Completely crazy week at work.  At least it was a short week.

I've finally finished filing and sorting the holiday photos.  And by that I mean changing exif data and renaming files that had the wrong times for whatever reason.  And fighting with the iphone which for some reason on one of the days decided to make the file names an hour different to the actual times taken.  No idea what that was about.  And filing the videos and correcting their times as well.  I swear, holidays should only ever be in one timezone.  Or I need better records of when I take photos so I can line everything up again later.

Thursday night I went with Kit to a party at Heather's (or one of Heather's friends).  It was fun but I was like twice the age of some of the people there.  So it was a little strange.  I felt old!  Unfortunately it was a pretty late night, and of course I woke up at 6am didn't I, so was tired all day yesterday.

We did get out for a walk to Palmerville.

We were watching M*A*S*H over dinner when the little brother called.  What was the name of your ship he asks.  Queen Mary 2 I says.  Watch channel 7 (6) at 8:30 he says.  So we put on Fantasia 2000 at 7:00 and then at 8:30 watched a special on the Queen Mary 2, filmed on a transatlantic crossing not long after she was built.  It was pretty awesome.  Thanks David!

Slept a lot better last night.  Will tackle the todo list today.

So after yesterday's pretty average day, we watched a free-to-air Air Crash Investigations and then we thought we'd watch a movie.

That was a very silly idea.

Our internet is so bad that Netflix is pretty much out of the question.

The DVD part of our PS3 died years ago so we couldn't watch a dvd on that.

My DVD recorder has recently been dropping out the video and it's been getting worse, dropping out all the time and making movies pretty much unwatchable.

So I dug out my old Toshiba DVD player from under the house but then I was looking at the back of the recorder and all the fricken outputs have cables hanging out.  So I couldn't even easily tell which outputs it was using to swap them to the other player.  So I went and lost it for a while.

Came back a while later and traced through some of the spaghetti.  There's standard video/audio out going into the tv, although I don't think we've been using that.  But I plugged those into my dvd player and set the tv to av mode and up it came.   W00t.  So we put Enemy at the Gates on, which I'd seen a long time ago, but could only remember the beginning, and Stu had never seen it.

Half an hour later it degraded so badly that we couldn't watch it.  I thought it was the dvd, but (after battling for ages to get it to even play) it played through that part of the disk on my computer.  I tried to get a little wifi dongle working in my computer so that I could Chromecast it, but it wouldn't work.

So I went to bed.

Sigh.

Got to sleep ok but woke up when Stu came to bed and stayed awake for ages.  And hurty kept me awake for a while too.

So I was still super grumpy today.

So I went into work to use the internet to geotag all my holiday photos.  About the only success I had all weekend.

Mostly did a jigsaw in the afternoon.  It rained, it even hailed, so didn't do any washing.

Around dinner time (Stu was still cooking and cleaning, bestest sweetie ever), I went down to Kit's to meet the new Ben, and after a glass of wine and a bit of socialising with Kit felt a lot better.  I was telling her the sad story of the dvd player, and she pulled an old one out of her cupboard and said, here you go, try that.  So we did.  And it did actually work for the most part, although it did have similar problems with audio and video a couple of times while we were watching it.  So it was a very frustrating experience.  But we did finally finish watching the movie.

I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

We've had a pretty quiet week.  We did go down to Kit's for a little while last night though which was nice.

This morning we got up relatively early .. scratch that.. Stu got up relatively early .. I'd been awake since 5:30am on account of having a sore spine from our dumb mattress.  Anyway.  Got ready and went to the farmers markets.  I actually find the farmer's markets somewhat stressful - too many crowds and too many transactions to get stuff from multiple vendors.  We had pies before we started, which were stressful in themselves due to having nowhere comfortable to sit to eat them.

Did a load of linen washing, fixed the hinge in the laundry door (the pin had almost worked its way out), and fought with our network for ages.  I still can't get the NAS working on the Cisco switch (which turns out to be unmanaged, so can't see any sort of logs), and one of the network cameras (which I swear was working this morning) is also being a poo.

Went to Coles in the afternoon and remembered why I hate it so much - there's still no trolley bays in much of the car park, so you have to walk your trolley all the way back into the shopping centre to get your money back.  Fills me with so much rage.

Got invited over to EffanC's, but we're still potentially contagious, so decided not to go.

Have been resizing holiday photos, but geotagging is super painful due to our super awful internet right now.  Our SNR Margin is 15.  Our loop attenuation is 66.  According to Draytek our internet shouldn't work at all....

You know how Stu came down with gastro the morning after we got home?  Well try as we might to avoid passing the germs on, I still managed to get it.  First sign was before lunch yesterday, so decided to come home.  Was actually fine for the afternoon, and worked from home, albeit very slowly with our terrible internet.  Was unwell last night but at least I wasn't sick (I think I got a milder case).  Decided to work from home again today (again, with super slow internet).

I've geotagged two days worth of photos, and selected highlights from day 1.

In case anyone missed me.. I've been cruising the East China Sea .. (see link in Holiday Blogs section).

So we got back on Sunday morning (thanks to Chrissie for picking us up from the airport!!).  While we were away they'd had problems one night with the alarm (went off for no good reason, and they couldn't find a spider).  There was also a problem with the back door not locking properly - the door has warped a little, possibly from all the humidity from the evaporative cooling, and so can't be locked unless you push the lock up quite hard.

Also, the internet was dead.  Something to deal with later.

Went to pick up something for lunch and for dinner.

After lunch I slept for about two hours, the sweetie most of the afternoon.  

I had a go at fixing the internet.  Rebooting the router didn't help.  Nor did rebooting the wifi (not that I thought that would do anything, on account of my pc is wired, and it wasn't even getting an IP address).  So I kicked the switch.  And everything came back.

Mostly.

My computer got an IP address and got back on the network.  But the NAS never came back.  Rebooted it.  Cold rebooted it.  Nothing.

We've had no end of trouble with all the Cisco gear we bought a few years back.  The 887 router just couldn't deal with our crappy phone line and would drop out and not come back til it was rebooted.  The WAP was pathetic and also kept dropping out.  We replaced both of them.  Now the switch has crapped out.  Anyone have any gigabit switches going begging?

Cooked sausages for dinner and we had a very early night.

And then woke up at 4:30 to the sweetie having a massive diarrhoea attack.  He was sick all day the poor thing.  I'm guessing a gastro virus picked up at the airport or on the plane.  So now it's the ticking time bomb of will I get it too..

Tonight I cooked myself dinner and gave the sweetie rice crackers for dinner.

And then fought with the NAS some more.  The thing has two network cables, but neither were giving a link light.  Given that the switch had spazzed out, I tried plugging them into a small 100mb switch we had lying around.  Sure enough, got link lights and the thing just started working!  So now I'm copying photos off the laptop at 100Mb/s (well actually about 9MB/s).  I really need to console onto the switch and find out what's up with it.

And we also really need to get our internet fixed.  Last night it was practically unusable.  It was a lot better earlier this evening, but has gone back to being almost unusable.  *sigh*

I never seem to have a shortage of Kit's animal photos..

These were the chickens all waiting for breakfast a few weeks ago..

Petal with her nails done..

About six weeks ago, Kit's friend gave her a bunny that was supposedly sexed by a vet as a girl.  So Kit thought she'd see how they'd go keeping it together with her girl bunny. 

Except Bonnie was a boy.

Whoops.

They'd been together maybe an hour before they made babies.  They were born last week and are epic cute!  This is them a day and a half old, after having survived the 40C day last Friday.

While mum was here over Christmas, we didn't spend a whole lot of time with her, on account of that's my only week off at home like ever, and so my only chance to really get things done around the house.  I still miss uni holidays.  Sigh.

Anyways, I said at the time she should come again for a weekend in say February, so she did.  She came down Friday night and we all had a swim to cool off (Friday was *stoopidly* hot).  Cooked sausages for dinner and we watched Shrek Forever After.  

Saturday morning I woke up at 4am and never got back to sleep - spine hurty and brain that wouldn't shut up.  Got ready and we all headed out to the club.  Were we sat in the pool and hid from the sun.  And then had lunch.  Then sat in the pool.  Then went home.  And sat in the pool.  Saturday was *stoopidly* hot as well.  I cooked honey mustard chicken for dinner and then mum and I did some photo labelling.  Well, all her photos are labelled, but there's plenty of photos where there's people's names, but I don't actually know the people or how they fit everything in.  I really need to do family trees for all that side of the family.  Mum's father's side is well documented, on account of us being First Fleeters, but mum's mother's side, and all of dad's side is a bit lacking in who's who.  Not that anyone will care after I die.  Heck I barely even care ;)

Sunday was a bit cooler.  Mum went to church in the morning so I finished scanning the last album I wanted to return.  Then we did more labelling.  Then off to Scott's with EffanC for drinks and nibbles and music and pizza.  Quite a pleasant afternoon.  Mum wanted to watch MKR when we got home so I stayed til the end of that, then had an early night.  

And then mum went home this morning.  

A week after the 1994 Como bushfires, twenty three years ago today, we held an open air service in the grounds of the church.  The media were in attendance and the back of my head and my hair was on the evening news.

After the service, Dad and some others knocked over some unsafe walls that were in danger of toppling.  Note that some of the photos of the cleanup in my last post were taken after this.

The Macaulays could still smile after having lost their home, can you believe it?

This is Dad holding two of the lecterns saved by the firies.  The firies also saved part of the baptismal register (but my page had fallen out and was missing), and the photocopier.  They continued to use the photocopier for several years, and the lectern on the right is still in use in the rebuilt church.

In the week after the 1994 Como bushfires, twenty three years ago this week, excavators moved in to knock down unsafe walls from burnt out buildings.  Here's some photos Dad got of the process.

Como Presbyterian Church demolition (round one)..

Como Presbyterian Church demolition (round 2)..

Dad took home several car loads of bricks and used them to make a path in the front yard of our house.

Demolition of the manse..

Mark Chaseling demolishing his home..

Demolition of Terry O'Shey's laundry..

The day after the bushfires burnt through Como, Sunday twenty three years ago today, we went up to inspect the damage.

Looking towards the front of the church.

This is standing at the top of the hill next to the church.  On the left is the front of the church, straight ahead is the manse, and the kindergarten playground is on the right behind the fence.  Just next to where dad is walking, in the little alcove in front of the window, some of the hymn books had fallen down, but hadn't been completely burnt.  Some of them had just had their edges burnt.  I looked through one and found the page where two hymns I knew were - 205 and 206 - The Church's One Foundation and Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken.  I've kept this page in a frame ever since.

This is taken where the entrance of the church was, looking into the building

A couple of more distant shots of the property

This is taken from inside the church.  Standing where the kindergarten hall used to be, facing north towards the church entrance (above) and the kitchen (straight ahead left).  At about this spot, I found where the marble baptismal font had crashed through the floor to the ground below.  It had smashed into pieces so I found a chunk of it that had the curved dish of the font, and I've kept it on a shelf ever since.

Next to the church was the manse.  The Macaulay's were out of the house for the day and when it started to burn dad begged the firies to let him in to try and rescue Andrew's computer, but they wouldn't let him so they lost *everything*.  Oddly though, one of Ruth's little plastic kiddie chairs was in the carport, and it survived unscathed.  This is looking across the fence between the church and the manse yard (that fence didn't burn either) across to the Chaseling's and past that to where Pauline O'Neil died.

This is looking in from the front to the lounge/family/kitchen of the manse.

Next door to the manse was the Chaseling's.  They were out for the day as well, so lost everything.  Catherine lost her super cute little poofy chickens which she was pretty devastated about.

Then we headed across to Woronora Crescent to see Chrissie's family's house.  We'd been to visit them the Friday night before the fires.  It was really hot that night and at one point poor little Red Car was overheating.  We got to Chrissie's and we could see across to Bangor and all the orange from the fires over there (in Bangor, Tanya Blencowe, who helped Sydney secure the rights to host the 2000 Olympics, lost part of her home and most of the memorabilia she had collected). They evacuated in stages on the Saturday, with Chrissie's dad being the last to leave.  But they really didn't get to save much.  I remember some really odd things that they lost, including a big roll of 1966 50c coins, some cool Magic Eye books, and a cute little tape deck that I'd given to Chris after I got one with a cd player in it for my 18th birthday.  They had some corningware that actually survived intact (I think it was them).  I also remember wondering at how little *black* there was around.  The fire was so intense that not even soon was left behind.

This is looking west down to the front of Chrissie's house.  The fire jumped the Woronora River and raced up the hill, taking out eighty-seven houses in the space of an hour or two.  Bonnet Bay is directly opposite, but was spared.

This is from the bottom of their yard looking up the hill towards the back of the house (on the right).

Chrissie outside her house.  Bushfires are incredibly fickle things.  Note the plastic swing seats.  The ones on the right are completely unharmed.

Elva Lennon's house on the left (next door neighbour's to Chris), and looking north along Woronora Crescent.  She wasn't insured, but the RSL helped her rebuild.

The next day on the Monday mum also got these photos.

This was Jean and Allan Wilson's house.  They'd had a frozen chicken in the freezer and found it cooked perfectly after the fires.

This was Como West Public School.  Most of the school burnt down, but the library didn't.