Sunday.  9th.  Mini roast beef for dinner.  Finished season 4 of The Crown.  In Amazing Race the cops came back, after being out for two weeks.  !!  Turns out at that point they'd been racing for six weeks total.  In like sixteen legs.  Craziness.  You wonder where all the other days go.  Travel days?  Rest days?

The lemon cheesecake I made

Monday.  Slept ok.  More server migration work.  And lots of photo culling.

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Tried to do a test server migration, but only got about ten minutes of that done all day because of all the stoopid and all the rage and all the meetings.  Needed a drink by 15:20 but no time for that cause I had a prod change to do at 16:30.  Sigh.  But I did manage to cook a nice pasta bolognase for dinner.  Also finished first pass photo culling of Europe photos!

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Got to work super early, and left super late, so got a lot of stuff done (at least on either side, not so much in the middle because people).  I'd get so much more work done if I didn't have to GO to work or have to talk to anyone.  

Thursday.  Had to migrate to a new DR laptop to replace an aging one, and tried to do a prod server migration.  Didn't finish either.  Oh well.

Saw this at lunch.. wtf??

Drinks/pizza/etc.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Took an RDO!!  Trying to do all All The Things.  But then took like three hours out of it to do an Ikea run.  *sigh*.  Thinking of something like this for a bin solution (will have to move all the shelves up a bit):

Also had pork ribs nom nom nom

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  

Do you reckon this will kill us?  

Looks disgusting right? :)  It was some beef dumplings that were being thrown at work (fridge clean: everything had been taken out of the fridges for cleaning.  Around 17:15 I claimed a couple of perishable things that would have needed throwing out if they'd been left out overnight.  These dumplings were a frozen solid ball that needed defrosting, but of course the dough can't handle that and they disintegrated).

But, they turn out quite nicely if you fry the heck out of them, and 24 hours later we haven't gotten sick ;)

Watched First Man in the evening.  So it was more a character study than a movie.  Not that there was much character to explore.  He says like three things the entire movie (ok exaggerating, a little, but not much).  It was told from mostly Neil's point of view, which means your entire experience of the movie is inside a dark shaky metal box.  Certainly none of magic of something like The Right Stuff (*that* was a good early astronaut movie).  This one was a bit lame.  AND FFS KEEP THE F#$&ING CAMERA STILL!!  OMFG such a terrible trend in filmmaking, oh let's just give the camera to a drunk cameraman to try and make the audience feel queasy.  Fricken hate.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  Except I felt blah about the fact that even long weekends are too short.  I can't keep this up.  There's just too much to do to have time to go to work.  Took some more stones to Cath's and made a bit of a dent in the periwinkle under the cherry tree.  Also finished sorting Dad's slides into some semblance of chronological order.  Going to have a break from that for a few weeks so I can finish culling Europe photos.  Then it will be geotagging, applying exif data, copying, touching up, renaming and filing.  

Some fun facts:
* this was from last week - Mozart actually had six children, but only two survived past infancy.  Neither married or had kids, although one did become a musician.
* Australia controls 11% of the world's air space!
* The name Arctic comes from the Greek arktos, meaning "bear." Anta is synonymous with anti, which means "opposite".  So you have Arctic (bear) and Antarctic (opposite bear).
* From the time Pluto was discovered until the time it was demoted from planethood, it still hadn't made one complete revolution around the sun (it still hasn't)
* Neil Armstrong had a daughter Karen (she died at the age of two from a brainstem tumor)

Sunday.  2nd.  Tuna casserole for dinner then The Crown.

Monday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - tired, itchy, restless.  Then it felt like too early a wakeup.  Sigh.  Finished migrating a server I started on Friday.  Also some more routing cleanup on some test devices.  TV dinners for dinner.  It was that kind of day (and we hadn't been shopping so there was barely any food in the house).  Then first pass culled our two days in the Cinque Terre.  

Also disturbed this huge wolf spider while weeding at lunch

Tuesday.   Took forever to get to sleep *again*.  I shouldn't be allowed to operate heavy machinery.  But then it was a crazy stoopid busy day.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok for a change. 

Not as crazy busy a day.  Had dinner at BONE .. oh sorry, B ONE.  They really need to fix their branding.

Pork belly bao - with kimchi, had a little bit of a kick to it

Chicken dumplings - ok, but very hard dough

Edamame - pretending to be a bit healthy with a little greenery

Tako karaage - after watching My Octopus Teacher I felt a little conflicted eating these guys..

Canberra winters..

Then saw Come From Away, which was funny and sad and sweet and very well done with such a small cast, I really enjoyed it.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Hard to concentrate at work - too many people and too much noise and talking.  

These went up all over the building overnight at work.  Clearly some idiot fell over watching their phone and not the steps, which means now we all need warnings/instructions on how to use stairs.  Of course "three points" is utterly ridiculous (you'd need to have both hands on a hand rail) and we ALL mocked it.

Whisky night at work.  Super quiet though, didn't get many people come up for it.  Sigh.

Pizza and Picard (with the Enterprise D! haha)

Friday.  Another server migration.  

We're getting two trees planted on our nature strip.  Neighbour is going to have a sad he won't be able to park there anymore.

Lunch at Herbert's with the Chrises, Tony and Neil.  I had a chicken burger.

We had been planning to go out to the club after work, but Stu was in the office every day this week and so he didn't feel like leaving the house in the evening (and the pouring rain certainly did help with the motivation).  Chicken kiev for dinner, then the first two thirds of Amadeus Director's Cut, which we both hadn't seen in a very long time.

Saturday.  We were supposed to go the club working bee, but Stu's back was killing him (too many days sitting up at a desk at work).  To be honest I was a bit relieved, as these days I'm waking up on Saturday mornings in a bit of a panic about everything I have to do.  Freeminded out the next six weeks in terms of photo culling and house stuff.  Did some food shopping in the morning then didn't leave the house all day.  Did I mention the rain?  I did a bunch of stuff on my todo list, but there was more I could have done.  Stu cooked Coronation Oden for dinner.  

Finished season 3 of Picard which I really enjoyed.  Makes me wanna go back and watch all of Next Gen again.  Then we finished Amadeus.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Continuation of All The Things.  Except I got distracted by one item on my todo list which was "Put Dad's slides away" except I couldn't do that without first trying to find where some mystery slides belong.  Which meant pulling out many rolls and trying to line up printed date/frame stamps.  There's still a few that just don't match up with anything which annoys me.  Dad's slides are probably at the lower end of my priority list, but still the one I end up doing when there's other things that need doing more. And I think it's because it's a *puzzle* that needs to be solved.  Getting them into order and figuring out where things should go is a challenge and there's a satisfaction from assembling an entire roll of film back into its original order.  

Some things I learnt this week (trying this as in idea to help me try and learn something new every day, let's see how long it lasts):  The sphincter at the top of the stomach is called the cardiac sphincter.  Well, it's *also* called that, as well esophageal sphincter which is what I always thought it was.  And the valve used on just about every bicycle/car/truck tyre is called a Schrader Valve.  There you go.

Sunday.  11th.  Lamb roast for dinner.

Then watched V for Vendetta.  Not nearly as scary watching this time as it was the first time we watched it.  The world is in a bit of a different place (in terms of who's in power in the UK, USA and Australia at the moment).

Monday.  Slept okish.  I finished culling photos from the cruise (the day entries, still need to do the Carnival Pride, food and hotels).  Got it down to 1042 photos.  Had a meltdown because the barrel vacuum cleaner is so damned hard to use.  I need two hands to hold onto it so it doesn't fall apart which leaves nothing left for moving furniture around, not to mention have to stop every two seconds to pull to barrel closer.  Hate hate hate hate hate.

Tuesday.  Shine Dome talk after work.  They had Mr Dean Yibarbuk who is a ranger in Arhem Land talk about his work with fire management up there which was pretty cool.  And also a talk by Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith.

Dinner at 10 After.

Wednesday.  Dinner at CBD Dumpling House.  Get a seat at the bar and watch the kitchen action!

The pan fried shallot cake was fresh and crispy

The xiao long bao were nice, but not as good as Din Tai Fung

The other dumplings were decent too

The place was packed, but we were in and out in twenty minutes.  Pretty impressive!!

Thursday.  Quickie drink at work then into town for the third night in a row to catch up with Luc who was in town.  We had such a short time to catch up - like less than an hour.  Great to catch up but sad it was so short.

Mary's French, with a Frenchman!

Antebellum

Watched some more Picard.  I'm enjoying this season.  The last couple of episodes were directed by Jonathan Frakes and have four or five original cast members which has been a lot of fun.  It's like Next Gen only more "real" and better character development.

Friday.  Windows patched and rebooted overnight.  They've stuffed up window behaviour.  Now if you maximise a window it'll either completely cover the task bar, or it'll hide the bottom of your window behind your taskbar.  Completely retarded.  ** As of Sunday night this seems to have been fixed, even without another reboot **  Leftover lamb shanks for dinner, then Futurama, then finished season 4 of Death in Paradise.  Kit invited us down for a drink.  Then had sad cause we don't live next door anymore.  

Oh, the other week I made it to level 10000 in Candy Crush!!  Except then this week they completely changed the interface.  That coupled with a super hard level 10086 and I've lost all motivation to play.  Other than logging in to collect daily rewards I've all but stopped playing.  Maybe they'll nerf the level and I'll take it up again.

Also this week I spent several mornings fighting with Dad's slides.  Specifically his ones of Yerranderie.  He did a bushwalking trip in June 1985, and we went there as a family in December 1985.  Those two trips were easy enough to separate.  But within the December trip there were clearly two different rolls of film.  But the second roll of film had photos interspersed with the first roll.  The dates were right (when compared with Mum's photos) so it just didn't make any sense.  Then Stu said "maybe there were two cameras" which also didn't make any sense until I thought about it some more.  Dad had massive problems with his old camera in August 1985 - he lost half of his photos to the camera over-exposing them.  Maybe he got himself a new camera for Christmas?  Mum couldn't remember.  But it was certainly plausible.  Maybe the half a dozen photos in the middle were simply finishing off the last roll of film on the old camera?  I decided to go with that :)

Saturday.  Woke up in the middle of the night for like an hour and a half for no good reason.  Spent most of the day labelling holiday photos and inventorying Vic's Lego.  I did also spent an hour and a half cleaning out a manky fish tank, consolidating a couple of tanks, then arranging the power and lights so that only two tanks are active now, with another essentially just keeping heaters from drying out, running for just a few hours in the middle of the day while the sun is out.  Then I found the house battery simply didn't charge.  Flatline at 10% all day.  Solar Edge strikes again.  #grunt.  Leftovers for dinner then watched Innerspace.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Spent the entire day (other than going out for lunch and food shopping) labelling photos and inventorying Lego.  The sort of nice quiet day I crave every day.  Oh, and the battery charged today.  Hurray.  

Sunday.  28th.  Not backdating for a change!  Roast turkey and all the veggies for dinner.  Then Futurama/Crown.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Day of trying to do All The Things - cleaning, photo culling, etc.  Also went into battle with the Dodgy Dyson.  Cleaned everything out, and reseated the battery.  No luck.  Fricken POS.  It's like Dyson programme these things to just stop working after a couple of years to force you to buy new stuff, even when the old stuff is perfectly fine.  Cooked a very nice tuna casserole for dinner.  Also, it was 18 years ago tonight that I met the sweetie in person!

Cutest bassoon player in the world?

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Filled with rage that the Electrolux cordless vacuum cleaner we have as backup has also decided its battery is no good.  So now we have no working cordless vacuum cleaners.  Sigh.  Ok day.  I think.  I forget.  Creamy fettuccini for dinner.  Finished first pass cull of cruise photos, and into final culls.

Not convinced by this Hutwoods candle.  It sure smells nice, but this huge reed wick burns funny and then splits

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Quiet morning.  Then found MESS - someone had put some test servers in a prod group, so I HAD to fix it. 

New Hardly Normal coming to the mall

Chicken and egg rice bowl from KSK

Leftovers for dinner, and finished final culls up to day 6.  Then watched the Lego Grandmasters final.  OMFG such amazing builds!!

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep but then slept ok.  More mess cleaning, and generally catching up.  Super quiet drinks.  Pizza.  Watched John Oliver's take on AI, which has foibles such as deciding that images of skin cancer with rulers in them are much more likely to be malignant.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  My birds didn't come to see me.  Chicken kiev for dinner, then watched My Octopus Teacher which was beautiful.

Saturday.  Sneaky trip to Wagga Wagga to see the Lego brick show (might get a selection of the 600-odd photos online one day).  Stopped at the Bethungra Spiral but the lighting wasn't great.  

These carriages were being transported from South Australia to Goulburn and the trainspotters were out in force

Had lunch with David at the Junee Hotel.

And there were also planes to be seen

Sunday.  Nothing much.  Did start a jigsaw and get a quarter of the way through it.  Then the usual Sunday afternoon crap, including feeling that life and weekends are far too short.

Sunday.  21st.  Had yummy basa bake for dinner, then Futurama, The Crown (Charles and Di's engagement and wedding) and Lego Grandmasters.

Monday.  Slept okish.  Cleaning and tidying day.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters in the evening.  The sweetie was having a day so we ended up getting pizza for dinner, including vomit pizza!

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - stressing about All The Things and restless.  Cleaning and decommissioning day.  Six magpies came to see me at lunch - three from either side of the ant hill demarcation line.  

Skipped doing any music to get an early start on culling.  Leftover butt beef cheeks for dinner.  Still took til 20:00 to cull three days of photos.  hmm.  

Wednesday.  Late getting to sleep, slept ok but woke up around 5.  Sick of the stoopid by 9am.  Sigh.  Did a cleaning change in prod which noone has yelled about so far.  

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  

Ok day I think.  After work went with the hills to the Hellenic Club for dinner and AWS show with Emma Pask and Ed Wilson (I'll put pics in another post).  I had veal scallopene for dinner which wasn't on the menu but I saw the dude next to us eating it and asked for it.  It was yummy!

Friday.  Took me a while to get to sleep even though it was very late.  And then woke up early.  Sigh.  Surprisingly not a zombie day though so that was nice.  Lots of cleaning and decommissioning work.  Did some weeding at lunch.  A currawong was closely monitoring the situation and even came down right next to me to pick up a big juicy worm I must have dislodged.  After work was Whisky Live which was fun as always.  

Saturday.  Some cleaning of the bedroom in the morning, and did a sort of Dad's Tasmania photos (this time he'd only smooshed together two trips).  I also found a whole heap more photos of the Lego Brickshow from last year.  I swear I'd taken more photos than I had seen on the Canon and iPhone.  Yeah - they were on the G5X - over 500 of them!  So might post some more of those at some point.  Headed out to the club in the late afternoon for an "M" themed night, which I used as a good excuse to trot out my Minifig costume!

Marcanna and Greg did an amazing Mexican feast!

It was also the club's birthday this week, so they had a big cake.  John and Shirley told a heap of stuff about the early history of the club, would have been nice to get it on video actually.  Doh.

Sunday.  Somewhat broken sleep (the sweetie couldn't sleep and I was actually a bit hot under a couple of doonas even though it was literally freezing - our water pipes actually froze solid overnight).  Came home and put all the Tasmania slides away and finished the second section of the Titanic, and did some computer stuff.

Here's a couple of photos of a hot air balloon a couple of weeks ago that were in the wrong directory so got missed...

Monday.  15th.  Woke up around dentist time and only got less than an hours more sleep between 5-6.  Sigh.  Trying to get stuff done in between distractions and having to play mediator (sooo not in my job description!!!).  Culled some more people photos from the cruise then uploaded them to Dropbox for people to grab.  

Tuesday.  Slept ok, although woke up a bit after 5.  Meh day, don't really even know what I did.  Made a slow cooker apricot chicken dish which was quite nice.  Photo culling and Lego Grandmasters, nothing very exciting this 16 May.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  Nothing exciting at work.  FFS Windows 11 sux donkey balls.  If you open a .txt file (or anything that opens in a browser) it'll open on whichever desktop it feels like.  Even if you haven't even been using that desktop for anything lately.  And I found a new bug ("feature") of Notepad.  If you have two large text files open and you're at the bottom of them both, if you then switch between them you won't actually stay at the bottom of the files, you'll be taken to somewhere random in the file and have to scroll or control-end to get to the bottom again.  Or another one - if you search for some text in a file and it takes you to that text, if you then close the search box you'll be taken to some random point in the file, not where you actually just were with the found text.  So hopeless.  Seriously considering uninstalling "new" Notepad and just going back to the good old Notepad that's like thirty years old and still works perfectly fine as designed thankyouverymuch.  

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep but then slept ok. Quietish day, quiet drinks, pizza, Mandalorian, Lego.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Ok day I guess.  Dropped off the car for service in the morning.  They reckoned it'd probably be ready by 14:00.  Had Kingsleys for lunch!!  First time there since November 21.  At 16:00 I went to get the car.  Oh, it's not ready yet, it's still over at Bob Jane.  WTF??  Still, but the time he'd spent like ten minutes sorting out all the paperwork they'd actually finished so I went and got it, came home then headed to the coast, but I'll save that for another post.

Sunday.  Got home and then had to do all my weekend todos in just a few hours.  As much as I like going away for weekends I also hate going away for weekends because it chews up so much of my down time.  I only had time for some essentials of cleaning and photos/blogging.  The only fun I had was doing a section of the Titanic.  No time for music or any other projects or hobbies.  I was going to vacuum the ensuite but came across the next problem with the Dodgy Dyson.  This time when I pulled the trigger nothing happened.  And I noticed a red flashing light on the battery pack.  32 red flashes before it stops.  Fricken great.  It worked just fine on Friday.  Now nothing.  I found one page which suggested a "reset" of the battery, but that didn't work.  Dyson is seriously Dodgy.  Sigh.  Basa bake in the oven for dinner.

Sunday.  30th.  Backdated because once again I ran out of time.  Tacos for dinner and watched the last episode of season 3 of The Crown.

Monday.  Woke up at like 1:30 til like 4:30.  Sigh.  I don't even really know what I did all day.  But my birds came to see me after six months of not.  Got stuck in a call from 14:00-15:00 which meant I was super late putting the dishwasher on - missed the sun and cut into the battery :(  Had kale chips and chicken kiev for dinner and did a bunch of photo filing.

Tuesday.  Decent sleep hurray!!  Cleaning/migration stuff at work.  But getting super frustrated at all the stoopid.  Then did some doco for another team.  Because that's what I do.  Yellow curry for dinner - used up a bunch of stuff in the fridge.  But still ended up with a heap more as leftovers.  Was good though.  Photo filing then started (finally) on Lego Grandmasters!!

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep because of cold feet.  But then slept ok.  A day of not getting anything done, just sitting there and dealing with everyone else's problems.  More photo filing, and my bowels started hurting again.  Sigh.  Honey mustard chicken leftovers for dinner.

Super low rainbow!!

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep - stressing about all the things - mostly about my belly.  Star Wars day, and they had two pieces of John Williams music from it between 7 and 8.  Cleaning planning and doco then just people distracting me.  Very quiet drinks, pizza for dinner.

Friday.  Slept ok.  More cleaning work.  Had lunch at Herbert's with the Chrises, Glenda, Neil and Tony.  We're getting to that age where our main topics of conversation are our health issues.  Sigh.  More Lego Grandmasters after dinner.

Satuday.  Slept ok.  Super productive morning.  Lunch at The Scottish Restaurant (got a double cheeseburger but it didn't have any pickles!  How rude!) then food shopping.  Fired up my old computer so I could scan some stuff and download the GPS for the Berrima trip.  Then music and suddenly it's dinner time.  What??  Sigh.  The sweetie cooked dinner though which was nice - oden - Japanese winter comfort food.  It was very nice. 

Then we watched the coronation.  Nice that it's prime time here.  We started off watching the ABC coverage but got bored of the republican debate beforehand, and the commercial coverage was pretty crap so ended up watching the BBC stream. The dude doing the deaf translation looked to be having a lot of fun heh.

Sunday.  Slept in!  A whole half hour!  Sigh.  Had breakfast at Deakin and Me which was nice, then dropped into Parliament House to see the Lego.  I haven't been in there like thirty-something years.  Also stopped into Bunnings to get some gum boots.  

Barely seemed to get anything done.  Did blog the Berrima weekend which took like an hour and twenty minutes.  Ran out of time for main blog of course.  Need. More. Time.  Leftover lamb roast for dinner, Crown, Lego Grandmasters.

Sunday.  23rd.  All the blogging!!  Even got caught up.  Stu cooked a vegetable "tagine" in the slow cooker, and we had Jenn over.  We played Carcassonne after dinner and Stu won by a point.  Watched some Crown, and could hear Groovin the Moo all the way from EPIC.  Stayed up way too late waiting for the candles to finish.

Monday.  Slept ok (other than the slightly late night).  Working on more cleaning.  Honey mustard chicken for dinner (desperately trying to use up the like three bottles of mustard we have in the fridge).  Watched the last episode of The Simpsons online.  We're actually caught up!!  Thirty four odd seasons of The Simpsons in a couple of years.  I think we started into Futurama tonight too.  So much for letting me pick the next series.  

Tuesday.  Crap sleep.  Hurray.  A day of All The Things.  There's just not enough TIME!!  And I forgot to cook some Anzac Biscuits.  Roast lamb for dinner.  

Wednesday.  Ok sleep. 

We were going to go to Broaster Chicken at lunch, but even though they were supposed to be open, well, they weren't.  Lame.  So we went to Canberra Cafe and Burgers, so I could get some loaded fries.  On the condition that the others would help me.  Which they did.  Because this stuff is epic!

Deleted a whole heap of stuff with Neil after lunch which is always fun.  

After work went into town.  Had a drink with the sweetie at Dolly's, or whatever they're called now, used to be Shorty's. 

Then we went to Taki for dinner.  We got the Taki Signature Platter ($139) which had four cuts of beef (A5 Japanese wagyu striploin, finger rib, thin karubi and diamond cut inside), as well as pumpkin, onion and two kinds of mushroom.  The beef was *divine*, but the vegetables were a bit meh.  They burn before they cook through, and really really need the dipping sauce because they're too dry otherwise.  But the meat!! OMFG so good!!!

Got home and found a HARD COPY Yellow/White Pages.  How totally bizarre, we haven't had one of those in years.  I wonder if they delivered it to our place by accident.  

Thursday.  Ok sleep.  But then I didn't write down any notes so can't remember what I did all day.  Drinks then Taco Thursday, and more Futurama.

Friday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  Another day with no notes.  Whoops.

Saturday.  Got ready then headed to Berrima!  But I'll save that for another post.  Which I might eventually get around to doing.  After I choose photos from the nearly 500 I took.  In the rain.

Sunday.  After we got home I mailed some cruise photos to someone, then finally finished putting together our tax.  Got most of it printed before the printer started jamming.  Also decided I'm not convinced by the output of movie files from iMazing.  If you use the defaults you get an MP4 which is smaller in dimensions than the original.  If you export without the conversion to MP4 you get a MOV file which is the right dimensions (1920p) and a smaller file size, but it's quite "enhanced" - it's brighter and looks over processed compared to if you just download from windoze.  hmmmmmm.  Did some music and blogging and suddenly it's dinner time.  Sigh.  

Sunday.  16th.  Not backdating for a change :)  Pic of the kale chips I made as part of dinner.  This was 15 minutes, some bits were a little overdone.

Monday.  17th.  Woke up around dentist time for like an hour and a half.  On the weekend I got back into collecting some extra data from Dad's slides, to help organise them better.  Because he would mix up rolls to put things together by subject.  Which is fair enough, but some slides don't have dates (I still need to find out if he ever digitised his slide labels from the books he had which have been lost) but do have processing dates sometimes, or can be linked together by the type of slide etc.  He also mixed like three trips up north into one collection, and bushwalks to the same area together.  I want to be able to get them back into chronological order for filing.  So more of that before work.  Tried to do one thing, which took all day because of everything else I had to deal with.  I tried to talk to the optometrist about whether the strain for distance is good strain (help reverse the myopia) or bad strain (make it worse).  But the receptionist called me back, not the optometrist, and said the optometrist said just not to do it.  And I'm like that doesn't answer the question, but of course she didn't have the answer, and wouldn't find out because he'd just said Don't.  Fricken sigh.  Hate.  Cranky all afternoon.  And I was cold and hungry ALL DAY (well except for briefly after lunch of nice warm noodles and a walk in the sun).  Leftovers for dinner.  Tried emailing some peeps to confirm their email addresses before I emailed photos, but Gmail intermittently wouldn't accept mail from Internode:

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 550-' This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for [kazza.id.au] did not pass with ip: [--]. The sender should visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for instructions on setting up authentication.

Some went through but others bounced.  So then I had to fight with Vodien to get an SPF record setup.  Internode is super helpful (https://www.internode.on.net/support/guides/email/spf_records/) providing the text to use for their mail servers.  But Vodien support was like, do it through cpanel, which is dumb because the cpanel host doesn't "own" the domain per se.  Of course that didn't work.  Then the actual Vodien DNS manager kept complaining about an invalid name.  They actually want you to put a name which is daft because TXT records don't have them.  I hate EVERYTHING.  Too cranky and depressed to do any Titanic.

Tuesday.  Slept okish I guess.  Well, after I finally got to sleep, which took like two hours because my feet were cold and wouldn't warm up.  Mail policy staring day.  Weeding at lunch.  Music, cheese kransky and cabbage for dinner (finally finished the cabbage that's been in the fridge since probably January - that stuff just never goes off!!).

Blogged the week before last, which took up most of the evening.  Then finally finished watching Avatar.  Only took like two weeks hehe.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep again because my feet were cold.  Lots of work with Neil.  We're probably going to end up deleting half the ruleset on one server because of things either no longer in use or things can be combined.  

Saw these at the chicken place and drooled.. but didn't buy any.. this time..

Herbert's for dinner for a tap takeover by Big Shed.

I tried all six beers on tap (half pints each of four of them which were good, not much more than a taste of the Brown (too dark for me), and most of a pint of the hard lemonade which tasted like Solo - yum! dangerous!).  

This was the rep and their Golden Stout Time - which smelt exactly like Golden Gaytime - but didn't taste really like it at all.  Weird.  

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Had breakfast with the sweetie at 54.

Had a look at a routing alert from last night.  Learnt a bunch of stuff and actually got to see some OSPF which we don't have much of.  Also started thinking about some more cleanup work. 

Managed to get a photo of the eclipse.  Not helped by the iPhone not actually using the lens you tell it to.  I wanted to use the 3x lens, which works until you put something in front of it, and it's like, oh you wanted to do macro did you, and changes the lens.  So retarded.  But fought with it and managed to get a couple of pics.  It certainly wasn't very exciting from Canberra!

Quiet drinks, pizza, and finished season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett.  We didn't see who was in the tank at the end, so asked Siri, Hey Siri, who was in the tank at the end of the Book of Boba Fett?" - and she actually answered correctly!  Pretty incredible really.  

Friday.  Slept ok.  Laid out all of Dad's 1969 Grampians and Great Ocean Road photos.  There's two rolls that cover that part of the trip, and you could tell from the processing date printing which were which.  You can mostly see the frame numbers (Dad wrote all over them obscuring parts of them). 

Looking at cleaning stuff.  TV dinners for dinner and Rocky Horror Picture Show (because it's fifty years since the show was first performed on stage).  Also found a bunch of Disney Singalong movies.. that could be a lot of fun hehe.

Next generation of turdburgers that will probably eat the house again over winter

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Continued sorting of the Grampians/Great Ocean Road photos.  I think I managed to get them all into the correct order.  It helped having a bit of local knowledge (from having done the exact same trip ourselves last year).  There's a few slides where the dates are clearly wrong, but not entirely sure what the correct date is.  They could have been taken late on the first day, or early on the second.  Got some house stuff done as well and got some holiday blog entries online.  Gmail is still intermittently blocking my emails.  Went out for lunch, got the loaded fries at Pattysmiths.  Their fries are actually really good, don't even need the bacon and cheese sauce

Then went to the chemist/pet store and did our food shopping and suddenly it's two and a half hours since we left home.  #grunt.  Some getting organised, music and Titanic and suddenly it's 17:00.  Sigh.  Sausages and wombok for dinner.  Then into season 3 of The Mandalorian, and some Death in Paradise.  

Sunday.  Woke up some time before 3 and stayed awake for at least two hours, then restless sleep.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Hurray.  Did mostly house cleaning stuff, bit of Titanic, and lots of blogging.  Also finally fixed my SPF record - you need to put the domain name (kazza.id.au) as the "name".  So dumb.  Also dumb: if you open a html file (that loads in Chrome), or a text file (that loads in notepad) it won't open in the desktop you're in, no no no, it opens in the default deskop, or whichever desktop you were using those apps in last (not sure which).  Windoze is so hopeless.  Is it beer o'clcok yet?

Tuesday.  11th.  Backdated.  Hurty from 3:30 til like 5:30.  Sigh.  Ok day I guess.  Some tidying.  Figuring out how to renew a certificate on one of our appliances.  Looking Back, Moving Forward night at the Shine Dome, with Bradley Moggridge (fresh water) and Mibu Fischer (marine biologist) and the work they're doing with indigenous knowledge on water management.  Interesting, and I do wonder if indigenous people have any better ideas on how to manage water, given there's 25 million people here now we need to feed and water.  I'm sure there's no easy solutions.  Short of stopping all breeding and immigration.  Dinner at 10 Yards after which was nice.

Wednesday.  Slept relatively well, but had to wake up stoopidly early cause Stu was having breakfast in town.  Did some policy work with Neil.  We started a new jigsaw which was an "Impossibles" series, but is actually super easy.  Oh, the other day I think I mentioned that windoze wall papers were doing ok between desktops.  Well after the storm and reboot on the weekend they'd been stuffed up, and only came good on Wednesday night.  

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep (like after 12:30).  And then work up at like 5:30.  Sigh.  Fought with the certificate replacement on the appliance.  Nothing is ever easy.   Especially with certificates.  Ok drinks.  Pizza and early night.

Friday.  Slept from like 20:30 til 5:45 hurray!!  Cotter Pumping Station Tour!  Will put that in another post.  Then dropped past the optometrist to pick up my new glasses.  Got there at 13:08 and there was a sign on the door: Back at 1:30pm.  Sigh. 

So got some lunch at Flavours of Jiangnan.  But they only take cash.  WTF???  There may have been leftovers.

So got my glasses.  The optometrist wasn't even there, just the receptionist.  Bizarre.  So noone to adjust the glasses to fit my head.  The dude's father took a lot more care.  This one.. well.. here you go, have fun.  #grunt.  Good news is they work really really well for the screen - I can SEEEEE again!  But distance is a strain.  He said they would be, but it wasn't really noticeable when he was doing the testing.  Question is, is it "good" strain or bad?  Dropped into Frank and Karen's after work to taste a few of their growlers, and see their Titanic and Colosseum.  Epic!!  Leftover yellow curry for dinner and Fantasia 2000.

Saturday.  Slept relatively well.  Busy day doing All The Things.  Got lots done.  Did a Bunnings run and got a shiny new toilet seat.

Also started the section box of the Lego Titanic.  Probably exactly while it was sinking 111 year ago.  Episode 6 of Boba Fett and 4.5 of Death in Paradise.

Eat the fridge week dinner

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Woke up around 3 for ages, then broken sleep.  More of doing All The Things.  Mostly culling down the cruise "people" photos and sorting them out to send to people.  Did some music but for too long, which put me behind schedule for photos and blogging before dinner.  I also bought iMazing.  Purely to save me the drama of fixing the timestamps on my pngs and movs.  And it randomly not copying files.  And then found a very happy side effect.  I use IrfanView to resize my photos into a "working" copy.  Usually it takes *forever* to resize my phone photos.  Been having issues for quite a few years.  But the files copied off with iMazing resize at lightning speed - same as the Canon and phone photos from years past.  So that's nice.  Also with iMazing, looking at the "file system" view is a lot quicker than the Photos view (I have nearly 40000 photos so it takes *forever* to load), but it's not as nice to look at.  There's just not enough damned TIME.  I need to retire.  Kiev for dinner, then Crown.  Watched a bit more of Avatar, then talked to the brother type person then the mother type person, so didn't finish it.  Oh well.