26.8.24 (backdated entry)

When we went food shopping at the markets on the weekend we were looking for something we could slow cook. Stu saw osso buco so we got some of those. Found a recipe in The Slow Cooker Kitchen that I think I got from the Green Shed.

Coat some osso buco steaks in a little flour then fry til caramelised.

While that's frying, add half a cup of dry white wine (I didn't measure this), a cup of stock, half a tub or so of tomato paste, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, garlic, rosemary, thyme, bay leaves (fresh ones, thanks Jo!).

When the meat is done, cook a diced onion and a couple of carrots until a bit coloured.

Cook in a slow cooker all afternoon.

Enjoy!  (enjoyed here with creamy polenta)

Sunday.  14th.  Vive la France.  All the roast veggies with leftover lamb.

Then Mash, then I watched the second half of the Pretty Baby documentary on Brooke Shields.  Although I was a little disturbed that Disney suggested watching The Kardashians next.. 

Monday.  Awake from some time after 2 to some time after 5.  Hurray.  Zombie day.  Cooked lemon pepper chicken for dinner which was quite nice, but too tired to do anything useful in the evening.

Totally winged it with the lemon pepper chicken.  Some leftover chicken, some mushrooms and cabbage that I fried up first, an eschallot, lemon juice, chicken jelly, cream, salt, pepper and shallots.

Tuesday.  Even though I was super tired and went to bed early, didn't get to sleep til like 11.  Sigh.  Feet too cold, too restless, too TIRED to go to sleep.  Busy day.  Pondering a problem with our migration work.  Did some music after work.  Leftovers for dinner.  Queensland photo culling.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  So two weeks ago when I was staring at my NRMA crap, they were wanting extra info about the car, which I filled in.  It was supposed to reduce our premium by $100.  Except whatever I did never actually saved.  I never got any confirmation of the change or an updated premium notice.  Today I went back to it to pay.  Sure enough, nothing had been saved, so answered all the questions AGAIN, then paid on the spot.  *Eventually* they sent through email confirmation this time.  Another busy day.  Leftovers again for dinner.  

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy day.  Another day pondering problems.  Ramen-O for lunch!

Quiet drinks.  Pizzas then Death in Paradise 10.2.

Friday.  Had an early night, but then an early wakeup.  Busy day.  Again.  Leftovers.  Again.  Mash, then Lego Masters.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day doing All The Projects.  I have about five of my most urgent projects going at the moment, which means I get about an hour each on them each day of the weekend.  I don't have time to go to work.  Windy and rainy and sunny all day. 

Before dinner watched The Movies that Made Us, on Friday the 13th.  I was utterly traumatised by this movie when I was about 11.  I honestly thought someone was going to come and murder me in my sleep.  Well as it turns out, it was actually Friday the 13th Part 3 that I saw at a sleepover that night back in ~1984.  I looked up the methods of murder, and it was actually part 3 that matched what I remembered.  The Lawrences should be ashamed of themselves letting a bunch of little kids watch this.  

TV dinners for dinner (trying to clear out the freezer), then we watched Barbie.  I had no idea what to make of it, it was utterly absurd for most of it.  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok until 4:30 then never got back to sleep.  Busy day doing All The Projects.  As well as some food shopping for next weekend.  Coles used to have additive-free turkey roasts.  But now all they have is "marinated" ones that contain milk and soy - no good for people with allergies!!  So bought them from Woolworths - which at least only contain soy and not milk.  Pissed that I can't get a plain turkey roast anymore.  Three trips in and out of the mall for three different shops.  And didn't even get booze.  Probably got covid though.  Sigh.

In other news, yesterday I watched the "launch" and naming ceremony for Spirit of Tasmania V.  I did have to wonder what happened to III (since we've been on I and seen II, and the new ones are IV and V).  Turns out III was only in service for a few years before being sold back to Europe.  It was kinda cool but a bit amatuer hour on the cameras!

Sunday.  7th.  Epic roast chicken and veggies for dinner.

Then watched first part of Pretty Baby - a documentary on Brooke Shields.  Funny that Judd Nelson appeared in that one, but not Andrew McCarthy's one.  

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  omfg NEW Teams is so trash.  They hid away the contact list so I had to Google how to find it.  You have to click on Calls on the left, then up in the top right click on View Contacts.  This starts up a "People" menu option on the left menu bar, but that's not persistent unless you pin it.  But then if you message someone from the contacts list it pops out into a new window instead of opening in the existing chat window.  Utterly hopeless Microsoft TRASH.  Spent most of the day looking at other peoples' problems.  Saw my birds at lunch for the first time since last winter.  They didn't fly over straight away, but did when I called them.  Cooked satay chicken for dinner with some leftover chicken and a Masterfoods satay sauce base.  Turned out ok.  The sweetie went back for seconds so must have been ok.  

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep but then slept ok.  Busy day of Everything Everywhere All At Once.  Had a drink after work.  Not a great idea because then I didn't feel like doing anything.  Least of all cook dinner.  So asked the sweetie to cook dinner.

Shallot rings, prawn toast, shredded beef Peking style, cashew chicken and rice.

So I had another drink.  And we both ate entirely too much.  And I only did like 1100 steps all day.  But I did finish a day of Queensland photo culling and watched some Lego Masters.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up at ~5:15.  Day of all the BS.  Hurray.  Photo culling and Lego Masters in the evening.  And the sweetie cooked dinner!  Miso mushrooms!

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Everything Everywhere All At Once.  Quietish drinks.  Made pizzas.  Started a new anime series.  Remind me to ask Stu what it was called.  Edit: Girl Band Cry.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Spent a chunk of the morning talking to people about moving all their stuff to our new environment.  Decom work in the afternoon.  Opened a bottle of bubbles I got for my birthday and shared it with the sweetie.

Had fried chicken pieces and veggies for dinner (Chris didn't have kievs! *gasp*!!)

After dinner I watched Parasite.  It was actually kinda fun for the first half, then just got silly and ultimately pointlessly violent.  Also.  Why the hell doesn't he just *leave* at the end??

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got ready and headed out to the club for a working bee.  Spent a couple of hours mattocking tussock.  Until I whacked the mattock into the ground and felt something move beneath my foot a good half a metre away.  Uh oh.  Sure enough, I'd hit a hose and it started leaking.  Went and found Boyd and he was like, eh, just turn off the water at the tank, then he came and dug around it and then cut through it and said, easy fix don't worry about it.  This is it a while later when I went back for a photo.

There's banksias flowering in the garden.

In the afternoon helped with hazard reduction around the back.

And there was this chunky bluetongue!

Came home (the sweetie and I had some good life conversations on the way to and back) and collapsed.  Had leftover satay chicken for dinner, Death in Paradise 10.1, then an early night.

Sunday.  Even though I went to bed early it still took ages to get to sleep.  And woke up around midnight with cranky bowels.  Maybe it was that tiny bit of rotten egg that got into the veggie hash browns at lunch yesterday.. I saw nothing..!  Super busy day.  Spent an hour each on Tassie culling, Queensland culling, Lego wishlisting, Mum photo picking, downloading bank statements, and shopping, with an extra blog post, music practise and phone backing up, then it was time to cook dinner and just like that the weekend is over.  Sigh.  I have so many projects going on at the moment it would be a full time job just to keep up with it all.  I don't have TIME to go to work full time.  It's killing me.

Sigh....

Sunday.  23rd.  Basa bake, veggie bake and potatoes for dinner.

Then Mash and Laid Back Camp (I think it was the end of season 3).  Such a delightful show.  They go to such cool places and cook amazing food.  Makes us wanna go motorbike camping around Japan :)  Then started season 2 of Lego Masters USA.  This time with Michelle from the Australians vs the World series.

Monday.  24th.  Slept mostly ok (bit restless and hands kept going to sleep).  Fairly busy day.  Cooked up a bag of mushrooms with cream and leftover corned beef from the April club night and veggies from the June club night.  Yum.  Into Mash season 7.  Watched an episode of Lego Masters USA.  Went to read an entry of my Tasmania blog for the day I was photo culling.  But my site wouldn't load.  504 Gateway Time-out - nginx.  And CageFS error in Terminal.  And scripts were broken.  Oh no.  Not again.  Need to give Vodien a bowl of petunias.  And so began a week of angst that I may post separately.  

Tuesday.  25th. 

HTTP working on the blog but scripts and terminal still broken.  Busy day at work.  Made "Mexican Mince" (in that I used some taco seasoning on it) with leftover peas and carrots from the club night, and made up some taco slaw as well.  The sweetie went back for seconds so must have been good.

Wednesday.  26th.

Took ages to get to sleep because I was cold.  Got frustrated with NRMA because they've been charging us twice (I think) for membership.  Filled in an online form asking about it.  And the insurance wanted us to update a couple of things on the policy but of course insurance and membership is two different accounts in totally different places on their site and it wasn't at all obvious how I could even update what they wanted.  I should have taken a screenshot of what they wanted on the renewal because it's literally written in Engrish.  Their help is trash too.  All trash.

Busy day.  Didn't do the One Thing I wanted to get done.

NRMA got back to me.  Said they couldn't sort out my problem over email and I'd need to phone in.  Sigh.

Also.  People drama this week.  In an effort to avoid drama, or indeed be the cause of it, I pushed away a good friend, possibly forever, which makes me pretty sad.  I keep telling people i'm a horrible person, maybe now they'll believe me.  Sigh.

Thursday.  27th.  Slept ok.  Another busy day at work not getting done the One Thing I wanted to do.  Pizza for dinner.  Montage episode of Mash.  Braindead response from Vodien.

Friday.  Slept ok (surprisingly, after last night's Vodien rage).  Until 4:35 when the sweetie had to get up to fly to Sydney.  Busy morning before work tidying up the house so I wouldn't have to spend time on the weekend tidying up the house.  Relatively quiet day at work, finished the One Thing I wanted to get done from the other day, then basically caught up on a bunch of crap.  House and fish stuff after work.  Lego Masters.  Vodien fixed cagefs and scripts but broke my access to cpanel and I realised with horror that my mysql database had been restored to a point from LAST OCTOBER.  Then watched The Shape of Water .. which was .. interesting.. 

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Made this!  How cool is this :)  Been meaning to make this for ages (found a gif I'd made ages ago while I was cleaning out my in tray).

Bit of house stuff, bit of photo stuff, bit of Lego part wishlisting.  

When the Vodien nonsense started at the beginning of the week I quickly exported my database in case anything happened.  At the time I thought.. funny.. that's significantly smaller than my last backup (taken in May).  But then didn't think much more of it.  On Saturday I realised to my HORROR that the backup I'd made was of the REVERTED database FROM LAST OCTOBER!!  I freaked out.  I couldn't login to cpanel anymore (they broke that on Friday) to do a tar.gz of the site.  I couldn't FTP anything (same login problem).  In the end I just loaded the May/June entries in my browser and manually saved them.  Then if all else failed at least I had the latest content since my May backup.  I also have it in a local RSS feed reader.  Although I do worry about having to ever do a mysql restore.  So much potential for things to go Very Badly with my blog.

The last of my mini capsicums is actually slowly ripening all by itself indoors!

Leftovers for dinner.  Second part of the Mash montage episode.  Then watched The Good Son, which I'd seen once a long time ago.  All I could remember from last time was the Highway Man and the cliffs at the end.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up early and started stressing about my database.  Got up to find the cpanel password reset email.  Cool.  But cpanel was full of scary errors, terminal had different errors and NONE OF MY WEBSITES OR EMAIL ACCOUNTS WORKED!!!  Finished getting ready, and thankfully by an hour later everything was working again.  I went to backup my database but phpMyAdmin had this error "mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied".  A quick Google said to just reset my cpanel password again so did that and it all came good.  Backed up the database.  Made a test blog post.  Hoped like hell this would be the end of the drama.  Until next time.

More drama with Rob and some club photos.  Sigh.

Bit of Tassie culling but mostly just Lego parts wishlisting.  Put some lamb into the slow cooker mid morning.  Lunch at Pattysmiths.  The cheesy chicken burger doesn't have actual cheese, just cheese sauce.  Still nice though.

