WARNING: there are fake wounds made of Vaseline, flour and red food colouring about halfway through this post.

Broke the habit!

For now.

My head is still all over the place and and trying to get and keep organised is presenting its usual massive challenge, exacerbated by the fact the children have been staggering being exhausted for no apparent reason lately (a possible reason is growth spurts, because they're lethargic and sleep a lot and suddenly they're bigger, especially the boys).

July was pretty cruisy but as everything is pretty much back to normal (I think we're still meant to be social distancing as the marks in checkout lines and the enlarged aisles in bigger stores are still present but seeing as we've never had community transmission ever more and more and more people seem to be forgetting/ignoring this) we've been doing more.

The garden has been doing fantastic and my little nephew keeps asking to come over so he can raid.

Happy Father's Day to all the people that do Father's Day!

We had Josh's dad, my uncle and one of my cousins over for lunch.  My uncle offered to cook the fish so we pulled 6 trout out of the tanks.  I've been observing that some of them were pretty big when feeding them, and one of the ones that Tao pulled up was quite large.

Big rainbow trout from the aquaponics tank, being held by father in law and patted by 3 year old

We finally bought a NAS, it's living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router).  I'm currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). 

Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it's 53Gb and going to blow out as I'm shooting RAW.

Moving the iTunes library was a bit more of a hassle.  Dragged to new location, changed library reference is preferences, dumped original in bin, restarted to make sure all was good, it seemed to be, so I emptied the trash can.  I think I missed the consolidation step (another reason to not do this when tired) so it had a huge cry about not having a libary to use.  I "opened" the folder I'd moved and now all is well with the world.

The D5000 died on us, Josh was quite determined he was going to stick with film and never getting another digital camera as the thing had only been 2 years old when it stopped working, apparently afflicted by a known and common problem with the D5000s.  The film camera bodies he has (F3 and F4) are still going strong and they're relics from the 1980s.

I i nformed him that I needed a digital camera as I wanted to be able to blog photos shortly after taking them, not a month or so after we'd finished the roll of film and gotten around to getting it developed, and that I was going to buy one of those little point and shoot numbers that would fit in my cargo pockets.

He apparently couldn't cope with the thought, so he bought me a Nikon D70.

Nikond70front (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a new-to-us thing and came with a Sigma lens (though I'm going to swap it out for my favourite which is an 18-55 that came with the D5000 and Josh doesn't think much of it) and a rather beat up old bag.  I'm now on a quest for a bag that will haul the camera, my laptop, wallet, phone and some miscellany, and I've also finally been able to take more photos of the aquaponics setup.

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period.  Oops.  Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn't gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so.  So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don't clean up for anyone!

We chatted and she seems like a nice person.  I gave her enough information to write a happy report and get us approved for another year.  She also sent me the literacy outcomes to help with the learning program which I have only just worked out that I do actually have (I'm a bit slow, I seem to do a lot of things because they make sense or because I need to do them to do other things etc and never realise they are processes that have names or that I'm implementing a program).

So what's been happening around here, we've managed to cram a bit into the couple of weeks we've been back.