Sunday.  15th.  Blogged, then leftover food poisoning for dinner.  I was fine.  Then the last of Donna Hay's 2022 Christmas special.  I really wish she'd stop saying "perfect"!!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

We just need Charlotte to write "Some Pig" in this...

Got ready, fed the fish, had a drink, put away some clothes, put a load of washing on, watered all the plants, mowed the lawn, picked up all the lemons, dusted, vacuumed, took out the rubbish and recycling, closed up all the windows and blinds, hung out the washing.  Then sat in front of the fan for ten minutes to cool down before starting work at 8:30.  Sigh.  I'm the Naughty Email Intervention Layer this week while Neil is on holidays.  I felt in holiday mode too.  Didn't want to do any decom (I always worry about deleting stuff then going on leave) so just a lot of cleaning out of inboxes etc.  Blogged some Lego after work.  Then worked on colour coding the weather pixie.  Also added the time zone based on the time zone on my host.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep (like 11), then woke up at 5.  Sigh.  Finished making up icons for the weather pixie - it has a different colour based on the feels like temperature.  Christmas movie season continued with Die Hard 2.  Man the plot holes in that thing are ridiculous, but it's still a lot of fun.

Wednesday.  School holidays.  Urgh.  But in a strange twist of fate, there was no queue at Subway and there was a *whole row* of empty tables next to us briefly.  That was unexpected!

Annie sent me a photo of the SAMs in Port (up for Potty's birthday)

Cooked up some food poisoning sausages (we were fine) and some broccolini and parnsips that really really needed cooking.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep, awake from 5.  It was nice and COLD overnight which was awesome.  Didn't get much work done between all the crap.  Lunch at Vanilla Pod.  Shared a pepperoni pizza with XL (Peroni beer and a pizza for $20 - pretty good value!!).

No sooner had I gotten back to work when James and Josh came and picked me up to go down to Woden to go to Space Kitchen (Rachel wanted to go to see the epic cakes).  Bizarre place.  They make a fuss about bookings and booking times (we only had "an hour", even though the booking was for 14:30 and they close at 16:00 and the place was mostly empty anyway - weird!!).  The cakes looked pretty spectacular, although I think my favourite was the lemon meringue pie - very lemony!!

Purple passionfruit

Nutty one

Lemon meringue

Red velvet

The little cakes we got

A very brief but lovely catchup.  

Too full to eat any chips at drinks (which was surprisingly busy for the last drinks of the year), and only ate half my pizza..

I love this time of year...

Friday.  Slept mostly ok but awake pretty early.  Had to go with the sweetie to pick up a package at Fyshwick (bumplugs at Border Express wouldn't try again to deliver it) and drop him off at work.  Which made me super late for work.  Frustrating day of coding - didn't get anywhere with my script cause I'm dumb.  Had dinner at Kinn Thai with the sweetie.

Salted and Pepper Squid - wok-tosses (their spelling!) fried squid, onion, garlic, 5 spices and chilli $19

Pad Prik Khing - stir fried crispy pork with chilli kaffir lime jam and green bean $29

They say you can get anything in a vending machine in Japan.  Truth is, the vast majory of vending machines only sell drinks.  I think the most unusual one I've ever seen in Japan sold flowers.  So it was pretty funny to see this vending machine in the Canberra Centre carpark selling toy Cat trucks!!

Then watched The Santa Clause (1994) which I don't think I've ever seen.  That was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Got heaps done but not nearly enough.  The dude serving us at Knead asked Stu.. hey this may sound like a strange question.. but do you have a sister?  And he's like yeah..  and the dude is like, what's her name?  And Stu is like .. Anne.. turns out the dude has Annie as an English teacher and recognised Stu cause, well, they do kinda look alike :)  Funny stuff!!

Made some creamy lemon dill chicken for dinner, then forced the sweetie to watch Love Actually with me (I said he could bring his laptop so he could just do stuff on the computer :) )

Sunday.  Did some weeding then I thought I'd go food shopping early to beat the crowds.  Except markets.  Sigh.  Literally no parking after several laps so parked at the pool, and they can find my trolley later.  But Coles itself turned out to be relatively quiet which was nice.  A lot easier to keep up your Christmas spirit when there's less people around.  Another day of All The Things.  Spent quite a bit of time sorting out paperwork for our trip next year and getting travel insurance.  Then I tried to book tickets for Pompeii at the museum.  The buttplugs at the National Museum now FORCE you to register a whole account just so you can book tickets online.  Hate hate hate hate hate.

I really wanted to have my last Bricklink order filed by Christmas.. but I'm only like two thirds the way through.. sigh.. 

Sunday.  3rd. 

We got another rump cap beef roast to cook.  I didn't realise how expensive it was - 1.8kg was like $50!!  eeep!!  This one wasn't as epic awesome as the last time we got one.  It was cooked nicely to medium rare but it was a lot tougher than last time. 

Watched The Entire History of You on Black Mirror. 

Speaking of Black Mirror.  The other night's episode Fifteen Million Merits had a scene in it where the dude literally couldn't even close his eyes to block out ads.  This is disturbingly close to being a thing in real life.  The only time I ever have to sit through ads on my phone is when I'm playing Candy Crush.  Yeah, still playing it.  But only when I have the spare 45-50 minutes to play an entire episode of 15 levels.  And I only do that so I can "win" the round against other people and get the 40 gold (it used to be 45).  Point is, when you don't finish in the requisite moves you can watch ads to get more moves and a bonus.  I don't watch the ads.  I literally just lay the phone down and count down the number of seconds until it's due to be finished.  Most of the time I have no idea what the ad is even for.  The point is, apparently Apple are thinking about monitoring eye contact during ads.  This could either be a good thing - they'll see that I'm not watching the ads and so not bother to give me such long ones, or they'll figure out a way to force you to watch them.  At that point I'll quit once and for all.

Monday.  Awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night.  Hurray.  Meh day.  Cooked lemon pepper chicken for dinner.  With maybe like 0.3% of the lemon juice I have in the house.  I think I'd keep the veggies separate next time.

Did some catchup blogging in the evening.  Watched Be Right Back on Black Mirror.  I reckon some of that sort of thing is really not that far off (apparently in the decade since the episode has aired there's been a few apps out there that have tried).

Tuesday.  Remember remember the 5th of November.  I always do cause it's the day I started at my current job.  17 years ago.  Eep!  Meanwhile, Neil has been there 49 years.   !!!!!!  Did some futzing around with powershell scripts.  Even managed to get something to work in our new environment which was pretty exciting.  Leftover beef with salad for dinner, photo picking and White Bear on Black Mirror.  

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Frustrating day with scripting at work - not nearly as successful as yesterday.  Late home, late dinner, then sorting files, backing up computer, washed hair, bed.

Twenty or so years ago when I was still living in Sydney there were the first mumblings of a plastic bag ban.  As such I started keeping all my plastic bags so that I would be able to have bin liners for years to come.  Then I moved to Canberra (brought all those bags with me!) and continued until we got supermarket green bags.  Even using those we still managed to accumulate plastic bags, except they were thicker (hurray!).  Except now our supply is dwindling.  We still only put out a bag or so of rubbish a week, but they're not being replenished.  I've got very few bags left now.  This was a bag from Sydney from 17-20 years ago.

The lake is very very low at the moment.

Thursday.  Oh the humidity!!  Juiced twenty lemons for Jim - like 1.8 litres worth!! 

Clouds were a little ominous.  Barely any rain though :(

Had some success with scripting which was cool.  Drinks, pizza, Death in Paradise 10.3.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Went to the doctor late morning.  Had a list of 11 things to talk about (booked a long appointment).  Getting old sux donkey balls.  Just saying.  Decided to drop into Herbert's to have the very last of the TRBC beers (the blood orange sour).  Messaged Tony to see if he'd want to join me, so he did.  Even ran into Fred and family who'd come for lunch which was pretty funny.  Had some tenderloins with mustard sauce which were quite nice, but quite small for $21 and did end up hungry later.

Stu also bought a new toy...

