Twenty years ago today Mum and some friends of hers and I did the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb for her birthday.  It was pretty amazing.  It's certainly not very strenuous as they stop every hundred metres or so to tell stories or take photos or whatever.  The girder is so wide that you can't really even look down.  The only place you can look straight down to the ground is when you're walking along under the approach to the arch/pylon.  Of course you can't take anything with you, and they make you attach glasses and tape up rings.  But they wouldn't let you attach a camera because then you'd take your own photos and wouldn't buy their overpriced ones.  Communication is done via these headsets that don't actually go into your ears - they sit just in front and work by vibrating your whole skull, so the bones in the ears pick it up.  Pretty amazing.

How good is this?

(From @JessHarwoodArt)

Stu and I are definitely owls.  Other than working from home and not catching up with friends on weekends, everything is much the same.

So our COVID-19 routine is not too different to general reality.  I started working from home on March 17.  Mainly because I had the hint of a sore throat and cough, and while it was extremelly unlikely to be Coronavirus (what with only about half a dozen cases in the ACT at the time), I didn't want to be *that person* that spread it around. 

My home setup is *ok* for working from home.  The biggest problem is my monitor setup.  At work my primary monitor is on my left, and the secondary is to the right.  At home my primary monitor is straight in front, and the secondary is smaller and off to the left.  So everything is a bit backwards for me.  Also I'm in what would be the formal dining room of the house, between the kitchen and the living room.  So just need to be a bit mindful of having Stu or David seeing stuff they shouldn't (which really isn't much).  We're lucky because our work is very well setup for people to work remotely, and our infrastructure supports it quite happily.  The only tricky situation came with all staff broadcasts flooding our internet links, but they've started streaming those to an external website, so even that is not such an issue anymore.  Skype, however, sux donkey balls.  It's fine for text chat, but that's about it.  Anything more is just asking too much of it.

Stu started working from home about a week and a half after me.  It took him a while to get the hardware/software he needed from his work setup.  But once he got that he's been doing ok.  We had started to setup my Lego room as a study for him before any of this started (with David mostly taking over the other desk in the dining room study, Stu wanted his own desk and private space).  It worked out really well for him to work in that room.  This weekend we've done a whole heap more rearranging.  Stu pulled out *lots* of books to be given away (sadly Lifeline are not currently taking donations due to covid-19 so they're just piling up at the moment).  I took all my models (well, all the ones from the big shelves) downstairs, and Stu took all his work/study and some of lifestyle books upstairs.  The bookshelves are super messy and unorganised right now due to all the rearranging, but I still need to get rid of the Lego minifig workstation on the table before I can pull out all the remaining books for sorting.  And it's starting to get really cold down there, so running out of time.  I suspect the bookshelves will stay messy for a while yet.

David has to keep going to work outside the house.  He's a shift worker, and unfortunately for him, we're home all the time now, which means he can't watch DVDs/Netflix while we're at work.  Well at least not on the TV.  He could probably setup his laptop to watch things with headphones if he was so inclined.  His work also means that if covid-19 does start spreading in Canberra, he's on the front lines for exposure, and it's probably inevitable that it hits our house at some point over winter.  

Lunches during the week are almost always leftovers of some description.  Pretty simple.  What has been suffering though is any sort of exercise and vitamin D.  Usually I would get a ten minute walk each way to go get food for lunch, but if I'm just heating up leftovers I don't get that.  So I've started going for a little walk at lunch.  Usually only about ten minutes, but enough to get me out of the house, get the blood circulating, and get a little vitamin D.  

Probably the single nicest thing about working from home is the lack of commuting.  I've been using the extra time in the mornings to scan more of Dad's slides.  I've been smashing out two boxes a week.  The evenings are a little less structured.  I've got a little list of things to do in the extra time between 5pm and 6pm, but haven't really done too much constructive with the extra time.  I am able to knock off work when I want to though, and not either have to wait for the sweetie or catch a bus.  So that's really nice.  My flex time is a bit too high at the moment, so will try and ease that down a bit, then will keep mostly fairly regular hours, which will also be nice.

Shopping is the biggest challenge of all of this.  I want to minimise how often I go out, so need to do bigger shops when I do go (and go by myself which is super sad - the sweetie and I have always gone shopping together).  There's three people eating here, two of us eating all meals at home, which means we need a lot more food in the house.  If I'm shopping fortnightly I have to get stuff for the first week that has to be eaten quickly, and stuff for the second week that lasts longer.  Fridge space is a huge issue at the beginning of the fortnight.  The supermarkets are out of various things at various times, so there's no guarantee that when you do go shopping you'll be able to get what you need.  I haven't seen toilet paper in Coles since we got one of the last packs when we got back from Pete's 40th at the beginning of March.  Fortunately I've been able to get it at Chris's so we haven't run out.  As I mentioned in another blog entry, we don't eat a lot of packaged food, mostly fresh food.  But the stuff that we do use all the time (tinned tomatoes, tomato paste and rice) has been difficult to get.  Again, I've been able to get things from Chris's when really needed.  

The rest of my routine hasn't changed.  I still get up at the same time (Stu plays on his phone a little longer before getting up).  I still shower and wear the exact same thing - my uniform of jeans a tshirt, with a jumper when it's cold.  I do the same things on the weekends - housework stuff and whatever projects/hobbies I'm working on.  I don't have any more time on my hands than normal, so it's not like I have time to binge watch anything.   Maybe if we do get sick we can binge watch stuff.  

The clutter is getting to me though.  We have things that need to go to the tip (like our old oven), or the Green Shed, or Lifeline.  But while I think the tip and the Green Shed are still open, I would classify them as non-essential.  So we have piles of stuff around the house.  And Stu could really use a better desk in his study, but we can't just go shopping for a new one.  Well, again, we probably *could* but we're trying to be good about this whole staying at home except for essential stuff thing...  

The only other significant change is not catching up with friends.  We would go out or have people over I guess on average every other weekend.  So that's not happening (other than a couple of virtual catchups).  It's a little sad, but remember, we're owls.  We like keeping to ourselves :)

In all of this we have been extremelly lucky/blessed.  We haven't had to stress about losing our jobs, or have to take care of kids as well as work, or wonder where the money for our next meal is going to come from.  2020 is sure going to be one hell of a year .. 

So twenty years ago was moving day.  I hired a 2 tonne truck, managed to reverse it up our driveway, and had a few friends come and help load and unload.  I only had a bedroom's worth of furniture to move so it wasn't very hard.

Early in 2000 I started looking for places to move out of home into.  Primarily I was sick of the commute (an hour driving each way), and I wanted to be closer to my friends in Kogarah, and CIA in the city.  So I was looking for one bedroom places around Marrickville and suburbs around.  I'm pretty sure I looked at a few places, although I only have memories of one of them (possibly in Belmore??), which was ok, but not great.  Then I saw this place in Marrickville.  I had a look around, then walked out.  But I hesitated.  There wasn't anything too glaringly wrong with it, so I indicated to the Real Estate agent I was going to have another look.  So I did.  And thought it could work.  And it was only (!) $135/week.  It was at the back of a big old building that had been split into four flats.  It had a living area with kitchen, then a bedroom, then a bathroom behind that.  I decided I'd see if I could get it.

This would have been on the Saturday.  Two days later, on the Monday night, I have photos of the flat with Mum in it.  Presumably I must have asked the Real Estate agent if I could go back with my Mum for another look.

So yeah, twenty years ago tonight I took these...

More of this story to come.. ;)

In other news.. it was six years ago that Dad went and carked it...

So last Tuesday after battling for two nights with Apple, and blogging, it got to 21:30 and I still needed to wash my hair.  Le sigh.

The lake was a little fuller after the hail storm.

Thursday was a bit of a crazy day.  There was a bushfire near the airport, so people were distracted monitoring that (it originally started in trees that I'd noticed on the way to the club just last weekend were dead because of the drought).  And then it took out some good chunks of our network because an Optus location lost power and they didn't have generator backup there.  And there was a water bomber plane crash.  Sadly it was the same C-130 we saw taking off out of HMAS Albatross last year.  Sad times.  And then they closed the airport (well most flights were cancelled), stranding people in (and out) of Canberra for the evening.  I really couldn't concentrate very well on work that afternoon.  In the evening I was going to watch Coco by myself (finally caught up on all the Pixar movies I started watching a year ago, with just Toy Story 4 to go now - which is coming soon!) but the boys were ok for me to watch it on the main tv and they watched it too.  Was pretty good.  Well except for the whole I issue I had that photos have only existed for the past hundred or so years, so what did people do before that?  Paintings?  hrmm

Friday I went over to Chrissie's and we had some champagne for her birthday and had Chinese takeaway and just chatted which was really nice.  Her car was damaged in the hail.

Saturday I did a bunch of research into how I was going to morph Ryan's donut photos.  One person said use "face movie" from Picasa.  My version of Picasa was pretty old and didn't seem to have it, so I downloaded the latest off the Wayback Machine.  And it was magic.  Saved me hours and hours and hours of effort.  Well, I still need to get some final photos from Luc to finish it off but I suddenly found myself free for the weekend.  

In the evening was a party for Aquila's 60th.  Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising but he came and stayed anyway which was nice.  And we didn't have a late night.  There was a lot of food.  Food spam to follow ;)  After the jigsaws!! OMFG!!

Sunday.  OMFG I hate Apple.  Ever since I got my XS, it's never synced my Google calendar with the phone.  I've tried all sorts of suggestions but nothing ever worked.  So I gave up and downloaded the Google Calendar app which works just fine.  But it's also stopped syncing my contacts.  Which is more annoying because I often update my phone, but I want Google to be the master.  So I went hunting to see if I could try again to fix Google sycning.  Someone talked about using iCloud.  So I logged into iCloud to find my contacts aren't synced there at all!!!  Even though it's set to backup contacts.  What a retarded piece of crap.  I complained on Twitter, as you do, and they actually responded.  Not with anything useful of course.  I haven't tried the last thing they suggested, because I was completely over it.  I'm going to go back to my old 1999 perl/mysql database as my "master", making sure I have a full backup of everything, then try some more to hack away at it.  

We were originally going to go to the club Sunday afternoon but Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising, so we just stayed home.  Which suited me just fine as I was having fun geotagging my USA 2000 photos, and listening to the Classic 100 Music in the Movies, Rescreened, which I listened to the entire weekend which was awesome.  Did a bit of jigsaw as well.  We watched Quantum of Solace in the evening.  Man, that movie made me dizzy just looking at it.  Such a frenetic pace in the action sequences - editing of shots less than a second each.  Madness.

Monday I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep (well I did for about half an hour at 6:30).  Hurrah.  Spent the day geotagging photos.  It was fun reliving my trip to New York from 2000, with more fresh memories to reinforce it all from a year ago.  I was sad geotagging the World Trade Centre photos though - I found it somewhat strange/disturbing that I could still geotag those photos with complete precision.  I was even able to geotag just about all the photos fairly accurately in Disneyland.  It's amazing how much has stayed the same over the past twenty years.  Managed to manually geotag the entire set of photos in one weekend.  Ok so there were only 727 of them, and about 70 I'd done the other week.  

On Monday afternoon a bushfire started near Orroral, where Stu, Kit and I did the Granite Tors walk a few years ago.  We could see the smoke from our place.

We watched the first episode of Picard in the evening.  

Got a much better night's sleep on Monday night.   Tuesday the Orroral fire got much much worse.  We could see the pyrocumulus clouds from work.  I got some pretty insane timelapses of it.

Tuesday night I backed up my phone.  It only took 32 minutes and about 8-10 reconnects of the phone to get the photos and the half dozen regular videos, not counting getting two timelapses I got via Google Drive earlier in the day.  Then another 15 minutes to process them (every single video had its timestamp changed), minus the few minutes I ran outside to see the sky on fire..

Today I worked from home.  Last Friday David had gotten sick enough of our slow internet upload speeds that he called Internode to see if they could fix it.  Today an NBN dude turned up and went off to fix it.  Turns out there was a broken connector, resulting in exactly half the speed we should have had.  So he fixed that and our download speeds are now back up to 20mbit down, 4 up.  Not quite as fast as it was before, but still twice as good as recent times.  Hurrah!  So at least that was a win.  Smoke from the Orroral fire blew north and the sky got a really eerie green/brown/yellow colour for much of the day.  

Tonight was just going back into the photo labels I'd done for the USA 2000 trip, and giving them a bit more detail and tidying it up.  I also redid all the panoramas.  Back in the day I used a program (Panavue?) that you had to manually set linkage points for it to line them up.  It worked pretty well for fairly horizontal panoramas, but not so well if the camera was angled.  So I redid them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor.  Sometimes Microsoft comes up with amazing software, and this is one example.  Works like magic.  

Case in point:

In all the crazyness of the world right now I can't help but be inspired by these flowers growing in our front garden.  They've basically had no water all summer, except during the storm last week.  Yet here they are, in full bloom, smiling at the world.

Stay safe everyone!

As always, on January 8 I remember three things..

This blog is seventeen years old today!  I wanted to get a mobile template applied to this blog over the break, but I just had too many things to do.  One day ..

David Bowie would have turned seventy three today.  Someone at work pointed out it was Elvis Presley's birthday as well.. which I knew but I've never mentioned here because I'm just not all that interested heh.  Edit: actually, I did, in 2015 :)

Bushfires raged through Como destroying many of our friends' homes and our church twenty six years ago.  The current bushfires are hence all too real for us.

Gavin was a friend I met at OzEmail in 1996.  We had a bit of a falling out, but became friends again by 2000.  He was into fast cars, and this was one he'd just bought, taken outside his and Fran's flat in Sutherland, twenty years ago today.  

The new year started for us in the Bermuda Triangle! It was 9am Caribbean time, 12am AEDT time. Stu was in bed and I was eating breakfast. And I watched the Sydney fireworks. Live. On an ocean liner. In the middle of the North Atlantic. I love technology :) We actually managed to stay awake til midnight ship time and heard them sound the horn to mark midnight.

So our overseas trip of the year was just the tail end of our North Atlantic crossing and Caribbean cruise. Had four days in New York which is not nearly enough time. Came home via Singapore on the longest commercial flight you can take (for now) - 18 hours!. Early in February I went up to Sydney to visit Mum for a post-Christmas catchup. Went and saw a Lego show, took the River Cat to Parramatta and caught up with Pam, and later with Daniel and Fi. Didn't get to see the Cartans on the Sunday morning which was a shame because Doug Cartan died later in the year. Visited Luc and Lizzi for Ryan's penultimate donut photo and saw Cordeaux Dam on the way home. We went down to see Kit and Pete several times - in March to see their house and go to their engagement party, in July for a visit and to do some wedding planning and go to the zoo, in November to do some wedding planning and meet and ride Kit's new horse Jet, and in December for their wedding. Went and visited David in Junee in June. In August I went up to Sydney for Diana and Graham's funeral, and Chrissie and I geeked out at standing in the spot we met thirty years and a couple of weeks earlier. Came home via Dapto that trip to meet up with Kit who wanted to look at a horse (not Jet), and had a fun drive up Macquarie Pass. In November we went to Melbourne for the weekend to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with Hannah and Rita.

Work was pretty decent this year. My life is four things: source, dest, port, protocol. Simple. Except way too many people don't understand basic client-server communication which is pretty frustrating. Whenever I had the time I would clean things. Our section disbanded (or was announced it would be disbanded) around February 14 - exactly one and a half years after I started in that section. I went back to comms but kept sitting in the same place for a while longer until they did a bit of a floor reshuffle. Fortunately I was able to get a seat away from the corridor and things stayed pretty stable which is essential for my mental health. Socially there was a big event at the beginning of the year which included an Escape Room, and dinner at the War Memorial, Laser Tag, and I ran a trivia night for it (using mostly recycled questions). We won a trivia night in April which meant we ran one in September. Had a whiskey night in June and a ball in October. Our drinking buddies dropped like flies though - Lachie, then Doc, then Hannah. Very sad times. Ran our annual Christmas party at the lake again, but it was very smokey and numbers were down - only about 40 this year!

On Valentines Day I had my appendix out! My first ever general anesthetic and first ever hospital stay. Then in April Annie had hers out too - didn't know these things were contagious ;) After surviving the plague ship (don't travel in northern hemisphere winters with old people - everyone gets sick) and not even getting sick when Stu did, I had a very small cold in February, but then survived all winter without getting sick again, only to get one in September then another one in December. The one in December was the worst and I was coughing for a couple of weeks, including being sick at Kit's wedding. Insomnia was a lot better this year but still got bouts of it.

Saw a bit of my family. Saw Mum in Sydney in February. David and Kat came to stay in April. Took them out for a bbq at the new van. Mum came to visit in June and we went down to Junee to visit David. Later blacklisted Kat from ever coming here again - I can't stand the way she treats David and there's no way I could be civil to her if I saw her ever again. David came to visit in October and we took him out for his birthday and then on a tram because he was going to interview for a job driving them. David got the job, and moved in with us in November (had to clean out space in the bedroom, bathroom, pantry and study). Mum came down at Christmas for a couple of days. We saw a little bit of Stu's family too. The other Stu came over for dinner in January. Kerry and the kids came to see the balloons in March and dropped in to visit. Dropped in to see Annie and the kids in April and save Daisy's life (emergency cash supply). Scott and Kerry and the kids dropped in briefly in October. Saw Noah on his 18th birthday. Stu and Annie and the family came over for Christmas lunch. I saw a bit of Chrissie during the year. Went over for a couple of low key dinners in January (hot cross bun ice cream!) and December, saw her the night her aunty and uncle were murdered and we just tried to process, had a few lunches out and about, and a nice BBQ on Anzac Day which also included her Dad, siblings and their partners. Saw quite a lot of EffanC and the N-gang which was great, including a couple of dinners at R&F's, various visits back and forth and dinners out at Pot Belly and Malaysian Chapter with EffanC including an election night event and New Years. We're still missing Kit and Pete and the chickens although did see them a few times during the year. Other than the four times we went down to the coast, they also came to stay for Tarun's wedding in March. Went wedding dress shopping with Kit then had dinner at Old Canberra Inn for Pete and Leisa's birthdays. They came back again in April to see Kit's brother before he went home to Germany. Kit came up again in May for Katie's sister's funeral and her friend Sophie's wedding. I organised Kit's Hen's at the end of November - Laser Tag and dinner at George Harcourt with drinks after at Moby's. And I ended up being a bridesmaid at their wedding after it became too difficult for Audrey. We farewelled Stewie and Cath (again) in February. Fiona came to stay the weekend after I got my appendix out, but was pretty stressed about it because everyone was sick and I couldn't sleep in the spare bed. Jenn came over a week later for a Turkish feast, and we caught up for drinks with her in October. Went to see Doc's new place with a big group of work peoples which was lovely. Had a couple of dinners with Hannah, at Dumpling Inn and Pizza Artigiana so Stu could get to know her before we went away together. Had our annual hanami part with Nat and Andrew, although I was sick the original weekend and the flowers were mostly all gone by the time they did get to come over. And went to @CLBradley's 60th at Ciscos.

Spent a bit of time at our social club. There was a Finnish night in March, with a wallaroo joey. Not to eat - that's Australian, not Finnish ;) In April we bought a well-established van off another member to give us some space to move (our old van was just barely big enough to sleep in, and even then not really). Sold the old one for a lot less that we paid for it because it had a leak that we never fixed and wasn't in great condition. Spent a bit of time cleaning and decluttering the new one, but there's still a long way to go. Had Chris and Ian's anniversary there, it's been a shame that I've had to miss two of them over the years. We did Christmas in July again for a huge crowd. Had a couple of nights there in August, including the AGM on Stu's birthday (doh!), and another night in September. September was a Chilean night, which was great, but some people really need to learn to better estimate catering. I mean a bit of overcatering is fine, you don't want to run out, but you also don't want an entire fridge full of leftover food - both cooked and uncooked! Went for Oktoberfest in October. We missed the Christmas party because we were down the coast at Kit and Pete's wedding. We were going to go out at New Years, but I was too nervous about the weather and potential for fires.

