David Morgan-Mar – dangermouse.net

Gravy Day

It’s the 21st of December…

One of the most culturally significant days in Australia before Christmas: Gravy Day. This comes from a song by one of our most iconic songwriters and performers, Paul Kelly. In 1996 he released a Christmas single, “How to Make Gravy“. It’s a very unconventional Christmas song – the lyrics are a letter being written by a man who won’t be home for Christmas…

Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well
It’s the 21st of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I’ll be out of here by July
Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don’t let ’em cry for me

Heck, just listen to it.

I don’t think I need to say anything else. If that’s not immediately one of your favourite Christmas songs then you have no heart.

Yesterday was Friday online games night, after a regular day with four ethics classes for me. Im doing an end-of-year hypotheticals class, where I just ask kids “What if?” scenarios and ask them to think about the logical consequences. One question I asked is “What if everyone knew exactly when they would die?” Most kids gave sensible consequences such as people would be depressed, or they would party for the last month of their lives. But one kid absolutely could not be dissuaded from trying to avoid the fate. He kept saying, “on the day, you don’t go anywhere, stay at home so nothing happens to you”. I repeated over and over again that you die anyway, nothing you do can stop it. And he’d just give some other way to try to avoid it. Oh well, I suppose he was still exercising his thinking skills!

In the evening we went out for dinner to our local pizza place. It’s the place we go to most often and we like to support the owners, who have been having a tough time since COVID messed up the restaurant industry. They’re having a break over Christmas and returning to reopen the restaurant on 15 January. We wished each other a Merry Christmas as we departed.

Then for games I joined three friends online and we played some games of Jump Drive. I lost the first two horrendously, with scores like 24 points while everyone else was well over 50. The third game I only came second last, so I called that an achievement and we moved on.

We tried a new game called Ratjack, which is a rat-themed version of blackjack with some twists. Cards have values from 1 to 12, but each card also has a special ability, things like stealing cards from other players, or swapping cards, or adding values to the numbers or whatever. Each turn you draw a new card to make a hand of 2 with the one card you had left over from last turn, and then choose one to play, either face up—in which case you do its special ability—or face down—in which case you don’t, and the score doesn’t add to your total. The goal is to reach 25, or to make opponents bust by going over 25. Some of the cards also have abilities that turn face down cards face up, or vice versa, so those cards are still definitely in play. It was okay, but suffered a bit from down-time while waiting for everyone else to think about and play their turns. I ended up winning.

Then one of the guys begged an early bedtime and three of us continued with Castles of Burgundy. Since we played this just a few weeks ago, I actually remembered the rules and could play without fumbling around in the early rounds. However I soon dropped into last place. But I scored a large region worth a lot of points late in the game, which neither of my opponents did, and so I managed to end up winning. My first ever win with this game, so I was very pleased.

This morning I did my 5k run. The weather was warmer but not as humid, and it wasn’t so draining. I ran down to the wharf and back, which is the harder of the two routes I usually do because of more hills. I’m up to a total of 480 km for the year so far. I’m hoping to be able to get four more runs in before the end of the year to make it an even 500.

I spent a bit of time today doing Darths & Droids story planning stuff, to prepare for Episode IX. I made a graphical timeline of important events, and it got pretty complicated and convoluted. I’ll show this off in the future after we finish writing and publishing the comics for the last movie, but it’s full of spoilers so I can’t show it off now.

After lunch I spent a couple of hours working on cleaning the car. It hasn’t had a wash or vacuum for far too long and was looking pretty grubby. So I gave it the full treatment: vacuuming all the debris out (mostly sand and tiny bits of twigs, leaves, bark, etc), washing the exterior, drying with a chamois, detailing the interior to wipe off dust everywhere, applying leather cleaner and then protector to the seats and other leather surfaces, glass cleaner on the interior window surfaces, then waxing the bodywork, and finally polishing.

Oh, in other news, remember the issue with our phantom pet named Scout? How our vet thought we had another pet called Scout? And my wife called up and got them to remove it from our records?

Today she got a Christmas message from the vet, wishing Scully and Scout a Merry Christmas!!

It turns out that this is because our vet used to have two premises operating under the same business, and we often switched between the premises as they have different advantages (one has longer operating hours, the other is more conveniently located). But earlier this year they separated into two separate businesses, but both have copies of Scully’s records. We learnt about this a couple of weeks ago when my wife got a message saying that Scully was overdue for her annual vaccinations. But that wasn’t true—she’d been vaccinated during her annual checkup in July—but at the other premises.

Anyway, because of that, it turned out that we’d only removed Scout from one of the vet’s records and not the other one! But… and this is very odd… the first one said that Scout was a cat. This one, when my wife called up to remove Scout from our records, said Scout was a rabbit. So I don’t know what’s up with this mysterious Scout.

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Seeking tea ceremonies

We had a rude awakening this morning, when Scully threw up on the bed, around 6:30. Normally my wife gets up about then but I sleep in a bit – but today I had to leap out of bed and deal with Scully being sick, and strip off the bed linen and get it in the washing machine. Scully seems okay though, she recovered quickly and ate her breakfast with gusto.

I had two ethics classes in the morning, then went for a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work (as she’d taken her with her after breakfast). I worked on some more Darths & Droids stuff again, trying to get ahead and start thinking about the start of Episode IX, which is coming up very soon.

I also spent some time searching for a traditional tea ceremony experience that we can book for Tokyo. My wife’s mother and sister are travelling with us at the end of February, and neither have been to Japan before. They are keen to try some cultural experiences, and thought a tea ceremony would be good. So I searched and found a few places in Tokyo that offer this. The range is quite broad, with some offering kimono dressing as part of it, others not, some traditional tatami mat seating on the floor, others table seating. I need to confirm with everyone what they would prefer before narrowing it down.

Last night I started watching Dune Part 2 on Netflix. Since Part 1 is no longer on Netflix, I read the plot summary on Wikipedia to remind myself. I’m very glad I did, because I would have been so confused without the refresher. But with it, I think I’ve followed all the important points of the story. I’ll watch more tonight, but at close to three hours running time I think I’ll have to split it over three nights of watching.

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Cool relief, Christmas ham

Today was thankfully much cooler than yesterday. We had a stiff breeze blowing and the temperature only reached around 24°C. Rather than having the air conditioning on all day, I had the windows all wide open. It rained a bit in the morning, including when I went out for a 5k run. I managed a much faster time than any other recent run, in the cooler air.

Then I drove over to the nearest Aldi supermarket that has parking – there’s one a bit closer but it’s in a business area with lots of office buildings and impossible to park anywhere nearby. So I almost never go into Aldi. But I wanted to today to pick up a Christmas ham. I also grabbed a few other things while there: a Christmas stollen, a panettone, and some brie and sliced turkey for making lunch sandwiches.

After eating a lunch of turkey and brie sandwiches on my home made sourdough bread, I walked up to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. And when we got home I worked on some more Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up a buffer.

I made some pesto pasta with broccoli for dinner, before my three ethics classes in a row, which took up the evening.

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Hot weather, southerly buster

The record-breaking heatwave affecting inland Australia made its way to the east coast today. Inland suburbs of Sydney touched 42°C, but it remained a bit cooler nearer the coast where I am, thankfully, in the low 30s. But the humidity was still over 50% in the hottest part of the day here, whereas inland it dropped into the 20s for that dry heat effect.

Knowing this was the forecast, I took Scully out for a long walk around 7am, before it got too hot. We did the Waverton loop, going around the harbour shore. There’s one house that we pass where the owners always plant sunflowers, and they were in bloom.

The birds were out in force in the morning, especially by the water. I spotted this group of eight little black cormorants… or was it seven with a clever imposter??

(Spoiler: It’s a silver gull.) I did a couple of bird counts for eBird and recorded 18 different species.

Back home, I sheltered in the air conditioning for most of the day. working on Darths & Droids comics. I want to get ahead because there’ll be some time spent story planning for Episode IX when we start that very soon. And I need to build up a buffer for upcoming trips in the new year.

This evening I had the first class of the final week’s critical & ethical thinking topic for the year. We’re just having fun this week, with hypothetical “What if?” questions, getting the kids to think through logical consequences of weird scenarios. For example: What if social media likes were used as money? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was? What if everyone had a twin who it was impossible to tell apart?

The last one generated some very interesting discussion. One kid said people could commit crimes and nobody could be punished, because it would be impossible to know if you arrested the correct twin, and you’d have to avoid punishing the incorrect person. But another kid suggested that if it was truly impossible to tell the twins apart, they might be treated like a single person, and share one identity, one bank account, one job, etc. And if either one committed a crime, both would be punished. Actually all of the questions generated interesting discussions of the consequences. So it was a lot of fun. Perfect for the last class before Christmas.

Just after 8pm the southerly buster arrived with force. This is the local name for the cold front coming through from the south which rapidly reduces the temperature after a hot day, and brings cold strong winds and thunderstorms. We had very close lightning and loud thunder, and about 30 minutes of absolutely torrential rain, before it eased off. Thankfully it’s a lot cooler outside now, although the humidity has skyrocketed back around 95%. Tomorrow is forecast to be much cooler than today, around 25°C. Phew!

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Hotness, classes, and D&D logging

Today was very warm. Much of Australia is enduring an heatwave, with the highest temperatures we’ve seen in five years (the past four summers have been cooler and wetter thanks to La Niña). Some towns in western New South Wales today were expected to potentially break their highest ever recorded temperatures, around 47°C. Inland suburbs of Sydney got into the high 30s, but fortunately the coastal strip was significantly cooler, reaching only 29°C in the city. But the humidity remains stupidly high, so it felt oppressive being out there.

After two morning ethics classes, I walked with Scully up to the fish & chip shop, and grabbed an Express Post envelope from the adjacent post office for mailing some documents. I didn’t want to walk back with the large envelope, and a box of fish & chips, and have to carry Scully over the parts of the road and footpaths that were baking in the sun and would have burnt her feet, so I ordered my lunch to eat in at the outdoor tables. Although these are shaded, it was so hot and humid sitting there that the sweat was just rolling down my face and body.

I got back home in time for my afternoon classes. After those I completed writing up a log of the previous Dungeons & Dragons session that we played back in October, which I hadn’t yet written up. Thankfully I’m now fully up to date with the campaign logs, all 12 sessions played so far. Next time we meet we should be starting a new adventure, which will be nice. Although the party has to contend with a curse placed on them by the God of Swords: to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die! My players are a fairly moralistic group, so this presents them with a significant ethical dilemma. They’re not just going to go around and slaughter the next 9 people they come across. It will be very interesting to see how they deal with this.

For dinner I made a cool falafel salad. I tried boiling two eggs to add to the salads, but I think I must have set the stove too low to simmer them, and the first one I tried to peel was too soft-boiled. I boiled the second egg for another 5 minutes and it came out fine, so we ended up with half an egg each instead of a whole one in our salads.

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A family lunch at Organica

This morning I did my 5k run, but it was tough conditions with warm and humid weather even shortly after sunrise. I ran down past the local ferry wharf, which has been closed under renovations for the past 6 months or so. I’d expected it to open before Christmas and was pleased to see today that it was newly open again. This is good news because we occasionally use the ferry to get around the harbour to various destinations, and we can take Scully on board (whereas she’s not allowed on trains).

I spent time this morning doing some Darths & Droids comics work.

And then we joined members of my wife’s family up at Organica restaurant for a family lunch to celebrate her brother’s birthday. There were seven of us (plus Scully). The weather was warm and humid, but we had a nice shady outside table. The food was good – I had a grilled barramundi fillet, which came with fennel, grilled cherry tomatoes, and grilled lemon half, and romesco sauce (I’m linking it because I don’t know about anyone else, but I can never remember what’s in romesco). I haven’t had this dish there before and it was good.

