It’s raining!
There is no more interesting thing that can be said about today. It was actually the lead item on the evening TV news tonight.
That’s how long it’s been since we’ve had decent rain.
New content today:
Author: David Morgan-Mar
Retrieving my sunglasses
This morning I walked over to the golf course to pick up my lost sunglasses. It’s a fair walk, and very hilly – it took me almost exactly an hour to walk there and back. Here’s a view looking down one of the hills.
Scully was doing a lot better today, after yesterday’s sickness. I took her to the dog park down by the water this afternoon and we had a walk with the other dogs and owners there. She had a good run around and has her appetite back.
Oh, and I updated the Irregular Webcomic! poll question. From Christmas decorations to… mint…
New content today:
Losing my sunglasses
Scully woke up early this morning, around 5:30, and wanted to go outside, so I had to take her downstairs. I got to see the pre-dawn light suffuse the sky. It’s amazing seeing actual clouds and sky – we’ve been under a smoky haze for so long that it really felt unusual.
Being up so early, I decided to head out early for some golf at the local course. I started well today, but dropped off in the last few holes, scoring 58, one shot worse than my best so far for the 9 hole course. My first tee shot was awesome though – so much so that I took a photo of where my ball landed:
When I got back to the car, I realised I’d lost my sunglasses somewhere along the course. I phoned up later and the clubhouse said they had my glasses, so I’ll have to go back and pick them up tomorrow.
At home, I spent some time researching e-commerce solutions for my new photography website. I’m planning to sell framed prints, canvas prints, and other things with some of my photos on them. So having an online shop seems like a good move! I’m thinking of going with WooCommerce, since it’s open source and free to use, as opposed to something like Shopify, which charges a monthly fee plus a percentage of your sales. I don’t expect my volume to be very big, so I want to avoid monthly fees if I can!
This afternoon I got a message from my wife that Scully had been sick at work, vomiting a couple of times, the first being a weird red-brown colour, and had been lethargic all day. We were concerned enough that we booked a visit to the vet this evening. By then Scully had perked up considerably, and the vet was happy with the examination, deciding it most likely wasn’t anything serious, and Scully just had a reaction to something and would recover naturally. She does seem a lot more back to her normal self now, so that’s good.
New content today:
Moon proof
This morning I took a bit of a walk, to North Sydney and back. It’s a very hilly walk – like virtually every walk around this area of Sydney. It passes a number of stately old houses, and a few old sandstone churches. This one is St Thomas’s Anglican in North Sydney.
Sydney is built on sandstone, and it’s the building material that characterises the city, with a lovely warm honey-coloured glow to new stone, that ages into a distinguished grey over time. It’s probably my favourite type of stone.
Back home, I worked on another Proof that the Earth is a Globe. I managed to dash that off relatively quickly, as it wasn’t a particularly complex one to write about. And I spent a bit of time doing some housecleaning and maintenance stuff, tidying up some odd jobs that have been lingering for a while.
And tonight my wife and I finished watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, rounding up our complete rewatch of the movie series.
New content today:
Smoky Sunday
Smoke descended on Sydney overnight, from the ongoing bushfires and backburning operations being carried out in an effort to stop the fires. When I got up this morning and opened the windows, I immediately closed them back up again, because the smell of smoke was so strong. There was a haze in the air, reducing visibility, but not as dramatically as it has been on some days recently.
We needed some groceries, and normally I walk up to the supermarket and back, but today I didn’t want to be outdoors breathing that air for a second longer than necessary, so I drove up. it did give me the opportunity to buy more than I’d normally be able to carry home. And I took a photo of the smoke haze form the roof of the supermarket car park:
Today I made a new Darths & Droids comic, and did some thinking about storylines for Episodes 7-9. And I starting editing some old photos that I scanned from film prints from a trip to Thailand I did back in 2005. These are photos I’ve never had in digital form before, which I scanned a while back, but hadn’t got around to editing yet. I’ll probably start posting some of these to Flickr in the near future.
New content today:
Visiting my brother
This morning I went to visit my brother and pick up a few old games from his place. I took over my game Azul, and taught him how to play, and he showed me a new game he’d got recently, Unspeakable Words, which was fun. Then he showed me his new PlayStation VR headset and after I looked at one of the VR demos I played a bit of the VR Golf game. The VR experience is pretty good, and it was fun. The golf swing mechanism was a bit artificial, but I adapted pretty quickly and I think enough experience form playing for real leaked across that I was able to hit the ball reasonably well after a few tries.
We had lunch at a pizza place near his place, and then I came home. I took Scully to the dog park this afternoon, and now this evening my wife and I have just watched most of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 – pausing it until tomorrow so we’re not up too late.
So… a fairly relaxing day.
New content today:
Unabridged writing
Early this morning I took to the local golf course to hit a ball around and get some exercise. I felt like I was doing poorly today, mis-hitting a lot of strokes, but I ended up scoring 60 (for 9 holes), which is only 3 worse than my best on that course, so I suppose that’s not too bad.
Back home I dedicated the day to doing some writing. I’m working on starting a series of tabletop roleplaying game supplements, which I hope to offer for sale through DriveThruRPG, to try and turn this time away from a job into some sort of income. I started jotting down ideas about bridges as significant structures in an adventure campaign, and I’ve got a few thousand words of stuff. I think I need a few more days of work to polish it up and format it, and then see about setting up a seller account.
So hopefully in the not too distant future you’ll start seeing RPG titles from me available. I have a whole bunch of other ideas for PDF gaming books as well. The ideas are actually the easy part – the hard part is spending the time to write them up as coherent and useful text!
New content today:
Mail and sundials
My first job this morning was to go to the post office and mail off my Reddit Rematch Secret Santa stuff. I found a box at the post office that was almost the perfect size, which was good! Then I bought some groceries on the way home.
When I got home I realised my wife hadn’t removed some of the grocery items from our shared list (in OneNote) after she’d recently bought some, so we now have a lot of tortillas and beans…. I guess we have some enchiladas in our near future.
I spent almost all the rest of the day writing up that next Proof the Earth is a Globe that I started yesterday, finishing around 8pm. My brain is fried from research and writing… But it’s posted!
New content today:
Into the city
We had rain overnight. Not just rain, but a thunderstorm. I was woken at 01:20 by a huge clap of thunder, not far away, and then there were several more over the next few minutes. There was rain too, moderately heavy, but it was nothing compared to the thunder, and I don’t think it lasted very long. Better than nothing though, as the gardens and lawns got some water for the first time in ages.
Sydney recorded 2.8 mm of rain. Which is not a lot, by any standard except the incredible drought that we’re currently in. Every second post in the subreddit /r/sydney this morning was some variant on “It’s raining!!” That’s how excited people here were to get less than 3 mm of rain.
The moisture mixed with the bushfire smoke hanging over Sydney to create a weird white smog effect that lasted through the whole day. It looked like fog, but had a faint smokey smell. I braved it go head into the city on the train to do some shopping. I signed up to be a reddit Rematch Secret Santa, and I was on an expedition to get some gifts. I won’t say what I got, but I think my recipient should be fairly pleased, as I hit many of the “likes” in their profile.
I got home and planned to spend the day writing up a new Proof the Earth is a Globe, but a little thing happened in Iran/Iraq that distracted me for a bit. I did eventually get into it, but I’m maybe only a third through writing it. Hopefully I can finish and post it tomorrow.
New content today:
Back to running
Wanting to get back into a regular exercise routine, this morning I took off for a 5k run. I jogged up to the local sports oval and then did the 9 laps that total to 5 km. Previously I’ve run partial laps and walked the remainder, but this time I jogged through the first 6 laps without dropping back to a walk. That was about all I could manage and I took some walking breaks during the next 3 laps. My time was about the same as previously – I think because the first 6 laps were at a slower jog than I would run partial laps, and it all evened out in the end.
Back home I finished off writing the annotations for the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! While doing that I found a bug in the database updating code I use to add the comics and annotations, so I had to spend some time debugging that and checking that it works okay, which chewed up a bit of time.
I wanted to start writing a new Proof the Earth is a Globe, but ran out of time, so I’ll get onto that tomorrow.
New content today: