Thursday night we went down to Kit's to play Cards Against Humanity which was a bit of fun.

Friday night Neil and I went along to Roz's 60th at the Abbey.  It was quite a nice night, although she asked me to be photographer which I wasn't super happy about - I like taking photos for myself, but doing it officially for someone else is way too stressful!

Saturday morning after waiting for the sweetie to get up and do some stuff for work, it was suddenly a lot later that I wanted it to be.  We went out to do food shopping for the evening - where we cooked a roast dinner for forty people at the club!!  Four kilos of pork, two kilos of turkey, a big potato bake, roast veggies, brussel sprouts with bacon, grilled zucchini, minted peas, and carrots, with my own apple sauce, and gravy using all of the pork drippings :)  It was pretty epic, but for forty people it was *just* enough food.  Still, everyone seemed happy, even though the turkey was a little dry on top because I forgot to put foil over it for the first part. 

We didn't get home til lunch time today.  I was a bit tired this afternoon so didn't get a whole lot done.  I did finally finish watching through Monty Python series four, so I've now half watched all of it, although it really is rather silly.

Tonight we just watched Voyager, and the new Ghost in the Shell, which I could actually follow, on account of it being dumbed down for American audiences, and me.

And just like that the weekend is over.  Sad times.

Friday night was a swim night, and then a bunch of us went back to EffanC's which was all very pleasant.  Soups and bubbly and cheese FTW!

Much of the weekend was just catching up and cleaning and organising paperwork and watching Air Crash Investigations and Monty Python (and I also watched Black Adder Goes Forth last week as well, don't think I mentioned it).  I finished one jigsaw of Kit's and started another one.  

Saturday night we watched Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, which to be honest I struggled with.  Even though there wasn't much plot for some reason I just found it *difficult*.  

Tonight I did a lamb roast, and we watched some Anthony Bourdain in Panang, and another one in Kansas City.  And for the first bit I'm like "I've just eaten dinner but I'm *hungry*" .. but after watching all the meat and bbq ribs in the second episode I was like I'm totally full just *looking* at that.. and then I started getting vegetable cravings.  Cause that's what you do in America after eating non-stop American food, which is pretty much just meat and deep-fried anything, it's just GIVE ME THE VEGETABLES.  Oh hai @stuartcryan !! :)

Weekends are too damned short.

So where were we?

Friday night we had an early mark, had snossages for dinner and watched tv.

Saturday morning I went into work first thing and was home by 9am which was nice. 

Mostly just sorted out our finances all weekend .. hurrah .. 

Saturday night we tried to go to Dumpling Inn for dinner with Chris and Mike and Zac, but it was closed for renovations, so we headed into Dickson and ended up at The Scholar Chinese restaurant.  The food there was nice enough but the service was SLOW - it took *forever* to get food.  At least that's what it seemed like for the hungry people.  In reality it was probably an hour before mains arrived.  And we could have sworn that people that got there after us got food before us.  hrmmm.

Today I remembered we had beef cheeks in the fridge that I'd bought last weekend, so I stuck em in the slow cooker with various Chinese flavouring as per Lorraine's recipe.  They were pretty good, although I'd added a lot more water to keep them covered, so the sauce was pretty watery.  Next time I'll add corn flour, or do it on the stove, or cut up the meat a bit to submerge it better.

Then we watched The Truman Show, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies with Luc and Cynthia in 1998.

Friday night we watched Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was all a bit silly, and completely predictable, but a bit of fun.

Saturday night we watched The Sixth Sense, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies when it first came out.  

In between was a very quiet weekend at home, only going out to do some food shopping today.  I spent most of the rest of the time scanning and organising paperwork and watching Air Crash Investigations videos and Blackadder Goes Forth.

I've just spent two hours cooking some coq au vin, as well as a spinach, turnip, feta and sage bake, and a cauliflower, zucchini, garlic, herbs, cream and cheeeeese bake.  Not that they'll necessarily go together, but the idea is to have plenty of food cooked for the week.

Oh and we're into season 4 of Voyager now.

Another long tiring week.  Culminating with Ryan's farewell and a long lunch that we had no intention of returning from.  A well deserved release.  

This weekend has been quiet and mostly at home (except for food shopping at the markets yesterday and a quick trip to Hall Markets with Kit and Pete this morning).  Got some cleaning done, water changed a fish tank, used the leaf blower to clean the gutters, did some more entries on my new blog, cooked a tomato bake and purple brussel sprouts with bacon last night, and an epic lamb roast tonight.  We watched The Human Stain last night, which was ok, but pretty disjointed.  

Way way back in 2004 I played with a photo-mosaicing application called Mazaika.  Back then I only had about 11000 photos.

But in the past week or two I've been doing a photomosaic jigsaw of Kit's, and it's rekindled my interest in photomosaics.

I had a look on the weekend for apps to try, and gave IMosaic a go.  It's quite old - no new releases since 2006, it's pretty slow, and it squishes vertical photos down to landscape mode, but it is free and does have the ability to index different directories independently, rather than as one massive index.  

So I indexed all my last holiday photos (6687 photos), and used them to create a photomosaic of the Queen Mary 2 (image from Wikpedia).

Here's some closeups of some areas

Fun times!!

James and Rachel were down on the weekend to make flowers.  No really.  Icing sugar flowers that Rachel is going to put on Marc's wedding cake.  :)

So they came down Friday night and did their two day course.  I cooked chicken fettuccini boscaiola on Saturday night and inflicted them with our slide show ;)

This week has been crazy busy both at work and at home.  Is it Thursday yet?

Thursday night we saw an episode of Voyager that had David Graf in it, so on Friday we watched Police Academy.  As you do :)

Saturday morning I headed into work to do an upgrade, and accidentally upgraded to the latest version instead of the second latest version we were meant to put on.  Whoops.

At lunch the little brother came over, having just purchased a brand new second hand switch.  I brought home cables and we plugged in and had a look and made sure the switch was working, which it looked like it was.  Then we fussed around with our network to see if we could figure out why the NAS won't get a link light on our Cisco switch.  It wouldn't even get link on David's HP switch.  Super epic weird.  Guess will just have to keep using it on our 100Mbps Netgear switch.  After that he did awesome stuff like install a couple of smoke detectors that I'd bought last year but hadn't installed, and we totally reprogrammed our Harmony remote.  They finally have drivers for our TV now which is awesome, and also for the new DVD player we got which has a super dodgy remote that presses buttons multiple times which makes it unusable.  But even though everything works now, the amp still makes the Harmony remote have issues.  Still, we can live with that given that we can drive all our devices now.  Oh and he also pulled apart the fan that's been rattling.  Turns out the mounting for the gear box which turns the fan from side to side had disintegrated.  So he pulled it all out.

Have I ever mentioned how awesome my brother is? :)

In the evening I cooked sausages and very garlicky pasta (sorry!) and leftover veggie bake, and we watched our cruise slideshow and various other cruising slideshows and chatted mostly about cruising.  Quite a nice evening.

Today David went home and I did some house cleaning and cruise blogging and we went food shopping and I cooked a lamb roast with lots of epic veggies and all in all had quite a nice weekend.

I could really get used to four day weekends!

Friday night we watched Innerspace, since we didn't manage to see it last weekend.

Saturday we walked around Palmerville, and we watched Airport in the evening.

Sunday we went food shopping at the markets.  Saigon Street Food was closed, so we went to Heng Hing.  It was all a little overwhelming.  The door by the mushroom doesn't have a clear path to the counters, you have to weave your way through tightly-packed tables.  And the ordering system is information overload with pictures all over the walls.  I found it all quite stressful.  The food was nice enough though.

In the evening Stu thought we could find something to watch on Netflix, but it took so long we gave up and went to bed without watching anything.

Monday the sweetie and I both took the day off.  I cooked roast beef with an epic veggie bake of zucchini, carrot, cauliflower and broccoli and then we watched Gladiator.

Today I did cheesy hash browns for brunch and made up a batch of Anzac biscuits in the afternoon.  The first batch didn't have a chance to get cold..

And other than that I've been gluing lots of little paper triangles.  And fighting with MovableType.  But I do have a new blog coming soon, stay tuned!

It's been an absolutely glorious weekend.  Except I've spent most of it inside sorting holiday photos :/

We did go for a walk together on Saturday.  And go to Bunnings.  And ran into Kit there.  On Saturday night Annie and the family came over for pizza for dinner and Stu showed them some holiday photos from his phone on the tv.

Sunday Stu gardened for a couple of hours while I did holiday photos.  I cooked pork medallion roast for dinner, and it was possibly one of the best pork roasts I've ever done.  Every bit of the crackling was perfect, and the meat was lovely too.  Also cooked a whole heap of veggies.  In the evening we had to watch something Russian-inspired, so we watched The Hunt for Red October.

Today I woke up at 4am with a sore spine, took ages to get back to sleep and ended up sleeping in fairly late.  Stu gardened while I did holiday photos.  Felt like I was wasting the weekend away indoors.  Around lunch time we went to Officeworks to pickup a HDMI cable, had Hungry Cracks for lunch and instantly regretted it, then had a wander around John Knight Park.  And ran into Kit there.  Seriously it's like we're stalking each other heh.  At least I got a bit of vitamin D.

When we got home Stu had a voicemail that Telstra had fixed our line.  The stats on the router aren't much improved, but download speeds and latency sure are a lot better.  We'll see how it goes..