Month: June 2024

When one door opens another closes

Friday was online games night with my friends. We played Applejack, Just One, 7 Wonders. I actually won the game of Applejack and the first game of 7 Wonders! Much better than my usual record.

The only other event of note on Friday was going out for dinner to our usual favourite pizza place. We both tried new dishes! My wife got the ravioli, filled with spinach and ricotta, in a tomato sauce. I tried a pizza combination I hadn’t had before, with pepperoni, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, and anchovies.

The weather was a bit unsettled, but not raining when we walked up. Fortunately we took our umbrellas though, because it began raining just before we left to come home. I checked the rain radar on my phone and thought it would pass in a few minutes, so we sat and waited for a while. It seemed to be getting lighter, so we set out…

And during the 10 minute walk home the rain began pelting down. Even with umbrellas we were so wet by the time we got home that we had to do complete changes of clothes and hang up what we’d been wearing in the bathroom to dry.

Today my wife was keen to go to the new croissant place that I’d found on Thursday. She’d seen the chocolate hazelnut one that I saved for dessert and wanted to know where it was from. So this morning I took her there. It’s a place called Moon Phase, and it’s a Korean bakery making French pastries, and Korean variants. There are some savoury pastries with kimchee or bulgogi beef, for example.

It was busy there this morning. My wife got the plain butter croissant, while I tried an almond croissant. Really good. Scully got to meet a couple of other small dogs while we were sitting outside at one of the two tiny tables they had. (There was more seating inside.)

My wife looked it up and found that this place had only opened in March this year. But on the topic of food places, she also had bad news. She’d heard that Botanica Garden Cafe at Waverton had closed! You may recall that just over a week ago I started working my way through their all-day breakfast menu. And now they’ve shut down!!

It’s always awful when a good food place closes down. And we recently lost our favourite Turkish restaurant as well, just a few weeks ago.

This afternoon we gave Scully a bath, since she’d been getting wet a lot in the rainy weather and starting to be a little “wet dog” smell.

Oh, and I finally did stage 13 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. It has an owlbear!

Lego D&D set, stage 13

And myconids!

Lego D&D set, stage 13

New content yesterday:

New content today:

More record rainfall?

It’s pouring down outside as I type this tonight. There are flash flood warnings in place for parts of the state and regular flood warnings for some of the rivers around Sydney. I’ve heard some pretty loud thunder too, as I was teaching my ethics classes a little earlier. With this current rain system, we have a good chance of passing Sydney’s annual average rainfall figure, less than 6 months into the year. This is already the second wettest year on record up to today’s date, beaten only by 2022, which was the overall wettest year on record.

In the classes tonight, talking about dilemmas, I asked the kids who they could ask for help to make a tough decision. I was expecting answers like friends and family, maybe teachers, and hoping for broader answers including professionals (e.g. doctors, scientists, lawyers), or even potentially asking people on the Internet (e.g. StackExchange or even reddit). I was surprised though when one kid answered: ChatGPT. And then in the next class another kid suggested ChatGPT as well!

I did manage to get to the post office this morning before the rain closed in around lunchtime. I found a new place to get croissants, not too far away, and bought a plain butter croissant for a snack, and a chocolate hazelnut one for dessert tonight. I never would have found this place without accidentally stumbling on a recommendation online, and it was well worth the visit. I’ll have to take my wife there one day soon to show her my discovery.

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Talking about dilemmas

This morning I worked on my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics classes. The new topic is “Dilemmas”. I start by giving the kids some interesting dilemmas to think about and try to decide what they would do, and then go into questions such as:

  1. What are some reasons why a decision might be difficult to make?
  2. How do you feel when you have to make a difficult choice?
  3. What are some ways you can make it easier to decide when you’re faced with a tough dilemma?
  4. Who can you ask when you’re having trouble making a decision? How can they help you?
  5. Is it okay to ask strangers on the Internet for advice on making a difficult decision that is really about your own life?
  6. If you have to make a difficult decision, should you feel guilty about it?

I took Scully for a walk to the post office again, to mail some more Magic cards to buyers. And then this afternoon I planned ahead for a future ethics class, scheduling in a week for a discussion on the topic of “Tradition versus Innovation”, which will be in the first week of July.

The weather is cold and grey and miserable this week, but at least it isn’t raining.

For dinner tonight we just made our own things, since I had classes from 5-8pm. I made myself some grilled cheese toasties, with cheddar and mozzarella, and sweet zucchini pickles which my wife got from the local farmer’s market. I topped one with some mango chutney, and the second with sriracha sauce for extra flavours. With home made sourdough bread they were pretty good.

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Special calzones with caramelised fennel

Today was cold. I took Scully for a morning walk and it was pretty chilly.

This morning I sold some more old Magic cards online. I had to make a couple of packages and take them to the post office after lunch. I spent some time working on Darths & Droids comics, scripts and producing the actual strips.

And I started cooing early for a special dinner. I chopped up a whole fennel bulb and fried it up to caramelise it and make it soft, adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to deglaze the saucepan and add flavour. I let that sit for the afternoon. Then this evening I made pizza dough, chopped up some spinach leaves and blanched them quickly. I assembled them into calzones, with ricotta cheese, and baked them in the oven. I’d also made a tomato sauce with chopped onions, garlic, basil, and oregano, to spoon over the top of the baked calzones.

I’ve made calzones before, with either just spinach and ricotta, or mushrooms inside. This was the first time I tried fennel and it was delicious, adding another dimension to the flavours.

