Been trying like to crazy to catch up with life, as well as trying to get through some of the stuff I really need to do in the next few weeks.  Not succeeding too well.

Friday we got to see Angry Anderson and he spent an hour telling us about his life and how it changed quite dramatically when his daughter was born.  It was funny and emotional, a really good talk.  He also looks *really good* for a 67 year old!

Yesterday the sweetie was still feeling pretty blah from whatever bug he picked up in Queensland, so we didn't go out to the club.  This was a relief for me as it gave me most of the day to do some cleaning and geotagging of holiday photos.

Had dinner at EffanC's which was nice, although C and Stu weren't too impressed with the episode of You Can't Do That On Television that we put on after dinner.  Me on the other hand was in full nostalgia mode - not having seen the show in something like twenty five years.  Stu also suffered through a game of Bananagram, which I won.

Today I went to the George Harcourt (for the first time ever in fact) for a birthday lunch for Steve.  Then we did our food shopping.

This afternoon was trying to organise stuff for the ball.  

Dinner was lamb.  So much lamb.  Then catching up on rss feeds (I'm *months* behind :( ).

Can someone please stop the world, I need to get off for a moment....

15-17.8.14

Friday night (after several disasters at their end) Marc and Jo arrived in town for the weekend.  We chatted til quite late.

Saturday morning we went into town for some breakfast at Mocan and Green Grout.

And we also had got some tapioca and persimon.  The tapioca was nice but the persimon was a little tough.

I took a *lot* of photos of this dog trying to get one of him with his tongue out.  I got a few.

There was also a honeyeater that needed documenting

Then we went down to the lake to document more birds

Then we went for a drive up Mt Ainslie

There were more birds :)

Marc and Jo went off to visit some other friends so we came home and chilled out, then went and did some food shopping.

We cooked up a *lot* of mushrooms (and had some leftover cause we bought too many) for Marc's strog

It was delicious!!

We put on Frozen after dinner while we chatted, then Rocky Horror.

In the morning Marc and I cooked up a storm for breakfast while various spouses dozed.  Bacon, eggs, hash browns, onions and mushrooms - yumm!

Then chillaxed and didn't do anything exciting.  They left later in the afternoon on Sunday.

10-13.8.14

Sunday I headed up to Sydney in time for a reunion of the people we went to Turkey with.  Chatted with some peoples and got to see Heather's photo books of our Israel/Jordan and Egypt trips.  They were spectacular, would love to get around to making some photos books ... one day ...

Then for dinner Aunty Di and Graham and Chrissie and Zac and Dave and Yvonne and Ben all came over to Mum's for a birthday dinner of takeaway chinese.  

We showed Zac Bubble Butt, he kinda freaked out hehe

There's photos of me and a cake around somewhere, I really should find those :)

Monday was Peking Duck day with @StuartCRyan

Monday and Tuesday we continued the cleanup downstairs (and upstairs).

Anyone want any back issues of Silicon Chip or Electronics Australia?

Wednesday night I came home.

Half of my battle with blogging these days is the whole *effort* of downloading, selecting, resizing, stripping geodata and blogging photos.

I have several weeks of photos to blog.  Over fifty actually.  Eep!  Lots of birds, funnily enough. 

Also, during the week I have nothing much to say.

Because I only tend to blog about stuff I've done, and I don't tend to do anything much interesting during the week.

But I've been really impressed with my SIL blogging every day this month and I feel bad being so slack with this blog.  I really do love the archive of my life I keep here.  

So I'm going to try again to blog more often.

Today I had my Sadie cap on, and cut the rules down on one firewall from over two hundred to a little over one hundred.  Cleaning makes me happy :)  Mind you it's a lot easier to clean up other people's messes.  My own messes are harder because I'm lazy :)

I don't really even have any interesting photos either.

Last Saturday was housework in the morning then headed out to the club.

Sunday we stopped in at Potty's to show him the new car.

Monday the little brother came over and stayed the night.  We had a tuna bake and watched Cities of the Underworld (Paris) which Dave thought was pretty cool because he'd actually *been* to not just the catacombs but also the stuff off the old disused train line.  We also started watching Total Recall but I didn't have the energy to stay up to the end of it.

Spent a good chunk of the week working through decommissioning stuff.  It takes just as much effort, if not more, than commissioning.  hrmm.

Thursday was bbq at @CLBradley's.

Friday we got Dumpling Inn takeaway and had Gaelian and Stef over.

We had a random cat show up last night too, meowing at the door.  It seemed a bit frightened.  It looked like it wanted to come in out of the cold but was a bit to scared to.  And when it did come in it wanted to go straight out again.  Had collars but couldn't find a name tag.  Hope it was all right.

On Friday I took an RDO - a Random Day Off.

Stu did too.

I took the opportunity to clean the garage.

Six hours!

I really should have taken some before photos, so you could really see the difference (there's a few here).

So yeah, pulled everything from along one wall out, cleaned, tidied, organised.  Then in the middle moved a stack of stuff outside that needs to be thrown out, recycled or freecycled.  In fact I also listed a bunch of things on Freecycle, and most of it went on Saturday! Win!

So there's a lot more space in there now, and it's a lot cleaner.

So after a super productive Friday I did pretty much nothing on Saturday.  Mostly just sat at my computer wasting time.

Last Sunday was such a lovely day that I felt kinda bad that we'd stayed indoors the entire day.

So the sweetie and I went for a walk around Palmerville.

And I took lots of photos of the sweetie and black cockatoos and stuff.. 

Mr Bug came over for dinner afterwards - slow cooked lamb shanks - nom! The Stus had a good long catchup, and we watched some of The Wind Rises.

Thoroughly demoralising week at work.  Still got issues with the app that went out last week.  Painful.

Thursday night a small group of us went out to 2 Yummy again - two weeks in a row!

Friday after work the sweetie and I had a drink at Capitol Bar and Grill.  I'd been there before when it was still just the Rydges hotel, but it's gone all funky now.

Then we went and fed Potty's fish and picked up some frozen stuff on the way home to cook for dinner.  Watched Downfall with the sweetie which was pretty good.

Saturday morning said goodbye to our old dishwasher and the new one got delivered and installed.  After lunch we bought the sweetie a new car.  Then did our food shopping and came home.

I made a white chocolate caramel slice out of my Women's Weekly "squares and slices" book.  Had some of that after dinner, was pretty yummy.

I also cooked some duck breasts with roasted veggies for dinner.  I've never cooked duck breasts before.  They turned out pretty well!

Watched 12 Monkeys with the sweetie, and then a doco on Queen.

This morning I cooked an imitation breakfast raclette, cleaned the kitchen, downloaded and blogged some photos, and put dinner on to cook a bit after 1pm.

So a very foodie weekend that's for sure.

But the sun is out.  I know we should really get out and get some exercise and some vitamin D ....

During our Turkey trip, I started having focussing issues with my camera (actually dad's camera, but my old lens).  Especially in low light, and mostly at full wide angle.  I had a quite a few failures, and it was most frustrating in the basilica cistern to get any photos that would work.  If I persisted and changed the focal length it'd usually come good.  But quite disappointing.

When I got back I didn't use it all that much, as I mostly use my phone for photos.  But I took it to the poultry show and it was having even more issues.  A week later and it was pretty much dead, completely unable to focus.  Even in bright light, it would just chug the motor back and forth and simply not focus at all.  

I tried taking off the UV shield to have a look, but it was wedged on pretty good - one side had jumped a thread by the look of it.  I think it might have happened in Turkey when I was taking photos out the bus window.  We went over a pretty decent bump and the camera got shoved nose first into the window.  I think that might have been what damaged it.  

I've seen youtube videos of people pulling apart the lenses to replace the auto focus flex cable, but it might not even be that.  There's definitely something loose in there though, as it rattles a little when I tip it upside down and back.

So it's all very sad.  Can't decide what to do - either get it fixed, get a replacement, or go the L series 24-105 .. which has less range on it than my 18-135, which is why I've been reluctant to get it...

Yeah it's been that kind of couple of weeks.

On the Saturday of the long weekend, Stu made a Cantonese custard with pork mince.  It was yummy!  But quite a lot of effort.

Sunday morning we had brunch at the Coffee Club, although it was so late I had an early lunch.

Then we went to the poultry show at Epic.  We didn't think it was still on at first because there was hardly anyone around at Epic.  But as it turned out, it was on, just in a smaller pavilion.  Apparently there'd been a bit of a faction split of some kind, and a lot of people weren't there.  We saw a whole heap of Kath's chookens that had won prizes.  Hers are very friendly chickies that don't mind being patted.

Then did our food shopping and came home.

On the Sunday night we had "Effan C" over for dinner.  I did the boeuf bourguignon, and prior to that we had quite the little party of cheeses.  And afterwards we sampled quite a few of our whiskeys.  And there might have been singstar that went til 2am!

Monday was mostly just culling down Turkey photos for sending out to people.

In the evening we went to Stu's sensei's place for shabu shabu beef.  Yumm.