Saturday.  8th.  Arrived home from our overseas adventure zombie tired.  I partly unpacked.  Had a nap but didn't really rest because I was too stressed about wasting a weekend day.  Went to Chris's to get some milk.  Did some clothes washing.  In the afternoon I started to feel the twinges of a sore throat.  The sweetie ordered Chong Co for dinner.  Then had an early night (20:30).

Sunday.  Woke up around 12:30 and stayed awake til around 06:00.  With a sore throat.  I got another couple of hours sleep after that, but it wasn't good quality and I was stressed about losing half the day.  Took a RAT which was negative.  The sweetie did the food shopping.  Had to fight with my phone to get all the files off it (I decided to recopy in case I'd missed any doing it piece-meal while I was away). And fighting with windows and memory sticks.  Cooked roast pork for dinner with heaps of crackling, so that was nice.  But basically achieved nothing much all day.  Simpsons and saw the first episode of Andor.

Monday.  Woke up at ~1:15 and stayed awake until like 4 or 5.  Sigh.  Slept til about 8:30 but again not good quality and felt zombie tired all day.  I flexed off most of the day, but could maybe have taken it as sick leave.  On account of I was sick.  Fortunately not super sick.  Just zombie tired.   Fought with SD cards and windows explorer - my computer kept showing the old card even with the new one plugged in.  Tried rebooting.  Then it wouldn't read my SD cards at all.  Sigh.  So got the files off using my old computer.  Gonna be pissed if the SD card reader is dead, the computer is less than a year old.  Nothing much else.  Logged onto work for a couple of hours in the afternoon to check my emails and catch up with Con.  Cooked san choy bow for dinner.  

Tuesday.  Work up some time after 1, til past 3.  Sigh.  Went to work (well, logged on), but brain dead.  Not as sick though.  Did a bit of weeding after work (attacking the huge growth of weeds next the lemon tree).  Was making good progress when John came and helped me and we ploughed through the rest.  Stu made pizzas for dinner.  And I made a coconut cake.  It was that kind of day.  

Wednesday.  Woke up a bit after midnight, didn't get back to sleep til like 4.  Sigh.  Zombie day yet again.  Went out and did some weeding at lunch for like 3/4 hour to get some sun to try and convince my brain that day time was actually day time.  Took some extra vitamin D as well.  Possibly being a bit sick and zombie tired meant not even setting foot outside the house, so not seeing any intense sunlight so not resetting the circadian rhythms??  Red curry with leftover pork for dinner.

Thursday.  Slept relatively ok, if restless.  Went into work for the first time in two months.  Had sort of farewell drinks for Jim, although not many people came, and dinner at the Brindabella/Magpies.  

Friday.  Ok sleep.  Our home internet died in the morning.  Unplanned outage.  Not that Internode ever bothered to update their status page.  They've gotten really bad since being taken over by iinet.  Flexed off the rest of the morning then headed down to Herbert's for lunch with the Chrises and Tony.  Except that Braddles had a Floriade shift conflict, and then Aquila got caught up at work, so ended up being just Tony and me.  The internet still hadn't come back after lunch, so got a bus to work for the afternoon (although the internet came back shortly after I got to work, doh).  Leftover san choy bow for dinner, finished season 28 of The Simpsons, and watched second episode of Andor.

Saturday.  Woke up at 6.  First time since I'd gotten home a week ago that I'd woken up naturally at normal time and actually felt human.  Did some house tidying in the morning, did our food shopping (we went together for like the first time since covid, but at Woollies Kippax where everything is *different*).  Then got stuck into organising photos from the trip (reorienting, and renaming with date/timestamp).  In the end I took 3727 on the big Canon, 5486 on the G5X, 3467 on the phone, and Mum took 1997.  Also 41 videos (11 on the G5X, and 30 on the phone).  So 12680 photos all up from me,14677 total.  Whoops.  Stu cooked sausages for dinner.  Also couldn't find my memory stick purse (that had backups on usb sticks, as well as the orginal SD cards not in the cameras).  Grunt.  Reread the travel brochure I wrote.  That was a bit of fun.  We did make a few changes to it, and missed out on a few things.  Did some weeding while Stu mowed the jungle.  Put the clarinet back together and had a bit of a play.  Was surprised I could still remember how to play.  Then Simpsons and Matrix Resurrections (which I'd seen on the plane on the way over, but was good to see again on a big screen).

Sunday.  Ok sleep again which was nice.  Did some house stuff in the morning, and a Bunnings run.  Dropped into work and found my memory card purse.  Also did some weeding and photo processing. And fish tank stuff and planted some seedlings and seeds.  Made some Lego.  Did some music.  Had to clear some space on one of my backup drives which is full, in order to backup holiday photos.  Basa bake for dinner.

When the weeds in your pavers are actually strawberries..

Why can't all days be like the last two??  I don't have time to go to work, I have far too many other things to do!!!

25.5.22

As seen after seeing Lego Jurassic World in Sydney.  When Dave2 was in Sydney in 2011, we went into St Mary's Cathedral to have a look, but at the time you weren't allowed to take photos.  Now you are, just not during services.  Which is nice, because it's actually a really beautiful cathedral.  

Sunday.  14th.  Celebrated with some bubbles and a Chong Co delivery feast.

Watched Moulin Rouge! in the evening.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Documenting more things to clean.  Plus being Neil on account of him having covid.  Had a go at playing some of the music in my new John Williams book.  John Williams is *hard* !!  Stu cooked a big bag of spinach which we had with some chicken.  Ordered an International Driving Permit.  At least you can do it all online now and upload a digital photo, so no need to go to NRMA.  Although you do have to pay $9 postage, which negates the saving of getting photos done at the post office.  Doh.  

Tuesday.  Tried to get back into the swing of planning proxy upgrade during the day.  Stuffed capsicums for dinner (using leftover veggie mince from the lasagna from last weekend). Switzerland planning in the evening.

Wednesday.  Dunno, no notes.

Thursday.  Tried to do more proxy planning but all the people with all the problems stopped that.  Homemade low-carb pizzas for dinner, with epic awesome garlic bread (Chris was selling it cheap as it was past its use-by date).  Watched Shine in the evening.  I saw it once a long time ago.  I swear you used to be able to see Geoffrey Rush's doodle on the trampoline!  Coincidentally, David Helfgott's second wife (not his first as shown in the movie) died just two days earlier.

This is the output of Stu's birthday present to himself

Friday.  Bad sleep.  Too much hissing.  Super tired All Day.  Deleted 3-5% of our ruleset from decommissioned apps that noone had bothered to tell us about.  That was fun.  Kiev and kalettes for dinner.  So awesome.

Roast the kalettes for 40-45 minutes and they go all crispy on the leaves and chewy in the middle.  So damned awesome!

Watched Kingsman: The Golden Circle in the evening.  Silly fun.  With Elton John!  And The Mandalorian!

Saturday.  Super good sleep which was lovely.  Holiday planning literally all day.  Got about half the hotels booked.  Although the Florence hotel was a bit of a poo and after I booked it was like, oh we *might* be able to give you a double bed.  So I cancelled.  Cause I aint sleeping in the same bed as my mother! ;)  Was too busy to do any music or even light a candle.  Stu heated up some minces for dinner with some spinach.  Watched the first half of Blue Murder, which I'd never actually seen before.  Richard Roxburgh was so young.  And Gary Sweet with hair was a bit disturbing! :)

Sunday.  Slept well enough.  Booked a different hotel in Florence.  This one is bigger, but they also were like, we can't guarantee two single beds.  Are you freaking kidding me??  Sigh.  More planning in the morning.  Fish stuff, music, photos, blogging and a bit more planning in the afternoon.

18.6.22

I last went to ANSTO in 2017 to visit Chrissie's dad, but he worked on the outside of the complex and we didn't go inside at all.  Before that the last time I went was twice in the early-mid-nineties.  Gordon M from the church I was going to at the time worked there and I got to go into the HIFAR (High Flux Australian Reactor) building *twice*!  Once by myself and once with Hao.  The reactor was shut down in 2007 (although it's still physically there).

The second reactor that was on site when I was there has also been shut down, but it's been completely removed.

ANSTO's latest reactor is OPAL - Open Pool Australian Lightwater (which even *looks* like an opal in photos).  It's housed in a building with a titanium cage over it that will supposedly shred a 737 and protect the building.  Unfortunately we didn't get to go in here.

So we met up at the discovery centre, then got split into two groups and went off to tour the place.

First up was the Opal Auditorium building, where we saw a couple of different models of the place and the reactor, and got a talk on the reactor and what they do there.  We also got to have a look at a live feed camera that he could control to show us the interior of the reactor building.  I couldn't find any photos of the models online though.

Next up we went to the molybdenum processing room where they make molybdenum-99 and technetium-99 used in medical imaging.  There were people working in there which was pretty cool and they have manipulator arms that they use to do the work behind nearly a metre of glass. There was also a small canister there that he said was 3/4 tonne on a little trolley.. not sure if I misheard, but seems a little.. high.. to me.  You can see the trolley in this pic

Next up was the beam room (Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering), where they divert neutron beams out of the reactor for all sorts of experiments.  The instruments all have Australian animal names (which they're running out of heh).

Finally we got to go into the Antares room (Australian National Tandem Research Accelerator), which is actually housed in a building that used to house a couple of non-active reactors, so there were epic thick concrete walls. Next door was a massive pressure vessel (vacuum chamber). One of the things they use it for is carbon dating organic samples.

While we were waiting for the other group, we stared at the massive poster they had of All The Isotopes which was pretty amazing.  Looked a bit like this..

The silliest thing about the visit is that there's strictly no photography (you have to leave your phone etc in the free lockers), BUT, most of the things we saw have photos freely available on the internet anyway.  Dumb.

Still, it was a really interesting tour.

Sunday.  Backdating a few days because life and birthdays and crap got in the way.  Had all the veggies and some chicken thighs for dinner.  Then watched more of The Crown.

Monday.  Um.  Probably a cleaning day.  Spent the evening looking at distances between places in Europe to see if we'll go over the daily allowance or need to buy unlimited kilometres.  And trying to plan an itinerary.  

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3 to pee, then started stressing about All The Things, then got hungry, then the hissing.  Sigh.  So tired, but still an ok day, mostly cleaning.  

Went to another Surprising Science talk in the Shine Dome.  There was Dr Chris Guppy from UNE talking about sulphur in soil, and Mahdokht Shaibani from RMIT talking about lithium sulphur batteries.  

The previous two photos of the Shine Dome were on my new G5X.  So is this next one.  This is hand held!!  Half a second.  Pretty impressive.

Had dinner at Master Bao but was disappointed they don't actually server bao!!?!?!  wtf!?

No bao at Master Bao!

Spring rolls

Dim sims

Shantung duck

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Busy cleaning day.

Thursday.  Okish sleep.  Another busy cleaning day.  Two days cleaning up stuff to get it all consistent and pretty.  And literally noone will care.  But I did fix something else that had been broken for a while (not by me) and did actually impact people so that was a win I guess.  Also got filled with rage at Outlook which by default only adds reminders to meetings created within Outlook, which means I keep missing stuff because I don't get reminders.  Hate Outlook.  HATE.  This was never a problem in Notes.  Just sayin!!

Homemade pizzas for dinner on Stu's low carb bases.  Then watched Careful, He Might Hear You.  I might have seen it once a very very long time ago.  I read the book ten years ago so was good to finally see the movie again.  I was disappointed they didn't have a shot of him on the train going over the Woronora Bridge (or in fact any shots at all of Sydney, I guess too hard with all the modern buildings).  

