Don't have a whole lot of energy for this tonight. But I left it so long last year that MT couldn't figure out how to place the entry, and it only ended up being viewable in the day-to-day links, and not in the monthly archives. So I'm just going to do it a bit quickly.
Did quite a lot of travelling this year, although only locally. Several trips to Queensland, including spending a nice first week of the year there. Much time spent with Chay and David, singing badly but eating well :) Got to visit them for a couple of days at the end of the year too which was nice. Also many visits to Canberra (more on that later), including taking hundreds of photos at Floriade. Another nice little trip was down to Batemans Bay and Mogo Zoo.
At work we moved offices again. I got *squished* in the seating arrangements, but several fish tanks and many guppies helped keep my sanity. Got a new Blackberry 8700 to play with, which I'm very attached to - although more for Poker and Solitaire than anything else I think heh. The main file server threw a disk in March which corrupted the file system *again* and once too often, so we decided then and there to replace the machine. Also spent time playing with windows firewall on all my servers, and locking down the vlan to block most incoming stuff. Towards the end of the year they (oh sorry, there is no "us" and "them" anymore - we've all been assimilated) centralised us in order to cut costs. My boss got seconded into the whole change process, Luc became my boss, and we all ended up with extra crap to deal with. There will be a round of redundancies next year, although noone knows when yet, and I'm hoping to get one and jump ship and go be with my boy. But the whole process and change has left me completely *dreading* going to work at the moment. Which is a shame, because it really is (was?) a wonderful job/place to work. We had a "wake" the Friday after we found out - to celebrate what once was, and the end of an era.
On the fish front, tried twice to breed blue guppies, but both lots died as soon as I got them. One lot in an established tank, the other lot in a fresh tank setup. So no idea what was going on with them there. My big girl angel is my only remaining original survivor, after the death of the other black angel and the three glass catfish. She keeps laying eggs which is kinda sad. Setup a way cool Macquarium at work. Yes, an aquarium in an old macintosh case. It's way way cool. Put three guppies and a betta in there and they've been doing splendidly. Guppies at work (and at home) continue to go nuts. A "fun" morning at work a few weeks ago when the girl in the Macquarium had her babies and the betta at them all heh. At home, got a bunch of glowlight and black neon tetras. The black neons have been doing well, but the glowlights not so well. The plants in that tank are going nuts though. Stu gave me some of his baby multies, which have gotten big enough in the last couple of weeks to start excavating the gravel around their shells. And finally, one of my favourite fish was found murdered on the floor after I accidently left the lids off one night. I was really sad cause he was such a wonderful little fish.
Didn't do much with Lego this year. Just got a lot of it put away that was dusting up my surfaces. And then built all my Harry Potter Lego, photographed it, and put it all away again. After the holidays will try and sell a bunch of it on ebay, so as less to move to Canberra.
Been mostly healthy this year. The usual colds/flus and a few days off work. Flat feet and crap quality shoes caused me some problems, which went away after wearing better shoes. Also dug out my old scales, and (assuming they're accurate), seem to have lost a couple of kilos in the past couple of months. Will be weighing myself a bit more regularly and try and get it down a bit.
Other bits and pieces:
* me little brother got married and I got a neato SIL. Very happy for them
* finished reading the Bible again (in three years read the whole Old Testament once, and the New Testament three times). Longest and most consistently that I've done that *ever*
* several poker nights at work and at cia. Lost all the cia ones, but came first, second and third in work ones.
* been slowly getting FLYwashed and slowly starting to get the hang of things, and having things like a clean bathroom all the time, which is completely foreign to me!
* bought a Netphone for Stu and me, but Stu's has been sitting uselessly in a box because he hasn't been able to get broadband where he is, so that was a complete waste of money. We'll likely be living together before he gets adsl.
* read The Half-Blood Prince again over Easter. Other than that, continued reading Cordelia's Honour which I'm *still* struggling to get through.
* saw a couple of free movies courtesy of IBM and Dell - The Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean 2.
* rearranged the furniture/tv in my flat
* finished indexing my USA photos, after 2 1/2 years.
* watched all bar one episode of the first three seasons of TNG
* walked on a piece of glass 300m directly above Sydney traffic on the Sydney Tower Skywalk
And finally.. Stu got a job in Canberra and moved down there at the end of April. Made seeing each other a heck of a lot easier, but the drive is starting to get tiring. Hopefully we won't have to do it for too much longer. Although the prospect of changing jobs is a scary one for me.. Things with Stu have been going wonderfully, and on Christmas Eve (well technically Christmas Day), we got engaged. No wedding date set yet. We'll deal with that next year.. oh wait... it *is* next year... hehe :)
Gosh, well that was a lot longer than expected. Ooops. :)
