Had a thoroughly awful day today :(

Mostly because of crappy proxies.  I take it personally when they don't work.  Which is a problem when they're just plain buggy and I don't understand how they work anyway and everyone expects me to be the expert when I'm damned well not.

Also, if you want me to freak out completely, just put me on the spot about aforementioned proxies in front of a room full of people from other organisations who want to know why our proxies are so bad.  Yeup.

And I also spent hours fixing another team's problem because I thought originally it was my problem.  But it wasn't.  *sigh*

Spent tonight geotagging photos.  Did all the random camera photos except for Disneyland, where I took over five hundred photos but didn't take the GPS with me.

Blink.  Whoops a week goes by.

I've been so busy at work I've barely had time to breathe.

Other than that, people drama is getting me down.  Sometimes I think maybe I should just go be a hermit somewhere.

Thursday night was nice though - bit of a farewell for Klaus.  Friday I wasn't feeling sociable at all, although we did end up going to Kit's for a while.  

Yesterday we had a pretty quiet day just doing housey stuff.  In the evening we watched Good Morning Vietnam, which the sweetie had never seen.  But aforementioned people drama came up again, even tho we weren't dealing with it directly.  Just made for a strange sort of a night.

I made these spinach and cheese pastries using some quite dried up puff pastry sheet's from Kerry's.  They still turned out pretty well we thought.

This morning I went with Chrissie to see the balloons.  But this was after hurty kept me awake for two hours in the middle of the night, so I only got about four hours sleep :(  Collapsed back into bed for a bit when I got home.  Good thing we get an extra day off this weekend.

After Friday's success I am *itching* to get my other firewall done sooner rather than later.  Except risk-averse people have scuttled the idea until later in the week.  Doh!!  Oh well, got some other stuff done today which is helping my confidence somewhat.

Tonight was just pool stuff, washing, cooking and watching House and Fuller House.  9:20 before I could finally relax.  But we cooked one of Serena's *epic* zucchinis, as well as a couple of old zucchinis, some old garlic, some old mushrooms, a pepper from Kit's, parsley from Kit's, and some meat we got at the markets yesterday.  

Today is the 50th anniversary of decimal currency in Australia.

For reasons unknown, the Mint had an open day to celebrate it yesterday instead of today.  So Neil and I went along.

Whereupon we were instantly frustrated with poor crowd control.

We arrived at about 8:15 for the 8:30 opening.  We'd paid for our factory walk tickets on Friday, so we expected to be able to line up for that, do the tour, and then go and buy the special edition coin after that.  Except that there was a lot of confusion about the queuing.  There seemed to be only one queue, and several stalls setup.  One seemed to be ready to sell the coin, but they said they weren't open yet.  Fair enough.  But both a security guard and a person in the booth said we should go join the queue (I said we already had our floor walk tickets).  So we did that.  But people in the queue didn't have their factory walk tickets, so I was wondering if we'd have to wait in line behind everyone buying tickets, when we should just be able to go straight through.  But after a while, someone wandered down the queue and said this was actually the queue to buy the coin.  We decided since we were there, we may as well just do that first, then do the tour afterwards.

Except.

They had the most inefficient system EVER to sell the coins.  They had a grand total of two eftpos machines for the transactions, and were also recording all the sales on laptops.  It was incredibly slow and inefficient and we were standing in the hot sun with no shelter for an hour and a half!!!!! I complained to their twitter that they needed to open up more registers to sell the coins.  Later on they said they did, although we didn't see it.  I also asked someone if there could be a cash only lane to get through people more quickly but they wouldn't do that either.  The stoopid thing was, people were buying them in bulk, for the sole purpose of profiteering off them.  The coin was $20, but when I got home they were on ebay for $35-$40.  I seriously considered doing the same thing but I was already so filled with rage at all the people taking so long I didn't want to join the ranks of the people I hated.

