Well it’s technically autumn here now, although it’s currently 36°C and climbing?? But let’s just quickly catch up on this past summer.

Scott turned 40. We had a big party at our house. I greatly underestimated the number of kids in our lives! Thankfully the children entertained themselves outside by piling up all the gravel in our courtyard. We had lots of food and drinks, and lots of Scott’s family and friends from school and work and everything came by even though it was so deep into Christmas party season. Overall success, imo.

Every second year is a big Christmas at the Jorna household (the other years people go to their other side of the family) and this year was a big one. I think there was about 40 people all together? Bonkers. There was a pinata, wading pool, bbq lunch, and soooooo many children and presents.

The next day we did a very Melbournian thing and went to Day 1 of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG. It was… very boring. Even people that love cricket thought it was boring. Because the grass was too flat and too smooth so nothing really happened. They would hit the ball very conservatively along the ground to just get one run at a time. There were only two wickets and one of them was while we were scanning our tickets to get in to the ‘G.

Scott and I worked through the Christmas holidays and saved our days off for when it wasn’t school holidays. It wasn’t busy at work so it wasn’t so bad.

I wanted to do a “polar bear” swim on New Years Day so we went to Half Moon Bay Beach which is only about 30 minutes away, on the bayside. It was a little busy but it was a hot day and the water was delightful. Plus there is really good fish and chips there.

It has been a hot summer of training. I sweat a lot even in the winter but when it’s >30°C it’s a whole other disgusting story. My face is always purple.

Sadly my coach Rob (in the aqua shirt) decided to retire. We were all very sad. I had one last competition with him 6 weeks ago, and then transitioned to getting coached by his son Adam. It’s different, but not that different, which is good.

We got this sweet bath caddy in the Kris Kringle gift swap thingy. I’m looking forward to when it’s cooler so I can have more baths. It feels nice on my back (which is actually not that bad at the moment btw).

We went ATVing in Gippsland, but I’ll save that for another post.

We also went camping at Wilsons Prom again this summer, but I will also save that for another post.

Scott has been doing hockey lessons and swimming lessons lately. He says they are both very challenging but very helpful.

We made some new board game friends! They are friends of Scott’s coworker (who also likes games) and they know how to play Agricola!! It’s tricky to find games for 6 players though. Last night we played Sushi Go Party, Sushi No, 7 Wonders, Coup, and King of Tokyo. I found Coup really hard, it is pretty much exactly what I am really bad at (bluffing and keeping track of what cards other people have).

On my way to the Aqua concert. :D

I had heard that Aqua was coming to Melbourne a while ago, along with a whole bunch of other 90s pop bands like Vengaboys, B*Witched, Eiffel 65, Lou Bega… but it was pretty expensive and I couldn’t find anyone to go with. I debated what to do for ages until the day before the concert I decided I would regret it if I didn’t try to go. I mean I still love the album Aquarium!!

I still didn’t want to pay a lot though. So I scoured Gumtree and Ebay and Facebook for cheap tickets and the morning of the concert someone finally accepted my offer! They ended up being very friendly girls and invited me to hang out with them since I didn’t know anyone else there. It was very random and very fun!!!!

The venga bus is coming…

Aqua!!! It was so nostalgic. They’re one of the few bands that I actually know most of the words to the songs haha. The tickets were awesome and we got right up close. Very fun night, I laughed a lot. I’m glad I decided to try and go. Would Aqua again.

Scott loves fried chicken so I thought it would be a good place for a quick birthday dinner but apparently when you turn 40 you suddenly lose your appetite. Everything was delicious but he barely ate anything. Strange.

We got tteokbokki (one of the things we fell in love with on our trip to Korea), chips, and boneless chicken (1/2 sweet chili, and 1/2 spicy).

This was way too much food for us, haha. And far too spicy. The tteokbokki was awesome and bouncy and saucy but also quite spicy, especially when your mouth was already hot from the chicken. The chips were good and the cold banchan was somewhat relieving from the spice.

I want to go back again soon and order better. I would still get tteokbokki but for the chicken I would get soy garlic sauce instead of spicy, and ask for the sauce on the side instead of slathered.

Gami Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

Yeah Christmas was over two months ago…. but better late than never?

Scott did a truly excellent job of making a DIY cider advent calendar for me this year. He went all over the city tracking down dry ciders that I mostly haven’t even heard of before. I was so excited to open the paper bag each morning!

Anyway for my own records I’m going to rate all of them. Note, I prefer quite dry ciders in general.

