Your products are fail.

Case in point:

This backpack is a week old.  Eight days I think.

IT SHOULD NOT BE FALLING APART ALREADY!!!!!

The ice rink looked so cool.  I'd love to have gone skating, but somehow the month got away from me and it was all too hard. Maybe if they do it again next year..

It snowed pretty much the whole day, which meant for super awesome snow all day, but not great visibility, made worse by goggles that kept steaming up and had heaps of blind spots around the edges.  So a little frustrating and it meant I went a lot slower than my normally slow speed.

Heading up the Interceptor Quad

Another shot from the Interceptor Quad

Snowflakes!!

Heading up the very pretty Ridge Quad.  Unfortunately as I was taking these photos, I dropped a glove :(  This was above Excelerator.  I really didn't want to do Excelerator as it's very steep, but alas I had to retrieve it.  Steve and Alan got there first and got it for me, but it was in a non-groomed bit so it was very icy and I stacked while trying to stop with them.  Got a big bruise on my leg to show for it.

The ice on the trees was pretty cool.  And this isn't even a lot - many other trees had heaps more ice.

From Side Saddle looking across to Blue Cow terminal.  I had my other stack of the day down the bottom nearish the lift.

Looking from Blue Cow terminal across to Summit.  Had lunch of a few snacks and just sat down for half an hour to recover from my morning.

More pretty snow on the trees

Looking down to Perisher resort

I don't think I've ever seen Lake Jindabyne so full!

Yesterday I had a play with the GPS track I took of the day.  It was super cool!  I took 17 lift rides (actually that reminds me, I need to create an account so I can look at the MyRide stats - ski passes are now all RFID and you swipe past them as you get on the lift, so you can see all your stats).  I did 15 green runs (although a decent chunk of those were the very easy Pleasant Valley) and 3 blue runs.  Next time I go I'm going to make much more of an effort to go on different runs and lifts all over the resort to make the GPS track look even better :)

Friday night was Jesus Christ Superstar at the Q.  I'd never actually seen this musical before, and my only exposure to it was the John Farnham/Kate Ceberano/Jon Stevens version of 1992 where several singles made it to the charts.  I have to say I wasn't too convinced by the interpretation of the story.  OK so it was told by Judas' point of view, but I didn't really like the portrayal of Jesus.  And if you didn't know the story I reckon you'd be struggling to follow a lot of it.  The performance itself was decent enough (for an amateur production - always difficult to decipher lyrics when sung by a chorus unless the singing timing is spot-on) - the girl who played Mary was pretty awesome.  But yeah, not the greatest of musicals.  Give me Joseph any day ;)

Saturday was breakfast, shopping, cleaning the house and cooking (a reasonably decent veal scallopini which I'll blog about separately one day when I've refined the recipe).  DaveO came over after dinner for Buzz, Mario Kart, Singstar and, when his voice gave out, Sports Resort.  

Sunday was just pottering around the house, jigsawing, scanning photos, reading news feeds and sorting out thousands of photos.  Only 2136 steps so far today - a decent chunk of those from bopping while doing the jigsaw.  Also more cooking - a massaman curry, that didn't didn't turn out as well as the last one I did, not sure why.  Maybe too much steak/potato/stock and not enough paste.

And suddenly it's the end of the weekend .. *sigh*.  

Here's some of the photos I scanned today.

Me and Guy's cat Tutu at Lake Macquarie, March 1997

My first ever "CIA Pic" - some of the hardware supporting CIA in early 1997

Marc Betbeder at 10 hours old - the youngest baby I'd ever seen at that stage.  Only surpassed by Violet at 3 hours last year.

The Broadway shopping centre being constructed, as seen from the offices of CIA in 1997.  I actually have this photo printed out and stuck to my desk, all these years later!

My bedroom in 1997, showing my new computer desk, which I'm still using at this very moment!

A "snow" trip we did in 1997.  Pete's family had a time share in Perisher that we got to go stay at with a group of friends.  No lifts were running but we did have some fun tobogganing, and I even found some money under the chairlifts :)

Today I was slowed down but refused to be stopped.  Stu had been wanting to go out for breakfast, so we went to Black Pepper.  It was very crowded, and after nearly getting blown away outside, we only got rained on a little bit.  But the food was yummy yum.

Went down to the lake and photographed some swallows and a blue dragonfly.

Then went to the other side of the lake to feed the swans/ducks/coots etc.

Home via Gem Aquatics.

This arvo I didn't do much, really just read news feeds and started working on my 3000 Ravensburger jigsaw (which I've never actually done myself - I lent it to Marylon once and I helped a bit then).  And photographed all the Harry Potter Lego from last year.

Tonight scanned 69 photos, mostly from 1994.  Photos included a series on Snowy, my budgie, my 21st birthday and some miscellaneous photos.

This was my budgie, Snowy, that I got for Christmas (or thereabouts) in 1993.  Had him (her? - Dad always thought it was a girl and called it a Widgie) for five years.

My 21st Birthday Cake, with Alphie (sequel cockatoo to Alphie, the Alphatech mascot at my Dad's work which got shipped off to South East Asia or some such convoluted story)

This is looking down the maintenance shaft of Sydney Tower.  My mother and I climbed Sydney Tower's steps - all 1385 of them!

Aftermath of an "Oops" at Waterfall

So not a bad year all up :)

Let's see.  Where to begin.

The year started with me away from the sweetie - I was visiting old Sydney friends.  First year since we met that we weren't together on New Years, which was a bit sad.

Did a fair bit of other travelling during the year.  

The big trip of course was to Japan and the UK in September.  It wasn't the best holiday I've ever been on.  Japan was 34C for five days in a row, and I didn't have shorts.  And the UK was grey and/or raining for a good chunk of the time we were there, plus we missed out on going to Legoland which was pretty devastating for me.  But on the plus side, everything "worked" in terms of bookings.  We didn't get robbed.  We didn't crash the car.  We didn't miss any planes or trains.  We did see heaps of cool stuff.  So really I can't complain too much heh.

Had quite a few smaller trips as well.  Spent a couple of days in January at the coast with all of Stu's family.  Would have been better if I'd brought stuff to entertain myself with heh.  Went to Mogo Zoo then.  There was a quick trip to Sydney for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary.  Went down the coast to DaveC's house three times in March, August over my birthday and October where we had a great whale sighting.  Went to Melbourne over the Easter weekend to see Cats with Nat&Andrew.  That was a cool weekend, we'd love to go back and do more Melbourney things.  In July we went to Queensland for a long weekend to visit Chay and David.  Decided that July/August is definitely the time to go to Brisbane, so will probably do that again this year.  And another quick visit to Sydney on Boxing Day. 

Had a very busy year at work.  Rolled out new proxies at the beginning of the year, but they were fraught with problems from the start and it was very stressful.  After several patches during the year, they finally settled down, only to have the upstream proxies start playing up.  Blah!   

Semi work-related were a ball in March where I managed to squeeze into a ten year old dress, but only just barely!   I also made a slightly drunken bet that I'd wear a dress to a Melbourne Cup lunch if all the boys wore suits.  Our director unfortunately decided to take it seriously and made all the boys wear suits.  Reluctantly I had to go buy a dress and wear it.  We also ran a trivia night that I think went really well.  And attended work drinks pretty much every week I was in the country ;)

One of the big projects at work took several months and was so stressful I'm sure it led to a high blood pressure reading in July.  I've been working on relaxing at work (and at home) and subsequent readings have been a lot more normal.

Otherwise healthwise I had a great year - just a cold early in the year but nothing else.

Spent a lot of time with Nat and Andrew during the year.  Those guys are always so much fun to be around, we really enjoy their company.  Also did a few Singstar nights with Windy and DaveO and saw Damien and Amanda a few times as well.  JamesC came to visit a few times, and the whole family stayed with us a couple of weeks ago.  The Hokins clan came to visit, as did the parents a couple of times and the little brother a few times.  We've spent a lot more time with DaveC in the second half of this year.  Seems I get on with him a whole lot better now that we're not working together heh.  

Had another heat wave early in the year which meant us putting quite a bit of ice into the four foot tank to try and keep the temperature down.  Seemed to work and we didn't lose any fish from it.  I'd moved the danios downstairs so they wouldn't overheat, and found a couple of months later some baby danios that had been surviving quite happily unattented.  When I later moved the danios back upstairs, there were more babies in the downstairs tank.  Win!  Stu got a colony of duboisis for the four foot, which are great fun, and will follow you around when you go to look at them in hopes that you'll feed them!  Stu's also gotten back into killifish and has been diligent at looking after his fish again.  We're back up to fourteen habitated fish tanks now!

On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, we had a very cold winter.  This year the pool froze over probably a dozen times (it only froze over twice last year).  One of the days the ice was a full 3mm thick in places!  We even had snow in October.  Go figure!

On the Lego front, a whole stack of Toy Story Lego was released so had to get all of that.  And six new Harry Potter sets as well, although really only one of those is "new".  There's a few other cool sets I want to get too.  Went to BrickExpo in August which was very cool, and made me wonder if I should put anything in one of these years.

Other toys included an iPhone for me, a Blackberry for Stu, a video camera for Stu, a Canon 500D for me and a PS3.  

So I've had the 500D for four and a bit months and have already taken 15000 photos on it!  The majority of those in the UK of course ;)  I still haven't sorted my UK photos *at all*.  I did however manage to sort enough of our Japan 2009 and Europe 2008 photos to get the highlights into the blog entries.  One of my next projects will be making photo books of those trips.  I did make a photo book of our wedding as a Christmas present for parents.  Having seen the finished result (which I was stoked with) there's a few little changes I want to make and need to fix up some of the images before we get our copy printed.

Around the house, we bought a whole stack of bookshelves for the downstairs room and set those up.  So that room is quite well setup now.  The garden has gone slightly feral though, especially with all the rain we've had recently.