Then food shopping.  I was worried going into Woollies that I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.  Just about every time I go to Woollies I can go in in a completely happy mood, and be wanting to kill people by the end of it.  So after the terrible week I've had I knew things were going to be bad.  And I was right.  I took a few deep breaths before I went in.  But then I was trying to find the dried fried shallots.  They're usually down the bottom in the Asian section.  But there was this couple and their trolley in the way and while they did move a bit, they still stayed there in front of everything for AGES and I couldn't see the damned shallots and I was getting more and more frustrated and stressed and when that happens I literally go blind and can't SEEEEE and then all these people were trying to get past in either direction and I just about had a panic attack.  I gave up looking and carried on but I obviously looked distraught enough that a staff member actually asked if I was ok and I was like no because I can't FIND anything and he very sweetly went and looked for me (it took him ages to find them too).  What a lovely guy.  Grabbed our last few things then got out of there.  Should go back to shopping at 7am, so much less stressful.  Pity the sweetie is allergic to mornings.  Not much else in the afternoon.  Mostly Lego wishlisting.  Glimmer of hope that good friend may not be lost.  And now to see if I can post this...

Before everything kicked off on Saturday morning they did a bit of a warmup, and we got two pieces of John Williams - the 1984 Olympics theme, and some stuff from Return of the Jedi. And then off it went.

Eight of my votes got up:
86 - Babe (yet they still only played the Saint-Saëns bits, not his original stuff)
77 - Harry Potter
76 - Jurassic Park
67 - Indiana Jones
64 - The Man From Snowy River
26 - Saint-Saëns Symphony #3 (Organ Symphony)
9 - Messiah / Hallelujah Chorus
1 - Beethoven's 9th. I picked this is as the winner even before it started.

My two votes that didn't:
ET - disappointing because this is magical music. They did play this though as the first "runner up" literally straight after everything finished so that was pretty cool.
Superman - I probably should have gone with something else like Finlandia instead, but there you go.

Actually, annoyingly, they didn't have Titanic by James Horner even as an option to vote for, if they had maybe Superman would have gone to that.

Other stuff that I thought was cool:

95 - Beethoven's 5th (bit more angry than feel good but whatevs)
92 - The Sound of Music (I didn't even think to vote musicals)
61 - Pomp and Circumstance
60 - Gladiator
57 - Bolero
54 - Fanfare for the Common Man
46 - Zorba the Greek
45 - Finlandia
43 - 1812 Overture
39 - Peer Gynt the Hall of the Mountain King
35 - Beethoven's 7th
28 - It's a Big Ad
22 - Star Wars
18 - The Nutcracker
13 - Zadok the Priest
5 - Rhapsody in Blue
2 - The Planets

Other runner up stuff I thought was cool:
William Tell Overture
The Princess Bride

A good fun weekend of all the feels :)

I haven't made any recipes from this book in a while - first it was Christmas then it was Tassie planning then it was Tassie then it was all just too hard.  But I pulled the book out again last weekend and let it fall open.  Mexican Shredded Beef is what it fell open to, so that's what I made!

All the ingredients laid out.

If I were doing these recipes for myself I'd rearrange things into the order you prep them to make things a little more efficient.

For example, rather than having the ingredients for the spice mix at the bottom but that being the first thing to make up in the instructions, I'd say chop the onion and garlic and start frying that while you make up the spice mix - that sort of thing.  I'm also conscious of the order of chopping things - much easier to chop the onion first then the beef, because otherwise you have to wash up the chopping board or find another one.  Plus, I'm lazy, so things like chopping garlic - meh, I'll just mince it and cook it a much shorter time.  It all depends how much you want to mise en place the thing before you start.  So I'll do up this blog with how I'd do it next time, not how I actually did it.. although it's pretty close :)

So chop up an onion and fry it.  I never follow recipes for this.  I add some water to the pan for the beginning of the cook and use a medium heat so the onion cooks slower but cooks before it burns.  It takes longer but you can be doing other things anyway.  

While the onion is cooking, chop up all the beef into chunks and put in a large bowl.  This was 2kg, but only because we were going to get the suggested 1.5kg but the butcher talked us into 2kg because it was the same price (and it was Sunday afternoon and he was probably trying to clear stock).  If you're worried about how long this will all take you can skip starting the onions until you're ready to go.

