Backdating, story of my life ;)

So where were we?  I'd been sick.  Starting Friday afternoon, most of Saturday in bed or sitting in the car.  On Sunday I felt a little better although super tired on account of very little sleep.  I decided it would depend how much sleep I got whether I would feel up to going to work on Monday.

Monday.  I actually slept really well - and for nine hours!  I was feeling a lot better, so thought I'd go to work, and go have a lie down if things got too much.  But I was actually ok all day so that was nice.

Had all my UK photo labelling done before dinner which was good.  Had a bit more of a think about hosting and gallery apps.  Had a serious meltdown because I was feeling underappreciated for all the cooking and cleaning I do.

And the kitchen light fitting caught this epic centipede.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep *sigh*.  Did a bit of UK photo labelling but stopped at Stonehenge - because a couple of hundred photos will basically just be a copy/paste so will be very quick to do.  Instead I was looking at cameras (mmm Sony A7C) and playing with Geosetter (see Geosetting for Fun and Pleasure).  

Wednesday.  Slept well.  Seems I can only sleep well every other day.  Got myself a gmaps api key (see previous geosetting link).

Thursday.  Slept well.  Two nights in a row!  Went into work for the day - six months to the day that I started working from home.  Went up to Pot Belly for drinks after work.  Watched the second episode of the Netflix show "High Score" (watched the first one the other night, not sure when).

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am til well after 4am *sigh*.  I'd planned to take a random day off, which was going to be a bit sucky to be so tired through.  Had a bit of a slow start then got stuck into my day.  I thought I'd do some fish tank stuff in the morning, then maybe some tax stuff in the afternoon.  Well the fish stuff took All. Day.  I started with the upstairs two foot (and managed to smash the lid in the sink when I was cleaning it :(:(:( ), moved onto Chrissie's tank after a break, then the angel tank (with no angels in it), and finally the downstairs two foot.  With an hour at work in the afternoon for a meeting.  I had plans for the other tanks too, I just ran out of time. 

I also took photos of the new bracket David installed out the back for the clothes line.  This way you can extend the line only half way out - where it's all under cover - so if it's going to be rainy it'll stay out of the elements.  Have I ever mentioned I have the bestest brother ever?  And this was after he mowed the front lawn as well.  He's just too awesome :)

Caught a bus into town (second bus in six months).  Met up with the sweetie and Damien who were having a drink, then we went to Happy's for dinner.

Came home and watched third episode of High Score.

Saturday.  Slept well!  Hurrah!  I didn't think I would on account of all the meat I had for dinner at Happy's.  Stu was still sick though.  He had a full week at home off sick, then all this week he was still coughing and spluttering, but his work would still rather he went to the office than work from home and keep his germs to himself.  Silly people.  

Did quite a lot of stuff on the todo list - which worked out to mostly fixing up slide scanning (the dust and scratch filter is sometimes a bit too enthusiastic and blats out real details, so have to redo those with no filter), photo processing, and blogging.  We felt like wedgies for dinner, so that's what we had!  With lots of sour cream and sweet chili sauce.  Watched the fourth episode of High Score, then Spirited Away, which I first (and last saw) in 2005 in Brisbane.  I had no memories at all of it.  Hurrah for dementia.  Hrmm.

Sunday.  Hurty kept me awake for hours in the middle of the night so that sucked.  Bit of a nothing day in the end.  Did a bit of blogging.  

David brought home a packet of Dinner Winner, so I had to make that for our dinner :)  Watched a documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the evening.

The ticketing for the Sydney 2000 Olympics was by ballot - months in advance you put in orders for what you'd like to see and with any luck you might get to see something you wanted to see.  I put in for gymnastics and on the 17th September 2000 the mother type person and I faced the HOARDES of people, in organised chaos, to go to Sydney Olympic Park and see some gymnastics at the Super Dome.  It was actually super-well organised and everything flowed nicely.

Of course we had to have a bit of a wander around to see everything first.  (aside: I still have that green tshirt - one of my "winter" tshirts)

First some photos from Mum's camera..

Then a bunch from mine..

Then onto the gymnastics!  I just had my little point-and-shoot Olympus camera with 3x optical zoom and no manual features, so the photos weren't great.  And if someone "stuck it" the crowd roared, which I'm sure would have been super off-putting for the other competitors....

Back when Covid-19 was first ramping up, the organisers of Floriade decided to pull the pin early and cancel the whole event.  But they decided to plant all the bulbs all around Canberra.  There's little patches of Floriade everywhere in Canberra, and I'm *loving* it!  I haven't been to Floriade very often because of the crowds and pain it is to get there.  So when Floriade is in your local area with no crowds, I'm sold!

This was in the Belconnen town centre (backdated to the day I took these photos).

A long long long time ago the brother type person put me onto Geosetter by Friedemann Schmidt.  I've been using it to geotag my holiday photos since probably around 2010.  I take the GPS tracks from my PhotoMate, and geotag all the photos with it.

I've only been using Geosetter for the basics of geotagging, but a while back David showed me that Geosetter could pull even more location data from GeoNames a free location database.  Well free except the api key is restricted to 1000 requests an hour.  It'll work briefly at the beginning of the hour then stop.  But, turns out you can register for a free account.  So I did that, and in the Internet settings of Geosetter, you put your GeoNames details in, and away you go!  Did that the other night and got it working.  I haven't started going through and adding the data to all my files yet - I'll start to work on that methodically at some point.

A year or two ago Google started charging to use their maps API.  Geosetter fell victim.  It would still work, but the map would be very dark and have "for development purposes only" watermarks all over the page.  This also would occasionally work properly if you loaded the application at a quiet time when other people weren't using it as much.  Then it would stay working for a few days, so I'd leave it open so I could come back to it.  But for most of the time it just made it a bit harder to label photos because the page would be so dark.   David had also gotten around this problem by registering for a Google API key.  This one you need to pay for, but unless you're making a lot of requests, it's pretty cheap (0.007 USD each map load if I read it right).  So I found a guide online which describes how to get an API key and configure it in Geosetter.  So I did that tonight and got it working!  It took a bit of fiddling with Google as the developer guide doco neglected to mention associating the Maps Javascript API with the project. It also didn't talk about how to associate billing.  I had to fiddle around in the Cloud Platform settings to find those myself.  But now it seems to load properly, so that'll be much more betterer!

Fun times!

(backdating to the day I took these)

Aquila posted some flowers on Instagram with the caption "It's that time of year".  A few days later I was out and about and took a few photos of flowers on my walk.  And the flowers in the front garden at home.  And ended up with photos of twenty-four different flowers.. whoops!!

One fun thing I did on our Tumut weekend two weeks ago was reproduce four photos Dad took in Adaminaby on a trip there in June 1961 (a group of them did a tour around the Snowy Mountains Scheme which was still in the process of being constructed).

Just look at the growth of the trees in sixty years!

1961 and 2020 photos below for comparison.

And here's me comparing the scene!

Not backdated, but no photos, will update with photos later.

Monday.  Noticed the sucking cat fish hadn't moved from yesterday.  I put my hand in the tank to poke it to see if it was alive, and it was COLD!!  15C!!  Fricken heater must have died.  No wonder the angel had died.  And the cory looked pretty sick too, and they hadn't eaten the algae wafer I gave them on Saturday.  Brought up a little heater from the empty two foot from downstairs.  But after being plugged in and running all day, the tank had only risen a couple of degrees in temperature.  Did my quota of UK labelling, washing up and finished a jigsaw by 19:30, so on to cull Tumut photos for the blog.

Tuesday.  Had to go into work - first time I'd done any work in the office since May.  I'd rather be at home.  But did go and have Kingsleys with the guys which was nice.  After lunch was a very draining meeting with vendors.  Blerf.  Meanwhile it's all happening for Kit and Pete - sold two houses and bought another in the space of a couple of weeks!  Cooked Coles chicken kievs and home-made wedgies.  Got quota of UK photos labelled (finished day 22), but didn't have the energy for Tumut photo culling.

Wednesday.  Turned the heater on in the morning but nothing happened.  It's been so warm these past few days.  It was still 19 in the house (heater was on 17).  Fish tank still slowly warming up.  However it was a cold day, and the house didn't warm up at all from the sun, in fact it kept getting colder, so turned the heater on (up to 18).

When you open your front door and this is what you see...

Thursday.  Scanned the 100th box of Dad's slides.  The fish tank had actually cooled down again overnight :(  That little 25W heater is just not up to the task.  I found a bigger one downstairs, but it hadn't been plugged in in forever, so wouldn't trust the seals on it, so mounted it so it wouldn't be submerged.  It managed to heat up the tank quite nicely.  Also after relative peace and quiet for the past month or so, one of the neighbours dogs has started barking on and on and on again.  Epic #grunt.  Went to the chemist at lunch, and did a couple of hundred dollars worth of shopping while waiting.  Whoops.  Watched start of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo.

