Monday.  18th.  (Not backdating).  Yay for catchup days.  Pretty good sleep.  Went into battle with my computer trying to get the scanner and GPS to work.  Neither do in windows 11.  The GPS won't work in windows 11 because it complains the driver is no good.  Transystem hasn't put out any new software/drivers in years which is pretty upsetting.  So had to get the dam trip GPS off on my laptop.  Now dreading what will happen if something happens to the laptop and I have to replace it.  I'll have to find an alternative to my little PhotoMate 887 which is one of the best inventions in history.  Was also fighting with the scanner which fricken USED TO WORK in windoze 11, but just stopped one day.  I've yet to reconnect it up to my old computer to test it.  Hate Microsoft.  Hate hate hate.  Did some weeding, and a magpie came right up to where I was working to see if I'd disturbed any bug noms for it.  Very cool.  Potted some geranium cuttings.  In the afternoon we tidied up the shelves in our bedroom cupboard that had been getting messier and messier.  Did a water change in the upstairs two foot for the first time in forever (there's always babies in that tank I'm worried about sucking up).  Then got frustrated yet again with Apple because it dropped out while downloading my photos and refused to show up in windows afterwards.  Was thinking I was going to have to reboot my computer.  It certainlly meant I couldn't blog the previous week.  Hate Apple.  Hate hate hate.  Then cooked all the food.  I prepped a chicken marbella from Not Quite Nigella, cooked some mince/bacon/onion/garlic, and we had salmon and cabbage for Monday night's dinner.  Then we watched the first episode of The Crown which was pretty good.  Got pretty stressed out about having to go back to work.  Even four day weekends are just not enough time to get everything *done*.  Eventually managed to reconnect to the phone and was able to download photos, but bed time so no blogging.

Was digging under the old pool and found all this steel reinforcing.  Maybe to stop slippage of the pool???

Tuesday.  Slept ok until hurty kept me awake half the night.  Ok day trying to catch up on stuff.  Then demoing stuff to peeps and trying to deal with all the stoopid.  It was a wine and candle kind of a night.  Also made the chicken marbella which was nice enough but a little watery.  

Wednesday.  Woke up for a while a couple of times.  Was sick of the stoopid by 8:40.  Fairly busy day prepping a firewall migration and prepping rules for a big project.  Did some music, then did a red curry with mushrooms, asian greens and leftover sausages.  Did some work on Eurasia panoramas but still no blogging.  

Thursday.  Another busy day, and a tonne of interruptions and meetings.  Did a firewall migration after lunch which took all of ten minutes (including testing) and was one of the most anticlimactic changes I've ever done.  Pretty quiet drinks.  Tried McCains frozen pizzas which weren't really any better than Spar.  Need to stick with Dominos or Dr Oetker (Doc Oc/Dr Octopus).

Friday.  Finished prepping a big ruleset, and even managed to deploy them the same afternoon which was good.  Had a craving for mac and cheese for lunch.  Lazy Su pickup for dinner and watched third episode of Gunther's Anatomy.

Saturday.  Basically got ready then Damien came over.  We chatted for ages, had frozen spring rolls and chips for lunch, then played Jaws in the afternoon.  After playing for a little while we put the movie on in the background (because I don't seem to have the soundtrack).  Stu has never actually seen it?!?!  Will have to watch it properly with him some time.  Damien and I played Brody/Hooper/Quint, and Stu played Jaws.  Stu got a really good start, pretty much totally evading us and getting lots of points for act 2.  But somehow we managed to survive and Quint finished him off with the machete.  Just as the movie was finished, amazing timing.  As soon as Damien left we both collapsed in a heap - seven hours of socialising is super super draining, who knew.  Had sausages and cabbage for dinner, then Simpsons, Black Books and second episode of The Crown.

I actually spent cash that day too - to get the shiny on the right here.  And in the same change got all four head designs of the Queen.

Sunday.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers, did some music practise, did some cleaning, and filled the green bin.  And suddenly the morning was gone.  Went to the markets after lunch to get some fresh veggies, came home and cooked some Anzac biscuits and prepped dinner.  And suddenly the afternoon was gone.  Sigh.  Jenn came over for dinner (a cheese and spinach burek we found at the markets) and then we played Carcassonne which I won.  Was going to have an early night, but then Stu tried to print something.  It did a whole lot quite happily, then went back to jamming in the same place at every damned page.  So got super cranky about the whole thing.

I nearly rage quit at one point because the pantry is so full of crap I can't get at anything without everything all falling over

Unfortunately these were a bit dry

Burek and veggies dinner

Monday.  Got a reminder to go look at planets.  Because I was awake, I did.  It was actually worth getting up for, with the moon, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter very obvious (although not so much in the resized photo).  I'll take peoples' word for it for Neptune and Pluto.

Then it was all morning trying to catch up on photos and blogging.  Yet again, even with a long weekend I'm struggling to keep up with life.  Stop the world I want to get off.

Sunday.  10th.  Backdating this.  Had Cath's basa bake for dinner with Brussels sprouts with bacon.  Was delicious.

Monday.  Slept ok until 4am when I woke up with upset bowels (maybe I undercooked the fish?) and never got back to sleep.  Got some Eurasia photos up before work.  Work was ok, doing firewall migration planning.  Weeding at lunch.  More Eurasia photos online before dinner (of leftover brisket I dug out of the freezer, with leftover veggies) and more after dinner as well.  Got depressed because I'm a horrible person and that's why noone likes me.  And the house is a mess.  Although did manage to put away three loads of washing and run the dishwasher.

Must be autumn

Tuesday.  Woke up ~4am and couldn't get back to sleep for ages.  Wasted most of the morning before work, so no photo stuff.  Bit of playing with log searches at work.  Leftover mince rissoni from the freezer, with potatoes for dinner.  Got lots of photo uploading done.  Watched some Lie to Me and did music practise.

How cute is this little 15mm Italian soldier Stu painted?

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep til after midnight, then woke up around 5am.  Sigh.  Even with a decent walk at lunch.  Couldn't stop yawning all day.  But.  I did get my Eurasia 2012 photos online in time for the 10th anniverary of when I left on that trip! 

Take your toasted cheese sandwiches to the next level - plop some parmesan cheese down beneath and on top of it.

Thursday.  Not a great sleep.  Ok day, updating dashboards.  Not bad drinks.  Although Optus was being a big fat poo and not delivering our smses, so the sweetie and I were sending each other all these messages and not getting any responses.  So we both ended up cranky and ended up getting pizza.  Finished Starry Night, but then couldn't get to sleep til midnight on account of restless legs.

Thanks Chris and Glenda for the challenge :)

Good Friday.  Well not so good for Jesus back in the day, but good for us now.  Since I was feeling like a big fat blob Thursday night decided to go climb Mt Rogers.  

Then music practise and working on the panoramas for Eurasia 2012.  Stuffed capsicums for dinner.  No leftovers.

Saturday.  Went and did food shopping first thing.  Bit of house stuff in the morning then headed out to the club after lunch.  I primed some more cabinetry.  Went up for Happy Hour, then just had a nice quiet evening with the sweetie.

Easter Sunday.  Super early pickup to go dam busting!  Pics in another post when I get around to it.  Quite exhausted when we got back so the sweetie ordered Chong Co.

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.  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.

This is now my official recipe for lemon cheesecake.

The Base

250g pack of biscuits, blended in food processor (in a couple of goes cause our food processor is a bit crap).  Normally Nice, but I got these fake Milk Arrowroot for 70c so used them.
125g butter, melted (a bit more won't hurt)

Mix butter and biscuits and spread out in a springform tin, or a lined lasagna dish

Filling

2x 250g packs of cream cheese, at room temperature
400g tin sweetened condensed milk
Juice and zest of three or four lemons - approx 200mL (although 300mL using up more lemons is also fine)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
3 teaspoons gelatine in 1/4 cup boiling water

Blend everything except the gelatine first in the biggest bowl you have, get cheese spatter all over you, then boil the water, add the gelatine, and mix in.

Pour into base

Allow to set in fridge for several hours or overnight.

Monday.  3rd.  Not backdating for a change ;)  Did the usual morning stuff, then Damien came over.  The boys had a coffee and a chat, then Damien saw my Queen Mary 2 in New York photo and was asking about it, and we ended up subjecting him to the slideshow of that trip ;)  I put out a bunch of nibblies (we've not really done much entertaining this break so we still had lots of junk food in the house) and the boys played Glory Recalled, which went all afternoon until Damien had to go home (I think Damien was winning). 

Meanwhile I did a few months worth of This Day in History posts.  Then.  STORM!!  We basically only got the side of it, but there was hail and so much rain and it was SO LOUD!!  Had to close all the windows on the south side of the house because rain was pouring in.  The backyard actually flooded at the lowest part.  And I put out two buckets to collect some free rainwater, and they both filled in just a few minutes.  

We didn't lose power during the storm itself, but we did have power fluctuations which confused a few things - the garage door thought it lost power and the cooler needed a full hard reboot to start working again, but the computer was ok (which I didn't shut down cause it needed updates and that'd take too long). 

We did lose power just before bed time but only for a few minutes.  The ESA website was just madness!

Ended up getting pizza for dinner.  

Tuesday.  Slept relatively well.  A day of All The Things.  Power went out again in the afternoon for like an hour or so.  Did some paint by numbers for a bit, and separated the plants that were going into each other by the front door.  Do you think I maybe should have pruned this plant a bit earlier? :)

I was blogging more This Day in History posts and realised I'd missed a *whole heap* of my own photos from 2020/2021 that need to be processed and added in.  I was hoping to get 2021 finished this break, but that put me in a bad mood about it all and I haven't been back since.  

Wednesday.  Went early to do our food shopping at Coles.  They lost power Monday night all night, and so lost all their fridge and freezer stock!! OMFG such a waste!!  So sad.  I was lucky I was able to mostly get the fresh/frozen stuff that I wanted.  I was hoping to pickup any leftover eggnog, but if there was any left it would have been lost.  Then home to tetris it all into the fridge (I primarily went for pantry stuff as there was a bunch of things we'd run out of, but I picked up some fresh stuff as well, because I was there, but we still have a lot of leftovers, so it was tricky to fit it all in).  By the time I'd gone through my weekly morning routine it was nearly lunch time.  Hmmmmmm.  Then spent most of the afternoon pulling out the computer desk and cleaning it all up and setting everything up again.  I bought a dvi to display port adapter in the morning at Officeworks, but it turns out the old HP second monitor I have (an old one of Stu's) doesn't work with Windows 11, so that was a waste of money.  But then I'd also pulled everything off my computer desk and made an epic mess of the study, so will probably spend the rest of the break trying to tidy up the mess I just made.. hrmmm.  And no weeding or music either.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Hating on Windows 11 - you can't ungroup taskbar windows anymore, and you can't have additional toolbars - two things I really need/want/use.  I find I can't *see* what I'm doing because Microsoft in its wisdom thinks it knows best, and wants you to look at a clutter-free taskbar.  They're trying to be like Apple or something.  Hate hate hate.  Eudora won't work in Windows 11 either - it loads ok, but can't connect to the servers.  Probably some sort of trust issue, but I don't know how to solve it (I tried turning off AV, compatibility mode and running as administrator).  Ended up cranky that I'd spent all day fighting with technology.  But we did have a nice stir fry with some leftover pork for dinner.

My Christmas present from Annie - the 12 beers of Christmas? :)

As part of the desk cleanup, I figured it was probably time to eat this wedding candy from Andy and Crystal's wedding in 2012.  On account of they're broken up now anyway.  hrmm.

And I should probably give these birds away too .. I mean they're super cute and all, but don't really mean anything to me..

As a "temporary" measure I moved all the ornaments and knick-knacks that were on top of my computer desk into the cubes in the spare room.  Yeah right.  Temporary.  haha.

The pork stir fry

Friday.  Woke up early hungry and needing to pee.  Tried do more tidying up in the study, but then ended up making more of a mess of the spare room too.  Sigh.  1246 covid cases in Canberra today.  That's ~25 times the peak of Delta.  We finished season 3 of Sex Education.  I actually had a dream a couple of nights ago that Jean had died, and so when we got to the end of episode 7 I was like *I NEED to know what happened* so we watched the final episode that night as well.  

Saturday.  Woke up early again.  But Stu hadn't slept pretty much all night!! Poor thing!  I reverted my monitor setup (I'd had a go at putting the secondary monitor on the right side, but ended up not liking it).  Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even that is not the primary monitor.  So fricken DUMB.  Just a day of more tidying - both on the computer and off.  Had an idea to see how many words are on my blog, and found this site which admittedly did timeout, but not until after it had counted all the monthly archives, which I could easily add up in Excel.  As of this week there's 935200 words on my blog!  Insanity!  Had salmon and salad for dinner and watched The Courier in the evening (it was the sweetie's turn to choose a movie so he chose a spy movie and/or true story movie .. in this case "and" :) )

Sunday.  Today!  Ok sleep (although not for Stu again :( ).  Today was fighting with Excel.  I don't know if it's just Windows 11 or one of the updates I did, but dates don't work in Excel anymore.  Yeah yeah I know, Office 2003 isn't supported anymore, but that's the version I own.  I tried Office 2013 that Stu got in Technet at one point, but I think he'd used up the licences, and it just crashed as soon as you tried to agree to the terms and conditions.  Tried reinstalling 2003 just in case, but no luck.  So I installed LibreOffice, which works just fine thankyouverymuch.  But in other news, I could copy a time-lapse video off my phone without explorer crashing, so that's a win, I guess.  But in a case of you win some, you lose some, you can't drag an icon onto an app on the task bar and have it pop up the app and open the file.  So lame.  Why do they have to *break* everything??

Stuffed capsicums for dinner, which will be in next week's post.  Covid cases are down today as well - "only" 30000 in NSW and 1000 in ACT (down from like 35000 for a couple of days in NSW and ~1200 in the ACT).