Month: October 2024

Noises in the night…

I was woken by a weird noise just before 3:30 this morning. At first I thought Scully was being sick, so I jumped out of bed. But she was fast asleep still.

The noise sounded like a wet wheezing, like a sort of cross between a small animal and a squeeze bottle half full of water was being squeezed repeatedly to force the air out. It was so loud that I was sure it was in our bedroom and I turned on the light thinking it must be some sort of animal. I thought it was coming from under the bed. I was prepared to have to deal with a mouse or rat or something. But I searched and couldn’t find anything, until I finally realised the noise might have been coming from outside. I confirmed this by opening the window and the sound was much louder and from that direction. And then it died away.

I’m guessing it was the death rattle of a possum or a big bird that maybe a cat had caught. I’m not sure what else it could have been. But the upshot was I was now wide awake and had trouble getting back to sleep, so it wasn’t a very restful night.

This morning I taught two ethics classes, and then prepared to go into the University of Technology Sydney for the last tutorial lesson of the year on image processing. The students have their final assessment projects due tomorrow. So next week I’ll be marking those.

Because it’s Halloween, I thought there might be some students, at least, dressed up for the occasion at the university, being a trendy sort of place where young people do fun things. But of the thousands of students I saw, not a single one had anything. I didn’t seen a single indication anywhere that it’s Halloween. No costumes, no decorations. I know it’s nowhere near as big here as in the USA, but I was honestly a little surprised.

And in other news, I have signed up to Bluesky, which I am hoping will be a better replacement for Twitter for me than Mastodon turned out to be. If you’re interested, you can follow me here: @dmmaus.bsky.social.

The problem I found with Mastodon was that I picked a server that matched one of my interests, namely tabletop roleplaying games, but then the way the system works, my posts get shown to everyone who is also on the same server, and they all expect everyone to talk mainly about games all the time. So I felt stifled in my ability to just post random shower thoughts and wry observations, as I did back on Twitter. I could probably move to a less specialised and more social server, but it looks like Bluesky is much closer to what I hoped a Twitter replacement would be. I’ll stay on Mastodon, but I’m sure to post much more frequently on Bluesky, I think.

New content today:

Trying new pies

This morning I had some Magic cards to send off to eBay buyers. Two packages, plus one person with a local pickup option. The buyer turned out to live in the block of flat immediately next door to one of my friends. This is in Newtown, home of The Pie Tin, one of my favourite pie shops, but one which I don’t get to visit often because it’s tricky to get to. But I can use my friend’s car parking spot if he’s home! So that’s what I arranged to do.

I parked there, met the eBay buyer and gave him the cards, and then took Scully over to The Pie Tin and had an early lunch. I decided to try some new things. They had a pan-fried chicken pie with vegetables, and a tuna mornay pie. I got one of each and went with Scully to a nearby park to sit and eat. They were both really good.

Once back home I went up to the post office to send the other two packages of cards. Then my wife contacted me and asked about dinner, and I realised I should have bought eggs! So I walked up to the shops again and got some eggs, to make quiche for dinner tonight, before my ethics classes.

In the afternoon I had a visit from a guy from a place that does blinds and other window accessories. Our window blinds are aging and in need of replacement, so we booked someone to come measure up the windows and give us a quote for new blinds. I was honestly expecting him to measure them with a tape measure, but he used a laser gadget. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there you go.

New content today:

Chinese Lebanese pizza

My back is much better today. So much so that when my wife got home I went out for a run. I took it a bit easy and only did 2.5 km, instead of my usual 5k. But it went well and I’m very happy that this episode of back pain has healed up quickly.

For lunch today I took Scully for a bit of a drive a couple of suburbs away to try a new place. I actually wanted to go visit the bottle shop to restock on some liquor, and chose a place to eat nearby. It was a Lebanese bakery, which made Lebanese style pizzas and pides and stuff. It was called Cedar Dough Lebanese Bakery, and the sign outside had the cedar tree of Lebanon on it, overlaid with Arabic text. Very authentically Lebanese. And when I went in to order something, the woman behind the counter was Chinese. Not exactly what I expected, but she was friendly and took my order for a folded pizza stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, and olives. I ate it sitting at the table outside with Scully, and it was pretty good.

In the morning before that I wrote up my next ethics lesson plan, on the topic of Hobbies. Tonight I had the first class. it went pretty well, except for one question, which I think I might have to excise from the class.

I asked: Are there any hobbies that could be harmful or raise ethical issues?
I expected: things like hunting, or trail bike riding.
I got: stealing things, committing crimes, bullying people.
In hindsight I’m glad no kid said serial killing…

New content today:

Final witchcraft Monday

I slept much better last night as my sore back felt better, and it continues to improve today.

I had my last 6 classes of the Halloween topic in my ethics class: Witch Hunts. it’s actually a fairly complex topic for some of the younger kids, and in one class today I had to take it quite slowly, but I think it was successful.

In one class, a kid was wearing a Star Wars shirt. I said cool, and asked him which movie was his favourite. He said, “Oh, I haven’t seen any of the movies. I just play the video games.” 😱

I just finished my last class at 10pm… so I’ll keep this short and go watch some TV before bed.

New content today:

Sore back recovery

I slept poorly, because I was trying hard not to injure my back more during the night as I rolled over in bed. I think I got about two hours sleep before waking to roll over and deciding to get up and stretch out and walk off the stiffness and pain. I put an ice pack on and did stretches before getting back into bed. Then I only kind of half-dozed for a few more hours without really falling asleep, and got up again to do more ice and stretching. I spent about an hour doing that before returning to bed again around 5:30am, and half-dozed again without moving.

But it helped! I was tired, but my back survived the night without getting much worse. During today I continued the ice and stretches, and we went on a big walk with Scully which gave it some natural movement. And this evening it feels a lot better. I can tell it’s still a bit tender and stiff, but it’s not painful at all. I think experience with this issue means I know how to attack it quickly and effectively to reduce how serious it is. Hopefully by tomorrow it’ll be close to normal again.

Mostly today I worked on comics. I did a Darths & Droids strip, and also photographed and assembled a week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! to cover the upcoming week. I’d intended to do a full batch of several weeks worth, but abandoned that when I hurt my back yesterday.

New content today:

Online games and a sore back

On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes about the Witch Hunt topic. I’m also asking the kids about their Halloween plans and the differences are interesting. Most of the kids not in the US/Canada don’t really have any big plans. Most of the ones there do, but not all – there were a couple of immigrants who don’t do anything, and one kid said he didn’t do anything for Halloween because it was his mother’s birthday.

I joined in online board games early in the evening because my wife and I decided not to go out for dinner. I just made some pasta at home, which gave me ore time to play games with friends. We played some Jump Drive, and one guy won all three games handily, which was okay as he doesn’t normally win that game, so he was pretty chuffed.

Then inspired by the upcoming US election, we tried Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game as a bit of fun. It’s actually an interesting abstract strategy game and I thought it was fine, but I think you’d need to play it a bit to get the strategy. Then we played Draftosaurus, which I won, and Vaalbara, which I never win because I haven’t figured out the strategy yet. We finished with a classic, Settlers of Catan, which we hadn’t played for ages. That game took a while, but I managed to win that one, so had a pretty successful night overall.

This morning I got up and had breakfast while my wife and Scully slept in. I planned to go out for a 5k run, but when I went into the bedroom to wake my wife up I bent over and hurt my lower back. I’ve done this a few times before and knew the horrible feeling when the muscles spasm and the pain shoots through the nerves. I quickly went and laid down on my front to calm the muscles down, and my wife got me an ice pack. I felt okay after a bit, but when I moved to try to stand up I could feel that it was going to be tough doing it without overwhelming pain. So I had to take it very slowly and struggled up after several minutes of tiny shifts.

Once standing, I could walk around and do some very gentle stretches to loosen up. The main problem is doing anything that might cause the muscles to spasm again, so I had to be super careful, all day. We’d planned to got out driving for the day, but had to nix that as I didn’t want to risk folding up in the car. I basically spent the day walking around slowly to relax and stretch the muscles and just avoid anything risky. Which made it hard to get much done in terms of things like writing comics or whatever that I’d wanted to do.

We went for a few short walks with Scully. Walking is the one thing I could do that works to help the muscles calm down and recover. For dinner we decided to go up the street to a local Szechaun place that we like, but where we haven’t been for a long time. I tried the sweet and sour pork for the first time (I usually get chilli prawns), and it was very good.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Back to the university

After two more Halloween special ethics classes this morning, I had some lunch (leftover Moroccan chick peas and rice from last night) and then went into the city to the university for the second last tutorial of the semester. The students are now working on their final assessment tasks and I’m there to assist and answer questions or provide suggestions and tips. It was a pretty busy session, as many students had questions arising from the first assessment report, which they just got their marks back from. Some of the teams are well advanced and looking good for their final reports, while others are a bit behind and trying to catch up on work. Hopefully the final reports I have to mark will be high quality!

Tonight I have two more classes online. Because we’re now into daylight saving time, they’re an hour later for me and I don’t finish until 10pm. In between I’m doing Japanese on Duolingo and watching Italian YouTube videos to practice my comprehension.

New content today:

Getting a pie card

Today was mostly spent working on comics and then doing more of my Halloween special ethics classes on Witch Hunts this evening.

I took Scully on a walk for lunch, to the pie shop at the station, where I haven’t been for a while. They had two new special pies today: pepper steak with cheese, and butter chicken. So I had to try those, and they were both very good. The woman there asked if I had a pie card, and I said no… they must be new! So I grabbed one and she clipped two of the little pie icons, and then she winked and said, “And I’ll do two more for last time.” And she gave it to me with 4 of the 10 icons clipped. Only six more and I get a free pie!

In the afternoon I decided to take Scully on another walk to get a bit more exercise. But when we got outside the air was full of smoke. Authorities have been doing controlled burns of bushland around the city today to reduce fuel before the summer fire season, and the prevailing wind blew it in my direction. It was quite thick and awful, so we cut short our walk and took a shortcut home. And when I got home I closed up all the windows to prevent the smoke getting in.

For dinner before my classes I made a Moroccan chick pea thing with tomato, spices, and some haloumi cheese. And for a bit of vegetable I threw in some broccoli, though I don’t think that’s very Moroccan. Unfortunately I tasted it and thought it needed aa bit of saltiness, so threw in a stock cube, and it ended up too salty. I should have only used half maybe. But I added some lemon juice and made rice to go with it, and it was okay.

New content today:

Restarting ethics classes, Halloween witch hunt special

This evening I had my first online ethics class since stopping for a week to make time for last week’s ISO meeting. I wrote the lesson plan yesterday, and it’s on the topic of Witch Hunts, since this is the last full week (Tuesday to Monday) before Halloween. I start with the Salem witch trials to set historical context, and ask some questions about why those events happened and how something so grossly unjust could take place. And then move onto modern figurative witch hunts, where people are accused of something with little or no evidence, and what sort of consequences may occur.

It’s a fairly complex topic for the age group of the kids I’m dealing with, but most of them are pretty bright and I think they can handle it. Except today I had a new enrolment, and I did the full 3-minute introduction to the class, then launched into the backgrounds tory and starting asking questions, and when it came to this new kid she just looked like a deer in the headlights. I had to ask several times if she was thinking, or if she understood the question, or if indeed she understood English, before determining that her English skills were quite rudimentary. I had to remove her from the class, and then afterwards refund the class fee, unenrol her, and write a message of explanation to the parent.

At lunchtime today I took Scully on a long walk, with ball chasing time. She’s missed out a little lately, so it was good to get out in the fresh air for a good long while today.

This afternoon I catalogued and photographed more Magic cards for listing on eBay. A few hundred cards from the Unglued, Unhinged, and Unstable comedy sets, and a few hundred from Throne of Eldraine.

New content today:

A low key day off

I had grand plans for my day off today. I was going to find some place to go with Scully and spend some time out. But the weather was a bit grim, with light showers giving way to strong winds and quite chilly temperatures.

I searched the net for some place that has good meat pies that I hadn’t tried before, but almost all of the ones filling those requirements were south of the Harbour and in inner city suburbs where parking is difficult. I didn’t fancy dealing with all that. I found a bakery called Berkelo in Manly, but again that is a bad place for parking. But then I saw they had a shop in Mosman, closer to home and easier to park.

So I just went there. They only had two types of pie: chicken or pumpkin. I chose the chicken pie, and a sausage roll. I reviewed the sausage roll (with photos) over on my sausage roll blog. The pie was okay, but nothing to write home about. But then I looked inside again for a sweet treat and they had… almond lamingtons. Like a lamington, but coated in almond crumbs, and filled with an almond cream. I took that away and ate on a nearby park bench. It was delicious.

After returning home, I spent some time making sourdough bread and pizza dough for dinner. And a comic. And… I really don’t know where the time went.

New content today: