Month: May 2020

Evil plots

Sunday morning saw another sleep in. I slept with my bandaged hand tucked under the quilt for the first time – it felt a bit weird but was okay. Better than resting my arm on top where it was cold all night the last few nights. The fingers are getting more flexible and stronger, and I can now type with two hands, although only using one finger on my left hand.

My wife and I went for another big walk with Scully this morning, though not as long as yesterday.

Scully on Berrys Bay

Well, that photo is actually from yesterday, but it’s nice so I thought I’d share it today.

This afternoon I spent dedicated to brainstorming and plotting more Darths & Droids story material, with some of my co-writers. We wrote almost 2000 more words of story notes, and now have a significantly better plan for how the story progresses through Episodes 7 and 8.

My wife cooked dinner again tonight. Pea soup, with fried halloumi as a vegetarian substitute for ham/bacon. It was delicious… and I’m not just saying that because I didn’t have to do any of the work. 🙂

New content today:

A long walk and a rest

Saturday is officially “no alarm Saturday” in this household, and we all slept in until almost 8 o’clock this morning. After getting up and having breakfast, we (my wife, Scully, and I) went for a nice long walk for some exercise and fresh air. The day was beautiful – a clear, brisk, late autumn day with puffy white clouds in the sky.

We walked basically this route which I covered in a photo walk essay a few weeks ago. With some bits added on to take us from our home to the start and end points as given in that page. The total walk was 9 kilometres, and took us a solid couple of hours, with a break for my wife to grab a coffee at a cafe on the way.

This afternoon I worked some more on Darths & Droids, writing up a bunch of story planning notes, based on thoughts from the past few days that hadn’t been recorded yet, and I made a couple of new strips.

And this evening my wife cooked the cauliflower dish that I was preparing on Wednesday when I sliced my hand with the kitchen knife. The offending cauliflower has been duly punished by being baked with a miso glaze and consumed with pomegranate, chilli, mint, and toasted sesame and sunflower seeds. Yum!

Miso cauliflower bomb

New content today:

Doing things one-handed

So there are a lot of things you can’t easily do with one hand out of commission. Washing yourself is tricky, especially since I have to keep my left hand dry. My wife helped me put a plastic bag over my left hand and tape it so I could have a shower, but then I realised I couldn’t wash my right arm. And squeezing shampoo out of a bottle into your one good hand is really difficult.

The good news is that when I woke up in the morning, all of the numbness from the anaesthetic had worn off overnight and I had full sensation in all fingers and thumb again. The thumb and forefinger had still been a bit numb when I went to sleep. And there’s not much pain. But I can’t really use my left hand for anything that requires any strength at all – I can’t hold anything in it or put any pressure on it.

I worked a bit on Darths & Droids today, managing to make a strip, although using Photoshop one-handed is a challenge as so many of the commands involve multi-key combos or holding down keys while clicking and dragging.

My wife had to do the grocery shopping, while I minded Scully, after she finished her work shift at lunch time. (I’ve been doing all the shopping recently.) And we went out for dinner tonight for the first time since COVID restrictions shut restaurants back in March. We had Indian food, and it was delicious. The waiter, seeing my hand bandaged up and in a sling, offered to bring me a spoon to help eating, but I said I’d be fine with a knife and fork, and sort of managed okay, using one utensil at a time.

And relaxed tonight watching The Last Jedi with my wife, to prepare for a home viewing of Rise of Skywalker on the weekend, which she missed seeing at the cinema last year.

New content today:

Hand update

So, after yesterday’s exciting events, I went back to the hospital at 7:30 this morning. I had to wait a while until a doctor saw me. She removed the overnight plaster and unwrapped the bandages and inspected the wound. It bled a bit so she wrapped it up again within a few minutes, but I got a good look and some photos. She tested motion and sensation in my fingers and thumb, which were all fine. And I got to see the x-rays taken last night, which showed no damage to any bones.

After this inspection they scheduled me for surgery later in the morning. They said it could be done with local anaesthetic and I’d be released in the afternoon. I had a bit of a wait, until almost 11 o’clock, and all the while being unable to eat or drink anything (since dinner last night), so I got pretty hungry, as well as bored of just sitting around and waiting.

Eventually I went in and the surgery didn’t take very long, with me conscious the whole time, although they had a screen up so I couldn’t see what they were doing. I emerged with the hand bandaged up and still numb, but that’s worn off now and it aches a bit. They put in ten stitches, although I won’t see them until a follow-up appointment in 2 weeks when they’ll remove the bandages. Until then I have to keep the hand and bandages dry.

They brought me some sandwiches and water while I was in recovery, and gave me a prescription for oral antibiotics. By 2:30pm I was allowed to go home. Which makes a total of 11 hours in the hospital since yesterday.

My wife had to cook dinner tonight, since my left hand is useless for the time being, bandaged and in a sling to keep it elevated. I normally do 99% of the cooking, so this was a bit of an adventure, but she did well, making miso chilli Brussels sprouts with a little direction from me, adding sesame seeds and pine nuts on her own initiative, which worked well with it.

Now to hope I can sleep okay with the bandage and the low level pain. They said to take paracetamol or ibuprofen, so I’ll have some before bed.

New content today:

Sliced

Well. I was planning to write about yet another day spent trawling through footage from The Force Awakens and writing Darths & Droids story planning notes. But around 5pm I started preparing dinner. For the dish I was planning, I needed to cut the core stem out of a whole cauliflower. I used one of my brand new super-sharp kitchen knives…

My hand slipped and the knife sunk deep into my left hand, into the fleshy area between the thumb and forefinger. It immediately started bleeding profusely, and I knew I’d need to get stitches as I could see the size of the wound. My wife had gone outside a while ago to walk Scully, so I was home alone. With one good hand, I rinsed the wound, but it kept bleeding copiously, so I grabbed a tea towel and wrapped it tight to try to stop the bleeding, then went next door to our neighbours and knocked on the door, said I needed to get to the hospital and asked them to contact my wife. One of them drove me to the hospital right away, while his wife phoned my wife to let her know what was happening.

