Nearly thirty six years ago while we were travelling in America, we had the tv on in the motel room and on tv was the Muppets Rocky Mountain Holiday with John Denver.  Dad and David and I were watching, and Mum was in the bathroom washing up.

So the Muppets arrive at the campsite and Kermit says "Time to pitch tents", and Animal.. well I'll let you watch it to see.  But Dad and David and I CACKED ourselves laughing at it, and we had to explain to Mum what she missed.  

Anyway I thought of it this morning, and, internet to the rescue!

I saw this clip for the first time in thirty six years tonight.  Fun times!

In other news.. Quiet Sunday just food shopping, and back at work this week.

Thursday morning I took the sticky tape off the two smaller incisions.  I was expecting a scabby mess, but no it all came off cleanly and there was just a little red line left underneath.  Put on trackie daks, which was first time I'd been out of pyjama bottoms since I got home.

Thursday night I got sick of lying on my back and sides and attempted sleeping on my stomach, but it still hurt a bit too much.

Friday morning I took the sticky tape off the larger incision.  This tape hurt more to get off, but again, the incision was clean.  

Friday evening Jenn came over and Stu ordered a LOT of Turkish food and we had that and chatted and had on the second draft of the slide show - still way too long at 900 photos (but down from the 1300 of the first draft).  Very annoyingly, I'd put a whole heap of heat mats down on the table, but there was so much food it ended up sitting on the table, and did a heap of heat damage to the surface of the table.  It's really obvious in three places.  Not happy Jan!!

Friday night I was able to sleep on my belly more comfortably.

Saturday was approaching normality (still need to be careful) but had quite a productive day Getting Things Done.  

In the evening we watched Discovery, and Sherlock Holmes (the Robert Downey Jr version).  It wasn't too bad, altho some of my gripes ("tomorrow" actually being the day after, a boat that size being able to sink in the Thames, and popping up from the Palace of Westminster at Tower Bridge) all made their way into the IMDB goofs page heh.

Last night the entrance smoke detector went off at 3:30 for no good reason.  We took it down and I stayed awake for like an hour but no smoke, so will need to investigate that today (could have been dust stirred up by all the wind - the kitchen bench was all gritty yesterday, or maybe a spider).  Edit: battery was at 7.5 Volts, so think it's probably worth changing the battery.

Today I'm in jeans for the first time in over a week.  Seems to be doing ok.

So Wednesday afternoon my bowels were feeling a little off.  Nothing unusual, can get that sometimes (all too often) if I eat too much bad food.  Or even regular food.  After dinner I was pretty gassy and burpy, moreso than usual.  

But throughout the night it got worse rather than better.  Woke up at 4:00 in some discomfort.

No nausea, so unlikely to be food poisoning.  

Oh wait, wave of nausea Thursday morning but overcame it and went to work.

Another one hit me at work but overcame that as well.

By the third wave I thought I'd let it have its way.  Maybe I'd feel better.

But I didn't.

So after feeling like crap I decided to go home at 10:00.

Lay down but couldn't rest - too uncomfortable.  I had a tiny piece of cheese and a little water but not really very much.  

Late morning and I'm doing the doctor google thing.  Symptoms were edging towards appendicitis.  Even though I wasn't in any real pain, just strong discomfort.  But it did hurt when I poked around my appendix.  Decided not to eat or drink anything more "just in case".

So drove myself to the walkin clinic.  Stu had already paid for parking for the day right there anyway, so no problem leaving the car there.  It was probably about 12:45 when I got there.  Had to wait ages, and was feeling very uncomfortable.  Eventually they took pity on me and I think I might have got bumped up a position.  The nurse had a bit of a poke and thought that yes I should probably go to the hospital.  Called the sweetie and he drove me over to the hospital.

Had to wait quite a long time there as well, so it's well and truly mid afternoon by now.  Had explained my symptoms to the triage nurse on the desk, and eventually got seen by a doctor.  He did a bit of a history and poked me a bit, and then stuck in a cannula (in my very dehydrated veins, first go, to his credit) and took some blood.  Asked me for a urine sample (did I mention I was dehydrated?  and I'd peed when I arrived at the hospital, so that was a bit of a challenge).  He asked for mid stream but got end stream, there was so little.