Friday.  Ok sleep until the hissing.  Had a fairly quiet day catching up on emails and stuff that had been slipping because I'd been busy the last couple of days.  Chicken Kiev for dinner, then watched Broadcast News.

Saturday.  Woke up at 2:22 with mild hurty.  Had a pain killer and some cheese.  An hour later I felt hungry again.  Then the hissing.  So a very slow morning.  I was trying to get things done in the afternoon but then more hurty so slow and painful.  But then that eased up and we had EffanC and Rob and Fiona over for dinner (brisket, blue cheese potato bake and roasted kale (I over cooked the kale :( )) which was lovely.  

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Finally booked a car for the first week of our trip.  Then spent like three and a half hours out and about running errands and doing shopping before we go into self-imposed quarantine.  Stu is not coming on this trip (sadly :( ) but I need him in quarantine as well in case he gets covid and brings it home to me.  I did get KFC for lunch, which is somewhat of a tradition, so that was nice.  Then tried to allocate seats on my flights.  For most of them this worked ok.  But the Sydney to Dubai leg I can't even tell which airline I'll be flying on.  Qantas say it's Emirates, and Emirates say it's Qantas, and neither will let me book seats.  Other than that, panicking over my todo lists.  Also.  Neil has covid.  He started feeling sick Thursday morning.  This was after I'd sat next to him all day Wednesday.  Sigh.  Felt like I was getting a sore throat Sunday.  As with every other time in the past two and a half years I'm sure it's just my imagination.  Suddenly it's 16:20 and it's like wtf happened to my weekend.  Managed to download my photos before giving up for the day and relaxing with the sweetie with some bubbles.

Six months ago today the sweetie and I headed off for a two week road trip around regional Victoria.  We packed quite a lot into the first week, then had a more relaxed second week.  We had almost perfect weather almost the whole time.  I was somewhat disappointed returning to places I'd been to before, because a lot of the views simply weren't accessible anymore.  But other than that we had a pretty fantastic time.

It took me a bit over five months to get all the photos online and extra blog entries done.  But here it all is!  Enjoy!!

Sunday.  24th.  Had leftover lamb for dinner with All The Veggies.  Watched the fourth episode of Obi-Wan and more of The Crown.

Monday.  Spent a bunch of time going through my todo list and tidying it up and actually doing some things on it.  Went and got my fourth jab at lunch - moderna this time to spice it up.  Tidying and cleaning in the afternoon.  In the evening fought with Optus' website.  OMFG their personal portal is just as bad as their enterprise portal.  Literally went round in circles three times trying to get myself re-registered and logged in.  I was trying to find out why I'd been charged for an international SMS when I hadn't made any.  But Optus' bills are completely useless and don't give you the time/date/number of SMSes, even online.  So got online with a chat bot and eventually a human, and the first thing they did was credit the account as a "valued customer" and I'm like, thanks, that's great, but I want to know why it's on the bill at all.  But she was like, oh we can't see that information.  hrmm.  So then she was like, oh btw, we can save you some money on your plan.  So that took a while longer.  But hey, it'll save me $15 a month, so the fact I lost an entire evening sorting it out was not all in vain.  But I was still like, is the date of that sms actually the date it was sent, or was it just because that's the last day of the billing cycle.  So she went off and found the date/time/number.   WTF??  Why say you can't do that when you totally can??  With the date/time I was able to find the offending sms.  I'd been replying to a message my real estate agent sent me that day, but the contact information was faulty, and the reply didn't go to a "real" number, it went to some text which got translated to a number.  The number was 0011 23553776774 which is like Chad or something.  If they'd have just put that information into the damned bill I wouldn't have had to waste an evening chasing them.  Le sigh.  

On a lighter note, we had very delicious stuffed capsicums for dinner.  This mix had bolognase mince, feta, spinach, mushrooms and parmesan.  I then topped them with cheese and roasted them.  Delicious!  And no leftovers ;)

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Very sore arm.  And quite tired.  Had a quiet cleaning day.  The sweetie cooked some Pialligo duck breast with spinach and mushrooms for dinner which was very nice.

Wait what?

Wednesday.  Still a very sore arm.  Did more cleaning planning at work.  Brought home my hard drive from two weeks ago and did a restore of my desktop/documents/downloads.  Turns out the files I thought OneDrive had deleted weren't actually there - they must have been there from an ancient backup of my old computer.  Those files had been filed when I moved to my new computer.  So all it's done is make faulty restores of files that weren't there just to confuse things and potentially create duplicates.  Sounds like something Apple would do.  And Microsoft is no better at it.  Hopeless.  My old computer doesn't load OneDrive at boot anymore.  And my laptop wasn't signed in, so I was able to clear things out before OneDrive got its hands on things.  Signed in on the laptop, and sure enough it tried to restore the same old files to my desktop.  Will have to go and completely clear out whatever is online with OneDrive.  I also turned backups OFF thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  No notes.  Probably cleaning.  Probably drinks.  Blah blah blah.

Friday.  Ok morning but super busy crazy afternoon trying to get All The Things done in the limited windows we have to Get Things Done.  Because I also wanted to log off early so we could go do the food shopping for the club Christmas in July event we were doing.  So went and did that after work.  All the pork and all the food.  Fun times.  Leftovers for dinner then watched the fifth episode of Obi-Wan.

Saturday.  It was cold.  Got up and ready then headed out to the club.

Did I mention it was cold?

Got out to the club and brought in All The Food (and a bunch of lucky door prizes on the left).

Then my whole day got thrown into dissarray because John bought a brand-new-second-hand oven!  So instead of having to do the turkey in advance and reheat it later, I could actually do it independently in the separate oven!

So spent a couple of hours prepping all the foods.  There was 8kg of pork, 3kg turkey, two epic potato bakes, 2kg peas, my (Coles) "winter salad" which I totally forgot to take a photo of, apple sauce and gravy, and I made a tray of "Christmas skewers" as well.

Two epic potato bakes

This was the sweet potato for the winter salad (which I didn't get a photo of!)

8kg pork!  So good!!

3kg turkey.  There would have been four except when I opened one, it had been dropped while still unfrozen and the seal was open too, so decided it would be safer not to use it.  We did run out of turkey (after everyone got seconds), but there was still pork so noone starved ;)

The potato bakes cooked

Mulled wine anyone?

These were the "Christmas skewers" I made - bocconcini balls, olives, tomato, basil, with balsamic glaze and olive oil.  A little time consuming to make, but actually simple and effective and they all got eaten.  

My dinner.  I might have already pigged out on pork and crackling so wasn't feeling super hungry at this point ;)

Stu and Chris helped decorate the pavlovas

All in all it went really well.  The food all turned out well and we didn't get much leftovers.  We won't mention the one woman who literally made a vomit face over the olives.  And when I said I'd be putting rocket lettuce with the sweet potato I asked if she'd vomit over that too, and she said yes so I said well maybe you could grab a few pieces of sweet potato before I do.  Seriously who does that?  If you don't like something you can just say "yeah not a fan" and not eat it.  But to make vomit faces and say you hate it makes you look like a three year old.  For someone in their 60s or 70s.  Lame.  Later she came into the kitchen and literally stood right behind me while I was cutting up the crackling obviously hoping to get some and I said NO!! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!!  Sigh.  But other than that, pretty damned awesome night!!  And not too late either, I think we went to bed around 22:30.

Sunday.  So last time we were out at the club I couldn't sleep because even with two doonas I was COLD.  So the other week I went and bought a 75% down doona.  And it was awesome!  We were quite comfortable all night.  Well other than be being awake for a couple of hours feeling bloated.  All that eating and drinking I guess.  Eventually got up and I spent an hour and a half packing up chairs and tables and vacuuming and washing up to get the place all tidy.  Although I didn't put away all the decorations because I didn't want to ;)  Got home and the house was COLD.  7 degrees!!  Craziness.  Two hours of running the heater later and it was still only half way to 19.  hrmmm.  Pretty nothing afternoon, although did download all my photos and do some music practise and blog.   

I also had to laugh at this.  This is a meme I saw this week about skies:

Which is so damned true!!  

This was the sky on Monday night when I went to Chris' for supplies

and this was at Jamo on Friday night

Merry Christmas in July!

Sunday.  17th.  Lamb roast and drinks with Kit.

Monday.  A fair bit of inbox tidying and decommission cleaning.  Got travel insurance for the cruise next year, but trying to get an ESTA was a pain in the poo poo hole.  When it came to putting through payment I clicked on the link and got a browser pop up saying it was going to leave the page.  Which I clearly didn't want to do.  So tried again and this time got a popup from the site saying I was going to leave the page.  So went "back" to see if there was something I missed but then it complained I already had an application in process.  So got to the end again and it was all "THE PAYMENT STATUS COULD NOT BE DETERMINED AT THIS TIME. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER FOR THE PAYMENT STATUS."  and literally no way to pay.  Tried different browsers with no luck.  #grunt.  So that was a waste of a good chunk of the evening.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Reloaded my ESTA application and it came straight up with the option to pay.  So just needed to wait for it to sort itself out.  Fighting with all the stoopid.  Had some mulled wine, and cooked sausages, cauliflower, bacon and these little kale sprouts I got off Tony which were fricken *amazing* - little crunchy leafy balls of goodness.  Also blogged last week.

Lunch: toasted cheese sandwich with pizza blend cheese to take it to next level

This photo cannot possibly capture how awesome those little sprouts of kale were!

Wednesday.  More dealing with all the stoopid, and frustration with people that don't respond to messages and/or disappear for hours at a time.  Also had to finally start using Outlook for the first time, ever.  And my welcome to it was a two hour delay in mails arriving because of "issues".  Seriously whoever thought that cloud would be a good idea for this crap??  Was watching stoopid crap on the internet in the evening and backing up my computer when I found out my desktop no longer existed (I have robocopy scripts that save the output to a folder on my desktop).  And I'm like WTF??  I had actually noticed the other day that everything on my desktop had little OneDrive icons.  Turns out Microsoft had taken upon itself to backup my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive.  EXCEPT IT HADN'T!!!  Half the files were actually missing.  I even looked online and they simply weren't there.  It had badly synced my files and chunks of them were missing.  So I turned off backup, at least for desktop, and will need to restore my files from last week's backup.  Fricken HATE.  Microsoft is doing an Apple and doing things of its own accord WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.  HATE HATE HATE.  Literally the second time this week my files have been screwed with by others (last time was on Friday when a rogue backup script deleted everything at work).  

Thursday.  Farewell for Casey who's moving to Melbourne, then Christmas in July drinks at work.  There were so many snackages I didn't need dinner, and in fact brought home all the leftovers that were going to be thrown out otherwise.  

Friday.  I dunno.  Mostly trying to get organised.  Declared POETS and we headed down the coast to see Kit and Pete.  The top of Clyde Mountain was pretty foggy, but it cleared up lower down.  I really wanted to get there by dark, but that didn't work out.  Oh well.  Had steak and salad for dinner and had a few drinks and chatted.  

Arthur, King of the Britons

Saturday.  I went to bed relatively early (altho an hour later than usual) but didn't get to sleep til like super super late (like after everyone else went to bed haha).  Had a bit of a sleepin though so wasn't tooo bad.  Watched Kit feed all the animals. 

Al and Kerry Paca

Kit and Pete hand-raised Lolly when she was abandoned.  She's very friendly and so damned cute!