I was triaged in emergency right away and the triage nurse applied a quick bandage to stop the ongoing bleeding. I was taken to the treatment area, where after a bit of a wait a doctor examined my hand. She said the wound was deep enough that she wanted to consult with a hand specialist. She used a lot of saline and antiseptic to rinse it out – very quickly, because it was still oozing copious blood – then she bandaged it up again.

After another wait she said they were scheduling surgery for me, so a surgeon could check the wound and see if there were any severed tendons or nerves or blood vessels that might require microsurgery, and clean it out properly before stitching it up. Then after some more waiting she came back and told me that the surgery is scheduled for 7:30am tomorrow, so in the meantime she would pack the wound and bandage it up to try to stop the bleeding, and then put my forearm and hand in a cast to keep it still overnight, and then I could go home, to return in the morning. She also gave me an IV of antibiotics.

Meanwhile my wife had arrived during all this, and just after 9pm we left and she drove me home. So, I’m now here, left arm in plaster, typing one-handed, trying to chill out enough to go to sleep soon after the adrenaline of the evening. And I have surgery to look forward to in the morning.

New content today:

Star Wars day

More Darths & Droids plotting today. I watched some more of The Force Awakens and came up with a question about one of the scenes in the film that is not particularly well explained. In discussion with co-writers, we wrote over 2000 words of story notes to explain this one scene in the film – maybe 5 seconds or so long.

I also converted another Imgur album of a suburban walking photo essay to a web page hosted on my site. I enhanced it with some additional research into historic buildings that I’d photographed along the way, learning a lot of interesting stuff about them.

New content today:

A very rainy day

Yesterday was very windy, today was very rainy. It’s been raining more or less all day, and has become steady and heavy during the afternoon and into the evening. It was light this morning, and I took the chance to take Scully for a walk up the street to the shops and back.

Last night when I took her out for pre-bedtime toilet, I was fortunate enough to see a meteor! I was only outside with her for a few minutes, but I habitually look up to observe the stars while outside and waiting for Scully to toilet. At the moment Scorpius is high in the sky around 10pm when I go out, and I’ve been observing it slowly climbing higher each night for several weeks as the stars wheel about the sky slightly faster than the sun. It’s one of my favourite constellations, with the instantly recognisable claws and spiralling tail, with the red heart of Antares at the centre. It’s beautiful, and it makes having to go out into the cold autumn/winter nights a bit more bearable.

Anyway, last night I looked up, as usual, to take in Scorpius above, and as I was looking, there was a brief flash and streak of white light, running across Scorpius from roughly north-east to south-west. I’ve seen meteors before and know what they look like (and I have a degree in astrophysics), and this was definitely one. So, cool!

Today I spent a lot of time going through Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, not quite frame by frame, but at least shot by shot, transcribing a list of scenes and shots for reference during story planning for Darths & Droids. I didn’t get through the whole film… I got through a bit less than an hour of it. But I noted several things relevant to our story, and had a big discussion with my co-writers via online chat, which led to some significant ideas and plotting notes. It was a day very well spent on the creative front. Now I just need to repeat that much productivity again, to complete a full scene by scene breakdown of the whole film. (I’d previously done the first 20 minutes or so prior to starting work on writing for the film.)

New content today:

A very windy day

The weather continues to be wintry here, with cold, overcast, and very strong winds today. I took Scully for a walk and it was a bit blowy. We recorded wind gusts up to 46 km/h today.

Blowin' in the wind

I spent a lot fo time today uploading photos and writing web pages for some of my Sydney walks, as part of the process of transferring from Imgur albums to pages hosted on my own site. I also expanded the commentary a lot, doing some research into various buildings that I’d taken photos of. In particular, this walk through Greenwich (the Sydney suburb) ended up having a lot of new historical details added.

Tonight for dinner I made a vegetable quiche. I make quiches a lot, but generally just with one vegetable, like chunks of pumpkin, or chopped spinach. A friend made some quiches recently with a variety of roasted vegetables, so I thought I’d fancy it up a bit. Here’s what I did:

  1. Chopped potato, butternut pumpkin (squash for the Americans), onion, broccolini. Spread on baking tray, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary. Baked 210°C for about 25 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile got some pre-made shortcrust pastry and put it in a pie dish. Placed it in the same oven after about 10 minutes, to blind bake for about 15 minutes.
  3. Placed vegetables in pastry shell, added chunks of feta, light sprinkle of salt, then poured over 3 eggs beaten with a bit of milk.
  4. Reduced oven to 190°C and bake 25 minutes.
  5. Yum!

Vege quiche 2

New content today:

Drizzly Saturday outing

Cold and wet weather has blown into Sydney. But my wife and I wanted to go out for a bit, just to get out of the house. We drove to the other side of the harbour to one of our favourite bakeries to get some lunch, and eat in the park a few blocks walk away, while Scully ran around and explored the grass.

I got a chicken pie and a Mexican beef pie, and a vanilla slice for a sweet treat. Check out the stickiness of the icing:

Vanilla slice, Drummoyne Bakehouse

This afternoon I did a bunch of story plotting and note writing for Darths & Droids. And a bunch of housework. I didn’t really get a whole lot done as it’s been a bit of a blah day, and I’ve felt a bit tired.

New content today: