So yesterday I got ready then hopped in the car and drove to Sydney.  Stopping once for petrol and once for morning tea and a toiley break at Maccas in Goulburn.  Passed a sneaky speed camera trap parked in bushes just over a rise.  Checked my speed and it was pretty much exactly 110, phew :)

Got to my old work at lunch time to find they had already wandered up the road without me :(  But at least they hadn't ordered.  Got a caesar salad thinking it'd be lighter than my usual chicken kiev but it still filled me up heaps!!  Wandered back to the office to discover really not much as changed.  Stuff that's been in the same places for years was all still there!  The server room was pretty much unchanged.  More clutter in there, a few new servers, and a few servers that had been turned off.  The biggest change was all the new people heh.  Stacks of new people there, scary.



Hung around there for a bit, then wandered out to Paramatta to see the new cia offices.  Pretty swishy!  Although parking there sucks :( 



Left with Kirk and we wandered back to Ric's place.  Had a beer there before going for a walk to the Italian Forum, going to Caesars for dinner. 



I had a mushroom pasta thing (pappardelle alla funghi or something) which was quite yummy, but unfortunately I was still full from lunch, so didn't feel like eating it :(  Ric got a marinara and Kirk got a meat platter.  Was all pretty good.  Stayed chatting for a while before we wandered back to Ric's and then I left.





Survived the Warringah Expressway (I really hate that bit of road, you never know what lane to be in and constantly have to change lanes to keep on going straight ahead :( ), and arrived at James and George's a bit before midnight.  Chatted for a bit before collapsing into bed.  Can't believe how solidly I slept - closed my eyes and it was night, opened them and it was morning.  Have no memories of being awake in the night at all.  Pretty cool :)

The '/" key on this laptop is broken - very distressing!! :(

So this morning we (read: Stu) got up early and we wandered off to Nat & Andrew's (where the parking situation is very UNuserfriendly) and then off to the Farmer's Markets.  There wasn't much there this time of year (altho the chickies were still there so we said hello to them) so we didn't buy much.  Played with Natto's ocarina which was a lot of fun - really must get a couple!! and everyone else looked up ecclectic medieval instruments on YouTube.

Then took out the last batch of stuff from our storage unit (after lunch at Fortune Box).  We've had the place for so long it feels kinda weird to let it go. 

The afternoon was spent doing "housy" stuff.

Tonight we watched the second part of Tinman (with Iron Chef and Rockwiz in the middle - felt very hungry while Iron Chef was on so cooked up the last of the Christmas turkey with garlic and honey - so yummm and Rockwiz wasn't the same without Julia) over a few drinks..  But I swear it ended just too suddenly .. I was expecting Askedelia to take over the kingdom as a "good" queen and DG to go home to Kansas or wherever .. but it just stopped so suddenly - the stoopid voiceovers starting even before the credits music had started... :(

So I've had quite a lot of cointreau tonight on account of having sold out of all our cheap alcomohol... really must go have a yokult before bed......

Not sure where the Life on Mars reference came from, maybe a link to Ghost Whisperer or something.....

Seems like forever ago...

New Years Eve was also quite a quiet day, altho I did manage to get some "housy" stuff done during the day.  The boys pulled out the Hills Hoist and netball hoop, and I cleaned the puddle and cooked up a chicken roast.  The plan was to eat lots, drink lots and sing lots.  But after dinner there was some disagreement over what Singstar songs should be sung.  ie, David didn't want to do any Abba and I wasn't very interested in the remainder of the songs that kept coming up.  So things degenerated quickly and in a moment of grumpiness and hesitation I went to the toily (cause I really needed to go) and people got upset and stormed off and it was all a big disaster.  While they were gone, I did the washing up, and Stu suggested we watch The Living Daylights and I thought that was a good idea.  So we watched that, even tho the digital restoration of the film makes it look like it was recorded on video tape not film.  It's eerily clear and clean and not like a film movie at all.  But the been-theres at Schonnbrunn and the ferris wheel were too cool.  C&D came back and we watched the new year in with the Sydney fireworks.  I still miss Sydney :/  and then watched the end of the movie before wandering off to bed.

New Years day I woke up depressed and so it was a bit of a slow day.  We actually just sat around for quite a while just chatting and not doing much.  Got some stuff done with my blog, updating some bits and pieces with it.  Eventually it was time for C&D to leave, so we took them to the airport.  It really was nice to have them here.. They're "low maintenance" and easy to get along with. 

So we got home and I declared it beer o'clock and proceeded to make up for the previous night's lost time.  Nat and Andrew came over, and we started playing Zombies!!! while waiting for pizza to arrive.  Except we waited like an hour and it still didn't arrive.  Yet again our local Dominos stuffed up, this time claiming not to have received our internet order.  At least we did get a $17 cash back when at last our pizza did arrive.  I think I actually won the game in the end, but only because everyone else cleared a path through the zombie dogs for me!  We had Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on in the background (because the doctor is in it), and at the end I feel asleep and apparently started snoring and they all made fun of me :(  Yet another very late night...

This morning had maccas for breakfast (it was a hangover breakfast kind of a day) and went into work for a bit.  Stu had lunch with me which was lovely.  Bought a new UV filter and had ice cream with Annie & co.  Came home pretty early and had a swim and did some bits and pieces round the house.  We watched A View to a Kill at my insistance and I rather enjoyed it :)  It has the same "video" feel to it as The Living Daylights did.  Very odd. 

So that's about it.  And now for my first early night in a week :)

Well I didn't think I'd do any good but for some weird reason I came third in our first game and first in our second game!! I mean seriously! This is me we're talking about.. someone who can't even find the lounge room door key to go out and turn the Christmas lights on outside.  But me doing semi ok at laser zone???  Inconceivable!!

Then after that everyone came back here for eating and drinking and being merry and it was all very fun, but I still can't find that door key which leads to alcohol crash and I just want to go to bed now and work sucks and I can't make things work and CH made some stuff work but I don't know if the rest of it is working and if it's not I'm going to be very depressed tomorrow because this was supposed to be working yesterday but I'm epic fail and it was so stressful getting home from work so late and then having to clean the house and then go shopping but I think I slept mostly ok certainly better than the night before last but I still don't want to go to work tomorrow and I'll have to copy logs and chase people and it's making me depressed just thinking about it and I'm rather thirsty and the place is a little bit of a mess from having lots of people over but not too much cause we used paper plates etc but even so it's messy and I think I might just go to bed soon...

I have this really bad habit of opening tonnes and tonnes of tabs in various browser windows with links from Life Hacker and Boing Boing and blogs and such places.  As well as links that I open and use but then never close.  Of course then my computer starts chugging under the load.. oops...

So thought I'd clear a few out..

There's the eight year old Google search as seen on Blogography a while back.  Eight years ago I was still on the front page of Google for Kazza :)  Apparently this won't be around for very long.

I completely and utterly want one of these for Christmas.  And a licence to fly it.  And a maintenance crew to take care of it.  Ok I'd settle for going in one.  Hell even seeing one in the air would be nice...

I still have Beep Beep open in YouTube, and the lyrics, although these aren't quite correct.. I suppose I could look for more correct ones but that would require effort. 

A useful tutorial I found on crontab when I was looking for the syntax for setting one up.  I've setup to download a snapshot of the Untersberg web cam three times a day to qualitatively see how often the mountain is in cloud.  And see the changing moods of the countryside.  I first saw some fresh snow there in late September, but that quickly melted.  There was a good covering a few days ago but that's melted too.  One of these years I'll get up that mountain - it's one of my missions in life!

Edit: Added The Atlas of the Real World, with pics here and here.

So.  Nat and Andrew came over on Friday night.  They stayed relatively sober while Stu and I got a little sloshed.. oops.. hope they don't hate us...

This was the second bottle of wine we drank (after a sparkling cabernet)..



Natalie had fun with my Russian Dolls..

Did the Earth Hour thing again last night.  Well sort of.  Forgot til about 8:20, oops :)

Just turned off lights, leaving on the computers to see by. Also turned off all the fish tank stuff for an hour, which had the effect of putting the timers back an hour a week early, so at least I won't have to reset those next weekend!

So is it true that candles produce more greenhouse gases than low-energy light bulbs?  That'd be funny in a tragic sort of a way ..!  (we didn't use any candles)

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Vista?  If you take a memory stick out of the card reader while you still have its window open, explorer crashes so completely that new explorer and internet explorer windows simply won't open.  Until a frigging reboot!!

Played pool with the soss guys tonight.  We lost two games and won one.  Lotsa fun, even though I'm crap at it.

Then off to the Dumpling Inn with Damien.  Food was amazing as always.  Especially the shredded beef peking style :)

Then took some cool rainbow photos.


Then to Scotty's to watch some more Firefly.

My going away present for my last job was some cash to put towards some Lego. One of the Lego things I got was the the third Hogwarts Castle. I finally had some time today to put it together.

There were a couple of funky new things. One of them was a Speckled Black-Silver Halberd (I've not seen that colour pattern before), and a "Wave Angular (Electric Zig Zag, Castle Magic Spark) with Marbled Trans-Purple Pattern", which is new this year to Lego.

And another new thing is minifig hands with fingers!! Apparently only on the Hagrid minifig, but cool nonetheless.

Umbridge up close..

Last night Natalie came over for pizza.

We drank.

A lot.

More than I've drunk in a while actually. Between the three of us we got through half a bottle of cointreau, half a bottle of vodka, a bottle of wine and goodness knows how much cognac.

And the pizzas were good too (I made them myself).

Somehow When Harry Met Sally came up in conversation (I think in relation to the whole thing about "men and women can never be friends because the sex part always gets in the way". Well the others had never seen it, so we put it on and it was fun, I think they enjoyed it.

I also found someone else who likes Tetrinet!! We had a few drunken games. Would have been fun to fire up another computer and have a three-way game. Maybe next time.

So yeah this morning we suffered. Not helped by TTotM hitting hard at 6am :(

So we had a quiet day today. Really didn't get anything done. Had some nice salmon for dinner and watched The Phantom Menace. That movie truly had some painful stuff in it :( We really must see if we can find the Phantom Edit...