Had a fairly quiet weekend.  

Went out to the club on Friday night.  Attempted to go to bed early but it was still nearly 11pm by the time we turned lights out.

Spent Saturday morning doing crafty stuff.  Then a bit of socialising.  In bed by 8:15pm.

Came home after breakfast this morning.

Had quite a productive afternoon.  Did some crafty stuff, vacuumed half the house, moved a desk into the "winter" hobby room, cleaned the kitchen somewhat.

Cooked a nice chicken roast with three cheese and bacon stuffing.  Yumm!

Then we watched Prisoner of Azkaban.

But I got hit with Sunday night depression/anxiety.  Hate hate hate Sunday nights.

I still haven't decided which lens to get.  I tried out work's 24-105 during the week.  While it's nice I really don't think it's *that* much better than my 18-135, which I much prefer the range on, especially for travelling.  I used the full zoom on that *all the time*, so to lose 20mm would suck.  Also, it's half the price of the L-series.  And the L-series weighs a fricken tonne (ok 670g vs 480g).  I've been stuck with this indecision for months.  But now I'm really running out of time to do something about it :(

So after sleeping beautifully on Thursday night and Friday night, Saturday I was awake for ages in the middle of the night, had a sleep on Sunday, and consequently couldn't get to sleep at all last night :(  It was after 2:30am by the time I got to sleep :(  I'm hoping I'll be tired enough to sleep properly tonight.

Spent most of the morning catching up on emails and had a bit of tidying fun in the afternoon.  Real work calls though so that will keep me busy for at least some of tomorrow.

I also lost $85 in cash today :(:(:(  After travelling and not having stuff in my pockets, I had the notes in the wrong pocket, and they must have fallen out some time between getting to work and lunch time.  Hopefully it made *someone*'s day :/

The sweetie picked me up at work and we did some food shopping, then came home and I cooked salmon for dinner - yum!

Tonight has been spent cooking, washing up, geotagging and catching up on tv.

When I travel I prefer to take a book that I know I will enjoy (this is probably after the time in 2000 that I was slogging my way through Starship Troopers which was not so fun to read).  So I took along "*batteries not included" by Wayland Drew.  Which was great except I finished it in a few days (at least half of it on the boat to/from Patmos).  Mum had the same problem with her book, so we swapped (I'm still reading hers).  She enjoyed it too :)

6.4.14 - 15.4.14

Sunday night after the Turkey meeting I got super frustrated because I checked the seat allocations we had against the type of aircraft we were getting and found that we were right over the wings on all flights.  After I'd asked specifically for NOT over the wing, and then asked again was she really sure when I first got the seating allocations back and she said the seats were definitely not over the wing.

!@#$%^&@*!!

This is the same woman who gave me this seat on my Sydney to Hong Kong flight ..

And this seat on my Cairo to London flight ..

And yes, I'd specifically asked for a window seat NOT over the wing for those flights too.

I was absolutely furious.  So I mailed her *again* and said the seats were in fact over the wing and could they please be changed.  (I tried to do it online myself but couldn't, presumably because of the group booking).  She did adjust the allocation a little further back, but not nearly as far as I would have liked.  Might have to ask at the airport when I checkin if there's any option to move further back.

*sigh*

Monday I met up with Luc at the Baxter Inn, but I'll save that for another post.

Also on Monday I *finally* got a game of 2048 out.

Tuesday was lunch with @StuartCRyan at Super Bowl - Peking Duck!!

Wednesday was takoyaki day at Sushi and Grill.  I asked them if they make their own, but she said they didn't.. oh well.  Still, they're not too bad for pre-made.

I also had some potato croquettes that day, but they weren't as nice

After lunch was reading about Heartbleed and getting scared.  If you haven't changed your passwords yet for things like Yahoo and Flickr DO IT NOW!

Also on Wednesday there was a "signal failure" at Mortdale, so trains were "late and out of timetable order".  The announcement at Martin Place was "the next three trains will be terminating at Hurstville and the next Cronulla train will be at 17:22".  This was at 17:10.  So I did what any sane person would do - hopped on a train to Kings Cross and caught it from there.  Window seat :)  I was on the wrong side of the train to see how crowded it was on the platforms at Martin Place and Town Hall, but I think it was pretty insane.  It wasn't meant to stop at Como, so I was just going to walk from Jannali, but they said after Oatley it would be stopping at Como, so I got off along with quite a lot of other people.

Also got a nice view of the city coming back from Kings Cross.

Thursday was sad cause there was no 4:51.

Friday was social club drinks so stayed for a couple of beers.  I came home and wanted to watch To Kill a Mockingbird that mum taped for me last year, but mum wanted to sort through stuff in the study, so we did that, and by the time we were done, it was too late to start watching a movie.

This is a box full of clip art that dad had compiled and printed out.. he had an obsession with clip art..

On Saturday, mum and I went and visited dad's little spot in the cemetery, where he had been buried that week.  He's there next to his grandmother and parents.  We also went and found Chrissie's mum.

Saturday night I went Chrissie's and we went to Rhodes.  We had dinner at the Phoenix Chinese restaurant.  We had some duck noodles which were nice enough

.. but we also had these slow cooked pork ribs .. oh my they were delicious!  The meat was fall off the bone tender and the sauce was really yummy.  Loved this.

Then we went and saw The Lego Movie.. because Everything is Awesome .. even a second time :)

On Sunday I went to church with mum.  In the afternoon we tried to figure out dad's photo filing system.  He made so many fricken backups of things, there's up to ten copies of some files, on multiple disks, with copies made for "slide shows", some with labels, others without, some full sized originals, others resized.  Some files don't have full sized originals, he only has "enhanced" or labelled copies.  Which is a bit of a poo.  So I backed everything up onto one little portable disk and brought it all home, and if I ever get time (yeah right) I'll try and sort it so there's a minimal number of copies in one organised location.

On Monday Uncle Colin and Sandra and Uncle Ian and Aunty Janet came over for dinner.  At the beginning of the evening I was freaking out about how similar my uncles are in some ways to dad.. just their attitudes to a lot of things and even some of their mannerisms.  It was a good fun night (it was Ian's birthday).

On Tuesday night I came home and cuddled my sweetie for a long time.

5.2.14

With all my travelling to Sydney (and working in the CBD for the first time ever), I decided to go on a mission to find the best takoyaki in Sydney.

The one that's winning so far is from Sushi and Grill on York Street.  Actual chunks of octopus!

Not the best of photo of the takoyaki on the left and some croquetty type things on the right.

So last weekend (well really the weekend before.. sorry, I've been a slacker) we went down to Bermagui for the weekend.  We had a slow start and left Saturday morning and didn't arrive till nearly 4pm.

Cheese!!  I wanted to stop here and try cheese .. maybe next time..

A crappy photo of the Wallaga Lake bridge, which was recently used as a film set for Angelina Jolie's upcoming movie "Unbroken".  The bridge is meant to be in Japan!

When we arrived at Bellbird Cottage B&B we got out of the car and it was all BELLBIRDS!  They were peeping all around the bush and it was a lovely welcome!

The B&B is delightful.  They only rent out one (very large) room and it's downstairs and has its own entrance, so it's very private and has a wonderful bush outlook.  

I was sitting on the toilet for this photo..  :)

On the first evening they bring down a cheese platter as a welcome, so it was lovely to sit and nibble cheese and look at the bush and listen to the bellbirds.

We chillaxed for a while before heading out.  Unfortunately we were a little too late for the seaside fair, so we had a wander around Sculpture on the Edge.

This was probably my favourite - it's made with the tops of milk bottles and old bicycle tyres and has solar powered strings of led lights mingled through.  I would love to have seen these at night.

Wandered down to the wharf to find some dinner.  The cafe was booked out, so we got some fish and chips from the outside servery.

It was about 7:45 at this point, and there were fireworks scheduled for 8:45.  It was threatening to storm on us, so we went and found somewhere that we could park with a view of the fireworks.  This is the spot we found.

The fireworks were actually really good for a small country town

Had a pretty good night's sleep.

In the morning they brought down a fabulous breakfast with a yummy variety of food.  In fact there was so much food we couldn't finish it all, and I packaged up the leftovers for our lunch!

Then it was off to meet up with some people at the beach.  It had been raining in the morning and it did look a little miserable to start with, but the weather cleared into quite a nice day.

Came back to Bellbird Cottage and chillaxed and listened to the birds and sipped some wine.  Lovely!

Then we met up with J&H and D at Il Passagio down at the wharf for dinner.

A very nice salt and pepper squid

Polenta chips - crispy and yummy

Quite a nice steak

Good panna cotta

The next morning was another amazing breakfast

Saying goodbye to Bellbird Cottage - we hope to be back one day!

Went via the foreshore to hack some portals

Stopped by some cliffs and took photos of birds

Scratching himself on the wing?

Stopped at the rather green Blue Pool.

And headed home via Cooma.

Stu fell in love with this place overlooking a beautiful valley and across to Brown Mountain.

Fred Piper Memorial Lookout.  On a clear day you can see the ocean.

Glider south of Canberra

Hume Solar Farm

And then we were home.  A bit tired from what seemed like two days of travelling, but it was lovely weekend nonetheless.

Before Dad died I started collating a list of silly things my Dad used to say.  There turned out to be quite a lot.  And I'm sure I've missed heaps.

As mentioned yesterday, there were a few random song snippets, such as "they're coming to take me away hey hey" and "beep beep, beep beep, his horn went beep beep burp".  Somewhat relatedly he'd sing "Sunday driving, Sunday driving" when we were out and about on a Sunday.  If we saw a delapidated building in our travels, the parents had a running joke that it was a "prospective youth hostel".  

When someone did something wrong, he'd say "nooo that's not it, try it again", as per Yosemite Sam.  Actually my brother and I changed the default error beep to that wav file many years ago on the parents' computer, and we had months of laughs because they couldn't figure out how to change it :)

When anyone offered him tea or coffee he'd say "I don't drink, don't smoke, don't drink tea or coffee, don't go around with naughty women".  This was appended in later years with "because I don't know any".  Actually this is why he thought it was so unfair that he had a brain tumour, as he didn't use a mobile phone either.  Still, he'd also say to people "I'll have a vodka and orange. Hold the orange" and at other times "Hello officer, I'm not under the affluence of incahol" in a slurred voice.

Regarding physics, he'd say things like "It's only the lack of heat that makes it cold", "It's only the weight of it that makes it heavy" and "It's not the fall that kills you it's the sudden stop at the bottom".

He could be quite negative (actually that's another story entirely).  But with Mum there'd be such things as "I earn the money, she spends it", "Whatever you say dear", "Yes boss" and "I'm always wrong".

With us there was the whole "Seven eights!!" thing that haunted David around Western Australia in 1984.  David was in primary school and learning his times tables, so on the holiday Dad would call out random times tables for David to give the answer to.  Except he kept tripping up on seven eights.  So Dad did it over and over again getting quite angry with David about it.  Mum said Dad changed on that trip.  He had issues with his camera and basically became a lot more negative and grumpy about things from that point on.  Mum thought he had a mid life crisis at that point.  He'd get annoyed at us for "drop" or leaving things around the house, but actually he was probably the worst offender.  And if we ever happened to burp at the table he'd say "oink".  To which after 1995 I'd respond "la la laaaa" :)

He'd get very frustrated with "yellow lights!" even more so than red ones, and also "Sunday drivers".  If a someone was heard shouting or speaking loudly, he'd say something like "We heard you the first time" or "ahhhh shaddap".  And if someone was incompetant they "couldn't organise single track working on a single length of N gauge".

He loved cockatoos, and the family had one when he was growing up.  So there was always "Scratch cocky" and "Hello cocky" and "G'bye! G'bye!" in screechy voices.  The doves he used to feed were "girls" because they were birds, so it'd be "hello girls" when they came down.

He liked cats, and whenever he saw one he'd say "I tawt I taw a putty tat", or simply a realistic meow (actually he'd meow at pretty random times too).

He loved cheese.  Or "ratfink".  And if anyone ever said "say cheese" for a photo, he'd say "Coon", his favourite cheese.

Whenever he got home and wanted to get changed he'd say "I'm going to take me pants off".  I use that a lot myself now too.

Many every day objects got different names.
"Soviet" was a meat pie - soviet spy in rhyming slang
"Serve you right" was a serviette.  I use this all the time, which confuses people sometimes.
Police were sometimes pronounced "poh-lice", or just "the fuzz"
"Screaming ice" was ice cream
"Gobbies" was his word for potato scallops
"Jackie" was a kookaburra
"Franks" meant thanks
"Probabully" was probably
"Grey shirts" were the train ticket inspectors.  He had an irrational thing against authority and beaurocracy.
"Woofit" meant "what's for tea?"
"Crick" was creek
"Rake" was a lake
"Crouds" were clouds
"Riv-her" was river
"Hurro" was hello
"Martian bastard" was a Mars Bar
"Chew and spew" was McDonalds
"Chif and phips" was fish and chips

And there was plenty of other random $#!+ .. :)

"Pong!" - obviously a response to ping!
"We want a funny story from" - sometimes said at random at the dinner table
"Growl, grumble and gripe, da dum da dum da dum" - the da dum bit might have been appended by my brother, can't remember
"Around the corner and into the straight comes beetle bomb" - or BDL Bomb, after the number plate of their old car
"Screech crunch tinkle tinkle" was a car accident
"Sparkle-arkle-arkling" usually referred to fizzy drinks
"Arc arc arc" or "stone the crows" whenever crows were around
"Die quietly" if someone was coughing loudly
"No bull" for no kidding
"Me three" instead of me too (I use this too)
"Me think that 'mazing" if something was good
"Bless me" if he sneezed
"Oh girl. You can't say oh boy, that's sexist".  

When my friend Luc first met my parents he said to me later "I can understand you better having met your parents".  Maybe anyone that's just read through the above list of words and phrases will see what a crazy Dad I had and understand how I came to be so completely silly :)

So 2013. Busy year!

We saw in 2013 with a small pool party at our place with Nat and Andrew and also Steve for a while.

  
We did a bit of travelling this year.

In January we went up the coast to South West Rocks to a school reunion of sorts for Stu and to visit Stu's dad. We drove up and down the coast, swam, visited Trial Bay Gaol, and caught up with Fiona and Margie on the way home.

We only managed to get to the coast once this year, in May. It was somewhat of a disaster with the spa being too cold on Friday night and too hot on Saturday night and a few other things that made it all a bit unpleasant (except for during the day on Saturday which was pretty good). Almost went again later in the year but had to go to Sydney and otherwise we've just been too busy.

We went to Queensland in July for a lovely long weekend to visit Chay and David.

At the end of July we flew up to Sydney for my Dad's 70th and one of my 40th parties (see below).

In October we decided at the last minute to go to Hong Kong for a week at the end of October. It was a great week, even if a little too humid. It's the most spontaneous holiday I've ever taken. I didn't do too much planning for it, because the more I researched, the more things I found of interest to see. So I stopped researching altogether and we took it as it came.

  
At work I had a mostly good year. I started off the year cleaning and pretty much cleaned all year. I started with the knowledge base articles for our team, then moved onto the log transfer system, then the load balancers. I also rehashed an old domino database for documentation which brought back a lot of memories of my last job. For the rest of the time it mostly felt like I was the "goto" person for any and all problems that came along. We were partly restructured, but the powers that be didn't really have a clear idea of what they wanted, so things didn't change as much as we originally thought they would. I made Stu drag out his tuxedo again for the work ball which was a lot of fun.

Healthwise I felt like I was sick the whole first half of the year - with colds in January, March, April, May and June. So that was pretty horrible. Not flus though, just annoying colds. Got another one the night before we went to Hong Kong too - yay :( But have been ok otherwise.

  
We had a super busy social year this year. In fact it was so busy that we went from May to September without having a free Saturday night. As a consequence our Buffy and Angel watching was almost non-existent. There were plenty of visits to/from Annie and Potty and the families. Various people came over for dinner and/or swims at the beginning of the year. Nat and Andrew came over a few times, as well as Andrew by himself when Nat was travelling. There were various after works drinks with my colleagues and Stu's and family and friends. Various Singstar/Mario Kart nights were had. Several BBQs at @CLBradley's. Several games nights at Mishi's. Had a video night at our place with work people. We visited people for lunches/dinners such as Matt and Helen, Andrew and Jen, Chris and Geoff, Josh and Ally, Windy and Nanette etc. We saw Daniel and Fi a few times when they came down. Several people came to stay including David and Yvonne, Ken and Jeanine, Fiona a couple of times and Stu's old school friend Tom. I met up with @StuartCRyan a few times in Sydney (we met in real life for the first time at my birthday). I also went to visit David in Junee.

Speaking of birthdays, I turned forty this year. To celebrate I had *three* great parties - one in Sydney, a big one at home the Saturday before my birthday, then a big lunch at work on my birthday followed by a nice dinner and seeing Phantom of the Opera. I was certainly in a different place mentally for my fortieth. During the whole run-up to my thirtieth I was very depressed, and my actual birthday was pretty meh. Such a different story this year though.

  
In sadder news, my Nana died of old age earlier in the year. And then I found out at the funeral that I have another cousin that I'd never heard about before!

Also in sad news, my father got diagnosed with a brain tumour in March. He had surgery immediately (and they had to cancel a holiday to New Zealand), followed by chemo and radiotherapy. Unfortunately it didn't really help, and he was hospitalised in July because he kept falling over and wasn't able to walk properly. He's been getting progressively worse and has been in a nursing home since September. In August I started going up to Sydney fairly regularly to see Dad and help Mum with the mammoth task of clearing out the garage and workshop. We've mostly been sorting things so far as I don't want to get rid of things until Dad goes. Fortunately I've been able to work out of the Sydney office so not having to take leave at the moment.

  
We've been enjoying a lot of visits to our little social club. We camped there over the Australia day long weekend, and the new tent survived a storm and massive downpour fairly well. But then a caravan came up for sale, so we bought it! We went to most of the club nights during the year, and plenty of other times as well. It's Stu's little get-away-from-the-world place and he thoroughly enjoys it.

With work people or the sweetie, tried out a few new restaurants. Continued going to Black Pepper for brunches and also Pulp Kitchen a few times. Went to Dumpling Inn a few times and Bella Vista as well. Didn't try too many desserts this year, although did make a Mars Bar slice and a peppermint rocky road, as well as an apple crumble and caramel slice that we tried at the club.

  
We bought another four baby angels for the angel tank. One died but the other three survived, so now have four angels and about seven danios in that tank. We got a lovely little betta for the macquarium, but he never thrived and died in six weeks. So thinking I'll probably give the macquarium away. The four foot still has a school of duboisis, two multies, a lelupi and a J.transcriptus. There's three multis downstairs, but after breeding once, the single baby I saw disappeared and haven't seen any since. There's still three or four quite old kribs downstairs as well.

Not much Lego action this year. I did get a cute little plane from Fiona, and a small City set from Ric for my birthday. I went with Nat and Andrew to Brick Expo, but was very frustrated with the crowds. I dismantled the Millennium Falcon which had been out for four years! Also over the Christmas break got to sort out and build all of Jake's lego which has been fun.

I did a lot of jigsaws this year. Mostly downstairs until downstairs got too cold. Mostly little ones, but also another section of the huge "Life" puzzle. Gave up on the skies of two jigsaws because their quality was just too poor.

I celebrated my tenth blogiversary this year. To mark the occasion I upgraded to Movable Type 5. But got very frustrated with the fact that I now cannot SSH to my host. Also with Movable Type which is *very* buggy. Next year my domain is up for renewal and I'm thinking about moving my domain to a new host with a new blogging platform. But the whole idea is pretty scary, so we'll see about that...

Shows

• The only show I saw this year was The Phantom of the Opera on my birthday.

Movies
Not many movies this year either...

• The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey
• Star Trek - Into Darkness
• Garden of Words and Ghost in the Shell: Arise

Books

• Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
• Polgara the Sorceress by David and Leigh Eddings
• Careful, he might hear you, by Sumner Locke Elliott
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs
• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
• I Hate You - Don't Leave Me by Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus
• The Naked Husband by Mark D'Arbanville
• Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs
• Airport by Arthur Hailey
• Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwall

Other stuff

• Had a full day at the War Memorial with Ken and Jeanine
• Had a jigsaw race with Nat
• Found my first geocache with Nat and Andrew
• Saw a Roller Derby bout
• Mum got her first mobile phone
• Had a random day off work to tidy up all the fish tank stuff in the garage
• Went for some walks around Palmerville with the sweetie
• Spotted the ISS a few times and waved to @Cmdr_Hadfield. Wasn't quite the same when he came back to earth.
• Went to the balloon fiesta on Canberra Day
• Watched the last couple of episodes and finale of House, which considering the timing with dad was pretty sad
• Took Stu's car for a drive up Mount Ainslie and got covered in lady bugs
• Our PS3 stopped playing DVD disks. Bluray is still ok though.  We considered getting a PS4 but the device isn't backwards compatible with old games.
• Went out to Captain's Flat on our fifth wedding anniversary
• Finished a cross stitch I got for Christmas in 1992
• Went up Black Mountain Tower
• Voted in ABC Classic FM's top 100 music in the movies, and most of my votes were in the top two hundred
• Did a blog for our trip to America in 1983
• Gave up reading Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama, Dooce and Dilbert
• Got extremely pissed off when Google Reader shut down. Destroyed my faith in Google.
• Looked at Comma Feed, Feedly and The Old Reader. Stuck with The Old Reader.  The Old Reader subsequently crashed from all the extra load of departing Google users, but was able to get funding to run on better hosting and has been fine ever since.
• Got more of my photos onto the RiotACT
• Cancelled Aussie Farmers Direct orders
• Had a look around Wintercon at EPIC
• Stu had a few car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• I had a LOT of car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• Saw the Skywhale
• Played through Diablo with the sweetie.  On easy mode.  Sue me.
• Did proper karaoke for the first time ever (and I've been to Japan four times!)
• Went to a Christmas Carols service at Como

So that's the end of 2013.  New Year's Eve will be spent out at the club with food and booze and friends and fairy lights and fireworks :)

Last night I finished reading Airport by Arthur Hailey.

I love this book.  I've read it before too.  Before our holiday I wanted to read something I knew I'd enjoy while we were travelling, so took this.  Sure enough it was a great read.  I know the movie pretty well too, so had images from the movie in my head most of the book, and interesting to note the differences as well.

Might have to watch the movie this weekend :)

I decided last week that I needed to stop reading my three busiest news feeds - Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama.

They were basically becoming a burden that was killing me.  They'd only take twenty minutes or so a day to do a basic skim through, but if you missed a day the next you'd have to spend forty minutes, and the next day would be an hour.  But then there'd be the "interesting" articles that I'd want to read or look at later, which meant either dozens of browser tabs, or dozens of unread articles I'd have to scroll past until I got around to looking at them.  I found I was spending what seemed like hours on the weekend just trying to keep up.

So I'm letting them go.

Boing Boing is usually the quickest to get through because I don't need to read many of the articles.  But at 30-50 items per day it was a struggle to keep on top of.  This feed I held onto for a long time, simply because it's my only source of internet "news" (albeit very biased).  How else was I going to find out about the bigger memes and general world news?

Lifehacker was usually the hardest to let go because there are always so many interesting articles.  But I figured if I need to find anything about the topics they cover, I can always search it later.

Neatorama always has lots of cool stuff, especially for travel, so I found myself leaving them lying around so I could add them to the travel todo lists. 

And I think I'll unsubscribe from Dooce as well.  Ever since she stopped putting full articles into the RSS feed (presumably to make more money from click-throughs) it's been a pain to read them (plus I feel a bit used by *having* to go to the site to read her content).  I'll just read the ones she links to from Twitter.

But with google reader meeting its demise, it was time to do a big declutter, and take a stack of dead blogs etc out to minimise what I have to take with me elsewhere.

The other thing I'm unsubscribing from is FlyLady.  I joined this list at the end of 2005 when I first met Annie.  But it also has dozens of mails per day and I found I just wasn't reading them anymore.  Well I never really read them all that much all along, but now I rarely read any at all.

So now I just need to make sure I use the spare time wisely, and not just playing mindless games...