Pretty quiet/boring weekend for us.  Although I was super busy doing house stuff - mostly the pool and fish tank stuff, a bit of housework, some cooking (a beef stew), food shopping, walking with Chris and also with the sweetie, and drinks with Kit and Ben.  In fact I was so busy doing the house stuff I barely had time for anything else, including photo processing (only managed three days worth over the weekend).

And is America *ever* going to toughen its gun laws or what?  Seriously.

So I got home at midnight on Friday night and slept til about 8am.

Saturday we went out to the club for a committee meeting, so I downloaded the last of the photos and wrote up the last day's blog entry.  Had a late lunch in Bungendore so didn't get home til after 3pm.  Cooked a roast chicken dinner and watched some Homeland and Inside Out.  I was expecting Inside Out to be a lot darker and more depressing than it was so was pleasantly surprised.  Then had an early night.

Of course I woke up at 2am and couldn't get back to sleep.  For four hours.  And then it was broken sleep.  Woke up around 9am but my spine wouldn't let me get back to sleep so got up around 10am and was a zombie for the rest of the day.  Really didn't get anything done at all.  Although we did go out and do our food shopping.

Went down to Kit and Ben's after dinner for some wine, which made me sufficiently sleepie and managed a pretty good night's sleep last night.

Now for the fun part.. going back to work..

Super super busy couple of days.  Couple of weeks actually.  No really couple of months.

Blerf.

Tonight it was get home, cook up some food, watch the pilot of Homeland, and suddenly it's 10pm.  What the???

Can someone please stop the world, I need to get off.

Weekend was a bit of a blur.  Friday Kit was celebrating finishing exams, so we helped.  Finally met Grant's wife Louise which was lovely.  

Saturday I did housey stuff and jigsaw etc.  Chrissie came up for a swim in the afternoon and brought up a corned beef which we stewed for a couple of hours, and we made some mashed potatoes and white sauce to go with it.

Today was mostly jigsawing etc, with our first trip to Ikea to get some bits and pieces, then food shopping.  Cooked epic low-carb lasagna for dinner (replacing pasta with sliced squash) - although it ended up mostly just smooshy nommness.

Noone wants to go back to work tomorrow.

Lately I seem to be feeling a constant low level stress/depression (that regularly flares up to much stronger versions).  Work is certainly not helping.  The heat over the last couple of weeks.  Lack of sleep.  Body cycles that should be four weeks being only three.  Food.  Blood pressure.  Missing jigsaw piece from a new and expensive jigsaw.  Bank fees.  Housework.  Vacuuming.  Trivia nights to prepare for.  A computer that hasn't installed updates since a cancelled upgrade to Windows 10 last year (other than Security Essentials updates) and doesn't seem to have the ability to either.  iPhone batteries that don't last the day.  Clutter.  Dust.  Holiday finances.  Weight.  Deteriorating eyesight.

Yup.

There just doesn't seem to be enough *time* in the world.  Last night was cool off in the pool, cook and eat dinner while watching House, a walk with Chris and just a little bit of time on the jigsaw.  And then it's bed time.  I didn't get any computer time.  I still haven't even *seen* most of my last holiday photos, let alone geotag them.  Tonight was better, but had to fight with my computer for too long after it started spazzing out.  Got a bit of trivia night stuff done at least.  A whole half hour.  Yay.

So what else happened.

Saturday night we picked up EffanC and went to Scott's place.  We were very late getting there.  It would have been a nice night, except I was overheating and the music was turned up to a level that killed my enthusiam to talk loudly over it.  Ended up being quite late home too.  At least we had a very nice salad for dinner that C made (and lots of yummy cheese!).  Had a swim when we got home to cool off.

Sunday I was pretty tired on account of not getting enough sleep.  Didn't get a whole lot done.  The heat was too miserable-making.  Did manage to do food shopping.  Kit came over briefly to dip her feet in the pool.  Had salmon and salad for dinner.

But last night I couldn't get to sleep *forever* - too damned hot, even with the fan going at full speed.  Dear summer, it's the middle of February, feel free to bugger off and bother someone else.  Felt like a complete zombie today and all the stoopid got to me and made me grumpy.  Also panicking slightly about my firewall project and getting it done in time.  Even our resident expert is not sure what is going on.  We did make one of them work nicely today though, so just need to figure out what *that* means.

Tonight cooked up a bunch of stuff for dinners/lunches during the week.

Saturday morning I gave away the fridge from the caravan that never worked on 240V.  One less piece of clutter in the house!

Then we headed out to the club.  I chatted to Chris and helped de-nail fence palings in the morning, and helped with the working bee (more de-nailing of fence palings) in the afternoon.

Came home and were all set for a quiet night in, started watching Back to the Future, then Kit invited us down.  Serena had brought Jenga Quake.  Which was my third variation of Jenga this week.  At work they have an original set.  At the club there's a much bigger set.  Quake has plastic bricks which have less friction so are a little easier to pull out.  But we didn't use the quake platform cause that's just silly.  Stayed up a bit too late annoying the neighbours by singing along to seventies music.

Today I barely did anything on the todo list.  Best I could manage was to clean the kitchen.  Did our food shopping, cooked/ate dinner, went for walkies with Chrissie then finished watching Back to the Future.

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.  

So last night we were all set to just have a quiet night at home with just the two of us.  I set out a spread of snack food that was to be our dinner/evening snacks and we sat down to watch an episode of House.

Then Kit messaged us.  Did we want to come down.

Heh.

So we went down, and then she invited Camilla and David over, and we were chatting for a while then invited Grant down as well.  And later on Chris and Zac came up.  So it was a lovely little neighbourhood party :)

Watched the fireworks at midnight, and stayed up chatting (well some of us did heh) for quite a while.

Today was fairly quiet.  Hid in the house from the sun most of the day, only going out to feed Annie's cat.  Did a bit of holiday planning, but not much house tidying. 

Had a salad for lunch which was offset by the sweetie wanting pizza for dinner.  Whoops.  So much for a healthy start to the year...

I'm missing one of the four baby angels, and another one is looking very sick.  Super sad-making :(

But did you know potato flowers are quite pretty?

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!