Wow, another strange year. Another crazy busy year.

Our year began very quietly with just the two of us. We didn't go out to the club because of Omicron taking the country by storm.

Travel-wise this year has been.. interesting. It started off with us desperatly trying to get out of the cruise we were due to go on. The charter company had postponed it a year, but with Omicron raging, government travel bans still in force, and lack of insurance for covid-related hospitalisations, we just couldn't justify it. The travel bans did get lifted and insurance companies started insuring for covid, but we still didn't think it was worth the risk. In the end, something like two weeks before the departure date, Carnival were like, ok fine, we won't charge the charter company if people don't want to come. Great. So we didn't go. The charter company were still @$$holes and would only provide a cruise credit for next year's cruise not the year after. It's caused me so much stress and angst and I would NEVER deal with them again. So plan B for February was Tasmania. But with Omicron raging and mandatory lockdowns for testing positive, we decided against that too. If we'd gotten sick while in Tasmania we would have nowhere to go and no way to get home. So plan C was regional Victoria. We only booked motels a night in advance, and if we'd gotten sick we could be home from anywhere in Victoria in a day. So that's what we did. And we actually had a lovely time with almost perfect weather (if a tad hot!). We had a very busy first week, cramming in lots of things, but took it a lot easier in the second week. In April there was a day trip to four Sydney dams to see three of them spilling which was super cool. In May was another sneaky trip to Sydney to see Woronora Dam spilling, and Brickman's Lego Jurassic World. I hadn't been planning to go see the Lego, but then was inspired by Lego Masters so went when it only had a few days to go. And then they extended it. Oh well. And then back again to Sydney in June for Mum's birthday where Kellie had organised to see Mary Poppins. Met up with Tony the next day and wandered the city and went out to Cockatoo Island, then met up with Mum again and saw Vivid. Finally a visit to Ansto at Lucus Heights which was very cool. We only made it down the coast once this year, in July, to see Kit and Pete. In September I went overseas for the first time in nearly four years. Mum and I went and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play, which I'd been wanting to see since the late 80s. We then drove through Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland (four countries in one day!!) and into Italy, where we ditched the car and toured northern and central Italy by train. We saw *heaps* of stuff, much more, and for much cheaper, than if we'd done it with the tour company like originally planned. I got filled with rage how Qantas and Emirates won't talk to each other to do seat allocations on code share flights. Jet lag hit me in a major way when I got home. It certainly didn't help that I got a cold as soon as I got home and so didn't go outside and see the sun in days. I was awake for hours every night for a week, and a complete zombie for much of it. Finally, we went back to Tumut for the Tumut 3 Power Station Open Day and another TRBC tour.

Work was, well, work. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that it takes up so much time out of my days. I have way too many things on my todo list to have time to go to work every day. Sigh. But at least working from home a few days a week makes it tolerable. I didn't actually go into the office at all until March (with Omicron raging and minimising people contact before we went on holidays). Then when I did eventually have to go back in I found it super loud and stressful and distracting and PEOPLE!! I had to be Neil a few times during the year and did some doco on his stuff (which he won't keep up to date heh). There were a couple of firewall migrations that went quite smoothly. A couple of load testing days in May and June. A few proxy upgrades which introduced more bugs than they fixed. But we did PoC a proxy from another company that actually looked pretty good. Migrated some servers. And All The Cleaning. Just call me Sadie. There was a whiskey night in July (which I actually missed, but was able to try everything the next week), and I ran my Christmas bbq at the lake for the tenth year in a row.

Healthwise I've been pretty good. Had a very slight cold in June and another one when I got home from Europe. Had booster jabs in January and July. The one in January caused a strong immune reaction so had to take a half day off and have a little lie down. Other than that just a sore arm so far is all I've had from the shots. Other than that just the usual bouts of insomnia, waking up with numb hands, and going blind.

We've been pretty slack at keeping up with friends and family this year. Although we have seen some friends a bit. We've seen Tony and Jess a few times for games and music. Damien came over in January, April and June for games. Jenn came over a couple of times in April and December. I had heaps of lunches at Herbert's with various Chrises and Tonys and other peeps as well. David came to stay before the Canberra Airport Open Day. Kit came to stay in July. Mum came to stay in December and we did our family Christmas with Kellie's family at the Burn's Club. We saw Annie and the family a few times - for Annie's 50th, Mila's 21st and Christmas, as well Immy coming over a couple of times to hang out. EffanC and R&F came over they day before my birthday. Had a lovely housewarming for R&F in November (it was cold and wet). Caught up with Aaron in December, probably as long as ten years since I last saw him. Finally saw Chrissie for the first time since covid in December. And met up with James and George and the kids for lunch in December on their way to Melbourne.

We only made it out to the club four times this year. It's been that kind of year. With quarantining and being on holidays for several events, the only times we made it out were for the Mexican night in March, the formal night in June, our Christmas in July and the Christmas party in November. We didn't even make it out in any non-event weekends which we like doing over winter.

I did a bit of work on processing Dad's slides early in the year but that fizzled out. I geotagged all of Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos in case we ended up going there. I also geotagged all our Victoria and South Australia photos from previous holidays to try and reproduce those. I started to scan Mum's Minolta negatives from the beginning (1983) and got some spectacular results, but that ground to a halt when I got up to 1994 and got into a batch of badly discoloured negatives that were unscannable. Not that there's even all that many past 1994 that I'm interested in keeping so no big deal I suppose. I managed to cull and label and get some photos onto the blog for the tenth anniversary of my 2012 Eurasia trip. That was a lot of work for the first few months of the year but it was so good to get it done. I also got 719 Victoria photos (plus bugs/flowers/panoramas) labelled and online in time for the six month anniversary of us leaving on that trip. After that I got really slack in the evenings - with no pressure or deadlines nothing much got done. For this year's Europe trip it took me a good six weeks just to geotag everything, then I got slack again. I was thinking I might be able to get the photos online by Christmas. Yeah right. Instead I used the evenings to start filing by 2022 photos and taking notes for my year in review post.

Stumpy is still doing great. We've had him (her?) nearly five years now! He'd be at least 13 by now. The fish are puttering along. My two main guppy tanks (the two foot upstairs and the two foot downstairs) look amazing - lots of plants (at least upstairs) and hardly any algae. But our guppies are two years old now and getting inbred. We really need to get some new genetics for them. I still have my "angel" 620T tank with a guppy, a platy, and an ancient cory. I still have Chrissie's tank with her two clown loaches and a guppy, but I'm considering moving them and getting rid of the tank. It's got horrible black hair algae which is not fun. I have the two two foots, as well as several small tanks downstairs, all with just guppies. And Stu has his four foot which is still full of algae. Really must move more juvenile guppies in there.

I lost heart in trying to complete any more of Vic's Lego sets, so decided to inventory what was left (I'm going to need to do that at some point anyway before selling it). I found a website called Basebrick which integrates with Bricklink which is super useful. Did heaps but ran out of time to finish it before I went overseas and haven't been back to it. For my birthday I got 10497 Galaxy Explorer and 75329 Death Star Trench Run Diorama which are pretty cool. I decided to sell the box of "MISB" Harry Potter Lego I got from 2003-2006. There were ten sets and they sold for quite a lot (I probably made the buy it now too small), but ebay makes it so you have to jump through all their hoops otherwise you can get totally screwed over buy the buyers. As it was I got totally screwed over by ebay who not only take 12.5% of the sale, but also 12.5% of the *postage* which I think is a complete scam. Not to mention the stress. If things go well it's actually quite simple, but if anything complicated happens (like people pay for everything and *then* want combined postage, or come to pick up from your house but don't mark online that they've done so, or the value is over the $100 Australia Post will cover you for) then it's a nightmare. I calculated how much profit I made, taking into account the cost of interest for not having the money in my mortgage all these years and all the fees, and I figure I made a total net profit of about $50. But, I'm sure I made a lot of people very happy they could get their hands on 15-20 year old brand new Lego sets. For Christmas I was going to get myself the Lego Titanic. But after not getting a Black Friday special on it, I decided to sit down and buy it on the Saturday. By which time it was out of stock. Sigh. But I did get a different Lego set for Christmas - in a manner of speaking. Neil lent me his Saturn V rocket that he bought a few years ago but had never done. So I've been having fun with that. Then will pull it all apart and give it back to him :)

I finally finished the Disney 40320 piece behemoth this year - finishing up with the Bambi section. I still haven't assembled the whole thing yet because I lost access to the really useful skybridge so don't know where I'm going to assemble it. Maybe Damien's driveway. Other than that, the usual jigsaws at home and work, although feeling like I really don't have time to do them.

They said La Niña would finish by the end of summer. It didn't. There was a massive storm in January which caused a lot of chaos in northwest Canberra. There were power outages all around Belconnen and Coles lost all their fridge and freezer stock. Chris kept power to his store, but his house had no power for days. We were lucky and just had a couple of small outages while they were fixing things. And the water. All The Water. In spring half of NSW was flooded. Insanity. And there was so much water there was no lettuce in Australia for a while. Craziness.

I've had a whole stack of problems with Windows 11 on my new computer. I hate it (windoze 11) so much. Like the fact you can't ungroup task manager icons which makes it so damned slow to switch between windows now. Before you could just click on the icon. Now you have to click or just hold and *wait* for the popup before you can switch windows. I took to making whole new desktops for the browser and explorer windows I need for different hobbies (such as music or lego) but even that has its bugs - like not displaying the wallpaper at the right size at random and then fixing it and then breaking it again all without me changing anything. Or that after a reboot only two of the desktops will display the right wallpaper at all, and if I switch between the working and non working one it'll put the wall paper from the working desktop onto the non working desktop I've just switched to. And after a few days it'll come good. Utter trash. Then there's the fact my GPS won't work at all (and there's no replacement drivers for it), my scanner won't work (even though it originally did), Eudora wouldn't work to begin with, then came good. My SD card reader only works intermittently. The front USB ports take at least thirty seconds to recognise there's anything plugged into them. My second monitor wouldn't work so had to buy a new one. It's great but the resolution is so high it's difficult to see. Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even if that is not the primary monitor. Excel 2003 dates wouldn't work, so had to put on Libre Office instead. You can't drag a file onto the application on the task bar, have said application pop up, and open the file in that application. That just doesn't work at all anymore. Similarly I can't drag anything into Eudora to attach it, I have to go to a menu and manually attach files. Printscreen didn't work to begin with, then started working. Hate hate hate hate hate. I've been playing a lot of Wordle style games, although cut back on those while overseas and only play a few of them now. I like Symble because you have to think more about it. Redactle is challenging. Wheretaken is a new favourite. Also Worldle, Waffle and Framed. In February Google changed one of their apis to enforce https, so had to hack Geosetter to get it to work again. Then in December Google finally killed the IE api, killing Geosetter completely. A few weeks later they released a new version of Geosetter which still has some issues, but at least will display the map again. Our printer is having a tonne of issues with jamming and poor quality printouts. It might just need a clean. Or a new printer. hmmm. Had to setup an app password in June for Eudora so it can backup my gmail. In July OneDrive took it upon itself to backup/sync all my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive. But all it succedded in doing was making a complete mess of things, bringing back files from my old computer that had long since been filed. Turned off backups everywhere and I minimise use of those directories completely. IOS 15.3.1 (or thereabouts) went back to putting photos into files by year/month (which I actually prefer). But Apple is STILL messing with the timestamps on my files. I got myself a 14 Pro for Christmas (it arrived instore literally the Friday night before Christmas, I was thinking I'd have to wait until January). Its camera has.. issues.. I lot of the first photos I got off it were utter crap. Primarily because I was using the 2x lens a lot to compare with my old phone. Firstly. Don't. The 2x "lens" is a digital interpolation of the 1x optics. So it's crap. The macro setting will work (if the stars align) but while it's good for getting actual closeups, it's crap at taking photos of flowers where you want the background all out of focus. Use the 3x lens as before just be far enough away for it to focus. Optus charged me 50c for an international SMS I didn't make in July. I got onto their online chat and they gave me a credit, but firstly said they couldn't find out the exact date/time and number, which was a total lie, because when I pressed them for it they could, and then I figure out what it was (it was a reply to a string of text, not a number, so it got translated to an international number). I bought myself new sandshoes in January, for the first time in like fifteen years. And new black shoes in August for the first time in seven years. I bought a G5X before our overseas trip. And got a brand-new-second hand wok on freecycle (to replace ours whose non-stick surface was coming off).

Around the house. I needed to move all the ornaments off the top of my desk to setup my new computer and rearrange monitors and crap. I moved them all into the shevles I bought for David in the spare room. I can see everything there a lot better, so I'm enjoying having them all there. The top of the desk has remained clear all year, although I do currently have my birthday presents up there at the moment. Tony came over in January to chainsaw off the oak tree sprouts and the front hedge. And then in December to attack the photinia. In between is all the weeding. Never. Ending. Weeding. Except in winter cause it's too damned cold heh. When the big storm went through in January water was coming out of places that water should not be coming out of. Like bricks next our bins, and bricks on one of the back steps at the back of the house. So got the plumbers to come out and do all the eeling. The sewage pipes were the easiest because we know the deal with them. The front courtyard was easy when we realised it's not a proper drainage pipe, just a 50mm pipe that goes just across the courtyard and drains off to the side. Looks to have been an afterthought. Then the stormwater. They went in via the sump next to the garage and it was like thirty metres down before they found the blockage. So they cleared that. Like the sewage, we'll just need to do that every couple of years. Finally they looked at the drainpipe near the bins. Under the concrete the pipe had come adrift and was full of roots, so the drain from the roof was just pooling under the stairs, and then going through the bricks next to the bins. So they dug up the front stairs, dug a wholly new trench, resealed, relaid the pipes, filled it all in, and got someone to put in some new stairs. Fifteen thousand dollars later. Ouch. Mice were scritching around the roof in March, which caused some sleepless nights. But then they went away. Which was good because I practically had a panic attack trying to figure out how I was going to get across to the far side of the roof without falling through it and getting covered in disgustingness. I tried to cut back the ivy in May. It's now covering more of the side wall than ever. Our largest stove element died. But we still haven't replaced the element or the whole stove. Found out in early spring that a pair of crimson rosellas had been chewing through the beams holding up our roof. Tried plastic sheeting, tinsel, scaring them, and scat. Nothing much seemed to work very well. They've found more interesting things to eat for now but I suspect they'll be back again next winter. We moved a shelf out of the dungeon because Stu wanted to put in a proper shelf there. Underneath was a massive growth of dark brown mold. We don't know if it's current or historical. hrmmm. The Dyson I got for my birthday two years ago stopped working. Don't know if it just needs a clean, or if the battery is dying, or if the Dyson is just a dud. My money is on the latter. Brought home the Electrolux from the club where we'd had it to use until I can get around to cleaning the Dyson. Got lots of strawberries from plants around the back yard. Including some from our paver weeds. The snails clearly didn't get the memo, so we got the strawberries instead of them. We had solar panels and a battery installed in December. They still don't work.

Our favourite restaurant this year was still Chong Co - we got deliveries from them in January, twice in April, twice in August, and October. Herberts is also popular for work Friday lunches (and their Christmas in July was a lot of fun). I didn't get to have any workday Kingsleys lunches because the building opposite blew up from a gas leak and they've never gone back, or been allowed to, not sure which. I did finally have some Kingsleys from Kippax a few weeks ago. We had Sichuan Chinese pickup from Belco a couple of times and were pretty impressed with them. We had brunch a few times at Market St Eats. Some others we went back to after long breaks included Mills and Grills (Stu went low carb so hardly any Dominos this year either), Chez Kimchi and Bella Vista. Tried out SpudBAR and 1919 Langzhou Beef Noodle which opened in the mall. Other one-offs included Co Dung (fried chicken wings were awesome), Lazy Su, Turqoise Turkish, Edgar's, Flavours of Jiangnan, Teddy Picker's, Badger & Co, Little Steamer, The Howling Moon, Mr Shabu Shabu, Little Oink, Master Bao (which had no bao), Magpies (for Jim's farewell), Pattysmiths, and Chinese Inn (from Kippax, just as bad as last time).

As always I end up doing quite a bit of cooking and trying new recipes, as well as doing old ones a few times. One new favourite is stuffed baby capsicums - fill with whatever mince you like and lots of cheese and roast. Yum yum. I made a few lemon cheesecakes, as well as a lime one and a cherry one. One of Stu's favourite meals is Cath's basa bake we've done that a few times. We did san choy bow a couple of times. We really like the potato, onion, blue cheese and bacon bake from my Gratins and Bakes book, but with Stu going low carb we only did it like once all year. The slow cooker gets a workout over winter. Favourite recipes for that are Alan's beef stew, brisket, and even pulled pork. And we tried slow cooking pork ribs (nice but lots of little fiddly bony bits). Beef cheeks are slow cooked on the stove. After doing turkey rolls that actually turned out this time at the club Christmas in July (on account of doing them in the oven instead of on the bbq), we tried one ourselves in August and also November (and likely New Years Eve as well). They turn out really nicely and we'll probably always keep one in the freezer to do when we feel like it. From Not Quite Nigella I tried a chicken marbella but wouldn't bother again, from the Gratins and Bakes book I tried potatoes with lemon and tomato but wouldn't bother again with that either, and from my Slow Cooker Kitchen book I tried honey rosemary chicken which was too salty. Completely evil meals included uunifetapasta, cheese nachos, and no-carb pizza (made with no base at all, just cheese). Slow cooked mini tomatoes are amazing, really must do them more often. Tried pork crackling by itself but I do prefer it done on the meat. A favourite lunch is grilled cheese sandwiches - but with shredded pizza cheese on the outside as well. Favourite veggies (well other than my favourite which is potato bake) include brussels sprouts with bacon. Over winter we discovered kalettes which when roasted for 35-40 minutes turn into little bliss bombs. Almost as good is kale chips, but it's a bit too easy to overcook those and have them go bitter. I made pesto with the last of the summer basil, and tried cheese biscuits in June (but need to find a better recipe). And made a coconut cake (Yum! Delicious!) in June and October.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* Australian Wind Symphony in May at the B (next to the Q)
* Lego Jurassic World in Sydney
* The Queen and Me exhibition at the National Capital Exhibition
* Mary Poppins in Sydney
* Canberra Lego Brick Show at Thoroughbred Park
* Australian Wind Symphony in November at St Andrews

Movies (at the movies)
* Top Gun: Maverick

Movies (TV)
* The Courier
* The Young Black Stallion
* The Grand Budapest Hotel
* Six Minutes to Midnight
* Sleeping With the Enemy
* Munich: Edge of War
* The Laundromat
* 1917
* The Mauritanian
* Zero Hour (twice) / Flying High
* Dr Strangelove
* No Time to Die
* Operation Finale
* Logan's Run
* 6 Underground
* The King's Speech
* Encanto / Luca
* The Death of Stalin
* The Royal Tenenbaums
* Gladiator
* Knives Out
* Edward Scissorhands
* The Monuments Men
* Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version)
* Mary Poppins / Saving Mr Banks
* The Little Mermaid II / Ariel's Beginning
* The Man from Snowy River
* An Affair to Remember / Sleepless in Seattle
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Constant Gardener
* Top Gun
* The Silver Brumby
* Kingsman: The Secret Service / Kingsman: The Golden Circle / King's Man
* Careful, He Might Hear You
* Moulin Rouge!
* Shine
* Blue Murder
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (twice - before and after Italy)
* Breaker Morant
* Matrix Resurrections
* Romeo+Juliet
* The Butterfly Effect
* Die Hard 1/2 / Love Actually
* Enola Holmes 2
* Operation Mincemeat
* Herbie Goes Bananas

TV
* Sex Education (season 3)
* The Simpsons (seasons 20 to half way through 31)
* The Girl on the Train in the Rear Window, or whatever it's called
* Mentour Pilot (about 3/4 of the air crash investigations episodes)
* Gunther's Autopsy
* Lie to Me (end of season 2 and season 3)
* Black Books
* Gunther's Anatomy
* The Crown (season 1 and most of season 2)
* Lego Masters (season 4)
* Martin Bashir's Diana interview
* The Diana Interview: Revenge of a Princess 2021
* Epstein's Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell
* Obi-wan Kenobi
* Super Cub
* Andor (season 1)
* Lego Masters Bricksmas special (last year's and this year's)
* Survivor Canberra (fan produced)
* Picard (season 2, haven't finished)

Books
* Read the first four books of the New Testament, but got behind in February when we travelled and never really caught up. Will try again next year for the rest of the New Testament.

Other stuff
* Tried to catch up on This Day in History posts, but there's still too much work to be done with Mum's photos to do it properly, so that stalled
* Car wouldn't start in January. Turns out it was the battery, which was probably original, so it would have been nearly eight years old
* Petrol got insanely expensive
* Balloon Fiesta in March
* Canberra Airport Open Day in April
* Dam Busters trip to Sydney in April
* Climbed Mt Rogers a couple of times
* Saw the planet/moon alignment in April
* Jupiter and Venus were having a sneaky early morning kiss in April
* Sneaky trip to Sydney in May to see Lego Jurassic World (and Woronora Dam)
* Got a democracy sausage in May
* Climbed Mt Ainslie in May (hadn't been planning to it just happened)
* Whiskey Live in May
* Queen Elizabeth II 70th Jubilee in Canberra - all the purple lights on buildings around Canberra
* ABC's Classic 100: Music for the Screen in June
* Inspected my flat, went to Cockatoo Island, saw Vivid and visited Ansto in June (after seeing Mary Poppins for Mum's birthday)
* Surprising Science at the Shine Dome in June, August, and December
* Walked up Mt Painter
* Stu cracked a tooth and needed it taken out
* Fought with Qantas' booking system again. I hate Qantas. So. Much.
* Had a hair cut in August
* Stu got a 3D printer which he's been using to make little models for his wargamming
* Total lunar eclipse in November
* Took a drive out the back of Dunlop/Holt to see the West Belconnen Pond
* Got a beer advent calendar from Plonk
* Went to the Green Shed a couple of times, dropped off a few things, came home with more jigsaws
* Continued to practise the clarinet

Have a very happy and safe new year!!

Monday.  12th.  Backdating.  No notes other than "blogged".

Tuesday.  Super crazy busy day all day.  Went with the hills to another Surprising Science talk.  The first talk was by Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths about uses of colour in nature, not just for visible light but also near infra-red, and how that might have applications in heating and cooling control.  The second one was by Professor Drew Evans and was a lot more physics-based, looking at invisibility, and he did mention about how most butterfly wings that look blue aren't actually blue from chemistry but physics.  

Wednesday.  Had a go at picking up some work I started before my last holiday (that I had to stop looking at cause the proxies blew up).  Went into town and had dinner at Chez Kimchi.  They've simplified their menu which is *much* nicer.  Then went to Coles to do some Christmas shopping.

Thursday.  Work.  Christmas party planning.  Posted a package to Potty.  $16 for regular, $20 for express.  They said regular *might* get there by Christmas.  hrmm.  Last drinks of the year.  Cheese kransky and salad for dinner.  Then it was getting ready for the Christmas party and cleaning the house.  Into season 31 of The Simpsons.

Our non-functioning solar setup.

Is Don!  Is good!  I miss those things, we used to have them all the time when I first came to Canberra.

Friday.  My Christmas party!!  Had about forty people come.  Once again I overspent on booze, although did bring home quite a lot of leftovers so hoping it'll even out.  It was slightly windy but otherwise it was a very pleasant afternoon.  That was my tenth year running it!!  Didn't catch any ducks, but did catch a honeyeater in flight, so to speak.

Went and picked up Mum from Jolimont.  Had toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner then pretty much just collapsed.

Saturday.  Proxy upgrade first thing.  Still haven't fixed any of their bugs.  Lame.  Had a look at Mum's last two holiday slideshows which was nice.  Then headed down to the Burns Club (had to join #grunt) for Kellie's family Christmas lunch.  They did a Kris Kringle thing where the budget was 5c to $30 .. and I was like.. um what?  Weird.  Stu ended up getting some cash and I got a bottle of Apple Pie Baileys yummm :)  And I ate too much.  All. The. Food.  !!

This time like three.. whoops..

Came home and collapsed in a heap from too much food and too much people.  David/Kellie/Hayley dropped in on their way back to Junee after they'd been to Ikea.  Had a super healthy dinner, then an early night.

Sunday.  Decided to drop in unannounced to see Chrissie.  I haven't seen her since before Covid!!!  It's been a running joke over the last three years that whenever I messaged them to see about catching up one of them would be sick.  And sure enough, Chris was sick this time.  So we all wore masks.  And had a nice long chat.  Dropped off Mum at Jolimont then headed home.  Stressed about people drama.  Stressed about the solar system not working properly and noone responding to our emails/smses.  #grunt.  But forgot about all that for a while and went to Herberts with Frank and Karen and Tony which was nice.  

Watched the third episode of Picard in the evening.

Monday.  5th.  Slept ok.  Got on early to see if there were any problems from Friday's work but haven't heard of any.  More cleaning planning.  Hacking photinia and creeper after work.  Basa bake for dinner.  Then watched crap on the internet while filing photos, and did some music.

Tuesday.  Woke up before 4 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  I don't even know what I did all day.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Music after dinner again.  Oh I started watching Survivor Canberra, a fan-produced show which is actually pretty decent (aside from audio quality issues in one of the early episodes).  

Wednesday.  Woke up at like 5.  hrmm.  Very distracing day.  Everyone wanting All The Things.  Went and run a heap of errands at lunch - bought some new pj bottoms, bought some bubbly, booked an eye appointment and went to the bank to get pretty green ones for the kids.  We won't mention the old fart who barged past me waiting outside the bank to go in, then convinced himself that he was next despite me saying I was waiting outside.  Buttplug.  But I did see Fleur from Lego Masters in the mall!  I almost said hello but I just wasn't sure (I have no idea where any of the contestants are even from).  After work caught up wih Aaron at the lighty which was nice.  Talked about everything and nothing.  Mostly work I guess.  

Thursday.  Solar installation day!!  One guy spent all day moving out roof files, grinding them down, and attaching mounting brackets.  In the afternoon another guy came as well and they got most of the panels up.  Went in to work for drinks.  Pork larb for dinner.

Friday.  The solar guys had the power off most of the day to completely rewire the switch board and plumb in all the devices.  I used the lack of electricity time to sort out all the boxes we've collected over the past couple of years.  At lunch time I went in for round two of work Christmas parties which was a very pleasant afternoon.  Chicken kiev for dinner and the second episode of Picard.

The first step is admitting you have a problem..

Saturday.  Solar guys installed the battery and associated cabling.  They wandered off in the middle of the day but didn't actually tell us they were done for the day.  In the meantime, Stu hired a carpet shampooer to attack the moldy carpet where the shelf had been downstairs.  It did a decent job although is not perfect.  Also did the hallway and some bits of the lounge room and study.  I was trying to attack my todo list but it was all too hard and ended up wasting most of the day catching up on rss feeds.  Sigh.  After dinner went over to see Mila in advance of her 21st birthday.  

These are all the seeds from *one* poppy head!

Sunday.  Went out for brunch at Market St Eats and did some food shopping.  Then cooking pretty much all afternoon (although did squeeze in twenty minutes of music).  Sigh.  Jenn came over for dinner - a very overcooked vege lasagna.  Then a relatively early night.

A mummy-long-legs and her babies (being evicted from the house)

Monday.  Woke up at 1:40 to the thunder of a coming storm.  And then didn't get back to sleep til like 4.  Sigh.  Bit of a zombie day.  Another day of all the people wanting all the things.  Solar guy spent all day wiring up the battery.  Apparently these things are so new that there's a few design quirks that need to be worked around.  He disconnected power a bit after lunch for like twenty minutes to hook it in.  Leftovers from first work Christmas party for dinner.  And caught up on blogging.  I still can't get Geosetter to work.  It died last week - refuses to load the map.  I suspect it's because it's using an ancient IE api that Google no longer supports (as of the end of November, so the timing fits), but noone else is complaining on the forum so I have no idea.  Might have to start looking for another photo geotagging app.  

Sunday.  27th.  Backdating this, because, life.  Basa bake for dinner which was very nice.  Then watched the last episode of Andor.  Which didn't wrap anything up, just left it all there for season 2.  Then I finished watching last year's Lego Masters Bricksmas Special.

There was a whole heap of hail in this storm

Monday.  Slept ok.  Although feeling panicky about my todo list.  Did some washing and washing up and dusting and vacuuming before work.  We'd brought home the Electrolux cordless from the club where we'd had it for the past year or so.  After spending ages trying to vacuum up christmas tree needles, I then emptied it and it wouldn't start again.  hrmmm.  Weeding in the evening and went and picked up a wok from someone on Freecycle (to replace our one where the non-stick surface is coming off).  Stuffed capsicums for dinner.

Tuesday.  Vacuum cleaner worked again after a charge.  Had a cleaning planning day mostly at work.  Weeding after work and tried out the wok to do a pork stirfry.  It's definitely not as "fast" as the old one - keeps turning off even with the heat up fairly high.  May need to max it out.

Before and after

Old and new

Wednesday.  More cleaning planning mostly.  Some music in the evening.  Have pretty much given up on the idea of getting my Europe photos online before Christmas.  Maybe all I'll be able to manage is filing my photos for the year and getting a year in review post done on time.  Watched the second episode of this year's Bricksmas special.  With eggnog!!  So that was a lot of fun.

Thursday.  First of the work Christmas parties in the afternoon which was quite pleasant.  I may have gotten a beer advent calendar from Plonk!

Friday.  Spent the afternoon cleaning up a whole heap of firewall rules.  Hope I don't break too much ;)  Chicken kiev for dinner then Die Hard 2.  The more I watch it the more plot holes I find :)  Still fun though.

Saturday.  Got lots done during the day.  Leftovers for dinner.  Watched Enola Holmes 2 in the evening, which was silly but a bit of fun.

This thing is probably at least fifteen years old.  Whoops.

Sunday.  Did a recycling and green shed run in the morning.  And only brought home five jigsaws.  Don't tell Stu ;)  Then went and did food shopping.  Had Kingsleys for lunch for the first time all year.  But then it's already after 13:00.  Sigh.  Did up some hotel reviews of Europe hotels, and read more for my year in review post.  Then some music.  And then it's dinner time.  Sigh.  Had leftover roast pork for dinner with some potatoes and a whole heap of kale chips.  Simpsons then first episode of the second season of Picard.

Sunday.  20th.  Yummy roast pork for dinner.  

Monday.  Slept ok.  Run/sun/rain/sun all day.  I managed to get the G5X photos off the SD card, but not the Canon (got them later).  Weeding after work.  Honey mustard chicken for dinner.  Used cream that was two weeks past its use-by date, and chicken that was use-by today.  It'll be fine right? :)  Culled a few days worth of photos (first pass anyway).  Then watched the first episode of the Lego Masters Bricksmas special which was a lot of fun.

Another paver weed strawberry

Remember early this year I completely cleared this?  Sigh.

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep because I was COLD!.  Then I was awake in the middle of the night for no good reason.  So a relatively slow day.  It was COLD again in the house.  14C on the heater thermostat.  We would normally turn the heater on at that temperature, except someone opened all the cooler vents the other day because it was getting hot enough to turn the cooler on.  So we suffered all day.  I had a coat around me some of the day.  My boss has covid!!!  But I haven't seen him since Thursday last week so I'll be fine.  But he was in the office yesterday so worried about other people getting sick.  More weeding after work.  Stu cooked sausages for dinner.  More photo culling.  I was going to watch the second episode of Bricksmas, but that's not til next Sunday.  Then I found out they did a Bricksmas last year!  So watched the first episode of that.  

After half an hour of cleaning yesterday

Wednesday.  Started working on something new to clean up.  Home late so nothing useful, other than a bit of culling.  Started watching the second episode of last year's Bricksmas but didn't finish it.

I love how these poppies can live where there's like, no water

Thursday.  More cleaning.  Bought a new phone at lunch.  It might turn up in January if China doesn't have too many more lockdowns.  Sigh.  Frank and Karen came to drinks which was nice.

Friday.  Catching up on bits and pieces, and more cleaning.  Stu cooked "chorizo mince" for dinner.  Started the Christmas movie season a little early with Die Hard.

More paver weed strawberries

Stu's chorizo mince

Saturday.  Panicking about my todo list and my lack of time.  So I squandered the little time I had with music and jigsaw.  Hrmm.  I was hoping the Lego Titanic might have a Black Friday discount, but it didn't, so decided to just buy it anyway.  They had stock when I looked at the price on Thursday/Friday, but when I sat down Saturday morning to buy it, it was "out of stock".  Sigh.  There goes my other Christmas present.  Sigh.  Headed out to the club after lunch and helped a bit with the setup and a bit of food prep.  Chilled for a bit then had a swim with the sweetie.  Dinner was pretty amazing as always.  Didn't stay up too late so that was good.  A lovely night as always.

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Up fairly early and came home.  Started to do All The Things, but didn't get very far before we went out to the chemist and Bunnings.  Also had a look at the Cameron Offices demolition, and tried out Pattysmiths which was nice enough.  Then home and did some more Christmas tree stuff.  Had out the fairy lights and there were enough blown bulbs to take out too many strings, so decided to rearrange the bulbs to get working strings in the middle.  Had gotten a fair way through it when Stu brought out Stumpy.  Who then proceeded to poop right where I was working.  Sigh.  So went and cooked dinner and download my phone photos (tried a few times but still can't get the SD card).  

Today's haul

Cameron Offices demolition

Pattysmiths Cheeseburger

Crazy busy boring week.  Three photos to blog, no movies to quote, and a few days where I didn't even get any useful notes.

Monday.  14th.  Awake from about 1 til about 4.  Hurray.  I was stressing about ebay to start with (ebay have made things a lot nicer for buyers but much much much much more stressful for sellers), then I got hungry and restless.  Sigh.  Started prepping our next proxy upgrade (maybe it'll fix problems they introduced with the last upgrade).  Geotagging holiday photos and filing this year's photos in the evening.  I also spent the afternoon charging up a bunch of rechargable batteries to put in Yvonne's keyboard so I could have a play on it.  Haven't played any keyboards in years.  Weeding and leftover buttbeef cheeks I dug out of the freezer.  

Tuesday.  Somewhat better sleep.  All the stoopid.  Weeding, music, leftover turkey for dinner, geotagging, photo filing, Mentour Pilot.

Canberra is overgrown with grass at the moment - they can't keep up with the mowing.. doesn't bode well for summer grass fires around the place..

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday.  Super busy days at work (although not as much on Friday).  Mostly slept ok.  I accidentally gave myself a reputation of being knowledgeable and helpful to some users by fixing some longstanding problems for them (all I needed was an error message to fix a problem that had been kicking around other teams for weeks).  Whoops.  Had chicken kiev for dinner on Friday and watched episode 11 of Andor.

Saturday.  Got some stuff done in the morning but not nearly enough.  Food shopping, where I got stressed out by being in the aisle and people pushing past and STRESS and trying to get the trolley back and Kippax sure doesn't make it easy (all the trolley bays are on the Other Side of the car park so you either have to All The Way Around, or squeeze between cars or go up and over kerbs between cars.  Sigh).  So was in an odd mood the rest of the day.  But I did finish geotagging our holiday photos!!  In the evening was the Lego Brick Show at Thoroughbred Park but I'll leave that for another post.  One day.

Sunday.  Slept ok but woke up at ~5:20 hungry (I really didn't eat enough last night).  Depressed about how much stuff I have to dooooo but seemingly not enough time to do it.  I had to drag out the old vacuum cleaner to vacuum the house because the stoopid Dyson is playing up (it's pulsing and keeps turning off.. could be something needs cleaning or could be the battery is on its way out or something stoopid).  The thing is only two years old!!  I maintain that Dyson, like Herman Miller, is simply over priced and not actually GOOD.  Change my mind!  Not to mention the stoopid SD card reader on my computer only works intermittently.  I still haven't been able to download all my photos from last night.  #grunt.  But did do some weeding and music and cooked a lovely roast pork for dinner and watched some tv with the sweetie. 

Sunday.  Backdating a few days because life and birthdays and crap got in the way.  Had all the veggies and some chicken thighs for dinner.  Then watched more of The Crown.

Monday.  Um.  Probably a cleaning day.  Spent the evening looking at distances between places in Europe to see if we'll go over the daily allowance or need to buy unlimited kilometres.  And trying to plan an itinerary.  

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3 to pee, then started stressing about All The Things, then got hungry, then the hissing.  Sigh.  So tired, but still an ok day, mostly cleaning.  

Went to another Surprising Science talk in the Shine Dome.  There was Dr Chris Guppy from UNE talking about sulphur in soil, and Mahdokht Shaibani from RMIT talking about lithium sulphur batteries.  

The previous two photos of the Shine Dome were on my new G5X.  So is this next one.  This is hand held!!  Half a second.  Pretty impressive.

Had dinner at Master Bao but was disappointed they don't actually server bao!!?!?!  wtf!?

No bao at Master Bao!

Spring rolls

Dim sims

Shantung duck

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Busy cleaning day.

Thursday.  Okish sleep.  Another busy cleaning day.  Two days cleaning up stuff to get it all consistent and pretty.  And literally noone will care.  But I did fix something else that had been broken for a while (not by me) and did actually impact people so that was a win I guess.  Also got filled with rage at Outlook which by default only adds reminders to meetings created within Outlook, which means I keep missing stuff because I don't get reminders.  Hate Outlook.  HATE.  This was never a problem in Notes.  Just sayin!!

Homemade pizzas for dinner on Stu's low carb bases.  Then watched Careful, He Might Hear You.  I might have seen it once a very very long time ago.  I read the book ten years ago so was good to finally see the movie again.  I was disappointed they didn't have a shot of him on the train going over the Woronora Bridge (or in fact any shots at all of Sydney, I guess too hard with all the modern buildings).  

Friday.  Ok sleep until the hissing.  Had a fairly quiet day catching up on emails and stuff that had been slipping because I'd been busy the last couple of days.  Chicken Kiev for dinner, then watched Broadcast News.

Saturday.  Woke up at 2:22 with mild hurty.  Had a pain killer and some cheese.  An hour later I felt hungry again.  Then the hissing.  So a very slow morning.  I was trying to get things done in the afternoon but then more hurty so slow and painful.  But then that eased up and we had EffanC and Rob and Fiona over for dinner (brisket, blue cheese potato bake and roasted kale (I over cooked the kale :( )) which was lovely.  

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Finally booked a car for the first week of our trip.  Then spent like three and a half hours out and about running errands and doing shopping before we go into self-imposed quarantine.  Stu is not coming on this trip (sadly :( ) but I need him in quarantine as well in case he gets covid and brings it home to me.  I did get KFC for lunch, which is somewhat of a tradition, so that was nice.  Then tried to allocate seats on my flights.  For most of them this worked ok.  But the Sydney to Dubai leg I can't even tell which airline I'll be flying on.  Qantas say it's Emirates, and Emirates say it's Qantas, and neither will let me book seats.  Other than that, panicking over my todo lists.  Also.  Neil has covid.  He started feeling sick Thursday morning.  This was after I'd sat next to him all day Wednesday.  Sigh.  Felt like I was getting a sore throat Sunday.  As with every other time in the past two and a half years I'm sure it's just my imagination.  Suddenly it's 16:20 and it's like wtf happened to my weekend.  Managed to download my photos before giving up for the day and relaxing with the sweetie with some bubbles.

Sunday.  31st.  Leftovers from Saturday night for dinner.  Finished watching Obi-Wan.  I liked that they had James Earl Jones voicing Darth Vader.. only .. they *didn't* ..!! they deep faked him!  And having Ian McDiarmid was pretty cool too.

Monday.  Slept ok-ish but woke up early.  Started panicking over my todo list.  Started trying to get in control by giving the house a bit of a tidy.  But had a meltdown as soon as I logged into work because people were making mess and it was all too much.  Had a cleaning planning day.  Leftover pork for dinner.

Oh, the other week my everyday walking shoes split (I bought these in 2015 and worn them almost every day since) so last week I bought some new ones.  Almost the same, look slightly different.

In the evening I tried to book flights to Europe with Qantas.  Big mistake.  I tried to book the exact same itinerary as I did three years ago (when it failed epically and I spent *hours* trying to sort it out and in the end said "screw you" and went with Emirates).  Well in three years QANTAS STILL HASN'T FIXED THEIR BOOKING SYSTEM!!!!  As with last time, you select a multi city trip (I only had three legs, nothing too complicated), it lets you get all the way through including doing seat allocations, but when you go to pay you get this error:

Sorry, an error seems to have occurred, and this page cannot be displayed (15079, 23951, 420)

Thanks a fricking lot QANTAS.  I can't believe they're still so bad at this crap.  It's like they're actively trying to deter business and alienate customers.  Literally every time I have to deal with Qantas I have to go through the sheer agony of their booking systems (if it wasn't for their AMAZING flight crews I'd probably boycot them completely).  

I used Webjet to hunt around for alternatives.  But THANKS COVID.. NOT.. there's very limited options at the moment.  Etihad had no flights available at all for the legs I wanted, and Emirates for the same legs was going to cost three thousand dollars more.  Yikes.  Lufthansa would have been ok except they had some really crazy connections that totally blew out the travel times.  So I booked the flights through WebJet, which was going to cost $200 more.  And sure enough, their APIs had the same issues with Qantas.  I got this error:

Customer Service Advice
We have been unable to confirm your requested itinerary, but have retained a copy of your requirements under Webjet Booking Reference: <redacted>
We will now process your itinerary manually and confirm your booking within 48 hours.
If you are departing within the next 48 hours we will contact you today. Please do not attempt to make another booking on this site or another, as this may result in a duplicate. Please wait for us to contact you.
Thank you for your co-operation.
Customer Service Centre

So I left it.  At least someone at WebJet will have to deal with Qantas and not fricken ME!!   

The next day I got an email from WebJet that everything was sorted and the flights had been booked.  Hurray.

Tuesday.  Cleaning day and holiday research.  Did a basa bake for dinner which was lovely.

Wednesday.  Rinse and repeat of Tuesday.  I had a whole commentary in my head about how getting older makes you more *fearful*.  I really noticed this a while back riding Kit's horses (I literally had no fear about riding horses when I was younger but now they're so *big* and it's a long damned way down!) and let's not mention The Nerve Test.  So I was stressing about all the ways things could go wrong with our holiday.  Although in the grand scheme of things, mostly all we'd lose is money.  I really need to keep that perspective.  

I did an experiment with the brussels sprouts - would they crisp up better "right way up" or "upside down"?  Turns out, didn't really make a difference!

Thursday.  Lay awake until like midnight stressing over All The Things (mostly holiday stuff).  Then woke up at 1am by the storm for an hour or so.  Then woke up early too.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Farewell for Alex at lunch.  Quiet drinks.  All The Water!!!

Friday.  Slept a lot better.  There was even a lovely sunny day after the wild weather all day yesterday.  I needed milk for breakfast so went over to Chris's to get some.  I didn't have enough for the eftpos minimum so thought I'd get a bottle of cab sav.  But he didn't have any singles out of the one I like so he was going to open a box but I said I'd buy the box.  It was on special too, so that was a bonus.  Except carrying it back home the box split and smashed all over the car park.  Lost two bottles of wine right there.  And then I was trying to clean up the mess and pricked myself with a shard of glass and started bleeding.  Sigh.  Another customer came up and I asked her to ask Chris for help.  So he came out and took away all the broken glass and gave me a bag for the other four bottles and the milk.  They say not to cry over spilt milk but you can cry over spilt wine, surely?  Another cleaning day. Chicken kiev for dinner.  Watched Kingsman: The Secret Service which was a bit of silly fun.  

Saturday.  Went food shopping first thing.  Then a bunch of house work.  Then dropped off my backup drive at work, bought some new fish tank lights for the 620T, and accidentally bought myself an early birthday present.

Got home and then it was time to do All The Cooking.  I made a low(ish) carb, vegetarian lasagna.

Slightly over done, whoops..

Had the hills over to enjoy it and Jess had a lot of fun playing Stu's instruments.  Wait, that sounds wrong.  ;)  Specifically, his cornettos.. cornetti?  After dinner Jess and I played a whole bunch of stuff together and she played all the harmonies around me trying to keep up with her awesomeness.  It was so much fun :)

Sunday.  Did a bunch of research on countries that we plan to visit on smartraveller.  Should all be fine.  Then a whole heap of fish tank stuff.  Also some camera side-by-side testing.  The new camera is much on par with my Canon and my iPhone for most things, but it does excel in extremelly low light.  Read: under the house with just vent holes for light.  It's not so great on closeups (but some of that may be me needing to get used to the settings) and it does struggle to focus.  The iPhone probably wins on difficult lighting (with pretty decent HDR), and the Canon wins on speed and focus (except in very low light).

It's almost completely dark under the house, so this shot is actually pretty impressive.

Then it was cooking All The Food.

Sunday.  24th.  Had leftover lamb for dinner with All The Veggies.  Watched the fourth episode of Obi-Wan and more of The Crown.

Monday.  Spent a bunch of time going through my todo list and tidying it up and actually doing some things on it.  Went and got my fourth jab at lunch - moderna this time to spice it up.  Tidying and cleaning in the afternoon.  In the evening fought with Optus' website.  OMFG their personal portal is just as bad as their enterprise portal.  Literally went round in circles three times trying to get myself re-registered and logged in.  I was trying to find out why I'd been charged for an international SMS when I hadn't made any.  But Optus' bills are completely useless and don't give you the time/date/number of SMSes, even online.  So got online with a chat bot and eventually a human, and the first thing they did was credit the account as a "valued customer" and I'm like, thanks, that's great, but I want to know why it's on the bill at all.  But she was like, oh we can't see that information.  hrmm.  So then she was like, oh btw, we can save you some money on your plan.  So that took a while longer.  But hey, it'll save me $15 a month, so the fact I lost an entire evening sorting it out was not all in vain.  But I was still like, is the date of that sms actually the date it was sent, or was it just because that's the last day of the billing cycle.  So she went off and found the date/time/number.   WTF??  Why say you can't do that when you totally can??  With the date/time I was able to find the offending sms.  I'd been replying to a message my real estate agent sent me that day, but the contact information was faulty, and the reply didn't go to a "real" number, it went to some text which got translated to a number.  The number was 0011 23553776774 which is like Chad or something.  If they'd have just put that information into the damned bill I wouldn't have had to waste an evening chasing them.  Le sigh.  

On a lighter note, we had very delicious stuffed capsicums for dinner.  This mix had bolognase mince, feta, spinach, mushrooms and parmesan.  I then topped them with cheese and roasted them.  Delicious!  And no leftovers ;)

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Very sore arm.  And quite tired.  Had a quiet cleaning day.  The sweetie cooked some Pialligo duck breast with spinach and mushrooms for dinner which was very nice.

Wait what?

Wednesday.  Still a very sore arm.  Did more cleaning planning at work.  Brought home my hard drive from two weeks ago and did a restore of my desktop/documents/downloads.  Turns out the files I thought OneDrive had deleted weren't actually there - they must have been there from an ancient backup of my old computer.  Those files had been filed when I moved to my new computer.  So all it's done is make faulty restores of files that weren't there just to confuse things and potentially create duplicates.  Sounds like something Apple would do.  And Microsoft is no better at it.  Hopeless.  My old computer doesn't load OneDrive at boot anymore.  And my laptop wasn't signed in, so I was able to clear things out before OneDrive got its hands on things.  Signed in on the laptop, and sure enough it tried to restore the same old files to my desktop.  Will have to go and completely clear out whatever is online with OneDrive.  I also turned backups OFF thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  No notes.  Probably cleaning.  Probably drinks.  Blah blah blah.

Friday.  Ok morning but super busy crazy afternoon trying to get All The Things done in the limited windows we have to Get Things Done.  Because I also wanted to log off early so we could go do the food shopping for the club Christmas in July event we were doing.  So went and did that after work.  All the pork and all the food.  Fun times.  Leftovers for dinner then watched the fifth episode of Obi-Wan.

Saturday.  It was cold.  Got up and ready then headed out to the club.

Did I mention it was cold?

Got out to the club and brought in All The Food (and a bunch of lucky door prizes on the left).

Then my whole day got thrown into dissarray because John bought a brand-new-second-hand oven!  So instead of having to do the turkey in advance and reheat it later, I could actually do it independently in the separate oven!

So spent a couple of hours prepping all the foods.  There was 8kg of pork, 3kg turkey, two epic potato bakes, 2kg peas, my (Coles) "winter salad" which I totally forgot to take a photo of, apple sauce and gravy, and I made a tray of "Christmas skewers" as well.

Two epic potato bakes

This was the sweet potato for the winter salad (which I didn't get a photo of!)

8kg pork!  So good!!

3kg turkey.  There would have been four except when I opened one, it had been dropped while still unfrozen and the seal was open too, so decided it would be safer not to use it.  We did run out of turkey (after everyone got seconds), but there was still pork so noone starved ;)

The potato bakes cooked

Mulled wine anyone?

These were the "Christmas skewers" I made - bocconcini balls, olives, tomato, basil, with balsamic glaze and olive oil.  A little time consuming to make, but actually simple and effective and they all got eaten.  

My dinner.  I might have already pigged out on pork and crackling so wasn't feeling super hungry at this point ;)

Stu and Chris helped decorate the pavlovas

All in all it went really well.  The food all turned out well and we didn't get much leftovers.  We won't mention the one woman who literally made a vomit face over the olives.  And when I said I'd be putting rocket lettuce with the sweet potato I asked if she'd vomit over that too, and she said yes so I said well maybe you could grab a few pieces of sweet potato before I do.  Seriously who does that?  If you don't like something you can just say "yeah not a fan" and not eat it.  But to make vomit faces and say you hate it makes you look like a three year old.  For someone in their 60s or 70s.  Lame.  Later she came into the kitchen and literally stood right behind me while I was cutting up the crackling obviously hoping to get some and I said NO!! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!!  Sigh.  But other than that, pretty damned awesome night!!  And not too late either, I think we went to bed around 22:30.

Sunday.  So last time we were out at the club I couldn't sleep because even with two doonas I was COLD.  So the other week I went and bought a 75% down doona.  And it was awesome!  We were quite comfortable all night.  Well other than be being awake for a couple of hours feeling bloated.  All that eating and drinking I guess.  Eventually got up and I spent an hour and a half packing up chairs and tables and vacuuming and washing up to get the place all tidy.  Although I didn't put away all the decorations because I didn't want to ;)  Got home and the house was COLD.  7 degrees!!  Craziness.  Two hours of running the heater later and it was still only half way to 19.  hrmmm.  Pretty nothing afternoon, although did download all my photos and do some music practise and blog.   

I also had to laugh at this.  This is a meme I saw this week about skies:

Which is so damned true!!  

This was the sky on Monday night when I went to Chris' for supplies

and this was at Jamo on Friday night

Merry Christmas in July!

Sunday.  17th.  Lamb roast and drinks with Kit.

Monday.  A fair bit of inbox tidying and decommission cleaning.  Got travel insurance for the cruise next year, but trying to get an ESTA was a pain in the poo poo hole.  When it came to putting through payment I clicked on the link and got a browser pop up saying it was going to leave the page.  Which I clearly didn't want to do.  So tried again and this time got a popup from the site saying I was going to leave the page.  So went "back" to see if there was something I missed but then it complained I already had an application in process.  So got to the end again and it was all "THE PAYMENT STATUS COULD NOT BE DETERMINED AT THIS TIME. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER FOR THE PAYMENT STATUS."  and literally no way to pay.  Tried different browsers with no luck.  #grunt.  So that was a waste of a good chunk of the evening.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Reloaded my ESTA application and it came straight up with the option to pay.  So just needed to wait for it to sort itself out.  Fighting with all the stoopid.  Had some mulled wine, and cooked sausages, cauliflower, bacon and these little kale sprouts I got off Tony which were fricken *amazing* - little crunchy leafy balls of goodness.  Also blogged last week.

Lunch: toasted cheese sandwich with pizza blend cheese to take it to next level

This photo cannot possibly capture how awesome those little sprouts of kale were!

Wednesday.  More dealing with all the stoopid, and frustration with people that don't respond to messages and/or disappear for hours at a time.  Also had to finally start using Outlook for the first time, ever.  And my welcome to it was a two hour delay in mails arriving because of "issues".  Seriously whoever thought that cloud would be a good idea for this crap??  Was watching stoopid crap on the internet in the evening and backing up my computer when I found out my desktop no longer existed (I have robocopy scripts that save the output to a folder on my desktop).  And I'm like WTF??  I had actually noticed the other day that everything on my desktop had little OneDrive icons.  Turns out Microsoft had taken upon itself to backup my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive.  EXCEPT IT HADN'T!!!  Half the files were actually missing.  I even looked online and they simply weren't there.  It had badly synced my files and chunks of them were missing.  So I turned off backup, at least for desktop, and will need to restore my files from last week's backup.  Fricken HATE.  Microsoft is doing an Apple and doing things of its own accord WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.  HATE HATE HATE.  Literally the second time this week my files have been screwed with by others (last time was on Friday when a rogue backup script deleted everything at work).  

Thursday.  Farewell for Casey who's moving to Melbourne, then Christmas in July drinks at work.  There were so many snackages I didn't need dinner, and in fact brought home all the leftovers that were going to be thrown out otherwise.  

Friday.  I dunno.  Mostly trying to get organised.  Declared POETS and we headed down the coast to see Kit and Pete.  The top of Clyde Mountain was pretty foggy, but it cleared up lower down.  I really wanted to get there by dark, but that didn't work out.  Oh well.  Had steak and salad for dinner and had a few drinks and chatted.  

Arthur, King of the Britons

Saturday.  I went to bed relatively early (altho an hour later than usual) but didn't get to sleep til like super super late (like after everyone else went to bed haha).  Had a bit of a sleepin though so wasn't tooo bad.  Watched Kit feed all the animals. 

Al and Kerry Paca

Kit and Pete hand-raised Lolly when she was abandoned.  She's very friendly and so damned cute!

Ricky the tiny horse

Then we had breakfast which was at nearly lunch time. 

I started a jigsaw and got a chunk done on it before we headed down to Bawley Point.  The river mouth was a bit too deep to cross, so we headed all the way down to Kioloa.  There was a fairly lethargic seal dozing on the rocks, which everyone thought was very unusual.  Walked all the way up the beach and back.  The seal was still there, but some others had already called some experts to get it checked out. 

Had a lamb roast for dinner, with one of Kit and Pete's sheep. 

Then we played a game of Squatter.  Which, like real life with sheep, is basically a case of what Bad Things will happen at every turn.  Kit won.  I think I was doing ok, but it was a bit hard to tell since it was all so random and Bad Things kept happening. 

Slightly earlier night.

Sunday.  Slept a lot better.  Bacon and eggs again for breakfast, then we watched Biscuit herding sheep which was pretty cool. 

Then headed home.  Unpacked and tidied up the house.  Did a bit more on the jigsaw.  Then put on dinner (roasted a bunch of veggies to have with leftover lamb) and did photos and blogging stuffs.