Had a bit of a financial "moment" today.  Found out my other mortgage account has been frozen - a couple of weeks earlier than we thought it would.  Had a bit of low level panic cause all my money is tied up in that account.  Had enough change for lunch, then got some money out of my "internet" bank account, but there's not much in there til pay day this week.

So now have to chase down all the automated payments that come out of that old account and stop them.  Then there's a tonne of paperwork to read and sign for the new mortgage.  And we haven't done our tax yet.

It's all a little stressful :(

(oh, and then realised we were meant to be going to Newcastle with friends at the beginning of November (not to mention going away with Scott and Kerry the weekend before), but we're likely to be moving that weekend.  And I'll probably be on call.  It's not shaping up to be a stress-free couple of weeks....)

I realised tonight I hadn't downloaded my photos in over a week.. oops!!

Last weekend was very springy...

A few of my mint seedlings survived the winter and are starting to thrive again..

This currawong sat in the back yard for quite a while, which gave me time to get a photo of it..

A young (pink) daisy..

A few shots of Canberra/Gungahlin..

I'll never tire of the blossom trees around here..

Not sure what this is..?

I like the cutlery they have in the Thai place we went to for lunch on Wednesday (Lemon Grass I think??)..

Of course the big news of this week is that we exchanged contracts for a house!! Terribly exciting for us :) Turns out our new house has a beautiful weeping cherry which is in full bloom at the moment..

Saw this on the ground on Friday afternoon, which I deemed stop-in-the-middle-of-the-city-to-take-a-photo-worthy..

Friday evening saw a bunch of us go to the Wig and Pen for after work drinks. It was a good fun night, although the place is far too pricey to be wanting to do it too often. At one point we got one beer, a plate of chips and a plate of wedges. For $21.30 ?!?!? Friggen rip-off. But the beer is pretty good.

On Saturday, Annie and most of the rest of the family came over with French champagne to celebrate our house-buying (actually the champagne was given to them when Little Squishy was born, but they hadn't gotten around to drinking it.. so we celebrated both occasions :) )

With our dinner (home-made pizzas) we opened another one of our wedding wines - a very nice Coonawarra shiraz. Quite delicious.. for a red wine ;)

Today we spent much of the day cleaning up the house in preparation for moving out.

And we went to the book fair :)

We filled up a shopping bag ($10 worth) with 38 books, so think we got our money's worth :)
Here's the ones I grabbed..

I'm most excited about "The Final Countdown". Dad and I saw this movie years and years ago, and then couldn't remember the name of it for the longest time. I've not seen it again since, so will be cool to read the book.

And so that's pretty much the last week and a bit.... :)

I noticed recently that Google Maps had added some beautiful high resolution sections of Canberra.  These were taken very obviously on a weekend, and apparently around March.

What I hadn't noticed until tonight was the Terrain button.

!!!

The hills at the northern end of the ACT..

So.  Nat and Andrew came over on Friday night.  They stayed relatively sober while Stu and I got a little sloshed.. oops.. hope they don't hate us...

This was the second bottle of wine we drank (after a sparkling cabernet)..



Natalie had fun with my Russian Dolls..

A function that worked quite happily last night (uploading pictures) is completely broken today.  I get a horrible Apache permission denied when it tries to create the file.

Also, the "Tags" metadata of the blog entry is not loading my previous tags when I put in a keystroke.

Also, the gallery app I have on one of my other sites is broken in a similar way.

*however* the gallery app *can* create images from another web site, but not uploading through my browser.

Tried rebooting, another browser, even another computer, all with no luck.

I haven't done anything to my site that could affect this, and it's the weekend so doubt my hosting provider has done anything (although you never know)..

It's exceedingly distressing :(

UPDATE:  /tmp is full on the host.  This may or may not be related to problems that MySQL had on Friday morning which also broke my blog and gallery.  *sigh*
UPDATE: /tmp has been cleared somewhat, picture upload ability restored!  woot!

Urghh... tiring weekend....

Saturday morning had to go shopping and clean the house.

Found this recycling bin at the markets in Gungahlin which cracked me up..

So then the parents arrived. Stu made a delicious vegan-friendly fried rice for lunch, and then we looked at honeymoon photos. Pretty much all afternoon. :/

Around 6pm we headed off to Della Rocca for dinner (our birthday dinner, the parents' shout). I had a veal dish (allan pana I think) which was pretty good. But we still had room for dessert, so had some.. heh. Even managed to convince mum to drink a little of the sparkling cabernet we took along (!)

So came back and finished going through the honeymoon photos. Mum liked the Legoland and Alps pics the most. Dad didn't really care for all the "city" photos.. but as that was about 95% of the trip, he got a little bored.. hrmm..

This morning we sat around wondering what to do when Potty called up and said they were heading out to Casuarina Sands for a picnic, so we tagged along.

The ducks came to be fed..

Walked down to the weir which was very pretty..

Scott made Jake a raft, so they brought it down to launch it..

The boys scrambled out to the middle..

It took a couple of relaunches to get it to finally go..

Having done that, we wandered home again.

The parents left, and just after that, Annie and the kids arrived. We all went for a little walk.

This galah watched us..

It was very bright in the sun..

And then home again.

I slow cooked a roast pork for dinner. We considered inviting people over, but we were a bit peopled out by this point. The pork turned out really well, and really cheaply too - the bone was very small, so mostly meat at $4.45/kilo.

And that was our weekend. I could use another one...

Didn't really get a whole lot done, but still was a nice day.

This morning our fireplace caught another sparrow (three died in there while we were on our honeymoon :( ).  Spent ages chasing it round the living room.  In fact I even had it pinned by the tail feathers at one point, only to have all the tail feathers come adrift and it get away :(

But I did manage to catch it eventually, and off it flew into the trees.

Then we went over to Damien's for lunch and games.

Started the afternoon off with Guillotine, which was quite fun, and Stu won. Then a game of Carcassonne which Stu also won, but it was very close. And finally Killer Bunnies, which wasn't a whole lot better than last time, although much less complamicated without all the extra expansion sets. It really is a rather pointless game. Damien won that one in the end.

Finally home for home-made pizzas and some Star Trek.

One of our favourite weekend breakfasts (or brunches) is home-made hash browns.  They are *so* simple - just grate some potato and fry in your favourite oil.  Or for a completely evil variation, add shredded cheese and bacon bits.  Soooo good!!

We also got some salad bits on Saturday, so had a nice (if not authentic) caesar salad for second lunch yesterday.

For dinner yesterday Stu roasted a bunch of veggies and a veggie roast.  Quite yum, but the potatoes could have done with *something*... not sure what..

Tonight I did a satay tofu stirfry.  Dug out the wok for this, which is much easier to use with bok choy than a small frying pan!

And last night we watched Happy Feet.  Meh.  I think it tried too hard.  It was almost like a Moulin Rouge wanna-be.  So it just didn't quite work for me.  Stu thought it was a little strange too.  Shrug :)

School kids are infesting the buses again.. sux majorly :(

With a flying visit to Sydney and Newcastle and probably eleven or twelve hours driving.  eep!

So set off mid morning yesterday and went straight to my Nana's 80th birthday celebrations.  It was.. .er... well it was interesting.. hrmm... kinda...
heh
Nah it was good to see some of my aunties and uncles and cousins that I don't see very often.  But remind me never to get old.. :(


My dad looked liked he actually belonged in the nursing home.. whatchathink? ;)

First cousin with first cousin once removed :)

So then we toddled off to George's brother's place for a good old-fashioned bonfire!  Was fantastic!








Underneath some of the logs were *glowing*!

And then back to J&G's where we did a slide show of 750 hastily assembled photos of our honeymoon (as in choosing only began around 10pm Friday night, and selections were made from thumbnails, so some were forgotten and a few not-so-good ones were included .. oh well...)

This morning we headed north, getting to Newcastle around lunch time.  Jan came over and we had lunch, and then did the slide show, take two. 


So a bit after three we headed for home.

What a very long weekend.. hrmm...

So this week had me on a six day SANS security course.  It was pretty good.  Although it did vary too much between really technical stuff and more management-level stuff.

We saw this dude on the first day and asked him where he got his t-shirt from.. :) (apparently it was a one-off limited run - doh!)

We had the biggest room at the Convention Centre which gave us a nice walk up to get our food at breaks

So since I was going to be out most of Saturday, Stu invited Damien over for a war game.  I came home part way through it.