Crazy weather today.  It was fine this morning.  At lunch time it was still fine, but the ground was all wet.  After work it was raining, but by the time we got home it there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the moon was out.  And then it started raining again.

Tonight by the time we'd gotten home, done my washing, had dinner, watched the obligatory episode of Voyager, then Survivor, scraped some grout in the bathroom and finished labelling the first day of photos of our last trip, it's suddenly 10pm.

And my eyes are tired.

I hate Mondays.

Friday night we got pizza to celebrate the sweetie's birthday and watched the new Total Recall.  Putting aside the ridiculous issue of a transport system that can traverse the earth's core in 17 minutes, it was basically just a massive CGI fest that had a lot of nods to the original but never quite achieved the same level of awesomeness.  I liked the "two weeks" scene, that was pretty funny.  Otherwise it was pretty average.

Saturday morning hurty kept me awake for an hour or so in the early morning so had a lazy start.  Other than cleaning, we went to Bunnings to get a grout saw and more grout, and the markets to top up our food supplies.  In the afternoon I had a couple of goes at scraping grout, but it's pretty tedious.  

Saturday evening were all set for a quiet night of watching videos, but then Serena invited herself over, then Kit came up, and Pete came over as well.  So went and bought some cheese and crackers and cooked some sausages and had a mini party.

Today I did more grout scraping in little bursts.  I also started actually labelling holiday photos.  Maybe I'll get all my photos labelled before I cark it..  hmm yeah right!

Tonight the sweetie cooked pork larb for dinner, and we watched Voyager (we're over half way through season five), and Survivor.  Also it seems that Chromecast will keep on casting, even when everything it's attached to is off.  Hurrah.  It had been going all night and all day, and we didn't notice til we went to play Voyager.  Whoops.

The weather was a bit crazy today.  At one point it was actually quite a bit warmer outside than in, so opened up the house for a while.

Friday night we watched Arrival.  Stu enjoyed it but I found it rather .. boring .. People on IMDB either loved it or hated it, there was no middle ground.  

Saturday first thing we headed out to the club.  I did some jigsaw while the committee meeting was on, then there was a bbq lunch, then the AGM.  So by the time we got home it was dinner time and *blip* there goes half my weekend.  Went down to Kit's after dinner for a couple of drinks and caught up with Katie before she disappeared off to Queensland to live.

Sunday was just house and computer stuff in the morning, food shopping and lunch, then cooking and cleaning.  Cath came over for dinner (epic roast pork) which was lovely.  (and it hailed and later *snowed* on Sunday!!)

Monday morning I was stressed at the state of the house and the state of All The Things going on and literally thought "I don't have time to go to work".  Seriously I can't cope at the moment.  I'm just not getting enough time at home to get everything done.  Self inflicted though.  We keep socialising.  cf next paragraph.

Monday night we were going to meet Damien at the Pot Belly for drinks, but turns out it's not open on Mondays.  So we ended up at the Labor Club instead.  Was good catching up, but it meant all I managed to do all evening was run the dishwasher and do my clothes washing.

Last night I was awake in the middle of the night stressing about everything (mostly about the flat in Sydney as well as our bathroom) so I was a zombie today.  I did sneak out to go to Chrissie's ultrasound which was pretty cool though.

Tonight Pete had a bit of a look at our shower as well and thought that no we probably aren't going to need to rip out the shower just yet (when were chatting on Saturday night he was thinking that we might have to).  Especially if there's no evidence of leaking after regrouting and sealing.  So that was a bit of a relief.  But by then it was already nearly seven o'clock, and I still had to get through Sunday's Survivor and eat dinner, download all my photos, backup my phone and backup my computer.  But our domain controller died overnight so I couldn't get onto the NAS to back it up.  So that was all a drama and everyone ended up grumpy.  I cleaned the kitchen while Stu tried to get a monitor plugged in to see what was up.  It eventually came back by itself, looks like it had some bad blocks, and was probably running a checkdisk which is why it took so long. 

And now it's 9:50 and I'm completely wasted.  Stop the world, I want to get off.

In 2002 there was a partial solar eclipse in Sydney (it was a total eclipse in South Australia, and guy from work made the trek out to see it there).  I only had my Olympus point and shoot digital camera at the time, and no filters.  So I wasn't expecting to get any decent photos of it.  But as it happened there were bushfires around Sydney that day, and smoke from one of them obscured the sun enough to let me see and get photos.  

