Tuesday.  5th.  Took me a while on Monday to get to sleep.  Still woke up early though.  Did my music practise in the morning.  Busy day, but I don't even know where most of it went.  Did washing up at lunch time and weeding after work.  Stu cooked dinner - creamy mushroom and chicken fettucini.  Nothing of use in the evening though, just jigsaw and rss feed reading and feeling blah.  Did the washing up.  Again.  Watched some Lie to Me.  Found that "print screen" started working again.  WTF is it with windows 11 that things just stop and start working at random (still haven't had time to fight with the scanner that just stopped working a couple of weeks ago).

I also raged at All The Things.

For example.  People complaining about fortnightly rubbish pickups (that have recycling and food/green waste pickups).  I just don't *get it*.  Growing up we didn't have any recycling (to begin with) and just one little metal bin for a family of four.  Nowadays we put out like one bag of rubbish a week.  We're lucky to put out the rubbish bin once a month, and then it's rarely more than half full.  What are people even doing now?  Putting literally everything into the rubbish bin, including all their recycling and food waste?  Maybe they only eat packaged food and nothing fresh.  No idea.  Like I said, I just don't *get it*.

Also.  If they want more people living in higher density buildings, there needs to be bigger units at a "reasonable" price.  These days the only units you can get are *tiny* little two bedroom units, or maybe a three storey penthouse - usually for a *lot* more than a house of the same size.  People probably have to get a house because they need the indoor space.  I'm sure plenty of families would be happy to live in a unit if you could get a decent size one without paying twice as much for it. Far out, we'd be much happier in a unit because we wouldn't have a yard to try and keep weed free.  But try getting anything the size of our place in a unit.  Good luck with that.

Also.  If they want more people to use electric cars, fricken standardise on power connectors.  At the moment it's like a Beta vs VHS war or HD-DVD vs Bluray.  And an electric car is fine if you have two cars and one is the city car and one is for holidays.  Good luck travelling anywhere much in Australia outside the big cities with an electric car.  Much of Australia is simply inaccessible without petrol at the moment.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy day but at least I got stuff done.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Cooked up some veggies to have with lefover pork for dinner.  Went through half of my Eurasia blog photos tweaking the colour balance a little (my old camera had way too much red and not enough blue) and cropping as necessary.

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep but still woke up super early (like 5am).  Ok day.  *At* work blerf.  It's noisy and distracting in the office.  Drinks was good, but ours was literally the only table there - noone else was there!  Too much covid in the office I guess.  Watched the first episode of Black Books.  Had a raging battle with the printer that is now jamming literally every page.  It puts toner down but then jams before fusing it.  Ended up angry and depressed.  Also had some Spar pizzas for dinner because Chris didn't have any Dr Oc.  Definitely not good.

Friday.  Busy day, had fun making up dashboards for some testing we're doing in a few weeks.  Chicken kiev for dinner (the Steggles ones are nowhere near as good as the Ingham ones).  Watched a couple of episodes of Gunther's Anatomy series.

Saturday.  A day of All The Things.  House, jigsaw, photos.  

This magpie came down after I'd been weeding for a while to see if I'd disturbed any bug noms for it

We dug Stumpy out cause we hadn't seen him in days.

Dinner was the last of the pork, refried in jelly, with some leftover rice from during the week and cabbage and kewpie sesame dressing

Watched The King's Speech in the evening, which we hadn't seen since we saw it at Stu's dad's place in 2013.

Today.  Rinse and repeat really.  Although mostly getting Eurasia photos sorted and ready for the blog.  Basa fillets for dinner, which will be in next week's post.

Happy tree is being obscured by another tree.. doh!

Third episode of Black Books.  19:30 is bed time right?

Sunday.  27th, not backdating although late.  Where were we.  I left off with hints of pork crackling and tomatoes.  Well the tomatoes were epic awesome!  It was all I could do to not just scoff them all in one sitting.

The pork crackling was ok, but not as thin and crispy as doing it on the meat

Monday.  Slept ok.  Did my quota of photo culling before work, which gives me hope I'll actually get this done.  Last day of being Neil hurrah!  I fixed a mail problem in the afternoon that had been there since December, so that was good.  Did nine minutes of weeding at lunch.  Better than nothing I guess.  Music after work and Stu made a nice salad of lettuce, cucumber, spring onion, some of the slow roasted tomatoes, minced fresh garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper and bacon bits I cooked on the weekend, to go with salmon I cooked.  

I was trying to do photo culling, but the sweetie was trying to print stuff for uni, but the printer was being a big fat poo.  It was flashing all its lights and once so we had to battle trying to get around than, but then it was continually getting jammed, so it was super annoying because I couldn't concentrate on photos because I had to stop every two seconds to unjam the printer.  So I got cranky and Stu got cranky.  We just want a quiet life and AND WHY THE F@#% WON'T THINGS JUST WORK!?!?!?  I gave up on photo culling after a while.  Then I was wondering why I don't seem to have any photos of the Walkie Talkie building in London.  Turns out it wasn't even built until after the last time I was there.. (which was ten years ago!)  I think I've got photos of its lift core under construction.  For some reason I thought it was built in the 70s!  I really need to get back to London some time..

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep (nearly midnight) but then slept ok.  More photo culling in the morning, now only three days of final culls to go (Leavesden Studios, Brussells and Legoland Billund).  Ok day, not being Neil yayy.  Approvals came much too late to get much cleaning done.  Did an hours weeding after work but no music oh well.  Chicken caesar salad for dinner.  After dinner I finished photo culling!!!  I was worried I wasn't going to get it done, but I did.  Now just need to process the photos and get them on the blog.