I’m also starting to organise our next Dungeons & Dragons session, which is planned for 28 June. I thought we could use another payer, and remembered an old friend who I haven’t seen for a while. She used to play with me and one of the other current players in different games many years ago. If you read Irregular Webcomic!, you’ll know her as the player of Alvissa the elf in the Fantasy theme and Paris in the Space theme. So I sent her an email to invite her to join our current game.

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Okonomiyaki day

I had my usual four classes this morning, taking me right up until 1pm. I had the leftover rice and vegetables from last night for lunch, fried up with an egg.

Then I took Scully for a walk. It was cloudy and cold, but not rainy. Winter feels really cold this year. I think it must be me getting older and disliking the cold more. I considered going for a run in the afternoon after my wife got home from work, but it was so cold and I felt too lazy, so gave that a miss.

During the afternoon I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, then made the new strips for this week and uploaded them for queuing in the buffer.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki, with the spring onions and cabbage, also grating a carrot into the batter before frying it up in thick pancakes. We ran out of okonomi sauce, so I’ve added that to my shopping list for next time I got to an Asian grocery store.

More classes tonight, not ending until 10pm…

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A brief meeting with visiting relatives

This morning we all slept in. It rained a lot overnight, and we had almost 150 mm in 24 hours, but it had cleared by this morning and it was sunny but cold.

My wife’s nephew and his partner are visiting Sydney from their new home in Auckland, having recently moved there from Oslo. So they’re now a lot closer to home, but still in another country. It was the first chance we had to see them for over a year. There was a morning tea at a cafe with some of the rest of the family. Because it was so cold, they wanted to sit inside, rather than at an outdoor table, so after saying hello I had to look after Scully.

I drove with her to Collaroy where I got pies for an early lunch. We walked over to the beach and sat on the bench looking out over the murky ocean and grey sky. The swell was large and a lot of surfers were out there braving the freezing conditions. After that I drove back to pick up my wife.

We got home at lunch time. I spent the afternoon writing up a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts, which I’ll photograph tomorrow.

And then some evening ethics classes to round out the day. For dinner I made a stir fry with 5 green vegetables: cabbage, broccolini, spring onions, celery, and fennel, flavoured with garlic, ginger, chilli, miso, mirin, and soy sauce, served over brown rice. It turned out pretty good.

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A missed classic

I discovered yesterday the greatest missed cover song opportunity ever. In 2003 No Doubt released a greatest hits compilation and wanted a new song to feature on it, and decided to record a cover. They considered hundreds of songs and narrowed it down to “It’s My Life” by Talk Talk and “Don’t Change” by INXS.

They chose “It’s My Life”.

I really like No Doubt’s “It’s My Life”, but hot damn…. I want to hear them do “Don’t Change”.

Friday was games night with my friends. It should have been in-person at someone’s place, but there were a couple of illnesses and we decided to convert it to online so more of us could participate. We played a new game for me, Cat in the Box, which is a quantum trick-taking game. The deck is simply 5 copies of each card, numbered 1 through to 9. Each copy is identical and has no suit.

You play tricks as normal, except that when you play a card, you declare its suit: red, blue, yellow, or green. There’s a board where you mark when you play each card. So if you lead with a 9 and say it’s blue, you put one of your pawns on the blue 9 on the board, to show that that card has been played. Other people have to either (a) follow suit by playing a card and declaring it to be blue—making sure it’s a card that hasn’t already been played by marking an empty space on the board with their pawns—or (b) play a card and declare it to be another suit. If you don’t follow the led suit then you have to mark on your personal player card (for everyone to see) that you have no more cards of the led suit (blue in this case); then in future tricks of the current hand you are not allowed to declare any card to be blue. Red is always trumps, so you can trump another led colour by declaring you have no more of that colour and playing a card and declaring it to be red (if you legally can do so).

Note that there are 5 cards of each number, but only 4 of them can ever be played, because there are only 4 suits. Also, it’s possible for you to get into a situation where you have several cards in your hand, but are unable to play any of them. For example, you have a 3, a 5, and a 6. But you’ve declared yourself out of blue cards, and the only available 3, 5, and 6 on the board are all blue. If this happens, you can’t play a card without causing a quantum paradox, and the round ends, with you scoring zero.

On top of this, after the cards are dealt you can discard any one card (to help avoid having unplayable cards), and then you have to bid a number of tricks that you expect win before the hand begins. You get one point per trick won. If you make your bid exactly, you get bonus points equal to the size of the largest cluster of your pawns on the board, connected vertically or horizontally (not diagonally). So there’s incentive to play cards of adjacent values or suits rather than more freely.

It’s a very different trick-taking game, and requires some very different strategies. I throughly enjoyed it.

Today, Saturday, I went for a 5k run in the morning and then spent the rest of the morning doing some overdue housecleaning – a thorough vacuum cleaning and cleaning the bathroom. And then the rain came in. It’s been raining heavily all afternoon and into the evening, sometimes very heavily. There’s also some heavy thunder and lightning this evening too. We’re just a tick shy of 100 mm of rain in the past 12 hours, and will likely reach that value before the 12 hours are up, with more heavy rain throughout the night and into tomorrow.

This evening our new neighbours across the hall invited us over for pre-dinner drinks and appetisers. We made some small pizza bites to take over – bite sized blobs of pizza dough topped with either tomato paste or pesto, and then a little bit of cheese, either mozzarella or feta. We sat and shared some wine and they also provided cheese, crackers, chips, nuts, dips, carrot sticks, and some dried fruit. We had a nice discussion of various things, getting to know each other better. They’re South African, having moved here from Johannesburg (which we knew), so they had some interesting stories to tell about that and various travels they’ve done. Scully got to play with their dog Sophie.

We came home after a couple of hours, and have eaten so much that just a bit of extra snacking will do us for dinner!

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