Backdating this because I'm a slacker .. again..

As of Tuesday last week I'd slept ok the past couple of nights.  Although I realised I probably shouldn't say such things as I'm likely to jinx myself.  I'd been stressing on the weekend about the neverending housework and how many times a day I cleaned the kitchen and I'd had to run the dishwasher *twice* on the weekend and again that Tuesday night, but then the little brother cleared the floor for me and the sweetie did some washing up and I felt better about life again :)  I cooked a bunch of veggies for dinner (a tomato bake - roasted halved tomatoes topped with basil and melty cheese at the end, asparagus caesar (asparagus, butter, lemon juice, parmesand cheese) and carrots).  And I made a Yum! Delicious! cake because David and found me self-raising flour.  

Wednesday I finally finished part picking the six sets I started on the weekend.  Sometimes it really does take all weekend (and then some) which is why I stopped for so long - if we had anything at all on the weekend I didn't commit to starting, because there'd be a good chance I wouldn't finish.  Cooked some pork leftovers up with some broccolini which was quite nice.

Thursday turned up to problems with SSO in the morning, and having to fight with router ACLs in the afternoon, so pretty crappy day.  Had some Corona with the sweetie.

We were going to try and get Chong Co delivery but their website wasn't showing up as available, and they didn't answer the phone either.  So had more deep pan pizza (getting a bit thicker) - but the second pizza that week - blerf.

And then watched Prisoner of Azkaban.

Tell me what this reminds you of..

Good Friday I started on Vic's Life on Mars part picking.  I thought there were twelve sets.  Turns out there was 22.  He had many copies of some of the smaller sets - eight of one of them!  Spent time on Saturday and Sunday doing that as well.  Also made some good progress on the big jigsaw we've had going since January.  It took us about three months to do half the jigsaw, and we did the second half pretty much over the Easter long weekend.  Helped by Ravensburger very nicely using the same cutter on either side of the jigsaw, so I flipped the top (mostly sky) round, lay it over the bottom, and smashed it out.  

On Friday we went for a walk around the block.  People were actually really friendly, everyone smiled.  I saw happy tree a bit closer up, but it's in someone's back yard, so can't get close.  Cooked sausages for dinner and watched the 1970 Airport movie.

Took ages to get to sleep Friday night - super restless.  House stuff, food shopping, jigsaw and Lego.  I went food shopping fairly early on Saturday, but Coles was depleted of different thing.  Like there was hardly any orange juice, frozen food, or bananas.  Still no toilet paper or liquid soap available, but I did manage to get some paper towel, garlic/echinacea/zinc/C tablets, and some brown rice.  And then felt like I was getting a sore throat all day.  Cooked pork leftovers red curry, and watched Airport 75.

Sunday, mostly just Lego and jigsaw.  There may have been pizza scrolls for lunch.  

I took a "before" photo of our dungeon room.  It's not before Stu started pulling out books to give away so that's why there's an empty few shelves.

Watched Airport 77 in the evening.

Monday was mostly just house stuff and rearranging shelves.  I put out a fun jigsaw for David to do to have a break between one hard one and the next.

And then made runny poo for dinner!

Actually beef stew, which looks digusting but tastes amazing

Finished up the Airport box set with Airport 79 - the Concorde.  The Concorde they used in the movie was the same one that crashed - so sad!!

Tuesday I woke up at Dentist Time and never got back to sleep :(:(  Started on the next section of the Disney behemoth jigsaw.

Wednesday was cranky day due to Skype sucking donkey balls.  I hate being on the phone at the best of times, but it kept dropping out and at one point left me with a big black square in the middle of the screen and I had to restart my vm to clear it.  Not happy Jan.  I asked the sweetie to cook dinner, so he ordered Chong Co, successfully this time.

How good is this?

(From @JessHarwoodArt)

Stu and I are definitely owls.  Other than working from home and not catching up with friends on weekends, everything is much the same.

So our COVID-19 routine is not too different to general reality.  I started working from home on March 17.  Mainly because I had the hint of a sore throat and cough, and while it was extremelly unlikely to be Coronavirus (what with only about half a dozen cases in the ACT at the time), I didn't want to be *that person* that spread it around. 

My home setup is *ok* for working from home.  The biggest problem is my monitor setup.  At work my primary monitor is on my left, and the secondary is to the right.  At home my primary monitor is straight in front, and the secondary is smaller and off to the left.  So everything is a bit backwards for me.  Also I'm in what would be the formal dining room of the house, between the kitchen and the living room.  So just need to be a bit mindful of having Stu or David seeing stuff they shouldn't (which really isn't much).  We're lucky because our work is very well setup for people to work remotely, and our infrastructure supports it quite happily.  The only tricky situation came with all staff broadcasts flooding our internet links, but they've started streaming those to an external website, so even that is not such an issue anymore.  Skype, however, sux donkey balls.  It's fine for text chat, but that's about it.  Anything more is just asking too much of it.

Stu started working from home about a week and a half after me.  It took him a while to get the hardware/software he needed from his work setup.  But once he got that he's been doing ok.  We had started to setup my Lego room as a study for him before any of this started (with David mostly taking over the other desk in the dining room study, Stu wanted his own desk and private space).  It worked out really well for him to work in that room.  This weekend we've done a whole heap more rearranging.  Stu pulled out *lots* of books to be given away (sadly Lifeline are not currently taking donations due to covid-19 so they're just piling up at the moment).  I took all my models (well, all the ones from the big shelves) downstairs, and Stu took all his work/study and some of lifestyle books upstairs.  The bookshelves are super messy and unorganised right now due to all the rearranging, but I still need to get rid of the Lego minifig workstation on the table before I can pull out all the remaining books for sorting.  And it's starting to get really cold down there, so running out of time.  I suspect the bookshelves will stay messy for a while yet.

David has to keep going to work outside the house.  He's a shift worker, and unfortunately for him, we're home all the time now, which means he can't watch DVDs/Netflix while we're at work.  Well at least not on the TV.  He could probably setup his laptop to watch things with headphones if he was so inclined.  His work also means that if covid-19 does start spreading in Canberra, he's on the front lines for exposure, and it's probably inevitable that it hits our house at some point over winter.  

Lunches during the week are almost always leftovers of some description.  Pretty simple.  What has been suffering though is any sort of exercise and vitamin D.  Usually I would get a ten minute walk each way to go get food for lunch, but if I'm just heating up leftovers I don't get that.  So I've started going for a little walk at lunch.  Usually only about ten minutes, but enough to get me out of the house, get the blood circulating, and get a little vitamin D.  

Probably the single nicest thing about working from home is the lack of commuting.  I've been using the extra time in the mornings to scan more of Dad's slides.  I've been smashing out two boxes a week.  The evenings are a little less structured.  I've got a little list of things to do in the extra time between 5pm and 6pm, but haven't really done too much constructive with the extra time.  I am able to knock off work when I want to though, and not either have to wait for the sweetie or catch a bus.  So that's really nice.  My flex time is a bit too high at the moment, so will try and ease that down a bit, then will keep mostly fairly regular hours, which will also be nice.

Shopping is the biggest challenge of all of this.  I want to minimise how often I go out, so need to do bigger shops when I do go (and go by myself which is super sad - the sweetie and I have always gone shopping together).  There's three people eating here, two of us eating all meals at home, which means we need a lot more food in the house.  If I'm shopping fortnightly I have to get stuff for the first week that has to be eaten quickly, and stuff for the second week that lasts longer.  Fridge space is a huge issue at the beginning of the fortnight.  The supermarkets are out of various things at various times, so there's no guarantee that when you do go shopping you'll be able to get what you need.  I haven't seen toilet paper in Coles since we got one of the last packs when we got back from Pete's 40th at the beginning of March.  Fortunately I've been able to get it at Chris's so we haven't run out.  As I mentioned in another blog entry, we don't eat a lot of packaged food, mostly fresh food.  But the stuff that we do use all the time (tinned tomatoes, tomato paste and rice) has been difficult to get.  Again, I've been able to get things from Chris's when really needed.  

The rest of my routine hasn't changed.  I still get up at the same time (Stu plays on his phone a little longer before getting up).  I still shower and wear the exact same thing - my uniform of jeans a tshirt, with a jumper when it's cold.  I do the same things on the weekends - housework stuff and whatever projects/hobbies I'm working on.  I don't have any more time on my hands than normal, so it's not like I have time to binge watch anything.   Maybe if we do get sick we can binge watch stuff.  

The clutter is getting to me though.  We have things that need to go to the tip (like our old oven), or the Green Shed, or Lifeline.  But while I think the tip and the Green Shed are still open, I would classify them as non-essential.  So we have piles of stuff around the house.  And Stu could really use a better desk in his study, but we can't just go shopping for a new one.  Well, again, we probably *could* but we're trying to be good about this whole staying at home except for essential stuff thing...  

The only other significant change is not catching up with friends.  We would go out or have people over I guess on average every other weekend.  So that's not happening (other than a couple of virtual catchups).  It's a little sad, but remember, we're owls.  We like keeping to ourselves :)

In all of this we have been extremelly lucky/blessed.  We haven't had to stress about losing our jobs, or have to take care of kids as well as work, or wonder where the money for our next meal is going to come from.  2020 is sure going to be one hell of a year .. 

Monday I went and did the food shopping at lunch.  Definitely less crowded than the weekend.  Almost no pasta.  No liquid soap or vitamins.  Still no flour, dry rice, paper towel or toilet paper.  I was able to get a couple of tins of diced tomatoes, but a squeezy bottle of tomato paste and a four pack of tomato paste sachets was "too much tomato" and the squeezy bottle wouldn't scan.  Sadness.  We don't eat a lot of dried/packaged food, primarily fresh food, but the pantry stuff that we do use regularly (tomatoes/tomato paste/rice) is the stuff we can't get easily at the moment.  Geotagged day 6 in the evening.

Tuesday I woke up at midnight for an hour or two, and again from 5:30.  Le sigh.  Our rose bush put out a couple of roses right at the end of summer.

In the evening I made nachos.  I don't think I've ever made nachos before.  Fry some onion and garlic, a pack of pork mince (that I was lucky enough to get on Monday), with one of the sachets of tomato paste, some cumin and some kashmiri chili, with corn chips I topped with cheese and grilled, and serve with salsa, cheese and sour cream.

The boys *destroyed* them.  So much for leftovers!

Wednesday was minifig picking in the evening for a bunch of sets.  I still hate how Lego changed the colours of their greys and brown back in ~2003.  It's a real pain in the @$$ to separate them, especially in low light.  I mean just look how similar they are.

With a flash it's slightly easier to see the difference

Wednesday was geotagging day 7 of our USA 2004 trip, finishing BBT season 7, and Friday finished scanning box 7 of Dad's slides (I'm smashing out two boxes per week).  777!

Thursday started on season 8 BBT.

Friday woke up at 3:30 with hurty.  Crazy busy couple of days at work.  I was so frazzled on Friday I really couldn't think straight at all.  But I did shut down access to an old test environment which was pretty cool.  In the afternoon David pulled the bumper off his car to install a new nudge bar and spotlights.  He managed to get it all done before 11pm, because he's "that good" ;)

Saturday woke up early with hurty.  Mostly house work and Lego part picking.  Had drinks with EffanC in the evening which was nice.  Even over Zoom.  Made coq au vin for dinner and watched half of Dr Strangelove (got too restless to watch all of it).

Sunday I woke up early with hurty, except this time it *really* hurt, even with codeine, not helped by running out of naprogesic.  Slept in a bit when I finally got back to sleep, but felt exhausted and depressed all day.  David spent all day installing stuff and running wiring in his car.  He made a complete mess, but managed to get puzzle all back together again before he went to work.

In the evening I gave the oven its first test with a full baked dinner (roast pork) which turned out pretty well, and finished Dr Strangelove (either that or started it Friday and finished Saturday, can't remember which).

And I watched the original Jodie Foster version of Freaky Friday that I saw once a very long time ago.  

Tonight we had pizza (because Stu got a migraine just after lunch and wanted comfort food).

And I blogged.

2020 is sure going to be a very strange year.

Gosh what a crazy week and a half.  The world has gone mad.  Toilet paper hoarders should be shot.  

So Saturday a week and a half ago.  I can't even remember it.  Spent all morning tidying the bedroom end of the house and clearing the lounge room floor of all the stuff that got dumped in there when we cleared out space for Stu's study.  Did mostly minifig sorting of Vic's Lego.  Had salmon for dinner and watched Spectre.

Sunday morning I got up early and headed in to see the balloons.  I thought I'd go to the north side of the lake this year.  But as soon as I got out of the car I knew they wouldn't be going up - far too windy.  I was right.  Checked on Twitter and Events Canberra said it was off.  Oh well.  Ended up spending most of the day doing minifig sorting.  In the afternoon Stu tried to make some of his low carb bread but the oven wouldn't work properly.  Also, strangely, there was a light on in the back of the oven that I'd never seen before.  He finished his bread, and I cooked dinner (roast beef with veggies), with the bottom element, but I managed to burn the bottom of the veggies and the beef was a bit overdone.  I had made a marinade to try and use up some of the mustard powder we'd had in the house forever.  Soy sauce, olive oil, ginger, garlic, mustard powder, brown sugar.  Was actually really nice.  

Watched BBT and Picard in the evening.

Monday I woke up at Dentist Time and probably only got another half hours' sleep, so zombie day Monday.  We did do our food shopping in the evening.  Even the fresh food was mostly sold out this time.

Got home quite late, but still made a zucchini noodle "carbonara" (not actually carbonara, but cream, bacon, mushrooms, garlic, herbs, cheese).  Yummo.  

Tuesday had the slight hint of a sore throat and cough.  Ordinarily I would have gone to work anyways, as I felt ok.  But in these uncertain times I decided to work from home because I could.  It was highly unlikely to be covid-19, as there were only like half a dozen cases in the ACT at the time, but you never know.

Managed to get some toilet paper from Chris's and made pasta bolognase for dinner.  After dinner we watched Labyrinth, to celebrate 30 years ago to the day that I first saw it on St Patrick's Day in 1990.  I've seen that movie probably fifty times, and yet I somehow never knew that Kenny Baker was in it as part of the goblin corps!!

Oh I forgot to mention we finished the Mandalorian at some point last week.  Remind me I need to put on the last two episodes for David some time.

Wednesday I worked from home again.  Not sure I was really sick or just imagining it.  No fever.  Still only the slightest hint of a cough/sore throat.  If it was a cold it was the mildest cold I've ever had.  The day was crazy busy.  Finished geotagging day 4 of our USA 2004 trip in the evening.

Thursday.  Not sick anymore.  But still at home.  I suspect I'll be working from home for the next several months.  Although I might have to pop into work every so often on the weekends to rotate out my backup drives.  Missed drinks (which as of writing tonight was the last drinks until further notice).  Sad times.  Watched The Big Short in the evening.  Somewhat topical at the moment with the economy in freefall.  While noone can really quantify how many people die as a result of increased unemployment, it's very likely a thing, and even if people don't die, the misery caused by losing jobs/houses/marriages would be immense.  I do wonder about the mass unemployment caused by shutting everything down because of the coronavirus pandemic and how many people will die as a result of that, versus from the virus itself.  

Contrails crisscrossed the sky all day Thursday, this is a set of five of them in the evening.

Friday was playing with SNMP V3.  In the evening I watched both versions of Lady and the Tramp.  All the reviewers on IMDB on the remake generally hated it.  It was actually quite similar to the original in terms of plot, just fleshed out a little in places.  I was pretty impressed with the CGI generally.  Did they use real dogs and just superimpose the faces?  Or were the dogs all CGI?  I should Google that crap.  But what I did find a bit jarring was the interracial marriage in 1909 Missouri.  Just wouldn't have happened. That and just some of the dialogue was too "modern" ("I missed you guys"). (And how could a "poor" musician afford such a huge house anyway?).  If they'd set it in modern times and not tried to make it look like a period piece, I think it would have worked better.  

Friday night couldn't get to sleep for hours, so ended up sleeping in a bit, which made me feel like half Saturday was wasted.  Grunt.  But did a bunch of house stuff, and picked more parts for another six Lego sets in the afternoon.  "Watched" the Blue Danube on YouTube, followed by Rhapsody in Blue, and then put on my Fantasia 2000 DVD, and finally The Planets.  Was a pretty great afternoon actually.  We felt like a pandemic movie in the evening.  Netflix has taken down Contagion, so we watched World War Z.  "Zombies" aside, I found it all a little what the?  I mean, why would the UN send out a rescue mission for someone that didn't even work for them anymore?  Doesn't make any logical sense.  

And it was a blood bath.  Ok so wine.  And it wasn't even mine.  What a waste of wine ;)

Sunday kept our social distance but had Maccas for brunch.  But Stu wasn't feeling the best (he probably got whatever I had, but again, a super mild case of whatever it was), so he stayed in the car while I did the shopping.  All three butchers at the markets were closed because they'd all run out meat, and chicken shop was closing up.  And it wasn't even lunch time!!  So got all our fruit and veg.  Then popped into Bunnings because David wanted me to get a new light for the oven, but they didn't have what I needed so I ended up getting the wrong thing, le sigh.  Also needed some cockroach and moth deterrants.  Then to Coles to get meat and some other bits and pieces.  There was some meat there, certainly more than last time.  I told the checkout chick that all the butchers at the markets were closed, and she said they'd sold out of meat completely on the Saturday as well.  I will be really pissed if I hear of people throwing out fresh food because they hoarded too much and couldn't get through it.  That would be so wasteful and so WRONG when there's people that can't even get food at the moment.  Put on dinner when I got home (slow cooked beef stew). 

David pulled the oven apart and found the cause of the mystery light - it was the back fan force element arcing.  We were lucky it didn't burn the house down or electrocute the sweetie.

He also installed a new clothes line for us, because the old one was falling apart (we'd already had one of the four lines break and the others were looking fragile).

Bestest brother ever!!

Spent all afternoon cleaning the oven, and had the beef stew for dinner, followed by Robot Chicken's Star Wars episode.

Monday I woke up at Dentist Time.  Again.  I got up for a bit this time, but didn't help much.  Blah morning.  Meanwhile David was sourcing parts for the oven.  He found a place he could get an element, but he also wanted to replace the cooling fan, which I think died years ago.  He wouldn't be able to get that for another two days, so it'd mean extra work and delays and would it really be worth fixing a probably nearly thirty year old oven?

Also.  Ewww.

So we bought a new one.  Whoops.

I wasn't in any fit mental or physical state to be out buying home appliances.  So I don't know if I did the right thing.  But we did get a fairly good discount on a discontinued De Longhi, so maybe??  The worst part?  Those hours wasted cleaning the old one :(:(:(

The afternoon was filled with too many dumb meetings and by the end of the day I really just needed a drink and an early night (which I had).

Monday night I slept really well, felt good all day.

Tuesday night (last night) I woke up at 1:20 and stayed awake for over four hours, mostly stressing about All The Things.  Mostly whether we'll be able to get food in the coming weeks/months.  And what all those unemployed people are going to do about food and rent and mortgages and kids.  At 5am, after a massive meltdown, I got up, had a double shot of Baileys, turned my alarm off, and eventually fell asleep a bit after 5:30 for two hours.  I was still super tired today though.  

Tonight I walked down to the end of the street and back.  Only nine minutes of walking, but I haven't done *any* walking in over a week.  Normally I get twenty minutes a day at lunch, so I've been feeling like a big fat blob.

In the past week, airlines have shutdown their flights, there's been travel bans, restaurants and "non essential" stores have been shut down.  My next holiday has been postponed for two years.  We were going to see the Passion Play in Oberammergau, which I've been wanting to see for over thirty years.  I find it somewhat ironic?  strange? weird twist of fate? that they've had to postpone due to a plague, when it was a plague that brought about its existence in the first place.  Luckily they've only postponed it and not outright cancelled it, as Mum might not be around for the one in ten years.  She might not be around in two years either if Covid-19 hits her.  Stay away from people Mum! :)

Stay safe (and home!) everyone!!

Last Tuesday morning I started scanning Dad's slides. There's about 7000 of them. I'm aiming for one box of 36 a week (more if I'm not too busy), which should mean I could get it all done in about four years. If I don't die of Covid-19 first. I had a play with the dust and scratch filter and it pretty much works like magic. I should have used it on Mum's slides. Oh well. I'm still impressed how well my 14 year old scanner works (Christmas present from the sweetie in 2005). Tuesday evening was washing, blogging, Lego sorting, geotagging (some of Day 3 of USA 2004 trip). I also started to try and figure out the catalog numbers for the hundreds of Vic's minifigs, and what sets they go in. He sure has a lot that don't belong to any particular set he had, so he must have gotten large quantities of loose Lego not in sets.

Wednesday evening the sweetie took me out to dinner because he's the best sweetie ever.  Went to Kinn Thai and had softshelled crab again, and orange duck.  Yumm.  Then more Lego and minifig sorting and finished geotagging day 3.

It rained during the week.  A lot.  Looky at this - the new Belconnen swimming pool they dug out the past couple of weeks!

Thursday was Gin night. Four of them tasted like, well, gin. One was a bit more interesting. And there were two flavoured ones - shiraz, and earl grey. They looked, smelt and tasted of those respective drinks. Cool stuff. Well the shiraz one was, the Earl Grey tasted like tea. We had F over for pizza and tv after.

Friday evening I had to work. My work was only about a minutes' worth, but I stuck around in case they needed my help with anything (or if I'd missed a firewall rule somewhere). Bailed at 11pm.

Saturday I checked in at work and everything seemed to be going ok. So midmorning we headed down the coast (via Belco to pick up a present for Pete). The blackened bush started at Nerriga (most of the town was saved) and stayed black the entire way to the coast. Absolutely heartbreaking. It was actually amazing to see just how much property had been saved though. In places it was completely burnt bush all around, and in the middle there would be a house intact. Amazing job done by all involved, especially the firies.

And because it's Australia, you have bushfires one week, raging floods the next.

We headed straight for Huskisson and went to the beach briefly because, coast.

Then had some lunch, picked up some supplies, then headed for Kit's. Their place was basically completely surrounded by fires, but their street was saved.  At Bewong it looked like the firies stood on the highway and said "you shall not pass" .. 

We setup the house then waited for Pete to get home. It wasn't a complete surprise because his mum spilled the beans, but he was expecting just his sister and maybe a couple of his local mates, but instead he got a small crowd so that was pretty cool :) So yeah nice party, and only one tantrum haha.

We had dessert first.  Because that's what adulting is all about.

Akubra party!

The itty bitty bbq gas bottle ran out, so they hooked up the house one to it.

I was up at normal time the next morning, but then had to wait hours for everyone else. Eventually Kit got up and I could copy all the wedding videos for them. Had some brunch, then we headed home.

Was too tired to do much Sunday arvo/evening so just had a quiet one and an early night.

Monday it was full steam ahead rearranging the house. Stu had been wanting some study space for quite a while. He tried setting up a space downstairs last year but he never really liked it. So we emptied out the dumping ground room, brought up the couch and swapped the tables around. It took all day. And now everything from the room is spread all around the house. Which is stressful in itself. hrmmm.

We also went out at lunch to do our food shopping.  We hadn't been in three weeks so we were pretty bare.  Of course the empty shelves were something to behold.  No toilet paper, almost no tissues or paper towel (people thinking they could use that instead of toilet paper??).  Very little rice, pasta and long life milk, no flour.  Just madness.  

Cooked curried sausages for dinner (to use up some of the curry powder that's been sitting in the spice cupboard for ten years or more).  They were pretty good.  I'll put the recipe separately, because I have this feeling I'll be using it again heh.

Tuesday woke up at 1:30 with hurty and never got back to sleep :( So zombie day Tuesday. It took about 14 goes of disconnecting and reconnecting my phone on Tuesday night to download the seven videos I'd taken at the party. Fricken HATE Apple.

Wednesday we finished season 6 of Big Bang Theory - half way through!

Tonight I've been watching the 1970 Ned Kelly which I've never actually seen.  There's not much on IMDB about it, but it does note it was filmed in Braidwood, and look at that!  So it was!  Fifty years later and all the buildings are still there (screenshots from the movie and Google Street View).  Enjoyed it more than My Brilliant Career.

I brought some glow sticks home from the party.  Six days later and they're still actually glowing.  !!   Although very faint now.  The first couple of nights the phone could still take pretty decent photos of them.

Wednesday I was just about to start eating lunch when Ben came over and said hi, so had lunch with him and Sarah which was nice.  In the evening geotagged day 1 of our USA 2004 trip.  The flights I'd done in Google Earth back in the day, so it wasn't too much effort.

Watched the first few episodes of the Mandalorian again so David could see them.  

Friday I took a Random Day Off and basically just tried to figure out what Lego sets Vic had by the pieces I had for things.  Picked up the sweetie from the airport in the evening.

Saturday morning went mountain climbing.

Did a bit of house stuff in the morning then we headed out to the club.  I spent some time finally finishing writing up my 2019 year in review.  Then it was happy hour and an epic Mexican feast.

Sunday was house stuff, jigsaw, geotagging and Lego.  Geotagging photos from moving cars is a whole lot harder than those taken walking around in cities.  Just sayin'.

Also this week one of Stu's living stones flowered!

Didn't end up doing any food shopping.  We're going to make do with what's in the freezer.  

Tonight I downloaded, processed and blogged all my photos for the week in a mere half an hour!

Last Tuesday.  Couldn't get to sleep again last Monday night so Tuesday was another zombie day.  But came home a bit early and had quite a productive evening doing housework and photo stuff.  Did most although not all of the things on the todo list, but actually felt pretty relaxed about it all which was good.

Tuesday night slept really well, which worried me I'd ruin Wednesday night's slep heh.  Did a bunch of planning work at work.  In the evening was blogging USA 2000 photos, and had another quite productive and fairly relaxed evening.

Another good night sleep Wednesday night, and more planning Thursday.

Well the good sleep had to end.  Friday morning woke up at 3am.  At 4am I got up and blogged.  Went back to bed and got a *little* bit more sleep.  But pretty tired Friday.  Finished of my planny plan plan and sent it around for review.  Got home and started watching Clutch Powers which Chrissie lent me forever ago, while waiting for Kit and Pete to arrive up from the coast.  They came and got me and we headed over to Pete's Mum's place.  We walked to the Labor Club only to find that Kit had been banned... fifteen years ago!!  And she didn't know.  Because she'd been to the Labor Club *multiple* times over the years.  Weird stuff.  My theory is that for years they would scan your licence, but probably there was nothing electronic to tie it back to a person, it was just as evidence.  Nowadays they OCR the licences and look people up electronically so it's finally linked her back.  Anyway so Kit was pretty upset and Leisa was hungry and Carol didn't want anything too salty and Kit's not a fan of Asian so we're all like.. um.. Anyway we thought we'd try Charnie's Noodles and Dumplings.  So the girls sat down while Pete and I went to the bottle-o.  When we got back they said it was an hour and a half wait for food.  And we were like WTF.  There were like three other people in the restaurant.  But apparently they have an epic takeaway/delivery service.  So we said forget it and walked out.  Back to the drawing board.  So we ended up getting Crust takeaway which we took back to Carol's.  A bit of a debacle, but we ended up having quite a nice evening of chatting.  And there was a puppy.

Slept relatively well Friday night, but didn't end up getting much done on Saturday.  Did a bit of USA 2000 photo stuff but not a lot else.  Watched Skyfall in the evening.  No good quotes from that movie or iconic one liners (at least from Bond).  

Another relatively good night's sleep Saturday.  Finally finished getting our tax organised to be posted off to the accountant.  Did a bunch of processing of the scans I have of Mum's photos (for future blogging).

Also saw this wild blue tongue lizard in the back yard twice on Sunday.

Dropped Stu off at the airport, then did food shopping.

Also.  Oh no, not again.

Monday I went to cook lemon chicken using some of the lemons that dropped over Christmas, but sadly they don't last forever and most of them had dried out.  Sadness.  Did find a few to use so that was nice.  Didn't get much else done though.

Tonight managed to get the photos off my phone without ending up in tears which is always a win.  Helped by not having any videos this week, and none of the pngs had had their timestamps screwed with by Apple.  Also watched the Dirty Dancing episode of The Movies that Made Us.

And look, it's before 9:30.  Although I still need to wash my hair.  Dammit.

Man the insomnia last week was horrendous.  I think I only got about one good night's sleep all week.

Tuesday night I woke up at ~3am for a couple of hours.  So Wednesday was an even worse zombie day than Tuesday.  On Wednesday evening I finished fully labelling my USA 2000 photos (everything had been labelled previously, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.

These things were so good!  Just like cheese kranskis.

Wednesday night I actually slept quite well.  I think I started culling down the USA 2000 photos for blogging on Thursday evening.  Note that all these photos have been online for nineteen years on conspiracy, but I've never put the photos and the blog together (actually I only digitised the blog a couple of years ago).  Rewatched first two episodes of Picard because David wanted to see it too.  Struggling to get stuff watched now cause noone's ever around at the same time.  Haven't even started the Mandalorian.

Friday morning I woke up at 1am and never got back to sleep.  Worst zombie day of the week.  I couldn't deal with people at work, you know the ones that don't actually understand basic networking, so they have no idea what they're even asking for.  My brain was just too mushy to deal.  So spent the day deleting old firewall rules which was a bit of fun.  Met up with the sweetie for a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar, then we had dinner at Kinn Thai.  Both the chili jam crispy pork and the papaya crispy chicken were "one chilli" rated, which you'd think would be mild, but it was at the upper limit of my tolerance.  I'd hate to try anything hotter there...

The sweetie dropped me off at the airport which was lovely of him, but when I arrived I found my flight had been delayed over an hour and a half - apparently due to the bad weather in Sydney.  I chatted to Rob and Fiona briefly who happened to be there.  Then I tried to see if I could get on the earlier Sydney flight, but apparently it was full.  Had to ask.  So went and bought some overpriced wine and sat and read my book.  The original indicator board said boarding was at 20:25.   So at a bit after 20:15 I went for a bit of a wander.  Saw the indicator boards that said my boarding time was 20:10, but there was nothing to say go to gate.  So that confused me a bit.  So I kept walking, and then finally heard the announcement for the final boarding call for my flight (I couldn't hear the announcements properly where I'd been sitting).  So then it's like crap.  I'm basically at the Qantas end of the terminal and I still need to pee.  So did that then basically had to run the entire way down the terminal to gate #3.  #grunt.  Turns out I wasn't the only one to get screwed over like that, we still had to wait for a few more people before we could take off.  Of course then I was coughing most of the flight from the exertion.  hrmmmmmm.  Still, I had the seat to myself, and got a few cool timelapses of the path out of Canberra and again in Sydney.

So it's nearly 10pm by this point, and the buses don't run all that often, according to a timetable I found the next one was in half an hour.  So I thought it would be quicker to get the train, even though it costs about $15 more #grunt.  But there were no trains.  And the indicator boards had *nothing* to indicate how long to the next one.  In the end I waited over half an hour for a train to Wolli Creek.  Shoulda gone for the damned bus.  At Wolli Creek a Waterfall train pulled in as I got there, but it was 19 minutes til the next Cronulla train.  So was going to go to Sutherland and walk, but messaged Mum and she said she'd come get me which was lovely.  

So got to Mum's place and crashed in a heap.

Slept relatively well - and quite late - til 7:30!!

Had breakfast with Mum (cardboard flakes with liquid cardboard on top - yeuch), then we went for a wander (in the rain haha) to the shops for some supplies.  Came back and gave her computer a bit of a health check and uninstalled some crap and allowed Kaspersky to delete some dodgy toolbars.  After lunch I culled down Ryan's photos a bit.

Then headed off to the party.  I was pretty anxious to start with due to such a big crowd of people and not knowing so many, and the people I did know I hadn't seen in years and I was all a bit freaked out, until Luc saved me with some wine.  Then we got the morph video going and downloaded all my photos, so they got played through as well.  Lots of food and most everyone else seemed to have a good time heh. 

Trained it back, just missed a Cronulla train so Mum picked me up from Sutherland again.  Isn't she a nice mother type person? :)

Slept reasonably well again, then got up, got ready and Mum nicely dropped me off at the station (it was *pouring* with rain heh).  Got to Central, went to the loo, then straight onto the coach which was waiting.  No announcements at all to confirm I was definitely on the right bus tho heh.  It was mostly full when I got there too, but someone was sitting on the aisle so I got a window seat yay!!  Not that there was much to see other than rain... Left fifteen minutes early, got into Canberra five minutes early.  I did finish my book an hour early though. Whoops.

Stu met me at Jolimont, then we had some lunch at Wild Panda which nice enough (some hot peanuts, tofu salad, and two sorts of dumplings).

Tried to do food shopping at the Spar in the city, but they had about three trays of meat and that was it.  So dropped into Coles on the way home.  In and out in ten minutes haha.

Didn't get home til mid afternoon, so then of course got depressed about not having any weekend.  And too late to start anything.  So just did a bit of Picasa tagging.  and cooked a pork roast.  But forgot to turn the oven down after half an hour, so the crackling was ruined (too hard).  Then I spilt most of the jelly everywhere.  I'm such a failure.  BBT, Fuller House, then bed.

Today I woke up thinking it was Saturday and got really sad that it was Monday.  But did a bit of planning which was good.  

A solid day of rain and the lake is full again!

Tonight I wanted to get the USA 2000 photos into the blog.  But at ~7:15 I started downloading and processing photos.  Two hours later and I'm still going, and still blogging (this has taken half an hour so far and I haven't even inserted any photos yet).  So much for getting anything else done tonight.  

Stop the world I want to get off.

.. or not..

Thursday we watched the live action Aladdin.  It was pretty underwhelming.  None of the charm of the original.  Will Smith's genie was probably the best thing about the movie, and he ain't no Robin Williams.  It felt like watching a Bollywood movie rather than a Middle Eastern one.

Friday Neil and I tried out Malatang Hotpot.  You choose your ingredients, pay by weight, choose a sauce, and they cook it for you.  ok value - my 275g of food was $7.95 or thereabouts (I can't remember the numbers).  They have four sauces in the built in sign above the food, but there were five on the counter (with spiciness ratings).  The ones above don't give any indication of spiciness, so I went with big bone broth, which sounded pretty mild.  And it was.  Neil got the spiciest, which was too hot for me.  I'd be happy to try a mild or maybe even a medium next time.  Biggest problem was the *huge* bits of spinach which made it super messy to eat.  They really need to cut things a bit smaller.

In the evening I watched My Brilliant Career, which was to be honest pretty boring.  Full of unlikeable characters behaving badly.  Meh.  But with a stoopidly young Sam Neill and Robert Grubb.

Friday night was stoopidly hot and I just could not get to sleep.  Epic grunt.  Might have had a meltdown around 1am.

So was pretty tired on Saturday.  Did a bit of house stuff, and a bit of photo stuff.  Did some food shopping, although I was nervous about leaving the house because it was super hot and very windy.  

As I was cooking dinner (beef stronganoff from an old packet of Mum's), EffanC called, so they ended up coming over for dinner and chatting and snackages.

Slightly late night but not too crazy.  

Sunday I spent the entire freakin day trying to get caught up on finances, getting bank statements etc to get organised for tax.  Yeah didn't even finish.  #grunt.

But the sweetie did cook a slow cooker chickpea curry for dinner.

Monday I took a random day off, had a super productive hour or two of housework, and processed all Ryan's morph photos.  Made several videos for the party.  Later in the afternoon I pointed Picasa at my work photo directory and had it see who was in photos.  Interesting stuff.  It did find a lot automatically once tagged, but the majority it wants confirmation on.  It rather nicely saves all the people in each file into an ini file in the directory, to make for easy extraction later.  But I did forget to do my washing.  Whoops.  Cooking chicken teriyaki for dinner with a packet that was best before the exact same day Dad went and carked it..

Tuesday.  Even though last night was *much* cooler, I *still* couldn't get to still til some time between 12 and 1am.  So frustrating.  So zombie day today.  Salmon for dinner.  And then Stu challenged David to fix our two digital radios which stopped working last year.  And he did.  Because he's the most awesomest brother ever.  Also fun: we were both labelling photos from flights across America.  Me from late 2000.  Him from early 2020.  Fun times.

And there's a reason I don't tell Certain People stuff - cause whenever I do they basically tell me I'm doing it Wrong and make me feel dumb.  Le sigh.

So last Tuesday after battling for two nights with Apple, and blogging, it got to 21:30 and I still needed to wash my hair.  Le sigh.

The lake was a little fuller after the hail storm.

Thursday was a bit of a crazy day.  There was a bushfire near the airport, so people were distracted monitoring that (it originally started in trees that I'd noticed on the way to the club just last weekend were dead because of the drought).  And then it took out some good chunks of our network because an Optus location lost power and they didn't have generator backup there.  And there was a water bomber plane crash.  Sadly it was the same C-130 we saw taking off out of HMAS Albatross last year.  Sad times.  And then they closed the airport (well most flights were cancelled), stranding people in (and out) of Canberra for the evening.  I really couldn't concentrate very well on work that afternoon.  In the evening I was going to watch Coco by myself (finally caught up on all the Pixar movies I started watching a year ago, with just Toy Story 4 to go now - which is coming soon!) but the boys were ok for me to watch it on the main tv and they watched it too.  Was pretty good.  Well except for the whole I issue I had that photos have only existed for the past hundred or so years, so what did people do before that?  Paintings?  hrmm

Friday I went over to Chrissie's and we had some champagne for her birthday and had Chinese takeaway and just chatted which was really nice.  Her car was damaged in the hail.

Saturday I did a bunch of research into how I was going to morph Ryan's donut photos.  One person said use "face movie" from Picasa.  My version of Picasa was pretty old and didn't seem to have it, so I downloaded the latest off the Wayback Machine.  And it was magic.  Saved me hours and hours and hours of effort.  Well, I still need to get some final photos from Luc to finish it off but I suddenly found myself free for the weekend.  

In the evening was a party for Aquila's 60th.  Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising but he came and stayed anyway which was nice.  And we didn't have a late night.  There was a lot of food.  Food spam to follow ;)  After the jigsaws!! OMFG!!

Sunday.  OMFG I hate Apple.  Ever since I got my XS, it's never synced my Google calendar with the phone.  I've tried all sorts of suggestions but nothing ever worked.  So I gave up and downloaded the Google Calendar app which works just fine.  But it's also stopped syncing my contacts.  Which is more annoying because I often update my phone, but I want Google to be the master.  So I went hunting to see if I could try again to fix Google sycning.  Someone talked about using iCloud.  So I logged into iCloud to find my contacts aren't synced there at all!!!  Even though it's set to backup contacts.  What a retarded piece of crap.  I complained on Twitter, as you do, and they actually responded.  Not with anything useful of course.  I haven't tried the last thing they suggested, because I was completely over it.  I'm going to go back to my old 1999 perl/mysql database as my "master", making sure I have a full backup of everything, then try some more to hack away at it.  

We were originally going to go to the club Sunday afternoon but Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising, so we just stayed home.  Which suited me just fine as I was having fun geotagging my USA 2000 photos, and listening to the Classic 100 Music in the Movies, Rescreened, which I listened to the entire weekend which was awesome.  Did a bit of jigsaw as well.  We watched Quantum of Solace in the evening.  Man, that movie made me dizzy just looking at it.  Such a frenetic pace in the action sequences - editing of shots less than a second each.  Madness.

Monday I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep (well I did for about half an hour at 6:30).  Hurrah.  Spent the day geotagging photos.  It was fun reliving my trip to New York from 2000, with more fresh memories to reinforce it all from a year ago.  I was sad geotagging the World Trade Centre photos though - I found it somewhat strange/disturbing that I could still geotag those photos with complete precision.  I was even able to geotag just about all the photos fairly accurately in Disneyland.  It's amazing how much has stayed the same over the past twenty years.  Managed to manually geotag the entire set of photos in one weekend.  Ok so there were only 727 of them, and about 70 I'd done the other week.  

On Monday afternoon a bushfire started near Orroral, where Stu, Kit and I did the Granite Tors walk a few years ago.  We could see the smoke from our place.

We watched the first episode of Picard in the evening.  

Got a much better night's sleep on Monday night.   Tuesday the Orroral fire got much much worse.  We could see the pyrocumulus clouds from work.  I got some pretty insane timelapses of it.

Tuesday night I backed up my phone.  It only took 32 minutes and about 8-10 reconnects of the phone to get the photos and the half dozen regular videos, not counting getting two timelapses I got via Google Drive earlier in the day.  Then another 15 minutes to process them (every single video had its timestamp changed), minus the few minutes I ran outside to see the sky on fire..

Today I worked from home.  Last Friday David had gotten sick enough of our slow internet upload speeds that he called Internode to see if they could fix it.  Today an NBN dude turned up and went off to fix it.  Turns out there was a broken connector, resulting in exactly half the speed we should have had.  So he fixed that and our download speeds are now back up to 20mbit down, 4 up.  Not quite as fast as it was before, but still twice as good as recent times.  Hurrah!  So at least that was a win.  Smoke from the Orroral fire blew north and the sky got a really eerie green/brown/yellow colour for much of the day.  

Tonight was just going back into the photo labels I'd done for the USA 2000 trip, and giving them a bit more detail and tidying it up.  I also redid all the panoramas.  Back in the day I used a program (Panavue?) that you had to manually set linkage points for it to line them up.  It worked pretty well for fairly horizontal panoramas, but not so well if the camera was angled.  So I redid them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor.  Sometimes Microsoft comes up with amazing software, and this is one example.  Works like magic.  

Case in point:

In all the crazyness of the world right now I can't help but be inspired by these flowers growing in our front garden.  They've basically had no water all summer, except during the storm last week.  Yet here they are, in full bloom, smiling at the world.

Stay safe everyone!