Pretty quiet fish year. I discovered my angel is a girl - she laid a couple of batches of eggs! At the end of the year I had four active tanks. The angel tank, with the angel, a cory, and a sucking catfish. The two foot, with three black neon tetras and a sucking catfish. Chrissie's little tank, with two clown loaches and a sucking catfish. And the downstairs two foot, with one large danio. Stu has his four foot which is always covered in algae because the lights are too good and there's not enough algae eaters, a tiny tank on his desk with a white cloud, and a little tank downstairs with a white cloud. There's also four empty tanks that were for killifish but they all died. I want to restock my tanks, but needed to prove I can take care of them first (ie, making sure at least one of them gets a water change every weekend, so no more than four weeks between water changes for each tank).

Nothing much on the Lego front either. I'm still working on sorting out Vic's Lego. It's extremelly slow going. It takes a good chunk of the weekend to do pick parts for six sets, so if there's anything on on a weekend nothing would happen. Really need to get back into it, as I really want my tubs and floor space back.

Not so many jigsaws this year either. I feel like there's too many other important things to do to "waste time" doing jigsaws :( Similarly with any of my other hobbies.

The weather was *hot* when we got back from overseas in January. We had the cooler running for three weeks straight. There were a lot of thunderstorms at the beginning of the year too. Had a duststorm in February. Then drought with a dry winter and super dry November and December, and the shroud of bushfire smoke for most of December.

Around the house.. I took a few days off at Easter to have a ten day break, and we Marie Kondo'd the house - well, clothes, linen cupboard, under the house a bit, some of the garage, and the pantry. David came during that break and replaced the light in the fan light, and also the kitchen lights, with LEDs. Had the sewer pipes eeled in May and he cleared a blockage at the same spot twelve metres in as last time. For Christmas I treated us to new towels - the first time in my life I've ever had matching bathroom linen - loving it!

Considering it feels like we don't eat out all that often, it seems like we ate out a lot. I tried Master Hin Dumplings at the mall. Very average dumplings. I'm surprised they're actually still there. Went to Chong Co on Australia Day and had their delivery a couple of times. Went to Gus's with the sweetie in February. Malaysian Chapter and Pot Belly a couple of times with EffanC, and for a work farewell lunch. Indian Pantry with Cath. Had Pho Hub with Neil. A couple of work lunches at Chompy's. Had Yat Bun Tong at least once with the sweetie. Possibly only made it to Dumpling Inn once this year - to meet up with Hannah so she and Stu could meet and we could discuss Harry Potter. The sweetie took me out to Temporada on our anniversary which was expensive but excellent. A group of us went to Rashays for their $5 lunches in May. We haven't been back since. Tried Tasting China and Akiba which were both pretty good. Went to Chez Kimchi a few times. They're ok but their menu is just a mess. Had Disappointing Sushi (aka Hero Sushi in Canberra Centre) a couple of times. It always meets expectations - it's always disappointing. We had Pizza Artigiana a couple of times. The first in July to meet Hannah's flatmate Rita who we were going to see Harry Potter with, and again with Stu in August. Tried lunch at 54 Benjamin a couple of times. Nice, but a bit expensive to do too often for lunches. Had Alice's in July, the Lake George Hotel in Bungendore in August with EffanC, Bella Vista on my birthday, Happy's in December. Tried out Yarralumla Kebabs' new store in Belco. Pro tip - take a knife and cut one in two and split it with someone - otherwise you'll feel to stuffed at the end (even Stu finds them too big!!). And went to Bharat International with some work guys. And there were several treks to Kingsley's ;)

It seems I wasn't terribly creative in the kitchen this year. Or maybe I just didn't document things. We ate one of Kit's little roosters and made a couple of lasagnas with her tomatoes. I had a lot of fun with puff pastry - making cheese and vegemite scrolls, pizza scrolls and cheese twists. Made tacos a couple of times. A large kit works a lot better with three people than two ;) Made a gnocchi carbonara bake a couple of times. Also made cheesy hash browns which are always pretty awesome. And made a huge batch of gingerbread biscuits for Christmas.

The only theatre/shows/exhibitions I saw were two Lego things (Lego Cities by Ryan McNaught in Sydney, and a private Lego Christmas Show in Ngunnawal), and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in Melbourne.

The only movie I saw in theatres was the Lego Movie 2 - the Second Part.

Saw a lot more movies on TV. As well as invididual movies which I won't list, we (or I) also carried on watching movies in series. Including:

• Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2
• Sherlock Holmes 1 and 2 (Robert Downey Junior version)
• The Hobbit 1, 2 and 3
• James Bond movies, starting in April, still haven't quite finished
• Paddington 1 and 2
• Bridget Jones 1 and 2
• Molly Ringwald teen movies (except Breakfast Club cause that's kinda boring)
• A few Tom Hanks movies
• Twilight saga
• Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 (haven't had a chance to see the rest yet)

Watched a surprising amount of TV too!