We got back from the lunch quite late and I didn’t have much time before starting ethics classes for the evening. During a one hour break I made myself a simple dinner which was essentially a vegetarian croque madame – essentially a grilled cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top. Something quick and relatively light after the big lunch.

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Dungeons & Dragons and hot weather

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and then in the evening I hosted our intermittent Dungeons & Dragons game with my friends. Our last session was in October, and we picked up where we left off.

The party were attempting to collect a series of magical swords. They found one being wielded by a giant octopus and engaged in combat. One of them severed the tentacle that was holding the sword, and two of the others tried to catch it before it fell into the deep pool of water, but both failed, so they had to do some diving into the water after the octopus had been dispatched, and incidentally obscured the water with ink and blood.

But the highlight of the evening was when they encountered a somewhat crazy mermaid queen, who challenged individuals to defeat her in combat, and promised to marry any who could do so. Well, the human fighter of the group managed this (after the elf failed), and was quickly married in a ceremony, and even crowned with a crown made of coral.

Later they encountered a vampire who was immobile, staked to the wall by one of the magic swords they were intent on retrieving. They had to work out how to gain the sword without letting the vampire loose to attack them. Overall it was a great fun game, with lots of amusing events and much fun had by all.

This morning I did my 5k run in warm and humid conditions. I fear it’s going to be like this until summer ends in a few months. The weather bureau has warned that the next few days are going to be the hottest days in five years for much of Australia.

In the heat of the day we drove over to my wife’s mother’s place to help her get out all the Christmas decorations, to ready the place for the Christmas Day lunch. Traffic was bad heading out towards the coast as lots of people were heading to the beaches. And on the water were lots of boats full of people enjoying the sunny weather.

We came home and I made pizza for dinner. And afterwards we walked Scully in the cooler evening air, after sunset. Although it was still 24°C. It’s probably not going to get much cooler than that overnight.

For dessert we had a mango. This time we had a Kensington Pride variety, which is no doubt the most “mango-ey” variety in flavour. It’s the fourth different type of mango we’ve had so far this summer. As the season progresses other varieties will ripen and become available, so it’s an interesting progression in flavours and textures.

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Massive mail and assembling comics

This morning I took the giant package of Magic: the Gathering cards to the post office. I didn’t want to walk up there with 10 kilos of packaged cards, so I drove there. Unfortunately the post office is across the street from a school and there were tons of parents dropping kids off even at 9 o’clock, so it was a bit chaotic and hard to find a parking spot. I managed to find one not too far away and hauled the boxes over. The big box turned out to be over 8 kg with the packaging, and I had a second box of about 2 kg as well. But they’re now on their way!

I had two ethics classes before lunch, then made some sandwiches to eat before taking Scully out for a brief walk. It was a hot day so we didn’t go too far. When it’s really hot and sunny I have to carry her over sections of sunny bitumen paths, because the black surface gets really hot and could burn her feet. She doesn’t like that and wriggle to get free, but it’s necessary to avoid burns. She walks on grassy areas and that has to be enough.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling the last of the Irregular Webcomic! strips that I shot on Sunday. Then I had to upload them and write annotations for them all. I only managed to complete that this evening, in between more ethics classes.

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Surprise dentistry and massive packaging

This morning first thing I had another visit to the dentist, following last week’s clean and check-up. I left last week with the impression that the dentist today would be repairing a couple of small fillings on two upper teeth. But when I was reclined in the chair, he started poking around the lower teeth and saying he was going to do two new fillings there on some grooves worn into the teeth near the gumline. This was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t had any impression of that last week.

I said I thought we were doing the top teeth, and he said yes, but he wanted to do the two lower teeth first. Being in the vulnerable position of being in the dentist chair I got a bit flustered as I was processing this unexpected news. The dentist agreed to do the upper teeth as I’d expected and then see how I felt about the lower teeth. This gave me enough breathing space to think it through and realise it was probably a good idea and give the go ahead.

The good part was all of the fillings were very shallow and I didn’t need any anaesthesia at all. He did drill a little, but somehow managed to do it without any pain at all, so that was great. I really hate the anaesthesia as it takes about 5 hours to wear off for me and is very annoying. But anyway, the new dentist seems very good like the old retired one, so that’s good. And because of the confusion over the teeth, he only charged me for three teeth instead of four.

My wife had taken Scully to work because of my dentist appointment, so I had some totally free time when I got home and took advantage to go on a 5k run. Fortunately it was a cool morning and a bit less humid than on the weekend, and I actually managed a decent time.

Then I went to pick up Scully from my wife’s work. We walked back via the pub at Crows Nest, where we stopped for lunch. I had a chicken schnitzel. They’ve changed the lunch menu – the schnitzel used to come with a choice of gravy/sauce, and I used to like both the peppercorn and the mushroom sauces. But now it doesn’t come with any. The schnitzel is till good but I missed the sauce with it.

At home, I had to pack up some more Magic: the Gathering cards. The same buyer as yesterday closed a deal for all of my Ice Age set cards. This was the first large set that came out after I started playing, and I got a lot of those cards, and the buyer wanted all of them. None of them are worth very much individually, but… when I’d done inventorying them there were over 4000 cards! I’d hoped to get them into the mail before 4pm, but it was almost 5pm by the time I’d actually packaged them up. So they’ll have to go into the mail tomorrow morning. It’s a very hefty package too… Checking the weight of Magic cards online shows about 1.8 grams per card, so this package is going to be around 8 kg with the box and all.

Tonight I had three more classes on the “Codes of Honour” topic. The flow is coming together a bit more now, after last night’s class was a bit choppy. It’s unfortunate the Tuesday kids always get the “experimental” version of the class, which then gets refined over the next few days.

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Shipping cards, codes of honour, fajitas

My first task this morning was supposed to be letting in a tradesman to install our new window blinds, which I’d ordered a few weeks ago to replace our ageing ones. He was supposed to arrive at 8 am, but I got a text message about 6 o’clock, saying that he’d had a family emergency and would call some time tomorrow to arrange a new date. Hopefully it’s nothing too serious, although it sounds pretty bad.

Next, I had to ship off a batch of Magic: the Gathering cards to a buyer, about 200 of them. After packing them carefully I walked with Scully up to the post office to send them. I’m slowly making a dent in this huge collection I have! (Which I’m trying to liquidate, since I rarely play any more. As previously mentioned on this blog.)

Next I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes. This week’s topic is “Codes of Honour”. I start with the chivalry of medieval knights, and go through an example of a pirate code, and then start the kids thinking about the relevance of codes of honour in the modern world. I ran the first class tonight and it went okay, though maybe some of the questions are a bit too open-ended for the kids.

This afternoon I made a lot more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took on Sunday. I’ve done most of them now, but still have half a dozen to go. Hopefully I’ll finish those off tomorrow.

For dinner I was feeling uninspired and didn’t have any cooking ideas until my wife came home from work. We decided to make vegetable fajitas, which required walking Scully up to the neighbourhood supermarket to get a zucchini, but we had everything else we needed. Including a fresh lime from our miniature lime tree, which added a nice zesty zing.

I also did a full write up and review of the green curry pork sausage roll for my food blog, that I promised on Sunday.

Oh, and my wife told me that she’d got a call from Scully’s vet today, saying that Scully was overdue for vaccinations. When my wife said that no, she’d had them in July with her annual checkup, the vet denied having any record of that. She finally determined that the two different branches of the vet business that we go to have at some point this year split into two separate businesses and no longer share records with each other. Which is inconvenient, because we switch between branch locations often based on convenience at the time – one is closer, but the other has longer hours. So I’m not sure what we’ll do now. I wonder if we can continue to go to both, and keep informing the other one of any events so we can keep the now-separate records in synch. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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