October 2020 – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Bit of a lazy Sunday

It was almost a lazy Sunday. Except for my wife rousing me to go with her and Scully for a walk this morning. We did our usual weekend circuit, around to our favourite local bakery and back via the marina and Berry Island. It’s about 4.5 km, a good solid walk. Scully was still a bit tired after yesterday’s big day out, so she slept a lot of this afternoon.

I made a comic, but mostly I worked on processing some old photos from our trip to Tasmania in 2000. I have a bunch of photos taken in King Solomon’s Cave in Mole Creek Karst National Park.

Oh, and I wrote up a new Snot Block & Roll review from yesterday, plus an older one that I’d had waiting for a few months.

And… that’s about it.

New content today:

A nice day for a ferry trip

Today I went on a Saturday outing with my wife and Scully. We walked down to Greenwich Point wharf, which is a decent walk in itself from our place.

From here we caught a ferry across the harbour to Balmain, home of many Victorian era terrace houses.

We walked up and down the main street, checking out food places and shops, and grabbing a few little bites to eat here and there to make up an overall lunch. The Balmain Post Office is an interesting structure, built in 1886-7. The writing on it still proclaims it to be the “Post and Telegraph Office”.

There are also old sandstone churches. The St Andrew’s Congregational Church, 1854 (with Scully):

And the Campbell Street Presbyterian Church, 1867:

After a few hours of enjoying the warm spring sunshine and visiting a suburb we don’t go to very much, we headed back home on the ferry.

This afternoon my wife and I played a few games of Codenames Duet, and finally completed the 11th city in our campaign. Sydney, as it happened. 😀

New content today:

Parallax and gardening

The plan for today was to write a new proof for 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe. I managed to get one completed: 45: Parallax of the Moon. This proof includes a practical experiment that I can do, with the help of readers in different places around the world. So if you’d like to help, please give it a look!

After finishing that, I walked up to the hardware store to get some hex keys. I have a hand towel holder in the bathroom that’s been loose for ages. It’s held onto a wall bracket by a grub screw with a hex key head. In the past few days I searched for the original hex key, but couldn’t find it in the likely places, such as either the mini toolbox under the kitchen sink, or the big toolbox in the garage. So I had to go buy some hex keys. Measuring the size of the needed hex key was pretty much impossible, so I figured I’d just buy a set with various sizes.

Of course I got to the hardware stores and they have sets in both metric and imperial sizes, and of course I have no idea which one I need, so I end up having to buy both. Fortunately it was only $5 for a set of 8 keys in each type, so I paid $10 for 16 keys. I got home and picked a likely looking size – 2.5 mm from the metric set – and it fit perfectly. I tightened the grub screw… but the towel holder was still wobbly. So I unscrewed it completely and took it off the bracket, and discovered that the bracket itself was loose on the wall. So I got a screwdriver and tightened that up, then reattached the hook and tightened up the grub screw, et voilà! The hook is now firmly attached and not wobbly any more.

And I have 16 new hex keys, 15 of which I’ll probably never use. And one of which I might never use again.

This afternoon I went out to the park across the street to use my new weeding tool (bought the other day) to remove some bindii from the grass. I’ve never done weeding in a garden/lawn before, but it was pretty easy to figure it out. I used gardening gloves, but even so, the thorns from the bindii sometimes poked through the gloves and into my fingers. It was some work squatting on the grass and pulling weeds, but I collected half a bucket full in about an hour, clearing an area of a few square metres of bindii. This will make it much more comfortable for Scully to walk around, although I’ll need to clear quite a bit more space to get the little park fully clear.

Tonight is our fortnightly games night, still virtual because of COVID. I’ve managed to win a game of 7 Wonders and 6 Nimmt so far.

New content today:

Haircuts and barberism

This morning I did the weekly grocery shop, and before heading into the supermarket I went to my regular barber to get a haircut. The owner wasn’t there, and a new guy was doing cuts. I got into the chair, he asked me how I wanted it cut, I described it, and he started work.

And as he started cutting, he launched into conversation with, “So, what do you think is the best German sports car?”

I was a bit dumbfounded, not being a car person. I was thinking, “Audi is German… what sports cars are German?”

And then he starts talking about the various Porsche 911 models… and I’m left just nodding my head, while trying not to nod my head while he’s cutting my hair… So yeah. It was a bit like that.

In good news, I made my first Etsy sale today! Just a single greeting card, but it’s off to a start. I realised I need to find a cheaper way to post them. I’ll have to buy some envelopes in bulk and figure out the cheapest postage rate.

And I made some comics and processed some photos… and the day just flew by.

New content today:

Etsy-fying

I had a busy day today, working on setting up an Etsy shop to sell greeting cards featuring my photography. I started by creating an account, then setting up a store, and adding some products. It turned out to be really easy to add and edit products – the user interface is much nicer than the one in WooCommerce that I use for my own photography website.

I finished adding a bunch of products, and hit the “next” button for setting up a store, expecting to have a few more configuration options to set up before finalising things, but Etsy immediately told me that my store was now live! That was a bit surprising, but at least it prompted me to finish the rest of the site customisation quickly!

Anyway, the result is I now have a functional Etsy store: DavidMorganMarPhoto

That took me pretty much all day to do, with breaks for meals and a bit of housework in between.

New content today:

Stocktake Tuesday

After yesterday’s 34°C, the temperature in Sydney didn’t even reach 20°C today, so it was time to rug up again. I had to go out on a couple of errands, first to the post office to send a redditgifts Secret Santa gift, and then to the tailor to pick up the new cotton jacket that I bought a couple of weeks ago, and left to be altered (described last Monday here). The tailor did a really nice job fixing the pocket, and now it opens normally and usefully on the top instead of the side.

At home I spent a couple of hours doing a stocktake of the greeting cards I’ve had printed and have been selling at market stalls. I hadn’t been keeping track of the stock/sales in each of the designs up to now, but now I have a better idea of what photos are selling and what I need to order more of. I also repacked them from the way I had them, which was very haphazard, and meant I had to search the entire collection to find a specific photo if I ran out of stock on the market display. Now I have them sorted in a single box, separated by labelled dividers, so I can instantly pull the exact card I want.

I also want to take individual photos of all the stock, possibly tomorrow, so I can build myself an Etsy store to sell the greeting cards. I need to find more ways to reach customers, and this seems like a good avenue. I’ve had a look at their terms and conditions and looked at a few stores selling photo greeting cards, and I think it should be easy enough to get started.

While in a work mode, I spent time going through recent ISO Photography standards ballots that Australia needs to vote on, and downloading all of the reports presented at the recent meeting a couple of weeks ago. I still have an action item and some follow-up work to do, writing a report for Standards Australia.

After completing all this, and also taking Scully to the dog park for about and hour and a half, I managed to squeeze in assembling a couple of Darths & Droids comics before cooking dinner (vegetable fajitas), and then making myself a dessert (apple and blueberry crumble), which is right now baking in the oven as I type. I can’t wait…

Update:

Mmmmm….

New content today:

No-holiday Monday

Today was the Labour Day public holiday here, but I actually did quite a bit of work-related stuff for my photography business. I worked on my portfolio a bit, booked a hire car for transporting goods to the market in a couple of weeks, and ordered some more stock of greeting cards to replace stock I’ve sold in the past markets. I also took care of some accounting and tax record-keeping stuff. Fun fun fun.

This afternoon I dedicated to writing more Darths & Droids comics, and got a good batch completed.

In between I went to the park with Scully, to do some ball throwing and get her some exercise. Otherwise we mostly spent the day inside, as it was pretty hot – today it got up to 34°C here where we are – yesterday’s sea breeze failed and we didn’t benefit from lower coastal temperatures.

New content today:

Comments on a Postcard #4285

Feels like summer’s here

It was warm and summery today, temperatures reaching up to 34°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was cooler with the sea breeze. It’s supposed to be hotter tomorrow, and then a cold front will come through, dropping temperatures back to around 20°C from Tuesday.

Being a long weekend, with a public holiday tomorrow, a lot of people took advantage of the warm weather by heading to the beach, or out on the harbour on boats. I went to a family lunch at my wife’s mother’s place, which is near a small harbour beach, and the traffic was horrendous, and parking near her house was non-existent. We had to park a few hundred metres away up a hill.

Before leaving for the lunch, we took Scully on a walk, doing our usual weekend loop to the bakery and back, but we took the variant route home through a bushwalk along the shore. This is actually my preferred route, but we’ve been avoiding it for the past several weeks because the local council laid fox baits to kill feral foxes in the bushland, and they’re deadly to dogs, so they advise not letting dogs into the area for about 6 weeks.

Yesterday I baked brownies to take to the family lunch, but they’re devilishly difficult to time correctly, so the centres stay soft and gooey, but the exteriors are firm enough to support the brownies when sliced. Last time we made them it turned out like a dense firm cake, with none of the delicious gooey centres. This time I took it out of the oven and let it cool, and then tried to slice it, but the centre of the baking pan wasn’t solid enough to be sliced. Fortunately the bits around the edge were pretty good, so we got a decent batch out of it. And the sloppy mess in the middle I saved to heat up and add vanilla ice cream to for dessert at home.

The other thing that happened is we went onto daylight saving time last night. I love daylight saving, with long warm evenings of light so you can do things outdoors until about 8 pm. But it means now my webcomics are updating apparently an hour later for me, which places them perilously close to bedtime. I’m thinking seriously of moving the update time an hour earlier, so I can check and write about the comics before it gets too late in the evening. In fact, maybe even a couple of hours earlier. Then I won’t have to hang around online checking things as late in the evening any more. I’ll have a bit more of a think about this tomorrow.

New content today:

Sneaking out for high tea

Scully was due for a groom at the dog groomer’s place today. We dropped her off at 10am, and my wife and I decided to use the time to sneak off into the city and get a high tea at The Palace, a fancy tea room in the Queen Victoria Building.

We took a train into the city, which felt a bit weird because we haven’t used public transport much at all since COVID-19 began. Normally on a Saturday morning the trains would be fairly full, especially getting close to Christmas like this. But today they were fairly empty, with only a handful of people spread out at sensible distances inside the carriages. And the city itself felt really empty, rather than the usual bustle of people.

But we had a good tea. I have to admit that when the servings came out, I was a little underwhelmed at the portions, having expected a bit more. But the food was very rich, and by the time we finished it, we were both very full and didn’t need anything else.

Indeed, although we began at 11am, it pretty much did us for lunch and we didn’t need anything until dinner time. Although I had an early dinner, around 5pm, because my friend organised a game of golf with another friend of ours, at the par-3 pitch-and-putt course where we’ve gone several times. And for something different, we played a twilight/evening game today, under the floodlights that they have at the course.

It was interesting and fun, although occasionally it was difficult to see where a ball went. I played moderately well, scoring 81, 2 strokes off my best on the course of 79. I would have done better except for a terrible blow-out 7 on one hole where I tried to pitch the ball up a slope to the green three times, falling just centimetres short each time and having the ball roll back down the hill to roughly where it had started.

The sunset was nice, but the moon rising in the east was amazing, a deep red colour due to smoke in the air from controlled burning operations taking place at the moment, to forestall another bad fire season over the summer.

Oh, an I also baked a batch of brownies today, both to take to golf and share with the guys, and also for a family lunch gathering that we’re having tomorrow.

New content today:

Little tasks and writing

I did a lot of little housekeeping tasks today – some literally housework, some just some things I needed to get done for other reasons.

And I did a 1k run, setting a time of 4:25, exactly the same as last week.

And then I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids comic scripts.

New content today: