Christmas 1980

We hadn't started doing family photos back then.  But Dad did take photos of David and me.  1980 was the year we got our first bikes.  So here's a photo of me on my shiny new bike!  No gears though, and we lived in a hilly suburb, so riding it was a lot of hard work!

Christmas 1990

Obligatory family and present photos.

We went over to Nana's on Christmas day.  This is all the cousins on Mum's side.

And some extra ringins I don't even know who they are.

No idea what we did with Dad's side of the family - no photos.

Christmas 2000

I was living out of home by now.

Christmas Eve we met up with Ian and Jan at Grandma's nursing home. 

I got a rare good photo of Jan!

Christmas Day we were back home for Christmas lunch, and some of Mum's family came over.

Christmas 2010

Had Christmas Day in Yass with Stu's family.

Then on Boxing Day we drove to Sydney to have dinner with my family.

Christmas 2020

A very quiet one this year.

I didn't sleep very well, and tried to sleep in.  But that put me "behind" all morning.  Not that I really was, I just felt like I was because I felt two hours out all morning.  I cooked a roast pork (the butcher only had fancy stuffed ones, and they only had coconut, mango and pineapple left, and as it turns out a kick of chili), potato bake and veggies.

After lunch Stu and I headed over to Annie's for drinks and afternoon tea.  Not that any of us felt like any food for *ages*.  I took over some of a gingerbread cheesecake (handy I had a backup - the pavlova I tried to make was an epic failure).

David had gone out in the afternoon/evening to a mate's place, so I think we just watched some Discovery before bed.

Merry (backdated) Christmas! :) 🎄🍾🥂🎁

Backdating, but only by two days ;)

Sunday.  Slow cooked some lamb shanks.  We went and visited Annie and the family in the middle, so instead of putting them in later, I put them on earlier, but at quite a low temperature.  They actually turned out really well.  But I didn't manage to get any leftovers.  Doh.  

In the evening watched the last episode of The IT Crowd (the one-off final special).

Monday.  Woke up at like 5am.  No notes for the day (it's been a bit of a nothing week).  Leftovers for dinner and watched episode 10 of Against the Wind.

Tuesday.  Better sleep.  Was scanning Dad's slides of San Francisco and came across these.  I might have LOLed.  A lot.

Noted that I had an ok day, but that I'd gone on strike house-wise.  Can't remember why.  But I was cranky at everything and so Stu cooked dinner - duck and plum gyozas with bok choy and rice.  Very nice.

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Went into town for a doctor's appointment.  Had ten minutes or so before it was due so thought I'd grab a quick lunch at KFC.  Ha.  Firstly it was *slow as*, and when I finally did get to order, they said they had no fillets.  And I'm like WTF?  And he was like, do you want a zinger.  NO, I want a fillet burger.  And this was after David the other night had tried to get a fillet burger at Gold Creek KFC and they had no fillets.  You could maybe understand that because it was very late at night, but I was in Garema Place at lunch time.  No fricken excuse KFC!  So I walked out in disgust.  And met up with the sweetie who let me have some of his KFC - Korean fried chicken - at Cocorea.

Fighting with migrating CVS to a new server in the afternoon but I couldn't figure it out because I'm dumb.  Stu was late to pick me up because of a burst water main on Barry Drive.  So we got pizza.  Blerf.  Watched episode 11 of Against the Wind.

Thursday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  Ok day.  I think.  Work drinks were good.  

Friday.  Took a random day off.  Woke up early but got a bit more sleep, but a bit of a slow start. 

Michelle's strawberries are doing great!

Washed the sheets.  Then we ran errands.  Took about a dozen wine boxes full of books to Lifeline.  Went to the tip to drop off the old oven, all its trays, and the old extenda-line, which turned out to be free because it was all primarily metal!  Win!  Then to the Green Shed.  I picked up a big pile of jigsaws, as well as a chest of drawers I want to use as a pantry in the van.  $15 for all the jigsaws and $10 for the drawers.  Not bad :)  Came home briefly then headed out again for Stuey R's farewell.  Didn't get much done in the afternoon - too sleepie.

So this week we had our roof restored.  Wednesday they cleaned.  Thursday they primed.  Friday morning they did the first coat.  Friday afternoon they did the second coat.  Just before the rain that was due Friday night!

Friday evening met up with EffanC for drinks at the Pot Belly.  Got home minutes before the rain started.

Saturday.  Slept fairly well.  Did heaps of things on the todo list, but nowhere near enough. 

First batch of strawberries!  Although slugs had gotten to one of them otherwise would have had four.  #grunt

Went over to EffanC's for dinner, with Robert and Ian.

This is the bottletop of a Great Northern beer

Can you see the bird?

Sunday.  Woke up after 3am some time and never got back to sleep.  So a very slow start.  Had brunch at The Scottish Restaurant then did our food shopping.  Too tired to do anything much.  In fact we both had a nap in the afternoon.  Well I didn't have much of a sleep - my body simply refuses to sleep, even when it's super tired.  A bit after 3pm I got up and spent the rest of the afternoon cooking.

I cooked all this (except one of the bags of potatoes).  Two trays of roast veggies.  Then roast beef with another two trays of veggies.  A kilo of mince with bacon, onion and garlic, and honey mustard chicken.

After dinner I ended up with five meals of roast beef and veggies, four of honey mustard chicken, mince in four containers to be cooked with whatever, and two extra containers of roast veggies.  Basically enough food for the entire week.  And probably even longer.  

Canberra has escaped relatively unscathed from COVID-19 (so far).  We had a spate of cases right in the beginning, but almost all of them were from returning overseas travellers and their close contacts.  There was a single case in June from a diplomat returning from overseas.  And in July there was a few linked to a family returning from Melbourne during their spike in cases.

Life for us hasn't changed too much.  As I said at the beginning, for us it just meant seeing less of our friends and not eating out as much.  As those restrictions were lifted some months ago, we have been able to catch up with friends more often, and we've been out for meals more often.

We're mostly doing our shopping fortnightly so we don't need to go to the shops as often.  We've done some shopping at the markets and I get most of our milk and orange juice (and beer!) from Chris's.  And our last two big Coles shops have been delivered, so we haven't set foot in Coles in over two months.

I think I'm about the same weight as pre covid.  I would normally eat lunches at the food court every day so that hasn't been happening, but I would also get quite a bit more walking in.  I'm still going for a short walk at lunch every day and seeing three or four groups of magpies.  Lunches are either leftovers or noodles or toast or whatever.  Not terribly healthy.

Our work drinks are still closed, although that may change soon.  During the six months of the lock down we drank through eight cases of Corona beer.  In the last couple of months the guys that have been in the office have gone up to the Pot Belly for Thursday drinks.  While it's good and all, it's *very* expensive compared to drinking at home, or even at work.

We've been encouraged to come into work to work more often.  Which is a shame because I could happily work from home and *never* go into the office.  But they won't let us do that.  So on Thursday I went into work - for only the third time since March - and exactly six months to the day that I started working from home.  I'll probably go in once a week to start with, unless we get an outbreak here.

Travelwise, the trip to Europe with Mum got postponed two years.  I found it somewhat ironic that the whole reason the Passion Play in Oberammergau came to be was because of a plague.  And this year they had to cancel (postpone).  Because of a plague.

Our cruise next year has finally been called off.  But again this one has been postponed a year.  Let's just hope there's a vaccine developed in the next year otherwise even then things will be in doubt.

We missed out on going to Tasmania for Stu's 50th, but did have a nice long weekend in Tumut which was really nice.

How's everyone else's lockdowns going?

Thirty years ago today Mum took this photo of David's train set in the garage downstairs.  Dad originally built this on a different wall of the workshop downstairs, but moved it to this spot where it stayed til David moved out of home and took all his trains with him.  It was pretty amazing because Dad was into electronics and had everything wired up - including working signals!  It was probably Dad's toy as much as David's ;)  

Forty years ago today someone took this photo of the locomotive at the Zig Zag Railway.  I have no idea if I was there or not.  I probably was, I do remember going a couple of times as a kid.  It was before Mum got her Minolta camera, so likely Dad took it and Mum got it printed.  ** edit:  so it was definitely Dad, and the whole family was there.  *however* Mum for some reason has crossed out the date on the slide and written her birthday.  I can't understand why.  All the photos are labelled 22.6.80, which was a Sunday, which makes sense for when the train would be running (the 16th was a Monday - highly unlikely it would have been running then).  Weird stuff.

But what was funny is that just after the top picture of David's trainset in the photo album were these photos of the Zig Zag railway.  So they would have been taken in 1990 as well - almost exactly ten years after the photo above.  Probably David took those ones.

Backdating again.. I'm such a slacker!!

Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday nothing eventful, just UK photo labelling and jigsaw.  By Wednesday I'd labelled 1706 photos in three weeks.

Thursday morning I passed 1000 slides of Dad's scanned.  Was up to episode 7 in Lego Masters.

Friday morning I found a date on one of Dad's pieces of RADOS paper.  The ABC used to print out the runsheets/programmes on paper and the system was called RADOS.  I'm sure Mum/David could correct me on the details.  The point is they only used the paper once then it was scrap.  So Dad used to bring it home for us as scrap paper.  All the time I was living at home I used that paper.  So did the rest of the family.  In the back of each slide box, Dad has used RADOS paper to summarise what is in each box.  The box I opened on Friday had the date - December 1980.  I already knew that Dad had rearranged slides somewhat from their original order, but this put a date on it - after 1980.  Fun times.  

Friday also happened to be the fifteen anniversary of when the sweetie and I first met in real life.  We had chicken kiev for dinner and watched Lego Masters.

Saturday I had a body corporate annual meeting for my flat in Sydney.  I've been to a couple over the years, but this year because of COVID-19 they did it as a phone meeting.  Which made it great for me - I could attend one without even leaving home!  The strata lady reckoned it was good because they got people calling in that wouldn't or couldn't normally come (like me!) and she even had one call in from South Africa for one of her buildings!

I also might have finished The Little Mermaid section of the jigsaw.  I cooked two trays of home-made potato wedges for dinner, which were epic awesome.  Then we watched some Lego Masters, which was the episode under water.  Which all tied in nicely with "Under the Sea" theme because we also watched The Little Mermaid that night.

Sunday was bits and pieces of housework, epic pizza scrolls for lunch, Lego part picking, and bribing the magpies not to swoop me come spring time (they came flying over before I'd even seen them - so fricken cool!)

Pretty sure we finished Lego Masters that Sunday night.  Was really happy the guys that won did, they looked like they were having fun the whole way through and their builds were amazing.

Monday we went food shopping.  Did a bit of housey stuff.  Cooked "lemon butt chicken" for dinner (just a roast chicken with a whole lemon as stuffing).  Turned out really nicely.  Didn't get a lot of leftovers though ;)

Long weekends are great.....

Forty years ago today our family headed off for a week long stay at Shoal Bay.  I have very few memories of that trip.  I do remember the kookaburra though! (and chasing the duckling)

A few of Mum's prints (from Dad's slides) are on my Australian Holidays blog.

Our family bought this little Datsun 120Y in March 1978.  Getting it was one of my earliest memories.  Even before we got it I remember going on a preschool excursion and driving past it in the car yard (we'd already decided on it but just hadn't picked it up yet).  I learnt to drive in that car (well officially my first drive was in a Volkswagen Passat and I drove 80km around the back roads of Condobolin in a Land Cruiser before I got my licence), but all my learning was in Red Car.  I bought my own car at the beginning of 1997, and about a year later my parents got a new car, and they gave? sold? Red Car to David.  He had a couple of years but kept it parked in the front yard because there were already two cars in the garage.  Then one day and old tree trunk fell on top of it :(:(  David had it repaired, but it was never quite the same - the chassis was probably slightly bent and he kept burning through tires due to bad wheel alignment.  In the end he got rid of it, and one of the Bargwanna sons took it to be a rally car.  

Twenty years ago tonight Mum took one last photo of it before it went away forever.

Celebrating what would have been a golden day ..

Here's some of Mum getting ready

Arriving at the church

Signing the register

Walking back down the aisle

Some shots of people outside the church

Some at the reception venue

Going away 

There were also a few small colour prints of the day.  Mum regretted not getting the whole day done properly in colour, but it was still a lot more expensive to do colour back then..

Happy anniversary Mum and Dad!

Thirty years ago today we went as a family on an early bushwalk as part of the St Clements bushwalking group.  That bushwalking group is still going in some form, although I don't think we ever went on a bushwalk again as a family...

Angophora on Lady Carrington Drive, Royal National Park

Group from St Clements Bushwalking Club sheltering from the rain on Lady Carrington Drive.
Ted, ?, Graham Reid, Evelyn Street, Peter Hanna, David, Pam Hanna, Diana Reid, Karen

The last week of our break was overshadowed, quite literally, by the catastrophe of the bushfires.  I watched them get closer and closer to Kit and Pete's place, then it skirted round their town, but they're not out of danger yet.  It's still very close to David's place at River Island.  It got very close to DC's place at Malua Bay, and Fiona's place in Newcastle.  @CLBradley's place at Kangaroo Valley is still under threat.  Lisa's family lost a farm house and a camper.   Connor's inlaws' land was burnt out, but the shed was ok.  Chloe's land got burnt out and their shed and tractor are gone, but the house they are building was untouched.  And that's just people I know.  People have died.  Many homes, farms and historic buildings have been lost.  The toll on the bush and the wildlife is incalculable.  The smoke we've been breathing for the past few weeks is the remains of millions upon *millions* of plants and animals.  It's utterly devastating and heartbreaking.  I really fear that this weather is the new "normal" and wonder if it will ever properly rain again...

So New Year's Eve was very hot and very windy, and I was *super* nervous about fires starting.  We were going to go out to the club but decided not to.  EffanC also decided not to go, so we went over to their place instead as conditions eased. 

So it was fairly quiet evening of just chatting and watching the Sydney fireworks.  Even David joined us after his shift finished which was nice.

The smoke got thick again as the wind changed in the evening.  My first photos of the new year are of the smoke on the way home..

It was a pretty late night so Wednesday, New Year's Day, was a slow, quiet day.  Did a bit of photo processing, blogging, some jigsaw, and we watched Die Another Day in the evening.

Thursday ended up being another quiet day.  Didn't get a whole lot done.  Stu signed up for Disney+ and we watched The Force Awakens in the evening.  Of course our introduction to Disney+, literally the first thing on the screen, was Error 43.  Fricken useless.

How cute are these!?  Stu got them in the mail (before Australia Post stopped deliveries because of the smoke).

Friday with the cooler weather I took the opportunity to check on the gutters.  They weren't too bad.  David also couldn't help himself and pulled apart our cooler and gave it all a good scrub.  Bestest brother ever!

After lunch Kit called.  They were in Canberra - they'd come up Thursday night with all the animals (two dogs, a cat, two birds, three frogs and a snake) leaving behind the chickens and the fish.  They came over in the afternoon and just chilled out for a couple of hours which was nice.  Pete had a lot of fun watching the wedding videos, while Kit monitored the fires and social media.  We dropped their car back at her mum's and had a drink.

Then Stu picked us up and we all went to Bella Vista for dinner.  

We had Garlic and cheese foccacia to share $9 which was delicious (Kit said it was the best cheese and garlic bread she'd ever eaten heh).

For dinner I had Vitello Saltimbocca: Veal escallops with sage, Prosciutto and mozzarella cheese in a white wine reduction sauce served with creamy mash and green beans. ($35)

Then back to our place to chat for a while.  It was nice that they felt they could just come and hang out and relax with us.  We think they made a sensible decision getting to safety ahead of the predicted craziness on Saturday.  

So Saturday.  The hot north-westerly winds picked up again, fanning the flames of all the fires going on at the coast.  I was tense again.  I spent the morning putting away all the Christmas decorations.  Didn't get much done in the afternoon, although I did finish blogging our Melbourne trip, where we went and saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  Link is here - http://kazza.id.au/oz_holidays/ - if you wanted to have a look (last entry is first on that page so scroll down to see it in order).  We watched Casino Royale in the evening.  

The wind did blow all the smoke away for the day, but it came back again around 10pm.

And when I say it came back, I mean it *really* came back.  We could smell it as soon as it hit, and it was swift and all consuming.  In the morning it was like waking up in hell...  the phone wouldn't get the white balance right, I had to fiddle with the DSLR to get this.  

Played through an escape game on my phone, but otherwise only got little bits and pieces done during the day.

In the evening a bunch of us went over to Rob and Lyn's for dinner which was lovely.  The temperature had cooled down significantly so it was nice outside, just very smoky, so we stayed inside, which was a lot hotter.  But had a very pleasant evening.  Rob cooked some quite delicious steaks and there was heaps of other food.

So back to some sense of reality on Monday.  My "essential" todo list kept me going til 10pm but then I couldn't get to sleep (a mosquito buzzing around certainly didn't help, not to mention where the f@#$ did it come from, given there's no standing water anywhere in Canberra at the moment).  So today was a bit of a zombie day, but was able to do lots of cleaning which was good.  And tonight processed photos, and have spent an hour writing up this entry.  

Stay safe everyone...