2023. Another lap around the sun. Another busy year.

The big trip for this year was to America with my brother to visit theme parks and do a Caribbean cruise out of Tampa. I still thought it was "too soon" to be travelling to America and cruising, but I had no choice because Bare Necessities is an evil company and I would never EVER travel with them again. And guess what. It was indeed too soon, half the ship got covid, and I probably did too at the end. But I didn't test because what was I going to do. We called it Schrödinger's Covid. Not that Americans care about covid anyway. They flat out refuse to wear a mask when they're sick or use hand sanitiser EVER. So I felt no guilt spreading germs around Disney World, especially when there's no hand sanitiser to be found anywhere in the parks. I kept my mask on which was the best I could do. Luckily I didn't get very sick and had a pretty awesome holiday with David. We had a couple of little trips as well. We went to Berrima for the weekend around our 15th wedding anniversary. It rained the whole time. We went to the coast in May to visit Kit and Pete, and a very last minute trip in October as well. We went to Sydney to catch up with some peeps for my 50th, and again to go to the Powerhouse Museum for possibly the last time ever. I also worked super hard to get the last two overseas trip photos online, and actually managed it, six months after America, and one year after Europe. But did get filled with rage at tripadvisor and booking.com. Both have utterly terrible invoicing and communication. Tripadvisor literally ripped me off for one of our Europe tours. And booking.com charges you randomly for hotels but I couldn't find emails for all the ones they did so had to make guesses on some of them.

At work my job description is still mostly Sadie. Well, when I have time in between people wanting stuff and wanting me to fix problems. Over and over and over again I was reminded that the correct spelling of Microsoft is actually B.S. Everything they do is designed to compromise any sort of security. I hate it so much. Early in the year I decided that we really need to manage our certificate renewals manually. That is, keep them in a diary of sorts so we don't miss renewals. Because over and over again there'd be outages for systems due to certificate expiries, even with management tools, to other teams, and I didn't want that to happen to our team. I helped out with some firewall upgrades in January. Did some apnic training on routing in March. Spent ages with Neil cleaning up mail policies. Cleaned up routing on a bunch of devices. Migrated our DR laptop to a new laptop. Did a week of oncall in September to give Connor a break. Trialled a proxy replacement, but while it did have some nice saas features, it was very week security-wise. Got forced into using Windoze 11. I hate it. So. Much. Got three new people in our team, but our area is already full so everyone's having to shuffle around every day which causes me all sorts of anxiety. And yet further down the floor it's a ghost town and noone sits there. Pisses me off. Socially we had a whisky night in July, and I went to trivia nights in July and September (I missed a later one due to Stu having covid). And I ran my big bbq at the lake for the eleventh year in a row with over fifty people.

I've generally been ok healthwise. There was the probable covid in America in March. I definitely had gut involvement because I'd get hungry but then only be able to eat a small amount before my stomach would be like, nope, I'm done. When I got home I had two bouts in March and April of what the doctor suspected might be diverticulitis (mild case) but I never actually found out the results of the tests. Given it was shortly after covid, it's quite possible it was related to that. I have been avoiding strawberries though, except the ones that grew in our back yard (no problems with those). There were the bouts of insomnia on and off that have been plaguing me for the past few years. Super annoying to just be lying there just awake. After getting back from America and having spent so little time on a screen in a month, I found I was completely blind trying to look at my monitors. So I really needed to get new glasses. I tried a new optometrist in Dickson (the son of the optometrist I used to see when I first moved to Canberra) but the practice is a little unorganised and when I went to pick up the glasses the optometrist wasn't even there to help fit them. Plus when I asked a follow up question later the optometrist wouldn't even talk to me. So not sure I'll go back. But, the glasses are great, I can see my computer now clearly. But it does mean I have to swap them out with my other glasses all the time as they're optimised for screen distance. I did have a bit of a cold in August, but multiple RATs were negative. Stu got a likely case of food poisoning in August, most likely from Disappointing aka Hero Sushi. I think he's only been back like once since then (he used to go all the time). He got covid in November most likely from a work colleague who continued coming into work even though his son was sick with covid. First time for him. He had a week off feeling pretty miserable and worked from home for a while after. I worked from home for a couple of weeks too, but never got it. I guess it helped having my booster just a few weeks earlier. Stu also got another possible bout of food poisoning in December, although it might have been covid related.

I saw quite a bit of various peeps at Herbert's during the year, either with Tony/Frank/Karen etc or The Chrises/Tony/Neil etc. There was a tap takeover by Big Shed in April, but I missed the one in October by TRBC because we went down the coast. Kit came to stay a night in January. We had Jenn over for dinner in April. Caught up with Luc for drinks in June. Went to R&F's in July and November. Had brunch with Katie (Stu's school friend) and Andrew at Little Bird in September. Went to Ben and Sarah's for dinner in September. Had Chris and Glenda over for dinner in October. Went to M&M's for dinner in November. Had Christmas Eve "Herbert's @ Tony's" although Dino and Kristin never made it, but it was still a good night with a bunch of peeps. David came to stay in September. He had a look at the oven and found a blown element (which died when the oven was less than two years old). He also replaced our stovetop (one of the elements had died but the final straw was when I accidentally smashed the whole surface by hitting the preexisting chip at just the right force/angle). I took him out for lunch at the Star Buffet after. Then we walked around Ikea for a couple of hours to walk off lunch. He came back again a couple of weeks later to install the new element I got, only to find the thing didn't actually fit. Sigh. We saw Annie and the family on Christmas day which was the first time we'd seen them all since last Christmas. We're all such slackers. Mum/David/Kellie/Sia came for Boxing Day lunch, and Mum stayed til the 28th before going home.

We didn't spend a whole lot of time out at the club this year. Partly because of Certain People, but also because Life. In March the sweetie and I completely emptied out the office, cleaned it, threw a whole heap of crap out, and put everything else back again. Then it was the Mardis Gras social. We went to the M themed night in May and I went as a minifig. There was Ian and Chris's anniversary formal night in June. I did Christmas in July again for like fifty people. And then another couple of working bees later in the year. We were going to go to the Christmas party but Stu got covid.

I had a few photo projects this year. One of them was getting Dad's slides into chronological order. I'd literally lay rolls and rolls of them out on the table to piece back together their correct order. This worked up until he started printing labels and gluing them all over the slide numbers, and the newest rolls were made of plastic so you couldn't even scrape back the label to see the frame number. I've still yet to finish processing the slides but at least now I'll be able to get them into the "correct" order. Well, except for the few odd ones that seem to be loners and not fit any other rolls at all. I also managed to get *two* overseas holiday photos online within six months and a year of going on the trip. I've gone back to working on Turkey 2014 to get them done in time for the ten year anniversary of the trip. Finally, I filed three years of "Canberra Life", "Friends and Family" and "Homes and Gardens" photos which had been presorted but not actually filed. Will go back to trying to file all my photos every week. There's still a lot of work I want to do in the sorting space. Hardest is when things overlap. Like going out to restaurants or holidays with friends - do they go under restaurants/holidays or under friends. It's a dilema.

Our blue-tongue lizard Stumpy is still puttering along. He (she?) must be about fourteen years old now. I got a bag full of guppies in January to add to the genetic diversity in the tanks. The last cory that I got in 2015 finally died in July. I consolidated all the downstairs tanks until Stu retires and has the brain space for fish again. So now we only have five active tanks. There's my "angel" tank (the 620T) which has guppies. The two foot upstairs has guppies and heaps of java fern - I rarely need to change the water in this tank because it's so well planted. Plus there's always so many babies I'd be worried about sucking them up. The four foot still has fourteen congo tetras and a loach, as well as some guppies (I think all male - no point letting them breed in that tank as the babies would get eaten straight away). The four foot is still plagued with algae problems - needs more plants and guppies I reckon. I still have Chrissie's tiny little tank with the two clown loaches. I've had them for nearly six years now. Downstairs I only have the one two foot tank active. It's got guppies and a sucking catfish and is also a fairly healthy tank. All the other tanks downstairs I either drained or turned the heaters/lights off and only run the filters for an hour or two every day (while the sun is at max on the panels) - to keep the heaters from drying out and the water from going stagnant.

I had a bit of a fun year with Lego this year. Last Christmas I got myself the Titanic, and built it (slowly, to make the build take longer) after my America trip. It's a spectacular model, I love it. I also made an iceberg with some of Vic's huge pile of 1x4 bricks. For my birthday I got The Starry Night (which I've seen in New York!) but it's not just a mosaic, it's a fully 3D version which is pretty cool. I also got Himeji Castle (been there!) which is a really lovely set, and finished it Christmas day. I got back into inventorying Vic's Lego and finished off the loose pieces. Then worked on the non-Star Wars minifigs. Bricklink was down for a week in November because a bunch of accounts got hacked. For Christmas I got a big minifig, although haven't started that yet - I don't have time for fun anymore!

I didn't do as many jigsaws at home this year - I'm just too damned busy - too busy for fun! The problem is if I start one I'll spend too much time on it and not doing the things I need to do. I need to retire so I have time for fun. I still play the clarinet a couple of times a week.

The weather this year has been a bit insane. Apparently 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. There was a huge lightning storm here in March. Fortunately it didn't do any damage here, but it destroyed heaps of Aquila's electronics including both his heating and cooling systems. There was snow out past Queanbeyan in May. The winter here just *felt* warm. Sure it was cold too but spring sure came early, with stuff flowering a couple of weeks earlier than usual (and Stumpy got *hungry* earlier than usual too). Another storm in December knocked down a sizeable branch off one of our trees. Fortunately no damage here, but there were heaps of trees down around Canberra. And let's not even get into the heatwaves, fires and flooding catastrophes around the world this year.

It was definitely a year of battles with technology this year.

My blog turned 20 this year! For its 20th blogiversary I gave it a bit of a design refresh. I put in a mobile friendly template which does make it a little easier to read on the phone. I also updated the banner. But I had to increase the throttle timeout so searches on my blog would work (no idea why it takes so much longer since the design refresh). I also got frustrated with Chrome which will now try the HTTPS site even when the link you click on is http:// This means the style sheet won't load as it's "mixed content". Unfortunately twenty years ago noone used https so my entire blog is all hardcoded by Movable Type with full urls with http:// I hardcoded the style sheet as https and for later pages it now renders correctly but if you look at older stuff and your dumbhead browser changes the page to https it doesn't render properly.

Vodien broke my blog three times this year. Firstly they broke Perl->MySQL in March and it took me a week of telling them it was in fact their fault before they finally fixed it. Then they broke my cpanel access during an upgrade. Twice. Had to get the password reset. Twice. Then they broke CageFS in October which broke *all* my scripts. When they eventually fixed it a couple of weeks later they left a "how did we do" survey which I couldn't do because the certificate was completely broken on *.vodien.com. Three big outages this year. Maybe I should pay for hosting somewhere else. Although with the state of the world I suspect it'd be just as bad anywhere. There's just no such thing as good service anymore.

I continued to be frustrated with Apple. While my new (now a year old) 14 Pro is great (the low light features are spectacular), it took a bit of getting used to. Firstly, don't ever use the 2x lens, it's just digital magnification. Either get closer or use the 3x lens. Next, if "macro" gets triggered while using 3x for macro, stand back, point it away to reset, and try again. The "macro" on 3x will completely destroy the photos, I have no idea what it does, it possibly uses the "wide angle" lens and then digitally magnifies 3x. When you can get the optical 3x to work on closeups it actually does ok. It pisses me off though that you can't force it to use the lens you choose. I got so fed up with Apple messing with the timestamps on my files when copying to windows that I bought a third party app - iMazing - which will at least copy jpgs/pngs properly. With movie files it copied them in native Apple HDR which makes them look trash. So I'd have to copy them off in windows as well anyway. Well that was until Apple changed something and now they both copy exactly the same. Oh, they also decided later in the year to start presenting HEIC files to windows instead of JPGs, so I *have* to use iMazing. I was enraged to find that Apple just randomly changed timezones while I was travelling in February. Multiple times a day it'd jump back and forth to GMT-4/GMT-5. It took me hours and hours to sort out the mess that was my holiday photos. And even when I got home, and had been home for a day or two on the correct time, it randomly dropped back to Houston time until a reboot. Speaking of reboots, the wallpaper is borked. Everytime you reboot the wallpaper is just a black screen. You have to go in, change to a different wallepaper theme, wait a few minutes, then change it back again. Someone suggested clearing browser cache to fix Redactle early in the year. Not only was it stoopid advice because Redactle itself is usually at fault, but whatever I did cleared *all* of my cache/cookies/whatever, so I lost all my streaks on wordle etc. So I pretty much just stopped playing them altogether on the spot. Finally, I told iTunes/my phone to trust my computer. It still doesn't trust my computer.

I had two separate battles with email. Firstly gmail refused to accept mail from me without an SPF record on my domain. Internode very nicely have a page on their website which tells you exactly what to use (for Eudora on my computer). Optus not so much (for my phone). And Vodien's support pages were misleading because they say to do it via cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't host the DNS. Eventually figured out how to get the record setup on Vodien DNS. Then Internode (aka Epic Bastards) moved their SMTP "service" to AWS, and cut off the ability to use it AS A PAYING CUSTOMER unless you use your internode address as the From address. Which is utterly ridiculous because they're cutting off the ability to even use the internode address for email AND what if you have multiple people in your household trying to send mail, not everyone can use that address!! So then had to spend hours massaging my twenty year old mail client into being able to use my hosting for SMTP. But that also means I can't email Stu/David at their domains because I host the websites for those and so Vodien thinks it owns them. I really wish Stu would get us off Internode. Their service has been pretty trash since they got bought out by iinet then TPG. I complained to Internode about how trash it was, and they were like, "oh we're just trying to stop spam". Nothing about being an internet SERVICE provider. Bastards bastards bastards.

And in other tech crap. On Friday 13th January, Epic Tool (aka Elon Musk) turned off 3rd party Twitter access. So I stopped using it. Simples. Had to fight with Optus in February who in their wisdom split out my accounts and made me stuff up my payments so had to sort that out as well as figure out how to actually even access both my accounts which are now separate. Hopeless. Continued to get frustrated at the sheer absurdity of Windoze 11. Finally got a new battery for the UPS after over a year of them not being able to get stock. Dodgy Dyson struck again - this time it decided the battery needed to be replaced WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT. David's Kogan iPhone cable got more and more flakey before I finally gave up on it in August.

The house caused no end of dramas too this year.

The Solar Edge solar system we got put in last December essentially was DOA. Sometimes it would work and we could see it doing 11kW which was great. Even though we were supposed to be maxed out at 5kW back to the grid sometimes we'd see it pushing more back, no idea how. But most of the time it didn't work at all. After many calls/emails that went unanswered (and I flat out refused to finish paying the sparkies until it was working) we finally left honest feedback (at their request), which finally got some action. They came and had a look in early January but didn't fix it. They rewired things so that the system would support working off grid (it was sold to us on the promise that it would but then the sparkies said oh no it doesn't do that, and later they were like, oh, Solar Edge says we can do that now). And they finally completely replaced the whole inverter in late January. We thought that would be the end of it, but the very first night it drained the battery to 0% even though it's supposed to only drop to 10%. So had to put in another support call for that. The app is great when it works, but oftentimes the system will lose connectivity and it'll be like "updated 4 hours ago". Dumb. And, upsettingly, the system never puts out more than 9kW now. I thought it might have been the angle of the sun so waited until December again (when it did 11kW last year) but alas not. So we'll have to raise *another* support call to find out what gives. On a lighter note, we did finally get a negative electricity bill in November. Separately, we got a new digital meter to replace the original analogue meter. This one has its own back to base internet connection for reporting, so noone needs to come read the meter anymore.

The night the sparkies came in early January I was turning the oven off and the power tripped. I was half wondering if the sparkies did anything. After a couple of times of the power tripping whenever we turned the oven off and on, we took to flipping the switch off at the board before turning the power to the oven on/off. Because the back element was fine, only the top element was broken, but there was no way to turn the oven on/off without going past a mode that activated the top element. I was totally pissed off though because the oven was less than three years old, and when I asked about it at Bing Lee and they said there was only a one year warranty. David eventually came to look at it in September, found the broken element, disconnected it, ordered a new one from TLE in Belco. On the same day we bought and installed a new stove (as mentioned further up). He came back two weeks later to install the element, only to find it didn't fit. I'd never buy a DeLonghi anything again - you can't get replacement parts for something that's only three years old. We still haven't replaced the element. Maynor and Cochran said they can get one, but I need to know that I can return it if it doesn't fit.

The garden is a neverending drama. I pulled back some of the ivy in February. It's grown back. And then some. Problem is our ladder is not long enough to reach it properly. We had a permaculture mob come out to talk to us about our yard. I was hoping they'd be able to talk to us and exchange ideas (that's what I assumed we paid them a couple of hundred dollars for). Instead she just said, oh well we'll need to do a cleanup first. That'll be 48 hours work just for the front yard. I'm like, WTF, there is NOT 48 hours of work in the front yard for professionals. So I did it myself. In a lot less than 48 hours. But because I focussed so long on the front yard, the back yard got out of control again. Sigh. I did manage to get all the bluestone moved to EffanC's though - thanks Tony and F!!

In other house crap. We got a new toilet seat in April as the old one was getting very yellowed and degraded. Went to Ikea in July and found a bin solution that would work. Bought all the bins but the shelves were out of stock. Turned out they were actually discontinued. Bought another shelf which wasn't exactly what we wanted. It looks sort of ok but is very flimsy. Finally ran some lines of sealant over the loose tiles in the shower in August. The leaking has finally stopped, although my future self will hate me as that's what the previous owners of my place in Sydney did and the sealent got all mouldy and discoloured over time. We got a couple of bottlebrushes planted out the front by the government. I took a chip out of the microwave platter in September. The cooler wouldn't turn the water on the first time we used it in November. But let it rest and it worked the next time. After I got past all the errors.

Our favourite restaurant of the year would still be Chong Co, with delivery from them four times over the year. Kinn Thai is another favourite, we went there a few times. Herbert's is a great local and had many lunches and some dinners there. We would often get Pattysmiths for lunch on shopping days. Their fries are awesome and the burgers pretty good too. Had dinner in March with EffanC at Hachiko which was expensive (got the banquet) but very nice. Went to Taki on our anniversary and had some delicious steaks. Dinners and takeaway from Raijin (average), 10 Yards (nice), Tiger Lane (meh), CBD Dumpling House (yummy and quick), BONE (stoopid name), Disappointing Sushi (gave us free KFC because the sweetie is a regular, although he mostly stopped going after he probably got food poisoning probably from there), Badger&Co (repeat of last time), Symposium (nice), Betty's Burgers (not bad), Happy's (sad cause of all the single guys hiding out there for dinner). Brunches at 54 Benjamin a couple of times, U&Co a couple of times, Cup of Joy, Deakin and Me, Coffee Club Gungahlin, Bunny Beans. Random lunches at Flavours of Jiangnan, Canberra Cafe and Burgers, Ramen O and Four Winds. You can now get potato on a stick in the mall, meaning I can get my two favourite street foods there (that and takoyaki). The problem is you have to wait for both of them, which is difficult if you're eating with people and don't want to make them wait.

On the cooking front, there was a few new things and a lot of old favourites. Stu really likes Cath's basa bake recipe so we make that semi regularly. Also tuna casserole and the 1kg frozen turkey roasts. In winter, favourites are Alan's beef stew, butt, er, beef cheeks and brisket. I also made a pea and ham soup in July which Stu likes but I'm meh about. We've had Luv-a-Duck Peking duck a couple of times which is pretty awesome. Kale "chips" are also great, but sadly we never saw kalettes for sale this year. We still often got pizza on Thursday, but sometimes made our own, and Fridays sometimes we'd have Ingham's chicken kievs. And I do like doing Sunday night roasts. I decided that roasting chicken "upside down" is much better than cooking it breast side up. Stu made a Japanese Golden Curry in March, and I made one later in the year. He also cooked "Coronation Oden" twice. I called it this because we first had it the night we watched the coronation of King Charles III. I made a really nice yellow curry out of a Coles magazine and liked it so much I've modified it slightly for my "official" recipe. Made a fairly nice apricot chicken to use up some old dried apricots, but would need to use a boneless cut of chicken I think. For my 50th, R&F gave me Nagi Maehashi's RecipeTin Eats Dinner book and I've so far made eight recipes out of it. They always take a lot longer to follow the recipe precisely, but they've all been very good, and I'd make them again even if just to streamline things a little. I've made several lemon cheesecakes, and also tried Milo cookies at Christmas.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* AWS at the Hellenic Club with Emma Pask and Ed Wilson
* Lego Brick Show in Wagga, caught up with David as well
* Jess and Uncle Doss at Herbert's
* Come From Away
* Australian War Memorial's Big Things in Store
* ANU Women's Revue with Jess aka Jeremy Laser

Movies (at the movies)
* Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
* Oppenheimer

Movies (TV)
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on NYE
* Laid Back Camp
* A Christmas Karen
* The Social Network
* Onward
* When Harry Met Sally / The Shop Around the Corner
* Avatar
* Glass Onion
* You've Got Mail
* Everything Everywhere All At Once
* 127 Hours
* Rocky Horror Picture Show
* Chernobyl 1986
* Amadeus
* First Man
* Raiders of the Lost Ark
* Dragonheart
* Innerspace
* Paterson
* Romancing the Stone
* Jewel of the Nile
* The War of the Roses
* Turning Red
* Pretty Woman
* Malcolm
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar / The Swan / The Rat Catcher / Poison / Fantastic Mr Fox
* Dumb Money
* Die Hard / Die Hard 2 / Love Actually
* Home Alone 2

TV
* Picard (finished season 2)
* You Can't Ask That (season 7)
* a series of Canberra Survivor on YouTube
* Origins of Us
* Bocchi the Rock
* The Crown finished (seasons 2-5)
* Death in Paradise (seasons 4-6)
* First two episodes of A Spy Among Friends. Stu was going to watch the rest himself but never did
* The Simpsons (seasons 32-34)
* The Book of Boba Fett
* Mandalorian (season 3)
* Futurama (all of it)
* Lego Grandmasters (season 5)
* Amazing Race Australia (seasons 3-4)
* War on Waste (seasons 2-3)
* Ahsoka
* The Orville (seasons 1-2)

Books
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (well, I started it)

Other stuff
* tried to see the balloons but the wind was blowing towards the airport so they didn't lift off. Tried again the next day and saw them. Jet lag and being awake stoopidly early helped.
* saw a double rainbow in March
* went with Tony to RFS tour of the helibase at Hume in March
* Pialligo Estate went broke - no more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!
* Looking Back, Moving Forward nights at the Shine Dome
* Cotter Pumping Station Tour
* saw a partial solar eclipse in April
* Parliament House in May to see the Lego Parliament House and wander round. Probably the first time I'd been in there since 1990.
* saddened over the death of Heather Armstrong (dooce.com) by suicide in May
* magpies came to see me over winter after six months of not
* Whisky Live in May
* Hardly Normal started work at beginning of June, but didn't open til November
* ABC Classic 100 - your favourite instrument - all of mine made it into the top 100
* got to level 10000 in Candy Crush in June. Got to 12186 by the end of the year by completely changing the way I play it.
* found some papers from my Dad's family and how they'd found the family home of some my ancestors!
* gave blood for first time in about 32 years in July
* bookings247 got hacked - they had my name and last four digits of my credit card. I know it was them because the email they used was the one I used on their website, once, in 2019. I contacted them but they ignored me.
* my 50th!! Had a party the Saturday before; day of was pretty quiet, just KFC for lunch and Chong Co delivered for dinner; Sydney the Saturday after; another run for club peeps in early September
* made a new candle with old candle wax, but need to make it thinner next time
* evil neighbours that refused to train their dogs got another one that barks a lot from time to time, but at least not *all* the time
* our car clocked 100000km in August
* went for a drive in September to the Air Disaster Memorial, Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), and Canberra's weather radar outside Captains Flat
* Herbert's for Sunday jazz in October
* saw a cool double rainbow in November
* got a heap of strawberries off our strawberry plants in November

And that wraps up another year.  Have a happy and safe New Year!!

Sunday.  19th.  Cooked roast beef for dinner.  It was a topside roast and it was very salty, almost like corned beef (although not *that* salty).  And even though I only cooked it for like an hour and three quarters (for 2kg meat) it seemed overcooked.  It looked a lot more well done that it should have, although it was quite juicy still.  Stu thought maybe it had been brined or something.  hrmm.  Started into season 6 of The Crown.

And in other news.. it's eggnog season!!

I added some tinsel and a string of lights to the Christmas tree.

Monday.  Slept ok for a while but then broken sleep in the middle of the night (not helped by Stu not sleeping really at all, which somehow disturbed me even in the other room).  Was mostly Neil all day and fighting with the servers to do some filtering on more stoopid Microsoft crap that's been coming our way since Friday.  They promised rain and storms all day.  Pfft.  Finally got around to it late in the afternoon.  Cooked a nice yellow curry for dinner.

I'm going to document this better, and this variety had mushrooms cooked at the beginning, but my "official recipe" now will be onion, ginger, half a jar of yellow curry paste, garlic, fish sauce (maybe a couple of table spoons), lime juice (either from a fresh lime with zest, or cheat and use bottled juice), brown sugar (maybe a couple of tablespoons), a tin of light coconut cream (not in the photo), then whatever protein and veggies you feel like.  There was leftover beef in this one, capsicum and bok choy/choy sum.

Back into season 34 of The Simpsons.  Far out this season is.. weird..!  Then lots of photo filing.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Bit of mail crap in the morning (fixed the filters I was working on).  Did some comms doco for another infrastructure team because they can't/won't fricken do it themselves.  Seriously other infrastructure teams are the WORST at doing doco/following (our) procedures.  Also some work on some new proxy servers for a migration.  In the evening was filing a small batch of photos from 2010 that had somehow never been filed.  It's a *lot* harder to figure out what stuff is from thirteen years ago, especially without the help of Foursquare checkin history.  Then Twin Peaks 1.5.

This speech was in The Simpsons tonight which was like .. yah huh .. 

