I asked for this set for my birthday because I mean look at the thing.. how pretty is it!?!?  Plus, well you know, we've been there and all that.

This one comes in seventeen bags and took me four hours and eleven minutes.  Here's shots at the end of every bag.

Here's some closeups of some of the things

And some more shots of the finished castle

A beautiful model, I loved it :)

Sunday.  3rd.  Cooked an epic roast pork, with a blue cheese potato/sweet potato/onion/bacon bake, brussels sprouts/bacon and capsicum.  I wouldn't have bought a roast pork this close to Christmas cause we're just going to be having it again in a few weeks, but Stu got it cause they were out of the beef he liked the other week.  It felt very much like a Christmas dinner.  Especially when I had some eggnog for dessert :)  6.2 of The Crown.

Monday.  Awake for a couple of hours with hurty, so bit of a zombie morning.  Aquila and I planned out a migration for tomorrow. 

I turn around for five minutes and the creeper has already taken over the garden.  Sigh.

Scanned another one of my ABC singing books after work.  Cooked cheesy cauliflower and mince stuffed capsicums for dinner.  It was kinda like a capsicum based pizza.

Tuesday.  Slept somewhat better.  I've been getting things done before and after work, but there's just too much to dooooo.  I don't have time to go to work.  Did the migration with Aquila in the afternoon.  Music then leftover pork and veggies for dinner.  Got back into culling photos from our Turkey trip.  Of 2014.  hrmm.  Twin Peaks 1.6.

Wednesday.  Um.

Thursday.  Vendor meeting in the morning.  Not getting anywhere.  I keep asking questions.  I keep not getting answers.  Big Christmas party in the afternoon which was pretty chilled.  The rain stayed just southeast of us.

Friday.  Awake for a little while in the middle of the night but otherwise slept ok.  Training and interruptions kind of a day.  Bit of decom work in the arvo.  Music, pizza, then Die Hard 2.  Which went a lot later than I planned on account of interruptions and having to turn everything off for the EPIC STORM.

Saturday.  Woke up around 4:40 for another small storm and didn't get much more sleep after that.  Had a day of trying to do All The Things.  Did I mention the EPIC STORM?

Tried to close off my Citibank account which we got for fee-free overseas purchases/ATM withdrawals but now don't use anymore because our new bank accounts also have it.  But got this error:

Your account closure request can not be processed at this point in time.

Dumb.

Fried up some leftover pork with some cabbage, spring onion, rice and pork jelly for dinner which was very nice, then watched The Orville 2.2.  Then I put on Home Alone 2 which I've only seen once a very long time ago.  As soon as the music started I was like OMFG John Williams .. I'd forgotten he'd done the music for the first one, and obviously they got him back to do the second one.  The music in this was Christmas magic, with a lot of elements of Harry Potter, and a bit of Superman and Indiana Jones.  I loved the first half of the movie, although I did get hit in the face by this, because I've literally stood right there too... I might have had a moment..

Another funny bit, Kevin asks for more ice cream with this line "Two? Make it three; I'm not driving" which cracked me up cause I reckon that's where Jamie (Jamie vs Julia) got that from whenever he adds an extra bay leaf!

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another busy day of doing All The Things.  Discovered that some time between September and October iMazing has started exporting MOV files the exact same way as if I copy them in windows explorer - the files are identical and don't have the HDR nonsense that was plaguing them before.  Possibly an update to iMazing changed something?   Or possibly also Apple changing things - because now whenever I copy MOV files in explorer it retains the correct modified datestamp.  Maybe Apple finally fixed that $#!+ ??  The other thing Apple is doing now is display photos to explorer as HEIC files rather than JPG.  FFS Apple is so crap.

So achieved lots this weekend.  Still have so much to do.  I don't have time for this whole work nonsense.  Need to win the lotto so I can retire...

Monday.  16th.  Not backdating!  Slept ok I guess but still cranky in the morning.  Ok day I guess.  Pasta for dinner.  Tallied up all the Europe spending, Mum owes me a little bit.  Still have yet to compare how much the whole thing would have cost us doing it ourselves vs doing it with Albatross.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Had a good tidying day, planning the work I wanted to do last Friday.  Filing photos in the evening.  Also started the latest Amazing Race.  Which is a celebrity edition.  Of which I've heard of like two or three of them.  

