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...

Monday.  13th.  Slept ok.  Not much useful in the morning.  In the afternoon I settled down to get some real work done but then the non stop interruptions.  Sigh.  Tried the cooler again in the afternoon.  This time it worked!!!!  Must have just gotten stuck.  Will ask them about it next time we get it serviced.  Leftover beef for dinner then Twin Peaks 1.3.  Man, David Lynch is weird..   @phonakins posted that it was 42 days til Christmas which freaked me out slightly haha.  This year has gone way too fast.  I might need to put my tree up soon.. ;)

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Cooked gnocchi and salad for dinner then Twin Peaks 1.4.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Went to pick up the sweetie, although he only had one drink so I had one as well then we went to Happy's for dinner.  We were the only couple for a while with like four other single guys.  It was 20:00 by the time we got home.  But nicely, during the day I checked if my cgi scripts were working and discovered they were!  Nothing from Vodien to say they'd fixed things though.  Hopeless.  Blogged the other week because I could.

Thursday.  Busy day but didn't feel like I achieved much.  Drinks/pizza.  Started watching Futurama with dinner but then started talking to Kit and ended up facetiming her for a while.  In other news.. Stu messaged during the day that he felt like he was having an immune reaction.  Hrmmm.

Friday.  Busy day.  Managed a bit of decom work and some Splunk training in between everything else and All The People wanting All The Things.  Kiev Friday!  

Then Death in Paradise 6.8.  The tune for the theme song is actually from a song called You're Wondering Now, by the Specials.  Which they actually had a version of at the end of the show.  Cool!  Even cooler.. Stu has it on CD :)  Afterwards I watched Turning Red which I had no idea what it was about.  For some reason it kind of annoyed me the pushing of western values, but the director was Chinese-Canadian so there's that.. 

In other news, Stu was definitely feeling sick today.  I told him to go back to bed but he was too busy with work.  He took a RAT but it was negative.  His boss on the other hand.. yeah no... 

Saturday.  Slept in the other room so Stu could cough and splutter in peace.  House stuff in the morning.   

I've gotten a few paver weed strawberries.  I've lost a few others to snails.

Stu took another RAT.

Welp.  Guess it had to happen eventually.  First positive RAT we've had in our house.  Decided to mask up and go do food shopping in case I get it too and neither of us can go out.  Put up the Christmas tree in the afternoon.  A week earlier than I normally would, because at my age the weeks fly by so quickly that I wanted an extra week to enjoy it :)  I just did the tree and will decorate it and the house over the course of the week.

Cooked up some mince with ragatoni for dinner, then we finished season 1 of The Orville.  Afterwards I watched The Movies that Made Us on Pretty Woman.  I saw that movie at the movies but don't know if I've actually seen it since.. may have done once.  

Sunday. 

Got a bit of house stuff done and some catch up blogging (RecipeTin Eats!!) but mostly trying to figure out what minifig heads I have.  Split out my hymns into batches so I don't need to do all of them every week.  Downloaded my photos.  Apple has decided to present HEIC files to windoze instead of JPGs like it usualy does.  EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING!!!  Far out I hate Apple. So. Much.

Star!  I'll be very sad when this thing dies

Last week we went and saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. 

Pretty sure I've seen all of them at the movies except for Temple of Doom.

It was quite a lot of fun.  

I mean sure, a bit silly and far fetched, but not nearly as bad as Crystal Skull.

They de-aged Indy for the beginning bit of the movie, and I was actually worried they were going to have him de-aged for the whole thing, but luckily it was just a prologue.  

So yeah I enjoyed it.

But Last Crusade will always be my favourite :)

And John Williams was just icing on the cake :)

Sunday.  16th.  Not backdating for a change :)  Pic of the kale chips I made as part of dinner.  This was 15 minutes, some bits were a little overdone.

Monday.  17th.  Woke up around dentist time for like an hour and a half.  On the weekend I got back into collecting some extra data from Dad's slides, to help organise them better.  Because he would mix up rolls to put things together by subject.  Which is fair enough, but some slides don't have dates (I still need to find out if he ever digitised his slide labels from the books he had which have been lost) but do have processing dates sometimes, or can be linked together by the type of slide etc.  He also mixed like three trips up north into one collection, and bushwalks to the same area together.  I want to be able to get them back into chronological order for filing.  So more of that before work.  Tried to do one thing, which took all day because of everything else I had to deal with.  I tried to talk to the optometrist about whether the strain for distance is good strain (help reverse the myopia) or bad strain (make it worse).  But the receptionist called me back, not the optometrist, and said the optometrist said just not to do it.  And I'm like that doesn't answer the question, but of course she didn't have the answer, and wouldn't find out because he'd just said Don't.  Fricken sigh.  Hate.  Cranky all afternoon.  And I was cold and hungry ALL DAY (well except for briefly after lunch of nice warm noodles and a walk in the sun).  Leftovers for dinner.  Tried emailing some peeps to confirm their email addresses before I emailed photos, but Gmail intermittently wouldn't accept mail from Internode:

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 550-' This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for [kazza.id.au] did not pass with ip: [--]. The sender should visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for instructions on setting up authentication.

Some went through but others bounced.  So then I had to fight with Vodien to get an SPF record setup.  Internode is super helpful (https://www.internode.on.net/support/guides/email/spf_records/) providing the text to use for their mail servers.  But Vodien support was like, do it through cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't "own" the domain per se.  Of course that didn't work.  Then the actual Vodien DNS manager kept complaining about an invalid name.  They actually want you to put a name which is daft because TXT records don't have them.  I hate EVERYTHING.  Too cranky and depressed to do any Titanic.

Tuesday.  Slept okish I guess.  Well, after I finally got to sleep, which took like two hours because my feet were cold and wouldn't warm up.  Mail policy staring day.  Weeding at lunch.  Music, cheese kransky and cabbage for dinner (finally finished the cabbage that's been in the fridge since probably January - that stuff just never goes off!!).

Blogged the week before last, which took up most of the evening.  Then finally finished watching Avatar.  Only took like two weeks hehe.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep again because my feet were cold.  Lots of work with Neil.  We're probably going to end up deleting half the ruleset on one server because of things either no longer in use or things can be combined.  

Saw these at the chicken place and drooled.. but didn't buy any.. this time..

Herbert's for dinner for a tap takeover by Big Shed.

I tried all six beers on tap (half pints each of four of them which were good, not much more than a taste of the Brown (too dark for me), and most of a pint of the hard lemonade which tasted like Solo - yum! dangerous!).  

This was the rep and their Golden Stout Time - which smelt exactly like Golden Gaytime - but didn't taste really like it at all.  Weird.  

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Had breakfast with the sweetie at 54.

Had a look at a routing alert from last night.  Learnt a bunch of stuff and actually got to see some OSPF which we don't have much of.  Also started thinking about some more cleanup work. 

Managed to get a photo of the eclipse.  Not helped by the iPhone not actually using the lens you tell it to.  I wanted to use the 3x lens, which works until you put something in front of it, and it's like, oh you wanted to do macro did you, and changes the lens.  So retarded.  But fought with it and managed to get a couple of pics.  It certainly wasn't very exciting from Canberra!

Quiet drinks, pizza, and finished season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett.  We didn't see who was in the tank at the end, so asked Siri, Hey Siri, who was in the tank at the end of the Book of Boba Fett?" - and she actually answered correctly!  Pretty incredible really.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Laid out all of Dad's 1969 Grampians and Great Ocean Road photos.  There's two rolls that cover that part of the trip, and you could tell from the processing date printing which were which.  You can mostly see the frame numbers (Dad wrote all over them obscuring parts of them). 

Looking at cleaning stuff.  TV dinners for dinner and Rocky Horror Picture Show (because it's fifty years since the show was first performed on stage).  Also found a bunch of Disney Singalong movies.. that could be a lot of fun hehe.

Next generation of turdburgers that will probably eat the house again over winter

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Continued sorting of the Grampians/Great Ocean Road photos.  I think I managed to get them all into the correct order.  It helped having a bit of local knowledge (from having done the exact same trip ourselves last year).  There's a few slides where the dates are clearly wrong, but not entirely sure what the correct date is.  They could have been taken late on the first day, or early on the second.  Got some house stuff done as well and got some holiday blog entries online.  Gmail is still intermittently blocking my emails.  Went out for lunch, got the loaded fries at Pattysmiths.  Their fries are actually really good, don't even need the bacon and cheese sauce

Then went to the chemist/pet store and did our food shopping and suddenly it's two and a half hours since we left home.  #grunt.  Some getting organised, music and Titanic and suddenly it's 17:00.  Sigh.  Sausages and wombok for dinner.  Then into season 3 of The Mandalorian, and some Death in Paradise.  

Sunday.  Woke up some time before 3 and stayed awake for at least two hours, then restless sleep.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Hurray.  Did mostly house cleaning stuff, bit of Titanic, and lots of blogging.  Also finally fixed my SPF record - you need to put the domain name (kazza.id.au) as the "name".  So dumb.  Also dumb: if you open a html file (that loads in Chrome), or a text file (that loads in notepad) it won't open in the desktop you're in, no no no, it opens in the default deskop, or whichever desktop you were using those apps in last (not sure which).  Windoze is so hopeless.  Is it beer o'clcok yet?

Monday.  20th.  Backdated cause of blog sadness.  Woke up at 4:19 on account of going to bed at 20:30.  Sigh.  But I'm only going to bed so early because I can't SEEEE anything on my computer in the evenings.  Had a look at the errors on my blog with Perl and MySQL.  Even my addressbook is broken with a similar perl->mysql error.  I'm just hoping that someone else running Perl/MySQL complains about it.  For now, we wait.  

Tuesday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  I started geotagging my holiday photos.  Also did some APNIC training on routing.  It takes ages when you stop to take notes, check mail queues, have to talk to people etc.  More geotagging after work.  Just before bed I was doing day 10 iPhone photos in St Thomas, and realised the phone had been an hour out in the morning, and had changed time half way up the cable car we did in the morning.  So I'll need to go fix the exif times and file names for them.

How good are these?  Mini toasts with cream cheese or blue cheese, quince paste, slow roasted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, salami and strawberries.  Doesn't take long to make and super tasty.

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Fixed up the St Thomas morning photos, only to find it's jumped back an hour part way through the day.  FFS Apple make up your mind.  Good thing I have the Canon to note what time we were *actually* in places.  #grunt.  Before we arrived it was an hour early.  It changed half way up the cable car.  Then later in the day it changed back again, and later again it went forward again.  Sigh.  And my eyes got tired very early today which didn't help.  It was raining after work so no weeding.  I can't SEEEE at night, so can't do any photo work because I need to stare at file names and figure out what's going on with them.  What else is there to do in the evenings if I can't work on my computer?  Drink and watch crap on the internet??  Sigh.  Started watching Avatar.  I first/last saw this at the movies in 3D and totally hated the 3D experience.  It's like watching a movie with sunglasses on.  So started watching it again since had just been doing a bunch of Pandora experiences at Disney recently.

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  OMFG epic storm!!!  Lightning everywhere and it was so dark at 9am lights were turning on outside (I shoulda taken a photo!!)

Did some training, some Neil, quiet drinks, pizza, episode 2 of Boba Fett (really need to rewatch the first episode though, because I was so jetlag tired I can't remember much of it).

Friday.  Did one of the APNIC training labs.  Took a few hours oof!  Some tickets, documenting servers etc.  Pork and salad for dinner.  Then watched Glass Onion which was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  Got ready, cleaned the kitchen then went out to the club for a working bee.  With sore bowels hmm.  Not many people came and it was threatening to rain.  John gave us the job of cleaning the office.  He'd replaced all the insulation and so there was bits of the old stuff *everywhere*.  So we pulled everything out, Stu cleaned every surface, then I put everything back all neat and tidy, and threw a bunch of stuff out as well.  I should have taken a before photo, because the place was such a mess (not just with insulation but from several years of people dumping crap in there).  The after looks pretty impressive though!  It won't last though!!

The social was Mardi Gras themed, and someone said a rainbow vomited in the shed..

Dinner was build your own burgers.  

Noticed during cleanup that someone had left the small oven on.  hrmm.  After dinner was lots of fun music and karaoke, but I was finding it too loud so went to Ian's for whiskey.  Bit of a late night but not too bad.

Sunday.  Belly still hurting.  hmm.  I wanted to be gone by 8, but by the time I'd gone and spent over an hour cleaning up the shed (and noticing someone had also left the big oven on all night *sigh*) it was nearly 11:00 by the time we got home.  I brought home a tonne of food (mostly the salad stuff).  Since my blog was still broken, I decided to email Vodien support.  They basically tried to fob it off "did you get an email about any changes?" "no, and I never have in the past either but it seems unlikely that you *never* patch your systems".  Gave them some evidence of things changing on their end and all the errors I could find.  I did catch up on writing up the rest of my holiday blog entries, even though I can't post them yet.  Started a jigsaw too because too stressed to enjoy doing more of the Titanic.  And my belly hurts.  Chicken kiev for dinner and The Crown.

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!!

Crazy busy boring week.  Three photos to blog, no movies to quote, and a few days where I didn't even get any useful notes.

Monday.  14th.  Awake from about 1 til about 4.  Hurray.  I was stressing about ebay to start with (ebay have made things a lot nicer for buyers but much much much much more stressful for sellers), then I got hungry and restless.  Sigh.  Started prepping our next proxy upgrade (maybe it'll fix problems they introduced with the last upgrade).  Geotagging holiday photos and filing this year's photos in the evening.  I also spent the afternoon charging up a bunch of rechargable batteries to put in Yvonne's keyboard so I could have a play on it.  Haven't played any keyboards in years.  Weeding and leftover buttbeef cheeks I dug out of the freezer.  

Tuesday.  Somewhat better sleep.  All the stoopid.  Weeding, music, leftover turkey for dinner, geotagging, photo filing, Mentour Pilot.

Canberra is overgrown with grass at the moment - they can't keep up with the mowing.. doesn't bode well for summer grass fires around the place..

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday.  Super busy days at work (although not as much on Friday).  Mostly slept ok.  I accidentally gave myself a reputation of being knowledgeable and helpful to some users by fixing some longstanding problems for them (all I needed was an error message to fix a problem that had been kicking around other teams for weeks).  Whoops.  Had chicken kiev for dinner on Friday and watched episode 11 of Andor.

Saturday.  Got some stuff done in the morning but not nearly enough.  Food shopping, where I got stressed out by being in the aisle and people pushing past and STRESS and trying to get the trolley back and Kippax sure doesn't make it easy (all the trolley bays are on the Other Side of the car park so you either have to All The Way Around, or squeeze between cars or go up and over kerbs between cars.  Sigh).  So was in an odd mood the rest of the day.  But I did finish geotagging our holiday photos!!  In the evening was the Lego Brick Show at Thoroughbred Park but I'll leave that for another post.  One day.

Sunday.  Slept ok but woke up at ~5:20 hungry (I really didn't eat enough last night).  Depressed about how much stuff I have to dooooo but seemingly not enough time to do it.  I had to drag out the old vacuum cleaner to vacuum the house because the stoopid Dyson is playing up (it's pulsing and keeps turning off.. could be something needs cleaning or could be the battery is on its way out or something stoopid).  The thing is only two years old!!  I maintain that Dyson, like Herman Miller, is simply over priced and not actually GOOD.  Change my mind!  Not to mention the stoopid SD card reader on my computer only works intermittently.  I still haven't been able to download all my photos from last night.  #grunt.  But did do some weeding and music and cooked a lovely roast pork for dinner and watched some tv with the sweetie. 

Sunday.  22nd.  Backdating cause long weekend aren't long enough.  Cooked up a bunch of veggies for dinner to have with the last of the leftover chicken.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Spent some time planning another firewall migration and tested it with some test traffic.  Filled the green bin with leaves while Stu cooked dinner - some gnocchi I got last time I went shopping, and using some of the mince I cooked last weekend with some tomato paste and cabbage.  It was very tasty.  Then photo culling and watched the Lego Masters finale which was fun.

Tuesday.  No notes.  Whoops.

Wednesday.  Sneaky trip to Sydney to see Brickman's Lego Jurassic World exhibition at the Australian Museum.  Will get that posted.  One day.

Thursday.  Not great sleep.  Nachos for dinner.  Soooo bad but soooo good.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Had a fun afternoon updating some diagrams.  In the evening was Whisky Live.  I hadn't been in a few years because we went two years in a row and it was a bit repetetive.  But this time there was *heaps* of new stuff I'd never even heard of before.  Took notes on lots of things.  I prolly better not mention how many different whiskys I tried :)  It was definitely not covid safe and I was worried about that for a while.  Then I started drinking and stopped worrying.  But as of a week and a bit later I'm still ok, so all good ;)

Saturday.  Slept relatively well considering. 

Mostly doing Lego stuff all day.  For dinner we went into Dickson for dinner.  We tried out Flavours of Jiangnan and had some very tasty brisket and pork.

Slow cooked beef brisket and noodle ($16)

Jiangnan specially cooked dongpou pork ($28)

Then watched Knives Out which was a bit silly but a bit of fun.  I loved one character's description of Daniel Craig's kentucky fried foghorn leghorn chicken southern drawl.  So true haha

Sunday.  Slept pretty well.  Lego and house stuff.  We're into season 25 of The Simpsons.  Then watched Edward Scissorhands which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies.  In 1990.

Monday.  Slept well enough.  Did a Green Shed run (dropped a bunch of stuff off and "only" left with six jigsaws) and a bottle drop off (finally took the Christmas party leftovers), and brunch at Teddy Picker's.

Eggs benedict at Teddy Picker's

The wall of cheese at Ainslie IGA

Lego and photo stuff in the afternoon.  Chicken kiev from Chris's for dinner.

No idea for the evening.  Probably depressed about how short long weekends are :)

Monday.  21st.  Did you miss me? :)  Probably not on account of I post so sporadically anyway right?  And the fact there's only like three people that read my blog anyway.  

We went here!

With all the photos on the Canon taken here

So Plan A was a cruise out of Florida that we were just to scared to go on, even after they finally started offering insurance for medical expenses for covid.  I was stressing about losing thousands of dollars, but eventually Carnival were like, ok fine, if you want to get out of if they'll let the charter company do a cruise credit.  It's supposed to be for next year's cruise, but I want to try and go the year after if possible.

Plan B was Tasmania.  But even that we thought was too risky.  If one of us got covid while we were there we'd be stuck there with no way home.

So Plan C was regional Victoria.  We figured then if one of us got it we could be home in a day.  So off we went Saturday three weeks ago.  We were still a bit paranoid about getting covid, and avoided Melbourne and any large regional towns (well sort of anyway).  And it turned out to be a pretty awesome trip.  We only booked motels basically a night in advance, although stayed at most of them a couple of nights.  The weather was amazing, only a bit overcast on a couple of days, and barely any rain.  The biggest disappointments were the Grampians and the Great Ocean Road, in terms of all the photos I wanted to reproduce I couldn't because of the risk-averse government fencing off access to everything.  Moral of the story: go back in time to see stuff, and never go back to things you thought were awesome back in the day.

If you want to read the blog, you can start here, although no photos are up yet.  

So we got home on Monday, then the afternoon was just unpacking and getting organised.  Pizza for dinner, hrmm.  And photo processing.

Tuesday.  Urgh, epic insomnia - couldn't get to sleep til like 1am.  Now that I'm home I'm stressing about All The Things that need doing.  And I was thinking about Shandee too, hrmm.  I'm physically incapable of relaxing, and my muscles were all tensed up to prove it.  Got some weeding done in the morning (it was nice and cool which helped).  Went and got some medical checkup tests done.  Then I had to fight with Geosetter.  Google "changed something" which rendered the application completely broken some time while we were away.  Turns out it was just a matter of changing the Google url from http to https, and specifying a newer api version in the uri.  Phew.  Because I needed Geosetter to geotag all my photos.  Spent the afternoon applying the GPS tracks to photos, and then going through and checking/tweaking as needed.  I did have a break and do some weeding in the afternoon, and went for a walk in the evening.  Dug some cooked mince out of the freezer and finished a box of risoni for dinner. 

How cool was the date today too.. too many twos today (Tuesday)!  (I wasn't up for 2:22 or 22:22, so 20:22 on 22.2.2022 would have to do!)

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep again, but then slept ok.  6am is actually really dark now, who knew.  Spent an hour in the morning clearing periwinkle out of the front yard garden beds (now that I can get to them after Tony chopped the hedge back before we went away). 

Then it was geochecking and filing photos.  Spent another hour or so in the afternoon clearing out the drain in front of the garage.  Which hasn't been done since we moved in.  Thirteen years ago.  

I didn't even know there was a hole there, I thought this was just a stormwater drain for the driveway!

While I was showing the sweetie what I'd done, this itty bitty baby blue tongue ran practically under our feet (probably chasing all the worms I'd chopped in half digging out all the soil from the drains)

I was exhausted, so it ended up being a frozen pizza and fries kind of an evening (Chris didn't have any chicken kiev)..

In the evening I watched Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which is a pretty sad state of affairs really.  

Thursday.  Got to sleep ok, but then woke up at 2am til well past 4am.  Hurrah.  So zombie day.  Took 332 bottles and cans (basically a year's worth) to Return It.  Going first thing sure did work, I got there as it opened and grabbed a couple of trolleys, and didn't have to wait to put them through.

But omfg the humidity!  So bad.  Then it was just house tidying and photo stuff.  And I started the next (last!) section of the Disney behemoth.

In the afternoon got a lift to the Pot Belly for a few drinks with some of the guys I haven't seen in months.  Just as I arrived the rain started, and it got heavier and heavier!

The Pot Belly has stripped all the vintage wallpaper off their toilet walls, and most of the tiles too.  At least they retained one row of Pigs and Chickens tiles!!

KFC for dinner (I'd been craving it for weeks).

Friday.  Not a great sleep but not as zombie as yesterday.  Weeding, photo stuff (burning DVDs and culling photos), bit of jigsaw, not too much else. 

How to make your regular toasted cheese sandwich even more awesome - just plonk a handful of shredded parmesan cheese underneath and on top.  So good!

It RAINED in the afternoon.  I went out to check on the nearly cleared drain (the sump is still blocked, but I'm hoping to get that eeled this week), and noticed this...

It's actually *outside* the house proper, but not sure where all the water is coming from.  It's possible it's coming from the downpipe in one corner of the roof which is struggling to find somewhere to go since the garage drain is blocked.  I guess we'll see what happens once the drains are cleared.  Either that or run a hose down that drainpipe and see what happens - one of the things my brain thinks about when trying to get to sleep at night.

Had leftover pork (from the freezer) with some cabbage (which never goes off, it's been in the fridge for like six weeks) and rice (which I cooked in stock a couple of days ago) for dinner.  Then we watched 1917, which was interestingly done.  It *appears* to be one long continuous take, but we knew it wouldn't have been, and sat there guessing the transition shots.  A few of the things that annoyed me were on IMBD's goofs page, but a few weren't (like an epic boggy field in one shot, and a completely dry area just a couple of hundred metres away, or the truck getting bogged trying to go around a tree on the road, when why was there even a bog there at all, and why didn't they just go a couple of metres around it, or in fact on the other side of the road!?, or the medic tent being *so close* to the trenches).

Saturday.  Slept very well for a change.  The morning was house stuff and getting organised.  All the organising!  But I'm drowing in photo work.  I want to get Eurasia 2012 photos culled and onto the blog before the 10 year anniversary.  It's going to be an insane amount of work!!  Basically I need to cull a day of photos per day for the next two months.  But I suffer from decision paralysis which makes the process extremelly difficult and time consuming :(  Then just to increase my photo work load, I started to scan Mum's Minolta camera negatives (I installed the driver/software I had for windoze 10 and it worked fine in 11).  For some reason the scanner takes about 5-10 times longer per frame than for slides.  I fiddled around with settings some more, and went up to 3200 dpi, the highest native resolution the scanner will go.  Sadly all Mum's negatives from 1983 have a bit of a redshift to them, so the photos are a bit green once scanned, but can be tweaked post.  Another oddity is that any sort of blemish which would normally be black is epic white for a negative, so the dust and scratch filter works a whole lot better, with less false positives and weird artefacts.  But it's also completely necessary to use, as epic bright white spots are harder to ignore than black ones.  So it took pretty much all afternoon just to scan one roll of 36 photos.  Strangely, I've looked in the next two envelopes of negatives and both of them have missing strips, which is going to be annyoing if they don't show up.

We needed to go to the chemist and get more bark for Stumpy's tank, so made an errand day of it.  We tried out Co Dung at the back of Belco for lunch.  Had to wait ages (over twenty minutes) for the food.  The fish cakes weren't great (not hot, and tough) but the fried chicken wings were epic awesome - hot and crispy and delicious!

Most expensive petrol I've seen ever...

Leftover mince and pork for dinner, then we watched The Mauritanian which was pretty sad really. 

Do not harm the iguanas, $10,000 fine.  I wonder if that sign was actually there.  Probably is.  

Sunday.  Sigh.  Epic insomnia, didn't get to sleep til about 2am, and then still woke up at 6:30.  So definitely a zombie day today. 

I had a go on my clarinet for the first time in weeks, and it was epic crap.  I'm so bad at it.  

IOS 15.3.1 or whatever I last got upgraded to has gone back to putting files into folders by year/month (which I prefer!!).  I wonder how long that will last before they change it again.  And Apple is STILL messing with the date/timestamps on my files.  During our holiday I was downloading photos every night and noticed that sometimes I could get movies/pngs without the dates being messed with.  But then the next time I looked the next night, the files will have been changed.  NFI what Apple is doing with my files.  Epic hate.  The sweetie cooked dinner (a nice tasting pasta) while I downloaded the week's photos and blogged the last two weeks.

19:30 is bed time right?  I wonder if I'd get to sleep if I went to bed this early..