Enough of this do-goodery. Open your eyes, rich people. We're not here to help the less fortunate, we're here to bask in our fortunateness. If we really wanted to make a difference, we'd do the one thing we've spent our lives avoiding, paying our taxes. ( Laughter ) Then one organization, "the government," could tackle all of society's ills, instead of leaving it to 1.5 million separate ego-driven micro-bureaucracies called "charities," including... get a load of this scam... religions. But no one here wants the rational way. We all want the United Way because that's the American way. Now, I paid $10,000 for this table. I'm taking it with me.

I don't really discuss politics on my blog, but I do feel like rich people should pay more taxes so the government can properly handle critical stuff like health, education, transport, communication, energy etc and not have that stuff be privatised.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Decided to work from home "just in case" I got covid.  Which gave me a bunch of extra time before I started work so I could get things done around the house.  Tidied the kitchen, did a fish tank water change and put my washing away.  Didn't get much actual real work done because I spent the day dealing with people wanting me to solve their problems for them.  Leftovers for dinner.  Finshed filing the directories of "previous years" photos (going back til about 2019), which means my entire "to be filed" folder was empty!!  Hurray!!  Things still do need more refining but pretty happy with that achievement.

Also added more lights to the tree.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep, but then still woke up early.  Again working from home so did more house tidying before I started. 

All The Problems in the morning, then documented some more decom work in the afternoon.  Beer and pizza (delivered).  Then after seeing the documentary on Pretty Woman the other night, decided to watch that.  I'm not sure if I've actually seen it or not since I saw it at the movies in 1990.  So that was a bit of fun.  The other day I noticed @kapgar's rss feed wasn't updating.  The rss feed I have in The Old Reader is http://kapgar.typepad.com/my_weblog/index.rdf but if you go to that it tries to download it.  The link on his blog is https://www.kapgar.com/my_weblog/atom.xml but when I try that in The Old Reader I get:

We couldn't find an exact match, but here are some similar feeds we found that might be what you're looking for.
Feeds similar to https://www.kapgar.com/my_weblog/atom.xml
kapgar https://www.kapgar.com/my_weblog/

Shrug.  Could I be bothered contacting him about it?  Dunno.. not sure that he even likes me.  

Friday.  Some training in the morning then spent the rest of the day deleting All The Things.

Stu is staying positive about his covid situation..

Did a bunch of weeding after work then kiev for dinner.

Then into season 7 of Death in Paradise.  Then watched Malcolm.  Wasn't sure if I'd ever actually seen it, but I think I might have a while back.  

This is funny.  We had the print of this above our "fireplace" at home.  If the thing hadn't been damaged by the new air conditioner they put in I would have taken it when Mum sold the house.  It was also in The Henderson Kids.  Annoyingly windoze 11 won't let you screenshot Netflix.. wtf?? Whenever you try you just get a black screen instead of the content.  Irfanview wouldn't work either.  In the end I just took a photo.. but seriously microsoft wtf??

Trippy!

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Did some house stuff in the morning (including putting up some more Christmas decorations) then mostly inventorying. 

Storm in the afternoon.  Cooked creamy fettucini because there was nothing else to do while my computer was off for the (five minute) storm.  

On Netflix last night I saw there was a short film on The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.  !!  So Saturday night I watched it.  OMFG it was so cool.  It was like word for word the same as the story and done in quirky Wes Anderson style.  Turns out there were four short films so I watched the other three as well - The Swan (which I remember reading and being sad about), The Rat Catcher, and Poison, neither of which I remember reading (but may have).  ** Edit: Poison was in Tales of the Unexpected that I have **

Sunday.  Slept ok but then woke up at 4:40 from a dream that we were in Italy and firstly we were on a bus travelling through Milan and I kept seeing things I thought I should take photos of but I was exhausted and it was going to take effort to pull out my camera and then not long after we had to catch a ferry (on the west coast of Italy, yeah nowhere near Milan) but I followed Mum down this sandy hill but we got separated from the tour group so I tried to back up to find them but couldn't and then we had to try and find a bus to get down the hill to the ferry and I was trying to find some contact information for the tour company but I was worried the paperwork was in my luggage that was with them, but I did find it in the end but then I was stressing about trying to get roaming working on Optus.  The lesson I learned from this dream is that you should always always get the mobile number of the tour operator/guide as soon as you meet them in case of emergencies.  I've never done this but I think I might try in future.  Finished putting up Christmas decorations in the morning as well as some house stuff, but then just inventorying most of the day.  

Cooked tuna casserole and veggies for dinner, then into season 2 of The Orville.

How evil is this ad that came up on Candy Crush during the week.. not sure how Apple let them get away with it..

20:08 by the time I'm posting this...

Sunday.  22nd.  Backdating because when I went to blog this a couple of weeks ago, found that Vodien had broken my CGI scripts AGAIN which meant none of my CGI scripts worked at all, and I couldn't even use the terminal shell.  More on that later.

Leftover veggies and duck sauce that I brought home from the coast for dinner, yum!  Then The Orville 1.8.

Monday.  Be early, slept fairly well.  Still woke up tired though.  And stressed about the lack of weekend.  Meetings in the morning and trial proxy working in the afternoon.  At lunch popped into the mall to get a covid booster and run some errands.  Sausages for dinner and Amazing Race 4.2.  Found myself getting super annoyed at the rich people saying like "oh I never do washing, I buy undies and tshirts and wear them once then throw them out".  People like that are everything that's wrong with the world.  

Tuesday.  Had a pretty rough night on account of vaccine reaction.  Pretty slow morning - still feeling a bit rough. 

Stu cooked gyozas for dinner.

Wednesday.  Slept somewhat better.  Fighting with frustrating trial proxy.  Then was fighting with this super weird problem with some really bizarre symptoms we'd literally never seen before.  Turned out to be assymmetric routing which I could have probably figured out quicker if I'd actually paid attention to the logs that were LITERALLY RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.  I was so upset.  That lack of situational awareness and tunnel vision is how planes crash.  Good thing I don't fly planes I guess.  

On a lighter note.

Thursday.  Awake for ages in the middle of the night.  Just restless.  Didn't take any work notes so no idea what I did.  Probably crap.  Had a sausage at drinks on a "welcome to summer" night, which was freezing cold.  Pizza for dinner (not much for me), then first episode of David Attenborough's Tasmania.

Friday.  Some cleaning in the morning, and some security talks in the afternoon.  Kiev for dinner (Kiev Fridays!!) then Death in Paradise 6.5.

Saturday.  Super productive day doing All The Things!!  Including chopping some huge branches off the photinia (thanks Tony!!), a green waste run, moving the rest of the stones (thanks Tony and F!!), and gave away our old pool cover to M&M. 

Five!!

Two fours and a five!!!

Manly men!!

This gecko ran out from under the pool cover as we moved it.  So cute!

Did some music in the afternoon as well, then pasta for dinner and then watched The War of the Roses.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Did a few bits and pieces in the morning but the mostly inventorying Vic's Lego (nearly done with the loose pieces!).  Took me about fifty minutes to play through all the hymns I've collected.  Will probably need to split them in two.  Put on dinner and then I sat down to blog.

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

FFS.  What have they done this time.  Checked my address book scripts.  Also broken.  So then tried to use the terminal to access stuff via CLI.

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to determine realpath of /home2/<user> (No such file or directory)

FFS.  And error logs were full of this crap

[2023-10-29 17:37:38]: CageFS jail error Unable to determine realpath of /home2/<user> (No such file or directory)
[2023-10-29 17:37:38]: uid: (1935/<user>) gid: (1937<user>) cmd: mt.cgi

Sigh.  So no blogging for me.  But did go in and backup my database just in cases.  Basa bake for dinner, then The Orville 1.9 and Amazing Race 4.6.

Friday.  Kit was desperate for some company with friends, so we headed down.  Left around 18:00, getting Scottish Restaurant drive through for dinner on the way.  

Otherwise a fairly uneventful drive and we even managed to find the driveway in the dark first go when we arrived at around 20:30.

We met Biscuit's seven new little crumbs (9 days old).

Chatted for a while, and not tooo late a night.

Saturday.

Who wouldn't want to wake up to this crap every morning?  Literally the view out the bedroom window when I woke up.

Found myself some leftovers that I'd brought down for breakfast. 

Then did all the animals.  There's still Arthur and Frankie the cats, Vicki, Biscuit and her seven crumbs, and Jasper.  Eight ducks (down from fourteen as she sold six of them that morning), about seven or eight guinea fowl, about thirty chickens and a couple of turkeys.  Then Scout and Ricky the horses, Al and Kerry the alpacas, and I dunno like twenty or thirty sheep.  And don't forget that little cow (bull) above.  There were two.  Now there's one.  And a freezer full of the other.

Headed down to the beach, walking all the way along Kioloa and part way up Shelly Beach and back.

Picked up some pies on the way home for lunch.  I started a jigsaw in the afternoon.  We found some luv-a-duck in the fridge, so had that with some spring onion and cucumber in rice paper rolls (not as good as peking duck pancakes but who cares).  Then chatted and went to bed at normal time.