Only cause our old one, which we've been using for like fifteen years since Grant sold it to us, died when the rip cord.. ripped off.. hmmmm.  Frustration with scripting at work.  Mostly cause I'm dumb.  But in the end cause the API I'm working with is crap and to do what I need to do I'd need to make like 3000 api calls.  Hurray.  Think I'll wait to see if powercli updates will be any good.  Kievs and veggies for dinner.  

Then watched Goodbye, Farewell and Amen on Mash.  The only thing I remembered from it was the chicken, so was watching the whole first half in light of that.  It was a pretty good ending to a tv series.  Apparently still the most watched episode of a TV series airing, like, ever.  Even after forty years.  I have all the DVDs from Dad, but I guess I'll probably never watch them now.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got some stuff done, but not nearly enough.  

My first strawberry of the season.  Photo taken in the morning.  I was going to go back in the afternoon and pick it.  I forgot.  By the next day it was GONE.

Stu tried out our new toy.  It's a lot quieter than the petrol one!  And a lot easier to start.  I always hated mowing the lawn as a teenager.  Our yard was huge and we had a heavy clunky lawnmower that always managed to hit me in the face with twigs even with the catcher on.  So I probably haven't mowed any lawn in thirty five years.  I might take it up again though!!

Pretty flowers on the walk to Herbert's

In the evening was a tap takeover at Herbert's.  I was half not wanting to go (would probably end up drinking too much and spending too much).  But went along anyway with Tony, Frank and Karen (J was busy).  The takeover was from Hopsters Co-operative Brewery.  Shared some nachos with Tony to start with and had a couple of beers.

Mitch the "only paid employee" came and sat with us for a bit which was pretty cool, and he told us about the brewery.  It's actually a democratic co-operative and they choose the best beers from their user's home brewed productions and brew them up at scale.  Very cool.

The gang!

After that I went to get more food and that's where the wheels fell off.  I asked for the "kids gems" ($9).  And Dino was like.. oh, we try to save those for the kids.. So I looked around and I'm like, there's literally no kids here.. and he's like, oh it's cause people "take the piss" and order a kids meal between four people.. and so I'm like, well don't worry about it then (I was literally ready to just not order anything at all), but he said he'd give them to me "just this once" (never mind the time I had them at the TRBC night a few weeks back).  Anyway so I sat down again and pretty much just lost it.  Like, I could have ordered a bowl of chips for $5 or a bowl of gems for $9.  I love gems.  I'd much prefer to have gems than chips.  HOW IS THAT A PROBLEM????  I could barely finish the beer I had (and missed out on trying the last one).  I couldn't even face the gems.  Forced myself to eat a few of them.  Tony had the rest.  And then I went home.  Sigh.

Sunday.  Slept mostly okish, except for hurty for a while in the middle.  Still upset/depressed about last night.  The whole drama, combined with a massive increase in food costs (their pea and ham croquettes were $16 the last time they had them in 2022, now they're $20; and the tenderloins I had yesterday were incredibly expensive for their size (for $5 more I could have had a burger and chips and like four or five times the amount of food)) means I probably won't be going back to Herbert's any time soon.  So didn't achieve much all day.  Did some food shopping.  Did a nice roast pork for dinner.  Fat spatter all over the oven though.. eep!

I'm just so over it all at the moment.  I'm almost at the point of giving up on everything.  If I didn't feel the need to travel I could retire now and just stay at home and do my hobbies and never go out and just have a quiet life.  

Sunday.  4th.  Cooked a nice potato bake, kalettes, veggies and another perfectly cooked head of garlic, to go with some leftover pork.

Monday.  Awake around 4 for like an hour or so.  But over eight hours sleep I guess so not *quite* as tired as yestrday.  Logged onto work and saw I might have broken stuff on Friday.  But couldn't figure out what.  Con eventually figured out what it was a bit before lunch.  Guess their post change testing was flawed.  Annoyed at myself for not figuring it out sooner though.  Dinner was a bunch of stuff that need using up in the fridge - mushrooms, bacon, feta, shallots, cream and basil.  Yummy but very salty. 

Finished culling my Tassie photos which is a bit of an achievement.  Watched the fourth part of the Olympics opening ceremony.  In some ways more people saw the ceremony .. but actually most people saw a lot less.  You had to be at the right spot on the Seine to see any of the performances, which means probably most people only saw the athletes on the boats.  And only a very small number of people actually saw the official bit.  Also bwhahahaha they put the flag on upside down!  #fail

Tuesday.  Super busy day.  Had a marathon call with a contractor on how to do some stuff.  Went into town after work and met up with Luc for a couple of drinks at Molly's.

Luc's Bijou and my Vieux Carré

Luc's Boulevardie and my whisky sour

Pretty impressive for a three second exposure

Then dinner at Bar Rochford.  

I had wagyu, but I was expecting some sort of vegetation, and Luc had three little entrees.

Lovely catchup, mostly talking about travel.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy day.  Neil and I tried out Uyghur Cuisine.  We had the kung pow chicken and sizzling beef.  We could have easily had just one of those dishes with rice and be done.

Had drinks with Neil, Jim and Taranii after work.  Dinner, backup computer, suddenly it's bed time.

Thursday.  Another busy day.  Good drinks.  Quick dinner at Badger (empandas).

Then to see Beethoven's 9th.  It was excellent.  Enjoyed it a lot more than last time.  And because I know a chunk of the words to it now I was singing along quietly.  Not quietly enough though it seems, apparently it was "a bit offputting".  Sigh.  That's it.  I'm done.  Thank you.  The end.

Friday.  Awake from 3am. 

Busy day again.  Finished writing up my doco on the migrations work. And in the afternoon we actually migrated two machines ourselves.  Chris promised kievs this week.  And he would have had them.  Except the supplier picked up the wrong thing.  Sigh.  His theory is they never had them, but gave him something else anyway.  So we had pizza for dinner.  Mash, rss feeds, early night.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Super busy day, but behind schedule all day trying to do All The Things.  Went into battle with Super this time.  I need to find out how much work put in so I can figure out the whole nonsense of claiming a deduction for the extra I put in.  Can't find anything in the portal.  Nothing was emailed.  Nothing was posted.  So went to fill in a contact form and a knowledge document comes up that says "Most statements will be available online from mid-August to mid-September."  Seriously WTF??  Cooked the fourth turkey roast we didn't use for the club Christmas in July with some veggies.  Probably overdid it a bit.  Might have eaten another head of garlic.

Mash (GW Bailey from Police Academy!) then watched the first part of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.

Sunday.  Took ages to get to sleep then had thermoregulation issues.  Busy day again.  Realised it'll be six months next week that we left on our Tassie trip.  Reckon I can label 1500 photos by then? hmmm.  Managed ~350 today.

Sunday. 28th.  Leftover club food for dinner.  Watched some more of the Olympics opening ceremony.  I reckon the commentators really had no idea what to make of most of it.  Also.  Minions??  WTF??  I did like how it showcased Paris though - got to see a lot more of the city than just the inside of an arena.  So that was pretty cool.

Monday.  Went to bed/sleep a bit early, but then woke up around 3 for like an hour and a half.  Sigh.  Frustrating day being pushed to make a change before anyone had communicated any of it to anyone.  I think it's a dumb change in the place, but whatevs, but at least TELL PEOPLE about it.  Nearly rage quit at one point because apparently we're being "inflexible".  The whole thing just made me super angry.  

For lunch I fried the skewer ingredients (tomato, olives, bocconcini and basil, with glaze) which was pretty awesome.

For dinner I fried up some leftover pork from the club.  This meat was attached to the bone in the core of the roast, and because slowest oven ever, it wasn't quite cooked through in the middle.  So after John carved most of it I chucked it back in the (off) oven to deal with later.  And then promptly forgot about it.  Til 5 the next morning.  Whoops.  Chucked it in the fridge and later brought it home.  Cut it up and fried the heck out of it.  I feel like I was tempting fate, but then I was almost half hoping I'd get food poisoning so I could take the next day or two off work.  

Photo culling then watched the Lego Masters USA season 3 finale which was pretty cool.  Turns out there's another few episodes after, some celebrity/holiday specials!  Cool!  Will watch those after I finish watching the Olympics opening ceremony.

