.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers thinking maybe exercise and sun would help with sleep.  Hmm.  But then it was too late to do photos and blogging before dinner.  Made another yellow curry for dinner, and then some more The Crown.