But the most recent one: people that buy stuff on ebay that don't bother to contact you after a week, even after repeated emails to them.  Or people that buy stuff on ebay, keep saying they'll be there "tomorrow" and then never turn up.

Hate.

In other news.

I've been having more Christmas parties - a big work one that went late and was a lot of fun.

Then instead of a nice relaxing weekend, I had to deal with aforementioned sucky people, as well as lots of other people trying to coordinate pickups remotely at mum's.  And this was down at the coast, without a computer, and I didn't have my ebay password and it was all a super huge stress.  Really really didn't want to have to go away that weekend, but it was S&K's combined 40th and we've been terrible relatives this year so thought we'd better go.  So had to go via the club, then headed down.  Stayed at Dave's house (thanks Dave!) but just did some jigsaw while Stu collapsed, then we watched some Veronica Mars and had pizza for dinner.  Didn't even bother with the spa.  Next morning was the party, although it didn't really get going til we had to leave.  Left there and headed straight to Sydney (we had to take two cars down the coast).  Sigh.  

Got to Sydney and didn't even get to dump my stuff - had to go straight to the new place to meet the uncles etc, then we went out for dinner which was quite nice.

Home, dealing with annoying ebay people, collapse.  Didn't get to sleep til like 1am though :(

And then there was chaos in the city today which made things .. interesting ..

More Sydney.  More sorting.  More stuff.

Mum purges tupperware

This pigeon was on the first floor of the George St KFC.  It made quite a mess.

Vicki

Caught up with Jo and Marc again at Jet at the QVB for drinks and pizza on the Tuesday which was great, but a bit of a disaster getting home as the trains were all stuffed up.  Took me an hour and a half to get home :(  

Also had a lovely lunch with @StuartCRyan.  

Came home Wednesday night with a car filled up with stuff to give away or sort through (including all Dad's slides and physical photos).  

Thursday after dinner and washing we went over to Kit's for a few drinks which was fun.  Friday I watched Air Crash Investigations and much of Gladiator while tidying up the dungeon for the car load of stuff.

Saturday I'd originally been going to help out with the big Christmas party, but I decided a few days out that I really needed a day at home for my sanity's sake. I have just had so little time at home in the past two months that I think I might have died if I hadn't stayed home.  So I was up early and spent the morning tidying up the dungeon, then emptying my car.  In the afternoon I did more sorting, cleaning and put up the Christmas tree.  I got nearly 10000 steps without even leaving the house.

In the evening we went to Mishi's for lots of eating and chatting and a bit of Pirate Fluxx, which I won two games of, and Mishi won a game.

Today I'm back in Sydney.  We went to Ikea to pick up a china cabinet, and she bought a mirror as well.  Then back to Taren Point to pick up her tv unit.  Squeezed the whole lot into my car.  Hatchbacks are pretty awesome really.

Tonight was Carols Under the Stars at Como church, but it was all thunderbolts and lightning, so it was inside under fairy lights which was pretty cool.  

Listed more stuff on Freecycle.

So you may remember that I've been freaking out the past few days about how busy I'm going to be for oh, you know, well til the end of the year.  On my calendar I have exactly one weekend where nothing has been planned, and that's the weekend before Christmas.

So you can imagine my delight finding out that the mother type person is planning to sell the house.  Like right now.  By Christmas.

Which leaves me exactly zero time to finish which would have taken probably at least another year's work in terms of sorting stuff out and either selling it or freecycling it.  Before Mum just gets a skip or five and chucks the whole lot out.

So now I'm studying my calendar trying to figure out what events I can drop, and what planning can be compressed into a half or a third the time I have available.  And what is going to need to give.  It'll probably be my holiday photo sorting.  I still haven't even *seen* most of my holiday photos.

Fun. Not.

Been trying like to crazy to catch up with life, as well as trying to get through some of the stuff I really need to do in the next few weeks.  Not succeeding too well.

Friday we got to see Angry Anderson and he spent an hour telling us about his life and how it changed quite dramatically when his daughter was born.  It was funny and emotional, a really good talk.  He also looks *really good* for a 67 year old!

Yesterday the sweetie was still feeling pretty blah from whatever bug he picked up in Queensland, so we didn't go out to the club.  This was a relief for me as it gave me most of the day to do some cleaning and geotagging of holiday photos.

Had dinner at EffanC's which was nice, although C and Stu weren't too impressed with the episode of You Can't Do That On Television that we put on after dinner.  Me on the other hand was in full nostalgia mode - not having seen the show in something like twenty five years.  Stu also suffered through a game of Bananagram, which I won.

Today I went to the George Harcourt (for the first time ever in fact) for a birthday lunch for Steve.  Then we did our food shopping.

This afternoon was trying to organise stuff for the ball.  

Dinner was lamb.  So much lamb.  Then catching up on rss feeds (I'm *months* behind :( ).

Can someone please stop the world, I need to get off for a moment....

Half of my battle with blogging these days is the whole *effort* of downloading, selecting, resizing, stripping geodata and blogging photos.

I have several weeks of photos to blog.  Over fifty actually.  Eep!  Lots of birds, funnily enough. 

Also, during the week I have nothing much to say.

Because I only tend to blog about stuff I've done, and I don't tend to do anything much interesting during the week.

But I've been really impressed with my SIL blogging every day this month and I feel bad being so slack with this blog.  I really do love the archive of my life I keep here.  

So I'm going to try again to blog more often.

Today I had my Sadie cap on, and cut the rules down on one firewall from over two hundred to a little over one hundred.  Cleaning makes me happy :)  Mind you it's a lot easier to clean up other people's messes.  My own messes are harder because I'm lazy :)

For most of Saturday afternoon I went through our receipts.  Mine went back to 2001, Stu's back to about 2008.  I'd pretty much kept every receipt of mine *ever*.  I always kept meaning to reconcile them with credit card statements, but that hasn't happened in years.  And I had great visions of entering groceries into some sort of database to watch how prices changed over time.  Yah right.

But I've been applying a rule to stuff like that - if noone would care about it after I died, then there's really no point keeping it.

Honestly, who's going to care how much I spent on groceries after I'm gone?

So this is the pile of receipts I'm chucking out.

I did keep some things.  A few sentimental ones, like Infinity on the Gold Coast where I went with Stu on our one and only date.  And receipts for dvds and cds, and appliances and the like that we still own.  Fourteen years of receipts down to this.

There was a bit of nostalgia in some of them, especially for the older stuff.  And some fun things like VHS tapes, which I was still buying as recently as 2005.  Zooper Doopers! I found a receipt for some of those from 2005, which means I've had some ice blocks in my freezer for about nine years... *gulp* .. maybe I should eat them this summer!  And at my old work, plenty of ATM withdrawals and Post Office receipts from my ebay packing in 2003-2004 that reminded me of places I haven't thought about in seven years.  Receipts from places like Rosehill, where I used to visit Striker for Evilhouse video nights.  Petrol receipts from places on the way to/from CIA visits and visits to Stu.  BigW receipts of DVD purchases when I first got a DVD player.  I used to go there whenever I needed to go shopping for groceries and have a look for weekly specials.  I used to get all my meat from Sonny's Butcher at Rockdale Plaza, and all my fruit and veg from Mile's Fresh Food Market, which I can't even remember whereabouts in the plaza that is now.  Booze came from Woolworth's Liquour, and the rest of my groceries from Franklins.

So much of my life history in little bits of paper.

So much of my life forgotten because it seemed too inane to blog about.

I wish I'd started blogging a lot earlier than 2003...!!

Thoroughly demoralising week at work.  Still got issues with the app that went out last week.  Painful.

Thursday night a small group of us went out to 2 Yummy again - two weeks in a row!

Friday after work the sweetie and I had a drink at Capitol Bar and Grill.  I'd been there before when it was still just the Rydges hotel, but it's gone all funky now.

Then we went and fed Potty's fish and picked up some frozen stuff on the way home to cook for dinner.  Watched Downfall with the sweetie which was pretty good.

Saturday morning said goodbye to our old dishwasher and the new one got delivered and installed.  After lunch we bought the sweetie a new car.  Then did our food shopping and came home.

I made a white chocolate caramel slice out of my Women's Weekly "squares and slices" book.  Had some of that after dinner, was pretty yummy.

I also cooked some duck breasts with roasted veggies for dinner.  I've never cooked duck breasts before.  They turned out pretty well!

Watched 12 Monkeys with the sweetie, and then a doco on Queen.

This morning I cooked an imitation breakfast raclette, cleaned the kitchen, downloaded and blogged some photos, and put dinner on to cook a bit after 1pm.

So a very foodie weekend that's for sure.

But the sun is out.  I know we should really get out and get some exercise and some vitamin D ....

Last Sunday I borrowed @CLBradley's car and headed up to Sydney.  Got it down to 7.0L/100km which is pretty decent.

Hacked some portals while I waited for mum to get home from her lunch.  We did a bit of cable de-ending, and pulling stuff out of the back alcove.  Dinner was scotch fillet steak.

Monday night we went out to celebrate Mum's birthday at the Tradies.  I had bbq pork ribs which were amazing, but I couldn't finish them, so brought the leftovers home.

We didn't do any more garage cleaning that night.

Tuesday was takoyaki day at Sushi and Grill.  This time I had it with grilled pork dumplings.  They were ok, but a bit difficult to manipulate with chopsticks.

After work I met up with Marc and Jo for a drink at Jet in the QVB, which turned into several drinks and then dinner.  A great fun night.

Partly demolished garlic bread

Supreme pizza.  Sadly we ended up getting too full to finish it :(

Calamari - yum

We didn't do any garage cleaning that night.

Wednesday was Peking Duck with @StuartCRyan.  We decided to be sensible this time and only have the pancakes, and get the san choi bow as takeaway.  So we didn't stuff ourselves silly for a change.

Work has been *insane* the last little while.  On Wednesday I was just about to go catch a train home when I got smsed by henrch to ask me to stay and help fix an app.  I sat there for two hours with next to no communication from the developer, which was super super frustrating.  And when I could finally escape I was in a rush to catch a train, so forgot about the san choi bow in the fridge :(:(:(  Hopefully my colleague remembered to take it.

We didn't do any garage cleaning that night.

In the end I decided to stay the night in Sydney, and go home the next morning.  Of course I was grumpy and stressed about work wasn't I, so couldn't sleep, and then got up at 4:30am the next morning to go home.  So I was pretty much a zombie the next day.  Went to bed at 8:30pm on Thursday night.

Blerf.

So after sleeping beautifully on Thursday night and Friday night, Saturday I was awake for ages in the middle of the night, had a sleep on Sunday, and consequently couldn't get to sleep at all last night :(  It was after 2:30am by the time I got to sleep :(  I'm hoping I'll be tired enough to sleep properly tonight.

Spent most of the morning catching up on emails and had a bit of tidying fun in the afternoon.  Real work calls though so that will keep me busy for at least some of tomorrow.

I also lost $85 in cash today :(:(:(  After travelling and not having stuff in my pockets, I had the notes in the wrong pocket, and they must have fallen out some time between getting to work and lunch time.  Hopefully it made *someone*'s day :/

The sweetie picked me up at work and we did some food shopping, then came home and I cooked salmon for dinner - yum!

Tonight has been spent cooking, washing up, geotagging and catching up on tv.

Generally had a quiet weekend.  Stu was still sick (yeah two long weekends and three days leave in between and he was sick the entire time :( ).

Friday I did a bit of house cleaning and watched Four Weddings and a Funeral in the afternoon.  I might have also made some Anzac Biscuits.

Saturday we celebrated our anniversary by going out for brunch at Pulp Kitchen.

The we did some food shopping and came home (via the church where we got married six years ago)

I put dinner on to slow cook (beef stew nommm).  Didn't do much at all in the afternoon (that I can remember).  

Enjoyed our dinner and watched Twister together in the evening.

Sunday I did a bit of stuff around the house then went to the War Memorial to see the model of Gallipoli, except the whole section is undergoing a big renovation at the moment til the end of the year :(  So had a bit of a wander around and had a play with Dad's camera there.