  • Caple Rd Cider – 9/10 – bit funky, quite dry, the can described it as “oaky, smoky with subtle notes of leather”
  • Zeffer Crisp Apple Cider – 7/10 – forgot to make any notes
  • Young Henrys Cloudy Cider – 8/10 – quite pleasant
  • Golden Axe Apple Cider – 8/10 – surprisingly nice? I thought it was going to be too sweet but it wasn’t
  • Colonial Bertie Brewing Co Cold Pressed Apple Cider – 8/10 – good
  • Coldstream Apple Cider – 7/10 – fine. They’re from the Yarra Valley
  • Blue Elephant Co Cider No 2 – 9/10 – really dry, really nice, one of my favourites now
  • Arquiteka Apple Cider – 8/10 – so hipster, quite dry, nice, not super strong flavour
  • Empire Apple Cider – 8/10 – nice, quite dry
  • Lost Pippin Raw Tasmanian Scrumpy 2016 – 2/10 – flat, bad taste
  • Barossa Cider Co Apple Cider Squashed – 8/10 – legit tastes like apple juice
  • Sidra Del Verano Spanish Apple Cider – 5/10 – too sweet, kinda yuck
  • Sassy Cidre – 7/10 – surprising! Like a traditional French cider not a hipster cider at all like the design would sugest. Funky
  • Fournier Poire Cidre – 7/10 – sweetish, tastes exactly like juice
  • Pure Blonde Crisp Apple Cider – 5/10 – reduced sugar, reduced flavour
  • Daylesford Cider Farmhouse Dry – 6/10 – meh. Don’t really care for still ciders
  • Treehouse Cider – 9/10 – one of my very favourites that’s not too hard to find
  • 2 Brothers Little Apple Cider – 6/10 – just didn’t like the taste
  • The Hills Cider Apple – 8/10 – a good standard cider
  • Pagan Cider – 8/10 – nice
  • Harcourt Apple Cider – 9/10 – very tasty
  • Huon Farmhouse Cider – 6/10 – tasted fine, a little funky, but not really a fan of still ciders
  • Cidre de Fouesnant Pur Jus Manoir de Kinkiz – ?/10 – this one had a cork! It was the one on Christmas Day and I forgot to write anything down
  • Aspall Suffolk Draught Cider – 8/10 – nice
  • Fog City Cloudy Cider – 8/10 – good!

Overall very good!! A lot of 8’s and 9’s there. Lots of new ones that I will look for when I’m shopping for cider. No still ciders though please, they just taste so flat and bad. Bubbles for lyfe.

Will I ever give a cider 10/10?? I’m not sure what that would take.

PS I made Scott a comic book advent calendar which I think he also enjoyed quite a bit.

It took me a month, but I think I’ve gotten everything working again here. This is a test, of sorts.

It was a slow process. I’m going to write it all out in case I ever have to do it again, or if anyone else is trying to decipher this process without having any idea of what they are doing, like me.

How to transfer your domain, change webhosts, and add Cloudflare.

First I had to transfer my domain. I had to unlock it and get a code emailed to me, request it to be transferred on the new registrar, wait several days for a confirmation email, and then confirm the transfer.

Then I transferred my webhosting. I paid for my new cheaper hosting, requested a full cpanel backup from my old host (they charged $5 US for this), then requested the new host to upload it and set everything back up. Once everything was uploaded I changed the nameservers on my new webhost to the new nameservers, which also took a few days to update. I just kept pinging my website to see if the IP address had changed or not yet.

Everything was working fine at this point, and looked exactly the same as before, but I wanted to add SSL. I didn’t want to pay for it though, so I signed up for Cloudflare which offers free very basic SSL for personal sites. I just had to sign up and then change my nameservers again to the Cloudflare ones and turn on https.

Then my website briefly stopped working. But with help from Scott and an internet friend I figured out it was because Cloudflare was using the IP address from my old webhost. Once I updated that everything works again!

I hope I don’t have to do this again for a long time.

I’ve been debating what to do with this blog. My webhost has gotten too expensive. Their service has been fine, but I don’t need unlimited bandwidth and storage when I get like… 5 views a day and I’ve only just cracked 1 GB in files. LOL.

I was kinda leaning towards just abandoning everything because I barely ever blog any more. But then I realized that someone else could take over the domain and turn it into something horrible. Also I do look things up on my blog on a regular basis… it’s nice having a fairly good record of my life even if just for personal use.

Anyway so I’ve decided to try to move to a different registrar and webhost. A cheaper one. Something much more basic. This might affect loading times and whatnot but… oh well, hopefully it’s not too noticeable.

Fingers crossed there’s not too much downtime in the process as well.