I did consider trekking to the US to see the total eclipse in a couple of weeks.. but it wasn't exactly practical heh.

Thursday night we went down to Kit's to play Cards Against Humanity which was a bit of fun.

Friday night Neil and I went along to Roz's 60th at the Abbey.  It was quite a nice night, although she asked me to be photographer which I wasn't super happy about - I like taking photos for myself, but doing it officially for someone else is way too stressful!

Saturday morning after waiting for the sweetie to get up and do some stuff for work, it was suddenly a lot later that I wanted it to be.  We went out to do food shopping for the evening - where we cooked a roast dinner for forty people at the club!!  Four kilos of pork, two kilos of turkey, a big potato bake, roast veggies, brussel sprouts with bacon, grilled zucchini, minted peas, and carrots, with my own apple sauce, and gravy using all of the pork drippings :)  It was pretty epic, but for forty people it was *just* enough food.  Still, everyone seemed happy, even though the turkey was a little dry on top because I forgot to put foil over it for the first part. 

We didn't get home til lunch time today.  I was a bit tired this afternoon so didn't get a whole lot done.  I did finally finish watching through Monty Python series four, so I've now half watched all of it, although it really is rather silly.

Tonight we just watched Voyager, and the new Ghost in the Shell, which I could actually follow, on account of it being dumbed down for American audiences, and me.

And just like that the weekend is over.  Sad times.

Back in the day, when I used to read more news feeds, one of them (can't remember which) often used to print snippets taken from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader books.  So when this one came out I got it as a birthday present for someone, promptly borrowed it, and had it sitting in my room for years.  Finally got through it last night (helps going to bed a bit early so you have time to read for a bit).  Lots of interesting factoids.  I should probably have written some of them down for our next trivia night ;)  But I did take photos of a couple of the pages for use in our next trivia night :)

I've spent the past few weeks working on a new blog - a blog about the Queen Mary 2.  I posted nearly all the photos I took of the ship herself, separating them out into the different areas of the ship.  It's a bit more mobile friendly than my main blogs (which I really need to convert, but only after a lot of testing and a well documented procedure).  Stu reckons I should put Google ads on it, but apart from them being a pain, they'd also lower the tone of the whole site heh.

Anyways, here it is: Kazza's Queen Mary 2 Blog.  Please have a look and let me know if you find any issues.

Way way back in 2004 I played with a photo-mosaicing application called Mazaika.  Back then I only had about 11000 photos.

But in the past week or two I've been doing a photomosaic jigsaw of Kit's, and it's rekindled my interest in photomosaics.

I had a look on the weekend for apps to try, and gave IMosaic a go.  It's quite old - no new releases since 2006, it's pretty slow, and it squishes vertical photos down to landscape mode, but it is free and does have the ability to index different directories independently, rather than as one massive index.  

So I indexed all my last holiday photos (6687 photos), and used them to create a photomosaic of the Queen Mary 2 (image from Wikpedia).

Here's some closeups of some areas

Fun times!!

As always, I have a backlog of photos to post.  Here's a couple from earlier in the year.

It's been an absolutely glorious weekend.  Except I've spent most of it inside sorting holiday photos :/

We did go for a walk together on Saturday.  And go to Bunnings.  And ran into Kit there.  On Saturday night Annie and the family came over for pizza for dinner and Stu showed them some holiday photos from his phone on the tv.

Sunday Stu gardened for a couple of hours while I did holiday photos.  I cooked pork medallion roast for dinner, and it was possibly one of the best pork roasts I've ever done.  Every bit of the crackling was perfect, and the meat was lovely too.  Also cooked a whole heap of veggies.  In the evening we had to watch something Russian-inspired, so we watched The Hunt for Red October.

Today I woke up at 4am with a sore spine, took ages to get back to sleep and ended up sleeping in fairly late.  Stu gardened while I did holiday photos.  Felt like I was wasting the weekend away indoors.  Around lunch time we went to Officeworks to pickup a HDMI cable, had Hungry Cracks for lunch and instantly regretted it, then had a wander around John Knight Park.  And ran into Kit there.  Seriously it's like we're stalking each other heh.  At least I got a bit of vitamin D.

When we got home Stu had a voicemail that Telstra had fixed our line.  The stats on the router aren't much improved, but download speeds and latency sure are a lot better.  We'll see how it goes..