As I mentioned in my previous entry, this weekend I started scanning Mum's Minolta negatives, which started on our trip to America in 1983, with her new brand new duty-free camera which she got to open on the plane.

The funniest thing I've noticed is just how much extra frame space is on the negative that was never on the print.  Check this out.. literally the first photo she ever took on that camera..

The negative scan (below) could do with a little tweaking, but is still pretty good.

Then there's this one which blew me away.  The negative scan (below) needs a bit less green in it, but you can actually see the snow now (a few others have been equally amazing).  

Or what about this??  The print faded so much over thirty years, the negative below just went a bit red (and hence a bit too much green in the scan)

Each strip of negatives is four photos, which means I can do eight at a time.  And that takes three quarters of an hour.  The good thing is I can pretty much just set and forget and come back to it later when it's done.  So while not as "quick" as doing slides, it probably won't be as much work.  Hopefully.  

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.. 

Monday.  24th.  Slept well.  Went to go food shopping at 7am but the car wouldn't start.  We've had this happen before, and usually it comes good after a few minutes.  But this time it didn't.  We tried with both keys but no luck.  So gave up on the idea of doing any food shopping.  Later we tried both fobs, locking and unlocking it, opening/closing the boot, taking the keys *away* from the car, even disconnecting the battery for a while, but nothing worked.  Had a good day at work, deleting stuff which is always fun :)   But the more I clean, the more things I find to clean.  It's like a choose-your-own-adventure going off in tangent after tangent.  Oh I forgot to mention in last week's blog post, that the rear element of the oven is in fact working.  I have no idea what happened the other week, but the next time I tried it it worked fine.  Go figure.  Then geotagging my Victoria/South Australia 1994 photos.

Tuesday.  In the morning finished geotagging my Vic/SA photos.  At work was cleaning and writing up of what needs cleaning.  San choy bow for dinner.  Then I started geotagging Dad's Vic/SA 1994 photos.  We also finished season 20 of The Simpsons.

For Mum

Wednesday.  234 years ago some poms got off their ships a few hundred k's away so we get a day off work.  Spent literally all day geotagging photos.  Leftovers for dinner (butter chicken out of the freezer because that's Strayan surely ;) ).  Watched Sleeping With the Enemy, which I'd seen but didn't remember when (and it wasn't on the blog) but Stu remembered watching it with me.  Oh well.  

Thursday.  Random day off.  More geotagging.  Basically finished geotagging all the photos that I wanted to for this round. 

Stu called the service people about the car, they just said get it towed to them (we were going to have it serviced next week anyway).  So I was going to call the NRMA, but then the neighbours went out, and was worried we wouldn't be able to get a tow truck in with their other car in the driveway.  #grunt.  Watched Munich: Edge of War in the evening which was interesting (if fictitious).  

Made arribbiata bake for dinner (sans anchovies cause apparently we'd run out, oh well ;) )

Which do you reckon will be hotter?  The Coles one I bought the other week, or the little ones off our plant?  Hint: even after washing my hands a couple of times with soap, I could still get a burnt tongue from licking my fingers.

Friday.  Another random day off.  Awake for ages in the middle of the night stressing about All The Things.  Got cranky at Gmail cause for a while you haven't been able to search for exact phrases using quotes anymore, and it sux donkey balls.  Tony came over at 9am because he's chainsaw qualified (it's a thing! and everyone fricken should be!!) and I wanted him to chainsaw back the oak tree suckers on our big stump.  But he couldn't help himself and chopped back our hedge as well and took three trailer loads to greenwaste!  Meanwhile I hacked weeds in the front garden.  And hacked and hacked and hacked.  Suddenly it was midday and our front yard looks amazing (thanks Tony!!!!!), and I was *wasted* haha.  I didn't even take any before/after photos - I'm a slacker I know!!  But I did get some photos of him hacking at the stump.

This is one of our roses - which unusually has opened - usually they just die before opening

After lunch I called the NRMA and they sent someone out.  He took one look and said, yup, it's the battery.  And I'm like, but everything lights up like a Christmas tree, and the headlights work and and and.. but it seems this is likely the original battery (Ford branded) so would be seven and a half years old, so decided to just replace it.  And it worked!!  The car started!!  What a relief!  

Saturday.  Got up early and went and did our food shopping.  OMFG the humidity though!!  It was intense!!  Fortunately it didn't get too *hot* and in the afternoon we just ran the cooler on fan only mode.  The sweetie talked me into Chong Co for dinner (he didn't have to try hard!) and then we watched The Laundromat, which is very similar to The Big Short in terms of trying to explain some crazy finance-world events.

Sunday.  Today.  Just a day of trying to get organised really.  Went to the chemist in the arvo (although really should have left it til tomorrow morning cause it was *crowded* #grunt). 

They're taking down the mushroom!

And suddenly my little short break is over.  Sad times.

Sunday.  16th.  Had sausages and cabbage for dinner, and geotagged Mum's Tasmania photos from 1968.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day, busy doing every except the one thing probably should have been doing.  But I did upgrade our master network diagram which is always fun.  Did some weeding in the afternoon (couldn't use "it's too hot" as an excuse).  Music, "filled gnocchi" for dinner.  Finished geotagging what I could of Mum's photos.  Saw a link on Blogography to Wordle so clicked through and played it (I think I might have heard/seen one or two references to it at some point in the past week or two).  This is my first ever attempt, and I got it in three goes!  This is probably not the best starting word, it was just what popped into my head.

Then after I'd done it I saw tweets from my brother *and* Jake who have also been playing it.  Synchronicity!

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  All the rain!!  But I was in a meeting during the worst of it, so forgot about clearing out the drain sump so the garage wouldn't flood.  Oops.  Wasn't too bad in the garage, but the backyard flooded again.  

Just for giggles I thought I'd try Eudora again, and this time it fricken worked and downloaded all my mail.  NFI why it didn't work before, or what made it start working.  In other windoze 11 crapfullness, "printscreen" (or alt-printscreen) no longer works.  I mean WTF??  Closest equivalent I can find is windows-shift-s which loads snippy which I can then capture a bit of the screen.  Windows 11 is a piece of crap.  And I'm still finding it super irritating that I can't drag a file onto an open application on the task bar and have it pop up so I can drag the file into the application.  I have to resize windows and have them out of the way so I can drag the file into the app.  Was super cranky about travel and everything was all too hard.  I give up.  Beer and pizza.  And Tuesday's Wordle was tricky - took all six goes!  (another not great starting word, I've since changed my strategy somewhat and start with more common letters).

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages, still depressed about travel.  My sneakers really started falling apart making it difficult to walk around.  These ones I bought in about 2005-2006 (while Stu was still living in Queensland).  But how am I meant to go shoe shopping without having to be around people?? 

Weeding, slide labelling and the sweetie cooked dinner (of some of the leftover mince, and cabbage and rice).

Thursday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages again - stressing about the cruise.  Was sitting at my computer first thing in the morning pondering my shoes and decided to go into the mall to get some new ones.  I left a bit early and went to Kmart first to get some undies (I've been needing new ones for ages but haven't been shopping really at all in five months).  Then still had some time so went to Target and got an extra fitted sheet and pillow cases (which always wear out a lot faster than a flat sheet).  Then to Athlete's Foot and walked out in new shoes!  Just for giggles I went to Amcal to ask about RATs, and they had some!  So I bought a two pack (if there's any chance of us going to Tasmania we'll need to get tested before we go).  So a super successful morning, and only an hour late to work.  Had a play with deleting old domains out of our IP management tool which was a bit of fun.  

Friday.  Depressed about cruise.  Then the brother type person called - they've offered a get out of jail free card!  Can transfer credit to next year's cruise.  I'd rather go the year after, so I'll try and negotiate that, but it means we're not going to (at least for now) lose all our money!  But in not so great news, Lily has covid and is not doing well.  Ok morning, although a bit bored in the afternoon waiting for people to do stuff so I could do my stuff.  Chicken kiev for dinner and then watched Six Minutes to Midnight, which was a little far fetched, but the school was actually a real thing.  

Saturday.  Spent all morning at work doing a firewall migration, which went quite smoothly for the most part.  Then seemed to spend the afternoon not getting much done, other than sorting out some of my music.

Sunday.  Really just house bits and pieces.  Weekends are far far far too short.. hrmmm..

This afternoon has been making cheesecake (we have lemons coming out the wazoo) and photos/blogging.  And Stu put on the Hottest 100 from 2001.  I know a few of the higher (lower) numbered songs.  Have cauliflower bake and veggies in the oven to have with some lamb I dug out of the freezer.

Sunday.  9th.  Not backdating ;)  During the week I bought these mini capsicums, so thought I'd do a stuffing for them - a bit of mince, some brown rice, and feta.  Topped with a bit of shredded cheese and roasted for like 40 minutes.  Yummy!

Monday.  Woke up at ~3:45 hungry and needing to pee.  At this point the sweetie hadn't actually been to sleep yet!  Poor thing.  I didn't get any more sleep after that either.  It seems on a given night one of us will be awake.  hmmm.  Spent all morning doing finance and tax stuff, and most of the afternoon checking receipts against bank statements.  Had to laugh - the RTA *finally* closed off my etag account, but funnily enough they refunded me the deposit for the tag, even though I never returned it (it was crushed with my old car).  Maybe they figured it was so old it wasn't worth it.  Shrug.  And guess how many times I went to the ATM last year?  Once.  ONCE!!  And that was only to get cash out for the kids' Christmas presents.  At least ACT covid cases were down a bit (well maybe - chances are a lot aren't being reported now because RATs are taking some of the load).  Leftover pork (refried in jelly) and cabbage for dinner.  Then I watched Die Hard with a Vengeance.

Stumpy is a bit retarded sometimes!

Tuesday.  Awake for a while around dentist time - probably from the neighbourhood dog barking at a possum.  Depressed about losing all our money on the cruise, depressed about going back to work.  So my tolerance for the stoopid was at rock bottom.  After work went and got my booster jab.  They had plenty of people working the family queue which seemed to move quickly, but there was only one person processing the adult queue.  So I was waiting for over half an hour in a queue.  I think they moved a few nurses across from the family section once that queue quietted down, because they had a few people going by the time I got seen.  

Picked up Crust pizza on the way home, but they don't keep their pizzas in the oven like Dominos do, so one was a bit cold by the time I got there and got it home.  Bit sad to find out that Bob Saget died.  In the evening tried to file photos, but I just can't *see*, especially at night.  Super frustrating.  And my resized to 1280 wide photos only take up a quarter of the screen now.

Wednesday.  Dog was barking in the middle of the night again, but not for too long.  Otherwise I think I slept ok.  Felt in a much better mental state about work.  Decided to document Neil.  After lunch I started feeling trippy - the feeling you get when you're having an immune reaction.  Went and had a little lie down.  Didn't sleep of course, but did rest.  Felt weak and floppy all afternoon/evening.  But at least my immune system is *doing* something about covid, which is a relief.  Leftover lamb and salad for dinner.  As usual we put on The Simpsons over dinner, and as soon as it started I was like OMFG wide screen!  This episode (Take My Life, Please) first aired in February 2009.  And it was glorious!  Clean and crisp, so much nicer than the old animations.  Didn't feel like doing anything much, so put on the Disney 2003 version of The Young Black Stallion, which was ok for a kids movie, but short and sweet.

Thursday.  Felt much better after a decent sleep.  Ok day, more being Neil and documenting him.  Leftover stuffing mix and cabbage for dinner.  Started geotagging Mum and Dad's 1971 Tasmania trip photos.

Friday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep, but slept ok after than.  Ok day, more documenting and writing test plans.  Chicken kiev for dinner, and watched The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I'd seen it before and thought it was quirky but overly violent.  Stu thought it was weird.  Except I swear they sanitised the violence, because it wasn't nearly as violent as I remember it.  

This is the saddest thing.  These booties were on my baptism cake!  Mum had them in her china cabinet until she moved, then they'd been on top of my computer desk gathering dust.  They had already started to absorb moisture and collapse, but when I cleared off the top of my computer desk I moved them temporarily to the dining table.  Where they sat under the cooler vent.  And promptly melted into a puddle.  Sad times!!

Super annoyingly, the rear element of our oven seems to have died - it just didn't heat up the oven when I turned it on.  The thing is less that two years old which is a big stinking poo!!!

Saturday.  Spent much of the day geotagging Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos (and I got as many of them geotagged as I could of their trip).  In the afternoon I went down to Tony's to look at / pick up some maps and brochures for Tasmania.  Ended up staying for dinner which was nice.

Sunday.  House stuff and music in the morning, and looking at Tassie locations in the afternoon.  At lunch time we were sick of our usual lunches so went out for a drive to get some takeway.  Drove past the shop where a gas leak blew up the building. 

Then picked up some Oporto drive through and went to Diddams Close park to eat it by the lake.  That quite nice, although we did have a very captive audience watch us the entire time!!

Of course now I have to go and geotag all Mum's slides from her YHA trip to Tasmania in 1968 :)

Monday.  3rd.  Not backdating for a change ;)  Did the usual morning stuff, then Damien came over.  The boys had a coffee and a chat, then Damien saw my Queen Mary 2 in New York photo and was asking about it, and we ended up subjecting him to the slideshow of that trip ;)  I put out a bunch of nibblies (we've not really done much entertaining this break so we still had lots of junk food in the house) and the boys played Glory Recalled, which went all afternoon until Damien had to go home (I think Damien was winning). 

Meanwhile I did a few months worth of This Day in History posts.  Then.  STORM!!  We basically only got the side of it, but there was hail and so much rain and it was SO LOUD!!  Had to close all the windows on the south side of the house because rain was pouring in.  The backyard actually flooded at the lowest part.  And I put out two buckets to collect some free rainwater, and they both filled in just a few minutes.  

We didn't lose power during the storm itself, but we did have power fluctuations which confused a few things - the garage door thought it lost power and the cooler needed a full hard reboot to start working again, but the computer was ok (which I didn't shut down cause it needed updates and that'd take too long). 

We did lose power just before bed time but only for a few minutes.  The ESA website was just madness!

Ended up getting pizza for dinner.  

Tuesday.  Slept relatively well.  A day of All The Things.  Power went out again in the afternoon for like an hour or so.  Did some paint by numbers for a bit, and separated the plants that were going into each other by the front door.  Do you think I maybe should have pruned this plant a bit earlier? :)

I was blogging more This Day in History posts and realised I'd missed a *whole heap* of my own photos from 2020/2021 that need to be processed and added in.  I was hoping to get 2021 finished this break, but that put me in a bad mood about it all and I haven't been back since.  

Wednesday.  Went early to do our food shopping at Coles.  They lost power Monday night all night, and so lost all their fridge and freezer stock!! OMFG such a waste!!  So sad.  I was lucky I was able to mostly get the fresh/frozen stuff that I wanted.  I was hoping to pickup any leftover eggnog, but if there was any left it would have been lost.  Then home to tetris it all into the fridge (I primarily went for pantry stuff as there was a bunch of things we'd run out of, but I picked up some fresh stuff as well, because I was there, but we still have a lot of leftovers, so it was tricky to fit it all in).  By the time I'd gone through my weekly morning routine it was nearly lunch time.  Hmmmmmm.  Then spent most of the afternoon pulling out the computer desk and cleaning it all up and setting everything up again.  I bought a dvi to display port adapter in the morning at Officeworks, but it turns out the old HP second monitor I have (an old one of Stu's) doesn't work with Windows 11, so that was a waste of money.  But then I'd also pulled everything off my computer desk and made an epic mess of the study, so will probably spend the rest of the break trying to tidy up the mess I just made.. hrmmm.  And no weeding or music either.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Hating on Windows 11 - you can't ungroup taskbar windows anymore, and you can't have additional toolbars - two things I really need/want/use.  I find I can't *see* what I'm doing because Microsoft in its wisdom thinks it knows best, and wants you to look at a clutter-free taskbar.  They're trying to be like Apple or something.  Hate hate hate.  Eudora won't work in Windows 11 either - it loads ok, but can't connect to the servers.  Probably some sort of trust issue, but I don't know how to solve it (I tried turning off AV, compatibility mode and running as administrator).  Ended up cranky that I'd spent all day fighting with technology.  But we did have a nice stir fry with some leftover pork for dinner.

My Christmas present from Annie - the 12 beers of Christmas? :)

As part of the desk cleanup, I figured it was probably time to eat this wedding candy from Andy and Crystal's wedding in 2012.  On account of they're broken up now anyway.  hrmm.

And I should probably give these birds away too .. I mean they're super cute and all, but don't really mean anything to me..

As a "temporary" measure I moved all the ornaments and knick-knacks that were on top of my computer desk into the cubes in the spare room.  Yeah right.  Temporary.  haha.

The pork stir fry

Friday.  Woke up early hungry and needing to pee.  Tried do more tidying up in the study, but then ended up making more of a mess of the spare room too.  Sigh.  1246 covid cases in Canberra today.  That's ~25 times the peak of Delta.  We finished season 3 of Sex Education.  I actually had a dream a couple of nights ago that Jean had died, and so when we got to the end of episode 7 I was like *I NEED to know what happened* so we watched the final episode that night as well.  

Saturday.  Woke up early again.  But Stu hadn't slept pretty much all night!! Poor thing!  I reverted my monitor setup (I'd had a go at putting the secondary monitor on the right side, but ended up not liking it).  Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even that is not the primary monitor.  So fricken DUMB.  Just a day of more tidying - both on the computer and off.  Had an idea to see how many words are on my blog, and found this site which admittedly did timeout, but not until after it had counted all the monthly archives, which I could easily add up in Excel.  As of this week there's 935200 words on my blog!  Insanity!  Had salmon and salad for dinner and watched The Courier in the evening (it was the sweetie's turn to choose a movie so he chose a spy movie and/or true story movie .. in this case "and" :) )

Sunday.  Today!  Ok sleep (although not for Stu again :( ).  Today was fighting with Excel.  I don't know if it's just Windows 11 or one of the updates I did, but dates don't work in Excel anymore.  Yeah yeah I know, Office 2003 isn't supported anymore, but that's the version I own.  I tried Office 2013 that Stu got in Technet at one point, but I think he'd used up the licences, and it just crashed as soon as you tried to agree to the terms and conditions.  Tried reinstalling 2003 just in case, but no luck.  So I installed LibreOffice, which works just fine thankyouverymuch.  But in other news, I could copy a time-lapse video off my phone without explorer crashing, so that's a win, I guess.  But in a case of you win some, you lose some, you can't drag an icon onto an app on the task bar and have it pop up the app and open the file.  So lame.  Why do they have to *break* everything??

Stuffed capsicums for dinner, which will be in next week's post.  Covid cases are down today as well - "only" 30000 in NSW and 1000 in ACT (down from like 35000 for a couple of days in NSW and ~1200 in the ACT).  

Saturday.  1st of January.  Very slow morning.  Turns out that late nights kill us, who knew.  Three hours late to bed.  Still woke up at normal time of course.  Managed to get a bit more broken sleep and then just played on my phone.  So my usual Saturday morning todos that are usually done by about 9am took til about mid afternoon.  hrmmm.  Then it was preparing dinner and really didn't get much else done.

Entertaining roast?  Let's see who we can entertain with this :)

Tony came over and we enjoyed the entertaining roast.  Unfortunately he likes crackling, so this had to be split among three ;)

But there's a tonne of leftovers.  Some will need freezing methinks.

After dinner we had a game of Wingspan.  Stu enjoyed it but I didn't - I found it overly complicated. I felt like I wasn't doing very well at all the entire game, and yet I somehow ended up winning, go figure.

Sunday.  Second day of the year.  Back to normal sleeping pattern which is nice.  Well, for me anyway, Stu unfortunately didn't get to sleep til super late, probably the afternoon siesta he had didn't help either.  Then just puttering through the todo list.  Slide processing, tagged several hundred work photos, fish stuff, music practise, and spent hours catching up on This Day in History posts from the year.  Still have a ways to go on that though.  I also thought I'd read through the New Testament again, which I haven't done in ages.  If you read about a chapter a day, it takes a year to read the New Testament.  About a chapter a day of the Old Testament takes about three years.  In the past I'd read both old and new, taking three years to read the Old Testament once and the New Testament three times in that time.  This year I'm going to just do the New Testament.  I'm going to use this reading program from Bible Gateway which should be easy enough.  Leftovers for dinner then tv.  We just finished season 19 of The Simpsons, and we're now into season 3 of Sex Education.  

How pretty is this!?  I was washing up this morning and saw it shining on the bench.  Bet you'd never guess what caused it.

Does this help? :)

Feeling quite happy and relaxed, which is super rare on a Sunday night.  I wish Sunday nights could always be this way...

1981

I was eight. In bed asleep.

1991

Chrissie's and my family went to the Reid's

Graham, Dad, Susannah, Di, Mum

Chrissie on the couch

I think this was Andy, and Chrissie

2001

Literally no idea, there's no photos.  Might have done something with James/George/Luc/Lizzi, but actually no idea at all.

2011

Stu's friend Kore was in the country, so we had a touristy few days with her, including staying at a ridiculously overpriced hotel in the city.  We saw the 9pm fireworks from the hotel, and went over to North Sydney to watch the midnight fireworks from Lavendar Bay.  We got there very very late, so couldn't really see the bridge.  After the fireworks we went to Central to meet up with David and Yvonne who had come up from Canberra on the train (David was helping run it), before it went back to Canberra.

2021

We were originally going to go out to the club, but Omicron had us worried about being with a group of people, so we had a lovely quiet night at home with just the two of us.

Bubbles and dinner delivered from Chong Co

Glow stick fail!  I bought these in May for Kit's birthday.. turns out these things have a shelf life!

Guess what movie we watched to keep us awake til midnight? :)

Sydney fireworks are the best fireworks in the world I reckon ;)

Happy New Year!

See 2020. Rinse and repeat. Another crazy crazy year. Wondering if life will *ever* get back to any sort of normal.

Our year started out at the club with friends. It likely would have finished there too. Except Omicron. So it is going to just be the two of us for a lovely quiet night.

Life for the first seven and a half months in Canberra was actually relatively normal. Then in mid August (two days before my birthday) someone tested postive (thanks Delta) and we got put into a snap seven day lockdown. That lasted a couple of months. For us it meant the bliss of not having to go into the office. Things did start to open up again in October/November/December but case numbers here and in NSW and Victoria are higher than ever right now due to Omicron (the numbers are staggering - 21000 per day in NSW at the past couple of days - twenty times higher than at the peak of Delta.  462 today in Canberra - it's basically been doubling every couple of days, and now also ten times higher than Delta). We got put into lockdown in August for one case, yet now we have hundreds of cases per day but there's basically no restrictions other than having to wear a mask indoors. Craziness. I mean sure, 98.5% of 12+ year olds are fully vaccinated here, but most of us haven't had boosters yet. Stu and I plan to hide from people as much as possible over the coming weeks.

We couldn't go overseas in 2021, so our only travel was within NSW. We went to the coast to Kit and Pete's for Pete's birthday in March. We got to see their new house, went for a drive to the coast, had a ride on Elle, went out for Pete's birthday, went to Myrtle Beach, and saw Old Blotchy on the way home. We also visted them in May for Kit's birthday, going to Mollymook for lunch and having snacks and drinks by the fire in the evening. In April we had a five day long weekend over our anniversary and went to Bathurst, Lithgow, Newnes, Glen Davis, Gulgong and Dubbo. We tempted fate by having Mum come down at Christmas, and went to Junee on Boxing Day to visit David. The tour company we'd booked Oberammergau through was being difficult, so in the end we cut out losses and cancelled our trip with them. I booked tickets for the show itself later next year, and if things work out we'll plan a trip around it closer to the date. We're still desperately trying to get out of a cruise out of Florida early next year, but again, the tour company is being buttheadful and are refusing any sort of refund. Our only hope is that the whole thing is cancelled and we can get our money back. Come on Omicron, you can do this!

At work I did an awful lot of *cleaning*. Tidying things up, documenting, deleting old crap. Helped shut down an old environment and migrated to new firewalls. A floor shuffle in April meant an annoyingly loud team moved in next to us which was all sorts of stressful. But then another floor shuffle in July moved us away. Rereading blog entries for most of the year it was amazing how stressed out I was just having to go into the office. Things were so much nicer from August once in lockdown. In October we had a farewell lunch for someone at the Lighty - which was the first time I'd seen any of my colleagues in person in two and a half months. Went back into the office to work for a day a week in November. I did a whole heap of overtime from October to December doing upgrades and migrations. There was a whiksy night in June, and we had "virtual" drinks a couple of times during lockdown. We tempted fate and had our usual Christmas bbq by the lake (in the rain!).

Healthwise, the main problem for me is still bouts of insomnia every so often. I thought I might have been getting sick in April but fought it off. I got my vaccines in June, with basically no side-effects at all, other than a sore arm, and perhaps a sore neck a couple of weeks later (both times). We both got colds in July, probably from someone at the club the previous weekend. Stu got tested (negative), I didn't bother, I just isolated.

Our biggest change in home life this year was David getting a job driving freight trains out of Cootamundra, so he moved out in January. Mum came down at Easter and Christmas to visit both us, and David in Junee. We saw David for about half an hour in February, and he came and stayed the night before the air show. I finally got to meet Kellie, who I found out about in about August. A lovely, thoughtful person who has a lot of the same thought processes/opionions/life outlook as me - freaky! We saw Stu's family a few times during the year including a couple of visits by Immy to see Stumpy, an afternoon tea at Annie's in October (first human contact we'd had with any of our friends/family in two months), a visit in November, and Christmas afternoon with them. We saw a bit of the N-Gang, although not so much as previous years. There was Rob's 51st in May, dinner at EffanC's in June, a couple of virtual drinks with EffanC during lockdown, and dinner with all those guys at Hachiko in July and Indian Pantry in October. I was feeling like noone liked me in July, but these guys reminded me I do have some pretty great friends. Who needs stinking young people anyway. We had brunch with Kit in June when she was up, and had Kit stay overnight in November - first time she'd been here in probably nearly two years, and the two visits to their place as well. Jenn came over a couple of times in February and July (the latter for an Indian feast that Stu cooked). CRD came over for dinner in February, and we had her at the club a couple of times too.

At our social club we went out for most of the social functions in the first half of the year (except April because we were in Dubbo). There was Robert's Chinese New Year feast in February, Matt & Michelle's Mexican feast in March, Italian night in May, Ian and Chris's anniversary dinner in June, and we did Christmas in July. CRD came out with us in May, and I did some more priming of the cabinetry. I haven't done any more tho because we've just had so little free time. There was a bbq in late October which was the first time we'd been since lockdown, and we went a week later as well for the working bee. Then for Rob and Fiona's Christmas party in late November.

I got a massive amount done on my photos this year. Early in the year I thought I was done doing fixup scans of Dad's slides, but as I started processing them I realised how bad a lot of them still were. So I spent the rest of the year (well, from March to October) redoing them *again*. Even then, a lot of the early ones still have lots of fluff on them, but I'm kinda over it now, and they can stay as they are now. I did come up with CLI commands (in Excel) to add a whole heap of exif data into his slides. If he went to the trouble of recording the aperture, shutter and F stop, then why not add it into the data files! I also have commands to add the date (if known) and captions for them. I've started (well restarted for some of them) processing them with aforementioned scripts and cropping/colour correcting, but it's still a lot of work to try and sort out the mess he's made combining things that probably shouldn't have been combined, not to mention geotagging them as I go ;) I'm basically happy with 18 boxes so far, which is about 10% of the way through them all. If I'm lucky I'll be finally finished mid next year. Just in time to start scanning Mum's negatives which started in 1983 :) I won't be scanning all of Mum's negatives that's for sure - just the ones I care about, such as holidays and family photos. A lot of the early prints are pretty crap and discoloured. In the first week of January I started labelling my Eurasia 2012 photos. At five hundred per week it was going to take most of the year. But I did it! Twenty four and a half thousand photos in eleven months. In fact I actually finished one day early :) I had a play with some gallery generating apps, and even got my USA 2000 photos online with it. The main blocker for getting more online (other than time) is deciding where to host it (likey it'll just stay on my current host), but also how to integrate it with the blog. Seems silly to have two different sites that are very similar yet one has just highlights and the other has almost everything. Because it also means the gallery doesn't have the blog detail. It's a bit of a dilema. I finished filing all my club photos into directories by event/category. One of these days they might go into some sort of club archive, but need to get permission from people first. I spent months on and off tagging people in work photos with Picasa. Still not sure how to get that data into a useful format, but at least the data is there. Still need to get Wello and Ray over to help me tag people I don't know. I also realised only last week that I hadn't been backing up the Picasa DB directories, so if my C: drive had died I would have lost all that work - yikes!

Fish. So many baby fish! I got five platies in January - first time I'd ever had platies. They had some babies, of which two survived to adulthood, but all five original ones died, so I currently just have the two babies left. Stu's tank is still overgrown with algae, but I have a solution to that - guppies!! The two foot I have upstairs (and now the one downstairs as well) is basically algae free, which I put down to having so many guppies in those tanks. So as babies (so many babies!) get big enough, I'm transferring them to other tanks, including the big one, to work on the algae.
Inventory:
Angel tank (the 620T): 1 ancient cory, 2 platies that were born in that tank (the twins!), 1 zebra danio, 2 guppies
Two foot: guppies! - a bunch of adults that we mostly got a year ago, and a tonne of babies. Some of the juveniles have been moved to other tanks
Four foot: 14 congo tetras, about half a dozen guppies I moved in fairly recently, some suckers (we think), a loach (sadly his siamensis friend died recently)
Chrissie tank: 2 clown loaches and a sucker (really need to move that medium sized sucker into the angel tank and bring one of the little ones up from downstairs, because Chrissie's big sucker in the angel tank died)
Downstairs two foot: four adult males, two adult females, and a tonne of babies, and two small suckers
Nursery tank: a few babies and juveniles, including a couple of very pretty spotted ones I'm hoping will be female
Other one foot tanks: more guppies
Stumpy is still doing well. I do think he got hungry earlier this year though. And now at the height of summer he's barely coming out at all. Silly lizard :)

No Lego building this year. We (David) moved the four-baseplate mosaic into the hallway so Stu could have the wall back for his things. I had a play with Gimp for making Lego mosaics (you feed it the colours you have in stock into a pallette file, then apply that pallette to your photo - voila! Mosaic pattern!), but haven't actually made one yet. I wanted to make one this break. Maybe I still will. If I can think of a picture that would work. I had some fun playing with Lego Digital Designer to continue working on the Lego model of our house. I got pretty much all the main floor done, but got stuck when it came to doing the roof design. The slope of the roof matches approximately a 1:4 slope brick, which you can get, but you can't get corner pieces, so doing corners would be messy. Might have to look into making the roof slops with plates/tiles. I still really haven't done any more work sorting out Vic's Lego. It just got too time consuming and depressing (because so much of it was missing). I did spend a bit of time sorting/constructing minifigs (so we can get the dungeon room back) but that was short-lived too. I might spend another couple of weekends trying to finalise another few sets, then just give up and start buying Lego to replace what's missing. Because after that is the really fun part - actually building sets.

This year was a year for *big* jigsaws. I did three sections of the Disney Behemoth - Dumbo, Snow White and Fantasia. Only one section to go now. I could have gotten it done by Christmas but it's very distracting and I had a tonne of other things that needed doing. Did a bunch of jigsaws at work too, although a lot slower on account of not being there as much (or at all). David and I made a 3D jigsaw model of the Titanic at Easter. I'm totally drooling over the Lego Titanic. I reckon I could do it, wait for it to not be on sale anymore, then sell it, and probably make a profit. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for sales ;) Very slow progress on the paint by numbers I got last Christmas. The main blocker there is the difficulty just *seeing* it - even with reading glasses I still need a magifying glass to see the tiny numbers. I took the plunge and bought myself a clarinet in September. I've been practising most days, but I still really struggle with bridging the register and the upper register notes. And reading music. I'm ok with the notes but not the tempo, so really struggle with playing music I don't know the tune to already.

Tech. Our NAS power supply died in March (someone let the smoke out). Stu bought a new one and replaced it himself. At some point we should probably get something more modern (with a higher version of SMB). The E: drive died in my computer, and since it was nine years old decided to get a new one. Haven't used it much but it seems pretty snappy. Continued frustration with Apple. Apple decided after one update this year to arrange all photos on the phone by month. This was great! But in the next update they reverted to a thousand photos per folder. And it's *still* messing with the datestamps on my photos. Hate Apple. Hate. Other purchases. Had to get new jeans. Eventually found some that are mediocre. Hating the fact that they don't make girls jeans with decent pockets. We also got a frame made (online) for my last paint by numbers, but the mounting bracket was mounted off-centre. Sigh.

Around the house. Had a lot of frustration at the beginning of the year with bathroom sealer companies not getting back to me. Eventually got a shower sealing company to come have a look. They confirmed loose tiles/cracked grout, but wouldn't replace them because there's asbestos in the walls. We bought a new mattress and then a new frame. King size which is great, but ultimately disappointed with it all. We watched a bunch of videos from Solar Quotes, but a year later we still haven't done anything about solar. Before winter I was doing a little bit of weeding, and got back into it when it warmed up. I make piles and piles, but everything grows back faster than I can get rid of it. I'm really really looking forward to getting green and organic waste pickups every week. It'll be easier to stay on top of garden waste, and our regular bin might go out like once every six months instead of every month or so like it does now.

Didn't eat out much this year. We did go to Ramen O a few times, and Koku Super Kare a couple of times, but would be good for both of those to have a cheaper, smaller lunchtime option. I went to Herbert's a few times, mostly with Tony and/or the Chrises and Neil. The sweetie and I tried KorBQ in the mall for our last work lunch together. We went to Pizza Artigiana once, and Dumpling Inn seems to be closed permanently which is sad. Had brunch with Annie at The District in April. We had Chong Co in May, and delivery from them a couple of times. Had brunch with Kit at Stellas by the Lake in June (it's no longer Black Pepper). Went with EffanC and R&F to Hachiko in July and Indian Pantry in October (which was our first outing post lockdown). Had Charnie's Noodle and Dumplings delivery in November, which was somewhat underwhelming, and Sichuan Chinese takeaway a couple of times in December, which is expensive but nice. Subway did a "cheesy garlic bread" (garlic butter, plus extra cheese) for a while which was awesome.

Cooking-wise, tried a few new things and some old favourites. There was zucchini spaghetti early in the year from some epic zucchinis we got from Con. I tried oven baked feta pasta (Uunifetapasta) from Tik Tok which wasn't too bad (but all that feta is way too salty for my blood pressure). I had a go at replicating Dominos puff pastry pepperoni and feta pizza. It was almost identical to the Dominos version - so amazing. But did someone say something about salt and blood pressure? We had Cath's crumbed basa a couple of times. I tried Ray's method of reheating pizza - frying it in a little oil with the lid on. OMFG this was so good - even better than it eating it fresh. Had that 80s deep pan vibe about it. Sooo good. I had a go at san choy bow in September which worked pretty well (Chris only has iceberg lettuce, so thought I'd have a go at doing something with that since I hadn't been to Coles in forever). I made meat jelly rice a few times - to use up meat jelly that you can't think of a better use for, mix with water and rice to make quite a flavourful rice. I experimented with slow cooker lamb roast (which I tried at the club for Christmas in July but only managed a mouthful of it because the rest of it got snapped up by everyone - I *think* it was really good?? :) ), and also slow cooker turkey (the first time it was fairly dry; it was better the second go but really works better with fattier meat). I made three new things from my Women's Weekly Gratins and Bakes book - Seafood Mornay Lasagna (expensive and fiddly and, well, seafoody), Spaghetti Rosa Bake (nice, but spaghetti is messy), Penne Arribbiata Bake (good, even with anchovies, and easy enough that I've done it a few times). We got a few nice strawberries off our strawberry plants, and there's chillis coming. I made a couple of different lemon cheesecakes in February and March, and combined them to come up with a definitive, easy to make recipe (that I tried before Christmas) that I'll probably use moving forward. I made a rocky road in February. I made Not Quite Nigella's mint slice in August, which was pretty good so made it again for Christmas.

And now for the lists!

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* Hamilton (on Disney+ so you may not want to count it ;) )

Movies (at the Movies)
* Penguin Bloom

Movies (TV - not all movies, but I've included series)
* Studio Ghibli movies
* Honey I Shrunk the Kids series
* A whole heap of true stories and spy movies, which is what Stu tends to pick when it's his turn
* The Poseidon Adventure (saw the remake at some point earlier, the original is way better)
* Some old Australian movies - Playing Beatie Bow, Gallipoli, The Shiralee
* Fantasia 2000 a few times, and Fantasia
* Nanny McPhee 1 and 2
* The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 1 and 2
* Snow White original and remake
* Dan Brown series
* Some Bette Midler movies
* Some Tom Hanks movies
* The Matrix trilogy
* Die Hard 1 and 2 and Love Actually in December

TV
* Discovery (finished season 3)
* The Simpsons (started off in season 5, ended up nearly finished season 19)
* The X-Files (seasons 1, 2 and a bit of 3)
* Laid Back Camp (seasons 1 and 2)
* Hibike! Euphonium (seasons 1 and 2)
* Encore!
* Amazing Race Australia
* Lego Masters
* A Place Further than the Universe
* The Surgeon's Cut
* Aircrash Confidential
* Alfred Hitchcock Presents (a bit of it)
* Human: The World Within
* Pandemic
* Diagnosis
* Brides of Christ
* The Movies that Made Us
* Air Crash Investigations (some recent seasons I hadn't seen)
* Love on the Spectrum
* Connected
* How the Mind Works
* Lie to Me (season 1 and most of season 2)
* You Can't Ask That (seasons 1 to 6)
* Sex Education (seasons 1 and 2)

Books
* Heartache and Birdsong by Sam Bloom, Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive
* To Catch a King by Harry Patterson
* Seizure by Kathy Reichs
* Doctor No by Ian Fleming

Other stuff
* neighbourhood dog barked nonstop for hours on end for months. It make me super cranky all last summer break and well into the new year
* scanned a whole heap of stuff in the filing cabing
* Disney+ launched "Star" with a whole heap of new content it could take me a lifetime to watch
* saw the RAAF 100th Anniversary airshow which was pretty amazing
* went down to Lake Burley Griffin for a wander round with the sweetie on Easter Monday
* saw my magpies throughout the year
* voted for and listened to ABC Classic FM's top 100 "Music You Can't Live Without"
* had to start wearing masks indoors for two weeks in June - my first time was in July for seeing my dentist. I continued wearing a mask in the mall even though I didn't have to, because you can't trust people to stay home when they're sick.
* snap 7 day lockdown in August that lasted three months
* had a lovely quiet birthday at home with nice food and hobbies and had Chong Co delivered
* we were in an exposure site the Wednesday before the lockdown, but didn't find out until Wednesday a week later. Had to get tested but it meant only a week of full lockdown at home. It was a good thing I'd done a big food shop that morning. The Saturday after that we got an sms from Canberra health that we'd been in an exposure site - literally a week and a half after we'd been there. Fricken hopeless.
* I missed the earthquake! (in September)
* in September I found out the super annoying yappy staffies down the road killed each other. No more annoying barking!!!!
* the first of October was an epic news day. 52 covid cases recorded - highest ever in Canberra for one day. ScoMo announced opening of international borders a lot sooner than we first thought. Gladys resigned.
* saw the remains of Floriade in Belconnen, but missed out on seeing it sans-crowds in Commonwealth Park
* would often go three weeks between Coles shops during the lockdown, getting essentials at Chris's
* went to the online funeral for Win Cartan. Still annoyed I didn't get to see them when I was at church in early 2019. Oh well, will see them in heaven soon enough.
* planted sunflowers across the road. One sprouted and is still going (last I looked)
* petrol prices hit an all time high in November
* mask mandate reintroduced just before Christmas (I reckon it should have been weeks earlier)

So there we have it. Another epic year. And for once I have this review done *before* the end of the year! It took *hours* :) Have a happy and safe new year. Get your booster. Eat less. Drink less. Sing. Floss. Stretch. Dance. Wear sunscreen.

This entry will likely get photos in a few days, so check back then :)

Tuesday.  28th.  Woke up at ~2am with hurty then stayed awake til like 5am.  So a slow and grumpy morning.  Mum went home.  Stu didn't sleep well either so we though we'd get food from the Scottish Restaurant for breakfast.  The queue was super slow moving.  And there were no eggs.  wtf??  So I'm like, can you put a hash brown in the muffins instead of an egg but she couldn't comprehend that, and I could barely understand her accent and a truck pulled up with a delivery making a lot of noise so making it even worse.  So I eventually get to pay but couldn't get a receipt because she said the printer wasn't working, and she said I could ask at the next window.  So I asked at the pickup window, but they say they can't print receipts for drive though.  FFS.  Then when I got home, the neighbour was trying to get her car out so I had to back out onto the street but there were cars coming so we all had to wait.  Finally get inside, of course there's no hash browns.  I bet we've still been charged for eggs but we'll never know because there was no receipt.  Fricken hopeless.  So I was tired and now even more cranky, and then the neighbour was running the little digger machine he's hired which makes this drone that goes on and on and has been going most of the break.  Epic #grunt.  Tried to catch up on All The Things but it was slow going.  I found a directory of 800+ work photos that I thought I'd tagged but apparently hadn't.  Cooked up some veggies to have with leftover turkey for dinner. 

Wednesday.  Slept relatively well which was a relief, so I could finally get stuck into my holiday.  In the morning I spent some time on things that I want to do every day to chip away at.  Then the afternoon was blogging and copying files.  USB 3 is a whole lot faster than USB 2, who knew? ;)  (I did but it's quite nice).  With omicron in the wild we'd been pretty dubious about going to the club at New Years, but then we found out from someone that there's actually heaps of people at the club, including a bunch from Sydney, so that made the decision for us.  Made creamy pasta for dinner.  The green stuff was a half-hearted attempt to pretend to be healthy!

Thursday.  Another day of doing All The Things, including some of the daily stuff, and got our Dubbo holiday blogged.  Lamb roast for dinner and finished season 2 of Sex Education.

Friday.  Today!  Last day of the year!  Spent ages processing box 18 of Dad's slides (this one he'd mixed three trips to the Blue Mountains together, and two trips to Kurnell, and only a few of them dated, so had to figure out which ones were which and guestimate dates).  Also looks like he hadn't dated any of his slides from late 1962, all through 1963, and into 1964.  Fortunately with those he was still writing roll and frame number, so at least they can all be put into order.  Then spent the rest of the day (pretty much) writing my year in review post.  The plan for the rest of the day is probably to do a few bits and pieces, including music practise, get Chong Co delivered for dinner (might need to get in a bit early) then try and stay awake til midnight, just need to find the right movie(s) that will keep us entertained ;)

Happy New Year!