OMFG!  Not backdating!! ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  In the evening I got up to labelling the photo of sad bean!  This was a baked bean Stu had at breakfast one morning on our UK 2010 holiday.  It had a crease and a couple of specks of pepper at just the right spots to make the bean look like it had a sad face.  Stu couldn't bear to eat sad bean, and I don't like baked beans, so that poor little bean didn't get eaten, which was even sadder!  I might have had a little sad ten years later just labelling the photo I took of it :(:(

Up to episode 7 of Against the Wind.

Tuesday.  Hurty woke me up and kept me awake for an hour and a half.  But otherwise slept ok. 

<work rant snipped>

But look!  Itty bitty Cape Weed flower!

Leftovers for dinner, UK labelling and episode 8 of Against the Wind.

Wednesday.  All the stoopid.  I don't even remember what now.  I ranted to Stu over a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar and pushed it from my memory.  

Stopped in at the markets on the way home to go to the chemist, and the sweetie even cooked dinner! :)

I thought this looked pretty cool - looks a bit like the Matterhorn!

Thursday.  Filled with rage at someone watching Bathurst near me at work without a headset - not even at their desk, but in our area because their own desk is outside the exec offices and that would look bad.  And three or four conversations going on around me meant for NOISE and I seriously nearly lost it.  Fortunately I have the bestest boss ever and he went and muted Bathurst for me so I didn't go postal.  Watched the second episode of the French sun documentary.

Neil and I saw these at lunch on Thursday.  Not a huge amount of information on the Beam website, you need to download the app to find out useful stuff, you know, like where you can ride them.  45c/minute introductory rate to ride one.  Wonder how well they'll last.  I wouldn't mind taking one for a trip around the lake :)

Friday.  Deleting all the things!  Did a massive cleanup of routes in the morning, and cleared out a big decommissioned app in the afternoon.  In between I had lunch at Herbert's with Tony and the Chrises.  Big lunch, so dinner was a small serving of popcorn (needed some fibre to counteract all the meat I had at lunch).  Watched Arrietty in the evening, which we last (first) saw at the movies in 2012.  The movie is based on the "The Borrowers" books which really annoys me as a title because they're not borrowing, they're *stealing*.  Just sayin!

Saturday.  Slept well.  A day of All The Things.  We did do a quick Bunnings run and food shop.  I'd already voted during the week so didn't get a democracy sausage (I think a lot of places aren't doing them anyway), but Bunnings has started up their sausage sizzles again, but they load the sauces for you.  So not quite as pretty as a photo as my actual democracy sausage featured on Atlas (Gastro) Obscura :)

Stu cooked dinner which was lovely of him - grilled eggplant with a sauce of miso, mirin, and sake.  Quite yummy.

In the evening we watched the first episode of season 3 of Discovery.  I enjoyed the first season, but the second season just got way too convoluted and hard to follow.  The first episode of this season was fine, hopefully this season won't be as complicated as the last.  Up to episode 9 of Against the Wind.  

Sunday.  Today.  For once I'm not backdating.. craziness I know!  Woke up at 3:45 to go to the loo but didn't get back to sleep for hours.  At 4:51 I got up to have some cheese because I was hungry.  Apparently just a little bit of eggplant and rice isn't enough to keep me full all night.  I did eventually get a bit more sleep, including have a dream that I was staying at Dooce's house, and it was *massive* and Stu for some reason was sleeping in some other building on the *campus*, and I was talking to Leta about what life was like being the daughter of such a famous blogger.  So a pretty slow start.  Did a few things on the todo list.  I was going to do some more Lego part picking of Vic's sets, but by the time I'd gotten the files organised and found the sets and gone through them for what they had already it was after lunch.  Then we went and visited Annie/Stu/Immy, and then came home and did cooking and photo processing and blogging and suddenly it's nearly dinner time.  Hrmmmmm.

Hey!  Not backdating for a change! ;)

But I'm also not doing a full week - just last week before the weekend.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 5:57 - two minutes earlier than yesterday :)  Tried contacting the plumber again, and Sefton House in Tumut.  By Tuesday neither the caravan park or Sefton House had replied (story in previous entry).  But at least the plumber got back to me - had no idea what happened to my previous email.  Took ages in the evening to do UK photo labelling.

Wednesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and didn't get back to sleep til well after 5am :(  Plumber came and spent ages testing stuff, and thinks it's most likely the waterproofing behind the tiles.  Which is exactly what Pete said.  I don't understand how *so much* water can leak through grout.  I mean I know it's not completely waterproof, but I thought it wouldn't leak like a sieve.  David hung around for much of the morning while I was at work.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever? :)  In the afternoon had a real estate agent over to give a bit of a valuation on the place, purely for interests sake.  Only took three goes to get all the movies off my phone in the evening.

Thursday.  Had better sleep.  Too much stoopid during the day.  Watched Whisper of the Heart in the evening. It was so real you could basically go to (almost) any of the locations and see them in real life.  Apparently one kid in a movie theatre was heard to say they could see their house!

Friday.  Tried to reboot my computer because it had run out of ram, and I wanted to do some more Tumut research.  But it sat patching for *hours* so lost the entire evening, which I really really needed.  #grunt

Short blog entry tonight, will do Tumut separately.  When I process the 940 Canon photos and 327 iPhone photos .. hrmmm!!

Twenty years ago today I was playing with work's new Sony Mavica camera.  They bought it because its memory was floppy disks!  This made it easy for staff to use because they didn't need anything special to get the files they'd taken off the camera - they could just put the floppy disk in their computer.  It also did movies which was pretty cool at the time.  Of course the movies couldn't be very long when you only had a 1.44MB floppy disk to save them to ;)

This was taken of Tux and Sami's Vortex sitting on top of my computer at work.  In the background is a picture of Vic's white WRX, and one of each different colour of Yowie "eggs".

Oh my what a week.

So back to last Sunday.  I forgot to mention we went to the markets for a little bit of food shopping, altho we didn't get very much.  Had chicken cordon bleu that we got that day for dinner because, yum.  Into season 11 BBT.

Monday just doing all the things and UK photo labelling.

Tuesday morning I felt like had way too much to do at home to have time to go to work.  But at work I was so insanely busy I actually felt a bit queasy in my stomach.  I was completely on edge all day.  Late in the afternoon I went downstairs to move crap out of David's side of the garage that we'd dumped there on the weekend and I stepped on an air packing bag in the dark (twice in three days - I'd done the same thing in the dungeon on the weekend) and it made a huge bang and I had a full on meltdown right there on the garage floor.  It was definitely a wine and candle kind of an evening.  I asked the sweetie to cook so we got pizza.  hrmm.

The boys put on another couple of episodes of Space Force, and I watched the start of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  There was also this photoshop disaster on the Chromecast.  That bridge isn't even in that location next to the Golden Gate Bridge, and the one they've photoshopped in there is only half there, and is distorted in places too.  Epic fail!

Wednesday morning was up to 1500 of Dad's slides.  Then started some pretty full on AWS training (via Zoom).  Also, I'm too stoopid to be a network admin.  In the evening I redid one of the labs to try and figure out what I was doing wrong.  Got there in the end, but I did miss out on two nights of photo labelling this week :(

Thursday wasn't quite so intense.  We didn't have much food in the house, but I did have some sausages defrosted that I bought in March (I got three trays of meat to freeze before everything got really crazy, and figured it was time to use them up).  Managed to make up quite a nice dinner of sausages, cabbage bake and potatoes.

Friday was pretty full on.  I didn't have time to go for a walk, and once I was done with the training I had to catch up on all the work I'd been neglecting at work.  Didn't finish til like 6pm.  Watched Howl's Moving Castle (the Billy Crystal english version on Netflix) with the sweetie, which I hadn't seen since we saw it at the movies in Brisbane in 2005.

Friday night I actually slept really well which was nice.  Saturday morning we did various medical things, had brunch at Rocksalt (really nice to have a nice brunch with the sweetie), dropped a boot full of clothes off at Vinnies and did a small food shop at the markets.  

Stu had the shakshuka.  He'd have liked a bit more feta but otherwise liked it.

I had eggs benedict.  Lovely crispy toast and bacon, well cooked eggs and a nice hollandaise sauce - great job!

Beautifully cooked eggs!

