Yesterday morning was pretty slow.  Slept in, washed my hair, read some news feeds etc. 

A bit before lunch headed into Hornsby where I met up with Daniel and Fee for lunch.  Wandered around til we found a cafe (Blu) and got lunch there.  I had a melt which wasn't bad, but probably not worth $13.  So chatted for a while and then wandered around the games shops in the shopping centre.  All in all a very pleasant couple of hours.

Then headed down to Rhodes where I fought the hordes trying to find parking :(  (This after not paying attention to my own golden rule - never go to Rhodes/Ikea on a weekend!!).  Seriously, parking at Rhodes shopping centre SUX!!!!  There's just too many people going there and not enough parking.  I don't know what on earth possessed Ikea to shut down their other Sydney stores, but I'm sure it's a dumb decision.  I didn't even consider buying anything because it was just too hot and stressful to even think about getting anything back to the car.  My poor little car was overheating too, which meant I couldn't have the aircon on while looking for parking.  *sigh*

Anyways, headed back to J&G's and jumped in their pool (which was 32C! eep!).  Still, it was still nice to clean off somewhat.

George cooked a very nomm roast dinner, and later we watched Mythbusters and then played Carcassonne (Ark of the Covenant edition (which I won by like 39 points or something)) and a few games of Fluxx.  I quite like Fluxx it's a fun game and you don't get too hung up about winning strategies (because the goal of the game keeps changing).  You win pretty much by luck only, which makes it just kinda fun.

Didn't sleep quite as well last night, but not too badly.

2008 was certainly a momentous year in the life of Kazza.

The first big news story of the year was that I got married to Stu in April.  I spent several months planning the thing, and planned pretty much everything myself.  In the end, the day went pretty successfully and everyone seemed to have a nice time.  I got the wedding I wanted for the most part, although I did get very stressed out by the reception venue, and they ruined the enjoyment of the reception for me.

Following the wedding we took off on our honeymoon, spending a night in Japan, then a month touring Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.  Took six and a half thousand photos between us and generally had a blast.  Lots of places we'd like to go back to!

The other really big news story of the year is that we bought a house here in Canberra.  And seemingly at just the right time - right in the midst of the world financial crisis which was very scary, but the subsequent drop in interest rates will save us something like $12000 per year!!!  We still have a couple of messy rooms, but are very much enjoying the house and we've had several groups of people stay with us.

Work has been a bit variable.  The first couple of months of the year I was still feeling very overwhelmed by the place, yet didn't have too much to do so was very lost.  After the honeymoon I was put on call, which meant learning a lot of things by being thrown in the deep end.  I was also dumped on severely with work, and found it very stressful from time to time.  Can't see any sign of letup any time soon :(  After a particularly crap day one night in July, I starting drinking with the guys earlier than usual and finished relatively late, which really launched the weekly drinking sessions (which up until that time had been a lot shorter and quieter). 

Other travelling included the trip over new years last year to visit Chay and David, a weekend at the coast with Scott and Kerry, a weekend in Sydney in March and another in July to attend my Nana's 80th birthday party, visit James and George, and see Stu's grandmother and aunties.  Two days and ten hours of driving was pretty tiring.  Chay and David came down just after Christmas to stay, which meant we spent two new years in a row with them which would have been cooler had I not collapsed in a grumpy/depressed heap. 

In fish news, we cut the number of tanks from fourteen down to seven.  Fourteen was far too much work and fish were getting severly neglected.  Seven is a bit more manageable but we may still cull further.  Moving all the tanks to our new house was definitely not fun, but we got most fish moved with only a few casualties.  One of my original angel fishies is still alive, making her six years old now.  She has appreciated the big water change of the move and laid several batches of eggs after the move.

Eating out, we tried a few various restaurants.  We discovered Satis in Watson in the middle of winter.  Satis is vegetarian and we have been there three or four times, although not since we moved.  Then there is the Kingsland vegan restaurant in Dickson which is fantastic.  Have only been there twice, but will definitely be going again.  And Fortune Box in Gungahlin is still a favourite shopping day lunch spot.  Bella Vista in Belconnen and the Dumpling Inn in Jamison are favourites as well.  Fanciest restaurant we visited all year was Watersedge on Lake Burley Griffin.  This was two weeks before the wedding after I'd had my hair and makeup trial, so we got dressed up and went out for dinner.  Was very nice, but of course very expensive!

We tried to see Stu's brother every week for a "sci-fi" night.  We watched all of Firefly, Serenity and some Battlestar Galactica.  But towards the end of the year this all got too hard.  Hopefully we'll do something next year.

Movies seen this year:

• Juno - pretty good, if a little unrealistic
  
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - fun but too ridiculous and too much on the "yeah right" scale
  
• Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina - very well done, but hard to keep up with the subtitles and watch all the action
  
• The Dark Knight - good movie, but dark and very long
  
• Quantum of Solace - ok, was too tied to the last movie
  
• Australia - very enjoyable, but very long (really it's two stories back to back), so don't know how would stand up to repeated viewings
  

And finally, a few other snippets:

• This blog had its 5th blogiversary and was celebrated with a new design
• Visited the Planetarium before it closed and met Andrew
• Little Squishy was born
• Went to the balloon fiesta
• Bought an Eee PC
• Set off fireworks on cracker night
• Went to a six-day SANS course
• Got excited by snow falling in Canberra!
• Went to an astronomy night at Mt Stromlo
• Went to two trivia nights - one with Nat and Andrew, and one at work
• Had the house wired with cat 6 by my brother and Shane and Chris
  
• Took the booze train to Tarago
• Played Zone 3 for the first time and actually won a game
• Big family Christmas with all of Stu's family and Kerry's family
  

So that's about it for another year.  Hoping to be a little more organised next year and more relaxed about life...

There's a bunch of photos sitting in my intray that I've been meaning to upload for months.  And a whole stack of other photos I haven't even sorted yet :/

Here's a few of them anyway..

Some Jelly Bellys

Some flowers from our old garden

A very agro young galah that screeched and flapped its wings at us when we walked under it

A storm that passed over us last weekend

Looking north(ish) from Mt Ainslie

Chay and David got us Eternity II for Christmas .. I think they just got it to torture me heh

It was most depressing waking up this morning.  My weekend was definitely too short. 

The downstairs room is somewhat more organised, although had to sacrifice my model bookshelf to do it.  Guess the models won't be coming out of storage for a while longer.  And a trip to Ikea will be necessary pretty soon. 

Having trouble copying files from our vista machines to the old w2k box.  Not sure if is problem with the old machine itself (although Skype seems to work quite happily) or some weird interaction between vista and w2k.  Wouldn't surprise me if it was vista...

There's wet stuff falling from the sky.  It's been falling and falling all day.  It's made the level of the puddle go up an inch or two.  I chucked ~150L in there from extra buckets collected around the place too.

The gutters are in a worse situation than we thought when looking at them recently.  Will spend some of the next dry weekend clearing them out...

Other than that, second Christmas party of the week at work today, although no drinking at this one (it was byo, but all too hard)

Have I ever mentioned that my brother rocks!!??  Yup, seems I have .. twice.. :)

He was coming down to Canberra for the week to work on a train, so last night came over to stay the night.  This morning we thought maybe he could have a look at the adsl link which is a bit flakey, and maybe replace a light fitting for us.

Instead he invited his friends over (Shane and Chris with Lowie in tow) and they wired the whole house!!!  Cleaned up the incoming phone line, cat 6ed the study, lounge room, spare room and bedroom, with everything terminating to the garage where we'll get a proper switch setup, as well as fixing up the aerial and wiring up the downstairs room with an aerial outlet...!! omigosh!!  We were so excited - this was so much more than we were expecting of the day!  And we did end up getting the study (dining room) light fitting replaced, a compact fluorescent dimmer installed (only $10 for dimmable compact fluorescents these days, although you do need a trailing edge dimmer not a leading edge one like most currently are), and the other dimmer moved to the living room chandeliers.  Totally f-ing brilliant! 

