So I've had a great Christmas break so far.  Mostly.

Christmas day was a fairly lazy start after staying up a little too late with Kit on Christmas Eve (I forced them to watch the carols hehe and then we half watched Frozen, oops).  Didn't get to Potty's til a bit later than I wanted to, which meant the pork didn't get on til a bit late, which meant it was going to be a late lunch.  But we brought heaps of nibbles so ordinarily that would have been fine.  But just as we were sitting down to eat lunch everything happened at once.  While serving ourselves lunch Annie and the family turned up (it was 2pm and they were meant to arrive after lunch, but lunch was late hrmm), and miss V took that as her cue to open her presents.  Next year I'm not putting labels on presents.  That'll learn em.  Anyway, so instead of a nice relaxing Christmas lunch it was all super rushed and stressful.  Grunt.  The rest of the afternoon was a bit better though.

George really didn't like his Christmas collar and was so depressed he almost got run over because he wouldn't get out of the way when we came home.

Friday morning I got stuck into my holiday break.  Friday and Saturday I had really productive days, getting stuff done around the house, as well as some sorting out of *stuff* and sorting my photos and lots of sorting of Dad's photos.  

Annie got me this for Christmas - super cute, goes with the little Neuschwanstein Castle she got me last year.

Cherries at Damien's

Sunday morning was more of dad's photo sorting, then we went over to Damien's for a Thermomix feast lunch.  Not a demo as such (he wasn't trying to sell us one), just a fun little banquet of dishes from it.

First he made up some pizza dough.

Then he made a very nice dip of cream cheese, garlic, green onions and parsely.

Then a leek and potato soup

The leftovers of the soup made the base for a sauce that went with this steamed chicken and vegetables

And here's that pizza

And finally a sorbet to finish

So quite a feast in the end!

Afterwards we played a round of the Logo Game, which I won, then came home and did more photo sorting.

Monday and today was primarily photo sorting and a bit of house stuff.  And shaking my head over dad's "system" of backups.  So much waste.

Here's the "before" pile.  The offsite backups, the archives, the working copies, backups of mum's photos, unsorted cds, copies of other people's photos, and an entire large spindle of unfiled duplicates.

And this is everything I'm chucking out.  Over four hundred cds :(  Such a waste.  They would never even have been used either.  He would have just burnt them, filed them, and that was the end of that.  And I swear about fifty of those cds were from their Gulf Savannah trip in 2007.  Sooo many copies of everything.  Sigh.

Last night we went to EffanC's for dinner, and after dinner we watched Labyrinth on the big screen (aka their lounge room wall).  It was super awesome.

So I've gotten a lot done this break, although not nearly as much as I wanted to.  There's still so many things on the todo list.  Life is too short.  Holidays are too short.  Sigh.

So got home from Mum's in time for dinner Tuesday night.

Wednesday night we went to Beijing House at Hawker shops with EffanC.  We got some dumplings, but after being spoilt by dumplings at Din Tai Fung in Taipei and Sydney, these were chunky and dry and boring.  Not terrible, just not great either.  The service was pretty bad though that night, it took them *forever* to bring out our entrees, then the mains came out straight away.  And they misheard one of our orders, which fortunately they didn't have, so we didn't end up with a dish we didn't want.  And in the end it was probably a good thing as we were totally full anyway.  Did a big food shop, then went back to their place for a nightcap on the way home.

Thursday I had a quiet night organising freecycle crap.

Friday was our floor party that I organised.  Thirty seven people (minus a couple that didn't show up).  Ate and drank just about everything and I think they day went pretty well.  

Came home and put flocculent in the pool, then watched Air Crash Investigations and Die Hard (I think our disk is faulty - it dies at a spot in the middle, and I think I remember having the same problem last time we watched it.

Today I was up early and emptied the car from the final trip to Sydney.  Organised all the freecycle crap that's here for people to collect.

Half way through the day and already have done lots of organising, two loads of washing, made up the spare room bed, and tidied two rooms.

Still a long way to go though to get the house looking presentable...

I left home today for the last time ever.  The family home.  Mum had lived there for forty two years.  I lived there for twenty six and a half years.

Sadness.

Although was too busy to feel much sadness during the process of removal, but did have a sad walk through at the end.

The end of an era.  The family home that noone else has lived in.  Now sold and to be rented out.

Yah.

But David and I did amuse ourselves by poking fun at mum .. "you've never moved have you?" .. because really she hadn't - not with a whole house of furniture and *stuff*.  Little things like rubbish bags and cleaning equipment she kept wanting to pack and send away and we're like, no you need to save those because you *will* need them.  heh.

Final council cleanup of everything left over

She got the dining table and chairs restored and reupholstered to match the new lounge.  It actually looks really good.

This is the sofa bed part of the new lounge

The china cabinet we built the other night, now filled up

So got mum moved in at the other end, and stayed til about 3pm unpacking boxes with Aunty Di.  Then I came home.  I never want to leave the house again.

Then I got depressed again at deadbeat ebayers who *still* haven't made any sort of contact with me.  I hate people.

I did finish decorating the Christmas tree though which made me feel a bit better.  It sparkles.

But the most recent one: people that buy stuff on ebay that don't bother to contact you after a week, even after repeated emails to them.  Or people that buy stuff on ebay, keep saying they'll be there "tomorrow" and then never turn up.

Hate.

In other news.

I've been having more Christmas parties - a big work one that went late and was a lot of fun.

Then instead of a nice relaxing weekend, I had to deal with aforementioned sucky people, as well as lots of other people trying to coordinate pickups remotely at mum's.  And this was down at the coast, without a computer, and I didn't have my ebay password and it was all a super huge stress.  Really really didn't want to have to go away that weekend, but it was S&K's combined 40th and we've been terrible relatives this year so thought we'd better go.  So had to go via the club, then headed down.  Stayed at Dave's house (thanks Dave!) but just did some jigsaw while Stu collapsed, then we watched some Veronica Mars and had pizza for dinner.  Didn't even bother with the spa.  Next morning was the party, although it didn't really get going til we had to leave.  Left there and headed straight to Sydney (we had to take two cars down the coast).  Sigh.  

Got to Sydney and didn't even get to dump my stuff - had to go straight to the new place to meet the uncles etc, then we went out for dinner which was quite nice.

Home, dealing with annoying ebay people, collapse.  Didn't get to sleep til like 1am though :(

And then there was chaos in the city today which made things .. interesting ..

Today alternated between crazy busy and waiting for people to do things.

Tonight we freecycled the old amp and speakers (the dude was a bit dubious about the speakers) then had lamb roast for dinner.  Then out to Mum's new flat (she got her keys today) to drop off the tv cabinet, china cabinet and mirror.  We built the china cabinet (mostly, need a hammer to finish it off) and suddenly it's like 9pm.  Grunt.  So came home to sort through freecycle and ebay emails (the freezer sold for $200, the tallboy $5.50, go figure) and realised I haven't done any of the sorting I wanted to do downstairs.  Sigh.

Too tired for this crap (even though I got a really good night's sleep last night).

Not that bad really in the grand scheme of things ;)

This was my "travelling tech" for our last trip, as well as other travel bits and pieces:

Friday was first big Christmas party.  Had dinner at Sanur's afterwards, followed by tv at Justin C's (Snog, Marry, Avoid and The Hobbit).

Saturday we did food shopping for the club Christmas party, which we catered the mains for.  We did lamb, pork and turkey roasts, with roast veggies, a potato bake, and frozen carrots and peas/corn/beans.  Pretty sure everything turned out ok (certainly it got demolished in short order).  We've never cooked for so many people, so that was all a bit scary.  And we realised the oven isn't as big as we thought it was.

Lamb, turkey and pork roasts

Veggie roast, roast veggies, baby carrots, a huge potato bake

Today I came up to Sydney.  Kept Mum on track as she went through all the kitchen cupboards pulling out stuff she doesn't want.  Documented it all and got it all up on freecycle (take stuff please!!).

Also, I really hate Sydney humidity.  Give me Canberra climate any day. 

Oh, also, idiots should be shot to put the rest of the world out of its misery.  I was getting petrol at the BP at Marulan today.  This service station has heaps of room between the bowsers, so you can easily pull into the front slot if it's free, and the person in the back slot can easily get around them afterwards.  I love service stations like this, they rock, and make for much more efficient use of the pumps.  But this butthead pulled in behind me while I was in paying, he didn't take the front slot.  He just was there waiting behind me.  And I'm like - take the front slot you idiot.  But he didn't.  He just sat there getting angry.  In fact I hadn't even sorted myself out when he beeped me to get going.  Like how stupid can a person be?  I was tempted to just sit there and take even longer.  Because if you're too stupid to use the pumps properly, then you deserve all the pain you get.  I hate stupid people.

So there's been trivia nights (that I ran), balls (that I had to organise/prepare for), work, holidays to plan, holidays to sort photos for, and two trips to Sydney for good measure.  We've Freecycled *heaps* of stuff, and I've brought two carloads of stuff back to Canberra for people that wanted things here.  I've barely been at home the past two months.  Ingress and exercise suffered most.  And my flex time - been in the red for a month and struggling to stay afloat.  I have a tonne of pics I want to upload.  One day...  

Here's one though, a spiny-leaf stick insect.. soo cute!

I talked to the little brother last night.  And I thought *I* was stressed about everything.  Not only does he have mum's house to worry about getting stuff out of, but a close friend of his has decided to sell his house as well.  Note this friend keeps an entire railway museum in his house, and so it's in a much worse state of clutter than this place.  And David can't get away from work to be able to actually spend any time here so he's not in a good way.

Meanwhile I'm just depressed about the whole thing.  I was counting on having many more months to take my time to try and find new owners for things rather than seeing the whole lot just thrown out, but that idea has gone out the window.  

Mum on the other hand is all excited about moving to a new place and wants to sell this house as soon as possible and throw everything out and just go.

So she's happy, but we're in a mess.

Anyway, I've put up photos of everything we've documented so far - http://kazza.cia.com.au/freecycle-como/ and there is much more to come.  I've only had two responses on Freecycle, but at least they're going to take a couple of things..

Please pass this around and help me clear this place out by taking things (I can bring smaller stuff back to Canberra, but if you know people in Sydney please pass this on!)

Also, public transport sux..  (well people suck really)..

Had a cleaning day today.  People will keep making mess, so I'll spend my life cleaning up after them .. hrmmm

Tony and Kiera convinced me to talk home with them.  Oops.  Did get a few new portals though.

Tonight I mostly geotagged photos (I've basically finished the Canon shots from the group tour).  But after you hit save on a day, you have about five to ten minutes where you can't do any more, so I used that time to work through some things on my todo list (mostly house cleaning type stuff heh).  If I can achieve as much as I did tonight *every* night then maybe I'll actually get everything done that I need to ...

Tuesday is disaster porn night.  An episode of Air Crash Investigations I'd seen, and one I hadn't.

Put the time to good use, finishing off a jigsaw I started earlier in the year but never finished because it's too cold downstairs in winter.  And I also started to tidy up a little downstairs (didn't make much progress, but every little bit helps, right?).

Much of today was spent prepping for some work I want to do on Friday.  Who knew removing firewall rules was so much more work than creating them!?  Mind you, if other people were as good at their doco as we were, it'd be a *lot* easier. *sigh*