March 2020 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Up for the sunrise

Scully woke us up early again, this time at 04:00. Normally she just sleeps through the night until we get up, but not the past few nights. She didn’t sneeze, but was a bit congested. I took her outside for a toilet, which took ages, and got in a bit after 04:30. Scully and my wife went back to sleep, but now I was wide awake again.

I decided to make the most of it and do another sunrise photography session.

This time I went to North Curl Curl, where there is an ocean pool on a rock shelf, just east of the surf life saving club.

I got there well before sunrise, and there was a thin crescent moon in the sky, above where the sun would appear. And yes, as the above photo shows, there is a large rock in the middle of the swimming pool.

The pool is separated from the ocean by a concrete wall. The tide was approaching high for the day, and at this time occasional waves crash over the wall and into the pool. The above photo is a long exposure, and the dark patch in the pool on the left is a swimmer.

A white-faced heron flew onto the rock shelf next to the pool, and as I watched it fished a small crab out of the water to eat. I wasn’t quick enough to a get a photo of it eating the crab.

A few minutes later the sun appeared on the horizon and climbed up into the sky. It goes from dark to light really quickly in Sydney.

Just a few minutes later I had the camera off the tripod and was taking hand-held shots of swimmers in the pool.

And not long after that about 50 kids arrived for some sort of swimming class. They all did a few laps of the pool and then ran off again.

With the sunrise done, I headed home to process the photos. This was interrupted only by taking Scully to the vet to have her congestion looked at. We have some medication to give her to get her feeling 100% again. Hopefully tonight she’ll sleep through… and I can get a decent night’s sleep.

New content today:

Clean clean clean

There’s nothing like a shower after a hard day of physical labour.

It began at 03:00 this morning, when Scully awoke with a bout of reverse sneezing. For those who don’t know, this is a thing dogs do sometimes when their nasal passages are irritated. Rather than expel air out like humans do when sneezing, they sometimes go into spasmodic rapid inhalations to clear their passages. She’s been doing this the past three nights.

I realised today that she had a bout of this last year… around this time… and I checked our vet records and discovered it was also in March. At that time we were less experienced dog owners and took her to the vet, who suggested it might be seasonal allergy, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and a half tablet of regular human antihistamine tablets daily (they’re fine for dogs!). She settled down after a while, but by then I was awake, and I have trouble falling asleep again once fully awake. So while my wife and Scully went back to sleep, I was pretty much up for the morning.

When they went off to work, I began cleaning the house thoroughly, to get rid of any aggravating dust. I dusted the entire bedroom – including places that hadn’t been dusted for way too long. Then I vacuumed the bedroom plus the whole rest of the house – a thorough and meticulous vacuuming, not the regular quick weekly once-over. By 11:00 I was ready for the next phase: shampooing the carpet.

I went to the hardware store and hired a carpet shampooer, which I’ve done before, so I knew how to use it. I did a full wet clean of the entire house, finishing around 14:00, with a short break to grab a quick lunch. After returning the hired cleaner, I stripped the quilt cover and put the inner quilt out in the sun to air and get some ultraviolet light. It was a hot day today, which helped dry the carpet with the windows open. Hopefully this level of clean will help Scully’s poor nose and she’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight – with the help of half a tablet of Telfast.

At 17:00 I went to pick up my wife and Scully from work, because she had to bring home the entire switchboard(😳) to prepare for working from home next week, due to coronavirus precautions. Her work has been tough this week with staff preparing for this big change, so we were both pretty worn out. We decided to go out to dinner to our favourite local pizza place, to support their business in these trying times. The restaurant was emptier than usual, but not by much – rather than every table occupied it was about two-thirds full.

One thing I realised today was that for most of the world this whole coronavirus thing has been disruptive and scary for a few weeks. But here in Australia we had those horrendous fires over the summer, which really took off in November and just went on and on and on, followed by the terrible flooding which eventually put the fires out. We here in this country have been dealing with non-stop existential economic and societal stress for five months now. We were already worn down in January.

We need a break.

Tonight my wife and I needed to go out and have a nice dinner. People in other parts of the world might not be able to or want to do that at this time. But tonight we needed it.

New content today:

A warm autumn Thursday

Firstly, I forgot to post this photo I took yesterday on my walk home from the shops:

This is a house I walk past occasionally. If I had unlimited money, this would be high on my list of houses to buy. Tennis court, lovely old house itself, and look at that view!

It was warm today. Earlier in the week we had some cold weather – the first truly cold weather since before summer, as we now slide into autumn. The maximum temperature on Saturday in Sydney was only 17.9°C, which is really winter-like conditions. It’s slowly been climbing as the week progresses, and today we reached 32.1°C, with 35°C forecast for tomorrow. So summer hasn’t quite released its grip yet, but winter is definitely on the way.

This morning I made use of the fine day to play 9 holes of golf at my nearest local course. I went really well today, equalling my record best score at that course. I was very pleased with my tee shot at the 4th hole:

That’s my ball there on the left, right on the green! The tee position is just below the wooden bench in the background, and you have to hit the shot over the wooded creek gully that you can see below. I’ve lost several balls in that gully, but not today! Putting was difficult though, because the course had done what I learnt later is called “aerating the greens” – they punch a grid of small holes in the surface and lay sand over the top. This is part of the course maintenance and my friend tells me it’s done twice a year, and the greens take a week or so to recover. But it meant that today they were very lumpy and inconsistent, so I had trouble putting, although I made up for it with decent long shots. I ended up 3-putting this hole for a bogey 4.

My wife’s work is adjusting to work-from-home conditions due to COVID-19, and her job-share partner has been told to not come in this week (as she has a very long commute on public transport), so my wife is working longer hours than normal this week (as she only has a short walk to the office). She normally takes Scully in to the office (the staff all love her), but Scully gets restless with the extra hours, so I’ve been going in to pick her up around lunch time. On the way home today we stopped to have a bit of a play in the park.

Apart from all this, the main thing I did today was work on more Darths & Droids strips. I wrote a couple of new strips and assembled a couple that I’d written yesterday. We’re getting a pretty good buffer for the new movie now.

New content today:

COVID cancellations

A while ago I’d booked a trip away over Easter, planning to do a road trip with my wife and Scully. We found a motel with a pet-friendly room at Mudgee, one of our favourite country town destinations, and a suitable AirBnB in another town making a nice loop from Sydney, with a couple of nights in each place. I also booked a couple of our favourite restaurants in Mudgee. We’ve been looking forward to this trip for a while.

But with the coronavirus situation in Australia getting progressively more serious by the day, and the very real possibility of travel restrictions being imposed, as well as the thought of possibly spreading the disease even if travel is not restricted, we’re reconsidering our plans. We decided to cancel the AirBnB today, but leave the Mudgee accommodation for the time being. Realistically I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to go, so at some point that will probably have to be cancelled too, as well as the restaurant reservations.

It’s a shame because besides having a trip ourselves, I really wanted to help the rural communities by visiting and spending some money there. The good news is that AirBnB announced just today that they’d be refunding all prepaid bookings, including the normally non-refundable fees, and they’d also not be charging the hosts for cancelled bookings (which normally they’d do, apparently). So at least both we and our cancelled host haven’t lost anything because of this cancellation.

Other than that, today I took a longish walk to a nearby suburb in search of some prebaked pizza bases, which we use to make pizzas for dinner at home. I tried to buy some the other day in my local supermarket, but they’d sold out, so I decided to try elsewhere today, and get a bit of extra exercise while at it. I found them, and enjoyed the time out in the warm autumn day.

At home today I mostly worked on writing some more Darths & Droids comics.

New content today:

Ethical dilemma

Primary Ethics has decided that ethics classes will cease from next week due to coronavirus concerns. They’ve left this week’s classes up to each individual school ethics coordinator. Mine has said that classes will run tomorrow.

However, I’ve decided that I won’t be going into the school to take my class tomorrow. I think the risks are low at this time, but still, I really don’t want to get sick a day later and realise that I may have exposed a classroom full of kids to the virus. I’ll miss the class, because even after just three weeks I’m keen to see the kids again and lead them through more of the ethics curriculum. But it’s because of that that I can’t bear to put any of them at greater risk.

Today I tended to a few odd tasks, finishing off writing annotations for the last batch of Irregular Webcomic, and queueing up a bunch of iToons submissions. And I picked up Scully from my wife’s work at lunchtime and looked after her all afternoon, including taking her to the dog park. The regulars there are still showing up each day, but noticeably keeping more distant than normal, and discussing virus-related stuff. It’s good to be out in the fresh air though.

New content today:

Adventure creation

I dedicated today to writing more of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for my gaming group. We’re partway through the adventure, and I need to write more of it before we play the next session.

I also went out to buy some groceries. The supermarket had no toilet paper at all, but there were stocks of everything else. Although apparently some people have no idea how to cook at home, since half the shelves of instant cup noodles were empty. And apparently people want to stock up on no added salt/sugar peanut butter. That’s the sort I buy. There was heaps of the regular peanut butter that most people normally buy, but virtually none of the no-added salt/sugar type. I have no idea, because normally the no added variety doesn’t sell as much.

New content today:

A day out to the north

With my market day cancelled (as mentioned yesterday), I took the opportunity to go on a short day trip with my wife and Scully. We drove north to the outskirts of Sydney, stopping first at the suburb of Berowra, which is secluded in a pocket surrounded by undeveloped bushland. We stopped first at a place named Barnett’s Playground, at the end of a street. Leading from the playground was a short walking track that proceeded to the edge of a steep drop from the ridge down to Berowra Creek far below. Here was Barnetts Lookout (no apostrophe, since designated place names in Australia are decreed to never have apostrophes – the playground, not being a designated place, is allowed to have an apostrophe).

After admiring the view for a while we took Berowra Waters Road down the hill to Berowra Waters, a tiny village on the creek. There is no bridge, and the only way to cross the creek is by boat.

Scully enjoyed the view too.

From here we drove back up the hill and further north to Pie in the Sky at Cowan, a popular roadside establishment that sells meat pies, mostly frequented by motorbike riders taking the narrow, winding old highway north rather than the newer and faster but boring freeway. Here we had lunch (I had one of the chicken, honey, and mustard pies and a Moroccan lamb pie), and also enjoyed the sky-high view east towards the Hawkesbury River and across Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park.

Tummies full, we headed back towards home, but stopped one more time, taking an unsealed road into the Muogamarra Nature Reserve. At the end of the road we left the car and took a short walk into the bush. It was peaceful and remote, and we could hear numerous birds flitting around in the vegetation. However Australian scrubland birds tend to be very active and never sit still for very long. But I waited patiently and got a few photos.

These are male and female variegated fairywrens.

We headed home, and as we drove south the weather closed in and rain fell, fortunately after we were done exploring for the day.

New content today:

COVID effects

Australia reached 200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 today, and the precautions and responses have begun to affect me. Firstly, this morning I received email from the organisers of That Great Market, where I was to have me second stall tomorrow, selling my photography prints. They have decided to cancel the market, citing both the virus precautions and also forecast bad weather, with wind and rain that would make the outdoors stalls tricky.

A knock-on effect of this is that I had booked a car hire to transport my goods to the stall (since my own car isn’t large enough). So I had to cancel the car hire, less than 24 hours before pick-up. According to the hire terms, that means zero refund – I still pay the full rental amount. So rather than making some money at the market stall to cover costs and make some profit, I’ve now had an expense with no chance to recover the outlay. The market stall booking fee is being rolled over to a later market, although honestly I can’t see next month’s one going ahead either at this point.

Next, I decided I should cancel Monday’s visit to Brookvale school. I should have gone to talk to kids about science, and run the Science Club, but for the safety of both myself and all the kids in the school I decided it’s probably better not to go ahead.

That meant I didn’t need to spend today preparing for the visit, and I used to time to finish off making the last batch of Irregular Webcomic strips that I photographed on Monday. I still need to write all the annotations, which I’ll do over the next couple of days.

For dinner tonight my wife and I went (with Scully) to a new pizza place we hadn’t tried before, 10 minutes drive from home. It’s a small place in a tiny cluster of shops surrounded by houses, and it was bustling with local business. It was good, and inexpensive, and the owner came out to have a chat with us as we ate. Our sort of place! We’ll definitely go back again.

New content today:

Sunrise at the beach

On Friday I set an alarm for 5:45, but I woke up just before 5:30. I got up, had a quick breakfast, and set out for the beach!

Sydney has a lot of beaches, and choosing the right one for a sunrise photo shoot is a matter of weather conditions, tide, time of year, angle of sunrise, personal preference, travel times, and other factors. I used an app – The Photographer’s Ephemeris – to map the direction of the sunrise from a few beaches. One constraint I had was that I had a booking for golf at 8:00 with a friend, at Cammeray Golf Club, so wherever I went I had to have enough time to drive back there, in peak hour traffic, to make tee-off.

The closest beach I could think of was Balmoral Beach, which is not an ocean beach, but a harbour beach, facing the protected waters of Sydney Harbour. I knew that Balmoral has a very small view of the open ocean, threading in between the two sandstone promontories of Middle Head to the south and North Head to the north. I checked The Photographer’s Ephemeris for the direction of the sunrise:

It was almost perfect! The yellow line to the right shows the direction of sunrise on Friday, and it threads the needle right between the two headlands. Because of the motion of the sun with the seasons, this coincidence probably only happens on a few days of the year. So with a perfect combination of convenience and opportunity, I selected Balmoral as my target. (I did this calculation the night before.)

As I drove to Balmoral before 6 am, I could see stars in the sky. At least it wasn’t raining like last week. I got to the beach and headed down to a small exposed sandstone rock platform, jutting from the sand into the water. The tide was low – at high tide these rocks would be covered with water. The sky was just beginning to lighten, but unfortunately the cloud cover was highly sub-optimal for sunrise photos:

There was a dark, thick band of cloud right on the horizon, and barely any cloud in the nearby sky above. This is exactly the opposite of what you want for shooting a sunrise: a clear horizon for the sun to shine through, and lots of cloud above for the golden and red light to bounce off and set the sky ablaze with colour. Oh well, I was here, so I shot what was available.

Early morning swimmers and joggers appeared on the scene, providing small points of interest for photos. After a while the tide started coming in, so to avoid being stuck on the rocks and having to wade back, I moved back across the sand and took photos from the path behind the beach. You can see the rocks I had been standing on in the middle of this next photo:

This was also taken with a different lens, a fisheye, for a super wide view. As the sun continued rising, it became light very quickly. I ditched my tripod (I’d been taking exposures up to 30 seconds long), and walked around, taking handheld shots.

I packed up about 7:15 and headed to the golf course to meet my friend. We played one round of the 9 hole course, having a lot of fun. It was the first time he’d been to this course, and it has a few interesting holes, which I showed off last time I wrote about it. It had rained – a lot – since that visit, and this time the water feature at hole 6 was full (compare to the third photo on the previously linked entry):

Unfortunately this meant we both landed our tee shots in the water! But I had a great tee shot at the par 3 9th hole. My ball landed on the green, pitching just 1 metre from the hole! Although it rolled a fair distance from there and I had a long putt, ending up with 4 strokes. But wow that was a great tee shot.

After golf I went home and worked on those sunrise photos, as well as some comics stuff, before preparing to head out to fortnightly Games Night with friends. We agreed to “socially distance” ourselves to minimise any disease transmission by touching as little as possible and using hand sanitisers, but of course playing board games means some interaction. Still, coronavirus isn’t very widespread here yet and it’s unlikely any of us has been exposed yet, so we felt okay with our level of precautions.

We played some games of the Throne of Eldraine Magic: the Gathering draft that we started a few weeks ago. I had two long games that both stalled with tough creatures on both sides. I ended up losing one, and winning the other, both by narrow margins. After that we split into two groups, one playing Spirit Island with 4 players, while I played Everdell with 3 players. It was a fun game, and I managed to pull together enough constructions and critters to score a lucrative 9 point bonus card, but it wasn’t quite enough – I ended up coming second with 51 points, to the winner’s 54.

New content today:

Market prep, and Star Wars

My next market day is coming up on Sunday, so I’m preparing stuff. Last time a friend gave me and my gear a lift in his large car. My car is too small to pack it in, and my friend is busy this time, so I’m having to make alternative arrangements. It looks like I’m going to have to hire a car for the day – which will add another expense that eats into my profits. But if I make as much as last time, it should be okay.

This time it’s at a different venue. East Lindfield Community Hall, East Lindfield, which is a bit further from my place. But this is this market’s established venue, where it’s been held monthly for almost 5 years, so it has an established customer base and people in the area know about it. So hopefully we’ll see more shoppers than two weeks ago at the first-time venue.

Today I also worked on Darths & Droids comics, doing some writing and then assembling the comics from screencaps. I completed three strips (although I’d done most of one before starting today), which is a week’s worth of comics in the queue and ready to be published.

Oh, I’ve also been thinking about Monday, which is my next school science visit. The coordinator has told me that the older kids (who I’ll be talking to) are studying plants at the moment. I think I’ll do a slideshow on exotic plants from around the world and their various adaptations to their environments. And I still need to find another couple of experiments for the Science Club kids as well. I’ll need to do all this probably on Saturday, since Sunday will be taken up by the market.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to try again on my abandoned sunrise photo expedition. The weather should be better than my last attempt. I’ll be getting up around 5:30 to head off before 6 am, for the sunrise at the beach. Hopefully it will be a good one!

New content today: