Monday.  21st.  Did I mention I'm doing low carb again for another few weeks? Except the day got off to a rocky start because I'd forgotten about an apple that needed eating. There goes my carb limit for the day.. whoops. The sweetie prepped a cauliflower bake and brussels sprouts for dinner and I chucked a chunk of beef in to go with it. I got my blogging done quite early. Funny how writing up notes properly during the week makes blogging a lot quicker on a Sunday.. or Monday in this case. DS9 2.24.

Tuesday.  Awake from Dentist Time for hours and only broken sleep after that. Sigh. NEIL at work, as well as trying to figure out the API of our IP management system to help someone with something. Leftovers for dinner, DS9 2.25. After dinner started going through Dad's photos (from when he switched from slides to prints and onwards) to get photos of Mum. Annoyingly Dad had a really bad habit of over-enhancing his photos. At least with the prints I can go back and rescan them, but for digital photos once they're enhanced at all they're destroyed because he didn't keep the originals. Which is odd in itself because he used to make backups upon backups upon backups, just not of the original unaltered files. #grunt.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok. Really wanted to get through some decom prep but the interruptions Would. Not. Stop. All. Day. So damned hard to concentrate with Teams and Outlook popping up every five seconds. Seriously considering turning all notifications off. The sweetie cooked creamy mushroom chicken for dinner which was very nice.

DS9 2.26. Then more photo picking. From 2010 and some of 2011 Dad saved the raw camera photos off separately to the enhanced photos. That was nice of him. Maybe there were other copies of the rest of his digital camera photos elsewhere that either he or I lost. More likely him. I spent an entire week one Christmas trying to sort it all out, and would definitely have kept any raw photos if I'd found them. Knowing him he probably made several backups, thought he had a backup, didn't in fact have a backup, and deleted the original. Or maybe he just never thought he'd need his originals. Silly Dad.

Thursday.  Slept okish until about 5:00. Mostly decom work at work. Bar 59 for drinks which was quite pleasant, although a lot more expensive than work drinks! Made pizzas then DS9 3.1.

Friday.  Anzac Day.  Lest we forget.  Awake from 1:45 for hours sigh.

House stuff mostly in the morning. Happy that Stumpy is basking more and is more enthusiastic about food.  Did some camera testing in the afternoon. Only to realise later I had it on the wrong mode. Sigh.

I need to find a spot to plant out these chrysanthemums.  I accidentally uprooted one of the ones out the front the other month and chucked it in a pot out the back.  They're now happily flowering while the ones out the front are barely hanging on to life.  These things like a lot of sun but our garden is completely hopeless so not sure where I can put them.  

Kievs for dinner.  With half a cauliflower and most of a capsicum.

DS9 3.2. Then watched Blackberry which made us both a little nostalgic. Also, it's Anzac Day but I've only worn a jumper like twice all year. Usually by now there would have been days where we'd be wanting to put the heater on in advance of the Anzac Day allowed starting date. Instead I had a window open in my room to cool it down so I could sleep.  hrmmm.

Saturday.  Slept mostly okish.

Cooked cheese kranskis and miso scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Although Stu just had eggs because he needed to only eat soft food to not break his temporary tooth crown again.

Started a jigsaw. Went for a several hour drive with the sweetie, checking out previous houses, family houses, the church we got married in etc. Was a lovely way to spend a few hours with the sweetie (and we drove like 70km!). 

Made a small share platter for lunch (although I did get hungry later)

Finished the jigsaw. Got Chong Co delivered for dinner (after the MenuLog driver finally turned up) and watched DS9 3.3, then The Princess Bride :)

Sunday.  Awake from ~3:30 and never got back to sleep. Sigh.  They promised many millimetres of rain.  We got about three drops.

Went and saw Constellations at the NFSA with Tony which was a bit of fun. House stuff mostly for the rest of the day, and some food shopping.

When you realise you have 15 different cheeses in the fridge.. whoops...

Filled with rage in the afternoon at Optus who FORCE you to use international roaming because there's no way to disable it. Their only workaround is leave the phone on flight mode and use wifi. WTF??? I think I did read somewhere that if you have a second sim you can disable the Optus one. Which would work unless I needed to receive an SMS for two factor for anything. But there's a heap of horror stories out there from people getting charged the $5/day even when the sim wasn't even in the phone!!!

Hi.

Sunday.  30th.  Had Jenn over for dinner, wherein we cooked up a huge vegetarian feast.  Stu cooked his miso mushrooms.  I did a potato bake, a blue cheese broccoli/cauliflower/onion bake and brussels sprouts with hazelnuts.

We debated how long it had been since we saw Jenn last.  I looked up my blog and said April 2023, which seemed way too long, but I do remember taking a photo of her hair, and the date on that was April 2023, which pretty much confirms it.  We're such slackers at keeping up with people.  Watched DS9 2.7 after Jenn left.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Got to hand back over the NEIL job back to Neil hurray!!!  Leftovers for dinner then DS9 2.8.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep #grunt.  Did a bunch of analysis of some catchall rules so I can put in some more specific ones so we can get rid of the catchall.  

I tried feeding Stumpy today.  He's still being lethargic and not basking, but he did eat a blueberry and some food which was good.

I'm always suprised how quickly the COLD hits in Canberra.  It'll be 30C for days on end, and suddenly it's 5C overnight and leaving the windows open makes for a very cold house.  Decided April 1 should be close up all the windows day (several are left permanently locked open over summer).  In the afternoon I was cold and hungry so had a cup of tea in our fancy Cunard tea cups.

Luv-a-duck for dinner which was very nice.  All. The. Garlic.  !!

DS9 2.9.  After dinner was watching a video Dave2 linked to on living without a smartphone.  Yeah I literally can't even remember how friends and I would meet up without being able to text each other updates or issues.  Like what if a train was late, how would you tell who you were meeting?  Navigation is another big thing.  Nowadays I can turn up anywhere and use GPS on my phone to navigate (except that one time in Switzerland when I had to pay more for a car with satnav because the esim I got didn't work in Switzerland).  I can't even imagine the paperwork you'd need to cart around to try and do the same thing with maps.  Don't get me wrong, I love maps, and I like navigating, but they're damned heavy and more often than not I'm doing the driving not the navigating, and I can't imagine Mum would have much luck navigating me around European cities.  Having said that, we did manage to navigate our way around the USA and Canada in 1983 and 2004 before phones.  But for the most part we stayed out of big cities.  And the USA is literally designed for road tripping.  Signage is way way better there than in Australia or Europe.

Wednesday.  Second night in a row dreaming about toilets.  I have this bizarre thing where I stress about finding a clean/usable toilet.  And not even when I need to actually pee in the middle of the night, it's just this weird obsession I have.  Bizarre.  

Somewhat busy day.  Late home.  Stu had had a day so we got KFC hmmm.  DS9 2.10.  

OneNote is trying to force me to upgrade to Office 365.  It's already upgraded itself from the old Technet version I've been using for years AGAINST MY WILL I might add (apparently there's a way to turn off automatic updates so I might try reinstalling it and do that).  So now it says I have 90 days of free usage.  Well I can tell you that there is no way in HELL I'm going to pay to use it.  I will NEVER get an Office 365 subscription.  I'll rip everything out of it and use LibreOffice and Notepad if it comes down to it.  Which is a shame, because OneNote is actually quite a good product.  I like how it keeps different groupings of notes together and you can easily password protect sections.

Thursday.  Late getting to sleep, then awake from 5:30 sigh.  Went out to put a few things in the recycling bin before it got collected, only to find two big bags of RUBBISH in it!?!  WTF!?!  I pulled them out and raged for a while.  Messaged the neighbours but didn't get a response.  In the end put out our bin (which only had one bag of rubbish in it so wasn't worth putting out) and put their rubbish in it.  As we were leaving for work neighbour's Dad was out there and I asked him and he said he did it.  Sigh.  Simon was sick at drinks so if I get sick early next week we'll know why.  Pizzas for dinner then DS9 2.11.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day - put in a heap of those firewall rules which took me all afternoon to do.  Kievs and veggies for dinner then DS9 2.12.

Saturday.  Awake from like maybe 1 til 4.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Spent a chunk of the day photo picking from "other peoples photos" and trying to sort out what backups I have of Mum's computer. I'm definitely missing a few years worth from 2015-2017 where I just haven't had the time during visits to get it all copied. Debating a trip to Sydney to do that, as well as sort out the mess they made when they built her a new computer and didn't transfer all the files. Luckily she has all the photos (I hope!) on an external hard drive that has a snapshot backup I made her do some years back. In the evening we went to Bar 59 for an "antiball" but it was a bit of a fizzer really. People forgot or double booked or just didn't turn up, so there was only seven of us there in the end. I tried a few cocktails just for a bit of fun. So it was nice enough night, but dunno if I could be bothered trying to organise another one. Neil very kindly gave us a lift home.

Sunday.  Awake for maybe an hour or so in the middle of the night - from 2:27, but the new 2:27, so didn't get to watch the clock go from 2:59 to 2:00. Still pretty tired though. Finally managed to setup SMTP on my iPhone using CloudLoop. Optus is flaky as hell for sending SMTP mail through, plus I get SPF softfails with them because I don't have their mail servers in my SPF records. Did a bit of house stuff, and started thinking about some holiday stuff. Tried again to add my Qantas frequent flier number to my Emirates flights, but I kept getting the error:

Warning:
Sorry, we`re unable to save the changes. Please check all the information and try again.

So I tried their online chat. It was quick and they just did it for me. Unexpectedly quick and painless! Not that I know why I bother really - Qantas expire all my points before I can use them. Then did some other holiday planning.

The Windows 11 Explorer trash is really pissing me off.  I have an in tray where I have all the photos that I post to this blog.  I update it every week when I'm processing my photos, and when I've posted them they get moved to Done.  I sort this folder by date (in reverse to what windows likes to set it to) so that when I'm blogging them I can see and post the photos in order.  Every time my computer reboots this setting is lost.  I have to go Sort By -> Date (twice to get it in the right order) not just in Explorer, but in Chrome as well.  Every damned time.  But lately it's gotten worse.   Tonight I did an experiment.  I had the folder set the way I wanted it, and copied the path to clipboard.  I closed explorer on this desktop.  Opened up again and pasted the path.  Folder view was reset to default.  So did it again, this time by navigating manually to the folder.  In this method the folder view is retained.  And it's repeatable. 

I also epic hate how Explorer collapses all explorer folders that you've had expanded whenever you insert or eject removable media.  Like WHYYYYYYYY????

I hate Windoze SO MUCH!!

And suddenly the weekend is over. hrmmm.

Capitalism at its finest.  A store is puttering along.  Gets bought out.  Parent company goes bust.  Takes a whole bunch of brands with it.  

And so ends Millers.  And Katies and a heap of others.

Not that I shopped at Millers much.  I don't shop anywhere much for clothes.  I HATE having to buy clothes.  It's a painful process, sometimes ends in tears, and almost never leaves me with clothes I actually like or look good in.

Twenty five years ago, Millers used to sell plain-dyed tshirts.  They had them in a big variety of colours and I had a lot of them.  

I still have them.  All of them.  They're practically threadbare now - really thin fabric, and some of the seams have gone but they're still hanging in there.  I wear them as my "winter" tshirts - under jumpers - because after twenty five years deodorant stains are a thing.

I took this photo in 2018 and resized it for my blog back then, when I was still only doing 400 pixel photos

Millers stopped selling those thsirts years and years ago.  I was super annoyed that I couldn't get them anymore.  They were made in Australia, only like $13 at the time.

And did I mention how well they've lasted?

My theory is they stopped selling them because noone was buying them.  Because people didn't need to buy any more of them once they had them because they lasted so well.

But here's the thing.

After twenty five years, the collars on them are still intact (ok this photo was taken in 2022 but nothing's changed)

Nowadays if you buy a tshirt you'll be lucky to get a couple of wears out of it before the collars go crinkly.  The one I got at Target last year - maybe six washes.  The one I got at Target last week - literally one wear/wash.  WTF??  Target used to be good.  Now it's utter TRASH.

The whole world has been enshittified.

Sigh.

I've been a zombie today and have achieved very little.  I have, however, blogged my recent trip to Adelaide.

Sunday.  16th.  After blogging we had leftover lamb I dug out of the freezer and cabbage.  DS9 1.16 then finished Stranger Things season 1.  

Extra Hard Rated!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

Had to stake the capsicum plant because it was falling over underneath its own weight

NEIL at work.  Spent some time deleting old spam addresses that Neil put in, but aren't in use anymore.  DS9 1.17 - Lwaxana Troi! heh.  Then watched Labyrinth - 35 years to the day that I first watched it.  Oh, and was going through Adelaide photos and found the ones of the odometer on the car - we did 106km on it.. and put a whole $6 worth of petrol in it.  !!

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - was actually cold!  NEIL again at work.  They're talking about doing some fundamental changes to the way we do things with mail.  May or may not be a bad thing.  Finished off the last of the pulled pork from the freezer with some cabbage.  DS9 1.14.  Had to do some stuff for oncall.  Tried to find where I took a photo in like 2010.  The mother called for an hour.  Then it was bed time.  Annoyingly I've been feeling a day out all week - like Tuesday felt like Wednesday.

Wednesday.  Took a little while to get to sleep.  NEIL again.  But also so fricken busy with All The People wanting All The Things.  Also found out I'd split my jeans right across my butt.  Hurray.  Wonder if anyone noticed.  Stu had had a day, so we had KFC for dinner.  hmmm.  The mother messaged.  She'd had a fall (probably fainted from her heart condition) and broken her collar bone.  !!

Thursday.  Had just gone to bed when got an alert.  So had to get back up again to check it out.  Everything seemed fine and even Jim didn't know what it alerted.  But it was like midnight before I got to sleep.  NEIL again, and another busy day of All The Things.  Deleted lots of spam list entries.  After drinks was trivia night.  Except it was ANOTHER one of THOSE trivia nights.  Where there were so many words on the slides that they went so low as to not be readable.  Where they read through the questions so damned fast I literally couldn't keep up with writing answers.  Where they asked questions about work that even people that worked there wouldn't know, let alone friends and family.  Where questions had an answer, with bonus points for fleshing out the answer, never mind that they didn't consider all possibilities so their answers were actually wrong.  Where answers were in fact wrong (we Googled afterwards).  Where they didn't mark things centrally, but got us to mark each others, which meant all the nonsense with the multipart and incorrect answers made it impossible to score properly.  I delegated marking because it would have made me too angry otherwise.  So, me being me, I started complaining loudly.  I could hear myself doing it and knew I should stop, but I just couldn't.  DC threatened to leave at one point.  Hell *I* almost left at one point.  Things did pick up a bit after the first couple of rounds and it did get more fun.  We were even winning at one point.  Ended up coming equal third, two points behind the winner.

Friday.  Awake for several hours in the middle of the night.  Partly stressing about the fact I'm such a Karen.  Sigh.  I should probably not go to trivia nights anymore - they bring out the worst in me.  NEIL again, but hardly anyone bothered me most of the day, so had quite a peaceful day Getting Things Done.  Got a dump of all the domains we'd had email from in the past six months, and used that to cross reference addresses in our spam lists.  Anything not used in the past six months could be deleted.  Also wrote up a change to do more mail policy rearranging next week.  Sorry Neil! ;)  Pizzas for dinner since we didn't get them last night.  Tried to watch DS9 but it was like double zoomed in - worse than even pan and scan that we had to watch Mash in.  It was literally unwatchable.  So watched Death in Paradise 14.3.

Saturday.  Early night and slept well hurray! 

House stuff mostly, and some tagging of travel photos in Picasa.  Quicker to find photos of Mum that way - software does all the hard work.  Cooked an epic feast for dinner - creamy lemon pepper dill chicken, cauliflower blue cheese bake, brussels sprouts with bacon and hazelnuts, capsicum and garlic.

Stu had a fiddle with Amazon Prime on the Chromecast, but it was still doubly zoomed in and he couldn't figure out how to change it.  After Googling he found it's just a "thing" that Amazon Prime does.  So we watched DS9 1.20 on Netflix.  Screw you Jeff.  Then watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, so slightly late night.

Sunday.  Awake from before 2 til after 4.  Sigh.  Not too zombie though.  Mostly photo tagging/picking.  While David was here last week we discussed our backup strategies for our phones.  Lately I've only been backing up MOV files using iMazing.  It will download the HDR versions from the phone.  Since I first started using iMazing they've (dunno who) made it so the HDR videos will play *ok* on Windows, not completely washed out like they used to.  But they're still a bit over exposed.  So tonight I decided to try and grab them again in Windows.  Some time in the last year or so Apple has stopped messing with the timestamps on the files that it presents to windows, so all the timestamps are correct which is nice.  I guess enough people complained about it.  So grabbing everything I've still got on this phone.

But I am still PISSED that Windoze resets the sort order and view settings on my folders EVERY DAMEND TIME IT REBOOTS.  #hate #grunt

Sunday.  9th.  Got home from the coast and spent some time doing Dotz, then closing off browser tabs.  I really feel like I need to spend less time on the computer/internet/phone... hrmmmm.  Downloaded photos from the week and blogged the last two weeks and some of the coast weekend.  Leftover mince with cauliflower rice and cheese for dinner.  Death in Paradise 14.1.  Somehow managed to lose a BRAND NEW HAIR TIE!!!  Had a slight meltdown because I'd been out of sorts all day, and this just sent me over the edge.  

Monday.  Went to bed early (like 20:30) but woke up at 12:45 and stayed awake for HOURS.  Sigh.  So not transfunctionating during the day.  Mostly just did house stuff during the day, which all took a lot longer than normal because I wasn't transfunctionating.  Finally finally got a bit of rain around 18:00 (even the weeds are dying at the moment!!).  Need to bribe the little brother into visiting before daylight savings finishes so I can see what I'm cooking.  Had lamb chops from Chris's and cabbage for dinner.  I never used to like lamb chops growing up because they were just too damned fiddly with all the fat and bones.  After forty years (and almost never having eaten them in the meantime) I have to say my opinion hasn't changed much.  Sure they're tasty, but just too annoying.

Tried to watch Stranger Things but nothing would connect to the Chromecast, even after rebooting it, the wifi and Stu's phone.  Did a bit of a Google and found everyone on the internet complaining about it.  Enshittification much??  We ended up watching a bit of Hard Quiz.  I think I could answer ONE question - football, meat pies, <what> and Holden cars?

Tuesday.  Slightly early night.  Actually slept quite well.  Hurray.  NEIL at work, who was off getting bits of him chopped out.  Chromecast still down.  Turns out an intermediate certificate expired so stuff couldn't authenticate.  I wonder if Google are debating whether or not to fix it or let the generation 2 devices all just die and force people to buy new ones.  I imagine that would piss off enough people that they would refuse to buy anything Google again.  I also got my quarterly reminder at work to check for expiring certificates coming up in the next quarter.  If only Google had done that.

