How was your day dear?: December 2020 Archives

2020.

Oh my.

We started the year at EffanC's, suffocating in bushfire smoke. We didn't go out to the club because I was too nervous about bushfires, and in fact even suburban fires. In 1994 I saw spotfires go a full kilometre from the bush, just a couple of hundred metres from our house. So I wanted to stay close. The bushfire smoke hung around for much of January and the devastation the fires caused was just heartbreaking.

The bushfires ended, then we got a massive hail storm that wrote off thousands of cars. I know *lots* of people that had their cars written off. And then it rained. And rained. And rained. Just a few weeks after the fires finished, much of the landscape was flooded. Which apparently is exactly what the river ecosystems *don't* need. Coastal communities begged Canberrans to come down and spend some money to help them recover. So we did. Although just an overnighter for Pete's 40th.

But then.

The C word.

As it hit, coastal communities begged Canberrans to stay away. When we got back from the coast, we dropped into Coles at Gungahlin to pick up a few supplies, including toilet paper (we were down to our last roll at home). We managed to get one of the last packets of toilet paper on the shelves. It was the last time I was to see toilet paper in Coles for about six or seven weeks. Fortunately I was able to get it at Chris's, otherwise things would have been pretty messy. The panic buying extended to all paper products that could be used in lieu of toilet paper - all the tissues and paper towel was gone for weeks as well. Pasta, pasta sauce, rice and even flour and yeast all disappeared off the shelves. I really didn't understand the flour/yeast thing - bread was still freshly available throughout the whole thing. In the second week even fresh food was mostly gone. Long lasting vegetables such as potatoes were nearly all gone, as was most fresh meat. One day (22 March) we went to the Belconnen markets and all three butchers had closed by lunch time Sunday because they'd simply run out of meat to sell.

On Monday 16 March I had the slightest hint of a sore throat and a cough. So Tuesday 17 March I stayed at home. And there I stayed. For six months. Other than a couple of odd days, and dropping in on a couple of weekends to swap out my backup hard drives, I didn't work in the office in any regular fashion until September. As it turns out I love working from home. Who knew. Previously I didn't really like it, partly because of my monitor setup is a bit backwards, but also because if I didn't go into the office every day I would lose the claim to "my" desk. But with everyone else working from home as well, and in fact they had a sticker on my desk for most of that six months saying don't work here (trying to keep people further apart), it wasn't an issue. And I got somewhat used to the monitors being backwards.

By 22 March, most flights around the world had been cancelled. The government imposed a travel ban. For every country they said "Do not travel". Restaurants, bars, cinemas and anything "non-essential" was shut down. I was quite upset by the impact that would have on low income earners. And then I raged at people whinging about their pay raise getting delayed six months. My holiday to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play got postponed two years. They started doing that play to thank God for saving them from the plague. And this year they had to postpone. Because of a plague. There's got to be some irony there somewhere. Qantas grounded all their 747s - forever. I was super sad about this.

In late March I went out at lunch time on a Monday to do the food shopping, when Jamo was a lot less crowded, and did that a couple of times. Still not much in the way of pasta/rice etc. We did big shops fortnightly to minimise having to go out. And I did the shopping by myself for a while too which was no fun because I like going with the sweetie. Every time I went shopping I swore I was getting a sore throat straight after. It was late April before I saw toilet paper again in Coles. June saw an outbreak in Melbourne, and panic buying started up again. In July I finally got my money back from Emirates for my Europe trip, although not the extra I paid for seat allocations.

Things eased up a lot in the second half of the year with no community transmission in Canberra since March. Restaurants opened and stayed open. We were able to start seeing our friends again. It hit Melbourne pretty hard in the middle of the year.  By December it looked like Australia was getting on top of things again. But then a driver of international flight crews got it in December and started spreading it around Sydney. Sydney went into lockdown of sorts and Mum couldn't come visit us after Christmas.

So a pretty wild year on that front.

Very little travel this year, for obvious reasons. I flew up to Sydney in February for Ryan's 21st birthday. But with all the delays it would have been quicker to take the coach. And that turned out to be my only flight for the year. I stayed with Mum and went to the 21st, where I put up a video of all the photos I'd taken of Ryan every week/fortnight/month/year since he was born. Caught the coach back the next morning. In March we went down the coast to stay with Kit and Pete for a surprise party for Pete's 40th. That was a bit of fun. Came home the next day. Did a quick trip to Sydney in late June to inspect my flat after the previous tenants decided to move out. We also dropped in to visit Luc and Lizzi, and on the way back I saw Nepean Dam. My flat ended up being empty for a month, and I had to drop the rent *a lot* which was pretty sad. In late August we wandered around the Snowy Mountains to Tumut, visited several dams and had a lovely afternoon at the Tumut River Brewing Company for Stu's 50th. In November Stu's brother convinced us to go up to Port Macquarie and South West Rocks to visit him and his father.

In lieu of actual travel, I did a *lot* of work on my travel photos. Throughout last year I'd gotten our Hong Kong/Singapore 2016 trip labelled, and had the blog ready for the fourth anniversary since we went. I geotagged my USA 2000 trip, fixed up all the labels, and got photos into the blog. I started geotagging my USA 2004 photos in February, but ran out of steam with that after about a week's worth, because it's *really* hard to geotag photos taken out of a moving car in the middle of outback USA. Next I labelled all twelve and a half thousand UK 2010 photos, finishing in December. I registered a Geonames account, and a Google Cloud account so I could use the Google Maps API in Geosetter.

