Sunday.  30th.  Veggies with leftover lamb for dinner, Crown, early night.

Monday.  Slept okish.  Still woke up a few times.  Spent some time trying to find a pub to go to for my Sydney party.  I wanted to go to the Argyle again (had a nice time there last time) but it doesn't open til like 4pm which is way too late.  Sigh.  Busy day.  Again.  Leftover turkey and veggies for dinner.  And spent some more time looking for a pub.  

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Morning of All The Hassling All At Once.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Then an afternoon of all the BS.  Cranky at everything.  

Wednesday.  Dunno, no notes, but it was another busy day.  

Thursday.

Completely defeated by Microsoft "security".  Cranky and stressed yet again.  After drinks it was all too much and the stress of the week just exploded and I literally had a meltdown all the way home.  Made pizzas for dinner.

Friday.  Had an early night, but then woke up at Dentist Time and never got back to sleep.  Stu on the other hand was sick all night and didn't get *any* sleep.  He was eventually actually sick but that didn't help him feel any better.  Poor thing.  I took an RDO and spent the day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Well actually the morning was mostly tidying up and weeding etc in the front yard.  The afternoon was mostly tidying inside.  In the middle was a pub lunch at Herbert's with the Chrises, Tony, Frank and Karen.

Saturday.  Had an early night and slept somewhat better.  Spent the entire day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Hardly any culling which was on the todo list though. 

Dinner at Badger&Co (literally the same thing I ordered last time I was there a year ago).

Then saw "Jeremy Laser" at the ANU Women's Revue.  They also played recorder (!!  Titanic  !!) and trombone.

After twenty minutes of just them getting setup and the band playing, just before the show started a group of five people walked in (twenty minutes late!!!!) and then demanded that people move around to accommodate their group of FIVE.  Tossers.

I had just about the perfect seat, but alas they asked us not to take any photos, so just got a sneaky one at the end.

Highlights from my crap memory (I was desperate to take some notes but didn't want to get out my phone)

* We Didn't Start the Movement (to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire)
* Never Gonna Give them Up (Rickrolled!!!  regarding returning museum artefacts)
* cute little in-between-skit music including the Wii home screen music, ABBA's SOS, and Jess playing Titanic music on recorder
* Fixer Upper (from Frozen)
* three lines from Do you Wanna Build a Snowman, except I can't actually remember the question.. go away Anna, ok bye.. must ask Jess what they asked
* a parking skit where they complained about campus parking, which I had to laugh at because when *I* was at uni there was no such thing as student parking on campus
* Jess singing I'm Too Sexy
* Let's hear it for Canberra
* ANU / Xanadu

Scotland forever!!

So yeah quite a bit of fun, but it did make for a very late night :(

Sunday.  Spent All Morning FINALLY putting some sealant over the cracked grout around the loose tiles in the shower.  $20 solution to a $20000 problem.  Hopefully.  Remains to be seen if it works.  But OMFG caulking guns are hard work.  My forearms are going to ACHE tomorrow.

Then did some more cleaning.  Even managed some music.  But didn't finish my goal of culling Verona and Venice photos this weekend.  Sigh.  And the poor sweetie is still sick.  His entire gut is on strike and he felt miserable all weekend.  He's eaten like four pieces of toast in three days.  Eeep!

Some random things I've learnt lately..
* the fact that the sun is made up of hydrogen and helium was first discovered by a woman - Cecilia Payne - but of course because she was a woman she never really got the credit
* a Camera Lucida is a super cool optical device which allows an artist to superimpose a real life scene onto paper so they can trace it out.  I want one!! haha

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)

So last weekend was the Classic 100.

All of my favourite instruments got up!

78 Carillon - Percussion (pitched)
62 Tubular Bells - Percussion (pitched)
51 Celesta - Keyboard (Harry Potter!!)
41 Synthesizer (including Moog) - Electronic, Keyboard
25 Recorder - Wind
9 Voice / Singing (Choir) - Voice (they played Ode to Joy but not the Hallelujah Chorus :( )
7 Organ - Keyboard, Wind (they're playing our song!!)
5 Clarinet - Wind
2 Piano - Keyboard
1 Cello - String (bowed)

And so did a couple I would have voted for if I'd had more votes

77 Ocarina
48 Theremin

Stu never got around to voting, but some of his got up, while others didn't

x Cornetto
x Crumhorn
x Sackbut
84 Contrabassoon
56 Flugelhorn
30 Trombone
22 Bassoon

Fun weekend, although it was a bit distracting and had to do different things that didn't require too much concentration.  So I culled holiday photos haha.

I'm not entirely sure they meant to post this graphic at the end though..!

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.

Friday night I got home from work, chucked everything in the car, and headed straight out again to go down the coast.  We nearly hit a kangaroo on Macs Reef Road.  Stoopid things.  Took it a bit slow and arrived about 19:45.  Had bbq chicken and salad for dinner and then just chatted for a bit.  Little bit of a late night but not too bad.

I slept like crap - woke up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  So a slow start.  Followed Kit around like these ducks as she did the morning animal routine.

These guys will be a lot of dinners one day

There's like eight or nine new lambs under a couple of weeks old which are so cute!

I don't even know how many birds she has.  There's ten ducks, one large male turkey (Nigel), a female turkey and a young turkey, as well as about ten guinea fowl, and countless chickens.

She still has Scout and Ricky

Biscuit has as much fun jumping into the creek as Vicky does

Chatted for a while before we headed into Bateman's Bay for lunch.  We were going to go to the Mariner's, but it was closed til early June.  So went to Catalina, which we've driven past heaps of times but never been in.  I had quite a nice pork belly salad.

Went back to Kit's and everyone else had a nap while I did a jigsaw.  Only 250 pieces but quite tricky - basically just had to pick up a piece, figure out where it went, rinse and repeat 250 times.

Then Kit and Pete and I played a couple of games.  First What Next? (The Skyscraper Caper) which is kinda like a choose your own adventure, but we failed on pretty much everything.  Then Dragonworld which was decent enough and I actually managed to win it.

Since we'd had a big lunch, dinner was just ham and cheese toasted sandwiches.  Then listening to music on YouTube.

Slept ok Saturday night.  Pete cooked us breakfast while I followed Kit around doing the animals.

Had our breakfast then we came home.  Was 12:30 by the time we got home, and I was stressed most of the way home about losing so much time out of my weekend.  Not sure how long I can keep up this work nonsense, it just takes up too much damned time..

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.

Monday.  8th.  Backdating because spent too much time last week blogging the week before.  Took a while to get to sleep Sunday night, woke up a bit early.  Ok day I guess.  Cooked creamy mushroom fettuccini for dinner, but it took over an hour.  Sigh.  Not enough TIME.  Cruise photo culling and Lego Grandmasters.

We caught this in the lounge room on the weekend

There's snow on them thar hills!

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Started off fresh and getting things done, then the hassling started, one thing after another after another.  I never did get item 2 of my todo list done.  Such a busy day.  Logged off, then five minutes later Con messaged me that work that had originally been planned for the night and had since been cancelled, had been uncancelled but noone bothered to tell me.  Brisket for dinner (the thing was making me hungry all afternoon.  

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Well other than waking up from a traumatic dream where I couldn't get my Subway lunch.  The dude serving me was speaking jibberish and also couldn't understand me.  I begged for someone else to help.  The manager tried but he made a footlong sub that also had seafood in it.  And I'm like, I'm not paying for a footlong with seafood because it'll be soggy and disgusting by the time I get to the second half later.  So he went to start a new one but then wandered off half way through and I'm getting super upset because I'm hungry and just want my lunch and noone else would help either and I was trying to come around to make it myself.  Silly really.  Another day of people coming to me with problems and not able to get my own work done.  But did have a good documentation session while waiting for the sweetie.  Leftover curry for dinner and photo culling.

This is a fun pic - the count of blog entries I've made per month over the past twenty years.  I used to blog more frequently back in the day, but didn't include photos nearly as much.  It's the downloading and processing of the photos that takes the most time and energy and was always the barrier to posting them more often.  And why I mostly only blog weekly now, so I only have to download and process my photos once a week.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Woke up to the news that Heather Armstrong of dooce.com had died.  Literally the first thing I saw on Instagram, and somehow I just knew it would be suicide.. the Black Dog finally caught up with her.  I feel bad for Leta, Marlo, Pete and all her family and friends, pretty awful thing for them to go through.  Rest in Peace.  Work/drinks, then mostly reading about Heather and some of the comments on her last post.

Friday.  Slept ok other than waking up a bit early.  I think.  Ok day.  I think.  Sigh.

Saturday.  Did a few things at home before we went out for breakfast and food shopping.

This overpass in Gungahlin wasn't here last time

Coffee Club brekkie burger

I'm a sweet pickle? what?

Of course it was nearly midday by the time we got home.  Then it was mostly cleaning the house all afternoon.  Sigh.  Had Nick and Tab over for butt beef cheeks for dinner which was nice.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Did a bottle/tip/Green Shed run.  At least it didn't take too long.  But then spent the entire rest of the day sorting out Dad's photos of various Queensland and northern NSW trips.  He'd mixed up like four entirely separate holidays all together into ten boxes of slides.  Oddly he'd also included some from a 1978 trip, but not all, and he'd also put some of the slides from one of the earlier trips into the 1978 trip.  Such a mess.  But think I got it all sorted out in the end.

But by the time I'd done that it was after 15:00 and I hadn't done anything else on the todo list and then I started freaking out how short weekends are and I how much I have to do.  I did some music, then photo downloading and processing.  But it takes like an hour to blog each week and I still hadn't blogged last week.  Sigh.  And I also think I might have accidentally found out the winners of Lego Grandmasters.  hrmm.  Stu cooked some mince for dinner, then Futurama/Crown.

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.

The original plan for our 15th wedding anniversary was to have a long weekend in Hobart.  But then life got in the way and we never organised anything and then Stu wouldn't have been able to take the time off from work anyway.

So plan B was organised a lot closer to the date, and we decided to just do a quick overnighter somewhere nearby.

So last Saturday we got ready and headed off.  We stopped at the Scottish Restaurant for breakfast.

Then out through Bungendore to Tarago.  Just a quick stop there because it was raining, and we'd stopped there before recently, and there's not much there anyway.

"The Morass" lakes are very full at the moment.

Next stop was Bungonia.  It was market day so there were *people* around.  There's a lot of historic buildings there so it would be interesting to take more time to explore there.  We didn't see much this time because it was raining.

We had to stop at the railway viaduct near Tallong.  Because bridge!

There was even a train!

At Tallong I had a look at the station, and had a WTF moment when Stu pointed this out!!  Stu stayed in the car.  Because it was raining.

We also found the Big Apple

Wingello station wasn't very interesting, but walking on the tracks is still kinda cool.  Stu stayed in the car.  Because it was raining.

We stopped in Bundanoon and had pies for lunch.

I went to find a loo, and went for a wander, while Stu sheltered from the rain.

Abbey Road, Bundanoon?

We didn't even stop in Sutton Forest.  Because it was raining.

We missed Exeter because the sweetie accidentally turned where he shouldn't have at Bundanoon and we ended up taking a different back way.

We continued past the centre of Berrima and out to the Berkelouw Book Barn.  Stu had been here once years and years ago when the Old Hume Highway was the Hume Highway.  But it was chaos because there was a wedding on the grounds, and the cafe area was *full* of annoying people that thought that congregrating next to doorways was a good idea (the place was emptying out while we were there).  I dunno if they were all part of the wedding or not (maybe waiting while photos were being taken??), but it seemed like a lot of people knew each other.  So the place was crowded and annoying.  Stu did buy a book on the art of war though.

Then headed back into Berrima and checked into the motel - the Bakehouse Motel.  It was just lovely.  I dunno why but Australian motels are often better/more comfortable/much better equiped than fancy hotels.  It almost seems standard that they have decent fridges and glasses and crockery.  This one didn't have a microwave in the room, but it had one in a common area, and you could also pick up cereal and milk for breakfast from there.  Plenty of power points around, and plenty of luggage rack space.  There was also aircon *and* a fan, although we didn't need either.  Just lovely.

The sweetie crashed for a bit and I did a sudoku.  Then I went out for a little wander around town.  In the rain.

I came back to the room and we had some wine and cheese (finished off a bottle we started last weekend).  All very civilised.

Then we went across the road to the Surveyor General Inn - Australia's Oldest Continuously Licened Inn - for a beer.

Then up past the gaol again.

And up to Escalot for dinner.  We were in the early sitting (17:45) and of course so everyone else in the same sitting all turn up at once and we're all waiting outside the door heh.  

We decided to go with the "Chef's feed me" ($95pp), which aligns with my usual philosophy of eating out - "bring food and I'll eat it".  

When they brought out All The Starters, I was like, we're going to need a doggy bag.  Or five.  Because look at this!!

So top left was cheese croquettes, then kingfish, and flatbread, with zucchini flowers bottom left and sweet potato on the right.  I don't know if the serving sizes are the same as the menu or just tasters, but here's the menu for them (I think, assuming they actually did the menu and not just made something up):

* actually I'm not sure about the croquette on the menu - might have been "manchego, leek and jalapeno croquette, yuzu aiolo, wakame" ($25)
* I think then "kingfish ceviche, cucumber consomme, sherry escalot, citrius, yoghurt" ($37)
* also not sure about the bread
* "zucchini flowers, smoked ricotta, honey, turffle pecorino" ($28)
* "dry aged sweet potato, almod, labneh and pomegranate ($25)

The mains were similarly amazing!

Up the back was fried chicken, then across the middle pork belly, salmon and carrots, and potato and salad at the front.  Possibly from the menu they were:

* "southern fried chicken, honey & sriracha glaze" ($35)
* "mead and miso glazed pork belly, pickled cucumber, caramelised radish" ($46)
* "sous vide king salmon, shoyu glaze, pickled radish, kimchi, rye" ($48)
* "local carrots, truffle honey, shaved manchego" ($18)
* "crispy chat potatoes, gochujang mayo" ($15)
* "eschalot garden salad, tomatoes, olives, white balsamic" ($15)

Dessert I'm not sure about, but I think it was a lemon tart, but doesn't line up entirely with either the example feed me menu online, or the general menu online (and didn't get a photo of the menu we saw).  She did say it had "fence berries" on it, and I'm like what, and she's like, yeah they're berries that grow on their fence.  haha!  It was nice though.  Although we probably would have enjoyed it more if we hadn't been stuffed silly with food.

My only complaint was that the pork belly skin wasn't crispy.  They didn't say it would be, so can't "complain", but I did say that it would have been sooooo much better if it was :)

Absolutely lovely meal, although we were both hurting from eating too much!!

Went back to the motel and crashed in a heap.

I actually slept reasonably well.  We had cereal from the motel for breakfast.

Then I went for another walk.  In the rain.

I went up to find the courthouse (right next to the gaol, easy)

And Harper's Mansion

And saw other cute buildings as well

But I didn't go to the south side of town.  Because it was raining.

Then we packed up and went home via the Hume.  

So yeah.  Lovely weekend.  But it did rain.  The. Entire. Weekend.  Maybe next time we'll have more luck with the weather..

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?