Sunday.  15th.  Blogged, then leftover food poisoning for dinner.  I was fine.  Then the last of Donna Hay's 2022 Christmas special.  I really wish she'd stop saying "perfect"!!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

We just need Charlotte to write "Some Pig" in this...

Got ready, fed the fish, had a drink, put away some clothes, put a load of washing on, watered all the plants, mowed the lawn, picked up all the lemons, dusted, vacuumed, took out the rubbish and recycling, closed up all the windows and blinds, hung out the washing.  Then sat in front of the fan for ten minutes to cool down before starting work at 8:30.  Sigh.  I'm the Naughty Email Intervention Layer this week while Neil is on holidays.  I felt in holiday mode too.  Didn't want to do any decom (I always worry about deleting stuff then going on leave) so just a lot of cleaning out of inboxes etc.  Blogged some Lego after work.  Then worked on colour coding the weather pixie.  Also added the time zone based on the time zone on my host.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep (like 11), then woke up at 5.  Sigh.  Finished making up icons for the weather pixie - it has a different colour based on the feels like temperature.  Christmas movie season continued with Die Hard 2.  Man the plot holes in that thing are ridiculous, but it's still a lot of fun.

Wednesday.  School holidays.  Urgh.  But in a strange twist of fate, there was no queue at Subway and there was a *whole row* of empty tables next to us briefly.  That was unexpected!

Annie sent me a photo of the SAMs in Port (up for Potty's birthday)

Cooked up some food poisoning sausages (we were fine) and some broccolini and parnsips that really really needed cooking.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep, awake from 5.  It was nice and COLD overnight which was awesome.  Didn't get much work done between all the crap.  Lunch at Vanilla Pod.  Shared a pepperoni pizza with XL (Peroni beer and a pizza for $20 - pretty good value!!).

No sooner had I gotten back to work when James and Josh came and picked me up to go down to Woden to go to Space Kitchen (Rachel wanted to go to see the epic cakes).  Bizarre place.  They make a fuss about bookings and booking times (we only had "an hour", even though the booking was for 14:30 and they close at 16:00 and the place was mostly empty anyway - weird!!).  The cakes looked pretty spectacular, although I think my favourite was the lemon meringue pie - very lemony!!

Purple passionfruit

Nutty one

Lemon meringue

Red velvet

The little cakes we got

A very brief but lovely catchup.  

Too full to eat any chips at drinks (which was surprisingly busy for the last drinks of the year), and only ate half my pizza..

I love this time of year...

Friday.  Slept mostly ok but awake pretty early.  Had to go with the sweetie to pick up a package at Fyshwick (bumplugs at Border Express wouldn't try again to deliver it) and drop him off at work.  Which made me super late for work.  Frustrating day of coding - didn't get anywhere with my script cause I'm dumb.  Had dinner at Kinn Thai with the sweetie.

Salted and Pepper Squid - wok-tosses (their spelling!) fried squid, onion, garlic, 5 spices and chilli $19

Pad Prik Khing - stir fried crispy pork with chilli kaffir lime jam and green bean $29

They say you can get anything in a vending machine in Japan.  Truth is, the vast majory of vending machines only sell drinks.  I think the most unusual one I've ever seen in Japan sold flowers.  So it was pretty funny to see this vending machine in the Canberra Centre carpark selling toy Cat trucks!!

Then watched The Santa Clause (1994) which I don't think I've ever seen.  That was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Got heaps done but not nearly enough.  The dude serving us at Knead asked Stu.. hey this may sound like a strange question.. but do you have a sister?  And he's like yeah..  and the dude is like, what's her name?  And Stu is like .. Anne.. turns out the dude has Annie as an English teacher and recognised Stu cause, well, they do kinda look alike :)  Funny stuff!!

Made some creamy lemon dill chicken for dinner, then forced the sweetie to watch Love Actually with me (I said he could bring his laptop so he could just do stuff on the computer :) )

Sunday.  Did some weeding then I thought I'd go food shopping early to beat the crowds.  Except markets.  Sigh.  Literally no parking after several laps so parked at the pool, and they can find my trolley later.  But Coles itself turned out to be relatively quiet which was nice.  A lot easier to keep up your Christmas spirit when there's less people around.  Another day of All The Things.  Spent quite a bit of time sorting out paperwork for our trip next year and getting travel insurance.  Then I tried to book tickets for Pompeii at the museum.  The buttplugs at the National Museum now FORCE you to register a whole account just so you can book tickets online.  Hate hate hate hate hate.

I really wanted to have my last Bricklink order filed by Christmas.. but I'm only like two thirds the way through.. sigh.. 

Monday.  9th.  Nice and cool overnight.  You'd think I'd be able to sleep.  You'd be wrong.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Busy morning before work doing all the dusting/vacuuming/weeding/cleaning the kitchen, and then time to go to work.  Cert renewal crap and meetings all day.  Kievs for dinner (was too hot and humid over the weekend to think about turning the oven on).  Did some catchup blogging, then bed.

Also waved at the peeps up on the space station.

Tuesday.  Nice and cool overnight.  You'd think I'd be able to sleep.  You'd be wrong.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Busy morning before work doing all the dusting/vacuuming/weeding/cleaning the kitchen, and then time to go to work.

Yeah a rinse and repeat.

Planned out some more decom work for later in the week.  Started looking at Daniel's quality report script.  Brain might have exploded.  Final Journey of Australian Science at the Shine Dome, which was back to hard science again which was pretty cool.  This one was related to the work of Sir John Carew Eccles.  They even had some of his family members there.

They had Prof Stephen Redman and Professor Lucy Palmer talking about their work with neurons and electricity in the brain.

Dinner at Terra afterwards.  We split a 220g beef brisket smoked steak and had charred broccolini and brisket fat chips as sides.  

Beef brisket (smoker) 220g | salsa verde $39

Charred broccolini | burnt miso butter, chili oil, garlic chips $18

Brisket fat chips $12

I enjoyed the sides.  The brisket itself I found a little.. dry..   I'm used to slower cooker brisket which is basically confit brisket.  This was done in a smoker so wasn't quite the same.  It wasn't bad, just wasn't what I'm used to.  It really needed the sauces.

Nice view of the tower on the way back to the car.

Wednesday.  Um.  I think I slept better.

Thursday.  12/12/24 - cool date!  I think I slept ok. 

Oh, I planted some mini capsicums the other week.  Some have sprouted.  At least one has been eaten already.

Got to do some decom work in the afternoon.  Ok drinks, but ate wayyy too much in the way of chips and sausage.  Still made pizzas but Stu ate most of mine.  Watched some more Jamie and Julia.

Friday.  took ages to get to sleep, then woke up at like 4:30.  Sigh.  Party day!!!!  The sweetie very kindly gave me a lift to work (he was working from home).  Picked up All The Sausages ($300 worth!!) and then just getting everything ready.  Went shopping with XL and Jo.  Then partied all afternoon! 

It was super hot though.  A special thanks to Louise and Tony for cooking the chicken and veggie stuff cause noone else wanted to go out in the heat! 

Typical though.. you give the camera to someone else and they cut off the tshirts and get all sky.  Uncropped.

Ho Ho Hold my .. bird.. ?  It's tradition for me to catch birds at these things.  I was never expecting to catch a honeyeater though!!

Finished up maybe like 19:30.  Stu took two loads of crap home.  Bestest sweetie ever!!  Con and Ward kicked on somewhere.  Tony biked it home.  And we gave Doc a lift home.  By the time we'd unpacked enough and organised, it was after nine by the time I got to bed.  Doh.

Saturday.  Slept relatively well.  Spent most of the morning organising the leftovers and party crap.  

For lunch I thought I'd see if any of the leftovers would give me food poisoning...

Mostly Lego filing in the afternoon.  Late in the afternoon I wondered how hard it would be to get a weather pixie on my blog...

Sunday.  Took ages to get to sleep (like 23:00).  Then woke up at 4:30.  Sigh.  Scripting, house stuff (two loads of washing up even! and ran the dishwasher for the second time in two days), Lego filing.  Put on my cd jukebox and listened to random crap all day.  Billy Joel sang about The King and I, and a few songs later Shall We Dance came up..!!  Funny stuff.

Sunday.  24th.  Had a very nice butterfly lamb roast which turned out really well and it wasn't too gristly.  There was even a crackling of sorts, which may have turned out better if I hadn't put a lid on the baking dish!

Finished watching the Lego Masters Christmas special from the American series.  For some reason channel 9 didn't put any ads through it.  Go figure!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up early.  Busy hour before work trying to catch up with life.  Frustrating day getting nowhere with my script cause I'm dumb.  Leftovers for dinner and blogging.  Watched Crocodile on Black Mirror - distracted by the scenery in Iceland!

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  More frustration with my script.  Had some time off it and went to figure out some other stuff which was cool.  Gave up trying to work out the bug with my script and ran it over prod anyway.. where the server promptly said piss off and disconnected the script.  Sigh.  Leftovers for dinner.  Mum photo picking then Hang the DJ on Black Mirror which was kinda sweet.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Oh the humidity!!!  But hardly any rain - ripped off!!  Someone decided that we could save a fortune in electricity during the energy crisis in the extreme heat wave by mandating that we close all the blinds and turn off monitors not in use.  Property peeps didn't even say excuse me as they pushed past me to get at the blind handle.  Never mind that these blinds are flimsy AF and closing them would make very little difference, or the fact that it was 21.5C outside when they did it.  Then they turned off the aircon.  

Yeah it was a pretty miserable afternoon.

Had some success with my script though - managed to get it to hobble along and generate a nice report for me which was pretty cool.  No progress on the powershell module though.  Leftovers for dinner then Metalhead on Black Mirror.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok. 

Tiniest poppy ever??

Wanted to get a few things done in the morning but derailed by people wanting stuff.  Work Christmas party in the afternoon which was pretty chilled. 

Photobomb!!

Ate way too much.  They wouldn't give me extra crackling as I went through (even though we were right at the back of the queue and there was heaps of crackling left).

But after the speeches when serving was all done, I grabbed a little bit more.  And then XL grabbed us a bunch more as well.  I may have eaten way too much.  Whoops.  Didn't have anything at all for dinner.  

Friday.  Took a while to get to sleep but then slept mostly ok.

Had a catchup morning - dealing with several weeks worth of mail.  Had a bit of fun in the afternoon redoing our links portal.  Made the sweetie pizza for dinner since he missed out last night.

Treehouse of Horror XXXV then John Wick.  With a phone call from the mother type person in the middle.

Saturday.  Slept ok I think.  

Some house stuff in the morning.  After lunch we headed out to the club.  Helped out with dinner prep and with serving.  It was a feast of epic proportions!  It was a pretty good night, with over 70 people there!!  Might have accidentally stayed up til nearly 2am.  !!!!!

It might have rained A LOT over Canberra which was pretty awesome.  The Christmas tree .. and all of us.. got a little.. moist .. ! ;)

Who's gonna make the gravy..?   Me!!  I've never made this much gravy before!  A whole packet!

Sunday.  Woke up around 5:30 and 6 briefly but slept through til 6:25.  Got ready and headed up a bit after 7 only to find most of the cleanup had already been done.  But I did spend ages doing a heap of washing up.  People took some of the food and I brought home what was left.  Tammy also found this little tortoise!  She had to run though so didn't have time to wait for it to come out fully.

Quiet day at home.  Tired after only four hours sleep funnily enough!!!

Sunday.  17th.  Had an almost vegetarian dinner (except for the bacon hehe).  The bullhorn chillis were $2 from Toms.

Watched the second Christmas special of the American Lego Masters series.

Monday.  Slept okish (took ages to get to sleep and woke up early.

The sky sure was blue after all the rain on the weekend!

Dunno what was up with this currawong.  Maybe it ate too many strawberries haha

Nick helped me out with a script and I actually got it working which was super happy making.  Leftover lemon pepper chicken for dinner.  Queensland photo picking, jigsaw, Men Against Fire on Black Mirror.  I'm sure if real militaries could do that they would.  The Bricklink order (the quote) was "cancelled"  #grunt.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep then woke up early.  The Bricklink seller said the quote was already cancelled when he went to look.  And there was no way to reopen it.  #grunt.  

From Bricklink:

Canceled - There are three reasons a quote is canceled:
The seller did not provide a quote within three business days.
The buyer did not take action on the quote within three business days.
The items in the quote were sold before the order was generated.

Probably that last one.  Fortunately I was able to add everything to a wishlist so it was (relatively) easy to reorder it.  

Productive day, got some scripts working, did some music, tidied the house a bit, cooked dinner, did some photo picking and watched some tv.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep and woke up early.

Finally!  A strawberry haul!  These were in the pool so the currawongs didn't know about them, and the snails never found them either.  

Ok day at work - made some progress on scripting - got one of Daniel's premigration scripts working so that made me super happy.  Road block on another function though.  Home late, dinner, backups, hair, jigsaw, bed.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep and woke up early.  Sensing a theme here. 

Busy day prepping and working with the vendor on a big cleanup of the mess they made.  Had to work through drinks so didn't really get to talk to people much.  Pizzas, bed.

