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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eat the fridge week dinner

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

Monday.  27th.  Backdating because ran out of time last weekend after blogging the previous two weeks.  Belly still hurting.  Managed to get an appointment with the doctor at 14:00.  APNIC training online for most of the day.  Doctor was like, eh, not sure, probably diverticulitis.  Don't have any fibre for a few days.  WTF.  I can't do that.  Especially since we just brought home a fridge full of salad stuff from the club.  

Tuesday.  APNIC training led training for the middle of the day.  It was a bit of a disaster really.  I struggled to keep up with the learning part, and the labs were a disaster, because they wanted forty people in two groups to configure twenty routers per group to all talk to each other with not very clear instructions.  The online learning and labs were much better structured.  Oh well.  John parked on our side again.  All fricken day.  Vodien got back to me about the perl/mysql issue.  They looked at it in https and said the problems I was having was because of mixed content (Movable Type hard codes my image urls as http://kazza.id.au/whatever and it's too hard to change it).  And I'm like, NO, it's a http site and you're not listening to me.  Sigh.  Stu reckons I should change blogging platforms, but my blog is such a behemoth nothing would be easy.  In other news I found if I sit close enough to my monitor I can see it better with my reading glasses.  And my main glasses are losing their coating and look all scratched up, so it's like trying to look through a dirty scratched window.  Sigh.  Had yoghurt for breakfast and a liquid diet all day.  If you google liquid low fibre diet, it's all crap like sugary drinks.  Gross.  Good luck if you're a diabetic.  So milk, oj, solo and some beef bone broth I found, and ended up with furry teeth and need to brush my teeth mid afternoon.  Beer for dinner, along with a bit of white rice and kewpie.  I went back to the beginning of the trip to try and figure out if other days had been affected by the time randomly changing on my phone.  Sure enough, it did.  Sigh.  My thought (at the time) was that maybe the phone was getting mixed up between ship time and gps time and just changing when it felt like it.  I. Hate. Everything.  

Wednesday.  So it's an epic disaster!!  Pialligo Estate has gone broke!!  No more streaky bacon!! Disaster!!  Completely traumatised trying to get a poop sample for the pathologist.  Nearly died.  But then forgot the form for the other tests.  Sigh.  Cleaning day at work.  Pizza for dinner because the sweetie wanted it.  It's low fibre right?  Watched some more of Avatar.  Turns out the Hallelujah Mountains are held in the air and float in the magnetic vortices due to the Meissner Effect.  There's a whole Avatar wiki page about that crap.  It was fun seeing the scene where they were flying around on the Ikran/Banshees because I'd just done that at Disney ;)

Thursday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep - stressing about All The Things.  Ok day at work.  More cleaning and working with Neil on cleaning policies.  Leftover pizza for dinner and watched episode 3 of Boba Fett.

Friday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  But!  THEY FIXED THE PERL/MYSQL PROBLEM!!  They never told me what was wrong, or what they did to fix it, or even admit that yes, they HAD in fact broken it.  I don't really care because my blog is working again hurray!!!!  Figured out that it's actually the time zone changing on my phone photos.  Most would be (say) GMT-5, but then others would be GMT-4.  If you look at the details of a photo the "top" time would (mostly) be correct.  If you drag it up, down the bottom you see the exif time, which would be wrong.  If you click Adjust, you can see the time zone, although you can't actually change it.  Sigh.  Watched You've Got Mail.  But just generally cranky and stressed about everything.  It's been a thoroughly crap week.  

Saturday.  Woke up early.  Cranky.  Stressing about phone photos.  There's no easy way in windows to see the time zone of the files in explorer.  I do have exif tools that show it, but nothing in a nice list.  I should probably script something to pull it all out with exiftool.  In the end what I did was do a dir /B, put the results in a spreadsheet, then use a simple formula to check if the numbers are out of order.  If the file number of one file is less than the one before it, it's out of order.  The first photo of the trip that was out of order was taken on the deck 9 forward deck.  Just one photo that day.  But more on subsequent days.  I have an exif editor that can do batch fixes.  So I have to pull out the photos that are wrong, run the tool over them to change their time, then use RenameMaster to fix the file naming.  Such a tedious process.  But the first few days that I'd previously geotagged had the old Date Taken hard coded in the files somewhere (in the XMP according to irfanview) and it was still using that, so for those ones I had to use Geosetter itself to adjust the times on the incorrect files before I could re geotag them.  Sigh.  By the time I got back to doing St Thomas on day 10 again (where I'd first discovered the problem and had already made some changes) it was a painstaking process to find the ones out of order, moving them out, fixing them up, and regeotagging.  So I spent all morning just fighting with iPhone photos.  Hate.  Apple is such a POS.  House stuff in the afternoon, and had sausages and salad for dinner (first real fibre all week and it was lovely).

Watched Simpsons (finished season 33) and Death In Paradise 4.3  Tried to watch Avatar on our tv, but Disney forced me to upgrade the app, but it wasn't quite at the right place and neither Stu nor me could find how to do any sort of seek other than in ten second increments.  Hate.  So gave up and watched it on my computer.  Not that I watched very much, then had an early night.

Sunday.  Woke up at ~4am.  Sigh.  (5am old time).  Had breakfast with the sweetie at U&Co which was nice.

Did a small food shop, then home to slog my way through the todo list.  No time for fun.  And too stressed about All The Things to feel like starting the next section of the Titanic.  But I did start a jigsaw.  Even though I don't have time for fun.  Roast chicken for dinner.

Sunday.  Our basa bake dinner (with sweet potato and beetroot for another night)

The Crown in the evening.

Monday.  Blerf meeting all morning.  Electricians finally came to replace the inverter.  My eyes got tired mid afternoon.  It was a dark and rainy day, but the solar system does appear to be working.  The battery got up to 84% in the afternoon without any direct sunlight.  Frustrating evening because I was blind and headachey from not being able to see all afternoon.  

Tuesday.  Took forever to get to sleep then woke up around 5.  Sigh.  The battery went completely flat overnight.  It's not supposed to do that, it's mean to sit at like 10%.  So I got super stressed and grumpy.  Then I couldn't get Redactle out because it wouldn't accept "Earth's" even though I'd put that in and it had matched two other incidences, but not the one in the title.  Clear the cache they said.  It'll fix it they said.  Yeah right.  I lost my entire browsing setup.  Which means all my streaks and stats for all my online games are gone.  The waffle one upset me the most.  And I can't see.  I had a full on meltdown because it was all too hard.  And I haven't played any of those games since.  Meh day.  Stu did get Solar Edge to change the battery settings to not go flat.  We're meant to be able to do that oruselves, but as with everything else by Solar Edge it hasn't worked properly.  Had a drink and watched Star Trek IV in the evening because my eyes were too tired to concentrate on anything that required seeing anything on my computer.

Wednesday.  Slept ok.  Ok day.  Was having a nice quiet morning then All The Things demanded attention at once.  Made a nice salad for dinner.  The sweet potato and beetroot I cooked the other night, with goats cheese, toasted pine nuts and bacon, with an honey, oil and lemon juice dressing.  Annoyingly the bag of rocket I was going to use (that expired today) had gone all manky.  So this salad really wasn't the same.  It really needed the lettuce to lighten it up.  It was still quite nice though.  We won't talk about the heart attack I had on Friday when my poo was a burgundy chocolate colour!

Thursday.  Did a bunch of planning for a big project at work.  Did up all the doco and passed it onto the others to do when I'm on leave.  Also looked at what logs we might be able to trim down to save space.  Then had to be Neil all afternoon while he had bits removed.  Made pizzas for dinner.  Talked to Kit and Pete for a while in the evening (still too hard to do holiday planning in the evening because I can't SEEEE).

Friday.  Woke up at like ~3am til like ~5am.  Sigh.  Did a bunch of holiday planning before work while I could still see.  Had to be Neil again, and did some cleaning.  I had a good eye day, and I could still see in the afternoon so did some holiday planning after work.  I also went into battle with Optus.  Last year when they put my number on a different plan, they set it up in a new account.  But left the shared data plan number behind.  Shared with nothing.  I'd forgotten to stop the automatic payments on this account, so it was in credit.  But the credit was not being used on the new account.  Dumb dumb dumb Optus.  So needed to get the credit transferred to the account which is actually costing money (the shared data plan is "free".. go figure).  And figure out how to access both accounts.  Because I can only access the old one on the website, not the new one.  Turns out I can manage both of them from the app.  So lame though.  Made some creamy mushroom and bacon fettucini for dinner.  Bad for the sweetie but he'd had a crap couple of days and needed the comfort food.  Watched Star Trek VI together in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at like 4:30 and never got back to sleep.  Super busy day doing All The Things - house stuff and holiday prep.  Overdid it on the computer though and ended up with tired eyes.  Cooked butt beef cheeks for dinner and watched second episodes of Spy Among Friends and Death in Paradise.

Sunday.  Today.  Woke up at 4:30 and didn't get back to sleep again.  Another super busy day doing All The Things.  We I even cut the ivy back from the ensuite window..

Really need a longer ladder though.  The sparkies had one that went right to the top of the tip of the roof.  

Both days this weekend the Solar Edge inverter has lost contact with the server, so we haven't been able to see the stats in the app (or website).  We have to go flip the switch on it to reset to reconnect.  Solar Edge is CRAP!!  The other annoyance is when it was sort of working briefly last year the panels were doing over 11kw.  But I haven't seen them get much over 9 since they got it working again.  I don't know if that's just because the angle of the sun is different or what.  We'll have to wait til December to find out I guess.  We had an inspector come Wednesday morning and they found the sparkie hadn't done a couple of minor things.  So they were back again Friday to finish up.  I asked him why, once the battery is charged and we're maxing out the 5kw back to the grid, does it say we're consuming ~3kw, when we're *actually* only consuming about 1kw.  He had no idea.  He said he'd find out and get back to us.  He hasn't.  #grunt.

Oh, and the neighbour parked on our side yesterday morning while he was shovelling gravel from his trailer.  And hasn't moved his damned car back since.  At what point do I pile a whole bunch of crap behind his car in protest??

Went on strike this afternoon because I'm sick of everything, so the sweetie is getting Chong Co for dinner.

Sunday.  22nd.  Here's the turkey roast from last week.

Monday.  23rd.  Took forever to get to sleep then awake at 4 for an hour with hurty.  And it was so cold in the house I put a jumper on!  Super tired all day.  Picked something new to clean and worked on that at work.  Made up some tomatoey mince and salad for dinner and blogged last week.

Tuesday.  Took quite a while to get to sleep but then mostly slept ok.  More cleaning.  Music after work and leftover turkey for dinner.  I setup a simlink to fool iTunes into backing up my phone to my D: drive, and backed up the new phone (and moved the backup of the old phone across too).

Wednesday.  Cleaning.  Also figured out how to replace a certificate on one of our appliances, and updated doco for it.  Watched Onward in the evening which was sweet and magical, enjoyed it.

Thursday.  Slept ok.  Did a bit of house stuff in the morning.  Did some organising of crap the rest of the day.  Realised, due to covid, I don't even have a complete set of circulation coins from 2019-2022, cause I just don't spend cash anymore.

There may have been a lamb roast for dinner.  Not Un-Australian.  Although if it were we could live in a land of lamb forever!  haha.

Friday.  Spent like All. Day. going through finances - downloading statements and sorting tax and crap.  Watched the first episode of season 3 of The Crown.

Saturday.  Checking receipts off against credit card statements.  Which took like All. Day.  Had to fight with booking.com and paypal.com and tripadvisor/viator dumbness.  Terrible web interfaces and they make it so damned difficult to find details on transations.  Paypal by default only shows you 90 days of past transactions.  To see more you have to click on the Date button (it's not obvious you even can) to choose dates.  Wtih Tripadvisor I booked three tours in Rome.  One on paypal and the other two just credit card direct.  Well at least the paypal one sent me their own email which had a reference number I could cross reference.  But the ones on credit card had literally nothing.  No email confirmations.  No invoices of any sort.  So I have two entries on my credit card, both for the same amount, but no idea which one is which.  Why is that a problem, since they're the same value?  BECAUSE THEY WERE DIFFERENT PRICES ON THEIR WEBSITE!!.  They've totally ripped me off for one of the tours.  I WOULD NEVER BOOK ANYTHING THROUGH TRIPADVISOR AGAIN!!!   It didn't help that I was having a bad eye day too.  Screen was out of focus all day.  I couldn't even do music for very long because I kept missing notes because I couldn't see where they were.  

For dinner we had a Luv-a-Duck Peking Duck kit.  omfg it was epic amazing!  I scoffed half of them (sorry sweetie! haha).

In the evening we started on season 4 of Death in Paradise.  We had stop watching this series a few years ago when the buttplugs at Netflix pulled it.  So we're watching it on Prime now instead.  Then watched the first episode of A Spy Among Friends.  Which was funny after seeing another of the Cambridge Four (Five) in The Crown the other night.  Maybe that was Stu's inspiration for watching this series.  

Sunday.  Pretty much the whole day consolidating receipts for our holiday last year.  Today's drama was with booking.com.  There were five hotels that didn't charge me directly, but charged through booking.com.  But booking.com only emailed me about one of them when they were about to take the money off the credit card.  The other four were a mystery.  And there's nowhere on their site that gives you invoices or anything actually useful.  You have the "estimate" in the booking, but that's not exact.  Two of the hotels actually gave me printed invoices, but they didn't line up with what I was charged either.  So I basically had to guess which one was which based on the prior guesstimate.  Fricken hopeless.  I also strained a muscle in my back helping the sweetie move the bed to vacuum behind it.  I don't think seriously, but I think it's going to hurt tomorrow.  I washed towels today and hung them out under cover.  But with rain on and off all day and Oh The Humidity they didn't dry.  And we got a whole bag full of new guppies!!  Music then cooked all the food for dinner.

So really a blerf longgg weekend dealing with finance crap.  I really need to be better organised and do it a bit more piecemeal so it doesn't take up an entire long weekend to catch up.  Sigh.

Stu had the idea the other week that we should try out some sort of low carb tuna casserole.  I liked tuna casseroles growing up so thought that was a good idea.  So we bought a big tin of tuna.  

The other weekend I surprised the sweetie with it.

Here's the ingredients

So a big tin of tuna, an onion, half a pack or so of cauliflower rice, cheese, mustard, salt, pepper, paprika, cream and kewpie mayo.  I also threw in a handful of frozen peas/corn because I wanted to get them out of the freezer, and there was some leftover chili from Chong Co the other night that I chopped up and threw in as well.  I cooked the onion on the stove to caramelise and cooked the chili as well.  Topped it with cheese, a small handful of panko crumbs, and spring onion, then it was all into the oven for like 40 minutes.

It actually turned out really well and the sweetie has asked for it again since then :)

Sunday.  8th.  Backdated.  Had pork and turkey fried in pork jelly with salad for dinner.  Then The Simpsons and The Crown.

I actually forgot to get these shapes out for Christmas.  This to me is the flavour of Christmas - Savoury Shapes with french onion dip.  Yum yum yum!

Compare the pair!  No forced perspective here - these are side by side!

Monday.  Got the house down to 16C with just the fan running overnight.  The blog publish was still going.  Did half an hour of weeding before work.  That makes it beer o'clock right??  Oh, did I mention I cleaned out the Dyson?  Pulled it apart and cleaned everything I could.  And it worked again!  Hurray!!  Cleaning at work.  Basa bake for dinner.  Then started watching A Christmas Karen.  This came on after the carols on Christmas Eve but it was way too late to start watching it then.  

Tuesday.  More weeding in the morning (pruning out the front).  Went back to my work on certificate management.  There was an email from Digicert the other day that said something like 80% of companies have had outages because of expired certificates.  And I'm like.. pfft.. more like 100%.  If 80% were true it'd mean the other 20% don't use certificates for anything.  Anyways, I'm working on not letting it happen to our team.  Sure we have tools, but they don't cover everything so it's good for a human to just keep an eye on things.  I made a tuna casserole for dinner using up stuff in the pantry and freezer that needed using up.  I'll post that separately I think.  We also started a new anime series - Bocchi the Rock.  And then I finished A Christmas Karen.  Which I actually thought was rather sweet.  As well as filing of photos.  Also, the blog publish finished.  This is why I hate doing any sort of design changes that require republishes of the whole site.

Wednesday.  Mostly finished my certificate management stuff.  Music after work.  Dug out some leftover chicken out of the freezer for dinner.  Also the ftp backup I did of the snapshot of my blog finished (that took multiple goes as well cause the ftp client would grind to a halt).  

Thursday.  Working through the test plan for the weekend's work.  Went looking for a drink after work with Dave 5 and Neil, but the Pot Belly was closed so we went to the Bavarian.  Because it was closest.  Because it was HOT.  Bavarian wasn't too bad.  I'd never actually been in before.  Had a couple of German beers which was nice.  Into season 32 of The Simpsons.

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am and couldn't get back to sleep until like 4:30 then kept waking up.  Sigh.  Which was a bit of a shame because I had an RDO.  Went and did a bottle and cardboard recycling run first thing.  Then dropped into Bing Lee to ask about the oven (whenever you turn the dial past a setting that has the top element, even when it's cold and there's no power otherwise, it trips the entire circuit).  They reckon there's only a two year warranty.  The thing is nearly three years old.  Epic #grunt.  Spent the entire rest of the day pulling out all the fish tank stuff downstairs, sorting it all out, pulling out stuff to give away or throw out, and putting it all back together again.  The corner looks pretty good now, but I didn't do some of the work I really wanted to do, and ended up hot and sweaty.  More leftover chicken for dinner, then watched The Social Network, which I hadn't seen since i saw it on a plane somewhere.

Before I stated

Everything spread out for sorting

Part way through

Finished!  

The pile of stuff to give/throw away

Saturday.  Loaded Echofon and got a popup saying I needed to authenticate with Twitter.  But that brought up an error page.  hmmmm.  Went into work to do some firewall upgrades.  Went fairly smoothly but took all morning.  Pattysmiths again for lunch.  Then spent most of the afternoon looking at all the shore excursions for my cruise.  And only looked at three ports.  Sigh.  Lamb for dinner then more of Origins of Us - on Guts.  Only they didn't mention what I thought they would - that our guts are shorter than a lot of animals because we cook our food.  And started on Brains as well.

I had the Crispy Chicken burger at Pattysmiths this time which was quite nice

Stu might have also bought himself a new toy!  Just so long as he lets me play it too haha

This is three seconds hand held on the phone.  I really need to try and find a tripod mount and test it out properly

Sunday.  Spent most of the morning looking at shore excursions.  Then we did our food shopping.  Then some music.  Then All The Cooking.  And suddenly the weekend is over.  Sigh.

For dinner I cooked roast chicken.  Except as an experiment I decided to cook it "upside down".  That, is, with the breast down and the back up.  I really don't know why this way isn't the preferred way to roast chickens.  This way all the little fatty bits on the back render down, while the breast stays moist at the bottom.  I reckon it turned out better than the traditional way.  Although it does look rather disturbing in photos.

Wow, another strange year. Another crazy busy year.

Our year began very quietly with just the two of us. We didn't go out to the club because of Omicron taking the country by storm.