Wednesday.  Slept fairly well.  Did some tweaking of dashboards for our workflow.  Salmon and salad for dinner again (probably should have bought two pack not a four pack).  Blogged the Balloon Fiesta. Into the third (final) season of Lie to Me.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  Started thinking about another firewall migration.  Finally finished the salmon heh.  Watched random stuff on YouTube including Robin Williams on Don Lane in 1979.  There was a quote from him along the lines of (this is a direct quote but it's a bit rambly) "to keep performing live .. it keeps me alive.. and just.. it just.. keeps contact with people is very important, cause if not you get just get dead you don't take chances anymore, and for me that's very important."  Kinda sad really.

Friday.  Slept ok.  I wonder how much of my insomnia is dietary.  I've been *trying* to eat better.  Not sure it's helping or not.  Probably salmon and veggies is going to sit better than pizza or kfc...  Ok day, cleaning in the afternoon (always takes a lot longer than you think).  David arrived and we had beef cheeks for dinner.  It doesn't photograph well but it's oh so delicious.

Watched Zero Hour! with David in the evening.  It was kinda law that he had to see it :)  We also saw a bunch of his holiday photos/videos (before I called it cause I was exhausted and needed sleep).

Saturday.  Slept ok, although lately every time I wake up I have numb hands which is super annoying.  Did a chemist/groceries run in the morning and did some jigsaw, as well as finishing watching David's holiday photos/videos.  Made a lemon cheesecake in the afternoon, and did a pork roast for dinner (felt like I was on my feet most of the day).  Watched 6 Underground in the evening.  Eh, Michael Bay, and very violent.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Canberra Airport Open Day.  Will save that for another post.  Came home utterly exhausted.  The sweetie ordered Chong Co for dinner and I had a super early night.

My phone has better eyesight that me.  Spot the mistake :)  This is our country's $50 note.  Silly really.

David helped with the village on Saturday.

Duck salad and pork belly - our favourites

Monday.  Today.  Slept ok but awake pretty early.  Got two loads of washing done before work.  More firewall migration planning in between all the things.  After work brought in all the washing and did some weeding and then did music while Stu cooked dinner - a pasta bolognase which was very nice.  Treehouse of Horror XXII in The Simpsons - we're into season 23 now.  Then phone/camera downloading and blogging.  I still haven't made the bed or put away the washing though.  Trying to cram an entire weekend into before and after work.  Doesn't work.  Too stressed.  Too much to do to have time for work.  Sigh.

Sunday.  20th.  Stu cooked dinner - pumpkin and sage ravioli with burnt butter and salad.  Delicious!  Then watched random flashmob videos to keep me awake until something resembling bed time.

Monday.  I actually had a shower Sunday night on account of getting all sweaty in the garden earlier.  So I was actually fairly relaxed in bed.  For the first hour.  Where I still didn't get to sleep.  At 22:30 the restless legs kicked in.  At 23:00 I had a meltdown.  How can you be so tired that you can't actually sleep.  Sigh.  Then woke up at 6, so was zombie tired.  All day.  Plus I had a sore ring finger.  I thought I might have slept on it funny but I think I actually strained it (I bent the nail back on that finger weeding on Sunday).  Struggled to concentrate all day.  Music after work, leftovers for dinner then had on more flashmob videos to keep my brain awake enough to do photo culling.

Tuesday.  Slept somewhat better, although it still took a while for me to get to sleep and then I woke up at 5am.  More being Neil (in Cairns now!) and documenting cleanup work that needs doing.  The backs of my legs still hurt from all the exertion on Sunday.  Leftovers for dinner then lots of photo culling.  Got frustrated at yet another barking dog in the neighbourhood.  Sigh.

Really need to put Bambi away

Wednesday.  Slept ok, but then a day of non stop messages and phone calls and meetings and stoopid so didn't really get anything useful done.  Leftovers for dinner, then completed a first pass cull of all my Eurasia 2012 photos.

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Nothing much in the morning then went DND for a bit to get some work done in the afternoon which was super helpful.  Got back into the swing of things with some doco.

This is the entire Disney behemoth stacked.  Each of the ten sections is cut into four and layered on packing paper from our move in 2007.  So it's forty layers thick.

Friday.  Woke up at 1:40 with the start of hurty.  Took some painkillers.  An hour layer it was worse so maxed out on painkillers but they never fully helped and didn't get back to sleep til after 5.  Sigh.  So yet another zombie day.  Did finish the cleanup doco though.  The Chrises might have talked me into a Herbert's lunch.

This cider was pretty good - nice and strong and not sweet

Prawn and chorizo skewers, and brown sugar chicken skewers

Watched a couple of episodes of Autopsy in the evening.  Well I did, the sweetie went and worked on his essay :)

Saturday.  Slept relatively well, so alternated between house, photo culling and jigsaw after doing food shopping first thing.  Late in the afternoon we headed out to the club (for the first time in four months!) for the Mexican night by M&M which was amazing as always.  Although I did have flashbacks to earlier life when we couldn't find anyone to sit with and all the "cool kids" were sitting together and I had that epic feeling of rejection that was so familiar to me for such a long time and I might have had a small meltdown.  But Rob came to the rescue so that was nice.  

We finished off the last ever TRBC Tex Mex beer.  I really hope they make some more, it was epic awesome!

Sunset was pretty too

So many yummy things to try!

Had a relatively early night, but still woke up at ~2am til well after 5 (there were still people partying in the shed when I went up to pee).  Slept in a bit but today was pretty much zombie day.  Sigh.  

So today was struggling to get through house stuff and photo stuff (did get a few days fully culled though).  In the afternoon setup to cook a whole bunch of the food I got yesterday.  This should keep us going all week and then some.  There's some tomatoes, plus some mince with garlic, eschallot and bacon, some bacon for having with salads, chicken thighs, some pork crackling (experimenting) and veggies.

You'll have to wait til next week to see the results of this - a whole heap of cherry tomatoes cut in half, drizzled with oil, salt, pepper and herbs and slow roasted for a couple of hours.  So good!!  

I also somehow managed to end up with a completely clean kitchen, and photos downloaded and processed and a blog entry, all before 18:00!  Although no music practise, oh well.

Sunday.  13th.  Roasted up some veggies for dinner and had it with some leftover lamb.  Watched Logan's Run in the evening.  Kinda like Soylent Green meets The Time Machine.  I want to go to the Fort Worth Water Gardens that'd be cool.  

Monday.  Epic insomnia.  Went back to sleep for an hour after the alarm went off.  Then it was just house/photo/jigsaw stuff.  

My aim here wasn't so much to completely get rid of the periwinkle this go, but give the area some light so the freesias will grow.  I'll keep going at it when I get the energy.

Special fried rice I made for lunch - leftover rice, fried up with a chopped up sausage, peas and corn, some of Stu's teriyaki sauce, and topped with kewpie mayo

Cheating

Didn't get to do more important things, like putting ratsak into the roof.  Made stuffed capsicums for dinner.  The sweetie doesn't even like capsicums much but he went back for seconds haha.  Then the last three episodes of the girl on the train in the rear window.  Completely ridiculous of course.

Tuesday.  Slept ok-ish. 

Had to be Neil at work.  Except I can't help myself and try and deal with problems that he's just happy to delete heh. 

An hour and a quarter of weeding after work.  Whoops.  Then had to go to back to work late in the evening to do a cert replacement.

I don't think this is all going to fit in the green bin..

Wednesday. Took forever to get to sleep - cold and still too wired from working late.  So pretty tired day.  Was Neil again.  Did music but no weeding after work.  Eh, it was wet anyway.  Late dinner of lefover lamb, cabbage and rice.  Did some photo culling (onto London now).

Cheating on the edges

Thursday.  Slept well for a change!!  Another day of being Neil.  Did some fun mail stuff I wouldn't have gotten to do if Neil was around.  Really not comfortable being in the office.  Too many people off with covid (which means they've likely been in contact with people in the office).  And at drinks someone was sniffling away.  omfg if you're sniffling stay home!  Even if it's "just a cold" I don't want to get your germs.  I guess it could have been hay fever but sheesh..!  Stu want home feeling sick during the afternoon (not covid related), so let him get pizza for dinner.

Friday.  Woke up some time after 3 and never got back to sleep.  Epic sigh.  Pizza=>insomnia?? 

Saw Tico out the window

Zombie day.  Did a bit of cleanup for Neil because I can't help myself.  And more of the fun mail stuff.  TV dinners for dinner.  Finished Bambi!  And not just Bambi, but the entire Disney Memorable Moments Behemoth!!  40320 pieces!  DONE!!!

Watched Flying High in the evening (after seeing Zero Hour! last week we had to)

Saturday.  Peed once but otherwise slept through from ~10pm til 5:30!! Hurrah!!  House stuff in the morning, and some weeding.  Then just photo culling.  Well other than going out late morning to do a chemist and bakery run for Annie's family, several of which have covid at the moment.  

This sweet little geranium is flowering even though it's just sitting in a glass on the window sill, and had been mostly eaten by an epic caterpillar.

Remember that cute little cow from last week?  This is the scene it went into.  So cute!

Got this off Chris and Glenda.  Any guesses what it is? :)

I was going to do some greenery with this.  Really I was.  But the chicken kievs were pretty big and this old bread needed using up, so it ended up being a pretty big meal.  And it was so awesome!!!

Sunday.  Today.  I swear brown meals cause insomnia.  Last night took *forever* to get to sleep because I was restless/itchy/uncomfortable.  And then I woke up around 5 and took forever to get back to sleep.  When I went to pee I could hear a pipe running and water dripping.  I thought it was the cooler dripping down the roof.  Slept til about 7:15 but it wasn't enough.  Sigh.  Realised after I got up the dripping was actually from the tap in the bath.  I must have turned it on slightly when I wiped down the bath on Friday night.  This is the only drawback of half turn taps - they are *very* easy to accidentally turn on!  Went out to do ten minutes of periwinkle hacking in the morning but John saw me and couldn't help himself.  He dug into the worst of the roots and pulled out all the rocks and suddenly (an hour and a half later) there's no periwinkle left there at all (I'll have to spray any shoots that come up).  Whoops.  I gave him a couple of beers but he definitely deserved a whole sixpack!!  Maybe a case!!

Does anyone want these rocks?

Then just alternating photo and jigsaw stuff.  

Can you guess now?  Easy bit is done, the rest is going to be horrendous :)

In the afternoon I put on Bambi.  I swear I had a bluray of this.  But maybe I just had the VHS and hadn't gotten around to getting a bluray of it yet.  Anyway, I couldn't find my own copy to watch so put it on on Disney+

As per usual, the jigsaw doesn't actually match the movie.

I mean, there *is* shot of the three of them

But Thumper on the ground is a different shot

So is Flower being bashful

And the flowers overhead aren't even there until Bambi grows up

Silly really.

Then photos and blogging and rain!

Sunday.  Not backdating!  Lamb roast for dinner.  Except it was two small roasts not one larger one, so the cooking time was very much reduced.  Which meant the garlic didn't cook fully.  So I stuck it back in the oven.  This has to be among the tastiest things on earth ;)

Monday.  Even though I was zombie tired from not sleeping well Saturday night, I still took *ages* to get to sleep, but at least finally slept ok.  It was so *windy* today.  I put my washing out on the line, it was probably dry in about three minutes.  Scanned a roll of negatives.  Had an ok day, doing cleaning and deleting old production stuff :)  Did music but no weeding.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Into season 22 of The Simpsons.  Did a "first pass" cull of three days of Eurasia 2012 trip.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  The questions started as soon as I logged in and didn't let up for nearly an hour.  Found it super frustrating in the afternoon because everything was blurry and I couldn't SEEEEE.  I don't know if I was tired which made it worse, or if not being able to see made me tired.  Did some photo culling before dinner.

Wednesday.  Could see the screen in the morning, although it got worse during the day.  Clearly I'm too old to be sitting at work all day staring at a computer screen.  More cleaning with HBZ's help.  And finally sat down to plan cleaning of another set of firewalls (that a previous cloud admin completely botched up and made an epic mess of).  Uunifetapasta for dinner.

Thursday.  Had to *go* to work.  Blerf.  There's still way too much covid around for me to be feel comfortable doing that.  And the office is *noisy*.  People yapping away everywhere, super annoying.  I went to talk to Neil at one point and found myself on TWO people's cameras in two different meetings.  So I went and sat back down until they were off their calls.  Hate being on camera hate hate hate.  Still, the bar was open so that was nice, first time in three months.

Friday.  Ok day.  Grilled the last of some bread I got the other day in the toasted sandwich maker with some parmesan cheese each side (and leftover KFC). Epic good.  Late getting off work because Neil was stressing about upgrades, although turns out what he thought was a problem wasn't a problem after all.  Doc Oc pizzas for dinner, then finally watched Zero Hour! (which Tony took it upon himself to reencode for us, and this time it worked perfectly, even streaming straight off OneDrive and casting from my computer browser). OMFG it was HILARIOUS.  Not because it was actually funny, but because Flying High is pretty much identical to this movie.  I mean I already know there were chunks of it the same, but I had no idea almost the entire movie, from plot to character names to the dialogue was pretty much verbatim.  I mean I could even quote this movie in a lot of places because it was all the same.  My brother would probably appreciate this, you should have a watch :)

Saturday.  Urgh couldn't get to sleep for *ages*.  Maybe even non-Dominos pizza will cause me insomnia.  I still got up to go see the balloons though.  Except I really didn't like the new location (Patrick White Lawns, in front of the library).  It was all very cramped and there was no *view* - no landmarks (other than the library if you could make your way through the crowds to get to the north side) and surround on all sides by trees.  So went somewhere else instead, which worked out a whole lot better.  Pics in a separate post.  Went and said hi to Neil afterwards.  The day was just house/photo/jigsaw stuff.  At lunch we did a Bunnings run (to get vermin poisoning stuffs), as well as Asian Supa for some bits and pieces and Officeworks (to get a decent reem of paper - to try instead of the Coles paper we have which keeps getting jammed - not sure if it's the paper or the printer).  Mostly just jigasw in the afternoon.  

Just a few weeks it was 181.9.  Just the other day it was 199.9.  Saturday 209.9.  omfg, madness.  See we should all be working from home to save petrol given the current crisis.

How cute is this teeny little cow that Stu painted? :)

Stu cooked dinner - a vegetarian Japanese curry which was very nice.

Watched Operation Finale in the evening.

Sunday.  Slept well for a change.  Forgot to have breakfast (routine was out of whack), so ended up having bacon and eggs (Pialligo bacon yummm) which was quite nice.

The day was house/photo/jigsaw stuff.. doing All The Things.

Sunday.  27th.  Jigsaw sorting in the afternoon.  

Stu cooked dinner!  Pantry dinner basically, but it was very nice.

Monday.  Slept really well, hurrah!!  Scanned the second roll of Mum's negatives (found the missing sheet, it was just out of order).  It took All Morning.  Literally.  With each batch of eight taking three quarters of an hour or so, I could just set them going and then just spend a couple of minutes every hour swapping them out.  Back to work though.  Sigh.  Spent most of the day trying to get through emails (didn't finish), in between talking to all the people wanting all the things.  Had a look at the dashboard for the new system we put in just before I went on leave, only to find people haven't been doing things properly and making a mess of things.  Doh.  Got some music practise in, but no weeding before dinner.  Of pizza.  Because we still hadn't been shopping and there wasn't much food in the house (well nothing fresh anyway).  And the sweetie had had an insomnia-zombie day (we take it in turns).  Then I went food shopping.  By myself.  I don't think we've actually done a full Coles shop together in two years.  So the fridge is nice and full again!  Hurrah!  But then it was 20:30 and too late to feel like starting any photo stuff, so just watched an episode of Mentour Pilot.

Tuesday.  Didn't get to sleep til midnight, then awake from 2 (Stu still hadn't slept).  Had some cheese and went to loo, but itchy and uncomfortable and restless and my hands go numb if I leave them still for more than a few minutes and didn't get back to sleep til about 4:30.  Then woke up at 6:30.  Of course.  Zombie day.  Stu was double zombie so went back to bed and slept most of the day.  I went to work.  Scanned roll 3 of Mum's negatives.  Fairly quiet day, haven't looked at my todo list yet.  Weeding after work.  Salmon and salad for dinner - it's so nice having fresh food in the house.  Photo culling in the evening.

These passionfruit across the road look lovely when they flower, but their fruit are infertile.

Wednesday.  Slept well, hurrah!  The plumbers arrived first thing to attack all our pipes.  First up they had a go at the drain in the courtyard under the bedroom windows.  The hole was full of dirt and there was a 50mm pipe outlet pipe they didn't want to put the eel through, so they stuck a high pressure hose down it. And then tried to figure out where it went.  Turns out it goes off to the side of the property and then just drains into the side passageway. ?!?!  Probably it was put in as an afterthought.  Shouldn't be too much effort to keep that one clear.  Next they attacked the drain in front of the garage which blocks up during heavy rain.  They went in about thirty metres before finally finding a blockage.  !!!  So now all the stormwater drains properly which is pretty awesome.  Next was the sewer pipes, actually the easy one, the one I need doing every couple of years.  And finally they had a look at the NE downpipe.  We think it's supposed to flow into the drain in front of the garage.  But when they stuck a hose down the drainpipe, water started pouring out of the bricks behind the bins, and only a very little bit into the drain.  hmmm.  So they're coming back tomorrow with a camera to have a look at that one.  Ok day, cleaning and documenting the proxies.  Music practise, pork larb for dinner, photo culling.

