Sunday.  1.9.24.  Backdated.  Long story.  Blogged after we got home from Chris and Geoff's but couldn't post because my database is still broken. Didn't get hungry even by 20:30. Made a piece of toast so I don't wake up hungry in the middle of the night.

Monday. Slept mostly ok. Busy day again. Stu had a job interview. In the afternoon Stu decided he really was too cold, and went down to reboot the heater (yanking the cable on it and waiting 30 seconds). Miraculously this worked! Ran the heater for a while. Got some sausages from Chris's for dinner to have with leftover veggies. Labelled some Queensland photos. Nearly done.

Tuesday. Slept mostly ok. Rinse and repeat really - busy day of migrations, Queensland photo labelling, frustration with hosting.

Wednesday. Slept mostly ok. Rinse and repeat really - busy day of migrations, Queensland photo labelling, frustration with hosting. 

Thursday. Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. Stressing about sleep study.  Busy day at work. Ok drinks. Shopping after work. Dominos pizzas for dinner.

Friday to Sunday - Port Macquarie.

Sunday.  Checked my gmail when we were near home.  I got depressed about the whole hosting thing again. Didn't even feel like drinking when we got home I was that depressed. You know there's something wrong with me when that is the case.

Sunday.  25th.  Backdated.  Long story.

Evening. After not turning on the heater this morning because it was 17C, it was getting colder in the evening so I went to turn it on. Except the control panel was blank. No power. Sigh. I bet even if we get someone to look at it, they won't fix it rather than can't fix it. I'm sure they'll be like, eh, dead, too bad so sad bye bye. Stu cooked miso mushrooms for dinner which were very nice. Then watched Twister.

Monday. Slept ok. Migration work at work. At lunch I put on osso buco to cook for dinner. Made up some creamy polenta to go with it.

Tuesday. Up twice in the middle of the night checking on a big bunch of migrations. It was a bigger batch than we'd ever done before and they took too long and ran over backup time, causing everything to grind to a halt, and we had to cancel and redo most of them.  Blog dramas begin.

Wednesday. Went to bed early and slept relatively well.  Blog dramas continue.

Not only that but I'm getting trash emails from a pharmacy in America (CVS) which some retard called Rose has signed up for using MY email address. The problem is I can't access any of the site to complain about it because "CVS.com® is not available to customers or patients who are located outside of the United States or U.S. territories. We apologize for any inconvenience." I raged to them on Twitter. They responded by asking my name. I told them and raged some more and of course they're ignoring me because why the hell should they care that they're spamming someone in Australia. Need to get on with a VPN I reckon.

Thursday. Busy day. Blog dramas continue.

Into season 9 of Mash. Watched most of the Netflix documentary "Feminists: What were they thinking?" They talked to lots of women, but each of them only got a couple of lines each because there were so many of them to get through. There was one woman from some archival footage saying they didn't want to be slaves in the home. Great. Except now it's the other way around. Women got their way. They can go to work. But because women work now, they can afford a more expensive house because a couple has two incomes. So house prices went up accordingly.  It's now gotten to the point where you can *only* afford a house if the woman is working too. So now women are slaves to working. As well as having to look after the house and family. Feminists: What were you thinking?

Friday. Blog dramas continue. Did some migration work and trying to catch up on tickets and emails. Kiev and carrots for dinner (kiev picked up from Coles on Thursday and a whole bag of carrots that Chris was throwing out cause they were going slimy and so I got them for free). Watched 9 to 5 which Jane Fonda had talked about in the feminists documentary.

Saturday. Slept ok. Quiet day. Photo labelling and house stuff.

Here we go again..

Went for a little drive after work to get petrol, CO2 and visit the lake.

Go away!!

Made a caramel slice, and then pizzas for dinner (the sweetie wanted my pizzas over commercial ones, go figure!).

Watched Mash, then The Door Into Summer, which was a bit confusing in the middle but mostly resolved itself satisfactorily.

Sunday. 1.9.24. Slept ok. Blog dramas continue.  More photo labelling and house stuff. Went over to Chris and Geoff's for a raclette lunch. It was eleven years and three months to the day that we last were there. We left it a little late, it really wasn't the weather for raclette. Still pretty awesome though. Went for a walk after lunch which was nice and helped walk off lunch. Not feeling like dinner though!

