It was warm and summery today, temperatures reaching up to 34°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was cooler with the sea breeze. It’s supposed to be hotter tomorrow, and then a cold front will come through, dropping temperatures back to around 20°C from Tuesday.
Being a long weekend, with a public holiday tomorrow, a lot of people took advantage of the warm weather by heading to the beach, or out on the harbour on boats. I went to a family lunch at my wife’s mother’s place, which is near a small harbour beach, and the traffic was horrendous, and parking near her house was non-existent. We had to park a few hundred metres away up a hill.
Before leaving for the lunch, we took Scully on a walk, doing our usual weekend loop to the bakery and back, but we took the variant route home through a bushwalk along the shore. This is actually my preferred route, but we’ve been avoiding it for the past several weeks because the local council laid fox baits to kill feral foxes in the bushland, and they’re deadly to dogs, so they advise not letting dogs into the area for about 6 weeks.
Yesterday I baked brownies to take to the family lunch, but they’re devilishly difficult to time correctly, so the centres stay soft and gooey, but the exteriors are firm enough to support the brownies when sliced. Last time we made them it turned out like a dense firm cake, with none of the delicious gooey centres. This time I took it out of the oven and let it cool, and then tried to slice it, but the centre of the baking pan wasn’t solid enough to be sliced. Fortunately the bits around the edge were pretty good, so we got a decent batch out of it. And the sloppy mess in the middle I saved to heat up and add vanilla ice cream to for dessert at home.
The other thing that happened is we went onto daylight saving time last night. I love daylight saving, with long warm evenings of light so you can do things outdoors until about 8 pm. But it means now my webcomics are updating apparently an hour later for me, which places them perilously close to bedtime. I’m thinking seriously of moving the update time an hour earlier, so I can check and write about the comics before it gets too late in the evening. In fact, maybe even a couple of hours earlier. Then I won’t have to hang around online checking things as late in the evening any more. I’ll have a bit more of a think about this tomorrow.
New content today: