Sunday.  1st.  Summer!! Final countdown to Christmas!!  Christmas music on the clarinet!!

:)

Also, Tony and Karen&Frank and I are doing the Plonk beer advent calendar again this year!

Roasted up some veggies and had it with leftover turkey from the club night.

Black Museum on Black Mirror.

Oh did I mention I picked up my new glasses last week?  The vision in them is *ok*.. I mean it's a bit better than it was.. but I certainly did get that whole "oh wow I can see" feeling from them.  Sigh.  Should NOT have gone to Specsavers. Also the ones with the anti-reflective coating are too tight and keep sliding down my nose and they're driving me NUTS.

Monday.  Slept fairly well.  Busy time before work just trying to catch up with life.

My washing dried in about five minutes outside.

Did some work on some decom tickets, and was able to use my new scripts to do the hard work for me, which was super exciting.  A few copy/pastes and it's done.. whereas to do it manually would be like twenty or way way more clicks per group.  Late finish.  Had a brief break before dinner and looking at holiday stuff after dinner and suddently it's nearly 20:00.  Sigh.  Labelled pics from our recent Queensland trip.  At one point it smelt like aviation fuel coming through the cooler.  Maybe that Virgin plane on its way to Adelaide that just flew over was leaking fuel.. hrmm.  Striking Vipers on Black Mirror.  

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy morning trying to keep up with life.  More decom work at work, and did up another script.  Cooked more veggies for dinner and finished off the lamb from last week.

Started into the 2024 season of Futurama, whatever they're up to now.  Mum photo picking then Smithereens on Black Mirror with Moriarty heh.  An episode with "present day" technology for the most part, but gripping.

Wednesday.  Restless, took a while to get to sleep, but still woke up early.  Busy day.  Got some bulk deleting scripts working to save me even more time on decoms.

Went back to Specsavers to try and get my glasses adjusted.  They pinched the nose piece a lot closer together, so now they don't slide down my nose - they just stick out way too far and hurt.  Sigh.

Have I ever mentioned how TRASH Windoze 11 is?  Today I opened a text file.  It opened in notepad on my main desktop no issues.  Five minutes later I opened the text file again.  This time it decided to open ON MY OTHER DESKTOP!!! WHICH I HAVEN'T EVEN USED TODAY!!!  What the actual F MICROSOFT?? 

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too on Black Mirror.  Miley Cyrus as herself much?  I found the house they filmed in on Google maps.  It's actually a place you can rent for like $8000/night.  And it's surrounded by a lot of electric fences.  

And that was the end of that for Black Mirror.  I've finished watching all the episodes so far.  I could easily rewatch them all (if the sweetie ever wanted to watch them).  I found the show fascinating for the most part.  Although it's usually very dark and often twisted.  

Thursday.  Slept okish. 

I have a jungle in the back yard

Had to take the bus to work (the sweetie came out at one point a complete zombie from a few nights in a row of not sleeping on account of being so stressed out by work).  Got to try out the MyWay+ app QR code.  Which you have to hold low enough for it to read it.  And currently you're not meant to tap off until they can work out bugs.  Half the people got free rides.  Kids just didn't even bother trying, they just walked on.  They're doing road works near one stop, which meant the GPS wouldn't activate because the bus wasn't close enough, so everyone there got a free ride.  Other people weren't scanning things the right way or tapping properly, so some of those just went meh and ignored it and got a free ride.  And there's still no real time location tracking of buses.  Lame.

Busy day.  Ok drinks.  Pizza/ice cream/Death in Paradise 10.6.

We had some slippage...

Friday.  Restless sleep - too hot and humid.  Awake from maybe 4.  Another decom day and more looking at scripts.  Made a lemon cheesecake after work.  Leftovers for dinner (too stinking hot and humid to run the oven for kievs).  Christmas movie season started with Die Hard.  I've learn almost all the words in German to sing along at the end :)

Saturday.  Slept somewhat ok.  Did I mention all the rain and storms this week?  Busy house day doing All The Things.  Went out for a bit of food shopping and errands.  Apparently Knead's sourdoughs mostly failed because it was so humid they wouldn't rise.  Tried two places to get a replacement light for Stumpy's tank which started flashing on Friday.  Failed.

