New Year’s Eve

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How is it now 2015?! I have no idea where last year went!

We went over to a friends’ place for New Year’s Eve, there were two fondue sets and a raclette grill plus the cheese of the same name. It was so. Good. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much cheese. kungfupolarbear made both a spinach dip and sweet potato pie, and both went over an absolute treat, they were delicious! Our friends’ live in an apartment, so unfortunately we couldn’t bring Beanie, and they don’t have air conditioning either, so it ended up being pretty toasty with all the dinner accoutrements that produce heat!

Next year is either going to be at ours, or at another couple’s place (they just bought a house, so we could bring Beanie and it has air conditioning).

Today has been a very lazy day consisting mostly of puttering around on the Internet, and playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Christmas

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We just got home from our Christmas lunch at my parents’ place. Haven’t heard a peep from Lily’s mother, so this is the first Christmas in a very long time (possibly ever) that we’ve not seen Lily. It’d definitely be nice to see her, but avoiding all the obnoxiousness that comes with having to deal with her mother is also nice, heh.

My sister, her husband, and their two kids came up from Nowra which was nice, as they don’t normally make it up here for Christmas. It was also our first Christmas since Nanny died, so that was a bit sad. Mum had a photo book printed with a bunch of photos from Nanny’s life, so that was lovely. 🙂

I got a heap of books (six Discworld novels—all of which I’ve read but never actually owned—, three Warhammer 40,000 novels, and Neil Gaiman’s “Neverwhere”), plus a tabletop game called X-Wing. Think Warhammer 40,000 but with Star Wars ships instead! I’ve never played it before but have heard good things and am excited to try it out!

Defeated

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Remember our path?

We admitted defeat today and pulled it all up. Despite there being a weed mat underneath it, and having sprayed the fuck out of it with a vinegar and salt solution (we didn’t want to use hardcore weed killers because Beanie putters around in the backyard and occasionally eats grass), it kept getting overrun with grass, and it was a giant pain in the goddamn arse to pull up. Especially since it’d just spring right back through in another spot.

R.I.P. path, 5th August 2013 – 14th December 2014. Heh.

In amongst all that, I also mowed the front and back lawn, did the whippersnippering, sealed up a hole in a roof tile, and cleaned the hot plate from the barbecue.

::faceplant::

Promotion!

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I’ve been acting-senior support engineer at work since the guy who used to do it moved to another team, but I’m now OFFICIALLY the senior support engineer. 😀 \o/

Lily!

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We had Lily for a week from Saturday the 27th to yesterday (it was school holidays). It was great to see her again, despite her mother being totally useless Lily seems to be a nice kid still, heh. Though she does have dreadlocks, ugh. Not over her entire head, but still. She was totally plastered to my side for the first couple of days, which was exhausting, but after that she’d calmed down and we got into the groove of things.

We went to the beach with mum, dad, my sister, and nieces (obligatory photos here), which was really nice, and mum and dad came to visit for lunch on Friday.

Lily’s reading is pretty incredible, she’s got a big book “Encyclopaedia of World Wildlife” that has whole pages of text about all these different animals, and she can totally read it all! She was playing a game on the Xbox where there’s lots of text that scrolls in fairly quickly and she was able to read that too.

Beanie was very excited to meet a new person, and was so devastated when I came back from dropping her off and she didn’t follow me out from the garage! He kept looking back and forth between me and the garage and wagging, as if to say “You’ve forgotten her!”

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kungfupolarbear is in the US visiting her family, she left yesterday and arrives back in the country two weeks later. It’s weird not having her here, I feel like I’m just biding my time until she’s back.

The whole stereotype of “The wife is away, I’m going to do all of these things that she doesn’t let me do normally!” just doesn’t apply to us at all. We both will happily play video games or putter around on the computer or whatever. I’m having gypocalypse, wobin, and some other friends over on Saturday to play this Warhammer 40,000-themed D&D-type thing, and that wouldn’t matter if kungfupolarbear was here, she’d happily hang out despite having zero interest in actually playing it and would absolutely not begrudge us spending time playing it. Everything is just so totally effortless, it still amazes me. <3

I had yesterday and today off (yesterday because we woke up at 3:30am in order to get to the airport on time D: ), and am working from home the rest of the time she’s gone since Beanie needs looking after and obviously can’t be by himself for 11 hours a day.

In other news we bought an Xbox One, a colleague of mine was selling his as he’s moving to Paris. We’ve got Forza 5 (a racing game) to tide us over until the Diablo III expansion comes out, and man the graphics are nice. This is only a launch title too, so they’ll be even more impressive once developers get a handle on squeezing the most out of the system. One very slick thing is that you can have the Xbox turn the TV and amplifier on when it turns on, and it’ll turn them off when the Xbox turns off too.

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Nanny’s funeral was yesterday. It was sad, of course, but mum made a really nice speech with lots of funny stories, and she was holding up really well. Several people commented that mum looked much more relaxed how — I can’t imagine how stressful the last few months had been for her. They had a slideshow of photos from Nanny’s life, and I was happy to see a number of my photos of Nanny from various Christmases being used. The music played as everyone was leaving the ceremony was Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, which everyone cracked up at.

There were quite a few relatives there that I’d never even laid on eyes before, apparently we have a number of them from Queensland. It was nice to catch up with some of my other relatives that we don’t see too often, too. We’ve never really been a family who had those stereotypical massive family gatherings, which I’m quite okay with, heh.

Today we’re off to see the Dogs on Show, well, show. It’s only purebred dogs, which is a bit annoying, but it’s great to wander around and see all the different breeds that you’ve never seen before. There will of course be lots of photos taken.

Five years of awesome marriage

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Good lord. FIVE YEARS. Crazy! It’s seriously just so effortless, I think that’s why it’s gone so quickly. kungfupolarbear has commented that it feels like we’re having one big long sleepover, and it’s totally true.

Every marriage should be between people who are best friends, and that’s absolutely the case with us. <3

One year to the day

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One year to the day since we moved into our house! It astonishes me that it’s gone by that quickly, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been a year.

This is the first place I’ll have lived in for more than a year since moving out of my parents’ place back in 2007. …actually that’s not quite true, now that I think about it. I was in the unit in Dee Why for probably 18 months or so, but that record will soon be eclipsed.

And kungfupolarbear informs me that this will be the first place she’s lived in for more than a year since 2002!

Eeeee!