Make up the spice mix.  This is 1 tsp each of allspice, ground coriander (which I had to mash myself from seeds), salt, pepper; 2 tsp onion powder, 1 tbsp each of paprika and oregano.  She also wanted 1 1/2 tbsp chipotle powder but we couldn't find that so I just used a bit of chilli powder and a squirt of liquid smoke.

Mix up the spices, then coat the beef in the big bowl.

When the onion is nearly done, add five cloves of minced garlic and cook carefully so the garlic doesn't burn.  Get out a slow cooker and turn it on.  Add the onion and garlic to the slow cooker.

Brown all the meat.

While the meat is browning, add the other liquids to the slow cooker - 3/4 cup orange juice, juice of a lime (I didn't even measure the 2 tbsp she wanted, I just use one lime and be done with it), 400g tin crushed tomatoes, 2 cups low salt beef stock, 1/2 cup of water.  Don't forget the liquid smoke ;)

Add all the meat to the slow cooker as each batch is done.

Slow cook all afternoon.  

There was HEAPS of the sauce so 2kg meat worked quite well.  I imagine it'd be very liquidy otherwise.

Now because the slow cooker won't reduce liquids much you need to do that on the stove.

So pull all the beef out.  I'm pretty sure I washed up that bowl after having the raw meat in it!! ;)

Very very carefully pour all the sauce into a large frying pan or stock pot and reduce the heck out of it

Then mix it all back together again (probably add the beef to the frying pan to warm it up a little since it's been sitting out for a while)

Serve with taco slaw, Mexican red rice, corn, sour cream and cheese.  Or make tacos or burritos or whatever.

The verdict? Yum yum yum.  A little time consuming at the beginning and having to reduce the sauce at the end is a bit annoying (I'd consider doing this on the stove for 3 hours like I do with coq-au-vin).  But ultimately quite simple and delicious.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: yes!
Stu: yes!

Monday.  27th.  Cooked an epic Mexican feast for dinner with three different recipes from RecipeTin Eats Dinner book.  Everything was amazing.  There was slow cooker shredded beef, taco slaw, red rice and corn.  Yummo!!

I went to check on the battery level after having the stove running for quite a while, only to find that it never fricken charged!!  And not only that, but THREE days out of the past week it didn't charge.  WTF??  Don't get Solar Edge people, it's just drama.  Mash and Shogun 1.8.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok although did wake up sweating at one point.  Sigh, not that crap again.  Wrote up some stuff for more decom work.  Leftover Mexican for dinner.  Mash with a very young James Cromwell!

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  No notes for the day.  Hurray.  Was backing up my computer in the evening and noticed it copying a new 2GB file created Sunday when I last backed up my phone.  WTF Apple??  I didn't have any new big movies or messages.  Only thing I can think of is an update to Happy Colour that I did last week.  Or maybe some new IOS update.

Thursday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Again.  Had to evict this little skink I caught in our bedroom last night..

I'm gonna need some lemon recipes soon..

Stressful afternoon (dealing with vendors is sure to cause me all sorts of anxiety).  But good drinks - heaps of people cause of exec event.  Pizza/Mash/Death in Paradise 9.5 (new DI).

Friday.  Slept ok (just a bit restless).  After getting more vendor crap out of the way and in between meetings spent the day deleting things which always makes me happy.

Mash/Orville 3.9 (penultimate episode).

Saturday.  Slept ok.  A day of doing All The Things.  So a nice quiet day.  Even did some Lego.  Pasta for dinner (had to use up half a tub of tomato paste from the Mexican red rice, plus finish off the basil that's about to give up the ghost).  Threw in some shredded beef and olives just for fun.

Laid Back Camp then we finally got around to watching the Mash movie.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Woke up thinking it was Monday morning.  Pleasantly surprised to realise I did in fact have another day of weekend.  Another nice quiet day of doing All The Things.  Finished the other big minifig, house stuff, weeding, music, Tassie photo stuff, other photo stuff etc.

Sunday.  19th.  Had a mini lamb roast for dinner which caused maxi fat spatter all over the oven.  Hurray.  

There may have been a whole tray of garlic.  I left three pieces for the sweetie..

Then Mash, Shogun 1.7.  My brain is weird.  I recognised one of the dudes in Mash (Larry Wilcox) as being one of the dudes in CHiPs.  

I haven't seen that show in FORTY YEARS.

So I recognised someone from an entire lifetime ago, but didn't recognise Thomas at the wedding (figured it out after looking at the photos).

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Ignored new proxies and finished writing up paperwork for our exclude problem.  Also seeing what policies we could disable on the current proxies (they're nine years old now and overloaded to the point of crashing most days, sometimes multiple times a day).  Did a bit of music after work.  2.5 reeds are HARD.  Blogged the Airport Open Day and watched some Lego Masters.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - stressing over all the conversations I had at the wedding.  Like, total cringe.  This is what happens when you don't let me drink while socialising, people!  I'm awkward.  Urggh.  Worked through exclude changes at work.  Music, leftovers for dinner, Mash, picked photos for the Wagga Brick Show post, culled the first day of Tassie photos.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Finished the excludes reworks and disabled some proxy policies.  Backed up my computer to two different disks (the little one barely holds anything these days).  Then Lego Masters.  Started culling day 2 of Tassie while I was doing all that, but hard to concentrate.

Thursday.  Nothing very exciting.  Good drinks.  Shane was in town so we stayed a bit later.  Pizza/Mash/Lego Masters (I think).

Friday.  Updated some doco from some previous decom work.  Fought with kerberos all afternoon.  Failed.  Sigh.  Kiev for dinner.  Into Mash season 6.

Kit and Oreo arrived a while later and we chatted a bit before bed.

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Kit went off to meet up with some friends and didn't come back til late in the afternoon.  I put the Lego train away, did some Tassie photo culling, weeding, blogging.  So a nice quiet day.  When Kit got home we had a few drinks and had Yat Bun Tong delivered (Dumpling Inn was being a bumhead and not appearing online).

Early night because everyone was tired.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Cooked cheesy hash browns for breakfast.

Kit left mid morning.  Did some Tasmania photo stuff.  Had Grease Monkey for lunch (they've got a food truck at the markets at the moment).

Did our food shopping.  Did Lego and weeding in the afternoon.  Leftover Chinese for dinner.  Mash/Orville 3.8 (movie length episode .. with Dolly Parton .. !!).

Monday.  Awake from 2:15 to 5:15 or so.  Sigh.  Finished the Lego minifig, did some Tassie culling, blogging, cooked dinner, had lunch, weeding, fish stuff.  And suddenly it's 3:30 - time to finish the weekend - backup phone, backup phone photos, blog etc.  No time for music.  Sigh.

Sunday.  12th.  Had tuna bake with cabbage bake and veggies for dinner.  Yes there was a bit of cream, cheese, bacon and tuna, but it was mostly vegegation.. honest!  Mash, Shogun 1.6.

Monday.  Meeting with proxy vendor but no progress on that front (waiting for another team to do some group policy stuff for me).  Fixed a script so it wouldn't get angry with me for making some groups not to its liking.  Had Luv-a-Duck cheat's Peking Duck for dinner.. all the duck!!

Tuesday.  No progress on the proxy front so was able to work on the excludes issue.  I had all day but because I decided I should fix crap instead of just migrating crap as is, it took all day and I still didn't finish it.  Sigh.  

Wednesday to Saturday - Syd-uh-nee!!  Separate posts coming.. one day..  

Sunday.  Awake for over an hour from like 3:45.  Hurray.  Tried to catch up on weekend stuff, and wrote up notes from the Sydney trip.

Went to see the Ralph Heimans exhibition at the portrait gallery.  There may have been a pub lunch beforehand..

Then downloaded photos from the week.  1002 on the phone, 481 on the G5X and 424 on the big Canon.

Whoops.

Sunday.  21st.  Roast beef for dinner which was very nice, and lots of leftovers.  Mash and Shogun 1.3.

Oh Chris saved me a Charlie today!!  This was the first one I've ever seen.  Forty years after I saw my very first $1 coin at church one morning.

Monday.  Hurty for a couple of hours overnight.  Ok day, fighting with stoopid proxies doing stoopid things - like behaving more like a router than a firewall in terms of pattern matching.  Dumb.  Over the weekend I put a thing into the MyWay peeps to say Stu's MyWard card had expired and what's the story.  The dude called and said too bad so sad bye bye, you lose the $5 you need to buy a new card so that the funds can be transferred.  I'm utterly filled with rage that a) you have to pay $5 for MyWay cards that have $0 credit on them in the first place and b) that the stoopid things would even expire at all.  The dude said the expiry was part of the terms and conditions and I said that was a dumb condition and there was deathly silence.  I suspect the dude agrees that it's a dumb condition but he's not allowed to say so.  Red curry with leftover beef for dinner.  Started labelling Turkey photos.  Stoopid dog barked for hours in the evening.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - strung out by the dog barking non stop til past 22:00.  Utterly sick of *everything* at the moment.  Mostly shattered confidence from not being able to figure out a stoopid problem at work because I'm stoopid.  But everything piled on top of that makes me want to just quit my job and go live as a hermit somewhere.  Had a couple of meltdowns during the day because it was all just too hard.  Photo labelling and Lego picking in the evening.

Wednesday.  Slept ok but still feeling to stoopid to do my job.  Had meltdowns on the way to and from work and even *at* work.  Sigh.  Tried out BZ Burgers with Neil at lunch, and had drinks at No. 10 after work.  Then pizza/Mash/Laid Back Camp and first two episodes of The Apothecary Diaries.  

We liked the Belconnen pictures at BZ Burgers.  Remember that dude who lived on the lake for a while?  And we still have those buses at bottom right.  I miss those butt ugly covered walkways though.  They were handy when it rained.

I had Chicken Mack - southern fried chicken, USA cheese, pickles, sour onion, lettuce and Mack sauce ($18).  It was quite nice although the chicken was a little crunchy so lost bits of the breading.  And I love how they call plastic cheese "USA cheese" hehe.

Thursday.  Anzac Day.  Slept mostly ok.  Got All The Things done in the morning then Lego picking.  Put a 2.4kg lamb leg (it was the smallest I could get at the butcher on the weekend) in the slow cooker at 8:00 and by 18:00 it was literally falling off the bone (found one in the bottom of the sauce!).  Cooked a bunch of roast veggies to go with it and had TJ over to enjoy it.  Quite a nice evening.

There were also Anzac Biscuits.  A little bit *too* gooey perhaps ;)

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Flexed off as I'm sure most of Australia did if they could.  Got a new headlight for the car (it died in Tasmania).  Closed off our ancient Citibank cards that we got for overseas travel but haven't used in ages and now they were taken over by NAB it was easy enough to go into a branch to close them off.  Queue was about ten minutes but the dude was able to just close them off without any fuss so that was nice.  Had lunch with the sweetie in the mall.  Had a quick look in Millers and Myer for wedding attire and got depressed cause clothes shopping is all too hard anyway.  Other than that I made a Lego train and did 3/4 hour of weeding.  We got Chong Co delivered for dinner although it was a bit rushed because I had to log on before 19:00 to do a cert replacement.  Took an hour which is the minimum time it takes if all goes well.  Then watched Death in Paradise 9.2.

Saturday.  Took ages to get to sleep, but still woke up at 6:00.  Another day of getting things done then Lego picking.  Went back to Supercheap Auto to get the actual headlight for our car (Stu bought the foglamp by mistake yesterday).  Then went out to the club.  A fairly quiet night with a remembrance dinner of corned beef and veggies.

They were doing backburning in the Brindabellas

Canberra sure is pretty in autumn

Club remembrance feast

Bec made these lovely biscuits


Sunday.  Brought home All The Leftovers from the club (since W/C wouldn't take them).  Got home, read about the Port Arthur massacre 28 years ago today.  It's also 28 years since Como Presbyterian Church reopened after the bushfires, and 23 years since Alan had his first heart attack.  Then labelled day 8 of Turkey, then Lego picking.  Dreading having to go back to work tomorrow.  I'm too old for this crap.

Leftovers for the next couple of weeks it seems..