Sunday.  16th.  Had sausages and cabbage for dinner, and geotagged Mum's Tasmania photos from 1968.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Ok day, busy doing every except the one thing probably should have been doing.  But I did upgrade our master network diagram which is always fun.  Did some weeding in the afternoon (couldn't use "it's too hot" as an excuse).  Music, "filled gnocchi" for dinner.  Finished geotagging what I could of Mum's photos.  Saw a link on Blogography to Wordle so clicked through and played it (I think I might have heard/seen one or two references to it at some point in the past week or two).  This is my first ever attempt, and I got it in three goes!  This is probably not the best starting word, it was just what popped into my head.

Then after I'd done it I saw tweets from my brother *and* Jake who have also been playing it.  Synchronicity!

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  All the rain!!  But I was in a meeting during the worst of it, so forgot about clearing out the drain sump so the garage wouldn't flood.  Oops.  Wasn't too bad in the garage, but the backyard flooded again.  

Just for giggles I thought I'd try Eudora again, and this time it fricken worked and downloaded all my mail.  NFI why it didn't work before, or what made it start working.  In other windoze 11 crapfullness, "printscreen" (or alt-printscreen) no longer works.  I mean WTF??  Closest equivalent I can find is windows-shift-s which loads snippy which I can then capture a bit of the screen.  Windows 11 is a piece of crap.  And I'm still finding it super irritating that I can't drag a file onto an open application on the task bar and have it pop up so I can drag the file into the application.  I have to resize windows and have them out of the way so I can drag the file into the app.  Was super cranky about travel and everything was all too hard.  I give up.  Beer and pizza.  And Tuesday's Wordle was tricky - took all six goes!  (another not great starting word, I've since changed my strategy somewhat and start with more common letters).

Wednesday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages, still depressed about travel.  My sneakers really started falling apart making it difficult to walk around.  These ones I bought in about 2005-2006 (while Stu was still living in Queensland).  But how am I meant to go shoe shopping without having to be around people?? 

Weeding, slide labelling and the sweetie cooked dinner (of some of the leftover mince, and cabbage and rice).

Thursday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages again - stressing about the cruise.  Was sitting at my computer first thing in the morning pondering my shoes and decided to go into the mall to get some new ones.  I left a bit early and went to Kmart first to get some undies (I've been needing new ones for ages but haven't been shopping really at all in five months).  Then still had some time so went to Target and got an extra fitted sheet and pillow cases (which always wear out a lot faster than a flat sheet).  Then to Athlete's Foot and walked out in new shoes!  Just for giggles I went to Amcal to ask about RATs, and they had some!  So I bought a two pack (if there's any chance of us going to Tasmania we'll need to get tested before we go).  So a super successful morning, and only an hour late to work.  Had a play with deleting old domains out of our IP management tool which was a bit of fun.  

Friday.  Depressed about cruise.  Then the brother type person called - they've offered a get out of jail free card!  Can transfer credit to next year's cruise.  I'd rather go the year after, so I'll try and negotiate that, but it means we're not going to (at least for now) lose all our money!  But in not so great news, Lily has covid and is not doing well.  Ok morning, although a bit bored in the afternoon waiting for people to do stuff so I could do my stuff.  Chicken kiev for dinner and then watched Six Minutes to Midnight, which was a little far fetched, but the school was actually a real thing.  

Saturday.  Spent all morning at work doing a firewall migration, which went quite smoothly for the most part.  Then seemed to spend the afternoon not getting much done, other than sorting out some of my music.

Sunday.  Really just house bits and pieces.  Weekends are far far far too short.. hrmmm..

This afternoon has been making cheesecake (we have lemons coming out the wazoo) and photos/blogging.  And Stu put on the Hottest 100 from 2001.  I know a few of the higher (lower) numbered songs.  Have cauliflower bake and veggies in the oven to have with some lamb I dug out of the freezer.

Monday.  3rd.  Not backdating for a change ;)  Did the usual morning stuff, then Damien came over.  The boys had a coffee and a chat, then Damien saw my Queen Mary 2 in New York photo and was asking about it, and we ended up subjecting him to the slideshow of that trip ;)  I put out a bunch of nibblies (we've not really done much entertaining this break so we still had lots of junk food in the house) and the boys played Glory Recalled, which went all afternoon until Damien had to go home (I think Damien was winning). 

Meanwhile I did a few months worth of This Day in History posts.  Then.  STORM!!  We basically only got the side of it, but there was hail and so much rain and it was SO LOUD!!  Had to close all the windows on the south side of the house because rain was pouring in.  The backyard actually flooded at the lowest part.  And I put out two buckets to collect some free rainwater, and they both filled in just a few minutes.  

We didn't lose power during the storm itself, but we did have power fluctuations which confused a few things - the garage door thought it lost power and the cooler needed a full hard reboot to start working again, but the computer was ok (which I didn't shut down cause it needed updates and that'd take too long). 

We did lose power just before bed time but only for a few minutes.  The ESA website was just madness!

Ended up getting pizza for dinner.  

Tuesday.  Slept relatively well.  A day of All The Things.  Power went out again in the afternoon for like an hour or so.  Did some paint by numbers for a bit, and separated the plants that were going into each other by the front door.  Do you think I maybe should have pruned this plant a bit earlier? :)

I was blogging more This Day in History posts and realised I'd missed a *whole heap* of my own photos from 2020/2021 that need to be processed and added in.  I was hoping to get 2021 finished this break, but that put me in a bad mood about it all and I haven't been back since.  

Wednesday.  Went early to do our food shopping at Coles.  They lost power Monday night all night, and so lost all their fridge and freezer stock!! OMFG such a waste!!  So sad.  I was lucky I was able to mostly get the fresh/frozen stuff that I wanted.  I was hoping to pickup any leftover eggnog, but if there was any left it would have been lost.  Then home to tetris it all into the fridge (I primarily went for pantry stuff as there was a bunch of things we'd run out of, but I picked up some fresh stuff as well, because I was there, but we still have a lot of leftovers, so it was tricky to fit it all in).  By the time I'd gone through my weekly morning routine it was nearly lunch time.  Hmmmmmm.  Then spent most of the afternoon pulling out the computer desk and cleaning it all up and setting everything up again.  I bought a dvi to display port adapter in the morning at Officeworks, but it turns out the old HP second monitor I have (an old one of Stu's) doesn't work with Windows 11, so that was a waste of money.  But then I'd also pulled everything off my computer desk and made an epic mess of the study, so will probably spend the rest of the break trying to tidy up the mess I just made.. hrmmm.  And no weeding or music either.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  Hating on Windows 11 - you can't ungroup taskbar windows anymore, and you can't have additional toolbars - two things I really need/want/use.  I find I can't *see* what I'm doing because Microsoft in its wisdom thinks it knows best, and wants you to look at a clutter-free taskbar.  They're trying to be like Apple or something.  Hate hate hate.  Eudora won't work in Windows 11 either - it loads ok, but can't connect to the servers.  Probably some sort of trust issue, but I don't know how to solve it (I tried turning off AV, compatibility mode and running as administrator).  Ended up cranky that I'd spent all day fighting with technology.  But we did have a nice stir fry with some leftover pork for dinner.

My Christmas present from Annie - the 12 beers of Christmas? :)

As part of the desk cleanup, I figured it was probably time to eat this wedding candy from Andy and Crystal's wedding in 2012.  On account of they're broken up now anyway.  hrmm.

And I should probably give these birds away too .. I mean they're super cute and all, but don't really mean anything to me..

As a "temporary" measure I moved all the ornaments and knick-knacks that were on top of my computer desk into the cubes in the spare room.  Yeah right.  Temporary.  haha.

The pork stir fry

Friday.  Woke up early hungry and needing to pee.  Tried do more tidying up in the study, but then ended up making more of a mess of the spare room too.  Sigh.  1246 covid cases in Canberra today.  That's ~25 times the peak of Delta.  We finished season 3 of Sex Education.  I actually had a dream a couple of nights ago that Jean had died, and so when we got to the end of episode 7 I was like *I NEED to know what happened* so we watched the final episode that night as well.  

Saturday.  Woke up early again.  But Stu hadn't slept pretty much all night!! Poor thing!  I reverted my monitor setup (I'd had a go at putting the secondary monitor on the right side, but ended up not liking it).  Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even that is not the primary monitor.  So fricken DUMB.  Just a day of more tidying - both on the computer and off.  Had an idea to see how many words are on my blog, and found this site which admittedly did timeout, but not until after it had counted all the monthly archives, which I could easily add up in Excel.  As of this week there's 935200 words on my blog!  Insanity!  Had salmon and salad for dinner and watched The Courier in the evening (it was the sweetie's turn to choose a movie so he chose a spy movie and/or true story movie .. in this case "and" :) )

Sunday.  Today!  Ok sleep (although not for Stu again :( ).  Today was fighting with Excel.  I don't know if it's just Windows 11 or one of the updates I did, but dates don't work in Excel anymore.  Yeah yeah I know, Office 2003 isn't supported anymore, but that's the version I own.  I tried Office 2013 that Stu got in Technet at one point, but I think he'd used up the licences, and it just crashed as soon as you tried to agree to the terms and conditions.  Tried reinstalling 2003 just in case, but no luck.  So I installed LibreOffice, which works just fine thankyouverymuch.  But in other news, I could copy a time-lapse video off my phone without explorer crashing, so that's a win, I guess.  But in a case of you win some, you lose some, you can't drag an icon onto an app on the task bar and have it pop up the app and open the file.  So lame.  Why do they have to *break* everything??

Stuffed capsicums for dinner, which will be in next week's post.  Covid cases are down today as well - "only" 30000 in NSW and 1000 in ACT (down from like 35000 for a couple of days in NSW and ~1200 in the ACT).  

Where were we?  Epic lamb roast.  31st Jan.  Backdated.

Watched more Hibike Euphonium.  

Monday.  Spent all morning renaming firewall objects to fit our naming scheme.  And documenting a whole stack of rules that had been done that I was going to need to duplicate.  Spent the entire afternoon doing all the rules - twice - on two different firewalls.  

In the evening a storm rolled through.  I was trying to run a script to copy "recent" files to One Drive (files modified since last backup), but the thing made my computer have a sad, so I ended up just shutting it down and disconnecting it from power and network.  There might have been just a bit of rain.

So it was a bit of a scramble to move the few things in cardboard out of the way and empty a few boxes.  Desperately need to declutter.

Had lamb red curry for dinner and finished season 6 of The Simpsons (Who shot Mr Burns?).  I never watched The Simpsons, but I do remember when the episode came out at the end of 1995 in Australia.  People were talking about it and I went and use this new fandangled thing called the internet to find out who did it (because the start of season 7 had already aired in the US).  Fun stuff.  So I knew who did it twenty five years ago.  Although not having seen the episode I didn't know how/why.  

After dinner fired everything up again from shutting it down for the storm.  Except the UPS decided to be a big stinky poo.  When I turned it on it had a fast beep and "reset battery" alarm.  If I held the on button down it would reset, but then it claimed it was in overload.  Which was silly because literally nothing was trying to use it (I even disconnected everything to prove it).  And then it got into such a state that I had to turn it off at the wall.  So now my computer is on mains power which is a big poo.  So by 8pm I'd only labelled fifty photos out of the three hundred I really needed to do to catch up.  At least the sweetie did the washing up yayyy.  Had another fight with windows, which has gone back to mapping by IP address rather than dns/netbios name.

Tuesday.  Remember that stoopid firewall that was being a big poo last year?  Well Wardie upgraded it the other weekend, which fixed it.  Go fricken figure.  So did up the bunch of rules I needed to do on it.  Only took like seven months to get to that point.  Hrmm.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Did some photo labelling but ran out of steam and started looking at bed frames online.  Found one that looked promising, and found it at two different fly-by-night retailers (Eliving Furniture and MyDeal) which both got pretty scathing reviews on review sites.  

Wednesday.  I'd just gotten to sleep on Tuesday night when right on midnight there was this super loud BEEP BEEP BEEP times four.  I sat right up and saw an orange light down the hall.  But as I was sitting up I caught the cable of my phone which knocked it onto the floor which broke my brain.  By the time I looked up again the light was off.  This of course freaked me out.  Was someone in the house and they had a light on but turned it off?  I had to work hard to get the sweetie to get out of bed to come investigate with me.  We searched the whole house but didn't find anyone.  We weren't even entirely sure what made the noise and light.  But we're pretty sure it was the new smoke detector.  This is one of those ten year battery smoke detectors that you can't take the battery out of (disabling it disables it *forever*).  So we're going to be pretty pissed if it keeps generating false alarms.  There was a daddy long legs in the vicinity so we caught it, and I've been dusting around the area quite regularly in case it was simply a spider that set it off.

Had an ok morning.  Did an audit of a complicated ruleset, to make sure all our firewalls are in sync.  Missed our team meeting to go to a specialist appointment.  Had to wait for ages in the waiting room, the longest I've ever waited there.  While I was there I had to a listen to a woman rabbit on about how the covid vaccine is made from aborted babies, how the news is manipulative (well duh), how Victoria shouldn't have needed to go into lockdown last year, and how is that *noone* in Victoria is accountable for the security guard hotel quarantine contract - clearly it *must* have been Daniel Andrews that authorised it, how the government in Victoria mismanaged the whole thing, because NSW was so much better at dealing with it all, how America is overreporting their covid deaths because the hospitals get paid $15000 for every covid death and so they're reporting deaths as covid deaths even if they died of something else but still tested positive for covid.... omfg I was like *get me out of here* ..!! Seriously you can't make this stuff up.  Eventually I was called up, and I was there so long because he "didn't think I'd arrived yet".  Fricken hopeless.  I was literally right on time.  I did have lunch with the sweetie afterwards so that was nice.  Did some work with Neil on our mail servers which was good.  Had Kingsley's for dinner because the sweetie wanted comfort food after his crazy busy day, and I was up for that too for the same reasons.  Simpsons and Hibike Euphonium and struggling to keep up with Eurasia photo labelling.

Thursday.  So apparently two pieces of Kingsley's southern fried chicken is actually not a lot of food, and I woke up at 3:12 hungry.  Had some cheese etc but couldn't get to back to sleep for at least an hour.  I was pretty tired in the morning with "dropsy".. including probably $15 worth of fish food pellets all over the floor :(  Should definitely not be operating heaving machinery today.  I scooped up a goodly amount of the fish food, because $15.

Had a Lighty lunch that Jim organised.  Connor and I shared the "special" pizza which was very nice.

Watched several episodes of Euphonium in the evening and then I watched the first episode of Encore by Kristin Bell.  It was Annie, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Friday.  Apparently two pieces of pizza and a garlic scroll is actually not a lot of food and I woke up a bit after 4am hungry.  Sigh.  Fairly busy day again. 

In the morning Aquila messaged me to see if I wanted to have lunch at Herbert's.   Of course!!

This time I tried the pot pie which was very nice.  I asked for a small serving of fries so I wouldn't stuff myself silly..

In the afternoon we tested the rules on the new firewall with real (testing) traffic which was pretty cool.  Didn't get the paperwork written up for it though.  In the evening went and saw Penguin Bloom with EffanC.

Saturday.  As noted in my movie review, I asked Sam Bloom whether she became friends with Bron again or not, so I was pretty stoked when she answered.  Pretty quiet day.  Didn't do too much house stuff (trying to actually enjoy weekends).  Had a bit of a play with Gimp to do Lego mosaics.  Watched Encore (The Sound of Music).  Stu cooked dinner - sausages and cabbage.  Then Simpsons, Hibike Euphonium, and Star Trek VI in memorium of Christopher Plumber (I wanted to watch The Sound of Music, but accepted Star Trek VI instead).

Sunday.  7th. 

This is why should always carry a camera on your person.  This flutterby landed near me when I was collecting lemons.  I barely had time to snap a photo before it flew away again.

Wrote out a very long todo list for the day, although forgot to add Eurasia photo labelling to it.  So I did a reasonable amount but nowhere near enough. 

I might have done some decluttering of my bedside table drawers.  Some of these soaps I've had since I was a kid.  I think it's time to use them up.

I never made it through the list as far as photo processing and blogging, so it never happened.  In fact I was still part way through the list when someone came to collect Stu's old bed.  While we were loading the trailer suddenly the lights went out.  I looked up and saw this.

Then it was time to make dinner (lots of roast veggies with leftover lamb), and I even made a cheese cake to use up some of our epic supply of lemons.  I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not, having added so much lemon juice (200mL!!).

Simpsons - You don't win friends with salad!! Euphonium and Encore.

Backdating a few days.. ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Got driven quite insane by the neighbour's dog barking for three and a half hours straight - from 7:25-11am.  I can't concentrate on anything while it's yapping.  It's like a car alarm going off.  It'll bark bark bark, have a brief stop, then start up again.  So upsetting.  At work, someone wanted me to look at something right at the end of the day so didn't finish up til 17:30.  In the evening freaked out at all the fresh food we have in the house.  Froze some of the uncooked meat, and some of the meals as well.  So the freezer is now very full.  Made up some meals out of the various bits and pieces (David's happy to pick up a meal of leftovers if he just needs to heat it up, rather than assembling all the bits and pieces first).  Had to laugh at the Simpsons (1993) with people using tapes in cars.  Tapes!

Tuesday.  We were going to have a team lunch at one of the Indian places in Belco, but neither Taj Agra or Indian Bay could be stuffed picking up their phones, even at ten to twelve, so we thought screw em, and went to the Labor club. 

I was feeling mixed up all week.  Tuesday firstly felt like a Wednesday because I was in the office, but then it felt like a Friday because we'd been out for a team lunch.  Weird.

The dog was quiet in the evening.. maybe the rain discouraged it?

Wednesday.  My computer rebooted itself overnight.  And I'm like what??  I'd literally rebooted it on Tuesday evening.  I'd had to reboot it after the last patching to reenable SMB 1.0 in order to connect to our ancient NAS.  So why did it need another reboot? hrmmm!!  Hate Windows, hate.  Oddly, Edge, Chrome, Notepad and OneNote had all come back and reopened where they left off, but Excel didn't.  Weird.  In the evening got extremelly pissed off that the flatbreads we'd bought on the weekend were covered in mould (I'd been planning to use them on Thursday to make pizzas).  If I'd known they were going to mouldy so quickly I'd have frozen them straight away.  Such a waste of food #grunt!!

Thursday.  Drinks, pizza, the usual.  David and I went and looked at Jupiter and Saturn near the moon (see the other post on this).

Friday.  Woke up at 4am.  Gruntfullness.  Had a bit of a wind down day at work tidying and finishing things up.  Had lunch with the Chrises, Neil and Raja at Herbert's.  I had the mac and cheese balls again, but didn't feel so stuffed full this time.  

I'd almost ordered the vegetarian loaded fries, but I was glad I didn't - Raja got them and they were enormous!!  He asked for a doggy bag even before he started!

I also had to laugh at their keg storage (their storage space is at a premium).

Finished up work, yay on holidays!!  Had leftovers for dinner and watched Die Hard in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at 3am for a couple of hours.  #grunt.  Had a little bit of a sleep in.  Then got stuck into All The Things.  So actually a fairly productive day.  Watched the second episode of The Queen's Gambit, and the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Spent the morning doing All The Things, mostly scanning and fixing scanning.  No promised rain though.  For lunch we went over to Rob and Lynne's with some other peeps for a lovely lunch/bbq.  As always Lynne fed us too much ;)

We also found out that Canberra has now asking anyone coming from Sydney to quarantine/self isolate for fourteen days.  Which means it's likely Mum won't be able to come down to visit after Christmas.  Waiting a few days to see if anything changes, but it's unlikely to.

Don't think we had any dinner at all Sunday night, but watched another episode of Discovery.

It wouldn't be me if I wasn't backdating ;)

Wednesday.  Slept quite well after our long drive home the day before.  Ok day I guess.  In the evening struggled through the todo list that was a long way behind on account of being away for four days.  So no UK photo labelling this week.  Backed up my computer, but couldn't connect to the NAS.  It seems likely that windows is refusing to talk to such an old version of SMB/CIFS.  The laptop which hasn't been patched for a little while can still talk to it.  Apparently 20H2 will fix it.  We shall see.

Thursday.  Poor lonely Santa.

In the evening had pizza and the second episode of Mandalorian.

Friday.  Caught up on three boxes of slide labels (slides had been scanned just hadn't done the data entry).  Soooo nice to be at home.  Went and saw some of my birds at lunch.  Did a bunch of cleaning on the mail servers.  Because that's what I do.  The new neighbours started moving stuff into their garage (they organised to get access before settlement to start moving stuff).  Stu cooked gnocchi for dinner and we watched From Up on Poppy Hill which was very sweet.

Saturday.  Smashed out all the things.  Did some scanning and housework and achieved a weekend's work by 9am.  Gathered stuff for tax in the morning.  Went out for lunch and did a huge food shop.  

In the afternoon cooked all the things.  

I cooked up some mince with onion and taco spice for taco Tuesday.  I cooked all the meat/bacon/onion ready to pop in the slow cooker on Monday.  And I cooked up a veggie loaded san choy bow mix for dinner that night.  

Took three hours.  Yeup.

Watched second episode of Discovery.  Her hair grew too much for one year.  Just sayin.

Sunday.  Another productive morning of all the things.  Spent quite a bit of time sorting out the piles of packing materials (boxes, bubble wrap, tissue paper etc) we have in the garage - organising it all so we can find it when we want to sell stuff.  Cooked a huge lamb roast for dinner, with epic leftovers.  Basically over the weekend I cooked most of our food for the fortnight.

We're into season four of The Simpsons, and up to the third episode of Discovery.

I've literally spent two days trying to get all my files downloaded off my phone so I could blog them.  But once again I'm having to fight with Apple to get my timelapse files.  

Half the time when I plug my phone in it shows Internal Storage -> DCIM, but then won't show any of the subdirectories.  Have to disconnect and reconnect and hope Apple will deign to show me its files the next time.

If you try to download timelapse files in "automatic", the computer will throw an error "a device attached to the system is not functioning" and then you have to disconnect and reconnect and if you're *lucky* you'll be able to see the phone in windows explorer, otherwise you have to reboot the whole phone. 

If you change the settings for Photos -> Transfer to Mac or PC -> Keep Originals (and then disconnect and reconnect the phone, again hoping this time it might show you the files), the file will download, but then you can't open it - windows throws the error "Can't play - This item was encoded in a format that's not supported.  0xc00d5212".  I was sure that's how I got it to work after one of our holidays, but it doesn't seem to anymore.  

Last time I emailed the file to myself, but this is 100MB. 

How the f@#% am I meant to get this file?  Buy a Mac?   Not a fricken chance.

And it's 20:30 and I haven't done *any* of my photo labelling for the night.  Blogging?? pfft!!!

I HATE APPLE!!!!

Tuesday got the shock news that Aunty Di and Uncle Graham had been murdered, apparently by their son.  I went over to Chrissie's Tuesday night and we shared some wine and just tried to process.

Wednesday night I got off the bus where Tony gets off and we walked up the hill.  I finally had a look inside the little library, which turns out to be in an old dishwasher!  Picked up three James Bond books.  Cooked tacos for dinner, which turned out quite well, but we ended up eating too much.

Thursday and Friday I had training which was pretty intense.

Thursday I was sick of pizza (we had it on Tuesday night at Chrissie's).  We ended up having leftovers.  Hurrah.  I watched You've Got Mail.

Friday had pizza (hey, it was a different sort) at Pizza Artigiana, and did some food shopping.

Saturday morning it snowed.

!!

Then we headed out to the club.  I did jigsaw while the meeting was on, then we had lunch with EffanC at the Lake George Hotel.  We didn't tempt fate (they wouldn't let me) to see if they could get the crackling on the pork belly right this time.  Instead we got a meal each, but could have easily done just two meals and shared.  The servings were huge.  Most of us conceded defeat and I took all the leftovers away in containers.

In the afternoon I measured all the windows for curtains, and did a little photo culling.  Had the fire going which made the cabin all nice and toasty warm.  Talked to the mother type person and the brother type person in the evening and had leftovers from lunch for dinner.

Anyone care to guess what this is?

There was more snow overnight, still visible this morning.

The house was cold when we got home and my feet never warmed up.  At all.  All day.  They are still cold.

Started going through a book Doc gave me a while ago, gathering questions for our next trivia night.  Other than doing some washing, that's all I managed to achieve all day.  Watched The Terminal in the afteroon/evening.  Stu cooked a dal for dinner and we watched a Veronica Mars.

Bit of a crazy intense week.  

So I pretty much always get depressed on Sunday nights.  But throw into the mix the fact that APPLE SUX and everything just becomes too hard.  Apple is STILL so buggy I can't download timelapse movie files off my phone with Windows Explorer.  I first noticed this when I first started taking timelapse movies using the inbuilt iOS feature.  If you try to copy the video file it says "a device attached the system is not functioning" and you have to reboot the phone just have another go at getting the *rest* of the files off.

This happened at least last year and I ranted long and hard about it, and the fact that the only way I could get the files off my phone at all was with iCloud.  But do you think I can find that rant?  Or even the movies I took?

No.

Because I suck.  And Apple sux.

No blog for you.

Edit: found the movies.  They were taken at the end of 2017 on my old iPhone. So this bug has persisted on two different phones with multiple versions of iOS.  Does this company actually care at all about people like me?  Guess not.

Edit again:  Actually I don't think I could use iCloud.  I just tried again and now I remember I had problems with that too - I get "Can't play - This item was encoded in a format that's not supported.  0xc00d5212".  Maybe I sent it via email.. which was ok for smaller files but was problematic for bigger files.  I wish I could find that rant and my solution :(

Edit again:  Ok so yeah emailing the file worked (for this file because it was small enough).  I think for larger ones I had to use this "fix" (not a fix at all because from memory it left the JPGs in some weird format, so I basically had to set this setting, get the files, then turn the setting back again).

I hate Apple So. Much.

I've just wasted a good chunk of my evening wasting time because of Apple's CRAP.  I should have just gotten an Android.

I woke up to the news this morning that Notre Dame in Paris had burnt down.  But looking at pictures tonight it looks like the fire was largely contained to the roof, and the interior stone roof is still intact in large chunks.  It will need some pretty significant repairs as heat stress can damage even stonework, but it doesn't seem as bad as I first thought.

I visited Notre Dame in 2012.  I was by myself after touring Israel, Jordan and Egypt with the parents, and six days by myself in London.  I had two and a half days in Paris and generally hated the place.  Oh sure the city itself was beautiful and I saw *lots* and walked *lots* (one day setting an all time pedometer record of 38450 steps in one day), but I couldn't stand the tourists.  And the queues.  Queues and tourists and more queues and more tourists.  And mainly because they were generally rude tourists.  I never had any problems with the locals, and if the French have a reputation of being rude to tourists, I'm sure for the most part it's because the tourists completely deserved it.  I think if I went back to Paris I'd enjoy it more if I didn't do anything "touristy".  I did tick off a major bucket list item though (going to the top of the Eiffel Tower).  

I actually saw Notre Dame all three days I was there.  These photos are going to focus on the roof and interior.  Most of the exterior, it seems, will be fine (we can hope!!).

First up in the afternoon I arrived, I wandered past while getting a lay of the Paris land.

Those copper statues had been removed prior to the renovation, so they were saved.

The next day I went up the Eiffel Tower and a whole heap of other things (this was the 38450 step day).  I made it back to Notre Dame around 16:30 and went inside this time.

My last day was also quite busy, but not as busy as the day before.  I stopped by Notre Dame in the morning because the sun was out (sort of) and it looked pretty.

Back on 8 February I headed up to Sydney to catch up with Mum for Christmas.  Just a few weeks late haha.

Drove up Friday evening (after having a random day off which was nice) and looked at some of Mum's holiday photo slide shows.

On Saturday morning we headed into The Entertainment Quarter for the latest Ryan McNaught Lego exhibition - Lego Cities.  We took the train to Central and a bus down Anzac Parade (where I think it's amusing they're putting light rail back in after it being gone for so long).

Except the Entertainment Quarter is huge and there was literally no information whatsover on the tickets about where to go.  Lucky we were early because we walked around for ages, and had to ask two separate people where it was.  Pathetic event management.

I'll leave the Lego to a separate post.

So we were done by 11am but it was a case of "now what?".  It was such a lovely day I didn't want to just go back to Mum's and do nothing.  We were in Sydney for heavens' sake!  Even if we just took a Manly Ferry and back it'd be *something*.  But then I thought, you know I've never taken the ferry to Parramatta before.  So we hopped on a bus to Circular Quay, topped my Opal Card, and hopped on a River Cat.  I decided not to sit outside in the sun (I came for a Lego show, so no hat, sunscreen or sunglasses, and did get ripped off by the pharmacy at Circular Quay just to get some sunscreen), so got seats on the left, fortunately the windows open!

I'll leave the ferry trip to a separate post.

On the way Mum called Pam and asked if she'd like to catch up for lunch (it was about 13:30 by this point).  So she met us at the ferry terminal.  Parramatta had been hit hard by the storm the previous night, and there were a lot of downed trees.  Pam's place (which is brand new, and they are the first tenants in the place) got heaps of water from leaky windows.  Note to self: don't buy an apartment in any new building until the building industry can get their act together - shoddy work is the norm on anything built since the building deregulation thirty years ago or whenever it was).  

We wandered up to Church Street to look for some lunch (it's after 14:00 by this point).  I stipulated it needed to be a *light* lunch as I was going out for dinner.  So we ended up at Volcanos Steakhouse, where we thought we'd get a few starters and call it a day.  Except their starters were HUGE.  And then Pam said she doesn't eat cheese, after the things Mum and I ordered had cheese.  I wish she'd said that before.  #grunt.  If I'd known all that I wouldn't have got any more than two dishes, tops.  They were pretty good though!

After eating way too much, we headed for the station (the ferry is nice and all but it takes like an hour and a half). 

St John's Parramatta

Parramatta Town Hall

Caught an inter-urban back to Central, and another train back to Mum's.

I had twenty minutes, which gave me just enough time to have a shower, then head out again.

Met up with Daniel and Fi at Redfern station and we walked down to the Duck Inn Restaurant and Pub.  I started with a delicious Grifter watermelon pilsner (Serpent's Kiss) that was perfect for a humid Sydney summer evening, and had one other that it seems I didn't check in, so don't remember which.  Could have been the Mismatch Lager, but not sure.

Because I had such a big late lunch, I was happy with just starters again.  And Daniel and Fi had spent the day down at Wollongong with Daniel's parents so didn't feel like too much either so that worked out.  And they all had duck in them!

Starting with confit duck loaded fries with fig, burgundy, thyme mayo, liquid gruyere cheese and scallions, which was amazing

And also steamed bao buns with shredded five spice duck, pickled carrots and daikon, coriander, chili and hoisin sauce, also amazing, and peking duck spring rolls served with micro herbs and soy infusion dripping sauce.

Was a lovely evening catching up with those guys.  I owe them a beer though!

Sunday morning I went to church with Mum, hoping to see the Cartans, as they're in their nineties now and times to see them may be limited..  But they weren't there.

So then headed off to Luc and Lizzi's to do a penultimate donut photo with Ryan, and ended up staying for lunch which was lovely.

Then headed for home.  I took a slight detour to go see Cordeaux Dam.  Again you can drive right up to it which is nice.

I'll leave the dam to a separate post.

And finally home.