Wednesday.  The brother type person called me while I was at lunch.  He could come TONIGHT.  Except I didn't have a new light to install yet.  He suggested Bunnings.  I walked up to Project Lighting instead.  They had a record of what we bought last time and I got something similar.  Not the same of course.  No no no.  Maybe that's a good thing though because turns out Mercator Franklin lights are TRASH!!!  Seriously LED lights should last years and years and years.  Not SIX years!!  And it's not like you can just replace a bulb, now you have to REPLACE THE WHOLE DAMNED FITTING!!! #hate  Anyways, so David picked me up after work and installed the new light! Hurray!!  Bestest brother ever. 

Had a few drinks and chatted then he got a bee in his bonnet to setup the PS3 to be able to use Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever?? :)

Thursday.  Woke up around 2:45 for several hours.  Sigh.  Although surprisingly unzombielike. 

NEIL again for the day.  Julian's farewell at drinks which was nice (I called the Japanese whisky, but not Lego Himeji Castle :) ).  Pizza with blue cheese for dinner!

DS9 1.13.  Another dumb episode.

Friday.  Slept fairly well.  NEIL at work.  Brown Food Friday!!!

DS9 1.14 and Death in Paradise 14.2.

Saturday.  Went to bed at 21:30 but didn't get to sleep til after 00:30.  Sigh.  Then meh sleep.  So twice this week I've had crap sleep the night before a day off.  Sigh.  Zombie morning, mostly house stuff.  Did some Dotz and even did a jigsaw in the late afternoon - 500 pieces in an hour and a quarter flat!  I asked the sweetie what's for dinner?  His response:

Google fixed the Chromecast issue.  Haven't looked up what they did.  Watched DS9 1.14.  Another meh episode.  Does DS9 actually get any better?  Most of season 1 is lame.  Stranger Things 1.5.  They finally banded together after all attackings things separately.  Reminded me in one place of E.T.  :)  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got a bee in my bonnet to write a script to swap out Picasa database directories.  And spent a chunk of the day tagging people in photos.  Whoops.  Also gave Neil a lift to the hospital for antibiotics (did you know "hospital at home" is a thing?  You stay home but have to pop into the hospital every day for treatment.  Advantages and disadvantages - nice that you can hang out in your own house but a pain to have to trek into the hospital every day). 

Also.  Why TF does windoze reset the sort order of my directories EVERY DAMNED TIME IT REBOOTS???  Far out it pisses me off.

Have had like three drops of rain this afternoon.  So much for showers.  

Monday.  3rd.  You might be missing a few days.  They'll be over in my Australian Holidays blog soon.  Slept okish til about 5 then that was it for sleep.  Busy morning before work dong two loads of washing and trying to get organised from not having a weekend.  Spent much of the day trying to catch up with work, on account of missing three days last week.  Very nice salmon and salad for dinner.  DS9 1.9 then Dotz for a while - first time in ages I've had a chance.  Downloaded my photos from the weekend.  While I was away I let the phone set the time zone.  Everything was ok until right near the end when one of the photos jumped back to Canberra time zone, then back to Adelaide time for the next one.  This happened straight after I took photos in burst mode (by accident).  This is exactly what happened to me in America two years ago - when it would jump around time zones, mostly after taking non-standard photo types - like panoramas or videos or whatever.  So I turned off the auto-set time zone setting again, cause I don't trust Apple not to randomly change the time zone of my photos whenever it feels like it.

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep.  Distracted day at work being NEIL.  Very nice eye fillet steak and salad for dinner.  Stu bought these steaks on the weekend which is unusual for him cause he rarely eats steak.  I let them rest for like an hour before I cooked them, and they turned out really well - tender and juicy and nicely pink in the middle.  Stu might be convinced to eat steak more often heh.

DS9 1.10.  Dumb episode.  Reminded me a bit of that movie Cube.  One of the lowest ranked according to ASTRA (Australian Star Trek Ratings Analysis - which has never been posted to the internet, it was only ever on Usenet back in the 90s).  

Wednesday.  Okish sleep.  It was nice and cool at least.  Slightly more productive day.  Stu cooked up a big batch of mince.  I cooked a cauliflower bake and All The Garlic.  

DS9 1.11.  The Grand Nagus' lips looked familiar.  They turned out to be Wallace Shawn's haha

Thursday.  Another distracted day.  Lunch at Lighty for Julian's farewell.

See if you can pick which ones were on the Canon and which on the iPhone..

Bruce's farewell at drinks, pizzas, DS9 1.12, bed.

Friday.  Early night.  Slept through til nearly 6 which was good.  Felt overwhelmed with my todo list and being away two weekends in a row.  hrmmm.  

Ever wondered what potato fruit looks like?

Monday.  10th.  Backdated because I spent the time I should have been blogging on cooking instead.

Stormy overnight.  Woke up around 2, then 3, then 4, but managed to get back to sleep each time.  Not a terribly productive day at work - fighting all the crap.  Found out HBZ is leaving.  And I immediately started feeling a sense of impending doom.  So did Con.  Yummy dinner of slow cooked pork neck and all the veggies.  Beyond Paradise 1.4, then bed.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  The BS started as soon as I logged in - a product used by our security team needs direct internet access, *apparently* doesn't support a proxy (to be confirmed).  Seriously this is a SECURITY product???  Didn't get anywhere with the errors on the new mail servers.  Although we were able to do a restore of an old one to a new one and it's working ok.  Mince and cabbage for dinner.  Beyond Paradise 1.5.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Was stretching just after I got up and felt a bit of a twang in my shoulder which hurts a bit.  Another unproductive day of dealing with crap and no word back from mail server vendor.  Nearly two weeks into keto and I'm already sick of food.  Sick of cooking.  Sick of having to think about what to eat.  Some retard used my Gmail address to book a hotel in South Carolina.  Very tempted to cancel the day before so he gets charged the first night fee and has nowhere to stay.  Stressed with travel agent who hasn't been communicating very well.  And finished Beyond Paradise, which had a nice crossover into Death in Paradise at the end of the 2023 season.  

Thursday.  Slept okish.  After emailing the mob in South Carolina last night that someone had booked the hotel using my email address, I got a thing back from them to say they'd cancelled the booking.  Lolz.  Another day of not getting much done due to all the crap.  Some of Con's grad cohort came to drinks which was a bit of fun.  Pizzas then started into Return to Paradise - a spinoff series set on the South Coast, with filming locations on the South Coast as well as Avalon.

Friday.  Had a bit of time for scripting in the afternoon.  But couldn't get a simple foreach to work.  Sigh.  Kievs for dinner, then Stranger Things 1.2, then the first two episodes of Meltdown: Three Mile Island.

Saturday.  Slept okish until about 4:30. hrmm. 

When you pack up the majority of the carbs in your pantry (I couldn't move in there).  Will slowly start going through this in a few weeks.

Stu found a keto muffin recipe that's actually quite good

Had a busy morning including house stuff, booking flights to Adelaide, taking my brand-new-second-hand saxophone for a service, going to Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  It's still got most of the vibes of the Green Shed in terms of range of stuff for sale.  But all the bits and pieces are arranged mostly by colour.  Odd.  It's also a bit expensive, like the cheapest stuff is still a dollar (sub dollar would be better for something small), cheap plastic glasses are still $2 which seems a bit high.  Jigsaws are somewhat variable but mostly $4 (Green Shed was $3 per jigsaw flat rate).  However, they retain the colour coded bargain weeks that Vinnies do, which means that that $4 jigsaw is only $1 or $2 depending on the coloured tag.  So I wasn't going to buy anything.  And then I did.  Whoops.  More house stuff in the afternoon.

Stu cooked creamy mushrooms and cauliflower rice for dinner - yum!

Return to Paradise 1.2, then finished the last two episodes of Meltdown: Three Mile Island.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Another busy day of house stuff, but this time had a bit of time for hobbies.  Played some clarinet for possibly the first time this year.  hrmmm. 