• The Good Place Season 3
• Tidying Up with Marie Kondo
• Discovery Season 2
• Fuller House Season 4
• MacGyver Season 1, start of Season 2
• Homeland Season 7
• Brooklyn 99 - up to season 5
• Death in Paradise Season 3
• Lego Masters
• Veronica Mars Season 4
• The Good Place Season 4
• The Amazing Race
• Fuller House Season 5

I'm not a big reader but did get through some books:

• Heaven is for Real - Todd Burpo
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more - Roald Dahl
• Silicon Snake Oil - Clifford Stoll
• Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
• The Cult of LEGO - John Baichtal and Joe Meno
• You Always Remember the First Time - edited by B.S. Johnson
• The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac (never finished)

And as always, I finish off with a big list of other bits and pieces..

• Started blogging weekly on Sunday nights, as that seems to happen more consistently, and get my photos online in a more timely manner
• Still raging that Apple sees fit to modify the timestamps on my photos and screenshots - on the phone!!
• Posted my Canberra 1986-2016 blog to Reddit and got a lot of nice comments
• Android (at least the last two Stu's had) has a SUPER annoying bug where the forward facing camera has no date taken exif data saved. Makes it harder to geotag the photos.
• Finally filled up my 2T drives with backups, had to split them out. Also bought a 4T drive to have room for everything. Took nearly a week to copy everything
• Found "Tent Go Bye Byes" on the internet so Mum could finally see what all the fuss was about in 1983
• Finished scanning all of Mum's photo prints
• Saw the Balloon Fiesta
• Took a stack of Tupperware to the Green Shed
• Read all of Julie Powell's "Julie and Julia" blog (started and got a good chunk of the way through in February after I had my appendix out, finished in September)
• Collected all the Coles Stikeez. And Little Shop 2
• The neighbours got ducks, although they didn't keep them for too long
• Got asked to be a bridesmaid at Kit's wedding. Got the shoes for the girls
• Finished scanning all of Mum's analogue photos. Started on her slides.
• Got our democracy sausage in May
• Finished labelling all 10000-odd photos from our last trip
• Created an S3 bucket for holiday photos. Still haven't gotten around to doing anything with it.
• Filled with rage at Qantas' website and general customer service, booked my next trip with Emirates instead
• Three cats we know - Pookie, Celeste and George - all had to be put down
• Processed and labelled all our Hong Kong and Singapore 2016 photos and got them into the blog
• NBN screwed us over - disconnected us during upgrades and never bothered to reconnect us. Had to get a tech to come out and fix it. Found out a while later they'd downgraded our speed from about 25mb to 12mbit. Bastards. (Edit: they broke the connector, hence only half the speed, later we got it fixed)
• Microsoft FINALLY enabled control-backspace in Notepad!!
• STILL raging at Apple and the inability to copy timelapse (and even regular video) files to my computer
• Bought a toasted sandwich maker - loving that
• David bought me a new frying pan (and another one at Christmas)
• Had my hair trimmed. Trimmed is an understatement.
• Got my North Atlantic trip fully labelled and blogged
• Didn't see blue sky in Canberra from before Kit's wedding til the end of the year
• Saddened by the bushfires that raged through south-eastern Australia
• Played some escape games on my phone which are a lot of fun
• Watched both Christmas Carols events. Carols in the Domain are pretty tacky but Melbourne's Carols by Candlelight is still ok.
• Spent the last couple of days of the year tidying and organising the house, and catching up on blogging

We finished out the year at EffanC's for a quiet evening with great friends.

Gosh what a busy week.

So Sunday a week ago was the Lego show at Ngunnawal.  Earlier in the day, which I didn't note last time, we went to Aldi and saw that they've changed their coin locks so my tool will no longer work with them.  Bastards.  I wouldn't mind using a coin if shopping centres could get off their asses and have a decent trolley return system, but they don't, which is why I'll continue to use my tool until it no longer works.

Monday morning I woke up at 4:15.  Hurrah.  And couldn't get back to sleep.  At least the day at work was relatively peaceful.  I cleaned out my locker and did a bit of inbox tidying.  After work we did some food shopping for Christmas.  But I was acting as a go-between for a couple of guys at work for a crisis that was going on, and so trying to rapidly type messages to both of them.  But OMFG iPhone autocorrect is infuriating sometimes.  It kept changing words that I'd typed correctly into different, incorrect, words, and so I'd have to keep retyping everything and sending correction message after correction message.  I swear I nearly smashed the damned phone onto the ground.  And I managed to screw up the steaks I cooked for dinner.  Yay.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 5:10.  Hurrah.  None of us were wanting to touch anything at work, because who wants to risk breaking anything so close to the break.  But as it turned out, the crisis the day before (still continuing Tuesday) was caused by someone changing something on Monday, and not telling their own damned team what they'd done.  So the others in the team had no idea that the problem was caused by one of their own.  Our team was dumbfounded.  I did however delete a bunch of Dev firewall rules for servers that no longer existed.  I figured if I broke anything in an environment that was being shut down anyway noone would care :)  Had a couple of sneaky drinks that we had leftover from the party before going home.  Had a super relaxing afternoon.  I even managed to finish scanning Mum's 1960s negatives and finish labelling our Hong Kong/Singapore photos, both of which I'd wanted to get done before Christmas, and I did!  In the evening we watched the Carols by Candlelight, which is so much better than the Sydney one.  It's more traditional and more mature and just not as *tacky* as Sydney.  

Look how low the lake is at the moment!  A good six inches down on its normal height.