Ricky the tiny horse

Then we had breakfast which was at nearly lunch time. 

I started a jigsaw and got a chunk done on it before we headed down to Bawley Point.  The river mouth was a bit too deep to cross, so we headed all the way down to Kioloa.  There was a fairly lethargic seal dozing on the rocks, which everyone thought was very unusual.  Walked all the way up the beach and back.  The seal was still there, but some others had already called some experts to get it checked out. 

Had a lamb roast for dinner, with one of Kit and Pete's sheep. 

Then we played a game of Squatter.  Which, like real life with sheep, is basically a case of what Bad Things will happen at every turn.  Kit won.  I think I was doing ok, but it was a bit hard to tell since it was all so random and Bad Things kept happening. 

Slightly earlier night.

Sunday.  Slept a lot better.  Bacon and eggs again for breakfast, then we watched Biscuit herding sheep which was pretty cool. 

Then headed home.  Unpacked and tidied up the house.  Did a bit more on the jigsaw.  Then put on dinner (roasted a bunch of veggies to have with leftover lamb) and did photos and blogging stuffs.  

Sunday.  10th.  Cooked a massive tray of brussels sprouts and bacon, cauliflower and broccoli bake, and reheated some brisket in jelly.  So good.  Hardly any leftovers!  Whoops!

Monday.  Slept ok.  Another proxy cleaning/documenting day.  Music after work, and made honey mustard chicken for dinner.  Worked on Victoria photos - flowers and resizing the iphone panorama set - all 258 of them!  Yipe!

Tuesday.  Slept ok I think.  More proxy stuff.  Music, brisket and veggies for dinner.  Victoria photo labelling - flowers and bugs.  Started watching The Silver Brumby.  A kids film, but beautifully filmed.  The cinematography is awesome.  The lead lady character was pretty cool, although that story arc is not in the books at all apparently.

Wednesday.  Slept ok, although had *two* dreams stressing about the trivia night - both dreams I turned up in the room where everyone had already turned up but we had nothing prepared.  The second dream I was telling everyone about the dream I'd literally just had.  Salmon and cabbage for dinner.  Labelled all the Victoria panorama photos.  Then finished The Silver Brumby.  So it was a bit silly in that they had a very well groomed palomino mare playing a "silver" brumby stallion.  And to be honest it was hard to feel any sympathy for the brumbys' story - they really don't belong there anyway.  I was hoping Russell Crowe's character would win .. or at the very least get his own horse back.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Another proxy day.  So for me it was pretty peaceful.  Stu on the other hand went to the dentist because he'd been in agony for a few days, and came home minus a tooth!!  Nice enough drinks.  Opened an ancient Midori Crush Neil threw out from a Christmas party a few years back.  It was fine :)

The travel insurance people also got back to me - they were happy to simply cancel the old policy and reissue it with the new PDS.  Hurray!

Friday.  Woke up at 01:50 when the sweetie got up in pain.  But then stayed awake til like 04:00.  Sigh.  Had a bit of a cleaning day - mostly cleaning out my inbox(es).  Also playing with proxy settings to prevent uploads of certain files.  Kit arrived late in the afternoon.  Had drinks and pasta/mince for dinner and a lovely catchup.

Saturday.  Kit went out to go shopping and catch up with Katie, so I did a heap of work on my Victoria photos.  And made a lemon cheesecake.  In the evening was Christmas in July at Herbert's.  I might put that in another post.  It was quite fun, if very loud.  

Sunday.  Slept like crap.  Apparently eating and drinking too much will do that to you, who knew.  Kit went out most of the day with her brother and his family.  Finished off Victoria photos, hurray!!  Did some music in the afternoon then All The Cooking.  

These were taken on the Canon so they didn't get downloaded in time for posting.  In May.

This is the Jupiter/Venus kiss, on 1 May.

And this helicopter was buzzing around the neighbourhood on 6 May, but it didn't have a public transponder so no idea what it was (and it didn't get close enough to see).