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - cold feet.  Turned on my computer in the morning but there was no network.  And Windows 11 is so retarded at the moment that telling it to turn off or reboot simply logs you out.  So dumb.  Pressing the power button convinced it to reboot, but had to hold it in to shut it off.  Still no network after a cold boot.  So tried it with another cable.  Worked fine.  Tried my cable on a different port.  Worked fine.  So somewhere between the wall panel and the switch.  Probably the Cisco switch just killed another port like it did with our NAS.  I'd really like to get a low power 12 port gigabit switch rather than the Cisco behemoth we have.  Also after the reboot the issue Windoze has updating the wallpaper between desktops is back.  Why is Microsoft so bad at everything whyyyyyy???

Had a slightly long lunch with Neil for his birthday.

And dinner with the sweetie in the evening.  Kinn Thai beef pad see iw and chilli jam crispy pork

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Did some work on another server migration. 

After missing out on the raspberry ones we decided to get these.  They definitely tasted cinnamoney, but these things need to be savoury not sweet.

Then meetings in the afternoon including an hour and a half one with a vendor where I had to be engaged the whole fricken time which I fricken HATE HATE HATE.  Utterly exhausted by the end of it.  Meanwhile someone broke some stuffs pretty badly but took them a few hours to make the connection between the fact that they made a change and the fact things were broken.  Even after I asked did anyone change anything.  Ok drinks, but just our group, then a quiet night.  

Friday.  Slept ok I think.  Bunch of crap in the morning then a lovely afternoon of cleaning.  We'd just settled down to share a bottle of bubbles after work when we got a somewhat desperate message from Kit, who was going through a bit of a crisis and really needed some friends.  So we packed up and headed down the coast.  Didn't get home til after 15:00 Sunday, and quite exhausted.

Monday. 25th. Backdating because last week's blogging time was taken up with blogging the previous week. Sigh. Awake from 2-5 or so. Sigh. Zombie morning. Did some work on getting stuff backing up to a new server.  Did some weeding while Stu cooked dinner - gyozas, yum.  Tired.  So tired.  But then hardcoded my style sheet to https so at least the blog will render ok in either http or https.

It's a bit hard to tell from the angle what this is.. I was taking a plate out of the microwave and it caught on the rim of the microwave plate and took a great big chip out of it :(  Not happy Jan!

Tuesday.  Slept much more betterer.  Fighting with backups all day.  Weeding and cooking after work so no time for music.  Finished blogging Europe food and drinks pages.  Then watched War on Waste 3.2.

This was fresh ravioli.  From Milan.  Which we didn't realise til we opened it up.  Carbon footprint on this a little ridiculous.  This was right before I dumped a tonne of cheese on it :)

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Still woke up early though.  Fighting with stuff on our DR laptop.  Had a 1.5 hour meeting with a vendor in the afternoon which left me completely wasted, but then had to wait another 1.5 hours for the sweetie.  Sigh.  Beer and homemade pizza for dinner.  Mum got a new computer cause her old one died, but they didn't just install everything fresh and copy data across, no they migrated the c: drive as is and massaged into working on the new hardware.  Which is a shame because she could really do with a clean install of windows in case of any lingering malware and nuisanceware on there.  Didn't get anything done in the evening because we got home so late and then I just wanted to collapse into bed.

You know you're around equinox when the sun is due west at sunset..

Thursday.  Stoopidly busy day.  Trying to get everything wrapped up for a long long weekend.  Ok drinks but very quiet.  Watched first episode of Inside Central Station.

We had a mini team lunch to Ramen O which I haven't been to in ages.  I had Yuzu tonkatsu ramen

Friday.  Slept ok although awake before 5.  Productive morning doing fish stuff and house stuff.  Finished the panorama posts for Europe, which means that whole blog is done!  Go check it out! :)  Also finished Starry Night and worked on Europe costs.  Then watched 1.5 of Ahsoka and 6.1 of Death in Paradise.

Frank and Karen gave me the very last can of Tex Mex for my birthday!!

Saturday we went for a drive but I'll post that separately.  Watched Jewel of the Nile in the evening.  

Sunday.  House and hobby stuff all morning.  Spent some time planning out all the things I always need to get done before Christmas and trying to come up with a plan for getting it all done.  Met up with various peeps at Herbert's for Sunday music.  Basa bake for dinner, then The Orville 1.4 and Death in Paradise 6.2.

Sunday.  16th.  Lamb roast for dinner.  Into season 5 of The Crown.  Then finished season 3 of The Amazing Race Australia.  I was really glad that (spoiler alert!!) Heath and Toni won.  

Monday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Then kept waking up early thinking it was time to wake up.  Then people hassled me the entire fricken day and It. Did. Not. Stop. All. Day.  I hung my washing outside in the morning because it was supposed to be 16 and breezy.  Pfft, never dried.  Saw three of my birds at lunch and did some weeding.  Sausages for dinner.  Still behind on culling.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Could have had more sleep though.  Got some culling down in the morning.  Work wasn't *as* crazy as yesterday.  Pea and ham soup for dinner (took literally two minutes to make - ham hock, packet of yellow split peas, bay leaves, onions (that I cooked last night), pepper and water).  Weeding at lunch.  Got up to date with culling.  Windows 11 is so bad.  I have notepad pinned to the task bar.  And normally when it's open it's in the place I have it set.  But every so often windoze just moves notepad all the way over to the right of all my icons, and not where I'd originally pinned it.  So I have to move it back.  So damned retarded.  And don't even get me started on cmd, which is pinned right next to notepad, but when you actually start it, it leaves the pinned icon there, but opens the actual command prompt in another icon all the way to the right.  So you go looking for your open cmd window on the left but can't find it, because it's all the way over to the right.  

Wednesday.  Spent all morning on one ticket trying to figure out how we do our cloud crap.  Another crazy day.  Gave blood for the first time in about thirty two years.  The first time I gave blood I felt really quite unwell after (I felt really off in my 4 unit maths class, and Sarah F gave me a lift home).  And the second time at the Red Cross centre in Wynyard I threw up.  So I never did it again.  But I'm about a hundred kilos heavier now so thought I'd give it a go.  And I wasn't sick.  Hurray.  Met up with Dennis and the sweetie for a drink after work.  Well they had a drink.  I thought a drink might be a bit unwise with reduced blood volume.  Then we had Kinn Thai for dinner.  I had grilled beef.  Because iron.

Thursday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Another morning trying to figure out cloud crap all for one ticket.  Trivia night in the evening.  We came 5th out of 10.  And I'm pissed at myself for getting one wrong that I should have known better.  If we'd gotten that one and just one more we would have come second, it was that close.  

Friday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Sigh.  At one point in the morning I was so overwhelmed I had a full on meltdown.  Sigh.  Totally worn out by this week.  But did manage to knock off early so we could go shopping and go out to the club. Laid out all the food and prizes before holing up in the van with the fire going.  It took us both several drinks to start to feel relaxed after such an insane week.

Saturday.  Slept ok(ish) (kept waking up with numb hands).  Our feather/down doona sure is lovely.  I stoked the fire maybe a little too much in the morning, but did have a leisurely morning.  I even made a candle (which I'll put in another post).  Went and chatted to Chris and Geoff for a bit (saved them from a phone call to Chris's sister), then went up to start the dinner proceedings.  

I was pottering away almost all afternoon.   I did allow for some help making the "Christmas Skewers", and John very nicely carved the meat and I had several amazing servers as well.

Other than that, did all the prep/cooking myself. 

Eight kilos of pork (the crackling didn't turn out as well this year, probably needed to have it higher longer, but it did mean the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender)

Four kilos of turkey

Two epic potato bakes (annoyingly the baking dishes I normally use have disappeared so had to use smaller ones)

And winter salad (sweet potato, rocket, goats cheese, toasted pumpkin seeds, honey and olive oil) which I remembered to take a photo of this year (there were two of these)

Tab made some lovely Biscoff muffins and some puddings.

It seemed to go well and I think everyone enjoyed dinner.  There was just the tiniest amount of leftovers, which meant catering was perfect - anyone that wanted seconds got them and there wasn't a huge pile of leftover food.  Just enough for a meal or two for us.  And not too late a night.  

I'm always amazed at the STARS out at the club.  Being away from Canberra's light pollution is pretty cool.  On the way back to the van I could see the Milky Way and wondered if my phone could capture it.  It could!!  How amazing is this.. hand held, on a PHONE!!

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Did I mention how good feather/down doonas are?  Got up relatively early and went up and spent an hour or so tidying up the shed. 

Then we came home.  And I realised I'd left a bunch of food in the fridge in the van.  Pissed about that.  As per usual on Sundays after club nights I felt pretty flat all day.  All I managed to achieve all day was finishing the Titanic.  But hey, I guess that's a pretty cool achievement.  Because I mean look at this thing!  So cool!

Something I learnt this week: Weenus!  I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's a slang word for the flap of skin you get over your elbow (technically referred to as olecranal skin).  There you go!

Sunday.  11th.  Lamb roast for dinner.

Then watched V for Vendetta.  Not nearly as scary watching this time as it was the first time we watched it.  The world is in a bit of a different place (in terms of who's in power in the UK, USA and Australia at the moment).

Monday.  Slept okish.  I finished culling photos from the cruise (the day entries, still need to do the Carnival Pride, food and hotels).  Got it down to 1042 photos.  Had a meltdown because the barrel vacuum cleaner is so damned hard to use.  I need two hands to hold onto it so it doesn't fall apart which leaves nothing left for moving furniture around, not to mention have to stop every two seconds to pull to barrel closer.  Hate hate hate hate hate.

Tuesday.  Shine Dome talk after work.  They had Mr Dean Yibarbuk who is a ranger in Arhem Land talk about his work with fire management up there which was pretty cool.  And also a talk by Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith.

Dinner at 10 After.

Wednesday.  Dinner at CBD Dumpling House.  Get a seat at the bar and watch the kitchen action!

The pan fried shallot cake was fresh and crispy

The xiao long bao were nice, but not as good as Din Tai Fung

The other dumplings were decent too

The place was packed, but we were in and out in twenty minutes.  Pretty impressive!!

Thursday.  Quickie drink at work then into town for the third night in a row to catch up with Luc who was in town.  We had such a short time to catch up - like less than an hour.  Great to catch up but sad it was so short.

Mary's French, with a Frenchman!

Antebellum

Watched some more Picard.  I'm enjoying this season.  The last couple of episodes were directed by Jonathan Frakes and have four or five original cast members which has been a lot of fun.  It's like Next Gen only more "real" and better character development.

Friday.  Windows patched and rebooted overnight.  They've stuffed up window behaviour.  Now if you maximise a window it'll either completely cover the task bar, or it'll hide the bottom of your window behind your taskbar.  Completely retarded.  ** As of Sunday night this seems to have been fixed, even without another reboot **  Leftover lamb shanks for dinner, then Futurama, then finished season 4 of Death in Paradise.  Kit invited us down for a drink.  Then had sad cause we don't live next door anymore.  

Oh, the other week I made it to level 10000 in Candy Crush!!  Except then this week they completely changed the interface.  That coupled with a super hard level 10086 and I've lost all motivation to play.  Other than logging in to collect daily rewards I've all but stopped playing.  Maybe they'll nerf the level and I'll take it up again.

Also this week I spent several mornings fighting with Dad's slides.  Specifically his ones of Yerranderie.  He did a bushwalking trip in June 1985, and we went there as a family in December 1985.  Those two trips were easy enough to separate.  But within the December trip there were clearly two different rolls of film.  But the second roll of film had photos interspersed with the first roll.  The dates were right (when compared with Mum's photos) so it just didn't make any sense.  Then Stu said "maybe there were two cameras" which also didn't make any sense until I thought about it some more.  Dad had massive problems with his old camera in August 1985 - he lost half of his photos to the camera over-exposing them.  Maybe he got himself a new camera for Christmas?  Mum couldn't remember.  But it was certainly plausible.  Maybe the half a dozen photos in the middle were simply finishing off the last roll of film on the old camera?  I decided to go with that :)

Saturday.  Woke up in the middle of the night for like an hour and a half for no good reason.  Spent most of the day labelling holiday photos and inventorying Vic's Lego.  I did also spent an hour and a half cleaning out a manky fish tank, consolidating a couple of tanks, then arranging the power and lights so that only two tanks are active now, with another essentially just keeping heaters from drying out, running for just a few hours in the middle of the day while the sun is out.  Then I found the house battery simply didn't charge.  Flatline at 10% all day.  Solar Edge strikes again.  #grunt.  Leftovers for dinner then watched Innerspace.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Spent the entire day (other than going out for lunch and food shopping) labelling photos and inventorying Lego.  The sort of nice quiet day I crave every day.  Oh, and the battery charged today.  Hurray.  

Monday.  15th.  Woke up around dentist time and only got less than an hours more sleep between 5-6.  Sigh.  Trying to get stuff done in between distractions and having to play mediator (sooo not in my job description!!!).  Culled some more people photos from the cruise then uploaded them to Dropbox for people to grab.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok, although woke up a bit after 5.  Meh day, don't really even know what I did.  Made a slow cooker apricot chicken dish which was quite nice.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters, nothing very exciting this 16 May.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  Nothing exciting at work.  FFS Windows 11 sux donkey balls.  If you open a .txt file (or anything that opens in a browser) it'll open on whichever desktop it feels like.  Even if you haven't even been using that desktop for anything lately.  And I found a new bug ("feature") of Notepad.  If you have two large text files open and you're at the bottom of them both, if you then switch between them you won't actually stay at the bottom of the files, you'll be taken to somewhere random in the file and have to scroll or control-end to get to the bottom again.  Or another one - if you search for some text in a file and it takes you to that text, if you then close the search box you'll be taken to some random point in the file, not where you actually just were with the found text.  So hopeless.  Seriously considering uninstalling "new" Notepad and just going back to the good old Notepad that's like thirty years old and still works perfectly fine as designed thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep but then slept ok. Quietish day, quiet drinks, pizza, Mandalorian, Lego.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Dropped off the car for service in the morning.  They reckoned it'd probably be ready by 14:00.  Had Kingsleys for lunch!!  First time there since November 21.  At 16:00 I went to get the car.  Oh, it's not ready yet, it's still over at Bob Jane.  WTF??  Still, but the time he'd spent like ten minutes sorting out all the paperwork they'd actually finished so I went and got it, came home then headed to the coast, but I'll save that for another post.

Sunday.  Got home and then had to do all my weekend todos in just a few hours.  As much as I like going away for weekends I also hate going away for weekends because it chews up so much of my down time.  I only had time for some essentials of cleaning and photos/blogging.  The only fun I had was doing a section of the Titanic.  No time for music or any other projects or hobbies.  I was going to vacuum the ensuite but came across the next problem with the Dodgy Dyson.  This time when I pulled the trigger nothing happened.  And I noticed a red flashing light on the battery pack.  32 red flashes before it stops.  Fricken great.  It worked just fine on Friday.  Now nothing.  I found one page which suggested a "reset" of the battery, but that didn't work.  Dyson is seriously Dodgy.  Sigh.  Basa bake in the oven for dinner.

EB managed to organise this for us last week.

I've been past this place multiple times and have even peeked in the windows, but I finally actually got to go inside!

One of Canberra's water supply pipes

Very old but also very cool picture of the heights of the various facilities.  They prefer taking water from Corin/Bendora because it's gravity fed to the Stromlo treatment plant.  They actually only pump from Cotter a few days a month.

Another infographic showing the various water networks

And then we got to go into the pumping room.  The pump in the first pic, and the one on the left in the second pic are the original pumps.

The one just behind the first one was put in during an expansion, and is the only pump made in Australia.

Some more views of the room

As they replaced the pumps with more modern pumps, they just left the old ones there and kept expanding the hall

A view back

And then through a doorway to the next part of the hall which is two storeys high and has the two current pumps used for Canberra water supply

Notice the blue wall and black line half way up the wall?  (see in previous pics too).  That's the level of the 1956 flood.  Which inundated the hall to that level.  !!

So when they put these pumps in, they put the motors upstairs!

Upstairs looking down into the old hall

These are the motors for the pumps downstairs

Another view out the back

This used to be a worker's cottage

The front of the pumping station

The back of the transformer house

Inside the transformer house

A new pump house.  They're going to start building a new pumphouse with four new pumps in August, then decommission the current ones

After that, they're going to turn the old Pumping Station into a full on museum.  

Very cool :)

Sunday.  2nd.  Backdating because life got in the way.  

Monday.  Woke up at dentist time, barely got any more sleep.  So it was a zombie day.  Went to a new optometrist at lunch.  The dude is actually the son of the optometrist I saw a couple of times when I first moved to Canberra.  He spent a good while testing my vision and coming up with a prescription, optimised for screen distance.  But parking in Dickson sure sux donkey balls.  $3/hour!  In the suburbs!!  Gross.  After the optometrist it was getting really late and I was starving, so went through maccas drive through, but there I sat.  FOR 16 MINUTES!!  Pretty much just after I got there the line just stopped.  Fricken sigh.  After work I went into town to pick up the sweetie and we had dinner at Kinn Thai which was very nice - first time in over three years - we were last there just before the pandemic hit.  

Chicken Pad See Iw and Chili jam cripsy pork at Kinn Thai

Got a couple of days of geotagging done in the evening, although was a bit dangerous doing it so tired, likely to make mistakes.

Tuesday.  So went to be early (like 20:30), but didn't get to sleep til after 22:30, and then awake from 3:45 for ages.  *sigh*  Cleaning day at work.  Cooked a salmon curry out of last month's Coles magazine which was delicious.

More geotagging in the evening (and morning too).

Wednesday.  Got to sleep ok, but then was awake half the night.  Sigh.  Spent all morning deleting things which is always fun.  And worked with Neil on some rules.  Pizza for dinner.  Fighting with my phone randomly changing time zones is making geotagging painful and is driving me mental.  And windows is dumb too.  Say I have some jpgs on my computer that I've backed up to an external drive.  If I copy those files to the NAS for storage, and then run the backup again from the NAS to the external drive, it'll recopy every single damned vertically rotated file again.  But just the vertical ones.  So fricken retarded.  

At least I can get these whenever I want now!

Although Champion Chicken and Tea is DUMB because they won't sell a single drumstick.  You have to buy two.  They have a single one on the boards for $3, but that's as an addition to a burger.  So I said screw that and went next door to KFC to get a piece of chicken.  Hate.

Thursday.  Crap sleep again.  Sigh.  But did have a somewhat productive day getting things done and having discussions with people about design decisions.  

Friday.  Good Friday.  Well maybe not for Jesus a couple of thousand years ago.  I actually slept reasonably well for a change.  It was cold and wet and miserable and I literally didn't set foot outside the house all day.  The phone changing time zones is making me crazy.  It would often change time zones right after taking a movie file.  And the movie and png files were always correct, it was just the exif data on the photos that would be wrong.  Took All Morning just do do a few things that I had on my todo list.  Then I found the NEXT bug with Apple.  On day 23 of the trip I found the numbers of the files on my computer didn't match up with the numbers on the phones on the phone.

!!!

Apple had literally presented the wrong file names to windows.  In fact 8772 and 8773 were the exact same file.  So all the photos after that, right up til 9999, were a number out (but again, the movs and pngs were fine). 

After lunch I downloaded iMazing, which David has been recommending for ages.  I did some tests with it.  The good news is that the created/modified dates that iMazing shows for files are in fact correct.  It's literally Apple being a dick and presenting the wrong date/times to windows.  Problematic files that wouldn't copy in windows will copy off ok in iMazing.  I did tick "preserve file names" so it wouldn't make up random file names.  The bad news is the times on the files taken in a different time zone didn't transfer as is - they came across with the wrong times on them.  Well that is, the movs and pngs were wrong, photos seemed ok, go figure.  Dunno how that would work during a daylight savings change either.  

In the afternoon there was a big storm so shut everything down and disconnected the computer.  Pulled it all out, cleaned, and reconnected the UPS (the one that died a few years ago, and I tried to buy a new battery for it in February 2022, and it only arrived about a month ago after a lot of back and forth with UPS Solutions (they couldn't get stock from APC)).  Did jigsaw while waiting for storms.  And talked to Mum for a bit.  And more jigsaw.  The poor house battery never got over 25% charged all day.  Leftover chicken and veggies for dinner, Simpsons, Boba Fett, Death in Paradise.  

Oh another thing with iMazing - you can actually see the file system.  And in the photos view, you can see all the files as HEIC.  But every so often I'd see JPGs.  Turns out if you take photos while you are taking a video, they get saved as JPG :)  I couldn't tell in difference in quality between jpgs copied via windows or exported at 95% in iMazing.  Yet iMazing saved files are actually a bit smaller than those saved in windows.  

Saturday.  Awake from ~1:30 til after 5:00.  Then somewhat slept til 8.  Went out for breakfast with the sweetie.  We were going to go to Stella's but it was super crowded and there was a big queue of people and I didn't know if they were queueing for a table or to order food and there were people pushing past in all directions so I noped out of there.  We walked all the way up to 54, but it was closed, so ended up at Cup of Joy.  Which wasn't too bad for a mall cafe. 

We'd put in online orders for the chemist, but they're notorious for just not doing the online orders at all when they're busy, so we went and said, hey we're here.  Hoping to get at least put in the queue (which for the person in front of us they said half an hour).  Then did some food shopping.  We were all set to go for a drive to fill in time, but got our smses about 45 minutes after we went in.  So back to pick up our stuffs.  But it meant we didn't get home til nearly 12.  My entire morning gone :(

I recopied the 1226 misnumbered photos off my phone (this time when I attached it, the phone was presenting the correct numbers).  I finally also got around to CLI-ing exiftool to actually pull out the timezone data from the files, which made it a whole lot easier to tell which ones were wrong, rather than finding which ones were out of order and figuring it out from that.

exiftool.exe -filename -offsettime -T *.jpg > output.txt

Basa bake, potato bake, brussels sprouts for dinner, then watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was super bizarre but also kinda sweet.

Sunday.  He is risen!  Slept ok for a nice change.  Processed all the photos I'd had to recopy - resize, file, fix times, geotag.  And jigsaw.  I wasted a whole heap of time looking at the design of the Epcot ball.  It's based on a pentakis dodecahedron, like I've made here.  If you look at my little model, the Epcot ball is like that, except every one of those 60 triangles is divided into *64* little triangles!!  Actually that makes it a Class II 8 frequency icosahedron.  Like this.  You asked.  And each one of those has a three-triangle pyramid on top of it.  Total on the Epcot ball is 3840 points made up of a total of 11520 triangles.  Well it would be if there weren't supports and doors and crap cut into it.  I pointed exiftool at my iphone "masters" directory.  None of those had random time zone changes.  All perfect.  It was just the holiday photos that were all stuffed up.  Well other than the two photos I took a few days after I got home which were taken in Houston time.  Did some music for first time in a couple of months.  Chicken kiev and veggies for dinner and then watched 127 Hours.

Monday.  Woke up after 1 with hurty and stayed awake til after 4 with added insomnia, and then restless sleep til 7:30.  Bit of house stuff.  Wasted half the morning solving the maze on the finished jigsaw.  More house stuff in the afternoon.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers thinking maybe exercise and sun would help with sleep.  Hmm.  But then it was too late to do photos and blogging before dinner.  Made another yellow curry for dinner, and then some more The Crown.

Monday.  27th.  Backdating because ran out of time last weekend after blogging the previous two weeks.  Belly still hurting.  Managed to get an appointment with the doctor at 14:00.  APNIC training online for most of the day.  Doctor was like, eh, not sure, probably diverticulitis.  Don't have any fibre for a few days.  WTF.  I can't do that.  Especially since we just brought home a fridge full of salad stuff from the club.  

Tuesday.  APNIC training led training for the middle of the day.  It was a bit of a disaster really.  I struggled to keep up with the learning part, and the labs were a disaster, because they wanted forty people in two groups to configure twenty routers per group to all talk to each other with not very clear instructions.  The online learning and labs were much better structured.  Oh well.  John parked on our side again.  All fricken day.  Vodien got back to me about the perl/mysql issue.  They looked at it in https and said the problems I was having was because of mixed content (Movable Type hard codes my image urls as http://kazza.id.au/whatever and it's too hard to change it).  And I'm like, NO, it's a http site and you're not listening to me.  Sigh.  Stu reckons I should change blogging platforms, but my blog is such a behemoth nothing would be easy.  In other news I found if I sit close enough to my monitor I can see it better with my reading glasses.  And my main glasses are losing their coating and look all scratched up, so it's like trying to look through a dirty scratched window.  Sigh.  Had yoghurt for breakfast and a liquid diet all day.  If you google liquid low fibre diet, it's all crap like sugary drinks.  Gross.  Good luck if you're a diabetic.  So milk, oj, solo and some beef bone broth I found, and ended up with furry teeth and need to brush my teeth mid afternoon.  Beer for dinner, along with a bit of white rice and kewpie.  I went back to the beginning of the trip to try and figure out if other days had been affected by the time randomly changing on my phone.  Sure enough, it did.  Sigh.  My thought (at the time) was that maybe the phone was getting mixed up between ship time and gps time and just changing when it felt like it.  I. Hate. Everything.  

Wednesday.  So it's an epic disaster!!  Pialligo Estate has gone broke!!  No more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!  Completely traumatised trying to get a poop sample for the pathologist.  Nearly died.  But then forgot the form for the other tests.  Sigh.  Cleaning day at work.  Pizza for dinner because the sweetie wanted it.  It's low fibre right?  Watched some more of Avatar.  Turns out the Hallelujah Mountains are held in the air and float in the magnetic vortices due to the Meissner Effect.  There's a whole Avatar wiki page about that crap.  It was fun seeing the scene where they were flying around on the Ikran/Banshees because I'd just done that at Disney ;)

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - stressing about All The Things.  Ok day at work.  More cleaning and working with Neil on cleaning policies.  Leftover pizza for dinner and watched episode 3 of Boba Fett.

Friday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  But!  THEY FIXED THE PERL/MYSQL PROBLEM!!  They never told me what was wrong, or what they did to fix it, or even admit that yes, they HAD in fact broken it.  I don't really care because my blog is working again hurray!!!!  Figured out that it's actually the time zone changing on my phone photos.  Most would be (say) GMT-5, but then others would be GMT-4.  If you look at the details of a photo the "top" time would (mostly) be correct.  If you drag it up, down the bottom you see the exif time, which would be wrong.  If you click Adjust, you can see the time zone, although you can't actually change it.  Sigh.  Watched You've Got Mail.  But just generally cranky and stressed about everything.  It's been a thoroughly crap week.  

Saturday.  Woke up early.  Cranky.  Stressing about phone photos.  There's no easy way in windows to see the time zone of the files in explorer.  I do have exif tools that show it, but nothing in a nice list.  I should probably script something to pull it all out with exiftool.  In the end what I did was do a dir /B, put the results in a spreadsheet, then use a simple formula to check if the numbers are out of order.  If the file number of one file is less than the one before it, it's out of order.  The first photo of the trip that was out of order was taken on the deck 9 forward deck.  Just one photo that day.  But more on subsequent days.  I have an exif editor that can do batch fixes.  So I have to pull out the photos that are wrong, run the tool over them to change their time, then use RenameMaster to fix the file naming.  Such a tedious process.  But the first few days that I'd previously geotagged had the old Date Taken hard coded in the files somewhere (in the XMP according to irfanview) and it was still using that, so for those ones I had to use Geosetter itself to adjust the times on the incorrect files before I could re geotag them.  Sigh.  By the time I got back to doing St Thomas on day 10 again (where I'd first discovered the problem and had already made some changes) it was a painstaking process to find the ones out of order, moving them out, fixing them up, and regeotagging.  So I spent all morning just fighting with iPhone photos.  Hate.  Apple is such a POS.  House stuff in the afternoon, and had sausages and salad for dinner (first real fibre all week and it was lovely).

Watched Simpsons (finished season 33) and Death In Paradise 4.3  Tried to watch Avatar on our tv, but Disney forced me to upgrade the app, but it wasn't quite at the right place and neither Stu nor me could find how to do any sort of seek other than in ten second increments.  Hate.  So gave up and watched it on my computer.  Not that I watched very much, then had an early night.

Sunday.  Woke up at ~4am.  Sigh.  (5am old time).  Had breakfast with the sweetie at U&Co which was nice.

Did a small food shop, then home to slog my way through the todo list.  No time for fun.  And too stressed about All The Things to feel like starting the next section of the Titanic.  But I did start a jigsaw.  Even though I don't have time for fun.  Roast chicken for dinner.