I may have iced and sprinkled some of the gingerbread cookies.

This is the cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  I got a better view of them on TV than I did in the theatre.

Wednesday.  Christmas Day.  Had a fairly relaxed morning.  Well other than having to take three quarters of an hour out of it to go feed Chrissie's animals, and clean up the cat poop one of the cats had done in the bath tub.  Hurrah.  The last hour before lunch was pretty busy, but the sweetie helped me with stuff so that was nice.  Annie and the family came over and we started snacking.  Then Mum arrived and we had Christmas lunch of prawns, ham, salad, bread, dips.  Then Stu put on stoopid YouTube videos so I went and did my own thing.  

We got the house some new towels for Christmas.

Mum brought this down from the cleanout at Diana and Grahams.  I can't believe noone else in their family snaffled this up.  And the wedding favours on top were from *our* wedding!

After everyone had left, Mum went off to go catch a tram, because they were free.  I went to put on a Christmas movie I had saved in my Netflix list, only to find that Netflix had deleted them all.  Bastards.  Moral of the story:  if you see something you want to watch on Netflix, watch it as soon as you can, because it won't be around for long.  Not the first time we've been caught.  I ended up watching The Movies that Made Us: Home Alone.  We watched Love Actually in the evening.  Well Mum and I did.  Stu ran away.

Thursday woke up early.  Hurrah.  Went to Bunnings in the morning with Mum.  Tried to have a sleep when we got back.  Failed.  Spent ages going through Mum's photos with her and updating labels with extra infos.  At one point we came across photos of the new Youth Hostel in Canberra that she was at the opening for in 1968.  So we went for a drive to try and find it.  We found it but the view is covered by trees, and even the building has had a lot of work done around it.  Had pizza for dinner and watched some BBT and into season 5 of Fuller House.  Played a couple of rounds of the basic game of Itchy Feet, a game I got for Christmas.  It was a little boring as the basic game, but may be better with the expansions, but I was too tired and cranky to feel like trying them.

Mum ate all the leftover prawns for us ;)

Friday woke up at 2am, didn't get back to sleep til after 3:30.  Then woke up around 6:30 with an aching spine.  Hurrah.  Mum went off to Chrissie's for the morning, which gave me peace and quiet to tidy the house and prepare lunch.  David arrived just before lunch, and we had roast pork with a lot of crackling and it was all very yummy.  Although not convinced by the stuffing (most of which oozed out and then burnt).  After lunch Mum left to go visit friends on her way home, David went to work and Stu went to the club, leaving me home alone.  I had a bit of a look at my todo list for the rest of the break but didn't actually do much.  Had some crackers and dip for dinner and a piece of crackling.  Healthy dinner, yay.  Watched 28 Days in the evening which I enjoyed.

This is what we call Five O'Clock Charlie - the smoke blowing in from the east.  It's usually more like 7pm though.  These photos were taken just four minutes apart.

Saturday woke up at 5:30 with an aching spine.  Hurrah.  With no car and no sweetie we couldn't do any shopping.  So grabbed the little brother to go storage tub shopping.  Basically there's a bunch of stuff in the dungeon and the spare room that's just all over the ground because there's no cupboard space, and I don't want to put any of it in the garage because of all the bugs.  But you can't even walk in those rooms because they're so choked up, so we can't even start with the decluttering of them.  So the idea is to use tubs as temporary storage to clear the rooms enough to be able to work in them again.  Once things are clearer, those tubs will be for more permanent storage of things that are in cardboard boxes right now - not good because, silverfish.  Spent the afternoon rearranging and filling tubs and getting rid of stuff.  Tidied the linen cupboard, the garage, the dungeon room, the hobby room.  So that was pretty good.  In the evening I watched Phar Lap, which I *might* have seen once more since seeing it at the movies in about 1983, but may not have.  Lots of been-there's heh.  Started watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, but then David pointed out that The Sound of Music was on, so may have accidentally watched the rest of that.  Even though I have it on DVD with no ads.  Whoops.

As I was cleaning out the linen cupboard, I found that my roller blades had completely disintegrated!! :(

When I was in the garage working, I heard a scratching on the door outside.  When I went to look, there was an itty bitty little blue tongue lizard.  He was pretty energetic too because he was so warm but I still managed to catch him for a photo.

Sunday was lots more tidying and organising.  Also a bunch of computer work.  Finished watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which was silly but a bit of fun.  I totally want a food machine ;)

Monday not a lot of physical stuff, mostly computer stuff, including catching up on blogging.  Went out for lunch and did a bit of shopping.  Picked up a heap of lemons off the ground, and made a lemon meringue pie with five of them.  Managed to piss everyone off after dinner, and so instead of watching Die Hard 4 we all got grumpy with each other and did our own thing.  I watched Sliding Doors which I first saw a few years ago.  

Blue sky!  Haven't seen blue sky in weeks!  It's gone again now though.

Today I've pretty much been doing computer stuff all day - downloading and processing photos and blogging.  The weather is making me extremelly tense.  Canberra new year festivities have been cancelled.  We were thinking about going to the club but don't think we're going to now.  I certainly couldn't concentrate on writing up my year in review post so that will have to wait.  Have a happy new year and stay safe everyone!