I didn't buy this but maybe I should have!

I did actually buy this because Scott and Dee had some at the club back in July - very nice!

Friday.  Morning was fine.  But afternoon was crap.  Couldn't get stuff to work, stoopid firewall is still being stoopid, and had that telltale feeling of getting sick - sore throat, coughing, just not feeling right.  I should point out that Stu came down sick on Sunday, four days after last contact with David, but he hadn't had contact with anyone else since then.  So we knew it wasn't going to be covid, but he was so sick he ended up taking the entire week off.  And he got a covid test.  And it was negative.  Like we knew it would be.  But it was fairly inevitable that I'd get sick too.  And I did.  Sigh.  Stu cooked dinner - some of my mince mix with peri peri sauce for a nice warmth, on toast with cheese.  Watched The Cat Returns which was a bit of fun, and the return of The Baron!

Saturday.  Woke up very early.  But my body is allergic to actual sleep.  Lay in bed all morning, alternating between pretending to sleep and colouring in Happy Colour.  Went back to bed for a bit after lunch.  The sweetie felt like going on a drive, so sat in the car and we drove around Denman Propect and the Cotter and came back via Uriarra Crossing.  Nice drive with the sweetie. 

Stu cooked dinner using some more of my mince, cabbage, sushi rice and seasonings.  He called his Japanese inspired chop suey.  It was tasty and everyone went back for seconds.

Sunday.  Went to bed early, but only managed an hours sleep by 3:30.  Got a few hours after that.  My body refuses to sleep at the best of times, but add not being able to breath and a sore spine and I've got no hope.  Another day of laying in bed all morning not sleeping.  David cooked ham and cheese panckes for lunch.  This afternoon was just blogging and we have a lamb roast in the oven for dinner.

Thirty years ago this week apparently was a church weekend away - to Collaroy Conference Centre.  

I have no memories of this weekend.  

I always thought it was odd they called them House Parties since they weren't at houses.  Especially when I went to House Parties in the late 90s and they were nothing like these ones ;)

Mum took a bunch of photos, including the two in this post taken thirty years ago today.  Apparently there was a medical theme and I had an amputated arm and Dad was in a mental asylum...

Backdating, and also no photos yet, I just haven't processed them yet.  At some point you should reload the September page, as there's going to be a bunch of backdated posts and updates with photos.

So Monday had peeps over for pizza for Stu's L'th.  So no UK photo labelling.

Tuesday.  Back to work.  Sigh.  Also.  David is sick with a cold.  Spent the entire night processing photos and blogging for previous weeks, so no UK photo labelling.

Wednesday.  David went for a covid test (it's not going to be covid), picked up supplies, then went home.  Once again photo processing and blogging so no UK photo labelling.

Thursday watched Herbie Rides Again, which was very silly, but the best part was Helen Hayes playing basically the same sweet little old lady as in Flying High.  David's covid test was negative (we knew it would be).

Friday.  Awake for hours in the middle of the night.  Hurrah.  Ok day.  Watched Princess Mononoke, which I found really quite irritating.  Normally there's good guys and bad guys in a story, but in this one everyone is a bit of both, so it's like, do we like these characters or not?  And ultimately no consequences for being evil, the "bad guys" (if you can call them that) win and carry on as before.  Urgh.  So annoying.  

Saturday.  Ploughed through the todo list.  Lost the my angel fish which was pretty sad.  Happy one day, dying the next.  Sigh.  Watched the original Mulan (we don't have premium so can't see the new one yet).  

Sunday.  Ploughed through the todo list. 

In the afternoon cooked for three hours straight.  Cooked up taco mince for during the week.  Cooked up a kilo pack of mince with onion, garlic and bacon to be used with whatever takes our fancy.  Cooked up some chicken thighs to have with Pataks later in the week.  And also cooked the sunday roast - tuscan drumsticks, potato bake, roast pumpkin, zucchini and carrot. 

In the evening watched My Neighbours the Yamadas.  Man the Ghibli films keep going downhill.  Not even a movie as such, just an animated comic book where each character gets a chance to show how it sux to be them.  I had restless legs the entire way through, and made the sweetie come sit with me instead of just playing his game so he could see what I had to suffer through.  Yeup.

Another couple of photos of the Woronora Bridge under construction, taken by Dad twenty years ago today.