Hey!  Not backdating for a change! ;)

But I'm also not doing a full week - just last week before the weekend.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 5:57 - two minutes earlier than yesterday :)  Tried contacting the plumber again, and Sefton House in Tumut.  By Tuesday neither the caravan park or Sefton House had replied (story in previous entry).  But at least the plumber got back to me - had no idea what happened to my previous email.  Took ages in the evening to do UK photo labelling.

Wednesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and didn't get back to sleep til well after 5am :(  Plumber came and spent ages testing stuff, and thinks it's most likely the waterproofing behind the tiles.  Which is exactly what Pete said.  I don't understand how *so much* water can leak through grout.  I mean I know it's not completely waterproof, but I thought it wouldn't leak like a sieve.  David hung around for much of the morning while I was at work.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever? :)  In the afternoon had a real estate agent over to give a bit of a valuation on the place, purely for interests sake.  Only took three goes to get all the movies off my phone in the evening.

Thursday.  Had better sleep.  Too much stoopid during the day.  Watched Whisper of the Heart in the evening. It was so real you could basically go to (almost) any of the locations and see them in real life.  Apparently one kid in a movie theatre was heard to say they could see their house!

Friday.  Tried to reboot my computer because it had run out of ram, and I wanted to do some more Tumut research.  But it sat patching for *hours* so lost the entire evening, which I really really needed.  #grunt

Short blog entry tonight, will do Tumut separately.  When I process the 940 Canon photos and 327 iPhone photos .. hrmmm!!

Ten years ago tonight the sweetie and I left for a holiday to Japan and the UK.  This was one of my rare holidays that all the photos are online in the blog.  I've spent the last couple of months actually labelling *all* the photos from that trip, with a view to getting more of them online than just the highlights in the blog.  

Still backdating ;)

Tuesday.  Slept ok, woke up on time. 

Tree guys came in the morning and trimmed our hedge back.  I told them to be brutal.  They complied.

Insanely crazy busy the rest of the day.  Although maybe I wouldn't have felt so bad if I'd been able to do my work in peace without ten different people talking to me non-stop all afternoon.  Sigh.  Watched the very last episode of Fuller House.  It was such a pity they could never get the Olsen twins to put in an appearance, because they had the rest of the cast which was just amazing to have the same group of people still working together for well over thirty years.  I don't know of any other show like it that has done anything remotely like what they did.  Just amazing.  Loved it.  Finished Day 19 of UK photo labelling.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Tackled the ticket queue I'd been ignoring yesterday afternoon, and played whack-a-mole with it most of the day.  Super heavy rain a couple of times during the day.  It was like night time, day time, night time, day time.  I watched the last two episodes of The Miraculous Mellops - and I was right about who the new Grand Baby was ;)  We also started on The Simpsons on Disney+.

Thursday.  Rage quit over people hassling me to do stuff.  I have this irrational rage at people that hassle me to do stuff while I'm literally doing stuff for them.  Then there were the people who hassled me in one system, and not five minutes later hassled me with direct messaging as well.  Drives me nuts.  Watched Derren Brown's The Push.  The whole Weekend at Bernie's reference had me cacking myself.  But I can't believe it could all be real.  Those people weren't showing any remorse or trauma at all.  If it was real, there should be arrests.  Seriously.  

Friday.  Up to episode three of The Simpsons.  But getting really annoyed at the cropping they did to get it onto 16:9 screens.  So I Googled that crap.  As of May, Disney+ had set a toggle switch so you can watch it the original aspect ratio.  Much more betterer!  Then watched Porco Rosso which I actually really enjoyed.  It has flying in it, but it's more realistic.  

Saturday.  Housework.  All.  Day.  Stu found a recipe for a vegan lasagna that said something like twenty minutes prep time.  It took him three hours.   !!  Craziness.  Had Nelson and Susan over for dinner.  Had a game of Roborally which Susan won, and a couple of games of Fluxx.