Shows seen this year:

Movies seen this year:

Books read this year:

And a few other bits and pieces:

Phewf.  Yup, busy year :)  I'm actually amazed I got this thing written *before* the end of the year - that never happens!! :)

Six hours to go.  Have a great 2011 peoples!  Happy New Year!!

!!

Actually I suppose you'd call it sleet, as there was plenty of rain too, but mixed in were little flurries of snow, which was epic cool!!

Did our food shopping, then spent the afternoon trying to tidy up the house.

I like how these coins arranged themselves when I dropped them on my desk the other day.

Then headed over to Nat and Andrew's and ordered Crust pizzas for dinner.  The winner for me was the "Peking Duck" pizza - with a hoisin sauce base and duck and a couple of whole leaves of bok choy.  Yum yum yum.

Had a go at iPad scrabble since we had four i-devices to use.  Worked ok, except that the phones kept dropping out :(  

Also played all 32 races of Mario Kart in a row.

Today was final cleaning of the house, and then the Canberra Killifish Study Group which we had at our place.  Six fishy geeks plus Stu :)  After they had a tour of all our fish tanks they had their meeting.  I heated up lunch.

Afterwards headed out to Corin Dam, but will put all of that in a separate post.

First, "Watership Down", by Richard Adams - a bookcrossing book I picked up a few years ago.  Not too bad, but a little slow going (picked up at the end).  It's a bit meandering, and just when you think it could stop they just keep on going.  And I realised they were going to need does before they'd even left, you wonder why they didn't (they were male *rabbits* for heavens sake!)...

Also, "On the Banks of Plum Creek" by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  So *this* is the book they based the tv series off.  They're in Minnesota, with the house seen the tv show (with the upstairs attic room for the girls), and where Nellie Oleson is.  Turns out (from the beginning of the next book) they only spent about five years here from when Laura was eight to thirteen.

One of these days I'll have do a road trip across the prairies of America.  Like Australia's wide open spaces, I imagine it's a little hard to comprehend how vast they are.  I did get a hint of it in 2000 when I flew from San Francisco to New York.  This was taken over Nebraska somewhere, and I was amazed at how endless the plains were...

Just putting a placeholder here cause MT is pretty crap at back dating across months.

..

So. 2009.  

Certainly not as *big* a year as 2008.

We've been in our house over a year now, but it's still not really "settled".  We did buy a nice big dining table, but that's about it.  We still haven't fully organised the rumpus room (although shelves are finally on order!!), and so "my" hobby room has been held up because of that (and because I've been too lazy to try and Freecycle all the crap that's been dumped in there).  We've only put hooks in the wall for one thing (my big Lego mosaic) so most of our pictures are still waiting for somewhere to go.  The spare bedroom has continued to be really really useful, and we've had a steady stream of people staying the night (mostly my brother heh).  The pool has been *brilliant*.  Mostly got the hang of taking care of it, so hopefully we don't get any algal blooms this year.

Work has been variable again this year.  The first half of the year feels like a bit of a blur.  I got a couple of big projects completed mostly on schedule.  The second half of the year was mostly working on the one thing, which we tried but failed to get into production by Christmas.  All through the year it was just insanely busy.  Not as insane as Stu's work though.  He was essentially doing three people's work and the stress of it all was taking a toll on his health.  So when an ex colleague had a positition advertised, she said he should apply.  Which he did, and he got it.  So a new year and a new job for the sweetie.

Our big holiday of the year was a trip to Japan for two weeks.  It was a significant challenge to try and organise because we went with a total of six people.  In the end Nat and I did the majority of the planning which worked reasonably well.  The holiday was *fantastic*!! - had a really great time.  Wish we could have stayed longer - at least twice as long would have been the bare minimum I think.

Went to Sydney a few times - in January over the long weekend while Stu played in Cancon - just caught up with lots of my friends and family.  Also in October for a primarily touristy weekend - even stayed in a hotel!  And then for Christmas and again for New Years.  Went down to Malua Bay with DC three times in March, April and October.  Mostly just us and him, but we did get Neil down for the October weekend.  And to Kangaroo Valley for Chris B's 50th which was a lot of fun.

Our fish tank numbers remained stable at seven.  We did lose a huge number of fish in the heatwave in February (where we had three consecutive 40C days with no cooling down at night).  All the julis, all but one of the adult multis, and all the tetras and the other little fish died.  The young multies and my angel were the only upstairs survivors.  I replaced the tetties with some leopard danios.  The multis grew up and have been breeding like rabbits.  Stu brought home the three julis he had at work and got some leleupies too.  The kribs downstairs I think need to have their tank rearranged, as they just sit there and do *nothing* all day.  Guppy breeding has slowed down dramatically too, not sure what's going on there, maybe needs some new genes..

Fairly quiet Lego year.  Made a nice big mosaic of Australia, and now my mosaics have a hanging place in the spare room.  I dug out and sold a bunch of Space Lego which cleared a little space - but have a long way to go!  And over Christmas built the Star Destroyer and Millennium Falcon to have them on display together.