Backdating a few days.. ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Got driven quite insane by the neighbour's dog barking for three and a half hours straight - from 7:25-11am.  I can't concentrate on anything while it's yapping.  It's like a car alarm going off.  It'll bark bark bark, have a brief stop, then start up again.  So upsetting.  At work, someone wanted me to look at something right at the end of the day so didn't finish up til 17:30.  In the evening freaked out at all the fresh food we have in the house.  Froze some of the uncooked meat, and some of the meals as well.  So the freezer is now very full.  Made up some meals out of the various bits and pieces (David's happy to pick up a meal of leftovers if he just needs to heat it up, rather than assembling all the bits and pieces first).  Had to laugh at the Simpsons (1993) with people using tapes in cars.  Tapes!

Tuesday.  We were going to have a team lunch at one of the Indian places in Belco, but neither Taj Agra or Indian Bay could be stuffed picking up their phones, even at ten to twelve, so we thought screw em, and went to the Labor club. 

I was feeling mixed up all week.  Tuesday firstly felt like a Wednesday because I was in the office, but then it felt like a Friday because we'd been out for a team lunch.  Weird.

The dog was quiet in the evening.. maybe the rain discouraged it?

Wednesday.  My computer rebooted itself overnight.  And I'm like what??  I'd literally rebooted it on Tuesday evening.  I'd had to reboot it after the last patching to reenable SMB 1.0 in order to connect to our ancient NAS.  So why did it need another reboot? hrmmm!!  Hate Windows, hate.  Oddly, Edge, Chrome, Notepad and OneNote had all come back and reopened where they left off, but Excel didn't.  Weird.  In the evening got extremelly pissed off that the flatbreads we'd bought on the weekend were covered in mould (I'd been planning to use them on Thursday to make pizzas).  If I'd known they were going to mouldy so quickly I'd have frozen them straight away.  Such a waste of food #grunt!!

Thursday.  Drinks, pizza, the usual.  David and I went and looked at Jupiter and Saturn near the moon (see the other post on this).

Friday.  Woke up at 4am.  Gruntfullness.  Had a bit of a wind down day at work tidying and finishing things up.  Had lunch with the Chrises, Neil and Raja at Herbert's.  I had the mac and cheese balls again, but didn't feel so stuffed full this time.  

I'd almost ordered the vegetarian loaded fries, but I was glad I didn't - Raja got them and they were enormous!!  He asked for a doggy bag even before he started!

I also had to laugh at their keg storage (their storage space is at a premium).

Finished up work, yay on holidays!!  Had leftovers for dinner and watched Die Hard in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at 3am for a couple of hours.  #grunt.  Had a little bit of a sleep in.  Then got stuck into All The Things.  So actually a fairly productive day.  Watched the second episode of The Queen's Gambit, and the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Spent the morning doing All The Things, mostly scanning and fixing scanning.  No promised rain though.  For lunch we went over to Rob and Lynne's with some other peeps for a lovely lunch/bbq.  As always Lynne fed us too much ;)

We also found out that Canberra has now asking anyone coming from Sydney to quarantine/self isolate for fourteen days.  Which means it's likely Mum won't be able to come down to visit after Christmas.  Waiting a few days to see if anything changes, but it's unlikely to.

Don't think we had any dinner at all Sunday night, but watched another episode of Discovery.

Not backdating for a rare change...!

Monday.  At lunch time a shower sealer dude came to look at the shower.  Basically he was stumped.  Never a good start.  Sigh.  David mowed the lawn in the afternoon - bestest brother ever!!  Spent some time in the evening dumping the sql from my old gallery apps into csv.  I dumped the two tables - one with the file names and one with the descriptions, then did vlookups in excel to merge them together.  Really I just wanted a dump of what I had since I can't get the gallery app to work (it's just too old and the mysql calls don't work in php7 - I'd basically have to convert mysql_ to mysqli_ *everywhere* and there'd still be no guarantee that it'd work).  Then I dropped the two databases and cleared out all the content.  

Tuesday.  December.  Seriously wtf?  I remember things in July being super recent, how can it possibly be December already?  Such a bizarre year.  Spent the evening doing more tidying up of my hosting.

Wednesday.  Went jeans shopping at lunch.  Arrghh.  I was hoping that the trend towards bigger phones would eventually filter back into a trend for bigger pockets in jeans.  Well half the jeans I looked at didn't have any pockets at all!!  And the ones that did were that horrible fake wear style that I thought died a fashion disaster years ago.  Hate. Hate. Hate.  I'm going to have to replace them soon though as they're falling apart.  I looked up my blog to see when I bought them - September 2016!  Four pairs, which meant each pair lasted about a year's worth of wear.  Take that Jeans West with your stoopid crappy jeans that only lasted the equivalent of like six months - last half as long and pay four times the price?  I don't think so!  Apple continued to be a piece of crap, and I got the "device attached to the system is not functioning" error - while copying photos!  Piece of crap.  Worked second go through, and even got both movies off it first go.  Didn't get anything else much done though after backing up the phone and backing up my computer and paying bills.  On a lighter note, our recycling got picked up.

Thursday.  Cirrus has unveiled its west tower.

In other news, it was revealed that the garbos wanted a 4% pay rise.  Per year.  For three years.  !!  Taking them up to something like $110k/year.  Which is a *lot*.  Certainly a lot more than I make.  Craziness.  Had a good long play with making dashboards in our new service desk system.  Took my notes that I'd written last week up to load a new beer into the till.  Seemed to work :)  Mandalorian in the evening.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Hurrah.  So a bit of a zombie day.  Had a bit of a play with reporting in our new service desk system.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Crazy busy productive day just getting things done, including food shopping.  Stu cooked mackerel in miso paste for dinner.  Mandalorian and then the live action Mulan in the evening.  I thought it wasn't too bad, certainly better than Aladdin (which was pretty lame) and even The Lion King (which was almost identical to the original but flat and lifeless).  

Sunday.  Not quite as productive a day but not too bad.  

These are nice - mini toasts (bought at Chris's for $2) with leftover cream cheese from the weekend, and blackberries we bought on Saturday.  The tomato ones were ok but a bit big to fit in my mouth and too hard to bite in half.

Went for a walk at lunch and saw inside a mobile phone tower comms room that someone had left the door open on.

Had a huge roast beef for dinner (leftovers ftw!) and someone brought up planning Christmas, which is always .. tricky.. hrmm.

Monday.  ok day I guess.  Went for a walk and saw one of my birds (haven't seen them really at all in weeks and weeks).  Spent half an hour hacking weeds and cherry tree suckers and didn't even make a dent.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Watched the first episode of a documentary series on The Mandalorian which was interesting.  But by the time that was all done it was 8:14pm, and too late to really feel like starting anything new.  So I blogged.  Hurrah.

Backdating.  Hi!

Monday.  Woke up with the storm around 1am and got up to backup my more recent files to OneDrive.  Added to a list of Robocopy commands to copy the most recent (14 days worth) of files from my most commonly used directories.  Still managed to wake up early for the daythough.  Ok day.  I'm no longer NEIL which is awesome ;)  Had roast pork for dinner and watched Mandalorian.

Tuesday.  Went with the sweetie to try out Ramen O.  It's pretty good but a bit expensive ($18 for a basic ramen) to do as a lunch all that often.  I'd love it if they did a smaller version for a cheaper price.  

Then saw this flower in a whole flowerbed of them on the way to the Lighty for Anthony's farewell.

In other news, Kit and Pete finally got keys to their new house!  In the evening had leftover brisket for dinner, fixed up the morning's slide scanning, and blogged last week.

Wednesday.  Had a few hours of training on Ansible and Ansible Tower.  Some pretty cool stuff you can do with it.

Watched Apollo 13 in the evening.  The blog title quote is the correct quote from the mission, not the one they used in the movie (which I can see why they did it, the real quote implies the problem is over and they're all cool now).

Thursday.  Busy day catching up on tickets from Wednesday.  In addition, the problem with Neil being off is that noone else knows how to do the back operations on the till for work drinks.  So I went up with Neil while he did stuff and took a bunch of notes for future reference.  Watched the start of 14 Minutes to Earth in the evening.  Also David figured out that we can in fact still access our NAS with its Netbios name (which died ages ago on my computer, and the DNS doesn't even resolve).  No idea how/why that's started working when it didn't used to work, while accessing via IP stopped working when it used to.  hrmmm.

Friday.  Took a Random Day Off with the sweetie.  I spent it doing all the things I would normally do on the weekend.  I also opened a random package I got in the mail this week - I could tell it was a jigsaw by its sound, but I had no clue who sent it.  I made a guess who sent it which turned out to be true!  So that was pretty cool.  However the quality was a bit of a disaster, but I'll leave that for another post.  Leftover lamb for dinner and watched As the Wind Rises in the evening, which I partly remembered from the last time we saw it.  I thought it was bittersweet, which was much how I described it the first time.  Most of his personal life was made up for the movie, but he did exist, and thought the war with the US was futile.

Saturday.  Out the door pretty early.  Had to do a big food shop and take it all out to the club for the club Christmas Party!  (I'd actually forgotten I'd volunteered to do this, having been quite disappointed that I didn't get to do Christmas in July this year because of Covid.  I got the reminder in the newsletter haha!)  Stopped at The Scottish Restaurant for our energy for the morning, then hit the shops.  Bought all the things from Coles, then to the markets to get the roast porks and some prawns.  Made it to the club by lunch time, then got down to cooking All The Things.  

There were two four kilo pork shoulders that I did in the oven (and home made apple sauce done on the stove), four one kilo turkey roasts that I delegated to have done in the bbq oven, two epic potato bakes, two kilos of peas that I added mint to at the end, two bags of carrots that I had to chop myself because Coles and Aldi don't sell frozen carrots anymore (wtf??) and added honey to, and a bunch of bread rolls. 

I also did some finger food.  I bought a couple of packets of mini toasts, which were topped with cream cheese, and either salmon and dill or tomato or cucumber.  With cucumber/cheese/tomato only option for the gluten-free person :) (we made more than are shown in this photo ;) )

And there were prawns with seafood sauce.  Whole prawns were like $30/kilo at the markets, but someone would have to shell/devein them.  For $40/kilo you could buy them shelled and deveined.  Given that whole prawns are literally half head, you're basically paying $60/kilo for the flesh, so it was a no-brainer to buy them cheaper and already processed.  And everyone loved them!

Eventually all the food was cooked, and I had an army of helpers to serve.

Apparently dinner was well appreciated, and I even got time to cool off in the pool after dinner (and avoid the secret santa cause I hate that crap haha).  Awesome evening!  Note to self:  next time find someone to do music!

Sunday.  Packed up all the leftovers (omfg there were actually some leftovers!  that never happens!) and came home.  Pretty quiet day.  Didn't do much other than put up the Christmas tree and some of the Christmas decorations.

Backdating.  Oh hai.

Monday.  Scanning.  Work.  Actually wore shorts to work.  Ok so I was at home, but it still felt a little strange.  The only time I ever wear shorts to work is the day of our Christmas party at the lake.  Cooked the beef stew for dinner (I'd done all the prep on the weekend, so it was just a matter of chucking it in the slow cooker all afternoon.  Nice sunset.  Did my UK photo labelling, then caught up on RSS feeds, but no blogging.  Whoops.

Tuesday.  Scanning.  Work.  Saw my birds at lunch.  David came along and we noticed a flooded pit that shouldn't be flooded, so David called Icon water to come fix.  Did my UK photo labelling.  One more night to go!  Didn't feel like doing much else.  Filed some photos.  I thought I'd download my phone photos so I can blog them at some point.  Except Apple died copying the movies, as it always does, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting it would get it to even open the phone in explorer.  *sigh*  Hate Apple.  HATE.  Wondering if my next phone will be a Samsung.  I'm sick of Apple's crapfullness.  Did some blogging.

Wednesday.  Scanning.  Work.  OMFG no recycling pickup.  Suez workers want a 4% pay rise and are striking til they get it.  4% seems a little high to me given our rate of inflation, but they're prolly paid like crap to begin with, so whatevs.  But still.  No recycling pickup!!  Gah!! 

Went to Specsavers at lunch.  Honestly should NOT have gone to Specsavers.  There's too many staff and too many people and they're just not very well organised.  The first half of the appointment was fine.  The general staff did scans of my eyes, and then I got to see the optometrist and all that was fine.  But then she said I should do a field of vision test and I could either wait and do it now or make an appointment.  I asked how long it would be and she went off and found out and said oh they can do it now, and I'll see you straight after.  Sweet.  So I went to go have it but they realised someone was in the room, and did I want to look at frames while I waited.  No that's fine, shouldn't be long, I'll just wait.  So I waited.  And waited and waited and waited.  I saw the previous patient leave, but noone bothered to come get me.  When they *finally* did the test, they said, oh your optometrist has gone on break, it'll be twenty five minutes, do you want to look at frames while you wait.  And I'm like NO, you told me I'd just do the test then get to see the optometrist.  So he goes off to try and find someone else to look at my results.  Ten minutes later and I'm waiting and fuming.  So I get up to leave and the guy goes oh did noone see you and I'm like no.  So he goes to the original optometrist and she comes out of her lunch break to tell me oh your results are fine.  Fricken I could have just left and you could have called me if any issues.  Fricken hopeless.  So I was fuming at all the stoopid by the time I got back to work and then had to deal with all the stoopid at work, which of course I couldn't because I was in a crap mental state.  Sigh. 

I left early with Stu to go pick up the car.  And had wine.  Because it was that kind of day.  The highlight of the day was that I finally finished labelling all twelve and a half thousand UK photos!  But the drama of the day was not over.  Kit and Pete had missed a document that needed to be signed for their new house to settle, and so it was all going to get delayed and cost them who knows how much money to sort out, and then they'd be homeless until it all got sorted out.  Which is never great when you've got so many animals to look after.  And have to go back to work at some point but all your clothes are packed.  

Oh, and there was also the cicada I rescued when I got back from lunch.  It was on the wall in the stairwell of our building.  So I grabbed it and took it outside and got a few photos before it flew away.

Thursday.  Scanning.  Work.  Work drinks.  Continuation of Kit's dramas.

Friday.  Hadn't gotten a new box of slides out to scan (and couldn't get at it cause David's car was in the way) so went back and fixed up a few rolls of previous boxes that needed fixing up (eg straighting or cleaning).  Work.  Discovery and Mandalorian in the evening.

Saturday.  All the things in the morning.  Super productive morning by 9:30, although didn't get as much done after that.  Had to log onto work at lunch time to try and fix a stoopid firewall problem, but the vendor couldn't figure it out either.  Even after three and a half hours on the phone.  So that was a bit of a poo.  Went over to Chris's to see if he had any veggies going.  He had some zucchinis which were looking pretty sad, so he gave them to me for free!  Win!  Cooked the whole lot of them (other than a few of the worst bits) and had them with the beef brisket that had been slow cooking all afternoon.  Watched the episode of The Simpons with Tom Jones in it, and we were like, what was that spoof movie he was in, and realised it was Mars Attacks!  So we watched that after.  Rented from Amazon Prime.

Sunday.  Houseworks in the morning.  I'm having to close the blinds on the south-east side of the house in the mornings now.  Our lovely pistachio tree that used to shade the house in the morning is gone, which is super sad.  Did a bunch of poking around with my hosting trying to tidy it up a bit.  Backing up files and rearranging things and deleting things and generally tidying up.  Still a lot of work I want to do in that space.  Culled photos for our North Coast holiday, and spent *hours* blogging it.  Also did a whole bunch of backdating of other blog entries.  If you don't use an RSS feed reader you may want to go back in time a few months, there's likely all sorts of entries you may have missed ;)  Leftovers for dinner.

When I was sick in September I spent most of a weekend in bed, and downloaded and played a lot of HappyColor.  However it's one of those apps that plays ads that override the phone's physical mute button, so it's blacklisted in a lot of situations.  Pretty much I only play the daily picture now.  One that came up the other week was this nice picture of a log cabin on a lake.

Then that night.  That very night.  This came up on our Chromecast.

And I'm like .. !!!!!

So I went on a mission to find it.  Didn't take too long.  Log cabin mountain lake is not exactly a useful search in Google, but the HappyColor picture had a church in it, and that let me find it.  Turns out it's Lake Braies in Italy.  And look at this - this looks to be the actual photo they used for HappyColor.  Except maybe squished a bit ;)

It wouldn't be me if I wasn't backdating ;)

Wednesday.  Slept quite well after our long drive home the day before.  Ok day I guess.  In the evening struggled through the todo list that was a long way behind on account of being away for four days.  So no UK photo labelling this week.  Backed up my computer, but couldn't connect to the NAS.  It seems likely that windows is refusing to talk to such an old version of SMB/CIFS.  The laptop which hasn't been patched for a little while can still talk to it.  Apparently 20H2 will fix it.  We shall see.

Thursday.  Poor lonely Santa.

In the evening had pizza and the second episode of Mandalorian.

Friday.  Caught up on three boxes of slide labels (slides had been scanned just hadn't done the data entry).  Soooo nice to be at home.  Went and saw some of my birds at lunch.  Did a bunch of cleaning on the mail servers.  Because that's what I do.  The new neighbours started moving stuff into their garage (they organised to get access before settlement to start moving stuff).  Stu cooked gnocchi for dinner and we watched From Up on Poppy Hill which was very sweet.

Saturday.  Smashed out all the things.  Did some scanning and housework and achieved a weekend's work by 9am.  Gathered stuff for tax in the morning.  Went out for lunch and did a huge food shop.  

In the afternoon cooked all the things.  

I cooked up some mince with onion and taco spice for taco Tuesday.  I cooked all the meat/bacon/onion ready to pop in the slow cooker on Monday.  And I cooked up a veggie loaded san choy bow mix for dinner that night.  

Took three hours.  Yeup.

Watched second episode of Discovery.  Her hair grew too much for one year.  Just sayin.

Sunday.  Another productive morning of all the things.  Spent quite a bit of time sorting out the piles of packing materials (boxes, bubble wrap, tissue paper etc) we have in the garage - organising it all so we can find it when we want to sell stuff.  Cooked a huge lamb roast for dinner, with epic leftovers.  Basically over the weekend I cooked most of our food for the fortnight.

We're into season four of The Simpsons, and up to the third episode of Discovery.

Backdating.  Cause I'm a slacker.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Went to have some of the snow peas that I bought probably only two weeks ago and they were *covered* in slime.  So fricken unusual because normally they last weeks and weeks in the fridge.  Pissed as.  Then David came home and spent all afternoon swearing at the fish tank lights.  But he got them working in the end.  Bestest brother ever.  (not sure if I ever mentioned the story - a few weeks back the transformer for Stu's stoopidly expensive LED fish tank lights went POP and that was the end of that.  It was a completely non standard transformer, there was no doco anywhere online for the lights, and they were strangely wired.  David decided to get resistors and rewire the thing so it'd work with a standard transformer, and also be less likely to blow out the lights.  Just waiting for the other transformer to go next so he'll have to do it all over again.. hrmmm....).  Had sausages and salad/veggies for dinner.  Then got more grunty that Stu's sauerkraut had gone off.  And some ham we bought ages ago is also looking very strange.  I *hate* wasting food and we've wasted so much this week >:(  Feeling like I should ban perishable food that I won't eat (like ham and sauerkraut) and veggies that only I like (like snow peas).  Don't get me started on trying to find veggies that everyone likes and doesn't cause health issues in people.  Took til 8pm to get UK photo labelling done.  811 left.  And blogging.  An hour and a half later.  hrmmm.

But look!  Poppy in the staircase!

Tuesday.  Ok sleep mostly.  Finished scanning Dad's WA slides.  Was good to see his photos, after only having seen Mum's very red-shifted prints for so many years.  I think I'll need to scan her negatives of those holiday trips - hopefully they fared better than the prints!  Worked from home so just watched some silly horse race on tv in the background.  David made home in time for the race but steadfastly ignored it ;)  Later in the afternoon had no tickets and not much else happening so flexed off for an hour or so and got some UK photo labelling done.  Only 581 photos left!  Leftovers from the club halloween night for dinner.  Hacked some periwinkle.  Watched random stuff on the internet in the evening.

Wednesday.  Okish sleep.  Up to 5000 of Dad's slides scanned.  I'm into Central Australia now.  I remember Mum saying a while back that Dad had issues with his camera on the WA trip, and there was a $25 camera fixing bill listed in the holiday expenses, but all the photos from that trip looked fine.  The Central Australia trip on the other hand was a disaster.  So many of the photos are over exposed, and there's *heaps* missing - obviously too bad to even keep.  I'm thinking *this* was the trip he had camera issues with.  Must have been absolutely heartbreaking for him.  I'll have to get Mum's negatives of this trip too.  Pity you can't climb Ayers Rock aka Uluru anymore.  I'm calling it though - I reckon within twenty years the local Aboriginal people will start doing guided tours to the top.  Charged of course.  I don't know how true it is, but David and Yvonne went some years ago and got the impression that the Aboriginal people didn't really care too much that people would want to climb to the top - they were much more worried about the sacred sites around the base of the rock.  I'm having to be the Naughty Email Intervention Layer (aka NEIL) at work, probably for another few weeks at least.  Which is a bit of a poo.  Cause he doesn't document anything!  Actually *going* to work sux epically - takes so much extra time out of my day.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Then it's back to "work" - finishing scanning the morning's photos (because there's not enough time in the mornings on "work" days), backing up hard drive, labelling photos etc.  Only 475 to go!!!

I don't have any notes for Thursday.  There was work drinks.  And I went with David to the mall to do some shopping.  Saw this very pretty car in the car park.

Friday.  I swear Dad must have had sex on the brain.  Following his Coitus Tower slides from the USA, this was the label for a thorny devil in Central Australia.

The evening was packing for our long weekend away...

OMFG!  Not backdating!! ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  In the evening I got up to labelling the photo of sad bean!  This was a baked bean Stu had at breakfast one morning on our UK 2010 holiday.  It had a crease and a couple of specks of pepper at just the right spots to make the bean look like it had a sad face.  Stu couldn't bear to eat sad bean, and I don't like baked beans, so that poor little bean didn't get eaten, which was even sadder!  I might have had a little sad ten years later just labelling the photo I took of it :(:(

Up to episode 7 of Against the Wind.

Tuesday.  Hurty woke me up and kept me awake for an hour and a half.  But otherwise slept ok. 

<work rant snipped>

But look!  Itty bitty Cape Weed flower!

Leftovers for dinner, UK labelling and episode 8 of Against the Wind.

Wednesday.  All the stoopid.  I don't even remember what now.  I ranted to Stu over a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar and pushed it from my memory.  

Stopped in at the markets on the way home to go to the chemist, and the sweetie even cooked dinner! :)

I thought this looked pretty cool - looks a bit like the Matterhorn!

Thursday.  Filled with rage at someone watching Bathurst near me at work without a headset - not even at their desk, but in our area because their own desk is outside the exec offices and that would look bad.  And three or four conversations going on around me meant for NOISE and I seriously nearly lost it.  Fortunately I have the bestest boss ever and he went and muted Bathurst for me so I didn't go postal.  Watched the second episode of the French sun documentary.

Neil and I saw these at lunch on Thursday.  Not a huge amount of information on the Beam website, you need to download the app to find out useful stuff, you know, like where you can ride them.  45c/minute introductory rate to ride one.  Wonder how well they'll last.  I wouldn't mind taking one for a trip around the lake :)

Friday.  Deleting all the things!  Did a massive cleanup of routes in the morning, and cleared out a big decommissioned app in the afternoon.  In between I had lunch at Herbert's with Tony and the Chrises.  Big lunch, so dinner was a small serving of popcorn (needed some fibre to counteract all the meat I had at lunch).  Watched Arrietty in the evening, which we last (first) saw at the movies in 2012.  The movie is based on the "The Borrowers" books which really annoys me as a title because they're not borrowing, they're *stealing*.  Just sayin!

Saturday.  Slept well.  A day of All The Things.  We did do a quick Bunnings run and food shop.  I'd already voted during the week so didn't get a democracy sausage (I think a lot of places aren't doing them anyway), but Bunnings has started up their sausage sizzles again, but they load the sauces for you.  So not quite as pretty as a photo as my actual democracy sausage featured on Atlas (Gastro) Obscura :)

Stu cooked dinner which was lovely of him - grilled eggplant with a sauce of miso, mirin, and sake.  Quite yummy.

In the evening we watched the first episode of season 3 of Discovery.  I enjoyed the first season, but the second season just got way too convoluted and hard to follow.  The first episode of this season was fine, hopefully this season won't be as complicated as the last.  Up to episode 9 of Against the Wind.  

