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...

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.

Thursday: work drinks, then Amazing Race, not sure why but I'm *still* surprised how loud, tedious and *dumb* Americans are.  Do they not teach you how to tell which way is north in America?

Friday: Watched part of Leon with the sweetie, then Air Crash Investigations and the Bourne Ultimatum.

Saturday: Went to Kingston and Fyshwick with the sweetie and was successful in part of our shopping mission, but not all.  Went hard on the trivia night, got pretty much everything ready except the whole process of getting it into the slide show.  I tried, but I couldn't connect up the work laptop for some reason, and then I couldn't connect to webmail either because I couldn't remember my pin.  So had to abandon that idea.  So I went ahead and finished geotagging all my holiday photos.  Also finished watching Leon with the sweetie.  Quite a good movie, enjoyed it.

Sunday: Cleaned the kitchen and bathroom and started culling holiday photos.  Also went out with EffanC for C's birthday.  Pics soon.  Then back to their place to chill out and chat for the rest of the afternoon.  Quite a lovely afternoon.  Food shopping, then home and then watched Frozen.  Hoping I don't get hungry later, because I really haven't eaten much since lunch time..

Been trying like to crazy to catch up with life, as well as trying to get through some of the stuff I really need to do in the next few weeks.  Not succeeding too well.

Friday we got to see Angry Anderson and he spent an hour telling us about his life and how it changed quite dramatically when his daughter was born.  It was funny and emotional, a really good talk.  He also looks *really good* for a 67 year old!

Yesterday the sweetie was still feeling pretty blah from whatever bug he picked up in Queensland, so we didn't go out to the club.  This was a relief for me as it gave me most of the day to do some cleaning and geotagging of holiday photos.

Had dinner at EffanC's which was nice, although C and Stu weren't too impressed with the episode of You Can't Do That On Television that we put on after dinner.  Me on the other hand was in full nostalgia mode - not having seen the show in something like twenty five years.  Stu also suffered through a game of Bananagram, which I won.

Today I went to the George Harcourt (for the first time ever in fact) for a birthday lunch for Steve.  Then we did our food shopping.

This afternoon was trying to organise stuff for the ball.  

Dinner was lamb.  So much lamb.  Then catching up on rss feeds (I'm *months* behind :( ).

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

Friday night we watched the Bourne Identity.

Saturday I had a fairly productive morning, then we headed out to the club for the afternoon/evening.  Didn't sleep too well - the mattress we have is pretty crap, so kept waking up with a sore spine.

Sunday afternoon we didn't really do much at all.  I did meet the new chickies.

And we did a *lot* of food shopping..

After dinner (of salmon) I went for a walk to hack some portals and make a field (which is surprisingly still there).  It was a very pleasant time of day to be walking, and there were flowers and the scent of jasmine in the air.  Lovely.

Last night we went to bed early, but I just lay there for hours, not getting to sleep til after midnight :(  So then I woke up at 6am *tired*.  Blah.

But still had a relatively productive day, so that was satisfying.

Cooked a very evil chicken with cheese and bacon stuffing for dinner - yumm!

Then after dinner we went for a walk around Palmerville.  We also watched the first episode of The Code, which I kept getting distracted over all the Canberra been-theres.

Friday morning I cooked dinner.

But because I didn't have time to fry down the mushrooms, there was a *lot* of liquid in it.  So it was very watery :(

Still, our dinner guests (EffanC) enjoyed it.

After dinner we watched Rocky Horror and then Frozen.  Yeah same movies as we watched with Marc and Jo the other week!  Silly really.  Stayed up quite late chatting.

In the morning we all went out for breakfast to A Baker.  The celeriac didn't work that well for me, but the whipped feta and bacon were great.

In the afternoon I did some organising of our filing.  Still a long way to go though!  In the evening we watched The Railway Man.  I wasn't in the right mindset to begin with, so found it a little tough going at the beginning, but once I'd settled into it I thought it was pretty good.

Today was more organising of finances.  We went for a walk to hack some portals and then got laughed at by the fairy wrens who wouldn't stay still to be documented.

Weird ..

Then had lunch at Fortune Box (a rather nice dish of pork, duck and more pork, with duck egg) before doing our food shopping.

George came by while we were cooking

This was dinner - a recipe out of my newest Women's Weekly cookbook - harissa roast chicken.  It also included a stuffing of Stu's suggestion, of butter, mushroom, thyme, garlic, lemon zest, sunflower and pumpkin seeds.  

The harissa was a tad burnt, and a tad too spicy for me, and the stuffing didn't really add much.  But the chicken and veggies were certainly yummy.

After dinner we went over to Annie's for a while to say hi and have some dessert.

15-17.8.14

Friday night (after several disasters at their end) Marc and Jo arrived in town for the weekend.  We chatted til quite late.

Saturday morning we went into town for some breakfast at Mocan and Green Grout.

And we also had got some tapioca and persimon.  The tapioca was nice but the persimon was a little tough.

I took a *lot* of photos of this dog trying to get one of him with his tongue out.  I got a few.

There was also a honeyeater that needed documenting

Then we went down to the lake to document more birds

Then we went for a drive up Mt Ainslie

There were more birds :)

Marc and Jo went off to visit some other friends so we came home and chilled out, then went and did some food shopping.

We cooked up a *lot* of mushrooms (and had some leftover cause we bought too many) for Marc's strog

It was delicious!!

We put on Frozen after dinner while we chatted, then Rocky Horror.

In the morning Marc and I cooked up a storm for breakfast while various spouses dozed.  Bacon, eggs, hash browns, onions and mushrooms - yumm!

Then chillaxed and didn't do anything exciting.  They left later in the afternoon on Sunday.

Last weekend was quite busy in terms of socialising.

As mentioned previously, the Friday night we had Gaelian and Stef over.

Late Saturday afternoon we went over to Potty's to try and clean up his computer that was full of malware the kids had installed.

Then we headed over to Mishi's for a games night.  Much chatting and eating and bit of game playing.  We played DC's logo game again which was fun, then started on Trivial Pursuit but gave up after Damien and Amanda got two pieces of pie, as the questions were quite hard and it was very slow going.

Sunday was lunch at Josh and Ally's with Andrea and GP.  Ally had cooked up some delicious food including a cassoulet!

I might have also helped the small person build one of her Lego sets.

We stayed all afternoon which was nice.

Then we came home and we watched Frozen that I'd borrowed off Miss M.

For most of Saturday afternoon I went through our receipts.  Mine went back to 2001, Stu's back to about 2008.  I'd pretty much kept every receipt of mine *ever*.  I always kept meaning to reconcile them with credit card statements, but that hasn't happened in years.  And I had great visions of entering groceries into some sort of database to watch how prices changed over time.  Yah right.

But I've been applying a rule to stuff like that - if noone would care about it after I died, then there's really no point keeping it.

Honestly, who's going to care how much I spent on groceries after I'm gone?

So this is the pile of receipts I'm chucking out.

I did keep some things.  A few sentimental ones, like Infinity on the Gold Coast where I went with Stu on our one and only date.  And receipts for dvds and cds, and appliances and the like that we still own.  Fourteen years of receipts down to this.

There was a bit of nostalgia in some of them, especially for the older stuff.  And some fun things like VHS tapes, which I was still buying as recently as 2005.  Zooper Doopers! I found a receipt for some of those from 2005, which means I've had some ice blocks in my freezer for about nine years... *gulp* .. maybe I should eat them this summer!  And at my old work, plenty of ATM withdrawals and Post Office receipts from my ebay packing in 2003-2004 that reminded me of places I haven't thought about in seven years.  Receipts from places like Rosehill, where I used to visit Striker for Evilhouse video nights.  Petrol receipts from places on the way to/from CIA visits and visits to Stu.  BigW receipts of DVD purchases when I first got a DVD player.  I used to go there whenever I needed to go shopping for groceries and have a look for weekly specials.  I used to get all my meat from Sonny's Butcher at Rockdale Plaza, and all my fruit and veg from Mile's Fresh Food Market, which I can't even remember whereabouts in the plaza that is now.  Booze came from Woolworth's Liquour, and the rest of my groceries from Franklins.

So much of my life history in little bits of paper.

So much of my life forgotten because it seemed too inane to blog about.

I wish I'd started blogging a lot earlier than 2003...!!

Thoroughly demoralising week at work.  Still got issues with the app that went out last week.  Painful.

Thursday night a small group of us went out to 2 Yummy again - two weeks in a row!

Friday after work the sweetie and I had a drink at Capitol Bar and Grill.  I'd been there before when it was still just the Rydges hotel, but it's gone all funky now.

Then we went and fed Potty's fish and picked up some frozen stuff on the way home to cook for dinner.  Watched Downfall with the sweetie which was pretty good.

Saturday morning said goodbye to our old dishwasher and the new one got delivered and installed.  After lunch we bought the sweetie a new car.  Then did our food shopping and came home.

I made a white chocolate caramel slice out of my Women's Weekly "squares and slices" book.  Had some of that after dinner, was pretty yummy.

I also cooked some duck breasts with roasted veggies for dinner.  I've never cooked duck breasts before.  They turned out pretty well!

Watched 12 Monkeys with the sweetie, and then a doco on Queen.

This morning I cooked an imitation breakfast raclette, cleaned the kitchen, downloaded and blogged some photos, and put dinner on to cook a bit after 1pm.

So a very foodie weekend that's for sure.

But the sun is out.  I know we should really get out and get some exercise and some vitamin D ....