Work was work. Still doing mostly internetty type stuff like firewalls and proxies. As mentioned previously, it turns out introverts like me like working from home. It's just so much more flexible and it *feels* like I'm home, even though I'm working. It means I can pop something in the slow cooker at lunch time, or something in the oven a bit earlier than I would if I got home at nearly 6pm. Or if it's a quiet Friday afternoon I can flex off for a bit without having to wait for the sweetie to go home or catch a bus. I got a bunch of our gear finally converted over to SNMP v3. I shut off access to an entire old environment. I fought with a particular firewall for months, including spending three hours on the phone to support one weekend trying to fix it. Still no resolution in sight on that one, but Wardie, bestest guy ever, has basically taken over, because he's awesome. Did a bit of training here and there, mostly free stuff. Got a new service desk tool in December, and had a lot of fun making shiny dashboards for it, which a bunch of other sections copied for themselves!  Socially, we had a gin night in early March, just before the lockdown. I actually missed the last work drinks before shutdown because of the slight sore throat I had. In August the guys started going to the Pot Belly for drinks, which we did for a little while before actual work drinks started up again. And I got to run my Christmas barbeque at the lake for over forty people. It was a lovely cool day, which made nice change from so many years where it's been crazy hot or shrouded in bushfire smoke.

Healthwise I was generally pretty good. Bouts of insomnia came and went a few times. Completely frustrating and debilitating. From mid March I felt like I had a permanently sore throat and slight cough for like a month or two. It was likely all in my head though. Got a flu vaccination in April. David came home with a cold in late August. He went home but it was too late - Stu caught it about a week later, and I caught it about five days after that. I was sick for a weekend. Stu was sick for a month. At least. I decided to go on short walks around the neighbourhood every day at lunch to get a little bit of exercise and vitamin D. I passed a lot of magpies, and decided to bribe them to not swoop me in spring by feeding them little bits of roast meat. All through winter they would see me coming and fly over. So cool! But come spring time they lost interest - there was obviously plenty of their own food around which they were more interested in. I also never got swooped :) Went up Mt Rogers once with David. Got some new reading glasses in December (should NOT have gone to Specsavers).

On the friends front, really things only went quiet for about two months from mid March to May. Other than that it was actually pretty much business as usual. We saw our fair share of EffanC at ours or theirs, including drinks over Zoom. We caught up with Kit and Pete when they came up in January to avoid the fires, and in February when they came up again, as well as Pete's 40th at their place in March. Had a few games of Kismet with them as well. We went to Rob and Lynne's with a bunch of peeps in January and again in December, and had them over in May. Went to a bbq at Brett and Sharon's in January, and the middle of the year we saw quite a bit of the A/M/C group, including some dinners, parties and walks. Got to see Rob and Fiona a couple of times too which was nice, as they really went into hibernation during the lockdown. Unfortunately didn't see much of Scott. Also didn't see much of Chrissie. Saw her on her birthday in January and I think that was it. Doesn't help that they are all always either crazy busy or sick. We didn't end up having a hanami lunch with Nat and Andrew.  I invited them but never heard back.  I would have chased them up but Stu was too busy and stressed with a uni assignment.  Had a lovely time at Aquila's 60th in January. Had Nelson and Susan over in August for vegan lasagna and games. Had drinks with Damien in September, I think that was the only time I saw him all year. We were supposed to go to Ben and Sarah's wedding in Queensland in October. Yeah that didn't happen. But Ben was able to have a nice 40th at Gungahlin Lakes on the day. We also had them over for dinner in December. And Doc organised drinks at the George for a bunch of work peeps between Christmas and New Year which was nice.

On the family side, well my family has been here the whole time! David has been living with us for a little over a year. While it can be challenging sometimes (mainly menu planning and trying to remember to vacuum around a shiftworker) it's generally been pretty good. And he fixes things! While he was here he replaced the light fitting in our ceiling fan (I think that might have been before he moved here), fixed the leaky ensuite toilet, installed new taps in the bathroom, installed LEDs everywhere, including some smartlights in the loungeroom that are pretty cool, installed a new extentible clothes line, installed a new oven, fixed the display on Stu's CD player, fixed the frequency on our digital radios, fixed up the bedroom curtain string which had come off the rails, fixed our back fence which had been pushed out by vines and photinia and finally broken in strong winds, phoned up and ordered and picked up a new fix tank lid for me, installed a bracket for the clothes line so we can extend it half way instead of the whole way, helped Stu build his new shelves, rewired the LEDs in Stu's four foot tank so it'd work with a standard transformer, installed a couple of new smoke detectors, fixed my scanner (cable had come loose, and I would have eventually figured this out because I would have moved it to test it on another computer). And he mowed the lawns. Seriously, most awesomest brother ever!!! And super handy having a qualified electrician in the family! About the best we could do to thank him was cook lots of roasts. Including roast lamb on his birthday, and he had a few friends over to help celebrate. I stayed with Mum in Sydney a couple of times - when I went up for Ryan's 21st, and when I inspected my flat in June. We saw a bit of Stu's family as well. Went and visited a few times in August, October and Christmas.  And we saw Scott and Kerry and the family and Jeff and Ruth in November.

Our social club events had to be curtailed somewhat, and I missed out on doing Christmas in July which I've done for a few years in a row now, but at least I got to do Christmas for something like fifty people (a whole bunch had to stay outside due to capacity restrictions). We had a few weekends out there while Stu was on the committee, including in January where I did some cleaning out of the "tool shed", a night in June, our first since February, where we really appreciated the little wood fireplace, and in July where I stared priming the cabinetry. Also had some time in early October. We went out for the last event before lockdown - an epic Mexican feast in February. One of the raffle prizes that night was a six pack of Corona beer with an attached N95 mask. There was a working bee in July where I scraped concrete off a glass door. That night would have been the Christmas in July night, and the alternative was going to be a bonfire, but it rained, so we cooked marshmallows in the wood heater in the shed. The first event post lockdown was a halloween party where I got to be Lego 80s Classic Space guy again. And then my Christmas party. And we finished the year there with a few friends and a lot of bubbles.

Another fairly quiet year with the fish. I bought ten zebra danios in April and put a few in my three tanks. Half of them died, some fairly quickly. I lost the angel in my 620T tank in September, and Chrissie's catfish was looking super depressed. I stuck my hand in to see if it was still alive, and the water was COLD. The heater had died, taking my angel with it. Pretty upset about that. I took a random day off in September, thinking I'd do some fish stuff in the morning and other things in the afternoon. But I ended up doing fish stuff *all day*. And I managed to break the lid of the upstairs two foot while I was trying to clean it. Stu got some little sucking catfish and some guppies at the end of the year. So Stu's four foot has ten congo tetras, one loach, one siamensis and four tiny sucking catfish. My 620T has Chrissie's huge sucking catfish, a huge old cory and two female danios. My upstairs two foot has two male danios, one who has been sick since shortly after I got him, but refuses to die. Little trooper. It also has a sucking catfish, and six of the guppies Stu got at the end of the year. My downstairs two foot has four of the male guppies and two sucking catfish from Stu's purchase. Also downstairs are five little tanks, all with two or three guppies in them to cycle the tanks.  No change with Stumpy.  He's just as much a gumby as ever.

Not much going on with the Lego. I'm still sporadically sorting Vic's Lego but it's just so painful. If sets were complete it would be a joy, but none of them are, so it's just depressing. I think the only sets I built all year were the set of Shanghai Stu got me for Christmas, and Neil's International Space Station.

The year started slowly with jigsaws - most of the first quarter was taken up with a three thousand piece jigsaw of The Bombing of Algiers. I did two sections of the forty two thousand piece Disney behemoth - Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid. Very few at work thanks to the lockdown, and not too many at home because I'm just too damned busy all the time.

I continued working on labelling and sorting photos. As mentioned above I geotagged and labelled thousands of photos. I also did a lot of filing of photos, but there's still sooo much to be done in that space. In March I started scanning Dad's slides. I started out doing a box a week, and at that rate it was going to take me four or five years. But working from home during lockdown gave me an extra half hour in the mornings that I used to scan a box a day. I managed to get all his slides scanned by Christmas, although I still had a bit of work to rescan slides that had dust on them on the first pass. Didn't quite complete that by the end of the year. In December I had a bit of a play with a gallery generator. The only reason I'm labelling all my holiday photos is because I want to get the majority of them online. I did consider Flickr, but I just have this feeling they're not going to last. Too many buyouts and changes of conditions. Most likely I'll just use S3 and pay the few cents a month it'll likely cost.

I continued to rage at Apple and the crappy things it does. It still messes with the timestamps on my files. I can't download movies first go, or second or third or fourth in a lot of cases. And can't download timelapse videos *at all* to my PC, I have to save them to Google Drive first and then if I'm lucky the encoding/dimensions will be right for me to play them on my PC. Calendar and contacts refuse to sync to Google like they used to (I don't think it's worked since I got my new phone two years ago and I've tried *everything*). The contacts don't even sync to Apple Cloud. I'm about ready to give up on Apple.

Most of the stuff around the house was done by David. Because he's awesome. Our oven element died in March. I cleaned the oven while he investigated getting a new element, but in the end we got a whole new oven. While I was on a work break. With no sleep. Yeah really not the best mental state to be buying home appliances. In April we went out to buy half turn taps. Again, while on a work break, from a situation at work I probably should not have left. The anxiety of that day was terrible!! But the new taps are amazing, I love them! Unfortunately the dripping shower was still there. Guess it's not the taps that are leaking. We had a plumber come look at it, and he did a whole heap of tests, and decided the membrane was gone (duh) and most likely just leaking through the grout. I could have saved myself four hundred dollars if I'd just done the "cover the drain and splash water on the walls" trick which I did just after and proved the same thing. We got a resealer to come have a look and give us a quote. But he was confused about why there would be so much leaking through the grout, promised to send a quote for a complete retile/reseal, but never did. Even when I mailed them again and asked. In March we cleaned out the dumping ground room so that Stu could have his own office. He'd been wanting to do that for ages. The timing was great, as it meant he had a private office during lockdown. He got new shelves later in the year and a whole heap of toys, and he really loves his little space. I spent a weekend tidying up the dungeon and under the house and rearranging everything to keep it clear of the drip. We had to get the Chinese pistachio tree removed in August because the trunks were sagging apart and it was in danger of falling down (onto Kit's garage). I was super sad about that because it was such a beautiful tree, and the birds absolutely love it, and as it turns out it was a great shade for the eastern side of the house, so our house is a lot hotter in the mornings now. We also got the tree guys to be brutal on our photinia which was getting out of control. Again. We had a roof restoration done in October and the roof looks very shiny now. Next up: solar. The garden continued to stay out of control. Although we did get a few strawberry plants off Michelle and got some very nice strawberries off them in October (the ones the slugs didn't get at).

We still managed to eat out a little bit this year. We took Kit and Pete out for dinner in January to Bella Vista. Went to Kinn Thai in January, February and March (which was our last eating out before lockdown). It's always fast service and the food really good. Had some very nice pizzas at Grease Monkey in January. Went to Grill'd with Neil in January to avoid the food court during school holidays. Tried Malatang Hotpot in January too. The one I had was fairly bland, and the one Neil had was super epic spicy, even for him. Need to try something in the middle, but then there was lockdown, and they're still not allowing you to handle the tongs to choose your own food. Tried Wild Panda in Civic when I got back from Sydney, but I don't remember it being anything special. Had lunch with the sweetie at Gus's in May - first eating out post lockdown. Had brunch at Rocksalt in June. Had some nice pork belly with crackling at the Lake George hotel a week before my birthday. It was going to be my birthday meal, but we ended up going to Chong Co on my birthday. And KFC for lunch of course. Went to Happy's a couple of times with the sweetie in September and October. Met up with a bunch of N-Gang people for dinner at Indian Pantry in October for a feast. Tried out Herbert's in November, and went there a couple of times in November and a couple in December with Tony and/or the Chrises. Had drinks a few times with the sweetie at the Beirut Bunker Bar. Had Disappointing Sushi, aka Hero Sushi in Civic in December. It lived up to expectations. It's literally a running joke with us now. You can be guaranteed that the hot food will be cold and everything has avocado in it.

As always, I do quite a bit of interesting cooking. I don't quite know how I manage that, since I'm not really a very good cook. Actually I'm basically a lazy cook. I like cooking things that don't require a lot of fiddly preparation or a lot of cleaning up. I cooked two pavlovas in January. I think this was the first time I'd ever made a full pavlova. I thought I'd have another go at Christmas and failed miserably. Twice. We had cheese and bacon sausages we got from Coles a few times. They're great to have in the fridge because they last ages, so we can use them when we've run out of other food. Made curried sausages in March to try and use up some of the many tins of curry powder we have in the house. We tried out Dominos "deep pan" pizzas a couple of times. They were pretty disappointing. Nothing like the crispy doughy deep fried goodness of pizzas in the eighties. Tried a slow cooked marinated beef in March to try and use up some of the mustard powder we have in the house. It turned out pretty well. Made nachos in late March, probably the first time I've ever made nachos myself. Several of our lunches during lockdown consisted of various types of puff pastry scrolls - cheese and vegemite and pizza scrolls being favourites. Did a coq au vin in April. Cooked a couple of "Yum! Delicious!" cakes and a cashew slice with Mum's peanut slice recipe. I also did Anzac Biscuits on Anzac Day which has become somewhat of a tradition in recent years. I did a few tomato based stews as we went into winter, and we think all the extra tomato set off David's gout, so we had to cut those right back. There was Sizzler cheesy toast a couple of times, and taco Tuesday multiple times - soooo bad but soooo good!! Did an epic lasagna in May. Tried a pulled pork in May. It was pretty amazing, but such a waste of crackling ;) David obliged me with a Country Cheese and cheese sauce craving and had quite a bit of that over winter. Whenever a packet is open it evaporates very quickly. Tried a couple of non-tomato based bakes from my gratins and bakes book - a broccoli and cheese penne with garlic and lemon crumbs, and a potato, bacon and blue cheese bake, both were very nice but also quite similar to my regular veggie bakes. Made an Irish stew in July - Stu was going to make it but life got in the way so I did it.  It was nice enough. Tried slow cooking beef brisket in July and fell in love with it, and did it several times. As well as some slow cooked pulled beef and NQN's beef cheeks as well. Slow cookers are amazing for hearty winter cooking! David reminded me of our youth and Dinner Winner, and we had Coles' One Pan Dinner a couple of times, and even had authentic Dinner Winner once. There may have been a rocky road in there at some point, and a fairly nice gingerbread cheese cake I made at Christmas. There were several weekends where I spent several hours cooking up meals for a week or more, to save cooking during the week (which is really no fun at all when you don't heat up the kitchen to save money on heating costs).

I saw exactly one movie/theatre/show/exhibition this year -
* Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

As usual for recent years I/we worked my/our way through a lot of movie series. This may have been aided *a lot* by Disney+ !
* finished up watching through all the James Bond movies
* watched Star Wars episodes VII and VIII before seeing IX at the movies
* finished up the Pixar series with Coco and Toy Story 4
* watched a *lot* of original/remakes of Disney movies - Aladdin, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Freaky Friday, The Lion King, The Parent Trap (just 1 and 2 they don't have 3 yet), 101 Dalmatians and Mulan
* saw a few "Australian classic" movies - My Brilliant Career, which I really didn't like, and Ned Kelly, which I thought was better
* in March was the 30th anniversary of seeing Labyrinth for the first time, so we watched it on David's Bluray
* we had to watch some pandemic disaster movies, so watched World War Z first up because Contagion had been pulled from Netflix, but David had Contagion on DVD so we all watched that later too
* Frozen II
* Airport series
* Naked Gun series
* Star Wars - I think we saw all nine this year
* almost all the Ghibli movies, except Grave of the Fireflies which wasn't on Netflix. Some of them are amazing. Some of them are crap.
* a few of the Herbie movies (still a couple to go, it's a bit of a struggle since they're very silly)
* Die Hard 1 and 2 and Love Actually at Christmas. David dissed Love Actually on Facebook, but he had the choice to leave but didn't and he seemed to be enjoying himself. Just sayin ;)

And again, somehow we managed to watch our way through a lot of TV. I always feel like I don't have time to watch tv/movies, and yet somehow we see a lot. Mostly from Thursday to Sunday, as Monday to Wednesday is "work" nights.
* first episode of Who is America
* Star Trek: Picard
* The Mandalorian (season 1)
* Big Bang Theory - finished mid year, took a little over year to watch all 12 seasons
* Brooklyn 99 until it ran out of episodes (up to season 6?)
* Fuller House (last seasons)
* Lego Masters (second Australian season)
* Unorthodox
* Filthy Rich
* The Dismissal
* The Miraculous Mellops
* The Simpsons (most of the way through season 5)
* High Score (documentary)
* Against the Wind
* Discovery (season 3)
* The IT Crowd (all of it)
* The Mandalorian (season 2)
* The Queen's Gambit

Not a lot of reading this year. I don't catch the bus much and I mostly feel too tired to read when I go to bed.
* Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J.K. Rowling
* Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all five books in the trilogy), by Douglas Adams
* Penguin Bloom, by Cam Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive (I also started Heartache and Birdsong)

Other stuff!
* Started "This day in history" posts
* Got Disney+ and watched a *lot* of Disney
* Got some cute "living stones" - succulent plants that grow extremelly slowly
* Played with Picasa for Ryan's 21st "morph" series
* Got our NBN fixed in January - because last time they did work they broke one of our connectors so we were only getting half the speed we should. David organised that because he's awesome.
* Used Picasa to tag people in a lot of work photos, still a long way to go on that
* Collected the next batch of Stikeez - got all but one of the specials
* Our rose bush and rhododendron out the front put out just a couple of flowers right at the end of summer when it finally rained
* Had cheese and nibbles with bubbly, and Chong Co delivered for our anniversary
* Went bed shopping in June but didn't find anything we really liked
* Went to Ikea and bought storage cubes for David and drawers for stu
* My domain - kazza.id.au turned 18
* Had a big outage of my web hosting in late June. Went looking for a new host and found VentraIP, but they didn't support Perl DBD::mysql so had to cancel it all again. But it did force me to do an upgrade of a dll in Eudora which allows secure downloads without ssl errors, so that's a win
* Had issues with the vacuum cleaner - it kept getting jammed - with my hair :(
* Got so much rain in August all creeks and rivers around Canberra flooded a bit
* The boys bought me a Dyson cordless for my birthday
* Couldn't get on the Qantas 747 joy ride flight out of Canberra, because Qantas' website sux donkey balls. So I watched it fly over central Canberra from Mt Ainslie instead (arguably better for photos anyway!)
* Listened to some podcasts with the sweetie - The Eleventh, Winds of Change, Thirteen Minutes to the Moon
* Got super sad at all the 747s around the world being retired
* A neighbourhood yappy dog pissed me off by barking non stop for literally hours at a time
* The winter was so warm our potatoes survived the whole winter without freezing
* Enjoyed Floriade in the suburbs!
* Went for a drive with the sweetie around Denman Prospect and out to Cotter
* Had a Bunnings sausage in October for first time since lockdown
* Voted in the ACT elections early so I didn't get a Democracy Sausage (most places I don't think were doing them anyway)
* Had a free run to the tip because what we took was mostly all metal
* Had to fight with windoze to maintain access to our NAS - its ancient version of SMB is making windoze super sad
* Tidied up all the packing materials in garage, with the idea to use it all to sell stuff
* Vodien moved my blog to a new host, but didn't tell me. Well, apparently they did tell me - to an email address that doesn't actually work anymore.
* Failed at jeans shopping
* Tried out Return-It's bulk facility which is only marginally better than their drop off system
* Saw the moon and Saturn and Jupiter near each other, but not at their closest point

Our year was finished off at the club. We headed out there on New Years Eve eve and stayed two nights, and had a fairly relaxed New Years.

2020 sure was one crazy year. Here's hoping 2021 settles down quickly into the "new normal".

Happy new year!! 

Backdating, because I wasn't even home to finish blogging the year :)

Saturday.  Boxing Day.  Ok sleep I think.  Bits and pieces of housework in the morning, alternating between that and making the Shanghai Lego set Stu got me for Christmas.  Downloaded Python, reverted to an older version of numpy (pip uninstall numpy / pip install numpy==1.19.3), then installed Simple Photo Gallery.  It does mostly what I want to do with it, although pulling a little more exif data would have been useful.  I don't know *anything* about Python, so not sure if I could do it myself.  Leftovers for dinner then more of the Mandalorian documentary.  We were going to have the failed pavlova anyway, but it hadn't dried properly and after two days the whole bottom of it had this horrible black mould all over it.  Gross.  Then Stu broke one of my pretty green Tupperware bowls (trying to cut through the base of the cheesecake, and to be fair those bowls are probably fifty years old) and the whole evening made me have a sad.  Went and watched the Poseidon remake which was pretty lame.  If you put aside the fact that cruise ships just won't stay capsized like that, as well as a zillion other plot holes and problems (eg, those bow thrusters would NOT be running, neither would all the ships lights, but granted you do need light so you can *see* the movie), my biggest gripes were that you don't actually get to know or care about any of the characters before the wave hits (turns out a good twenty minutes of scenes where you get to know them were cut from the movie), and the North Atlantic in the middle of winter is freezing cold - they would have all died of hypothermia with the amount of time they spent in the water.  Just sayin.  

Sunday.  Couldn't get to sleep for ages.  #grunt.  Puttered through the todo list, mostly houseworky type stuff.  In the afternoon I pulled apart the scanner to try and clean under the glass.  This dude had a really helpful guide on how to pull it apart.  Sadly even after two attempts, there's still dust on the underside of the glass.  I really don't know what to do to get it clean.  Stu cooked sausages and zucchini for dinner.  

Monday.  In an attempt to have a holiday I finished the That's Insulting jigsaw, and built Neil's ISS Lego set.  Watched the second last episode of The Queen's Gambit in the evening.

Tuesday.  Tried to catch up on photo processing and blogging.  Did our food shopping at lunch time, then came home and cooked up a kilo of mince with onion, garlic and bacon, and also a batch of honey mustard chicken (with added peas/corn/carrots) and rice. 

Straight after I finished cooking, went and met up with Doc and a bunch of peeps for drinks at the George which was all very pleasant. 

Came home and used some of the mince to make up One Pan Dinner for dinner.  Finished The Queen's Gambit in the evening - very well done show, we both really enjoyed it, much more than Discovery.

Wednesday.  Stu was restless and couldn't get to sleep, and eventually that woke me up and I was awake for two or three hours.  Hurrah.  So Wednesday was a zombie day.  Pretty much a nothing day.  I did patch my laptop and backup my computer before heading out to the club in the afternoon.  Too tired to do anything much, but did sand off the top of this little chest of drawers (I should have taken a before photo).

Had a swim with the sweetie, then had a drink with some of the peeps that were out there, before heading back to the van for dinner (leftover honey mustard chicken) and an early night. 

Thursday.  New Years Eve.  Slept quite well.  Pottered about the van in the morning.  Started a paint by numbers set I got myself for Christmas.  Around lunch time I finished off the first tin of primer and got more of the cabinetry, and the top of the drawers, primed with a first coat.  Checked to make sure we could light a fire, and burnt a big pile of leaves and bark from around our van in the fire pit.  After all that hot work we then went and had a swim.  I rescued this bee but then had to wait for ages for her to dry herself off (I didn't want to poke her to get off, cause that's when they sting you).  Eventually got out of the pool and was able to get her off.

And hey look!  Royal Bluebells!

I'll save the evening for a New Years Eve post.

Backdating, because you wouldn't expect anything less!!

Monday.  Slept okish I think.  After the weekend this counted as the first day of our holidays.  I had the idea that I would "work" until Christmas - finish scanning Dad's slides and fixing them all up, get the house cleaned, get photos sorted out, get my year in review done, that sort of thing, and then after Christmas would be "holiday" time to do fun things.  So I spent All. Fricken. Morning. trying to fix up two boxes of slides.  Some slides I had to scan up to *seven* times to get them without fluff somewhere in the scan.  So was pretty cranky to start with.  Then stressed about having to cook all the time and deal with everyone's dietary issues.  I pulled everything out of the freezer and did an audit on it.  Pulled out a few things to defrost and eat before we're allowed to go shopping next.  It took all day to fix up seven boxes of slides.  Felt super annoyed that my first day of holidays was just doing this and nothing useful.  Watched Die Hard 2 in the evening.

Tuesday.  Got morning stuff done then we headed out.  I dropped off the last of the tubs we'd used for the bbq back at work.  Took a drive through the Parliamentary Triangle and I got Stu to stop so I could take a photo of George - because I'd never taken a photo before!

Then continued on.  Went all the way to Kambah to a brewing supply store so Stu could pick up a CO2 cylinder for his fish tank.  Then back into the city so Stu could buy some pens and I could have a look for jeans in Big W (epic fail there as well).

Had "Disappointing Sushi" at Hero Sushi.  It lived up to expectations - the first takoyaki plate I got was *cold*.  And everything has avocado in it.  Why can't you put cucumber in some of it??  Some of us don't like avocado!  #grunt.  By the time we got home it was mid afternoon.  Spent an hour fighting with slides and managed to fix one roll.  The sad story is there's dust and tiny hairs *under* the glass, so even though I wipe down the glass and practically scrub the slides before each scan, there's always dust in a few set positions.  But there's now so much fluff there I can't even flip the slides 180 degrees because there's fluff in all the corners, which means there's *always* fluff in the sky no matter which way I orient the slide.  So an hour and a half to fix two boxes.  Had leftovers for dinner.  Watched more of the Mandalorian documentary.  But basically I was cranky all day due to simply not enough hours in the day to get through the ever growing todo lists, not enough days in a holiday (still miss my uni three month holidays), being out most of the day, slide scanning being so painful etc.  I didn't even bother to try and go see Jupiter and Saturn on their second closest night.

Wednesday.  Finally finished scanning all Dad's slides (at least a first pass).  Took two hours to do one box.  Day was spent fixing slides, blogging, processing photos.  In the afternoon we met up with Tony and later Keira at Herbert's for a couple of beers and dinner.  I had the porcetta burger this time (which has crackling!!) and managed to mostly get through it.  Earlyish night.

Thursday.  Christmas Eve.  4:30 wake up - itchy and restless legs.  Just a day of all the things, although not as much as previous days.  Put on a video of Beethoven's 9th while wrapping presents and blogging.  In the afternoon watched the end of Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, which I'd started the other night.  I'd watched the first half one night when I was feeling cranky, and as such didn't really enjoy it.  But enjoyed the second half a bit more.  It sure is pretty to look at, but basically a bit meh.  The kid who played Journey is pretty cool tho.  Pizza for dinner (Thursday!), then watched Love Actually (Stu endures it because he has no choice, David had a choice, and although he dissed it, he actually stayed and seemed to be enjoying it ;) ), and then the Melbourne Carols by Candlelight.  Such a strange thing to watch with no audience due to Covid, and most of the choir for the Hallelujah Chorus singing remotely.  

Anything that turned up at the house in December went under the tree.  Seemed little point rewrapping any of it, so that's how they stayed til Christmas morning ;)

Backdating a few days.. ;)

Monday.  Slept ok.  Got driven quite insane by the neighbour's dog barking for three and a half hours straight - from 7:25-11am.  I can't concentrate on anything while it's yapping.  It's like a car alarm going off.  It'll bark bark bark, have a brief stop, then start up again.  So upsetting.  At work, someone wanted me to look at something right at the end of the day so didn't finish up til 17:30.  In the evening freaked out at all the fresh food we have in the house.  Froze some of the uncooked meat, and some of the meals as well.  So the freezer is now very full.  Made up some meals out of the various bits and pieces (David's happy to pick up a meal of leftovers if he just needs to heat it up, rather than assembling all the bits and pieces first).  Had to laugh at the Simpsons (1993) with people using tapes in cars.  Tapes!

Tuesday.  We were going to have a team lunch at one of the Indian places in Belco, but neither Taj Agra or Indian Bay could be stuffed picking up their phones, even at ten to twelve, so we thought screw em, and went to the Labor club. 

I was feeling mixed up all week.  Tuesday firstly felt like a Wednesday because I was in the office, but then it felt like a Friday because we'd been out for a team lunch.  Weird.

The dog was quiet in the evening.. maybe the rain discouraged it?

Wednesday.  My computer rebooted itself overnight.  And I'm like what??  I'd literally rebooted it on Tuesday evening.  I'd had to reboot it after the last patching to reenable SMB 1.0 in order to connect to our ancient NAS.  So why did it need another reboot? hrmmm!!  Hate Windows, hate.  Oddly, Edge, Chrome, Notepad and OneNote had all come back and reopened where they left off, but Excel didn't.  Weird.  In the evening got extremelly pissed off that the flatbreads we'd bought on the weekend were covered in mould (I'd been planning to use them on Thursday to make pizzas).  If I'd known they were going to mouldy so quickly I'd have frozen them straight away.  Such a waste of food #grunt!!

Thursday.  Drinks, pizza, the usual.  David and I went and looked at Jupiter and Saturn near the moon (see the other post on this).

Friday.  Woke up at 4am.  Gruntfullness.  Had a bit of a wind down day at work tidying and finishing things up.  Had lunch with the Chrises, Neil and Raja at Herbert's.  I had the mac and cheese balls again, but didn't feel so stuffed full this time.  

I'd almost ordered the vegetarian loaded fries, but I was glad I didn't - Raja got them and they were enormous!!  He asked for a doggy bag even before he started!

I also had to laugh at their keg storage (their storage space is at a premium).

Finished up work, yay on holidays!!  Had leftovers for dinner and watched Die Hard in the evening.

Saturday.  Woke up at 3am for a couple of hours.  #grunt.  Had a little bit of a sleep in.  Then got stuck into All The Things.  So actually a fairly productive day.  Watched the second episode of The Queen's Gambit, and the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

Sunday.  Slept ok I think.  Spent the morning doing All The Things, mostly scanning and fixing scanning.  No promised rain though.  For lunch we went over to Rob and Lynne's with some other peeps for a lovely lunch/bbq.  As always Lynne fed us too much ;)

We also found out that Canberra has now asking anyone coming from Sydney to quarantine/self isolate for fourteen days.  Which means it's likely Mum won't be able to come down to visit after Christmas.  Waiting a few days to see if anything changes, but it's unlikely to.

Don't think we had any dinner at all Sunday night, but watched another episode of Discovery.

Not backdating for a change!

Tuesday.  Stu didn't actually get any sleep.  All night.  !!  So he stayed in bed all day.  Up to 6000 of Dad's slides scanned.  Saw one of my birds at lunch.  After work spent half an hour hacking weeds - this time the oak tree sprouts that went from about a cubic foot to about a cubic metre or two in the space of just a couple of weeks.  Also, the neighbour's yappy dog is *really* pissing me off.  It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.  And then on and on and on and on some more.  Leftovers for dinner.  Started season 5 of The Simpsons.  Spent all evening filing photos of the years into directories.  Avoiding rereading the blog for doing the year in review post ;)

Wednesday.  Woke up at 3am from a disturbing dream, finally managed to get back only to wake up from another disturbing dream.  Hurrah.  So zombie day.  People were loving my dashboards, so I ended up duplicating them for two other teams as well.  Connor and I sat down and did the risk assessment for our Christmas party.  Yeah moving on.  Stu mostly cooked dinner.  Read through my blog posts for January for the year in review.  Finished watching 14 Minutes from Earth.  Such a waste of resources.  Especially all that helium.  When are people going to realise once all the helium is gone it's gone forever.  People shouldn't be wasting it on such frivolous things.  

Thursday.  Slept much better.  There was pizza.  Of course there was pizza.  Watched the first episode of The Queens Gambit, which was quite interesting.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Because that's what I do.  I finished decorating my nails.

Then it was "my" Christmas party at the lake where I (with some help with the shopping and the cooking) put on a bbq for forty three people (minus one no show, and three that turned up right at the end to say hi).  It was a lovely day for a change, just a tad windy.  

A lovely afternoon.

Had leftovers for dinner and watch some Mandalorian, and more of the making of documentary.

Saturday was All The Things.  Had a very productive morning.  Went out a lunch (Stu had an El Maco, and I had a McRib which was super messy) and then did our food shopping.

Came home and basically just did cooking until Ben and Sarah came over for roast chicken dinner.  Started watching Home Alone til everyone got too tired, and called it an early night.

Sunday.  Not as productive a day, but did get some stuff done including fixing up several boxes of slides.  Only ten rolls left to scan!  Did a bunch of filing/sorting of photos as well.  Took bottles/cans from the party for recycling - got $18.30 back for it all, which almost lets me break even (I went about $30 over budget on the party, not sure where all the money went.. hrmm!).  

So I have three tips for Return-It.  Firstly, go to one of the bulk facilities.  Do not register an account with them - they want all your personal details, including "security questions" such as your mother's maiden name.  That is completely RIDICULOUS.  Not only that, but they're just as likely to never even give you any money at all, which is what happened to me.  They're a bunch of scammers.  So go to a facility where you don't have to register, and get cash on the spot.  Secondly, wear ear plugs.  It's very loud.  I suspected as much and took ear plugs, because I have sensitive ears and the clinking of bottles upsets them.  Thirdly, especially if you actually care about your fellow humans waiting in line behind you, SORT YOUR BOTTLES FIRST!!  They get you to put glass bottles on one side and everything else on the other.  I had already sorted out all the bottles and cans, so the sweetie and I burned through everything super quickly.  While everyone else literally didn't care that they were holding up everyone else by removing lids from bottles, videoing their kids looking dumb in front of the machine while the kids looked at the bottles and wondered which side to put them on, or simply spent ages after tipping all their bottles into a sorting sink separating bottles out as they went.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate people?

Finished a bunch of leftovers for dinner, which is good, because the fridge is completely full.  hrmmm!  Then I finished watching Home Alone.  Haven't actually seen it in years.  And, John Williams!  And I blogged!  On time for once!

Not backdating for a rare change...!

Monday.  At lunch time a shower sealer dude came to look at the shower.  Basically he was stumped.  Never a good start.  Sigh.  David mowed the lawn in the afternoon - bestest brother ever!!  Spent some time in the evening dumping the sql from my old gallery apps into csv.  I dumped the two tables - one with the file names and one with the descriptions, then did vlookups in excel to merge them together.  Really I just wanted a dump of what I had since I can't get the gallery app to work (it's just too old and the mysql calls don't work in php7 - I'd basically have to convert mysql_ to mysqli_ *everywhere* and there'd still be no guarantee that it'd work).  Then I dropped the two databases and cleared out all the content.  

Tuesday.  December.  Seriously wtf?  I remember things in July being super recent, how can it possibly be December already?  Such a bizarre year.  Spent the evening doing more tidying up of my hosting.

Wednesday.  Went jeans shopping at lunch.  Arrghh.  I was hoping that the trend towards bigger phones would eventually filter back into a trend for bigger pockets in jeans.  Well half the jeans I looked at didn't have any pockets at all!!  And the ones that did were that horrible fake wear style that I thought died a fashion disaster years ago.  Hate. Hate. Hate.  I'm going to have to replace them soon though as they're falling apart.  I looked up my blog to see when I bought them - September 2016!  Four pairs, which meant each pair lasted about a year's worth of wear.  Take that Jeans West with your stoopid crappy jeans that only lasted the equivalent of like six months - last half as long and pay four times the price?  I don't think so!  Apple continued to be a piece of crap, and I got the "device attached to the system is not functioning" error - while copying photos!  Piece of crap.  Worked second go through, and even got both movies off it first go.  Didn't get anything else much done though after backing up the phone and backing up my computer and paying bills.  On a lighter note, our recycling got picked up.

Thursday.  Cirrus has unveiled its west tower.

In other news, it was revealed that the garbos wanted a 4% pay rise.  Per year.  For three years.  !!  Taking them up to something like $110k/year.  Which is a *lot*.  Certainly a lot more than I make.  Craziness.  Had a good long play with making dashboards in our new service desk system.  Took my notes that I'd written last week up to load a new beer into the till.  Seemed to work :)  Mandalorian in the evening.

Friday.  Woke up at 3am.  Hurrah.  So a bit of a zombie day.  Had a bit of a play with reporting in our new service desk system.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Crazy busy productive day just getting things done, including food shopping.  Stu cooked mackerel in miso paste for dinner.  Mandalorian and then the live action Mulan in the evening.  I thought it wasn't too bad, certainly better than Aladdin (which was pretty lame) and even The Lion King (which was almost identical to the original but flat and lifeless).  

Sunday.  Not quite as productive a day but not too bad.  

These are nice - mini toasts (bought at Chris's for $2) with leftover cream cheese from the weekend, and blackberries we bought on Saturday.  The tomato ones were ok but a bit big to fit in my mouth and too hard to bite in half.

Went for a walk at lunch and saw inside a mobile phone tower comms room that someone had left the door open on.

Had a huge roast beef for dinner (leftovers ftw!) and someone brought up planning Christmas, which is always .. tricky.. hrmm.

Monday.  ok day I guess.  Went for a walk and saw one of my birds (haven't seen them really at all in weeks and weeks).  Spent half an hour hacking weeds and cherry tree suckers and didn't even make a dent.  Sausages and salad for dinner.  Watched the first episode of a documentary series on The Mandalorian which was interesting.  But by the time that was all done it was 8:14pm, and too late to really feel like starting anything new.  So I blogged.  Hurrah.