It was cold and dark and miserable enough to light a candle

Thursday.  Ok day.  Plumber came back with camera.  He made a hole in the downpipe and had a look and couldn't get the camera down any further because the downpipe was actually separated from the other bit of the downpipe and there were roots everywhere and the whole thing is an epic disaster.  He spent ages poking around deciding what the best way forward would be.  Small Pot Belly session after work and KFC.

At Aquila's suggestion, Glenda brought these over!! :)

Friday.  Insomnia.  Spent some of that awake time stressing about the EMP apocalypse.  hmmm, what a useful way to spend my time.  Thought I'd do *one thing* at work, but never finished it because of interruptions and breaking things (well trying to fix something I broke in January - I did learn a whole heap about one of our products in the process though).  We tried watching Zero Hour! on archive.org, but it had issues buffering and synching audio/video so that was disappointing (I really wanted to see it).  The sweetie put on Dr Stangelove instead.  

Saturday.  Slept ok.  There was a pretty red sky in the morning that I didn't document.  Instead of doing anything useful, or anything I should be doing, I spent most of the morning tidying files on my computer.  hrmm.  And most of the afternoon on the jigsaw, so barely any photo culling.  Didn't help that the quote to fix the downpipe/drain was nearly $10000, plus another extra up to $2500 if they have to redo the concrete next to the bins if they can't blast through the half filled with concrete pipe that's there.  Sigh.  

I was feeling uninspired at dinner time, so the sweetie decided to make a very nice teriyaki sauce which we had with chicken/rice/cabbage. 

I was on a bleh mood so couldn't decide what to watch, so the sweetie put on No Time to Die.  Like longest Bond movie in history.  Went til way past my bed time.  Not that it mattered, I was still awake past 1am, when mice decided to start scritching around above our heads.  I couldn't sleep through that (omfg the anxiety), so moved into the spare room.  Where I still couldn't get to sleep til about 3am.  Sigh.  Woke up at 7am.  Of course.  Hurrah zombie day today.  

Had a look in the roof this morning.  The mice are way over there in the corner somewhere....

I was going to check on the situation and put down a mouse trap, but I only got that far before it all got too hard and I wasn't sure which beams were safe to walk on and it was dirty and spidery and I had to hold the torch in one hand and try and move around and I hadn't had enough sleep anyway and it was all too much and I freaked out and had a meltdown on that spot.  So no idea what we're going to do.  Probably we'll just get some Ratsak granules and literally just throw them at the corner and hope for the best.  I can't think of any other way to get across there.  Either that or just pay a professional to do it.  I'm totally not qualifed for home ownership :(:(:( 

So the rest of the day was basically a zombie waste.  I did make pretty good progress on the jigsaw though so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of a day??

The sweetie somehow managed to make this epic bubble while washing up

I fillled in a bunch more on Thumper after taking this photo

I think I'll be going to bed straight after dinner...

Monday.  21st.  Did you miss me? :)  Probably not on account of I post so sporadically anyway right?  And the fact there's only like three people that read my blog anyway.  

We went here!

With all the photos on the Canon taken here

So Plan A was a cruise out of Florida that we were just to scared to go on, even after they finally started offering insurance for medical expenses for covid.  I was stressing about losing thousands of dollars, but eventually Carnival were like, ok fine, if you want to get out of if they'll let the charter company do a cruise credit.  It's supposed to be for next year's cruise, but I want to try and go the year after if possible.

Plan B was Tasmania.  But even that we thought was too risky.  If one of us got covid while we were there we'd be stuck there with no way home.

So Plan C was regional Victoria.  We figured then if one of us got it we could be home in a day.  So off we went Saturday three weeks ago.  We were still a bit paranoid about getting covid, and avoided Melbourne and any large regional towns (well sort of anyway).  And it turned out to be a pretty awesome trip.  We only booked motels basically a night in advance, although stayed at most of them a couple of nights.  The weather was amazing, only a bit overcast on a couple of days, and barely any rain.  The biggest disappointments were the Grampians and the Great Ocean Road, in terms of all the photos I wanted to reproduce I couldn't because of the risk-averse government fencing off access to everything.  Moral of the story: go back in time to see stuff, and never go back to things you thought were awesome back in the day.

If you want to read the blog, you can start here, although no photos are up yet.  

So we got home on Monday, then the afternoon was just unpacking and getting organised.  Pizza for dinner, hrmm.  And photo processing.

Tuesday.  Urgh, epic insomnia - couldn't get to sleep til like 1am.  Now that I'm home I'm stressing about All The Things that need doing.  And I was thinking about Shandee too, hrmm.  I'm physically incapable of relaxing, and my muscles were all tensed up to prove it.  Got some weeding done in the morning (it was nice and cool which helped).  Went and got some medical checkup tests done.  Then I had to fight with Geosetter.  Google "changed something" which rendered the application completely broken some time while we were away.  Turns out it was just a matter of changing the Google url from http to https, and specifying a newer api version in the uri.  Phew.  Because I needed Geosetter to geotag all my photos.  Spent the afternoon applying the GPS tracks to photos, and then going through and checking/tweaking as needed.  I did have a break and do some weeding in the afternoon, and went for a walk in the evening.  Dug some cooked mince out of the freezer and finished a box of risoni for dinner. 

How cool was the date today too.. too many twos today (Tuesday)!  (I wasn't up for 2:22 or 22:22, so 20:22 on 22.2.2022 would have to do!)

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep again, but then slept ok.  6am is actually really dark now, who knew.  Spent an hour in the morning clearing periwinkle out of the front yard garden beds (now that I can get to them after Tony chopped the hedge back before we went away). 

Then it was geochecking and filing photos.  Spent another hour or so in the afternoon clearing out the drain in front of the garage.  Which hasn't been done since we moved in.  Thirteen years ago.  

I didn't even know there was a hole there, I thought this was just a stormwater drain for the driveway!

