The majority of my new team is in Melbourne, and this week we had a couple of day catchup with the whole team.

It was a pretty productive session but somewhat tiring.

The highlight of the whole thing was the flight down.  The back of our 737 was almost empty.  Connor and I were on the right side of the plane, and we took off to the north, and then banked around to the left.  So as soon as the seatbelt sign turned off, we jumped up and over to the other side of the plane.  We had the most spectacular view of Canberra I've ever seen!  Just amazing.  

Qantas Boeing 737-800 VH-VXB

Canberra from the air

Canberra from the air

Canberra from the air

Belconnen from the air

Belconnen Town Centre from the air

Canberra from the air

Tidbinbilla

Tuggeranong

After passing out of Canberra I went back to my seat and Connor went to the seat behind.  But we got up again to see the SNOW!

Mt Kosciuzsko is centre of frame

Khancoban

I stayed in my seat for the rest of the flight.  Usually when I fly into Melbourne it's on runway 27, which is a completely boring approach.  But this flight flew in over the Melbourne CBD before swinging north into 34.  I didn't realise how far south we'd come until I saw the Exhibition Building!  So awesome!

And what flight would be complete without going to say hi to the flight crew at the end :)

Another highlight of the trip was catching up with David not once but twice!  Firstly for dinner on Monday night, and then again for breakfast on Wednesday morning.  That was super cool.

On the Tuesday night a bunch of us went out for dinner.  We ended up at Kollabo Kitchen for *lots* of fried chicken.  All this plus two bimimbaps for three people?  hrmmmm!!  Similar amounts of chicken were ordered by others.

We didn't finish it.

So I took all the leftovers back to the hotel.  Some of it David and I ate in the morning, and most of the rest of it we had for lunch later on.

Oh and also, had my first Uber rides.  They were pretty good.  The drivers were certainly a lot less aggressive on the road that taxi drivers!

It was nice to sleep in my own bed again at the end!

On Thursday night, Neil and I went along to the annual Brokenwood Wine dinner.

This year it was at the Monster Kitchen and Bar in Hotel Hotel in New Acton.

This was the entree of Mooloolaba Bug Tails.  Quite a few elements, although not a lot of actual bug tails.  Good textures and flavours, quite nice.

Mains was liquorice cured duck breast and boudin noir.  I don't like liquorice but I was pleasantly surprised to not really taste it.  Boudin noir is essentially a black pudding.  I found the duck went very nicely with the pinot noir, and the blood sausage went better with the shiraz.  The duck was lovely and the crunchiness of the nuts gave this dish a great texture.

Dessert was a mixed plate of "soft chocolate, mandarin, almond, rosemary".  The soft chocolate was a little bar of chocolate pudding.  The mandarin was actual pieces of mandarin.  There were biscuity bits and other crunchy stuff to give it great texture.  The rosemary seemed to be in the ice cream.  Overall I think this was probably my favourite dish.  It was paired with a sweet "Sticky Wicket" semillon, which a lot of other people didn't finish.

So overall a lovely meal, but I think there could have been a bit more food.  I didn't end up full, and I'm not even a big eater.  I can imagine hungry guys would still be hungry afterwards.  And because it was only three courses it meant there were two white wines to go with entree and two reds to go with mains.  I would have preferred more but smaller courses so you only had to worry about one wine per course.

But, the food was nice and we had enough wine to keep us pleasantly happy without getting too silly :)

Friday night we watched Arrival.  Stu enjoyed it but I found it rather .. boring .. People on IMDB either loved it or hated it, there was no middle ground.  

Saturday first thing we headed out to the club.  I did some jigsaw while the committee meeting was on, then there was a bbq lunch, then the AGM.  So by the time we got home it was dinner time and *blip* there goes half my weekend.  Went down to Kit's after dinner for a couple of drinks and caught up with Katie before she disappeared off to Queensland to live.

Sunday was just house and computer stuff in the morning, food shopping and lunch, then cooking and cleaning.  Cath came over for dinner (epic roast pork) which was lovely.  (and it hailed and later *snowed* on Sunday!!)

Monday morning I was stressed at the state of the house and the state of All The Things going on and literally thought "I don't have time to go to work".  Seriously I can't cope at the moment.  I'm just not getting enough time at home to get everything done.  Self inflicted though.  We keep socialising.  cf next paragraph.

Monday night we were going to meet Damien at the Pot Belly for drinks, but turns out it's not open on Mondays.  So we ended up at the Labor Club instead.  Was good catching up, but it meant all I managed to do all evening was run the dishwasher and do my clothes washing.

Last night I was awake in the middle of the night stressing about everything (mostly about the flat in Sydney as well as our bathroom) so I was a zombie today.  I did sneak out to go to Chrissie's ultrasound which was pretty cool though.

Tonight Pete had a bit of a look at our shower as well and thought that no we probably aren't going to need to rip out the shower just yet (when were chatting on Saturday night he was thinking that we might have to).  Especially if there's no evidence of leaking after regrouting and sealing.  So that was a bit of a relief.  But by then it was already nearly seven o'clock, and I still had to get through Sunday's Survivor and eat dinner, download all my photos, backup my phone and backup my computer.  But our domain controller died overnight so I couldn't get onto the NAS to back it up.  So that was all a drama and everyone ended up grumpy.  I cleaned the kitchen while Stu tried to get a monitor plugged in to see what was up.  It eventually came back by itself, looks like it had some bad blocks, and was probably running a checkdisk which is why it took so long. 

And now it's 9:50 and I'm completely wasted.  Stop the world, I want to get off.

Thursday night we went down to Kit's to play Cards Against Humanity which was a bit of fun.

Friday night Neil and I went along to Roz's 60th at the Abbey.  It was quite a nice night, although she asked me to be photographer which I wasn't super happy about - I like taking photos for myself, but doing it officially for someone else is way too stressful!

Saturday morning after waiting for the sweetie to get up and do some stuff for work, it was suddenly a lot later that I wanted it to be.  We went out to do food shopping for the evening - where we cooked a roast dinner for forty people at the club!!  Four kilos of pork, two kilos of turkey, a big potato bake, roast veggies, brussel sprouts with bacon, grilled zucchini, minted peas, and carrots, with my own apple sauce, and gravy using all of the pork drippings :)  It was pretty epic, but for forty people it was *just* enough food.  Still, everyone seemed happy, even though the turkey was a little dry on top because I forgot to put foil over it for the first part. 

We didn't get home til lunch time today.  I was a bit tired this afternoon so didn't get a whole lot done.  I did finally finish watching through Monty Python series four, so I've now half watched all of it, although it really is rather silly.

Tonight we just watched Voyager, and the new Ghost in the Shell, which I could actually follow, on account of it being dumbed down for American audiences, and me.

And just like that the weekend is over.  Sad times.

The sweetie and I went to SplunkLive today.  It was a pretty good day.  I was hoping for a little more deep diving into the cool stuff Splunk can do but it was really only hinted at in the demos.  It was still good to get an overview of the sorts of things people are doing with Splunk.

Biggest disappointment though: #epicfail with the tshirts.  The keynote speaker (who *totally* reminded me of Sheldon) was even making a big deal about big data and analysing who's in a room and what you can do with all that data.  And they were all oh yes we work for a tshirt company that also sells software.  But for all their fussing they couldn't even get a simple thing as a mix of tshirt sizes right.  They had exactly two sizes available - XL and XXL.  And by the end of the day even the XXLs were gone.  Epic. Fricken. Fail.  I don't even know why I'm so bitter.  Maybe because they made such a fuss of it, but then couldn't get it right.  Oh well.  At least I got a bit of wine out of it.  And a nice lunch.

Came home and watched some Voyager, and Finding Dory, which the sweetie hadn't actually seen.  

I got access to my old CIA email address today.  I'd thought it had been shut down back in 2010, but turns out it had actually just moved hosts.  I knew Guy had gotten himself access to his mailbox a few years back, but I hadn't thought too much of it as I'd mostly been using my kazza.id.au addresses.  Then Marylon the other day said her mail to that address had bounced because the mailbox was full, so I decided to try and get access to it again.  So tonight I downloaded about 7000 emails from August 2010 to November 2016 when the mailbox filled up.  Fun times :)  Mostly spam of course, but there's the odd bit of legitimate mail from people that didn't know the address had died.  

In other news, hurty kept me awake in the middle of the night for a couple of hours so I'm pretty much a zombie.  Hurrah.

So where were we?

Friday night we had an early mark, had snossages for dinner and watched tv.

Saturday morning I went into work first thing and was home by 9am which was nice. 

Mostly just sorted out our finances all weekend .. hurrah .. 

Saturday night we tried to go to Dumpling Inn for dinner with Chris and Mike and Zac, but it was closed for renovations, so we headed into Dickson and ended up at The Scholar Chinese restaurant.  The food there was nice enough but the service was SLOW - it took *forever* to get food.  At least that's what it seemed like for the hungry people.  In reality it was probably an hour before mains arrived.  And we could have sworn that people that got there after us got food before us.  hrmmm.

Today I remembered we had beef cheeks in the fridge that I'd bought last weekend, so I stuck em in the slow cooker with various Chinese flavouring as per Lorraine's recipe.  They were pretty good, although I'd added a lot more water to keep them covered, so the sauce was pretty watery.  Next time I'll add corn flour, or do it on the stove, or cut up the meat a bit to submerge it better.

Then we watched The Truman Show, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies with Luc and Cynthia in 1998.

So that progress I made yesterday?  All failed today cause I'm a retard and stuffed it up and now need to go for a half hour drive just to access the device to kick it in the head so I can try again.

Yeup.

Not to mention my "communication skills" suck.

Just sayin.

Kerry and the kids came over for dinner tonight (they very nicely brought pepperoni pizza nommm) .. but sadly Scotty didn't come as he's meeting up with them later.  Oh wells......

Here's a photo of some iphones I took at drinks the other week.  All iPhone 5 form factor, including an SE in there .. Why can't Apple do an iPhone 7 in a small form factor??

Also.  Ward and I are *literally* surrounded by sick people at work.  *Six* of our team are sick with colds, and with Violet coughing all over us tonight, if we don't get sick it'll be a miracle....

Yesterday I took a Random Day Off to recover mentally from the past couple of weeks.  I had a pretty good day, just at home cleaning, tidying, organising, rearranging, scanning, and even starting a jigsaw.  

Today I forgot it was school holidays.  Urgghhh.  Too many *people*!!

I've been watching ABC's War on Waste over the past week.  Some of the waste depicted is pretty staggering.

The thing that upset me most was seeing the huge waste of food right on farms because supermarket cosmetic policies. Banana a few millimetres too long?  Goes to waste before it even gets to stores.  Just heartbreaking.

Then there was the disturbing news that Woolworths don't necessarily recycle the soft plastics people put in the store bins in good faith that it will be recycled.

And in the What The..? files: the girls in the third episode who don't wear the same outfit twice!!  What the actual f@#%??

"Fast fashion" completely pisses me off because I buy clothes and wear them until they wear out.  Except these days things wear out after just a couple of wears in some cases.  T-shirts and even jumpers that can't be worn after not very long because the collar buckles and looks ridiculous.  Years ago Millers did plain-dyed t-shirts that I'm still wearing twenty years later!  But they stopped selling them, and now, practically any t-shirt you buy will wear out very quickly.  With jeans, I got sick of paying $100 EVERY YEAR for Jeans from JeansWest because the "denim" is so thin and flimsy that it simply wears through.  So last time I paid $7 per pair in KMart.  The material is just as thin and crappy, but it's only a fraction of the price.  I'd be happy to pay more for quality, but it simply doesn't exist anymore!

Since discovering relatively recently that Coles do soft plastic recycling, our waste has been reduced dramatically.  Most of our food scraps go over the fence to the chickens, soft plastics go to Coles, and the majority of the rest of our rubbish is recycling.  We typically only put about a bag of rubbish *or less* a week out in the bin, and so the bin doesn't go out for collection most weeks. 

* Fast food restaurants (Subway I'm looking at you) stop giving out more than one serviette. I keep mine and use them at home as paper towels but I'm sure most people just thrown them straight out unused
* McDonalds do you really need to give me my burger in a huge paper bag?  No, if there's one item, I can carry it - save the paper!
* The huge rolls of junk mail we get are such a waste - please stop!
* Canberra needs green waste bins for garden waste.  Drop rubbish collection to fortnightly and use the savings to collect green waste fortnightly instead.
* Supermarket shopping online needs to stop using plastic bags.  We did a shop a few weeks ago and got enough plastic bags to last us six months!  At one point they were loading things into crates and then just emptying the crates once delivered.  Much better option.
* If they really want to stop people wasting plastic bags, put a significant tax on them.  Instead of free or even 15c, give them a real cost - like $1.  People would definitely think twice about getting a bag if it became a significant cost.
* People still need bags for bin liners.  I've got several years stocked up because I never throw away shopping bags that we do end up getting from time to time, but with a complete bag ban we'd have to buy bin liners. 
* Use a keep cup
* *Please* can we get decent quality clothing back?
* Coles you need to empty your plastic recycling bins more often.  I've never once been able to easily get my bag in the bin, and often I've had to leave my bag next to the bin.
* Tom's Super Fruits (and every other grocer) please stop packing a couple of things on a polysterene tray covered with glad wrap.  So wasteful!

I'm sure I'll think of more..

In the meantime, I'm going to start using up my stash of plastic bags for fruit and veg - they've been building up for a while and there's no good reason not to reuse them.