So at 9:45 we finally got our coins and went inside.  They encouraged people to buy tickets online to save queuing, but there were no queues at all inside.  Wish they could have been so efficient *outside*.

Anyways.

Things improved enormously once inside.  The staff were all super friendly and helpful and enthusiastic about answering questions.  They were great.  The tour was just a slow walk through the tool room, the circulating coin hall, the proof room and the packing rooms.  It was pretty slow in places but it was super cool to see the coin pressing machines up close while they were running.  The proof room is where they manually press and carefully check all the coins used in proof sets.  Normally it's a clean room so I felt a bit bad for them having to deal with all the extra dust we were tramping through the room.  They had a lot of reject coins!  Interestingly, every single person working in the proof packing rooms was an asian lady!  Better attention to detail by them?  Who knows!

Afterwards we went upstairs to the gallery to have a look down at the floor.  Just for fun, here's a comparison of the factory floor in late 2002 vs early 2016..

This is the proof room.

I decided I'd come back again at a future date to have a better look through the gallery area.  Just too many people and I was tired and hungry.  So we just went home.

Mum was on the front line of the change to decimal currency fifty years ago - she worked in a bank!  Also.. happy anniversary .. :)

Also.  I've had this in my head ever since - https://youtu.be/5ZTeWLA1LAs

Wednesday Kit came over briefly after work for a bit of a cool off (not that she actually went *in* the pool - just her feet!).

Thursday the little brother and Kat came up with the tv and stayed.  Kit and Ben came up as well.  Stu was a little anxious about *stuff*, Kit had decided to quit her job, and all the extra people in the house made for a very strange night.

Friday the sweetie and I had a random day off.  Stu went to the doctor, then we had brunch in town.  Came home and started pulling out stuff to give away and throw out.  Took a whole heap of fluoro lights and old magazines to Revolve and had a walk through the Big Green Shed which was fun.  Also took several boxes of books to Lifeline.  But didn't get too much else done.  Watched Back to the Future II in the evening.

This morning went along to the Mint Open Day.  I'll leave that for a separate post, but their event management and crowd control was just plain awful.

What's the deal with people dropping off at 69 from cancer??  First David Bowie, now Alan Rickman!

Mum is 69 - she'd better not be next!!

On Friday night I left work a bit early and drove up to Sydney.  I drove past a fire at the airfield at Marulan, which turned out to be not from natural causes, but because of a plane crash!  (the dude walked away - must have been a good landing!).  We went and fed the Macaulay's cat, visited Aunty Di and Graham, then had an early night.

On Saturday we spent the morning looking at photos (we played Dad's funeral slide show which was a bit emotional) and food preparation.  We did a big roast pork and my epic potato bake as well as some other veggies and lots of nibblies.  We also whipped some cream and decorated a pavlova.  Graham and Pam and Ken and Jeanine came over and we had a lovely afternoon.

In the evening we went and fed Macaulay's cat again, and watched The Princess Diaries (which Chris and I had been talking about only just the other day).

On Sunday I caught a train into the city to go see a couple of Lego exhibitions (which I'll save for separate posts).

At Central I was all set to walk around to Harris Street when I noticed the end of the Devonshire Street tunnel didn't *end* anymore - it kept on going - with a sign to the Powerhouse Museum.  So I walked down through it.  They've converted that whole little area between Central and the museum from the old goods lines into a park called The Goods Line.  Totally spun me out because that area of the city has always been a dead zone and it was a real pain trying to get around because you couldn't just walk across town because of all the railway lines in the way.

The Powerhouse Museum (bottom entrance).

After seeing Art of the Brick, I headed back to Central to catch the train to Circular Quay (it was super hot and I didn't want to get hot and sweaty walking all the way, and as it turned out, Sunday is currently $2.50 all day on the trains so it didn't cost anything).

Then there was the second Lego exhibition of the day - the Sydney Harbour Icons at the Museum of Sydney.

Then up to Martin Place to train it back to mum's.  I walked straight onto a train which was pretty cool.

Picked up all my stuff, then a flying visit to Luc and Lizzi's to do a donut photo of Ryan, then drove home.

I was expecting when I got home to have a quiet night of getting myself organised, but instead I came home to a pool full of people, in varying states of intoxication.  Which was rather unexpected (and made me feel somewhat left out! heh).  So didn't get anything done at home that night.  Oh well.  

All up a pretty decent year.  Nothing too life shattering.  Quite busy as always.

We didn't manage to get overseas this year.  Stu's work was being a bit special and didn't want to give him one of the weeks off in November.  We could have pushed a trip back a week, but then would have started missing Christmas parties, so we decided to postpone.  The only flying holiday we did was to Queensland to visit Chay and David which was a lovely relaxing long weekend as always.  We did get down the coast a couple of times.  Firstly in March, where we also went down to Bermagui, and over the June long weekend as well.  I only went to Sydney once this year - in May to inspect my flat, go to a body corporate meeting, and stay with mum.  We also did a weekend in Junee to visit the little brother.  And did a two night trip to the snow in September, after a failed proxy upgrade, and I was so flustered I forgot the charging cable for the GPS, *and* couldn't find the android.

At work I started the year busy but "comfortable" - in that I knew what I was doing most of the time.  We changed proxy vendors in May - and traded one set of problems for another.  At least the performance of the new ones is generally a lot better (I was still sad when we finally turned the old ones off for good).  At the end of June our team was restructured out of existence, and I lost most of the work I'd been doing to another team (I could have gone with the work to the new team, but decided I'd rather pick up new work with a more local team). Neil was away for the first month after the restructure, which mean I was literally the only person doing half the work of our old team.  So that was a super stressful month.  Then I moved desks away from Neil which made me feel even more isolated.  I spent several months in the new team really having no idea what I was doing.  But towards the end of the year I've been fairly well immersed in some new firewalls and am starting to get the hang of them.  Just before Christmas I organised a BBQ for fifty people which was pretty cool.

Healthwise I've been ok, but starting to notice the whole getting old thing.  It seemed I blogged quite a lot about insomnia.  Not able to get to sleep for no good reason, or waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.  I had a one-day cold in April, and a one-month cold in October.  I was at home for a full week in October, and was coughing for another three weeks after that :(  I started monitoring my blood pressure again, and noticed it was high *all the time*.  I tried a low-salt diet for a time, and it did come down, but it was pretty much impossible to maintain.  Go out for dinner?  High sodium.  Go out for lunch?  High sodium.  Pretty much anything in a jar or can?  High sodium.  Cheese?  High sodium.  I started taking my lunches into work several days a week which helped for lunches.  And was a bit more careful about dinners too, as well as buying low-sodium breakfast cereals.  But I was getting sick of the same boring stuff all the time, and let's face it, I can't live in a world without cheese, so I went on medication.  Still working on a dosage that will suit, although what I'm on now I think is causing some skin issues, so will see the doctor again in the new year to see if it's related, and maybe try a different medication.  I also realised in March that my bottom two wisdom teeth have finally fully erupted.  And my eyesight is getting worse.  Next year will definitely be an eye/teeth/skin/blood pressure sorting kind of a year.

We spent a lot of time with our "whisky" friends earlier in the year - dinners and movies etc - but less later in the year.  We only saw Nat and Andrew once this year in January which is a bit sad-making.  We had games nights at Mishi's in March, June and November, with a special party for her in December.  Met up with @phonakins when she was in town for Eat, Drink, Blog, and @Chrispycon and Anne when they were back from Hong Kong briefly.  Doc came over in September for some MarioKart and Singstar, but the TV died in the middle of a race, and we still haven't gotten it fixed because we're slackers.  Had dinner at the Dumpling Inn with Damien and Amanda in September.  Various people came to stay including Jo and Marc, the little brother several times, Chrissie a few times, and Mum in January and December.  Chris applied for a job and had moved to Canberra (in stumbling distance of us) within the space of a month, so that's pretty cool.  We've spent quite a bit of time with Kit and Ben over the year too which is fun.  It's nice having cool neighbours.  And finally we've still been enjoying our visits to "the club"  and going to the social occasions.  The pool exploded there earlier in the year, and we helped build the new one.  We also provided a Christmas in July feast there, and did pork again for the proper Christmas party.  Any excuse for me to do a big roast pork with crackling ;)

In the fishy world, I've been making better attempts to maintain the health of the fish and the fish tanks, although not until a bunch of disasters (and still had disasters after).  The original AR-620T had some small angels in it, but they had died over summer.  The last one had been in there a couple of days, and we only pulled it out just before putting in the last remaining duboisi and sucking catfish in there.  They died within two days which upset me rather a lot.  Tank of Death living up to its name :(  So the big four foot remained empty for a while.  My AR-620T also remained empty for a while.  I gave it a good cleaning out, and left it running with just plants for a couple of months to try and stabilise it.  Eventually I got five danios for it, which have survived, and later four baby angels which are also still alive.  That tank is actually looking really good at the moment, and I'm keeping up the regular water changes in it (it helps that with all the heat the potplants need a lot of water, so fish tank water goes onto the plants).  Stu gave his four foot a cleaning out and later in the year, and has set it up with really bright lights, and a soil-based substrate to make a planted tank.  He has some native fish in there too and it's looking pretty good.  The two foot tank has massive issues with this black slime algae, and I think it's pretty toxic.  The two nine-year-old black neon tetras and five rummy-nose tetras are still going ok in there.  I had five new danios in there which I've since taken downstairs to avoid the worst of the heat.  And then I bought five cories for that tank, hoping that maybe they'd eat some of the algae.  They started dying off pretty much straight away. :(  I moved the last two into the angel tank.  One continued to deteriorate and die, but the other one recovered and is still going strong in there.  The light in the two foot also just died the other day, so I'm going to completely clean that tank out and start again.  Downstairs the ten-year-old krib is still going, but she's looking pretty old.  I put five danios from upstairs in with her for the summer.  When Chris came down from Sydney she had nowhere to put all her platies, so I filled a spare tank for them.  I put four of them, and the big sucking catfish, in with the krib and the danios and the rest are still in a small tank awaiting their new home to be ready.  Stu also has two small tanks on his desk.  One has two endler guppies and a cherry shrimp, and the other has four teeny shrimp he just got the other day.  So currently seven tanks with animals in them at the moment!

I got two Lego sets this year - both from the Lego Movie.  I got the Double Decker Couch and SPACESHIP!!  I also made mosaics of the Ingress Enlightened logo in two different sizes (32x32 and 48x48)

I continue to do jigsaws.  I seem to have a never-ending supply of them.  Once they're done I usually give them away.  I still want to have some sort of jigsaw exchange going in Canberra, but I'm allergic to organising people, so good luck with that.  I finished a paint-by-numbers set of a fox earlier in the year, and bought a much larger one which took me months to do, but looks really good.  At the club I finished a longstitch that I'd inherited off Nana *years* ago.  It looks pretty good too but I've not done anything with it, it's just sitting downstairs.  I spent December evenings filing digital photos from the past year into folders by subject.  With a clean slate, it might now be time to start tweaking the folder filing system a bit.  Really the goal is to make it easy to find stuff, and obvious what things are in case I go and cark it.  Although if I go and cark it, noone will care about *any* of my photos .. or mum and dad's .. Speaking of which, I scanned three of mum's photo albums, and so far nearly a thousand of dad's photos this year.  All of my own scanned photos (from my own cameras) are all now digitised, labelled and renamed to include the date, roll and frame number.  I haven't filed those into folders yet though.

Weatherwise, the pool didn't fully freeze over much, but did form some beautiful ice flakes a couple of times.  It snowed once in September.  We've already had some quite hot days this summer, and I'm somewhat worried about the fish over January in this El Niño year.  I'll be doing a bit of fish tank rearranging to try and minimise casualties.

New food/recipies I tried this year included honey mustard chicken, made with actual ingredients, not out of a jar (except the mustard); duck breast fillets which are expensive but yummy; chicken kievs made from scratch, which were nice enough, but lacking the *salt* of the pre-prepared stuff (why does everything that tastes good have to have so much salt and fat???); a failed attempt at a lemon meringue pie, which was still tasty, just very goopy; various recipes trying to use up a kilo of white beans, the best being a cassoulet (salt and fat anyone?); a chocolate cake to celebrate Neil working at the same place for forty years - I haven't baked a cake in years!; a couple of things using wombok out of our garden (well, a planter box, to keep it out of reach of snails); and gingerbread cookies.

Didn't eat out as much this year.  We went to Kinh Do a couple of times.  Tried the degustation menu at Mezzalira which was pretty awesome.  Discovered Italian thick white hot chocolate in a hug mug at Max Brenner.  Finally got back to the Dumpling Inn after it had been closed for like a year.  Had dinner with Stu's dad at The District in Crace which was pretty good.  We tried the Wig & Pen at its new premesis, but it lacked the atmosphere of the old place.  Also tried its offshoot - Bentspoke which was nice enough.

Shows:
* Of Mice and Men

Movies:
* The Imitation Game
* The Theory of Everything
* Citizenfour
* x+y
* Cinderella
* Jurassic World
* Spectre
* Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Books (I really stopped reading because I pretty much never catch the bus anymore, and tend to just play on my phone before bed):
* Conqueror of Darkness by Phyllis Garlick
* Letters to Karen by Charlie W. Shedd
* Pollyanna by Elanor H. Porter
* Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Other stuff:
* Started the new year at the club but weren't very inspired by the whole evening and struggled to stay awake til midnight
* Started doing the FridayQ again for a while. Stopped when I got stumped and never took it back up again :( 
* Spent the summer watching Dad's documentaries while doing jigsaws and the like
* Finally fixed up our wedding photo book and had it reprinted
* Watched all three seasons of Veronica Mars
* Went to Costco for the first time
* Wandered around Mount Stromlo with the sweetie
* Almost quit Candy Crush in February, but took it up again.  Am currently within seven levels of the end (until they move the goalposts)
* Accidentally siphoned a huge amount of water out of the pool. Twice.
* Japanese culture night with Stu's Japanese class, which he has since stopped going to
* Came second in a work trivia night
* Went to the Balloon Fiesta on Canberra Day
* Got Netflix
* Scotch Malt Whisky Society tastings in March and in June
* Watched all three seasons of Rake
* Got Israel trip photos from three years ago online
* Finished scanning all my analogue photos
* Lost our really cool number plate and had to get a new set
* Watched all of Sherlock
* Got frustrated that you can't buy quality denim anymore for ladies' jeans
* Been with the sweetie for ten years!!
* Saw Nick Davies (investigative journalist who exposed the News of the World phone hacking scandal) at the Library
* Went to Whisky Live
* Chris and Zac came to visit in July. Went to the curry festival and went ice skating in Garema Place
* Cleaned out the "winter" hobby room in July, although didn't actually use the room
* Whisky night at work in July
* Cooked a Christmas in July feast the club - including four kilos of pork and two kilos of turkey, which all got eaten
* Watched all the Harry Potter movies
* Played through all the working maps I have for Unreal Tournament
* Celebrated turning 21 again, and recreated a photo taken on my 21st birthday
* Won a work trivia night. Busy planning the next one.
* Started a new blog for my Australian holidays, but haven't added much to it yet
* Saw "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson at the library
* Freecycled a bit of stuff, but still a lot more to go
* The watch I got for graduation died, and Mister Minit in Belconnon could not fix it, even after replacing the movement three times. Still pissed about it.
* Stu bought a battery-operated whipper snipper and a hedge trimmer and spent many evenings attacking the weeds
* Upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1. There's a couple of things I like about the new OS (most especially the logical numbering of the photo directories when you attach the phone to your computer, photo sorting in general, as well as being able to manage attachments in SMSes), but mostly things are uglier and clunkier and it makes my phone chug, especially after unlocking the screen.
* Went to an Ingress First Saturday event
* Saw First Dog on the Moon at the Library
* Did a first aid course. Apparently now I'm qualified.
* Went Go-Karting for a vendor event
* Wore a dress to a wedding
* Hosted family Christmas lunch here
* Hosted a Christmas day lunch here
* Used the holiday break to do some thorough cleaning of the garage and fridge

So there goes 2015.  Have a happy and safe 2016!

A Schnitz outlet opened up earlier in the year.  We avoided it for the first few weeks on account of crazy crowds.  But one day I saw it with not much queue so went and tried it.

I decided to try their very basic chicken schnitzel to start with.  It wasn't too bad.  Maybe a little bland.  And definitely expensive ($9.90).

A few months later when the stars aligned and there wasn't much queue, I tried another one - this time their parmagana chicken schnitzel.  This was even more expensive ($13.90), and messy.  Just look at the mess!  It was also soggy.  I don't think parmagana works on a roll.

The biggest problem with Schnitz (other than it's very high prices for a food court lunch) is that noone knows how to GET THE F@!# OUT OF THE WAY!  Seriously people, once you've ordered, move up to the other end of the counter where you pick up the burger!  The number of times in that few months I simply kept walking past because I couldn't tell if people were actually in the queue, or had ordered and were waiting for pickup.. Even that second time I went, there were a couple in front of me that had ordered but kept hanging around on the fricken *wrong side*.  Idiots!

So yeah lots of idiots, high prices, and so far uninspiring food have put me off the place.  It does still seem popular with other people though, so maybe it'll survive.

Wednesday night we did a big food shop.  And I got some stuff for Friday's BBQ.

Thursday Kit came up for drinks and pizza, and then Chrissie came up with a bag of fish that she'd been carting around for a couple of days.  So I filled a small tank and dumped the fish in that.  The next morning I moved four of the platies and the catfish in with the krib.

Friday morning it was out to Hawker to pick up 160 sausages - this year a full half of them were the chili ones that everyone loves (except me heh).  Also to the mall to pick up bread and salad stuff.  Thought we had *heaps* of money, so spent it on things like Tim Tams and ended up using up the entire budget.  So that worked out well.

And then it was organising transport for all the food and drinks.  So yeah organised and ran a BBQ for fifty people.  It all went really smoothly and I think everyone had a good time.  There were some drinks leftover, a bunch of the chili sausages (which I sent down the coast with Lachie), and some salad stuff (which I brought home but will need to be a bit careful about as it was sitting in the sun (in cold water) for a while).

Yesterday in the morning we went to the markets to pick up some deli meats and other goodies, then back home to make up about four salads - a caesar salad, a potato salad, a waldorf salad and a prosciutto and mango salad.  Annie and Stu came over first and the girls had a swim, then Potty and Kerry as well and we all ate lots of food.  Then there was more swimming.  And generally chillaxing.  A relatively stress-free family Christmas (it helped that I'd lowered my expectations *a lot* this year).  In the evening we watched Star Trek VI and the Carols in the Domain.

Also last night I moved the five danios from the two foot downstairs with the krib.  It's a lot cooler down there, and danios really don't like the heat.  I've left the five danios in the angel tank for now, and have been dumping ice in there as fast as I can make it.  I'd be making more, except our freezer (and fridge) are completely chock-a-block full.  We have enough leftovers from yesterday to last the entire week.  W00t!