While I was showing the sweetie what I'd done, this itty bitty baby blue tongue ran practically under our feet (probably chasing all the worms I'd chopped in half digging out all the soil from the drains)

I was exhausted, so it ended up being a frozen pizza and fries kind of an evening (Chris didn't have any chicken kiev)..

In the evening I watched Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which is a pretty sad state of affairs really.  

Thursday.  Got to sleep ok, but then woke up at 2am til well past 4am.  Hurrah.  So zombie day.  Took 332 bottles and cans (basically a year's worth) to Return It.  Going first thing sure did work, I got there as it opened and grabbed a couple of trolleys, and didn't have to wait to put them through.

But omfg the humidity!  So bad.  Then it was just house tidying and photo stuff.  And I started the next (last!) section of the Disney behemoth.

In the afternoon got a lift to the Pot Belly for a few drinks with some of the guys I haven't seen in months.  Just as I arrived the rain started, and it got heavier and heavier!

The Pot Belly has stripped all the vintage wallpaper off their toilet walls, and most of the tiles too.  At least they retained one row of Pigs and Chickens tiles!!

KFC for dinner (I'd been craving it for weeks).

Friday.  Not a great sleep but not as zombie as yesterday.  Weeding, photo stuff (burning DVDs and culling photos), bit of jigsaw, not too much else. 

How to make your regular toasted cheese sandwich even more awesome - just plonk a handful of shredded parmesan cheese underneath and on top.  So good!

It RAINED in the afternoon.  I went out to check on the nearly cleared drain (the sump is still blocked, but I'm hoping to get that eeled this week), and noticed this...

It's actually *outside* the house proper, but not sure where all the water is coming from.  It's possible it's coming from the downpipe in one corner of the roof which is struggling to find somewhere to go since the garage drain is blocked.  I guess we'll see what happens once the drains are cleared.  Either that or run a hose down that drainpipe and see what happens - one of the things my brain thinks about when trying to get to sleep at night.

Had leftover pork (from the freezer) with some cabbage (which never goes off, it's been in the fridge for like six weeks) and rice (which I cooked in stock a couple of days ago) for dinner.  Then we watched 1917, which was interestingly done.  It *appears* to be one long continuous take, but we knew it wouldn't have been, and sat there guessing the transition shots.  A few of the things that annoyed me were on IMBD's goofs page, but a few weren't (like an epic boggy field in one shot, and a completely dry area just a couple of hundred metres away, or the truck getting bogged trying to go around a tree on the road, when why was there even a bog there at all, and why didn't they just go a couple of metres around it, or in fact on the other side of the road!?, or the medic tent being *so close* to the trenches).

Saturday.  Slept very well for a change.  The morning was house stuff and getting organised.  All the organising!  But I'm drowing in photo work.  I want to get Eurasia 2012 photos culled and onto the blog before the 10 year anniversary.  It's going to be an insane amount of work!!  Basically I need to cull a day of photos per day for the next two months.  But I suffer from decision paralysis which makes the process extremelly difficult and time consuming :(  Then just to increase my photo work load, I started to scan Mum's Minolta camera negatives (I installed the driver/software I had for windoze 10 and it worked fine in 11).  For some reason the scanner takes about 5-10 times longer per frame than for slides.  I fiddled around with settings some more, and went up to 3200 dpi, the highest native resolution the scanner will go.  Sadly all Mum's negatives from 1983 have a bit of a redshift to them, so the photos are a bit green once scanned, but can be tweaked post.  Another oddity is that any sort of blemish which would normally be black is epic white for a negative, so the dust and scratch filter works a whole lot better, with less false positives and weird artefacts.  But it's also completely necessary to use, as epic bright white spots are harder to ignore than black ones.  So it took pretty much all afternoon just to scan one roll of 36 photos.  Strangely, I've looked in the next two envelopes of negatives and both of them have missing strips, which is going to be annyoing if they don't show up.

We needed to go to the chemist and get more bark for Stumpy's tank, so made an errand day of it.  We tried out Co Dung at the back of Belco for lunch.  Had to wait ages (over twenty minutes) for the food.  The fish cakes weren't great (not hot, and tough) but the fried chicken wings were epic awesome - hot and crispy and delicious!

Most expensive petrol I've seen ever...

Leftover mince and pork for dinner, then we watched The Mauritanian which was pretty sad really. 

Do not harm the iguanas, $10,000 fine.  I wonder if that sign was actually there.  Probably is.  

Sunday.  Sigh.  Epic insomnia, didn't get to sleep til about 2am, and then still woke up at 6:30.  So definitely a zombie day today. 

I had a go on my clarinet for the first time in weeks, and it was epic crap.  I'm so bad at it.  

IOS 15.3.1 or whatever I last got upgraded to has gone back to putting files into folders by year/month (which I prefer!!).  I wonder how long that will last before they change it again.  And Apple is STILL messing with the date/timestamps on my files.  During our holiday I was downloading photos every night and noticed that sometimes I could get movies/pngs without the dates being messed with.  But then the next time I looked the next night, the files will have been changed.  NFI what Apple is doing with my files.  Epic hate.  The sweetie cooked dinner (a nice tasting pasta) while I downloaded the week's photos and blogged the last two weeks.

19:30 is bed time right?  I wonder if I'd get to sleep if I went to bed this early.. 

Monday.  24th.  Slept well.  Went to go food shopping at 7am but the car wouldn't start.  We've had this happen before, and usually it comes good after a few minutes.  But this time it didn't.  We tried with both keys but no luck.  So gave up on the idea of doing any food shopping.  Later we tried both fobs, locking and unlocking it, opening/closing the boot, taking the keys *away* from the car, even disconnecting the battery for a while, but nothing worked.  Had a good day at work, deleting stuff which is always fun :)   But the more I clean, the more things I find to clean.  It's like a choose-your-own-adventure going off in tangent after tangent.  Oh I forgot to mention in last week's blog post, that the rear element of the oven is in fact working.  I have no idea what happened the other week, but the next time I tried it it worked fine.  Go figure.  Then geotagging my Victoria/South Australia 1994 photos.

Tuesday.  In the morning finished geotagging my Vic/SA photos.  At work was cleaning and writing up of what needs cleaning.  San choy bow for dinner.  Then I started geotagging Dad's Vic/SA 1994 photos.  We also finished season 20 of The Simpsons.

For Mum

Wednesday.  234 years ago some poms got off their ships a few hundred k's away so we get a day off work.  Spent literally all day geotagging photos.  Leftovers for dinner (butter chicken out of the freezer because that's Strayan surely ;) ).  Watched Sleeping With the Enemy, which I'd seen but didn't remember when (and it wasn't on the blog) but Stu remembered watching it with me.  Oh well.  

Thursday.  Random day off.  More geotagging.  Basically finished geotagging all the photos that I wanted to for this round. 

Stu called the service people about the car, they just said get it towed to them (we were going to have it serviced next week anyway).  So I was going to call the NRMA, but then the neighbours went out, and was worried we wouldn't be able to get a tow truck in with their other car in the driveway.  #grunt.  Watched Munich: Edge of War in the evening which was interesting (if fictitious).  

Made arribbiata bake for dinner (sans anchovies cause apparently we'd run out, oh well ;) )

Which do you reckon will be hotter?  The Coles one I bought the other week, or the little ones off our plant?  Hint: even after washing my hands a couple of times with soap, I could still get a burnt tongue from licking my fingers.

Friday.  Another random day off.  Awake for ages in the middle of the night stressing about All The Things.  Got cranky at Gmail cause for a while you haven't been able to search for exact phrases using quotes anymore, and it sux donkey balls.  Tony came over at 9am because he's chainsaw qualified (it's a thing! and everyone fricken should be!!) and I wanted him to chainsaw back the oak tree suckers on our big stump.  But he couldn't help himself and chopped back our hedge as well and took three trailer loads to greenwaste!  Meanwhile I hacked weeds in the front garden.  And hacked and hacked and hacked.  Suddenly it was midday and our front yard looks amazing (thanks Tony!!!!!), and I was *wasted* haha.  I didn't even take any before/after photos - I'm a slacker I know!!  But I did get some photos of him hacking at the stump.

This is one of our roses - which unusually has opened - usually they just die before opening

After lunch I called the NRMA and they sent someone out.  He took one look and said, yup, it's the battery.  And I'm like, but everything lights up like a Christmas tree, and the headlights work and and and.. but it seems this is likely the original battery (Ford branded) so would be seven and a half years old, so decided to just replace it.  And it worked!!  The car started!!  What a relief!  

Saturday.  Got up early and went and did our food shopping.  OMFG the humidity though!!  It was intense!!  Fortunately it didn't get too *hot* and in the afternoon we just ran the cooler on fan only mode.  The sweetie talked me into Chong Co for dinner (he didn't have to try hard!) and then we watched The Laundromat, which is very similar to The Big Short in terms of trying to explain some crazy finance-world events.

Sunday.  Today.  Just a day of trying to get organised really.  Went to the chemist in the arvo (although really should have left it til tomorrow morning cause it was *crowded* #grunt). 

They're taking down the mushroom!

And suddenly my little short break is over.  Sad times.

Sunday.  16th.  Had sausages and cabbage for dinner, and geotagged Mum's Tasmania photos from 1968.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day, busy doing every except the one thing probably should have been doing.  But I did upgrade our master network diagram which is always fun.  Did some weeding in the afternoon (couldn't use "it's too hot" as an excuse).  Music, "filled gnocchi" for dinner.  Finished geotagging what I could of Mum's photos.  Saw a link on Blogography to Wordle so clicked through and played it (I think I might have heard/seen one or two references to it at some point in the past week or two).  This is my first ever attempt, and I got it in three goes!  This is probably not the best starting word, it was just what popped into my head.

Then after I'd done it I saw tweets from my brother *and* Jake who have also been playing it.  Synchronicity!

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  All the rain!!  But I was in a meeting during the worst of it, so forgot about clearing out the drain sump so the garage wouldn't flood.  Oops.  Wasn't too bad in the garage, but the backyard flooded again.  

Just for giggles I thought I'd try Eudora again, and this time it fricken worked and downloaded all my mail.  NFI why it didn't work before, or what made it start working.  In other windoze 11 crapfullness, "printscreen" (or alt-printscreen) no longer works.  I mean WTF??  Closest equivalent I can find is windows-shift-s which loads snippy which I can then capture a bit of the screen.  Windows 11 is a piece of crap.  And I'm still finding it super irritating that I can't drag a file onto an open application on the task bar and have it pop up so I can drag the file into the application.  I have to resize windows and have them out of the way so I can drag the file into the app.  Was super cranky about travel and everything was all too hard.  I give up.  Beer and pizza.  And Tuesday's Wordle was tricky - took all six goes!  (another not great starting word, I've since changed my strategy somewhat and start with more common letters).

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages, still depressed about travel.  My sneakers really started falling apart making it difficult to walk around.  These ones I bought in about 2005-2006 (while Stu was still living in Queensland).  But how am I meant to go shoe shopping without having to be around people?? 

Weeding, slide labelling and the sweetie cooked dinner (of some of the leftover mince, and cabbage and rice).

Thursday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages again - stressing about the cruise.  Was sitting at my computer first thing in the morning pondering my shoes and decided to go into the mall to get some new ones.  I left a bit early and went to Kmart first to get some undies (I've been needing new ones for ages but haven't been shopping really at all in five months).  Then still had some time so went to Target and got an extra fitted sheet and pillow cases (which always wear out a lot faster than a flat sheet).  Then to Athlete's Foot and walked out in new shoes!  Just for giggles I went to Amcal to ask about RATs, and they had some!  So I bought a two pack (if there's any chance of us going to Tasmania we'll need to get tested before we go).  So a super successful morning, and only an hour late to work.  Had a play with deleting old domains out of our IP management tool which was a bit of fun.  

Friday.  Depressed about cruise.  Then the brother type person called - they've offered a get out of jail free card!  Can transfer credit to next year's cruise.  I'd rather go the year after, so I'll try and negotiate that, but it means we're not going to (at least for now) lose all our money!  But in not so great news, Lily has covid and is not doing well.  Ok morning, although a bit bored in the afternoon waiting for people to do stuff so I could do my stuff.  Chicken kiev for dinner and then watched Six Minutes to Midnight, which was a little far fetched, but the school was actually a real thing.  

Saturday.  Spent all morning at work doing a firewall migration, which went quite smoothly for the most part.  Then seemed to spend the afternoon not getting much done, other than sorting out some of my music.

Sunday.  Really just house bits and pieces.  Weekends are far far far too short.. hrmmm..

This afternoon has been making cheesecake (we have lemons coming out the wazoo) and photos/blogging.  And Stu put on the Hottest 100 from 2001.  I know a few of the higher (lower) numbered songs.  Have cauliflower bake and veggies in the oven to have with some lamb I dug out of the freezer.

Sunday.  9th.  Not backdating ;)  During the week I bought these mini capsicums, so thought I'd do a stuffing for them - a bit of mince, some brown rice, and feta.  Topped with a bit of shredded cheese and roasted for like 40 minutes.  Yummy!

Monday.  Woke up at ~3:45 hungry and needing to pee.  At this point the sweetie hadn't actually been to sleep yet!  Poor thing.  I didn't get any more sleep after that either.  It seems on a given night one of us will be awake.  hmmm.  Spent all morning doing finance and tax stuff, and most of the afternoon checking receipts against bank statements.  Had to laugh - the RTA *finally* closed off my etag account, but funnily enough they refunded me the deposit for the tag, even though I never returned it (it was crushed with my old car).  Maybe they figured it was so old it wasn't worth it.  Shrug.  And guess how many times I went to the ATM last year?  Once.  ONCE!!  And that was only to get cash out for the kids' Christmas presents.  At least ACT covid cases were down a bit (well maybe - chances are a lot aren't being reported now because RATs are taking some of the load).  Leftover pork (refried in jelly) and cabbage for dinner.  Then I watched Die Hard with a Vengeance.

Stumpy is a bit retarded sometimes!

Tuesday.  Awake for a while around dentist time - probably from the neighbourhood dog barking at a possum.  Depressed about losing all our money on the cruise, depressed about going back to work.  So my tolerance for the stoopid was at rock bottom.  After work went and got my booster jab.  They had plenty of people working the family queue which seemed to move quickly, but there was only one person processing the adult queue.  So I was waiting for over half an hour in a queue.  I think they moved a few nurses across from the family section once that queue quietted down, because they had a few people going by the time I got seen.  

Picked up Crust pizza on the way home, but they don't keep their pizzas in the oven like Dominos do, so one was a bit cold by the time I got there and got it home.  Bit sad to find out that Bob Saget died.  In the evening tried to file photos, but I just can't *see*, especially at night.  Super frustrating.  And my resized to 1280 wide photos only take up a quarter of the screen now.

Wednesday.  Dog was barking in the middle of the night again, but not for too long.  Otherwise I think I slept ok.  Felt in a much better mental state about work.  Decided to document Neil.  After lunch I started feeling trippy - the feeling you get when you're having an immune reaction.  Went and had a little lie down.  Didn't sleep of course, but did rest.  Felt weak and floppy all afternoon/evening.  But at least my immune system is *doing* something about covid, which is a relief.  Leftover lamb and salad for dinner.  As usual we put on The Simpsons over dinner, and as soon as it started I was like OMFG wide screen!  This episode (Take My Life, Please) first aired in February 2009.  And it was glorious!  Clean and crisp, so much nicer than the old animations.  Didn't feel like doing anything much, so put on the Disney 2003 version of The Young Black Stallion, which was ok for a kids movie, but short and sweet.

Thursday.  Felt much better after a decent sleep.  Ok day, more being Neil and documenting him.  Leftover stuffing mix and cabbage for dinner.  Started geotagging Mum and Dad's 1971 Tasmania trip photos.

Friday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep, but slept ok after than.  Ok day, more documenting and writing test plans.  Chicken kiev for dinner, and watched The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I'd seen it before and thought it was quirky but overly violent.  Stu thought it was weird.  Except I swear they sanitised the violence, because it wasn't nearly as violent as I remember it.  

This is the saddest thing.  These booties were on my baptism cake!  Mum had them in her china cabinet until she moved, then they'd been on top of my computer desk gathering dust.  They had already started to absorb moisture and collapse, but when I cleared off the top of my computer desk I moved them temporarily to the dining table.  Where they sat under the cooler vent.  And promptly melted into a puddle.  Sad times!!

Super annoyingly, the rear element of our oven seems to have died - it just didn't heat up the oven when I turned it on.  The thing is less that two years old which is a big stinking poo!!!

Saturday.  Spent much of the day geotagging Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos (and I got as many of them geotagged as I could of their trip).  In the afternoon I went down to Tony's to look at / pick up some maps and brochures for Tasmania.  Ended up staying for dinner which was nice.

Sunday.  House stuff and music in the morning, and looking at Tassie locations in the afternoon.  At lunch time we were sick of our usual lunches so went out for a drive to get some takeway.  Drove past the shop where a gas leak blew up the building. 

Then picked up some Oporto drive through and went to Diddams Close park to eat it by the lake.  That quite nice, although we did have a very captive audience watch us the entire time!!

Of course now I have to go and geotag all Mum's slides from her YHA trip to Tasmania in 1968 :)