No thanks to DC, Duncan, Aquila, Neil and Ben, we won the damned trivia night tonight.  Which means we need to run the next damned one.

Grunt!

;)

On a lighter note, I came home with three bottles of wine :)

Had a work trivia night last night.  We came second by one point.

Best.  Outcome.  Ever.

You see the trick is to not actually win these things - because otherwise you need to run the next one.  And they're an awful lot of work.  But second place you still win a prize to make your night break even.

I could only claim one point where I knew the answer but noone else did (largest freshwater lake by volume - Lake Baikal).  And there were a few we knew because we'd done them ourselves in previous trivia nights :)

So thanks Duncan, DC, Doc, Neil, Lorna and Remy for a fun night :)

So last night we finished watching Veronica Mars season 3.  And I was just annoyed last night as I was the last time I saw it in 2007 when it just *stopped*.  And then I read this morning that Rob Thomas did that deliberately!  Bastard!!

Anyway, tonight we watched the movie again.  Which was great, probably better than the first time I saw it because the series was so fresh in my mind, and not a seven year gap like last time.  Although her super lowered voice annoyed me.  I thought it may have been the production, but possibly related to her pregnancies .. maybe..

So 2014. We survived.

Probably the most significant event of the year was that my Dad died in February. Mum handled it fairly well, as she'd gotten used to the idea over the course of nearly a year. And in the end it was a relief of sorts, knowing that he was out of his misery and in a much better place. I continued doing trips to Sydney to help clear out the garage of all dad's stuff. We took many car loads to metal recycling and made a couple of hundred dollars out of it. We also freecycled quite a lot of stuff. In October mum got accepted into a retirement village and the next two months became a whirlwind of trips to Sydney, a trip to Hong Kong and Taipei, a trivia night that I had to prepare and run, a work ball I had to prepare for as well as life in general to be lived. I only just survived til December 16, then was able to collapse in a heap. It was pretty sad saying goodbye to the family home of forty two years.

So I actually had three big holidays this year. The first mum and I decided to go on when it was pretty obvious dad wasn't going to last much longer. That was for two weeks in Turkey. That was a pretty awesome trip and we saw heaps of amazing stuff. Then I did another trip with my mum in September. That was an Outback Spirit tour from Cairns to Brisbane via Mt Isa and Longreach. It was a good trip, but hideously expensive - as expensive as the Turkey trip, but didn't include international airfares, fancy hotels every night or restaurant quality meals for every meal. At the end of that trip we spent nearly a week with Chay and David which was a lovely chance to chillax after being go go go for two weeks. And the last big trip was to Hong Kong and Taipei for two weeks. I was in the middle of chaos at the time, so Stu did all the planning for it. That was a pretty good trip too, although we did struggle at times to find the best balance of going and seeing things and doing nothing and relaxing. Other than that, we went with DC to his coast house in January, to Bermagui in March, and also stayed at the coast briefly to go to Scott and Kerry's combined 40th.

Had an ok year at work. Spent a good amount of time "cleaning" - decommissioning old services and doing massive cleanups of firewall rules. Also got chucked in the deep end on a couple of projects that required extra assistance, so they were a bit stressful at times.

Healthwise I was pretty good this year. I got a cold during the Turkey trip (a pretty nasty flu thing had been going around the whole tour group so I got off pretty lightly). And it seems I got a cold probably at the movies the other night as yesterday I started sniffling. Other than that I've been pretty healthy.

We've spent heaps of time with our "whiskey" friends this year which has been awesome. But we've not seen nearly enough of Nat and Andrew as I'd have liked. We had a few games nights at Mishi's in January, August and December, with lunch at Damien's in December. My Sydney visits meant lunches (Peking duck!!!) with @StuartCRyan which was awesome, but sadly that won't be happening anymore. We saw Josh and Ally a couple of times, and Gaelian and Stef as well. A Sydney trip for George's 40th. A fair bit of drinking with the neighbours and playing with the animals. Various people came to stay over the year including the little brother, Chris and Zac, and Marc and Jo a couple of times. We're continuing to enjoy our visits to "the club" and went to many of the social events on during the year.

Pretty quiet year for the fish. All the zebra danios in the angel tank have finally died. I got five rummy nosed tetras for the two foot, and they're lovely little fish and drew out the black neon tetras which otherwise just spent their life hiding up the back of the tank. A couple of the duboisis died, which threw off the dominance balance, so one of them became dominant and picked off the rest of them one by one, so he's the only one left in that tank now with a sucking cat fish. Most of the kribs and multis downstairs are gone now too. Really would like to get rid of a lot of our fishtanks and crap ..

I didn't buy any Lego this year, but throughout January I got to play with all of Jake's Lego - around eighty sets of it! Building and dismantling and checking for missing pieces, and documenting. Sooo much fun! Also dismantled the Star Destroyer which had been out for four years!

Continued doing a lot of jigsaws at home during the summer, and some at work, although not anymore there which is a shame. I finally finished the 24000 piece "Life" jigsaw, but still haven't gotten around to taking it to work to document it all laid out. Not much else in the way of hobbies, other than part of a paint-by-numbers which I got for last break but still haven't finished.

January had a run of very hot days which required lots of icing the fish tanks to keep them cool. But the rest of the year was surprisingly mild. Winter had some very cold nights, but the pool only partly froze over a couple of times. We've had some very hot days too, but again generally it's been fairly mild. In fact this whole Christmas break has been *lovely*. Because of all the travel and chaos, the pool was a mess until just before Christmas, but because it hasn't been super hot since then, we haven't gone in yet.

Tried a surprising number of new recipes during the year - almost one a month by the look of it.
* two different lasagnas - both awesome
* black forest slice - needs some modification
* Boeuf Bourguignon inspired by Julie and Julia
* Coq au vin
* various vegetables
* breakfast raclette - trying to perfect a recipe
* white chocolate caramel slice
* duck breast
* harissa roast chicken
* zucchini and cheese fritters

We ate out a bit. I didn't think all that often, but still a fair amount. Our favourites are still Dumpling Inn and Pulp Kitchen. Bella Vista as well, although only once this year (maybe twice?). Went to Grazing a couple of times and it was awesome both times. Went to Ace Sushi a couple of times when doing shopping at the markets, but it's pretty average. Revisted Asian Cafe, Wig and Pen, Iori. New this year included:
* Grazing - awesome
* Ellacure - not fussed
* Edgar's - ok
* Bellucci's - pretty good
* Mocan and Green Grout - interesting
* A Baker - good
* Kinh Do - good
* Beijing House - meh

At work, other than the mall, tried out Altitude Cafe (meh), got thoroughly pissed off at Samiuz, went to Sanurs for an after party dinner, 2 Yummy a couple of times for after drinks dinners, and Outback Jacks a couple of times for team lunches/dinners (quite impressed with their feasts). Probably lots of other places too undocumented.

In Sydney our regular for Peking Duck was Super Bowl, and Tako Tuesdays were at Sushi and Grill on York Street for takoyaki - not fresh, but better than other places I'd tried, and it was just downstairs from work.

Also found a couple of speakeasys. The Baxter Inn in Sydney which is awesome. Went there by myself first up, then later with Luc and again later with Neil. Went to Molly with the sweetie as well.

Movies:
* The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
* The Lego Movie (x2)
* Lucy
* The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Books:
* Deadly Décisions, by Kathy Reichs
* The Earthsea Quartet, by Ursula LaGuin
* The Delinquents, by Criena Rohan
* Fatal Voyage, by Kathy Reichs
* Animal Farm, by George Orwell
* *batteries not included, by Wayland Drew
* Palomino, by Danielle Steel
* Star Wars Episode I, by Terry Brooks
* Dewey, by Vicki Myron
* A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle
* Thunder Dog, by Michael Hingson
* Star Wars Episode II, by R.A. Salvatore

Other Stuff:
* Multicultural Festival aka meat on a stick day!
* Hall Markets for first time
* Mapping Our World exhibition at the National Library
* Balloon Fiesta in March
* Inherited Dad's camera
* Inspected the Sentinel apartments in Belconnen
* Inspected my flat in Sydney. Got depressed over deadbeat tenants who don't take care of other people's property
* Won another work trivia night. Ran the next one
* Airport open day - flying visit as could only spend an hour there
* Went to the War Memorial but was disappointed the WWI exhibition was closed for renovations
* Whiskey Live - 44 whiskeys oh my!
* Stu's Japanese classes cultural nights twice
* Poultry show at epic
* Had to buy a new lens because I'd smashed my other one in Turkey. Bought the same one
* Drama with cooling problems with my car. Found a new mechanic who I think might have fixed it
* Had to buy a new dishwasher as the last one burnt out
* Fired up Stu's old Android and started playing Ingress. Got a sim for it seven weeks later but the damage to my iPhone battery was done.
* Took a random day off and cleaned half the garage
* Zone 3 with work
* Bought Stu a new car on a very good finance deal - cheaper than our mortgage!
* BBQs at @CLBradley's. On one of them I borrowed Frozen and have been slightly obsessed with it ever since
* Chucked out years of receipts
* Birthday dinner of Chinese takeaway in Sydney
* Whiskey tasting night on my birthday, Bella vista for dinner
* Skiing in August
* Chickens and duckies next door (and lizards and frogs and cats and dogs)
* Total lunar eclipse
* Pulled off a semi-convincing Queen Elsa at our work Halloween Ball
* Mum tried to electrocute herself but thankfully failed
* Carols service at Como Church

So that's 2014 done! I know some of my readers have had a tough year (especially my brother). Hope things improve in 2015.

Happy new year!

So there's been trivia nights (that I ran), balls (that I had to organise/prepare for), work, holidays to plan, holidays to sort photos for, and two trips to Sydney for good measure.  We've Freecycled *heaps* of stuff, and I've brought two carloads of stuff back to Canberra for people that wanted things here.  I've barely been at home the past two months.  Ingress and exercise suffered most.  And my flex time - been in the red for a month and struggling to stay afloat.  I have a tonne of pics I want to upload.  One day...  

Here's one though, a spiny-leaf stick insect.. soo cute!

Thursday: work drinks, then Amazing Race, not sure why but I'm *still* surprised how loud, tedious and *dumb* Americans are.  Do they not teach you how to tell which way is north in America?

Friday: Watched part of Leon with the sweetie, then Air Crash Investigations and the Bourne Ultimatum.

Saturday: Went to Kingston and Fyshwick with the sweetie and was successful in part of our shopping mission, but not all.  Went hard on the trivia night, got pretty much everything ready except the whole process of getting it into the slide show.  I tried, but I couldn't connect up the work laptop for some reason, and then I couldn't connect to webmail either because I couldn't remember my pin.  So had to abandon that idea.  So I went ahead and finished geotagging all my holiday photos.  Also finished watching Leon with the sweetie.  Quite a good movie, enjoyed it.

Sunday: Cleaned the kitchen and bathroom and started culling holiday photos.  Also went out with EffanC for C's birthday.  Pics soon.  Then back to their place to chill out and chat for the rest of the afternoon.  Quite a lovely afternoon.  Food shopping, then home and then watched Frozen.  Hoping I don't get hungry later, because I really haven't eaten much since lunch time..

Last weekend was quite busy in terms of socialising.

As mentioned previously, the Friday night we had Gaelian and Stef over.

Late Saturday afternoon we went over to Potty's to try and clean up his computer that was full of malware the kids had installed.

Then we headed over to Mishi's for a games night.  Much chatting and eating and bit of game playing.  We played DC's logo game again which was fun, then started on Trivial Pursuit but gave up after Damien and Amanda got two pieces of pie, as the questions were quite hard and it was very slow going.

Sunday was lunch at Josh and Ally's with Andrea and GP.  Ally had cooked up some delicious food including a cassoulet!

I might have also helped the small person build one of her Lego sets.

We stayed all afternoon which was nice.

Then we came home and we watched Frozen that I'd borrowed off Miss M.

2.4.14

Yeah so we accidentally won the social club trivia night, no thanks to DC, Doc and Aquila.  Sheesh. Now we need to organise the next one!  Bah!   ;)

Before the tables were ready, Aquila and I went for a wander to hack some portals, and document this spider (sorry Tony!)

I've barely spent any time at my computer this week.  News feeds are way behind.  Blogging is way behind.  Photo sorting is way behind.

Saturday night we all went to a games night at Mishi's.  We played Geek Battle, which our team won, then 80s Trivial Pursuit, which Damien and Amanda won.  I'd gotten 80s Trivial Pursuit some years back from somewhere or other, played it once and not really liked it (I was only a kid in the 80s, so didn't have much concept of news, sport, and even music for pretty much the whole first half).  We gave it to Nat and Andrew, but they eventually returned it, considering they weren't even born until 1983 ;)  So when Amanda said they wanted it a while back, I wholeheartedly passed it on :)

Sunday morning Fiona went out, and the sweetie and I had brunch at Black Pepper and did our food shopping.  I continued to enjoy a full weekend at home and got a bit more of the house tidied.

Sunday night we did a roast pork, although I failed somewhat on the crackling.

Standard working week, although have been on call, and have had alerts wake me up Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday ... blah :(

Friday night saw us heading to North Cooma (aka as far south in Canberra as you can go) to have dinner at Andrew and Jen's.  Richard and Tracey came too so it was quite the party.

And how cool is this - Andrew's building a 747 flight simulator, complete with physical controls and switches and computerised flight systems that plug into Microsoft Flight Simulater.  Extremelly cool!

And there was quite the feast of food, including a rather tasty dish of chicken, prawns and bacon .. sounds strange but it was very nice :)

After dinner we played p0ker until Tracey's chips ran out (and they had to get kids home to bed). Then we played Cranium which is a mashup of Pictionary, Charades, Trivial Pursuit and Rapidough.  The game play was a bit confusing and odd, but that might have been because we just hadn't read the instructions thoroughly.  It was fun anyway.

Saturday night we went to Josh and Ally's for a lovely evening of chatting and a very yummy middle eastern fish dish.