I've added another two photos to the Stanwell Tops collection :)

Monday.  Day after first covid shot.  Just a sore arm, but otherwise felt fine - oh well, no day off! ;)  Labelled most of my quota of photos before dinner, and all 193 by 19:19.  Watched some Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Netflix Human: The World Within.  

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - just super restless.  Had most photos labelled before dinner, but had to stop and turn the computer off because of the passing storm (One Drive was being a poo, and so was FTP to my hosting server and I hadn't backed up the computer that night yet).  Finished labelling day 18 by 19:33 then watched some more Alfred Hitchcock and Human show.  CSS is evil.

Wednesday.  Slept ok for a change.  Cleaning day when I wasn't getting distracted by stuff.  More Human show.  CSS is definitely evil.  I gave up fighting with it to get things how I wanted for my USA 2000 gallery.  I've pretty much finish it for now.  I'm not entirely happy with the design of it, but it'll do for the moment.  Now to start on the next holiday gallery ;)

How dumb is Whittaker's chocolate?  This salted caramel dark chocolate is very nice, but it refuses to break where it's supposed to, instead breaking through the middle of the pieces, making an awful mess, even after I attempt to cut through with a knife!

Thursday.  Annual whiskey night at work.

The Midleton was very smooth but the Kilchoman was smokey which made it the winner.

We also bought snackages for people to have on their tables 

Afterwards Con and I went over to Lachie's mate's place cause it was Lachie's thirtieth.

Friday.  Felt like peppermint tea in the morning.

Met up with the Chrises and Neil for lunch at Herbert's

I gave myself all week to do a bunch of doco I needed to do for the next round of cleaning, yet still didn't manage to finish it by Friday arvo :(  X-Files with the sweetie in the evening, and I watched Gifted, which was very sweet, and Mckenna Grace is pretty awesome.

Saturday.  Didn't get a whole lot done because I was somewhat distracted listening to the Classic 100.  

We did pop out in the morning so Stu could pick up a package, and get petrol, and have brunch with Kit.  My phone is playing up at the moment (iOS 14.6 maybe??) and sometimes just doesn't save a photo when you take it.  So it never saved the photo I took of my eggs benedict I had a Stella's by the Lake (no longer Black Pepper).  

Got home and put dinner on.  We found this cut of pork the other week and got it - because I feel like it's a waste of all that crackling to use it in a pulled pork.  Also made it a lot less fatty!

Sunday.  Rinse and repeat of radio listening.  Stu and Immy came over for a bit to play with Stumpy.

I pulled out some pens to test them.  These Pentel pens I've had since 1986.  They don't work too well, but all of them at least wrote something.. thirty five years later!!!

These gel pens are somewhat newer.  Although they could be as old as ten or fifteen years old.  None of them work properly (in fact some of them had issues from day one).  So sadly they all got tossed.

In the evening we went to EffanC's for dinner which was nice - first time we've really caught up with them all year.

Stu really liked this crumbed basa (so did I actually) - lemon juice, basa, then a thick layer of breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese and spring onions.

Monday.  Today.  Alternated between house stuff and photo stuff and even started a new section of the Disney behemoth jigsaw. 

Made pizza scrolls for lunch, with tomato paste, three cheeses, herbs, garlic powder, mushroom, olives and sundried tomato, but my phone didn't save the before photo I took, and stuffed up one of the after photos, so this is all I got.

Stoopid useless Apple.

Download photos off my phone this arvo for first time since 14.6  Photos are now arranged by month, instead of being in a new folder every time the phone clocks a thousand photos.  But Apple is STILL messing with the timestamps on my files.  I don't think they're EVER going to fix that bug.  Thinking my next phone is more likely going to be a Samsung.

Managed to get photo downloading and processing done, a bunch of Eurasia photo labelling done, cooked dinner (lots of roast veggies and some steak for me) and cleaned up, and watched the last episode of Human: The World Within (although Netflix played them in reverse order for reasons unknown) by about 20:45.  An hour later and I've also managed to blog.. hurrah..

Monday.  End of the weekend.  Cooked all the veggies for dinner.  Potato and sweet potato, tomato with buffalo mozarella I got for 80% off, brocollini and facon, cauliflower with paprika, and capsicum and zucchini.  And a bit of lamb I dug out of the freezer.

Tuesday.  We're into season 11 of The Simpsons.  Then photo labelling and the first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (I'm sure we used to watch this a bit when we were young).  

Wednesday.  Finally got caught up with my photo labelling, into Egypt this week.  More Alfred Hitchcock.

Thursday.  OMFG why is every interaction I have with the government so damned painful?!?!?  So it was announced on the news Thursday morning that 40-49 year olds are now eligible for Pfizer - win!!  So I logged on to book an appointment, except you need to create a myDHR account.  Sigh.  Don't they have some sort of centralised system attached to Medicare for all this crap?  So I went through the process of registering an account, except it died half way through with this error:

So I'm like.. did it go through or not??  (my tweet about it *still* hasn't been answered!!!)  Fricken hopeless.  So started all over again, and this time it went through.  Except then you have to wait up to 24 hours for them to confirm your eligibility before you can book an appointment.  Sigh.  In the end it probably only took an hour or so for them to get back to me, so booked an appointment for Sunday afternoon.

My Aunty Rhonda sent me this work of art this week, made by an aquaintance of hers.  It's a journal, but it's more like an adventure, with little pockets and fun little bits and pieces all through it.  Not quite sure what I'll do with it, but it sure is pretty!!

Friday.  Finished watching tv with the sweetie over dinner just after 6pm, so watched The Wolf of Wall Street.. which was very.. long..  I didn't realise it was based on a true story (what I get for not ever reading up on movies before I see them).

Saturday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - my feet were freezing.  Woke up early though, tried to get back to sleep, ended up getting a bit more, slept til nearly 8am.  Bit of a slow start, and in the end pretty much all I did was play with my USA 2000 photo gallery.  The sweetie cooked dinner of chilli mince.  Then we watched a few hours of Gettysburg.

Sunday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - this time I was too hot.  I think I'm dying. 

Made pancakes for lunch.

After cleaning the kitchen in the morning I just worked on my USA 2000 photo gallery.  In fact I got it to a point where you can have a look if you like.  I've still got some work to create the location index pages, and I need to setup a footer with contact deets and links back to my blog.  But if I die now, at least one of my holiday photo galleries will be online.  Saw my birds in the afternoon, then did a bunch of fish tank water changes.  Then I went and got my first dose of Pfizer vaccine!!!  I arrived about 17:15 for a 17:30 appointment.  Gave them my deets then waited.  And waited and waited and waited.  They didn't call me up to go in until 17:50, and then I had to wait while the single nurse there attended to the other person that came in at the same time as me.  It was 18:00 before I finally got my jab.  While I was waiting to make sure I didn't keel over, another person that came in was being seen at 18:05 - for an 18:15 appointment!!  No fair, how come I had to wait thirty five minutes, and he got in early???  Sigh. 

Got Kingsley's on the way home for dinner.  I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night hungry.  CSS is evil.  Or more precisely, how different browsers deal with it is infurating.  More Alfred Hitchcock while I downloaded and processed phone photos and blogged.

Now for the fun part.. waiting to see what side effects I get from the vaccine.. :)

Monday.  24th.  Not backdating ;)  Slept ok I think.  Had an ok day.  Updated our network diagram because it was WRONG, and we can't have that!  (discovered while trying to fix some monitoring dashboards).  Got 174 photos labelled before dinner and another hundred after dinner - past 10000!!!  Also downloaded and processed my phone photos from last week but didn't have time/energy to blog.

Tuesday.  Couldn't get to sleep for *ages* stressing about All The Things.  Had a big lunch (oops - people kept telling me to eat their chips! .. and I'm a seagull.. soo..)  Connor helped me take home three pallets from downstairs - just so that I can store some boxes in the garage without worrying about them getting water damaged for the once every year or two flood that we get through the garage.  

Wednesday.  Woke up at 5:30 from a dream where the sweetie had died during brain surgery.  I was so upset I couldn't get back to sleep.  Spent hours and hours during the day in meetings. Fun. Not.  Super late home but still managed to label all Dad's day 16 photos (nearly two hundred of them), even while watching Aircrash Confidential (watched all six episodes on 9Now this week).  Only a hundred behind in the photo labelling now, should be able to catch those up on the weekend.

Thursday.  More meetings.  Neil's beer(s) of the week this week were two from Moondog - the white chocolate white ale I first tried at Herbert's the other week, and a chilli vanilla stout (which didn't taste like chilli or vanilla or stout!).  

Friday.  Hurrah for working from home!!  Did a bit of cleaning, pretty quiet day.  Watched Gallipoli in the evening - forty years old this year and yet I've never actually seen it.  Hurrah for peeps uploading stuff to Youtube!

Saturday.  Had a pretty relaxing day.  ie, got practically nothing done around the house/computer.  Stu had a migraine in the morning so it was a pretty quiet day all round.  Headed out to the club in the afternoon and lit the fire and it was all very cosy, then we headed up for the evening's events - an Italian themed night.  All the food!

Sunday was pretty much just *work*, almost no fun.  Feel like I'm drowing in housework.  Did a couple of loads of washing, fish tank stuff, clothes sorting and a bunch of blogging.  Started watching the remake of Rebecca in the afternoon (I saw the Alfred Hitchcock version on the plane from New York to Singapore in early 2019).  Watched Lucy with the sweetie in the evening.

Today was much of the same.  All these boxes had been up in my "hobby" room until Stu converted it into his man cave, so they got moved downstairs, but it blocked up the whole dungeon room so we couldn't move in there, so now I had those pallets I could move them onto them in the garage.

Other than that just food shopping, all the work, caught up with photo labelling (finished day 16, into day 17), cooking an epic dinner of almost all veggies (ok so also a bit of leftover lamb i pulled out of the freezer) and some tv with the sweetie.  Finished up watching Rebecca in the evening.  Not entirely sure if I liked it or not.  It had more modern "values" but they could have written Maxim a bit better, altho apparently it did have Daphne du Maurier's ending not Alfred Hitchcock's censored version (I can't remember the book it was like thirty years ago).  

Forty years ago today one of the parents (probably Mum) took these photos on Dad's camera of us as kids.

When I was a blonde.  With a bowl cut.

Me and David (Mum liked getting photos of my hair)

Realised I never did this at the end of March!

This was one from the Green Shed I did at work.  Complete!  Somewhere in Canada, but I don't think anywhere I've been.  This puzzle was a bit tricky because pieces would fit even if they were wrong.

Bernese Highlands.  Another Green Shed one we did at work.  Complete!  XL helped a bit with this one.  Whoever did this jigsaw last pulled the edges off first and kept them separated - because some of those middle bits have *very* straight edges.  I wasn't so kind to the next person, and put everything away together ;)

Sizergh Castle.  One of a trio I got at the Green Shed.  This one had one extra piece that I kept aside just in case..

Wittenberg.  The second of the trio I got from the Green Shed.  That extra piece from the previous puzzle?  It went in this one :)  I had a look through all my photos taken in Wittenberg, but seems I didn't actually see this.

Annie gave me this for Christmas last year.  It was pretty horrible.  The pattern wasn't too bad, but all that white stuff was a killer.  It sat for like a month or so without really being done.  The cream coloured parts at least had a bit of gradient so that part wasn't too bad either.  I finished it over Easter, so technically this should have gone into the next quarter, but it was out for so long in the first quarter I'm putting it there.

On the weekend of the 26-27 May 2001 the parents and I repainted the second bedroom of my flat.  It went from an actually pretty but very bright blue to boring off white.

Mum also took photos of the exterior, and with my bed made up in it

Monday.  17th.  Backdating this.  Super busy day of people asking me stuff as soon as I logged on, and All The Tickets (4 incidents and 13 requests!!) so no cleaning time.  Cooked dinner (beef cheeks) at lunch time, as well as after work.  I seriously don't have time for work, just too much to do.  Also roasted a bunch of veggies for dinner, so lots of leftovers so no more cooking all week.  Only a bit of photo labelling (66 photos) because it was the Lego Masters finale.  Was actually surprised Scott and Owen didn't win in the end, I reckoned they could have won it from about episode one or two.  

Tuesday.  Another busy day.  Lost it when I was over talking to Neil and after ages realised I was standing right in the middle of Duncan's meeting.  Far out I hate going into the office.  Noone ever goes to meeting rooms anymore, they all just sit at their desks.  So whenever I get up I run a gauntlet of walking through three or four meetings on my way out.  Hate hate hate.  Sad there was no more Lego Masters to watch, but did label some photos.

Wednesday.  Dusting around the hallway smoke detector and it went off and wouldn't stop (until Stu got out of the shower to press its button).  Ok fine, so I must have gotten some dust in it.  But ten minutes later it went off again at random.  Was a bit stressed about going to work if it was just going to beep all day - it'd distress Stumpy and the fish *a lot*.  But got Damien to listen on his way in and he couldn't hear it, so think it's ok.  Stressful day.  Labelled 196 photos, so only 260 behind - half a week's worth.

Thursday.  Generally depressed about Microsoft and its complete nonsense with how everything of it works.  Literally nothing it does is standard and we've had to make an *awful* mess of our network to try and accommodate it.  Hate.  Was astounded at the price of new vinyl in JB's .. like $50 for popular records!?  Insanity!

Will stop here.

Sunday.  Didn't post a pic of the pork roast..

Monday.  Busy day, trying to clean all the things, but getting deeper and deeper into the mess the deeper I go.  Leftover pork for dinner, photo labelling (into Jordan in Eursasia photo labelling), Lego Masters.

Tuesday.  Rinse and repeat of Monday really.

Wednesday.  Busy day.  XL has been off on training or sick all week so super busy with tickets.  This week we finished the Puntasic Musicians jigsaw so people had a lot of fun trying to find the musicians/bands.  Labelled 82 photos.  So 208 photos behind to keep up the schedule for the year.  Manageable.

Thursday.  Went with the sweetie to our doctor who has moved to a suburban location, maybe wanting to get into aged care much??  After a couple of days of people guessing musicians, we did the big reveal of the answers just before drinks.  Had pizza for the first time in a month.  

Dominos Florey is still advertising The Big One, but I asked and they're not selling them anymore

Watched several episodes of the Antarctica anime (Singapore been-theres!!!) then the second episode of The Surgeon's Cut (watched the first one the other day, not sure when).  

Friday.  Was helping out Aquila with some DNS stuff and he put a beer emoji in the chat, and that was enough of a trigger to suggest a Herbert's lunch.  @CLBradley couldn't make it, but Tony could so that was nice.  Had some of the Moon Dog white chocolate white ale which was amazing, and had the Mac and Cheese which was delish.  

Went down after work to help with Tony and Jess's horrible Bach jigsaw.  It's all black and white, but the worst thing about it is if you put two pieces together you can't actually tell if they're right or not.  Worst jigsaw in history, they may not ever finish it. 

Watched Nomadland with the sweetie in the evening.  It was pretty slow, but somehow still interesting.

Saturday.  A day of all the things.  Alternating between physical stuff (houseworky type stuff), photo stuff (Dubbo photo culling) and fun (playing with my digital Lego house model).  Stu had the oven on in the morning to make some baked eggs in an attempt to get through the epic jar of salsa we have, so at lunch I had a go at making a Dominos puff pastry pepperoni and feta pizza.  It actually worked really well, except for it being a little soggy in the middle, and it also blew up a bit.. maybe pricking the surface would have helped?  I'll post most of the pics in its own post.

Pretended to be healthy for dinner - cooked up some leftover pork with some shallot, garlic and cabbage, on rice, with dried fried onion on top.

Stu must have liked it - he went back for seconds!  After some Antarctica anime I watched the third episode of The Surgeon's Cut, about a transplant surgeon.  She talked about the liver being the centre of the body - where the soul is.. and all I could think about was alcohol making the soul happy .. only it doesn't.. haha

Sunday.  Got some stuff done in the morning, then headed out for brunch, a Bunnings run and some food shopping.  Spent the majority of the afternoon blogging - our Dubbo trip from 1981 (check it out!!), the Dubbo This Day in History posts from the past week, and downloading and processing photos for this week's blog.  Stu cooked a pea and ham soup for dinner.  Finished up with Lego Masters and this blog entry.

Today was 16 May, a day which has had various significant events over the years, but this year we didn't do anything of any particular note.  Oh well.  

Forty years ago today we went to the Western Plains Zoo and Old Dubbo Gaol.  Full entry of that trip is here.

Before we went to the zoo Dad took a photo of the Court House.  Look at that palm tree go!

Dubbo Court House - 1981

Dubbo Court House - 2021

Then we biked around the zoo.  I don't have exact replicas of the photos, but they're sorta close.

Giraffe at Western Plains Zoo - 1981

Giraffe at Western Plains Zoo - 2021

Giraffes at Western Plains Zoo - 1981

Giraffes at Western Plains Zoo - 2021

Zebra at Western Plains Zoo - 1981

Zebra at Western Plains Zoo - 2021

Rhinoceros at Western Plains Zoo - 1981

Rhinoceros at Western Plains Zoo - 2021

After biking around the zoo all day we went to the Old Dubbo Gaol.  I don't know how we were still standing as kids.  Stu and I biked around the zoo last month and were pretty worn out by the time we had to return the bikes.  I certainly wouldn't have had the energy to go to the gaol after!

Entrance to Old Dubbo Gaol - 1981

Entrance to Old Dubbo Gaol - 2021

Gallows at Old Dubbo Gaol - 1981

Gallows at Old Dubbo Gaol - 2021