I missed yesterday’s post because I was so busy that I just didn’t have time for it. I had 4 ethics classes before lunch, then spent the afternoon sorting out Magic: the Gathering cards to try and get some more sold and shipped off. This time I went through all the cards from the Fallen Empires expansion released in 1994, and I found I had enough cards to assemble a few complete sets of all 187 cards in the set. These are not expensive cards, and each full set is only worth $130 or so. But selling them as sets means I get rid of a lot of common cards, of which I have numerous copies, and which would be difficult to sell in anything other than bulk lots.
I also had to quickly make an Irregular Webcomic! strip using photos previously shot, because I’d neglected to make new strips for this week on the weekend. And I did some work on new Darths & Droids strips too, to try not to fall behind on those as well. Then I had two more ethics classes lat in the evening to round out the day. And in between I walked Scully and made pizza for dinner.
Tuesday’s have been my day off ethics classes for a long time, and I use the time to write the upcoming week’s topic. But this week I begin teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney, again, in the image processing course that runs in second semester. And this year the class is scheduled for 2-5pm on Thursdays, and the travel time to get home clashes with one of my classes on Thursday evening. So I had to move that class to a new day, and Tuesday was the only sensible choice. So my deadline to get my class written was 5pm today, instead of 5pm Wednesday as it has been.
In addition, I posted those Fallen Empires sets for sale on a Magic Discord server, and got some buyers. So I had to go the post office twice – once to get packing boxes, and twice to mail them off after packing the cards carefully.
And the plumber came today to install a new kitchen sink mixer tap. Our old one had been falling apart, with the aerator coming out back in May so that the water splattered everywhere if turned on beyond a slow trickle, and recently it also began dripping. I’d bought a replacement tap a few weeks ago, and thought I’d give it a go of installing it myself, given my recent success replacing the toilet valve. But I prevaricated and kept putting it off, until finally the dripping got to me and last weekend I opened up the tap box and had a look at the installation instructions. I decided this was going to be significantly more complicated than the toilet valve, so I called a plumber.
So the plumber had to work on it for almost two hours, and he measured the water pressure in the pipes and found it to be fairly high at 900 kPa. He said that was great for nice shower pressure, but too much for a kitchen tap, and indeed the tap was only warranted for pressures up to 500 kPa. So he had to install pressure regulators on the hot and cold water pipes. And then install a bit of copper pipe so the flexible hoses of the new tap could reach. In other words, this was way beyond my means, and I thanked my lucky stars that I just called a plumber and didn’t try to do this job myself.
And then I had to make another new Irregular Webcomic! strip for tonight’s update. I really need to find some time to get ahead and buffer some strips in advance.
Oh, and I had the first ethics class on a Tuesday! Thankfully all of the students who were doing it on Thursday got my messages about the change of day and could make it, so I had three kids, talking about Shapeshifting. I think this is a good topic, because it was a fun and interesting discussion.
Oh, and in other good news, the local council here has sent us a development proposal for public comment. They are planning to build a raised speed bump pedestrian (zebra) crossing in front of my place, to replace a pedestrian safety island which has speed bumps before it on either side of the street. I think this is a fantastic proposal, because the current arrangement means that cars can AND DO swerve across the median line and onto the wrong side of the street, potentially into oncoming traffic, just to avoid the speed bumps. Because the current speed bumps aren’t aligned across the street, cars can do this chicane manoeuvre to avoid them, and the ones that do it are trying to avoid them because they’re travelling too fast. So it’s ridiculously dangerous. So I’ve submitted a public comment, saying words to this effect. Hopefully we’ll see that new crossing constructed in a few months.
New content yesterday:
New content today:
I have some fond memories of the Fallen Empires. It was the first ‘new’ expansion when started playing Magic, though at least The Dark was still available in the stores. Also in regular book stores, mostly we bought the cards from them, not speciality gaming stores.
In retrospect, it was not a very good set. I remember fun big creatures, like Deep Spawn and Ebon Praetor, but they weren’t very useful. I used Hymn to Tourach to good effect in both friendly games and our own friendly tournamets, it was maybe the best card in the set. We also built Thallid and Thrull decks, too, but those weren’t that good, either.
And of course there was the Lord of the Breeding Pit combo, with only two mana upkeep for the Lord! Not very efficient by today’s standards, either.
For the plumbing, you probably wouldn’t even had thought of the pressure nor had the equipment to measure it, so very good that you got a plumber.