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.

Sunday.  9th.  Not backdating ;)  During the week I bought these mini capsicums, so thought I'd do a stuffing for them - a bit of mince, some brown rice, and feta.  Topped with a bit of shredded cheese and roasted for like 40 minutes.  Yummy!

Monday.  Woke up at ~3:45 hungry and needing to pee.  At this point the sweetie hadn't actually been to sleep yet!  Poor thing.  I didn't get any more sleep after that either.  It seems on a given night one of us will be awake.  hmmm.  Spent all morning doing finance and tax stuff, and most of the afternoon checking receipts against bank statements.  Had to laugh - the RTA *finally* closed off my etag account, but funnily enough they refunded me the deposit for the tag, even though I never returned it (it was crushed with my old car).  Maybe they figured it was so old it wasn't worth it.  Shrug.  And guess how many times I went to the ATM last year?  Once.  ONCE!!  And that was only to get cash out for the kids' Christmas presents.  At least ACT covid cases were down a bit (well maybe - chances are a lot aren't being reported now because RATs are taking some of the load).  Leftover pork (refried in jelly) and cabbage for dinner.  Then I watched Die Hard with a Vengeance.

Stumpy is a bit retarded sometimes!

Tuesday.  Awake for a while around dentist time - probably from the neighbourhood dog barking at a possum.  Depressed about losing all our money on the cruise, depressed about going back to work.  So my tolerance for the stoopid was at rock bottom.  After work went and got my booster jab.  They had plenty of people working the family queue which seemed to move quickly, but there was only one person processing the adult queue.  So I was waiting for over half an hour in a queue.  I think they moved a few nurses across from the family section once that queue quietted down, because they had a few people going by the time I got seen.  

Picked up Crust pizza on the way home, but they don't keep their pizzas in the oven like Dominos do, so one was a bit cold by the time I got there and got it home.  Bit sad to find out that Bob Saget died.  In the evening tried to file photos, but I just can't *see*, especially at night.  Super frustrating.  And my resized to 1280 wide photos only take up a quarter of the screen now.

Wednesday.  Dog was barking in the middle of the night again, but not for too long.  Otherwise I think I slept ok.  Felt in a much better mental state about work.  Decided to document Neil.  After lunch I started feeling trippy - the feeling you get when you're having an immune reaction.  Went and had a little lie down.  Didn't sleep of course, but did rest.  Felt weak and floppy all afternoon/evening.  But at least my immune system is *doing* something about covid, which is a relief.  Leftover lamb and salad for dinner.  As usual we put on The Simpsons over dinner, and as soon as it started I was like OMFG wide screen!  This episode (Take My Life, Please) first aired in February 2009.  And it was glorious!  Clean and crisp, so much nicer than the old animations.  Didn't feel like doing anything much, so put on the Disney 2003 version of The Young Black Stallion, which was ok for a kids movie, but short and sweet.

Thursday.  Felt much better after a decent sleep.  Ok day, more being Neil and documenting him.  Leftover stuffing mix and cabbage for dinner.  Started geotagging Mum and Dad's 1971 Tasmania trip photos.

Friday.  Took *forever* to get to sleep, but slept ok after than.  Ok day, more documenting and writing test plans.  Chicken kiev for dinner, and watched The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I'd seen it before and thought it was quirky but overly violent.  Stu thought it was weird.  Except I swear they sanitised the violence, because it wasn't nearly as violent as I remember it.  

This is the saddest thing.  These booties were on my baptism cake!  Mum had them in her china cabinet until she moved, then they'd been on top of my computer desk gathering dust.  They had already started to absorb moisture and collapse, but when I cleared off the top of my computer desk I moved them temporarily to the dining table.  Where they sat under the cooler vent.  And promptly melted into a puddle.  Sad times!!

Super annoyingly, the rear element of our oven seems to have died - it just didn't heat up the oven when I turned it on.  The thing is less that two years old which is a big stinking poo!!!

Saturday.  Spent much of the day geotagging Mum and Dad's Tasmania photos (and I got as many of them geotagged as I could of their trip).  In the afternoon I went down to Tony's to look at / pick up some maps and brochures for Tasmania.  Ended up staying for dinner which was nice.

Sunday.  House stuff and music in the morning, and looking at Tassie locations in the afternoon.  At lunch time we were sick of our usual lunches so went out for a drive to get some takeway.  Drove past the shop where a gas leak blew up the building. 

Then picked up some Oporto drive through and went to Diddams Close park to eat it by the lake.  That quite nice, although we did have a very captive audience watch us the entire time!!

Of course now I have to go and geotag all Mum's slides from her YHA trip to Tasmania in 1968 :)

.. or not..

Thursday we watched the live action Aladdin.  It was pretty underwhelming.  None of the charm of the original.  Will Smith's genie was probably the best thing about the movie, and he ain't no Robin Williams.  It felt like watching a Bollywood movie rather than a Middle Eastern one.

Friday Neil and I tried out Malatang Hotpot.  You choose your ingredients, pay by weight, choose a sauce, and they cook it for you.  ok value - my 275g of food was $7.95 or thereabouts (I can't remember the numbers).  They have four sauces in the built in sign above the food, but there were five on the counter (with spiciness ratings).  The ones above don't give any indication of spiciness, so I went with big bone broth, which sounded pretty mild.  And it was.  Neil got the spiciest, which was too hot for me.  I'd be happy to try a mild or maybe even a medium next time.  Biggest problem was the *huge* bits of spinach which made it super messy to eat.  They really need to cut things a bit smaller.

In the evening I watched My Brilliant Career, which was to be honest pretty boring.  Full of unlikeable characters behaving badly.  Meh.  But with a stoopidly young Sam Neill and Robert Grubb.

Friday night was stoopidly hot and I just could not get to sleep.  Epic grunt.  Might have had a meltdown around 1am.

So was pretty tired on Saturday.  Did a bit of house stuff, and a bit of photo stuff.  Did some food shopping, although I was nervous about leaving the house because it was super hot and very windy.  

As I was cooking dinner (beef stronganoff from an old packet of Mum's), EffanC called, so they ended up coming over for dinner and chatting and snackages.

Slightly late night but not too crazy.  

Sunday I spent the entire freakin day trying to get caught up on finances, getting bank statements etc to get organised for tax.  Yeah didn't even finish.  #grunt.

But the sweetie did cook a slow cooker chickpea curry for dinner.

Monday I took a random day off, had a super productive hour or two of housework, and processed all Ryan's morph photos.  Made several videos for the party.  Later in the afternoon I pointed Picasa at my work photo directory and had it see who was in photos.  Interesting stuff.  It did find a lot automatically once tagged, but the majority it wants confirmation on.  It rather nicely saves all the people in each file into an ini file in the directory, to make for easy extraction later.  But I did forget to do my washing.  Whoops.  Cooking chicken teriyaki for dinner with a packet that was best before the exact same day Dad went and carked it..

Tuesday.  Even though last night was *much* cooler, I *still* couldn't get to still til some time between 12 and 1am.  So frustrating.  So zombie day today.  Salmon for dinner.  And then Stu challenged David to fix our two digital radios which stopped working last year.  And he did.  Because he's the most awesomest brother ever.  Also fun: we were both labelling photos from flights across America.  Me from late 2000.  Him from early 2020.  Fun times.

And there's a reason I don't tell Certain People stuff - cause whenever I do they basically tell me I'm doing it Wrong and make me feel dumb.  Le sigh.

Paper bills are easy.  You have them on your desk, and you write on them when you pay them.

But electronic ones.. 

Aside from getting lost in the clutter of email I get every day (which I've remediated somewhat by automatically filing important ones into a "To Action" folder), you have no way of knowing if you've paid them or not, without hunting through bank statements.  So painful.

I do like having an electronic copy, as it does save paper and scanning time, but I really need a better system of processing electronic bills.

Some bills I pay by direct debit, and some that are fixed get an auto payment.  But some billers make it very difficult to setup direct debit (this is 2018 I should NOT need to have to fill out a paper form!!).

So fun times.

Not.

Other than bill nonsense, I was pretty impressed that my Monday night routine including doing my washing, cooking, eating and cleaning up after dinner was done by 7pm.  The sweetie helped cook which was nice :)

Then I watched a special Dad taped off tv back in 1988 about the Bicentennary.  At least part of it anyway.  And finally finished a 2000 piece jigsaw I've been working on for what feels like ages.

Oh, and I set a new high score for myself in 2048 - 80200!

This afternoon had carpet cleaners come by to clean this enormous space

Have been charting our mortgage balance over the past eight months.  It looks relatively healthy when it spans only $100k .. but over the whole thing it doesn't look like it's moving at all :(

Finally updated my spreadsheets for the last couple of months of my Sydney loan tonight. 

In the seven and a half years I had the mortgage I paid $78k in interest, and interest rates went up 17 times from 2002 to 2008.  They started to go down again right at the end - just in time for our new mortgage heh.  My old mortgage had a higher than average interest rate, but there were no fees, no charges on using any atm, no charges on withdrawing cash from the credit card account, and elegant simplicity with the way the interest and credit card worked.  Their internet banking (or lack thereof) sucked donkey balls though, and the only improvement in the eight years was to allow Bpay.  The interface never changed and I was never able to transfer money to other accounts.  I was with Homeloans Ltd with finance from ING if anyone cares :)

The charts looked pretty cool, with dips and peaks where things like small loans to/from relatives, holidays, termination payouts etc took their toll.



And the interest rate graph for the same time period looked pretty scary..

So the Reserve Bank slashed interest rates by a full 1% today.

The Australian dollar has dropped significantly against the US dollar.

Banks are merging.

At the moment I'm just a little freaked out about the financial world.  As one might be wont to do after buying a house in the current financial climate. 

Now I know that unless one of us gets made redundant and house prices fall significantly that we shouldn't be affected too badly by all of this.. and indeed the interest rate cut will make a big difference to our repayments in the beginning.. but I just can't help feeling a little scared.  And it doesn't help watching videos like this one...

Tony came over tonight to discuss finances.  Apparently we could borrow an insane amount of money for a house.. but don't think we'll be borrowing anywhere near that heh.

So now house hunting begins in earnest....