So he comes back shortly after and says he's admitting me - yep, likely appendicitis.  18000 white blood count, elevated temperature and some of the classic symptoms.  Fun.

So I'm in a bed in emergency.  Eventually a surgeon comes by and gets all the details all over again (I've told the story four or five times today already).  They were considering a CT but decided not to (for unrelated reasons), and at 16:45 decided to load me up with fluids and do an ultrasound at 17:45.  By 17:35 my bladder hurt like hell.  How was I going to hold it in for another half hour (at least) ??  Then around 17:45 they were like, meh, not going to bother with the ultrasound, just going to do the surgery.  So I peed! Yayyyyy!!   (dude for ultrasound eventually turned up - at 17:55 - I really don't think I would have lasted that long).  I did get sick again though because I was so hungry (it's a thing I do, don't ask).  Nothing there though except bile.  Hurrah.

The sweetie had gone back to work in the afternoon, and went home to get changed.  I let him know where I was up to, that they were going to do surgery, so he thought he'd grab some dinner on the way in and then come see me before I went off to surgery.  Except maybe around 18:30 off I went, and never got to see him :(:(

Got wheeled through the hospital upside down and backwards, which is somewhat disorienting.  Went to the OR prep.  More doctors and nurses and anesthesiologists and told my story yet again.  They asked me to say in my own words why I was there, and I said "for an appendectomy" and the admitting nurse scolded me for my American usage - "it's appendicectomy didn't you know??"

Then in to the OR.  Everyone was gloved, but still *touching things*.  I'm sure that pen and paper isn't sterile... hrmmm.  

Scooted over onto the operating bed and got poked and prodded some more.  Pain killers (they weren't wrong about making me light headed) and the next thing I knew was calls of Karen Karen Karen and it was all over.  A couple of hours later.  Couldn't feel any pain (figured that would change) and felt quite tired.

After about twenty minutes waiting for my heart rate to lower I got wheeled to my room for the night, and I'm like, where's the sweetie?  He was just outside! Yayy!  He'd called my mum and some family/friends to let everyone know what was happening, bestest sweetie ever.

So there's still more poking and prodding and checking obs, when I all I wanted was some food and to brush my teeth and go to the toilet and go to bed.  But everything operates on hospital time.  They'd wander off and it'd be ten or fifteen minutes before they came back.  So it was after midnight by the time I got to turn lights out.

Not that I slept very well.  I don't really like sleeping on my back but on my sides was too painful.  A teenager came in across the way in a lot of pain.  The lady next to me had all sorts of complications and also in a lot of pain.  Had my pulse and blood pressure read a couple of times.  At 4:00 when they came in for something I said I may as well go pee again.  Dozed but didn't really get any sleep.

The morning dragged on as well.  They said I could go home that day, but I got a steady stream of various people come by.  Breakfast (I was starving) wasn't til 8:45.  

The sweetie came by at some point too.  But nothing much happened.  A bit before midday my temp was up a little and I was in a bit more pain, so I was worried I was getting an infection.  But likely it was just the panadol wearing off that I'd had at 5:30.  Time kept dragging.  Had a late lunch (probably too much food) but still waiting around to go home.  

Finally FINALLY I could go at about 14:30.  

Rested with the sweetie for a while, but didn't really sleep.  Then he went off to pick up Fiona from Jolimont, and they went and had beer and meat on a stick.  Well not quite.  They did to go to Bentspoke for beer, and to the multicultural festival for potato on a stick (and a couple of other things).  Because I'd had such a big late lunch I had popcorn for dinner.  Because, fibre!  Watched some old episodes of Naked Chef (man he was so *young* when he started, and Jules was just his girlfriend hehe).  Started watching Muriel's Wedding on Netflix, even though I have it on DVD.  Silly really.  Then Stu and Fiona came home.  They brought frozen chips so we heated some of those up.  But it did mean I went to bed a lot later than I wanted to.

Had some panadeine (from my stash before they stopped selling the stuff over the counter) and actually slept quite well.  Was able to sleep on my sides for some of the night, and slept in til about 7:30.  

Today Stu and Fiona went off to do some food shopping and I watched the rest of Muriel's Wedding and Netflix and tried to select photos for the holiday slideshow.  I've been mostly just sitting up.  I was never a fan of lying on the couch anyway (hurts my back unless I get things just right), and it's a lot harder to get up from the couch.  This afternoon has mostly just been chilling.  Nice and quiet like.  I also found the web archive of Julie Powell's blog, so have been reading that from the beginning.  Not really sure why some people hated it so much.  It reads like someone just doing it for themselves, not out to make a name for themselves.  She does sound like she was burning the candle at both ends though!

My butt does hurt from sitting so much though...  normally I'm bouncing up and down a *lot* more!

So an eventful couple of days.  But of everything, from appendicitis, to surgery, to recovery, the single most painful thing of the whole experience was them taking off the sticky tape holding in my cannula!   (followed by holding my pee for the ultrasound that never happened :) )

Starting Australia Day.

Saturday: All The Things!  I renamed and resized all six thousand odd photos from the Canon from the holiday.  Watched Julia sans Julie.  Had a lovely lunch with the sweetie at Chong Co.  Did our food shopping.  Geotagged a lot of the Canon photos.  Watched Fuller House and The Usual Suspects.

Sunday: Began processing iPhone photos from the holiday, dealing with random changes in time zones and the fact that APPLE SUX (still raging at Apple randomly changing the date fields on my files).  Had dinner at Chrissie's.  Had Over the Hedge on cause Zac wanted to watch it, but Chris and I chatted and didn't really watch the movie.

Monday:  Had a good nights sleep.  Continued iPhone photo processing.

Tuesday:  Backed up the computer (and all that work on the photos).  Salmon for dinner.

Wednesday:  Zombie day on account of epic insomnia on Tuesday night.  Couldn't get to sleep.  Maybe it was the salmon?  Not the first time I've had salmon then not be able to get to sleep.  Got up to resizing and geotagging the iPhone photos.

Thursday:  Had F over for pizza for dinner, and watched bits and pieces of Stephen Colbert.  Appreciated the cool change!  Couldn't get into my computer before I went to bed.  It was swapping hard and the login screen was unresponsive.  In the end I got impatient with it and rebooted it.  But in the process corrupted the inboxes in Eudora :(  

We saw these out shopping on 26 January.  We didn't try them.

When I went over to Chrissie's on 27 January we stopped by the shops first and saw this.  And because the joke is now that they bring out hot cross buns on January 1, we thought we should try it.  It was delicious!  We even convinced the sweetie to come in and try some when he came to pick me up.

The sweetie and I tried out Master Hin Dumplings at the mall in January.  They literally do one thing - dumplings.  You can have regular dumplings or cheesy dumplings, pork, prawn or chicken (I think, something like that), or a combo of all three.  We both tried the regular dumplings, mixed.  They were.. well... average.  If you're going to do one thing you better get it right.  This place.. not so much.

On 26 January we went to Chong Co and had Thai.  Because this is Australia.  Had the Duck Salad (Sliced roasted duck with coconut shredded, chilli jam, coconut milk, cucumber, mint, shallot, coriander and cherry tomatoes), and Prik Khing crispy pork belly (Stir fried with prik khing curry paste, green beans and kaffir lime leaves).  It was delicious!

On 1 February Neil and I were going to go to Red Rooster to avoid the mall because, kids.  But!  It was closed for renovations!  Disaster!  So we went to Zambrero's.  I thought I'd get the kids nachos ($5) to compare against Mad Mex and GYG, and because the full sized nachoes were like $13.90.  They were nice enough, but what I should have done was gotten *two* kids nachos for $10, which would have been the same amount of food as the $13.90 version.  Ridiculous, guys!

The next morning the sweetie and I had late brunch at Gus' Place in town.  I had "Fritters" (corn, sweet potato and zucchini fritters, grilled halloumi, rocket, romesco, tzatziki).  The sweetie had "Huevos Sucios (Dirty Eggs)" (fried eggs, chorizo, potato and cheese croquettes, black bean and corn salsa, tortilla, paprika, spicy aioli).  Quite yum.

On the weekend after cooking dinners I found myself with a bowl of food scraps - offcuts from the veggies I cooked.  Ordinarily I would throw all these over the fence to Kit's chickens.  But she moved and took all her chickens away :(:(:(

That bowl sat out on the bench for days.  For some reason it felt completely wrong to throw those food scraps into the bin.

We'll just have to get our own chickens.  Or a rabbit.  We just don't really have a good space for them.  We have plenty of space now that the pool is gone, but that space is like a desert in summer, and chickens can overheat.  Have to think about that one some more.

Did anyone actually miss me?  Prolly not.  Shrug.  

We've been off galavanting around the world again.  Got back yesterday morning.

Kept moving for a couple of hours when we got home, eventually succombed to a snooze after lunch (some leftovers I pulled out of the freezer) for a couple of hours.  Had to force myself to get up and keep moving.

Had pizza for dinner because there was no food in the house.  And the sweetie wanted it.

Then collapsed into bed.

Woke up at 3am this morning after seven hours sleep.  But couldn't get back to sleep.  Gave up around 5:30 and got going.  Had a very productive morning.  Did some food shopping.  Haven't been so productive since we got back though..

So the beginning of the year. We began the new year at Kit's with Ben and Sarah for a nice start to the year.

We took the first two weeks of January off, so three weeks all up, but during the first two weeks our house was a revolving door of people wanting to use the pool. I do enjoy having people over, but we needed a break!! I think in that two weeks we socialised every single day which was completely exhausting. Later I was able to do a deep clean of most of the kitchen, and organised the garage.

Somehow we managed to go overseas twice this year. In April we made an impromptu trip to Wellington, New Zealand for a lonnng weekend for our tenth wedding anniversary. We only arranged it a few weeks in advance (taking Wello's lead of going to New Zealand just because (actually he did it for status points haha)), and got one of the very last direct Canberra to Wellington flights on Singapore Airlines. In December we avoided the family Christmas obligations and headed to the northern hemisphere. We had a couple of days in Japan before heading to Southampton to board the Queen Mary 2 for a transatlantic crossing and Caribbean cruise. Christmas and New Year were on board the ship in the North Atlantic. I went up to Sydney in January for the mum/uncles post-Christmas chatchup, where we went to Pandora's in Rouse Hill for lunch and sat in Ken and Jeanine's spa all afternoon; and again in June for Mum and Uncle Ken's birthdays, and we went and saw Vivid Sydney which was pretty cool. I went to Junee in May and we went and saw the Bricktastic Lego exhibition, which was awesome because no crowds, and we went to the circus as well. I went to Melbourne in June for work, and again with the sweetie in August for Kit's graduation.

Work was pretty stressful this year. The work itself was fine (I completed a massive cleanup project in around a year, much less than my estimate of two years) and my supervisor is great, but we switched to hot-desking which is all kinds of stressful for me. Not to mention that "activity based working" means we should be sitting with the people we work with, but because there's not enough seats that's often not the case. I get in relatively early (thanks sweetie!) so at least I get *some* consistency. We had a Ball in March which was very .. blue! and a lot of fun. Our work bar closed in June and we had an amazing final night. We got a new one, but it's half the size and not as practical. One of the first nights in the new bar was a whiskey night which was good. I organised a trivia night for March, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to lack of interest. Tried again in May and this time it was a packed house, and the last one in the old bar. We won the first one in the new bar in October, but the organisers said as incentive to win, the second place winners should run it. Let's hope they do or I'll be running another one!

Healthwise I've been pretty good. Just had a cold in May and another in July. Other than that it was just a lot of insomnia. A lot a LOT of insomnia. Omigosh sometimes I was convinced it was going to kill me.

Once again we had a *very* social year. As I mentioned earlier we had a lot of visitors in the first week of January. David came to stay a few times. He came in January and fixed some taps in the bathroom, and later in January to see about the Railway Historical Society and whether or not they'd try and reopen. He came with Leanne in February, to stay after the Airport Open Day (that I never managed to get tickets for), again in April, September and October with Kat. Always great having him here. Chrissie got bigger and bigger with Beavis and I got to see a couple of ultrasounds. She had a quite small but quite cute Nathan at the end of February. Visited them a little but not nearly often enough. Didn't help that Chris was completely exhausted from lack of sleep. Aunty Di and Uncle Graham came down a couple of times and we did fondue with them at Chrissie's in April and October. Had lunch a few times with her as well which was nice. Chris also gave me a kick up the butt in July and helped me grout half the shower. We caught up quite a few times with the extended N-Gang, going to either EffanC's, R&F's, Scotts for pizza, and beef cheecks at our place in July. We saw quite a lot of Kit and Pete during the year. It was sooooo nice having cool neighbours you could pop down to for a quiet drink. Pete is into games, so played a few with him (Kit played begrudgingly) - including Travel Trivial Pursuit, Cards Against Humanity, and Kismet. We went out to the George for Kit's birthday in May, had Ben over for roast in March, and had BBQ at Serena's for her birthday in October. Kit and Pete had a farewell party at the beginning of November (much drama ensued) but we still got to see them every weekend until they left. Helped pack their truck at the beginning of December, and they moved down the coast the same weekend we went overseas. We met up with Damien and Amanda at the Dickson Dumpling House in April, and Stu had a wargame with Damien in July, followed by dinner at Laziza House. Jenn came over in February with various Tequilas she'd bought on her trip to Mexico. Hao came up for work in May, so caught up with him at Alice's. Had our annual Hanami lunch with Nat and Andrew in late September. Stu's dad came over for dinner sans Ruth in January. Scott and Kerry came down at the end of June on the way to the snow and we had the whole family over for dinner. Had Wello's 40th at Casey Jones in October, and went over to @CLBradley's in November for BBQ for his birthday.

We didn't do as much club stuff this year. The event dinners are getting out of control with so many people going, and Stu has to go out once a month for committee meetings, which leaves us with no enthusiasm to go out at other times. We did go a couple of times, including a nice night in November with only six of us out there. We did an epic Burns Night in January, with two huge pork roasts, a huge haggis, tatties, neeps, peas, carrots and cranachan, for about forty five people. We did another round of two huge roast pork roasts and veggies for Christmas in July, and something like fifty people came. We were going to help with the Christmas party, but Stu got a migraine just before we were going to head out. During the committee meeting in August I regrouted the shed's kitchen splashback, because I could scrape out the old stuff with a fingernail, and I had the last of the grout from our bathroom that I thought I could use up. Only went to a couple of swim nights.

Pets. For years we've only ever had fish in this house. In February Chrissie was heavily pregnant and overstressed and the stress of Stumpy not eating was too much for her (Stumpy being a lovely blue tongue lizard). Kit had had Stumpy since he was born in her last place (I remember when they first moved in seeing the tank in the spare room, thinking at the time it was fish). Stumpy spent many years living in Kit's garage generally being neglected. So a couple of years ago Kit gave him to Chris and Zac. He fattened up nicely. But as I said, Chrissie couldn't deal, and asked if I'd take him. Well our front entrance way was still full of clutter that had been there for like five years that I'd been wanting to get rid of. So she took the majority of the stuff to sell on Gumtree one day, and we got Stumpy. He didn't eat at all for the first six months we had him. Didn't help that I didn't have lights through the early part, and then it was winter. So he sat doing not much for the whole time. Then later in the year (I'd been increasing the amount of heat/light to match the seasons) he suddenly started eating. It's been lovely having him. Stu really likes him and gives him lots of cuddles.

On the fish front. I got five new black neon tetras in January for the two foot, and some harlequin rasboras in May. I got a little sucking catfish to keep the algae at bay in Chrissie's little tank. We went to Serkan's for killifish study group meetings in March and August. Stu has been trying to breed killifish, with mixed success. He gets all enthusiastic for spurts, then they get neglected for weeks at a time. The other drama was the epic stress caused by dodgy Aqua One LED fish tank lights. All three, plus one I'd already had replaced died in the space of a couple of months. In the end got all my money back and went back to fluoros. Confirming my hatred for all things Aqua One.

Lego, jigsaws, and other hobbies. In January, Vic came down from Sydney with an entire bootfull of his kids' Lego he wanted to sell. It wasn't sorted so I spent months sorting it and checking each and every damned piece for FAKE Lego. Had to stop working downstairs in April when it got too cold, but didn't really do too much at the end of the year - I was too busy getting ready for our holiday. I'd bought some nice Willow storage tubs to replace all the cardboard boxes I have for storage, and they got pressed into service holding sorted Lego. I really want to get rid of it all to get the space back (and my storage tubs back!), but need to do something about the computer I'm using down there - it doesn't have enough grunt to keep five word docs open at a time containing the parts lists for the sets. I did a LOT of jigsaws this year, including several sections of the Disney behemoth. Another reason I want the space back downstairs...! Didn't do much else hobbywise. Spent a lot of time fighting with Apple. I downloaded Image::ExifTool and used a perl script to rename the files based on Date taken instead of Date modified which I've been doing all these years with all my other photos. I processed, labelled and blogged all the photos from our New Zealand holiday within two months, then I went back and labelled all the photos from our East Asia holiday and got that blogged by the end of the year.

For some reason I always mention the weather. We had the extremes this year. We had a dust storm in March. In fact all through March the max temperature was around 30C almost every day. It was freaky hot. Then throughout July it was crazy cold. We got so much ice on the pool it was ridiculous. One time it was 14mm thick in places! Maybe the super thick ice was the beginning of the end for the pool - I did consider that all that ice can't be good for all the joints.

New toys! My iPhone 5 got more and more annoying. For some months the lock button was really sticky. It either wouldn't work at all, or would spend the whole time in the lock position, so the phone would think you were trying to turn it off. I waited til the Apple announcements in September to see if they'd release a small form factor phone, but alas none came. So I bit the bullet and got a HUGE XS. The new phone and iOS STILL screws around with the date modified on my files. Pissed off at that. But the camera is very nice. Especially the HDR capabilities. My old phone feels like such a sweet little phone when I pick it up (I've kept it around because it has a bunch of apps that won't run on the new one). Also before our holiday I decide to replace the seven year old Asus Eee PC. It was always under-powered (what is it with Asus and not enough memory?) and spent most of its life swapping to disk and not actually doing anything. It was pretty much unusable and frustrating, so got a little Lenovo net book which was just great to travel with.

A few house sagas this year. The first being the leaky shower. It took me forever to finish scraping off the old sealant and scraping back the old grout. And then it sat there for months doing nothing. Eventually Chrissie gave me a kick up the bum and helped me grout half the shower, and I finished it a week or two later in July, followed by the sealant in August. Took a little over a year to get that shower back into use, but it doesn't seem to leak anymore. I also attacked the cloudiness on the shower glass but NOTHING worked - not bathroom cleaner, not vinegar, not diluted CLR, not straight CLR, not straight CLR left there on the glass for weeks on end. I gave up the idea of ever having that glass clear again. We came home from New Zealand to find the power had gone off in the house and had been off for four days. We lost some fish in the cold (the rummy nose tetras), and I chucked out a bag of stuff from the fridge just in case, but the freezer didn't defrost completely (still had a couple of whiskey balls in tact) so didn't chuck anything out from there. Then there was the epic stress over the blown hot water release valve. It had died *just before* it was one year old, but I didn't call them for ages because I'm allergic to the phone. When I did call them it sounded like they were going to charge me, but when the dude turned up he was all "is that all?" and replaced it for me on the spot (and left me a spare to boot). Fortunately Rheem didn't charge me for their second defect in its first year. Then there was the circuit breaker that caught fire, taking out all our power points. Fortunately we got it fixed the same day, and used the lack of computer to do a lot of cleaning and organising. And finally the pool. Maybe all the ice over winter stretched all the seals to breaking point. But we had a leak that I don't know how old it was and we couldn't see how much damage had been done to the structural wall. The pool turned out to be around thirty years old! So even though it broke my heart we (I) decided to drain it and say goodbye. We did have a win - Pete replaced the laserlite sheeting on our back pergola, as well as the front piece of wood that had been positioned right under the old sheeting and had gotten rotten.

We ate out a little this year but not too much. Went to Iori with EffanC, Yat Bun Tong a few times (Stu likes the dumplings), with Damien and Amanda we went to Dickson Dumpling House and Laziza House, went with EffanC and Scott to Pialligo Estate for a "Meet the Maker" dinner with wines by Shaw and Smith in April which was delicious, Happys with the sweetie, Malaysian Chapter a couple of times with the N-Gang, The George for Kit's and my birthdays, Lake George Hotel in Bungendore with EffanC - disappointed with the pork belly, Tipsy Bull in Braddon for Stu's birthday which was great, and Sushi Bay sushi train with the sweetie. Went to Chong Co a couple of times. Probably others I didn't mention.

Didn't have too much blog-worthy food. A guilty pleasure was nachos - simply corn chips topped with cheese and baked for five or so minutes. Did Lorraine Elliot's Asian Style Beef Cheeks a couple of times (is it possible for something to have *too much* flavour?), and had a go at Sizzler cheese toast!! OMFG!!! SO GOOD!!! I'd make it all the time if given half a chance...

Theatre/Shows/exhibitions
* Bricktastic in Junee which was great and no crowds of kids
* Circus in Junee which had exotic animals to my surprise, but convinced their no photography rule is simply to not have anyone get it on video if they fall off stuff or get eaten by lions
* Ben Law and Jenny Phang at Library Up Late which was interesting
* *Didn't* see Cartier, but did wander around a bit of the National Gallery with Cath
* Brickman Lego exhibition by Ryan McNaught with Neil which was also awesome and also no crowds of kids (sensing a theme here?)

Movies
* The Last Jedi
* Bohemian Rhapsody

Movies on TV
* Well lots but I'm not going to list them all
* Lord of the Rings series (in advance of going there)
* Kevin Smith movies
* Harry Potter series
* Star Trek series
* Pixar series. Saw what we could of these on DVD and Netflix, then saw most of the rest on various plane trips at the end of the year. The only one I didn't see (and have never seen) is Coco.

TV
* Star Trek Discovery (season 1)
* The Good Place (season 2)
* Pride and Prejudice (BBC series borrowed off @CLBradley)
* A lot of Dad's war documentaries up until April, and then again from October
* One episode of Altered Carbon
* Homeland (season 6)
* Star Trek Enterprise
* Addams Family (maybe season 2, would need to check)
* Anthony Bourdain's The Layover
* Back in Time for Dinner
* David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities
* Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown
* Rake (season 5, not as good as previous seasons, too over the top)
* The Good Place (season 3)
* Death in Paradise (seasons 1 and 2)

Books
* Prey, by Michael Crichton
* The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories
* Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
* The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer

Other stuff

* Got NBN!!!!!!! In January - haven't complained about our internet since. 12x faster than before!
* Stopped by Cataract Dam on the way home from Sydney in January
* Took my car to the wreckers. Realised six months later I'd left my RTA etag in it, so called the wreckers but my car was crushed. There goes $40. Also realised, when I went to charge Kit's car in December, that I'd forgotten the battery trickle charger attachment that had been mounted in the engine bay.
* Climbed Black Mountain from Bindoubi Street with Cath, Fiona and their friend Heather
* Saw the Canberra Balloon Fiesta
* Filled with rage at the tax office that refuse to send paper bills, so how the hell am I meant to know how much I owe them??
* Was super happy with the awesome customer service from Willow when I found one of the lids I'd bought was cracked. Saddedened at the appalling experience from ebay
* reCAPTCHA died, but have been puttering along without it since May, and doesn't seem to be getting comment spam these days anyway
* Watched Flying High twice this year
* Tried taking recycling bottles to Return-It, but (after they forced me to register all my personal details) they RIPPED ME OFF and never put any money in my account. Return-It is a SCAM!!  I've been collecting the bottles but I've never been back - I give them to David whenever he comes to stay and he takes them to NSW where they have a PROPER system, or take them out to the club where someone else takes them to NSW or I think the new one in ACT where you get a receipt on the spot.
* Went to Frank Bradley's funeral, on my birthday. Tried to go to Stanley's in Bruce for dinner but it's closed Tuesdays so ended up at The George.
* Got a green bin!!
* Ate some of Kit's chickens
* Stu chopped a foot of hair off just before we went away at the end of the year

We finished the year at nine o'clock in the morning, North Atlantic time.  Stu was in bed and I was eating breakfast.  And yet, even in the middle of the North Atlantic, I could still watch the Sydney fireworks live :)

Thursday night: epic insomnia.

Friday: Kit came home for the weekend.  We didn't think she was going to come back because she had to go to Sydney on Sunday night, but she did, so we went down and said hi after dinner.

Saturday:  All The Things.  Although not really all of them.  Got some stuff done but not huge amounts.  In the afternoon we headed out to the club for the evening.  The pool was warm enough so it was all quite pleasant.

Sunday:  More house stuff, food shopping, Rake and Death in Paradise.  Oh and we also went clothes shopping and it didn't end in tears!

Struggling to stay on top of everything.  So.  Busy.  

Stop the world, I want to get off!!