After lunch Neil and I popped into Sanity so Neil could get series 3 of Dark Matter.

And I accidentally bought six Disney Blurays and the Lego Batman Movie.

It's all his fault I swear.

That and I wanted to get all the movies I'm building a jigsaw out of (they were only missing Cinderella).

So tonight we watched the Lego Batman Movie.  Because we somehow never managed to see it at the movies.

OMFG.

I soooo need to go back and watch like every Batman movie ever.  Because there were so many references to them and I'm sure I only *got* a tiny fraction of them.

And there were Daleks. And Sauron. And SIRI. And VOLDEMORT.  And GREMLINS!!!!  (and too many more things to mention)

Silliest thing was - Ralph Fiennes did the voice of Alfred, but not Voldemort.  Silly really.

Friday night we watched The Last Samurai, which we'd last seen in 2012.  

Saturday morning was just houseworkey stuff.

In the afternoon we headed out to the club.  G&A did a great pork roast for dinner.  Later there was epic Jenga which I didn't lose at :)

Going back a step.  The other week I saw this in the window of Games Capital:

OMFG!!!

I totally want one!  The price was obscured, but it looked like $500.  Given that I paid $385 for the Life jigsaw (24000 pieces), this didn't seem unreasonable.

So anyway.  Stu said I could get it if i could clear enough space in the dungeon to do it down there.  So guess what I spent a couple of hours Sunday afternoon doing?  I should have taken some before and after photos, it made a huge difference.

In the evening we got pizza and watched Short Circuit (getting through movies I've bought on DVD but haven't watched - this one I'd bought in 2004).  

!!

Whoops.

So Monday morning I called the Games Capital to check if they still had the jigsaw in stock, and if so how much it was.  Yes they said.  $1500 they said.

Fricken. OUCH.

That's like $150 for each of the 4000 piece sections.  Which, considering we paid $150 for the piece of crap 5000 colours jigsaw (which was appalling in quality and was even missing a piece!  I've yet to rant about that here), is not *completely* ridiculous, but still...

Anyway, so I had a sad on Monday morning.  We finished stacking Stu's books (badly) into shelves, clearing the floor and a table.  I set up the tv (which we hadn't even plugged in since we replaced the upstairs one like a year and a half ago) and set myself up with a jigsaw and did that for a while in the afternoon.  

I could get used to three day weekends.

Last night we thought we'd watch The Green Mile, which we hadn't seen in ages.  In fact, as it turned out, the dvd was still in its wrapping.

After watching it I thought I'd see how long "ages" actually was.  I watched it twice in 2003, and again in 2005.  I bought the dvd in 2006. 

2006.

!!!

I had the dvd for eleven years before finally watching it.

Wow.

I don't have too many dvds in that situation but I do have few.  And there's a bunch of tv dvds as well I want to get through.

I need to retire so I actually have time to watch tv and movies..

(oh and we also watched an episode of Voyager, and I'm like "that's George Costanza" .. and it was hehe)

So where were we?

Friday night we had an early mark, had snossages for dinner and watched tv.

Saturday morning I went into work first thing and was home by 9am which was nice. 

Mostly just sorted out our finances all weekend .. hurrah .. 

Saturday night we tried to go to Dumpling Inn for dinner with Chris and Mike and Zac, but it was closed for renovations, so we headed into Dickson and ended up at The Scholar Chinese restaurant.  The food there was nice enough but the service was SLOW - it took *forever* to get food.  At least that's what it seemed like for the hungry people.  In reality it was probably an hour before mains arrived.  And we could have sworn that people that got there after us got food before us.  hrmmm.

Today I remembered we had beef cheeks in the fridge that I'd bought last weekend, so I stuck em in the slow cooker with various Chinese flavouring as per Lorraine's recipe.  They were pretty good, although I'd added a lot more water to keep them covered, so the sauce was pretty watery.  Next time I'll add corn flour, or do it on the stove, or cut up the meat a bit to submerge it better.

Then we watched The Truman Show, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies with Luc and Cynthia in 1998.

Friday night we watched Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was all a bit silly, and completely predictable, but a bit of fun.

Saturday night we watched The Sixth Sense, which I hadn't seen since I saw it at the movies when it first came out.  

In between was a very quiet weekend at home, only going out to do some food shopping today.  I spent most of the rest of the time scanning and organising paperwork and watching Air Crash Investigations videos and Blackadder Goes Forth.

I've just spent two hours cooking some coq au vin, as well as a spinach, turnip, feta and sage bake, and a cauliflower, zucchini, garlic, herbs, cream and cheeeeese bake.  Not that they'll necessarily go together, but the idea is to have plenty of food cooked for the week.

Oh and we're into season 4 of Voyager now.

The theme for Kit's 30th was 80s characters.  Game/tv/movies/whatever.  I couldn't think of what to go as for the longest time, but then while reading an entry on Kevin Apgar's blog I had an epiphany - Classic 80s Space Guy!!  He's been my avatar for years, so I just *had* to do it!!

I did a bit of hunting around the internet for ideas, and in the end decided to mostly copy this one.  The major difference being I didn't start with a balloon.  I really should have to get a nice smooth dome, but I was worried I wouldn't be able to get it big enough without it bursting in my face while inflating.  So I made a cardboard frame instead.  This worked ok, except the weight of the wet paper and glue weighed it down, so I had to sit it on a bowl on top of some containers, but that raised the top of the dome too high, so it's really not quite the right shape.  And it's pretty wonky.  But hey, it had the desired effect, and Kit loved it.

At this point I was really just getting the size and shape right.  I had to make sure it would fit around my head!  I just started with paper, then added cardboard.

Adding a bit of strength to the frame.  Stapling was very effective and much tougher than gluing or using sticky tape.

Testing to make sure it would sit right and the face opening was about the right size

This is the helmet after the first layer of papier mache.  For each layer I was using about 1/3-1/2 a cup of flour, about the same amount of water (possibly a little bit extra water), and maybe half to a full teaspoon of salt to help prevent mould.  You can see the weight of the wet newspaper sagging into the holes.

This is after about five coats done over several days.

Once fully dry, I covered it in duct tape (got a nice blue roll from Officeworks for $8.68).  You can see the bubble wrap I put in around the top of the helmet to let it sit in the right position on my head (and it made it quite stable and comfortable as well).

The finished helmet

For the tanks I got a couple of softdrink bottles and wrapped some cardboard around them to make them actually cylindrical, with some newspaper shoved in the gap between the cardboard and the bottles at the top.  I added some extra cardboard around the spouts of the bottles to give them the "top" or joiny bit of the tanks.  Then covered the whole lot in duct tape. I wasn't sure how to attach them to the outfit.  In the end I just stuck on some string to go over my head.  But it was very heavy, so added another loop of string to hook onto my belt to hold it in position and not strangle me.  A "backpack" setup might have worked better but I was worried they'd sit too low on my back.

For the logo I found a good quality png online, printed it out and glued it to some cardboard for strength.  I used sticky tape to attach it, but sadly this wasn't really strong enough and at point the thing fell off and got trampled on.  So if I want to wear the costume again I'll have to print out another one.

For my clothes I simply wore my jeans and my royal blue jumper.  I found some gloves in Dollar Pop for $3.50 which worked well, but made it impossible to use my phone!

Here's me in the finished outfit!

The Hours.  The couple of hours of my life I won't get back.  Seriously What The??

It's probably one of those movies they make high school students watch so they can write essays on that crap.  Yeup.

So after yesterday's pretty average day, we watched a free-to-air Air Crash Investigations and then we thought we'd watch a movie.

That was a very silly idea.

Our internet is so bad that Netflix is pretty much out of the question.

The DVD part of our PS3 died years ago so we couldn't watch a dvd on that.

My DVD recorder has recently been dropping out the video and it's been getting worse, dropping out all the time and making movies pretty much unwatchable.

So I dug out my old Toshiba DVD player from under the house but then I was looking at the back of the recorder and all the fricken outputs have cables hanging out.  So I couldn't even easily tell which outputs it was using to swap them to the other player.  So I went and lost it for a while.

Came back a while later and traced through some of the spaghetti.  There's standard video/audio out going into the tv, although I don't think we've been using that.  But I plugged those into my dvd player and set the tv to av mode and up it came.   W00t.  So we put Enemy at the Gates on, which I'd seen a long time ago, but could only remember the beginning, and Stu had never seen it.

Half an hour later it degraded so badly that we couldn't watch it.  I thought it was the dvd, but (after battling for ages to get it to even play) it played through that part of the disk on my computer.  I tried to get a little wifi dongle working in my computer so that I could Chromecast it, but it wouldn't work.

So I went to bed.

Sigh.

Got to sleep ok but woke up when Stu came to bed and stayed awake for ages.  And hurty kept me awake for a while too.

So I was still super grumpy today.

So I went into work to use the internet to geotag all my holiday photos.  About the only success I had all weekend.

Mostly did a jigsaw in the afternoon.  It rained, it even hailed, so didn't do any washing.

Around dinner time (Stu was still cooking and cleaning, bestest sweetie ever), I went down to Kit's to meet the new Ben, and after a glass of wine and a bit of socialising with Kit felt a lot better.  I was telling her the sad story of the dvd player, and she pulled an old one out of her cupboard and said, here you go, try that.  So we did.  And it did actually work for the most part, although it did have similar problems with audio and video a couple of times while we were watching it.  So it was a very frustrating experience.  But we did finally finish watching the movie.

I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

So 2016. Not too bad a year for me personally. But memorable for a spate of celebrity deaths (two I'd seen in real life - David Bowie and Carrie Fisher) and two overseas trips.

My first trip of the year was by myself to Sydney to see mum and the uncles/aunties for a Christmas party in early January where I cooked a big baked dinner for everyone. Also saw two Lego exhibitions on the same day while I was up there. Came home from that trip to a pool party in full swing. In January we did a two week trip to Hong Kong (to see Chris and Anne one last time there before they came home) and Singapore. The weather was the biggest downer of the trip - grey and rainy in Hong Kong, and unbearably humid in Singapore. In April we went to Sydney again for my cousin Ben's wedding. Later in April I went to Europe for six weeks with mum. The first two weeks was for a "reformation tour" of sites pertaining to the protestant reformation. That was a really interesting trip and a good group of people. Had a couple of days in Salzburg before heading up to Scandanavia for a three week tour. We saw some amazing things on that tour, but the size of the group (forty people) made it incredibly draining for me. In June mum and I went down to Junee to visit David and celebrate mum's 70th birthday. We only went down to the coast once this year in July. And we did our yearly trip to Queensland, but in November, which was a lot later in the year than I wanted to (Stu had uni work making it to hard to go any earlier). Fortunately the weather wasn't *too* hot and humid.

At work my most interesting work was some firewall migrations. Our first attempt in the test environment though was a bit of a disaster. It took the cleverer network guys about a month to solve a super weird MTU issue in the switch infrastructure they were plugged into. After that, the migrations went very smoothly. I also did an authentication system migration which also went well. So the first half of the year I was pretty busy and the work was interesting. In the second half of the year though I had to deal with the proxies again which drains my will to live. Is there actually such a thing as a *good* proxy? I'm beginning to think not. They caused me a lot of stress this year, including *three* failed attempts to upgrade them to the lastest version. Other than that I was feeling way too dumb to be in the team I'm in. But things picked up towards the end of the year with another firewall migration that went pretty smoothly and a stocktake, which is kind of my super power.

Socially at work I ran another trivia night in March which was packed. We won the next trivia night in June, but luckily the second place getters agreed to run the next one. Which we then won in September, so now I have to run the next one. Had a Gatsby ball in June, although I didn't get with the theme. Had a whiskey night in July. And for our section Christmas party (with various hangers on) I organised a bbq for nearly 40 people.

Healthwise I've been ok. I find lying down uncomfortable due to my deformed spine, which results in a lot of insomnia due to not being comfortable. Early in the year I did some proactive stuff that I'd been putting off forever - I got my skin checked, went to the dentist for the first time in twenty years and got new glasses. I got a minor cold in July, and a more severe one in November.

We've had a super social year this year. We've continued our visits to "the club", going to events and committee meetings in February, March, June, did a Christmas in July, October, twice in November (one of them we fed seventy-plus people) and December. My best friend from high school Chris moved down to Canberra at the end of last year so we've seen quite a bit of her - either dinners here, there, or out, or just going for walks (she lives in stumbling distance which is super handy!). We've also spent a lot of time with Kit, and also Ben and Serena - mostly just hanging out in the courtyard, but the occasional parties, meals as well, and even a p0ker night. Ben moved into a new place earlier in the year and we had a small housewarming there. I did an impromptu hanami party with Chris, Kit and Serena, and another one a week later with Nat and Andrew and the sweetie. Unfortunately that was the only time we saw Nat and Andrew all year. We've seen quite a bit of EffanC and Scott this year as well which as been nice - alternating between our places and enjoying champagne or a local equivalent. We had games nights at Mishi's in July and August. Also caught up with Damien and Amanda at the Dumpling Inn, and Damien and Tom at the Durham on a trivia night. Managed to see Ding twice this year, although the second time was a lot more chaotic with a heap of people in the house. Luc came to stay a night in March, Stu's ex colleague Jenn came for dinner, and we had an afternoon tea at Chris and Glenda's.

Dave and Kat came to stay with us five times this year which was great - in February, April, August, November and December. Mum stayed in June and December. Kerry and the kids dropped in in April, and Potty and Jake came to stay a night on the way to the snow and ended up staying for several nights. Didn't see much of Annie's family, only saw them a couple of times. Graham and Pam came to stay in April as well, and we went to the Dumpling Inn for dinner. Uncle Colin dropped in to say hi in December.

Various people came to swim in the pool in the summer months. For Christmas we did roast pork for Mum, Dave, Kat, Chris and Zac.

In the fish tanks I had four baby angels at the beginning of the year but three of them died. One of them survived, and it shares the AR-620T tank with four huge danios and a cory catfish. The two foot tank was a disaster at the end of last year with toxic black algae. I moved the fish downstairs over summer and cleaned it out completely. The black algae did start to come back, but with a bunch of plants, snails and a siamensis the tank has stabilised nicely and looks really good. The two remaining black neon tetras died this year - but they'd had a good run - I'd had them for ten years!! Amazing for such small fish. I bought some danios to be dither fish for the rummy nose tetras which worked really well - you can see them and their colour a lot better now. So in the upstairs two foot I have the five rummy nose tetras, five danios and a siamensis. Downstairs I had four of Chris's platies that I looked after while she moved house, but three of them died so there's only one left now. It shares the tank with four danios. Stu also has a tiny tank with a betta and some really small fish, and his four foot which got overrun with algae for a while but it's settled down a bit now.

I did a 5000 piece jigsaw this year which was good, but the quality of it was shocking. Did other jigsaws as well, but not as many this year. I've been doing a lot of nonograms online ever since the GCHQ Christmas puzzle last year. And just a couple of days ago I rediscovered Loops of Zen. I didn't buy any Lego this year, but I did spend a couple of months sorting out all of Zac's Lego.

The weather was *hot* this year. Summer seemed to last *forever* this year - global warming anyone? Made good use of the pool, but suffered in the heat. Had a lot of heat-induced insomnia and generally felt miserable for months. We got some hail in January. The pool only froze over twice this year in late June. It actually snowed one morning in July, but then a week later had the warmest overnight July temperature in recorded history. The El Niño finished up and it rained *a lot* over winter and spring.

We did a lot of stuff with the house this year. We got all the guttering replaced (while I was overseas). No more flooding of the garage after heavy rain! We got gutter guards in one corner where the oak tree is, but probably should have gotten them along the back as well, as one end still clogs up from that tree. Our twenty five year old hot water system died in the middle of winter, luckily a plumber could come the same day to replace it. The same plumber came a month or so later to clear out the sewer pipes which had been blocked by roots. We put evaporative cooling in which has been amazing for the most part, except this whole Christmas break which feels like the humidest week in Canberra ever! And we got a solar blanket for the pool (basically glorified bubble wrap) which has made a small difference to the temperature, but also has added bonuses of keeping most of the light out so algae doesn't grow as much, and keeps most of the leaves and bugs out as well.

I got a bit frustrated with technology this year. Had to fight with Logitech's Harmony remote software again. In the end never got it working with our tv. Upgraded my computer to Windows 10, which actually went ok, but had some drama with Windows Defender, and got sick of it rebooting without permission whenever it feels like it. I thought I'd bricked my iPhone because the battery got so dead it wouldn't turn on, even after charging overnight. Warming it up fixed it. Did this several more times over the next few months before finally replacing the battery in late November. I would like to get an iPhone 7, but I want one as small as I have now. Still having issues with the scanner, but still haven't gotten around to testing it on another computer to see if it's the computer or the scanner. And this blog got moved to new hardware by my hosting company so it's a lot more responsive now.

The Dumpling Inn was still our most visited restaurant this year. We went for Chrissie's birthday, again with Pam and Graham, again with Chrissie, with Chris and mum in June, and Damien and Amanda in July. I finally got to go to Smoque in Civic, fortunately, because it closed down later in the year. I went with Neil to a degustation dinner at Sage which was awesome. We went to Shogun for Ben's birthday, The Hungry Buddha with EffanC and Scott, and Casey Jones with Annie and the family for my birthday. With the sweetie we had dessert at Max Brenner in Civic, went to Chong Co, and tried Jamie's Italian and Pappa Rich. Generally we didn't eat out as much this year - trying to save a bit of money. Although we still had a lot of pizza! And bacon and cheese loaded fries from Maccas. omfg sooo good! Sadly the last time I tried to get some they didn't have them anymore :(

I didn't do a whole lot of creative cooking this year. I did make some cream cheese bacon balls which are so evil they're amazing. I made "epic" stuffed zucchini. I made some cheese and spinach pastries with some pastry inherited from Kerry before they moved which turned out pretty well. I did a zucchini lasagna. And a I tried a couple of different breakfast casseroles - one pretty evil and I made it a few times, and one I wasn't too fussed about.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions:
* Art of the Brick Exhibition in Sydney
* Sydney Icons in Lego in Sydney
* The Proclaimers

Movies:
* Sherlock - The Abominable Bride
* The Big Short
* Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
* Independence Day: Resurgence
* Finding Dory
* Star Trek: Beyond
* Rogue One

TV:
* Finished the last seasons of House
* Season 1 of Fuller House
* Documentaries on Netflix
* First four seasons of Homeland
* Most of Star Trek: the Original Series
* Australian Survivor
* Start of season 2 of Fuller House

Books:
* The Tower by Richard Martin Stern
* The Hindenburg Disaster by Jeff Rovin
* Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler
* Grey Mountain by John Grisham
* Penguin Bloom by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive

Other Stuff:
* Started off year with an impromptu neighbourhood party at Kit's
* Didn't dance on Lachie's table
* Saddened by deaths of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Prince, Gene Wilder, Kenny Baker, George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and the end of the world as we know it, ie, the US presidential election results.
* Went to the Mint open day
* Went to Canberra's new Ikea for first time
* Went to the Canberra Show with Chrissie
* Watched Das Rheingold with the sweetie, but still haven't gotten around to watching the rest of it
* Saw the Canberra balloon fiesta - twice
* Digitised my USA 2000 blog, although still haven't added photos to it
* Did the Granite Tors walk with Kit, nearly trod on a brown snake
* Ben and Stu fixed up the festoon lights out the back (only took seven and a half years to get around to doing!)
* Went to the Canberra Airport open day
* Installed Windows 10 on my travel laptop and my main computer
* Scanned ten of mum's photo albums
* Voted twice, but only got one #democracysausage
* Went out to Cotter Dam in August to see it overflowing, and went back again a week or two later to get it with better lighting
* Did a flying visit to Sydney in August to drop Stu off at the airport early Sunday morning, and saw the Sea Cliff Bridge on the way home
* Chrissie brought up her steam cleaner and made the bathroom all sparkly
* Saw James Turrell's Skyspace at the Art Gallery
* Kept myself busy in September with a massive photo project
* Popped into the War Memorial for an hour to look at the newly done WWI memorial halls
* Saw the first flight from Singapore to Canberra land, and the first flight from Canberra to Wellington depart
* Went to Costco for the second time. I think Coles and Aldi are actually cheaper.
* Did a massive photoshoot around Canberra to compare thirty years ago til now
* Photographed the super moon
* Spent several days over the break cleaning out cupboards

Yesterday afternoon we had a vendor-hosted screening of Rogue One, telling the story of the events immediately prior to Episode IV.

Generally I liked it.

It was a bit violent (well not really for Hollywood movies these days, but still a bit more than most of the other Star Wars movies).

And it was a bit choppy to get going, a bit all over the place and no continuity to begin with.

And very little in the way of character development.

CGI Peter Cushing was pretty cool though.  And a few other nods to the rest of the Star Wars universe.

A second watching would help now that I know who is who, and that may happen if I go to see it with the sweetie.