Results matching “Snow”

Give yourself a beer

Stole this off kapgar:

Give yourself a beer for each one you've done and then total it all up!

  1. Been married ðŸº
  2. Been divorced
  3. Fell in love ðŸº
  4. Given the keys to someone else ðŸº
  5. Been to Bourbon Street in New Orleans 
  6. Been to Disneyland ðŸº
  7. Skipped school (I did have a note to take off the afternoon of our year 10 formal to get ready)
  8. Watched someone give birth 
  9. Watched someone die 
  10. Been to Canada ðŸº
  11. Ridden in an ambulance 
  12. Been to a brewery ðŸº
  13. Been to Europe ðŸº
  14. Been to Las Vegas ðŸº
  15. Been to Washington, D.C. ðŸº
  16. Riden a "bull" in Gilleys
  17. Visited Florida (would have ticked this one if it hadn't been for covid)
  18. Visited and had a beer in Mexico 
  19. Seen the Grand Canyon in person ðŸº
  20. Flown in a helicopter ðŸº
  21. Been in a mud hole on your 4wheeler
  22. Served on a jury
  23. Danced in the rain (I might have done this, no memory tho)
  24. Been to California ðŸº
  25. Been to New York ðŸº
  26. Played in a band 
  27. Sang in choir (does singing in church count?)
  28. Sang karaoke ðŸº
  29. Laughed so much you cried ðŸº
  30. Laughed so hard you peed 
  31. Caught a snowflake on your tongue ðŸº (not sure if I have or not, but I've probably tried)
  32. Had children 
  33. Had a pet(s) ðŸº
  34. Been thrown out of Dennys after 2 a.m. 
  35. Been downhill skiing ðŸº
  36. Been tubing (what even is that?)
  37. Rode on a motorcycle ðŸº (when I was like six)
  38. Traveled to all 50 states (17 +DC, although a couple only passing through on the train)
  39. Jumped out of a plane ðŸº
  40. Been to a drive-in movie ðŸº
  41. Rode an elephant 
  42. Rode a horse ðŸº
  43. Been on TV ðŸº
  44. Been in the newspaper ðŸº
  45. Been on the radio ðŸº
  46. Stayed in the hospital ðŸº
  47. Donated blood ðŸº
  48. Gotten a piercing ðŸº
  49. Gotten a tattoo 
  50. Driven a stick shift vehicle ðŸº
  51. Been scuba diving 
  52. Been snorkeling ðŸº
  53. Lived on your own ðŸº
  54. Ridden in the back of a police car 
  55. Gotten a speeding ticket 
  56. Broken a bone️ ðŸº
  57. Gotten stitches ðŸº (as part of surgery)
  58. Traveled alone ðŸº

34 beers out of 58  if I've counted right.

usastatesvisited

Monday.  4th.  Not backdating for a change ;)  After I blogged last week we had lemon chicken for dinner (pulled out of the freezer from a club night early in the year).  Started watching Snow White and the Huntsman.  It was dark and slow and she's not exactly fair and pure slashing people with spikes, just sayin.  My legs were too restless to finish watching it.  

Tuesday.  Woke up at 4am and never got back to sleep :(  So a zombie morning.  Although was fairly busy all day.  Managed to label 153 photos before dinner - helped that Stu cooked!!  We defrosted some uncooked pork loin which he fried up with some greens and had with rice.  Very nice.  316 photos labelled all up - actually caught up with my schedule!  The photos were mostly in Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg - amazing place.

Mystery yellow flowers

Light pink azaleas

Rhododendron

Pork loin

Wednesday.  Woke up at ~3am for a while but eventually got back to sleep.  Busy in the morning but fairly quiet in the afternoon.  Into day 41 of Eurasia photo labelling - I'm *almost* up to 20000 photos labelled!  Only 37 behind schedule, not too bad.  

Maroon ruffled tulip

Thursday.  Slept okish.  Fairly busy day.  I wasn't planning to have virtual drinks, but a couple of the guys asked, so we did it with five people all up.  Watched the fourth episode of Connected - Digits which was pretty interesting.  Stu was learning about that stuff for work a while back.  Finished watching Snow White and the Huntsman.  I went in with very low expectations.  It met expectations.

Friday.  Awake from 12:30 til about 3am with hurty and insomnia.  Hurray.  So zombie day.  Had a two hour support call in the morning which was epic draining.  Had a bit of fun in the afternoon though.  Had a tv dinner for dinner, because Friday.  Then we watched The Da Vinci Code.  I saw this at the movies in 2006.  Stu thinks we'd seen it together at some point, but I never blogged it so no idea.

Irises

Saturday.  Woke up about 5:30 needing to pee, so sleep was all over from then.  Had a pretty productive day doing All The Things.  Stu cooked dinner again - this time a gnocchi bake.  I ate too much.  ;)  Then we watched Angels and Demons.  

This is the first time I've ever done the edge first.. that's how hard the rest of it is!
Mickey edge

Gnocchi bake by Stu

Sunday.  Today.  Bit of a late night last night due to Stu cooking dinner (always takes a long time ;) ) and then him decided we should also start watching a new series of anime.  So actually slept quite late - til 6:37!!  Fairly quiet day.  Did achieve some things on my list though, including filling the green bin and some music practise.  Have started trying to play (and not screech) upper register notes.  Not as bad sound-wise as high recorder notes, but quite difficult.  The transition from A to B is a nightmare.  In the afternoon we went over to Annie's because she invited us over for afternoon tea.  It was the first time we'd seen any of family or friends in two months!  So that was lovely.  Came home and prepped veggies for dinner (to have with some leftover roast pork I dug out of the freezer).  And here we are - having my photos downloaded and processed and blogged all by 17:25 - a miracle! ;)

Climbing roses

Afternoon tea at Annie's

Monday.  20th.  Backdating (last Sunday afternoon I managed to blog the week before but not this week).  Epic insomnia overnight.  And there was a dog barking for ages as well :(  (different to the usual annoying ones, further west of us).  Ok day I guess.  Dark and rainy most of the day.  Lit the last candle of the season (finished off a pack of Sinlig vanilla candles).  Had san choy bow for dinner (I made the mince on Sunday).  Managed 55 photos before dinner, 210 all up (Brussels tonight).  Also good progress on the jigsaw.

Oh hai Stumpy

Snow White 20 Sep

Tuesday.  Slept somewhat better.  Had a two and a quarter hour meeting in the morning which was pretty exhausting.  Then all the stoopid.  Leftover chicken with veggies all fried up for dinner.  Managed 50 photos before dinner and 141 all up (into day 38 Amsterdam).  

Floriade ruffles

Snow White 21 Sep

Wednesday.  Upgrading stuff, failing, learning stuff along the way.  I missed the earthquake!  The guys that felt it here were in high rise apartments.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  45 photos before dinner, 168 all up - actually on schedule for a change.  And I finished Snow White!

Freesias

Freesias

Snow White finished

Thursday.  Continuation of yesterday really, but on the phone most of the day which is never fun.  

Bit of a ringin here!
Floriade ringin

Friday.  Working on proxy block pages which was a bit of fun.  Cooked some rice in brisket jelly for lunch which was quite nice.  Leftover roast pork for dinner.  Watched Suffragette in the evening which was interesting.  Bit funny watching all these people we've seen in other movies recently (Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go, Helena Bonham Carter in Enola Holmes, Brendan Gleeson in In the Heart of the Sea).  

Brisket rice

Oh, I also found out today that the super annoying yappy staffies down the road actually killed each other ..  !!

Saturday.  A day of All The Things.  Usual Saturday really.  Put on Snow White in the afternoon so I could photograph it behind the jigsaw.  

Snow White with movie

Scene sorta kinda matches

Snow White scene

What's up with this manic squirrel though?

Manic squirrel

Had a bit of a whoopsie transferring it to paper for stacking.  Took 17 minutes to fix up.

Snow White whoopsie

The sweetie might have convinced me to have Chong Co for dinner.  Ok it didn't take much convincing ;)

Chong Co September

Watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in the evening.  Stu missed it when I saw it with EffanC in 2015, and he enjoyed it.

Sunday.  Another day of All The Things.  Started the next section of the Disney behemoth.  Guess which section.. Roast veggies with leftover pork for dinner.  Watched Cocktail in the evening, which I don't think I've seen since I first saw it, probably at the movies, over thirty years ago.  Kokomo was one of my favourite songs for years.  I also didn't realise Don't Worry Be Happy was in it, another one of my favourite songs.  

Next section

Didn't blog cause I'd run out of energy heh.

Sunday. 12th.  Backdating.  Doh.  Roast chicken dinner which was very nice.

Roast chicken dinner

Roast chicken dinner

Monday.  Ok day, was Neil all day because he took the day off to go to the dentist.  Which means I try and fix all the stoopid problems I see.  I can't help myself ;)  In the evening was looking for paperwork from the Eurasia trip to help with photo labelling.  Was actually feeling super panicky/anxious about the fact that there's just not enough *time* to get everything done.  Labelling Louvre photos in the evening.  Only managed 35 photos before dinner, which was a bit late (leftover brisket), and only 75 done by 8pm.  Turns out labelling things in the Louvre is hard work if you want to do it properly.  Still hadn't blogged for the week.  hrmm.  Managed 156 all up for the evening.

Tuesday.  Ok day, although I felt like I didn't get much done in between talking to people all day.  41 photos labelled before dinner (of leftovers), and 116 done by 8:04pm.  77 behind, hrmm.  Finished day 35 in Paris though.

Wednesday.  Ok day.  Finished up yesterday's slide scanning fixing, but hadn't brought up a new box yet, so scanned 12 of Stu's negatives that he took on a youth group boating trip on the Hastings.  Also managed to clean the kitchen.  Bit of a late finish, so no labelling before dinner (of filled gnocchi with sweet potato salad).  After dinner was trying to deal with my computer which had some stoopid windoze process running taking up all its energy.  Spent an hour trying to shut down as many things as I could, so didn't end up doing any labelling at all. 

Snow White 15 Sep

Pretty Floriade

"Filled gnocchi" - that I got a while back because Coles had sold out of regular fresh gnocchi.  Just fried in butter which was very tasty.  Salad is rocket and sweet potato, with toasted pine nuts and pumpkin seeds and feta, with a honey and olive oil dressing.  Yumm.
Filled gnocchi

Thursday.  Ok day.  Pretty much a standard Thursday.

Friday.  Had an RDO (random day off), which was the first one I'd had since July (and I was definitely feeling it).  Spent the day trying to get on top of All The Things.  In the late afternoon put on Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, which was a bit silly.  Leftover brisket and veggies for dinner.  In the evening watched Words Bubble Up Like a Soda Pop, which Stu described as Japanese Mall Rats.  Kinda sweet but a bit silly.

Saturday.  A day of All The Things.  Caught up on this week's photo labelling which I was behind on.  Other than that the normal Saturday of trying to do house stuff, project stuff, photo stuff and have a bit of fun in the middle.  Put on Bridget Jones's Baby later on while filing photos.  Stu cooked creamy pasta with mussels for dinner which was very nice.  In the evening watched Enola Homes which was a bit of fun but pretty silly, and too "modern" for a period piece.  (I've been a bit spoilt by a documentary we watched on our last cruise about anachronisms in movies, and how modern values colour period movies).

Heart of Floriade

Creamy penne mussels

Sunday.  Much the same as Saturday but with fewer time limits.  

Snow White 19 Sep

I might have bought myself a new toy during the week, which arrived in less than a week, from America, on a Sunday!

Clarinet case

Clarinet pieces

Clarinet

So I've actually been wanting to learn the clarinet for long time.  I learnt the recorder as a kid, but it has a very limited range which can be frustrating.  I read a bunch of reviews that said the Jean Paul CL-300 was probably the best value for money in terms of pretty decent quality for not a crazy price.  Turns out it's a lot harder than a recorder to play, who knew! I was expecting to be able to blow into it and make a sound, but it's a lot more complicated than that.  And I'm really going to need a neck strap so I don't get RSI in my thumb/hand.

Cooked All The Food in the evening - roast pork for dinner, and some mince for dinner during the week.

Roast pork September

Watched the second episode of Connected (Poop) (we watched the first episode - Surveillance a little while ago), then I watched another episode of How the Mind Works, on memory.  

Snow White 19 Sep

Sunday.  5th.  Backdating.  Sorry. ;)  Cooked all the food - some mince to have however, as well as roast veggies and a cauliflower bake.  Into season 15 of The Simpsons.

All the food

All the food

All the food

Monday.  Ok day.  Spent the day trying to do *one thing* but not getting anywhere because of interruptions and people wanting stuff.  Sausages and leftover veggies for dinner.  113 photos labelled before dinner, 213 all up, up to my first day in Paris.  Then Air Crash Investigations.

Tuesday.  Slept relatively well.  Stressful day because I was in meetings for hours and hours and hours, but still had heaps of work to get done as well.  Ended up working a bit late and only managed to label 54 photos.

Oh hai crimson rosella

My floriade

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Got up a bit early, and this time I checked the Covid exposure sites *before* I went out to do some food shopping.  First time doing a proper shop in three weeks - our pantry list was getting super long from things that had run out or were running out.  Oddly, there were no bags of any kind for bagging up veggies, so I ended up using a shopping bag to get mushrooms.  Once again, Coles was depleted of different odd things, like almost no eggs (didn't need any this week), and mint ice cream.  But they did have bacon and cheese rolls out early this time.  I bought one pack thinking it would last me a couple of days, but the sweetie had other ideas and they lasted a day.  I shoulda bought two ;)  There was plenty of toilet paper, but I didn't need any this week either (been getting it from Chris's).  Ok day, busy afternoon, again in meetings but also trying to get work done.  Salmon and salad for dinner - hurrah for fresh food!  Managed to label 155 photos, only 52 behind now, should be easy to catch up.

Most beautiful tree ever

Pretty but evil

Salmon and salad

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Horrible day - spent over half of it on the phone :(  So sucky and draining.

Tulip middle

Friday.  Awake for a while in the middle of the night but not too bad.  Another day of trying to stay on top of things and fighting with peeps over all the stoopid.  Did some cleaning in the afternoon though which was good.  Knocked off a little early and tidied the house a bit, then tried to wrangle my insanely huge todo list.  Honey mustard chicken for dinner.  Then we watched Never Let Me Go which was kinda interesting and depressing.

Back view

Petal waterfall

Petal closeup

Purple bells

Pretty tree

Honey mustard chicken

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Just a day of getting things done around the house.  Bolognase and salad for dinner, then we watched Gandhi, which I'd never actually seen before. 

Snow White edge

Snow White 11 Sep

Bolognase and salad

Sunday.  Busy doing stuff, although no idea what, the todo list I ticked off didn't have much on it.  

Snow White 12 Sep

My local floriade

Roast chicken for dinner, then watched Nanny McPhee which I'd seen a while ago.  Actually quite a sweet movie.  Although a bit like watching Love Actually.  Or Harry Potter.  Or Bridge Jones' Diary.  So much cast overlap :)

Monday.  30th.  Not backdating!!  Okish sleep, bit broken.  Ok day.  Saw my birds at lunch. 

Another day, another wattle
Another day, another wattle

Found this in our front yard - self seeded, no idea what it even is?  Some sort of grevillea??
Grevillea maybe

Had a lot of fun doing diagrams in the afternoon.  Lamb stir fry for dinner.  Labelled 197 photos - in Leavesden Studios!!  Harry Potter!!  So much fun.  And watched an episode of Air Crash Investigations.

Lamb stir fry

Lamb stir fry

Tuesday.  Another pretty good day, mostly doing diagrams!  Made mushroom, olive and salami pizza scrolls for the sweetie for lunch.

Birthday pizza scrolls

Birthday pizza scrolls

Then Pizza Capers for dinner.  Simpsons, X Files, Air Crash, and still managed to label 157 photos for Leavesden Studios.

Wednesday.  Woke up in the middle of the night for at least an hour and a half.  Sigh.  Ok day, not very exciting.  Leftover lamb roast for dinner.  Simpsons, then jigsaw (finished sorting pieces into basic colours), and Air Crash Investigations, and still managed to label 232 photos - I'm actually exactly on schedule now - 17500 photos labelled!!

Daffodil trio

Snow White sorted

Thursday.  Why is it the tireder you are, the harder it is to get to sleep???  So I was epic tired, went to bed on time, I might have nodded off briefly once, but otherwise didn't get to sleep til after midnight.  And then woke like every hour after that, but at least got back to sleep.  Ok day, I think.  

First cherry blossoms

Galah on a post

First cape weed

Love these

Daffodil trio in the sun

Made a creamy spaghetti for dinner that was absolutely amazing.

Onion, mushrooms, bacon, garlic
Creamy spaghetti

Cream, cheese
Creamy spaghetti

Spaghetti
Creamy spaghetti

Can you guess which section yet?

Snow White beginnings

Friday.  Okish sleep, but still pretty tired.  Ok day planning for a change and eventually doing it, only to break everything cause *someone* didn't configure a remote environment in prod to be the same as test.  So this change I'd done in test didn't work in prod.  So technically not my fault, but I still felt responsible, because I should have made sure other people could do their job right before I could do mine.  TV dinner for dinner, then watched Weathering With You which was quite sweet, and, been-theres.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Nice quiet day doing house/photo type stuff.  It rained.  A lot.  Did slow cooked brisket for dinner which was pretty awesome, and did polenta as well, which I'd never done before.  Turned out ok.  The meal could have done with some greenery though ;)  Watched Dead Poets Society in the evening, which I hadn't seen in forever, possibly I saw it at the movies thirty two years ago.

Brisket and polenta

Today.  Slept ok.  Another quiet day. 

First cherry blossoms

Headed out after the rain stopped and saw my little patch of Floriade, and my birds, and a whole bunch of other birds as well. 

My little patch of Floriade

Cockatoo with roots

Cockatoo on a post

Cockatoo on a wire

And went to Chris's for supplies.  Watched The Incredible Journey (which I'd seen a long long long time ago) while doing photo processing.  Then cooked up some mince, as well a whole heap of roast veggies for dinner.  Had a Zoom chat with EffanC, then watched the first episode of Love on the Spectrum.  Man I know I'm socially awkward but these guys have it much worse.  Or maybe I was that bad when I was younger (quite possibly was) and just "grew out of it" (read: "learned" how to people) - cause that's the thing with Asperger's, relating to people is something you actually need to learn, it certainly doesn't come naturally.  And blogged.  Took well over an hour.  Again... 

30

Sunday.  8th.  Filling in the evening after I blogged :)  Cooked All The Veggies for dinner.  Had all the roasted veggies, with mince and cheese and sour cream on the potato wedges.  Yumminess.

All the veggies

Mince nachos and veggies

Simpsons, X Files, Air Crash Investigations.

Monday.  Ok day.  Got practise looking at traffic spikes and figuring out what they were.  Labelled 182 photos - have finished Egypt and onto London, day 28.

Tuesday.  Pretty quiet day, although didn't get much done.  Leftovers/Simpsons/jigsaw/cleaned kitchen/backed up computer and suddenly it's 8pm.  Hrmm.  And labelling goes super slowly when you need to identify every building in Legoland Miniland (eg Covent Garden, which I'd never been to before, so that took a bit of flying around Google Maps trying to find it).  So I only managed to label 26 photos before dinner, did a few more while watching tv, managing 48 all up for the evening.  hrmmm.

Wednesday.  Started off ok, but then felt like a failure because I couldn't solve some stoopid problems with stoopid firewalls and stoopid proxies.  Then arguments with people who made me feel like everything I do is wrong.  Sigh.  It was a wine and scotch and no photo labelling kind of an evening.  

Thursday.  Woke up at 3am but didn't get back to sleep ~5am :(  So I was tired and grumpy.  The bathroom sealer people called me in the morning - the asbestos test came back positive (duh) so they won't do minor works, they'll only do a complete bathroom renovation so the asbestos can all be removed.  Sigh.  More fighting with stoopid firewalls and feeling like a failure and people hate me cause I hate everything.  Felt miserable all afternoon.  

But on a lighter note, before lunch it was announced Canberra would go into a snap seven day lockdown due to our first local cases of covid in over a year (it finally happened).  And my first reaction was woohoo.  I mean literally.  To just stay at home and not have to deal with people (at least directly) for a week - heaven.  I mean don't get me wrong, I do actually feel really bad for peeps in the hospitality and "non-essential" retail whose anxiety levels will go through the roof not knowing where their next pay check will come from, or anyone that had a wedding or something planned for this weekend - that'd be pretty devastating for them.  Neil and I had lunch at the mall as usual, then we went for a walk through the fresh food section to laugh at all the people panic buying milk and toilet paper.  About half the trolleys we saw had toilet paper in them.

Panic buying

Panic buying

Panic buying

Panic buying

I should point out that after all the panic buying of toilet paper finished last year and it was readily available again, I bought a pack of 24 and put it downstairs.  Then I've continued to buy it normally ever since, knowing that if we ever did have a snap lockdown, we'd be set.  In fact we'd just opened a pack of 12, so won't need any in the short term.

At 12:49pm there was already a queue to get into Woollies

Woolworths queue

And there was a queue at Baker's Delight too

Baker's Delight queue

HBZ also went shopping just after lunch, and already all the toilet paper was gone, and it took him an hour and a half to get through the checkouts.  Yikes!

On the way home we stopped for essentials - read - beer! ;)  Although tragically, Chris had sold out of Corona! *gasp*  ;)

Beer and pizza for dinner.  This is why I'm going to die young:

All the grease

Friday the 13th.  Got somewhat better sleep, and actually managed to achieve some stuff at work.  Went for a walk at lunch and saw my birds. 

In the afternoon I went to check the mailbox and this daisy was there to greet me

First daisy photo of the season

So I got photos of some of the other flowers out already as well

Snow drops

No idea what these are

Picked up TV dinners from Chris's (we actually have a freezer full of leftovers, but I really didn't feel like cooking) - he said it had been pretty quiet. 

Asahi not Corona!

Watched the 2008 Get Smart with the sweetie, which was completely ridiculous but I was snorting all through it - just a bit of fun :)

Saturday.  I'd had an early night, but woke up a bit before 5 and never got back to sleep.  Turned 30.  I'll let you figure out what base (thanks DC :) ).  Stu cooked breakfast of Pialligo bacon and cheesy hash browns. So brown but so good!!!!

Bacon and cheesy hash browns

Then had a lovely day just pottering around the house, doing jigsaw and the like.  Stu also had fun, building his little morse code thingie...

Stu soldering

At lunch we went for a walk to see the birds, and saw this very smelly burnt out car.

Burnt out car

Burnt out car

And the sweetie took a photo of me in front of the same wattle tree I had photos of the other day.

Kaz and wattle

In the afternoon I did a 500 piece jigsaw as a break from the agonisingly slow Dumbo.  Sadly it was missing a piece, but that's what you get for Green Shed jigsaws.  The sky was pretty at dusk too.

Pretty sky

We may have shared some bubbles.

Birthday bubbles

We got Chong Co delivered for dinner!

Chong Co feast

We had the wagyu salad and the duck salad (I asked for everything "medium" but the beef was a bit hot for me - endorphins!)

Chong Co salads

As well as the pork belly prik pao (not crispy anymore from being in transit) and satay chicken

Chong Co mains

Delicious!

After dinner we put on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which we enjoyed with heated Gluhwein and candles.

Mulled wine, candles and a movie

And all through the day (except the 10 second blackout and time taken for the router to reconnect) Stu put on a John Williams playlist which added a wonderful soundtrack to actually quite a wonderful day.

Sunday.  Another nice quiet day.  Took ages to do slide fixup scanning because every time I rescanned a bunch of slides, they'd get dust in different positions :(  

Late in the morning we went for a walk and saw these tiny flowers

Tiny flowers

With bee!

Tiny flowers with bee

For lunch I made salami and olive pizza scrolls

Salami and olive pizza scrolls

My lockdown lunch is better than yours!

Salami and olive pizza scrolls

In the afternoon I alternated between Dumbo jigsaw and Legoland photo labelling (including geotagging a bunch I'd taken on the train but hadn't set the location) - managed 113 photos - so I'm still *way* behind where I need to be.  I also pulled everything out of the freezer and did an audit of what we have.  There's quite a bit of leftover meat (including a bunch of food from various club nights), and some frozen veggies.  I'm thinking I might do an early morning shopping trip one day this week to get more fresh food.

Then put on dinner (all the veggies, with some pulled pork from the freezer) - finished off most of our fresh vegetables, and blogged.

Sheep

Way back in the 90s, the only drawing application we had on our computer was MS Paint.  I used it to create a few drawings that I kept.  

One drawing I did was of sheep grazing on a hillside, with snow capped mountains in the background.  The sheep were a customised paint brush so you could paint the same thing over and over again - for a whole flock.

Last year when we went to Tumut I saw the exact scene in real life!  This inspired me to find that original picture.  

Here it is!

Sheep drawing

And this is the photo I took last year :)

I once drew a picture very similar to this on my computer using Paint

2020.

Oh my.

We started the year at EffanC's, suffocating in bushfire smoke. We didn't go out to the club because I was too nervous about bushfires, and in fact even suburban fires. In 1994 I saw spotfires go a full kilometre from the bush, just a couple of hundred metres from our house. So I wanted to stay close. The bushfire smoke hung around for much of January and the devastation the fires caused was just heartbreaking.

The bushfires ended, then we got a massive hail storm that wrote off thousands of cars. I know *lots* of people that had their cars written off. And then it rained. And rained. And rained. Just a few weeks after the fires finished, much of the landscape was flooded. Which apparently is exactly what the river ecosystems *don't* need. Coastal communities begged Canberrans to come down and spend some money to help them recover. So we did. Although just an overnighter for Pete's 40th.

But then.

The C word.

As it hit, coastal communities begged Canberrans to stay away. When we got back from the coast, we dropped into Coles at Gungahlin to pick up a few supplies, including toilet paper (we were down to our last roll at home). We managed to get one of the last packets of toilet paper on the shelves. It was the last time I was to see toilet paper in Coles for about six or seven weeks. Fortunately I was able to get it at Chris's, otherwise things would have been pretty messy. The panic buying extended to all paper products that could be used in lieu of toilet paper - all the tissues and paper towel was gone for weeks as well. Pasta, pasta sauce, rice and even flour and yeast all disappeared off the shelves. I really didn't understand the flour/yeast thing - bread was still freshly available throughout the whole thing. In the second week even fresh food was mostly gone. Long lasting vegetables such as potatoes were nearly all gone, as was most fresh meat. One day (22 March) we went to the Belconnen markets and all three butchers had closed by lunch time Sunday because they'd simply run out of meat to sell.

On Monday 16 March I had the slightest hint of a sore throat and a cough. So Tuesday 17 March I stayed at home. And there I stayed. For six months. Other than a couple of odd days, and dropping in on a couple of weekends to swap out my backup hard drives, I didn't work in the office in any regular fashion until September. As it turns out I love working from home. Who knew. Previously I didn't really like it, partly because of my monitor setup is a bit backwards, but also because if I didn't go into the office every day I would lose the claim to "my" desk. But with everyone else working from home as well, and in fact they had a sticker on my desk for most of that six months saying don't work here (trying to keep people further apart), it wasn't an issue. And I got somewhat used to the monitors being backwards.

By 22 March, most flights around the world had been cancelled. The government imposed a travel ban. For every country they said "Do not travel". Restaurants, bars, cinemas and anything "non-essential" was shut down. I was quite upset by the impact that would have on low income earners. And then I raged at people whinging about their pay raise getting delayed six months. My holiday to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play got postponed two years. They started doing that play to thank God for saving them from the plague. And this year they had to postpone. Because of a plague. There's got to be some irony there somewhere. Qantas grounded all their 747s - forever. I was super sad about this.

In late March I went out at lunch time on a Monday to do the food shopping, when Jamo was a lot less crowded, and did that a couple of times. Still not much in the way of pasta/rice etc. We did big shops fortnightly to minimise having to go out. And I did the shopping by myself for a while too which was no fun because I like going with the sweetie. Every time I went shopping I swore I was getting a sore throat straight after. It was late April before I saw toilet paper again in Coles. June saw an outbreak in Melbourne, and panic buying started up again. In July I finally got my money back from Emirates for my Europe trip, although not the extra I paid for seat allocations.

Things eased up a lot in the second half of the year with no community transmission in Canberra since March. Restaurants opened and stayed open. We were able to start seeing our friends again. It hit Melbourne pretty hard in the middle of the year.  By December it looked like Australia was getting on top of things again. But then a driver of international flight crews got it in December and started spreading it around Sydney. Sydney went into lockdown of sorts and Mum couldn't come visit us after Christmas.

So a pretty wild year on that front.

Very little travel this year, for obvious reasons. I flew up to Sydney in February for Ryan's 21st birthday. But with all the delays it would have been quicker to take the coach. And that turned out to be my only flight for the year. I stayed with Mum and went to the 21st, where I put up a video of all the photos I'd taken of Ryan every week/fortnight/month/year since he was born. Caught the coach back the next morning. In March we went down the coast to stay with Kit and Pete for a surprise party for Pete's 40th. That was a bit of fun. Came home the next day. Did a quick trip to Sydney in late June to inspect my flat after the previous tenants decided to move out. We also dropped in to visit Luc and Lizzi, and on the way back I saw Nepean Dam. My flat ended up being empty for a month, and I had to drop the rent *a lot* which was pretty sad. In late August we wandered around the Snowy Mountains to Tumut, visited several dams and had a lovely afternoon at the Tumut River Brewing Company for Stu's 50th. In November Stu's brother convinced us to go up to Port Macquarie and South West Rocks to visit him and his father.

In lieu of actual travel, I did a *lot* of work on my travel photos. Throughout last year I'd gotten our Hong Kong/Singapore 2016 trip labelled, and had the blog ready for the fourth anniversary since we went. I geotagged my USA 2000 trip, fixed up all the labels, and got photos into the blog. I started geotagging my USA 2004 photos in February, but ran out of steam with that after about a week's worth, because it's *really* hard to geotag photos taken out of a moving car in the middle of outback USA. Next I labelled all twelve and a half thousand UK 2010 photos, finishing in December. I registered a Geonames account, and a Google Cloud account so I could use the Google Maps API in Geosetter.

Work was work. Still doing mostly internetty type stuff like firewalls and proxies. As mentioned previously, it turns out introverts like me like working from home. It's just so much more flexible and it *feels* like I'm home, even though I'm working. It means I can pop something in the slow cooker at lunch time, or something in the oven a bit earlier than I would if I got home at nearly 6pm. Or if it's a quiet Friday afternoon I can flex off for a bit without having to wait for the sweetie to go home or catch a bus. I got a bunch of our gear finally converted over to SNMP v3. I shut off access to an entire old environment. I fought with a particular firewall for months, including spending three hours on the phone to support one weekend trying to fix it. Still no resolution in sight on that one, but Wardie, bestest guy ever, has basically taken over, because he's awesome. Did a bit of training here and there, mostly free stuff. Got a new service desk tool in December, and had a lot of fun making shiny dashboards for it, which a bunch of other sections copied for themselves!  Socially, we had a gin night in early March, just before the lockdown. I actually missed the last work drinks before shutdown because of the slight sore throat I had. In August the guys started going to the Pot Belly for drinks, which we did for a little while before actual work drinks started up again. And I got to run my Christmas barbeque at the lake for over forty people. It was a lovely cool day, which made nice change from so many years where it's been crazy hot or shrouded in bushfire smoke.

Healthwise I was generally pretty good. Bouts of insomnia came and went a few times. Completely frustrating and debilitating. From mid March I felt like I had a permanently sore throat and slight cough for like a month or two. It was likely all in my head though. Got a flu vaccination in April. David came home with a cold in late August. He went home but it was too late - Stu caught it about a week later, and I caught it about five days after that. I was sick for a weekend. Stu was sick for a month. At least. I decided to go on short walks around the neighbourhood every day at lunch to get a little bit of exercise and vitamin D. I passed a lot of magpies, and decided to bribe them to not swoop me in spring by feeding them little bits of roast meat. All through winter they would see me coming and fly over. So cool! But come spring time they lost interest - there was obviously plenty of their own food around which they were more interested in. I also never got swooped :) Went up Mt Rogers once with David. Got some new reading glasses in December (should NOT have gone to Specsavers).

On the friends front, really things only went quiet for about two months from mid March to May. Other than that it was actually pretty much business as usual. We saw our fair share of EffanC at ours or theirs, including drinks over Zoom. We caught up with Kit and Pete when they came up in January to avoid the fires, and in February when they came up again, as well as Pete's 40th at their place in March. Had a few games of Kismet with them as well. We went to Rob and Lynne's with a bunch of peeps in January and again in December, and had them over in May. Went to a bbq at Brett and Sharon's in January, and the middle of the year we saw quite a bit of the A/M/C group, including some dinners, parties and walks. Got to see Rob and Fiona a couple of times too which was nice, as they really went into hibernation during the lockdown. Unfortunately didn't see much of Scott. Also didn't see much of Chrissie. Saw her on her birthday in January and I think that was it. Doesn't help that they are all always either crazy busy or sick. We didn't end up having a hanami lunch with Nat and Andrew.  I invited them but never heard back.  I would have chased them up but Stu was too busy and stressed with a uni assignment.  Had a lovely time at Aquila's 60th in January. Had Nelson and Susan over in August for vegan lasagna and games. Had drinks with Damien in September, I think that was the only time I saw him all year. We were supposed to go to Ben and Sarah's wedding in Queensland in October. Yeah that didn't happen. But Ben was able to have a nice 40th at Gungahlin Lakes on the day. We also had them over for dinner in December. And Doc organised drinks at the George for a bunch of work peeps between Christmas and New Year which was nice.

On the family side, well my family has been here the whole time! David has been living with us for a little over a year. While it can be challenging sometimes (mainly menu planning and trying to remember to vacuum around a shiftworker) it's generally been pretty good. And he fixes things! While he was here he replaced the light fitting in our ceiling fan (I think that might have been before he moved here), fixed the leaky ensuite toilet, installed new taps in the bathroom, installed LEDs everywhere, including some smartlights in the loungeroom that are pretty cool, installed a new extentible clothes line, installed a new oven, fixed the display on Stu's CD player, fixed the frequency on our digital radios, fixed up the bedroom curtain string which had come off the rails, fixed our back fence which had been pushed out by vines and photinia and finally broken in strong winds, phoned up and ordered and picked up a new fix tank lid for me, installed a bracket for the clothes line so we can extend it half way instead of the whole way, helped Stu build his new shelves, rewired the LEDs in Stu's four foot tank so it'd work with a standard transformer, installed a couple of new smoke detectors, fixed my scanner (cable had come loose, and I would have eventually figured this out because I would have moved it to test it on another computer). And he mowed the lawns. Seriously, most awesomest brother ever!!! And super handy having a qualified electrician in the family! About the best we could do to thank him was cook lots of roasts. Including roast lamb on his birthday, and he had a few friends over to help celebrate. I stayed with Mum in Sydney a couple of times - when I went up for Ryan's 21st, and when I inspected my flat in June. We saw a bit of Stu's family as well. Went and visited a few times in August, October and Christmas.  And we saw Scott and Kerry and the family and Jeff and Ruth in November.

Our social club events had to be curtailed somewhat, and I missed out on doing Christmas in July which I've done for a few years in a row now, but at least I got to do Christmas for something like fifty people (a whole bunch had to stay outside due to capacity restrictions). We had a few weekends out there while Stu was on the committee, including in January where I did some cleaning out of the "tool shed", a night in June, our first since February, where we really appreciated the little wood fireplace, and in July where I stared priming the cabinetry. Also had some time in early October. We went out for the last event before lockdown - an epic Mexican feast in February. One of the raffle prizes that night was a six pack of Corona beer with an attached N95 mask. There was a working bee in July where I scraped concrete off a glass door. That night would have been the Christmas in July night, and the alternative was going to be a bonfire, but it rained, so we cooked marshmallows in the wood heater in the shed. The first event post lockdown was a halloween party where I got to be Lego 80s Classic Space guy again. And then my Christmas party. And we finished the year there with a few friends and a lot of bubbles.

Another fairly quiet year with the fish. I bought ten zebra danios in April and put a few in my three tanks. Half of them died, some fairly quickly. I lost the angel in my 620T tank in September, and Chrissie's catfish was looking super depressed. I stuck my hand in to see if it was still alive, and the water was COLD. The heater had died, taking my angel with it. Pretty upset about that. I took a random day off in September, thinking I'd do some fish stuff in the morning and other things in the afternoon. But I ended up doing fish stuff *all day*. And I managed to break the lid of the upstairs two foot while I was trying to clean it. Stu got some little sucking catfish and some guppies at the end of the year. So Stu's four foot has ten congo tetras, one loach, one siamensis and four tiny sucking catfish. My 620T has Chrissie's huge sucking catfish, a huge old cory and two female danios. My upstairs two foot has two male danios, one who has been sick since shortly after I got him, but refuses to die. Little trooper. It also has a sucking catfish, and six of the guppies Stu got at the end of the year. My downstairs two foot has four of the male guppies and two sucking catfish from Stu's purchase. Also downstairs are five little tanks, all with two or three guppies in them to cycle the tanks.  No change with Stumpy.  He's just as much a gumby as ever.

Not much going on with the Lego. I'm still sporadically sorting Vic's Lego but it's just so painful. If sets were complete it would be a joy, but none of them are, so it's just depressing. I think the only sets I built all year were the set of Shanghai Stu got me for Christmas, and Neil's International Space Station.

The year started slowly with jigsaws - most of the first quarter was taken up with a three thousand piece jigsaw of The Bombing of Algiers. I did two sections of the forty two thousand piece Disney behemoth - Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid. Very few at work thanks to the lockdown, and not too many at home because I'm just too damned busy all the time.

I continued working on labelling and sorting photos. As mentioned above I geotagged and labelled thousands of photos. I also did a lot of filing of photos, but there's still sooo much to be done in that space. In March I started scanning Dad's slides. I started out doing a box a week, and at that rate it was going to take me four or five years. But working from home during lockdown gave me an extra half hour in the mornings that I used to scan a box a day. I managed to get all his slides scanned by Christmas, although I still had a bit of work to rescan slides that had dust on them on the first pass. Didn't quite complete that by the end of the year. In December I had a bit of a play with a gallery generator. The only reason I'm labelling all my holiday photos is because I want to get the majority of them online. I did consider Flickr, but I just have this feeling they're not going to last. Too many buyouts and changes of conditions. Most likely I'll just use S3 and pay the few cents a month it'll likely cost.

I continued to rage at Apple and the crappy things it does. It still messes with the timestamps on my files. I can't download movies first go, or second or third or fourth in a lot of cases. And can't download timelapse videos *at all* to my PC, I have to save them to Google Drive first and then if I'm lucky the encoding/dimensions will be right for me to play them on my PC. Calendar and contacts refuse to sync to Google like they used to (I don't think it's worked since I got my new phone two years ago and I've tried *everything*). The contacts don't even sync to Apple Cloud. I'm about ready to give up on Apple.

Most of the stuff around the house was done by David. Because he's awesome. Our oven element died in March. I cleaned the oven while he investigated getting a new element, but in the end we got a whole new oven. While I was on a work break. With no sleep. Yeah really not the best mental state to be buying home appliances. In April we went out to buy half turn taps. Again, while on a work break, from a situation at work I probably should not have left. The anxiety of that day was terrible!! But the new taps are amazing, I love them! Unfortunately the dripping shower was still there. Guess it's not the taps that are leaking. We had a plumber come look at it, and he did a whole heap of tests, and decided the membrane was gone (duh) and most likely just leaking through the grout. I could have saved myself four hundred dollars if I'd just done the "cover the drain and splash water on the walls" trick which I did just after and proved the same thing. We got a resealer to come have a look and give us a quote. But he was confused about why there would be so much leaking through the grout, promised to send a quote for a complete retile/reseal, but never did. Even when I mailed them again and asked. In March we cleaned out the dumping ground room so that Stu could have his own office. He'd been wanting to do that for ages. The timing was great, as it meant he had a private office during lockdown. He got new shelves later in the year and a whole heap of toys, and he really loves his little space. I spent a weekend tidying up the dungeon and under the house and rearranging everything to keep it clear of the drip. We had to get the Chinese pistachio tree removed in August because the trunks were sagging apart and it was in danger of falling down (onto Kit's garage). I was super sad about that because it was such a beautiful tree, and the birds absolutely love it, and as it turns out it was a great shade for the eastern side of the house, so our house is a lot hotter in the mornings now. We also got the tree guys to be brutal on our photinia which was getting out of control. Again. We had a roof restoration done in October and the roof looks very shiny now. Next up: solar. The garden continued to stay out of control. Although we did get a few strawberry plants off Michelle and got some very nice strawberries off them in October (the ones the slugs didn't get at).

We still managed to eat out a little bit this year. We took Kit and Pete out for dinner in January to Bella Vista. Went to Kinn Thai in January, February and March (which was our last eating out before lockdown). It's always fast service and the food really good. Had some very nice pizzas at Grease Monkey in January. Went to Grill'd with Neil in January to avoid the food court during school holidays. Tried Malatang Hotpot in January too. The one I had was fairly bland, and the one Neil had was super epic spicy, even for him. Need to try something in the middle, but then there was lockdown, and they're still not allowing you to handle the tongs to choose your own food. Tried Wild Panda in Civic when I got back from Sydney, but I don't remember it being anything special. Had lunch with the sweetie at Gus's in May - first eating out post lockdown. Had brunch at Rocksalt in June. Had some nice pork belly with crackling at the Lake George hotel a week before my birthday. It was going to be my birthday meal, but we ended up going to Chong Co on my birthday. And KFC for lunch of course. Went to Happy's a couple of times with the sweetie in September and October. Met up with a bunch of N-Gang people for dinner at Indian Pantry in October for a feast. Tried out Herbert's in November, and went there a couple of times in November and a couple in December with Tony and/or the Chrises. Had drinks a few times with the sweetie at the Beirut Bunker Bar. Had Disappointing Sushi, aka Hero Sushi in Civic in December. It lived up to expectations. It's literally a running joke with us now. You can be guaranteed that the hot food will be cold and everything has avocado in it.

As always, I do quite a bit of interesting cooking. I don't quite know how I manage that, since I'm not really a very good cook. Actually I'm basically a lazy cook. I like cooking things that don't require a lot of fiddly preparation or a lot of cleaning up. I cooked two pavlovas in January. I think this was the first time I'd ever made a full pavlova. I thought I'd have another go at Christmas and failed miserably. Twice. We had cheese and bacon sausages we got from Coles a few times. They're great to have in the fridge because they last ages, so we can use them when we've run out of other food. Made curried sausages in March to try and use up some of the many tins of curry powder we have in the house. We tried out Dominos "deep pan" pizzas a couple of times. They were pretty disappointing. Nothing like the crispy doughy deep fried goodness of pizzas in the eighties. Tried a slow cooked marinated beef in March to try and use up some of the mustard powder we have in the house. It turned out pretty well. Made nachos in late March, probably the first time I've ever made nachos myself. Several of our lunches during lockdown consisted of various types of puff pastry scrolls - cheese and vegemite and pizza scrolls being favourites. Did a coq au vin in April. Cooked a couple of "Yum! Delicious!" cakes and a cashew slice with Mum's peanut slice recipe. I also did Anzac Biscuits on Anzac Day which has become somewhat of a tradition in recent years. I did a few tomato based stews as we went into winter, and we think all the extra tomato set off David's gout, so we had to cut those right back. There was Sizzler cheesy toast a couple of times, and taco Tuesday multiple times - soooo bad but soooo good!! Did an epic lasagna in May. Tried a pulled pork in May. It was pretty amazing, but such a waste of crackling ;) David obliged me with a Country Cheese and cheese sauce craving and had quite a bit of that over winter. Whenever a packet is open it evaporates very quickly. Tried a couple of non-tomato based bakes from my gratins and bakes book - a broccoli and cheese penne with garlic and lemon crumbs, and a potato, bacon and blue cheese bake, both were very nice but also quite similar to my regular veggie bakes. Made an Irish stew in July - Stu was going to make it but life got in the way so I did it.  It was nice enough. Tried slow cooking beef brisket in July and fell in love with it, and did it several times. As well as some slow cooked pulled beef and NQN's beef cheeks as well. Slow cookers are amazing for hearty winter cooking! David reminded me of our youth and Dinner Winner, and we had Coles' One Pan Dinner a couple of times, and even had authentic Dinner Winner once. There may have been a rocky road in there at some point, and a fairly nice gingerbread cheese cake I made at Christmas. There were several weekends where I spent several hours cooking up meals for a week or more, to save cooking during the week (which is really no fun at all when you don't heat up the kitchen to save money on heating costs).

I saw exactly one movie/theatre/show/exhibition this year -
* Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

As usual for recent years I/we worked my/our way through a lot of movie series. This may have been aided *a lot* by Disney+ !
* finished up watching through all the James Bond movies
* watched Star Wars episodes VII and VIII before seeing IX at the movies
* finished up the Pixar series with Coco and Toy Story 4
* watched a *lot* of original/remakes of Disney movies - Aladdin, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Freaky Friday, The Lion King, The Parent Trap (just 1 and 2 they don't have 3 yet), 101 Dalmatians and Mulan
* saw a few "Australian classic" movies - My Brilliant Career, which I really didn't like, and Ned Kelly, which I thought was better
* in March was the 30th anniversary of seeing Labyrinth for the first time, so we watched it on David's Bluray
* we had to watch some pandemic disaster movies, so watched World War Z first up because Contagion had been pulled from Netflix, but David had Contagion on DVD so we all watched that later too
* Frozen II
* Airport series
* Naked Gun series
* Star Wars - I think we saw all nine this year
* almost all the Ghibli movies, except Grave of the Fireflies which wasn't on Netflix. Some of them are amazing. Some of them are crap.
* a few of the Herbie movies (still a couple to go, it's a bit of a struggle since they're very silly)
* Die Hard 1 and 2 and Love Actually at Christmas. David dissed Love Actually on Facebook, but he had the choice to leave but didn't and he seemed to be enjoying himself. Just sayin ;)

And again, somehow we managed to watch our way through a lot of TV. I always feel like I don't have time to watch tv/movies, and yet somehow we see a lot. Mostly from Thursday to Sunday, as Monday to Wednesday is "work" nights.
* first episode of Who is America
* Star Trek: Picard
* The Mandalorian (season 1)
* Big Bang Theory - finished mid year, took a little over year to watch all 12 seasons
* Brooklyn 99 until it ran out of episodes (up to season 6?)
* Fuller House (last seasons)
* Lego Masters (second Australian season)
* Unorthodox
* Filthy Rich
* The Dismissal
* The Miraculous Mellops
* The Simpsons (most of the way through season 5)
* High Score (documentary)
* Against the Wind
* Discovery (season 3)
* The IT Crowd (all of it)
* The Mandalorian (season 2)
* The Queen's Gambit

Not a lot of reading this year. I don't catch the bus much and I mostly feel too tired to read when I go to bed.
* Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J.K. Rowling
* Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all five books in the trilogy), by Douglas Adams
* Penguin Bloom, by Cam Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive (I also started Heartache and Birdsong)

Other stuff!
* Started "This day in history" posts
* Got Disney+ and watched a *lot* of Disney
* Got some cute "living stones" - succulent plants that grow extremelly slowly
* Played with Picasa for Ryan's 21st "morph" series
* Got our NBN fixed in January - because last time they did work they broke one of our connectors so we were only getting half the speed we should. David organised that because he's awesome.
* Used Picasa to tag people in a lot of work photos, still a long way to go on that
* Collected the next batch of Stikeez - got all but one of the specials
* Our rose bush and rhododendron out the front put out just a couple of flowers right at the end of summer when it finally rained
* Had cheese and nibbles with bubbly, and Chong Co delivered for our anniversary
* Went bed shopping in June but didn't find anything we really liked
* Went to Ikea and bought storage cubes for David and drawers for stu
* My domain - kazza.id.au turned 18
* Had a big outage of my web hosting in late June. Went looking for a new host and found VentraIP, but they didn't support Perl DBD::mysql so had to cancel it all again. But it did force me to do an upgrade of a dll in Eudora which allows secure downloads without ssl errors, so that's a win
* Had issues with the vacuum cleaner - it kept getting jammed - with my hair :(
* Got so much rain in August all creeks and rivers around Canberra flooded a bit
* The boys bought me a Dyson cordless for my birthday
* Couldn't get on the Qantas 747 joy ride flight out of Canberra, because Qantas' website sux donkey balls. So I watched it fly over central Canberra from Mt Ainslie instead (arguably better for photos anyway!)
* Listened to some podcasts with the sweetie - The Eleventh, Winds of Change, Thirteen Minutes to the Moon
* Got super sad at all the 747s around the world being retired
* A neighbourhood yappy dog pissed me off by barking non stop for literally hours at a time
* The winter was so warm our potatoes survived the whole winter without freezing
* Enjoyed Floriade in the suburbs!
* Went for a drive with the sweetie around Denman Prospect and out to Cotter
* Had a Bunnings sausage in October for first time since lockdown
* Voted in the ACT elections early so I didn't get a Democracy Sausage (most places I don't think were doing them anyway)
* Had a free run to the tip because what we took was mostly all metal
* Had to fight with windoze to maintain access to our NAS - its ancient version of SMB is making windoze super sad
* Tidied up all the packing materials in garage, with the idea to use it all to sell stuff
* Vodien moved my blog to a new host, but didn't tell me. Well, apparently they did tell me - to an email address that doesn't actually work anymore.
* Failed at jeans shopping
* Tried out Return-It's bulk facility which is only marginally better than their drop off system
* Saw the moon and Saturn and Jupiter near each other, but not at their closest point

Our year was finished off at the club. We headed out there on New Years Eve eve and stayed two nights, and had a fairly relaxed New Years.

2020 sure was one crazy year. Here's hoping 2021 settles down quickly into the "new normal".

Happy new year!! 

Backdating.  Cause I'm a slacker.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Went to have some of the snow peas that I bought probably only two weeks ago and they were *covered* in slime.  So fricken unusual because normally they last weeks and weeks in the fridge.  Pissed as.  Then David came home and spent all afternoon swearing at the fish tank lights.  But he got them working in the end.  Bestest brother ever.  (not sure if I ever mentioned the story - a few weeks back the transformer for Stu's stoopidly expensive LED fish tank lights went POP and that was the end of that.  It was a completely non standard transformer, there was no doco anywhere online for the lights, and they were strangely wired.  David decided to get resistors and rewire the thing so it'd work with a standard transformer, and also be less likely to blow out the lights.  Just waiting for the other transformer to go next so he'll have to do it all over again.. hrmmm....).  Had sausages and salad/veggies for dinner.  Then got more grunty that Stu's sauerkraut had gone off.  And some ham we bought ages ago is also looking very strange.  I *hate* wasting food and we've wasted so much this week >:(  Feeling like I should ban perishable food that I won't eat (like ham and sauerkraut) and veggies that only I like (like snow peas).  Don't get me started on trying to find veggies that everyone likes and doesn't cause health issues in people.  Took til 8pm to get UK photo labelling done.  811 left.  And blogging.  An hour and a half later.  hrmmm.

But look!  Poppy in the staircase!

Life finds a way

Tuesday.  Ok sleep mostly.  Finished scanning Dad's WA slides.  Was good to see his photos, after only having seen Mum's very red-shifted prints for so many years.  I think I'll need to scan her negatives of those holiday trips - hopefully they fared better than the prints!  Worked from home so just watched some silly horse race on tv in the background.  David made home in time for the race but steadfastly ignored it ;)  Later in the afternoon had no tickets and not much else happening so flexed off for an hour or so and got some UK photo labelling done.  Only 581 photos left!  Leftovers from the club halloween night for dinner.  Hacked some periwinkle.  Watched random stuff on the internet in the evening.

Some silly horse race

Wednesday.  Okish sleep.  Up to 5000 of Dad's slides scanned.  I'm into Central Australia now.  I remember Mum saying a while back that Dad had issues with his camera on the WA trip, and there was a $25 camera fixing bill listed in the holiday expenses, but all the photos from that trip looked fine.  The Central Australia trip on the other hand was a disaster.  So many of the photos are over exposed, and there's *heaps* missing - obviously too bad to even keep.  I'm thinking *this* was the trip he had camera issues with.  Must have been absolutely heartbreaking for him.  I'll have to get Mum's negatives of this trip too.  Pity you can't climb Ayers Rock aka Uluru anymore.  I'm calling it though - I reckon within twenty years the local Aboriginal people will start doing guided tours to the top.  Charged of course.  I don't know how true it is, but David and Yvonne went some years ago and got the impression that the Aboriginal people didn't really care too much that people would want to climb to the top - they were much more worried about the sacred sites around the base of the rock.  I'm having to be the Naughty Email Intervention Layer (aka NEIL) at work, probably for another few weeks at least.  Which is a bit of a poo.  Cause he doesn't document anything!  Actually *going* to work sux epically - takes so much extra time out of my day.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Then it's back to "work" - finishing scanning the morning's photos (because there's not enough time in the mornings on "work" days), backing up hard drive, labelling photos etc.  Only 475 to go!!!

I don't have any notes for Thursday.  There was work drinks.  And I went with David to the mall to do some shopping.  Saw this very pretty car in the car park.

Pretty car

Friday.  I swear Dad must have had sex on the brain.  Following his Coitus Tower slides from the USA, this was the label for a thorny devil in Central Australia.

Horny devil

The evening was packing for our long weekend away...