In the afternoon was catching up on blogging and house stuff.  Also David fixed the display on Stu's CD player which hasn't worked for years (one incandescent light bulb blew, putting too much voltage on the other two which blew as well).  Most awesomest brother ever!!

Watched some BBT and the next couple of Netflix corona virus documentary episodes (the race for a vaccine and how to cope).  The sweetie and I have been super lucky throughout this lockdown.  Even though we're introverts and actually prefer isolation, we still have each other (and David ;) ).  So we've been coping probably better than most people.  

Today was nice and quiet, mainly just cleaning and tidying the house.  Altho I did feel somewhat cranky this afternoon (the vaccuum cleaner being a bumhead certainly didn't help).  We do have some roast pork in the oven so that should hopefully be nice.

And it rained this weekend!  I put this glass out last night and look at all the rain it caught!

Backdating a week cause, well, I'm a slacker ;)

Sunday we watched the second episode of Lego Masters where everything when kaboom!  Fun times.

I remembered on Monday that I hadn't posted a funny I found in the new Lion King movie.  In the original movie during the song Hakuna Matata, Pumbaa sings "And I got downhearted, Every time that I .." and Timon cuts him off and says "Pumbaa not in front of the kids".  Well in the new one he actually sings "farted" which cracked me up ;)  Got my quota of UK photos labelled early, all the more time for the jigsaw!  Frustratingly slow though, because even if you know the *exact shaped piece* you still have to search through hundreds and hundreds of pieces to find it.  Also started season 10 of BBT.

This was on my walk on Monday.  I'm bribing these guys not to swoop me come spring time ;)

Tuesday I worked from home in the morning, then went into the city with the sweetie.  We had lunch at Gus's which was really nice (both being able to go out and share a meal with the sweetie, and lunch wasn't bad either ;) ). 

Went to the sweetie's doctor's appointment, then chucked one in for me as well.  Went into work for a bit in the afternoon while I waited for the sweetie to do stuff at his office.  They'd just put a sticker on "my" desk saying don't sit there.  The disadvantage of hotdesking (with TINY desks) is you don't get proper social distancing.  So whateves - whilever that sticker is on my desk I'll continue working from home.  So being "at work" for the afternoon meant that I really didn't feel like cooking when I got home.  So the sweetie got pizza.  Hrmmm.  The sweetie and I are relishing our time at home and working from home.  We'd very happily never go into the office again.  Of course we'd be even happier just being hermits and having a quiet life and not ever having to deal with people :)

Wednesday was too cold and miserable for a walk at lunch.  And crazy crazy busy.  And too much stoopid.  Wasn't til after 5pm that I could actually leave all the busyness and get stuck into prep work I really needed to do for Saturday.  For dinner I cooked the last of the leftover pork from the weekend with the last of a cabbage that I bought like six weeks ago, a sausage from the other night, a handful of green beens and the last of the pork jelly.  It was a pretty random meal but tasty enough and used up a bunch of stuff in the fridge.  And there was even leftovers for David!  That morning I scanned 28 of Dad's slides, and in the evening got up to 1094 photos labelled from UK 2010.  Nothing on the jigsaw though.

Thursday was chicken kiev for dinner (since we'd already had pizza this week).  And watched Lego Masters episode 3.

Friday hurty kept me awake from 12:30 to 3:00 so was pretty tired all day Friday.  Although I did manage to finish scanning a third box of Dad's slides for the week.

Saturday I was at work all day watching graphs during some DDoS testing.  Stu made pea and ham soup for dinner from a soup packet mix I got from Chris's last year some time. I actually liked it better because it had chunky bits in it that didn't all just disintegrate like the peas do.  Watched more Lego Masters.

I think Tassie is a little out of scale...

Sunday I alternated between the jigsaw and housework.  Had Rob and Lynn over for roast lamb for dinner which was nice.  

Monday morning I actually scanned a whole box of 36 of Dad's slides all before work.  I still wonder if I should have (or should) invest in a slide scanner.  Rob and Lynn said they did and managed to get through thousands of slides in just a few weeks.  Dad actually did, and I have it downstairs, but I haven't really played with it and not sure how good it is (or how fast it is).  I'm actually really happy with the results that I'm getting from the scanner Stu got me for Christmas in 2005.  It's slow, sure, but the quality seems pretty good (to me).  And if I continue to scan a box a day I'll be done by Christmas.....!  In the evening I did another 200 UK photos.  All of them in Japan.  hrmm :)   Also roasted a couple of trays of potatoes to have with the leftover lamb.

