Friday Fish Day

 It was a big lunch day today with Baked Snapper and also a Rice&Cod fish dish not to mention salads and prawns.  We had Estelle, Asher and Kaia for extra entertainment and they seem to be eating as much as the rest of us these days.  I did some desert with a chocolate cake complete with icing but the finishing touch was a box of chocolate liquers that Grandpa brought. After that there was a bit of sleeping off the food then a session over at the beach which got quite warm as the Sun broke thru for an hour or so.  We used the good old TV to quieten things down with Zootopia. It's a funny show not just for kids.

Choc a lot

lunch spread

hands full

wet sand makes good castles

Jump

Watching Zootopia

Data Recovery

 I have successfully recovered all the data that went missing a couple of months ago when my latest NAS disk got a problem and would not startup.  This exercise has cost $1000 for the recovery and also the cost of a new drive not to mention the cost of the old drive. The broken drive was more sophisticated having a printed circuit board in the enclosure as well as the disk.  Strictly speaking, when the board caught fire this in turn sent a shock thru the disk drive.  The recovery centre is an operating theatre quality clean space. The disk is disassembled in the pristine environment and each platter in the drive is mounted individually, spinning them up and reading off anything that can be found.  

Back in the day I worked with RAID systems, where multiple disks were mounted as one unit containing mirrored copies and striped copies of all the data.  If one disk broke, just take it out put in an identical drive and the data would be rebuilt from other drives.  I have a 20 year old drive from the BACS days which is still working and contains two mirrored disks but I have not seen anything like it since.  These days you rent disk space in the cloud which all have full RAID protection, so there is no way any of that will be lost.   

Five different trips were recovered  including  to Brisbane, Cairns and Port Fairy.  All the Roberts Slide reels that I rescanned are now all back again, as well as two years of what I call general daily photos and might include sunsets, beaches or bike rides etc. These are a few of the photos that were recovered.

Evie makes you laugh

20 Roberts cousins within a few years of age

Christmas maybe 1969

Darwin 1993

 Back onto the scanning project, there were three packets of negatives without any corresponding photos in the envelope, that were wedged into the side of a box.  Those photos are most likely in an album, maybe with Pam in Adelaide or Brian in Darwin, so as usual I am just scanning them anyway. This is the first packet and is an excursion up the Adelaide river to find crocodiles. There are also some backyard fun with kids etc.  This lot are 30 yar old.

Working/Beaching

 Debbie had a big Pure Bookkeeping day starting with a 7:00am meeting to suit world time zones that went for some hours. Then at 1:00pm all the prospective contacts from the last two bookkeeping conferences were gathering online for a final run through, so you have to be on your game.  After that we had some down time by eating lunch rolls on the beach but we had to be back at 3:00pm as Ross and Franster were arriving for a bit of a catchup. Like for instance their most recent trip to Lord Howe Island. While that was going on, this morning I unloaded yesterday's video,  which was a good thing as the medicine Asher made for me kept me going thru the day.

Lunch

followed by drinks

Sorrento Soon

 This would have to be the most complicated Grandie sitting day that you might imagine.  It goes like this. A voucher prize for a massage and hot springs experience was given to Daniel & Bianca and had been extended previously and was yet again about to expire.  So they have driven and stayed in a hotel near the venue and we have taken a walk on ferry ride across the Bay to Sorrento to take charge of the Grandies while the said voucher was honoured.  Now we were in the open for the three to four hours that this took and were completely at the whim of the weather in the first week of April.  But it was the more perfect of days. We alternated from beach to park to shops to beach then pub for lunch.  Kaia only needed changing once during that time and we happened to find a toilet block with a complete baby changing room setup.  Whew!

New Ferry terminal

Making Sand Soup

Walking the Tracks

Brain Squeeze

April Water Play

Ferry Captain

Fairy Garden extension

Debbie has been into the Fairy garden again today.  There is a new bridge and toadstool which are heavy additions to make fit.  Also the fence decorations have been completely taken down and returned in a new arrangement. The grandies will all think it's a new place to go.  My fingers are still recovering from yesterday's weeding but it is also a good way to get some garden exercise other than mowing.

I'm glad the wind chime doesn't work too often. It's loud.

 

BackYard Jungle

 We got the bikes out for a 16km circuit while the Sun was out.  Debbie's bike had cobwebs on it which says she has been a tad busy lately, with time on Grandies and quite a bit on Pure Bookkeeping to catch up on.  We called into the Jones coffee shop on the way back. It was busy and sitting inside was crowded.  The veggie patch was a sea of weeds so I got the gardening gloves out to clean it out while Debbie got onto the Fairy Garden. My fingers gave out after an hour or so but at least you can see the ground now.  

This is the 3000th time I have typed something into this blog. No that is not an April fool's statistic. The Retirees Occasional Blog Of Time ROBOT has been at least daily for some years. To quote Larry David "Where do I keep finding stuff to write about each Week?"

A Wheely good sculpture on the bike track

Selfie practice

Behold we have dirt and I killed 20 snails