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.

Friday night we watched Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was all a bit silly, and completely predictable, but a bit of fun.

Saturday night we watched The Sixth Sense, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies when it first came out.  

In between was a very quiet weekend at home, only going out to do some food shopping today.  I spent most of the rest of the time scanning and organising paperwork and watching Air Crash Investigations videos and Blackadder Goes Forth.

I've just spent two hours cooking some coq au vin, as well as a spinach, turnip, feta and sage bake, and a cauliflower, zucchini, garlic, herbs, cream and cheeeeese bake.  Not that they'll necessarily go together, but the idea is to have plenty of food cooked for the week.

Oh and we're into season 4 of Voyager now.

Another long tiring week.  Culminating with Ryan's farewell and a long lunch that we had no intention of returning from.  A well deserved release.  

This weekend has been quiet and mostly at home (except for food shopping at the markets yesterday and a quick trip to Hall Markets with Kit and Pete this morning).  Got some cleaning done, water changed a fish tank, used the leaf blower to clean the gutters, did some more entries on my new blog, cooked a tomato bake and purple brussel sprouts with bacon last night, and an epic lamb roast tonight.  We watched The Human Stain last night, which was ok, but pretty disjointed.  

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.

Saturday morning I woke up at 3am and stayed awake for a couple of hours.  After thinking recently that I hadn't had insomnia for a while, I jinxed myself and got it.  Blerf.

In the morning after a late start I did a bit of house tidying.  Then for lunch we went to Chinese Inn at Kippax for lunch for Sarah's 30th birthday.  Wasn't a fan of the place.  The shantung chicken we had was nice enough, but no crispy skin; and the salt and pepper squid was pretty tough with a very thick batter.  But it was a nice enough lunch, even if we barely knew anyone.

In the afternoon I went down to Chrissie's to help clean up her house post move.  I scrubbed oven racks to the point of getting a blister - doh!

In the evening the sweetie and I watched Zodiac.  It's a long movie and I was pretty tired so didn't know if I'd be able to last, but it was pretty interesting, even though I was frustrated with the ending, so finished watching the whole thing.

Sunday was more cleaning at Chrissie's.  Came back so we could go to the markets for lunch and food shopping.  Back to Chrissie's in the afternoon.  Then home to prepare dinner - roast pork with lots of roast veggies for @Chrispycon and Anne.  Hadn't seen those guys in ages, so was good to see them again.

Today has just be a nice quiet day at home, catching up on house stuff, blogging etc.

Saturday I started gluing things into my holiday scrapbook.  Until I ran out of glue.

So then I started trying to organise my tax paperwork but decided it was all too hard, so thought I'd start with an easier job - digitising my tax paperwork starting from 1996.  Hrmm.  Did about seven years worth before the scanner needed a rest.

In the evening we watched some Voyager and then we watched The Third Man, which had been mentioned in an episode we saw the other night of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations set in Vienna (Viennese people sure love their pork!).  And it went on the Riesenrad, which we'd been on, so we had to watch it :)  Interesting movie, a little slow to get going but picked up at the end, and who killed the porter??

Today I wanted to do more paperwork sorting and work on my new blog, but didn't end up doing any of that.  Instead I cleaned the oven.  Hurrah.  And did some fish tank stuff and did some food shopping and cleaned and cooked and cleaned.  And my hands aren't very happy with me.

And in the What The files.. I was feeding Stu's fish and they got so excited that the smaller siamensis rocketed out of the tank and went flying over and out and landed under Stu's comfy chair.  Had to rescue it and put it back in the tank!  Silly fish!

Saturday I spent most of the morning getting ready and cooking for Kit's 30th birthday party.  It was family-friendly for the afternoon, including pony rides!!  In the evening after dinner we got picked up by the party bus for a pub crawl, stopping at The Ducks Nuts, The Durham, and PJ O'Reilly's in Tuggeranong.  I had a pretty good time while some of the others got suitably silly hehe.  The 80s music collection on the bus was pretty pitiful though, I struggled to find good stuff to play.  

Pinky Pie pinata. There was meant to be an adults one as well but Kit ran out of time to make it.

Kit gave me the ingredients to make up this ambrosia salad.  But there was so much food it never even got brought out.

Stu went as a Rubicks Cube

And I went as Classic 80s Space Guy!!!

Ponies!!

The party bus

Sunday was just housework, jigsaw etc, and I helped clean up a little bit.  Kit had *heaps* of leftover food which various people including us are helping her with heh.

Thursday night we saw an episode of Voyager that had David Graf in it, so on Friday we watched Police Academy.  As you do :)

Saturday morning I headed into work to do an upgrade, and accidentally upgraded to the latest version instead of the second latest version we were meant to put on.  Whoops.

At lunch the little brother came over, having just purchased a brand new second hand switch.  I brought home cables and we plugged in and had a look and made sure the switch was working, which it looked like it was.  Then we fussed around with our network to see if we could figure out why the NAS won't get a link light on our Cisco switch.  It wouldn't even get link on David's HP switch.  Super epic weird.  Guess will just have to keep using it on our 100Mbps Netgear switch.  After that he did awesome stuff like install a couple of smoke detectors that I'd bought last year but hadn't installed, and we totally reprogrammed our Harmony remote.  They finally have drivers for our TV now which is awesome, and also for the new DVD player we got which has a super dodgy remote that presses buttons multiple times which makes it unusable.  But even though everything works now, the amp still makes the Harmony remote have issues.  Still, we can live with that given that we can drive all our devices now.  Oh and he also pulled apart the fan that's been rattling.  Turns out the mounting for the gear box which turns the fan from side to side had disintegrated.  So he pulled it all out.

Have I ever mentioned how awesome my brother is? :)

In the evening I cooked sausages and very garlicky pasta (sorry!) and leftover veggie bake, and we watched our cruise slideshow and various other cruising slideshows and chatted mostly about cruising.  Quite a nice evening.

Today David went home and I did some house cleaning and cruise blogging and we went food shopping and I cooked a lamb roast with lots of epic veggies and all in all had quite a nice weekend.

I could really get used to four day weekends!

Friday night we watched Innerspace, since we didn't manage to see it last weekend.

Saturday we walked around Palmerville, and we watched Airport in the evening.

Sunday we went food shopping at the markets.  Saigon Street Food was closed, so we went to Heng Hing.  It was all a little overwhelming.  The door by the mushroom doesn't have a clear path to the counters, you have to weave your way through tightly-packed tables.  And the ordering system is information overload with pictures all over the walls.  I found it all quite stressful.  The food was nice enough though.

In the evening Stu thought we could find something to watch on Netflix, but it took so long we gave up and went to bed without watching anything.

Monday the sweetie and I both took the day off.  I cooked roast beef with an epic veggie bake of zucchini, carrot, cauliflower and broccoli and then we watched Gladiator.

Today I did cheesy hash browns for brunch and made up a batch of Anzac biscuits in the afternoon.  The first batch didn't have a chance to get cold..

And other than that I've been gluing lots of little paper triangles.  And fighting with MovableType.  But I do have a new blog coming soon, stay tuned!

Had a very quiet long weekend.  Didn't really do much other than house stuff.  Stu went to work and I went with Chris and Kit to Salvos and Vinnies.  Not much else really.  Did finish up all the fresh food in the house though which was good.