It’s our last full day at home before we fly out to Japan tomorrow evening. I was busy with four ethics classes, starting at 9am, followed by three in a row from 2pm.
After the first one I worked a bit on completing Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! strips for the buffer so that they can continue updating while I’m overseas. I managed to get all this done, so both comics will be uninterrupted by my trip. (Hopefully… if nothing goes wrong with the auto-updating scripts.)
Between the classes, I had an errand to run, heading out in the car first to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and then taking her on a drive across town to a friend’s place. He was the one who gave me my sourdough starter a couple of years back. He said recently that he thinks his starter had died and he wanted to get a bit of mine back to start again. The timing was fortunate and I asked if I could just drop off the whole starter and he could feed it while I’m overseas, taking some for himself, and then I could pick it up when I get home. So I was going over to drop it off.
We made it a contactless exchange, since his wife had COVID in the past few days, and he didn’t want to expose me to it. He’s been busying himself making fermented chilli sauces recently, and left a bottle of a sauce he made from Carolina Reaper chillis for me. I’m actually a bit afraid to try it. I do like a hot sauce, but middling heat is more my style. I won’t try it before I leave for Japan tomorrow, but when I get back I’m going to start by adding just a single drop to a whole meal and stirring it through, to gauge how hot it is.
In travel prep, I recharged the batteries for my DSLR camera. And I looked into overseas roaming for my phone. I’ve never used this before, because it was expensive and I was okay just connecting to WiFi when necessary. But prices have dropped and I think I might just take the plunge this trip, and see how it works It’ll be handy having net access and things like Google Maps just working everywhere. There are a few other housekeeping and packing things to be done tomorrow, but our flight is in the evening, so we have time after we drop Scully off at a friend’s place for dogsitting while we’re away.
New content today:
When I go overseas, I tend to grab a local SIM. I have absolutely no idea how practical that is in Japan.
Have a great time.