Sunday.  18th.  When we were in the butcher we asked about the "rump cap" they had in the fridge (I'd never heard of it).  Like would you slow cook it or roast it.  He said to roast it.  So we did.  And it was amazing!  So tender and flavourful.  Loved it.

Then watched Iron Man 3.  I would argue that anyone with a huge house like that in such a prominent location, the owner would probably be "public knowledge".  ie, giving out your address would be a bit pointless because any sort of basic search would probably turn it up.  I could be wrong of course.  Also, the movie failed with its assumed knowledge.  There were mentions of "New York" but the last time I saw Iron Man in New York it was for his expo.  I think there was one mention of aliens.  But yeah pretty much a fail in terms of filling people in that had only seen the first two Iron Man movies and none of the rest of it.  I still have no idea what happened to him.

Monday.  Stu had another nosebleed overnight but this time it went *everywhere* :(  Didn't sleep well after that.  Another busy day.  Toulouse sausages and salad for dinner.  Spent two hours uploading Tassie html to the blog.  Was hoping to get it all done.  Only got half way.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy day.  Finished getting Tassie photos online, well at least the day photos, not the food/hotel ones.  I still need to fix the style sheet and scripts on all my blogs so it's hardcoded https so they'll render properly.  In my copious free time.  Sigh.  But @kapgar and @blogography have both managed to post comments recently, I thought they'd either stopped reading or given up posting on my broken site heh.  Hi!!

Wednesday and Thursday.  Bit of a blur.  Super busy days at work.  We did sneak out for a Lighty lunch though.  Their caesar salad is pretty epic - more bacon and cheese than lettuce!

Friday.  Slept like crap.  Busy day trying to catch up on tickets.  

After work was Dark Matter in the Pub with EB. 

It was interesting but OMFG Too. Damned. LOUD!!  We used ear plugs.  I think I should keep some in my bag permanently.

See!  I'm not the only one that thought it was too loud - three or maybe four other people in view blocking their ears as well!!

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Finished culling Queensland photos.  Finished doing Tassie food photos.  House and Lego stuff.

Kievs for dinner (that I got from Coles during the week).  Watched Miss Potter.  I had no idea what it was going to be about.. until I saw a picture of Peter Rabbit heh.  Quite a sweet movie.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Felt totally flat all day.  Didn't feel like doing anything much.  Sigh.  Didn't turn the heater on this morning, it was 17C when I got up.  Did some photo stuff, Lego, music, food shopping.

Sunday.  21st.  Roasted All The Veggies for dinner, and had that with some leftover beef.

Monday.  Slept okish, bit restless, kept waking up hot.  Took out the recycling tub to the bin outside and noticed behind it a big stain on the side of the pantry from a stream of dirty water.  Seems I must have overwatered the plant on top on Friday night.  Sigh.  So then had to spent a bunch of time before work wiping it all down and having a sad that the chipboard had swelled from the water.  Sigh.  Busy day doing some migration work and paperwork.  Into Mash season 8.

Tuesday.  Dunno, no notes.

Wednesday.  Had a big lunch at work.  Well, it was big in that there were lots of people, but lunch was super small on account of heaps of people turning up without being catered for so they ran out of food.  Whoops.  At least I did get something. 

In the evening Team Blank accidentally won the trivia night.  Sigh.  Only by two points too.  It was generally pretty fun.  My only main gripe was some of the questions were either half points for two part answers, or two points.  And it wasn't consistent.  Which wouldn't have been a problem except they weren't marking them centrally, they got us to swap with other tables.  So that was bit annoying. 

Anyways.  Looks like I have to plan another trivia night.  First since pre covid.  Someone suggested getting AI to write it.  Wonder what sort of questions it would come up with.  

At least there was mulled cider.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Although awake from after 4 til 5 after the sweetie got up to pee (he'd been awake for hours stressing about All The Things).  Dealing with All The Problems during the day.  Then pizzas, Mash, Lego Masters.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Morning was just dealing with crap and tidying up and crap. 