Of course having so many people in the house all day was pretty draining, so we ordered pizza and watched the first couple of episodes of Californication season 2.  And then I had a meltdown because my computer wouldn't connect to the internet.  We replaced the cable (that was working previously) and all seems well, but it was just too much to bear at the time.  

And we didn't get anything else that we'd been planning to do this weekend done, but hey, who's complaining..?? :)

Busy day today.

Someone from work came over and took away a bunch of our boxes.

Damien came over with lunch and to see the house.  Stu and Damien talked for a couple of hours about work.
Yay.

Then we went over to Damien's new place which was like going back in time to the seventies.  And we thought our house was bad.  Omigosh.  Orange glass.  Original shag pile carpet.  Original appliances.  It was all very amusing and needed to be documented :)

Did a big shopping run, since only did fruit and veg last weekend.  Have a fully stocked fridge again. 

Babysat Jake so Scott and Kerry could go to the movies.  Spent the evening remoting to work to fix a mail problem, and building a lego ferry while watching Mythbusters, Iron Chef and Rockwiz.

Then into work to move a few files off a c: drive on a server that was sending alerts every twenty minutes cause it was low on disk space.

So very very tired now..

• put up the Christmas tree tonight while watching Harry Potter
• had a thoroughly crap week at work, and to top it off, I'm on call all weekend
• the house is a mess
• have a big todo list for the weekend
• our shopping list of stuff for the house is huge
• there's an ABBA singstar which comes free with Playstation 3.  We are seriously considering getting it.
• life is all too hard sometimes
  

Last Saturday morning I finished reading The Final Countdown by Martin Caidin.

It was quite an easy, enjoyable read, I'm glad I picked it up at the book fair.

Apparently it follows the movie fairly closely.

Just need to remind Neil to lend me his dvd (was hoping to watch it this weekend, oh well).

Why is it I always seem to leave blogging photos til the end of the weekend..? :)

This was actually taken during the week - Canberra is so green at the moment.  Gotta love that la nina weather.  But even with all the rain we've had this year, our dams haven't risen all that much.  Which is why cramming more people into Canberra is rather a silly idea..

At work on Friday, one of the sections had some of these for their morning tea - Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs!!  I haven't had these in years (although I've had caramelised popcorn in that time).  I instantly got a craving, so when Windy said he was going to the shops I asked him to buy me a packet...

Yum! Delicious!

On Saturday we trekked out to Fyshwick to pick up a printer for me little brother. What a beast! This stoopidly big A3 laser printer that he picked up at auction for $7 (!) We also stopped at a coffee machine shop so Stu could drool over the coffee machines and grinders. Then we went to Fisher Discounts to go to the upstairs section that we missed last time we were there (which we never would have known about had someone at work not told us). I got myself a model of the Space Shuttle which I've wanted for ages (although this one is by Revell so the quality may not be great), and Stu got a bunch of little bits and pieces to go with his wargaming stuff. But the total came to less than the price tags we added up, so we were under the voucher by like $20. To save having to come back and spend the remainder, we impulse bought a little electric screwdriver that was at the counter. Oops :)

I also took some more photos of our English Country Garden on Saturday. It's really quite a lovely garden, and things take their turns flowering all through spring to summer. At the moment the lilac is starting to bloom, the wisteria is going nuts, this big creeper thing is about to explode with flowers, irises have burst forth all over the place, some pink/purple daisies are quietly doing their thing in the shade, and lavendar and roses are getting ready to go. Some fresias I planted are also quietly blooming yellow in the shade near the daisies. Rosemary and daphne have been and gone, as have the jonquils that I planted. I'll actually kinda miss this garden when we move. Will have to try and take some cuttings of a few things...

The rest of Saturday was spent packing, cleaning, and dismantling the Millenium Falcon.

Sunday: repeat.

Monday: repeat, with weeding of the yard.
Actually didn't get much packing or cleaning done today. Oh well.