Month: December 2021

A mixed bag Christmas treats day

I got up early this morning. The sun is rising early these days – in fact I just realised today is the summer solstice. I went for a 2.5k run before the day got too hot. I’m still improving in my times, despite the weather recently getting warmer and more humid. I’ve been hovering around 13:20-13:30 for the past week or so. I thought today’s time would be slow because of the heat, but somehow I managed to clock 13:03, my best time so far.

Remember the council renovation work on the nearby park, which I posted about a few months back? They finished the work a month or so ago, but I was very disappointed by a set of sandstone stepping stones which the workers laid between the path and a section of grass up a steepish slope. The posted landscaping plans showed a proper stairway installed there, but for some reason they didn’t go ahead with that, and instead simply laid a set of three stepping stones on the hillside – at the angle of the slope. So each stone was at maybe a 20° angle or so to the horizontal. This made them tricky to walk on – not especially so for me, but we have a lot of elderly people in the neighbourhood who use that park, and I could see that they would be difficult to negotiate for anyone of less than sprightly mobility.

So I contacted the council. I phoned up and spoke to the councillor in charge of the landscaping work, and explained why I thought the stepping stones were dangerous, and suggested that – even if the full staircase had been abandoned – the stones could be relaid so they are horizontal, thus forming a set of horizontal steps ascending the slope. The woman I spoke to took my suggestion seriously and said it sounded like a good improvement, and that she would look into it.

And a few days ago, this happened!

New steps in the park

The stepping stone slabs that were sloping have been relaid with concrete under them so that they now lie level, and form steps, exactly as I’d asked for. Nice! You really can get government to do some things if you ask nicely for them.

This morning I had an Outschool ethics class scheduled… Even though I stopped all my classes for a few weeks over Christmas, Outschool has a teacher tool where you can set up time slots in which parents can schedule classes if you have no class already on at that time. I’d set this up early on, when I was trying to expand my enrolments – and forgotten about it. So, of course, a parent scheduled a class for today. I tried to contact them to ask them to choose a different time slot, because I really wanted to keep Tuesdays free, but they never got back to me. So when the time came, I started Zoom and waited for the student…

And they never showed up. Oh well, I get paid for it anyway, so at least it wasn’t a complete waste of time. After 10 minutes waiting, you can cancel the class, which I did. And then a minute later the parent contacted me! But they didn’t complain about the cancelled class as I feared. They requested a transfer into one of the existing Monday classes (which start up again in January). So that’s actually good.

After I picked up Scully from my wife’s work, we went on a drive. My wife had got an order for some dog bandanas from a woman who had met her at the market on Sunday, shed offered to make them and deliver before Christmas. To ensure that, I drove over and popped them in the mailbox, rather than entrust them to Australia Post. It was only about 20 minutes drive, so not too far.

On the way back I stopped at a liquor store to pick up some bottles of wine, since we were completely out of red wine. They allow dogs there, so I could take Scully in with me. And then we stopped again on the way home, at the new bakery in Naremburn that I’ve mentioned a few times. I’d been feeling like some cake for the past few days, and decided to satiate my craving. They had slices of carrot cake there – they seem to have a rotating menu of sweet treats that they go through, as there’s a different selection every time I go. They also had some amazing looking mince tarts for Christmas, so I got half a dozen of those too, which we’ll work through over the next few days.

In between all this, I worked on Darths & Droids comics. Phew! A busy day!

Addendum: And I just fed my sourdough starter, in preparation for baking tomorrow. It’s a significant day, because today my starter is a year old! It was spawned off a friend’s starter one year ago today.

New content today:

Catching up with an old friend

Today I’d arranged a lunch with an old friend from university, named Gina, who I hadn’t seen in…. over 25 years. She’s moved down to Melbourne, but is up in Sydney visiting her parents for Christmas. Last time we tried to meet up we were foiled by me and my wife travelling to Hobart for Christmas.

She’s staying with her parents, who live way on the other end of Sydney, so I drove most of the way there, and she came partway to meet me somewhere in the middle. The place she chose for lunch was a cafe at a marina on the Georges River, which was also next to a tidal baths swimming area.

Como Tidal Baths

I also took Scully with me, so my friend could meet her. It was a warm day, but thankfully we had a shady table with a view of the river and the swimmers. We caught up over lunch of seafood, chips, and salad. When you haven’t seen someone for that long, there’s a lot of things you have to tell one another!

After lunch I drove back home with Scully. And we sat and waited for my wife to come home. (I did some comics work, and skimmed through some cool new Star Trek RPG sourcebooks that I got from a Humble Bundle deal.) My wife had some unfun news though – her work has cancelled their Christmas party which was to be held tomorrow, due to COVID concerns. They were going to finish work before lunch and spend the afternoon at the party venue, but now she has to work a regular day tomorrow. 😕

New content today:

Pre-Christmas market day

Today was the first time the East Lindfield markets were held since July, the last few having been cancelled due to COVID restrictions. My wife and I figured it would be a good day, being close to Christmas, and hopefully a good number of people would be out shopping.

I got up and had a quick breakfast before packing the car and heading over to the market site. As usual, I need to make two trips because we have a small car, and after unloading the stuff I returned home to pick up my wife, Scully, and the remainder of the gear. We had our stall set up and ready to go about 20 minutes before the official starting time of 9 o’clock.

The day was hot, really hot. I heard on the news this evening that it was the hottest day since January (last summer). It felt really humid too, although checking the humidity later when I got home it was only around 50% for most of the day. Fortunately, we had an indoor stall, and the community centre we were in had recently renovated and installed air conditioning, so it was fairly pleasant where we were. But all of the people with outdoor stalls under marquees must have been sweltering.

But there were a good number of customers coming through today, which was nice. We didn’t sell a lot of stuff, but we made a profit above the stall rental fee, and handed out a bunch of business cards. And by the time we got home again, my wife actually got an order on Etsy for 3 dog bandanas from one of the women she’d given a business card to, so that sort of counts as well. And it was nice to see some of the familiar faces of the other stallholders there, after so many months of cancellations. So overall it was a decent and positive day.

The hot weather broke into a storm as I was making my second trip home with our stuff. We got a few minutes of heavy rain, but the storm had merely skirted us, and as we discovered when watching the evening news it had caused havoc further north, tearing rooves off buildings, bringing down power lines and trees, destroying cars, and killing a person. The news footage was really quite scary. Another storm front come through later and we got very strong winds here and heavy rain, but I don’t see any damage from our windows.

This evening it’s time to relax, after a busy and exhausting day!

New content today:

Gaming Friday + Trekking Saturday double update

I didn’t have time to do an entry yesterday as it was board games night with my friends and I was out all evening. I did my run and exercises in the morning and some Darths & Droids work.

In the afternoon I worked on making some tutorial exercises for students in the university data engineering course. I wanted to make some fairly simple exercises involving calculating means and medians and standard deviations and such stuff from a dataset. I found several sites with free datasets that could be used, and went through them looking for something interesting. The first I found was a Kaggle dataset on avocado prices. That seemed okay, but then I found a cool site with other datasets, including one that was almost 2000 different people’s guesses as to the weight of a cow in a guessing competition. That looked amusing, and it has some interesting statistical properties. And then I found another site which has a set of data about the passengers on the Titanic, including nationality, sex, cabin class, fare paid, and whether they survived the sinking or not. I think this could be really interesting as you can ask questions like the average fare paid by survivors compared to the average fare paid by people who died. I still have some work to do to analyse this myself and turn it into student exercises, but I think this is a good start.

Games night was face-to-face, but we only had four participants. The first game we played was Hadrian’s Wall.

Hadrian's Wall

In this game each player is a Roman commander in charge of an outpost on Hadrian’s Wall. You get a bunch of meeples representing different types of people, and “resources”, and you spend these things to develop your outpost. The game is played by marking checkboxes on a pair of playsheets – each time you pay the cost for something in meeples and/or resources, you mark it off on your sheets. Marking off certain boxes grants you more meeples or resources, or alternatively points which are scored along four tracks: renown, piety, valour, and discipline. There are a lot of interactions and much of the game is optimising your spends to cascade into more meeples and resources that you can then spend to get more stuff. There’s a lot going on and many many options.

I kind of enjoyed it and would play it again once or twice, but I feel like it wouldn’t hold my interest after a few more games. It’s a very solitaire-like play experience – there was virtually zero interaction between the four players, and we spent most of our times heads down examining our own scoresheets to try to optimise our turns, so it felt a bit antisocial as well. I ended up “winning”, with 80 points to the second player on 77, but I made a mistake at one point and did a few spends on things that I shouldn’t have had access to until I’d developed something else – it’s a very easy mistake to make on your first game.

The host’s wife arrived back home while we were playing, and asked us what we were playing and if it was fun. Another player said, “It’s a bit like we’re all working on spreadsheets, and yes, it’s fun.” I agree with that assessment – it felt a lot like optimising a mathematics problem, and it was kind of fun, but for me I think it would wear thin within another few games.

The second game we played was 18 Holes, a golf simulation.

18 Holes

I think this game could have been good, however we got kind of messed up during the set-up. The owner suggested playing the “chaos golf” variant, and we set up the board for that. But then when he described how to play it – everyone just aims at any hole they like and we all go around the course in whatever individual directions we want to try and complete unscored holes before other players – another player said that sounded silly and can’t we just play a normal round of golf? So we did that, but we kind of had half the chaos golf rules and set-up still, and honestly it got a bit tired and repetitive, and it became clear that because of the “chaos golf” club sets that were handed out, certain players had significant advantages over other players. So it was rather unsatisfying. I feel like if we’d played one or the other version according to the rulebook it would have been fine, but we ended up in a weird non-rules-legal hybrid that didn’t play well. I’d try this again, but I’d want to play it strictly by the book next time.

I got home late, so didn’t write this up until just now. Today we had a long drive out to another suburb because my wife had an appointment there, so we went together, and I took Scully for a walk at the nearby wetlands park while we waited for her. This is a nice place for a walk as there are plenty of birds, including many species that I don’t get to see around where I live.

We got home and relaxed for the afternoon. The day has been hot – it really feels like summer finally. We had 31°C in the city, up to 29°C in some suburbs (the city is always cooler as it’s on the water).

This evening we went out to a nice seafood restaurant for dinner. It’s one of our favourites, but a little expensive so we don’t go as often as we’d like to. It’s very nice sitting outside, in warm evening air, with light still in the sky and a cool breeze to soften the heat a bit, and have some really well prepared seafood.

New content today:

Late spring cleaning

Today I started a belated spring clean of the house. I’d booked a carpet shampooing machine, hired from the local hardware store. I’ve used these machines several times in the past, and it really brings the carpet up nicely. I like to try and do it a couple of times a year, but I think it’s been longer than that.

After breakfast and vacuuming the house thoroughly to remove any loose dust and lint, I picked up the shampooer at 9am. Once at home, I filled the machine with hot water and carpet shampoo, and began the tough work of spraying the carpet and sucking up the water and dirt. If you’ve never done this before, imagine using a vacuum cleaner, but three times as heavy, including the hose and nozzle bits. And you have to scrub it back and forth on the carpet with pressure, and multiple times. It’s serious physical work, hot and exhausting. After an hour or so I was dripping with sweat and ready to quit. Fortunately my place is not large, and that completed the job.

I emptied out and cleaned the shampooing machine for return to the hardware store. The minimum hire is 24 hours, so I could have returned it tomorrow, but didn’t want to have it hanging around, so I took it back to the hardware store at lunch time. The guy there looked at my receipt for the refundable deposit.

He said, “You’re returning it already?”

I said, “Yeah, my place is small. I finished it in a couple of hours.”

He said, “You know you’re supposed to wait until the carpet dries, and then do it again. And then do it a third time, until the water comes off clean, so you know the carpet is clean.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll do that next time.”

He said, “You’re not cleaning a rental before moving out, are you?”

“No, it’s my own place.”

He said, “Oh, well that’s okay then. But next time do it properly.”

Huh. The dozen or so times I’ve hired one of these machines, nobody’s ever told me that before. But honestly, one go over the carpet was exhausting enough. I can barely imagine doing it again in the afternoon, and then again in the evening!

I basically spent the afternoon relaxing my tired muscles. Until heading out for a 2.5k run after my wife got home. And for dinner I made a pasta with broccoli in a tomato sauce.

New content today:

A day off!

For the first time since April I don’t need to start a new week of ethics classes this week! I have taken the next three weeks off to have a bit of a break over the Christmas and New Year period.

To celebrate, I went out to play golf this morning – for the first time in months. Rather than hit a full size course, I went to the pitch and putt par 3 course, to try and get my eye in a bit before tackling anything longer. It was a fine sunny day, and actually warm – finally it’s starting to feel like summer. The course wasn’t very full, so I hit two balls from each tee and played them in parallel, so that I ended up with two complete rounds of 18 holes.

My previous best total on this course was 72. It’s par 54 for 18 holes, so that equates to averaging a bogey on each hole. Today my two simultaneous rounds scored 72 and 71! So my best round, and averaging less than a bogey per hole. Maybe I’ll try to get onto a full course next week.

I went home via the pie shop at Collaroy, where I grabbed lunch to eat while sitting by the beach, watching the birds and the paragliders who were taking advantage of the winds off the headland.

And this afternoon I relaxed a bit. And did my now daily run, and made dinner.

New content today:

Last science lesson of the year

And today I did the final science lesson for the girl I’m teaching individually online. Today we rounded off the last 11 lessons on physics by discussing wave properties, including refraction, dispersion, and the Doppler effect. We’re having a break in this course over Christmas too, and I think next year I’ll start on biology.

I spent much of today preparing the lesson, making diagrams and slides. I also took Scully for a couple of long walks to tire her out, since my wife said she’d been being getting into mischief at her office.

Not much else to report today, and it’s a bit late, so I’ll leave it there.

New content today:

Last ethics of the year

Today I taught my final two ethics classes for the year. I’m taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period and will return to teaching the kids in the first week of January.

To celebrate, I went out for lunch, trying a new cafe in the area that I haven’t tried before, called Bitter & Twisted. They had a Korean chicken burger on the menu which looked tempting, so I got that.

Korean chicken burger

Wow, that’s enormous! I was very full after that. The burger was decent, but the chips were really good.

This afternoon was the Christmas party at the dog park where I take Scully. I took her there before 4pm so we could go for a walk along the waterfront before the party officially started at 4:30. My wife finished work a little early and came on down as well, arriving around 5, so we could meet and greet all the other dog owners and share some of the snacks and things that everyone had brought. It’s a nice gathering, in a nice outdoor setting, with kids and dogs running around.

This evening back at home… I can relax! Whew! Oh, also, it was sunny today! And warm! It almost feels like summer, finally.

New content today:

Double bread and cooking Sunday

Late this morning we had a morning tea with my wife’s brother and mother, at a cafe a few suburbs away. The traffic was awful, in both directions. It seems that Sydney traffic is back to its usual levels after the COVID lockdown, at least on weekends. I think the weekday traffic is still down a bit due to many people now working from home.

On the way home I dropped my wife and Scully at a local market so they could browse around and do a bit of Christmas shopping. Back home I worked on Irregular Webcomic! strips for the upcoming week.

I also did a lot of cooking. My wife wanted a fruit and nut loaf with the sourdough starter that I refreshed this morning, for baking tomorrow morning. But we need some normal bread too, so I threw together a loaf using yeast. It rises a lot faster, so I could bake it this afternoon. We had some of it with dinner, which was corn fritters with tomato relish. I spotted that on the cafe menu this morning and decided I felt like it for dinner. So I found some relish recipes, but most of them called for doing stuff overnight! I eventually found a recipe that was done within about half an hour, and made that. I adapted it a bit, using some ingredients from another recipe, including capers, which I had in the fridge. It turned out really good!

I don’t know if I’ve ever made corn fritters before either so I found a recipe and fiddled with it a bit, and they also turned out nicely. It would have been good to have these with a salad, but I didn’t happen to have salad ingredients ready to go, so we just had them with some of the freshly baked bread.

New content today:

It almost didn’t rain today

It was actually sunny for much of today, although not very hot – there was a chilly wind blowing for much of the day. I got stuck into writing and making some new Darths & Droids comics.

Besides my now usual 2.5k run, I went out later in the afternoon to take Scully for a walk. It was sunny when we left, but 15 minutes later it was raining! Fortunately it wasn’t too heavy and we didn’t get too wet.

I’ve also been playing a lot with artflow.ai, a website that generates portraits from text descriptions. It’s a lot of fun, and my friends and I have been having fun making blended portraits, such as:

Bilbo Baggins played by Harry Potter:

Bilbo Baggins played by Harry Potter

Or Gandalf played by Queen Elizabeth II:

Gandalf played by Queen Elizabeth II

New content today: