All up a pretty decent year.  Nothing too life shattering.  Quite busy as always.

We didn't manage to get overseas this year.  Stu's work was being a bit special and didn't want to give him one of the weeks off in November.  We could have pushed a trip back a week, but then would have started missing Christmas parties, so we decided to postpone.  The only flying holiday we did was to Queensland to visit Chay and David which was a lovely relaxing long weekend as always.  We did get down the coast a couple of times.  Firstly in March, where we also went down to Bermagui, and over the June long weekend as well.  I only went to Sydney once this year - in May to inspect my flat, go to a body corporate meeting, and stay with mum.  We also did a weekend in Junee to visit the little brother.  And did a two night trip to the snow in September, after a failed proxy upgrade, and I was so flustered I forgot the charging cable for the GPS, *and* couldn't find the android.

At work I started the year busy but "comfortable" - in that I knew what I was doing most of the time.  We changed proxy vendors in May - and traded one set of problems for another.  At least the performance of the new ones is generally a lot better (I was still sad when we finally turned the old ones off for good).  At the end of June our team was restructured out of existence, and I lost most of the work I'd been doing to another team (I could have gone with the work to the new team, but decided I'd rather pick up new work with a more local team). Neil was away for the first month after the restructure, which mean I was literally the only person doing half the work of our old team.  So that was a super stressful month.  Then I moved desks away from Neil which made me feel even more isolated.  I spent several months in the new team really having no idea what I was doing.  But towards the end of the year I've been fairly well immersed in some new firewalls and am starting to get the hang of them.  Just before Christmas I organised a BBQ for fifty people which was pretty cool.

Healthwise I've been ok, but starting to notice the whole getting old thing.  It seemed I blogged quite a lot about insomnia.  Not able to get to sleep for no good reason, or waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.  I had a one-day cold in April, and a one-month cold in October.  I was at home for a full week in October, and was coughing for another three weeks after that :(  I started monitoring my blood pressure again, and noticed it was high *all the time*.  I tried a low-salt diet for a time, and it did come down, but it was pretty much impossible to maintain.  Go out for dinner?  High sodium.  Go out for lunch?  High sodium.  Pretty much anything in a jar or can?  High sodium.  Cheese?  High sodium.  I started taking my lunches into work several days a week which helped for lunches.  And was a bit more careful about dinners too, as well as buying low-sodium breakfast cereals.  But I was getting sick of the same boring stuff all the time, and let's face it, I can't live in a world without cheese, so I went on medication.  Still working on a dosage that will suit, although what I'm on now I think is causing some skin issues, so will see the doctor again in the new year to see if it's related, and maybe try a different medication.  I also realised in March that my bottom two wisdom teeth have finally fully erupted.  And my eyesight is getting worse.  Next year will definitely be an eye/teeth/skin/blood pressure sorting kind of a year.

We spent a lot of time with our "whisky" friends earlier in the year - dinners and movies etc - but less later in the year.  We only saw Nat and Andrew once this year in January which is a bit sad-making.  We had games nights at Mishi's in March, June and November, with a special party for her in December.  Met up with @phonakins when she was in town for Eat, Drink, Blog, and @Chrispycon and Anne when they were back from Hong Kong briefly.  Doc came over in September for some MarioKart and Singstar, but the TV died in the middle of a race, and we still haven't gotten it fixed because we're slackers.  Had dinner at the Dumpling Inn with Damien and Amanda in September.  Various people came to stay including Jo and Marc, the little brother several times, Chrissie a few times, and Mum in January and December.  Chris applied for a job and had moved to Canberra (in stumbling distance of us) within the space of a month, so that's pretty cool.  We've spent quite a bit of time with Kit and Ben over the year too which is fun.  It's nice having cool neighbours.  And finally we've still been enjoying our visits to "the club"  and going to the social occasions.  The pool exploded there earlier in the year, and we helped build the new one.  We also provided a Christmas in July feast there, and did pork again for the proper Christmas party.  Any excuse for me to do a big roast pork with crackling ;)

In the fishy world, I've been making better attempts to maintain the health of the fish and the fish tanks, although not until a bunch of disasters (and still had disasters after).  The original AR-620T had some small angels in it, but they had died over summer.  The last one had been in there a couple of days, and we only pulled it out just before putting in the last remaining duboisi and sucking catfish in there.  They died within two days which upset me rather a lot.  Tank of Death living up to its name :(  So the big four foot remained empty for a while.  My AR-620T also remained empty for a while.  I gave it a good cleaning out, and left it running with just plants for a couple of months to try and stabilise it.  Eventually I got five danios for it, which have survived, and later four baby angels which are also still alive.  That tank is actually looking really good at the moment, and I'm keeping up the regular water changes in it (it helps that with all the heat the potplants need a lot of water, so fish tank water goes onto the plants).  Stu gave his four foot a cleaning out and later in the year, and has set it up with really bright lights, and a soil-based substrate to make a planted tank.  He has some native fish in there too and it's looking pretty good.  The two foot tank has massive issues with this black slime algae, and I think it's pretty toxic.  The two nine-year-old black neon tetras and five rummy-nose tetras are still going ok in there.  I had five new danios in there which I've since taken downstairs to avoid the worst of the heat.  And then I bought five cories for that tank, hoping that maybe they'd eat some of the algae.  They started dying off pretty much straight away. :(  I moved the last two into the angel tank.  One continued to deteriorate and die, but the other one recovered and is still going strong in there.  The light in the two foot also just died the other day, so I'm going to completely clean that tank out and start again.  Downstairs the ten-year-old krib is still going, but she's looking pretty old.  I put five danios from upstairs in with her for the summer.  When Chris came down from Sydney she had nowhere to put all her platies, so I filled a spare tank for them.  I put four of them, and the big sucking catfish, in with the krib and the danios and the rest are still in a small tank awaiting their new home to be ready.  Stu also has two small tanks on his desk.  One has two endler guppies and a cherry shrimp, and the other has four teeny shrimp he just got the other day.  So currently seven tanks with animals in them at the moment!

I got two Lego sets this year - both from the Lego Movie.  I got the Double Decker Couch and SPACESHIP!!  I also made mosaics of the Ingress Enlightened logo in two different sizes (32x32 and 48x48)

I continue to do jigsaws.  I seem to have a never-ending supply of them.  Once they're done I usually give them away.  I still want to have some sort of jigsaw exchange going in Canberra, but I'm allergic to organising people, so good luck with that.  I finished a paint-by-numbers set of a fox earlier in the year, and bought a much larger one which took me months to do, but looks really good.  At the club I finished a longstitch that I'd inherited off Nana *years* ago.  It looks pretty good too but I've not done anything with it, it's just sitting downstairs.  I spent December evenings filing digital photos from the past year into folders by subject.  With a clean slate, it might now be time to start tweaking the folder filing system a bit.  Really the goal is to make it easy to find stuff, and obvious what things are in case I go and cark it.  Although if I go and cark it, noone will care about *any* of my photos .. or mum and dad's .. Speaking of which, I scanned three of mum's photo albums, and so far nearly a thousand of dad's photos this year.  All of my own scanned photos (from my own cameras) are all now digitised, labelled and renamed to include the date, roll and frame number.  I haven't filed those into folders yet though.

Weatherwise, the pool didn't fully freeze over much, but did form some beautiful ice flakes a couple of times.  It snowed once in September.  We've already had some quite hot days this summer, and I'm somewhat worried about the fish over January in this El Niño year.  I'll be doing a bit of fish tank rearranging to try and minimise casualties.

New food/recipies I tried this year included honey mustard chicken, made with actual ingredients, not out of a jar (except the mustard); duck breast fillets which are expensive but yummy; chicken kievs made from scratch, which were nice enough, but lacking the *salt* of the pre-prepared stuff (why does everything that tastes good have to have so much salt and fat???); a failed attempt at a lemon meringue pie, which was still tasty, just very goopy; various recipes trying to use up a kilo of white beans, the best being a cassoulet (salt and fat anyone?); a chocolate cake to celebrate Neil working at the same place for forty years - I haven't baked a cake in years!; a couple of things using wombok out of our garden (well, a planter box, to keep it out of reach of snails); and gingerbread cookies.

Didn't eat out as much this year.  We went to Kinh Do a couple of times.  Tried the degustation menu at Mezzalira which was pretty awesome.  Discovered Italian thick white hot chocolate in a hug mug at Max Brenner.  Finally got back to the Dumpling Inn after it had been closed for like a year.  Had dinner with Stu's dad at The District in Crace which was pretty good.  We tried the Wig & Pen at its new premesis, but it lacked the atmosphere of the old place.  Also tried its offshoot - Bentspoke which was nice enough.

Shows:
* Of Mice and Men

Movies:
* The Imitation Game
* The Theory of Everything
* Citizenfour
* x+y
* Cinderella
* Jurassic World
* Spectre
* Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Books (I really stopped reading because I pretty much never catch the bus anymore, and tend to just play on my phone before bed):
* Conqueror of Darkness by Phyllis Garlick
* Letters to Karen by Charlie W. Shedd
* Pollyanna by Elanor H. Porter
* Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Other stuff:
* Started the new year at the club but weren't very inspired by the whole evening and struggled to stay awake til midnight
* Started doing the FridayQ again for a while. Stopped when I got stumped and never took it back up again :( 
* Spent the summer watching Dad's documentaries while doing jigsaws and the like
* Finally fixed up our wedding photo book and had it reprinted
* Watched all three seasons of Veronica Mars
* Went to Costco for the first time
* Wandered around Mount Stromlo with the sweetie
* Almost quit Candy Crush in February, but took it up again.  Am currently within seven levels of the end (until they move the goalposts)
* Accidentally siphoned a huge amount of water out of the pool. Twice.
* Japanese culture night with Stu's Japanese class, which he has since stopped going to
* Came second in a work trivia night
* Went to the Balloon Fiesta on Canberra Day
* Got Netflix
* Scotch Malt Whisky Society tastings in March and in June
* Watched all three seasons of Rake
* Got Israel trip photos from three years ago online
* Finished scanning all my analogue photos
* Lost our really cool number plate and had to get a new set
* Watched all of Sherlock
* Got frustrated that you can't buy quality denim anymore for ladies' jeans
* Been with the sweetie for ten years!!
* Saw Nick Davies (investigative journalist who exposed the News of the World phone hacking scandal) at the Library
* Went to Whisky Live
* Chris and Zac came to visit in July. Went to the curry festival and went ice skating in Garema Place
* Cleaned out the "winter" hobby room in July, although didn't actually use the room
* Whisky night at work in July
* Cooked a Christmas in July feast the club - including four kilos of pork and two kilos of turkey, which all got eaten
* Watched all the Harry Potter movies
* Played through all the working maps I have for Unreal Tournament
* Celebrated turning 21 again, and recreated a photo taken on my 21st birthday
* Won a work trivia night. Busy planning the next one.
* Started a new blog for my Australian holidays, but haven't added much to it yet
* Saw "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson at the library
* Freecycled a bit of stuff, but still a lot more to go
* The watch I got for graduation died, and Mister Minit in Belconnon could not fix it, even after replacing the movement three times. Still pissed about it.
* Stu bought a battery-operated whipper snipper and a hedge trimmer and spent many evenings attacking the weeds
* Upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1. There's a couple of things I like about the new OS (most especially the logical numbering of the photo directories when you attach the phone to your computer, photo sorting in general, as well as being able to manage attachments in SMSes), but mostly things are uglier and clunkier and it makes my phone chug, especially after unlocking the screen.
* Went to an Ingress First Saturday event
* Saw First Dog on the Moon at the Library
* Did a first aid course. Apparently now I'm qualified.
* Went Go-Karting for a vendor event
* Wore a dress to a wedding
* Hosted family Christmas lunch here
* Hosted a Christmas day lunch here
* Used the holiday break to do some thorough cleaning of the garage and fridge

So there goes 2015.  Have a happy and safe 2016!

So the last couple of days have been busy with more bits and pieces.

Mum went home Tuesday morning, and spent the rest of the day and also Wednesday morning doing "finance" type stuff - downloading various statements, sorting receipts (cross checking bank statements, chucking out the boring ones), that sort of thing.

Went out to feed various cats, then out for lunch, then did our food shopping for the next week.

Got home and Kit asked if we could help her taken Petal to the vet (her car is out of action), so did that, and had a drink at Bentspoke while we waited.  Like Wig and Pen it has interesting beers, and would be good to drop in every so often to try different ones.

This morning I've just been blogging the rest of my photos that need blogging.

Still have a lot more stuff I need to do this holiday break, and only four days left to do it ....

Not too much happening this past week.

Friday night Chris and Zac came down, and on Saturday we went house hunting for them.  As of Monday she's already been offered a place but still wants to find out about her favourite.

Saturday night was a bit of a party at Mishi's to celebrate her birthday/retirement/Christmas etc.

We did buy some new fish yesterday - four baby angels.  They haven't died yet.  And Stu bought some Endler guppies which are pretty cute (three out of four of his shrimps died for no good reason).

I've been busy doing my year in review post (getting in early this year and not leaving it all to the last minute), filing photos (one month a night, should have them all filed by the end of the year), planning for the next trivia night (omfg it's a lot of work), but not doing nearly enough house tidying...

Friday was the first of our work Christmas parties.  It was at the Lighthouse, but it was a little pricey - $35 for a two course meal (platter of entrees and a choice of three dishes for mains).  The problem with that being we have lunches at the Lighthouse all the time, and for $35 I could normally get a large meal *and* a few beers.  Also they were super super slow bringing food out - we didn't get entrees til 1pm, the fish mains at 1:30pm, and the steak mains at 2pm.  But it was a lovely day and there was plenty of time to have a bit of bubbly and they compensated us with a free drink voucher each so that was nice of them.  Had a great afternoon.

In the evening we watched Mockingjay Part 1.

Saturday we got ready and headed out to the club for the "official" opening of the pool.

Then we (I) cooked the roast pork (in a brand new oven!!) for a Christmas dinner.  The oven had never been used before so that was quite fun (although it was a bit sad to ruin its pristine condition!).  It works a lot better than the old one too and is much much much easier to light the oven and the cooktops - no more fiddling with a lighter and hoping you don't take the hairs off when you finally manage to light the oven.  The crackling turned out really well and I think the whole lot got demolished.  I also made up some apple sauce from scratch, and some gravy (which I'd forgotten to bring - so I was glad that we found a packet there). Other people brought other food so it was quite the feast.

Just before we were about to serve dinner, we got a call from Kit - she was getting water all through her yard.  I realised I'd left the hose disconnected from when I'd been watering the potplants that morning and it must have dropped down and started siphoning off the pool.  Kit jumped the back fence and saved the situation.  It was a little horrifying to think what could have happened if she hadn't noticed - another fifteen hours before we had planned to be home and it could have drained a *lot* of water.  Honestly, bestest neighbour *ever*!

After dinner was the compulsory fun.  Aka the Kris Kringle where you can open something new or steal something that's already been opened.  I'd completely forgotten about it til that morning, and then we were running late, so we didn't have time to do anything more imaginative that a couple of bottles of wine.  I'd used wine before and it's never popular, so was a bit reluctant to do it again, but didn't have time for anything else.  And guess which two things were the *very last* things to be picked up?  Yup, my two bottles of wine.  And to add insult to injury, the people that got them were all like "oh yay, wine".  I lost it.  I actually went up to both of them and said I'd buy them back off them, but they were all "oh, it's ok, it'll get drunk".  Yay.  I was feeling pretty miserable, and the sweetie had been feeling physically unwell all night, so we just went home.

Today was a cleaning and organising type day.

We also went over to Potty's cause he wanted to get rid of a bit of fridge stuff and some cleaning products that couldn't go in the truck.  I ended up with five full Coles bags of stuff, and a huge box full of cleaning products.  hrmmmm!!  I had to fire up the little fridge in the garage, and Tetris what I could into the freezer.  But got it all in.

For dinner I picked some of the wombok that's been growing like crazy, and cooked up some duck we'd gotten off potty.  

Saw some pretty cool storm clouds from a big storm out past Captains Flat

Also cooked up a batch of honey mustard chicken for lunches/dinners during the week.

And have been trying to get on top of my photos.

And I might have put the Christmas tree this afternoon.  Last year I had the idea to do a "Frozen" inspired theme - so I've only put on blue and silver stuff, with blue and white lights.  It's very blue!

My Sunday night depression started last night when we got home.  Too much go go go and then a sudden deflation.  And the weekend was half over and I hadn't been home for any of it.

So I really didn't feel like doing much today.  In the end I alternated between doing holiday photos and a jigsaw.

The sweetie on the other hand spent *hours* cleaning the bathroom, toilet and ensuite, as well as mowing the lawn and doing more garden tidying.  Bestest sweetie *ever* ! :)

Tonight I cooked up a big batch of bolognase for the week's lunches.

One year ago today we went up Taipei 101, wandered through Huashan 1914 Creative Park, and I wandered through Guanghua Electronics Plaza.

So by the time I got home, did pool stuff, did fish stuff, put on some washing, cooked dinner, ate dinner, watched an episode of House, tidied the kitchen, hung out the washing, and backed up my computer... it's suddenly 10pm.

Sigh.

So instead of doing anything I wanted to do tonight, I'm just going to collapse into bed.

Here's some photos of a bunny rabbit.

Yeah so spring is nearly over.  And I've been accumulating photos to post for months, because I'm a slacker.  Here's a bunch of photos celebrating spring.

Pelicans come inland to breed.  I couldn't see this one's partner though.

Dad always called these things swanlings.  Because he was weird.  And I call them that too.  Because I'm weird.

Cherry blossoms!

Dad always called these things ducklets.  Because he was weird.  And I call them that too.  Because I'm weird.

After our Queensland trip I started bringing my lunch into work most days so I could control my sodium intake.  But that left me with the problem of not getting out and about for a bit of a walk.  So for quite a while, Aquila and I were doing Ingress missions to get some exercise.  We ran out of local missions though, so that's fallen by the wayside a little (and me being off sick for a week certainly didn't help).
This was taken on one of the mission days.

Same day, different spot

Pictures of daffodils never get old

Saw these mystery flowers on a walk one morning.  No idea what they are.  Cause I'm dumb.

More mystery flowers.  These things are from bulbs and pop up in our yard every spring.  No idea what they are.  Cause I'm dumb.

Usually we associate storms with summer, but we've had more than our fair share of thunderstorms this spring

Sunflower seedling.  It's quite a bit bigger than that now. 

Wisteria flowers

Poppies!

These things only flower for like a *day*, but the plant keeps on pumping out new flowers for several weeks.  They're weeds around our yard, but I can't bring myself to pull them out.

Can you believe these photos are taken on a *phone* ???

I'm pretty sure I've never seen these flowers in our yard before this year, so no idea where they came from.  Or what they are.  Cause I'm dumb.

I do like azaleas but I think they take too much water and as such have no place in Canberra.

Irises in our yard

Mini wombok grown from seed.  Hoping I get to eat it before the bugs do.

The poppies are still coming

Oh, there you go.  Done.

So I upgraded my phone from 6.1.4 to 9.1 on Sunday night.

Yeah yeah yeah, shut up.

I spent ages and ages on the weekend making sure I had everything backed up.  Because given my history with iTunes, there was no way I was going to trust my content to Apple.

As it turned out, I did get errors.

I tried upgrading iTunes (my phone was a brick at this point).

And in the end it did in fact want to completely wipe my phone.

But then it upgraded ok, and restored the backup ok.

So far the only thing I've noticed that I've lost was all the gold I'd spent months accumulating on Candy Crush.  So was pretty pissed off about that.  But at least all my other rewards and my level were maintained.

So. 

iOS 9.

Having not ever used 7 or 8, the "new" interface is new to me for the first time.  The calendar and photo sorting differences have been around for a while, but are new to me.

Things I like:

* I do like the photo sorting.  Rather than one big folder of thumbnails, now they're separated by date and location.  Much easier now to find and clear photos.
* the predictive text feature that I've seen on Android is there, although I've not really used it.
* the clock actually works on the home screen now!  And it even has a second hand!
* it *seems* like the battery life is a lot better
* EDIT: OMG! You can see all the attachments on SMSes!!  Will be easy to go through and remove excess crap

Things I'm not sure about:

* not sure I like the new icons
* the music player is no longer on the left of the home screen, and doesn't come with a double click from the lock screen unless you already have it open
* reminder alerts don't go away from your lock screen until you've actually swiped them to unlock/read.  But at least swiping to open an SMS actually opens the messages app and doesn't just unlock the phone and then expect you to load messages after that.

Things I really don't like:

* the notes application has now split up my notes based on some arbitrary decision about whether they're in my mail file or on the phone.  Dumb dumb dumb. Just give me a notes file.  I'm constantly having to switch between the two views of notes to see the notes in the two different locations.
* lack of consistency in switching between *stuff*.  Want to switch between an app?  Scroll left and right.  Want to switch tabs in Safari?  Scroll up and down.  Completely retarded.  Plus the animation is too enthusiastic and you end up scrolling past apps, or accidentally closing them when you meant to scroll left or right instead of up or down.
* lack of response to clicking the home button or scrolling.  Previously when I clicked the home button to unlock, the screen popped up straight away.  Now it can take up to a full second before the screen comes up, making me think I haven't pressed it properly.  And previously swiping between home screens was quite sensitive and responsive.  Now sometimes it just doesn't swipe until you've *really* swiped - otherwise it'll just bounce back to the screen you were on.  Super annoying.  EDIT:  This mainly seems to be after unlocking the screen.  Presumably when unlocking the screen it starts up a bunch of processes to do *stuff* when unlocked.
* I've really not liked the calendar interface since iOS 7 (when seeing it on other phones).  iOS 6's calendar let you show a month at a time, and when you clicked on a day it showed you the events at the bottom.  Simple, and it didn't change layouts around.  Now you *can* get a month view, but if you click on day you get taken to a list view that shows all events in a list.  Yuk.  And actually part of the reason I put off upgrading my phone.
* photo location map.  This was a super cool feature that showed you on a map where all your photos were taken.  I have photos all over the world on this phone and it was cool to see on a map.  Don't know if this feature is still there but hidden, or gone forever.
* EDIT: really not liking the reminders anymore.  Just clunky and awkward to use now.

Really the main reason for upgrading was just too many apps these days need iOS 7 or later to work.  So I had to bite the bullet and do it...

Last Saturday we went over to EffanC's to celebrate C's (ahem) 25th.  So that was a lovely afternoon of drinking bubbly and chatting.  In the evening we watched Juno on the big screen.

Last Sunday Chrispycon and Anne were in town from Hong Kong, so we met up with them and a bunch of their friends at Manuka for drinks.

Last night was a BBQ at Kit's, just because.

In between has been working, house cleaning, fish buying, mandarin learning, cooking.

!

Yesterday I was feeling completely overwhelmed by the state of the house.  So Stu wisely told me to just work on one pile, which I did.  So that was good.

Dad's photo scanning is coming along.  I'm up to 260 out of the thousand-odd needing to be scanned.  I'm half way through his photos of our Kangaroo Island holiday in 1994.

Stu has bought a heap of plants and some native fish for his four foot tank.  I've gotten some danios for the two foot, and some more danios to start again on the "angel" tank.  Stu has also setup a tiny little tank with some cherry red shrimp which are very cute.

I've pulled apart the Ingress Lego logos.  I'm really wanting to find a new mosaic design to use.  The current big mosaic was made in February 2009!!  And has been hung up in the spare room since November 2009.  That's just insane. 

And tonight I've got a better than average chance of completely bricking my phone by upgrading it from 6.1.4 to 9.1.  I might have spent ages today making sure I have everything that I care about backed up off it.

Still sick.  Have so far spent the entire weekend feeling miserable.  Other than not being able to sleep and watching quite a few videos, all I managed to achieve was creating the Enlightened logo in Lego, and rename the 800 photos I took on film from 1992-1999 with a filename containing the date, roll and frame number.  Actually didn't take all that long.  I also figured out that it's quite possible that dad had never scanned the first thousand photos he had.  It looks like he was working his way backwards through his photos - the ones he had from 1999 were scanned just before he was diagnosed with his brain tumour.  Doesn't explain why the excel files with the labels are missing though.

I was thinking I might be able to work from home tomorrow, but if I'm feeling as crappy as I do now I might even reconsider that :/