Oh, and David might have been on the news the other night..

Friday. 

Finish of the cleanup went ok, noone screamed.  Mostly scripting all day.  Managed to get something super complicated working so that was cool (adding IP addresses to a group, sounds like it should be simple right hahahahaahh), but didn't finish Daniel's complicated script converting.  Kievs for dinner.

USS Callister on Black Mirror which was actually kinda fun.  A little bit like White Christmas in some ways.

Saturday.  Breakfast with Annie at Gang Gang which was nice.

Did our food shopping afterwards.  Then All The Things all day.  

Cooked up the last of the leftover pork in a red curry

Death in Paradise 10.5 and then Arkangel on Black Mirror.  

Yeah so it's early.  Sue me.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up fairly early.  Just around the time the cacaphony of birds was starting.  Got a smidge more sleep until 5:30.  House stuff in the morning.  I even mowed the lawn!  Probably the first time in over thirty years.  I had to mow the lawn sometimes as a teenager and I HATED it!!  The lawnmower was loud and hard to start and our lawn was huge and I would ALWAYS get hit by debris even with the catcher on (which was a pain to have to empty over and over again).  I never did it here either because our lawnmower was loud and hard to start and I'd been scarred from doing it as a teenager.  Anyways.  We got a new lawnmower the other week because the starter cord on the old one broke right off.  The new one is battery powered (we did get a new 36v battery and charger because it was easier to just get the kit rather than putting in a special order for just the mower.  Turns out the new battery is chunkier so that's useful.  The thing is super easy to start - you just press down the start button and pull one of the levers (you have to keep the lever(s) held down for it to keep operating which is the only real annoyance).  And it's relatively quiet.  So yeah, winning.

Other than that just various house/computer stuffs all day.

Sunday.  3rd. 

We got another rump cap beef roast to cook.  I didn't realise how expensive it was - 1.8kg was like $50!!  eeep!!  This one wasn't as epic awesome as the last time we got one.  It was cooked nicely to medium rare but it was a lot tougher than last time. 

Watched The Entire History of You on Black Mirror. 

Speaking of Black Mirror.  The other night's episode Fifteen Million Merits had a scene in it where the dude literally couldn't even close his eyes to block out ads.  This is disturbingly close to being a thing in real life.  The only time I ever have to sit through ads on my phone is when I'm playing Candy Crush.  Yeah, still playing it.  But only when I have the spare 45-50 minutes to play an entire episode of 15 levels.  And I only do that so I can "win" the round against other people and get the 40 gold (it used to be 45).  Point is, when you don't finish in the requisite moves you can watch ads to get more moves and a bonus.  I don't watch the ads.  I literally just lay the phone down and count down the number of seconds until it's due to be finished.  Most of the time I have no idea what the ad is even for.  The point is, apparently Apple are thinking about monitoring eye contact during ads.  This could either be a good thing - they'll see that I'm not watching the ads and so not bother to give me such long ones, or they'll figure out a way to force you to watch them.  At that point I'll quit once and for all.

Monday.  Awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night.  Hurray.  Meh day.  Cooked lemon pepper chicken for dinner.  With maybe like 0.3% of the lemon juice I have in the house.  I think I'd keep the veggies separate next time.

Did some catchup blogging in the evening.  Watched Be Right Back on Black Mirror.  I reckon some of that sort of thing is really not that far off (apparently in the decade since the episode has aired there's been a few apps out there that have tried).

Tuesday.  Remember remember the 5th of November.  I always do cause it's the day I started at my current job.  17 years ago.  Eep!  Meanwhile, Neil has been there 49 years.   !!!!!!  Did some futzing around with powershell scripts.  Even managed to get something to work in our new environment which was pretty exciting.  Leftover beef with salad for dinner, photo picking and White Bear on Black Mirror.  

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Frustrating day with scripting at work - not nearly as successful as yesterday.  Late home, late dinner, then sorting files, backing up computer, washed hair, bed.

Twenty or so years ago when I was still living in Sydney there were the first mumblings of a plastic bag ban.  As such I started keeping all my plastic bags so that I would be able to have bin liners for years to come.  Then I moved to Canberra (brought all those bags with me!) and continued until we got supermarket green bags.  Even using those we still managed to accumulate plastic bags, except they were thicker (hurray!).  Except now our supply is dwindling.  We still only put out a bag or so of rubbish a week, but they're not being replenished.  I've got very few bags left now.  This was a bag from Sydney from 17-20 years ago.

The lake is very very low at the moment.

Thursday.  Oh the humidity!!  Juiced twenty lemons for Jim - like 1.8 litres worth!! 

Clouds were a little ominous.  Barely any rain though :(

Had some success with scripting which was cool.  Drinks, pizza, Death in Paradise 10.3.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Went to the doctor late morning.  Had a list of 11 things to talk about (booked a long appointment).  Getting old sux donkey balls.  Just saying.  Decided to drop into Herbert's to have the very last of the TRBC beers (the blood orange sour).  Messaged Tony to see if he'd want to join me, so he did.  Even ran into Fred and family who'd come for lunch which was pretty funny.  Had some tenderloins with mustard sauce which were quite nice, but quite small for $21 and did end up hungry later.

Stu also bought a new toy...

Only cause our old one, which we've been using for like fifteen years since Grant sold it to us, died when the rip cord.. ripped off.. hmmmm.  Frustration with scripting at work.  Mostly cause I'm dumb.  But in the end cause the API I'm working with is crap and to do what I need to do I'd need to make like 3000 api calls.  Hurray.  Think I'll wait to see if powercli updates will be any good.  Kievs and veggies for dinner.  

Then watched Goodbye, Farewell and Amen on Mash.  The only thing I remembered from it was the chicken, so was watching the whole first half in light of that.  It was a pretty good ending to a tv series.  Apparently still the most watched episode of a TV series airing, like, ever.  Even after forty years.  I have all the DVDs from Dad, but I guess I'll probably never watch them now.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got some stuff done, but not nearly enough.  

My first strawberry of the season.  Photo taken in the morning.  I was going to go back in the afternoon and pick it.  I forgot.  By the next day it was GONE.

Stu tried out our new toy.  It's a lot quieter than the petrol one!  And a lot easier to start.  I always hated mowing the lawn as a teenager.  Our yard was huge and we had a heavy clunky lawnmower that always managed to hit me in the face with twigs even with the catcher on.  So I probably haven't mowed any lawn in thirty five years.  I might take it up again though!!

