Sunday.  19th.  Super yummy roast pork for dinner.  2.5kg so barely fit in my baking dish.  There may have been a lot of fat..!

Because it was so big, the crackling turned out really well, but the meat stayed nice and tender.  It was awesome!

Stu decided we should watch Futurama.  They're into season 13.  But honestly they should just STOP.  It's done its dash.  13.1 was pretty dumb too.  Then I finished watching The Green Mile.

Monday.  Slept like crap - awake for ages because I was hot.  Another disjointed distracted day at work. The temperature today got to like 32C! Turned the cooler on for the first time this year. Yeah last week we had the heater on (briefly), this week we had the cooler on. That's Canberra for you. Leftover pork for dinner. Futurama 13.2 then blog reading and photo filing.

Tuesday.  1 Timothy 2:11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing--if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. .... yeah hmmm.  Again, makes you wonder how much of this is cultural.  

Slept like crap again - awake for ages because I was hot. Even with the cooler fan going.

Busy being NEIL in the morning and not getting any other work done. My Christmas present arrived! ;) To be revealed.. one day..!  Penultimate nuking session, finished the Wasgij jigsaw, then walked up and visited Neil.

Then battled peak hour traffic to get home. Canberra has peak hour traffic.. who knew!? Leftover pork and veggies (refried in the "aspic" - I don't know why you'd want to eat that stuff cold anyway - just use it as a kind of "stock" to fry stuff in - much more yummierer!) for dinner, Futurama 13.3, blogged my last two Diamond Dotz birds sets.

Wednesday.  

Last nuking!!!!!!

Got conflicting advice about my skin.  They're all like.. keep it moisturised.. but those bits, keep them dry.  Like make up your mind.  Rang the bell though hurray!

Got home and had a couple of beers and got Chong Co delivered for dinner then Futurama 13.4

Thursday.  1 Timothy 4:10 That is why we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.  .. "all people" .. and "especially"..? what does that even mean?

Okish sleep.  Opened the door under the "angel" tank to get the food out and it was tougher to open than usual.  Which usually means swollen chipboard from a leak.  Except I couldn't find where the leak was coming from.  hrmmmm.  

NEIL for a bit in the morning then fighting with new proxies. If you turn off inspection on a site it can't figure out what browser you're using, and so it blocks you (we block Firefox from general browsing and only allow it to some sites). But it won't give you an error, you just get a connection reset. So dumb. Then fighting with the test mail servers after someone spammed the hell out of them.

Went into drinks for the first time in months. Then it was a trivia night. It was one of THOSE trivia nights - stoopidly complicated question/marking setup (like three parts to an answer, each with two parts, and if you get one out of the two you get half a point, but if you get both parts right you get two points, oh and you have to mark each others, it's not marked centrally so there's no consistency in the scoring). Yeah so fricken dumb. One round wasn't even trivia, it was look at this picture for 10 seconds, then answer the crappiest stuff, like how many ears were in this picture, or how many feet were in this other picture. Not even trivia. Dumb dumb dumb. But my expecations for these trivia nights are so low now that I just didn't care. And I had bubbles. I don't even know what the final scores were, I didn't get a photo. I think we came third. They spun a wheel to determine who'd run the next one, and it missed us by one. Winning!  Also, Gin picked me up some Subway to have for dinner.. first Subway in like three months!!

Friday.  1 Timothy 5:23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.  Yeah cause fresh water back in the day was usually contaminated, and alcohol killed a lot of the germs.

Logged onto work briefly to be NEIL for the overnight stuff, then took an RDO.

Did some washing, did some weeding, went shopping (actually had fairly successful shopping mission.  Was chatting to Faye at Subway at lunch about how I'd been away with the C word, and she gave me a free cookie! So sweet :) ), took some cans for recycling and suddenly it's 15:45. And nowhere near enough done on my todo list. hrmmm.

I've missed Subway so much..!!  So much that I had it for dinner last night then lunch today haha

Drinks at Jo's in the afternoon and Tony came too so that was a nice catchup.

Cooked up some veggies to go with some leftover pork. Futurama 13.5.  Then I watched "Apollo 13: Survival" documentary on Netflix which was pretty interesting.  Jim Lovell only died a couple of months ago, and Marilyn only a couple of years ago.

Saturday.  1 Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.  .. not necessarily "money".. but the "love of money".  

Got a few things done in the morning then we headed out. First up to "The Shed", an offshoot of the Green Shed. Quite a bit smaller than the old shed, but he only has the lease til December so he may find something bigger (and with better parking would be nice!). They still charged me $3 for jigsaws, although I have a feeling they only did that after I asked (they revised the total down). They charged $2 each for some plates which I thought was a little high. Oh well.

This would fit in nicely with Mum's collection :)

Then next door to the other second hand place there (Down Memory Lane, I think??).  Mum would definitely recognise this ;)

Then out to the club for the "Spooktacular" halloween night. But first up went for a wander with the sweetie.

Then had a good long chat to Chris and Geoff. Then it was up to the shed for drinks and a spectacular charcuterie board, and an amazing dinner with lots of different things. Little bit of a late night but not too bad.

Sunday.  Got up and went and tidied up the shed a bit, with a bit of help from Brenton. Then home via the Scottish Restaurant, which took them 18 MINUTES to deliver our food from when we first arrived. So much for FAST food. Also. BOM updated their website a few days ago, and in the process shut down the APIs used by third party apps for the radar. TWITTER MUCH??? I'm so pissed off that RainRadarAU doesn't work anymore - I always preferred it to the BOM app. Hopefully there will be enough backlash/complaints and they'll restore them. Got a few things done in the afternoon and pfft, there goes the weekend. Sigh.

Sunday.  22nd.  Cooked some roast chicken, brussels sprouts and a blue cheese cauliflower bake for dinner.  It sure makes a difference cooking the chicken "upside down" - because the breast meat cooks in juices and so it doesn't dry out as much.  Much more betterer.

DS9 4.16, then Lego Masters 7.7.

Monday.  Slept okish I think.

The mini capsicum plant finally succumbed to the sub-zero temperatures!

Busy day again. Cooked up leftover chicken with some mushrooms, bok choy, yellow curry paste, ginger paste, garlic paste, and Greek yoghurt (I didn't have any coconut cream in the house).

Andor 2.7. Photo culling and picking.

Tuesday.  Took a while to get to sleep and woke up very early hrmmm. Another crazy busy day. Cooked up the last of the leftover chicken with half a cauliflower, cream, lemon juice, dill and some Greek yoghurt (didn't have much cream).  I probably should have let it reduce some more, but I was hungry!

Andor 2.8 then computer backups. Been thinking about life and death recently. And am I the only one that's worried about nuclear war? If I die what is to become of all my photos? Will anyone ever see them? Or care? Is there any point in trying to save them from the EMP apocalypse? And what is the meaning of life really? To know Christ and to make him known. I'm not very good at that.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly okish. A day of interruptions stopping me from getting any work done (of which there was still tonnes to do). After 17:00 it got quiet and I had an hour of peace which I used to finally get to my inbox under control (it's been out of control for a couple of weeks). So that was nice. Pizzas for dinner, must be Thursday. Wait, what? 

Then Andor 2.9. No time for Legomasters, nearly bed time sigh.

Thursday.  Busy day again. After drinks was a trivia night. We might have won. Whoops. But the good thing was they decided in advance that the last place table should run the next one which was a relief for us. Read: me. The first round was called Geospatial, which was Google Earth shots of various cities and landmarks. We totally aced that round. That was literally *my* round haha. The next round was macro shots of various objects and you had to guess what they were. We did pretty well, but a couple eluded us. Current affairs was fairly standard. Music was tv theme tunes. A couple I'd never heard of but Neil and Duncan were like "oh that's F Troop" haha. They did Home and Away too. Gin and I sang that one. What's funny is that I literally haven't heard the theme tune in like 35 years (we watched the first few seasons back in the late 80s/early 90s) but I still remembered all the words. We might have sung a bit of The Love Boat as well.  Aussie TV ads was also a bit of fun. The last round was dumb - photos of random people and had they ever worked here. So yeah, it was all (mostly) on the easy side, so everyone did quite well, but that also made just so much more fun. Great night.

Friday.  Slept relatively well considering. Not too many tickets which was good - gave me some time to finally fix the issues in my config dump script. Took it and ran it over our dev environment, which needs a massive cleanup. We were going to go into the city after work to look at lenses, but in the end didn't go and had kievs for dinner.

DS9 4.17 then Lego Masters.

Saturday.  Slightly early night, but then woke up at 4:40 doh. Mostly filing Lego all day. Headed out to the club in the late afternoon - first time we'd been out in six months! Eeep! It was Chris and Ian's 10th wedding anniversary formal night which was pretty cool. It was James Bond themed, and of course there was trivia, and we might have won. Whoops. Not toooo late a night.

I always love seeing STARS out at the club.. and the phone can pick up the Milky Way

Sunday.  Slept relatively well considering. Came home and then mostly just Lego filing.  Think will have an early night tonight!

Sunday.  16th.  After blogging we had leftover lamb I dug out of the freezer and cabbage.  DS9 1.16 then finished Stranger Things season 1.  

Extra Hard Rated!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

Had to stake the capsicum plant because it was falling over underneath its own weight

NEIL at work.  Spent some time deleting old spam addresses that Neil put in, but aren't in use anymore.  DS9 1.17 - Lwaxana Troi! heh.  Then watched Labyrinth - 35 years to the day that I first watched it.  Oh, and was going through Adelaide photos and found the ones of the odometer on the car - we did 106km on it.. and put a whole $6 worth of petrol in it.  !!

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep - was actually cold!  NEIL again at work.  They're talking about doing some fundamental changes to the way we do things with mail.  May or may not be a bad thing.  Finished off the last of the pulled pork from the freezer with some cabbage.  DS9 1.14.  Had to do some stuff for oncall.  Tried to find where I took a photo in like 2010.  The mother called for an hour.  Then it was bed time.  Annoyingly I've been feeling a day out all week - like Tuesday felt like Wednesday.

Wednesday.  Took a little while to get to sleep.  NEIL again.  But also so fricken busy with All The People wanting All The Things.  Also found out I'd split my jeans right across my butt.  Hurray.  Wonder if anyone noticed.  Stu had had a day, so we had KFC for dinner.  hmmm.  The mother messaged.  She'd had a fall (probably fainted from her heart condition) and broken her collar bone.  !!

Thursday.  Had just gone to bed when got an alert.  So had to get back up again to check it out.  Everything seemed fine and even Jim didn't know what it alerted.  But it was like midnight before I got to sleep.  NEIL again, and another busy day of All The Things.  Deleted lots of spam list entries.  After drinks was trivia night.  Except it was ANOTHER one of THOSE trivia nights.  Where there were so many words on the slides that they went so low as to not be readable.  Where they read through the questions so damned fast I literally couldn't keep up with writing answers.  Where they asked questions about work that even people that worked there wouldn't know, let alone friends and family.  Where questions had an answer, with bonus points for fleshing out the answer, never mind that they didn't consider all possibilities so their answers were actually wrong.  Where answers were in fact wrong (we Googled afterwards).  Where they didn't mark things centrally, but got us to mark each others, which meant all the nonsense with the multipart and incorrect answers made it impossible to score properly.  I delegated marking because it would have made me too angry otherwise.  So, me being me, I started complaining loudly.  I could hear myself doing it and knew I should stop, but I just couldn't.  DC threatened to leave at one point.  Hell *I* almost left at one point.  Things did pick up a bit after the first couple of rounds and it did get more fun.  We were even winning at one point.  Ended up coming equal third, two points behind the winner.

Friday.  Awake for several hours in the middle of the night.  Partly stressing about the fact I'm such a Karen.  Sigh.  I should probably not go to trivia nights anymore - they bring out the worst in me.  NEIL again, but hardly anyone bothered me most of the day, so had quite a peaceful day Getting Things Done.  Got a dump of all the domains we'd had email from in the past six months, and used that to cross reference addresses in our spam lists.  Anything not used in the past six months could be deleted.  Also wrote up a change to do more mail policy rearranging next week.  Sorry Neil! ;)  Pizzas for dinner since we didn't get them last night.  Tried to watch DS9 but it was like double zoomed in - worse than even pan and scan that we had to watch Mash in.  It was literally unwatchable.  So watched Death in Paradise 14.3.

Saturday.  Early night and slept well hurray! 

House stuff mostly, and some tagging of travel photos in Picasa.  Quicker to find photos of Mum that way - software does all the hard work.  Cooked an epic feast for dinner - creamy lemon pepper dill chicken, cauliflower blue cheese bake, brussels sprouts with bacon and hazelnuts, capsicum and garlic.

Stu had a fiddle with Amazon Prime on the Chromecast, but it was still doubly zoomed in and he couldn't figure out how to change it.  After Googling he found it's just a "thing" that Amazon Prime does.  So we watched DS9 1.20 on Netflix.  Screw you Jeff.  Then watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, so slightly late night.

Sunday.  Awake from before 2 til after 4.  Sigh.  Not too zombie though.  Mostly photo tagging/picking.  While David was here last week we discussed our backup strategies for our phones.  Lately I've only been backing up MOV files using iMazing.  It will download the HDR versions from the phone.  Since I first started using iMazing they've (dunno who) made it so the HDR videos will play *ok* on Windows, not completely washed out like they used to.  But they're still a bit over exposed.  So tonight I decided to try and grab them again in Windows.  Some time in the last year or so Apple has stopped messing with the timestamps on the files that it presents to windows, so all the timestamps are correct which is nice.  I guess enough people complained about it.  So grabbing everything I've still got on this phone.

But I am still PISSED that Windoze resets the sort order and view settings on my folders EVERY DAMEND TIME IT REBOOTS.  #hate #grunt

Monday.  28th.  Cranky cause I was meant to do a time use survey over the weekend.  Except they mailed me on Thursday.  We went to Queensland on Friday.  I never saw the emails til Monday.  When the survey had closed.  With only a "noreply" email address to reply to.  "noreply" email addresses should totally be outlawed. 

The congo tetra that hadn't been eating had died.  I was also trying to fix the outflow to the 620T tank, and found the stone that I'd previously used to pin down the filter wool from flowing away had gotten stuck there.  Just trying to deal with all the crap and suddenly it's 8:40.  Sigh.  Catching up and dealing with crap all day.  Blogged last week.  Cooked some frozen chicken pieces I had in the freezer with some veggies for dinner (cabbage bake and brussels sprouts).  Watched Mazey Day on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.  Another one where they can't keep the damned camera still.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Pissed off at one of my lovely poppy plants being knocked over.  I blame retarded cats.

So I brought the flowers inside.  As you do.

Bits and pieces day, mostly watching security talks. 

Leftovers and random stuff for dinner.  Demon 79 on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok (once I finally got to sleep).  Of note is that I finally finished uploading all my Queensland 2014 photos!!  For those of you reading along at home (hi Mum!) you can go back and see food and hotel photos.  Noone else will ever care, I'm sure.  Took an early mark and went with Neil and Tony to Herbert's to finally try the very last TRBC beer - a blood orange sour.

The sweetie decided we had to have pizzas on a Wednesday since I'd be out Thursday night.. 

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Stu thought it was Friday cause I'd been out drinking the night before and we'd had pizza for dinner.. 

The lake is very low at the moment...

Crap all day.  Drinks, trivia night.  Heaps of trash, like a whole round on exec baby/kid photos, and some super specific stuff that if you worked in the right area you *might* know, or crap like when does a full moon next fall on Halloween (and when did it last).  ie, not a whole heap of actual real trivia.  The exec table won.  Yeup.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up very early.  Crap all day again. 

The poppies that I brought inside.  I didn't think the unopened buds would open but they did!  But with a delicate peach colour rather than the bright orange they'd normally be.

The neighbour's bamboo is making a break for freedom.. hmmmmmmm!!

This can't be good!!

The sweetie ordered Dumpling Inn for dinner nom nom nom.  The National Anthem on Black Mirror (for some reason Netflix started me at season 6, so back to season 1).  Early night.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  A day of All The Things.  Starting with the broken lemon tree..

Yeah .. 112 of them .. !!  I put 20 of them on the letterbox with a sign that said "free".  Only four left by the end of the day.

Changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au over to CloudLoop.  Did some hosting tidying up and clearing stuff out of Vodien.  

Same plant, two colours...

Leftover Dumpling Inn for dinner.  Watched an episode of Donna Hay's Christmas special from 2022.  Found her house in Avalon in a few minutes.  Although I guess it could always be some family/friend's house.  Edit: or probably just hired - there was a thing in the credits about "Katy Young, Contemporary Homes" or something.  Also.  I wish she'd stop saying "perfect".  !!  Fifteen Million Merits on Black Mirror.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  And still didn't get nearly enough done. 

Put another 10 lemons out on the letter box.  All gone by the end of the day.  Still have like 70 on the family room table...

Finally posted my dramas with Vodien over August/September.

Also this little bastard nearly dropped on my head.  I heard it go *thonk* right next to me as it fell down from the roof!

Hot today.  Like 31.  Gross.

So when we won the trivia the other night, Craig said I should ask AI to write a quiz.  

So here's what I posed to ChatGPT:

"Please write a 10 question quiz about current events"

And here was its response... and my comments in blue:

Sure! Here's a 10-question quiz about recent current events:

Current Events Quiz

Which country recently hosted the 2024 Summer Olympics?
a) France
b) Japan
c) USA
d) Brazil
Actually a sensible question, with a correct answer

What major tech company announced a new AI-driven product called "Project Quantum" in July 2024?
a) Google
b) Microsoft
c) Apple
d) Amazon
hmm not really sure this is a thing

Which country won the 2024 FIFA Men's World Cup?
a) Brazil
b) Argentina
c) Germany
d) France
Given the last FIFA world cup was 2022 (Argentina won), and the next one is 2026, this is a bollux question

Who was recently appointed as the new Secretary-General of the United Nations?
a) António Guterres
b) Angela Merkel
c) Ban Ki-moon
d) Amina J. Mohammed
António Guterres is Secretary-General of the United Nations, but he's been there since 2017, I wouldn't exactly call that recent

What significant climate agreement was signed by over 100 countries in early 2024?
a) Paris Agreement 2.0
b) Kyoto Protocol II
c) Glasgow Climate Pact
d) Global Green Deal
The original Paris Agreement was in 2016. 2.0 doesn't seem to be a thing? The Kyoto Protocol was a thing, but not, it seems, Kyoto Protocol II. Glasgow Climate Pact was in 2021. Global Green Deal might actually be a thing but it was for Europe.  Someone more up on current events could confirm these I guess.

Which space agency successfully landed a rover on Mars in March 2024?
a) NASA
b) ESA
c) CNSA (China National Space Administration)
d) ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
Um, yeah noone.

Which social media platform implemented new strict regulations to combat misinformation in 2024?
a) Facebook
b) Twitter
c) TikTok
d) Instagram
eh, maybe Meta, hard to verify

In 2024, which country became the first to pass a law banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035?
a) Norway
b) Germany
c) Canada
d) Japan
Well it seems the EU did a couple of years ago, and even the ACT.  But this year?  Dunno

Which tech CEO stepped down from their position in June 2024, making headlines worldwide?
a) Sundar Pichai (Google)
b) Tim Cook (Apple)
c) Mark Zuckerberg (Meta)
d) Elon Musk (Tesla)
Yeah I don't think any of these have. I could be wrong.