So when I left you on Sunday night I was frustrated at the whole experience I'd had with Qantas that afternoon.  In the end my booking hadn't gone through properly because of a problem with my credit card (I never use it, in fact I don't think I'd used this one since activating it, so wasn't really surprised).  On Monday I tested the credit card worked (it did) so in the afternoon I called Qantas.  Where I got in a queue that said I would be on hold for THREE HOURS.

!!!!!!!

Are you freaking kidding me?  Most companies have different queues for sales and support.  Sales *want* your business and so put on more staff to handle the calls.  Not so Qantas.  So I complained on twitter.  As you do.  There was a bit of back and forth during the afternoon, and they said they'd call to try again with the credit card.  Which they did - while I was in the other room having dinner and watching Brooklyn 99, so didn't hear the phone.  

While I was waiting again, I got onto Emirates' site. I put through the same itinerary, which 1) actually seemed to let me do (I got all the way up to the payment page), 2) had a much better connection to Singapore, giving us a few extra hours there, and 3) was THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS CHEAPER.  I asked Qantas if we could please cancel.  I was too upset/stressed from the whole thing to concentrate on anything much, so I went and cleaned the kitchen.  Of course as soon as I left the room Qantas called again.  Sigh.  But confirmed my wish to cancel the booking and eventually they did.

On Tuesday I put the whole booking through Emirates.  I still had issues with the credit card (the two-factor code wouldn't come through to my phone), so I just used a different card.  And that was that.  Done.  

Although Emirates do price gouge with seat selection - $20-$30 for regular seats, $120 for the little pair of two at the back of the plain, who even knows how much for exit row seats.  There goes that saving...

So Qantas had three lost opportunities to get my money.  If their multi city flights were actually usable I would have booked on the spot, using whichever credit card had worked.  If their booking management system had actually made a provision to "pay now" and let me pay online, I would have.  If they didn't make me wait THREE HOURS in a phone queue I would have done it over the phone.

Qantas really need to lift their game if they want to stay competitive in 2019.

Sigh.

Monday morning I cleared a massive backlogs of tickets due to me being away on Friday for the funeral.  Started to panic at the sheer volume of work facing me for the week.  And I couldn't get anything done on Monday afternoon due to nonstop interruptions.  Every one of them tore my concentration away so the *one thing* I was trying to do I couldn't get done.  In the end I managed to get it done between 5pm and 6pm when everyone else had gone away.

Tuesday not *quite* so busy, but did get stuff done.

Wednesday I was in race condition mode.  That is, too many high priority tasks competing, which meant I actually didn't get anything meaningful done at all in the morning.  Sigh.  So did some stuff for Henrch, and then Shane saved me by pushing back on the people that haven't done their docos :)

Also on Wednesday I had just stood up and was looking out the window and saw a Tarago back into a car in the car park, bumping it so I saw it move.. and then it drove away.  I grabbed my camera and took some pics.  And then went and left a note :)  I did get a call from the police asking for the photos, but no word of thanks or even acknowledgement from the owner of the car that was hit.

Aldi proved themselves once again to be a bunch of scammers.  Neil saw an ad for some scotch that he thought he'd get for the bar.  So we had a look at lunch.  But not only was there none of that scotch to be seen, but there wasn't even an empty spot on the shelf for it.  There was no price tag at all for that scotch.  Which clearly meant they never had it for sale at all.  SCAMMERS!

And then on Friday Dan's tried to charge me $14.99 for a bottle of Henkell.  I knew when I saw the price tag there was going to be trouble, so I took a photo of it, and got it for the cheaper price ;)  

When we got home on Thursday night I was in the family room doing up my hair and talking to the sweetie when I heard something and saw something move out of the corner of my eye.  One of Chrissie's clown loaches was flopping on the top of the book case next to the tank.  It must have been startled when we got home, but it had somehow managed to get out between the loosish lid and the tank wall (might have to weight it down heh).  Grabbed the fish and plonked it back in, and it's been fine ever since.  It was lucky I saw it too, I don't normally linger at that spot for very long, it would have been just as likely for me not to even have noticed til the next day.

I really wanted to have a random day off on Friday but there was just too much work all week.  I think I closed something like 30 tickets which is *huge*.  I did manage to leave at 4pm tho.  Started watching Friends with Benefits until the sweetie got home, then we watched For Your Eyes Only.  I haven't seen most of the early James Bonds in probably twenty years or more - when Dad used to put them on while I was still living at home.  But with the early ones I could still remember bits and pieces and even the odd lines of script and one-liners.  But I have no memories at all of For Your Eyes Only, except for dropping the dude down the chimney at the beginning. 

Saturday morning was the usual house work type stuff.  Not too much in the afternoon.  Finished watching Friends with Benefits.  Silly and predictable, but hey, New York.  Watched Jackie with the sweetie.  It wasn't bad, but had a very disjointed filming style.

Today was Lego picking, trivia night planning, photo culling, lunch out and food shopping, more of the same in the afternoon.  Watched Parenthood before dinner and finished after. Roasted a stack of veggies for dinner and watched some Veronica Mars.

And blogged.