Kazza the Blank One - Search Results

And so it ends...

I still miss my three month uni summer holidays .. I know, it's been fifteen years since I had one, but I still miss them!

Anyways.

So the end of the break and I actually had a really relaxing day. Was sort of at peace, so to speak. Got my desk mostly cleared. Paid some bills. Sorted out some finance stuff. Sorted some receipts. Played Loops of Zen. Played Canasta. Did some kirigami. Went through some newspapers. Edged some of the front lawn. Played with my magnets and made a buckyball. Played with HDR, Camera+, and Instagram on my iPhone. Cooked a nice red curry for dinner. Watched some Star Trek with the sweetie. Kept the kitchen cleaned up. Did some washing. Downloaded photos.

Really good productive day, with lots of fun as well.

I got this 7x7 cube for Christmas. I haven't been game to muck it up yet!

Bucky ball!

I'm really liking making my own red curries at the moment.

This one has:

A little bit of leftover pork, garlic mince and half an onion fried in peanut oil in a wok

Mushrooms and zucchini added next

Finally some red capsicum and pak choy

Add in three teaspoons of red curry paste and a tin of light coconut cream

Nomm! (I also added a small handful of cashews on top). The sweetie went back for seconds :)

2010 Year in Review

So not a bad year all up :)

Let's see. Where to begin.

The year started with me away from the sweetie - I was visiting old Sydney friends. First year since we met that we weren't together on New Years, which was a bit sad.

Did a fair bit of other travelling during the year.

The big trip of course was to Japan and the UK in September. It wasn't the best holiday I've ever been on. Japan was 34C for five days in a row, and I didn't have shorts. And the UK was grey and/or raining for a good chunk of the time we were there, plus we missed out on going to Legoland which was pretty devastating for me. But on the plus side, everything "worked" in terms of bookings. We didn't get robbed. We didn't crash the car. We didn't miss any planes or trains. We did see heaps of cool stuff. So really I can't complain too much heh.

Had quite a few smaller trips as well. Spent a couple of days in January at the coast with all of Stu's family. Would have been better if I'd brought stuff to entertain myself with heh. Went to Mogo Zoo then. There was a quick trip to Sydney for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Went down the coast to DaveC's house three times in March, August over my birthday and October where we had a great whale sighting. Went to Melbourne over the Easter weekend to see Cats with Nat&Andrew. That was a cool weekend, we'd love to go back and do more Melbourney things. In July we went to Queensland for a long weekend to visit Chay and David. Decided that July/August is definitely the time to go to Brisbane, so will probably do that again this year. And another quick visit to Sydney on Boxing Day.

Had a very busy year at work. Rolled out new proxies at the beginning of the year, but they were fraught with problems from the start and it was very stressful. After several patches during the year, they finally settled down, only to have the upstream proxies start playing up. Blah!

Semi work-related were a ball in March where I managed to squeeze into a ten year old dress, but only just barely! I also made a slightly drunken bet that I'd wear a dress to a Melbourne Cup lunch if all the boys wore suits. Our director unfortunately decided to take it seriously and made all the boys wear suits. Reluctantly I had to go buy a dress and wear it. We also ran a trivia night that I think went really well. And attended work drinks pretty much every week I was in the country ;)

One of the big projects at work took several months and was so stressful I'm sure it led to a high blood pressure reading in July. I've been working on relaxing at work (and at home) and subsequent readings have been a lot more normal.

Otherwise healthwise I had a great year - just a cold early in the year but nothing else.

Spent a lot of time with Nat and Andrew during the year. Those guys are always so much fun to be around, we really enjoy their company. Also did a few Singstar nights with Windy and DaveO and saw Damien and Amanda a few times as well. JamesC came to visit a few times, and the whole family stayed with us a couple of weeks ago. The Hokins clan came to visit, as did the parents a couple of times and the little brother a few times. We've spent a lot more time with DaveC in the second half of this year. Seems I get on with him a whole lot better now that we're not working together heh.

Had another heat wave early in the year which meant us putting quite a bit of ice into the four foot tank to try and keep the temperature down. Seemed to work and we didn't lose any fish from it. I'd moved the danios downstairs so they wouldn't overheat, and found a couple of months later some baby danios that had been surviving quite happily unattented. When I later moved the danios back upstairs, there were more babies in the downstairs tank. Win! Stu got a colony of duboisis for the four foot, which are great fun, and will follow you around when you go to look at them in hopes that you'll feed them! Stu's also gotten back into killifish and has been diligent at looking after his fish again. We're back up to fourteen habitated fish tanks now!

On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, we had a very cold winter. This year the pool froze over probably a dozen times (it only froze over twice last year). One of the days the ice was a full 3mm thick in places! We even had snow in October. Go figure!

On the Lego front, a whole stack of Toy Story Lego was released so had to get all of that. And six new Harry Potter sets as well, although really only one of those is "new". There's a few other cool sets I want to get too. Went to BrickExpo in August which was very cool, and made me wonder if I should put anything in one of these years.

Other toys included an iPhone for me, a Blackberry for Stu, a video camera for Stu, a Canon 500D for me and a PS3.

So I've had the 500D for four and a bit months and have already taken 15000 photos on it! The majority of those in the UK of course ;) I still haven't sorted my UK photos *at all*. I did however manage to sort enough of our Japan 2009 and Europe 2008 photos to get the highlights into the blog entries. One of my next projects will be making photo books of those trips. I did make a photo book of our wedding as a Christmas present for parents. Having seen the finished result (which I was stoked with) there's a few little changes I want to make and need to fix up some of the images before we get our copy printed.

Around the house, we bought a whole stack of bookshelves for the downstairs room and set those up. So that room is quite well setup now. The garden has gone slightly feral though, especially with all the rain we've had recently.

Shows seen this year:

Canberra Show (ok technically this isn't a show ;) )
Ron Mueck exhibition in Queensland
Spamalot - so much fun and great for an amateur production
Twelfth Night - quite well done
Wishful Drinking - super awesome!
George Hrab - wished I'd listened to more of his music before the day (me fail!)

Movies seen this year:

Toy Story 3
The Kung Fu Kid
Inception
Not the Messiah (should this be a show or a movie? heh)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1)

Books read this year:

"Watership Down" by Richard Adams
"On the Banks of Plum Creek" by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and the rest of the Little House books)
All five Belgariad books by David Eddings
"Vet in Harness" and "If Only They Could Talk" by James Herriot
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell
"Bare Bones" by Kathy Reichs
"Jaws" by Peter Benchley
"Seven Little Australians" by Ethel Turner
"Wishful Drinking" by Carrie Fisher

And a few other bits and pieces:

Installed Windows 7
Got a new niece - Violet Grace
Tried my first ever Big Mac, and quite liked it
Went to the Dinosaur museum at Gold Creek
Climbed a couple of mountains - Black Mountain, and Mount Painter a couple of times
Had lots of fun making panoramas with Microsoft Image Composite Editor
Lost all my holiday GPS tracks because iTunes sucks donkey balls
Lots of trips to various ACT (and NSW) dams as they all filled up and overflowed. Haven't made it to Bendora yet, I kept being on call or there was too much rain closing the road to it
Tried out Crust Pizzas. Stu is on a mission now to try them all :)
Got heaps of my dam photos and other photos onto the RiotACT
Had a Yellowbeard night here with a bunch of Daves and a Neil
Watched the end of a lunar eclipse

Phewf. Yup, busy year :) I'm actually amazed I got this thing written *before* the end of the year - that never happens!! :)

Six hours to go. Have a great 2011 peoples! Happy New Year!!

When I was your age

So Dave dragged me along to George Hrab's show in King O'Malley's today. I'd heard some of his stuff before (including the song "When I was Your Age" down the coast one time) and bits and pieces of podcasts. But as always with these things, it's always super cool seeing and hearing someone you've only ever heard electronically before.

He did a bunch of songs for a while, then did an "Ask George" bit, then a few more songs. At around 3pm I think he finished up, but then he hung around the bar and chatted to people for ages, and then later on played a few more songs to the few of us that were left.

All in all it was a lot of fun and very cool :)

James and Buzz

So James called me up this morning. He was in town and did we want to do something this week :)

So said dinner tonight would work :)

So he came over and we got some food from across the road courtesy of Uncle Bill and cooked it up (and it was nomm) and then we played Julia's TV Quiz Buzz (which wasn't just TV, it was actually general knowledge and we quite liked it). I won a game and the sweetie won a game. Fun stuff.

And now it's 10pm .. whoops..

(of course it meant all my plans for tonight including cleaning my desk and doing some washing went totally out the window.. oops..)

Twelfth Night

So Dave's regular theatre buddies piked on him, so the sweetie and I went along with him to see Twelfth Night tonight.

It was a lot of fun. There were some modern touches to it and some Australianisms thrown in (including Floriade!) and even some songs! Tubthumping!?! Funny stuff. There were only seven actors, so some had multiple roles so it was *slightly* tricky to keep up with (since I've never read it and I did not know the story at all) but not too bad.

On the way to the theatre (there was the whole butthole at Baskin Robbins incident but I won't go there) we saw a poster for Wishful Drinking - with Carrie Fisher!! This I must see! Does anyone else want to come with me? You have 24 hours to get back to me, your time starts now.. :)

Home

Well I'm quite convinced that if I stopped blogging and tweeting noone would even notice, much less care. My last tweet was a week ago and only two people commented - my brother and a friend who doesn't have a twitter account. I considered stopping blogging/tweeting altogether. I considered going somewhere else and starting again or going totally private. But I have to keep coming back to the only real reason I blog - it's just too good a diary not to. The years before I started blogging are almost like the dark ages, where I don't really know what I was doing from day to day. I love the chronicle, and going back to find out when I did things. And all the photos. And occasionally reading a random month or search results and reading stuff I'd completely forgotten about. Twitter is a supplement to the blog, and records stuff that doesn't seem blogworthy enough for a whole post. It's crap as an online archive, but regular backups mean I still have an offline record. So as much as I'd like to wait around for someone to miss me, I doubt that'll happen any time soon, and not blogging is hurting me more than anyone else.

So we got back from Japan and the UK on Saturday morning. Managed to survive most of the day before collapsing at 4pm for a couple of hours. Slept ok Saturday night and was basically fine on Sunday. Although did stay up waaaayyy too late on Sunday night. Whoops. Monday was more recovery from Sunday than from jetlag heh.

The holiday was decent enough. The biggest downer was the weather. It was grey most of the time. Rainy a lot. Very little sunlight. Which is pretty depressing as a photographer. And Legoland was closed the last two days we were there, which is when we were planning to go. I, of course, was devastated. It was supposed to be one good thing to finish the trip off on, and instead it was the biggest let down. It really soured my mood about the whole trip and harder to think of the highlights. Which included our first day in London, Harry Potter filming locations, some lovely cathedrals and Scotland. We also missed quite a few things I wanted to see because we didn't have the time. And the things we did see were rushed. But I'm not planning to go back any time soon (except maybe to Edinburgh, and Legoland if I can face it) as there's too many other places in the world to see. I took around 12000 photos (haven't got an exact count yet). I still haven't seen most of them.

Our weeping cherry tree was nice enough to wait til late September to flower this year. It made me very happy to come home and see it in full bloom.

In the afternoon there was a cool rainbow

Tonight there were storms south of us, and Mt Ainslie was all black, the sky was dark, but it was sunny on the foreground. Made for some cool lighting conditions.

Although this spider freaked me out by coming up next to me while I was taking photos out the window.

I spent some time on the weekend building this model of Tower Bridge I picked up in London. It was quite fun to build, but not really a puzzle, as all the pieces are numbered and there's instructions. But a pretty cool result.

And even cooler? An email from Lego on the weekend with a Lego version!!

This of course I must have. The Lego version doesn't have the other piers on the ends, so I'll probably get some extra bricks off BrickLink and make up my own.

For reference, the real thing -

So it was back to work today. I had planned to spend an easy day getting back into things, reading emails etc. And mostly that's what I did. Took til around mid afternoon to get through five weeks of emails. I did get given two projects, both of which are fairly urgent. One will be significantly easier than the other though. And also got caught up in *problems* which are just painful and suck time like you have it to spare.

Epic win of the day was an incorrect shelf price at Toys R Us, which meant I got the Toy Story garbage truck in Lego (RRP $99.99 and $109.99 normally at Toys R Us) for $65.99 !! Epic win!! Only one more Toy Story set to go now. And the new Imperial Shuttle. And the new Diagon Alley. And the Eiffel Tower.

With daylight savings, and a beautiful warm afternoon/evening, it felt like summer. Had a walk, dusting done and two episodes of Survivor watched before 8pm. And the sweetie cooked dinner :)

Shogun, Koko Black, Bugs Bunny

Last night the Windys were kidless, so we went out to dinner to use up some Entertainment Book stuff.

We decided to go to Shogun in Civic and have the Teppanyaki bar.

Starting with a Yebisu

We had to wait a little while because he had to come and setup in the second room. Another group of three people came in, and a single guy.

After a while the dude started cooking. He cooked up some egg first and had a go at throwing it into our mouths. He actually got it in a few people's :)

It was yum yum yum! :)

We just had the cheap teppanyaki menu ($35.90 for fish, chicken and steak)

At the end he signed thankyou on the hotplate in salt - backwards for him!

He also signed happy birthday for the dude sitting next to us, whose birthday it was :) We all sang happy birthday to him :) And we paid out one of the girls who didn't know the Twighlight dude was Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter (or that he was British!).

It was a heap of fun, we want to go again :)

After dinner (which actually included dessert) we went across to Koko Black for coffees. I had a raspberry icecream - it was yummmm!

Then came home and got really grumpy with a broken system at work - grumpy because it was too slow and painful to actually try and do it remotely. So I gave up in disgust and went to bed (fixed it this morning - MS10-024 which is a patch for the SMTP service in IIS completely resets your SMTP settings!! How fail is that!! We weren't the only ones that had the same thing happen to us - #microsoftfail )

Tonight the sweetie stayed back for after work drinks with his colleagues. I'd probably have joined them except I was on call :( But it did mean I could watch whatever I wanted on telly, so I watched the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner movie which was just a collection of the clips with a little bit of new stuff joining it together. And repeats of Blackadder II. Then went into town to pick up the sweetie when he was ready to go.

Lamb roast

Yesterday the call was put out... and Nat and Andrew answered (well the little brother did too, but too impractical for him to make it).

Had an epic nommm lamb roast for dinner, with herbed baked potatoes and these way cool carrots that Nat did (thinly-sliced carrots, butter and honey, wrapped in foil and bunged in the oven for as long as the roast). 1.3kg of lamb and only two slices of it left and no veggies left.. oops!

But Vienetta for dessert! Nommm!!

So around eating we played a bit of Wii Music (stupidest game in history because you can't skip the stoopid intro stuff and have do the whole tutorial - lame!!) and lots of Buzz.

Was a lots fun evening :):)

The rest of the day was catching up on news feeds (down to 138!), the photomosiac jigsaw (finished it!), sorting photos and cleaning the house...

Melbourne Day 2 - Saturday

Managed to get out at the door just after 10am on Saturday and wandered down to Degraves Street to find somewhere to sit for breakfast. It was very crowded, but found a table outside Degraves Espresso Bar. I had a delicious (but somewhat expensive) breakfast of bacon and eggs.

Wandered up Centre Place/Way so we could go to Haigh's. I've never even heard of it (go figure!!) (oh, this was after walking past the Lindt shop on the way to breakfast and being very disappointed they didn't have lime Lindt. Seems we are going to have to stock up on them next time we go to Europe!)

Continued wandering up Elizabeth St. Stu stopped for a coffee while N&A and I checked out Bernard's Magic Shop.

Carried on walking past La Trobe St. The old City Circle trams are very cute.

Finally we made it to Queen Victoria markets, where we spent a couple of hours wandering up and down looking at stuff. I bought a photomosaic jigsaw and some beer stubby holders and was very tempted by some wooden landmarks like Tower Bridge etc. But decided to be good and not get any heh.

I liked the big slabs of butter they had in this store.

Curds and Whey in Queen Victoria Markets

Eventually wandered back towards the city, stopping in at the Shot Tower cone in Melbourne Central.

Carried on wandering down.. (skipping a browse through Myer because Stu was tired)

And went into Minotaur for a good while.

At this point Stu went back to the hotel, and Nat and Andrew and I went down to Flinders St to catch the City Circle tram out to docklands.

None of the docklands stuff existed last time I was in Melbourne so it was amazing to see how much stuff is out there now. Now it's labelled the "entertainment and lifestyle precinct".

Of course we were there to play at Glowgolf..

Which had some very pretty murals in some of the rooms

Andrew won and I got par so was all a bit of fun.

Then we hopped on another tram and went back to the hotel.

Picked up the sweetie then headed out again to find dinner. If we'd had more time we would have gone to Lygon St, but in the end we just went to Tono Italian Restaurant on Bourke/Russell St. Watched suicidal skateboarders while sharing some wine and enjoying some nice chicken.

Didn't have time to go back to the hotel, so went straight to the Regent Theatre to see Cats!

(this photo was taken the night before when the theatre was still in session)

I sneaked this photo in right at the end of the show. I *loved* the hundreds festoon lights they had all around the theatre.

The show itself was ok.. not one of the better musicals I've ever seen. It was well done and all, it just didn't have a *point*. And I only knew two songs from the whole production. So it was a bit meh. Got to scritch a kitty .. Nat was so jealous :):)

Then we just went back to the hotel and crashed.

Friends and parties and stuff

Last night we had Nat and Andrew over so we could eat the Batman chicken nuggets I'd had for a few months in the freezer. We also played some Pictionary (the boys sooo didn't want to) and watched Love Actually and had pasta and salad for dinner.

Today was just a quiet day at home. I dusted nearly a half of my models, some requiring a damp cloth (the trick being not to wipe off decals with the dust).

This evening we went to All Bar Nun for Doc's birthday drinks and dinner. Had a lot more drinks than dinner! :) Doc jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane this morning so was fun to hear about his experience with that. The sweetie wanted to come home a lot earlier than I was ready to .. doh..! But otherwise quite a pleasant evening :)

Results matching “Fun stuff”