Sunday.  28th.  Cooked up an epic lamb roast ($22/kg from Tathra Place in the markets) and veggies for dinner, then watched The Big Year (which some random dude on our holiday told us about).  It was a bit "serious" for all the comedic actors in it, but kinda cool.

Monday.  Slept relatively ok I think, for a change.  Spent much of the day geotagging holiday photos.  Stu also pulled out all the bedroom furniture to vacuum nearly 18 years worth of dust behind stuff...

Had some of Lily's Youfoodz for dinner.

Watched Professor T 1.5 together then I watched Taxi Driver which I've never actually seen.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep, epic restless.  Finished geotagging holiday photos.

In the afternoon we went to Palmerville for a walk and to do some birdwatching.  This Bell 206L-1 (VH-OAS) chopper had been buzzing around Canberra all day, Evoenergy checking powerlines.  

I hadn't walked along the new pathway yet

Such a fun shot..

Finished off Lily's Youfoodz dinners and the last of the salad

Then watched Professor T 1.6 together (end of season one) then I watched a doco on the Titanic - Titanic: Digital Resurrection.  Considering the effort they went to to digitise the ship, the computer graphics they also used were pretty cheesy.  Interesting though.

Wednesday.  April Fools!  Slept okish, only awake for an hour or two around 3.  Back to work.  Yeup definitely an April Fool.  Spent most of the day catching up on chats and emails.  

The sweetie cooked up a heap of veggies and I fried up some lamb, then we watched Professor T 2.1.

You can tell the sweetie was cooking - the potatoes are all lined up nicely ;)

Then spent the rest of the evening putting up reviews of all the places we stayed on our holiday in booking.com.

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Mostly still catching up on crap at work.  Had a gin night at drinks but hardly anyone else turned up.  Sad times. 

Bus home (trying to save petrol) then made pizzas for dinner and watched Professor T 2.2.

Friday.  Good Friday.  Although not so good for Jesus back in the day.  Slept mostly ok.  Didn't get much done all day sigh.  Pretty much a nothing day.  We did go for another walk in the afternoon to Palmerville to try out Stu's new toy (all the bird pics I'll put in another post one day).

Kievs for dinner then Professor T 2.3.  I then watched "Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes" from 2015, which was mostly footage around Christa McAuliffe.. (as an aside, I didn't know that her backup, Barbara Morgan, later went on to be a full-blown astronaut in her own right.. cool!).  Eerily, the peeps that are on their way to the moon right now used booster rockets from the shuttle programme.. that wouldn't be freaky .. at. all.   .. !!)

Saturday.  Only awake for an hour or two around midnight.  Spent literally the entire morning doing housework.  Sigh.  Went out with EB to have a look at the new road around the north/east side of the airport which was pretty cool, had a good long drive around the area, then went in to Quangers for lunch at the Royal Hotel (had a very nice caesar salad).

Air traffic control tower at Canberra Airport

Did you know they're closing down the air traffic control tower at Canberra Airport and replacing it with cameras done with remote control..?  What could possibly go wrong?

Swing bridge in Queanbeyan

Caesar salad at the Royal Hotel in Queanbeyan

It's such a shame they haven't setup any sort of dedicated planespotting area with all the new works

Stu cooked a tuna bake and veggies for dinner then we watched Professor T 2.4.  I then watched Lantana which I'd never seen before.  Lots of unlikeable characters behaving badly.  Hurrah.

Easter Sunday.  He is risen!  Slept mostly okish I think.  Woke up 6am!  But 5am in reality. Sigh. Didn't achieve really anything all day.  Stu took Stumpy outside for a walk.

In the afternoon we went over to Annie's for afternoon tea and catchup with the family.  Pebbles wasn't being *quite* the scardey cat...

Leftovers for dinner.  The just-past full moon was rising and it was like, hey there's four peeps in between me and that bright shiny thing!  Pretty cool!  Then watched Molly's Game, which I'd seen on a plane but Stu hadn't seen.  

Monday.  Slept mostly okish.  Got a bunch of Europe 2016 photo stuff done, and a heap of jigsaw.  Stu has cooked up a bunch of veggies to have with some leftover lamb for dinner.

Sunday.  7th.  The sweetie cooked up a bunch of veggies for dinner, unfortunately there wasn't much in the way of leftovers! Stranger Things 5.1, set 18 months after the last season but filmed three years later.

Monday.  Slept okish I think (awake a few times hot).

This little spider ran across a chopping board, stopped just long enough for me to take a photo of it, then ran off, never to be seen again.  Googled that crap, apparently it's a scuttling spider of Cycloctenidae (although one Redditor is trying to get it nicknamed mittens spider).  It sure is cute!

More work on the domain controller rules. Managed to break something doing a cutover though. Sigh. I remember being confused by the mess the other week, and looks like I never went back to sorting out the mess, so that app got left out when I was adding the new rules.  Did some email sorting and filing after work. Stu cooked up some veggies for dinner which were quite nice.

Stranger Things 5.2. Did a bit of Christmas music on the recorder because the sax is all too hard. Photo filing in the evening.

Tuesday.  2 Peter 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.  Be kinda cool if he returned in our lifetime.

Okish sleep. Busy day of not achieving much. Did finish going through the domain controller flows. Leftover pesto pasta and some salad for dinner. Stranger Things 5.3. Finished geotagging holiday photos from the phone (just checking them and fixing them up). Then talked to David for a bit about web hosting. I'm so out of the loop with modern DNS and hosting options these days.

Wednesday.  1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Restless sleep. Went to see nuking doctor, although only saw her briefly and spent most of the time with a registrar. NEIL briefly in the morning then spent the rest of the day fighting with our new DR laptop. How many IT professionals does it take to copy a file? Too (many). And a lot of angst. Still fighting with all the restrictions they put on these things. Stu cooked a delicious tuna bake and brussels sprouts for dinner.

Stranger Things 5.4. Now we need to wait til Christmas for more episodes to drop.

Thursday.  Restless sleep.  Meh day, didn't achieve much. 

Busy drinks which was good.  Someone (or something) has been cutting off the heads of my epic dandelion plant under the lemon tree.  I thought it was the neighbours but that doesn't really make sense.  Why would they come over and cut off flowers that haven't even popped yet?  Maybe it's possums.  The sweetie and I got grumpy at each other over differing expectations about life so that made for an unfun evening.  We did have pizzas and garlic bread.  I started watching Birdman.  Is this like art imitating life or what?  Batman? Birdman?  I knew literally nothing about the moving going into it other than it had Michael Keaton in it.  I had such a thing for him when he was Batman.  I noticed the "one take" shooting pretty early on and looked out for the transitions.

Friday.  1 John 3:16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. 

Okish sleep.  Spent much of the morning reworking our ticket dashboard to fix it up for the new version.  They've removed at least one useful thing (being able to colour code filter titles) but at least now you can choose the columns you want in the dashboard and not have your settings for that table be there.  First work Christmas party at lunch and all afternoon.  There was an epic roast lunch and all the food.  I ate lots so didn't get too silly. 

The sweetie was going to pick us up but a little before he had to leave he had epic dizziness and nausea and actually was sick (three times!!) - he *never* gets sick (almost never).  So Neil/Wello/me caught buses home.  Finished Birdman.  Yeup.  Weird.  

Saturday.  Pretty crap sleep funnily enough.  I think I was awake pretty much the whole time from about 2.  Stu was sick again overnight and nauseus all day.  I had a day of All The Things, mostly getting the house organised. 

I was so excited this week to find a 2011 10c coin!  I've never seen one before!

I may have taken over 50 photos of the cockatoos demolishing our self-seeded plum tree..

Kievs and wedgies for dinner. 

I also made a strawberry "sauce" from all the strawberries Tony picked and froze for us while we were away.  They all turned to mush after being frozen, so I smooshed them through a sieve and added a little sugar.  It worked really well with vanilla ice cream!

Then we watched The Neverending Story.  I don't think I've seen that movie since I was a teenager.  The DVD cost me like a dollar from Vinnies (it was still shrinkwrapped!) but I don't think I'll keep it - it was pretty cheesy!!

Sunday.  Okish sleep. Another day of All The Things. Although I put aside my regular todo list and just focussed on Christmas stuff.

And juicing lemons.

And taking photos of Stumpy.  Look how tanned he is with the combo heat/uv light!

Got enough done that I felt relaxed enough to make up some gingerbread biscuits after lunch!!  Then some music (I found a heap of good Christmas music for the saxophone yesterday so played those all through again today.  They're all a lot higher than your regular C major which is nearly impossible to play for me at the moment (I struggle with E and D, and C and B are right out).

Sunday.  30th.  

Stu finished cooking some potatoes from the club as well as some of the bread and we had that with leftover turkey and veggies. Stranger Things 4.5.

Monday.  December! Minimun 8.7, maximum 18, 2 predicted overnight! Welcome to summer! Took ages to get to sleep again. Then awake from 4:30 and never got back to sleep.

Busy day being NEIL for a while, then catching up on chats and emails then clearing the ticket queue.

Cracked open this year's beer advent calendar after work.  Which isn't any sort of official one.  Since I couldn't go to work drinks for months, Neil saved all the Beer of the Weeks for me.  I had almost enough to fill an advent calendar box (I still had the box from last year's Plonk advent calendar).  And I've been collecting them now that I'm going back to drinks.  I also asked @aquila to pick me up the Bridge Road Brewers Christmas beers, so this photo doesn't show the box as full, but I'll have more beers than will fit :)

Did some music after work, dinner, Stranger Things 4.6, geotagging holiday photos. The house is a disaster. I still haven't finished putting up Christmas decorations. I still haven't fully unpacked or put all my washing away. Need. More. TIME!!!!

This star light is probably 24 years old.  This year one of the lights has finally blown in it.  I do have one spare bulb but I'd have to pull everything out of the cupboard again to get at it.. next year.. 

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep, awake at 4 but got back to sleep.

Welcome to summer in Canberra!!

Busy day. I decided I really wanted to get back to working on a project I started months ago, but it requires a lot of concentration, which I couldn't really do while being NEIL and working on proxies. So tried to get back into it. But was interrupted every five seconds by people wanting crap and distracting me. I even stayed back late after work to work on it because it's quieter then, and I STILL got interrupted by someone wanting crap. FFS. Stu cooked some pasta to go with some pesto I dug out of the freezer.

Stranger Things 4.7. Then it was pretty much bed time. Sigh. Also getting annoyed at my email which isn't downloading properly for some senders. It's like the messages are getting corrupted somehow. Or at least just not rendering correctly.  It started around maybe mid to late November. They view ok on the server in webmail. Maybe there's something in one of the headers that's confusing things. There's definitely content downloaded but it's just not displaying. And it's not everything, it's only some mails from some senders. Sigh.

Wednesday.  Okish sleep but awake from 4. Got into work early and was able to do a bunch of work before a morning full of meetings.

Connor tried the Stranger Things Upside Down Double at lunch

Got more stuff done in the arvo including fixing an ldap health check for TLS. Got home and the sweetie was cooking up leftovers from the club night. Stranger Things 4.8, then backed up my computer then it was basically bed time. hrmmm.

Thursday.  Took ages to get to sleep. Looking at traffic to domain controllers most of the day. Super quiet drinks - just our table.. oof! The sweetie felt like Dominos so that's what we got for dinner. Ate too much. Whoops. Stranger Things 4.9 (end of season 4). Some of season 5 has dropped so we'll be able to start watching that straight away. Although it's another three years later so the kids will be all grown up!

Friday.  Meh sleep.

More AD traffic checking. Lunch with the Chrises and Neil and Glenda at the Burns Club (aka Magpies) which was very nice.

Seniors Salt and Pepper Squid, with tartare sauce, lemon chips and salad, $20M $21.50NM.  At least the Burns Club is happy to serve anything off the menu, including seniors meals to non seniors.  See, it's not that hard, HERBERTS!!

Drinks with Luc and his mate Stephen (from AARNet) at Molly (Old Fashioned and a Rusty Nail)

Then dinner at Bamiyan - we had an epic feast of camel skewers, butter chicken, mantu (lamb dumplings) and lamb biryani. So good!! I ate way too much but did bring home some leftovers. Hasty goodnight as my bus arrived just as we got to the bus stop.

Saturday.  Crap sleep (bloated cause I ate (and probably drank) too much). It didn't cool down overnight either so had to have the cooler running with water all night. Spent much of the morning tidying the house.

Yeah it was stoopidly hot, but I'm trying to clear stuff out of the freezer

Then it was all afternoon at Mishi's for her 60th. Picked up TV dinners from Chris's for dinner, then watched Die Hard.

Sunday.  Awake from dentist time for a while. More house stuff and sorting out holiday finances.

Finished the puff pastry out of the freezer

Food shopping after lunch.

Ethos topped out this week (you can't see the tree in this pic)

And the Premier inn is gorrrrne, skyline replaced with The Residence at The Markets

And stressing over how little of my todo list I've gotten done this weekend :(

Sunday.  2nd.  Backdating because life got in the way.  

Monday.  Woke up at dentist time, barely got any more sleep.  So it was a zombie day.  Went to a new optometrist at lunch.  The dude is actually the son of the optometrist I saw a couple of times when I first moved to Canberra.  He spent a good while testing my vision and coming up with a prescription, optimised for screen distance.  But parking in Dickson sure sux donkey balls.  $3/hour!  In the suburbs!!  Gross.  After the optometrist it was getting really late and I was starving, so went through maccas drive through, but there I sat.  FOR 16 MINUTES!!  Pretty much just after I got there the line just stopped.  Fricken sigh.  After work I went into town to pick up the sweetie and we had dinner at Kinn Thai which was very nice - first time in over three years - we were last there just before the pandemic hit.  

Chicken Pad See Iw and Chili jam cripsy pork at Kinn Thai

Got a couple of days of geotagging done in the evening, although was a bit dangerous doing it so tired, likely to make mistakes.

Tuesday.  So went to be early (like 20:30), but didn't get to sleep til after 22:30, and then awake from 3:45 for ages.  *sigh*  Cleaning day at work.  Cooked a salmon curry out of last month's Coles magazine which was delicious.

More geotagging in the evening (and morning too).

Wednesday.  Got to sleep ok, but then was awake half the night.  Sigh.  Spent all morning deleting things which is always fun.  And worked with Neil on some rules.  Pizza for dinner.  Fighting with my phone randomly changing time zones is making geotagging painful and is driving me mental.  And windows is dumb too.  Say I have some jpgs on my computer that I've backed up to an external drive.  If I copy those files to the NAS for storage, and then run the backup again from the NAS to the external drive, it'll recopy every single damned vertically rotated file again.  But just the vertical ones.  So fricken retarded.  

At least I can get these whenever I want now!

Although Champion Chicken and Tea is DUMB because they won't sell a single drumstick.  You have to buy two.  They have a single one on the boards for $3, but that's as an addition to a burger.  So I said screw that and went next door to KFC to get a piece of chicken.  Hate.

Thursday.  Crap sleep again.  Sigh.  But did have a somewhat productive day getting things done and having discussions with people about design decisions.  

Friday.  Good Friday.  Well maybe not for Jesus a couple of thousand years ago.  I actually slept reasonably well for a change.  It was cold and wet and miserable and I literally didn't set foot outside the house all day.  The phone changing time zones is making me crazy.  It would often change time zones right after taking a movie file.  And the movie and png files were always correct, it was just the exif data on the photos that would be wrong.  Took All Morning just do do a few things that I had on my todo list.  Then I found the NEXT bug with Apple.  On day 23 of the trip I found the numbers of the files on my computer didn't match up with the numbers on the phones on the phone.

!!!

Apple had literally presented the wrong file names to windows.  In fact 8772 and 8773 were the exact same file.  So all the photos after that, right up til 9999, were a number out (but again, the movs and pngs were fine). 

After lunch I downloaded iMazing, which David has been recommending for ages.  I did some tests with it.  The good news is that the created/modified dates that iMazing shows for files are in fact correct.  It's literally Apple being a dick and presenting the wrong date/times to windows.  Problematic files that wouldn't copy in windows will copy off ok in iMazing.  I did tick "preserve file names" so it wouldn't make up random file names.  The bad news is the times on the files taken in a different time zone didn't transfer as is - they came across with the wrong times on them.  Well that is, the movs and pngs were wrong, photos seemed ok, go figure.  Dunno how that would work during a daylight savings change either.  

In the afternoon there was a big storm so shut everything down and disconnected the computer.  Pulled it all out, cleaned, and reconnected the UPS (the one that died a few years ago, and I tried to buy a new battery for it in February 2022, and it only arrived about a month ago after a lot of back and forth with UPS Solutions (they couldn't get stock from APC)).  Did jigsaw while waiting for storms.  And talked to Mum for a bit.  And more jigsaw.  The poor house battery never got over 25% charged all day.  Leftover chicken and veggies for dinner, Simpsons, Boba Fett, Death in Paradise.  

Oh another thing with iMazing - you can actually see the file system.  And in the photos view, you can see all the files as HEIC.  But every so often I'd see JPGs.  Turns out if you take photos while you are taking a video, they get saved as JPG :)  I couldn't tell in difference in quality between jpgs copied via windows or exported at 95% in iMazing.  Yet iMazing saved files are actually a bit smaller than those saved in windows.  

Saturday.  Awake from ~1:30 til after 5:00.  Then somewhat slept til 8.  Went out for breakfast with the sweetie.  We were going to go to Stella's but it was super crowded and there was a big queue of people and I didn't know if they were queueing for a table or to order food and there were people pushing past in all directions so I noped out of there.  We walked all the way up to 54, but it was closed, so ended up at Cup of Joy.  Which wasn't too bad for a mall cafe. 

We'd put in online orders for the chemist, but they're notorious for just not doing the online orders at all when they're busy, so we went and said, hey we're here.  Hoping to get at least put in the queue (which for the person in front of us they said half an hour).  Then did some food shopping.  We were all set to go for a drive to fill in time, but got our smses about 45 minutes after we went in.  So back to pick up our stuffs.  But it meant we didn't get home til nearly 12.  My entire morning gone :(

I recopied the 1226 misnumbered photos off my phone (this time when I attached it, the phone was presenting the correct numbers).  I finally also got around to CLI-ing exiftool to actually pull out the timezone data from the files, which made it a whole lot easier to tell which ones were wrong, rather than finding which ones were out of order and figuring it out from that.

exiftool.exe -filename -offsettime -T *.jpg > output.txt

Basa bake, potato bake, brussels sprouts for dinner, then watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was super bizarre but also kinda sweet.

Sunday.  He is risen!  Slept ok for a nice change.  Processed all the photos I'd had to recopy - resize, file, fix times, geotag.  And jigsaw.  I wasted a whole heap of time looking at the design of the Epcot ball.  It's based on a pentakis dodecahedron, like I've made here.  If you look at my little model, the Epcot ball is like that, except every one of those 60 triangles is divided into *64* little triangles!!  Actually that makes it a Class II 8 frequency icosahedron.  Like this.  You asked.  And each one of those has a three-triangle pyramid on top of it.  Total on the Epcot ball is 3840 points made up of a total of 11520 triangles.  Well it would be if there weren't supports and doors and crap cut into it.  I pointed exiftool at my iphone "masters" directory.  None of those had random time zone changes.  All perfect.  It was just the holiday photos that were all stuffed up.  Well other than the two photos I took a few days after I got home which were taken in Houston time.  Did some music for first time in a couple of months.  Chicken kiev and veggies for dinner and then watched 127 Hours.

Monday.  Woke up after 1 with hurty and stayed awake til after 4 with added insomnia, and then restless sleep til 7:30.  Bit of house stuff.  Wasted half the morning solving the maze on the finished jigsaw.  More house stuff in the afternoon.  Went and climbed Mt Rogers thinking maybe exercise and sun would help with sleep.  Hmm.  But then it was too late to do photos and blogging before dinner.  Made another yellow curry for dinner, and then some more The Crown.

Monday.  20th.  Backdated cause of blog sadness.  Woke up at 4:19 on account of going to bed at 20:30.  Sigh.  But I'm only going to bed so early because I can't SEEEE anything on my computer in the evenings.  Had a look at the errors on my blog with Perl and MySQL.  Even my addressbook is broken with a similar perl->mysql error.  I'm just hoping that someone else running Perl/MySQL complains about it.  For now, we wait.  

Tuesday.  Ok sleep.  I think.  I started geotagging my holiday photos.  Also did some APNIC training on routing.  It takes ages when you stop to take notes, check mail queues, have to talk to people etc.  More geotagging after work.  Just before bed I was doing day 10 iPhone photos in St Thomas, and realised the phone had been an hour out in the morning, and had changed time half way up the cable car we did in the morning.  So I'll need to go fix the exif times and file names for them.

How good are these?  Mini toasts with cream cheese or blue cheese, quince paste, slow roasted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, salami and strawberries.  Doesn't take long to make and super tasty.

Wednesday.  Ok sleep.  Fixed up the St Thomas morning photos, only to find it's jumped back an hour part way through the day.  FFS Apple make up your mind.  Good thing I have the Canon to note what time we were *actually* in places.  #grunt.  Before we arrived it was an hour early.  It changed half way up the cable car.  Then later in the day it changed back again, and later again it went forward again.  Sigh.  And my eyes got tired very early today which didn't help.  It was raining after work so no weeding.  I can't SEEEE at night, so can't do any photo work because I need to stare at file names and figure out what's going on with them.  What else is there to do in the evenings if I can't work on my computer?  Drink and watch crap on the internet??  Sigh.  Started watching Avatar.  I first/last saw this at the movies in 3D and totally hated the 3D experience.  It's like watching a movie with sunglasses on.  So started watching it again since had just been doing a bunch of Pandora experiences at Disney recently.

Thursday.  Slept ok I think.  OMFG epic storm!!!  Lightning everywhere and it was so dark at 9am lights were turning on outside (I shoulda taken a photo!!)

Did some training, some Neil, quiet drinks, pizza, episode 2 of Boba Fett (really need to rewatch the first episode though, because I was so jetlag tired I can't remember much of it).

Friday.  Did one of the APNIC training labs.  Took a few hours oof!  Some tickets, documenting servers etc.  Pork and salad for dinner.  Then watched Glass Onion which was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  Got ready, cleaned the kitchen then went out to the club for a working bee.  With sore bowels hmm.  Not many people came and it was threatening to rain.  John gave us the job of cleaning the office.  He'd replaced all the insulation and so there was bits of the old stuff *everywhere*.  So we pulled everything out, Stu cleaned every surface, then I put everything back all neat and tidy, and threw a bunch of stuff out as well.  I should have taken a before photo, because the place was such a mess (not just with insulation but from several years of people dumping crap in there).  The after looks pretty impressive though!  It won't last though!!

The social was Mardi Gras themed, and someone said a rainbow vomited in the shed..

Dinner was build your own burgers.  

Noticed during cleanup that someone had left the small oven on.  hrmm.  After dinner was lots of fun music and karaoke, but I was finding it too loud so went to Ian's for whiskey.  Bit of a late night but not too bad.

Sunday.  Belly still hurting.  hmm.  I wanted to be gone by 8, but by the time I'd gone and spent over an hour cleaning up the shed (and noticing someone had also left the big oven on all night *sigh*) it was nearly 11:00 by the time we got home.  I brought home a tonne of food (mostly the salad stuff).  Since my blog was still broken, I decided to email Vodien support.  They basically tried to fob it off "did you get an email about any changes?" "no, and I never have in the past either but it seems unlikely that you *never* patch your systems".  Gave them some evidence of things changing on their end and all the errors I could find.  I did catch up on writing up the rest of my holiday blog entries, even though I can't post them yet.  Started a jigsaw too because too stressed to enjoy doing more of the Titanic.  And my belly hurts.  Chicken kiev for dinner and The Crown.

Sunday.  Christmas!!  Woke up at 5am.  Of course.  Had a pretty chilled morning.  Had bacon and eggs for breakfast.  Opened some presents.  Watched some crap on the internet.  Setup my new phone.  Cooked and ate lunch - roast pork!!  Played with some Lego.  In the evening we went over to see Annie and the family for D&D (drinks and dessert).  You gotta love it when the entire planning for a family Christmas event was done in literally half a dozen smses.  "What you want do?"  "Drinks and dessert"  "What time?"  "7"  "ok"  So easy :)

Finished the Plonk beer advent calendar!  So much fun!

Monday.  Got overwhelmed by my todo list.  I planned out a huge todo list, with the idea of trying to catch up on a bunch of stuff for a few hours each day, and also have time for projects.  Except the catching up stuff took most of the day.  Sigh.  Downloaded Geosetter 4.0.4 (still beta) and at least the maps work again.  Hurray.  And I think the fifth episode of Picard.

Tuesday.  Brunch at Pollen with the hills and testing out the new phone.  Caught up on some blog entries.  Did a Bunnings run.  Worked on year in review post.  Had Chinese Inn from Kippax delivered for dinner.  It was just as crap as last time heh.  Sixth episode of Picard.

Wednesday.  Booked flights to America and tickets to Busch Gardens.  Did some camera testing in the afternoon.  Oh the lastest bug with Apple, and this happened once recently on my old phone too, so is prolly an iOS 16 thing - sometimes I can't copy off or even look at photos on my phone from Windoze.  I can't open them in explorer on the phone, and if I copy them they either copy as 0 bytes, or occasionally it'll copy as just a thumbnail.  Very upsetting.  To get the files off I have to email them to myself.  So lame.  Maybe I should have bought the Pixel....  Stu cooked dinner or mushroom/cabbage/pork/bacon.  Watched Operation Mincemeat in the evening.  

Thursday.  Spent pretty much the whole day catching up on blogging.  If anyone cares there's a bunch of new entries in April, May and June.  Homemade pizzas for dinner.  Episode 7 of Picard, and Luca.

Friday.  Tony came over and chainsawed the photinia.  Three trips to green waste later   .. !!  Then year in review post writing.  So much for having fun this break.  Or doing anything like music practise or paint by numbers.  Pretty much the only fun I've had was building the Saturn V.  Chicken kiev for dinner.  Picard episode 8.  Herbie Goes Bananas.

Saturday.  New Years Eve.  OMFG I couldn't get to sleep and had no idea why.  It felt like I never got to sleep until after 3am.  Although Stu said I slept a bit between 22:30 and midnight.  Sigh.  Slept in til 8.  Did an Ikea and Officeworks run.  Finished the Saturn V.  Bit of house tidying.  The plan is for a quiet NYE at home..

Monday.  5th.  Slept ok.  Got on early to see if there were any problems from Friday's work but haven't heard of any.  More cleaning planning.  Hacking photinia and creeper after work.  Basa bake for dinner.  Then watched crap on the internet while filing photos, and did some music.

Tuesday.  Woke up before 4 and never got back to sleep.  Sigh.  I don't even know what I did all day.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Music after dinner again.  Oh I started watching Survivor Canberra, a fan-produced show which is actually pretty decent (aside from audio quality issues in one of the early episodes).  

Wednesday.  Woke up at like 5.  hrmm.  Very distracing day.  Everyone wanting All The Things.  Went and run a heap of errands at lunch - bought some new pj bottoms, bought some bubbly, booked an eye appointment and went to the bank to get pretty green ones for the kids.  We won't mention the old fart who barged past me waiting outside the bank to go in, then convinced himself that he was next despite me saying I was waiting outside.  Buttplug.  But I did see Fleur from Lego Masters in the mall!  I almost said hello but I just wasn't sure (I have no idea where any of the contestants are even from).  After work caught up wih Aaron at the lighty which was nice.  Talked about everything and nothing.  Mostly work I guess.  

Thursday.  Solar installation day!!  One guy spent all day moving out roof files, grinding them down, and attaching mounting brackets.  In the afternoon another guy came as well and they got most of the panels up.  Went in to work for drinks.  Pork larb for dinner.

Friday.  The solar guys had the power off most of the day to completely rewire the switch board and plumb in all the devices.  I used the lack of electricity time to sort out all the boxes we've collected over the past couple of years.  At lunch time I went in for round two of work Christmas parties which was a very pleasant afternoon.  Chicken kiev for dinner and the second episode of Picard.

The first step is admitting you have a problem..

Saturday.  Solar guys installed the battery and associated cabling.  They wandered off in the middle of the day but didn't actually tell us they were done for the day.  In the meantime, Stu hired a carpet shampooer to attack the moldy carpet where the shelf had been downstairs.  It did a decent job although is not perfect.  Also did the hallway and some bits of the lounge room and study.  I was trying to attack my todo list but it was all too hard and ended up wasting most of the day catching up on rss feeds.  Sigh.  After dinner went over to see Mila in advance of her 21st birthday.  

These are all the seeds from *one* poppy head!

Sunday.  Went out for brunch at Market St Eats and did some food shopping.  Then cooking pretty much all afternoon (although did squeeze in twenty minutes of music).  Sigh.  Jenn came over for dinner - a very overcooked vege lasagna.  Then a relatively early night.

A mummy-long-legs and her babies (being evicted from the house)

Monday.  Woke up at 1:40 to the thunder of a coming storm.  And then didn't get back to sleep til like 4.  Sigh.  Bit of a zombie day.  Another day of all the people wanting all the things.  Solar guy spent all day wiring up the battery.  Apparently these things are so new that there's a few design quirks that need to be worked around.  He disconnected power a bit after lunch for like twenty minutes to hook it in.  Leftovers from first work Christmas party for dinner.  And caught up on blogging.  I still can't get Geosetter to work.  It died last week - refuses to load the map.  I suspect it's because it's using an ancient IE api that Google no longer supports (as of the end of November, so the timing fits), but noone else is complaining on the forum so I have no idea.  Might have to start looking for another photo geotagging app.  

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.

Sunday.  16th.  Had crumbed basa bake for dinner which was very nice.  Third episode of Andor an early night.

Monday.  Slept ok.  Trying to do All The Things before work.  Still didn't have time for them all.  I DON'T HAVE TIME TO GO TO WORK!!  All afternoon everything was out of focus.  I can't SEE!!  Which is incredibly frustrating.  Maybe because I'm tired.  Or maybe I'm tired because everything is out of focus.  I certainly wasn't up to concentrating on anything on the computer.  7pm is bed time right?  So I just watched crap on the internet.  Of course then I was depressed that I still hadn't achieved anything useful all night.  Life is too short to go to work.  I'll be dead before I've done everything I want to.

Tuesday.  Started geotagging Europe photos in the morning.  Another afternoon of not be able to SEE.  Did some weeding but struggled to see music.  Kept missing notes because the lines were all blurry and I couldn't tell where the notes were.  Stu cooked mince for dinner.  Bit more geotagging, but hard work trying to accurately geotag photos in Munich's Residence because the thing is so huge.  I had to fudge things a bit.  

Wednesday.  Slept okish.  All the work.  At least I could see when I got home, but it was late(ish) so no weeding or music.  Stu was exhausted as well from a very draining day, so we ended up having beer and pizza.  hmmm.  Finished geotagging til end of day 5.

Thursday.  Ok day, pretty busy.  Ok drinks.  Since we had pizza last night I wanted KFC (first time in months).  Except we had to wait 15 minutes in the drivethrough :( Watched Romeo+Juliet, because, we'd just been in Fair Verona.  

Friday.  Woke up at ~4am and never got back to sleep.  Super super busy day (have been doing three people's jobs all week.. well two really since I didn't have time to do any of my own work).  

Saturday.  Did all my morning stuff then we did food shopping, then I cooked dinner, then had lunch and by then it's 13:20.  Sigh.  Got some more stuff done in the afternoon, including moving a set of shelves because Stu wants to get more substantial ones for all his wargaming stuff.  I'm not if we've fixed the rising damp issues by fixing the drainage, but this sure isn't great... 

It didn't feel wet, so possibly it's ok now.. we really don't know.  I doused the area with vanilla fridge wipe to sterilise it..

Alan's beef stew (aka runny poo) with a heap of roasted veggies for dinner which was very nice.  Watched episodes 4 and 5 of Andor.

Sunday.  Just a day of All The Things.  House stuff, a couple of days of geotagging, a bit of Lego.  I also dropped the sweetie at the airport (he had to go to Melbourne for work) and dropped by Scrivener Dam on the way back.  It was flowing nicely, but not nearly as intense as 2010 or 2012.

Monday.  21st.  Did you miss me? :)  Probably not on account of I post so sporadically anyway right?  And the fact there's only like three people that read my blog anyway.  

We went here!

With all the photos on the Canon taken here

So Plan A was a cruise out of Florida that we were just to scared to go on, even after they finally started offering insurance for medical expenses for covid.  I was stressing about losing thousands of dollars, but eventually Carnival were like, ok fine, if you want to get out of if they'll let the charter company do a cruise credit.  It's supposed to be for next year's cruise, but I want to try and go the year after if possible.

Plan B was Tasmania.  But even that we thought was too risky.  If one of us got covid while we were there we'd be stuck there with no way home.

So Plan C was regional Victoria.  We figured then if one of us got it we could be home in a day.  So off we went Saturday three weeks ago.  We were still a bit paranoid about getting covid, and avoided Melbourne and any large regional towns (well sort of anyway).  And it turned out to be a pretty awesome trip.  We only booked motels basically a night in advance, although stayed at most of them a couple of nights.  The weather was amazing, only a bit overcast on a couple of days, and barely any rain.  The biggest disappointments were the Grampians and the Great Ocean Road, in terms of all the photos I wanted to reproduce I couldn't because of the risk-averse government fencing off access to everything.  Moral of the story: go back in time to see stuff, and never go back to things you thought were awesome back in the day.

If you want to read the blog, you can start here, although no photos are up yet.  

So we got home on Monday, then the afternoon was just unpacking and getting organised.  Pizza for dinner, hrmm.  And photo processing.

Tuesday.  Urgh, epic insomnia - couldn't get to sleep til like 1am.  Now that I'm home I'm stressing about All The Things that need doing.  And I was thinking about Shandee too, hrmm.  I'm physically incapable of relaxing, and my muscles were all tensed up to prove it.  Got some weeding done in the morning (it was nice and cool which helped).  Went and got some medical checkup tests done.  Then I had to fight with Geosetter.  Google "changed something" which rendered the application completely broken some time while we were away.  Turns out it was just a matter of changing the Google url from http to https, and specifying a newer api version in the uri.  Phew.  Because I needed Geosetter to geotag all my photos.  Spent the afternoon applying the GPS tracks to photos, and then going through and checking/tweaking as needed.  I did have a break and do some weeding in the afternoon, and went for a walk in the evening.  Dug some cooked mince out of the freezer and finished a box of risoni for dinner. 

How cool was the date today too.. too many twos today (Tuesday)!  (I wasn't up for 2:22 or 22:22, so 20:22 on 22.2.2022 would have to do!)

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep again, but then slept ok.  6am is actually really dark now, who knew.  Spent an hour in the morning clearing periwinkle out of the front yard garden beds (now that I can get to them after Tony chopped the hedge back before we went away). 

Then it was geochecking and filing photos.  Spent another hour or so in the afternoon clearing out the drain in front of the garage.  Which hasn't been done since we moved in.  Thirteen years ago.  

I didn't even know there was a hole there, I thought this was just a stormwater drain for the driveway!

While I was showing the sweetie what I'd done, this itty bitty baby blue tongue ran practically under our feet (probably chasing all the worms I'd chopped in half digging out all the soil from the drains)

I was exhausted, so it ended up being a frozen pizza and fries kind of an evening (Chris didn't have any chicken kiev)..

In the evening I watched Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which is a pretty sad state of affairs really.  

Thursday.  Got to sleep ok, but then woke up at 2am til well past 4am.  Hurrah.  So zombie day.  Took 332 bottles and cans (basically a year's worth) to Return It.  Going first thing sure did work, I got there as it opened and grabbed a couple of trolleys, and didn't have to wait to put them through.

But omfg the humidity!  So bad.  Then it was just house tidying and photo stuff.  And I started the next (last!) section of the Disney behemoth.

In the afternoon got a lift to the Pot Belly for a few drinks with some of the guys I haven't seen in months.  Just as I arrived the rain started, and it got heavier and heavier!

The Pot Belly has stripped all the vintage wallpaper off their toilet walls, and most of the tiles too.  At least they retained one row of Pigs and Chickens tiles!!

KFC for dinner (I'd been craving it for weeks).

Friday.  Not a great sleep but not as zombie as yesterday.  Weeding, photo stuff (burning DVDs and culling photos), bit of jigsaw, not too much else. 

How to make your regular toasted cheese sandwich even more awesome - just plonk a handful of shredded parmesan cheese underneath and on top.  So good!

It RAINED in the afternoon.  I went out to check on the nearly cleared drain (the sump is still blocked, but I'm hoping to get that eeled this week), and noticed this...

It's actually *outside* the house proper, but not sure where all the water is coming from.  It's possible it's coming from the downpipe in one corner of the roof which is struggling to find somewhere to go since the garage drain is blocked.  I guess we'll see what happens once the drains are cleared.  Either that or run a hose down that drainpipe and see what happens - one of the things my brain thinks about when trying to get to sleep at night.

Had leftover pork (from the freezer) with some cabbage (which never goes off, it's been in the fridge for like six weeks) and rice (which I cooked in stock a couple of days ago) for dinner.  Then we watched 1917, which was interestingly done.  It *appears* to be one long continuous take, but we knew it wouldn't have been, and sat there guessing the transition shots.  A few of the things that annoyed me were on IMBD's goofs page, but a few weren't (like an epic boggy field in one shot, and a completely dry area just a couple of hundred metres away, or the truck getting bogged trying to go around a tree on the road, when why was there even a bog there at all, and why didn't they just go a couple of metres around it, or in fact on the other side of the road!?, or the medic tent being *so close* to the trenches).

Saturday.  Slept very well for a change.  The morning was house stuff and getting organised.  All the organising!  But I'm drowing in photo work.  I want to get Eurasia 2012 photos culled and onto the blog before the 10 year anniversary.  It's going to be an insane amount of work!!  Basically I need to cull a day of photos per day for the next two months.  But I suffer from decision paralysis which makes the process extremelly difficult and time consuming :(  Then just to increase my photo work load, I started to scan Mum's Minolta camera negatives (I installed the driver/software I had for windoze 10 and it worked fine in 11).  For some reason the scanner takes about 5-10 times longer per frame than for slides.  I fiddled around with settings some more, and went up to 3200 dpi, the highest native resolution the scanner will go.  Sadly all Mum's negatives from 1983 have a bit of a redshift to them, so the photos are a bit green once scanned, but can be tweaked post.  Another oddity is that any sort of blemish which would normally be black is epic white for a negative, so the dust and scratch filter works a whole lot better, with less false positives and weird artefacts.  But it's also completely necessary to use, as epic bright white spots are harder to ignore than black ones.  So it took pretty much all afternoon just to scan one roll of 36 photos.  Strangely, I've looked in the next two envelopes of negatives and both of them have missing strips, which is going to be annyoing if they don't show up.

We needed to go to the chemist and get more bark for Stumpy's tank, so made an errand day of it.  We tried out Co Dung at the back of Belco for lunch.  Had to wait ages (over twenty minutes) for the food.  The fish cakes weren't great (not hot, and tough) but the fried chicken wings were epic awesome - hot and crispy and delicious!

Most expensive petrol I've seen ever...

Leftover mince and pork for dinner, then we watched The Mauritanian which was pretty sad really. 

Do not harm the iguanas, $10,000 fine.  I wonder if that sign was actually there.  Probably is.  

Sunday.  Sigh.  Epic insomnia, didn't get to sleep til about 2am, and then still woke up at 6:30.  So definitely a zombie day today. 

I had a go on my clarinet for the first time in weeks, and it was epic crap.  I'm so bad at it.  

IOS 15.3.1 or whatever I last got upgraded to has gone back to putting files into folders by year/month (which I prefer!!).  I wonder how long that will last before they change it again.  And Apple is STILL messing with the date/timestamps on my files.  During our holiday I was downloading photos every night and noticed that sometimes I could get movies/pngs without the dates being messed with.  But then the next time I looked the next night, the files will have been changed.  NFI what Apple is doing with my files.  Epic hate.  The sweetie cooked dinner (a nice tasting pasta) while I downloaded the week's photos and blogged the last two weeks.

19:30 is bed time right?  I wonder if I'd get to sleep if I went to bed this early..