Pretty flowers on the walk to Herbert's

In the evening was a tap takeover at Herbert's.  I was half not wanting to go (would probably end up drinking too much and spending too much).  But went along anyway with Tony, Frank and Karen (J was busy).  The takeover was from Hopsters Co-operative Brewery.  Shared some nachos with Tony to start with and had a couple of beers.

Mitch the "only paid employee" came and sat with us for a bit which was pretty cool, and he told us about the brewery.  It's actually a democratic co-operative and they choose the best beers from their user's home brewed productions and brew them up at scale.  Very cool.

The gang!

After that I went to get more food and that's where the wheels fell off.  I asked for the "kids gems" ($9).  And Dino was like.. oh, we try to save those for the kids.. So I looked around and I'm like, there's literally no kids here.. and he's like, oh it's cause people "take the piss" and order a kids meal between four people.. and so I'm like, well don't worry about it then (I was literally ready to just not order anything at all), but he said he'd give them to me "just this once" (never mind the time I had them at the TRBC night a few weeks back).  Anyway so I sat down again and pretty much just lost it.  Like, I could have ordered a bowl of chips for $5 or a bowl of gems for $9.  I love gems.  I'd much prefer to have gems than chips.  HOW IS THAT A PROBLEM????  I could barely finish the beer I had (and missed out on trying the last one).  I couldn't even face the gems.  Forced myself to eat a few of them.  Tony had the rest.  And then I went home.  Sigh.

Sunday.  Slept mostly okish, except for hurty for a while in the middle.  Still upset/depressed about last night.  The whole drama, combined with a massive increase in food costs (their pea and ham croquettes were $16 the last time they had them in 2022, now they're $20; and the tenderloins I had yesterday were incredibly expensive for their size (for $5 more I could have had a burger and chips and like four or five times the amount of food)) means I probably won't be going back to Herbert's any time soon.  So didn't achieve much all day.  Did some food shopping.  Did a nice roast pork for dinner.  Fat spatter all over the oven though.. eep!

I'm just so over it all at the moment.  I'm almost at the point of giving up on everything.  If I didn't feel the need to travel I could retire now and just stay at home and do my hobbies and never go out and just have a quiet life.  

Dear Vodien, 

Here's a bowl of petunias:

Tuesday 27.8.24.

I went to update my blog because I realised I'd forgotten to add a photo from last week's entry. Loaded the blog interface but got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Loaded terminal through cPanel. Which luckily worked (no CageFS errors this time). Ran my test perl script which connects to SQL and got this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
DBI connect('db:localhost','<user>',...) failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at common.pl line 18.
Cannot connect: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

In phpMyAdmin in cPanel I got:

mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied for user '<user>'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Fricken great. Just what I need. Feeling like I should be buying a bowl of petunias for Vodien.

Wednesday 28.8.24.

I remembered that I'd had the phpMyAdmin error before, and the fix was to just reset the cPanel password. So I did that. Great, phpMyAdmin loads.

Except.

My MySQL database had been reverted to a point in time from last October!!

!!!!

AGAIN!!

Yeah so the exact same problem as in June where they reverted it back to the same spot in October. In June, after a week or two of yelling at them, they restored it.

So of course I yelled at them.

I didn't send them a photo of a bowl of petunias. I should have.

Now before you ask, yes I do have recent backups of my database, having learnt my lesson from last time, but that's not the damned point. In fact I'd taken a backup the Sunday before, so I was only missing one entry from my blog. But as it turned out, having my own backup was not going to help. But we'll get to that later.

Thursday 29.8.24

Vodien ticket escalated (supposedly) to the sysadmins.

Friday 30.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Saturday 31.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Sunday 1.9.24.

Still no response from Vodien - three days now. Started a new ticket. Which they promptly closed.

I changed the permissions on mt-comments.cgi so noone could post any comments. They would either fail because the entries don't exist, or break the site with a republish. And I didn't want more mess to clean up.

Monday 2.9.24.

Vodien provided a restore of the database in an .sql file and said here you go. But it was the database at the "bad" restore point from October last year - so it didn't have any recent data in it.

Tuesday 3.9.24.

One week in.

No progress getting Vodien to restore the correct database for me.

Wednesday 4.9.24.

Vodien basically keep telling me I have to restore my database myself. Which I was considering doing, assuming I actually had the right data. I did end up getting a copy that was taken a few days before they broke it, but I decided to keep pushing for the whole thing.

Then I went to my blog interface to check it and got

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@<domain> to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And logging into the terminal in cPanel I got

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to mount /var/cagefs/35/<user>/home2 -> /usr/share/cagefs-skeleton/home: Too many levels of symbolic links.

So either they were trying to fix it or just making it worse.

Thursday 5.9.24.

Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. At least the cagefs file system on my website was working again in the morning. But the database is still bad.

Friday-Sunday.

Long weekend in Port Macquarie.

Sunday 8.9.24.

Checked my mail when we were near home. I shouldn't have, because the lack of useful response was just making me more and more depressed.

Monday 9.9.24.

While not getting to sleep last night I wondered if maybe there were two database servers on the server. It always used to be MySQL, but the restore they did recently (and I think I might have noticed this previously) was from Maria DB. Same only different. My latest theory is there's actually the old MySQL database server still on the host, and for whatever reason the pointers for Perl and phpMyAdmin have been pointed back at it (again). I mentioned this to them, but their only response was "what's the URL of your blog entry manager?". Yeah right like I'm going to let you into that. So I gave them a command line command that they could use to query my address book database, which has also been impacted by this whole drama. That was in the morning. No response by evening.

Tuesday 10.9.24.

Two weeks in.

No response from Vodien. Eventually they responded with something that didn't make sense, so yelled at them again to put this through to a senior sysadmin.

As an aside: if you Google "Vodien is trash" (I literally did this) you'll get links to review pages that have page after page of people ranting about how utterly trash Vodien is. One star reviews all the way.

Wednesday 11.9.24.

Awake from after 3. Vodien sent me a database restore. But restored from 19 August which was before my last backup anyway.

Tried to reload my blog index, but I got:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@kazza.ciapics.cia.com.au to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Turns out they've blatted all my cgi scripts permissions to 644 instead of 755 or 744. Every single one of them.

WTF?? I mean seriously, WTF???

So now what. Do I take their database, restore it, and hope they don't flip over to the other database at some random point (which I couldn't even find out from them if that's what had happened). Or do I just give up and take my clean backup to a new hosting company. Ok I'd pretty much made up my mind I was going to move. They've broken my site multiple times in the past few years, and it always takes days or weeks of yelling to get it resolved. I'm sick of it.

Thursday 12.9.24.

Apparently they've restored a database again.

Friday 13.9.24.

Tried opening my blog interface and got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yet my Address Book scripts still work. Ok, gave it some time and it came back. But database was still from October 2023.

Saturday 14.9.24.

Resolved myself to spending my entire weekend sorting out this mess.

Step one: find a new hosting company.

Back in 2020 I tried VentraIP. It looked to have everything I wanted and was a good price. I talked to them online before I joined and said I had a Perl/MySQL setup and they said that was fine. But when I went to get it going I found they didn't have the DBD::MySQL perl module and my blog wouldn't work. So that was a complete waste of time. So I wasn't going to try them again.

Had a look on https://www.productreview.com.au/ and someone recommended CloudLoop and they had excellent reviews. So had a look. $10/month for a basic plan which would cover what I needed. They didn't have an online chat, so I emailed them asking about Perl/MySQL. This was fairly early on a Saturday morning. They responded in MINUTES! I was impressed. So I joined up. Pro-rata til the end of the month it was only around $5, so even if it didn't work out I wouldn't lose much.

After the account was activated a short time later, I logged into cPanel only to find they don't have Terminal enabled. Fricken great. So set myself up an SSH private key to try and use ssh. But Internode blocks ssh doesn't it. Fricken fricken. So tried to log into Internode, but their MFA is trash and I had to log off/on a few times before I could finally get in. Also, Stu's phone number is out of date, but we can't update it because:

Your contact details cannot be changed at this time
Unfortunately, your contact details cannot be viewed or changed online at this time. Please contact us to update your details. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thanks Internode, sorry iinet, sorry TPG.

Anyways, eventually got in and turned off the firewall, now to wait and see if it will work.

In the meantime I emailed support about Terminal in cPanel. Again they responded in minutes. They said it was not available for security reasons, but they enabled ssh access and I had to whitelist my IP address in the firewall. Which I couldn't actually find.
But.
Terminal now showed up in cPanel! Great! That's really all I need anyway. Let's do this thing!
(I think they may have mixed up ssh/cpanel terminal - so ssh is disabled which is fair enough, but the terminal in cpanel had been enabled which is all I needed anyway).

So first step is to make sure Perl will work with MySQL. I imported my address book database (it's only tiny) and tried out one of my scripts.

Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (you may need to install the CGI module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at quickie.cgi line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at quickie.cgi line 3.

Turns out CGI.pm hasn't been around since Perl 5.22. Vodien has 5.16. CloudLoop has 5.26.

So I get CGI.pm from CPAN. Add a line to my script to use lib and the path of the file. Works!

Next up my blog script (mt-check to start with). It wanted Util.pm so copied that up as well.

But then it wanted FCGI.pm. Got that too, but this time I got this error:

Can't locate loadable object for module FCGI in @INC

Which I think means it needs to be properly installed/compiled for binaries, which I can't do. hmmmmm

Ok so then ran mt-check on the web. It actually ran! It complained about a bunch of modules, but then it complains on the old site as well. It loaded enough that I might be able to work with it.

So next I need to get my database imported. I still didn't have the most current database export from Vodien (their exports are a different format to mine), so I used my own backup. But I was running into all sorts of problems. phpMyAdmin wouldn't import the file, giving sql errors when importing the "blob" data. And the file is 50MB so trying to edit it and cut it down to just do individual tables was proving problematic. Now I didn't have these problems when I tried VentraIP a few years back, so I'm guessing there must be some versioning problems or something?? But I was getting super frustrated with it. I did have a go at using Vodien's sql file and that one did import, albeit with old data.

Sunday 15.9.24.

So with some actual blog data in the database I next had to get an eighteen year old release of Movable Type working on a modern server. Yes yes I know I should update to something else. But newer versions of Movable Type are $499USD. PER YEAR. And I've seen the dramas people have moving to WordPress. Stu has threatened to spend his retirement moving it to a more modern platform heh. But in the meantime, I just want my blog to work.

So first up I try running mt.cgi on the command line to see what sort of errors I'd get.

[user@server MT-5.2.2]$ perl mt.cgi
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at lib/MT/App.pm line 1821.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Got an error: Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/{{ <-- HERE support}}/?/

Yeah so now you need to escape {} characters in regex strings. Think I fixed that.

So then did a test post and that actually worked!! (using a hosts file entry on my computer so I could test it out on CloudLoop before changing DNS anywhere)

Well that was good enough for me to commit to moving the site across.

Tarballed my directory up on Vodien. ~2.5GB. !! Downloaded it to my computer, extracted it, saved into a number of smaller zip files, uploaded them one at a time, extracted them. Uploading large files must be a bit upsetting for Internode, and I kept getting dumped out of FTP because our IP address kept changing. Have I ever mentioned how trash Internode has become since they got bought out by iinet then TPG? Also I have a 5GB size limit on CloudLoop. Anyways, got there in the end.

Now all that's left is to get a proper copy of my database from Vodien. They did have a restore file taken on the morning of 26 August - the morning after my last blog post. But the files were owned by root and I had no read access. After a few chats/emails back and forth I realised there were actually two copies of the files, one in the root and one in my website. So got them. And they were perfect! Well, they had my latest data in them anyway.

Right, so tried to use phpMyAdmin to import it, but got errors again (didn't record what). But then I found this command

mysql -u database_username -p database_name < file.sql
from this site https://support.hostinger.com/en/articles/4536306-how-to-import-a-database-over-ssh
And that worked perfectly.

But it was at this point I realised that the export sql file was full of funky characters. Somewhere along the line "special characters" from foreign languages lost encoding and were broken. Tried doing search/replaces in vi, but it didn't want to play. So put that aside for now.

Tested posting some blog entries and they worked, so hopefully the database is working well enough.

But I was getting SSL certificate errors - saying it was self signed. I changed the DNS A record in Vodien and waited for it to change over, but I was still getting errors on https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=kazza.id.au

Emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a response in minutes. And then sslhopper was picking the certificate up properly. Not sure if they did anything or not, but I was blown away by the responsiveness and usefulness of CloudLoop support. It's like a breath of fresh air after dealing with the faceless Vodien.

Monday 16.9.24.

Before all these dramas started I'd already been meaning to fix up my blogs properly. I'd fixed the style sheet on my main blog to be hardcoded to https, but I hadn't published it to everywhere, comments were still broken on https, and I wanted to get all my holidays blogs using a consistent design. I also wanted to replace the defunct Google Analytics scripts with the new ones. So after dinner I spent ages working on my holiday blog templates - fixing everything so it all works in https, fixing style sheet locations etc. I picked the Americas 2023 blog (the last one I did) and made sure everything worked properly, then made a Theme from it.

Tuesday 17.9.24.

Working through all my holiday blogs using the updated theme/design. The special characters in my Turkey blog were proving problematic :( Some of the characters I can do a search/replace in the blog interface and it'll go through and change them all. While this works for some characters (eg umlauts) it wouldn't work for some of the characters in the Turkish language :( I also found and fixed a time zone setting in my blog that has been annoying me for twenty years haha.

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday

Work on fixing holiday blogs.

Saturday 21.9.24.

Finished fixing up my holiday blogs (including the Australian Holidays blog which has a slightly different config to it, although have since found a couple of problems I still need to fix).

So then it was onto my behemoth of a main blog. There's over five thousand entries in it. The last time I tried to publish after design update it took over a day. Look I even took a screen shot! 

So I was dreading the pain it was going to cause. I'd taken notes during the fixing of my holiday blogs design, so it was pretty quick to repeat the changes in the main blog. But before I committed, I wanted to test the design with a test post to make sure it picked up everything ok.

Took a while and then BAM..

500
Internal Server Error
An internal server error has occurred.

The good news is the entry did actually post. Although not properly, and it was intermittent. Like it'd mostly update the entry page, but then not the archives page etc. So thinking there might be resource limits. I didn't see any real spikes/errors in the cPanel Resource Usage thingie though.

I tried clearing out the entire activity log. This cleared nearly 9MB out of the database. But it didn't help. I tried a few other Movable Type config options as well with no luck.

So I emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a super quick response. And a stack trace. And they looked while trying to reproduce the problem themselves. This was all well and truly above and beyond the level of support I would have expected. I was astounded. But a definite possibility was the Assets. Since Movable Type 4, whenever you upload an image it would save it to the database as an asset. This annoyed me when it first started because of all the extra clutter, but I did like it simply because it'd read the image and put height/width info into the html. But after sixteen years, I had 14000 assets. !! So I deleted them all!! (well, firstly I tested what would happen if you did. I found it would delete the asset and the image itself, but it left the html alone. So all I needed to do was restore the images once I'd deleted the assets, and all would be well).

Then I did a test post.

It published.

In SECONDS.

!!!!

After a bit more testing of posting and commenting I was ready to release the hounds. I republished the entire site. I did it in chunks, but it was all done in under ten minutes. And search results are returned super quickly too now. My blog hasn't been this fast in YEARS!!!

The only real remaining issue now is the foreign characters. I download the mt-entry table (16MB) and did some search/replaces and was able to fix a lot of it. But there's some characters that I just can't publish because it won't talk to the database. There might be a way to fix it. Something about telling perl to talk to MySQL with the right version of utf-8. But I'm too dumb for that sort of thing. Replaced a good chunk of the bad characters. Almost accidentally blatted the .bak table because I forgot to change the table name in the insert into lines (yay for it not importing duplicate entries). Had to redo the whole thing again because I didn't escape ' and " characters. Then republished again. Nine minutes, fifty seconds. I should probably republish all my holiday blogs too.

Sunday 22.9.24.

Spent most of the afternoon blogging entries from the past month.

Monday 23.9.24.

Wrote up this post so far.

I still haven't changed my mail or DNS configs over yet. Or the websites for my subdomains. I'll do that first before I post this.

I haven't decided what I'll do with johnson.id.au or trainman.id.au. I'd actually prefer to keep trainman where it is, because then I'd be able to email David again (currently using my account as an SMTP server, which intercepts mail for trainman.id.au and delivers it to me instead of David).

I also need to figure out how to backup my database properly. I'll have to do some testing of exporting/importing the data on the same version. Otherwise I'm going to need to figure out a better way to backup the blob data in the database. If I hadn't been able to get the Maria DB dump from Vodien I would have been a bit stuck as I wasn't able to properly import my own database backup, which is quite upsetting.

Tuesday 24.9.24.

Started going through and documenting everything in my Vodien cPanel setup. Found a place for mail forwarding, so tried setting trainman.id.au to an external MX record to see what would happen if I sent mail there from my account. It hasn't bounced back to me, so maybe it did deliver to David. This is good to know if I end up moving trainman.id.au to CloudLoop. Also found another backup section which lets you download MySQL databases. This has the same format as what Vodien sent to me. Interestingly the Vodien export is full of trash characters, while the CloudLoop export is fine. This is good news. Dropped my TTLs on mail to 300. Setup my mail accounts on CloudLoop. Tried them out in Eudora. TLS errors to start with, but easily fixed by setting TLS to Required, Alternate Port in Eudora. So changed the DNS for mail.kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. So inbound mail all working. Had a look at migrating ciapics over. But it's half a gig. And I only have five on CloudLoop. Considering leaving it there, but I really want to take all of kazza.id.au off Vodien. Next up - SMTP. Got it to auth and send ok, but now to battle with the SPF record. Adding the IP address of my host didn't help. Or adding relay.mailchannels.net. hmm. On a lighter note, cPanel and DNS are actually integrated on CloudLoop which is nice.

Wednesday 25.9.24.

Tested mail again and my SPF record has propagated around so that's nice - can send to gmail now. Although this is all likely to be moot once I switch the nameservers across and use CloudLoops DNS which already has all this stuff. While clearing stuff out of Vodien I discovered that at some point they'd actually fixed the ownership of the db restores. Lolz.

Friday 27.9.24.

Setup johnson.id.au as a domain on CloudLoop.  Copied over the content (there's like, one page).  Then changed the nameservers from Vodien to CloudLoop.  Tested email once DNS propagated.

Saturday 2.11.24.

Been on CloudLoop for like six or seven weeks now. No issues. Today I changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. Pointed a few A names of my photo subdomains back at Vodien. They have a lot more storage so keeping my photos sites there.

Sunday 3.11.24.

Cleaned out most of kazza.id.au off Vodien, including my blog database. Left an entry in my addressbook database and make sure the scripts were working to access it. So I'll be able to tell when Vodien break it again.

In conclusion.

I knew as soon as Vodien broke my database AGAIN for the second time in three months that I was going to have to finally move my blog. This was reinforced over the next few weeks by being impossible to get anyone who actually cared or had the capability to look at the issue and fix it. No matter how much pleading and yelling I did I just couldn't get anywhere. It made me seriously depressed for weeks. I was also upset that the backups of the database I'd been dutifully taking weren't necessarily going to work properly.

On the flip side, the support and responsiveness of CloudLoop (Karthick) was utterly outstanding. They definitely deserve their five star reviews.

In the end my blog is a lot happier. The holiday sites are consistent in design and everything works properly in HTTPS. The culling of the assets out of the database means my entries publish in seconds. Every new year I'll clear out the previous year's assets to keep it trimmed down.

Let's hope I don't have to write another one of these posts any time soon...

Monday.  7th.  Labour Day.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Woke up ~6.29.  Fish and gardening stuff all morning.  Then setting up and fighting with the new printer (needed another driver to print double sided).  Then trying to sort out tax stuff.  And getting stressed at everything.  Adulting is hard :(

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Catchup day at work really.  Shine Dome talk in the evening. Prof Nanda Dasgupta talking about the research of Prof Mark Oliphant, and Dr Ed Simpson talking about his work with particle accelerators and making new elements. 

Bronte Cormican-Jones's "Of Line of Light" outside the NFSA

Dinner at Badger&Co after.  Talked into buying more food than I wanted.  Like a LOT more.  Oh well, leftovers.  Hurrah.  Also Badger is pretty hit and miss, and more misses with the specials.  Like the "crispy" pork belly bites that weren't crispy.

Wednesday.  Awake from before 1:30 til after 4.  Hurray.  Zombie day.  Did go to the Crepe Cafe for lunch to avoid the food court in school holidays.  Hadn't been since pre covid.  Except they're the Aussie Crepe House now.  I had the stroganoff crepe (up to $17 now, ouch).  It probably had a bit more cheese filling, but the beef was TOUGH.  

Cooked cheese kranski chipolatas for dinner, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of them for the next 24 hours or so!

Thursday.  Ok day I think.  Herbert's after work for a final TRBC tap takeover.  Tim came which was nice.  He might be looking for IT work in Canberra, although his wife is not keen on them leaving Tumut.  

Friday.  Crap sleep.  Ok day.  Kept a bit late at work and then had to race down the hill for a bus, which I only *just* caught, to go out to Cypher for Wello's birthday drinks.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day trying to catch up with life.  Stu was also too stressed with life so we didn't go to the club working bee. 

In the evening was a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's.  I did a very half-hearted attempt at Eddie (couldn't find a wig or vest, or borrow a saxophone, but did find a scarf which matched and made a slingshot).  

The sweetie went as Dr Scott.

There were frank n furters, meatloaf, and rocky horror road.

Ian even let me have like one of the last ever TRBC beers I'm ever likely to have!

Ended up staying up wayyyy too late, but it was fun.

Sunday.  Got like five hours sleep.  Cause I wake up early no matter what.  With sore throat.  Spent the day continuing to catch up with life.  Managed to get all my Queensland photos online, only a month late.  Also went and did food shopping.  Tuna bake and veggies for dinner.  Early night.

Friday - 6.9.24

Out the door at 9am, but had to get some extra things for Jeff's "hamper". Then we needed to get breakfast. So it was after 10 by the time we got away from Canberra.

Lake George shining

Stu put on an audio book - The Easy Life in Kamusari.

At the Nattai River hill we were passed by a hoon. I was disappointed there wasn't police on the other side of the hill (there often is). When we got to the M7 turnoff in Sydney there was a bit of a traffic jam and we were in the wrong lane to turn onto it, so that was a bit stressful. We were finally able to merge in and when we got to the pyramid there were police cars and the same hoon pulled over and under arrest (literally saw him in handcuffs on the ground haha).

Stopped at Ourimbah for petrol and lunch.

New freeway and overpasses at Hexham

I'll miss the old bridge at Hexham

Then just drove on. Mostly finished the book.

Arrived in Port Macqaurie just before 6. Dumped our stuff then headed out again.

Went out to Potty's for drinks and pizzas. Most of the family was there so that was nice. The kids were very loud heh.

Saturday - 7.9.24

Didn't sleep very well - the pillow was too thick and the bed too soft. I did go and get my own pillow which helped, but kept getting a sore spine from the soft bed.

Got ready then went out for a good long walk around the beaches which was pretty nice.

Folly, on Windmill Hill

Butcherbird

Nobby Head

Oxley Beach

Flagstaff Lookout

Town Beach

Oxley Beach

Waves crashing off Oxley Beach

Town Beach

There was a small formation of vintage aircraft flying around

Port Macquarie Observatory

Gak gak birds!!

Then I tried to find coffee and breakfast. I'd already passed one busy cafe at Town Beach but wasn't ready to get stuff yet. I found one other cafe but they didn't have any nice pastries just a couple of cakes/banana bread type stuff. Looked for a few other cafes but they didn't look the sort to do takeaway coffee. So #fail. In the end got some snackages and coffee in a can from the Foodary.

Annie stopped by to drop off a dress (I don't own dresses lolz). It was a bit big but looked marginally ok. Stu thought I should wear it.

Then we headed up to SWR, and finished the book on the way. It was kinda funny. Nice story.

Kempsey Northern Gateway Sculpture

At Jeff and Ruth's we arrived in time for morning tea (everyone was already there, so that was a bit stressful), and they put on a slide show which was pretty cool.

Jeff about to go through the slide show

Then we headed off to lunch - The Old Bank in Gladstone. They'd setup a table outside under a big tree overlooking the river - absolutely lovely setting. Had a pretty awesome lunch there. And there were lots of speeches hehe. And there were two snakes. Or the same snake doing the rounds. I thought it was Sally's leash that was moving, and things weren't computing, and everyone thought I was having a seizure or something. But I hope I didn't step on it (I don't think I did). Left after 3.

Family photo

Ruth and Jeff

Arancini balls

Chicken sausage rolls

Prawn platter

Green tree snake (take 2 - the other one that I nearly trod on got away before I could get a photo)

Beef tenderloin I had for lunch

Annie reading her poem

Jeff's birthday cake

Happy birthday!!

The plan was to go back to Jeff and Ruth's to get changed to go for a swim. But then it was decided to drive around the beaches to see which one would be the best. But then it was decided which beach they were going to go to, but noone told us, and most of them didn't come back to Jeff's. This made it Too Hard, so I just stayed with the Stu's.

Then back to Port for dinner of snackages (still full from lunch). Watched some Big Bang Theory then to bed.

Sunday - 8.9.24

Still too soft a bed to sleep very well. Woke up at 5.

Got ready then headed out to Potty's for coffee. We were first there which was nice.

Had breakfast at The Scottish Restaurant then tried to get petrol. But if you're coming from the restaurant side it's incredibly confusing and we drove around a couple of times and in the end came in through the back cause they made it too damned hard.

Put on the next Kamusari book which we got most of the way through (Kamusari Tales Told at Night).

Hexham Bridge

Had lunch in Ourimbah, and got petrol in Marulan.

At Lake George (which is still very full) a wallaby on the side of the road started moving onto the road. Stu slowed down, gently, then rapidly, then to a hard stop. We were lucky we didn't hit the thing. The dude on the right didn't slow down at all and zoomed past us while we were stopped. If the wallaby had kept crossing the road it would have been hit. In the end it went back off to the left. So that was a bit rattling.

Home a bit before 6.

This view coming into Canberra never gets old!

Sunday.  11th.  Picked up Neil and went into town.  Had Pappa Rich for dinner.  I had the roti canai with curry chicken which turned out to be huge, didn't need those chicken dumplings..

Did you know there's a bowling alley in Civic?? I didn't..

Then saw Twisters.

This whole week has been a complete blur.  Work is insanely busy and stuff on most nights as well.

Tuesday was a Shine Dome night with Professor Richard J Payne with a very interesting talk on discovering and synthesising new proteins, and A/Prof Rona Chandrawati and her work on using visible light properties of chemicals/reactions for practical applications such as detecting food spoilage.

Dinner at 10 Yards.

Wednesday had a sneaky afternoon off with the little brother and went to Questacon.

Loled at this on the way home..

Had some bubbles

Got Chong Co delivered

And made up the pavlova leftover from the club Christmas in July.

Was a lovely afternoon/evening and great that David could come up.

Thursday.  Awake from like 3 til 5.  Hurray.  Crazy busy day.  Again.  Drinks.  Bed.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Crazy busy day.  Again.  Finished at like 18:30.  Still no kievs at Chris's so found other frozen brown food to have.

Then watched Iron Man.  Bit of fun, if a bit silly in places.  It's a bit dumb that the other dude could fly straight away.  What would have *actually* happened is he'd faceplant the first time he took off.  Someone on IMDB agreed with me:

Tony Stark is shown, learning to control the powerful thrusters in the suits hands and feet. It takes Tony considerable time to master the art of flying. However, when Stane acquires the arc reactor from Tony and inserts it into his new iron suit, he is able to fly and maneuver well, immediately.

Saturday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Felt totally overwhelmed in the morning trying to keep up with housework.  I did finish labelling Tassie photos (day photos) so that was a win I guess.  And started some Lego.  But felt too blah to cook, so got tv dinners.  Hurray.  Then tried to watch Iron Man 2, but Disney refused to play anything - Error Code 83.  It was literally working before dinner.  Then I tried Netflix.  Had it going round in loops of logging me out, freezing up, not having anything in my profile, logging me out again.  WTF.  Fine.  So I try it in Edge.  Works fine.  Stoopid Chrome.  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy day of house/photo/food shopping/cooking etc.  Juiced all the lemons that had fallen off the tree in the past week or two.  Now what..

These are nice though..

Sunday.  21st.  Roasted All The Veggies for dinner, and had that with some leftover beef.

Monday.  Slept okish, bit restless, kept waking up hot.  Took out the recycling tub to the bin outside and noticed behind it a big stain on the side of the pantry from a stream of dirty water.  Seems I must have overwatered the plant on top on Friday night.  Sigh.  So then had to spent a bunch of time before work wiping it all down and having a sad that the chipboard had swelled from the water.  Sigh.  Busy day doing some migration work and paperwork.  Into Mash season 8.

Tuesday.  Dunno, no notes.

Wednesday.  Had a big lunch at work.  Well, it was big in that there were lots of people, but lunch was super small on account of heaps of people turning up without being catered for so they ran out of food.  Whoops.  At least I did get something. 

In the evening Team Blank accidentally won the trivia night.  Sigh.  Only by two points too.  It was generally pretty fun.  My only main gripe was some of the questions were either half points for two part answers, or two points.  And it wasn't consistent.  Which wouldn't have been a problem except they weren't marking them centrally, they got us to swap with other tables.  So that was bit annoying. 

Anyways.  Looks like I have to plan another trivia night.  First since pre covid.  Someone suggested getting AI to write it.  Wonder what sort of questions it would come up with.  

At least there was mulled cider.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Although awake from after 4 til 5 after the sweetie got up to pee (he'd been awake for hours stressing about All The Things).  Dealing with All The Problems during the day.  Then pizzas, Mash, Lego Masters.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Morning was just dealing with crap and tidying up and crap. 

The turdburgers are back to eat the house

Knocked off at lunch then did some club dinner prep and food shopping and more prep including making a peppermint slice.  Frustrated with LibreOffice formatting.  I have a random line in one of my documents that I literally cannot delete.  Give me Notes formatting any day.

Here's all the shopping for the club Christmas in July night.

Dessert.  After I'd started making up the peppermint slice

Presents

It's times like this I really miss the little brother...

Chris *promised* me kievs this week.  He lied!!  He did say I could beat him over the head.  So had to have some other random chicken stuff instead to go with the kalettes.

This is some of the peppermint slice cut up 

Saturday.  Not much in the morning.  Stu decided he was too stressed to go out to the club so I went out by myself.  

All my bags of crap

After I dumped everything in the fridge I went for a wander and had a chat with Chris and Geoff and Tammie and Brenton.  Then watched a demo of the log splitter and had a go on it.  Then it was into the kitchen to wash up everything and start prepping dinner.  Which took all afternoon.  Note to self: start closer to 12 than 1.  There were a couple of minor disasters.  Firstly I forgot to take out the small wooden skewer sticks so I couldn't make up the Christmas Skewers (Chris suggested putting the bits out in bowls but they didn't really get eaten much).  Then the door on the little oven was a bit bent so it wasn't closing properly, so when I opened up the foil on the turkeys they were nowhere near done.  John hacked the oven door and got it to close properly and so I cranked the temp and waited a bit longer.  All good cause the other oven was still super slow even with less food in it.  So dinner was a little later than I planned but it all worked out.  It was also a fairly quiet night, only like 20-25 peeps.  And I also missed getting photos of a lot of the food cause I was concentrating too much on getting it organised.  Whoops.

John and some turkey

Coles winter salad

One of the potato bakes

Minted peas

We only did one pavlova because of so few people

Eggnog overload!!  With actual real eggnog from last Christmas, that had been in the freezer at home since January

Went to bed a little late but not too bad.

Sunday.  Happy birthday Dad.  Woke up quite early and never got back to sleep.  Eventually got up and went up at 7:30 to clean up the shed, and was totally amazed to see snow!  Will post pics separately.  After making it past the snow, then spent half an hour taking down Christmas decorations, had some breakfast, then spent an hour doing washing up from last night.  hmmm.  Definitely not part of the plan.

Came home but was zombie tired so didn't feel up to doing anything useful.  I did make some drawer dividers for our implements drawer out of reject Lego of Vic's (worn/yellowed stuff).  And watched an hour of the Olympics opening ceremony.  Then took the sweetie to the airport, then came home for photos/blogging etc.