Twin buses...

Pork/parmesan/truffle sausages for dinner and cheesecake!

Death in Paradise 10.7.

Sunday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot/restless/itchy.  Did I mention the humidity?  Everything is damp.  Not looking forward to this being the new normal for Canberra with global warming.  At least today was a lot less humid.  The cooler was actually useful as a cooler and not just a humidifier.  Went out to the Reptile Zoo at Gold Creek after lunch to try and get a UV light for Stumpy's tank.  I actually even called them before we went to see if they had one.  They said they should.  They didn't.  They had a 5% one in 48", but she reckons blue-tongues probably need like the 12% ones.  Which of course they didn't have.  They barely had any four foot lights at all.  There's all sorts of random sizes nowadays, like 46" wtf?? 

If/when Stumpy carks it, we'd be very tempted to get a bearded dragon.. they're so awesome!

Made some French onion soup, although probably made it too liquidy.  Might be an epic disaster.  Also blogged Notre-Dame in Lego.  Been meaning to for a while, but they just reopened it this weekend, so thought it would be a good time.

Man the insomnia last week was horrendous.  I think I only got about one good night's sleep all week.

Tuesday night I woke up at ~3am for a couple of hours.  So Wednesday was an even worse zombie day than Tuesday.  On Wednesday evening I finished fully labelling my USA 2000 photos (everything had been labelled previously, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.

These things were so good!  Just like cheese kranskis.

Wednesday night I actually slept quite well.  I think I started culling down the USA 2000 photos for blogging on Thursday evening.  Note that all these photos have been online for nineteen years on conspiracy, but I've never put the photos and the blog together (actually I only digitised the blog a couple of years ago).  Rewatched first two episodes of Picard because David wanted to see it too.  Struggling to get stuff watched now cause noone's ever around at the same time.  Haven't even started the Mandalorian.

Friday morning I woke up at 1am and never got back to sleep.  Worst zombie day of the week.  I couldn't deal with people at work, you know the ones that don't actually understand basic networking, so they have no idea what they're even asking for.  My brain was just too mushy to deal.  So spent the day deleting old firewall rules which was a bit of fun.  Met up with the sweetie for a drink at Beirut Bunker Bar, then we had dinner at Kinn Thai.  Both the chili jam crispy pork and the papaya crispy chicken were "one chilli" rated, which you'd think would be mild, but it was at the upper limit of my tolerance.  I'd hate to try anything hotter there...

The sweetie dropped me off at the airport which was lovely of him, but when I arrived I found my flight had been delayed over an hour and a half - apparently due to the bad weather in Sydney.  I chatted to Rob and Fiona briefly who happened to be there.  Then I tried to see if I could get on the earlier Sydney flight, but apparently it was full.  Had to ask.  So went and bought some overpriced wine and sat and read my book.  The original indicator board said boarding was at 20:25.   So at a bit after 20:15 I went for a bit of a wander.  Saw the indicator boards that said my boarding time was 20:10, but there was nothing to say go to gate.  So that confused me a bit.  So I kept walking, and then finally heard the announcement for the final boarding call for my flight (I couldn't hear the announcements properly where I'd been sitting).  So then it's like crap.  I'm basically at the Qantas end of the terminal and I still need to pee.  So did that then basically had to run the entire way down the terminal to gate #3.  #grunt.  Turns out I wasn't the only one to get screwed over like that, we still had to wait for a few more people before we could take off.  Of course then I was coughing most of the flight from the exertion.  hrmmmmmm.  Still, I had the seat to myself, and got a few cool timelapses of the path out of Canberra and again in Sydney.

So it's nearly 10pm by this point, and the buses don't run all that often, according to a timetable I found the next one was in half an hour.  So I thought it would be quicker to get the train, even though it costs about $15 more #grunt.  But there were no trains.  And the indicator boards had *nothing* to indicate how long to the next one.  In the end I waited over half an hour for a train to Wolli Creek.  Shoulda gone for the damned bus.  At Wolli Creek a Waterfall train pulled in as I got there, but it was 19 minutes til the next Cronulla train.  So was going to go to Sutherland and walk, but messaged Mum and she said she'd come get me which was lovely.  

So got to Mum's place and crashed in a heap.

Slept relatively well - and quite late - til 7:30!!

Had breakfast with Mum (cardboard flakes with liquid cardboard on top - yeuch), then we went for a wander (in the rain haha) to the shops for some supplies.  Came back and gave her computer a bit of a health check and uninstalled some crap and allowed Kaspersky to delete some dodgy toolbars.  After lunch I culled down Ryan's photos a bit.

Then headed off to the party.  I was pretty anxious to start with due to such a big crowd of people and not knowing so many, and the people I did know I hadn't seen in years and I was all a bit freaked out, until Luc saved me with some wine.  Then we got the morph video going and downloaded all my photos, so they got played through as well.  Lots of food and most everyone else seemed to have a good time heh. 

Trained it back, just missed a Cronulla train so Mum picked me up from Sutherland again.  Isn't she a nice mother type person? :)

Slept reasonably well again, then got up, got ready and Mum nicely dropped me off at the station (it was *pouring* with rain heh).  Got to Central, went to the loo, then straight onto the coach which was waiting.  No announcements at all to confirm I was definitely on the right bus tho heh.  It was mostly full when I got there too, but someone was sitting on the aisle so I got a window seat yay!!  Not that there was much to see other than rain... Left fifteen minutes early, got into Canberra five minutes early.  I did finish my book an hour early though. Whoops.

Stu met me at Jolimont, then we had some lunch at Wild Panda which nice enough (some hot peanuts, tofu salad, and two sorts of dumplings).

Tried to do food shopping at the Spar in the city, but they had about three trays of meat and that was it.  So dropped into Coles on the way home.  In and out in ten minutes haha.

Didn't get home til mid afternoon, so then of course got depressed about not having any weekend.  And too late to start anything.  So just did a bit of Picasa tagging.  and cooked a pork roast.  But forgot to turn the oven down after half an hour, so the crackling was ruined (too hard).  Then I spilt most of the jelly everywhere.  I'm such a failure.  BBT, Fuller House, then bed.

Today I woke up thinking it was Saturday and got really sad that it was Monday.  But did a bit of planning which was good.  

A solid day of rain and the lake is full again!

Tonight I wanted to get the USA 2000 photos into the blog.  But at ~7:15 I started downloading and processing photos.  Two hours later and I'm still going, and still blogging (this has taken half an hour so far and I haven't even inserted any photos yet).  So much for getting anything else done tonight.  

Stop the world I want to get off.

Moved to https://kazza.id.au/oz_holidays/2014/09/day-2---kuranda.html

I tried a new bus route today.  The drop off is a little closer to home than the other indirect bus I sometimes get, which would make for about a 23 minute trip - still faster than taking the bus the whole way home, plus I get a fifteen minute walk up the hill.  Although it took slightly longer today because I had to go kill a portal.

Here's some galahs we saw while out for a walk a few weeks ago.

This had to be smashed, so the sweetie and I killed it all

Here's a bus being towed  (!!)

And here's a warm lamb Greek salad.  There was leftover roast lamb that needed eating, so fried that up to get it scrumptious, then mixed it with greek seasoning, olives, fetta, capsicum and cucumber.  It was delicious.

Seriously.  It's the best time of the year.  In Sydney it meant quieter roads and less traffic.  In Canberra it means a quiet and peaceful bus trip.  My bus this morning had two whole people on it when it got to my stop, instead of the usual 30 or so noisy kids. 

Bliss!!!

Someone must have pointed out the idiocy of cancelling all the Northern Suburbs -> City buses, and have retained some of them during peak hour.  So I was very excited this morning.  Although the map page suggests it might only be during the morning peak which worries me, as then how are you going to get home again?  Whether this is just an omission on the map or in the timetable I'm yet to find out...

And yet another lame feature of the new routes, is that the express buses from Gungahlin don't actually go to the city!

FAIL!