Travel-wise this year has been.. interesting. It started off with us desperatly trying to get out of the cruise we were due to go on. The charter company had postponed it a year, but with Omicron raging, government travel bans still in force, and lack of insurance for covid-related hospitalisations, we just couldn't justify it. The travel bans did get lifted and insurance companies started insuring for covid, but we still didn't think it was worth the risk. In the end, something like two weeks before the departure date, Carnival were like, ok fine, we won't charge the charter company if people don't want to come. Great. So we didn't go. The charter company were still @$$holes and would only provide a cruise credit for next year's cruise not the year after. It's caused me so much stress and angst and I would NEVER deal with them again. So plan B for February was Tasmania. But with Omicron raging and mandatory lockdowns for testing positive, we decided against that too. If we'd gotten sick while in Tasmania we would have nowhere to go and no way to get home. So plan C was regional Victoria. We only booked motels a night in advance, and if we'd gotten sick we could be home from anywhere in Victoria in a day. So that's what we did. And we actually had a lovely time with almost perfect weather (if a tad hot!). We had a very busy first week, cramming in lots of things, but took it a lot easier in the second week. In April there was a day trip to four Sydney dams to see three of them spilling which was super cool. In May was another sneaky trip to Sydney to see Woronora Dam spilling, and Brickman's Lego Jurassic World. I hadn't been planning to go see the Lego, but then was inspired by Lego Masters so went when it only had a few days to go. And then they extended it. Oh well. And then back again to Sydney in June for Mum's birthday where Kellie had organised to see Mary Poppins. Met up with Tony the next day and wandered the city and went out to Cockatoo Island, then met up with Mum again and saw Vivid. Finally a visit to Ansto at Lucus Heights which was very cool. We only made it down the coast once this year, in July, to see Kit and Pete. In September I went overseas for the first time in nearly four years. Mum and I went and saw the Oberammergau Passion Play, which I'd been wanting to see since the late 80s. We then drove through Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland (four countries in one day!!) and into Italy, where we ditched the car and toured northern and central Italy by train. We saw *heaps* of stuff, much more, and for much cheaper, than if we'd done it with the tour company like originally planned. I got filled with rage how Qantas and Emirates won't talk to each other to do seat allocations on code share flights. Jet lag hit me in a major way when I got home. It certainly didn't help that I got a cold as soon as I got home and so didn't go outside and see the sun in days. I was awake for hours every night for a week, and a complete zombie for much of it. Finally, we went back to Tumut for the Tumut 3 Power Station Open Day and another TRBC tour.

Work was, well, work. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that it takes up so much time out of my days. I have way too many things on my todo list to have time to go to work every day. Sigh. But at least working from home a few days a week makes it tolerable. I didn't actually go into the office at all until March (with Omicron raging and minimising people contact before we went on holidays). Then when I did eventually have to go back in I found it super loud and stressful and distracting and PEOPLE!! I had to be Neil a few times during the year and did some doco on his stuff (which he won't keep up to date heh). There were a couple of firewall migrations that went quite smoothly. A couple of load testing days in May and June. A few proxy upgrades which introduced more bugs than they fixed. But we did PoC a proxy from another company that actually looked pretty good. Migrated some servers. And All The Cleaning. Just call me Sadie. There was a whiskey night in July (which I actually missed, but was able to try everything the next week), and I ran my Christmas bbq at the lake for the tenth year in a row.

Healthwise I've been pretty good. Had a very slight cold in June and another one when I got home from Europe. Had booster jabs in January and July. The one in January caused a strong immune reaction so had to take a half day off and have a little lie down. Other than that just a sore arm so far is all I've had from the shots. Other than that just the usual bouts of insomnia, waking up with numb hands, and going blind.

We've been pretty slack at keeping up with friends and family this year. Although we have seen some friends a bit. We've seen Tony and Jess a few times for games and music. Damien came over in January, April and June for games. Jenn came over a couple of times in April and December. I had heaps of lunches at Herbert's with various Chrises and Tonys and other peeps as well. David came to stay before the Canberra Airport Open Day. Kit came to stay in July. Mum came to stay in December and we did our family Christmas with Kellie's family at the Burn's Club. We saw Annie and the family a few times - for Annie's 50th, Mila's 21st and Christmas, as well Immy coming over a couple of times to hang out. EffanC and R&F came over they day before my birthday. Had a lovely housewarming for R&F in November (it was cold and wet). Caught up with Aaron in December, probably as long as ten years since I last saw him. Finally saw Chrissie for the first time since covid in December. And met up with James and George and the kids for lunch in December on their way to Melbourne.

We only made it out to the club four times this year. It's been that kind of year. With quarantining and being on holidays for several events, the only times we made it out were for the Mexican night in March, the formal night in June, our Christmas in July and the Christmas party in November. We didn't even make it out in any non-event weekends which we like doing over winter.

I did a bit of work on processing Dad's slides early in the year but that fizzled out. I geotagged all of Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos in case we ended up going there. I also geotagged all our Victoria and South Australia photos from previous holidays to try and reproduce those. I started to scan Mum's Minolta negatives from the beginning (1983) and got some spectacular results, but that ground to a halt when I got up to 1994 and got into a batch of badly discoloured negatives that were unscannable. Not that there's even all that many past 1994 that I'm interested in keeping so no big deal I suppose. I managed to cull and label and get some photos onto the blog for the tenth anniversary of my 2012 Eurasia trip. That was a lot of work for the first few months of the year but it was so good to get it done. I also got 719 Victoria photos (plus bugs/flowers/panoramas) labelled and online in time for the six month anniversary of us leaving on that trip. After that I got really slack in the evenings - with no pressure or deadlines nothing much got done. For this year's Europe trip it took me a good six weeks just to geotag everything, then I got slack again. I was thinking I might be able to get the photos online by Christmas. Yeah right. Instead I used the evenings to start filing by 2022 photos and taking notes for my year in review post.

Stumpy is still doing great. We've had him (her?) nearly five years now! He'd be at least 13 by now. The fish are puttering along. My two main guppy tanks (the two foot upstairs and the two foot downstairs) look amazing - lots of plants (at least upstairs) and hardly any algae. But our guppies are two years old now and getting inbred. We really need to get some new genetics for them. I still have my "angel" 620T tank with a guppy, a platy, and an ancient cory. I still have Chrissie's tank with her two clown loaches and a guppy, but I'm considering moving them and getting rid of the tank. It's got horrible black hair algae which is not fun. I have the two two foots, as well as several small tanks downstairs, all with just guppies. And Stu has his four foot which is still full of algae. Really must move more juvenile guppies in there.

I lost heart in trying to complete any more of Vic's Lego sets, so decided to inventory what was left (I'm going to need to do that at some point anyway before selling it). I found a website called Basebrick which integrates with Bricklink which is super useful. Did heaps but ran out of time to finish it before I went overseas and haven't been back to it. For my birthday I got 10497 Galaxy Explorer and 75329 Death Star Trench Run Diorama which are pretty cool. I decided to sell the box of "MISB" Harry Potter Lego I got from 2003-2006. There were ten sets and they sold for quite a lot (I probably made the buy it now too small), but ebay makes it so you have to jump through all their hoops otherwise you can get totally screwed over buy the buyers. As it was I got totally screwed over by ebay who not only take 12.5% of the sale, but also 12.5% of the *postage* which I think is a complete scam. Not to mention the stress. If things go well it's actually quite simple, but if anything complicated happens (like people pay for everything and *then* want combined postage, or come to pick up from your house but don't mark online that they've done so, or the value is over the $100 Australia Post will cover you for) then it's a nightmare. I calculated how much profit I made, taking into account the cost of interest for not having the money in my mortgage all these years and all the fees, and I figure I made a total net profit of about $50. But, I'm sure I made a lot of people very happy they could get their hands on 15-20 year old brand new Lego sets. For Christmas I was going to get myself the Lego Titanic. But after not getting a Black Friday special on it, I decided to sit down and buy it on the Saturday. By which time it was out of stock. Sigh. But I did get a different Lego set for Christmas - in a manner of speaking. Neil lent me his Saturn V rocket that he bought a few years ago but had never done. So I've been having fun with that. Then will pull it all apart and give it back to him :)

I finally finished the Disney 40320 piece behemoth this year - finishing up with the Bambi section. I still haven't assembled the whole thing yet because I lost access to the really useful skybridge so don't know where I'm going to assemble it. Maybe Damien's driveway. Other than that, the usual jigsaws at home and work, although feeling like I really don't have time to do them.

They said La Niña would finish by the end of summer. It didn't. There was a massive storm in January which caused a lot of chaos in northwest Canberra. There were power outages all around Belconnen and Coles lost all their fridge and freezer stock. Chris kept power to his store, but his house had no power for days. We were lucky and just had a couple of small outages while they were fixing things. And the water. All The Water. In spring half of NSW was flooded. Insanity. And there was so much water there was no lettuce in Australia for a while. Craziness.

I've had a whole stack of problems with Windows 11 on my new computer. I hate it (windoze 11) so much. Like the fact you can't ungroup task manager icons which makes it so damned slow to switch between windows now. Before you could just click on the icon. Now you have to click or just hold and *wait* for the popup before you can switch windows. I took to making whole new desktops for the browser and explorer windows I need for different hobbies (such as music or lego) but even that has its bugs - like not displaying the wallpaper at the right size at random and then fixing it and then breaking it again all without me changing anything. Or that after a reboot only two of the desktops will display the right wallpaper at all, and if I switch between the working and non working one it'll put the wall paper from the working desktop onto the non working desktop I've just switched to. And after a few days it'll come good. Utter trash. Then there's the fact my GPS won't work at all (and there's no replacement drivers for it), my scanner won't work (even though it originally did), Eudora wouldn't work to begin with, then came good. My SD card reader only works intermittently. The front USB ports take at least thirty seconds to recognise there's anything plugged into them. My second monitor wouldn't work so had to buy a new one. It's great but the resolution is so high it's difficult to see. Windows 11 *still* only ever puts the screensaver on the left-most monitor, even if that is not the primary monitor. Excel 2003 dates wouldn't work, so had to put on Libre Office instead. You can't drag a file onto the application on the task bar, have said application pop up, and open the file in that application. That just doesn't work at all anymore. Similarly I can't drag anything into Eudora to attach it, I have to go to a menu and manually attach files. Printscreen didn't work to begin with, then started working. Hate hate hate hate hate. I've been playing a lot of Wordle style games, although cut back on those while overseas and only play a few of them now. I like Symble because you have to think more about it. Redactle is challenging. Wheretaken is a new favourite. Also Worldle, Waffle and Framed. In February Google changed one of their apis to enforce https, so had to hack Geosetter to get it to work again. Then in December Google finally killed the IE api, killing Geosetter completely. A few weeks later they released a new version of Geosetter which still has some issues, but at least will display the map again. Our printer is having a tonne of issues with jamming and poor quality printouts. It might just need a clean. Or a new printer. hmmm. Had to setup an app password in June for Eudora so it can backup my gmail. In July OneDrive took it upon itself to backup/sync all my desktop, documents and downloads directories to OneDrive. But all it succedded in doing was making a complete mess of things, bringing back files from my old computer that had long since been filed. Turned off backups everywhere and I minimise use of those directories completely. IOS 15.3.1 (or thereabouts) went back to putting photos into files by year/month (which I actually prefer). But Apple is STILL messing with the timestamps on my files. I got myself a 14 Pro for Christmas (it arrived instore literally the Friday night before Christmas, I was thinking I'd have to wait until January). Its camera has.. issues.. I lot of the first photos I got off it were utter crap. Primarily because I was using the 2x lens a lot to compare with my old phone. Firstly. Don't. The 2x "lens" is a digital interpolation of the 1x optics. So it's crap. The macro setting will work (if the stars align) but while it's good for getting actual closeups, it's crap at taking photos of flowers where you want the background all out of focus. Use the 3x lens as before just be far enough away for it to focus. Optus charged me 50c for an international SMS I didn't make in July. I got onto their online chat and they gave me a credit, but firstly said they couldn't find out the exact date/time and number, which was a total lie, because when I pressed them for it they could, and then I figure out what it was (it was a reply to a string of text, not a number, so it got translated to an international number). I bought myself new sandshoes in January, for the first time in like fifteen years. And new black shoes in August for the first time in seven years. I bought a G5X before our overseas trip. And got a brand-new-second hand wok on freecycle (to replace ours whose non-stick surface was coming off).

Around the house. I needed to move all the ornaments off the top of my desk to setup my new computer and rearrange monitors and crap. I moved them all into the shevles I bought for David in the spare room. I can see everything there a lot better, so I'm enjoying having them all there. The top of the desk has remained clear all year, although I do currently have my birthday presents up there at the moment. Tony came over in January to chainsaw off the oak tree sprouts and the front hedge. And then in December to attack the photinia. In between is all the weeding. Never. Ending. Weeding. Except in winter cause it's too damned cold heh. When the big storm went through in January water was coming out of places that water should not be coming out of. Like bricks next our bins, and bricks on one of the back steps at the back of the house. So got the plumbers to come out and do all the eeling. The sewage pipes were the easiest because we know the deal with them. The front courtyard was easy when we realised it's not a proper drainage pipe, just a 50mm pipe that goes just across the courtyard and drains off to the side. Looks to have been an afterthought. Then the stormwater. They went in via the sump next to the garage and it was like thirty metres down before they found the blockage. So they cleared that. Like the sewage, we'll just need to do that every couple of years. Finally they looked at the drainpipe near the bins. Under the concrete the pipe had come adrift and was full of roots, so the drain from the roof was just pooling under the stairs, and then going through the bricks next to the bins. So they dug up the front stairs, dug a wholly new trench, resealed, relaid the pipes, filled it all in, and got someone to put in some new stairs. Fifteen thousand dollars later. Ouch. Mice were scritching around the roof in March, which caused some sleepless nights. But then they went away. Which was good because I practically had a panic attack trying to figure out how I was going to get across to the far side of the roof without falling through it and getting covered in disgustingness. I tried to cut back the ivy in May. It's now covering more of the side wall than ever. Our largest stove element died. But we still haven't replaced the element or the whole stove. Found out in early spring that a pair of crimson rosellas had been chewing through the beams holding up our roof. Tried plastic sheeting, tinsel, scaring them, and scat. Nothing much seemed to work very well. They've found more interesting things to eat for now but I suspect they'll be back again next winter. We moved a shelf out of the dungeon because Stu wanted to put in a proper shelf there. Underneath was a massive growth of dark brown mold. We don't know if it's current or historical. hrmmm. The Dyson I got for my birthday two years ago stopped working. Don't know if it just needs a clean, or if the battery is dying, or if the Dyson is just a dud. My money is on the latter. Brought home the Electrolux from the club where we'd had it to use until I can get around to cleaning the Dyson. Got lots of strawberries from plants around the back yard. Including some from our paver weeds. The snails clearly didn't get the memo, so we got the strawberries instead of them. We had solar panels and a battery installed in December. They still don't work.

Our favourite restaurant this year was still Chong Co - we got deliveries from them in January, twice in April, twice in August, and October. Herberts is also popular for work Friday lunches (and their Christmas in July was a lot of fun). I didn't get to have any workday Kingsleys lunches because the building opposite blew up from a gas leak and they've never gone back, or been allowed to, not sure which. I did finally have some Kingsleys from Kippax a few weeks ago. We had Sichuan Chinese pickup from Belco a couple of times and were pretty impressed with them. We had brunch a few times at Market St Eats. Some others we went back to after long breaks included Mills and Grills (Stu went low carb so hardly any Dominos this year either), Chez Kimchi and Bella Vista. Tried out SpudBAR and 1919 Langzhou Beef Noodle which opened in the mall. Other one-offs included Co Dung (fried chicken wings were awesome), Lazy Su, Turqoise Turkish, Edgar's, Flavours of Jiangnan, Teddy Picker's, Badger & Co, Little Steamer, The Howling Moon, Mr Shabu Shabu, Little Oink, Master Bao (which had no bao), Magpies (for Jim's farewell), Pattysmiths, and Chinese Inn (from Kippax, just as bad as last time).

As always I end up doing quite a bit of cooking and trying new recipes, as well as doing old ones a few times. One new favourite is stuffed baby capsicums - fill with whatever mince you like and lots of cheese and roast. Yum yum. I made a few lemon cheesecakes, as well as a lime one and a cherry one. One of Stu's favourite meals is Cath's basa bake we've done that a few times. We did san choy bow a couple of times. We really like the potato, onion, blue cheese and bacon bake from my Gratins and Bakes book, but with Stu going low carb we only did it like once all year. The slow cooker gets a workout over winter. Favourite recipes for that are Alan's beef stew, brisket, and even pulled pork. And we tried slow cooking pork ribs (nice but lots of little fiddly bony bits). Beef cheeks are slow cooked on the stove. After doing turkey rolls that actually turned out this time at the club Christmas in July (on account of doing them in the oven instead of on the bbq), we tried one ourselves in August and also November (and likely New Years Eve as well). They turn out really nicely and we'll probably always keep one in the freezer to do when we feel like it. From Not Quite Nigella I tried a chicken marbella but wouldn't bother again, from the Gratins and Bakes book I tried potatoes with lemon and tomato but wouldn't bother again with that either, and from my Slow Cooker Kitchen book I tried honey rosemary chicken which was too salty. Completely evil meals included uunifetapasta, cheese nachos, and no-carb pizza (made with no base at all, just cheese). Slow cooked mini tomatoes are amazing, really must do them more often. Tried pork crackling by itself but I do prefer it done on the meat. A favourite lunch is grilled cheese sandwiches - but with shredded pizza cheese on the outside as well. Favourite veggies (well other than my favourite which is potato bake) include brussels sprouts with bacon. Over winter we discovered kalettes which when roasted for 35-40 minutes turn into little bliss bombs. Almost as good is kale chips, but it's a bit too easy to overcook those and have them go bitter. I made pesto with the last of the summer basil, and tried cheese biscuits in June (but need to find a better recipe). And made a coconut cake (Yum! Delicious!) in June and October.

Theatre/Shows/Exhibitions
* Australian Wind Symphony in May at the B (next to the Q)
* Lego Jurassic World in Sydney
* The Queen and Me exhibition at the National Capital Exhibition
* Mary Poppins in Sydney
* Canberra Lego Brick Show at Thoroughbred Park
* Australian Wind Symphony in November at St Andrews

Movies (at the movies)
* Top Gun: Maverick

Movies (TV)
* The Courier
* The Young Black Stallion
* The Grand Budapest Hotel
* Six Minutes to Midnight
* Sleeping With the Enemy
* Munich: Edge of War
* The Laundromat
* 1917
* The Mauritanian
* Zero Hour (twice) / Flying High
* Dr Strangelove
* No Time to Die
* Operation Finale
* Logan's Run
* 6 Underground
* The King's Speech
* Encanto / Luca
* The Death of Stalin
* The Royal Tenenbaums
* Gladiator
* Knives Out
* Edward Scissorhands
* The Monuments Men
* Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version)
* Mary Poppins / Saving Mr Banks
* The Little Mermaid II / Ariel's Beginning
* The Man from Snowy River
* An Affair to Remember / Sleepless in Seattle
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Constant Gardener
* Top Gun
* The Silver Brumby
* Kingsman: The Secret Service / Kingsman: The Golden Circle / King's Man
* Careful, He Might Hear You
* Moulin Rouge!
* Shine
* Blue Murder
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (twice - before and after Italy)
* Breaker Morant
* Matrix Resurrections
* Romeo+Juliet
* The Butterfly Effect
* Die Hard 1/2 / Love Actually
* Enola Holmes 2
* Operation Mincemeat
* Herbie Goes Bananas

TV
* Sex Education (season 3)
* The Simpsons (seasons 20 to half way through 31)
* The Girl on the Train in the Rear Window, or whatever it's called
* Mentour Pilot (about 3/4 of the air crash investigations episodes)
* Gunther's Autopsy
* Lie to Me (end of season 2 and season 3)
* Black Books
* Gunther's Anatomy
* The Crown (season 1 and most of season 2)
* Lego Masters (season 4)
* Martin Bashir's Diana interview
* The Diana Interview: Revenge of a Princess 2021
* Epstein's Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell
* Obi-wan Kenobi
* Super Cub
* Andor (season 1)
* Lego Masters Bricksmas special (last year's and this year's)
* Survivor Canberra (fan produced)
* Picard (season 2, haven't finished)

Books
* Read the first four books of the New Testament, but got behind in February when we travelled and never really caught up. Will try again next year for the rest of the New Testament.

Other stuff
* Tried to catch up on This Day in History posts, but there's still too much work to be done with Mum's photos to do it properly, so that stalled
* Car wouldn't start in January. Turns out it was the battery, which was probably original, so it would have been nearly eight years old
* Petrol got insanely expensive
* Balloon Fiesta in March
* Canberra Airport Open Day in April
* Dam Busters trip to Sydney in April
* Climbed Mt Rogers a couple of times
* Saw the planet/moon alignment in April
* Jupiter and Venus were having a sneaky early morning kiss in April
* Sneaky trip to Sydney in May to see Lego Jurassic World (and Woronora Dam)
* Got a democracy sausage in May
* Climbed Mt Ainslie in May (hadn't been planning to it just happened)
* Whiskey Live in May
* Queen Elizabeth II 70th Jubilee in Canberra - all the purple lights on buildings around Canberra
* ABC's Classic 100: Music for the Screen in June
* Inspected my flat, went to Cockatoo Island, saw Vivid and visited Ansto in June (after seeing Mary Poppins for Mum's birthday)
* Surprising Science at the Shine Dome in June, August, and December
* Walked up Mt Painter
* Stu cracked a tooth and needed it taken out
* Fought with Qantas' booking system again. I hate Qantas. So. Much.
* Had a hair cut in August
* Stu got a 3D printer which he's been using to make little models for his wargamming
* Total lunar eclipse in November
* Took a drive out the back of Dunlop/Holt to see the West Belconnen Pond
* Got a beer advent calendar from Plonk
* Went to the Green Shed a couple of times, dropped off a few things, came home with more jigsaws
* Continued to practise the clarinet

Have a very happy and safe new year!!

Monday.  19th.  Backdating a couple of days.  Super stressed out about the solar.  Also annoyed that my version of the app doesn't show the individual panels.  Maybe only the ipad version does??  All the stoopid at work.  At lunch time we met up with James and George and the kids and bfs for lunch at Bella Vista.  That was lovely and all too short.  

Made a cabbage lasagna for dinner with the leftover veggie mince and bechamel sauce from last weekend.  Did some year in review reading.

Tuesday.  They must have turned off the solar system remotely, because now the app wasn't showing any production at all - just our actual usage.  Which with all the fish tank filters running all day is about a kilowatt with spikes for things like the hot water.  Finished work early.  My heart's just not in work for the rest of the year, I've had enough.  Dug out some mince from the freezer and had that with some bacon, leftover onion, tomato paste, passata, and leftover salads from the Christmas party.

Wednesday.  Wandered the building and found a new jigsaw to borrow and do.

Thursday.  It was a day.  Watched the fourth episode of Picard.  Totally cacked myself when they had Kirk Thatcher 36 years later playing the same punk song on the bus.  Except this time when they tell him to shut up he sheepishly agrees (after putting his hand to his neck remembering Spock's nerve pinch).  So funny :)

Friday.  Such a busy morning.  So much for a gentle wind down to Christmas.  Lunch at Herbert's, this time with the Chrises and Tony. 

Played some Christmas on Yvonne's keyboard in the afternoon and tidied the house.  They turned the solar back on again in the evening and it caught the last of the rays.  Did a veggie roast and potato bake for dinner and had the hills over. 

Jess and I played some Christmas music, although I'm struggling with my reeds at the moment (but I don't want to open a new one because I won't be using it for long before going away again).  She also determined (like Stu has been trying to tell me) that David's Aulos recorder is out of tune, and in fact my original one from primary school (that I haven't played in like 35 years on account of I thought David's sounded better) is more accurate.  Sigh.  Also got an SMS that my new phone had arrived at JB.

Saturday.  Christmas Eve.  Got the house down to 16 overnight just running the fan.  Then went and braved the mall to pick up my phone and some bubbles and a few other bits and pieces while I was there.  Did some stuff on my todo list.  Made a cherry cheesecake in the afternoon.  We think the solar is disconnected from the battery as now the production is maxing out at like 5kW when it should be doing like 13. And the pattern of consumption is being dumb again, showing us using as much as it's producing.  Epic stresssed and depressed about it.  Had chicken kiev for dinner.  Then finally watched Love Actually (been too crazy busy), and the carols.  So quite a late night.

It's not carols until Marina Prior has sung Angels we have Heard on High!

Did someone say Tumut 3 Power Station Open Day?!?

Friday

Left work a little early and headed down the Hume.  We stopped at the lookout at the north end of Gundagai to see All The Water.

Then took a drive down to the flood plain to see All The Water.

Middleton Drive across the Murrumbidgee was closed to traffic.  Because All The Water.

Also had a look from the south end of town.

Straight after arriving in Tumut we headed up to TRBC for a couple of beers and noms.

We had a potato and rosemary pizza which was lovely and the Amazeballs were actually totes amazeballs! 

Saturday

Bacon and egg rolls for brekky then off we headed to Talbingo.

We got the second shuttle from town, in time for the second power station tour at 9:10.

They had a bunch of staff doing the tours.  These guys were not normally tour guides!  We had an electrical fitter? engineer? (can't remember) and another tradie as well.  We had to wear a hard hat and highvis, and also safety glasses which were pretty pointless because they didn't fit over my glasses (and the "tour guide" wasn't wearing them anyway).  They also said "no photos" but then "you'll be told where you can take photos" and our guide was like, um what places would they be? heh.  Part of it they were worried about people dropping things down some very big holes, but also apparently they were a bit secretive of the electronics at the top of the turbines.  The rest of it is all pretty much common knowledge anyway.  We walked down and past the busbar room and onto the generator hall floor.  I did ask if we could take photos of the old control room which is no longer in use (they remote control everything from Cooma these days and just have a skeleton crew on site, plus whatever projects are going on).  

After we got out I said we should take the earliest penstock tour we could do to beat the crowds.  We walked straight onto a coach and it wasn't full - winning!

We went up past the dam wall, and across the top.  People could have gotten out at the far end, but it would have meant waiting for the next coach in half an hour to come back, so noone did (plus I had better photos from last time when we had glorious weather).  

Then onto the top of the penstocks.  They gave us ten minutes there and it was super cool!

Then back down.  The queues were already getting long now.  I totally called it.

The signs said no climbing on the pipes.  Nothing about standing under them to show how damned big they are!

The last time we were here I had a sad that this wasn't open to go in and have a look.  So I was pretty excited that we could this time.

The turbine hall is super cool.  Six turbines.  Three of them only generate, and the other three can either generate or pump water back up the penstocks when power is cheaper.  The generators were upgraded from 2006-2012 to 300 megawatts, so the whole power station can generate 1800 megawatts.

Looking across to the old control room.

One of the inlet pipes

They also have a super cool working model of one of the turbines.

And a model of the area around the dam and power station

I'd love for this thing to be on the internet - it's a graphic of all the different powerstations on the Snowy Hydro system and which ones are in use.  Only like three were in the whole system - lots of solar and wind around or something.  

Finally we took a shuttle back to Talbingo.  The guy organising the queues for the buses (one for the penstocks and the other for the town shuttle) clearly wasn't used to doing this sort of thing and was completely overwhelmed by the crowds.  Luckily most people seemed to be queueing for the penstocks, so we walked straight onto a shuttle back.

Stopped by Jounama.  It was flowing pretty hard, and Blowering was full right back up to this dam.

Last time we were here Blowering was a *lot* lower.  Blowering was actually over full.

We tried to get a good view of the spillway which was spilling *hard* but as I discovered last time there's not really any good views of it.  And sadly the road to the top was closed off, so couldn't even walk across the top to see it (we saw people up there so no idea how they got there).

We did find this suspension bridge over the Tumut River.

The Tumut River was flowing hard with All The Water.

Found somewhat of a view of the spillway on the way back.

Had a pie back in Tumut for lunch, then headed out to Adelong.  It had been flooded just last week.  Water was up to the level of that bridge.

This house had water midway up the shed, and the yard was full of damaged gyprock from the house.  The owner's story is here.

This is that bridge from before showing all the damage from debris.

The sculpture walk was closed, but we did see this rabbit sculpture which reminded me of Donnie Darko.

The mine area was closed off too, so just got a view from the viewing point.

We tried to get out to the truss bridge over the Tumut River east of town but All The Water was over the road from both directions.  It *probably* would have been fine, but we decided not to risk it.

Back in Tumut we walked down to the Old Bridge park.  Last time we were here the water was a lot lower!  The bridge itself had a big gate across it as well.

The walkway either side of the bridge was flooded in various places.  This is on the south side with the bridge over Mcfarlane's Creek.

The park was also filled with All The Water.

Had some bubbles back at the motel before heading over to Mendrinas at Brooklyn for dinner.  The steak was just a teensy bit over done but the lamb was quite overdone which was a bit sad.  The salad was pretty amazing though.

Sunday

Went for a bit of a wander around town to fill in some time.

The Tumut River with All The Water from Wee Jasper Road.

At 11:00 it was time for our tour at TRBC.  Unfortunately we didn't get Tim this time (apparently he has to have time off *sometimes* hehe) although we did see him in the bar and chatted for a while.  So the story wasn't as rich this time.  They do have more brewing tanks now, and they've recently got their own canning run, so they can can their beer as needed and not have to wait for the canners to come in.  They're still getting used to it.

The tour isn't nearly as good value for money either now.  Last time the four tasters were larger and included lunch.  Now the tasters are smaller and lunch is not included.  Oh well.

For lunch we had maple bacon and blue cheese pizza and a salad with smoked trout.

Bought a mixed case of beer, then headed home.

Sunday.  23rd.  Backdating cause I'm a big fat slacker.  Roast chicken for dinner.  

Monday.  Super busy day.  Finished or at least documented another sneaky birthday present I got.  Crumbed salmon and leftover veggies for dinner.  Geotagged days 9 and 10.

How cute is the little x-wing!?

Tuesday.  Had a fit of rage at all the email I get that I never read.  So unsubscribed from everything that's sent me mail in the past few weeks.  Built a new trial proxy with Connor which was a bit of fun.

Wednesday.  Woke up at 2am and never got back to sleep :(  Cooked up a batch of mince and picked up the sweetie.

Thursday.  Broke the prod proxies while trying to setup the new trial ones.  Sigh.  But did learn some stuff about our implementation of kerberos so that was handy.  Two episodes of Andor in the evening.

Friday.  Spent all morning writing up the incident report from yesterday as well as updating the doco so we don't make the same mistake again next time.  Herbert's with the Chrises and Tony at lunch.  Leftover chicken for dinner and more Andor in the evening.

Zucchini fritters and halloumi fries

Saturday.  We were meant to go out to the club but Stu wasn't feeling it (having been in Melbourne half the week) and I was stressed about the loss of weekend as well so we didn't end up going.  I spent all day doing All The Things.  Leftover beef stew and a bit of Andor in the evening.

Sunday.  Some geotagging in the morning.  Went out for brunch (I had the same potato fritters I had last time I was at Market St Eats and they were just as awesome!) and then did food shopping and a Bunnings run.  Then spent the entire rest of the day photographing, packing and weighing Lego and then listing it all on ebay.  Ten Harry Potter sets from 2004-2006 that I've been saving MISB.  I was about to relax for the evening when six of them sold to one person.  But they put through five together in one transaction and one in another and paid for it all and *then* wanted to combine postage.  *sigh*.  eBay sure don't make that scenario easy to deal with.  No time for music.  Stuffed capsicums and roast kale for dinner.