Sunday.  Did the animals first up.  Then headed into Batemans Bay for brunch.  

Eventually left a bit after twelve.  Did some food shopping on the way home so didn't get home til after 15:00.  Exhausted.  And just in time to do my end of weekend routine.  

Monday.  16th.  Not backdating!  Slept ok I guess but still cranky in the morning.  Ok day I guess.  Pasta for dinner.  Tallied up all the Europe spending, Mum owes me a little bit.  Still have yet to compare how much the whole thing would have cost us doing it ourselves vs doing it with Albatross.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Had a good tidying day, planning the work I wanted to do last Friday.  Filing photos in the evening.  Also started the latest Amazing Race.  Which is a celebrity edition.  Of which I've heard of like two or three of them.  

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Turned on my computer in the morning but there was no network.  And Windows 11 is so retarded at the moment that telling it to turn off or reboot simply logs you out.  So dumb.  Pressing the power button convinced it to reboot, but had to hold it in to shut it off.  Still no network after a cold boot.  So tried it with another cable.  Worked fine.  Tried my cable on a different port.  Worked fine.  So somewhere between the wall panel and the switch.  Probably the Cisco switch just killed another port like it did with our NAS.  I'd really like to get a low power 12 port gigabit switch rather than the Cisco behemoth we have.  Also after the reboot the issue Windoze has updating the wallpaper between desktops is back.  Why is Microsoft so bad at everything whyyyyyy???

Had a slightly long lunch with Neil for his birthday.

And dinner with the sweetie in the evening.  Kinn Thai beef pad see iw and chilli jam crispy pork

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Did some work on another server migration. 

After missing out on the raspberry ones we decided to get these.  They definitely tasted cinnamoney, but these things need to be savoury not sweet.

Then meetings in the afternoon including an hour and a half one with a vendor where I had to be engaged the whole fricken time which I fricken HATE HATE HATE.  Utterly exhausted by the end of it.  Meanwhile someone broke some stuffs pretty badly but took them a few hours to make the connection between the fact that they made a change and the fact things were broken.  Even after I asked did anyone change anything.  Ok drinks, but just our group, then a quiet night.  

Friday.  Slept ok I think.  Bunch of crap in the morning then a lovely afternoon of cleaning.  We'd just settled down to share a bottle of bubbles after work when we got a somewhat desperate message from Kit, who was going through a bit of a crisis and really needed some friends.  So we packed up and headed down the coast.  Didn't get home til after 15:00 Sunday, and quite exhausted.

Sunday.  6th.  Finished the leftover pork from the club for dinner with a bit of char siu sauce which made it very nice.  Early night.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Stu was still feeling uneasy in his bowels.  Had a not so insane morning which let me catch up on some tickets.  Spent an hour after work doing house cleaning.  Leftovers for dinner.  Did some culling but still didn't finish Verona/Venice.  Watched War on Waste 2.2 (saw third episode another night this week, don't remember which night though).  

Tuesday.  Took til like 1am to get to sleep - itchy and restless legs.  Still woke up before 6 though.  First thing in the morning they came by to dig holes for the new trees, then a little while later they came by to plant the trees.  Which look decidedly like bottlebrushes not English hawthorns.  Not that I'm complaining, just different to what they said.  Another day of non stop interruptions and all the stoopid.  Chicken kiev for dinner.  Because I didn't feel like leftovers.

Wednesday.  Got to sleep ok but then woke up at like 4 for like an hour an a half.  Stressing about All The Things.  Stu was somewhat back to normal with his bowels.  Very unpleasant week for him.  They came by to mulch in the trees.  Lots of being hassled again.  Made some pasta with some mince I dug out of the freezer.  Then I finished culling down the Italy trip!!!  And culled down the food and hotel photos as well.  1303 photos in the main section and a couple of hundred each extra for food and hotels.  Wondering if I had a scratchy throat...

Thursday.  Definitely feeling like I had a scratchy throat.  hmmm.  Decided to work from home.  Craziness in the afternoon.  Sigh.  Still not actually feeling sick, just a slight scratchy throat and an infrequent cough.  Took a RAT at some point today, I think.  Negative.  Pizza for dinner, Futurama, Death in Paradise 5.3.

Friday.  Throat still a bit scratchy.  The plan was to take an RDO and clean the house.  But at this point I didn't even know if I'd be going ahead with the party.  So I worked in the morning.  Did another RAT.  Still negative.  Finished up around 2 then did a quick bit of house cleaning, then went and did the food shopping for the party.  Tv dinners for dinner.  Just because.  5.4 of Death in Paradise.

Saturday.  Went to be early but then woke up at midnight for over three hours.  Stressing about All The Things.  Sigh. 

Spent all day cleaning.  All of this should have been done yesterday and Saturday was meant to be completely chilled with just the food prep to do.  Sigh.  Just before Kit left the coast I did a third RAT.  Still negative.  But messaged everyone anyway to let them know the situation and they didn't have to come if they didn't want to risk getting sick.  A few people did pull out and I don't blame them.

I'll save the party for another post.

Sunday.  Woke up at 6:30.  Because that's what I do.  No matter how late I go to bed.  Saw Kit off at 8.  Tried to get more sleep but failed.  Slow day just doing a big cleanup - two loads of washing up, sorting the rubbish and recycling and vacuuming the lounge room.  Not much else.  Did start a jigsaw in the afternoon because didn't feel like doing anything else.  Cooked up some of the leftover party food for dinner with some brussells sprouts.  

Saw a cool video on sesquizygotic twins this week, in which twins share all of their maternal DNA, but only about half their paternal DNA.  They're stoopidly rare and they're not quite sure how it happens.  One theory is that an egg gets two sperm, and somehow they still manage to divide up the chromosomes successfully so as to not get duplicates.  Cool stuff!

Friday night I got home from work, chucked everything in the car, and headed straight out again to go down the coast.  We nearly hit a kangaroo on Macs Reef Road.  Stoopid things.  Took it a bit slow and arrived about 19:45.  Had bbq chicken and salad for dinner and then just chatted for a bit.  Little bit of a late night but not too bad.

I slept like crap - woke up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  So a slow start.  Followed Kit around like these ducks as she did the morning animal routine.

These guys will be a lot of dinners one day

There's like eight or nine new lambs under a couple of weeks old which are so cute!

I don't even know how many birds she has.  There's ten ducks, one large male turkey (Nigel), a female turkey and a young turkey, as well as about ten guinea fowl, and countless chickens.

She still has Scout and Ricky

Biscuit has as much fun jumping into the creek as Vicky does

Chatted for a while before we headed into Bateman's Bay for lunch.  We were going to go to the Mariner's, but it was closed til early June.  So went to Catalina, which we've driven past heaps of times but never been in.  I had quite a nice pork belly salad.

Went back to Kit's and everyone else had a nap while I did a jigsaw.  Only 250 pieces but quite tricky - basically just had to pick up a piece, figure out where it went, rinse and repeat 250 times.

Then Kit and Pete and I played a couple of games.  First What Next? (The Skyscraper Caper) which is kinda like a choose your own adventure, but we failed on pretty much everything.  Then Dragonworld which was decent enough and I actually managed to win it.

Since we'd had a big lunch, dinner was just ham and cheese toasted sandwiches.  Then listening to music on YouTube.

Slept ok Saturday night.  Pete cooked us breakfast while I followed Kit around doing the animals.

Had our breakfast then we came home.  Was 12:30 by the time we got home, and I was stressed most of the way home about losing so much time out of my weekend.  Not sure how long I can keep up this work nonsense, it just takes up too much damned time..

Monday.  15th.  Woke up around dentist time and only got less than an hours more sleep between 5-6.  Sigh.  Trying to get stuff done in between distractions and having to play mediator (sooo not in my job description!!!).  Culled some more people photos from the cruise then uploaded them to Dropbox for people to grab.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok, although woke up a bit after 5.  Meh day, don't really even know what I did.  Made a slow cooker apricot chicken dish which was quite nice.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters, nothing very exciting this 16 May.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  Nothing exciting at work.  FFS Windows 11 sux donkey balls.  If you open a .txt file (or anything that opens in a browser) it'll open on whichever desktop it feels like.  Even if you haven't even been using that desktop for anything lately.  And I found a new bug ("feature") of Notepad.  If you have two large text files open and you're at the bottom of them both, if you then switch between them you won't actually stay at the bottom of the files, you'll be taken to somewhere random in the file and have to scroll or control-end to get to the bottom again.  Or another one - if you search for some text in a file and it takes you to that text, if you then close the search box you'll be taken to some random point in the file, not where you actually just were with the found text.  So hopeless.  Seriously considering uninstalling "new" Notepad and just going back to the good old Notepad that's like thirty years old and still works perfectly fine as designed thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep but then slept ok. Quietish day, quiet drinks, pizza, Mandalorian, Lego.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Dropped off the car for service in the morning.  They reckoned it'd probably be ready by 14:00.  Had Kingsleys for lunch!!  First time there since November 21.  At 16:00 I went to get the car.  Oh, it's not ready yet, it's still over at Bob Jane.  WTF??  Still, but the time he'd spent like ten minutes sorting out all the paperwork they'd actually finished so I went and got it, came home then headed to the coast, but I'll save that for another post.

Sunday.  Got home and then had to do all my weekend todos in just a few hours.  As much as I like going away for weekends I also hate going away for weekends because it chews up so much of my down time.  I only had time for some essentials of cleaning and photos/blogging.  The only fun I had was doing a section of the Titanic.  No time for music or any other projects or hobbies.  I was going to vacuum the ensuite but came across the next problem with the Dodgy Dyson.  This time when I pulled the trigger nothing happened.  And I noticed a red flashing light on the battery pack.  32 red flashes before it stops.  Fricken great.  It worked just fine on Friday.  Now nothing.  I found one page which suggested a "reset" of the battery, but that didn't work.  Dyson is seriously Dodgy.  Sigh.  Basa bake in the oven for dinner.

Wow, another strange year. Another crazy busy year.

Our year began very quietly with just the two of us. We didn't go out to the club because of Omicron taking the country by storm.

Travel-wise this year has been.. interesting. It started off with us desperatly trying to get out of the cruise we were due to go on. The charter company had postponed it a year, but with Omicron raging, government travel bans still in force, and lack of insurance for covid-related hospitalisations, we just couldn't justify it. The travel bans did get lifted and insurance companies started insuring for covid, but we still didn't think it was worth the risk. In the end, something like two weeks before the departure date, Carnival were like, ok fine, we won't charge the charter company if people don't want to come. Great. So we didn't go. The charter company were still @$$holes and would only provide a cruise credit for next year's cruise not the year after. It's caused me so much stress and angst and I would NEVER deal with them again. So plan B for February was Tasmania. But with Omicron raging and mandatory lockdowns for testing positive, we decided against that too. If we'd gotten sick while in Tasmania we would have nowhere to go and no way to get home. So plan C was regional Victoria. We only booked motels a night in advance, and if we'd gotten sick we could be home from anywhere in Victoria in a day. So that's what we did. And we actually had a lovely time with almost perfect weather (if a tad hot!). We had a very busy first week, cramming in lots of things, but took it a lot easier in the second week. In April there was a day trip to four Sydney dams to see three of them spilling which was super cool. In May was another sneaky trip to Sydney to see Woronora Dam spilling, and Brickman's Lego Jurassic World. I hadn't been planning to go see the Lego, but then was inspired by Lego Masters so went when it only had a few days to go. And then they extended it. Oh well. And then back again to Sydney in June for Mum's birthday where Kellie had organised to see Mary Poppins. Met up with Tony the next day and wandered the city and went out to Cockatoo Island, then met up with Mum again and saw Vivid. Finally a visit to Ansto at Lucus Heights which was very cool. We only made it down the coast once this year, in July, to see Kit and Pete. In September I went overseas for the first time in nearly four years. Mum and I went and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play, which I'd been wanting to see since the late 80s. We then drove through Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland (four countries in one day!!) and into Italy, where we ditched the car and toured northern and central Italy by train. We saw *heaps* of stuff, much more, and for much cheaper, than if we'd done it with the tour company like originally planned. I got filled with rage how Qantas and Emirates won't talk to each other to do seat allocations on code share flights. Jet lag hit me in a major way when I got home. It certainly didn't help that I got a cold as soon as I got home and so didn't go outside and see the sun in days. I was awake for hours every night for a week, and a complete zombie for much of it. Finally, we went back to Tumut for the Tumut 3 Power Station Open Day and another TRBC tour.

Work was, well, work. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that it takes up so much time out of my days. I have way too many things on my todo list to have time to go to work every day. Sigh. But at least working from home a few days a week makes it tolerable. I didn't actually go into the office at all until March (with Omicron raging and minimising people contact before we went on holidays). Then when I did eventually have to go back in I found it super loud and stressful and distracting and PEOPLE!! I had to be Neil a few times during the year and did some doco on his stuff (which he won't keep up to date heh). There were a couple of firewall migrations that went quite smoothly. A couple of load testing days in May and June. A few proxy upgrades which introduced more bugs than they fixed. But we did PoC a proxy from another company that actually looked pretty good. Migrated some servers. And All The Cleaning. Just call me Sadie. There was a whiskey night in July (which I actually missed, but was able to try everything the next week), and I ran my Christmas bbq at the lake for the tenth year in a row.

Healthwise I've been pretty good. Had a very slight cold in June and another one when I got home from Europe. Had booster jabs in January and July. The one in January caused a strong immune reaction so had to take a half day off and have a little lie down. Other than that just a sore arm so far is all I've had from the shots. Other than that just the usual bouts of insomnia, waking up with numb hands, and going blind.

We've been pretty slack at keeping up with friends and family this year. Although we have seen some friends a bit. We've seen Tony and Jess a few times for games and music. Damien came over in January, April and June for games. Jenn came over a couple of times in April and December. I had heaps of lunches at Herbert's with various Chrises and Tonys and other peeps as well. David came to stay before the Canberra Airport Open Day. Kit came to stay in July. Mum came to stay in December and we did our family Christmas with Kellie's family at the Burn's Club. We saw Annie and the family a few times - for Annie's 50th, Mila's 21st and Christmas, as well Immy coming over a couple of times to hang out. EffanC and R&F came over they day before my birthday. Had a lovely housewarming for R&F in November (it was cold and wet). Caught up with Aaron in December, probably as long as ten years since I last saw him. Finally saw Chrissie for the first time since covid in December. And met up with James and George and the kids for lunch in December on their way to Melbourne.

We only made it out to the club four times this year. It's been that kind of year. With quarantining and being on holidays for several events, the only times we made it out were for the Mexican night in March, the formal night in June, our Christmas in July and the Christmas party in November. We didn't even make it out in any non-event weekends which we like doing over winter.

I did a bit of work on processing Dad's slides early in the year but that fizzled out. I geotagged all of Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos in case we ended up going there. I also geotagged all our Victoria and South Australia photos from previous holidays to try and reproduce those. I started to scan Mum's Minolta negatives from the beginning (1983) and got some spectacular results, but that ground to a halt when I got up to 1994 and got into a batch of badly discoloured negatives that were unscannable. Not that there's even all that many past 1994 that I'm interested in keeping so no big deal I suppose. I managed to cull and label and get some photos onto the blog for the tenth anniversary of my 2012 Eurasia trip. That was a lot of work for the first few months of the year but it was so good to get it done. I also got 719 Victoria photos (plus bugs/flowers/panoramas) labelled and online in time for the six month anniversary of us leaving on that trip. After that I got really slack in the evenings - with no pressure or deadlines nothing much got done. For this year's Europe trip it took me a good six weeks just to geotag everything, then I got slack again. I was thinking I might be able to get the photos online by Christmas. Yeah right. Instead I used the evenings to start filing by 2022 photos and taking notes for my year in review post.

Stumpy is still doing great. We've had him (her?) nearly five years now! He'd be at least 13 by now. The fish are puttering along. My two main guppy tanks (the two foot upstairs and the two foot downstairs) look amazing - lots of plants (at least upstairs) and hardly any algae. But our guppies are two years old now and getting inbred. We really need to get some new genetics for them. I still have my "angel" 620T tank with a guppy, a platy, and an ancient cory. I still have Chrissie's tank with her two clown loaches and a guppy, but I'm considering moving them and getting rid of the tank. It's got horrible black hair algae which is not fun. I have the two two foots, as well as several small tanks downstairs, all with just guppies. And Stu has his four foot which is still full of algae. Really must move more juvenile guppies in there.

I lost heart in trying to complete any more of Vic's Lego sets, so decided to inventory what was left (I'm going to need to do that at some point anyway before selling it). I found a website called Basebrick which integrates with Bricklink which is super useful. Did heaps but ran out of time to finish it before I went overseas and haven't been back to it. For my birthday I got 10497 Galaxy Explorer and 75329 Death Star Trench Run Diorama which are pretty cool. I decided to sell the box of "MISB" Harry Potter Lego I got from 2003-2006. There were ten sets and they sold for quite a lot (I probably made the buy it now too small), but ebay makes it so you have to jump through all their hoops otherwise you can get totally screwed over buy the buyers. As it was I got totally screwed over by ebay who not only take 12.5% of the sale, but also 12.5% of the *postage* which I think is a complete scam. Not to mention the stress. If things go well it's actually quite simple, but if anything complicated happens (like people pay for everything and *then* want combined postage, or come to pick up from your house but don't mark online that they've done so, or the value is over the $100 Australia Post will cover you for) then it's a nightmare. I calculated how much profit I made, taking into account the cost of interest for not having the money in my mortgage all these years and all the fees, and I figure I made a total net profit of about $50. But, I'm sure I made a lot of people very happy they could get their hands on 15-20 year old brand new Lego sets. For Christmas I was going to get myself the Lego Titanic. But after not getting a Black Friday special on it, I decided to sit down and buy it on the Saturday. By which time it was out of stock. Sigh. But I did get a different Lego set for Christmas - in a manner of speaking. Neil lent me his Saturn V rocket that he bought a few years ago but had never done. So I've been having fun with that. Then will pull it all apart and give it back to him :)

I finally finished the Disney 40320 piece behemoth this year - finishing up with the Bambi section. I still haven't assembled the whole thing yet because I lost access to the really useful skybridge so don't know where I'm going to assemble it. Maybe Damien's driveway. Other than that, the usual jigsaws at home and work, although feeling like I really don't have time to do them.

