Friday night we watched Rogue One, because the sweetie hadn't seen it.  I actually enjoyed it more the second time round.

Saturday Stu went off for a committee meeting, so I stayed home and cleaned and tidied.  And started a jigsaw.  Didn't get any photo labelling done or do much grout scraping.  I did however manage to backup and upgrade my phone without incident.  In the evening we got tv dinners and watched The Green Mile.

Sunday was a bit more relaxed.  Didn't do any grout scraping or photo labelling.  We went out for brunch to the new Market St Eats cafe at the markets.  It was decent enough but a little pricey.  And then did our food shopping.  Did a lamb roast for dinner and watched Voyager and Survivor.

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 :)

Tuesday lunch I met up with Chrissie for lunch which was nice.

In the evening met up with Luc in town.  Had a couple of beers at Marble and Grain, then looked for somewhere to get "winter" food for dinner, on account of it being 5C.  We thought we'd try Black Fire, which I'd never even heard of.  We had variations of wagyu steak and vegetables and it was all very nice and I even came home with a doggy bag of leftovers :)  A lovely catchup.

Friday night we got pizza to celebrate the sweetie's birthday and watched the new Total Recall.  Putting aside the ridiculous issue of a transport system that can traverse the earth's core in 17 minutes, it was basically just a massive CGI fest that had a lot of nods to the original but never quite achieved the same level of awesomeness.  I liked the "two weeks" scene, that was pretty funny.  Otherwise it was pretty average.

Saturday morning hurty kept me awake for an hour or so in the early morning so had a lazy start.  Other than cleaning, we went to Bunnings to get a grout saw and more grout, and the markets to top up our food supplies.  In the afternoon I had a couple of goes at scraping grout, but it's pretty tedious.  

Saturday evening were all set for a quiet night of watching videos, but then Serena invited herself over, then Kit came up, and Pete came over as well.  So went and bought some cheese and crackers and cooked some sausages and had a mini party.

Today I did more grout scraping in little bursts.  I also started actually labelling holiday photos.  Maybe I'll get all my photos labelled before I cark it..  hmm yeah right!

Tonight the sweetie cooked pork larb for dinner, and we watched Voyager (we're over half way through season five), and Survivor.  Also it seems that Chromecast will keep on casting, even when everything it's attached to is off.  Hurrah.  It had been going all night and all day, and we didn't notice til we went to play Voyager.  Whoops.

The weather was a bit crazy today.  At one point it was actually quite a bit warmer outside than in, so opened up the house for a while.

The sweetie has been feeling a bit off colour the last couple of days, but we did end up going out for his birthday last night - met up with Cath and Scott for dinner at Malaysian Chapter.  Nice food (deep fried anchovies are actually edible! Who knew!) and good friends made for a pleasant evening.

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.

Saturday morning was just cleaning the house.

The mother type person arrived around lunch time, and the brother type person arrived a little later.  We spent much of the afternoon doing a 3D jigsaw of the Sydney Opera House which was super cool.

Also it was decided that we all needed a cake.

In the evening we went to the Labor Club for dinner.

Came home and David dug out the dungeon roof to see what was up with our leaking shower.  We found a mixing bowl full of water with a copper pipe drilled into it draining to who knows where on the other side of the dungeon wall under the house.  

!!!

No idea what that was about.  We poked around and did some testing and we're pretty sure the leaking is actually in the corner where the grout has been breaking away.

Finished off the Opera House jigsaw, and did a 500 piece jigsaw.

Sunday morning we did another 500 piece jigsaw then David went home.  Mum and I went to Bunnings and got some silicone sealant, and then went to the markets to do some food shopping.

In the evening I did epic roast pork and had Chrissie et al over for dinner which was all very nice.

Monday morning mum went home, and at work I tried getting setup in my new desk, but it was all super stressful because stuff wasn't working and I don't have cubicle walls which I find pretty distressing.  I might have had a slight meltdown.

Had lunch with Chrissie - KFC - which is semi-traditional.

In the evening the sweetie took me out to Bella Vista for dinner which was excellent as always.

Arrancini con pancetta affumicata
Classic smoked bacon & onion risotto balls with cheese encased in golden panko breadcrumbs served with a creamy tomato sauce and miniature leaf salad.

Capesante e calamari
Pancetta wrapped Canadian scallops with butter poached calamari pieces on seasoned avocado puree, asparagus tips and roasted capsicum puree & pesto sauce.

Pappardelle alla Bistecca
Thin slices of Angus sirloin steak pan-fried with bacon and mushrooms finished in a caramelised butter, Pecorino Reggiano cheese and wilted baby spinach sauce tossed through Pappardelle pasta.
(note: I wouldn't say "when" to the parmesan cheese, so he gave me the whole lot ;) )

Maiale Arrosto
Twice cooked pork belly with a roasted mushroom, red onion, cherry tomato and scallop salsa served with prosciutto crisp and a garlic and thyme jus.

Orange cake (didn't get a photo of the description).

Tonight I had a go at trying to get the old silicone out of the corner of the shower.  I didn't have much luck, only managing to get silicone out of two tiles before my fingers hurt too much from using the only tool I had which seemed to do any good - an old file.  Sigh.

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.

Last night we met up with Damien and Amanda for dinner at Olive at Hawker.  I'd never even heard of it before, but a quick Google sorted that out.  They even have an online reservation form which is very civilised.  We were the first ones in at 6pm, but it did fill up pretty much completely.  

The bread was amazing - fresh and warm and crusty.  And those little battered and fried stuffed olives were also great.

I quite enjoyed my duck, but needed the sweetie's assitance to finish

Stu enjoyed his octopus (he had two entrees instead of a main)

Lovely creme brulee, but again, needed the sweetie's assistance to finish

We had a lovely meal but both came home moaning - me from eating too much food, and Stu from eating too much bread.  Oops :)

Friday night was a swim night, and then a bunch of us went back to EffanC's which was all very pleasant.  Soups and bubbly and cheese FTW!

Much of the weekend was just catching up and cleaning and organising paperwork and watching Air Crash Investigations and Monty Python (and I also watched Black Adder Goes Forth last week as well, don't think I mentioned it).  I finished one jigsaw of Kit's and started another one.  

Saturday night we watched Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, which to be honest I struggled with.  Even though there wasn't much plot for some reason I just found it *difficult*.  

Tonight I did a lamb roast, and we watched some Anthony Bourdain in Panang, and another one in Kansas City.  And for the first bit I'm like "I've just eaten dinner but I'm *hungry*" .. but after watching all the meat and bbq ribs in the second episode I was like I'm totally full just *looking* at that.. and then I started getting vegetable cravings.  Cause that's what you do in America after eating non-stop American food, which is pretty much just meat and deep-fried anything, it's just GIVE ME THE VEGETABLES.  Oh hai @stuartcryan !! :)

Weekends are too damned short.