What was the major breakthrough in medical science announced in April 2024 related to?
a) Cancer treatment
b) Alzheimer's disease
c) Diabetes management
d) Heart disease prevention
Could be anything. Or nothing.  More likely nothing.

Feel free to use or adapt these questions as needed!

Yeah so a pretty trash set of questions.  Some of them could be useful in terms of at least the *idea* for a question, but I certainly wouldn't be trusting any of it at face value.

Sunday.  21st.  Roasted All The Veggies for dinner, and had that with some leftover beef.

Monday.  Slept okish, bit restless, kept waking up hot.  Took out the recycling tub to the bin outside and noticed behind it a big stain on the side of the pantry from a stream of dirty water.  Seems I must have overwatered the plant on top on Friday night.  Sigh.  So then had to spent a bunch of time before work wiping it all down and having a sad that the chipboard had swelled from the water.  Sigh.  Busy day doing some migration work and paperwork.  Into Mash season 8.

Tuesday.  Dunno, no notes.

Wednesday.  Had a big lunch at work.  Well, it was big in that there were lots of people, but lunch was super small on account of heaps of people turning up without being catered for so they ran out of food.  Whoops.  At least I did get something. 

In the evening Team Blank accidentally won the trivia night.  Sigh.  Only by two points too.  It was generally pretty fun.  My only main gripe was some of the questions were either half points for two part answers, or two points.  And it wasn't consistent.  Which wouldn't have been a problem except they weren't marking them centrally, they got us to swap with other tables.  So that was bit annoying. 

Anyways.  Looks like I have to plan another trivia night.  First since pre covid.  Someone suggested getting AI to write it.  Wonder what sort of questions it would come up with.  

At least there was mulled cider.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Although awake from after 4 til 5 after the sweetie got up to pee (he'd been awake for hours stressing about All The Things).  Dealing with All The Problems during the day.  Then pizzas, Mash, Lego Masters.

Friday.  Slept ok.  Morning was just dealing with crap and tidying up and crap. 

The turdburgers are back to eat the house

Knocked off at lunch then did some club dinner prep and food shopping and more prep including making a peppermint slice.  Frustrated with LibreOffice formatting.  I have a random line in one of my documents that I literally cannot delete.  Give me Notes formatting any day.

Here's all the shopping for the club Christmas in July night.

Dessert.  After I'd started making up the peppermint slice

Presents

It's times like this I really miss the little brother...

Chris *promised* me kievs this week.  He lied!!  He did say I could beat him over the head.  So had to have some other random chicken stuff instead to go with the kalettes.

This is some of the peppermint slice cut up 

Saturday.  Not much in the morning.  Stu decided he was too stressed to go out to the club so I went out by myself.  

All my bags of crap

After I dumped everything in the fridge I went for a wander and had a chat with Chris and Geoff and Tammie and Brenton.  Then watched a demo of the log splitter and had a go on it.  Then it was into the kitchen to wash up everything and start prepping dinner.  Which took all afternoon.  Note to self: start closer to 12 than 1.  There were a couple of minor disasters.  Firstly I forgot to take out the small wooden skewer sticks so I couldn't make up the Christmas Skewers (Chris suggested putting the bits out in bowls but they didn't really get eaten much).  Then the door on the little oven was a bit bent so it wasn't closing properly, so when I opened up the foil on the turkeys they were nowhere near done.  John hacked the oven door and got it to close properly and so I cranked the temp and waited a bit longer.  All good cause the other oven was still super slow even with less food in it.  So dinner was a little later than I planned but it all worked out.  It was also a fairly quiet night, only like 20-25 peeps.  And I also missed getting photos of a lot of the food cause I was concentrating too much on getting it organised.  Whoops.

John and some turkey

Coles winter salad

One of the potato bakes

Minted peas

We only did one pavlova because of so few people

Eggnog overload!!  With actual real eggnog from last Christmas, that had been in the freezer at home since January

Went to bed a little late but not too bad.

Sunday.  Happy birthday Dad.  Woke up quite early and never got back to sleep.  Eventually got up and went up at 7:30 to clean up the shed, and was totally amazed to see snow!  Will post pics separately.  After making it past the snow, then spent half an hour taking down Christmas decorations, had some breakfast, then spent an hour doing washing up from last night.  hmmm.  Definitely not part of the plan.

Came home but was zombie tired so didn't feel up to doing anything useful.  I did make some drawer dividers for our implements drawer out of reject Lego of Vic's (worn/yellowed stuff).  And watched an hour of the Olympics opening ceremony.  Then took the sweetie to the airport, then came home for photos/blogging etc.

Sunday.  17th.  Backdating because, life.  I need to retire.  I had a nice day doing house stuff and hobbies, but I need a day like that every day for the rest of my life.  Just to keep up.  Cooked RecipeTin Eats garlic roast potatoes to go with some roast lamb (that was sadly very gristly). 

Chrome is being super annoying.  My blog is http only.  Because when Movable Type was invented noone used https.  And it hardcodes everything with full urls.  But https is enabled on the domain, and because of that, Chrome will try to use the https site EVEN IF THE LINK YOU CLICK ON IS HTTP!!!  The problem with that is the mixed content.  It renders the images ok (clearly browsers have decided it's "safe" to allow mixed content images), but the style sheet is not rendered so the site looks dumb.  It's pissing me off.

Monday.  Slept ok.  I think.  Stoopidly busy day.  Late finish (doing doco! hurray!) then some weeding.  Leftovers for dinner.  Then spent an hour waiting for the support peeps at Vodien to actually pay attention to the call they're on and reset my cpanel password after the great upgrade fiasco of the other week.  What should have taken all of a few minutes took over an hour.  Sigh.  Gave up using the nice long Kogan iphone cable because it kept not working.  Either not even registering at all, or saying it was charging but wasn't.

Tuesday.  New iphone cable also playing up - saying it was charging but then not doing anything.  Replug it in and it'll actually start charging.  #grunt (although as of nearly two weeks later it's been ok).  Busy day.  Did some firewall cleaning.  Weeding after work.  Some frozen stuff from the parties for dinner.  Finished writing up hotel posts for Europe trip.  And finished season 23 of Air Crash Investigations.

Cape weed may be an invasive species but it is quite pretty

So.  Many.  Weeds.

Two kiev balls left, and those carbonara bites are yummy but the box is a rip off, only like half full.

Wednesday.  Missed three calls in quick succession while the phone was in the bedroom while I was having breakfast.  Sigh.  Then a stoopidly busy day. 

Apparently these are called scilla.  I had one plant of them last year.  This year I have like ten.

David came after work to install the new oven element.  Except.

The design is different.  It wasn't going to fit.  #grunt.  We all had a sad.

Watched The Orville 1.3.  

Thursday. 

Returned the element in the morning.  So back to square one.  Slightly more productive day.  Trivia night in the evening.  We came fourth.  Some of the rounds were "normal" and therefore fun.  But some of the rounds were just plain evil.  And badly done too.  Like there'd be five-part questions/answers with text so small you could barely read it.  Like this BS.

How do you even mark that crap??  What if you get one out of order but the rest in order, do you get four out of five or none?  And they did badly acted readings, this time from tv shows, but they didn't learn a damned thing from the previous people that ran it, AND YOU COULDN'T HEAR A DAMNED THING.  Ridiculous.  

Friday.  Hurty in the middle of the night.  Zombie day.  Back to cold weather which was nice. 

I actually had a really nice day because hardly anyone bothered me all day so I could concentrate on some decommission works. 

Did some weeding after work.  Before and after.  

Went over to Ben and Sarah's for dinner which was lovely. 

Saturday.  Productive morning, and did some food shopping.  Did RecipeTin Eat's mac and cheese for dinner, which was yummy but took two hours.  hrmmm.  It was too late and we were too tired to watch a movie so watched some Death in Paradise.

These cherry tree suckers are like a week or two old.  Sigh.

I guess they're pretty .. but still..

This cracked me up - a lineup of Teslas!  Two parked, and a third one just happened to come alone while I was taking a photo of them!

Sunday.  24th.  Somewhat better sleep.  Weeding, Lego inventorying and building, blogging, tax.  Man, financial crap is such a pain in the @$$.  You have to go into battle with every damned website and fight to get the information you need out of it.  I really hate the ones that don't let you right click to save-as (which is like all of them these days).  One site wouldn't let me download *anything* - you'd click on the link and nothing would happen.  Sigh.  Hate hate hate.  Roast pork for dinner which was yummy.

Then watched the last episode of season 5 of The Crown, which was actually the last episode aired so far.

Sunday.  30th.  Veggies with leftover lamb for dinner, Crown, early night.

Monday.  Slept okish.  Still woke up a few times.  Spent some time trying to find a pub to go to for my Sydney party.  I wanted to go to the Argyle again (had a nice time there last time) but it doesn't open til like 4pm which is way too late.  Sigh.  Busy day.  Again.  Leftover turkey and veggies for dinner.  And spent some more time looking for a pub.  

Tuesday.  Slept okish.  Morning of All The Hassling All At Once.  Did some weeding at lunch.  Then an afternoon of all the BS.  Cranky at everything.  

Wednesday.  Dunno, no notes, but it was another busy day.  

Thursday.

Completely defeated by Microsoft "security".  Cranky and stressed yet again.  After drinks it was all too much and the stress of the week just exploded and I literally had a meltdown all the way home.  Made pizzas for dinner.

Friday.  Had an early night, but then woke up at Dentist Time and never got back to sleep.  Stu on the other hand was sick all night and didn't get *any* sleep.  He was eventually actually sick but that didn't help him feel any better.  Poor thing.  I took an RDO and spent the day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Well actually the morning was mostly tidying up and weeding etc in the front yard.  The afternoon was mostly tidying inside.  In the middle was a pub lunch at Herbert's with the Chrises, Tony, Frank and Karen.

Saturday.  Had an early night and slept somewhat better.  Spent the entire day cleaning the house.  Hurray.  Hardly any culling which was on the todo list though. 

Dinner at Badger&Co (literally the same thing I ordered last time I was there a year ago).

Then saw "Jeremy Laser" at the ANU Women's Revue.  They also played recorder (!!  Titanic  !!) and trombone.

After twenty minutes of just them getting setup and the band playing, just before the show started a group of five people walked in (twenty minutes late!!!!) and then demanded that people move around to accommodate their group of FIVE.  Tossers.

I had just about the perfect seat, but alas they asked us not to take any photos, so just got a sneaky one at the end.

Highlights from my crap memory (I was desperate to take some notes but didn't want to get out my phone)

* We Didn't Start the Movement (to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire)
* Never Gonna Give them Up (Rickrolled!!!  regarding returning museum artefacts)
* cute little in-between-skit music including the Wii home screen music, ABBA's SOS, and Jess playing Titanic music on recorder
* Fixer Upper (from Frozen)
* three lines from Do you Wanna Build a Snowman, except I can't actually remember the question.. go away Anna, ok bye.. must ask Jess what they asked
* a parking skit where they complained about campus parking, which I had to laugh at because when *I* was at uni there was no such thing as student parking on campus
* Jess singing I'm Too Sexy
* Let's hear it for Canberra
* ANU / Xanadu

Scotland forever!!

So yeah quite a bit of fun, but it did make for a very late night :(

Sunday.  Spent All Morning FINALLY putting some sealant over the cracked grout around the loose tiles in the shower.  $20 solution to a $20000 problem.  Hopefully.  Remains to be seen if it works.  But OMFG caulking guns are hard work.  My forearms are going to ACHE tomorrow.

Then did some more cleaning.  Even managed some music.  But didn't finish my goal of culling Verona and Venice photos this weekend.  Sigh.  And the poor sweetie is still sick.  His entire gut is on strike and he felt miserable all weekend.  He's eaten like four pieces of toast in three days.  Eeep!

Some random things I've learnt lately..
* the fact that the sun is made up of hydrogen and helium was first discovered by a woman - Cecilia Payne - but of course because she was a woman she never really got the credit
* a Camera Lucida is a super cool optical device which allows an artist to superimpose a real life scene onto paper so they can trace it out.  I want one!! haha

Sunday.  16th.  Lamb roast for dinner.  Into season 5 of The Crown.  Then finished season 3 of The Amazing Race Australia.  I was really glad that (spoiler alert!!) Heath and Toni won.  

Monday.  Took ages to get to sleep.  Then kept waking up early thinking it was time to wake up.  Then people hassled me the entire fricken day and It. Did. Not. Stop. All. Day.  I hung my washing outside in the morning because it was supposed to be 16 and breezy.  Pfft, never dried.  Saw three of my birds at lunch and did some weeding.  Sausages for dinner.  Still behind on culling.

Tuesday.  Slept ok.  Could have had more sleep though.  Got some culling down in the morning.  Work wasn't *as* crazy as yesterday.  Pea and ham soup for dinner (took literally two minutes to make - ham hock, packet of yellow split peas, bay leaves, onions (that I cooked last night), pepper and water).  Weeding at lunch.  Got up to date with culling.  Windows 11 is so bad.  I have notepad pinned to the task bar.  And normally when it's open it's in the place I have it set.  But every so often windoze just moves notepad all the way over to the right of all my icons, and not where I'd originally pinned it.  So I have to move it back.  So damned retarded.  And don't even get me started on cmd, which is pinned right next to notepad, but when you actually start it, it leaves the pinned icon there, but opens the actual command prompt in another icon all the way to the right.  So you go looking for your open cmd window on the left but can't find it, because it's all the way over to the right.  

Wednesday.  Spent all morning on one ticket trying to figure out how we do our cloud crap.  Another crazy day.  Gave blood for the first time in about thirty two years.  The first time I gave blood I felt really quite unwell after (I felt really off in my 4 unit maths class, and Sarah F gave me a lift home).  And the second time at the Red Cross centre in Wynyard I threw up.  So I never did it again.  But I'm about a hundred kilos heavier now so thought I'd give it a go.  And I wasn't sick.  Hurray.  Met up with Dennis and the sweetie for a drink after work.  Well they had a drink.  I thought a drink might be a bit unwise with reduced blood volume.  Then we had Kinn Thai for dinner.  I had grilled beef.  Because iron.

Thursday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Another morning trying to figure out cloud crap all for one ticket.  Trivia night in the evening.  We came 5th out of 10.  And I'm pissed at myself for getting one wrong that I should have known better.  If we'd gotten that one and just one more we would have come second, it was that close.  

Friday.  Crazy busy day AGAIN.  Sigh.  At one point in the morning I was so overwhelmed I had a full on meltdown.  Sigh.  Totally worn out by this week.  But did manage to knock off early so we could go shopping and go out to the club. Laid out all the food and prizes before holing up in the van with the fire going.  It took us both several drinks to start to feel relaxed after such an insane week.

Saturday.  Slept ok(ish) (kept waking up with numb hands).  Our feather/down doona sure is lovely.  I stoked the fire maybe a little too much in the morning, but did have a leisurely morning.  I even made a candle (which I'll put in another post).  Went and chatted to Chris and Geoff for a bit (saved them from a phone call to Chris's sister), then went up to start the dinner proceedings.  

I was pottering away almost all afternoon.   I did allow for some help making the "Christmas Skewers", and John very nicely carved the meat and I had several amazing servers as well.

Other than that, did all the prep/cooking myself. 

Eight kilos of pork (the crackling didn't turn out as well this year, probably needed to have it higher longer, but it did mean the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender)

Four kilos of turkey

Two epic potato bakes (annoyingly the baking dishes I normally use have disappeared so had to use smaller ones)

And winter salad (sweet potato, rocket, goats cheese, toasted pumpkin seeds, honey and olive oil) which I remembered to take a photo of this year (there were two of these)

Tab made some lovely Biscoff muffins and some puddings.

It seemed to go well and I think everyone enjoyed dinner.  There was just the tiniest amount of leftovers, which meant catering was perfect - anyone that wanted seconds got them and there wasn't a huge pile of leftover food.  Just enough for a meal or two for us.  And not too late a night.  

I'm always amazed at the STARS out at the club.  Being away from Canberra's light pollution is pretty cool.  On the way back to the van I could see the Milky Way and wondered if my phone could capture it.  It could!!  How amazing is this.. hand held, on a PHONE!!

Sunday.  Slept okish.  Did I mention how good feather/down doonas are?  Got up relatively early and went up and spent an hour or so tidying up the shed. 

Then we came home.  And I realised I'd left a bunch of food in the fridge in the van.  Pissed about that.  As per usual on Sundays after club nights I felt pretty flat all day.  All I managed to achieve all day was finishing the Titanic.  But hey, I guess that's a pretty cool achievement.  Because I mean look at this thing!  So cool!

Something I learnt this week: Weenus!  I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's a slang word for the flap of skin you get over your elbow (technically referred to as olecranal skin).  There you go!

Monday.  Spent all night working on the trivia night.

Tuesday.  Spent all night working on the trivia night.

OMFG Open Office sux donkey balls.  I'm sooo converting to Power Point next time.

Wednesday.  More fighting with Open Office, which decided to "link" a lot of my images instead of properly pasting them in.  So had to repaste a whole lot of them after I copied them to the laptop.  Hate Open Office.  Hate.

But.

The night went really well.  Had about seventy people which filled the rooms nicely.  If anything the questions were a tad easy (only one that noone got, but nearly a quarter that everyone got right).  

Thursday got *extremely* upset after dealing with property, who never updated my request so setup the room to the original old request, and who had told us to come to assist with the setup, but then did it an hour early and never let us know.  It was just a disaster of miscommunication all round.  I'd say lesson learned for next time, but not sure I could ever deal with a next time.  Dealing with property upsets me too much.  I'd rather just never go to a trivia night again, so no chance of winning, so no chance of having to do it again.

I also didn't sleep very well Wednesday night, so Thursday was zombie day.  Had a couple of quiet beers then came home and had home-made pizza for dinner.

Slept really well on Thursday night, then took a random day off on Friday which was *bliss*.  Got caught up on All The Things that had fallen by the wayside while prepping the trivia night.  Put on some music and churned through a hugely long todo list.

Then we headed out to the club.  Chilled in front of the fire and had a tv dinner for dinner.

Didn't sleep very well unfortunately.  The bed is bigger than the one in the last van, but not by much.  And I always wake up trying to decide if I *really* need to go to the toilet or not.  Which keeps me awake.  hrmm.

Saturday I did the jigsaw during the committee meeting, had a late lunch, gathered some firewood, worked on a tapestry.  Chilled in front of the fire for a while before it got a bit too hot, so no chillin involved there.  Ended up just having snackages for dinner.  Slept somewhat better.

Came home Sunday then got stuck back into the todo list. 

In the evening we went over to EffanC's, where we mostly just talked about our surgeries.  Had pizzas for dinner.

And then back to reality today.  

Also.  Rain!!!

Also wik.  Got a few more days of the North Atlantic blog online.