Not actually a vegan cake - they used eggs from chickens they knew

Sunday.  Bit of a late night but not too crazy.  But woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep.  Hardly did anything all day.  Roast pork for dinner.  Watched Pom Poko in the evening.  OMFG what a completely bizarre movie.  Really didn't like this one very much.

Monday.  Woke up at 5:59 - right on time!  Ok day for a Monday.  Spent all evening trying to sort out accomodation in Tumut for the next weekend.  The problem with small places is their websites are very amateurish.  Sefton House said there were three different queen rooms, but it really wasn't clear which ones had ensuites and which had "exclusive" bathrooms.  And they never answered the query I sent them.  The caravan park looked like they had some lovely cabins by the river, but it was basically impossible to tell which cabin you were trying to book on their online web form.  At least they did respond (eventually) to my query, but the ones we wanted were all booked out.  I actually didn't want to commit to anything too far in advance - I didn't want to be up for a few hundred dollars if one of us got sick and we had to cancel.  So that was all very blah.  And didn't get my quota of photos labelled.

Backdating, because I'm a slacker... ;)  Also I think there was an entry or two in the July archives you might not have seen if you don't use an rss feed reader.  

Monday.  5am wakeup.  Sore spine, numb hands, full bladder.  Sigh.  Tired all day.  Hid out in do not disturb mode all morning and caught up on all Thursday and Friday's tickets.  Long weekends are never long enough!    Tried to read stuff but too many interruptions in the afternoon.  Got my UK photo labelling done a bit early then went into battle with Apple to get the movie files off my phone.

Tuesday.  3am wakeup.  Didn't get back to sleep til probably 5ish for another hour.  Even tireder than yesterday :(  Stayed in DND all day.  Got a bit more than my quota of UK photos done.  Two episodes of BBT, but far too tired to blog.

Wednesday.  Yayyy 9.5 hours sleep!!!  Tried a pulled beef recipe - which was ~1tbs brown sugar, smoked paprika, garlic powder; ~1tsp salt, pepper.  Rubbed some mustard on the meat, covered with the dry rub, then chucked in the slow cooker (with some leftover lamb jelly and some liquid smoke in the bottom) and left it on high all afternoon.  Possibly could have been done a bit longer, it wasn't quite pull apart.  Also should have used a fattier cut of meat.  But it was still pretty good.

Thursday.  Ok sleep.  Work ok.  Caught a bus into work in the afternoon, went and picked up a new pass (the old one had expired), went and said hi to the team, then headed up to Pot Belly.  First drinks with work peeps in five months!  So that was nice.  Picked up pizza on the way home then watched the last four episodes of Big Bang Theory.  Took us a bit over a year to watch through all twelve seasons.

Friday.  Wouldn't be my birthday if I didn't end up in tears over *something*.  In this case trying to understand our crazy networking.  David took me to KFC for lunch (it's tradition!) but we couldn't eat in so had to bring it home. 

Blerfy afternoon fighting with stoopid firewall which is doing stoopid things that noone can explain.  The plan was to catch a bus into town and have dinner somewhere with the sweetie, but I was so late getting away he just came home and picked me up and we went to Chong Co, which was lovely as always.  

Thai fish cakes - famous spicy Thai fish cackes, served with sweet chilli sauce ($12.00)
Crispy crab net rolls - crab meat, shrimp, fish mixed with water chestnuts, and taro delicately wrapped in crispy net roll ($9.50)

Prk Pao Moo Grob - stir fried mild chilli yam sauce with capsicum, onion, shallot, mushrooms, corn and basil leaves ($25.00)

Duck salad - sliced roasted duck with coconut shredded, chilli jam, coconut milk, cucumber, mint, shallot, coriander and cherry tomatoes ($23.00)

Came home and watched Shakespeare in Love.

Saturday.  Awake from 2-5am, then broken sleep til 8am.  So a bit of a zombie day.  Went to Michelle's in the evening for her birthday party.  They have a karaoke machine and a subscription to an online karaoke website, which is pretty good - it has all the original audio - but it doesn't have the original videos like Singstar had.  Not that anyone really needed the karaoke machine, everyone was just singing.  I only joined in for a few, was elsewhere chatting to people and standing in front of the fire for a fair bit of it.  I did get to sing Let it Go right at the end of the night which was fun though ;)  Too late a night though for me.

Sunday.  Slept ok, including a bit of a sleepin.  Mostly housework in the morning.  Had lunch then cooked dinner (beef cheeks).  Need moar slow cooker recipes so we don't sick of things.  Watched penultimate episode Fuller House.

Monday.  Slept ok, and slept in til nearly 7am - whoops!  Super productive morning getting things done while scanning slides.  Went and took some photos of the daffodils out the front, and saw a cold wild blue tongue lizard.  So caught it (it wasn't happy haha) and had it pose for photos.  And its little claws are *sharp* - so much sharper than Stumpy's!

Had a two hour long demo from Sharpie which was quite useful, but I need to see something like ten times before it will sink in....  And stoopid firewall is still being stoopid. 

Backdating.. cause I'm a slacker!!

Monday.  Definitely not enough hours in the day.  Had the tree people out.  The pistachio is slowly splitting at the base and one part of it is leaning on the fence to Kit's place.  The dude was like, this has to go sooner rather than later.  Took more time off work when David got home to help him sort out the fence.  We cut away more vines and weeds, and he was able to get the panel pulled back up and held in place with string until we could get some screws.  Cooked (not) Dinner Winner (Coles don't sell Dinner Winner) for dinner.  Was quite nice, although I could probably do something pretty similar myself.  

In the evening passed half way in my UK 2010 photo labelling.  Still on track to have everything done by the end of the year.  Next year I want to label my Eurasia 2012 photos.  Twenty three and a half thousand photos.  At five hundred photos per week that'll take forty eight weeks to do!!  Craziness.  But the idea is to have all the work on in complete by the time it's ten years since we went in 2022.

Tuesday.  Had the ACT Government tree inspector out (I put a form in on the weekend).  He also took one look at the tree and said it had to go sooner rather than later.  Got verbal approval to remove it straight away.  So talked to the tree peeps and they rearranged some customers so they could come out the next day.  Later, David and I went round to the neighbour's side to pull away more vines and weeds, and he was able to strap up the fence to pull it back into position to be screwed.  Poor neighbours, we keep hassling them!  But did I mention I have the bestest brother ever? :)  Cooked beef cheeks for dinner.  Not as dark this time for some reason.  David really liked this version.

Wednesday.  Tree guys came first thing.  Such a shame to see such a beautiful tree taken down, but the thing was in danger of falling down so had to go :(  Kit was sad as well, although I think she'd have been sadder if it had fallen on her garage!

They came back later in the afternoon to grind out the stump.

Had our pizza night a night early, then played Kismet with Kit and Pete.  I got not one but *two* kismets - the first with 1s, the second with 6s.  I ended up winning.

Thursday morning.  Emirates refunded our Europe flights (although not the extra we paid for seat allocations hmmm).  Still, can't complain too much, we're lucky to have gotten anything back at all.  Packed up to go out to the club.  Lit the fire and collected more firewood before the predicted rain.  

Hey look!  I saw a 747 in flight!

This is what we came out for so early - to seal this sawdust board MDF

They'd put this cabinetry in but hadn't sealed it, so a single drop of water would make the whole thing swell up.  Which is really great right next to the kitchen sink.

I sanded and sanded it, but it didn't get smooth, just all fluffy.

Had drinks and leftover roast pork by the fire.  Listened to a podcast on the possible CIA origins of Winds of Change (part 1 of 8).  

Friday morning.  Got stuck into the first coat of primer.  Things were going well until the fumes made Stu sick :(  So stopped after an hour and a half and washed out the brush.  In the afternoon did some tidying and organising of the "tool shed" in the van.  Also did some work on the tapestry.  Stu had some pretty chilled out music going so it was a nice pleasant afternoon just chillin.  I also sanded the cabinetry again.  This time got things somewhat smoother.  Cooked curried sausages for dinner.  I don't think I'd really want to cook much from scratch out there in future.  I mean I can, but there's no range hood, so steam from cooking just goes everywhere.  Think we'll just stick to leftovers, or bbq.  Listened to another episode of Winds of Change and had an early night.

Saturday.  Stoopid fricken insomnia.  Lit the fire again, had a bit of a sleepin.  Did another coat of primer while Stu was at the committee meeting.  I think another sanding and another coat of primer (just on the horizontal surfaces that had been damaged) and it'll be as smooth as I can get it. 

We were meant to meet up with EffanC after for lunch, but we went to the wrong hotel, 20km away.  This is what happens when you use the PHONE, people, instead of MESSAGING!!!  If I'd seen it in writing would have been less likely to get it so wrong.  #grunt !  Anyway, Stu and I had a nice enough lunch at the Lake George Hotel.

This time they got the pork belly right - with crackling!  

Finished watching the end of Herbie the Love Bug in the evening.

Sunday was housework all fricken morning.  After lunch went and visited Annie, but we were running a bit early, so Stu drove me around to look at the flooded Ginninderra Creek.

So seeing Annie and Immy, and later Noah and Stu, was nice.  Haven't seen them in forever.  Did our shopping at Casey Supabarn, I think for the first time since 2017 when they ripped us off.  This time they wouldn't do any bagging, which is a massive pain when you're trying to wrangle a large trolley load full of shopping at either end.  At least I had Stu's help this time, it would not have worked *at all* if I'd been by myself.  I swear if they try and do that sort of crap again I would send one bag and what I wanted to go in it through, go to the other end and load it, before coming back to pass the next bagful of stuff through.  Got home and cooked for hours.  Roast chicken and veggies, chicken to make up some honey mustard chicken during the week, and mince for tacos.  Dinner and BBT.  I went to go clean up after dinner and Stu put YouTube videos of various BBT stuff.  While I'm fricken working and everyone is just sitting around watching videos without me.  Might have had a meltdown.  There is no way I could be a mother, I'd lose my $#!+ every fricken day.

So contrary what the date on this entry says, I didn't blog that night, in fact like three weeks behind in blogging by that point.  *sigh*

Backdating.. cause I'm a slacker ;)

Monday.  Scanned photos of our house being built in the morning.  Usual Monday stuff, and caught up on some blogging.

Tuesday.  Scanned baby photos in the morning.  Usual Tuesday stuff, including Taco Tuesday.  More blogging catchup, and labelling York photos in the evening.

Wednesday.  Yayyy - good sleep!  More baby photo scanning in the morning.  Crazy day at work with dumb meetings and people wanting dumb things.  Got a message from Kit that a panel in the fence had been knocked out in the wind.  Was too busy with work to go look at it so finally saw it after work.  Vines had been getting in and pushing things loose, but also the hedge branches had gotten so big they were also pushing on it.  Then the strong wind on Tuesday night it was enough to dislodge it.  Hurrah.

I can't even see that corner with all the shrubbery

Hacked and hacked to be able to get this far

Hurrah

In the evening continued York photo labelling, including the National Railway Museum and Hogwarts Express!!

Thursday.  Another crazy busy day at work.  Watched the first half of Herbie - The Love Bug.  I was a bit disturbed about Herbie murdering another car tho.  Seemed excessively violent.

Friday.  Watched Kiki's Delivery Service, which I didn't think I'd seen, but in fact had, and only five years ago too.  Hurrah for dementia.  I put out some snackages which ended up being dinner.  Whoops.

Saturday.  Passed 2700 of Dad's slides scanned.  Into New Zealand 1975 photos.  Started to get house stuff organised - emailed tree, plumber and roof restoration people.  In the evening Stu said we could watch whatever I wanted.  So I suggested a few things, and then he put on Mortal Engines.  So much for my choice ;)  Still, it wasn't too bad.

Sunday I got stuck into tidying the dungeon so I could move all the Lego boxes so the plumber would be able to get easy access to look up into the cavity.  The damp is so bad there was a big patch of mould under where I had a plastic tub near the wall.  

I also tidied up under the house for access from the other side.

Cooked roast lamb for dinner, and had C over for dinner and Pictionary.  D and I won one, and Stu and D won another.

Twenty years ago today I was doing some Lotus Notes training in North Sydney.  Pretty sure it was the trainer who had lost part of a finger getting it caught in a balcony railing as he fell (I think that was the story).  The training rooms had a great view of the Warringah Freeway.  

I also found some photos of my damaged car while I was searching my hard drive for photos taken in July 2000.  But while I could remember coming home to find the car damaged (and an open pit in the footpath next to it - clearly there'd been construction work that day) I couldn't figure out why my car had been home that day - normally I drove to work.  I dug out my old copy of Lotus Notes and was hunting through it trying to find out what I might have been doing.  And searched through a couple of copies of Eudora for clues.  In the end I found an email from Luc saying "hope you're having fun at training" and suddenly I realised that's where I'd been, and sure enough the photo above was from the same day.  

Fortunately the construction workers paid for the repairs, so it wasn't too much of a disaster.

Backdating.. cause I'm a slacker!

Monday.  Usual Monday Stuff.  Having trouble keeping up with UK photo labelling.  Just hard work.  In the afternoon David came home with a Lego Yoda to build!  Someone at his work had conceded defeat with it and given it to David to do.  He sat down in the late afternoon and didn't move until he'd finished yet - like five hours later (I brought him dinner of leftovers).  Although the first hour was pulling apart the beginnings of the work that had been done, and finding the mistakes which would have made it very hard for his colleague to have progressed with.  

As usual, there's always a tonne of new Lego pieces I've never seen before!

Tuesday.  Leftovers for dinner.  Started watching season 12 of BBT (David brought up his Blurays).  Then watched 101 Dalmatians - the Glenn Close version, with Mr Weasley and House as the thugs :)  None of the animals speak in the live action remake so it's a little more human focussed, but not bad.  Pretty sure I've seen it before a long time ago.  Also tried out Coles shopping online which we haven't done in a few years.

Wednesday.  Catching up on photo labelling from the past couple of nights - labelled nearly four hundred photos, although over a hundred of those were of the bird of prey show at Warwick Castle.  Ended up only 67 photos behind for the week.  Also made a random gnocchi since David wasn't home and I could use tomatoes.

Thursday Stumpy was being naughty and trying to get out.  He'd actually gotten on top of the light before he slipped off when I got this picture.

Friday we had the Coles delivery.  Some of the meat I ordered wasn't available, and they gave us a block of cheese because they didn't have cubes.  Pretty sure you can set replacement options, but ultimately shopping online is a bit of a pain because if something isn't available you don't find out until they're about to deliver it.  In store you could just get something else, but online you end up going without.  

In the evening we headed out to the club.  Got the fire going, and had some drinks and snackages, which turned out to be dinner.  Whoops.

The owners of our old van were trying to burn out a big stump.

Went up to the shed and chatted to people for a bit, then went to bed.

Saturday.  Terrible sleep.  Was awake from 2-4:30 or so.  Had a bit of a sleep in and a very slow start.  Got a fire going again.

There was a working bee on the day.  I asked John for a job and he pointed me at the glass sliding door to the sun room and said see if you can get the concrete spatter off that (from when they poured the slab).  So I spent ages with a fingernail, a paint scraper and some vinegar getting it looking beautiful.

Others were redoing the pool decking that was completely rotten and very dangerous.

In the evening we were supposed to have a bonfire, but it threatened rain so we just hung out in the shed (just under the covid people limit for the space).  Didn't stop me from cooking marshmallows in the fire!

I was pretty bummed that I wasn't doing my Christmas in July dinner that night - have done it every year for quite a few years now.  I even took some roast pork and stuff for a potato bake, but I wasn't sure who was going to be using the oven so it was all too hard so we just had snackages, although did have some of Nick/Tab and Dee's food which was nice of them.

Sunday morning we came home.  I was feeling lost, after having lost over half my weekend at home.  In the afternoon cooked for several hours straight - cooked up taco mince for later in the week, the roast pork, brussels sprouts with bacon, epic potato bake, a rocky road and some cheese and bacon balls, using cream cheese that was best before May.  It was totally fine.  I'd picked the wrong thing from the Coles order (another disadvantage of shopping online - too easy to make mistakes and pick the wrong thing) - taco shells instead of a taco kit - so had to make my own taco spice.  I think I used about a teaspoon each of chili powder (bit less of that), garlic powder, herbs, paprika, cumin, corn flour, salt and pepper.  I was already feeling delicate when David snuck into the kitchen at one point and scared the hell out of me.  I might have had a meltdown on the spot.  And then everyone was sulky with each other all night.  Hurrah.  

This was the first eclipse that I saw after I started owning digital cameras.  I took these out the back of my flat in Marrickville twenty years ago tonight.  My little Olympus point and shoot camera only had a 3x optical zoom, and no manual controls, so the photos weren't very good.

Backdating.. cause I'm a slacker...!

Monday after two late mornings on the weekend I slept in til 7:10am!  Whoops!  So no slide scanning.  Deleted lots of stuff at work which always makes me happy.  Dinner and kitchen cleaning and took all night to label my quota of photos.

Monday night I couldn't get to sleep til after midnight - restless legs/itchy skin.  Then woke up at 3:20 and couldn't get back to sleep for over two hours, then broken sleep til 7:10.  Got up and had breakfast, then attemped to get some more sleep, but failed.  *sigh*.  So another day of no slide scanning.  Had a 2.5 hour marathon session with Ward doing all the Sharefilez.  Taco Tuesday, then took all night to label 145 photos of the Tower of London.

At least I slept well Tuesday night, sleeping in til 6:40.  Put on an Irish stew at lunch, but the recipe Stu gave me could have used a slow cooker twice as big as ours.  I did realise this and cut it down a lot, but it was still very full (and as I write this on 28/7 there's *still* some leftover in the fridge!).  Into season 2 of IT Crowd.  By the time we'd had dinner and watched some tv and done the washing up by the time I sat down it was like 8pm.  *sigh*.  Kinda struggling a bit.. hrmmm..

Thursday.  Slept ok again, even woke up on time.  Finished watching the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians.  And started getting a cold sore.  Hurrah.

We're onto our sixth case of Corona since the lockdown.  I calculated we've drunk about 7.4 beers each week between the two of us.  We're saving the boxes for filling up with books if Lifeline ever start taking donations again...

Let Stumpy out for a walk.

Wait what?  Am I watching One Hundred and One Dalmatians here?  Or Peter Pan?  I call shenanigans!!

Friday I took a long lunch to go see Qantas' last 747 fly over Canberra.  If I get Coronavirus it'll be from the guy who came and stood right next to me upwind of me and was sniffling and coughing (only very quietly, but still..).  Epic #grunt.  

Had chicken kiev for dinner and watched My Neighbour Totoro.

Didn't really do much on Saturday.  Nothing noteworthy anyway.  In the evening went over to EffanC's for dinner.

Sunday also not much.  I did scan a box of slides - of me as a baby.  Had C over for a music session and dinner.  Did slow cooker beef brisket based on this recipe.  I've never cooked beef brisket before, but it turned out pretty well.  Very fatty though!!  I'll append an after shot once I've gotten it off the phone, although it really wasn't very photogenic!!

Also how funny is this - the bottle on the left was best before 2004.  !!  It was the second bottle Stu owned when I met him, and after finishing the first I moved onto this one.  Except it was so dehydrated it was pretty much a sticky mass that wouldn't pour.  So we got a new one.  Best before 2022.  :)