The turdburgers are back to eat the house

Knocked off at lunch then did some club dinner prep and food shopping and more prep including making a peppermint slice.  Frustrated with LibreOffice formatting.  I have a random line in one of my documents that I literally cannot delete.  Give me Notes formatting any day.

Here's all the shopping for the club Christmas in July night.

Dessert.  After I'd started making up the peppermint slice

Presents

It's times like this I really miss the little brother...

Chris *promised* me kievs this week.  He lied!!  He did say I could beat him over the head.  So had to have some other random chicken stuff instead to go with the kalettes.

This is some of the peppermint slice cut up 

Saturday.  Not much in the morning.  Stu decided he was too stressed to go out to the club so I went out by myself.  

All my bags of crap

After I dumped everything in the fridge I went for a wander and had a chat with Chris and Geoff and Tammie and Brenton.  Then watched a demo of the log splitter and had a go on it.  Then it was into the kitchen to wash up everything and start prepping dinner.  Which took all afternoon.  Note to self: start closer to 12 than 1.  There were a couple of minor disasters.  Firstly I forgot to take out the small wooden skewer sticks so I couldn't make up the Christmas Skewers (Chris suggested putting the bits out in bowls but they didn't really get eaten much).  Then the door on the little oven was a bit bent so it wasn't closing properly, so when I opened up the foil on the turkeys they were nowhere near done.  John hacked the oven door and got it to close properly and so I cranked the temp and waited a bit longer.  All good cause the other oven was still super slow even with less food in it.  So dinner was a little later than I planned but it all worked out.  It was also a fairly quiet night, only like 20-25 peeps.  And I also missed getting photos of a lot of the food cause I was concentrating too much on getting it organised.  Whoops.

John and some turkey

Coles winter salad

One of the potato bakes

Minted peas

We only did one pavlova because of so few people

Eggnog overload!!  With actual real eggnog from last Christmas, that had been in the freezer at home since January

Went to bed a little late but not too bad.

Sunday.  Happy birthday Dad.  Woke up quite early and never got back to sleep.  Eventually got up and went up at 7:30 to clean up the shed, and was totally amazed to see snow!  Will post pics separately.  After making it past the snow, then spent half an hour taking down Christmas decorations, had some breakfast, then spent an hour doing washing up from last night.  hmmm.  Definitely not part of the plan.

Came home but was zombie tired so didn't feel up to doing anything useful.  I did make some drawer dividers for our implements drawer out of reject Lego of Vic's (worn/yellowed stuff).  And watched an hour of the Olympics opening ceremony.  Then took the sweetie to the airport, then came home for photos/blogging etc.

Sunday.  7th.  Epic roast chicken and veggies for dinner.

Then watched first part of Pretty Baby - a documentary on Brooke Shields.  Funny that Judd Nelson appeared in that one, but not Andrew McCarthy's one.  

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  omfg NEW Teams is so trash.  They hid away the contact list so I had to Google how to find it.  You have to click on Calls on the left, then up in the top right click on View Contacts.  This starts up a "People" menu option on the left menu bar, but that's not persistent unless you pin it.  But then if you message someone from the contacts list it pops out into a new window instead of opening in the existing chat window.  Utterly hopeless Microsoft TRASH.  Spent most of the day looking at other peoples' problems.  Saw my birds at lunch for the first time since last winter.  They didn't fly over straight away, but did when I called them.  Cooked satay chicken for dinner with some leftover chicken and a Masterfoods satay sauce base.  Turned out ok.  The sweetie went back for seconds so must have been ok.  

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep but then slept ok.  Busy day of Everything Everywhere All At Once.  Had a drink after work.  Not a great idea because then I didn't feel like doing anything.  Least of all cook dinner.  So asked the sweetie to cook dinner.

Shallot rings, prawn toast, shredded beef Peking style, cashew chicken and rice.

So I had another drink.  And we both ate entirely too much.  And I only did like 1100 steps all day.  But I did finish a day of Queensland photo culling and watched some Lego Masters.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up at ~5:15.  Day of all the BS.  Hurray.  Photo culling and Lego Masters in the evening.  And the sweetie cooked dinner!  Miso mushrooms!

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Everything Everywhere All At Once.  Quietish drinks.  Made pizzas.  Started a new anime series.  Remind me to ask Stu what it was called.  Edit: Girl Band Cry.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Spent a chunk of the morning talking to people about moving all their stuff to our new environment.  Decom work in the afternoon.  Opened a bottle of bubbles I got for my birthday and shared it with the sweetie.

Had fried chicken pieces and veggies for dinner (Chris didn't have kievs! *gasp*!!)

After dinner I watched Parasite.  It was actually kinda fun for the first half, then just got silly and ultimately pointlessly violent.  Also.  Why the hell doesn't he just *leave* at the end??

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got ready and headed out to the club for a working bee.  Spent a couple of hours mattocking tussock.  Until I whacked the mattock into the ground and felt something move beneath my foot a good half a metre away.  Uh oh.  Sure enough, I'd hit a hose and it started leaking.  Went and found Boyd and he was like, eh, just turn off the water at the tank, then he came and dug around it and then cut through it and said, easy fix don't worry about it.  This is it a while later when I went back for a photo.

There's banksias flowering in the garden.

In the afternoon helped with hazard reduction around the back.

And there was this chunky bluetongue!

Came home (the sweetie and I had some good life conversations on the way to and back) and collapsed.  Had leftover satay chicken for dinner, Death in Paradise 10.1, then an early night.

Sunday.  Even though I went to bed early it still took ages to get to sleep.  And woke up around midnight with cranky bowels.  Maybe it was that tiny bit of rotten egg that got into the veggie hash browns at lunch yesterday.. I saw nothing..!  Super busy day.  Spent an hour each on Tassie culling, Queensland culling, Lego wishlisting, Mum photo picking, downloading bank statements, and shopping, with an extra blog post, music practise and phone backing up, then it was time to cook dinner and just like that the weekend is over.  Sigh.  I have so many projects going on at the moment it would be a full time job just to keep up with it all.  I don't have TIME to go to work full time.  It's killing me.

Sigh....

Sunday.  23rd.  Basa bake, veggie bake and potatoes for dinner.

Then Mash and Laid Back Camp (I think it was the end of season 3).  Such a delightful show.  They go to such cool places and cook amazing food.  Makes us wanna go motorbike camping around Japan :)  Then started season 2 of Lego Masters USA.  This time with Michelle from the Australians vs the World series.

Monday.  24th.  Slept mostly ok (bit restless and hands kept going to sleep).  Fairly busy day.  Cooked up a bag of mushrooms with cream and leftover corned beef from the April club night and veggies from the June club night.  Yum.  Into Mash season 7.  Watched an episode of Lego Masters USA.  Went to read an entry of my Tasmania blog for the day I was photo culling.  But my site wouldn't load.  504 Gateway Time-out - nginx.  And CageFS error in Terminal.  And scripts were broken.  Oh no.  Not again.  Need to give Vodien a bowl of petunias.  And so began a week of angst that I may post separately.  

Tuesday.  25th. 

HTTP working on the blog but scripts and terminal still broken.  Busy day at work.  Made "Mexican Mince" (in that I used some taco seasoning on it) with leftover peas and carrots from the club night, and made up some taco slaw as well.  The sweetie went back for seconds so must have been good.

Wednesday.  26th.

Took ages to get to sleep because I was cold.  Got frustrated with NRMA because they've been charging us twice (I think) for membership.  Filled in an online form asking about it.  And the insurance wanted us to update a couple of things on the policy but of course insurance and membership is two different accounts in totally different places on their site and it wasn't at all obvious how I could even update what they wanted.  I should have taken a screenshot of what they wanted on the renewal because it's literally written in Engrish.  Their help is trash too.  All trash.

Busy day.  Didn't do the One Thing I wanted to get done.

NRMA got back to me.  Said they couldn't sort out my problem over email and I'd need to phone in.  Sigh.

Also.  People drama this week.  In an effort to avoid drama, or indeed be the cause of it, I pushed away a good friend, possibly forever, which makes me pretty sad.  I keep telling people i'm a horrible person, maybe now they'll believe me.  Sigh.

Thursday.  27th.  Slept ok.  Another busy day at work not getting done the One Thing I wanted to do.  Pizza for dinner.  Montage episode of Mash.  Braindead response from Vodien.

Friday.  Slept ok (surprisingly, after last night's Vodien rage).  Until 4:35 when the sweetie had to get up to fly to Sydney.  Busy morning before work tidying up the house so I wouldn't have to spend time on the weekend tidying up the house.  Relatively quiet day at work, finished the One Thing I wanted to get done from the other day, then basically caught up on a bunch of crap.  House and fish stuff after work.  Lego Masters.  Vodien fixed cagefs and scripts but broke my access to cpanel and I realised with horror that my mysql database had been restored to a point from LAST OCTOBER.  Then watched The Shape of Water .. which was .. interesting.. 

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Made this!  How cool is this :)  Been meaning to make this for ages (found a gif I'd made ages ago while I was cleaning out my in tray).

Bit of house stuff, bit of photo stuff, bit of Lego part wishlisting.  

When the Vodien nonsense started at the beginning of the week I quickly exported my database in case anything happened.  At the time I thought.. funny.. that's significantly smaller than my last backup (taken in May).  But then didn't think much more of it.  On Saturday I realised to my HORROR that the backup I'd made was of the REVERTED database FROM LAST OCTOBER!!  I freaked out.  I couldn't login to cpanel anymore (they broke that on Friday) to do a tar.gz of the site.  I couldn't FTP anything (same login problem).  In the end I just loaded the May/June entries in my browser and manually saved them.  Then if all else failed at least I had the latest content since my May backup.  I also have it in a local RSS feed reader.  Although I do worry about having to ever do a mysql restore.  So much potential for things to go Very Badly with my blog.

The last of my mini capsicums is actually slowly ripening all by itself indoors!

Leftovers for dinner.  Second part of the Mash montage episode.  Then watched The Good Son, which I'd seen once a long time ago.  All I could remember from last time was the Highway Man and the cliffs at the end.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up early and started stressing about my database.  Got up to find the cpanel password reset email.  Cool.  But cpanel was full of scary errors, terminal had different errors and NONE OF MY WEBSITES OR EMAIL ACCOUNTS WORKED!!!  Finished getting ready, and thankfully by an hour later everything was working again.  I went to backup my database but phpMyAdmin had this error "mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied".  A quick Google said to just reset my cpanel password again so did that and it all came good.  Backed up the database.  Made a test blog post.  Hoped like hell this would be the end of the drama.  Until next time.

More drama with Rob and some club photos.  Sigh.

Bit of Tassie culling but mostly just Lego parts wishlisting.  Put some lamb into the slow cooker mid morning.  Lunch at Pattysmiths.  The cheesy chicken burger doesn't have actual cheese, just cheese sauce.  Still nice though.

Then food shopping.  I was worried going into Woollies that I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.  Just about every time I go to Woollies I can go in in a completely happy mood, and be wanting to kill people by the end of it.  So after the terrible week I've had I knew things were going to be bad.  And I was right.  I took a few deep breaths before I went in.  But then I was trying to find the dried fried shallots.  They're usually down the bottom in the Asian section.  But there was this couple and their trolley in the way and while they did move a bit, they still stayed there in front of everything for AGES and I couldn't see the damned shallots and I was getting more and more frustrated and stressed and when that happens I literally go blind and can't SEEEEE and then all these people were trying to get past in either direction and I just about had a panic attack.  I gave up looking and carried on but I obviously looked distraught enough that a staff member actually asked if I was ok and I was like no because I can't FIND anything and he very sweetly went and looked for me (it took him ages to find them too).  What a lovely guy.  Grabbed our last few things then got out of there.  Should go back to shopping at 7am, so much less stressful.  Pity the sweetie is allergic to mornings.  Not much else in the afternoon.  Mostly Lego wishlisting.  Glimmer of hope that good friend may not be lost.  And now to see if I can post this...

Monday.  10th.  Epic beef ribs for dinner.  Although they were probably a little undercooked in that didn't easily fall off the bone, took a bit of persuasion.

Perfectly cooked garlic candy.  Stu got a few bits but I devoured the rest!

Mash/Laid Back Camp/Lego Masters.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Finished prepping All The Deleting in the morning.  Then All The Deleting in the afternoon.  Shine Dome talk - The journey of Australian science - Dorothy Hill, geology and the Great Barrier Reef with Professor Dorrit Jacob and Associate Professor Zoe Richards, followed by beef cheeks at Badger&Co.

Wednesday.  Slept ok but woke up fairly early.  All The Deleting.  Deleted 1195 objects, including 200 policies - 10.5% of the ruleset!!  Finished just before 17:00 and declared it beer o'clock and even Jim came with me so that was really nice. 

Windoze 11 is so trash.  If you have notepad open in one desktop, and open a text file on another desktop, it'll open the file on the OTHER desktop!?!?!  Like does anyone at Microsoft actually use their own products?  In what world would it be logical to open a file in an entirely different workspace to the one you're in??  Microsoft is utter TRASH.

Thursday.  Caught up on crap from the previous two days I'd been ignoring trying to get stuff deleted.  Because in the afternoon we started a big migration of our entire ruleset from one environment to another.  Fun times.  Busy drinks (lots of directory type peeps in town).  Kit came over after and we made pizzas and chatted.  I finally got to open the Limoncello I got for Christmas!!  It was very nice :)

Friday.  Awake for like three hours in the middle of the night.  Hurray.  Dealing with stoopid firewall problems cause stoopid firewalls is stoopid.  Early finish.  Went down to Herbert's cause it was meant to be Fred's 50th.  Except it was tomorrow.  I *swear* they said the Friday.  Sigh.  So had a beer and a mulled wine and left.

Leftover beef ribs for dinner and early night.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Day of All The Things.  Got lots done which was good.  Back to Herbert's again for take 2 of Fred's party.  Turned out they'd booked out the entire inside area, with bar tab and a steady procession of their bar bites - haloumi fries, garlic chicken balls, spicy mac'n'cheese bites, zucchini fritters and meat balls (that I missed out on cause they ran out but never came back).  I hardly knew anyone, but did know a couple of peeps so talked to them and later others.  Finished up a bit after 19:15, a lovely party.  And they didn't even finish the bar tab.  Whoops.  hehe

Mash/Laid Back Camp and early night.

Sunday.  Awake for like three hours in the middle of the night.  Sigh.  Did get some stuff done but not as much as yesterday.  Did some food shopping in the afternoon.  Talked to John when we got back.  Apparently a massive branch of our lemon tree broke off into their yard (I'm really worried about the tree - branches are rotting all over the place) and they got SIXTY TWO lemons off it!!  How amazing is that!?  I picked a couple for dinner and they were really good lemons too - fairly thin pith, not the usual super thick pith.  

Then it was the usual Sunday night backup phone, cook dinner, blog, and get depressed about having to go back to work tomorrow.. 

This blog entry's title is not a quote, it's the name of one of the episodes of Mash we watched this week :)

Sunday.  2nd.  Went out for dinner with Annie and Stu to Raku.  Stoopidly expensive tasting menu but an excellent meal and a lovely catchup.  

Monday.  Awake for hours in the middle of the night.  Sigh.  NEIL for the day.  Figured out my kerberos problem, but it was an obvious problem that I was too stoopid to spot.  This is how planes crash.  Leftovers for dinner.  Finished watching Lego Masters Australia vs the World.  The winning team's build was spectacular!  I picked them as the winners and they were!  But didn't do any music, didn't do any blogging catchup, didn't do any weeding.  Barely cracked 1000 steps all day.  Sigh.

I finally picked some of the mini capsicums (the one on the right had a hole in it from some bug so water was getting in).  There's still plenty more green ones but I doubt they'll ripen.

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - mostly stressing about being so stoopid.  But also thinking about Lego Masters.  hmm.  Slept mostly ok otherwise but woke up pretty early.  Pretty much a BS day.  Weeding at lunch.  Did some music, Tassie photo culling, blogging, dinner and suddenly it's 19:45.  Sigh.  Did some more culling and watched the first episode of the first season of the American Lego Masters.  It's quite a bit bigger production.  They had ten teams, and they cgi animate the Lego.  But the episodes are quite short (41 minutes each) so they have to rush through the final showing of the builds so you don't get a good look at them.  But.. Krystle!!  That was a crack up to see her two nights in a row but for different countries :)

Wednesday.  Meh day.  Talked Neil into going to the pub after work.  Wasn't hard to convince with the offer of a lift home instead of a walk in the pouring rain :)

Thursday.  Awake for three hours in the middle of the night.  Hurray.  Crazy busy day.  Reasonably busy drinks which was good.

Friday.  Slept for like nine hours!!  Woke up at one point thinking it was the middle of the night but it was actually 6am!  Winning! 

Another crazy busy day.  Chris didn't have kievs though!!  Disaster!!  So had some other fried chicken pieces instead.  With kalettes!!  Might have over cooked the kalettes a little - this oven is definitely a lot hotter than the last one.

Finally got around to finish watching The Sound of Music (which I didn't even blog the start of, but it was forever ago, like months).

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Day of house stuff centered around the Classic 100 "Feel Good".  Tuna bake for dinner with the other pack of kalettes.

Then watched the last episode of The Orville.  After the somewhat more heavy episodes of the third series it all finishes off quite lightly with a wedding which was nice.  

Sunday.  Slept ok.  More house stuff (and noting missing parts from Vic's Lego) amongst the Classic 100.  Did sneak out to do some food shopping but didn't miss too much (got to sing the Hallelujah chorus in the car on the way home, sorry sweetie ;) ).  Cheat's Peking Duck for dinner.

Then the second last episode of Shogun.  I was actually wanting to watch Fantasia 2000 (since there were two pieces from it in the Classic 100), so put that on afterwards, but still managed an early night.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Did a bit of noting of missing parts, but mostly just cleaning the house.  Nothing like having people over to force the issue...  Put dinner on after lunch.. for next time!

I haven't made any recipes from this book in a while - first it was Christmas then it was Tassie planning then it was Tassie then it was all just too hard.  But I pulled the book out again last weekend and let it fall open.  Mexican Shredded Beef is what it fell open to, so that's what I made!

All the ingredients laid out.

If I were doing these recipes for myself I'd rearrange things into the order you prep them to make things a little more efficient.

For example, rather than having the ingredients for the spice mix at the bottom but that being the first thing to make up in the instructions, I'd say chop the onion and garlic and start frying that while you make up the spice mix - that sort of thing.  I'm also conscious of the order of chopping things - much easier to chop the onion first then the beef, because otherwise you have to wash up the chopping board or find another one.  Plus, I'm lazy, so things like chopping garlic - meh, I'll just mince it and cook it a much shorter time.  It all depends how much you want to mise en place the thing before you start.  So I'll do up this blog with how I'd do it next time, not how I actually did it.. although it's pretty close :)

So chop up an onion and fry it.  I never follow recipes for this.  I add some water to the pan for the beginning of the cook and use a medium heat so the onion cooks slower but cooks before it burns.  It takes longer but you can be doing other things anyway.  

While the onion is cooking, chop up all the beef into chunks and put in a large bowl.  This was 2kg, but only because we were going to get the suggested 1.5kg but the butcher talked us into 2kg because it was the same price (and it was Sunday afternoon and he was probably trying to clear stock).  If you're worried about how long this will all take you can skip starting the onions until you're ready to go.

Make up the spice mix.  This is 1 tsp each of allspice, ground coriander (which I had to mash myself from seeds), salt, pepper; 2 tsp onion powder, 1 tbsp each of paprika and oregano.  She also wanted 1 1/2 tbsp chipotle powder but we couldn't find that so I just used a bit of chilli powder and a squirt of liquid smoke.

Mix up the spices, then coat the beef in the big bowl.

When the onion is nearly done, add five cloves of minced garlic and cook carefully so the garlic doesn't burn.  Get out a slow cooker and turn it on.  Add the onion and garlic to the slow cooker.

Brown all the meat.

While the meat is browning, add the other liquids to the slow cooker - 3/4 cup orange juice, juice of a lime (I didn't even measure the 2 tbsp she wanted, I just use one lime and be done with it), 400g tin crushed tomatoes, 2 cups low salt beef stock, 1/2 cup of water.  Don't forget the liquid smoke ;)

Add all the meat to the slow cooker as each batch is done.

Slow cook all afternoon.  

There was HEAPS of the sauce so 2kg meat worked quite well.  I imagine it'd be very liquidy otherwise.

Now because the slow cooker won't reduce liquids much you need to do that on the stove.

So pull all the beef out.  I'm pretty sure I washed up that bowl after having the raw meat in it!! ;)

Very very carefully pour all the sauce into a large frying pan or stock pot and reduce the heck out of it

Then mix it all back together again (probably add the beef to the frying pan to warm it up a little since it's been sitting out for a while)

Serve with taco slaw, Mexican red rice, corn, sour cream and cheese.  Or make tacos or burritos or whatever.

The verdict? Yum yum yum.  A little time consuming at the beginning and having to reduce the sauce at the end is a bit annoying (I'd consider doing this on the stove for 3 hours like I do with coq-au-vin).  But ultimately quite simple and delicious.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: yes!
Stu: yes!

Sunday.  19th.  Had a mini lamb roast for dinner which caused maxi fat spatter all over the oven.  Hurray.  

There may have been a whole tray of garlic.  I left three pieces for the sweetie..

Then Mash, Shogun 1.7.  My brain is weird.  I recognised one of the dudes in Mash (Larry Wilcox) as being one of the dudes in CHiPs.  

I haven't seen that show in FORTY YEARS.

So I recognised someone from an entire lifetime ago, but didn't recognise Thomas at the wedding (figured it out after looking at the photos).

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Ignored new proxies and finished writing up paperwork for our exclude problem.  Also seeing what policies we could disable on the current proxies (they're nine years old now and overloaded to the point of crashing most days, sometimes multiple times a day).  Did a bit of music after work.  2.5 reeds are HARD.  Blogged the Airport Open Day and watched some Lego Masters.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - stressing over all the conversations I had at the wedding.  Like, total cringe.  This is what happens when you don't let me drink while socialising, people!  I'm awkward.  Urggh.  Worked through exclude changes at work.  Music, leftovers for dinner, Mash, picked photos for the Wagga Brick Show post, culled the first day of Tassie photos.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Finished the excludes reworks and disabled some proxy policies.  Backed up my computer to two different disks (the little one barely holds anything these days).  Then Lego Masters.  Started culling day 2 of Tassie while I was doing all that, but hard to concentrate.

Thursday.  Nothing very exciting.  Good drinks.  Shane was in town so we stayed a bit later.  Pizza/Mash/Lego Masters (I think).

Friday.  Updated some doco from some previous decom work.  Fought with kerberos all afternoon.  Failed.  Sigh.  Kiev for dinner.  Into Mash season 6.

Kit and Oreo arrived a while later and we chatted a bit before bed.

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Kit went off to meet up with some friends and didn't come back til late in the afternoon.  I put the Lego train away, did some Tassie photo culling, weeding, blogging.  So a nice quiet day.  When Kit got home we had a few drinks and had Yat Bun Tong delivered (Dumpling Inn was being a bumhead and not appearing online).

Early night because everyone was tired.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Cooked cheesy hash browns for breakfast.

Kit left mid morning.  Did some Tasmania photo stuff.  Had Grease Monkey for lunch (they've got a food truck at the markets at the moment).

Did our food shopping.  Did Lego and weeding in the afternoon.  Leftover Chinese for dinner.  Mash/Orville 3.8 (movie length episode .. with Dolly Parton .. !!).

Monday.  Awake from 2:15 to 5:15 or so.  Sigh.  Finished the Lego minifig, did some Tassie culling, blogging, cooked dinner, had lunch, weeding, fish stuff.  And suddenly it's 3:30 - time to finish the weekend - backup phone, backup phone photos, blog etc.  No time for music.  Sigh.