Tuesday.  Early night.  Woke up at like 3:45 thinking maybe hurty, but it wasn't, but I was awake then, and stayed awake for like an hour and a half.  Sigh.  Zombie tired, even worse than yesterday.  Meh day at work.  Went for a walk at lunch and saw my magpies.  Leftovers for dinner then Queensland photo culling, but too tired to watch anything.

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep, then woke up at like 4:30.  But must have slept ok in the middle because I didn't feel as tired today.  Busy day at working doing All The Things.  Had lunch with Neil at No. 10.  Their $17 Express Lunch special isn't bad (although the calamari isn't as nice as Lighty's), and Wednesdays is a free glass of wine or beer, so wine for free!  Winning! 

Mum photo picking after work, and computer backups.

Thursday.  Slept okish.  Busy day.  Had lunch with Jim/Con/XL at Ikko.  The others all bought starters to share and if I'd known they were doing to do that I would have too.  But then probably would have instantly regretted the over supply of food.  As it was I took nearly half of my karaage chicken curry home as leftovers.

Agadashi tofu

Edamame

Gyoza

My karaage chicken curry

Stayed til the end at drinks because didn't have the sweetie anxious to get home.  Quick dinner then bed, but was still awake when the sweetie got home!!!  :)

Friday.  Slept okish.  Super busy day planning then actioning decom of a whole bunch of telephony/chat crap.  Stu wanted pizza for dinner so we got that.  Then Mash, a bit of Olympics opening ceremony but just crashed for an early night.

Saturday.  Awake from Dentist Time to 5.  Sigh.  Went into battle with organisatons for tax crap.  One for our shares doesn't give statements til like the end of July (wtf??) but when I went in on Saturday they were down for "scheduled maintenance".  wtf??  Then our health insurance was giving 502.3 Bad Gateway errors trying to download our statement.  Fricken hopeless.  And their chat widget on their website was all "chat to us .. oh but not on the web, you have to use whatsapp or imessage or some trash".  Utter BS.  Super tired, achieved a bit, but could have done more.  Passed the accident at Florey when we went out to do food shopping.  I still don't understand what happened.  From the looks of the damage on the cars it looks like the Toyota went through the stop sign and got hit by the Falcon.  But if that was the case, why would the Falcon driver have fled the scene (and was later arrested)?? Makes no sense.  The only other thing I can think of was the Ford driver was turning right onto John Cleland and hit the Corolla travelling northbound on Coulter.. but then why would the Ford driver have ended up so far to the right.  hrmmm.  I'll probably never know.

Watched A Night To Remember, which I think I saw a long long long time ago.  Couldn't help but compare it to the James Cameron version.  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok until about 5 then awake stressing about All The Things.  Sigh.  Photo stuff, getting annoyed at BS, scanning etc etc.  Lots of veggies in the oven for dinner.

Sunday.  21st.  Roast beef for dinner which was very nice, and lots of leftovers.  Mash and Shogun 1.3.

Oh Chris saved me a Charlie today!!  This was the first one I've ever seen.  Forty years after I saw my very first $1 coin at church one morning.

Monday.  Hurty for a couple of hours overnight.  Ok day, fighting with stoopid proxies doing stoopid things - like behaving more like a router than a firewall in terms of pattern matching.  Dumb.  Over the weekend I put a thing into the MyWay peeps to say Stu's MyWard card had expired and what's the story.  The dude called and said too bad so sad bye bye, you lose the $5 you need to buy a new card so that the funds can be transferred.  I'm utterly filled with rage that a) you have to pay $5 for MyWay cards that have $0 credit on them in the first place and b) that the stoopid things would even expire at all.  The dude said the expiry was part of the terms and conditions and I said that was a dumb condition and there was deathly silence.  I suspect the dude agrees that it's a dumb condition but he's not allowed to say so.  Red curry with leftover beef for dinner.  Started labelling Turkey photos.  Stoopid dog barked for hours in the evening.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - strung out by the dog barking non stop til past 22:00.  Utterly sick of *everything* at the moment.  Mostly shattered confidence from not being able to figure out a stoopid problem at work because I'm stoopid.  But everything piled on top of that makes me want to just quit my job and go live as a hermit somewhere.  Had a couple of meltdowns during the day because it was all just too hard.  Photo labelling and Lego picking in the evening.

Wednesday.  Slept ok but still feeling to stoopid to do my job.  Had meltdowns on the way to and from work and even *at* work.  Sigh.  Tried out BZ Burgers with Neil at lunch, and had drinks at No. 10 after work.  Then pizza/Mash/Laid Back Camp and first two episodes of The Apothecary Diaries.  

We liked the Belconnen pictures at BZ Burgers.  Remember that dude who lived on the lake for a while?  And we still have those buses at bottom right.  I miss those butt ugly covered walkways though.  They were handy when it rained.

I had Chicken Mack - southern fried chicken, USA cheese, pickles, sour onion, lettuce and Mack sauce ($18).  It was quite nice although the chicken was a little crunchy so lost bits of the breading.  And I love how they call plastic cheese "USA cheese" hehe.

Thursday.  Anzac Day.  Slept mostly ok.  Got All The Things done in the morning then Lego picking.  Put a 2.4kg lamb leg (it was the smallest I could get at the butcher on the weekend) in the slow cooker at 8:00 and by 18:00 it was literally falling off the bone (found one in the bottom of the sauce!).  Cooked a bunch of roast veggies to go with it and had TJ over to enjoy it.  Quite a nice evening.

There were also Anzac Biscuits.  A little bit *too* gooey perhaps ;)

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Flexed off as I'm sure most of Australia did if they could.  Got a new headlight for the car (it died in Tasmania).  Closed off our ancient Citibank cards that we got for overseas travel but haven't used in ages and now they were taken over by NAB it was easy enough to go into a branch to close them off.  Queue was about ten minutes but the dude was able to just close them off without any fuss so that was nice.  Had lunch with the sweetie in the mall.  Had a quick look in Millers and Myer for wedding attire and got depressed cause clothes shopping is all too hard anyway.  Other than that I made a Lego train and did 3/4 hour of weeding.  We got Chong Co delivered for dinner although it was a bit rushed because I had to log on before 19:00 to do a cert replacement.  Took an hour which is the minimum time it takes if all goes well.  Then watched Death in Paradise 9.2.

Saturday.  Took ages to get to sleep, but still woke up at 6:00.  Another day of getting things done then Lego picking.  Went back to Supercheap Auto to get the actual headlight for our car (Stu bought the foglamp by mistake yesterday).  Then went out to the club.  A fairly quiet night with a remembrance dinner of corned beef and veggies.

They were doing backburning in the Brindabellas

Canberra sure is pretty in autumn

Club remembrance feast

Bec made these lovely biscuits


Sunday.  Brought home All The Leftovers from the club (since W/C wouldn't take them).  Got home, read about the Port Arthur massacre 28 years ago today.  It's also 28 years since Como Presbyterian Church reopened after the bushfires, and 23 years since Alan had his first heart attack.  Then labelled day 8 of Turkey, then Lego picking.  Dreading having to go back to work tomorrow.  I'm too old for this crap.

Leftovers for the next couple of weeks it seems.. 

Sunday.  18th.  Backdating for reasons which will become obvious.  Kiev and veggies for dinner ftw!

Then Sex Education 4.5.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Bits and pieces day at work.  Flipped to a new proxy server.  Two minor issues, one with SE linux and one with on prem stuff using it to talk to cloud stuff and we were like whyyyy.  Both easily fixed.  Mince and salad for dinner, then organising Tassie stuffs.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Mostly decom prep work at work, then Tassie planning.

My mini capsicums are about to flower.. I'm going to miss them!!

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep til 11 then woke up at 5.  Sigh.  Did a bunch of decom work.  Dropped into Herbert's on the way home.  Dinner, then packing.

Only the top left corner is clothes/toiletries.  The rest is *stuff*.

Thursday.  Took forever to get to sleep, because travel.  Tetrised everything into the car and left a bit before 10.  You can read the text of the trip from here, although you may want to wait until I add photos.

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...

Six months ago today I headed up to Sydney to start my America trip.  The one that cost me stoopid amounts of money and I couldn't get out of because Bare Necessities are utter buttwads and I would never ever ever ever travel with them again.  Despite their suckiness we had a pretty awesome time.  Well other than (probably) getting covid.  Because dip$#!+ Americans won't wear a mask or use hand sanitiser when they're sick.  

Anyhoo.

I actually managed to get photos online about a month ago, but left it til today (the six month anniversary (semi-anniversary??)) to post a link.

So here you go, enjoy all the photos from that trip!

Sunday.  9th.  Mini roast beef for dinner.  Finished season 4 of The Crown.  In Amazing Race the cops came back, after being out for two weeks.  !!  Turns out at that point they'd been racing for six weeks total.  In like sixteen legs.  Craziness.  You wonder where all the other days go.  Travel days?  Rest days?

The lemon cheesecake I made

Monday.  Slept ok.  More server migration work.  And lots of photo culling.

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Tried to do a test server migration, but only got about ten minutes of that done all day because of all the stoopid and all the rage and all the meetings.  Needed a drink by 15:20 but no time for that cause I had a prod change to do at 16:30.  Sigh.  But I did manage to cook a nice pasta bolognase for dinner.  Also finished first pass photo culling of Europe photos!

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Got to work super early, and left super late, so got a lot of stuff done (at least on either side, not so much in the middle because people).  I'd get so much more work done if I didn't have to GO to work or have to talk to anyone.  

Thursday.  Had to migrate to a new DR laptop to replace an aging one, and tried to do a prod server migration.  Didn't finish either.  Oh well.

Saw this at lunch.. wtf??

Drinks/pizza/etc.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Took an RDO!!  Trying to do all All The Things.  But then took like three hours out of it to do an Ikea run.  *sigh*.  Thinking of something like this for a bin solution (will have to move all the shelves up a bit):

Also had pork ribs nom nom nom

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  

Do you reckon this will kill us?  

Looks disgusting right? :)  It was some beef dumplings that were being thrown at work (fridge clean: everything had been taken out of the fridges for cleaning.  Around 17:15 I claimed a couple of perishable things that would have needed throwing out if they'd been left out overnight.  These dumplings were a frozen solid ball that needed defrosting, but of course the dough can't handle that and they disintegrated).

But, they turn out quite nicely if you fry the heck out of them, and 24 hours later we haven't gotten sick ;)

Watched First Man in the evening.  So it was more a character study than a movie.  Not that there was much character to explore.  He says like three things the entire movie (ok exaggerating, a little, but not much).  It was told from mostly Neil's point of view, which means your entire experience of the movie is inside a dark shaky metal box.  Certainly none of magic of something like The Right Stuff (*that* was a good early astronaut movie).  This one was a bit lame.  AND FFS KEEP THE F#$&ING CAMERA STILL!!  OMFG such a terrible trend in filmmaking, oh let's just give the camera to a drunk cameraman to try and make the audience feel queasy.  Fricken hate.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  Except I felt blah about the fact that even long weekends are too short.  I can't keep this up.  There's just too much to do to have time to go to work.  Took some more stones to Cath's and made a bit of a dent in the periwinkle under the cherry tree.  Also finished sorting Dad's slides into some semblance of chronological order.  Going to have a break from that for a few weeks so I can finish culling Europe photos.  Then it will be geotagging, applying exif data, copying, touching up, renaming and filing.  

Some fun facts:
* this was from last week - Mozart actually had six children, but only two survived past infancy.  Neither married or had kids, although one did become a musician.
* Australia controls 11% of the world's air space!
* The name Arctic comes from the Greek arktos, meaning "bear." Anta is synonymous with anti, which means "opposite".  So you have Arctic (bear) and Antarctic (opposite bear).
* From the time Pluto was discovered until the time it was demoted from planethood, it still hadn't made one complete revolution around the sun (it still hasn't)
* Neil Armstrong had a daughter Karen (she died at the age of two from a brainstem tumor)