They said La Niña would finish by the end of summer. It didn't. There was a massive storm in January which caused a lot of chaos in northwest Canberra. There were power outages all around Belconnen and Coles lost all their fridge and freezer stock. Chris kept power to his store, but his house had no power for days. We were lucky and just had a couple of small outages while they were fixing things. And the water. All The Water. In spring half of NSW was flooded. Insanity. And there was so much water there was no lettuce in Australia for a while. Craziness.

I've had a whole stack of problems with Windows 11 on my new computer. I hate it (windoze 11) so much. Like the fact you can't ungroup task manager icons which makes it so damned slow to switch between windows now. Before you could just click on the icon. Now you have to click or just hold and *wait* for the popup before you can switch windows. I took to making whole new desktops for the browser and explorer windows I need for different hobbies (such as music or lego) but even that has its bugs - like not displaying the wallpaper at the right size at random and then fixing it and then breaking it again all without me changing anything. Or that after a reboot only two of the desktops will display the right wallpaper at all, and if I switch between the working and non working one it'll put the wall paper from the working desktop onto the non working desktop I've just switched to. And after a few days it'll come good. Utter trash. Then there's the fact my GPS won't work at all (and there's no replacement drivers for it), my scanner won't work (even though it originally did), Eudora wouldn't work to begin with, then came good. My SD card reader only works intermittently. The front USB ports take at least thirty seconds to recognise there's anything plugged into them. My second monitor wouldn't work so had to buy a new one. It's great but the resolution is so high it's difficult to see. Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even if that is not the primary monitor. Excel 2003 dates wouldn't work, so had to put on Libre Office instead. You can't drag a file onto the application on the task bar, have said application pop up, and open the file in that application. That just doesn't work at all anymore. Similarly I can't drag anything into Eudora to attach it, I have to go to a menu and manually attach files. Printscreen didn't work to begin with, then started working. Hate hate hate hate hate. I've been playing a lot of Wordle style games, although cut back on those while overseas and only play a few of them now. I like Symble because you have to think more about it. Redactle is challenging. Wheretaken is a new favourite. Also Worldle, Waffle and Framed. In February Google changed one of their apis to enforce https, so had to hack Geosetter to get it to work again. Then in December Google finally killed the IE api, killing Geosetter completely. A few weeks later they released a new version of Geosetter which still has some issues, but at least will display the map again. Our printer is having a tonne of issues with jamming and poor quality printouts. It might just need a clean. Or a new printer. hmmm. Had to setup an app password in June for Eudora so it can backup my gmail. In July OneDrive took it upon itself to backup/sync all my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive. But all it succedded in doing was making a complete mess of things, bringing back files from my old computer that had long since been filed. Turned off backups everywhere and I minimise use of those directories completely. IOS 15.3.1 (or thereabouts) went back to putting photos into files by year/month (which I actually prefer). But Apple is STILL messing with the timestamps on my files. I got myself a 14 Pro for Christmas (it arrived instore literally the Friday night before Christmas, I was thinking I'd have to wait until January). Its camera has.. issues.. I lot of the first photos I got off it were utter crap. Primarily because I was using the 2x lens a lot to compare with my old phone. Firstly. Don't. The 2x "lens" is a digital interpolation of the 1x optics. So it's crap. The macro setting will work (if the stars align) but while it's good for getting actual closeups, it's crap at taking photos of flowers where you want the background all out of focus. Use the 3x lens as before just be far enough away for it to focus. Optus charged me 50c for an international SMS I didn't make in July. I got onto their online chat and they gave me a credit, but firstly said they couldn't find out the exact date/time and number, which was a total lie, because when I pressed them for it they could, and then I figure out what it was (it was a reply to a string of text, not a number, so it got translated to an international number). I bought myself new sandshoes in January, for the first time in like fifteen years. And new black shoes in August for the first time in seven years. I bought a G5X before our overseas trip. And got a brand-new-second hand wok on freecycle (to replace ours whose non-stick surface was coming off).

Around the house. I needed to move all the ornaments off the top of my desk to setup my new computer and rearrange monitors and crap. I moved them all into the shevles I bought for David in the spare room. I can see everything there a lot better, so I'm enjoying having them all there. The top of the desk has remained clear all year, although I do currently have my birthday presents up there at the moment. Tony came over in January to chainsaw off the oak tree sprouts and the front hedge. And then in December to attack the photinia. In between is all the weeding. Never. Ending. Weeding. Except in winter cause it's too damned cold heh. When the big storm went through in January water was coming out of places that water should not be coming out of. Like bricks next our bins, and bricks on one of the back steps at the back of the house. So got the plumbers to come out and do all the eeling. The sewage pipes were the easiest because we know the deal with them. The front courtyard was easy when we realised it's not a proper drainage pipe, just a 50mm pipe that goes just across the courtyard and drains off to the side. Looks to have been an afterthought. Then the stormwater. They went in via the sump next to the garage and it was like thirty metres down before they found the blockage. So they cleared that. Like the sewage, we'll just need to do that every couple of years. Finally they looked at the drainpipe near the bins. Under the concrete the pipe had come adrift and was full of roots, so the drain from the roof was just pooling under the stairs, and then going through the bricks next to the bins. So they dug up the front stairs, dug a wholly new trench, resealed, relaid the pipes, filled it all in, and got someone to put in some new stairs. Fifteen thousand dollars later. Ouch. Mice were scritching around the roof in March, which caused some sleepless nights. But then they went away. Which was good because I practically had a panic attack trying to figure out how I was going to get across to the far side of the roof without falling through it and getting covered in disgustingness. I tried to cut back the ivy in May. It's now covering more of the side wall than ever. Our largest stove element died. But we still haven't replaced the element or the whole stove. Found out in early spring that a pair of crimson rosellas had been chewing through the beams holding up our roof. Tried plastic sheeting, tinsel, scaring them, and scat. Nothing much seemed to work very well. They've found more interesting things to eat for now but I suspect they'll be back again next winter. We moved a shelf out of the dungeon because Stu wanted to put in a proper shelf there. Underneath was a massive growth of dark brown mold. We don't know if it's current or historical. hrmmm. The Dyson I got for my birthday two years ago stopped working. Don't know if it just needs a clean, or if the battery is dying, or if the Dyson is just a dud. My money is on the latter. Brought home the Electrolux from the club where we'd had it to use until I can get around to cleaning the Dyson. Got lots of strawberries from plants around the back yard. Including some from our paver weeds. The snails clearly didn't get the memo, so we got the strawberries instead of them. We had solar panels and a battery installed in December. They still don't work.

Our favourite restaurant this year was still Chong Co - we got deliveries from them in January, twice in April, twice in August, and October. Herberts is also popular for work Friday lunches (and their Christmas in July was a lot of fun). I didn't get to have any workday Kingsleys lunches because the building opposite blew up from a gas leak and they've never gone back, or been allowed to, not sure which. I did finally have some Kingsleys from Kippax a few weeks ago. We had Sichuan Chinese pickup from Belco a couple of times and were pretty impressed with them. We had brunch a few times at Market St Eats. Some others we went back to after long breaks included Mills and Grills (Stu went low carb so hardly any Dominos this year either), Chez Kimchi and Bella Vista. Tried out SpudBAR and 1919 Langzhou Beef Noodle which opened in the mall. Other one-offs included Co Dung (fried chicken wings were awesome), Lazy Su, Turqoise Turkish, Edgar's, Flavours of Jiangnan, Teddy Picker's, Badger & Co, Little Steamer, The Howling Moon, Mr Shabu Shabu, Little Oink, Master Bao (which had no bao), Magpies (for Jim's farewell), Pattysmiths, and Chinese Inn (from Kippax, just as bad as last time).

As always I end up doing quite a bit of cooking and trying new recipes, as well as doing old ones a few times. One new favourite is stuffed baby capsicums - fill with whatever mince you like and lots of cheese and roast. Yum yum. I made a few lemon cheesecakes, as well as a lime one and a cherry one. One of Stu's favourite meals is Cath's basa bake we've done that a few times. We did san choy bow a couple of times. We really like the potato, onion, blue cheese and bacon bake from my Gratins and Bakes book, but with Stu going low carb we only did it like once all year. The slow cooker gets a workout over winter. Favourite recipes for that are Alan's beef stew, brisket, and even pulled pork. And we tried slow cooking pork ribs (nice but lots of little fiddly bony bits). Beef cheeks are slow cooked on the stove. After doing turkey rolls that actually turned out this time at the club Christmas in July (on account of doing them in the oven instead of on the bbq), we tried one ourselves in August and also November (and likely New Years Eve as well). They turn out really nicely and we'll probably always keep one in the freezer to do when we feel like it. From Not Quite Nigella I tried a chicken marbella but wouldn't bother again, from the Gratins and Bakes book I tried potatoes with lemon and tomato but wouldn't bother again with that either, and from my Slow Cooker Kitchen book I tried honey rosemary chicken which was too salty. Completely evil meals included uunifetapasta, cheese nachos, and no-carb pizza (made with no base at all, just cheese). Slow cooked mini tomatoes are amazing, really must do them more often. Tried pork crackling by itself but I do prefer it done on the meat. A favourite lunch is grilled cheese sandwiches - but with shredded pizza cheese on the outside as well. Favourite veggies (well other than my favourite which is potato bake) include brussels sprouts with bacon. Over winter we discovered kalettes which when roasted for 35-40 minutes turn into little bliss bombs. Almost as good is kale chips, but it's a bit too easy to overcook those and have them go bitter. I made pesto with the last of the summer basil, and tried cheese biscuits in June (but need to find a better recipe). And made a coconut cake (Yum! Delicious!) in June and October.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* Australian Wind Symphony in May at the B (next to the Q)
* Lego Jurassic World in Sydney
* The Queen and Me exhibition at the National Capital Exhibition
* Mary Poppins in Sydney
* Canberra Lego Brick Show at Thoroughbred Park
* Australian Wind Symphony in November at St Andrews

Movies (at the movies)
* Top Gun: Maverick

Movies (TV)
* The Courier
* The Young Black Stallion
* The Grand Budapest Hotel
* Six Minutes to Midnight
* Sleeping With the Enemy
* Munich: Edge of War
* The Laundromat
* 1917
* The Mauritanian
* Zero Hour (twice) / Flying High
* Dr Strangelove
* No Time to Die
* Operation Finale
* Logan's Run
* 6 Underground
* The King's Speech
* Encanto / Luca
* The Death of Stalin
* The Royal Tenenbaums
* Gladiator
* Knives Out
* Edward Scissorhands
* The Monuments Men
* Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version)
* Mary Poppins / Saving Mr Banks
* The Little Mermaid II / Ariel's Beginning
* The Man from Snowy River
* An Affair to Remember / Sleepless in Seattle
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Constant Gardener
* Top Gun
* The Silver Brumby
* Kingsman: The Secret Service / Kingsman: The Golden Circle / King's Man
* Careful, He Might Hear You
* Moulin Rouge!
* Shine
* Blue Murder
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (twice - before and after Italy)
* Breaker Morant
* Matrix Resurrections
* Romeo+Juliet
* The Butterfly Effect
* Die Hard 1/2 / Love Actually
* Enola Holmes 2
* Operation Mincemeat
* Herbie Goes Bananas

TV
* Sex Education (season 3)
* The Simpsons (seasons 20 to half way through 31)
* The Girl on the Train in the Rear Window, or whatever it's called
* Mentour Pilot (about 3/4 of the air crash investigations episodes)
* Gunther's Autopsy
* Lie to Me (end of season 2 and season 3)
* Black Books
* Gunther's Anatomy
* The Crown (season 1 and most of season 2)
* Lego Masters (season 4)
* Martin Bashir's Diana interview
* The Diana Interview: Revenge of a Princess 2021
* Epstein's Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell
* Obi-wan Kenobi
* Super Cub
* Andor (season 1)
* Lego Masters Bricksmas special (last year's and this year's)
* Survivor Canberra (fan produced)
* Picard (season 2, haven't finished)

Books
* Read the first four books of the New Testament, but got behind in February when we travelled and never really caught up. Will try again next year for the rest of the New Testament.

Other stuff
* Tried to catch up on This Day in History posts, but there's still too much work to be done with Mum's photos to do it properly, so that stalled
* Car wouldn't start in January. Turns out it was the battery, which was probably original, so it would have been nearly eight years old
* Petrol got insanely expensive
* Balloon Fiesta in March
* Canberra Airport Open Day in April
* Dam Busters trip to Sydney in April
* Climbed Mt Rogers a couple of times
* Saw the planet/moon alignment in April
* Jupiter and Venus were having a sneaky early morning kiss in April
* Sneaky trip to Sydney in May to see Lego Jurassic World (and Woronora Dam)
* Got a democracy sausage in May
* Climbed Mt Ainslie in May (hadn't been planning to it just happened)
* Whiskey Live in May
* Queen Elizabeth II 70th Jubilee in Canberra - all the purple lights on buildings around Canberra
* ABC's Classic 100: Music for the Screen in June
* Inspected my flat, went to Cockatoo Island, saw Vivid and visited Ansto in June (after seeing Mary Poppins for Mum's birthday)
* Surprising Science at the Shine Dome in June, August, and December
* Walked up Mt Painter
* Stu cracked a tooth and needed it taken out
* Fought with Qantas' booking system again. I hate Qantas. So. Much.
* Had a hair cut in August
* Stu got a 3D printer which he's been using to make little models for his wargamming
* Total lunar eclipse in November
* Took a drive out the back of Dunlop/Holt to see the West Belconnen Pond
* Got a beer advent calendar from Plonk
* Went to the Green Shed a couple of times, dropped off a few things, came home with more jigsaws
* Continued to practise the clarinet

Have a very happy and safe new year!!

Sunday.  20th.  Yummy roast pork for dinner.  

Monday.  Slept ok.  Run/sun/rain/sun all day.  I managed to get the G5X photos off the SD card, but not the Canon (got them later).  Weeding after work.  Honey mustard chicken for dinner.  Used cream that was two weeks past its use-by date, and chicken that was use-by today.  It'll be fine right? :)  Culled a few days worth of photos (first pass anyway).  Then watched the first episode of the Lego Masters Bricksmas special which was a lot of fun.

Another paver weed strawberry

Remember early this year I completely cleared this?  Sigh.

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep because I was COLD!.  Then I was awake in the middle of the night for no good reason.  So a relatively slow day.  It was COLD again in the house.  14C on the heater thermostat.  We would normally turn the heater on at that temperature, except someone opened all the cooler vents the other day because it was getting hot enough to turn the cooler on.  So we suffered all day.  I had a coat around me some of the day.  My boss has covid!!!  But I haven't seen him since Thursday last week so I'll be fine.  But he was in the office yesterday so worried about other people getting sick.  More weeding after work.  Stu cooked sausages for dinner.  More photo culling.  I was going to watch the second episode of Bricksmas, but that's not til next Sunday.  Then I found out they did a Bricksmas last year!  So watched the first episode of that.  

After half an hour of cleaning yesterday

Wednesday.  Started working on something new to clean up.  Home late so nothing useful, other than a bit of culling.  Started watching the second episode of last year's Bricksmas but didn't finish it.

I love how these poppies can live where there's like, no water

Thursday.  More cleaning.  Bought a new phone at lunch.  It might turn up in January if China doesn't have too many more lockdowns.  Sigh.  Frank and Karen came to drinks which was nice.

Friday.  Catching up on bits and pieces, and more cleaning.  Stu cooked "chorizo mince" for dinner.  Started the Christmas movie season a little early with Die Hard.

More paver weed strawberries

Stu's chorizo mince

Saturday.  Panicking about my todo list and my lack of time.  So I squandered the little time I had with music and jigsaw.  Hrmm.  I was hoping the Lego Titanic might have a Black Friday discount, but it didn't, so decided to just buy it anyway.  They had stock when I looked at the price on Thursday/Friday, but when I sat down Saturday morning to buy it, it was "out of stock".  Sigh.  There goes my other Christmas present.  Sigh.  Headed out to the club after lunch and helped a bit with the setup and a bit of food prep.  Chilled for a bit then had a swim with the sweetie.  Dinner was pretty amazing as always.  Didn't stay up too late so that was good.  A lovely night as always.

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Up fairly early and came home.  Started to do All The Things, but didn't get very far before we went out to the chemist and Bunnings.  Also had a look at the Cameron Offices demolition, and tried out Pattysmiths which was nice enough.  Then home and did some more Christmas tree stuff.  Had out the fairy lights and there were enough blown bulbs to take out too many strings, so decided to rearrange the bulbs to get working strings in the middle.  Had gotten a fair way through it when Stu brought out Stumpy.  Who then proceeded to poop right where I was working.  Sigh.  So went and cooked dinner and download my phone photos (tried a few times but still can't get the SD card).  

Today's haul

Cameron Offices demolition

Pattysmiths Cheeseburger