Sunday.  Today.  For once I'm not backdating.. craziness I know!  Woke up at 3:45 to go to the loo but didn't get back to sleep for hours.  At 4:51 I got up to have some cheese because I was hungry.  Apparently just a little bit of eggplant and rice isn't enough to keep me full all night.  I did eventually get a bit more sleep, including have a dream that I was staying at Dooce's house, and it was *massive* and Stu for some reason was sleeping in some other building on the *campus*, and I was talking to Leta about what life was like being the daughter of such a famous blogger.  So a pretty slow start.  Did a few things on the todo list.  I was going to do some more Lego part picking of Vic's sets, but by the time I'd gotten the files organised and found the sets and gone through them for what they had already it was after lunch.  Then we went and visited Annie/Stu/Immy, and then came home and did cooking and photo processing and blogging and suddenly it's nearly dinner time.  Hrmmmmm.

So we have a new local!  Herbert's at Evatt.  When you Google Herbert's Evatt, some of the results are for Herbert Evatt, who the suburb was named after.  Learn something new every day ;)

Tony has been going there quite a bit over recent months.  It's been super popular over the covid period, with people working from home and going there for lunches and dinners - he's had to book in advance just to get a table.  With people going back to work now, and now that it's not so "new", business has dropped a little, and with covid capacity restrictions easing it's easier to get in.  So couple of weeks ago I met up with Tony and Jess and Keira for lunch. 

Their favourite brewer is Tumut River Brewing Company and they have several of their beers on tap! 

When we were in Tumut in August we heard about TRBC's Fifty Shades of Purple, which Herbert's had on tap, so I finally got to try it!

It was purple when they first tapped it - Tony got to try the first glass!  But it was quite blue by the time I got to it.  It makes your whole mouth turn blue!

I was going to be going out for a birthday barbeque in the evening so I thought I'd go for a light lunch and order off the starters menu.  I got four mac and cheese balls which were quite yummy, but huge!  I was actually *full* all afternoon!  Whoops!

Last Friday I met up with Tony and the Chrises for lunch again.  They still had some Fifty Shades of Purple left, so had some of that, as well as a Ginja Ninja.  This time I thought I'd order off the starter menu again and got the lemon chicken skewers.  Also delicious, but I was *full* all afternoon - whoops!

I'll have to get the sweetie there some time.  Would be a great place to drop in for a drink after work.  And if they start doing breakfast on the weekends we could do brunch there sometimes :)

Canberra has escaped relatively unscathed from COVID-19 (so far).  We had a spate of cases right in the beginning, but almost all of them were from returning overseas travellers and their close contacts.  There was a single case in June from a diplomat returning from overseas.  And in July there was a few linked to a family returning from Melbourne during their spike in cases.

Life for us hasn't changed too much.  As I said at the beginning, for us it just meant seeing less of our friends and not eating out as much.  As those restrictions were lifted some months ago, we have been able to catch up with friends more often, and we've been out for meals more often.

We're mostly doing our shopping fortnightly so we don't need to go to the shops as often.  We've done some shopping at the markets and I get most of our milk and orange juice (and beer!) from Chris's.  And our last two big Coles shops have been delivered, so we haven't set foot in Coles in over two months.

I think I'm about the same weight as pre covid.  I would normally eat lunches at the food court every day so that hasn't been happening, but I would also get quite a bit more walking in.  I'm still going for a short walk at lunch every day and seeing three or four groups of magpies.  Lunches are either leftovers or noodles or toast or whatever.  Not terribly healthy.

Our work drinks are still closed, although that may change soon.  During the six months of the lock down we drank through eight cases of Corona beer.  In the last couple of months the guys that have been in the office have gone up to the Pot Belly for Thursday drinks.  While it's good and all, it's *very* expensive compared to drinking at home, or even at work.

We've been encouraged to come into work to work more often.  Which is a shame because I could happily work from home and *never* go into the office.  But they won't let us do that.  So on Thursday I went into work - for only the third time since March - and exactly six months to the day that I started working from home.  I'll probably go in once a week to start with, unless we get an outbreak here.

Travelwise, the trip to Europe with Mum got postponed two years.  I found it somewhat ironic that the whole reason the Passion Play in Oberammergau came to be was because of a plague.  And this year they had to cancel (postpone).  Because of a plague.

Our cruise next year has finally been called off.  But again this one has been postponed a year.  Let's just hope there's a vaccine developed in the next year otherwise even then things will be in doubt.

We missed out on going to Tasmania for Stu's 50th, but did have a nice long weekend in Tumut which was really nice.

How's everyone else's lockdowns going?