And that's up til then.  No movies to quote though for the blog subject.  Guess I'll just have to use one from last week ;)

Last Tuesday.  Couldn't get to sleep again last Monday night so Tuesday was another zombie day.  But came home a bit early and had quite a productive evening doing housework and photo stuff.  Did most although not all of the things on the todo list, but actually felt pretty relaxed about it all which was good.

Tuesday night slept really well, which worried me I'd ruin Wednesday night's slep heh.  Did a bunch of planning work at work.  In the evening was blogging USA 2000 photos, and had another quite productive and fairly relaxed evening.

Another good night sleep Wednesday night, and more planning Thursday.

Well the good sleep had to end.  Friday morning woke up at 3am.  At 4am I got up and blogged.  Went back to bed and got a *little* bit more sleep.  But pretty tired Friday.  Finished of my planny plan plan and sent it around for review.  Got home and started watching Clutch Powers which Chrissie lent me forever ago, while waiting for Kit and Pete to arrive up from the coast.  They came and got me and we headed over to Pete's Mum's place.  We walked to the Labor Club only to find that Kit had been banned... fifteen years ago!!  And she didn't know.  Because she'd been to the Labor Club *multiple* times over the years.  Weird stuff.  My theory is that for years they would scan your licence, but probably there was nothing electronic to tie it back to a person, it was just as evidence.  Nowadays they OCR the licences and look people up electronically so it's finally linked her back.  Anyway so Kit was pretty upset and Leisa was hungry and Carol didn't want anything too salty and Kit's not a fan of Asian so we're all like.. um.. Anyway we thought we'd try Charnie's Noodles and Dumplings.  So the girls sat down while Pete and I went to the bottle-o.  When we got back they said it was an hour and a half wait for food.  And we were like WTF.  There were like three other people in the restaurant.  But apparently they have an epic takeaway/delivery service.  So we said forget it and walked out.  Back to the drawing board.  So we ended up getting Crust takeaway which we took back to Carol's.  A bit of a debacle, but we ended up having quite a nice evening of chatting.  And there was a puppy.

Slept relatively well Friday night, but didn't end up getting much done on Saturday.  Did a bit of USA 2000 photo stuff but not a lot else.  Watched Skyfall in the evening.  No good quotes from that movie or iconic one liners (at least from Bond).  

Another relatively good night's sleep Saturday.  Finally finished getting our tax organised to be posted off to the accountant.  Did a bunch of processing of the scans I have of Mum's photos (for future blogging).

Also saw this wild blue tongue lizard in the back yard twice on Sunday.

Dropped Stu off at the airport, then did food shopping.

Also.  Oh no, not again.

Monday I went to cook lemon chicken using some of the lemons that dropped over Christmas, but sadly they don't last forever and most of them had dried out.  Sadness.  Did find a few to use so that was nice.  Didn't get much else done though.

Tonight managed to get the photos off my phone without ending up in tears which is always a win.  Helped by not having any videos this week, and none of the pngs had had their timestamps screwed with by Apple.  Also watched the Dirty Dancing episode of The Movies that Made Us.

And look, it's before 9:30.  Although I still need to wash my hair.  Dammit.

Man the insomnia last week was horrendous.  I think I only got about one good night's sleep all week.

Tuesday night I woke up at ~3am for a couple of hours.  So Wednesday was an even worse zombie day than Tuesday.  On Wednesday evening I finished fully labelling my USA 2000 photos (everything had been labelled previously, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.

These things were so good!  Just like cheese kranskis.

Wednesday night I actually slept quite well.  I think I started culling down the USA 2000 photos for blogging on Thursday evening.  Note that all these photos have been online for nineteen years on conspiracy, but I've never put the photos and the blog together (actually I only digitised the blog a couple of years ago).  Rewatched first two episodes of Picard because David wanted to see it too.  Struggling to get stuff watched now cause noone's ever around at the same time.  Haven't even started the Mandalorian.

Friday morning I woke up at 1am and never got back to sleep.  Worst zombie day of the week.  I couldn't deal with people at work, you know the ones that don't actually understand basic networking, so they have no idea what they're even asking for.  My brain was just too mushy to deal.  So spent the day deleting old firewall rules which was a bit of fun.  Met up with the sweetie for a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar, then we had dinner at Kinn Thai.  Both the chili jam crispy pork and the papaya crispy chicken were "one chilli" rated, which you'd think would be mild, but it was at the upper limit of my tolerance.  I'd hate to try anything hotter there...

The sweetie dropped me off at the airport which was lovely of him, but when I arrived I found my flight had been delayed over an hour and a half - apparently due to the bad weather in Sydney.  I chatted to Rob and Fiona briefly who happened to be there.  Then I tried to see if I could get on the earlier Sydney flight, but apparently it was full.  Had to ask.  So went and bought some overpriced wine and sat and read my book.  The original indicator board said boarding was at 20:25.   So at a bit after 20:15 I went for a bit of a wander.  Saw the indicator boards that said my boarding time was 20:10, but there was nothing to say go to gate.  So that confused me a bit.  So I kept walking, and then finally heard the announcement for the final boarding call for my flight (I couldn't hear the announcements properly where I'd been sitting).  So then it's like crap.  I'm basically at the Qantas end of the terminal and I still need to pee.  So did that then basically had to run the entire way down the terminal to gate #3.  #grunt.  Turns out I wasn't the only one to get screwed over like that, we still had to wait for a few more people before we could take off.  Of course then I was coughing most of the flight from the exertion.  hrmmmmmm.  Still, I had the seat to myself, and got a few cool timelapses of the path out of Canberra and again in Sydney.

So it's nearly 10pm by this point, and the buses don't run all that often, according to a timetable I found the next one was in half an hour.  So I thought it would be quicker to get the train, even though it costs about $15 more #grunt.  But there were no trains.  And the indicator boards had *nothing* to indicate how long to the next one.  In the end I waited over half an hour for a train to Wolli Creek.  Shoulda gone for the damned bus.  At Wolli Creek a Waterfall train pulled in as I got there, but it was 19 minutes til the next Cronulla train.  So was going to go to Sutherland and walk, but messaged Mum and she said she'd come get me which was lovely.  

So got to Mum's place and crashed in a heap.

Slept relatively well - and quite late - til 7:30!!

Had breakfast with Mum (cardboard flakes with liquid cardboard on top - yeuch), then we went for a wander (in the rain haha) to the shops for some supplies.  Came back and gave her computer a bit of a health check and uninstalled some crap and allowed Kaspersky to delete some dodgy toolbars.  After lunch I culled down Ryan's photos a bit.

Then headed off to the party.  I was pretty anxious to start with due to such a big crowd of people and not knowing so many, and the people I did know I hadn't seen in years and I was all a bit freaked out, until Luc saved me with some wine.  Then we got the morph video going and downloaded all my photos, so they got played through as well.  Lots of food and most everyone else seemed to have a good time heh. 

Trained it back, just missed a Cronulla train so Mum picked me up from Sutherland again.  Isn't she a nice mother type person? :)

Slept reasonably well again, then got up, got ready and Mum nicely dropped me off at the station (it was *pouring* with rain heh).  Got to Central, went to the loo, then straight onto the coach which was waiting.  No announcements at all to confirm I was definitely on the right bus tho heh.  It was mostly full when I got there too, but someone was sitting on the aisle so I got a window seat yay!!  Not that there was much to see other than rain... Left fifteen minutes early, got into Canberra five minutes early.  I did finish my book an hour early though. Whoops.

Stu met me at Jolimont, then we had some lunch at Wild Panda which nice enough (some hot peanuts, tofu salad, and two sorts of dumplings).

Tried to do food shopping at the Spar in the city, but they had about three trays of meat and that was it.  So dropped into Coles on the way home.  In and out in ten minutes haha.

Didn't get home til mid afternoon, so then of course got depressed about not having any weekend.  And too late to start anything.  So just did a bit of Picasa tagging.  and cooked a pork roast.  But forgot to turn the oven down after half an hour, so the crackling was ruined (too hard).  Then I spilt most of the jelly everywhere.  I'm such a failure.  BBT, Fuller House, then bed.

Today I woke up thinking it was Saturday and got really sad that it was Monday.  But did a bit of planning which was good.  

A solid day of rain and the lake is full again!

Tonight I wanted to get the USA 2000 photos into the blog.  But at ~7:15 I started downloading and processing photos.  Two hours later and I'm still going, and still blogging (this has taken half an hour so far and I haven't even inserted any photos yet).  So much for getting anything else done tonight.  

Stop the world I want to get off.

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!

Urgh.  I hate Apple.  But more on that later.

Monday I finished blogging our Hong Kong and Singapore photos and got them online which was good.  Finally I achieved something.  Hurrah.  Logged onto our Disney+ account and had a look around.  There's a bunch of the new live action movies I want to see (although not Lion King), and Toy Story 4 is coming in February.  But there's a bunch of things I want to watch before we take a break from it.

Tuesday.  Blerf.  Stoopid insomnia.  Couldn't get to sleep *and* woke up for ages feeling uncomfortable.  Spent the day deleting All The Things.  Had EPIC steaks for dinner (I didn't eat all this! Not even one of them! ;) ).

Wednesday I extracted all the geodata out of Google Earth (myplaces.kml) from the geotagging I did of our flights across America in 2000.  Used exiftool to take that geodata to geotag the files, and then fix them up slightly (because annoyingly the data has tilt and range, it doesn't have altitude in the geodata, although I did calculate it trigonometrically).  

And it rained!  A bit anyway.

And people that spit chewing gum onto the ground have to be up there with the most disgusting ferals on the planet.  Right up there with those who leave their dog turds on other people's front lawns.

Then Echofon lost its auth, and Internode started blocking me from sending mail via its smtp server.

So a bit of fun, but also a lot of pain.

Thursday we had a bbq at work to finally finish off all the sausages from the Christmas Party.  Stu wanted to have drinks after work so I went to get him, but first we had dinner of pizzas at Grease Monkey.

The lake was very low last week...

Friday might have shared some wine with Neil at Grill'd.  Made tacos for dinner.  Watched the first episode of Who is America, which was extremelly cringey (especially the gun fanatics).  

Saturday morning (after waking up at 3:50 #grunt) I spent much of the morning filing and organising my old photos (mainly the ones taken on my Olympus camera between 1999 and 2004, as well as a bunch taken on the Sony in 2004).  Making sure everything had the date in the file name (so I can find them for the This Day in History project) and just general neatness.  Also with a view to sorting out all the kids' photos for Ryan's 21st.. hrmm.. 

Then we headed out to the club.  Had a swim then a bit of an antisocial with a bunch of people that were out there.  The new carpet and kitchen bench are amazing.

Sunday morning I spent ages going through the "tool shed" in our van, taking of stock of what's there and sorting things out.  Then came home and spent the rest of the day doing photo filing and sorting.

Monday had a super intense hail storm.  Luckily our car was under cover, and it all missed our house.  But the carnage in Canberra was crazy.  Hundreds if not thousands of cars, awnings and gardens damaged or destroyed.  I'll put up some pics in another post.

Did some food shopping in the afternoon and marvelled at the blue sky, which we really haven't seen in nearly two months.

Came home and then went into battle with Apple.  As per usual, downloading even regular videos caused the device is not attached to the system error.  Had to reboot the phone because it refused to show me the file system at all afterwards.  Twice.  Had to do *multiple* reconnects of the cable to even show the file system.  Then when I got (most of) the files, most files' timestamps were changed by Apple on the phone and had to be manually fixed.  Took literally all evening to get all most of my files.  Transferred some with Google Drive, but even one of the regular videos (not a timelapse) won't play. F#%$ I hate Apple.

Tonight I got home and did a water change in Chrissie's tank and cooked and ate dinner and then it was like 20:00.  #grunt  And then I spent the next hour or so continuing to fight with Apple.  I should paste the table of crazy inconsistent behaviour.  In the end David used his Macbook to recode the couple of videos that I couldn't get to play.

You're lucky you got this blog entry at all.  Two nights battling with Apple is killing my will to live, or in fact do anything.  And I have a billion things that need doing, and none of them are getting done.  I'm dying from the stress of it all.

I don't think I saw any movies this week.  Sad times.  

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.