Dropped into the reptile place at Gold Creek.  They *still* don't have a 48" 10% UV light, but they did suggest an edison screw heater with UV that I could try in the meantime.  But I'm a bit worried about giving Stumpy sunburn, he hasn't had any UV all summer.  The baby blueys are so cute though!!

Did you know you can buy garlic cloves by the kilo?  Only $12 too!  Bargain!!

Lots of cooking in the afternoon, so no time to blog. 

A big veggie bake, a heap of garlic, and one of Tony's eggplants with ham and cheese.  The eggplant went very slimy though

Lachie's breakfast lasagna

Watched Stranger Things 1.3.  Tried to start on Chernobyl, but, technology.  Turned on the NAS for the first time in months.  The thing booted which was nice, but the admin interface and sharing protocols are so old my computer wouldn't talk to it.  Had to fire up an ancient version of Firefox I had lying around to be able to connect to the admin interface.  Reenabled SMB 1 on my computer but will need to reboot to use it.

Sunday.  26th.  Leftovers for dinner, then went over to give Lily her 21st birthday presents.

Monday.  Bit late getting to sleep, then woke up at like 5.

Spent much of the day on my blog doing some catchup blog entries including a couple from 21 years ago.  Started to look at why Google isn't indexing my site very well anymore.  One error it complained about is canonical links being http.  The problem is I can't really do anything about that cause I have no idea how to fix MTEntryPermalink - <link rel="canonical" href="<$mt:EntryPermalink encode_html="1"$>"> cause I'm dumb.  It'll be buried deep deep deep in the Movable Type code somewhere.  Sad times.  Leftovers for dinner, Death in Paradise 13.6, Wednesday 1.3.  Then went and tried for some more comet photos on the new camera.

Tuesday.  Went to bed/sleep a little late, but woke up early still.  Decided to go to work (had been debating taking the day off).  Tidied up a bunch of doco from all the deleting I did on Friday.  Luv-a-Duck for dinner that we picked up when we went shopping today (Stu also cooked up a bunch of keto food).

Death in Paradise 13.7 then Mum photo picking.

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep, even though it was nice and COLD after stoopidity of the day's heat.  Slept in past 6 though. 

Bit of crap in the morning then mostly planning out mail server upgrade (need to build new vms).  Home late, dinner of sausages and salad.  Death in Paradise 13.8 (end of season 13) with another preposterous setup for a murder.  Backed up computer, washed hair then bed.

Thursday.  Mail upgrade planning.  Built a vm.  Updated some doco.  Had our last drinks at Bar 59 for a while.  Made pizzas then Wednesday 1.4.

Friday.  Early night and slept ok (another nice cool change).  Crap meetings, bit of mail server work, amongst distractions.  Kievs for dinner.

Wednesday 1.5 then logged onto work for an hour and a half to do a big certificate renewal.

Saturday.  1st February.  Earlyish night but awake from 2-4.  Sigh.  Stu was awake for ages too.  Slept in til 7.  Bit of house stuff, food shopping and suddenly it's 10am and haven't really done anything.  Pretty much just cleaned the house all day.

Had EffanC over for dinner, which was lovely, it's been wayyyyy too long since we've had them over.  Did a nice rump cap, blue cheese potato bake and brussels sprouts.

Finished the last bottle of bubbles from my 50th!

Sunday.  Got about five hours sleep which wasn't too bad all things considered, but I was tired all day.  Had a nice quiet day, mostly doing Dotz and also cooking up a huge batch of mince/bacon/mushroom/garlic/onion to decorate in different ways over the next week or so.  

"Been away, sorry". 

"I'll upload my travelogue prolly tomorrow"

bwaahahaah

Nearly 21 years later...

My parents and I went up to Queensland in April 2004 for Uncle Colin's wedding with Sandra.  We took two days to drive up, and two to drive back, with the wedding in the middle.

Today I finally posted blog entries for the holiday and the wedding.

Queensland 2004
Colin and Sandra's Wedding