Backdating, cause I'm a slacker ;)

Tuesday.  Woke up at 5am for over an hour.  Meh day at work.  Taco Tuesday.

Wednesday.  Woke up at like 4am.  Crazy intense day of meetings.  Rollout planned for the afternoon didn't work.  Part of it we had no idea why, another part we realised before we started it wasn't going to work so didn't go ahead.  Meanwhile all my other work is slipping.  Hrmm.  After the failed rollout Neil and I went to the Labor Club (first time since last year!) and debriefed over a bottle of bubbles.  We actually came up with some ideas.  For dinner I cooked chicken thighs, with a lemon/butter/thyme sauce inspired by @phonakins.

Had a game of Kismet with Kit and Pete, that Pete won, but no UK photo labelling.

Thursday.  No slide scanning other than finishing off yesterday's roll (*going* to work sux!!  Doesn't leave me nearly enough time in the mornings (or evenings)).  Watched the second episode of Against the Wind.

Friday.  Woke up at 4:40.  OK day.  It was actually pretty quiet (some hardware problems had a lot of people offline that would usually be sending me work).  In fact I wandered off for an hour and a half in the afternoon to get stuff done around the house.   See, working from home is much more efficient.  I can flex off for an hour or two when the workload is light.  If I was *at* work I'd have to hunt around for things to do.  Not that I don't have any shortage of things to do, my todo list is a hundred years long, but sometimes on a Friday afternoon you'd rather just be tidying the house.  Did a Bunnings run and some food shopping (omfg Coles was closed! Some eftpos issue affecting their stores nationwide, so we went to Aldi, and fortuntely they had a caramel mudcake that I wanted to get for David's birthday), and may have had the Scottish Restaurant for dinner.  Watched episode 3 of Against the Wind.  Had to laugh and the really bumpy camerawork while they were following people walking/on horseback - no steadycams in 1978!!  

Saturday.  Slept in til 6:20!!  Felt so much better.  Got ready then basically just started prepping lunch.  There might have been a slightly epic lamb roast for the little brother's birthday lunch :)

A few peeps came over to wish him a happy birthday :)

I might have eaten too much ;)  

Watched some more Against the Wind, but I have to keep stopping it to go look up the history (the series was based on actual events).  In the evening we watched David Attenborough's Witness Statement, which was completely depressing for the first half.  There was more of a message of hope in the second half.  Stop breeding.  Check.  Go solar.  Coming soon.  Eat less meat.  Need to work on that one.

Sunday.  Mostly decent sleep.  Just did All The Things all day.  Managed to chip one of the good bowls while doing the washing up which gave me an epic sad.  I searched and searched everywhere for that chip but never found it.  I was hoping to minimise the impact by supergluing it back on, but it vanished off the face of the earth :(  In the evening we shared a bottle of McGuigan's shiraz that I bought on our Hunter Valley trip in 2012, and funnily enough I was wearing the same tshirt Sunday as the day I bought it :) 

Watched the first episode of a French documentary on the sun, and episode 6 of Against the Wind.

Backdating, cause I'm a slacker! ;)

Monday.  Slept well.  Ok day at work, although I felt like I was waiting for everyone for stuff, and I was just in limbo.  Leftover brisket and salad for dinner.  Got kitchen cleaned and UK photos done by 19:30 so got stuck into blogging.  An hour and a half later and still not caught up.

Tuesdsay.  Went to the chemist at lunch.  But the markets are closed Monday/Tuesday which made for an eerie place to go.  But they did have Floriade there too!

Wednesday.  Woke up at 4:30 and never got back to sleep.  Another day of stoopid meetings.  Was going to wait for the sweetie, but I'd had enough by 4pm and went to meet the sweetie for a drink, followed by dinner at Happys.

Thursday.  More expensive drinks at Pot Belly.

Friday.  Woke up at 3:30, think I only got about fifteen minutes more sleep just before 6am.  Hurrah.  Lunch with Tony/Jess/Keira at Herbert's, but I'll stick that in another post.  In the evening headed into Belco for C's birthday pot luck barbeque.  A whole crowd of "neurodiverse" people, such as are her friends :)  A very pleasant evening by the lake, and we were among the last to leave, and still managed an early night :)

Saturday.  Logged into work to try and finish off some work I didn't have time for on Friday (too much stoopid) but Notes had crashed, so it was a sign to just shut it all down.  Then we headed out to the club.  Stu read a book outside while I did another coat of primer on the main benchtops, and started some more of the cabinetry as well.

The boys had stained the dick as well

Happy hour started super early (like 15:30!) and Rob and Lyn brought *heaps* of food, which ended up being our dinner.  We avoided the various parties around the place and had a nice quiet evening by the fire (not that we needed the fire - the day had been super hot!).

Sunday.  Woke up at ~1am and didn't get back to sleep for like four hours, and then only had a little more.  Heard people going home from parties at 3am new time (2am old time).  Headed home in the morning (we could have stayed another night but Stu thought we should go home). 

Found out all that yellow stuff around Canberra is Cape Weed, an invasive species from South Africa.

I was so tired it was a bit of a nothing day.  All I managed to achieve was towel washing and jigsaw.  Had roast pork for dinner and watched Ponyo.

Monday.  Woke up at 5am (new time, so really 4am old time).  But!  All the things!!  Had a really productive day.  Started watching Against the Wind (more on that in another post).  Did some blogging catchup, although no UK photo labelling.

Backdating cause I'm an epic slacker!

Monday.  Slept well.  Should have been a good start to the week right?  Except I logged onto work and my Notes profile had been completely blatted which made me all kinds of grumpy.  Then I bit my mouth *hard* while eating an apple for morning tea.  Too many stoopid useless waste of time meetings.  Stu had some Ikea shelves delivered, but turns out he'd mixed up the height/width measurements, so they weren't going to fit like he thought.  Yeah I was pretty pissed off by the end of the day.  David and Stu built the shelves.  The third one in the set didn't fit there, but we did find another spot for it in the room which actually works out ok.

There were fields of yellow though..

And storms and rainbows and stuff..

This was more like the real colour of the sky

Tuesday.  Slept well.  Actually had a good day at work.  Got a bunch of tickets done, decided I was going to build some servers, did up all the doco/paperwork for them, got them built and configured, ready for Neil to play with.  David also went to Fyshwick and got me a new fish tank lid to replace the one I smashed - bestest brother ever!!!   But $25 for a single piece of glass though - ouch!  I remember when you could get whole tanks for that price.  He also mowed some of the lawn until the bin got too heavy.  Have I mentioned I have the bestest brother ever??  He and Stu also had a fiddle with the stoopidly expensive 4' fish tank LED lights - one of the transformers had gone POP the other week.  Completely non-standard of course and irreplacable.  

Wednesday.  All the stoopid.  

Thursday.  Actually went to work.  Pot Belly for drinks.  They really need to open up work drinks again - $39 for a round for three people *hurts*.  Came home and watched the Simpsons episode on video game violence, followed immediately by the High Score episode on video game violence.  heh.  Finished Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo.

Friday.  Thoroughly grumpy with the world.  Had been fighting all week with Dream11 - some sports betting company in India.  Some retard signed up with my gmail email address and I couldn't get it shut down and I couldn't get onto their support forms because they either redirected away from the form depending what option you tried, or the captcha wouldn't load, or if it did load the form wouldn't actually submit.  I was getting more and more frustrated and angry.  But I finally finally, after a week, managed to get the form to submit.  They wouldn't remove my email address from their systems no no no, buttplugs, but they did at least suspend the account and promise not to ever spam me.

We might have made evil nachos for dinner.

Watched Tales from Earthsea in the evening which I quite enjoyed.  Stu had read all the books.  I wouldn't mind reading them.

Saturday.  Housework and slide scanning in the morning.  Mostly finances in the afternoon.  Cooked epic beef brisket all afternoon.  

Watched the last episode of High Score in the evening.

Sunday.  Productive day doing All The Things.  Well not all.  That never happens.  But a lot.  Roast lamb for dinner, but hardly any leftovers, whoops.

On the middle Saturday night of the Olympics, twenty years ago tonight, there was a free concert in The Domain.  For some reason I ended up going with Neety, the brother type person's girlfriend at the time.  I was a little too terrified as a youngster to take my *super expensive* digital camera with me, so the only photos from the night were Neety's.  

The concert was pretty cool.  There were a bunch of acts that I'd either never heard of or didn't know any of their work, then Paul Kelly and Neil Finn (Crowded House).

Aside from creepy guy rubbing his genitals into us in the mosh pit, but after I GLARED at him he went to find some other people to harrass.

This was Leonardo's Bride

and Mark Seymoure

Paul Kelly was a surprise.  The only thing I knew by him was Dumb Things from the Young Einstein soundtrack, but even though I didn't know his work I really enjoyed him live. 

And Neil Finn did a whole bunch of Crowded House songs, which was super awesome, even though he stopped singing I Fall at Your Feet just in time for everyone to sing "who knows where that might lead" and barely anyone sang it (I did!!!).  

Neety wanted to hang around after to see if she could wangle a meeting with Neil Finn, or even get a copy of the playlist, and span some yarn about coming all the way from the Blue Mountains or some such silliness, but didn't get anything.  

There is a photo she took of Neil Finn rehearsing earlier in the day though.

Backdating, story of my life ;)

So where were we?  I'd been sick.  Starting Friday afternoon, most of Saturday in bed or sitting in the car.  On Sunday I felt a little better although super tired on account of very little sleep.  I decided it would depend how much sleep I got whether I would feel up to going to work on Monday.

Monday.  I actually slept really well - and for nine hours!  I was feeling a lot better, so thought I'd go to work, and go have a lie down if things got too much.  But I was actually ok all day so that was nice.

Had all my UK photo labelling done before dinner which was good.  Had a bit more of a think about hosting and gallery apps.  Had a serious meltdown because I was feeling underappreciated for all the cooking and cleaning I do.

And the kitchen light fitting caught this epic centipede.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep *sigh*.  Did a bit of UK photo labelling but stopped at Stonehenge - because a couple of hundred photos will basically just be a copy/paste so will be very quick to do.  Instead I was looking at cameras (mmm Sony A7C) and playing with Geosetter (see Geosetting for Fun and Pleasure).  

Wednesday.  Slept well.  Seems I can only sleep well every other day.  Got myself a gmaps api key (see previous geosetting link).

Thursday.  Slept well.  Two nights in a row!  Went into work for the day - six months to the day that I started working from home.  Went up to Pot Belly for drinks after work.  Watched the second episode of the Netflix show "High Score" (watched the first one the other night, not sure when).

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am til well after 4am *sigh*.  I'd planned to take a random day off, which was going to be a bit sucky to be so tired through.  Had a bit of a slow start then got stuck into my day.  I thought I'd do some fish tank stuff in the morning, then maybe some tax stuff in the afternoon.  Well the fish stuff took All. Day.  I started with the upstairs two foot (and managed to smash the lid in the sink when I was cleaning it :(:(:( ), moved onto Chrissie's tank after a break, then the angel tank (with no angels in it), and finally the downstairs two foot.  With an hour at work in the afternoon for a meeting.  I had plans for the other tanks too, I just ran out of time. 

I also took photos of the new bracket David installed out the back for the clothes line.  This way you can extend the line only half way out - where it's all under cover - so if it's going to be rainy it'll stay out of the elements.  Have I ever mentioned I have the bestest brother ever?  And this was after he mowed the front lawn as well.  He's just too awesome :)

Caught a bus into town (second bus in six months).  Met up with the sweetie and Damien who were having a drink, then we went to Happy's for dinner.

Came home and watched third episode of High Score.

Saturday.  Slept well!  Hurrah!  I didn't think I would on account of all the meat I had for dinner at Happy's.  Stu was still sick though.  He had a full week at home off sick, then all this week he was still coughing and spluttering, but his work would still rather he went to the office than work from home and keep his germs to himself.  Silly people.  

Did quite a lot of stuff on the todo list - which worked out to mostly fixing up slide scanning (the dust and scratch filter is sometimes a bit too enthusiastic and blats out real details, so have to redo those with no filter), photo processing, and blogging.  We felt like wedgies for dinner, so that's what we had!  With lots of sour cream and sweet chili sauce.  Watched the fourth episode of High Score, then Spirited Away, which I first (and last saw) in 2005 in Brisbane.  I had no memories at all of it.  Hurrah for dementia.  Hrmm.

Sunday.  Hurty kept me awake for hours in the middle of the night so that sucked.  Bit of a nothing day in the end.  Did a bit of blogging.  

David brought home a packet of Dinner Winner, so I had to make that for our dinner :)  Watched a documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the evening.

Early on in the year the sweetie decided he wanted to go to Tasmania for his 50th birthday.  We'd go down for a long weekend and just have a nice quiet weekend in Hobart.

Then Covid-19 happened. 

We couldn't plan anything in advance.  We couldn't even guarantee we'd be allowed across the border into NSW much more than a few weeks in advance.  So we sat on the idea and wondered what we might be able to do or where we might be able to go.

Then in early August Lorraine Elliot of Not Quite Nigella blogged about her trip to Tumut, Tumbarumba, Gundagai and Yass, including a visit to the Tumut River Brewing Company.  I thought a brewery tour and a weekend in Tumut sounded like a great idea and suggested it to the sweetie.  He thought it sounded like a great idea too.  The Sunday before we planned to go down I called up to see if tours would even be running (because, covid), and they were, and got ourselves booked in.  I didn't book accommodation until the day we left, because I didn't want to have to go through the drama of cancelling if one of us got sick in the intervening time.

We took the slow way to Tumut on the Saturday, via Adaminaby, snow and dams.

Sunday morning we visited Blowering Dam and the Tumut lookout before walking up to the pub.

The brewery itself is setup in an old store building, and the pub is setup next door in what used to be a tyre store.  Out the front all the tables are full of people enjoying lunch and a beer in the glorious late winter day.

There's a hand santising station out the front, setup like a beer tap!

Inside is full of comfy couches, and the day's live performance act, Toby Mobbs, is getting setup.

We enquire about our tour booking.  It seemed to have gone astray, however there's two other groups for a tour booked, so we pay and go in to sit down.  There's a couple of different options you can get - the tour; tour and tasting; or tour, tasting and meal.  We opt for the latter - tour, tasting and meal.  This includes the talk by Tim Martin, one of the owners, four 7oz tasters, and a burger or mini pizza.  All for $35.  Absolutely excellent value!!

We start with a pint of Full Grunt and enjoy drinking a beer in front of all the equipment.

While we're waiting, we have a look around.  There's the processing tanks, as well a series of fermenting tanks.

On the other end of the building are the stores of grains and hops, and cans ready for canning.  The canners come and setup in the middle of the floor and can on the spot.

On one side is a keg cleaning? filling? both? station

12:30pm rolls around and Tim gets started on his story.  Two guys have a dream to make great beer.  They all live happily ever after.

Not quite!

The story has been going on for years, and has been one drama and set back and battle after another, over and over and over again.  Which is such a shame, because they do in fact make great beer, and the brewery is an amazing thing for Tumut to have going for it.  

We have a couple of breaks during the talk (once you break that seal.. ;) ), and we get started on our tasters.  You get four tasters each, so the sweetie and I worked our way through eight different beers.

Some of the others got the Full Grunt burger and were raving about it, so for lunch we got one of those, and a mini pizza.  I wasn't quite concentrating when I went to order the food - I should have gotten something a bit more adventurous than pepperoni ;)  Sadly the sweetie had eaten half the burger before I got a chance to get a photo!

After telling the story of how the brewery came to be, Tim then went into the details of the beer making process, explaning the whole thing from start to finish, and how they use locally sourced ingredients where possible.  Did I mention this brewery is great for the local area? :)

And if you want to know about the bubble wrap marks on the side of the vats, you'll have to go and take a tour to hear the story!

After the tour is done, we head back out into the lounge.  We grab another pint each and listen to the last couple of songs by Toby Mobbs.

His last song of the day is "Three Cities" about "coming from" three cities - Albury-Wodonga and Wagga Wagga.  

I also have a bit of a wander round the pub.  

The bottle wall is amazing.  There's all sorts of historic bottles and cans there, and it was cool to try and pick ones I'd had.

We had a thoroughly lovely afternoon there, and it was a great way to spend Stu's 50th (even tho that was the next day, shh! ;) ).

The next morning on our way out of town we dropped in to pick up a mixed case of beer.  You can buy them individually, or in four packs, six packs or cases.  We opted for six different four packs, as the four packs were already bound and easy to pick up.

Tim saw us there and brought out a small glass of a sour that's nearly ready for canning.  It was very refreshing - it will be good in summer!

I truly hope Tim gets a "happily ever after" - he's put in sooo much effort!!

PS, as I started writing this this afternoon I was chatting to Tony, and he said Tim? or someone from TRBC was at Herbert's just down the road!  Today!!  And I missed it!!!  Gahh!!!!  They also tapped their 50 Shades of Purple last night, I'm going to have to get down there to try it!!

The ticketing for the Sydney 2000 Olympics was by ballot - months in advance you put in orders for what you'd like to see and with any luck you might get to see something you wanted to see.  I put in for gymnastics and on the 17th September 2000 the mother type person and I faced the HOARDES of people, in organised chaos, to go to Sydney Olympic Park and see some gymnastics at the Super Dome.  It was actually super-well organised and everything flowed nicely.

Of course we had to have a bit of a wander around to see everything first.  (aside: I still have that green tshirt - one of my "winter" tshirts)

First some photos from Mum's camera..

Then a bunch from mine..

Then onto the gymnastics!  I just had my little point-and-shoot Olympus camera with 3x optical zoom and no manual features, so the photos weren't great.  And if someone "stuck it" the crowd roared, which I'm sure would have been super off-putting for the other competitors....

A long long long time ago the brother type person put me onto Geosetter by Friedemann Schmidt.  I've been using it to geotag my holiday photos since probably around 2010.  I take the GPS tracks from my PhotoMate, and geotag all the photos with it.

I've only been using Geosetter for the basics of geotagging, but a while back David showed me that Geosetter could pull even more location data from GeoNames a free location database.  Well free except the api key is restricted to 1000 requests an hour.  It'll work briefly at the beginning of the hour then stop.  But, turns out you can register for a free account.  So I did that, and in the Internet settings of Geosetter, you put your GeoNames details in, and away you go!  Did that the other night and got it working.  I haven't started going through and adding the data to all my files yet - I'll start to work on that methodically at some point.

A year or two ago Google started charging to use their maps API.  Geosetter fell victim.  It would still work, but the map would be very dark and have "for development purposes only" watermarks all over the page.  This also would occasionally work properly if you loaded the application at a quiet time when other people weren't using it as much.  Then it would stay working for a few days, so I'd leave it open so I could come back to it.  But for most of the time it just made it a bit harder to label photos because the page would be so dark.   David had also gotten around this problem by registering for a Google API key.  This one you need to pay for, but unless you're making a lot of requests, it's pretty cheap (0.007 USD each map load if I read it right).  So I found a guide online which describes how to get an API key and configure it in Geosetter.  So I did that tonight and got it working!  It took a bit of fiddling with Google as the developer guide doco neglected to mention associating the Maps Javascript API with the project. It also didn't talk about how to associate billing.  I had to fiddle around in the Cloud Platform settings to find those myself.  But now it seems to load properly, so that'll be much more betterer!

Fun times!

Just before the start of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the Olympic flame had been traversing the world from Greece (do they really allow naked flames on aircraft?), all around Australia, and finally through Sydney for a few days.  

On this day twenty years ago I managed to see the torch relay twice, and my camera documented it three times.  NFI who any of the people were.  If it had been now it would be easy to find this stuff online, but not so easy to find stuff from back then.

First up was in Marrickville, a kilometre or two from where I lived.  It was headed southeast down Marrickville road, and turned left onto Victoria Road, where I saw it.  I went and saw it before heading to work.  

At lunch time, I walked up to Randwick from work (along with half the Eastern Suburbs) to see it coming down Avoca St? Belmore Rd?

Then I passed my camera off to Daniel, who took it into the city where it was *epic* - epic crowds and festivities for the celebration.  Apparently there was even Steve Waugh.

Still backdating ;)

Tuesday.  Slept ok, woke up on time. 

Tree guys came in the morning and trimmed our hedge back.  I told them to be brutal.  They complied.

Insanely crazy busy the rest of the day.  Although maybe I wouldn't have felt so bad if I'd been able to do my work in peace without ten different people talking to me non-stop all afternoon.  Sigh.  Watched the very last episode of Fuller House.  It was such a pity they could never get the Olsen twins to put in an appearance, because they had the rest of the cast which was just amazing to have the same group of people still working together for well over thirty years.  I don't know of any other show like it that has done anything remotely like what they did.  Just amazing.  Loved it.  Finished Day 19 of UK photo labelling.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Tackled the ticket queue I'd been ignoring yesterday afternoon, and played whack-a-mole with it most of the day.  Super heavy rain a couple of times during the day.  It was like night time, day time, night time, day time.  I watched the last two episodes of The Miraculous Mellops - and I was right about who the new Grand Baby was ;)  We also started on The Simpsons on Disney+.

Thursday.  Rage quit over people hassling me to do stuff.  I have this irrational rage at people that hassle me to do stuff while I'm literally doing stuff for them.  Then there were the people who hassled me in one system, and not five minutes later hassled me with direct messaging as well.  Drives me nuts.  Watched Derren Brown's The Push.  The whole Weekend at Bernie's reference had me cacking myself.  But I can't believe it could all be real.  Those people weren't showing any remorse or trauma at all.  If it was real, there should be arrests.  Seriously.  

Friday.  Up to episode three of The Simpsons.  But getting really annoyed at the cropping they did to get it onto 16:9 screens.  So I Googled that crap.  As of May, Disney+ had set a toggle switch so you can watch it the original aspect ratio.  Much more betterer!  Then watched Porco Rosso which I actually really enjoyed.  It has flying in it, but it's more realistic.  

Saturday.  Housework.  All.  Day.  Stu found a recipe for a vegan lasagna that said something like twenty minutes prep time.  It took him three hours.   !!  Craziness.  Had Nelson and Susan over for dinner.  Had a game of Roborally which Susan won, and a couple of games of Fluxx.

Not actually a vegan cake - they used eggs from chickens they knew

Sunday.  Bit of a late night but not too crazy.  But woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep.  Hardly did anything all day.  Roast pork for dinner.  Watched Pom Poko in the evening.  OMFG what a completely bizarre movie.  Really didn't like this one very much.

Monday.  Woke up at 5:59 - right on time!  Ok day for a Monday.  Spent all evening trying to sort out accomodation in Tumut for the next weekend.  The problem with small places is their websites are very amateurish.  Sefton House said there were three different queen rooms, but it really wasn't clear which ones had ensuites and which had "exclusive" bathrooms.  And they never answered the query I sent them.  The caravan park looked like they had some lovely cabins by the river, but it was basically impossible to tell which cabin you were trying to book on their online web form.  At least they did respond (eventually) to my query, but the ones we wanted were all booked out.  I actually didn't want to commit to anything too far in advance - I didn't want to be up for a few hundred dollars if one of us got sick and we had to cancel.  So that was all very blah.  And didn't get my quota of photos labelled.