So last night F&C came over for dinner.  We had a swim first up, accompanied by wine and nibbles from the Spa Bar.  Then the sweetie did some very nice marinated salmon.  Somehow it came up that we should watch Meaning of Life, so we did, while sampling some very nice single malt whiskeys.  Then another dip in the pool because it was still super hot.

Today I did housework and Lego dismantling and then our food shopping.  This evening Fiona and Bruce came over and we had more wine and cheese in the pool followed by pizza for dinner and The Big Lebowski.

It's too danged hot.

Three months ago yesterday we walked the Avenue of Stars in Hong Kong and went up to The Peak and I explored the ladies markets.  Three months ago today we took a ferry to Lantau Island and visited Tai O and Ngong Ping, and watched the Symphony of Lights.

Friday was another fairly easy going day.  Tried to automate some stuff to make my life easier.  Lunch at the Lighty just because.  Of course I was itching to get home and continue the Lego building saga.  Pulled out the pieces for a whole lot of sets, to be constructed at the club.

Saturday morning I was ready by 7am (stoopid insomnia) so continued with the Lego.

After lunch headed out to the club.  Had a swim which was nice and built the Lego I'd pulled out to do.  Did that pretty much all evening.

This morning was more Lego building.  Chris' sister and BIL were there and he suggested the most likely cause of the fridge not working properly might actually be a ventilation issue.  Stu actually tried it on gas and it worked really well, but really heated up the caravan in the process.  This dude reckoned without the proper ventilation even running it on gas could be dangerous, and we were likely to asphyxiate in our sleep.  So we tried to find a vent today, but the most handy shop didn't have them, so will try Fyshwick some other time.

This is the Hannah Cabinet at the Wood Works Gallery in Bungendore.  Absolutely stunning work.

Anyway, after lunch had another swim, then came home.

Check out this bug outside our caravan.  Pic taken on my iPhone!

So Jake's Lego is nearly all sorted and built.  There's a few chunks of it missing, will see if they can find it around the house...

So 2013. Busy year!

We saw in 2013 with a small pool party at our place with Nat and Andrew and also Steve for a while.

  
We did a bit of travelling this year.

In January we went up the coast to South West Rocks to a school reunion of sorts for Stu and to visit Stu's dad. We drove up and down the coast, swam, visited Trial Bay Gaol, and caught up with Fiona and Margie on the way home.

We only managed to get to the coast once this year, in May. It was somewhat of a disaster with the spa being too cold on Friday night and too hot on Saturday night and a few other things that made it all a bit unpleasant (except for during the day on Saturday which was pretty good). Almost went again later in the year but had to go to Sydney and otherwise we've just been too busy.

We went to Queensland in July for a lovely long weekend to visit Chay and David.

At the end of July we flew up to Sydney for my Dad's 70th and one of my 40th parties (see below).

In October we decided at the last minute to go to Hong Kong for a week at the end of October. It was a great week, even if a little too humid. It's the most spontaneous holiday I've ever taken. I didn't do too much planning for it, because the more I researched, the more things I found of interest to see. So I stopped researching altogether and we took it as it came.

  
At work I had a mostly good year. I started off the year cleaning and pretty much cleaned all year. I started with the knowledge base articles for our team, then moved onto the log transfer system, then the load balancers. I also rehashed an old domino database for documentation which brought back a lot of memories of my last job. For the rest of the time it mostly felt like I was the "goto" person for any and all problems that came along. We were partly restructured, but the powers that be didn't really have a clear idea of what they wanted, so things didn't change as much as we originally thought they would. I made Stu drag out his tuxedo again for the work ball which was a lot of fun.

Healthwise I felt like I was sick the whole first half of the year - with colds in January, March, April, May and June. So that was pretty horrible. Not flus though, just annoying colds. Got another one the night before we went to Hong Kong too - yay :( But have been ok otherwise.

  
We had a super busy social year this year. In fact it was so busy that we went from May to September without having a free Saturday night. As a consequence our Buffy and Angel watching was almost non-existent. There were plenty of visits to/from Annie and Potty and the families. Various people came over for dinner and/or swims at the beginning of the year. Nat and Andrew came over a few times, as well as Andrew by himself when Nat was travelling. There were various after works drinks with my colleagues and Stu's and family and friends. Various Singstar/Mario Kart nights were had. Several BBQs at @CLBradley's. Several games nights at Mishi's. Had a video night at our place with work people. We visited people for lunches/dinners such as Matt and Helen, Andrew and Jen, Chris and Geoff, Josh and Ally, Windy and Nanette etc. We saw Daniel and Fi a few times when they came down. Several people came to stay including David and Yvonne, Ken and Jeanine, Fiona a couple of times and Stu's old school friend Tom. I met up with @StuartCRyan a few times in Sydney (we met in real life for the first time at my birthday). I also went to visit David in Junee.

Speaking of birthdays, I turned forty this year. To celebrate I had *three* great parties - one in Sydney, a big one at home the Saturday before my birthday, then a big lunch at work on my birthday followed by a nice dinner and seeing Phantom of the Opera. I was certainly in a different place mentally for my fortieth. During the whole run-up to my thirtieth I was very depressed, and my actual birthday was pretty meh. Such a different story this year though.

  
In sadder news, my Nana died of old age earlier in the year. And then I found out at the funeral that I have another cousin that I'd never heard about before!

Also in sad news, my father got diagnosed with a brain tumour in March. He had surgery immediately (and they had to cancel a holiday to New Zealand), followed by chemo and radiotherapy. Unfortunately it didn't really help, and he was hospitalised in July because he kept falling over and wasn't able to walk properly. He's been getting progressively worse and has been in a nursing home since September. In August I started going up to Sydney fairly regularly to see Dad and help Mum with the mammoth task of clearing out the garage and workshop. We've mostly been sorting things so far as I don't want to get rid of things until Dad goes. Fortunately I've been able to work out of the Sydney office so not having to take leave at the moment.

  
We've been enjoying a lot of visits to our little social club. We camped there over the Australia day long weekend, and the new tent survived a storm and massive downpour fairly well. But then a caravan came up for sale, so we bought it! We went to most of the club nights during the year, and plenty of other times as well. It's Stu's little get-away-from-the-world place and he thoroughly enjoys it.

With work people or the sweetie, tried out a few new restaurants. Continued going to Black Pepper for brunches and also Pulp Kitchen a few times. Went to Dumpling Inn a few times and Bella Vista as well. Didn't try too many desserts this year, although did make a Mars Bar slice and a peppermint rocky road, as well as an apple crumble and caramel slice that we tried at the club.

  
We bought another four baby angels for the angel tank. One died but the other three survived, so now have four angels and about seven danios in that tank. We got a lovely little betta for the macquarium, but he never thrived and died in six weeks. So thinking I'll probably give the macquarium away. The four foot still has a school of duboisis, two multies, a lelupi and a J.transcriptus. There's three multis downstairs, but after breeding once, the single baby I saw disappeared and haven't seen any since. There's still three or four quite old kribs downstairs as well.

Not much Lego action this year. I did get a cute little plane from Fiona, and a small City set from Ric for my birthday. I went with Nat and Andrew to Brick Expo, but was very frustrated with the crowds. I dismantled the Millennium Falcon which had been out for four years! Also over the Christmas break got to sort out and build all of Jake's lego which has been fun.

I did a lot of jigsaws this year. Mostly downstairs until downstairs got too cold. Mostly little ones, but also another section of the huge "Life" puzzle. Gave up on the skies of two jigsaws because their quality was just too poor.

I celebrated my tenth blogiversary this year. To mark the occasion I upgraded to Movable Type 5. But got very frustrated with the fact that I now cannot SSH to my host. Also with Movable Type which is *very* buggy. Next year my domain is up for renewal and I'm thinking about moving my domain to a new host with a new blogging platform. But the whole idea is pretty scary, so we'll see about that...

Shows

• The only show I saw this year was The Phantom of the Opera on my birthday.

Movies
Not many movies this year either...

• The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey
• Star Trek - Into Darkness
• Garden of Words and Ghost in the Shell: Arise

Books

• Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
• Polgara the Sorceress by David and Leigh Eddings
• Careful, he might hear you, by Sumner Locke Elliott
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs
• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
• I Hate You - Don't Leave Me by Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus
• The Naked Husband by Mark D'Arbanville
• Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs
• Airport by Arthur Hailey
• Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwall

Other stuff

• Had a full day at the War Memorial with Ken and Jeanine
• Had a jigsaw race with Nat
• Found my first geocache with Nat and Andrew
• Saw a Roller Derby bout
• Mum got her first mobile phone
• Had a random day off work to tidy up all the fish tank stuff in the garage
• Went for some walks around Palmerville with the sweetie
• Spotted the ISS a few times and waved to @Cmdr_Hadfield. Wasn't quite the same when he came back to earth.
• Went to the balloon fiesta on Canberra Day
• Watched the last couple of episodes and finale of House, which considering the timing with dad was pretty sad
• Took Stu's car for a drive up Mount Ainslie and got covered in lady bugs
• Our PS3 stopped playing DVD disks. Bluray is still ok though.  We considered getting a PS4 but the device isn't backwards compatible with old games.
• Went out to Captain's Flat on our fifth wedding anniversary
• Finished a cross stitch I got for Christmas in 1992
• Went up Black Mountain Tower
• Voted in ABC Classic FM's top 100 music in the movies, and most of my votes were in the top two hundred
• Did a blog for our trip to America in 1983
• Gave up reading Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama, Dooce and Dilbert
• Got extremely pissed off when Google Reader shut down. Destroyed my faith in Google.
• Looked at Comma Feed, Feedly and The Old Reader. Stuck with The Old Reader.  The Old Reader subsequently crashed from all the extra load of departing Google users, but was able to get funding to run on better hosting and has been fine ever since.
• Got more of my photos onto the RiotACT
• Cancelled Aussie Farmers Direct orders
• Had a look around Wintercon at EPIC
• Stu had a few car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• I had a LOT of car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• Saw the Skywhale
• Played through Diablo with the sweetie.  On easy mode.  Sue me.
• Did proper karaoke for the first time ever (and I've been to Japan four times!)
• Went to a Christmas Carols service at Como

So that's the end of 2013.  New Year's Eve will be spent out at the club with food and booze and friends and fairy lights and fireworks :)

I've been really slack with blogging this year, especially the second half.  Lots of trips to Sydney mucking up my routine and cutting deeply into my "home" time is certainly not helping.  And the lack of comments is also not helping either, I feel like noone's really out there anymore.  Since my birthday in August I've had a whole *two* comments from regular readers.  Not that I do this for you, I do it for me, which is why I'm a bit annoyed I'm not keeping up - as this provides a valuable record for me of my life.

Anyways.

Thursday night after drinks we went to the Lighty for dinner, and then onto Karaoke.  I've never done karaoke like this before.  And found it a lot more difficult than Singstar.  With Singstar the lead vocals are at full volume compared to the music, and the timings are on screen.  With karaoke the lead vocals are basically non existent, which means you're pretty much on your own getting the timing right.  And when people are singing very loudly and very badly, it's very hard to try and get it right.  In the end with a lot of songs I blocked an ear and closed my eyes and was able to keep the timing a lot better.  And the videos are crap - at least with Singstar you mostly get the original video clips.  But it was a great fun night - we stayed for two hour-long rounds.

Friday night I made the sweetie watch Love Actually with me.  Because, you know, Christmas.

Saturday morning I was up at normal time to go help out with the big work Christmas party.  Neil and Henrch and Windy had spent a couple of hours on Friday afternoon moving things up onto the loading dock, so in the end it only took half an hour to load the truck.  We had the whole place setup by about 10:30, and then just needed to wait for the booze to turn up and then we were done.  Quickest setup *ever*.  After everything was done, I went on a couple of rides and took a lot of photos, then had my lunch and came home.

Saturday afternoon we headed over to Mishi's for a games evening.  We read a stack of Geek Battle questions which turned out to be great conversation starters.  Then we played a couple of games of Fluxx - Geoffrey won one game and I won another.  Then we watched Inception because Mishi had never seen it, and the sweetie and I hadn't seen it since we saw it at the movies.  Quite enjoyed it the second time around.

Sunday we went to Potty's for a big family BBQ.  Essentially it was the family Christmas gathering, as everyone was there, and won't be for Christmas itself.

And then back to work.  I have *sooo* much to do it's not funny.  And yet I got so many interruptions and problems to deal with that yesterday I barely got *any* of it done.  So much for a nice wind-down to Christmas ...

Had one night at home which gave me a chance to do two loads of washing.  

Then headed out to the club on Friday after work.  Stayed two nights, which is actually the first time I've ever done that.  On Saturday afternoon I pulled all the utensils, crockery and glassware tubs out, cleaned them, sorted their contents and made labels for it all.  Took pretty much all afternoon.  Yipe.  Sunday morning I finished the job by doing all the cutlery drawers.

Left for Sydney from there a bit before midday.

Feed me!!

Went and visited Dad (he's much the same).  Took him some hot chips.  Also read him the $#!+ My Dad Says list that I've been working on - sayings and stuff that are distinctly him.  He laughed at a few of them which was cool.

Mum did a lamb roast for dinner which was yummy, then we continued on with the workshop.  Made pretty good progress on one of the work benches in the workshop.  Pretty much cleared a whole surface.

OMG a work bench!!!

Tonight (after a dinner of scotch fillet steak) we continued on and around the corner.  Found papers dating back to 1976 - gardening and orchid stuff he was into years ago.  And a lot of disgusting stuff hidden up the back which probably hasn't seen the light of day in twenty five years.  And a piece of HO scale railway track.  And unopened tools.  And lots of duplicates of tools.  We think he would lose things and then go and buy another one because the old one was buried.  Silly really.  Setup some boxes - one for screw drivers, one for pliers and cutters, and another for "small" tools.  And another one for multimeters - at least four of the things.

Dad installed this intercom so that mum could call dad when he was downstairs in the workshop.  Except after a while the voice bit of it died, and only the call buzzer really worked.  So for the latter years of its life mum would press the button three times, which meant dinner's ready.

A few trips ago I forgot pyjamas.  This trip I forgot my phone charger and house keys.  Fortunately someone at work has one, so didn't have to go out and buy a new one today.

Will get some photos into this post later in the week.

Last day of my thirties was spent at work.  Yay.  Was put in a foul mood by the "support" of one of our vendors, which made the morning's work on their product that much more depressing.

Had some wine and roast lamb for dinner, then made a mint rocky road from a cookbook I got off DC for my birthday.

Then watched Air Crash Investigations.

My blog is still having awful problems.  The host it's on is struggling badly, and everything takes *forever* to do.  I'm thinking seriously about moving it off somewhere else.  You get what you pay for after all .. :/  So sorry if you can't comment or get any other sorts of errors.

Last of my parties tomorrow, which would normally mean life would get back to normal, but it's looking like that's not going to happen for weeks or even months.  In fact things are about to get a whole lot crazier ...

Thursday night: Slept til 4am then woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.

Friday night: Went to bed at 9:30pm.  Got up at 9:30am.  Only slept six of those twelve hours.  Spent the other six hours stressing about the party and the fact that I wasn't sleeping.

Saturday: Did a bit of house organising but not really enough.  Was too tired.  Went out for kebabs for lunch, then did party shopping.  And nearly killed people because there was too many of them in once place.  Came home and cleaned the house, but not really enough because we only had an hour and a half and there was just too much to do.  Chris P arrived at 4pm, then Neil, who forgot the salami so Stu went with him to get it.  Then others turned up in dribs and drabs for the next few hours.  After about an hour I finally managed to have a drink.  And finally another.  And finally started to relax.  And then finally to start enjoying myself.  There was *tonnes* of food.  We bought eight packets of frozen food to cook over the course of the night and it all got eaten (and the neighbours came up very late and brought some frozen pizzas and they got eaten too).  I spent so much time trying to make sure I talked to everyone that I didn't really talk to anyone, which was slightly sad.  A slow cooker and a half of mulled wine was drunk, along with a whole recycling tub full of beer and wine.  I think people had a good time?  Certainly the last of them didn't leave til 2am!

Windy took a few photos (thanks Windy!), but this was my favourite - a "Cognac of Chrises" (and a small ring-in whose middle name is Chris).  There'd have been eight if Henrch and the other Chris Bell had been able to make it!

Sunday:  woke up early (apparently that's what happens when you drink) but didn't get up til around nine.  Chris got up before me and cleaned up the entire kitchen and living room!  It was amazing!  She was my little cleaning fairy!  Quiet morning with Chris and Zac (Zac's quite a lovely kid, as kids go) and Potty, and we shared some of Chris L's bread and marmalade for breakfast.  Saw Chris off at lunch time, then tried to get ourselves and the house back into some semblance of sanity.

In the afternoon I went to Brick Expo, but I'll save that for another post.

Sunday night had a nightcap before bed, then slept very well from about 9:30pm til 6:30am.  I needed it!

Monday: Spent all morning dealing with fallout from the weekend's work.  

And it looks like life might get super complicated in the next little while...

And speaking of jigsaws ...

Here's the third jigsaw I've had to give up on because the pieces are so poorly designed it's impossible to tell if they're in correctly or not.  It's becoming a disturbing trend - three in my lifetime, two this year...  (this is actually an April jigsaw, but it sat on the table for two months incomplete)

And here's a couple from June

This is the Louvre.  I picked this up from Vinnie's for $6.  It was actually a fairly easy jigsaw to do.

One from David's collection - an "Impossipuzzle".  I last did this jigsaw in 1997.  Correction.  Not *this* jigsaw.  Another one just like it ..

Tried three new RSS feed readers tonight - Comma Feed, Feedly, and The Old Reader.  

Stu suggested Comma Feed to me.  Its layout is ok, keyboard shortcuts work and I could rearrange my feeds, but I couldn't figure out how to not automatically mark things read as you scrolled past them.  But it was super sluggish with its response times and it also hung in my browser - flash crashed or something.  If it keeps doing that it'll be unusable.

Feedly rated highly in LifeHacker a while back.  I could rearrange feeds pretty easily, but the default layout is terrible (I like full articles - but to get full articles you have to click on that option for every feed - super annoying - and it's just inconsistent).  It imported pretty much everything as read, which didn't give me a lot to work with in terms of usability.  So far I hate it.

The Old Reader is my favourite of the three.  It's designed on Google's feed reader from a couple of generations ago.  Settings for not auto marking things read and keyboard shortcuts work, and those settings are retained between feeds.

Will keep up all three for the rest of the week, see how they behave.

I really think this could be the beginning of the end for Google.  How are they ever going to get market share on a product when the market simply doesn't trust them not to pull the service after a couple of years?

I decided last week that I needed to stop reading my three busiest news feeds - Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama.

They were basically becoming a burden that was killing me.  They'd only take twenty minutes or so a day to do a basic skim through, but if you missed a day the next you'd have to spend forty minutes, and the next day would be an hour.  But then there'd be the "interesting" articles that I'd want to read or look at later, which meant either dozens of browser tabs, or dozens of unread articles I'd have to scroll past until I got around to looking at them.  I found I was spending what seemed like hours on the weekend just trying to keep up.

So I'm letting them go.

Boing Boing is usually the quickest to get through because I don't need to read many of the articles.  But at 30-50 items per day it was a struggle to keep on top of.  This feed I held onto for a long time, simply because it's my only source of internet "news" (albeit very biased).  How else was I going to find out about the bigger memes and general world news?

Lifehacker was usually the hardest to let go because there are always so many interesting articles.  But I figured if I need to find anything about the topics they cover, I can always search it later.

Neatorama always has lots of cool stuff, especially for travel, so I found myself leaving them lying around so I could add them to the travel todo lists. 

And I think I'll unsubscribe from Dooce as well.  Ever since she stopped putting full articles into the RSS feed (presumably to make more money from click-throughs) it's been a pain to read them (plus I feel a bit used by *having* to go to the site to read her content).  I'll just read the ones she links to from Twitter.

But with google reader meeting its demise, it was time to do a big declutter, and take a stack of dead blogs etc out to minimise what I have to take with me elsewhere.

The other thing I'm unsubscribing from is FlyLady.  I joined this list at the end of 2005 when I first met Annie.  But it also has dozens of mails per day and I found I just wasn't reading them anymore.  Well I never really read them all that much all along, but now I rarely read any at all.

So now I just need to make sure I use the spare time wisely, and not just playing mindless games...