Sunday.  2nd.  Leftover beef and potato bake for dinner.  So much for keto.  Death in Paradise 2024 Christmas special with a new Detective Inspector.  Early night.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up at 5:30.  House stuff for a bit, then a bottle and can run (mostly cans).  Apparently I haven't been there since June.  !!  Got $29.70 and that's not with the Christmas party cans.  Nice relaxing RDO of doing crap.  Had a bit of "fun" but mostly just house stuff - like tidying up the garage, fish tank stuff, cooking up more veggies (yeah yeah I pick a stoopidly hot day to have the oven on).  Wednesday 1.6.

All the veggies

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up early again.  Cheese kransky for breakfast.  So good but the sodium is going to kill me.  Crap day of all the crap doing all the crap for all the people.  Mum photo picking in the evening and Wednesday 1.7.

Ribbon grass flower

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok (I thought) but woken up by alarm just before 6:30.  Super tired all day.  Not fully transfunctionating.  Stu put on a new series - Beyond Paradise, with Colin Frizzle (Kris Marshall) moved back to the UK.

Ominous clouds

Thursday.  Um.  All. The. Crap.  No time for any of my own stuff, just doing all the crap for all the people.  Busy first drinks, pizzas, finished Wednesday season 1.  Really quite enjoyed it.  

Friday. 

Mini capsicum plant

Rinse and repeat at work. 

Man you forget to water the plants *one morning* and they're doing this by the afternoon.

Forgot to water the strawberries

Might have done an oopsie.

Whoops

Beyond Paradise 1.2.

Saturday.  All. The. Crap.  At home this time.  Didn't get nearly enough done.  Did have a bit of a look at holiday stuff.  I was worried the PDF of the trip we were supposed to be booked on didn't have the sailing date we were supposed to be on.  But I think the agent just printed out the wrong one for Mum.  I found another very similar cruise that aligns with the description in the itinerary, and this does have our date on it.  I emailed the tour company directly anyway just to confirm.  Leftovers for dinner.  Beyond Paradise 1.3.  Then started into Stranger Things.

Sunday.  Woke up maybe around 2.  For like 3 hours.  Sigh.  Got some bits and pieces done, but not nearly enough.  I have too many projects that I don't know where to start, so end up doing none of them.  I did add a bunch of locations to a Google Map for our next trip though.  And house crap.

Are these chives?  They're growing as weeds in our pavers.
Chives weeds

When you go looking in the pantry for something and decide to clear out all the carbs so you can find it.  Will have to put these all in a tub for a few weeks.
Zero carbs

Mini capsicum flower!
Mini capsicum flower

Something is eating the piths on our lemons - but not the fruit.  I mean WTF?  Surely the pith would be more bitter and less nutritious than the fruit??
Lemon pith chew

In other news, keto is going well.  Breakfasts are still the worst, and my morning routine is utterly stuffed up.  I was going to cook up stuff to have as breakfasts this weekend.  I didn't.  But otherwise, doing well, and losing weight - like a kilo in a week.  I was loading the dishwasher today and had to wipe out container after container of all the fat from them (from cream or cheese or whatever).  Seems counterintuitive to be eating all the fat but losing weight.  

This was a Christmas present from Kellie and the family.

miniblocks Owl in Tree box

Unboxed.  This set has a lovely little dome to stop the set getting dusty.

miniblocks Owl in Tree

All the pieces laid out by shape.

miniblocks Owl in Tree pieces

At one point in the instructions it wanted pink pieces, and I'm like, there's no pink pieces.  Turns out there are - but they're stoopidly light and very difficult to tell from the white.

miniblocks Owl in Tree colour similarity

Same here.  Luckily I'd kept them separated when I was unbagging everything.

miniblocks Owl in Tree colour similarity

Another place you could get tripped up - some of these pieces had holes, but others didn't.

miniblocks Owl in Tree piece similarity

At the end there were a *lot* of leftover pieces.  One or more of most of the pieces.  Although there were extras of some of the bigger bricks too which made me wonder if I'd missed a step or two here and there, and even went back to check through the instructions.  Found one place where I'd made a mistake because they flipped the whole thing round 180 degrees without telling you.  But I don't think I actually missed anything.

miniblocks Owl in Tree leftover pieces

Finished!!

miniblocks Owl in Tree finished

It's flimsy AF but cute as hell!!

miniblocks Owl in Tree finished

You can't really pull this apart when you're done - it has stickers that span multiple pieces :(

miniblocks Owl in Tree

Overall, very cool, and it'll go nicely with the Nanoblocks sets Annie has given me over the years.

Another Diamond Dotz I got for Christmas.  This one had 31 colours, 11904 dotz, and covered the entire canvas!!

I started it a couple of days after Christmas.

Stoopidly, even though there's 31 colours, they only provided 10 snap lock baggies to put the dotz in after you open the sealed bags.

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty colours

The blank canvas

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty canvas

The canvas has symbols, but these symbols aren't on the bags - only the colour and the colour number.  I literally drew the symbol onto the bag label so I'd know which symbol I was looking for.  Dumb.

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty in progress

About half way

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty in progress

A close up of the other eye

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty eye closeup

Finished!!  Took maybe three and a half weeks.

Diamond Dotz Green Eyed Beauty finished

I love it!  It's so sparkly! 

I'll have to see about getting it framed.. somehow..

Keto slow start

So I'm fat.  Like, heaviest I've ever been.  Last year I did low carb for a month and lost several kilos.  Time to try again.

Day one was okayyyyy..

Bacon, miso scrambled eggs and tomato for breakfast - so far so good

Keto day 1

Mostly salad with some keto tuna patties Stu made the other day.  Also not too bad (and kewpie is practically zero carb!!)

Keto day 1

Dinner is where the wheels fell of slightly.  We had EffanC over for dinner.  There was a blue cheese potato bake.  And ice cream.

Keto day 1

Whoops.

Of course there were leftovers of the potato bake and ice cream.  So days 2 and 3 have been bad because of that.

Diet starts tomorrow!

Sunday.  26th.  Leftovers for dinner, then went over to give Lily her 21st birthday presents.

Monday.  Bit late getting to sleep, then woke up at like 5.

Flutterby

Spent much of the day on my blog doing some catchup blog entries including a couple from 21 years ago.  Started to look at why Google isn't indexing my site very well anymore.  One error it complained about is canonical links being http.  The problem is I can't really do anything about that cause I have no idea how to fix MTEntryPermalink - <link rel="canonical" href="<$mt:EntryPermalink encode_html="1"$>"> cause I'm dumb.  It'll be buried deep deep deep in the Movable Type code somewhere.  Sad times.  Leftovers for dinner, Death in Paradise 13.6, Wednesday 1.3.  Then went and tried for some more comet photos on the new camera.

Tuesday.  Went to bed/sleep a little late, but woke up early still.  Decided to go to work (had been debating taking the day off).  Tidied up a bunch of doco from all the deleting I did on Friday.  Luv-a-Duck for dinner that we picked up when we went shopping today (Stu also cooked up a bunch of keto food).

Savoury muffins

Luv-a-duck

Death in Paradise 13.7 then Mum photo picking.

Wednesday.  Took ages to get to sleep, even though it was nice and COLD after stoopidity of the day's heat.  Slept in past 6 though. 

Stripy clouds

Stripy clouds

Stripy clouds

Stripy clouds

Bit of crap in the morning then mostly planning out mail server upgrade (need to build new vms).  Home late, dinner of sausages and salad.  Death in Paradise 13.8 (end of season 13) with another preposterous setup for a murder.  Backed up computer, washed hair then bed.

Thursday.  Mail upgrade planning.  Built a vm.  Updated some doco.  Had our last drinks at Bar 59 for a while.  Made pizzas then Wednesday 1.4.

Friday.  Early night and slept ok (another nice cool change).  Crap meetings, bit of mail server work, amongst distractions.  Kievs for dinner.

Chicken Kiev

Wednesday 1.5 then logged onto work for an hour and a half to do a big certificate renewal.

Saturday.  1st February.  Earlyish night but awake from 2-4.  Sigh.  Stu was awake for ages too.  Slept in til 7.  Bit of house stuff, food shopping and suddenly it's 10am and haven't really done anything.  Pretty much just cleaned the house all day.

Ribbon grass flower

Had EffanC over for dinner, which was lovely, it's been wayyyyy too long since we've had them over.  Did a nice rump cap, blue cheese potato bake and brussels sprouts.

Finished the last bottle of bubbles from my 50th!
Piper champagne

Roast beef

Roast beef

Roast beef

Sunday.  Got about five hours sleep which wasn't too bad all things considered, but I was tired all day.  Had a nice quiet day, mostly doing Dotz and also cooking up a huge batch of mince/bacon/mushroom/garlic/onion to decorate in different ways over the next week or so.  

I didn't actually realise until last night that this comet was an entirely different one to the one I saw last year.  And the one I saw last year I thought I saw just before Christmas.  Nope.  October!!  I'm losing my mind.  

I went out on Wednesday night (22/1) at maybe 20:30.  Way too bright.  But did meet up with Rob and Lynne and so we hung out together to wait for it to get dark.

My G5X picked it up first a bit after nine.  But I'm blind and the screen is so tiny I couldn't see it.  The phone could see it around 21:14.  Well, that's when it was bright enough for me to zoom and in and find the little smudge so we knew where to look.

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

I managed to get a few photos on the G5X before it got so dark it had not enough contrast to focus.

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Another shot on the phone

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

I also had a go on the 600D.  My ~12-13 year old camera that I inherited from Dad in 2014.  That has, as I discovered, many dead pixels.  It also had trouble focussing in the dark, so set to manual focus and was able to get some shots.

This one was 20 seconds - star trails!

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

On Friday 24/1 Tony said he hadn't seen it yet, so we headed up Mt Rogers to get a different view.  Turns out city lights, while annoying for astro photography, also give cameras something to focus on.

Once again I was able to use the phone to figure out exactly where to look.  Here's a couple of shots on the phone.

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

And those lights gave the G5X something to focus on, so got the rest of the photos of the night on that.

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Bug trails!!  And by bug trails I mean Elon's space junk #grunt
Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)

Fun times!

Oh, I forgot to link to this.. lyra_lightchaser's spectacular photo of it streaming off the top of Black Mountain Tower!

Sunday.  19th.  

Epic dandelion

Leftover lamb and veggies for dinner.  Death in Paradise 12.7.

Monday.  Took a little while to get to sleep then awake ~5:30.  The Access Canberra ticket I opened on 5 January is still "unassigned".  Fricken hopeless.  My trip from 16/1 is there in the history now though, but not the first two trips on the new system.  

Tuesday. 

Pink flowers

Did up a script to look for orphaned groups/objects.  Cooked up a tonne of veggies including some stuffed capsicums with some leftover cheesy mince.  Watched the Death in Paradise 2023 Christmas special.  

Epic veggies

Epic veggies

Wednesday.  Took forever to get to sleep - restless - but then mostly slept ok.  Bits and pieces at work, mostly going through the output of the orphaned objects script for stuff to clean up.  Leftovers for dinner.  Death in Paradise 13.1.  Then went out to see if I could see the comet.  Rob and Lynne saw me from waayyyyyyy across the field and called to me, so we hung out for like half an hour waiting for it to get dark.

Comet hunters

Waiting for the comet

Fireworks

I'll chuck some comet photos in another post.

But here's one of a satellite.  Starlink cluttering up the sky?

Satellite

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep.  Mostly decom prepping at work.  Drinks at Bar 59 again.  Pizzas again.  Death in Paradise 13.2.

Friday.  Decommission Day!  Deleting All The Things.  I love how much time my deleting scripts save me, not to mention saving me from RSI!!  Kievs for dinner.

Chicken kiev and potato

Death in Paradise 13.3.  Started watching the Netflix series Wednesday which we both really enjoyed.  Addams Family meets Hogwarts.  And *of course* it's Tim Burton and Danny Elfman.  Then went and had another look at the comet.  

Venus and the Mt Rogers trig station

Venus and the Mt Rogers trig

Canberra from Mt Rogers

Southern Cross over Canberra

Jupiter is the bright one on the middle left, Orion in the middle at the top, and Mars just below the head of the trig station

Stars, planets, trig

Belconnen from Mt Rogers

Belconnen by night

Saturday.  Took a while to get to sleep but slept in til 6:33.  Pretty quiet day.  Didn't achieve too much.  Bought a new camera.  Had some of my 50th birthday bubbles.  Dumpling Inn delivery for dinner.  Death in Paradise 13.4. Wednesday 1.2.

Pink flowers

Birthday bubbles

Dumpling Inn delivery

Sunday.  26th.  237 years since my great great great great great great grandparents arrived here.  Slept mostly ok.  Felt like I didn't achieve much, but I did get some stuff done.

Purple weed flowers

No roast tonight, just finishing up some leftovers.