The other night Tony messaged me that there should be aurora visible, even from here.

So I looked out the back window.  Couldn't see anything.  In fact it wasn't really even dark yet.  Plus we have a heap of city light.  I took a few snaps on my phone anyway, and wouldn't you know it, there was pink stuff in the sky.  So I pulled out the "real" camera (with the 24-105 L series lens because it's brighter) and got some snaps.

This was the forecast.. not super great from here.

Meanwhile in Canada..

Sigh.

Sunday.  9th.  9/11.  Stu had a recipe he wanted to make up this week that had pork belly, but not the rind. So the butcher cut it off and gave it to us separately. So I made crackling with it! It actually turned out really well.

Stu also cooked up a cauliflower bake and some sweet potato and we had that with leftover beef.

Stranger Things 2.6. Early night.

Monday.   So I think I got to sleep ok, but I know I was restless. Then I woke up at 4:42. Hurray.

Usual day of NEIL and all the crap.

We may have cut down the bamboo sprout..

Stu cooked up that pork belly with a very nice Japanese recipe. My only complaint: not enough vegetables ;)

Stranger Things 2.7. Then finished watching the You Are What You Eat docuseries. Yeah really need to eat less meat! hmmm.

Tuesday.  Hebrews 9:27 Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, 28 so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

Got stuck into planning moving proxies temporarily. Remembering there's no such thing as temporary solutions at our work. Stu cooked up the mince I cooked the other day with some stock and flavourings.  And there was a lot more veggies :)  I didn't eat all that mince, I gave some to the sweetie.

Stranger Things 2.8. Finished watching Half-Life Histories (for now). 

Wednesday.  Stoopid MyWay+ is stoopid. It keeps refusing to bring up my QR code. Last time it did this I fiddled and fiddled and got it going, but not this morning. It did mean a free ride though.  Hurrah. NEIL/proxy migration/crap. I only really got any useful work done after about 16:30. Stoopid MyWay+ is stoopid. This evening I did what I did last time and signed into the portal within the app. This seems to kick it, and turns out that was probably what got it working two weeks ago.

Stu cooked up leftover pork belly with more garlic spinach and rice.

Stranger Things 2.9 which finished season 2 which was pretty cool. Tony messaged me about the aurora (which was super helpful otherwise I never would have seen it). Got some photos but couldn't actually *see* anything. Went to bed wayy past my bed time but then epic restless legs because I was overtired.

Thursday.   Yeah crap sleep after a bit of a late night. NEIL/proxies/crap. Finished copying across all the proxy config and then managed to test it. After Jim extended my admin ID because the new system is too lame and doesn't work yet. How am i meant to do my JOB without the access i need??  But yeah was super excited that the proxies "just worked" after copying all the config.  Even kerberos authentication which is a strange beast.  But then my desktop froze up and never came back which made me depressed because you never know what you've LOST when your computer crashes.  Good drinks though.  Made pizzas then watched The Simpsons 36.14 (I think we may have missed some, need to check synopses).  

Friday.  Crap sleep.  Again.  Hurray.  Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. .. I learnt that as: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.  I wonder what my printed copy has.  

Yeah I have strawberries growing as WEEDS in our pavers!

Remember those LR44 batteries from 1998?  Well they finally died.  Given they were well over twenty five years old and lasted for nearly two years once I started using them I was pretty damned impressed.  Yayy Seiko!  I bet the Energizer ones I bought today won't last that long!

Logged into work and found my desktop had only frozen and hadn't completely crashed! So it was all there!!! Hurray!! Finished getting the proxy cutover work done and did some testing. I got frustrated at our border firewalls that barely work and you have to FIGHT them to get certificates deployed. Then I got frustrated with our Strata mob who don't send reminders if you don't pay your strata fees, they start charging ridiculous interest. No idea what happened this time, I had filed the email, filed the attachment, and marked it as paid on my budget spreadsheet, but couldn't find any payment in my internet banking. So I paid it. Without the interest. Because it's RUDE that they don't send a reminder first. I've complained to them about it in the past too. Then got frustrated with St George's internet banking which doesn't give you an option to add a nickname to payee accounts. So if I have two payee accounts with the same name but different account numbers I have to go and look up which account is which. Every. Damned. Time. They've never updated their internet banking interface in OVER TWENTY YEARS!!  So I complained AGAIN to them about it. Then I got frustrated at the ATO because their billing system is so TRASH!! I had a "New myGov Inbox message" so went to look. It's complaining about an overdue PAYG tax bill, but I can't find any original bills at all!! They just give me a dollar value and say it's overdue. They don't say which quarter it's for. Fricken HOPELESS ATO!!!!! Not only that, but most of the links from MyGov to the ATO site were giving such fun errors as "An error has occurred. We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. We apologise for any inconvenience. Try again later." Yeah thanks ATO.  Had EB over after dinner and we watched a 50th anniversary documentary on Jaws (Jaws @ 50) which was pretty cool.  

Saturday.  Awake from 2:52 for most of the rest of the night.  Hurrah. 

More WEEDS! ;)

Day of housework, Lego filing, jigsaw, scanning.  Then went over to Rob and Fiona's for a "deck warming" which was a very pleasant evening, but a bit of a late night, whoops.

Sunday.  Slept relatively well all things considered.  Spent entirely too much time geotagging photos of Dad's. Whoops.

I didn't actually realise until last night that this comet was an entirely different one to the one I saw last year.  And the one I saw last year I thought I saw just before Christmas.  Nope.  October!!  I'm losing my mind.  

I went out on Wednesday night (22/1) at maybe 20:30.  Way too bright.  But did meet up with Rob and Lynne and so we hung out together to wait for it to get dark.

My G5X picked it up first a bit after nine.  But I'm blind and the screen is so tiny I couldn't see it.  The phone could see it around 21:14.  Well, that's when it was bright enough for me to zoom and in and find the little smudge so we knew where to look.

I managed to get a few photos on the G5X before it got so dark it had not enough contrast to focus.

Another shot on the phone

I also had a go on the 600D.  My ~12-13 year old camera that I inherited from Dad in 2014.  That has, as I discovered, many dead pixels.  It also had trouble focussing in the dark, so set to manual focus and was able to get some shots.

This one was 20 seconds - star trails!

On Friday 24/1 Tony said he hadn't seen it yet, so we headed up Mt Rogers to get a different view.  Turns out city lights, while annoying for astro photography, also give cameras something to focus on.

Once again I was able to use the phone to figure out exactly where to look.  Here's a couple of shots on the phone.

And those lights gave the G5X something to focus on, so got the rest of the photos of the night on that.

Bug trails!!  And by bug trails I mean Elon's space junk #grunt

Fun times!

Oh, I forgot to link to this.. lyra_lightchaser's spectacular photo of it streaming off the top of Black Mountain Tower!

Sunday.  20th.  Kiev and veggies for dinner.  Loch Henry on Black Mirror.  Far out I wish they'd keep the camera still.  

Went out to find the comet (Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS).  I only knew where to look cause David posted a photo the night before.  Of course I couldn't actually see it.  I'm blind and there's too much city light.  And I couldn't be stuffed taking my cameras/tripod.  So I took some crappy photos on my phone.  As you do.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Didn't get to do my doco clearing cause All The People wanted All The Things.  Had a long lunch to do bank and tax crap.  Tax was surprisingly painless.  I was stunned at how much is automatically populated by the ATO.  David dropped in for meat and veggies for dinner before heading home again.  Watched Beyond the Sea on Black Mirror.  You just know things are going to go Very Badly on this show, although I didn't quite pick *how* it would turn out.  When she said "What if.. what if you let him use your link?" .. you can already see where this is going..  heh.  But keep the damned camera still!!!

Tuesday.  Slept ok I think.  Mostly finishing up decom doco at work.  Mum photo picking in the evening.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  OMFG windoze is so trash.  Like, for most of the time I've had this computer I can't actually shut it down.  I tell it to, but it just logs me off and stays at the login screen.  I have to actually reboot it and turn it off half way through the reboot cycle.  Had a scheduled power outage.  The Solar Edge system dutifully kicked in and kept all the fish tanks running.  But it didn't charge the battery at all.  This was totally not what we were sold on.  Had an early mark and went to Herbert's.  I was on a mission to finish the Ginja Ninja so they'd put on the dessert sour.  Alas, I couldn't do it.  But they were likely my last ever Ginja Ninjas.  Unless someone buys out and continues running TRBC.  TV dinners for dinner.  Have I mentioned how trash windoze is?  This time, after turning on my computer and backing it up, it refused to eject the disk.  Even though I had pretty much nothing running on account of having just rebooted.  I could hear that *something* had the disk open.  But even leaving it for ages it wouldn't let go.  Ended up rebooting again to clear it.  Hate windoze.  Hate hate hate hate.

There's something you don't see every day - a two leaf clover!!!  And a four.  But I see those all the time ;)

HFC (healthy fried chicken) Chipotle burger from Grill'd (went with Neil at lunch)

Possibly one of my last ever Ginja Ninjas :(

Thursday.  Dunno.  Two of the baby gak gak birds are still alive..

Pizzas for dinner.

Friday.  Queensland!

Saturday.  Wedding!

Sunday.  Home! 

John has been building a retaining wall on our bit of the land next to the driveway.. and he very kindly left the epic dandelion there (cause I asked :) )!!

Got upstairs and found the 620T fish tank was *very* low.  Like a good five centimetres lower than it should be.  Uh oh.  Had a look and sure enough, the water was backed up enough that it was dribbling back over the back of the tank where the power cables come in.  Sigh.  So dried up what I could and put a small fan on it to try and dry things out.  Bit of a lost cause though, the backing (made of compressed sawdust) was even more badly swollen than the last time this happened.  Whoever thought that chipboard and sawdust fish tank stands were a good idea should be shot in the head.  TV dinners, Mash, early night.

Monday.  25th. Spent all morning trying to catch up with life and blogging.  Feeling completely overwhelmed at life (even had a bit of a meltdown after blogging (which finished way after lunch) because it was all too hard).  Worked on Eurasia panoramas and got some online.  Cooked a lamb roast with veggies for dinner.  We opened a *very* nice bottle of wine we got at the end of 2012 for our anniversary.  Then Simpsons/Black Books/The Crown.  Also started into the fourth season of Lego Masters.  Had to LOL at the Andrew and Crystal couple (names of my cousin and wife who have since split up).  

We had tardigrades for dinner!!

Tuesday.  Woke up to stress over cruise (the one we put off).  They want us to use the credit so got plunged into the stress of it again.  Ok day.  Nothing special for our anniversary because Stu had uni til quite late.  

Wednesday.  Stress over cruise.  They refused to allow us to use the credit for 2024, forcing us to use it for 2023.  *sigh*.  Ok day.  At the office.  Felt like a Thursday.  Stu cooked pork larb for dinner with some limes from Tim and chilli from Tony.  Continued to stress over cruise.

Thursday.  Ok day.  Pretty quiet drinks.  Picked up some CCs on the way home and had cheesy nachos for dinner.  OMFG the most unhealthiest dinner in the history of the universe but *so good*.  Finished season 23 of The SImpsons.

Friday.  Playing with logs all day.  Was actually kinda fun.  Leftover lamb and veggies for dinner.  Watched Encanto in the evening which was pretty decent.  Nice story and the graphics are spectacular.  

Saturday.  House stuff in the morning.  Stressed over the cruise to the point of depression.  To get a balcony like we had last time would cost us another $1500 USD, which I'm simply not prepared to give them.  I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER deal with this company again.  I was almost at the point of saying F#$% you and walking away from what we've already paid.  The best I can afford with our credit is a window (not a balcony) with an obstructed view.  After tidying up the house and study I thought I'd start inventorying what was left of Vic's Lego.  I had a poke around to see what was available, and one that looked really good was Basebrick.  Except they said they'd send an email to verify the account.  Except that email never arrived.  *sigh*.  So more "everything is awful".  So I started inventorying in excel in the interim.  Sichuan Chinese for dinner then watched The Death of Stalin .. which was.. intersesting.. heh

Sichuan Chinese - Kung pow chicken (lots of chilli so lots of pow), sliced pork twice cooked in green pepper (yummm), stir fry mixed vegetables, with sichuan special fried rice

Sunday.  Woke up early (between 5:30-6:00 is normal now).  Remembered the planets and went and had a look.  This morning Jupiter and Venus were having a sneaky early morning kiss.  I couldn't be stuffed finding the tripod and going outside in the cold, so just did some hand-held photos.  This is off the phone.  Haven't downloaded the camera yet.

Went out fairly early and had breakfast at Market St eats.  I had "Potato Fritters" - potato and cheese fritters, poached eggs, maple glazed bacon, hollandaise, chorizo, pickled cucumber & onion salsa.  Which was really really good.  The poached eggs were perfect, the fritter was delicious.  It was just like eggs benedict but with a croquette instead of bread.  Although the salsa was basically just some chopped red onion.  Kept me going til dinner time ;)

Then we did food shopping and had to wait for Chemist Warehouse being buttheads.  We both put our orders in early while still at home before their opening time.  They open at 9:00.  I got my SMS at 9.39.  We went and picked mine up at 10:30.  They said Stu's order was still in the queue and would be another "ten minutes".  We waited and waited and eventually he went in and was able to pick his up at 10:55.  He got his sms at 11:15.  Absolutely ridiculous that it takes ALL MORNING for them to be organised enough to do an online order.  If it wasn't for the fact that they're *significantly* cheaper than anywhere else we certainly wouldn't bother with them.  

Came home and did Lego inventorying, then music then weeding then fish stuff and suddenly it's 4pm and I need to do All The Cooking.  Which I'll save for later posts and sign off for now.

Monday.  18th.  (Not backdating).  Yay for catchup days.  Pretty good sleep.  Went into battle with my computer trying to get the scanner and GPS to work.  Neither do in windows 11.  The GPS won't work in windows 11 because it complains the driver is no good.  Transystem hasn't put out any new software/drivers in years which is pretty upsetting.  So had to get the dam trip GPS off on my laptop.  Now dreading what will happen if something happens to the laptop and I have to replace it.  I'll have to find an alternative to my little PhotoMate 887 which is one of the best inventions in history.  Was also fighting with the scanner which fricken USED TO WORK in windoze 11, but just stopped one day.  I've yet to reconnect it up to my old computer to test it.  Hate Microsoft.  Hate hate hate.  Did some weeding, and a magpie came right up to where I was working to see if I'd disturbed any bug noms for it.  Very cool.  Potted some geranium cuttings.  In the afternoon we tidied up the shelves in our bedroom cupboard that had been getting messier and messier.  Did a water change in the upstairs two foot for the first time in forever (there's always babies in that tank I'm worried about sucking up).  Then got frustrated yet again with Apple because it dropped out while downloading my photos and refused to show up in windows afterwards.  Was thinking I was going to have to reboot my computer.  It certainlly meant I couldn't blog the previous week.  Hate Apple.  Hate hate hate.  Then cooked all the food.  I prepped a chicken marbella from Not Quite Nigella, cooked some mince/bacon/onion/garlic, and we had salmon and cabbage for Monday night's dinner.  Then we watched the first episode of The Crown which was pretty good.  Got pretty stressed out about having to go back to work.  Even four day weekends are just not enough time to get everything *done*.  Eventually managed to reconnect to the phone and was able to download photos, but bed time so no blogging.

Was digging under the old pool and found all this steel reinforcing.  Maybe to stop slippage of the pool???

Tuesday.  Slept ok until hurty kept me awake half the night.  Ok day trying to catch up on stuff.  Then demoing stuff to peeps and trying to deal with all the stoopid.  It was a wine and candle kind of a night.  Also made the chicken marbella which was nice enough but a little watery.  

Wednesday.  Woke up for a while a couple of times.  Was sick of the stoopid by 8:40.  Fairly busy day prepping a firewall migration and prepping rules for a big project.  Did some music, then did a red curry with mushrooms, asian greens and leftover sausages.  Did some work on Eurasia panoramas but still no blogging.  

Thursday.  Another busy day, and a tonne of interruptions and meetings.  Did a firewall migration after lunch which took all of ten minutes (including testing) and was one of the most anticlimactic changes I've ever done.  Pretty quiet drinks.  Tried McCains frozen pizzas which weren't really any better than Spar.  Need to stick with Dominos or Dr Oetker (Doc Oc/Dr Octopus).

Friday.  Finished prepping a big ruleset, and even managed to deploy them the same afternoon which was good.  Had a craving for mac and cheese for lunch.  Lazy Su pickup for dinner and watched third episode of Gunther's Anatomy.

Saturday.  Basically got ready then Damien came over.  We chatted for ages, had frozen spring rolls and chips for lunch, then played Jaws in the afternoon.  After playing for a little while we put the movie on in the background (because I don't seem to have the soundtrack).  Stu has never actually seen it?!?!  Will have to watch it properly with him some time.  Damien and I played Brody/Hooper/Quint, and Stu played Jaws.  Stu got a really good start, pretty much totally evading us and getting lots of points for act 2.  But somehow we managed to survive and Quint finished him off with the machete.  Just as the movie was finished, amazing timing.  As soon as Damien left we both collapsed in a heap - seven hours of socialising is super super draining, who knew.  Had sausages and cabbage for dinner, then Simpsons, Black Books and second episode of The Crown.

I actually spent cash that day too - to get the shiny on the right here.  And in the same change got all four head designs of the Queen.

Sunday.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers, did some music practise, did some cleaning, and filled the green bin.  And suddenly the morning was gone.  Went to the markets after lunch to get some fresh veggies, came home and cooked some Anzac biscuits and prepped dinner.  And suddenly the afternoon was gone.  Sigh.  Jenn came over for dinner (a cheese and spinach burek we found at the markets) and then we played Carcassonne which I won.  Was going to have an early night, but then Stu tried to print something.  It did a whole lot quite happily, then went back to jamming in the same place at every damned page.  So got super cranky about the whole thing.

I nearly rage quit at one point because the pantry is so full of crap I can't get at anything without everything all falling over

Unfortunately these were a bit dry

Burek and veggies dinner

Monday.  Got a reminder to go look at planets.  Because I was awake, I did.  It was actually worth getting up for, with the moon, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter very obvious (although not so much in the resized photo).  I'll take peoples' word for it for Neptune and Pluto.

Then it was all morning trying to catch up on photos and blogging.  Yet again, even with a long weekend I'm struggling to keep up with life.  Stop the world I want to get off.

I get a lot of my news from @Cmdr_Hadfield.  The other week he alerted me to the "planet kiss" coming up.  I dug out my old copy of Starry Night and went and had a look.  Last Thursday was going to be the most interesting, because the moon would be in frame too.  Monday night they would have been closest, but it was raining here that night.  I popped outside briefly last night to have a look, but didn't bother with any photos because my little 135mm (200 equiv) lens would still just show them as a single dot.  Unless you have a great telescope the planet kiss wouldn't have been very interesting.  But having the moon next to them was pretty cool.  My best shot by far was on David's 400mm lens (even greater because of my sensor scale).  

(that's Jupiter at the bottom, Saturn slightly up to the right).

This is just the moon, from that same shot..

And this is the same shot again, at actual pixels..

Fun times :)

Backdating a few days.. ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Got driven quite insane by the neighbour's dog barking for three and a half hours straight - from 7:25-11am.  I can't concentrate on anything while it's yapping.  It's like a car alarm going off.  It'll bark bark bark, have a brief stop, then start up again.  So upsetting.  At work, someone wanted me to look at something right at the end of the day so didn't finish up til 17:30.  In the evening freaked out at all the fresh food we have in the house.  Froze some of the uncooked meat, and some of the meals as well.  So the freezer is now very full.  Made up some meals out of the various bits and pieces (David's happy to pick up a meal of leftovers if he just needs to heat it up, rather than assembling all the bits and pieces first).  Had to laugh at the Simpsons (1993) with people using tapes in cars.  Tapes!

Tuesday.  We were going to have a team lunch at one of the Indian places in Belco, but neither Taj Agra or Indian Bay could be stuffed picking up their phones, even at ten to twelve, so we thought screw em, and went to the Labor club. 

I was feeling mixed up all week.  Tuesday firstly felt like a Wednesday because I was in the office, but then it felt like a Friday because we'd been out for a team lunch.  Weird.

The dog was quiet in the evening.. maybe the rain discouraged it?

Wednesday.  My computer rebooted itself overnight.  And I'm like what??  I'd literally rebooted it on Tuesday evening.  I'd had to reboot it after the last patching to reenable SMB 1.0 in order to connect to our ancient NAS.  So why did it need another reboot? hrmmm!!  Hate Windows, hate.  Oddly, Edge, Chrome, Notepad and OneNote had all come back and reopened where they left off, but Excel didn't.  Weird.  In the evening got extremelly pissed off that the flatbreads we'd bought on the weekend were covered in mould (I'd been planning to use them on Thursday to make pizzas).  If I'd known they were going to mouldy so quickly I'd have frozen them straight away.  Such a waste of food #grunt!!

Thursday.  Drinks, pizza, the usual.  David and I went and looked at Jupiter and Saturn near the moon (see the other post on this).

Friday.  Woke up at 4am.  Gruntfullness.  Had a bit of a wind down day at work tidying and finishing things up.  Had lunch with the Chrises, Neil and Raja at Herbert's.  I had the mac and cheese balls again, but didn't feel so stuffed full this time.  

I'd almost ordered the vegetarian loaded fries, but I was glad I didn't - Raja got them and they were enormous!!  He asked for a doggy bag even before he started!

I also had to laugh at their keg storage (their storage space is at a premium).

Finished up work, yay on holidays!!  Had leftovers for dinner and watched Die Hard in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at 3am for a couple of hours.  #grunt.  Had a little bit of a sleep in.  Then got stuck into All The Things.  So actually a fairly productive day.  Watched the second episode of The Queen's Gambit, and the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Spent the morning doing All The Things, mostly scanning and fixing scanning.  No promised rain though.  For lunch we went over to Rob and Lynne's with some other peeps for a lovely lunch/bbq.  As always Lynne fed us too much ;)

We also found out that Canberra has now asking anyone coming from Sydney to quarantine/self isolate for fourteen days.  Which means it's likely Mum won't be able to come down to visit after Christmas.  Waiting a few days to see if anything changes, but it's unlikely to.

Don't think we had any dinner at all Sunday night, but watched another episode of Discovery.

Was opening a window tonight and saw the moon next to Jupiter.  Looked so cool I took a bunch of photos.  An hour and a half later and they're even closer together so took a few more.

Issues at work are making it super stressful at the moment.  Undoubtedly affecting my blood pressure.  :(