December 2024 – dangermouse.net

The New Year’s Eve post

It’s the last day of 2024. I just took Scully for a walk around Greenwich (about 7:30 pm) and saw lots of people walking down towards the Harbour for the fireworks. Also lots of traffic going down Greenwich Road, reaching the closed streets at the end, realising there’s no parking anywhere within 2 kilometres, and turning around and coming back out. Even my street is parked out, and it never is. And I’m a good 2.5 km from the nearest good fireworks viewing spot.

We had a low-key day. I got up and went for a 5k run, my last for the year, taking my total distance for 2024 to 505 km. It was also the warmest weather for a run since March, at 25.2°C (and 70% humidity) when I left at 9:30 am. Despite this, I did a reasonable time, under 27:30.

After I had a shower, I set about working on finishing off the Darths & Droids comics for Episode VIII. I managed to make all of the three intermission strips, which leaves the next strip to be made the opening strip of Episode IX. I created an “EpisodeIX” folder on my computer, and was disappointed to find that the operating system sorts it between “EpisodeIV” and “EpisodeV”. All the episodes so far have sorted nicely since the Roman numerals up to VIII increase alphabetically, but now it’s messed up! I did search briefly for if there was any way to make MacOS sort folders by Roman numerals. People have asked this question, but there are no positive answers, alas.

But anyway, it feels good to have completed another movie! Only one more to go. I was keen to try and get it done by the end of the year, although the strips will run into January.

I upgraded my machine to MacOS Sequoia. I didn’t realise there was an upgrade from Sonoma until I went looking for information about an issue with Photoshop being laggy, and discovered that this was actually a general issue with lagginess known to exist in Sonoma. But that Sequoia came out a few months ago, and for some reason my machine didn’t prompt me to install it. So I did the upgrade and… wow… yeah. Everything on my machine is noticeably zippier and less laggy. So that’s good!

We had our usual New Year’s Eve snack of wine and cheese, a coupe of hours before a light dinner of lettuce, cucumber, and tomato salad with falafels, fried haloumi, and pomegranate, with a tahini dressing. The wine tonight is a 2010 Riesling that we bought in 2015 in Clare Valley, South Australia—one of Australia’s prime Riesling growing regions—and have been keeping ever since. I was a bit concerned it might have turned since we just kept it in the garage, not a proper cellar, but it’s really good. Classic fruity Riesling notes, with a long toasty finish. It’s matured very nicely.

We’re staying in for the night. Sydney’s fireworks are great, but it’s a real chore to see them in person, even living this close. We’ve done it a few times when younger, but the crowds and the hassles claiming a spot and getting home afterwards are just too much now. People claim spots first thing in the morning, and then have to sit out in the blazing sun all day, which is the absolute last thing I want to be doing.

Anyway, here’s to hoping 2025 is a good year for all!

New content today:

Trying the new ferry wharf

I’ve probably mentioned that the nearest ferry wharf, at Greenwich Point, has been under reconstruction for the past six months, and recently reopened just before Christmas. With ferry services resumed from a place within walking distance of home, we can now do excursions on public transport with Scully again. So today we took the opportunity to try out the brand new wharf and take a trip across the Harbour to Balmain.

The new wharf is pretty spiffy, better than the old one. Here’s the old one (last year):

And here’s the new one today:

Over in Balmain we walked up and down the main street. My wife stopped for an iced coffee because it was a bit warm (28°C), and then we walked a bit further before deciding on a place for lunch. We stopped at Shila Kitchen, a Persian restaurant, where we had a variety of mezze dishes.

That’s not all of them – we also had a spinach and feta borek pastry, which I forgot to take a photo of. It was a delicious lunch and a great day out. Afterwards we walked back to Balmain wharf, stopping to browse a couple of book shops along the way, and caught a ferry back home. Scully was tired after the day out!

New content today:

Planning to eat out this week

Today we didn’t do very much. It was a kind of rest at home Sunday. My wife took Scully for a walk in the morning while I worked on some more comics. I’m trying to get ahead with a buffer while I can. I also planned out some more ethics class topics for the coming month, deciding to do topics on Bio-engineering, and Opinion versus Fact.

There’s really not that much else to report.

Oh, we went for a walk together with Scully after dinner, in the cooler evening. We did the big loop around the harbour shore and I did a bird count using eBird along the way. I commented to my wife that I’d counted 16 species tonight, which is higher than normal (usually around 12 or so is more normal). And I started mentioning some rarer species that I have seen occasionally. I mentioned that I’d spotted a pelican (Australian pelican) only twice in this area. As we left the waterfront and started up the hill back home, I ended my count at 16 species.

And then halfway home I looked up and saw an unusual bird circling in the sky. I thought at first maybe it was an ibis (the most likely option for a large white flying bird in this area), but then I realised the shape was wrong… It was a pelican! Seriously! Just a few minutes after I’d talked about them being so rare to spot here.

In other bird news, there are a lot of baby brushturkeys around at the moment. Their eggs have obviously hatched not long ago and now the little chicks are running around all over the place. The parents abandon them and the chicks have to fend for themselves immediately. Fortunately they’ve very well camouflaged and stick to undergrowth, so they generally do pretty well. Definitely, given the population explosion around here in recent years.

On to the headline topic: we’ve made plans to go out for lunch tomorrow. We’re going to walk down to the newly reopened ferry wharf and catch a ferry across the harbour to Balmain, and find a nice place to sit and have lunch before making our way home again.

And on Friday we decided to do something fancy and try a new place. There’s an Italian wine bar/restaurant which is highly rated and has outdoor seating so we can take Scully: Enoteca 128. It looks pretty nice! We have a booking for dinner on Friday.

New content today:

An outing to Tonton

The weather cooled down overnight from yesterday’s heat with a pleasant southerly change. I got up, head breakfast, and then went out for a 5k run. This brought my total running distance for the year up to an even 500 km. It wasn’t exactly a hundred 5k runs, because I did a few other distances in there: a few 2.5ks when recovering from a sore back, and a few 7.5ks when I felt extra inspired.

I began to notice a few months ago that reaching 500k for the year was a possibility, but I wasn’t quite approaching it fast enough with running only on the weekends, and needed an extra effort in December. Fortunately my wife and I have some time off in these weeks and I’ve added some extra runs in mid-week, which was just enough to bring me to the target.

After showering and changing into fresh clothes, we went on an expedition. My wife has been hankering for a December special from Tonton Bread advertised on their Instagram, a coffee bean croissant:

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A post shared by Tonton Bread (@tontonbread)

We hadn’t had a chance to head over there (it’s a 15-minute drive) before Christmas, so we took the opportunity today. Unfortunately they didn’t have the coffee croissant that she wanted, but they had a pecan coffee choux pastry, which she got instead (upper right in this Instagram:)

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A post shared by Tonton Bread (@tontonbread)

I chose a crookie:

This is a croissant with a cookie strip on top, and filled with cookie dough. It’s so rich that I had half after lunch and am saving the other half for dessert tonight.

In the afternoon I spent some time housecleaning. I washed the floors of both the kitchen and bathroom, and cleaned all of the tiled wall surfaces in the bathroom, as well as the front and back of the door. I also did a bit of bookshelf rearranging to shelve a pile of unshelved recent purchases. Which involved a lot of dusting as well. It’s odd how I always end up doing neglected housework during holidays.

For dinner I fried up some vegetarian sausages, and made garlic, chilli, and miso Brussels sprouts to accompany them.

Oh, the other thing I did this afternoon was go through all my photos from day 4 of last year’s trip to Japan, process and upload a bunch, and add selected ones to my travel diary of the day. There are a lot of food photos there!

New content today:

Early board games night

I’m able to write this post tonight because we had our fortnightly Friday night board games gathering early this week. There were only four of us who could make it, and one friend wanted to bring his young daughter along, so we decided to start at my place at 4pm instead of the usual 6pm, and finish early so they could go home before it got too late.

Because we had a young girl (about 9 years old, I’d guess – I didn’t ask how old she was), we played some lighter games with her first. We started with a game of King of Tokyo. Then we played a few hands of Uno: Show ‘Em No Mercy to start. Then while the girl entertained herself with an iPad and headphones the rest of us played a game of Evergreen. Then she rejoined us for a game of Camel Up (second edition). And finally we rounded things off with some hands of Uno Flip!

We ordered pizza during the gaming and also had plentiful snacks. I was hoping to have them eat some of the copious sweet things we have leftover from Christmas, but they brought so much other stuff that there wasn’t much room for those.

Earlier in the day we basically just took it easy, staying inside as it was extremely hot out. It reached over 37°C in the city, and just a fraction shy of 40°C in some suburbs, despite an early storm which dumped heavy rain about 9 o’clock in the morning. That just served to keep the humidity up. Another storm hit about 4:30pm, which dropped the temperature rapidly. We now have a strong southerly blowing, which will cool things more overnight. Tomorrow should hopefully be nowhere near as hot.

We did take Scully out in the late morning, after the first storm, but not for a long walk. We just went to the nearby park, where she could run on the grass and there was plenty of shade, rather than walking on hot concrete paths.

New content today:

Boxing Day relaxation

Everyone slept in this morning. I got up and took Scully out close to 8am, before having some breakfast and then heading out for a 5k run to try and work off some of yesterday’s food. It was a much warmer day, even that early, and my time was slow.

We didn’t do much else today. I worked on some photo processing from last year’s travel and did some comics stuff. Oh, and made a sourdough loaf. And watched some of the Boxing Day Test cricket from Melbourne. It was a really fun first session, watching the debutant Sam Konstas batting like a madman!

For dinner I made lentil dhal and rice, with spinach. Because my wife bought a whole bag of baby spinach leaves for the Christmas Eve quiches, not realising I’d bought a whole bag just to use for dinner vegetables this week. So we have a lot of spinach we need to use in the next few days.

Not much else to say. It felt like we really needed a relaxing day of not doing much, after the hustle before Christmas.

New content today:

Christmas Day lunch

Today was all about family lunch with my wife’s family. Although Scully got a visit from the Christmas Wombat this morning.

I spent the morning baking a ham, with a maple syrup glaze. Then we had to pack it into the car with bags of gifts and all the sweet treats my wife has been making over the past few days. And drive over to her mother’s place.

Traffic was awful, unlike yesterday’s light traffic. And when we got there there was no parking anywhere closer than about 150 metres away, so we had to walk all the way back with everything carried.

Lunch was a traditional affair of roast turkey, the ham I’d baked, roast vegetables, and the zucchini loaf my wife had cooked last night. And some salad. And then dessert of Christmas pudding, with ice cream and/or cream. All very filling.

Late in the afternoon I went for a swim in the harbour at the nearby small beach. The weather was warm and sunny, but not too hot. It’s always good to go for a swim after Christmas lunch, to cool down and get the blood circulating again after the heavy meal.

We headed home a bit after sunset. Still too full to contemplate any sort of proper dinner.

New content today:

Christmas cooking and Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve dawned clear and cold. The temperature dropped down to 16.5°C overnight, and it was still chilly when we got up and I took Scully out for her morning toilet. My wife then took her for a walk, while I did a 5k run. The cooler temperature meant an easier run, and I managed to record my second best 5k time, at 26:24.

After a shower it was time to cook some mini quiches to take to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering in the afternoon. My wife had made the pastry an hour earlier, and I rolled it out into a dozen small circles, which she put into muffin tins to blind bake. Then we chopped spinach and mixed the eggs and some milk to make the filling, which she poured into the pastry shells, then baked another 25 minutes.

We took care of some other last minute prep and then drove out to the western suburbs of Sydney for my family’s gathering. It’s become a new tradition to gather in a park by the shore of the Nepean River.

I’m really surprised that nobody else uses it for Christmas Eve. We basically have the whole place to ourselves every year. This time there were a few other people there, but only very small gatherings, like four people eating lunch, and a couple on a picnic blanket. Our group was a total of 21 people once everyone had arrived, plus Scully. We had finger food and snacks, and fresh fruit, plus one of my cousins’ wife had made some caramel slice for sweets – all together it was plenty for a lunch.

Some of the people played a lawn game involving throwing chunks of wood at wooden pins, while the rest of us caught up on family news and gossip. I see things about horror family gatherings, but everyone in my family genuinely gets along very well, so these events are always good fun.

My uncle does wood turning and gave us a hand-made vase:

There’s a hole in the top with a glass tube in it to hold the water and flowers.

We left after a few hours to drive back home – the trip each way took an hour so it was a substantial chunk of time. Back home I made dinner. I got an idea off the Italian home shopping network cooking videos that I’ve been watching for language practice. They made a pizza dough and then made small parcels stuffed with ricotta and something else (pancetta I think). And then pan-fried them! So I decided to make spinach and ricotta ones.

I made a Napolitana sauce with tomato, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, and a hint of chilli to go on top.

Then after eating my wife made a zucchini loaf to serve as a vegetarian main course at Christmas lunch with her family tomorrow. It has zucchini, carrots, onions, cheese, and a bit of flour to bind it together. Phew!! And tomorrow morning before heading out to the lunch I need to glaze and bake the ham.

New content today:

Christmas prep: treat cooking

My wife, having this week off work, spent much of today in the kitchen, making various Christmas treats. More of the chocolate date balls she made yesterday, and some rocky road.

On the other hand, my day was full of online classes. My normal topic week goes from Tuesday to Monday, so I wanted to have the Monday classes before finishing for the year. Four during the day, and two late in the evening.

We also had to go out driving for a couple of chores. Altogether, this pretty much filled up the day. There wasn’t really a spare moment to do much else.

New content today:

Christmas prep: delivery number one

This morning I slept in a bit. I’d had an early rise yesterday and Friday and needed to catch up a bit, so it was good to snooze a bit. After getting up and having a quick breakfast I went for my 5k run. It turned sunny and hot later in the day, but the morning was overcast and pleasantly cool for the run, which was nice.

After lunch we drove over to my mother-in-law’s place to take a bunch of Christmas goodies. Christmas lunch is there, and we’ll also be taking a bunch of food that day, so we thought it would be good to get a head start and take some of the other stuff today: drinks, gifts, and whatnot. Traffic was light, with a lot of people already away for Christmas vacations. But my mother-in-law lives adjacent to a popular walking track along the harbour shore, and that was very busy, with a lot of people enjoying the sunny weather and scenery along the walk.

When we came home my wife started Christmas cooking, making some gingerbread with bits of dried fruit in it, and some chocolate date balls with a white chocolate topping. I think she’s got something else planned too.

Oh, I forgot to mention Scully had her pre-Christmas wash and groom yesterday, and is looking neat and trim for the big day too.

New content today: