This morning I labelled all the photos I took of all the stuff Mike is going to try and sell.  Still need to get them to him..

After that alternated between sorting Lego and working on the trivia night.  Although sorting became a problem because I had to make an emergency emptying of some of the cardboard boxes it came in due to flooding in our garage (which hasn't happened since we got our guttering fixed).  I knew it rained on and off during the night last night but I had no idea how heavy it was.  We got a couple of streams coming through the garage but fortunately no other damage.  Even late this afternoon the creek at the bottom of the hill was still in full flood.  Amazing, considering how low the lake has been after several weeks of no rain.  Typical of Australia though - droughts and flooding rains.

So yeah, also got three rounds done for the trivia night (only another seven to go..).

This afternoon did some food shopping.  Watched Enterprise over dinner then went back to Lego sorting.

And in other stories of life and death.. Chrissie hasn't popped yet.  And just found out that kid killed in Palmerston the other night was the son of someone I know :(:(

Some time ago Kit gave her blue tongue lizard, Stumpy, to Chrissie.  With everything going on in her life at the moment she redelegated him to me.

So now we have a lizard in our front entranceway :)

But that meant clearing out all the clutter that's been in the front entranceway for at least five years.  Mike offered to have a go at selling it all (which is why it was all still there - I just hadn't gotten around to photographing, packaging, weighing and listing everything).  So we did a trade.

I spent all morning photographing (almost) everything before Mike took it all.  After which time I was hot and sweaty and the cooler was doing nothing.  So spent most of the afternoon and evening sorting Vic's Lego.  

Tonight I watched two episodes of Building Giants - one on the cruise ship Meraviglia which was awesome (built in the same shipyard as the Queen Mary 2, and a lot of the same construction techniques), and one on the Copenhagen new metro line which was pretty cool.  And then an episode of Heston's Feasts which was a bit of fun.

Got about five minutes of rain which was awesome but not nearly enough to make up for having no rain for the past few weeks..

Pretty quiet day today.  Did a bit of jigsaw.  Took a few things out to Lifeline and the Green Shed.  Unfortunately came back with almost as much.  Whoops.

Tonight we had leftovers and watched Discovery, Good Place, and War Horse, which I'd last seen on the plane to Europe in 2012..

This blog is fifteen years old today.  Fifteen!!  I've been blogging for a third of my life!

Quiet day today.  Mostly alternating between scraping grout in the shower and trying to get email inboxes under control. 

Also, the kitchen is probably the cleanest its been since we moved in.  All the cupboards under the bench have been cleaned out and decluttered, and the entire benchtop cleaned.

The sweetie cooked barbeque pork for dinner (with a nice chinese bbq marinade), roast beetroots (from Serena's garden) and a peach crumble (also from Serena's garden).  Then we watched Discovery, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Twenty-four years since the Como bushfires; David Bowie would have turned seventy-one.

Wow this has certainly been a busy year, and a very very social one. I left writing up the friends and family section til last because it just seemed to go on forever and ever!

Our year began at home, with Ben and EffanC over for nibbles and a small party. Annie and the family came over the next day for chaos and Turkish food. Saw Scott and Kerry and the kids on the first day back at work before they went home.

We had one holiday this year - a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 out of Hong Kong (with a couple of days in Macau beforehand). I was super excited about it, and it lived up to expectations. Although I felt like we didn't quite belong there, on account of not being retired highly paid executives. We never made it to Queensland this year - things were just too *complicated*. I did do two day trips to Sydney to inspect my flat. And there was a work trip to Melbourne for two days.

At work I swapped teams after not quite fitting in with the old team (I'm too dumb for that team!). Still doing much the same work, but with different technology. The project I joined had been going for about two years, and I figure I have about two years of work to clean up the mess that has been made! I had a little bit of weekend work doing upgrades to various things and monitoring of some events. The majority of my new section is in Melbourne, so we went down in September for a two-day planning session. The highlight of the trip was the amazing flight down, and catching up with David twice. We ran a trivia night in March. Unfortunately the winning table weren't going to be around to run the next one, so we asked the second-place getters if they'd do it. They said yes, but never did it. So I'll probably run another one in February or March. We had a whiskey night in June which was a bit of fun. I went with the sweetie to SplunkLive! and I'm *still* bitter that a big data company couldn't get the distribution of tshirt sizes right. We had a DAIS video night in August, as it had been way too long since the last one. Finally, I ran our annual floor barbeque at the lake for forty people and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

I was pretty healthy this year. I had a bit of a cold in February, and then another one picked up on the Queen Mary 2 (it was going around the entire ship), but after that I didn't get any more colds all year. The other thing we got on the way home from our holiday was a bout of gastro, which hit Stu just after we got home, and me a day or so later (although I seemed to only get a fairly mild case of it). I went to the dentist after one year instead of twenty and will probably keep going regularly now. I did battle with insomnia quite a few times during the year. Usually for no apparent reason, although it tended to be associated with a sore spine and/or a brain that wouldn't shut up. I rage-quit on Stu's bed earlier in the year and more often than not sleep in the spare room. That room has the bed Yvonne gave me in 2005 which has a much firmer mattress than Stu's. I don't get a sore spine *as much* in that bed, and my restless legs don't play up nearly as much there either (don't know why that is - different fabrics??). We've been meaning to go shopping for a new king size bed, but we just haven't gotten around to it yet.

We saw a lot of F&C (EffanC) this year which was really nice. Went to their place a number times and had them over here as well. Also saw Scott with them a few times. We saw quite a lot of Kit, with various combinations of Serena, Ben, Sarah, Anita and Pete. David came to stay in January, April, August and December, and Mum came to visit in February and August. Only saw a little bit of Annie the family - they came over for a Turkish feast in January, we went to their place for dinner in March, had them over here in April, their place for cake for Noah's birthday, and them here for Christmas dessert. Saw even less of Potty and the family - seeing them at the beginning of the year before they went home, Kerry brought over sick kids in July, then everyone came at Christmas (twice). We met Chrissie's new boyfriend in January, and by July they were living together with a baby on the way. I've gotten to go to a few of the ultrasounds which has been pretty cool. They came over for our first hanami party, and we had Zac come and stay in December so Chris and Mike could celebrate their anniversary. Nat and Andrew came over for our second hanami party, but sadly that was the only time we saw them all year. We had Damien and Amanda over for dinner in May, and went with them to Olive at Hawker in July, and saw just Damien for drinks in August. James and Rachel came down for a cake decorating course in May and they stayed with us which was nice. James also came down for work in November and we caught up for dinner at Bella Vista. We met up with Jenn at Chong Co in January, and had Jenn and Nick over in June for dinner. Jenn was getting set for a foodie trip to Mexico, which she went on later in the year and we got copies of her travelogue which was pretty cool. Had dinner with Luc and Cynthia and the boys when they came down in January, had @Chrispycon and Anne over for dinner in June, went to a barbeque at @CLBradley's in June, had dinner with Luc when he was down for work in September, and went over to Lachie's for darts (which I was crap at) and Jenga (which I didn't lose at) in November.

At "the club" we went to a couple of swim nights, and several socials at the club. One of them we did pea and ham soup, and another we did Christmas in July for forty people.

Pretty quiet year for the fish. I got some more danios for the two foot, and a couple of bristlenose catfish for my big tank and the two foot. We did get another tank from Chrissie as well which is quite a nice little tank. In the big angel tank is the angel, two big (probably female) danios, a cory, the bristlenose I bought, and a big bristlenose I got off Chris. In the upstairs two foot there's five danios, four rummy nose tetras and a bristlenose. In the little tank from Chris are her two clown loaches. They're really too big for that tank but haven't decided where to put them yet. It could really use a bristlenose as well, as the tank gets direct sunlight so there's lots of algae starting to grow. Downstairs there's four danios and the platy I got off Chris two years ago. Stu has two guppies in the little tank on his desk, and heaps of fish in his four foot. We bought expensive LED lights for two of the tanks instead of regular fluoros, but one of them died after only eight months which is very disappointing. Hoping the other one we bought doesn't die as quickly.

I didn't get any new Lego this year, although I did get a Nanoblocks Empire State Building for Christmas. I did a bunch of jigsaws throughout the year including a very cool 3D one of the Sydney Opera House. I finally assembled the 24000 piece "Life" jigsaw, because I figured I *had* to before I could get going on the 40320 piece "Memorable Moments" Disney jigsaw! I had fun with papercraft as well, making some Villarceau circles, completing a geodesic dodecahedron and two geodesic octahedra (or hexahedra), making a four frequency geodesic icosahedron which is pretty spectacular (and I had this hanging from the roof at work for a while which is probably how they noticed ceiling cat), and an icosidodecahedron and a geodesic icosidodecahedron.

For some reason I always mention the weather in my year in review posts. This year seemed quite cold in winter, but the pool only froze over a couple of times. We had hail and snow on the same day in August which was pretty exciting. October seemed like a very cold month, and as per usual December had its fair share of cold days as well. Not that I'm complaining, I'd prefer it to be cold than hot. Our evaporative cooler works very well, although I swear last summer was the most humid summer in Canberra ever (the evaporative cooler doesn't work very well when it's humid). This summer we've used it a little and it's quite lovely. I'm even noticing a temperature inversion now - often it's cooler upstairs than downstairs! But the best part is being able to use it on fan only to simply bring cool air into the house once it's cooler outside than in. In the past it could be quite cool outside, but still hot inside simply because the air is so still and there's no crossflow ventilation. Having the fan bring it in is wonderful.

At the end of last year I was considering getting a backpack vacuum cleaner because I *hate* dragging a barrel vacuum cleaner around. David suggested we get a cordless one instead. I was a bit reluctant because they are essentially glorified dustbusters, and all the ones we saw had rollers that just tangle up hair. But we ended up getting one anyway. It sat unused for probably six months, but I've finally gotten into the habit of doing a room or two per day, and now the house is actually getting fully vacuumed every week. Amazing! Our Cisco switch died while we were on holidays in March. And we never did get the NAS working again with it - it's still going through a little old 100Mb switch. Our home internet has always been bad here, and getting steadily worse. When we got back from holidays it was completely unusable. We called Internode to have a look. They got Telstra to have a look, and confirmed a problem with the line something like 400m away. They fixed this and things did improve somewhat, but our internet is still painfully slow (2Mb down). Netflix seems to buffer relatively well but Stan is abysmal. We're hoping NBN will improve things a little, but given that our node is like a kilometre away I doubt it's going to be amazing. My blog and hosting/email was offline for a few days while we were on holidays. Possibly a DOS, but don't know if it was ever explained. Then Vic sold everything off and retired. I'm wondering how long it takes them to figure out this hosting is a freebie and either shut it down or make me start paying for it. I really really need to move this blog off, but it's such a huge beast it's going to be very difficult. Even backing up the site via FTP takes a couple of days. I might have more luck tarring up the whole thing into one file which would transfer more quickly and efficiently, but I'm hampered by not having any shell access. And I couldn't find the perl script I used to have which lets you run commands interactively via the website (yes I know - super dangerous, which is why it's not online, and hence I can't find it). We had dramas with our dvd players. The video on my old dvd recorder kept dropping out, and it was getting worse. The PS3 dvd part stopped working years ago. I even had issues with my old Toshiba. So in the end we spent $80 on a new player that will play everything including media on usb stick. The remote is faulty - any time you press a button it fires off the action multiple times. But we got it working with our Harmony remote, so in the end didn't bother to swap it (especially since JB HiFi price matched it with Big W). The old Android of Stu's that I used for Ingress got so old that the Play Store wouldn't work anymore, which meant I couldn't update Ingress, so the thing essentially became a brick. Maybe I could still use it as a media player, since my phone doesn't have space for that sort of thing. I upgraded my five year old iPhone to 10.3.3 without any dramas. It's faster after unlocking than iOS 9 was which is pretty cool.

Around the house, we discovered our shower was leaking, probably from old cracked grout in the corner. We scraped it back (mostly) but still haven't regrouted/siliconed. It's on the todo list for our staycation! The snifter valve exploded on our hot water system, but I still haven't gotten around to calling up Aquamax. It's on the todo list for our staycation! We had a heap of pool dramas this year. At the beginning of the year there was way too much stabiliser (sunscreen) which meant the chlorine didn't work at all. Got that under control with a bunch of water changes (dear Adelaide: you're welcome), but then this summer the pool has been unbuffered and unstable and keeps going green, even with adding plenty of chlorine. Sad times. Possibly the pH has been too high, so have adjusted that, vacuumed the last batch of algae to waste, raised the total alkalinity and added a bunch of chlorine and *hopefully* it'll settle down now. The tenants of my flat in Sydney moved out after seven years, and the place needed to be fully renovated, costing me something like $16000 :( Did two trips to see the before and after. Good news is it's getting a lot more rent now that it's all shiny again.

We didn't eat out too much this year, and when we did it was generally when meeting up with other people. We did go to Bella Vista a few times - for our anniversary, for my birthday, and when James came to visit. We only went to Dumpling Inn a couple of times because they were closed for much of the year. Both times were with Chris, Mike and Zac. We also tried The Scholar in Dickson with them, but I wasn't impressed with the very slow service. Also wasn't impressed with Chinese Inn at Kippax where we went for Sarah's birthday. Went to Hero Sushi in the city a couple of times, the first experience a lot better than the second. Went to Malaysian Chapter with Cath and Scott for Stu's birthday, and Chong Co with Jenn. Only had brunch out a couple of times this year, once at Market St Eats at Belconnen markets and once at Gus' Place. We often have lunch at Saigon Streetfood when doing our food shopping, or sometimes Ali Baba or more recently Alaska Seafood. We did get to try out a few new places too - The Courtyard Restaurant at Mercure with Luc and Cynthia when they were in town, Olive at Hawker with Damien and Amanda, and Black Fire in Braddon with Luc. We tried out Mills and Grills pizzas this year which are pretty good, and Stu loves the karaage chicken pizza from Pizza Capers. And finally I went with Neil to the Brokenwood Wine dinner at Monster Kitchen and Bar in Hotel Hotel.

I tried a few new recipes this year. Lemon ginger chicken from a Coles magazine was very nice, beef cheeks from Not Quite Nigella was also pretty good, and Jamie's five ingredient Asian fishcakes were simple but nice. Stu cooked Scotch eggs a couple of times, and pork larb a few times. I had a go at fondue, but didn't follow a recipe so the cheese split. Chrissie gave me a book of fondue recipes, and I got a proper fondue set, but we've yet to have another go at it. Kit and Serena's gardens provided an excess of produce that we happily used up, and we got to eat some young roosters that Kit had raised and processed. I made Anzac biscuits on Anzac Day, caramel slice at least three times, a mint rocky road and a cheesecake.

Didn't see any theatre or shows or exhibitions this year.

The only movie we saw at a cinema was Silence - in Hong Kong!

Stu likes to watch tv while we eat dinner. I feel like being forced to sit in one place for three quarters of an hour is pretty stressful, especially on weekday evenings. Having said that, some shows are better than others and with some shows it didn't feel so much of a burden.

• Sherlock - season four
• Fuller House - season two
• Star Trek: The Original Series - finishing up what we started last year
• Star Trek: Voyager - the entire thing, which took most of the year and was the most stressful to have to watch
• Homeland - season five
• Black Adder Goes Forth - borrowed off Annie years ago but hadn't gotten around to finishing, watched this on my computer
• Monty Python - season four - borrowed off DC years ago but hadn't gotten around to finishing, watched this on my computer
• Air Crash Investigations - various episodes watched online while doing other things on my computer
• Australian Survivor - season two of the current incarnation - the only commercial tv we watched all year
• Fuller House - season three (in two parts)
• Dad's documentaries - stuff he'd taped off tv over the years. I've been working my way through them while I do jigsaws downstairs in the summer months
• The Good Place - season one and the first half of season two
• Rake - season four

Books Read

• Tales of Two Cities, various short stories
• Bones Never Lie, by Kathy Reichs
• Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader
• The Barefoot Investor, by Scott Pape
• ET: The Book of the Green Planet, by William Kotzwinkle
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nets, by Ken Kesey
• No Place to Hide, by Glenn Greenwald

Other stuff

• Kit had baby bunnies but Vicki killed them by "playing" with them
• Neil won Ali Baba's "Chance to win $1000000" - but that's all it was - a chance to win. He didn't actually win the $1000000.
• Went to the Multicultural Festival with Chrissie for beer and meat (and potatoes) on a stick, while remembering Dad from three years earlier
• Had to do some actual clothes shopping for formal and other nice clothes for the cruise. Material Pleasures was awful, City Chic was much more successful, then again so was Vinnies and it was a lot cheaper
• Went to the farmers markets in April but I find it too stressful and it's too early for Stu so we don't really like going
• Stopped going to Coles at Jamison for the most part, because Jamison couldn't be arsed putting in enough trolley return bays around the car park
• Made a classic 80s space guy costume for Kit's 30th birthday party
• Had a brief play with IMosaic
• Setup a blog for the Queen Mary 2 with photos of the ship
• Went to Shepherd's Lookout and down to the river with Kit
• Paid off our mortgage
• Went to Hall Markets with Kit and Pete
• Got access to my old CIA mailbox and downloaded seven years of mail
• Setup a blog to compare Canberra between 1986 and 2016, sent it to the RiotACT but they didn't link to it. Johnboy would have.  Just sayin'.
• Had to be official photographer for Roz's 60th at The Abbey which I found very stressful
• Saw some of Kit's chicks hatching
• Kit had more baby bunnies but they died, we don't know why
• Had my democracy sausage photo feature in Atlas Obscura 
• Got long service leave
• Accidentally bought Twisties that make your tongue turn blue. I couldn't eat them. Ewww. Stu said it wasn't the only thing that turned blue..!

Where were we?

Tuesday we went over to wish Noah a happy birthday.  Really don't see enough of those guys.

Thursday night we got invited over to EffanC's for dinner.  This time Kate P was there which was quite nice.

Friday was the second big work party which was all very pleasant, although I wasn't game enough to ask for leftovers this time haha.  In the evening David came up and we went out to Ikea so he could get some bookshelves.  Hint: going to Ikea on a Friday night is *much* more civilised than going on the weekend!  Went to Shane and Jessica's new place in Queanbeyan afterwards and had pizza for dinner.

Saturday Serena and Ben and Sarah came over for a Christmas pool party.  Which was good but all morning was doing food prep and all afternoon was in the pool and all evening was pool and watching Life of Brian.  So it was a nice day but did take up half the weekend.

Sunday morning David went home fairly early to get home in time for a thing in Wagga Wagga.  We had a bit of a lazy morning, went out for lunch and to do some food shopping.  Then Chris, Mike and Zac came over for a while.  And suddenly it was dinner time and my entire weekend was gone.

Last two days have been winding down somewhat at work which is kinda nice, except for when you find yourself with nothing much interesting to do and resort to clearing out your inbox...

Ok not literally.  But I did need to put a jumper on today.  And I feel like I may need an extra doona tonight.  Yipe.

Where were we?

Wednesday James was in town for work so we caught up at Bella Vista for dinner.

Friday night we watched a bit of tv, then I put up our Christmas tree.

Saturday was pretty much all just house stuff and food shopping.  Didn't have time to do any of my jigsaw but did fully dismantle the Life jigsaw back into baggies (we only dismantled it enough to get into bags on assembly day). 

In the evening Anita came over and she talked all night.  Did a super yummy pork belly for dinner and got plenty of leftovers.  (I did burn the top slightly when grilling it at the end).

Oh did I mention I had insomnia *again* on Friday night?  This time I woke up at 3:30am and never got back to sleep.  After getting up a couple of times to eat something because I was hungry, I finally gave up around 6am.  So I had a relatively early night Saturday night because I was exhausted.

Sunday was a bit of house stuff and a fair bit of jigsaw.  I also went cherry picking.  This is the biggest crop of cherries I've ever gotten off our tree.  They don't taste super great, and the dark purple juice will stain your whole mouth purple, but hey, phytochemicals!

In the evening we went over to EffanC's for cheese for dinner (yumm ;) ) and to watch The Room.  Yes, that one.  Ok I'd never heard of it, but everyone said it was supposed to be like one of the worst films ever made.  They certainly weren't wrong.  It was terrible.  It was so terrible it was *hilarious*.  Fun times :)

In May 2011 I saw a 24000 piece jigsaw in Games Capital called "Life" and knew I had to get it.  It was once the World's Largest Jigsaw, although by the time I saw it it was relegated to second place behind Ravensburger's Double Retrospect 32000 piece jigsaw.

I purchased the jigsaw shortly afterwards for $385 from the Games Capital.

I started it immediately on the dining room table.  The jigsaw was split into four 6000-piece sections.  One section covered most of the dining room table - in fact it hung off the edges just a little bit!

I finished part one at the end of June 2011.

I had a break from it then, before working on the second section through February 2012.

I had another break then, before starting the fourth section in February 2013, finishing up in March 2013.  I did it this way because I didn't want to finish up on the blue corner which other people had said was quite tricky.  I moved downstairs for this section which gave me a bit more room to work with, but even then it just went off the edges of the table.

I finally started the third (and final) section in February 2014 and finished it in March 2014.

The puzzle is actually twenty-four identical 999 piece squares.  I laid each one of those squares on butchers paper I had leftover from my move to Canberra in 2007.  Then I stacked them - 24 high!

And there they sat for three and a half years.

Whoops.

Anyways with my next purchase I needed to finally assemble the jigsaw and dismantle it.  So on the weekend, I finally did it!!  I took it into work to photograph it from the floor above.

How fricken cool is that!  The middle bit is reflecting the light a bit but other than that it turned out really well.  It took probably twenty minutes to half an hour to assemble the twenty four sections.  And then another thirty to forty minutes to disassemble back into the 999 piece sections and put them into individual baggies.  If (when) I do this again, it'll be a lot easier, with twenty four small jigsaws to do instead of four (or one!) large one.

Thanks to Daniel for helping with it!  And I was glad that a few people got to see it - Connor, Ward and Chuck all saw it assembled and thought it was suitably cool :)

I've been watching the BBC series The Human Body hosted by Robert Winston for the past little while while doing jigsaws.  Tonight (while sorting the Beauty and the Beast section of my new jigsaw) was the death episode.  Which had me thinking about death.  And why are we here?  And what is the point of my life?  And I don't have time to do all the things I want to do.  

Sigh.

Friday night we watched The Last Samurai, which we'd last seen in 2012.  

Saturday morning was just houseworkey stuff.

In the afternoon we headed out to the club.  G&A did a great pork roast for dinner.  Later there was epic Jenga which I didn't lose at :)

Going back a step.  The other week I saw this in the window of Games Capital:

OMFG!!!

I totally want one!  The price was obscured, but it looked like $500.  Given that I paid $385 for the Life jigsaw (24000 pieces), this didn't seem unreasonable.

So anyway.  Stu said I could get it if i could clear enough space in the dungeon to do it down there.  So guess what I spent a couple of hours Sunday afternoon doing?  I should have taken some before and after photos, it made a huge difference.

In the evening we got pizza and watched Short Circuit (getting through movies I've bought on DVD but haven't watched - this one I'd bought in 2004).  

!!

Whoops.

So Monday morning I called the Games Capital to check if they still had the jigsaw in stock, and if so how much it was.  Yes they said.  $1500 they said.

Fricken. OUCH.

That's like $150 for each of the 4000 piece sections.  Which, considering we paid $150 for the piece of crap 5000 colours jigsaw (which was appalling in quality and was even missing a piece!  I've yet to rant about that here), is not *completely* ridiculous, but still...

Anyway, so I had a sad on Monday morning.  We finished stacking Stu's books (badly) into shelves, clearing the floor and a table.  I set up the tv (which we hadn't even plugged in since we replaced the upstairs one like a year and a half ago) and set myself up with a jigsaw and did that for a while in the afternoon.  

I could get used to three day weekends.