Dear Vodien, 

Here's a bowl of petunias:

Tuesday 27.8.24.

I went to update my blog because I realised I'd forgotten to add a photo from last week's entry. Loaded the blog interface but got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Loaded terminal through cPanel. Which luckily worked (no CageFS errors this time). Ran my test perl script which connects to SQL and got this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
DBI connect('db:localhost','<user>',...) failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at common.pl line 18.
Cannot connect: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

In phpMyAdmin in cPanel I got:

mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied for user '<user>'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Fricken great. Just what I need. Feeling like I should be buying a bowl of petunias for Vodien.

Wednesday 28.8.24.

I remembered that I'd had the phpMyAdmin error before, and the fix was to just reset the cPanel password. So I did that. Great, phpMyAdmin loads.

Except.

My MySQL database had been reverted to a point in time from last October!!

!!!!

AGAIN!!

Yeah so the exact same problem as in June where they reverted it back to the same spot in October. In June, after a week or two of yelling at them, they restored it.

So of course I yelled at them.

I didn't send them a photo of a bowl of petunias. I should have.

Now before you ask, yes I do have recent backups of my database, having learnt my lesson from last time, but that's not the damned point. In fact I'd taken a backup the Sunday before, so I was only missing one entry from my blog. But as it turned out, having my own backup was not going to help. But we'll get to that later.

Thursday 29.8.24

Vodien ticket escalated (supposedly) to the sysadmins.

Friday 30.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Saturday 31.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Sunday 1.9.24.

Still no response from Vodien - three days now. Started a new ticket. Which they promptly closed.

I changed the permissions on mt-comments.cgi so noone could post any comments. They would either fail because the entries don't exist, or break the site with a republish. And I didn't want more mess to clean up.

Monday 2.9.24.

Vodien provided a restore of the database in an .sql file and said here you go. But it was the database at the "bad" restore point from October last year - so it didn't have any recent data in it.

Tuesday 3.9.24.

One week in.

No progress getting Vodien to restore the correct database for me.

Wednesday 4.9.24.

Vodien basically keep telling me I have to restore my database myself. Which I was considering doing, assuming I actually had the right data. I did end up getting a copy that was taken a few days before they broke it, but I decided to keep pushing for the whole thing.

Then I went to my blog interface to check it and got

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@<domain> to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And logging into the terminal in cPanel I got

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to mount /var/cagefs/35/<user>/home2 -> /usr/share/cagefs-skeleton/home: Too many levels of symbolic links.

So either they were trying to fix it or just making it worse.

Thursday 5.9.24.

Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. At least the cagefs file system on my website was working again in the morning. But the database is still bad.

Friday-Sunday.

Long weekend in Port Macquarie.

Sunday 8.9.24.

Checked my mail when we were near home. I shouldn't have, because the lack of useful response was just making me more and more depressed.

Monday 9.9.24.

While not getting to sleep last night I wondered if maybe there were two database servers on the server. It always used to be MySQL, but the restore they did recently (and I think I might have noticed this previously) was from Maria DB. Same only different. My latest theory is there's actually the old MySQL database server still on the host, and for whatever reason the pointers for Perl and phpMyAdmin have been pointed back at it (again). I mentioned this to them, but their only response was "what's the URL of your blog entry manager?". Yeah right like I'm going to let you into that. So I gave them a command line command that they could use to query my address book database, which has also been impacted by this whole drama. That was in the morning. No response by evening.

Tuesday 10.9.24.

Two weeks in.

No response from Vodien. Eventually they responded with something that didn't make sense, so yelled at them again to put this through to a senior sysadmin.

As an aside: if you Google "Vodien is trash" (I literally did this) you'll get links to review pages that have page after page of people ranting about how utterly trash Vodien is. One star reviews all the way.

Wednesday 11.9.24.

Awake from after 3. Vodien sent me a database restore. But restored from 19 August which was before my last backup anyway.

Tried to reload my blog index, but I got:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@kazza.ciapics.cia.com.au to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Turns out they've blatted all my cgi scripts permissions to 644 instead of 755 or 744. Every single one of them.

WTF?? I mean seriously, WTF???

So now what. Do I take their database, restore it, and hope they don't flip over to the other database at some random point (which I couldn't even find out from them if that's what had happened). Or do I just give up and take my clean backup to a new hosting company. Ok I'd pretty much made up my mind I was going to move. They've broken my site multiple times in the past few years, and it always takes days or weeks of yelling to get it resolved. I'm sick of it.

Thursday 12.9.24.

Apparently they've restored a database again.

Friday 13.9.24.

Tried opening my blog interface and got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yet my Address Book scripts still work. Ok, gave it some time and it came back. But database was still from October 2023.

Saturday 14.9.24.

Resolved myself to spending my entire weekend sorting out this mess.

Step one: find a new hosting company.

Back in 2020 I tried VentraIP. It looked to have everything I wanted and was a good price. I talked to them online before I joined and said I had a Perl/MySQL setup and they said that was fine. But when I went to get it going I found they didn't have the DBD::MySQL perl module and my blog wouldn't work. So that was a complete waste of time. So I wasn't going to try them again.

Had a look on https://www.productreview.com.au/ and someone recommended CloudLoop and they had excellent reviews. So had a look. $10/month for a basic plan which would cover what I needed. They didn't have an online chat, so I emailed them asking about Perl/MySQL. This was fairly early on a Saturday morning. They responded in MINUTES! I was impressed. So I joined up. Pro-rata til the end of the month it was only around $5, so even if it didn't work out I wouldn't lose much.

After the account was activated a short time later, I logged into cPanel only to find they don't have Terminal enabled. Fricken great. So set myself up an SSH private key to try and use ssh. But Internode blocks ssh doesn't it. Fricken fricken. So tried to log into Internode, but their MFA is trash and I had to log off/on a few times before I could finally get in. Also, Stu's phone number is out of date, but we can't update it because:

Your contact details cannot be changed at this time
Unfortunately, your contact details cannot be viewed or changed online at this time. Please contact us to update your details. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thanks Internode, sorry iinet, sorry TPG.

Anyways, eventually got in and turned off the firewall, now to wait and see if it will work.

In the meantime I emailed support about Terminal in cPanel. Again they responded in minutes. They said it was not available for security reasons, but they enabled ssh access and I had to whitelist my IP address in the firewall. Which I couldn't actually find.
But.
Terminal now showed up in cPanel! Great! That's really all I need anyway. Let's do this thing!
(I think they may have mixed up ssh/cpanel terminal - so ssh is disabled which is fair enough, but the terminal in cpanel had been enabled which is all I needed anyway).

So first step is to make sure Perl will work with MySQL. I imported my address book database (it's only tiny) and tried out one of my scripts.

Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (you may need to install the CGI module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at quickie.cgi line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at quickie.cgi line 3.

Turns out CGI.pm hasn't been around since Perl 5.22. Vodien has 5.16. CloudLoop has 5.26.

So I get CGI.pm from CPAN. Add a line to my script to use lib and the path of the file. Works!

Next up my blog script (mt-check to start with). It wanted Util.pm so copied that up as well.

But then it wanted FCGI.pm. Got that too, but this time I got this error:

Can't locate loadable object for module FCGI in @INC

Which I think means it needs to be properly installed/compiled for binaries, which I can't do. hmmmmm

Ok so then ran mt-check on the web. It actually ran! It complained about a bunch of modules, but then it complains on the old site as well. It loaded enough that I might be able to work with it.

So next I need to get my database imported. I still didn't have the most current database export from Vodien (their exports are a different format to mine), so I used my own backup. But I was running into all sorts of problems. phpMyAdmin wouldn't import the file, giving sql errors when importing the "blob" data. And the file is 50MB so trying to edit it and cut it down to just do individual tables was proving problematic. Now I didn't have these problems when I tried VentraIP a few years back, so I'm guessing there must be some versioning problems or something?? But I was getting super frustrated with it. I did have a go at using Vodien's sql file and that one did import, albeit with old data.

Sunday 15.9.24.

So with some actual blog data in the database I next had to get an eighteen year old release of Movable Type working on a modern server. Yes yes I know I should update to something else. But newer versions of Movable Type are $499USD. PER YEAR. And I've seen the dramas people have moving to WordPress. Stu has threatened to spend his retirement moving it to a more modern platform heh. But in the meantime, I just want my blog to work.

So first up I try running mt.cgi on the command line to see what sort of errors I'd get.

[user@server MT-5.2.2]$ perl mt.cgi
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at lib/MT/App.pm line 1821.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Got an error: Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/{{ <-- HERE support}}/?/

Yeah so now you need to escape {} characters in regex strings. Think I fixed that.

So then did a test post and that actually worked!! (using a hosts file entry on my computer so I could test it out on CloudLoop before changing DNS anywhere)

Well that was good enough for me to commit to moving the site across.

Tarballed my directory up on Vodien. ~2.5GB. !! Downloaded it to my computer, extracted it, saved into a number of smaller zip files, uploaded them one at a time, extracted them. Uploading large files must be a bit upsetting for Internode, and I kept getting dumped out of FTP because our IP address kept changing. Have I ever mentioned how trash Internode has become since they got bought out by iinet then TPG? Also I have a 5GB size limit on CloudLoop. Anyways, got there in the end.

Now all that's left is to get a proper copy of my database from Vodien. They did have a restore file taken on the morning of 26 August - the morning after my last blog post. But the files were owned by root and I had no read access. After a few chats/emails back and forth I realised there were actually two copies of the files, one in the root and one in my website. So got them. And they were perfect! Well, they had my latest data in them anyway.

Right, so tried to use phpMyAdmin to import it, but got errors again (didn't record what). But then I found this command

mysql -u database_username -p database_name < file.sql
from this site https://support.hostinger.com/en/articles/4536306-how-to-import-a-database-over-ssh
And that worked perfectly.

But it was at this point I realised that the export sql file was full of funky characters. Somewhere along the line "special characters" from foreign languages lost encoding and were broken. Tried doing search/replaces in vi, but it didn't want to play. So put that aside for now.

Tested posting some blog entries and they worked, so hopefully the database is working well enough.

But I was getting SSL certificate errors - saying it was self signed. I changed the DNS A record in Vodien and waited for it to change over, but I was still getting errors on https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=kazza.id.au

Emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a response in minutes. And then sslhopper was picking the certificate up properly. Not sure if they did anything or not, but I was blown away by the responsiveness and usefulness of CloudLoop support. It's like a breath of fresh air after dealing with the faceless Vodien.

Monday 16.9.24.

Before all these dramas started I'd already been meaning to fix up my blogs properly. I'd fixed the style sheet on my main blog to be hardcoded to https, but I hadn't published it to everywhere, comments were still broken on https, and I wanted to get all my holidays blogs using a consistent design. I also wanted to replace the defunct Google Analytics scripts with the new ones. So after dinner I spent ages working on my holiday blog templates - fixing everything so it all works in https, fixing style sheet locations etc. I picked the Americas 2023 blog (the last one I did) and made sure everything worked properly, then made a Theme from it.

Tuesday 17.9.24.

Working through all my holiday blogs using the updated theme/design. The special characters in my Turkey blog were proving problematic :( Some of the characters I can do a search/replace in the blog interface and it'll go through and change them all. While this works for some characters (eg umlauts) it wouldn't work for some of the characters in the Turkish language :( I also found and fixed a time zone setting in my blog that has been annoying me for twenty years haha.

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday

Work on fixing holiday blogs.

Saturday 21.9.24.

Finished fixing up my holiday blogs (including the Australian Holidays blog which has a slightly different config to it, although have since found a couple of problems I still need to fix).

So then it was onto my behemoth of a main blog. There's over five thousand entries in it. The last time I tried to publish after design update it took over a day. Look I even took a screen shot! 

So I was dreading the pain it was going to cause. I'd taken notes during the fixing of my holiday blogs design, so it was pretty quick to repeat the changes in the main blog. But before I committed, I wanted to test the design with a test post to make sure it picked up everything ok.

Took a while and then BAM..

500
Internal Server Error
An internal server error has occurred.

The good news is the entry did actually post. Although not properly, and it was intermittent. Like it'd mostly update the entry page, but then not the archives page etc. So thinking there might be resource limits. I didn't see any real spikes/errors in the cPanel Resource Usage thingie though.

I tried clearing out the entire activity log. This cleared nearly 9MB out of the database. But it didn't help. I tried a few other Movable Type config options as well with no luck.

So I emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a super quick response. And a stack trace. And they looked while trying to reproduce the problem themselves. This was all well and truly above and beyond the level of support I would have expected. I was astounded. But a definite possibility was the Assets. Since Movable Type 4, whenever you upload an image it would save it to the database as an asset. This annoyed me when it first started because of all the extra clutter, but I did like it simply because it'd read the image and put height/width info into the html. But after sixteen years, I had 14000 assets. !! So I deleted them all!! (well, firstly I tested what would happen if you did. I found it would delete the asset and the image itself, but it left the html alone. So all I needed to do was restore the images once I'd deleted the assets, and all would be well).

Then I did a test post.

It published.

In SECONDS.

!!!!

After a bit more testing of posting and commenting I was ready to release the hounds. I republished the entire site. I did it in chunks, but it was all done in under ten minutes. And search results are returned super quickly too now. My blog hasn't been this fast in YEARS!!!

The only real remaining issue now is the foreign characters. I download the mt-entry table (16MB) and did some search/replaces and was able to fix a lot of it. But there's some characters that I just can't publish because it won't talk to the database. There might be a way to fix it. Something about telling perl to talk to MySQL with the right version of utf-8. But I'm too dumb for that sort of thing. Replaced a good chunk of the bad characters. Almost accidentally blatted the .bak table because I forgot to change the table name in the insert into lines (yay for it not importing duplicate entries). Had to redo the whole thing again because I didn't escape ' and " characters. Then republished again. Nine minutes, fifty seconds. I should probably republish all my holiday blogs too.

Sunday 22.9.24.

Spent most of the afternoon blogging entries from the past month.

Monday 23.9.24.

Wrote up this post so far.

I still haven't changed my mail or DNS configs over yet. Or the websites for my subdomains. I'll do that first before I post this.

I haven't decided what I'll do with johnson.id.au or trainman.id.au. I'd actually prefer to keep trainman where it is, because then I'd be able to email David again (currently using my account as an SMTP server, which intercepts mail for trainman.id.au and delivers it to me instead of David).

I also need to figure out how to backup my database properly. I'll have to do some testing of exporting/importing the data on the same version. Otherwise I'm going to need to figure out a better way to backup the blob data in the database. If I hadn't been able to get the Maria DB dump from Vodien I would have been a bit stuck as I wasn't able to properly import my own database backup, which is quite upsetting.

Tuesday 24.9.24.

Started going through and documenting everything in my Vodien cPanel setup. Found a place for mail forwarding, so tried setting trainman.id.au to an external MX record to see what would happen if I sent mail there from my account. It hasn't bounced back to me, so maybe it did deliver to David. This is good to know if I end up moving trainman.id.au to CloudLoop. Also found another backup section which lets you download MySQL databases. This has the same format as what Vodien sent to me. Interestingly the Vodien export is full of trash characters, while the CloudLoop export is fine. This is good news. Dropped my TTLs on mail to 300. Setup my mail accounts on CloudLoop. Tried them out in Eudora. TLS errors to start with, but easily fixed by setting TLS to Required, Alternate Port in Eudora. So changed the DNS for mail.kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. So inbound mail all working. Had a look at migrating ciapics over. But it's half a gig. And I only have five on CloudLoop. Considering leaving it there, but I really want to take all of kazza.id.au off Vodien. Next up - SMTP. Got it to auth and send ok, but now to battle with the SPF record. Adding the IP address of my host didn't help. Or adding relay.mailchannels.net. hmm. On a lighter note, cPanel and DNS are actually integrated on CloudLoop which is nice.

Wednesday 25.9.24.

Tested mail again and my SPF record has propagated around so that's nice - can send to gmail now. Although this is all likely to be moot once I switch the nameservers across and use CloudLoops DNS which already has all this stuff. While clearing stuff out of Vodien I discovered that at some point they'd actually fixed the ownership of the db restores. Lolz.

Friday 27.9.24.

Setup johnson.id.au as a domain on CloudLoop.  Copied over the content (there's like, one page).  Then changed the nameservers from Vodien to CloudLoop.  Tested email once DNS propagated.

Saturday 2.11.24.

Been on CloudLoop for like six or seven weeks now. No issues. Today I changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. Pointed a few A names of my photo subdomains back at Vodien. They have a lot more storage so keeping my photos sites there.

Sunday 3.11.24.

Cleaned out most of kazza.id.au off Vodien, including my blog database. Left an entry in my addressbook database and make sure the scripts were working to access it. So I'll be able to tell when Vodien break it again.

In conclusion.

I knew as soon as Vodien broke my database AGAIN for the second time in three months that I was going to have to finally move my blog. This was reinforced over the next few weeks by being impossible to get anyone who actually cared or had the capability to look at the issue and fix it. No matter how much pleading and yelling I did I just couldn't get anywhere. It made me seriously depressed for weeks. I was also upset that the backups of the database I'd been dutifully taking weren't necessarily going to work properly.

On the flip side, the support and responsiveness of CloudLoop (Karthick) was utterly outstanding. They definitely deserve their five star reviews.

In the end my blog is a lot happier. The holiday sites are consistent in design and everything works properly in HTTPS. The culling of the assets out of the database means my entries publish in seconds. Every new year I'll clear out the previous year's assets to keep it trimmed down.

Let's hope I don't have to write another one of these posts any time soon...

Monday.  7th.  Labour Day.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Woke up ~6.29.  Fish and gardening stuff all morning.  Then setting up and fighting with the new printer (needed another driver to print double sided).  Then trying to sort out tax stuff.  And getting stressed at everything.  Adulting is hard :(

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Catchup day at work really.  Shine Dome talk in the evening. Prof Nanda Dasgupta talking about the research of Prof Mark Oliphant, and Dr Ed Simpson talking about his work with particle accelerators and making new elements. 

Bronte Cormican-Jones's "Of Line of Light" outside the NFSA

Dinner at Badger&Co after.  Talked into buying more food than I wanted.  Like a LOT more.  Oh well, leftovers.  Hurrah.  Also Badger is pretty hit and miss, and more misses with the specials.  Like the "crispy" pork belly bites that weren't crispy.

Wednesday.  Awake from before 1:30 til after 4.  Hurray.  Zombie day.  Did go to the Crepe Cafe for lunch to avoid the food court in school holidays.  Hadn't been since pre covid.  Except they're the Aussie Crepe House now.  I had the stroganoff crepe (up to $17 now, ouch).  It probably had a bit more cheese filling, but the beef was TOUGH.  

Cooked cheese kranski chipolatas for dinner, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of them for the next 24 hours or so!

Thursday.  Ok day I think.  Herbert's after work for a final TRBC tap takeover.  Tim came which was nice.  He might be looking for IT work in Canberra, although his wife is not keen on them leaving Tumut.  

Friday.  Crap sleep.  Ok day.  Kept a bit late at work and then had to race down the hill for a bus, which I only *just* caught, to go out to Cypher for Wello's birthday drinks.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day trying to catch up with life.  Stu was also too stressed with life so we didn't go to the club working bee. 

In the evening was a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's.  I did a very half-hearted attempt at Eddie (couldn't find a wig or vest, or borrow a saxophone, but did find a scarf which matched and made a slingshot).  

The sweetie went as Dr Scott.

There were frank n furters, meatloaf, and rocky horror road.

Ian even let me have like one of the last ever TRBC beers I'm ever likely to have!

Ended up staying up wayyyy too late, but it was fun.

Sunday.  Got like five hours sleep.  Cause I wake up early no matter what.  With sore throat.  Spent the day continuing to catch up with life.  Managed to get all my Queensland photos online, only a month late.  Also went and did food shopping.  Tuna bake and veggies for dinner.  Early night.

Ten years (and one month) ago today my mother and I went to Queensland for an Outback Spirit tour of Queensland.  

While it was a very well organised tour, it was STOOPIDLY expensive - like a thousand dollars a day for the two of us.  This totally left a bad taste in my mouth for a lot of the trip.

I was going to post this link last month on the ten year anniversary, but Vodien broke my database (again) and it literally took weeks to sort out.  So it's a month late.

It's also funny how much of the trip I'd forgotten.  I was going through and choosing photos and labelling them and there were chunks I didn't remember at all, even when seeing the photos.  Stoopid dementia brain.

Anyway.. here it is!

With food/hotel photos still to come.  And by hotels, I mean like campsites.  Because a thousand dollars a day with Outback Spirit will get you picnic lunches and campsite accommodation.  Hurray.

Sunday.  22nd.  Finished Wonka.  Cool been-there's of St Paul's and Oxford.  

Monday.  Slept ok I guess.  Busy day.  On the phone from 16:00 to 18:00 blah.  Cooked a red curry with some of the leftover beef.  And spent the evening writing up my dramas with Vodien.

This bit of geranium has been out of the ground since January.  !!!

Tuesday.  Slept ok I guess.  Not quite as crazy busy day.  Biggest set of migrations done, with cutover later in the week.  Smaller batches to go.  All evening battling mail on CloudLoop.

Wednesday.  Um.  Planning migrations I think.  Drinks after work with Neil and some other peeps.  Watched some Amazing Race, talked to Kit for a bit.

Thursday.  Awake from like 2 to 4 or something.  Setup johnson.id.au on CloudLoop and changed the nameservers over.  Cutover of some management stuff.  Broke a proxy.  Good drinks.  Pizzas for dinner.  Early night.

Friday.  Awake from maybe like 2 or 2:30 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  Dealing with the failed proxy.  Wardie restarted it last night which fixed it.  Seems the cutover we did confused it.  Sadness.  Went to Herbert's at lunch with the Chrises which was nice.  Kiev balls!  Back at work, contractor broke stuff.  I'm getting a reputation for failed changes.  Sigh.  Proper chicken kievs for dinner.  Bed 19:30.

I totally need to get the recipe for these things!!

Four of these 17 kegs are TRBC beers.  They're planning a tribute night soon with them.

Saturday.  Early night but woke up at 3:40 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  Breakfast at Beess & Co.  Had a very nice eggs benedict (although salty AF, I was *thirsty* later).

Wandered around Yarralumla while waiting for the mint to open, then went in there.

Stopped at Scrivener Dam on the way home.

This looked like a roomba lawn mower..

Wrote up a todo list for the day.  I think it'll take a couple of weeks to get through.  I had to fix up all the Canon photos I'd taken this year - they were all still on summer time :(  I got some stuff at Chris's the other day to make up a lasagna to use up the white sauce that's been in the fridge for months.  Turns out it really didn't freeze very well and was quite disgusting once it was defrosted.  Sigh.  So I had to make my own white sauce (using Lana's recipe).  But the flour I used was from a container I'd dug up that needed using from forever ago.. I think it may have come from Mum's.. and I think it was a little.. off..  So I was worried it'd be a disaster.  But it wasn't!!  Hurray!!  It was a little dry, which I attribute to not adding enough liquid to offset the dry sheets I got from Chris's.  Lana summed it up perfectly:

"Fresh lasagne sheets. I really can't recommend using anything other than these. If you do feel the need to use dry sheets, then slap yourself make sure you add extra liquid to the meat sauce, as they will suck it up. Nothing worse than dry lasagne."

In the evening we watched Grave of the Fireflies.  Yeah it was pretty sad. 

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok for a change.  Another busy day of doing all the things.  Finally uploaded my Tassie hotel photos.  Also did some food shopping.  

Six months ago today the sweetie and I headed off for a month in Tasmania.  We had a lovely time and saw heaps of stuff.  But not nearly everything we could have seen.  We could go back and have basically the same itinerary and still see a months' worth of completely different things.  

Yeup.

So here's the photos!  Enjoy!

And in other news.

I was FORTY YEARS ago today our family left for a holiday in Western Australia.  Unfortunately I only realised this a couple of days ago so didn't have the time to process the parents' photos to get them online.  Soon!!

13.6.24 with EB.  Definitely not my choice of date!  

After spending entirely too much time photographing Lego, did a very quick wander through the rest of the place.  "The Drop" is still there, but none of the other "circus" stuff from 20 years ago is.  The Tesla Coil, tornado, big Jupiter cloud spinny ball thing and earthquake machine are all still there (although the latter was out for repairs).

Ferro fluid

The Gravatram has been moved into the museum, but wasn't working

Tesla coil

Tornado

Thermal camera.  I'd love to own one of these!

The last time I was there was 2007 and before that 2003.  Need to go again and allocate more time.  And not during school holidays!!

Cooked this from Jamie's (antichef) take on Marcella Hazan's Spaghetti Carbonara before I went on holidays.  Only with different ingredients on account of I didn't have pancetta or spaghetti in the house.

So the idea is you're meant to heat up 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil.

Then add four split cloves of garlic - fry until golden then remove.  I chopped mine cause the recipe was on the computer and I was winging it a little.  And probably overcooked them.   Whoops.  You're then meant to remove the garlic (I just ate it all later) to leave the oil infused.

Then you're meant to fry 500g of chopped pancetta.  I only used 250g of bacon.  Add 1/4 cup dry white wine and reduce a little.

Meanwhile, whisk up two eggs, and add 1/4 cup grated pecorino romano, 1/2 cup parmagiana regianno (both of which I just just winged it and probably added too much, but you can never have too much cheese), 2 tbsp chopped parsley (I don't think I had any of this either - think I just used dried herbs), and pepper.

Then you're meant to add the cooked spaghetti to the egg mix and mix in the pancetta

So it was easy enough and nice enough.. but a little.. bland ..?  Probably because there wasn't enough bacon/pancetta.  And it was odd with low carb fettucini instead of spaghetti.  I'd do this again, but maybe heat the sauce a little rather than adding it cold, and add a little more salt (or just a lot more bacon/pancetta).  

Sunday.  18th.  Backdating for reasons which will become obvious.  Kiev and veggies for dinner ftw!

Then Sex Education 4.5.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Bits and pieces day at work.  Flipped to a new proxy server.  Two minor issues, one with SE linux and one with on prem stuff using it to talk to cloud stuff and we were like whyyyy.  Both easily fixed.  Mince and salad for dinner, then organising Tassie stuffs.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Mostly decom prep work at work, then Tassie planning.

My mini capsicums are about to flower.. I'm going to miss them!!

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep til 11 then woke up at 5.  Sigh.  Did a bunch of decom work.  Dropped into Herbert's on the way home.  Dinner, then packing.

Only the top left corner is clothes/toiletries.  The rest is *stuff*.

Thursday.  Took forever to get to sleep, because travel.  Tetrised everything into the car and left a bit before 10.  You can read the text of the trip from here, although you may want to wait until I add photos.

Sunday.  14th.  Cooked up an epic feast for dinner/leftovers.  There was a tuna bake, a broccoli/cauliflower bake, capsicum and broccolini with butter/lemon juice (which I stoopidly overcooked).  

Then Mash and The Crown 6.7.

Monday.  Slept relatively well!  All. The. Rain.  !!  Ok day.  Bit of planning for a new database we're hoping to get setup for notifications.  Did an hour of weeding after work and Stu helped cook dinner which was nice.  Then went for a walk up Mt Rogers.

I think I might get moist... (spoiler: I did!)

Then had a look at the Tassie map.  Then it was bed time.  WTF.  Every day I want to do music, weed the garden, keep the house clean/tidy, cook dinners, exercise, process photos, plan holidays.  Except I can only do a couple of those every day because work takes up too much damned time.  And let's not even mention actually having fun and doing my hobbies.  I. Do. Not. Have. Time. To. Go. To. Work.  Sigh.

Tuesday.

Slept mostly ok although woke up at 4:45.  Did housework for a HOUR before work.  And some effing cat sprayed our laundry door.  Buttplug.

Work.  I dunno.  Forty-five minutes of weeding after work.  I rescued some geraniums that had been cut off the plant by accident a couple of weeks ago.  Yeah these stems had been sitting on the ground for a couple of weeks, yet they were still flowering!!  So I stuck em in water.

Stu cooked dinner of cabbage and bacon (and I threw in the last of some leftover turkey).

Tried to finish the jigsaw we started on the weekend, but it's such terrible quality it was pretty much impossible.  It's made of soft plastic and you have to force the pieces together even when they're correct.  Now imagine pieces that are *almost* identical in shape, so you literally have no idea whether they're correct or not.  I got down to four pieces left a couple of times but they just would not go in.  Stoopid.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Even got back to sleep after waking up at 4:45.  The other week Tony gave me a container of basil which is growing like weeds in his yard.  But of course I'm a complete slacker and didn't do anything with it.  Well it was getting desperate so before I work I made some pesto.  But first had to contend with a microscopic reanimated spider that's been in hibernation for a couple of weeks..

The pesto turned out quite well.  Even if I did end up having to throw out half the basil.  Sigh.

Ok day I guess.  Managed to find some jeans at kmart.  The only two in my size in the whole store.  As with Target, everything is "skinny".  Well some of us *aren't* skinny.  Hate.  So either *everyone else* wants skinny and that's why they stock so many.  Or *noone* wants skinny which is why that's all there is and hardly anything else.  Also why TF can't women's clothing standardise on sizes??  Last time I bought jeans they were size 8.  This time - 10.  I've had everything from 8 to 12 over the years cause they keep changing.  I really should try on some boys jeans some time.. Or go to a workwear place..

Westfield didn't get the memo about the 12 days of Christmas.. 

Late home, leftover pork (fried in lamb jelly (cause needed to clear freezer space)) and salad for dinner.  Backed up my computer and then it was time to wash my hair and go to bed.  Sigh.

Thursday.  Tidying up and bits and pieces at work.  Showed the newbies some stuffs on one of our firewalls.  Drinks at Lighty then Death in Paradise 8.1.

He's not missing a leg, but he did just leave that poop there

Friday.  Awake for like two hours in the middle of the night.  Sigh.  Climbed Mt Rogers. 

Mt Rogers has *pink* epic dandelions!

Then mostly just housework and getting organised, including bringing up the Lego from downstairs where it had been hiding for a few months due to the Silly Season.  Used the pesto I made yesterday with some chicken I dug out of the freezer, some broccoli and some "fake" pasta (kognac pasta) for a yummy dinner.  Stu went back for thirds, even though he doesn't really like broccoli, so must have been good haha.

Then The Orville 2.11.  I had the kind of day that I would like every day for the rest of my life.  kthxbai.

Saturday.  Slept ok until hurty kept me awake from like 3:45 to 5:45.  Sigh.  After not great sleep the night before either it was definitely zombie day.  Sigh. 

Dude, aren't you a bit far north of the border?

Did a bit of Turkey photo culling but not nearly enough.  Tried to sort out some Lego but my brain was too fuzzy and I'm sure I've stuffed something up. 

The baby capsicums are getting bigger.  That snail is just a shell.  Maybe a bluey got it.. 

Leftovers of the "pulled lamb" (which was still epic spectacular) and cauliflower with cheese sauce for dinner.

Mash and Sex Education 4.3.  Really had to feel for Jean (portrayed as my age even though Gillian Anderson is a fair few years older) and her exhaustion.. omfg there's no way I could have kids.. the sleep deprivation would kill me!!

I rescued those things on the right today too - their stem had broken off, possibly due to lack of water, so grabbed them and brought them inside

Sunday.  Slept fairly well hurray!!  Except I don't really know what I did all day.  I know I renamed all of Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos to get them into chronological order.  I also wrote out their itinerary for their 1971 trip.  They only had two weeks and managed to cram heaps in (including getting perfect days for Mt Amos and Cradle Mountain - totes jelly) and it was cool seeing the order of the photos plotted against the map.  Other than that I'm not even sure.  I didn't managed to do any photo culling.  Barely any dots.  Hardly any Lego inventorying.  There was a walk up Mt Rogers thoguh.  And food shopping.  And getting epic enraged by the pantry which descends into chaos the moment your back is turned.  Sigh.

Look at this trash.  This is what happens when you go low carb.  Everything's damnedwell GREEN haha

Now I just need a quote...

2023. Another lap around the sun. Another busy year.

The big trip for this year was to America with my brother to visit theme parks and do a Caribbean cruise out of Tampa. I still thought it was "too soon" to be travelling to America and cruising, but I had no choice because Bare Necessities is an evil company and I would never EVER travel with them again. And guess what. It was indeed too soon, half the ship got covid, and I probably did too at the end. But I didn't test because what was I going to do. We called it Schrödinger's Covid. Not that Americans care about covid anyway. They flat out refuse to wear a mask when they're sick or use hand sanitiser EVER. So I felt no guilt spreading germs around Disney World, especially when there's no hand sanitiser to be found anywhere in the parks. I kept my mask on which was the best I could do. Luckily I didn't get very sick and had a pretty awesome holiday with David. We had a couple of little trips as well. We went to Berrima for the weekend around our 15th wedding anniversary. It rained the whole time. We went to the coast in May to visit Kit and Pete, and a very last minute trip in October as well. We went to Sydney to catch up with some peeps for my 50th, and again to go to the Powerhouse Museum for possibly the last time ever. I also worked super hard to get the last two overseas trip photos online, and actually managed it, six months after America, and one year after Europe. But did get filled with rage at tripadvisor and booking.com. Both have utterly terrible invoicing and communication. Tripadvisor literally ripped me off for one of our Europe tours. And booking.com charges you randomly for hotels but I couldn't find emails for all the ones they did so had to make guesses on some of them.

At work my job description is still mostly Sadie. Well, when I have time in between people wanting stuff and wanting me to fix problems. Over and over and over again I was reminded that the correct spelling of Microsoft is actually B.S. Everything they do is designed to compromise any sort of security. I hate it so much. Early in the year I decided that we really need to manage our certificate renewals manually. That is, keep them in a diary of sorts so we don't miss renewals. Because over and over again there'd be outages for systems due to certificate expiries, even with management tools, to other teams, and I didn't want that to happen to our team. I helped out with some firewall upgrades in January. Did some apnic training on routing in March. Spent ages with Neil cleaning up mail policies. Cleaned up routing on a bunch of devices. Migrated our DR laptop to a new laptop. Did a week of oncall in September to give Connor a break. Trialled a proxy replacement, but while it did have some nice saas features, it was very week security-wise. Got forced into using Windoze 11. I hate it. So. Much. Got three new people in our team, but our area is already full so everyone's having to shuffle around every day which causes me all sorts of anxiety. And yet further down the floor it's a ghost town and noone sits there. Pisses me off. Socially we had a whisky night in July, and I went to trivia nights in July and September (I missed a later one due to Stu having covid). And I ran my big bbq at the lake for the eleventh year in a row with over fifty people.

I've generally been ok healthwise. There was the probable covid in America in March. I definitely had gut involvement because I'd get hungry but then only be able to eat a small amount before my stomach would be like, nope, I'm done. When I got home I had two bouts in March and April of what the doctor suspected might be diverticulitis (mild case) but I never actually found out the results of the tests. Given it was shortly after covid, it's quite possible it was related to that. I have been avoiding strawberries though, except the ones that grew in our back yard (no problems with those). There were the bouts of insomnia on and off that have been plaguing me for the past few years. Super annoying to just be lying there just awake. After getting back from America and having spent so little time on a screen in a month, I found I was completely blind trying to look at my monitors. So I really needed to get new glasses. I tried a new optometrist in Dickson (the son of the optometrist I used to see when I first moved to Canberra) but the practice is a little unorganised and when I went to pick up the glasses the optometrist wasn't even there to help fit them. Plus when I asked a follow up question later the optometrist wouldn't even talk to me. So not sure I'll go back. But, the glasses are great, I can see my computer now clearly. But it does mean I have to swap them out with my other glasses all the time as they're optimised for screen distance. I did have a bit of a cold in August, but multiple RATs were negative. Stu got a likely case of food poisoning in August, most likely from Disappointing aka Hero Sushi. I think he's only been back like once since then (he used to go all the time). He got covid in November most likely from a work colleague who continued coming into work even though his son was sick with covid. First time for him. He had a week off feeling pretty miserable and worked from home for a while after. I worked from home for a couple of weeks too, but never got it. I guess it helped having my booster just a few weeks earlier. Stu also got another possible bout of food poisoning in December, although it might have been covid related.

I saw quite a bit of various peeps at Herbert's during the year, either with Tony/Frank/Karen etc or The Chrises/Tony/Neil etc. There was a tap takeover by Big Shed in April, but I missed the one in October by TRBC because we went down the coast. Kit came to stay a night in January. We had Jenn over for dinner in April. Caught up with Luc for drinks in June. Went to R&F's in July and November. Had brunch with Katie (Stu's school friend) and Andrew at Little Bird in September. Went to Ben and Sarah's for dinner in September. Had Chris and Glenda over for dinner in October. Went to M&M's for dinner in November. Had Christmas Eve "Herbert's @ Tony's" although Dino and Kristin never made it, but it was still a good night with a bunch of peeps. David came to stay in September. He had a look at the oven and found a blown element (which died when the oven was less than two years old). He also replaced our stovetop (one of the elements had died but the final straw was when I accidentally smashed the whole surface by hitting the preexisting chip at just the right force/angle). I took him out for lunch at the Star Buffet after. Then we walked around Ikea for a couple of hours to walk off lunch. He came back again a couple of weeks later to install the new element I got, only to find the thing didn't actually fit. Sigh. We saw Annie and the family on Christmas day which was the first time we'd seen them all since last Christmas. We're all such slackers. Mum/David/Kellie/Sia came for Boxing Day lunch, and Mum stayed til the 28th before going home.

We didn't spend a whole lot of time out at the club this year. Partly because of Certain People, but also because Life. In March the sweetie and I completely emptied out the office, cleaned it, threw a whole heap of crap out, and put everything else back again. Then it was the Mardis Gras social. We went to the M themed night in May and I went as a minifig. There was Ian and Chris's anniversary formal night in June. I did Christmas in July again for like fifty people. And then another couple of working bees later in the year. We were going to go to the Christmas party but Stu got covid.

I had a few photo projects this year. One of them was getting Dad's slides into chronological order. I'd literally lay rolls and rolls of them out on the table to piece back together their correct order. This worked up until he started printing labels and gluing them all over the slide numbers, and the newest rolls were made of plastic so you couldn't even scrape back the label to see the frame number. I've still yet to finish processing the slides but at least now I'll be able to get them into the "correct" order. Well, except for the few odd ones that seem to be loners and not fit any other rolls at all. I also managed to get *two* overseas holiday photos online within six months and a year of going on the trip. I've gone back to working on Turkey 2014 to get them done in time for the ten year anniversary of the trip. Finally, I filed three years of "Canberra Life", "Friends and Family" and "Homes and Gardens" photos which had been presorted but not actually filed. Will go back to trying to file all my photos every week. There's still a lot of work I want to do in the sorting space. Hardest is when things overlap. Like going out to restaurants or holidays with friends - do they go under restaurants/holidays or under friends. It's a dilema.

Our blue-tongue lizard Stumpy is still puttering along. He (she?) must be about fourteen years old now. I got a bag full of guppies in January to add to the genetic diversity in the tanks. The last cory that I got in 2015 finally died in July. I consolidated all the downstairs tanks until Stu retires and has the brain space for fish again. So now we only have five active tanks. There's my "angel" tank (the 620T) which has guppies. The two foot upstairs has guppies and heaps of java fern - I rarely need to change the water in this tank because it's so well planted. Plus there's always so many babies I'd be worried about sucking them up. The four foot still has fourteen congo tetras and a loach, as well as some guppies (I think all male - no point letting them breed in that tank as the babies would get eaten straight away). The four foot is still plagued with algae problems - needs more plants and guppies I reckon. I still have Chrissie's tiny little tank with the two clown loaches. I've had them for nearly six years now. Downstairs I only have the one two foot tank active. It's got guppies and a sucking catfish and is also a fairly healthy tank. All the other tanks downstairs I either drained or turned the heaters/lights off and only run the filters for an hour or two every day (while the sun is at max on the panels) - to keep the heaters from drying out and the water from going stagnant.

I had a bit of a fun year with Lego this year. Last Christmas I got myself the Titanic, and built it (slowly, to make the build take longer) after my America trip. It's a spectacular model, I love it. I also made an iceberg with some of Vic's huge pile of 1x4 bricks. For my birthday I got The Starry Night (which I've seen in New York!) but it's not just a mosaic, it's a fully 3D version which is pretty cool. I also got Himeji Castle (been there!) which is a really lovely set, and finished it Christmas day. I got back into inventorying Vic's Lego and finished off the loose pieces. Then worked on the non-Star Wars minifigs. Bricklink was down for a week in November because a bunch of accounts got hacked. For Christmas I got a big minifig, although haven't started that yet - I don't have time for fun anymore!

I didn't do as many jigsaws at home this year - I'm just too damned busy - too busy for fun! The problem is if I start one I'll spend too much time on it and not doing the things I need to do. I need to retire so I have time for fun. I still play the clarinet a couple of times a week.

The weather this year has been a bit insane. Apparently 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. There was a huge lightning storm here in March. Fortunately it didn't do any damage here, but it destroyed heaps of Aquila's electronics including both his heating and cooling systems. There was snow out past Queanbeyan in May. The winter here just *felt* warm. Sure it was cold too but spring sure came early, with stuff flowering a couple of weeks earlier than usual (and Stumpy got *hungry* earlier than usual too). Another storm in December knocked down a sizeable branch off one of our trees. Fortunately no damage here, but there were heaps of trees down around Canberra. And let's not even get into the heatwaves, fires and flooding catastrophes around the world this year.

It was definitely a year of battles with technology this year.

My blog turned 20 this year! For its 20th blogiversary I gave it a bit of a design refresh. I put in a mobile friendly template which does make it a little easier to read on the phone. I also updated the banner. But I had to increase the throttle timeout so searches on my blog would work (no idea why it takes so much longer since the design refresh). I also got frustrated with Chrome which will now try the HTTPS site even when the link you click on is http:// This means the style sheet won't load as it's "mixed content". Unfortunately twenty years ago noone used https so my entire blog is all hardcoded by Movable Type with full urls with http:// I hardcoded the style sheet as https and for later pages it now renders correctly but if you look at older stuff and your dumbhead browser changes the page to https it doesn't render properly.

Vodien broke my blog three times this year. Firstly they broke Perl->MySQL in March and it took me a week of telling them it was in fact their fault before they finally fixed it. Then they broke my cpanel access during an upgrade. Twice. Had to get the password reset. Twice. Then they broke CageFS in October which broke *all* my scripts. When they eventually fixed it a couple of weeks later they left a "how did we do" survey which I couldn't do because the certificate was completely broken on *.vodien.com. Three big outages this year. Maybe I should pay for hosting somewhere else. Although with the state of the world I suspect it'd be just as bad anywhere. There's just no such thing as good service anymore.

I continued to be frustrated with Apple. While my new (now a year old) 14 Pro is great (the low light features are spectacular), it took a bit of getting used to. Firstly, don't ever use the 2x lens, it's just digital magnification. Either get closer or use the 3x lens. Next, if "macro" gets triggered while using 3x for macro, stand back, point it away to reset, and try again. The "macro" on 3x will completely destroy the photos, I have no idea what it does, it possibly uses the "wide angle" lens and then digitally magnifies 3x. When you can get the optical 3x to work on closeups it actually does ok. It pisses me off though that you can't force it to use the lens you choose. I got so fed up with Apple messing with the timestamps on my files when copying to windows that I bought a third party app - iMazing - which will at least copy jpgs/pngs properly. With movie files it copied them in native Apple HDR which makes them look trash. So I'd have to copy them off in windows as well anyway. Well that was until Apple changed something and now they both copy exactly the same. Oh, they also decided later in the year to start presenting HEIC files to windows instead of JPGs, so I *have* to use iMazing. I was enraged to find that Apple just randomly changed timezones while I was travelling in February. Multiple times a day it'd jump back and forth to GMT-4/GMT-5. It took me hours and hours to sort out the mess that was my holiday photos. And even when I got home, and had been home for a day or two on the correct time, it randomly dropped back to Houston time until a reboot. Speaking of reboots, the wallpaper is borked. Everytime you reboot the wallpaper is just a black screen. You have to go in, change to a different wallepaper theme, wait a few minutes, then change it back again. Someone suggested clearing browser cache to fix Redactle early in the year. Not only was it stoopid advice because Redactle itself is usually at fault, but whatever I did cleared *all* of my cache/cookies/whatever, so I lost all my streaks on wordle etc. So I pretty much just stopped playing them altogether on the spot. Finally, I told iTunes/my phone to trust my computer. It still doesn't trust my computer.

I had two separate battles with email. Firstly gmail refused to accept mail from me without an SPF record on my domain. Internode very nicely have a page on their website which tells you exactly what to use (for Eudora on my computer). Optus not so much (for my phone). And Vodien's support pages were misleading because they say to do it via cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't host the DNS. Eventually figured out how to get the record setup on Vodien DNS. Then Internode (aka Epic Bastards) moved their SMTP "service" to AWS, and cut off the ability to use it AS A PAYING CUSTOMER unless you use your internode address as the From address. Which is utterly ridiculous because they're cutting off the ability to even use the internode address for email AND what if you have multiple people in your household trying to send mail, not everyone can use that address!! So then had to spend hours massaging my twenty year old mail client into being able to use my hosting for SMTP. But that also means I can't email Stu/David at their domains because I host the websites for those and so Vodien thinks it owns them. I really wish Stu would get us off Internode. Their service has been pretty trash since they got bought out by iinet then TPG. I complained to Internode about how trash it was, and they were like, "oh we're just trying to stop spam". Nothing about being an internet SERVICE provider. Bastards bastards bastards.

And in other tech crap. On Friday 13th January, Epic Tool (aka Elon Musk) turned off 3rd party Twitter access. So I stopped using it. Simples. Had to fight with Optus in February who in their wisdom split out my accounts and made me stuff up my payments so had to sort that out as well as figure out how to actually even access both my accounts which are now separate. Hopeless. Continued to get frustrated at the sheer absurdity of Windoze 11. Finally got a new battery for the UPS after over a year of them not being able to get stock. Dodgy Dyson struck again - this time it decided the battery needed to be replaced WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT. David's Kogan iPhone cable got more and more flakey before I finally gave up on it in August.

The house caused no end of dramas too this year.

The Solar Edge solar system we got put in last December essentially was DOA. Sometimes it would work and we could see it doing 11kW which was great. Even though we were supposed to be maxed out at 5kW back to the grid sometimes we'd see it pushing more back, no idea how. But most of the time it didn't work at all. After many calls/emails that went unanswered (and I flat out refused to finish paying the sparkies until it was working) we finally left honest feedback (at their request), which finally got some action. They came and had a look in early January but didn't fix it. They rewired things so that the system would support working off grid (it was sold to us on the promise that it would but then the sparkies said oh no it doesn't do that, and later they were like, oh, Solar Edge says we can do that now). And they finally completely replaced the whole inverter in late January. We thought that would be the end of it, but the very first night it drained the battery to 0% even though it's supposed to only drop to 10%. So had to put in another support call for that. The app is great when it works, but oftentimes the system will lose connectivity and it'll be like "updated 4 hours ago". Dumb. And, upsettingly, the system never puts out more than 9kW now. I thought it might have been the angle of the sun so waited until December again (when it did 11kW last year) but alas not. So we'll have to raise *another* support call to find out what gives. On a lighter note, we did finally get a negative electricity bill in November. Separately, we got a new digital meter to replace the original analogue meter. This one has its own back to base internet connection for reporting, so noone needs to come read the meter anymore.

The night the sparkies came in early January I was turning the oven off and the power tripped. I was half wondering if the sparkies did anything. After a couple of times of the power tripping whenever we turned the oven off and on, we took to flipping the switch off at the board before turning the power to the oven on/off. Because the back element was fine, only the top element was broken, but there was no way to turn the oven on/off without going past a mode that activated the top element. I was totally pissed off though because the oven was less than three years old, and when I asked about it at Bing Lee and they said there was only a one year warranty. David eventually came to look at it in September, found the broken element, disconnected it, ordered a new one from TLE in Belco. On the same day we bought and installed a new stove (as mentioned further up). He came back two weeks later to install the element, only to find it didn't fit. I'd never buy a DeLonghi anything again - you can't get replacement parts for something that's only three years old. We still haven't replaced the element. Maynor and Cochran said they can get one, but I need to know that I can return it if it doesn't fit.

The garden is a neverending drama. I pulled back some of the ivy in February. It's grown back. And then some. Problem is our ladder is not long enough to reach it properly. We had a permaculture mob come out to talk to us about our yard. I was hoping they'd be able to talk to us and exchange ideas (that's what I assumed we paid them a couple of hundred dollars for). Instead she just said, oh well we'll need to do a cleanup first. That'll be 48 hours work just for the front yard. I'm like, WTF, there is NOT 48 hours of work in the front yard for professionals. So I did it myself. In a lot less than 48 hours. But because I focussed so long on the front yard, the back yard got out of control again. Sigh. I did manage to get all the bluestone moved to EffanC's though - thanks Tony and F!!

In other house crap. We got a new toilet seat in April as the old one was getting very yellowed and degraded. Went to Ikea in July and found a bin solution that would work. Bought all the bins but the shelves were out of stock. Turned out they were actually discontinued. Bought another shelf which wasn't exactly what we wanted. It looks sort of ok but is very flimsy. Finally ran some lines of sealant over the loose tiles in the shower in August. The leaking has finally stopped, although my future self will hate me as that's what the previous owners of my place in Sydney did and the sealent got all mouldy and discoloured over time. We got a couple of bottlebrushes planted out the front by the government. I took a chip out of the microwave platter in September. The cooler wouldn't turn the water on the first time we used it in November. But let it rest and it worked the next time. After I got past all the errors.

Our favourite restaurant of the year would still be Chong Co, with delivery from them four times over the year. Kinn Thai is another favourite, we went there a few times. Herbert's is a great local and had many lunches and some dinners there. We would often get Pattysmiths for lunch on shopping days. Their fries are awesome and the burgers pretty good too. Had dinner in March with EffanC at Hachiko which was expensive (got the banquet) but very nice. Went to Taki on our anniversary and had some delicious steaks. Dinners and takeaway from Raijin (average), 10 Yards (nice), Tiger Lane (meh), CBD Dumpling House (yummy and quick), BONE (stoopid name), Disappointing Sushi (gave us free KFC because the sweetie is a regular, although he mostly stopped going after he probably got food poisoning probably from there), Badger&Co (repeat of last time), Symposium (nice), Betty's Burgers (not bad), Happy's (sad cause of all the single guys hiding out there for dinner). Brunches at 54 Benjamin a couple of times, U&Co a couple of times, Cup of Joy, Deakin and Me, Coffee Club Gungahlin, Bunny Beans. Random lunches at Flavours of Jiangnan, Canberra Cafe and Burgers, Ramen O and Four Winds. You can now get potato on a stick in the mall, meaning I can get my two favourite street foods there (that and takoyaki). The problem is you have to wait for both of them, which is difficult if you're eating with people and don't want to make them wait.

On the cooking front, there was a few new things and a lot of old favourites. Stu really likes Cath's basa bake recipe so we make that semi regularly. Also tuna casserole and the 1kg frozen turkey roasts. In winter, favourites are Alan's beef stew, butt, er, beef cheeks and brisket. I also made a pea and ham soup in July which Stu likes but I'm meh about. We've had Luv-a-Duck Peking duck a couple of times which is pretty awesome. Kale "chips" are also great, but sadly we never saw kalettes for sale this year. We still often got pizza on Thursday, but sometimes made our own, and Fridays sometimes we'd have Ingham's chicken kievs. And I do like doing Sunday night roasts. I decided that roasting chicken "upside down" is much better than cooking it breast side up. Stu made a Japanese Golden Curry in March, and I made one later in the year. He also cooked "Coronation Oden" twice. I called it this because we first had it the night we watched the coronation of King Charles III. I made a really nice yellow curry out of a Coles magazine and liked it so much I've modified it slightly for my "official" recipe. Made a fairly nice apricot chicken to use up some old dried apricots, but would need to use a boneless cut of chicken I think. For my 50th, R&F gave me Nagi Maehashi's RecipeTin Eats Dinner book and I've so far made eight recipes out of it. They always take a lot longer to follow the recipe precisely, but they've all been very good, and I'd make them again even if just to streamline things a little. I've made several lemon cheesecakes, and also tried Milo cookies at Christmas.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* AWS at the Hellenic Club with Emma Pask and Ed Wilson
* Lego Brick Show in Wagga, caught up with David as well
* Jess and Uncle Doss at Herbert's
* Come From Away
* Australian War Memorial's Big Things in Store
* ANU Women's Revue with Jess aka Jeremy Laser

Movies (at the movies)
* Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
* Oppenheimer

Movies (TV)
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on NYE
* Laid Back Camp
* A Christmas Karen
* The Social Network
* Onward
* When Harry Met Sally / The Shop Around the Corner
* Avatar
* Glass Onion
* You've Got Mail
* Everything Everywhere All At Once
* 127 Hours
* Rocky Horror Picture Show
* Chernobyl 1986
* Amadeus
* First Man
* Raiders of the Lost Ark
* Dragonheart
* Innerspace
* Paterson
* Romancing the Stone
* Jewel of the Nile
* The War of the Roses
* Turning Red
* Pretty Woman
* Malcolm
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar / The Swan / The Rat Catcher / Poison / Fantastic Mr Fox
* Dumb Money
* Die Hard / Die Hard 2 / Love Actually
* Home Alone 2

TV
* Picard (finished season 2)
* You Can't Ask That (season 7)
* a series of Canberra Survivor on YouTube
* Origins of Us
* Bocchi the Rock
* The Crown finished (seasons 2-5)
* Death in Paradise (seasons 4-6)
* First two episodes of A Spy Among Friends. Stu was going to watch the rest himself but never did
* The Simpsons (seasons 32-34)
* The Book of Boba Fett
* Mandalorian (season 3)
* Futurama (all of it)
* Lego Grandmasters (season 5)
* Amazing Race Australia (seasons 3-4)
* War on Waste (seasons 2-3)
* Ahsoka
* The Orville (seasons 1-2)

Books
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (well, I started it)

Other stuff
* tried to see the balloons but the wind was blowing towards the airport so they didn't lift off. Tried again the next day and saw them. Jet lag and being awake stoopidly early helped.
* saw a double rainbow in March
* went with Tony to RFS tour of the helibase at Hume in March
* Pialligo Estate went broke - no more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!
* Looking Back, Moving Forward nights at the Shine Dome
* Cotter Pumping Station Tour
* saw a partial solar eclipse in April
* Parliament House in May to see the Lego Parliament House and wander round. Probably the first time I'd been in there since 1990.
* saddened over the death of Heather Armstrong (dooce.com) by suicide in May
* magpies came to see me over winter after six months of not
* Whisky Live in May
* Hardly Normal started work at beginning of June, but didn't open til November
* ABC Classic 100 - your favourite instrument - all of mine made it into the top 100
* got to level 10000 in Candy Crush in June. Got to 12186 by the end of the year by completely changing the way I play it.
* found some papers from my Dad's family and how they'd found the family home of some my ancestors!
* gave blood for first time in about 32 years in July
* bookings247 got hacked - they had my name and last four digits of my credit card. I know it was them because the email they used was the one I used on their website, once, in 2019. I contacted them but they ignored me.
* my 50th!! Had a party the Saturday before; day of was pretty quiet, just KFC for lunch and Chong Co delivered for dinner; Sydney the Saturday after; another run for club peeps in early September
* made a new candle with old candle wax, but need to make it thinner next time
* evil neighbours that refused to train their dogs got another one that barks a lot from time to time, but at least not *all* the time
* our car clocked 100000km in August
* went for a drive in September to the Air Disaster Memorial, Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), and Canberra's weather radar outside Captains Flat
* Herbert's for Sunday jazz in October
* saw a cool double rainbow in November
* got a heap of strawberries off our strawberry plants in November

And that wraps up another year.  Have a happy and safe New Year!!