Twenty years ago I took a daily series of photos of sunflowers I planted which sprouted on my window sill.  I'll just include one of the series, and later the plants once they were planted outside and flowering in January :)

Not backdating for a change!

Tuesday.  Stu didn't actually get any sleep.  All night.  !!  So he stayed in bed all day.  Up to 6000 of Dad's slides scanned.  Saw one of my birds at lunch.  After work spent half an hour hacking weeds - this time the oak tree sprouts that went from about a cubic foot to about a cubic metre or two in the space of just a couple of weeks.  Also, the neighbour's yappy dog is *really* pissing me off.  It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.  And then on and on and on and on some more.  Leftovers for dinner.  Started season 5 of The Simpsons.  Spent all evening filing photos of the years into directories.  Avoiding rereading the blog for doing the year in review post ;)

Wednesday.  Woke up at 3am from a disturbing dream, finally managed to get back only to wake up from another disturbing dream.  Hurrah.  So zombie day.  People were loving my dashboards, so I ended up duplicating them for two other teams as well.  Connor and I sat down and did the risk assessment for our Christmas party.  Yeah moving on.  Stu mostly cooked dinner.  Read through my blog posts for January for the year in review.  Finished watching 14 Minutes from Earth.  Such a waste of resources.  Especially all that helium.  When are people going to realise once all the helium is gone it's gone forever.  People shouldn't be wasting it on such frivolous things.  

Thursday.  Slept much better.  There was pizza.  Of course there was pizza.  Watched the first episode of The Queens Gambit, which was quite interesting.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Because that's what I do.  I finished decorating my nails.

Then it was "my" Christmas party at the lake where I (with some help with the shopping and the cooking) put on a bbq for forty three people (minus one no show, and three that turned up right at the end to say hi).  It was a lovely day for a change, just a tad windy.  

A lovely afternoon.

Had leftovers for dinner and watch some Mandalorian, and more of the making of documentary.

Saturday was All The Things.  Had a very productive morning.  Went out a lunch (Stu had an El Maco, and I had a McRib which was super messy) and then did our food shopping.

Came home and basically just did cooking until Ben and Sarah came over for roast chicken dinner.  Started watching Home Alone til everyone got too tired, and called it an early night.

Sunday.  Not as productive a day, but did get some stuff done including fixing up several boxes of slides.  Only ten rolls left to scan!  Did a bunch of filing/sorting of photos as well.  Took bottles/cans from the party for recycling - got $18.30 back for it all, which almost lets me break even (I went about $30 over budget on the party, not sure where all the money went.. hrmm!).  

So I have three tips for Return-It.  Firstly, go to one of the bulk facilities.  Do not register an account with them - they want all your personal details, including "security questions" such as your mother's maiden name.  That is completely RIDICULOUS.  Not only that, but they're just as likely to never even give you any money at all, which is what happened to me.  They're a bunch of scammers.  So go to a facility where you don't have to register, and get cash on the spot.  Secondly, wear ear plugs.  It's very loud.  I suspected as much and took ear plugs, because I have sensitive ears and the clinking of bottles upsets them.  Thirdly, especially if you actually care about your fellow humans waiting in line behind you, SORT YOUR BOTTLES FIRST!!  They get you to put glass bottles on one side and everything else on the other.  I had already sorted out all the bottles and cans, so the sweetie and I burned through everything super quickly.  While everyone else literally didn't care that they were holding up everyone else by removing lids from bottles, videoing their kids looking dumb in front of the machine while the kids looked at the bottles and wondered which side to put them on, or simply spent ages after tipping all their bottles into a sorting sink separating bottles out as they went.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate people?

Finished a bunch of leftovers for dinner, which is good, because the fridge is completely full.  hrmmm!  Then I finished watching Home Alone.  Haven't actually seen it in years.  And, John Williams!  And I blogged!  On time for once!

Not backdating for a rare change...!

Monday.  At lunch time a shower sealer dude came to look at the shower.  Basically he was stumped.  Never a good start.  Sigh.  David mowed the lawn in the afternoon - bestest brother ever!!  Spent some time in the evening dumping the sql from my old gallery apps into csv.  I dumped the two tables - one with the file names and one with the descriptions, then did vlookups in excel to merge them together.  Really I just wanted a dump of what I had since I can't get the gallery app to work (it's just too old and the mysql calls don't work in php7 - I'd basically have to convert mysql_ to mysqli_ *everywhere* and there'd still be no guarantee that it'd work).  Then I dropped the two databases and cleared out all the content.  

Tuesday.  December.  Seriously wtf?  I remember things in July being super recent, how can it possibly be December already?  Such a bizarre year.  Spent the evening doing more tidying up of my hosting.

Wednesday.  Went jeans shopping at lunch.  Arrghh.  I was hoping that the trend towards bigger phones would eventually filter back into a trend for bigger pockets in jeans.  Well half the jeans I looked at didn't have any pockets at all!!  And the ones that did were that horrible fake wear style that I thought died a fashion disaster years ago.  Hate. Hate. Hate.  I'm going to have to replace them soon though as they're falling apart.  I looked up my blog to see when I bought them - September 2016!  Four pairs, which meant each pair lasted about a year's worth of wear.  Take that Jeans West with your stoopid crappy jeans that only lasted the equivalent of like six months - last half as long and pay four times the price?  I don't think so!  Apple continued to be a piece of crap, and I got the "device attached to the system is not functioning" error - while copying photos!  Piece of crap.  Worked second go through, and even got both movies off it first go.  Didn't get anything else much done though after backing up the phone and backing up my computer and paying bills.  On a lighter note, our recycling got picked up.

Thursday.  Cirrus has unveiled its west tower.

In other news, it was revealed that the garbos wanted a 4% pay rise.  Per year.  For three years.  !!  Taking them up to something like $110k/year.  Which is a *lot*.  Certainly a lot more than I make.  Craziness.  Had a good long play with making dashboards in our new service desk system.  Took my notes that I'd written last week up to load a new beer into the till.  Seemed to work :)  Mandalorian in the evening.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Hurrah.  So a bit of a zombie day.  Had a bit of a play with reporting in our new service desk system.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Crazy busy productive day just getting things done, including food shopping.  Stu cooked mackerel in miso paste for dinner.  Mandalorian and then the live action Mulan in the evening.  I thought it wasn't too bad, certainly better than Aladdin (which was pretty lame) and even The Lion King (which was almost identical to the original but flat and lifeless).  

Sunday.  Not quite as productive a day but not too bad.  

These are nice - mini toasts (bought at Chris's for $2) with leftover cream cheese from the weekend, and blackberries we bought on Saturday.  The tomato ones were ok but a bit big to fit in my mouth and too hard to bite in half.

Went for a walk at lunch and saw inside a mobile phone tower comms room that someone had left the door open on.

Had a huge roast beef for dinner (leftovers ftw!) and someone brought up planning Christmas, which is always .. tricky.. hrmm.

Monday.  ok day I guess.  Went for a walk and saw one of my birds (haven't seen them really at all in weeks and weeks).  Spent half an hour hacking weeds and cherry tree suckers and didn't even make a dent.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Watched the first episode of a documentary series on The Mandalorian which was interesting.  But by the time that was all done it was 8:14pm, and too late to really feel like starting anything new.  So I blogged.  Hurrah.

So I know I said I didn't reproduce other photos from our Port Macquarie trip in 1976.  But as it turns out, I did actually have some from Trial Bay Gaol.  In fact I had the same photos from our trip there in 2013 as well.  So here's Trial Bay Gaol, as seen forty four years ago today, nearly eight years ago, and two weeks ago.

And the interior

Forty four years ago today Dad took this photo from the balcony of a rental flat on the corner of Hill and Cross Streets in Port Macquarie.  

Two weeks ago I took a photo from the same spot!

How funny is that!!  I didn't have the original photo on me to line it up right, but I got pretty close.  I love how much that pine tree has grown in forty four years!

There were a few other photos from this trip that I didn't reproduce, simply because I didn't even think of it until we were already there, and I had no way of seeing the photos to know what he'd taken.  Oh well.. next time right.. hrmmm...

Backdating.  Oh hai.

Monday.  Scanning.  Work.  Actually wore shorts to work.  Ok so I was at home, but it still felt a little strange.  The only time I ever wear shorts to work is the day of our Christmas party at the lake.  Cooked the beef stew for dinner (I'd done all the prep on the weekend, so it was just a matter of chucking it in the slow cooker all afternoon.  Nice sunset.  Did my UK photo labelling, then caught up on RSS feeds, but no blogging.  Whoops.

Tuesday.  Scanning.  Work.  Saw my birds at lunch.  David came along and we noticed a flooded pit that shouldn't be flooded, so David called Icon water to come fix.  Did my UK photo labelling.  One more night to go!  Didn't feel like doing much else.  Filed some photos.  I thought I'd download my phone photos so I can blog them at some point.  Except Apple died copying the movies, as it always does, and no amount of disconnecting/reconnecting it would get it to even open the phone in explorer.  *sigh*  Hate Apple.  HATE.  Wondering if my next phone will be a Samsung.  I'm sick of Apple's crapfullness.  Did some blogging.

Wednesday.  Scanning.  Work.  OMFG no recycling pickup.  Suez workers want a 4% pay rise and are striking til they get it.  4% seems a little high to me given our rate of inflation, but they're prolly paid like crap to begin with, so whatevs.  But still.  No recycling pickup!!  Gah!! 

Went to Specsavers at lunch.  Honestly should NOT have gone to Specsavers.  There's too many staff and too many people and they're just not very well organised.  The first half of the appointment was fine.  The general staff did scans of my eyes, and then I got to see the optometrist and all that was fine.  But then she said I should do a field of vision test and I could either wait and do it now or make an appointment.  I asked how long it would be and she went off and found out and said oh they can do it now, and I'll see you straight after.  Sweet.  So I went to go have it but they realised someone was in the room, and did I want to look at frames while I waited.  No that's fine, shouldn't be long, I'll just wait.  So I waited.  And waited and waited and waited.  I saw the previous patient leave, but noone bothered to come get me.  When they *finally* did the test, they said, oh your optometrist has gone on break, it'll be twenty five minutes, do you want to look at frames while you wait.  And I'm like NO, you told me I'd just do the test then get to see the optometrist.  So he goes off to try and find someone else to look at my results.  Ten minutes later and I'm waiting and fuming.  So I get up to leave and the guy goes oh did noone see you and I'm like no.  So he goes to the original optometrist and she comes out of her lunch break to tell me oh your results are fine.  Fricken I could have just left and you could have called me if any issues.  Fricken hopeless.  So I was fuming at all the stoopid by the time I got back to work and then had to deal with all the stoopid at work, which of course I couldn't because I was in a crap mental state.  Sigh. 

I left early with Stu to go pick up the car.  And had wine.  Because it was that kind of day.  The highlight of the day was that I finally finished labelling all twelve and a half thousand UK photos!  But the drama of the day was not over.  Kit and Pete had missed a document that needed to be signed for their new house to settle, and so it was all going to get delayed and cost them who knows how much money to sort out, and then they'd be homeless until it all got sorted out.  Which is never great when you've got so many animals to look after.  And have to go back to work at some point but all your clothes are packed.  

Oh, and there was also the cicada I rescued when I got back from lunch.  It was on the wall in the stairwell of our building.  So I grabbed it and took it outside and got a few photos before it flew away.

Thursday.  Scanning.  Work.  Work drinks.  Continuation of Kit's dramas.

Friday.  Hadn't gotten a new box of slides out to scan (and couldn't get at it cause David's car was in the way) so went back and fixed up a few rolls of previous boxes that needed fixing up (eg straighting or cleaning).  Work.  Discovery and Mandalorian in the evening.

Saturday.  All the things in the morning.  Super productive morning by 9:30, although didn't get as much done after that.  Had to log onto work at lunch time to try and fix a stoopid firewall problem, but the vendor couldn't figure it out either.  Even after three and a half hours on the phone.  So that was a bit of a poo.  Went over to Chris's to see if he had any veggies going.  He had some zucchinis which were looking pretty sad, so he gave them to me for free!  Win!  Cooked the whole lot of them (other than a few of the worst bits) and had them with the beef brisket that had been slow cooking all afternoon.  Watched the episode of The Simpons with Tom Jones in it, and we were like, what was that spoof movie he was in, and realised it was Mars Attacks!  So we watched that after.  Rented from Amazon Prime.

Sunday.  Houseworks in the morning.  I'm having to close the blinds on the south-east side of the house in the mornings now.  Our lovely pistachio tree that used to shade the house in the morning is gone, which is super sad.  Did a bunch of poking around with my hosting trying to tidy it up a bit.  Backing up files and rearranging things and deleting things and generally tidying up.  Still a lot of work I want to do in that space.  Culled photos for our North Coast holiday, and spent *hours* blogging it.  Also did a whole bunch of backdating of other blog entries.  If you don't use an RSS feed reader you may want to go back in time a few months, there's likely all sorts of entries you may have missed ;)  Leftovers for dinner.

I was labelling UK photos tonight (literally one more night of work to go!!) and was doing some taken at Frankfurt Airport on our way home.  Frankfurt Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world and I was wondering how they manage to deal with so many planes all at once.  And then I was looking the pictures and realised there were *no* planes.  Well ok, a couple.  Holy crap this pandemic has been hard on the airline industry.

I watched a documentary the other night on Covid and the death of the Jumbo Jet.  I don't have any particular sentimental attachment to A380s, but even so, those things are only a max 13 years old so it's still sad to see them being abandonded.  But seeing so many 747s being put out to pasture just made me cry.

Twenty years ago today I left with Pete for a two week trip to the USA, just four cities.  It was a pretty good trip (although those quick flights across the Pacific are slightly horrendous).  I updated the blog this year with photos, see it here.

Twenty years ago today I took photos of a few things around my flat.

First there is my shiny new Iomega Clik! drive.  CIA bought this for me to take to America with me to download my photos.  This thing had a Smartmedia and a Compact Flash reader, and a 40MB disk (basically a big floppy disk).  You put your memory card in, clicked a button, and it would copy your files from your memory card to the Clik drive.  I really only used it for this trip, with three 40MB disks.  In the long run I probabaly would have been better off just buying bulk memory cards.  The thing worked flawlessly, but I was terrified that it wouldn't and I'd lose all my photos.  I managed to give it away to someone before I left Sydney.

And then there's a couple of photos of my bedroom/study.  As always, it's fun seeing what I still have and what I don't.  I'm using that exact same desk and chair right now for example :)

Slept like crap.  Hurrah.  Felt like I was awake half the night.  Certainly felt that way in the morning - zombie tired.

We got ready and left at 8:07. 

Stu stopped on the road out of town so I could get some close up photos of the goldilockses.  Another flower we don't get in Canberra.  Miss these things.

Saw the Memorial Garden at Clybucca, but only in passing - we should definitely stop there next time we're up this way.  Until the bypass and bridge opened, the turn off to South West Rocks was further south so hadn't actually seen it before.

Crossing the Hastings River

Stopped in Port for breakfast at the Scottish Restaurant and get petrol.

And then we drove.  And drove and drove and drove.

We listened to two episodes of Thirteen Minutes to the Moon.  I dozed for a while because I couldn't keep my eyes open.  

The trip back through Northconnex was better - we didn't have to stop.

We made it all the way through to Sutton Forest without stopping (I did offer to swap driving, although it was probabaly safer having Stu drive for most of it).  Had the Scottish Restaurant for a late lunch, and got petrol, then I drove the rest of the way home (I was feeling much more awake by this point).  

Got home at 16:40.  Too tired to do anything much, and had pizza for dinner.  And David even put the bins out.  Bestest brother ever!