Today my blog turned 21!!  Still not even half my life blogging though.

David Bowie would have turned 77 today.

The Como-Jannali bushfires were 30 years ago today.

2023. Another lap around the sun. Another busy year.

The big trip for this year was to America with my brother to visit theme parks and do a Caribbean cruise out of Tampa. I still thought it was "too soon" to be travelling to America and cruising, but I had no choice because Bare Necessities is an evil company and I would never EVER travel with them again. And guess what. It was indeed too soon, half the ship got covid, and I probably did too at the end. But I didn't test because what was I going to do. We called it Schrödinger's Covid. Not that Americans care about covid anyway. They flat out refuse to wear a mask when they're sick or use hand sanitiser EVER. So I felt no guilt spreading germs around Disney World, especially when there's no hand sanitiser to be found anywhere in the parks. I kept my mask on which was the best I could do. Luckily I didn't get very sick and had a pretty awesome holiday with David. We had a couple of little trips as well. We went to Berrima for the weekend around our 15th wedding anniversary. It rained the whole time. We went to the coast in May to visit Kit and Pete, and a very last minute trip in October as well. We went to Sydney to catch up with some peeps for my 50th, and again to go to the Powerhouse Museum for possibly the last time ever. I also worked super hard to get the last two overseas trip photos online, and actually managed it, six months after America, and one year after Europe. But did get filled with rage at tripadvisor and booking.com. Both have utterly terrible invoicing and communication. Tripadvisor literally ripped me off for one of our Europe tours. And booking.com charges you randomly for hotels but I couldn't find emails for all the ones they did so had to make guesses on some of them.

At work my job description is still mostly Sadie. Well, when I have time in between people wanting stuff and wanting me to fix problems. Over and over and over again I was reminded that the correct spelling of Microsoft is actually B.S. Everything they do is designed to compromise any sort of security. I hate it so much. Early in the year I decided that we really need to manage our certificate renewals manually. That is, keep them in a diary of sorts so we don't miss renewals. Because over and over again there'd be outages for systems due to certificate expiries, even with management tools, to other teams, and I didn't want that to happen to our team. I helped out with some firewall upgrades in January. Did some apnic training on routing in March. Spent ages with Neil cleaning up mail policies. Cleaned up routing on a bunch of devices. Migrated our DR laptop to a new laptop. Did a week of oncall in September to give Connor a break. Trialled a proxy replacement, but while it did have some nice saas features, it was very week security-wise. Got forced into using Windoze 11. I hate it. So. Much. Got three new people in our team, but our area is already full so everyone's having to shuffle around every day which causes me all sorts of anxiety. And yet further down the floor it's a ghost town and noone sits there. Pisses me off. Socially we had a whisky night in July, and I went to trivia nights in July and September (I missed a later one due to Stu having covid). And I ran my big bbq at the lake for the eleventh year in a row with over fifty people.

I've generally been ok healthwise. There was the probable covid in America in March. I definitely had gut involvement because I'd get hungry but then only be able to eat a small amount before my stomach would be like, nope, I'm done. When I got home I had two bouts in March and April of what the doctor suspected might be diverticulitis (mild case) but I never actually found out the results of the tests. Given it was shortly after covid, it's quite possible it was related to that. I have been avoiding strawberries though, except the ones that grew in our back yard (no problems with those). There were the bouts of insomnia on and off that have been plaguing me for the past few years. Super annoying to just be lying there just awake. After getting back from America and having spent so little time on a screen in a month, I found I was completely blind trying to look at my monitors. So I really needed to get new glasses. I tried a new optometrist in Dickson (the son of the optometrist I used to see when I first moved to Canberra) but the practice is a little unorganised and when I went to pick up the glasses the optometrist wasn't even there to help fit them. Plus when I asked a follow up question later the optometrist wouldn't even talk to me. So not sure I'll go back. But, the glasses are great, I can see my computer now clearly. But it does mean I have to swap them out with my other glasses all the time as they're optimised for screen distance. I did have a bit of a cold in August, but multiple RATs were negative. Stu got a likely case of food poisoning in August, most likely from Disappointing aka Hero Sushi. I think he's only been back like once since then (he used to go all the time). He got covid in November most likely from a work colleague who continued coming into work even though his son was sick with covid. First time for him. He had a week off feeling pretty miserable and worked from home for a while after. I worked from home for a couple of weeks too, but never got it. I guess it helped having my booster just a few weeks earlier. Stu also got another possible bout of food poisoning in December, although it might have been covid related.

I saw quite a bit of various peeps at Herbert's during the year, either with Tony/Frank/Karen etc or The Chrises/Tony/Neil etc. There was a tap takeover by Big Shed in April, but I missed the one in October by TRBC because we went down the coast. Kit came to stay a night in January. We had Jenn over for dinner in April. Caught up with Luc for drinks in June. Went to R&F's in July and November. Had brunch with Katie (Stu's school friend) and Andrew at Little Bird in September. Went to Ben and Sarah's for dinner in September. Had Chris and Glenda over for dinner in October. Went to M&M's for dinner in November. Had Christmas Eve "Herbert's @ Tony's" although Dino and Kristin never made it, but it was still a good night with a bunch of peeps. David came to stay in September. He had a look at the oven and found a blown element (which died when the oven was less than two years old). He also replaced our stovetop (one of the elements had died but the final straw was when I accidentally smashed the whole surface by hitting the preexisting chip at just the right force/angle). I took him out for lunch at the Star Buffet after. Then we walked around Ikea for a couple of hours to walk off lunch. He came back again a couple of weeks later to install the new element I got, only to find the thing didn't actually fit. Sigh. We saw Annie and the family on Christmas day which was the first time we'd seen them all since last Christmas. We're all such slackers. Mum/David/Kellie/Sia came for Boxing Day lunch, and Mum stayed til the 28th before going home.

We didn't spend a whole lot of time out at the club this year. Partly because of Certain People, but also because Life. In March the sweetie and I completely emptied out the office, cleaned it, threw a whole heap of crap out, and put everything else back again. Then it was the Mardis Gras social. We went to the M themed night in May and I went as a minifig. There was Ian and Chris's anniversary formal night in June. I did Christmas in July again for like fifty people. And then another couple of working bees later in the year. We were going to go to the Christmas party but Stu got covid.

I had a few photo projects this year. One of them was getting Dad's slides into chronological order. I'd literally lay rolls and rolls of them out on the table to piece back together their correct order. This worked up until he started printing labels and gluing them all over the slide numbers, and the newest rolls were made of plastic so you couldn't even scrape back the label to see the frame number. I've still yet to finish processing the slides but at least now I'll be able to get them into the "correct" order. Well, except for the few odd ones that seem to be loners and not fit any other rolls at all. I also managed to get *two* overseas holiday photos online within six months and a year of going on the trip. I've gone back to working on Turkey 2014 to get them done in time for the ten year anniversary of the trip. Finally, I filed three years of "Canberra Life", "Friends and Family" and "Homes and Gardens" photos which had been presorted but not actually filed. Will go back to trying to file all my photos every week. There's still a lot of work I want to do in the sorting space. Hardest is when things overlap. Like going out to restaurants or holidays with friends - do they go under restaurants/holidays or under friends. It's a dilema.

Our blue-tongue lizard Stumpy is still puttering along. He (she?) must be about fourteen years old now. I got a bag full of guppies in January to add to the genetic diversity in the tanks. The last cory that I got in 2015 finally died in July. I consolidated all the downstairs tanks until Stu retires and has the brain space for fish again. So now we only have five active tanks. There's my "angel" tank (the 620T) which has guppies. The two foot upstairs has guppies and heaps of java fern - I rarely need to change the water in this tank because it's so well planted. Plus there's always so many babies I'd be worried about sucking them up. The four foot still has fourteen congo tetras and a loach, as well as some guppies (I think all male - no point letting them breed in that tank as the babies would get eaten straight away). The four foot is still plagued with algae problems - needs more plants and guppies I reckon. I still have Chrissie's tiny little tank with the two clown loaches. I've had them for nearly six years now. Downstairs I only have the one two foot tank active. It's got guppies and a sucking catfish and is also a fairly healthy tank. All the other tanks downstairs I either drained or turned the heaters/lights off and only run the filters for an hour or two every day (while the sun is at max on the panels) - to keep the heaters from drying out and the water from going stagnant.

I had a bit of a fun year with Lego this year. Last Christmas I got myself the Titanic, and built it (slowly, to make the build take longer) after my America trip. It's a spectacular model, I love it. I also made an iceberg with some of Vic's huge pile of 1x4 bricks. For my birthday I got The Starry Night (which I've seen in New York!) but it's not just a mosaic, it's a fully 3D version which is pretty cool. I also got Himeji Castle (been there!) which is a really lovely set, and finished it Christmas day. I got back into inventorying Vic's Lego and finished off the loose pieces. Then worked on the non-Star Wars minifigs. Bricklink was down for a week in November because a bunch of accounts got hacked. For Christmas I got a big minifig, although haven't started that yet - I don't have time for fun anymore!

I didn't do as many jigsaws at home this year - I'm just too damned busy - too busy for fun! The problem is if I start one I'll spend too much time on it and not doing the things I need to do. I need to retire so I have time for fun. I still play the clarinet a couple of times a week.

The weather this year has been a bit insane. Apparently 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. There was a huge lightning storm here in March. Fortunately it didn't do any damage here, but it destroyed heaps of Aquila's electronics including both his heating and cooling systems. There was snow out past Queanbeyan in May. The winter here just *felt* warm. Sure it was cold too but spring sure came early, with stuff flowering a couple of weeks earlier than usual (and Stumpy got *hungry* earlier than usual too). Another storm in December knocked down a sizeable branch off one of our trees. Fortunately no damage here, but there were heaps of trees down around Canberra. And let's not even get into the heatwaves, fires and flooding catastrophes around the world this year.

It was definitely a year of battles with technology this year.

My blog turned 20 this year! For its 20th blogiversary I gave it a bit of a design refresh. I put in a mobile friendly template which does make it a little easier to read on the phone. I also updated the banner. But I had to increase the throttle timeout so searches on my blog would work (no idea why it takes so much longer since the design refresh). I also got frustrated with Chrome which will now try the HTTPS site even when the link you click on is http:// This means the style sheet won't load as it's "mixed content". Unfortunately twenty years ago noone used https so my entire blog is all hardcoded by Movable Type with full urls with http:// I hardcoded the style sheet as https and for later pages it now renders correctly but if you look at older stuff and your dumbhead browser changes the page to https it doesn't render properly.

Vodien broke my blog three times this year. Firstly they broke Perl->MySQL in March and it took me a week of telling them it was in fact their fault before they finally fixed it. Then they broke my cpanel access during an upgrade. Twice. Had to get the password reset. Twice. Then they broke CageFS in October which broke *all* my scripts. When they eventually fixed it a couple of weeks later they left a "how did we do" survey which I couldn't do because the certificate was completely broken on *.vodien.com. Three big outages this year. Maybe I should pay for hosting somewhere else. Although with the state of the world I suspect it'd be just as bad anywhere. There's just no such thing as good service anymore.

I continued to be frustrated with Apple. While my new (now a year old) 14 Pro is great (the low light features are spectacular), it took a bit of getting used to. Firstly, don't ever use the 2x lens, it's just digital magnification. Either get closer or use the 3x lens. Next, if "macro" gets triggered while using 3x for macro, stand back, point it away to reset, and try again. The "macro" on 3x will completely destroy the photos, I have no idea what it does, it possibly uses the "wide angle" lens and then digitally magnifies 3x. When you can get the optical 3x to work on closeups it actually does ok. It pisses me off though that you can't force it to use the lens you choose. I got so fed up with Apple messing with the timestamps on my files when copying to windows that I bought a third party app - iMazing - which will at least copy jpgs/pngs properly. With movie files it copied them in native Apple HDR which makes them look trash. So I'd have to copy them off in windows as well anyway. Well that was until Apple changed something and now they both copy exactly the same. Oh, they also decided later in the year to start presenting HEIC files to windows instead of JPGs, so I *have* to use iMazing. I was enraged to find that Apple just randomly changed timezones while I was travelling in February. Multiple times a day it'd jump back and forth to GMT-4/GMT-5. It took me hours and hours to sort out the mess that was my holiday photos. And even when I got home, and had been home for a day or two on the correct time, it randomly dropped back to Houston time until a reboot. Speaking of reboots, the wallpaper is borked. Everytime you reboot the wallpaper is just a black screen. You have to go in, change to a different wallepaper theme, wait a few minutes, then change it back again. Someone suggested clearing browser cache to fix Redactle early in the year. Not only was it stoopid advice because Redactle itself is usually at fault, but whatever I did cleared *all* of my cache/cookies/whatever, so I lost all my streaks on wordle etc. So I pretty much just stopped playing them altogether on the spot. Finally, I told iTunes/my phone to trust my computer. It still doesn't trust my computer.

I had two separate battles with email. Firstly gmail refused to accept mail from me without an SPF record on my domain. Internode very nicely have a page on their website which tells you exactly what to use (for Eudora on my computer). Optus not so much (for my phone). And Vodien's support pages were misleading because they say to do it via cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't host the DNS. Eventually figured out how to get the record setup on Vodien DNS. Then Internode (aka Epic Bastards) moved their SMTP "service" to AWS, and cut off the ability to use it AS A PAYING CUSTOMER unless you use your internode address as the From address. Which is utterly ridiculous because they're cutting off the ability to even use the internode address for email AND what if you have multiple people in your household trying to send mail, not everyone can use that address!! So then had to spend hours massaging my twenty year old mail client into being able to use my hosting for SMTP. But that also means I can't email Stu/David at their domains because I host the websites for those and so Vodien thinks it owns them. I really wish Stu would get us off Internode. Their service has been pretty trash since they got bought out by iinet then TPG. I complained to Internode about how trash it was, and they were like, "oh we're just trying to stop spam". Nothing about being an internet SERVICE provider. Bastards bastards bastards.

And in other tech crap. On Friday 13th January, Epic Tool (aka Elon Musk) turned off 3rd party Twitter access. So I stopped using it. Simples. Had to fight with Optus in February who in their wisdom split out my accounts and made me stuff up my payments so had to sort that out as well as figure out how to actually even access both my accounts which are now separate. Hopeless. Continued to get frustrated at the sheer absurdity of Windoze 11. Finally got a new battery for the UPS after over a year of them not being able to get stock. Dodgy Dyson struck again - this time it decided the battery needed to be replaced WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT. David's Kogan iPhone cable got more and more flakey before I finally gave up on it in August.

The house caused no end of dramas too this year.

The Solar Edge solar system we got put in last December essentially was DOA. Sometimes it would work and we could see it doing 11kW which was great. Even though we were supposed to be maxed out at 5kW back to the grid sometimes we'd see it pushing more back, no idea how. But most of the time it didn't work at all. After many calls/emails that went unanswered (and I flat out refused to finish paying the sparkies until it was working) we finally left honest feedback (at their request), which finally got some action. They came and had a look in early January but didn't fix it. They rewired things so that the system would support working off grid (it was sold to us on the promise that it would but then the sparkies said oh no it doesn't do that, and later they were like, oh, Solar Edge says we can do that now). And they finally completely replaced the whole inverter in late January. We thought that would be the end of it, but the very first night it drained the battery to 0% even though it's supposed to only drop to 10%. So had to put in another support call for that. The app is great when it works, but oftentimes the system will lose connectivity and it'll be like "updated 4 hours ago". Dumb. And, upsettingly, the system never puts out more than 9kW now. I thought it might have been the angle of the sun so waited until December again (when it did 11kW last year) but alas not. So we'll have to raise *another* support call to find out what gives. On a lighter note, we did finally get a negative electricity bill in November. Separately, we got a new digital meter to replace the original analogue meter. This one has its own back to base internet connection for reporting, so noone needs to come read the meter anymore.

The night the sparkies came in early January I was turning the oven off and the power tripped. I was half wondering if the sparkies did anything. After a couple of times of the power tripping whenever we turned the oven off and on, we took to flipping the switch off at the board before turning the power to the oven on/off. Because the back element was fine, only the top element was broken, but there was no way to turn the oven on/off without going past a mode that activated the top element. I was totally pissed off though because the oven was less than three years old, and when I asked about it at Bing Lee and they said there was only a one year warranty. David eventually came to look at it in September, found the broken element, disconnected it, ordered a new one from TLE in Belco. On the same day we bought and installed a new stove (as mentioned further up). He came back two weeks later to install the element, only to find it didn't fit. I'd never buy a DeLonghi anything again - you can't get replacement parts for something that's only three years old. We still haven't replaced the element. Maynor and Cochran said they can get one, but I need to know that I can return it if it doesn't fit.

The garden is a neverending drama. I pulled back some of the ivy in February. It's grown back. And then some. Problem is our ladder is not long enough to reach it properly. We had a permaculture mob come out to talk to us about our yard. I was hoping they'd be able to talk to us and exchange ideas (that's what I assumed we paid them a couple of hundred dollars for). Instead she just said, oh well we'll need to do a cleanup first. That'll be 48 hours work just for the front yard. I'm like, WTF, there is NOT 48 hours of work in the front yard for professionals. So I did it myself. In a lot less than 48 hours. But because I focussed so long on the front yard, the back yard got out of control again. Sigh. I did manage to get all the bluestone moved to EffanC's though - thanks Tony and F!!

In other house crap. We got a new toilet seat in April as the old one was getting very yellowed and degraded. Went to Ikea in July and found a bin solution that would work. Bought all the bins but the shelves were out of stock. Turned out they were actually discontinued. Bought another shelf which wasn't exactly what we wanted. It looks sort of ok but is very flimsy. Finally ran some lines of sealant over the loose tiles in the shower in August. The leaking has finally stopped, although my future self will hate me as that's what the previous owners of my place in Sydney did and the sealent got all mouldy and discoloured over time. We got a couple of bottlebrushes planted out the front by the government. I took a chip out of the microwave platter in September. The cooler wouldn't turn the water on the first time we used it in November. But let it rest and it worked the next time. After I got past all the errors.

Our favourite restaurant of the year would still be Chong Co, with delivery from them four times over the year. Kinn Thai is another favourite, we went there a few times. Herbert's is a great local and had many lunches and some dinners there. We would often get Pattysmiths for lunch on shopping days. Their fries are awesome and the burgers pretty good too. Had dinner in March with EffanC at Hachiko which was expensive (got the banquet) but very nice. Went to Taki on our anniversary and had some delicious steaks. Dinners and takeaway from Raijin (average), 10 Yards (nice), Tiger Lane (meh), CBD Dumpling House (yummy and quick), BONE (stoopid name), Disappointing Sushi (gave us free KFC because the sweetie is a regular, although he mostly stopped going after he probably got food poisoning probably from there), Badger&Co (repeat of last time), Symposium (nice), Betty's Burgers (not bad), Happy's (sad cause of all the single guys hiding out there for dinner). Brunches at 54 Benjamin a couple of times, U&Co a couple of times, Cup of Joy, Deakin and Me, Coffee Club Gungahlin, Bunny Beans. Random lunches at Flavours of Jiangnan, Canberra Cafe and Burgers, Ramen O and Four Winds. You can now get potato on a stick in the mall, meaning I can get my two favourite street foods there (that and takoyaki). The problem is you have to wait for both of them, which is difficult if you're eating with people and don't want to make them wait.

On the cooking front, there was a few new things and a lot of old favourites. Stu really likes Cath's basa bake recipe so we make that semi regularly. Also tuna casserole and the 1kg frozen turkey roasts. In winter, favourites are Alan's beef stew, butt, er, beef cheeks and brisket. I also made a pea and ham soup in July which Stu likes but I'm meh about. We've had Luv-a-Duck Peking duck a couple of times which is pretty awesome. Kale "chips" are also great, but sadly we never saw kalettes for sale this year. We still often got pizza on Thursday, but sometimes made our own, and Fridays sometimes we'd have Ingham's chicken kievs. And I do like doing Sunday night roasts. I decided that roasting chicken "upside down" is much better than cooking it breast side up. Stu made a Japanese Golden Curry in March, and I made one later in the year. He also cooked "Coronation Oden" twice. I called it this because we first had it the night we watched the coronation of King Charles III. I made a really nice yellow curry out of a Coles magazine and liked it so much I've modified it slightly for my "official" recipe. Made a fairly nice apricot chicken to use up some old dried apricots, but would need to use a boneless cut of chicken I think. For my 50th, R&F gave me Nagi Maehashi's RecipeTin Eats Dinner book and I've so far made eight recipes out of it. They always take a lot longer to follow the recipe precisely, but they've all been very good, and I'd make them again even if just to streamline things a little. I've made several lemon cheesecakes, and also tried Milo cookies at Christmas.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* AWS at the Hellenic Club with Emma Pask and Ed Wilson
* Lego Brick Show in Wagga, caught up with David as well
* Jess and Uncle Doss at Herbert's
* Come From Away
* Australian War Memorial's Big Things in Store
* ANU Women's Revue with Jess aka Jeremy Laser

Movies (at the movies)
* Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
* Oppenheimer

Movies (TV)
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on NYE
* Laid Back Camp
* A Christmas Karen
* The Social Network
* Onward
* When Harry Met Sally / The Shop Around the Corner
* Avatar
* Glass Onion
* You've Got Mail
* Everything Everywhere All At Once
* 127 Hours
* Rocky Horror Picture Show
* Chernobyl 1986
* Amadeus
* First Man
* Raiders of the Lost Ark
* Dragonheart
* Innerspace
* Paterson
* Romancing the Stone
* Jewel of the Nile
* The War of the Roses
* Turning Red
* Pretty Woman
* Malcolm
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar / The Swan / The Rat Catcher / Poison / Fantastic Mr Fox
* Dumb Money
* Die Hard / Die Hard 2 / Love Actually
* Home Alone 2

TV
* Picard (finished season 2)
* You Can't Ask That (season 7)
* a series of Canberra Survivor on YouTube
* Origins of Us
* Bocchi the Rock
* The Crown finished (seasons 2-5)
* Death in Paradise (seasons 4-6)
* First two episodes of A Spy Among Friends. Stu was going to watch the rest himself but never did
* The Simpsons (seasons 32-34)
* The Book of Boba Fett
* Mandalorian (season 3)
* Futurama (all of it)
* Lego Grandmasters (season 5)
* Amazing Race Australia (seasons 3-4)
* War on Waste (seasons 2-3)
* Ahsoka
* The Orville (seasons 1-2)

Books
* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (well, I started it)

Other stuff
* tried to see the balloons but the wind was blowing towards the airport so they didn't lift off. Tried again the next day and saw them. Jet lag and being awake stoopidly early helped.
* saw a double rainbow in March
* went with Tony to RFS tour of the helibase at Hume in March
* Pialligo Estate went broke - no more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!
* Looking Back, Moving Forward nights at the Shine Dome
* Cotter Pumping Station Tour
* saw a partial solar eclipse in April
* Parliament House in May to see the Lego Parliament House and wander round. Probably the first time I'd been in there since 1990.
* saddened over the death of Heather Armstrong (dooce.com) by suicide in May
* magpies came to see me over winter after six months of not
* Whisky Live in May
* Hardly Normal started work at beginning of June, but didn't open til November
* ABC Classic 100 - your favourite instrument - all of mine made it into the top 100
* got to level 10000 in Candy Crush in June. Got to 12186 by the end of the year by completely changing the way I play it.
* found some papers from my Dad's family and how they'd found the family home of some my ancestors!
* gave blood for first time in about 32 years in July
* bookings247 got hacked - they had my name and last four digits of my credit card. I know it was them because the email they used was the one I used on their website, once, in 2019. I contacted them but they ignored me.
* my 50th!! Had a party the Saturday before; day of was pretty quiet, just KFC for lunch and Chong Co delivered for dinner; Sydney the Saturday after; another run for club peeps in early September
* made a new candle with old candle wax, but need to make it thinner next time
* evil neighbours that refused to train their dogs got another one that barks a lot from time to time, but at least not *all* the time
* our car clocked 100000km in August
* went for a drive in September to the Air Disaster Memorial, Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), and Canberra's weather radar outside Captains Flat
* Herbert's for Sunday jazz in October
* saw a cool double rainbow in November
* got a heap of strawberries off our strawberry plants in November

And that wraps up another year.  Have a happy and safe New Year!!

Every time I get a new Lego set it'll have pieces in it I've never seen before (or maybe I have for some of them but have forgotten).  Some of them are like "where have you been all my life???" while others are like.. why...

These were from Titanic

These were from The Starry Night

These were from Himeji Castle

Sunday.  17th.  Backdating, because, life.  Made a golden curry for dinner with some leftover sausages.  Leslie Neilsen was in Mash!  Then watched The Crown 6.4.  Really need to watch The Queen again, which Stu has never seen (I saw it on a plane once).  Funnily enough also written by Peter Morgan.

Monday.  Slept ok I think.  Frantic morning before work trying to get the house back in order.  Had a task closing party at work.  Leftover sausages and salads for dinner.  Ronny Howard was in Mash!

These are mini capsicum seedlings that sprouted after I planted some from our dinner the other week - just for fun

Really tempting fate here with leftover sausages and salads from my bbq

Tuesday.  Went to bed at normal time but didn't get to sleep til midnight.  Sigh.  Mostly a decom day at work.  At lunch time was Col's funeral.  Place was packed and heaps of club people came.

Mash had Hawkeye do the nudie walk through camp.  Funnily enough I remembered quite a bit from this episode, even some of the lines.  We *might* have seen this episode a few years back when we started watching Dad's DVDs, but I mainly remember it from seeing it as a kid.

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep then woke up early.  Sigh.  We had cake for Duncan's 60th.

Then to the Bavarian for lunch.  Someone said pork knuckle.  I asked for a doggy bag before I ordered :)

Did some food shopping after lunch but forgot the damned shopping list.  Again.  (this was after forgetting it on the weekend too, but this time I thought it was in the shopping bag but it was back at work).

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep, woke up fairly early.  Documentation day.  Two hour lunch dealing with bank queues and Coles.  This time I remembered to take the shopping list, but this time left it *at* Coles.  Sigh.  At least I had everything off it by now.  Bit of an early mark.  Pizza for dinner then The Orville 2.4.  Watched a new Mark Rober video (glitter bomb 6.0).

Friday.  Just tidying up at work.  Went out in the morning for a quick post office run for the sweetie.  Had a final lunch at Herbert's with Tony/Braddles/Neil.  Felt a bit off later in the arvo, maybe those two big sour beers.  Hrmm.  Mash and Death in Paradise 7.3.

Saturday.  Awake from ~3:30 til like 5.  Sigh.  Did some washing first thing because they promised rain and maybe a storm.  But no rain to be seen anywhere all day.  BOM is getting so bad lately.  Went out to pick up some booze and stuff for Annie's family (Stu was meant to get stuff during the week but was feeling off so never actually went).  The new markets are open, but the place was packed even at 8:30.  Did a bottle and Green Shed run.  Made some cookies.  Other than that just house stuff and All The Things.  Made a pizza for dinner with the last wrap in the fridge.  Mash and The Orville 2.5

Sunday.  Christmas Eve.  I think I spent more time awake than asleep.  Sigh.  Spent like an hour weeding and cleaning out some of the tubs we borrowed for my bbq.  But then a relatively chilled morning quietly getting things done. 

Whoops, time to drain/clean these!

How cute are potato flowers?

Later in the afternoon was Herbert's @ Tony's, but sadly Dino and Kristin ended up not making it.  And of course neither could Stu cause his belly was still upset.  Fun evening anyway.

Came home in time to watch most of the carols.

It's not carols until Marina Prior sings Angels we have Heard on High

Or they do the Hallelujah chorus

Very late night though :(

Monday.  6th.  Backdating because of the Second Great Vodien Outage of 2023.

Slept ok.  Urgghh they forced me to start using Windoze 11 at work.  I hate Windoze 11. So. Much.  Even worse is that notifications are all but invisible.  Skype changes the colour of its icon ever so subtly and there's a tiny red dot under the icon instead of a tiny blue dot.  So I'm missing stuff all the time.  And don't even get me started on not being able to ungroup task bar icons.  Crap in the morning and proxy trialling in the afternoon.  Cooked green spaghetti from RecipeTin Eats for dinner.  I wish books like this would use "real world" measurements, like two or three cloves of garlic, instead of a teaspoon or whatever.  Or the juice zest of one lemon instead of a tablespoon and x mL.  That sort of thing.  It was quite nice though.  Evening was filing "Canberra Life" photos.

Tuesday.  Slept okish although awak for like an hour in the middle of the night.  Proxy trialling all day.  Tony messaged me just before lunch - he was heading out to Four Winds to pick up some wine and did I wanna come with.  And I was like.. sure why not.  The last time I was out there was in 2012 for the Moving Feast.  So that was nice.

On the way back we came across this lizard with a death wish.  It clearly had no idea of what could possibly kill it, as evidenced by lack of body parts.  And it wouldn't even run away until I full on poked the thing.

In the afternoon watched a few horses run around in circles for a couple of miles.  At one point my $2 was coming second, and later my $5 was coming second.  But they finished at 20th and 7th.

Salmon, salad and leftover veggies for dinner.  Then filing house photos.  Watched Amazing Race 4.10, caught up to all aired episodes.

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot and restless.  Woke up early but managed a bit more sleep.  Nothing useful in the morning.  In the afternoon working with Wardie to document what to do in the event of him being away and us having to turn off MFA in the event of Optus being total idiots and breaking their entire network.  Leftovers for dinner then filing "Friends and Family" photos.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Good drinks - lots of people.  Popped into Tony's on the way home to pick up my old iPhone 3GS which I sold to Heather in 2012.  And since I'd sold my XS to Tony last year and I'd kept my 5, it meant I could line up every one of my iPhones!!  How cool is this!

3GS - 2010-2012, 5 - 2012 - 2018, XS - 2018-2022, 14 Pro - 2022-present.  We won't talk about the crack Tony got on the XS recently.. 

Friday.  Slept ok.  Got a "How did we do?" survey from Vodien which pissed me off because they still hadn't fixed anything and I hadn't had any contact other than first contact asking for some more information.  So let them know.  Skipped a 4pm meeting because I have zero interest in talking to Certain People at 4pm on a Friday, especially when I often log off around then for POETS.  Had Luv-a-Duck Peking Duck for dinner.  Got as good as Super Bowl obviously, but still very yummy.

Death in Paradise 6.7 and Amazing Race 4.11.

Saturday.  Hurty.  But otherwise slept ok.  Pretty much just did minifig sorting all day.  Except for taking a couple of hours out to do errands in the middle of the day. 

Apparently these are Oyster Plants

Tried to turn the cooler on when we got home but nothing happened.  It sat there for like ten minutes but it was like the pump to suck up the water hadn't run.  And then it errored out.  Sigh.

It wouldn't even run on fan mode which was very upsetting.  So we melted a bit in the afternoon.

So did the house - it even went over the top of the min/max fluid.

Watched David head off to New Zealand on Carnival Splendor.

Had dinner at R&F's with M&M and ChiliRob and Cath and Rob's mother Cath.  Too many Robs and Caths in the room hehe.

When I got home I poked the cooler control panel a bit and somehow got it to run on fan only which was a relief.

Sunday. 

Had a hare-brained idea to go climb Mount Rogers before it got too hot.  It was still too hot.

Spent all day doing minifig sorting and so got to the end of the weekend without having done any of the things I was *meant* to do.  Whoops.  Dug out some beef out of the freezer to have with some roasted veggies.  The Orville 1.11 and Amazing Race 4.12 which was the finale.  I was a bit sad that Emma and Hayley didn't win because they were just lovely people, but then Darren and Tristan decided to call it a three way tie so they split the winnings.  So awesome!!

Monday.  2nd.  Not backdating for a change.  But it is running pretty late on a Sunday afternoon when I still have two dinners to prep/cook.  And that's without even doing the Captains Flat post.  hrmmm.  Awake for a while in the middle of the night, but otherwise slept ok.  Tony helped me with a greenwaste run in the morning which was very nice of him.  Then Lego inventorying and jigsaw but not much else.  Apple is so retarded.  I told it to trust my phone the other week.  It still doesn't and I still need to enter the password every time I want to back it up.  Tuna casserole for dinner.

Left is "brown".  Right is "reddish brown".  According to Bricklink, the radar dish doesn't exist in brown, only reddish brown.  I beg to differ.  

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - hot and restless.  Have I mentioned how hot it's been the past little while?  Ok day.  Procrastinating at looking a new proxy product by catching up on life.  Watched the first episode of Twin Peaks, which I've never seen, although I have known whodunnit for over thirty years.

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - hot and restless. 

Halloween cupcakes by a-cakes

Went to reply to an email of Mum's in the evening and it wouldn't send.  First up I was getting TLS failures.  I'd already updated a couple of the dlls for Eudora a couple of years ago, but found updated ones from the Hermes project so got past that fairly quickly.

Great. Except now I get:
the SMTP server (mail.internode.on.net) said:
550 mf-505: Sender Policy - Relay Denied

*sigh*  F$*%ing internode have broken their SMTP server (moved it to AWS).  Previously you could always use their SMTP server if you were on their network.  Now.. they're like nope, screw you.  So much for an internet "service" provider.  Got literally nothing else done tonight.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Cranky with everything and everyone.  Fighting with proxies most of the day.  Busy drinks (old farts drinks).  Pizza for dinner (although not much because too much pigging out on snackages).

Friday.  Fighting with proxies in the morning.  Gave up because the thing won't block an executable file if it's been renamed to .txt.  Did decom work in the arvo, because Fridays.  Ahsoka in the evening.

Saturday.  Awake in the middle of the night for two or three hours.  Sigh.  Had breakfast at The Scottish Restaurant then did food shopping from a couple of places.  Was nearly midday by the time we got home.  Sigh.  Afternoon alternating between cleaning the house and finishing the jigsaw.  Roast beef for dinner and had Chris and Glenda over which was lovely.  Played Battle of the Sexes in the evening.  The questions were fun but the rules were pretty confusing and the gameplay was a bit retarded.

There was roast beef and potato bake and other veggies

Glenda brought pavlova!

Sunday.  Awake for a little while in the middle of the night but not as badly as last night.  Spent the ENTIRE MORNING fighting with SMTP. 

Had a go at connecting to Vodien for authenticated SMTP. 

Firstly had to enable "esoteric" features in Eudora so that I could see the ports.  Ended up setting the SMTP port to 587.

Started off with errors like
535 Incorrect authentication data
Can't send to ''. The server gives this reason: '550 SMTP AUTH is required for message submission on port 587'.

I was able to get Thunderbird to authenticate against my kazza.id.au host and send, so then spent ages fiddling with configs in Eudora trying to get it to work.  Eventually after MUCH hacking I got it to work.

But then my SPF record needed to be updated.  Gmail was rejecting with fun errors like
"Messages missing a valid Message-ID header are not accepted"
but even that was inconsistent.  Eventually after much hacking and googling I settled on 
include:_spf.syrahost.com include:all._spf.ds.network
which as it turns out was buried deep in cpanel as well.

Of course the problem is now I can't send emails to Stu's domain, or to David's domain, because I have those in my cpanel account for web hosting, and now it thinks it owns them and delivers the mail to me not them.  Sigh.  

The afternoon was then music, weeding and blogging.  And I haven't even finished catching up on blogging.  Sigh.

I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. 

Sunday.  17th.  Backdating because, life.  I need to retire.  I had a nice day doing house stuff and hobbies, but I need a day like that every day for the rest of my life.  Just to keep up.  Cooked RecipeTin Eats garlic roast potatoes to go with some roast lamb (that was sadly very gristly). 

Chrome is being super annoying.  My blog is http only.  Because when Movable Type was invented noone used https.  And it hardcodes everything with full urls.  But https is enabled on the domain, and because of that, Chrome will try to use the https site EVEN IF THE LINK YOU CLICK ON IS HTTP!!!  The problem with that is the mixed content.  It renders the images ok (clearly browsers have decided it's "safe" to allow mixed content images), but the style sheet is not rendered so the site looks dumb.  It's pissing me off.

Monday.  Slept ok.  I think.  Stoopidly busy day.  Late finish (doing doco! hurray!) then some weeding.  Leftovers for dinner.  Then spent an hour waiting for the support peeps at Vodien to actually pay attention to the call they're on and reset my cpanel password after the great upgrade fiasco of the other week.  What should have taken all of a few minutes took over an hour.  Sigh.  Gave up using the nice long Kogan iphone cable because it kept not working.  Either not even registering at all, or saying it was charging but wasn't.

Tuesday.  New iphone cable also playing up - saying it was charging but then not doing anything.  Replug it in and it'll actually start charging.  #grunt (although as of nearly two weeks later it's been ok).  Busy day.  Did some firewall cleaning.  Weeding after work.  Some frozen stuff from the parties for dinner.  Finished writing up hotel posts for Europe trip.  And finished season 23 of Air Crash Investigations.

Cape weed may be an invasive species but it is quite pretty

So.  Many.  Weeds.

Two kiev balls left, and those carbonara bites are yummy but the box is a rip off, only like half full.

Wednesday.  Missed three calls in quick succession while the phone was in the bedroom while I was having breakfast.  Sigh.  Then a stoopidly busy day. 

Apparently these are called scilla.  I had one plant of them last year.  This year I have like ten.

David came after work to install the new oven element.  Except.

The design is different.  It wasn't going to fit.  #grunt.  We all had a sad.

Watched The Orville 1.3.  

Thursday. 

Returned the element in the morning.  So back to square one.  Slightly more productive day.  Trivia night in the evening.  We came fourth.  Some of the rounds were "normal" and therefore fun.  But some of the rounds were just plain evil.  And badly done too.  Like there'd be five-part questions/answers with text so small you could barely read it.  Like this BS.

How do you even mark that crap??  What if you get one out of order but the rest in order, do you get four out of five or none?  And they did badly acted readings, this time from tv shows, but they didn't learn a damned thing from the previous people that ran it, AND YOU COULDN'T HEAR A DAMNED THING.  Ridiculous.  

Friday.  Hurty in the middle of the night.  Zombie day.  Back to cold weather which was nice. 

I actually had a really nice day because hardly anyone bothered me all day so I could concentrate on some decommission works. 

Did some weeding after work.  Before and after.  

Went over to Ben and Sarah's for dinner which was lovely. 

Saturday.  Productive morning, and did some food shopping.  Did RecipeTin Eat's mac and cheese for dinner, which was yummy but took two hours.  hrmmm.  It was too late and we were too tired to watch a movie so watched some Death in Paradise.

These cherry tree suckers are like a week or two old.  Sigh.

I guess they're pretty .. but still..

This cracked me up - a lineup of Teslas!  Two parked, and a third one just happened to come alone while I was taking a photo of them!

Sunday.  24th.  Somewhat better sleep.  Weeding, Lego inventorying and building, blogging, tax.  Man, financial crap is such a pain in the @$$.  You have to go into battle with every damned website and fight to get the information you need out of it.  I really hate the ones that don't let you right click to save-as (which is like all of them these days).  One site wouldn't let me download *anything* - you'd click on the link and nothing would happen.  Sigh.  Hate hate hate.  Roast pork for dinner which was yummy.

Then watched the last episode of season 5 of The Crown, which was actually the last episode aired so far.

Sunday.  20th.  Backdating.  Because dinner on the 27th took all afternoon. TV dinners for dinner (it was that kind of day after getting back from Sydney) on the 20th, then Futurama/Crown and an early night.

Monday.  Woke up at 3am for an hour and a half.. sigh.  The BS started pretty early.  Only got to decommission stuff late in the afternoon.  Cauliflower bake and veggies for dinner and photo labelling in the evening.

Tuesday.  Dunno.  Nice sunrise thought.  And there were flowers.  And slow cooker brisket for dinner.

Wednesday.  All the stoopid.  All the BS.  Beer and wraps for dinner.  But did get some labelling done.  

Moist...

Thursday.  Global warming is real y'all.  Our cherry tree doesn't normally flower til well into September.  But here it is starting a full week before the end of August.

Actually had a great day at work for a change.  Had a lovely day of deleting crap, and hardly any interruptions or BS.  Had some frozen stuff from the freezer for dinner - needed to clear some space for the sweetie to get some ice cream :)  Futurama then Death in Paradise 5.5.

I thought this shadow was cool

Hardly Normal opening here soon..

Friday.  Awake from two til four or so.  Sigh.  Zombie morning.  I finished a few glasses of Diet Coke leftover from the party to help keep me awake.  Another nice day of deleting stuff and not too much BS.  Made wraps again for lunch and leftover brisket for dinner.  Then watched the first episode of Ahsoka.

Saturday.  Slept a bit better but not super great.  Slept til 6:37 which pushed my whole routine back.  Did lots of Europe photos labelling and a bit of house stuff, some fish stuff, weeding and music.  Basically my ideal day.  I'd be happy with days like that for the rest of my life.  Got onto Ikea's chat to ask them about the shelves we want to get and when they're likely to be in stock.  Had to get past the braindead bot to get to a human who said, oh, it's discontinued.  Fricken sigh.  Now don't know if I should keep all the bins I bought or take them all back.  Stu cooked sausages for dinner and we had a romatic night in watching Romancing the Stone (after two weekends of chaos previously and another one next weekend we *needed* a quiet night).  

Sunday.  Slept fairly well.  Mostly photo labelling, bit of house stuff, food shopping, listented to Jurassic Park on Screensounds.  Then spent half the afternoon cooking meat balls from my new recipe book, but more on that in another post.  One day.  It was very nice but it was two and a half hours in the kitchen which is Too Long.  Then Futurama/Crown.

One of the champagne flutes I got for my birthday from M&M

Friday.  11th.  The plan was to have everything done on the Friday, and it would just be a last minute tidy up and food prep on the Saturday.  Yeah that didn't happen.  I worked most of Friday not even knowing if the party would go ahead.  Took a RAT.  Negative.  Decided to do the food shopping.

This isn't even everything.  I delegated a bag of frozen stuff as there was no way it was all going to fit in our freezer.

Saturday.  12th.  So most of Saturday was cleaning.  Sigh.  But.  I had a saviour.  Tony came up a little early and did all the food prep while I finished up.  (Took a RAT at lunch time - still negative).

From 4pm peeps started arriving - it felt like all at once!!  It made my brain explode heh.

We did cake at 6pm, which Tab made, because she's awesome.

And there was the funniest rendition of Happy Birthday I've ever heard in my life - everyone sung in different keys and at different speeds.  Think the Hogwart's school song from the first book.  It was just like that.

Duncan pointed out that I'd be competing with the soccer, so I warned the sweetie that we'd likely need to put it on.  And sure enough we did!  It was a pretty epic finish with a penalty shootout.

Tony also brought a massive glowstick he'd had since Jess was little.  We had no idea if it would even work - but it did!

And I put candles in the bathroom because don't candles in bathrooms look awesome!?

In the end thirty people came.  I had heaps of fun, and I think I managed to talk to everyone, even if only briefly for some of them.  But a massive shoutout to Tony, who'd had a bit of a big night the night before and so felt up to just helping out.  He managed all the hot food in the oven the entire night which was a *massive* relief for me, as I could just enjoy the party instead of being distracted dealing with the food (which is what happened last time).  Thanks Tony!!!!!!!

Sunday.  13th.  Woke up at 6:30am.  After getting to bed at 2am.  Because that's what I do.  Kit left fairly early to go have breakfast with her brother and SIL.  Then I cleaned up.  Did a couple of loads of washing up of glasses and dishes, and sorted the rubbish and recycling.

Other than that not much else.  My cough decided to go from just being a slight gentle cough to moving to my chest and being quite chesty.  Hurray.

Monday.  14th.  Slept from around 9pm til after 6am yayyy!!  But it was kind of a boring day really.  Took another RAT late morning.  Still negative.  Went into the office before lunch because Maddie had made me a cake (she didn't get the memo I WFH Mondays :) ).  It was really nice!

Then went to the chemist, and picked up takeaway KFC on the way home for lunch.  We had Chong Co delivered for dinner (didn't go out because the sweetie had to leave for Adelaide in the morning and it would have been all too hard).  They haven't had the "crying duck" style salad in ages, but turns out the wagyu salad is basically identical!  Also got satay chicken and crispy pork with chili jam.

Then I watched Dragonheart while the sweetie packed and got ready.

Saturday.  19th.  Syd-ah-nee bound.  I drove the first half.  We listened to a couple of episodes of The Lazarus Heist, about the alleged hacking of Sony by North Korea.  Swapped driving half way.  The GPS took us a bit of an odd way into Sydney - round the back of the airport and up through Alexandria (but not even the way the Murray's coaches do it).  Sydney keeps changing.  Like a lot.  New roads (the M8, never even heard of it!), new tunnels, new bridges.  Craziness.  Got to the hotel around 1pm, parked ($45, but still works out cheaper for the two of us than coach/bus/train/plane), and checked in.

Then headed off to the pub. 

I'd settled on the Keg&Brew in Surry Hills.  Simply because it looked like it had enough space to go to without a booking, had a rooftop bar, and it was right next to the station. 

We ended up on a decent sized table and nine people came, as well as us. It was funny though because there were *five* different streams - Mum's family, Dad's family, the Clan, CIA, and Uni, and not many people knew each other (but enough did so that noone had noone else to talk to).

The sweetie got a couple of pizzas (two for one FTW!)

And I had a lovely afternoon :)

We booked a table downstairs for dinner and the sweetie and Mum and Uncle Graham and I went down for dinner when the soccer started (it was a little bit noisy heh).  Mum and I split crispy pork belly and cripy potatoes which was very nice.

Then we went back to the hotel and crashed. 

After seeing the end of the soccer (4th place!!  Still pretty epic!!)

Sunday.  20th.  Was awake for many hours in the middle of the night.  Too hot.  The aircon wouldn't go down below 21C which was way too hot, and didn't notice the ceiling fan til the morning (the sweetie did but I wasn't paying attention when he suggested turning it on).  #grunt.  So slept like crap.  But then we got up and headed home.  

Got to go through the M8 tunnel this time.

There were people falling out of the sky at Picton.  Had some brunch at Sutton Forest.  Listened to some more of the Lazarus Heist.

And Lake George is still very full.

Sunday.  30th.  Veggies with leftover lamb for dinner, Crown, early night.

Monday.  Slept okish.  Still woke up a few times.  Spent some time trying to find a pub to go to for my Sydney party.  I wanted to go to the Argyle again (had a nice time there last time) but it doesn't open til like 4pm which is way too late.  Sigh.  Busy day.  Again.  Leftover turkey and veggies for dinner.  And spent some more time looking for a pub.  

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Morning of All The Hassling All At Once.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Then an afternoon of all the BS.  Cranky at everything.  

Wednesday.  Dunno, no notes, but it was another busy day.  

Thursday.

Completely defeated by Microsoft "security".  Cranky and stressed yet again.  After drinks it was all too much and the stress of the week just exploded and I literally had a meltdown all the way home.  Made pizzas for dinner.

Friday.  Had an early night, but then woke up at Dentist Time and never got back to sleep.  Stu on the other hand was sick all night and didn't get *any* sleep.  He was eventually actually sick but that didn't help him feel any better.  Poor thing.  I took an RDO and spent the day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Well actually the morning was mostly tidying up and weeding etc in the front yard.  The afternoon was mostly tidying inside.  In the middle was a pub lunch at Herbert's with the Chrises, Tony, Frank and Karen.

Saturday.  Had an early night and slept somewhat better.  Spent the entire day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Hardly any culling which was on the todo list though. 

Dinner at Badger&Co (literally the same thing I ordered last time I was there a year ago).

Then saw "Jeremy Laser" at the ANU Women's Revue.  They also played recorder (!!  Titanic  !!) and trombone.

After twenty minutes of just them getting setup and the band playing, just before the show started a group of five people walked in (twenty minutes late!!!!) and then demanded that people move around to accommodate their group of FIVE.  Tossers.

I had just about the perfect seat, but alas they asked us not to take any photos, so just got a sneaky one at the end.

Highlights from my crap memory (I was desperate to take some notes but didn't want to get out my phone)

* We Didn't Start the Movement (to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire)
* Never Gonna Give them Up (Rickrolled!!!  regarding returning museum artefacts)
* cute little in-between-skit music including the Wii home screen music, ABBA's SOS, and Jess playing Titanic music on recorder
* Fixer Upper (from Frozen)
* three lines from Do you Wanna Build a Snowman, except I can't actually remember the question.. go away Anna, ok bye.. must ask Jess what they asked
* a parking skit where they complained about campus parking, which I had to laugh at because when *I* was at uni there was no such thing as student parking on campus
* Jess singing I'm Too Sexy
* Let's hear it for Canberra
* ANU / Xanadu

Scotland forever!!

So yeah quite a bit of fun, but it did make for a very late night :(

Sunday.  Spent All Morning FINALLY putting some sealant over the cracked grout around the loose tiles in the shower.  $20 solution to a $20000 problem.  Hopefully.  Remains to be seen if it works.  But OMFG caulking guns are hard work.  My forearms are going to ACHE tomorrow.

Then did some more cleaning.  Even managed some music.  But didn't finish my goal of culling Verona and Venice photos this weekend.  Sigh.  And the poor sweetie is still sick.  His entire gut is on strike and he felt miserable all weekend.  He's eaten like four pieces of toast in three days.  Eeep!

Some random things I've learnt lately..
* the fact that the sun is made up of hydrogen and helium was first discovered by a woman - Cecilia Payne - but of course because she was a woman she never really got the credit
* a Camera Lucida is a super cool optical device which allows an artist to superimpose a real life scene onto paper so they can trace it out.  I want one!! haha