Monday.  Awake from 4:33. The morning was spent pulling mail for an incident on the weekend. The afternoon was more workgroup db tidying. Leftover lamb and salad for dinner, MacGyver and photo stuff.

I forget how nice greek yoghurt is with food..

Tuesday.  Day of all the BS. So much BS. I even lost it at lunch. Later in the afternoon Stu said I should ditch work and go birdwatching with him. So I asked Con. He said do it. So I did. It was good for my brain.

Logged back on for an hour when I got home so the hit on my flex wasn't tooo bad.  Stu cooked up pea and ham soup for dinner.

Wednesday.  Cisco training in the city. Except it wasn't really training, it was just a hands on lab. The lab was actually pretty good as labs go, and I managed to achieve the suggested work for the day (with more work that can be done in the next few days). Beer at Kingos with the sweetie then Disappointing Sushi.

Thursday.  Tried to revise the labs from yesterday but nonstop interruptions all day. Drinks was pretty epic - heaps of temp staff came up which was great.

Friday.  OMFG SOLAR EDGE IS TRASH!!!! We were scheduled for a power outage today (they were replacing a cross beam on the power pole in the neighbour's yard). So Stu told it not to discharge the battery last night. All good. They cut the power at 8:45. A second or two later the battery kicked in. Great. After the router rebooted I reconnected back to work and all was well. Until fifteen minutes later when everything went dead. Stu did a complete restart of the system but it didn't do anything. After nearly an hour I gave up and caught a bus to work (they said they were likely to be done by 13:00) as I had a heap of work I really wanted to get done. Stu fought with Solar Edge's system to try and get a support ticket in about the whole debacle (which he's still waiting to hear back from). The system is in la la land AGAIN. Every few days it just drops off the network so you can't see what it's doing. I HATE SOLAR EDGE SO MUCH!!!! I wish we'd gotten something different. So I get to work and get about an hour's worth of solid work in, then got an alert I had to spend an hour investigating. It's been a literal conspiracy to stop me getting this training done. Did managed to get some decent work done in the afternoon though.  Everything is awful. Kievs and Black Mirror.

Saturday.  Awake for a couple of hours from midnight. Had a heap of things on my todo list. Didn't do much of it. In the afternoon we headed out to Callum Brae Nature Reserve. Birds were being turds and hiding. Did get to see a heap of rainbow lorikeets though, I'd never seen them in Canberra before.  And a cool photo of a spotted pardalote.

There's three of these powder magazines 100m apart near the Mugga quarry (used for storing explosives for the quarry)

Red-necked wallaby.  Only saw one macropod, but a LOT of rabbits

Leftovers for dinner then watched Jurassic Park in honour of Sam Neill.

Sunday.  Awake from around 5.  Red in the morning.. shepherd's warning..

Weather was crap so didn't leave the house.  So it was a house/hobby/photo kind of a day. I did finish one photo project though which was good.  After several blissful weeks of windoze explorer remembering my folder settings, today it's forgotten them again (or at least one of them, another was ok). Why does windoze 11 suck so badly???

And just for fun.. last week the Riot-ACT (Region Media) posted this infographic based on AAMI insurance data for accident hotspots.  Except they used AI to generate it.  Hilarious!  #fail  It got pulled pretty quickly.

MacGyver, then Romy and Michele's high school reunion. I blame Dave2.  They don't have in the goofs in IMDB that while they're driving south into Tucson the sun is setting on their left. It would be setting on the right. So they were actually driving north in the shot. Also, dude says he has a Bell Ranger.. he actually has an Agusta A109C.

Monday.  Slept mostly okish. Fair bit of crap in the morning, including getting depressed about some possible upcoming changes, and Microsoft is making me want to rage retire. I did get some work done on some dashboards in the afternoon though. Leftovers for dinner, MacGyver, and getting South Coast trip photos online.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly okish. Distracted day not really achieving much. We did get the dev load balancers upgraded. We'll be doing a lot more of that in the future with the move to monthly patches. Leftovers for dinner, MacGyver, photo stuff.

Oh and Stu got this cool photo of a kangaroo while he was out birdwatching..

Wednesday.  After work had Ben/Sarah/Brae/Kit over for pizzas which was a lovely catchup.

Thursday.  Finished fixing the proxy to allow encrypted files without needing to disable inspection completely. Pretty decent drinks. KFC for dinner since we had pizza last night. The Emu Bank KFC really is quite trash.  Two out of the three pieces I got were small pieces, and all very dry.

Friday.  Got some more dashboards done.  Kievs for dinner (with actual vegetables since we didn't have freezer space to get more gems) and Black Mirror.

Saturday.  25th.  I still remember the date as Alexia Gallagher's birthday. One of those people from high school I wish I'd kept in contact with. I didn't know how to human back then. Took a while to get to sleep, then awake from five (I never sleep well on party days).

So got ready then headed to the markets to pickup the last of the groceries, the pork and some booze for raffle prizes. Then headed out to the club. Laid out everything for a photo then began the prep work.

Meanwhile, B&T and K&S setup the tables and decorations.

Two issues: I forgot to put the sweet potato on so it was 20 minutes late going on. Definitely not cooked enough when I took it out to put the turkeys in. Then when I got the turkeys out at the 3/4 point they weren't even hot - I could pick them up with my hands. So then had to cook everything for another 40 minutes or so. Slowest ovens in the world. It didn't harm the pork being cooked all that extra time, but the potato bakes got a bit overdone on the bottom. So the pork turned out to be among the best I've ever done. The crackling was all really good all over, and the meat was fall off the bone tender (John had trouble carving it). So unfortunately I've set the bar for myself too high now haha. So yeah all went well, although a late night as it would have taken too much effort to get up and go to bed haha.

Potato bakes before cooking

Very trying...

John carving some turkey

Best roast porks I think I've ever done

The potato bakes were probably a little over done

I forgot to get a photo of the winter salads so this is what was left of them.. and even most of this got eaten before the night was out.  I got hard goats cheese this year, which was easier to cut, but not as nice as the creamy stuff

Matching tshirts! (sort of)

Sunday.  Crap sleep funnily enough. 

Helped T&B tidy up the shed, then we came home.  Once we'd unpacked everything I went over to Ben and Sarah's to take some frozen stuff they won't be able to take with them (movers are coming tomorrow!).  

Didn't get a whole lot done during the day, too tired to concentrate on anything.

Lost another thumbnail this morning...

Went out for a walk around the Aranda bushlands in the afternoon.

Qantas 787-900 VH-ZNE Sydney to Perth

I still haven't tried out the new lens on the moon..