David Morgan-Mar – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

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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Hazelnut surprise

My wife started at the new gym this morning which is taking over from the old one that closed down two weeks ago. They had some sort of arrangement with a new gym opening up, to transfer memberships. It’s in a slightly different location and she took a different walking route home… which went right past Moon Phase, the bakery! So she brought me home a surprise treat, one of their choc-hazelnut pastries. Mmmm. I had it late in the morning, just before starting two online classes in a row before lunch.

After making myself some sandwiches for lunch, I took Scully for a walk around the railway station. The weather was cloudy and cooler than the past few days, which was nice, but we didn’t have time for a long walk as I had to be back for two more classes from 1pm.

Tonight I made a mushroom pizza for dinner. I have some leftover sour cream which I need to use up quickly before it goes off, so I dolloped some on top of the hot slices and added a bit of chilli oil, making it kind of like a stroganoff pizza. Well, maybe not, but it tasted good enough.

Not much else to report today. Oh, I made another new Darths & Droids strip. Tomorrow I’ll need to spend some time assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips using the photos I took on Sunday.

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Exotic food and a childhood memory

This morning I did my 5k run. The weather was sunny and not as humid as yesterday. I thought I was going faster, and was confident I’d record a better time, but it turned out to be about 20 seconds slower! I think sometimes I really have no idea how fast I’m actually running.

After a shower, my wife and I drove over to Annandale, a suburb across the harbour. She wanted to visit a small market where they had pottery goods. We found the address and a nice shady parking spot nearby. The place was a small building with pottery works inside, spilling out into a couple of stalls on the footpath outside. Also outside they had a coffee stall, a place selling cakes, and another selling focaccias and hot snacks.

I had a close look at the hot food and found they had some really interesting Asian fusion pies and sausage rolls!

Wow! Beef rendang pie, green curry pork roll, and prawn and chicken roll! I had to try one, and chose the green curry pork roll. It was absolutely delicious. I’m going to write up a full review for my sausage roll blog, but not tonight.

My wife bought a couple of hand made pottery plates, for us to use at home. We walked up the street a bit to the nearby shops on the next corner. While doing this, I mentioned to my wife that my grandparents used to have a warehouse in Annandale for their Paddy’s Market stall goods (they sold crockery and silverware and similar stuff). I remembered what the warehouse was like, a two-storey building down a long and very narrow driveway. I’d been there many times as a young child in the late 1970s and I reckoned I could recognise it if we happened across it and it hadn’t been redeveloped. However I thought the odds of that were minimal.

We stopped at a cafe called Clover for a cold drink and a snack, sharing a grilled halloumi sandwich.

Then we walked back to the car. It was literally just one short block, back the way we’d come, but we happened to be on the other side of the street as the cafe had been across the street. And just two doors down… I spotted a long, narrow driveway. Looking down it, I saw the unmistakeable two-storey old warehouse that my grandparents had used! It looked like it had been converted into a house, but it was clearly the same building I remembered.

The driveway was still dirt and grass, exactly as I recalled! Wow, firstly what an amazing coincidence, and secondly how incredible that this old place had not been redeveloped since the last time I’d been here, which must have been around 1980.

I don’t have anything else today that can top that.

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Games night and a very sticky Saturday

Friday morning I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I take Scully up to meet my wife at the gym nearby after her early morning class, but her gym has closed down and so this week I just went up alone. Berries are all pretty cheap at the moment as they’re in season, so I bought punnets of blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries as part of our fruit haul. (Also two varieties of apples, bananas, and an orange. I skipped the mangoes this week.)

During the day I had four ethics classes on the Alien Invasion topic. One kid who a few weeks ago in the Robots topic was obsessed with rounding up and destroying all the robots because they were evil and wanted to enslave humanity, this week decided that when aliens come to Earth we need to round up all their robots and destroy them.

For dinner we decided not to eat out, but rather to get take-away from Green Gourmet, a vegan Chinese restaurant that we used to frequent before we got Scully. Unfortunately they are on the highway and don’t have outdoor tables, so we’ve never dined there with Scully. While my wife and Scully waited outside the front door and I went in to order, I explained this to the woman who took my order, pointing at Scully outside. But she said it was no problem, we could bring a dog inside to eat at one of the indoor tables! And she said if the front room was full, there was a small room out the back where we could eat with Scully too.

Having dogs in the indoor dining areas of restaurants is not normal here. In fact, strictly speaking it’s not allowed according to the law (apart from service dogs), but some places are more accommodating about it than others. Which is why we normally have to sit at an outdoor table when taking Scully. But now that we know that Green Gourmet will let us take Scully in, we can go back to this place. They have some delicious meals. We took home some vegetable and faux-pork steamed buns, Szechuan deep-fried cauliflower, and a hotpot dish with protein balls and vegetables. And rice. It was really good, and there was plenty left over for my dinner tonight too.

While eating I joined my friends online for board games. We played a game of The Castles of Burgundy. It took me a while to remember the rules, but I did pretty well, coming second of four players. We tried a new game, Rallyman: DIRT, but none of us knew the rules and it was too tricky to work out quickly enough, so we abandoned that for another day. We moved on to Just One, and had an absolutely awful start to the game.

Three of the first four words were guessed incorrectly, despite none of the five clues being duplicated (and hence removed) in each case. In fact, weirdly the only clue that was duplicated in the first 6 or 7 rounds was “Rumpelstiltskin” (for the word “spinning wheel”). We ended up scoring only 8 correct answers in 15 rounds. Pretty awful going. Then we moved on to Jump Drive and played about five or six games, of which I won two. I also had one miserable game where the winner ended on 97 points, while I only had 28!

Today was awful, weather-wise. It began with a loud thunderstorm that woke me up at 5:30. By the time I got up and had breakfast and was ready for my 5k run, it was already 24°C and 94% humidity. It was really oppressive and difficult to run. I felt very slow and thought I’d be lucky to stay under 30 minutes, but was surprised when I managed 28:15. I was absolutely soaked with sweat though! I had a cold shower immediately, and then another one about half an hour later after I’d cooled down some more.

I worked on Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! strips today. I have enough of the latter written to do some Lego photography tomorrow.

We went out for a walk with Scully just before 5pm. It was gloomy when we left, having been raining on and off all day, and I thought it wouldn’t be too bad, but the clouds parted and the sun came out as we walked and steamed things up. The temperature had stayed around 25°C most of the day, but now while walking around it warmed up to almost 29°C, and with humidity around 80%. It felt like the times we were in Bangkok, or the Amazon jungle. Really, really draining just to walk at a normal pace.

In other news, the agenda for the next ISO Photography meeting in Tokyo in February has been released. This is the last thing required for me to get travel funding from Standards Australia for my trip there. So hopefully that will be processed soon. I’m beginning to really look forward to being in Tokyo in February, where it will be nice and cold!

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Italian notes are migrated

Today I finished transferring all of my Italian language notes from OneNote to Obsidian. The last two pages of notes were complicated and needed a lot of reformatting, which was why I left them to last. They are my pages on verb tenses and conjugations, and a second page all about the subjunctive tense. I realised they needed a bit of revamping and reorganisation, so it was quite a job porting them across.

I also wrote a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, ready for photographing on the weekend. I’m getting close to finishing off most of the theme storylines. My plan, as it is, is to hopefully write and produce one last batch during the Christmas break, which should hopefully mean that I finish making new comics before the New Year, although the comics will run into January, and maybe slightly into February.

And of course I had some ethics classes. The Alien Invasion topic is very fun and interesting, with some intriguing and amusing discussion from some of the kids.

On TV I’ve started rewatching the original series of Star Trek, which is on Netflix. I watched “The Cage” and “The Man Trap” the past two nights. Tonight I might do “Charlie X”. It’s been too long since I rewatched all of these. And I was somewhat surprised in a class this evening to have a girl mention while we were discussing aliens that she watched Star Trek too, with her parents, and it was one of her favourite shows.

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Cool dinner for a hot day

The start of summer continues to be unusually warm and humid. I decided to make a cool dinner tonight, a couscous salad. I had to message my wife to pick up some cucumbers on the way home from work, but I had everything else I needed. I made the couscous and added the chopped cucumber, a diced tomato, some feta cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and also a little bit of mango to provide sweetness. Normally one might put raisins or dried cranberries or something in, but I had a fresh mango and decided that would work. It did, the resulting salad was pretty good.

I did another new Darths & Droids comic today. I also spent some time tidying up language notes for Italian. I’ve been keeping notes on grammar and usage in OneNote, but I’ve slowly been transferring all of them to Obsidian. All my Japanese notes are there as I started Japanese more recently, but I had a lot of older Italian notes. I have to copy them across and reformat them, and I added some improvements while I was doing it.

And I also processed and uploaded more photos from last year’s Japan trip. This time going through my iPhone photos from the same day, adding shots of things like food and stuff which I didn’t use my SLR for. I also added several photos to that day of my travel diary, which you can now see here.

Here’s a food photo which didn’t make the cut into the diary.

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Some long overdue photography processing

First thing this morning I had my dental hygiene appointment. As I mentioned a while back, my dentist retired just a few days ago, so I didn’t get to see him again. The new dentist is a young guy and seems very nice. During the check-up he looked at a couple of old fillings and said they were showing wear and erosion and should be replaced. So I’m booked in for that next Wednesday.

I expected to see the regular hygienist, but they had bad news – she had a family emergency and had taken extended leave. The replacement hygienist said she should be back in a few weeks. But when I went out to reception to pay for today’s visit the receptionist said that the old hygienist might not be returning at all, and if so the temporary replacement would be staying on. The old hygienist was really good, but the temp who did my teeth today was also very good, so it’s a toss-up in terms of preference, but of course I hope the family emergency isn’t something that will drag on.

I hadn’t had time for breakfast before going to the dentist, so I decided to walk home via Moon Phase and try that last regular pastry on the menu that I haven’t tried yet (second last item described here). The last item was a kouign-amann, a type of pastry I’d never heard of before, and had no idea how to pronounce. I kind of assumed it was a Korean name, as the bakery is run by Koreans, but turns out it’s Breton. Anyway, it was basically a cylinder of delicious laminated dough, glazed all over with a super thin layer of caramelised sugar. Like all their products, really good.

I came home and worked on this week’s ethics class lesson plan, on the topic of Alien Invasion. This should be a fun one, as it’s speculative and about a popular fictional theme. The first class was tonight and it was pretty good.

In the afternoon I sorted and counted some more Magic: the Gathering cards, doing an inventory of another set in preparation to selling them.

And I spent some time going back to old photos I took on my trip to Japan in June last year and starting to process them and upload them to Flickr. I have hundreds of dSLR photos which I haven’t touched since the trip, plus hundreds of iPhone photos, and I want to go through them and make an album of the best shots before I go to Japan again in February! I did photos of Okayama Castle today.

I have a bit of work to do to go through the whole trip. And then I have my trip to Italy and Finland from November 2023 to do as well!

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Like Garfield, Mondays are the toughest days of the week

A total of six ethics classes eat up a lot of the day. I walked Scully at lunch time, but not too far as it was a hot day. The roads and footpaths get so hot in the sun that I only really let Scully walk on shaded areas. If they’re in full sun, I reach down to feel the paving and it was definitely too hot today to let her walk on without potentially burning her feet, so I had to carry her part of the way.

In the early evening I made pizza for dinner. And then went for a walk as the sun was going down with my wife and Scully. It was cooler, but still on the warm side and humid. But now at least the paths had cooled down so Scully could have a solid walk.

I think the nearby shops that we walk past should have a gelato shop! But interestingly the fish & chip shop is now open on Mondays. It never used to open on Mondays. My wife thinks that it must have new owners who have decided to extend the opening hours.

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More storms and steamy weather

It’s beginning to feel like a tropical rainforest here. It was warm and sticky again when I went for my 5k run this morning, at 7:30 which was earlier than yesterday, but it was warmer and another difficult effort.

Just before 3pm we had a huge storm, with a lot of loud thunder, which dumped 34 mm of rain on Sydney in less than half an hour. Then it stopped and warmed up again, driving the humidity sky high again. it’s really pretty unpleasant. The weather bureau did warn us this summer would be wetter than usual. I’d just love a hot day with low humidity for a change.

I did another Darths & Droids comic this morning, and did a bunch of housecleaning stuff. Cleaned the bathroom, shower cubicle, and vacuumed the floors. Which was hard, sweaty work in this weather.

Not much else to say today. I was a bit tired because it was warm during the night and Scully decided to snuggle up right against my back during the night for some reason, making me even warmer and disrupting my sleep a bit.

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Games on Friday and Saturday

The weather has turned from hot and humid to warm, rainy, and very humid. At least it’s not as hot as Monday to Thursday. Friday was cooler, but very wet. There was a huge thunderstorm around midday, and I had to warn students in my ethics Zoom class that if I disappeared it might be because of a power blackout. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but there some very loud cracks of thunder during the class.

Today has been ridiculously humid. It dropped as low as 87% in the mid-afternoon during a break in the rain, but it’s back up in the high 90s where it’s been most of the day. It was 99% and 21°C when I did my 5k run at 9am this morning. Which made it really draining as breathing deeply while running was like in a sauna.

Friday night was games night at a friend’s place. I took Arcs and we played a four player game, with three of the same players as last time when we all learnt it, and one new player. He picked up the idea quickly and actually ended up winning.

The game took a while to play, and by the time we were done the host was tired, so we didn’t play anything else.

Today, I played a game of Root with my wife. She tried the Marquise de Cat this time, after having played Alliance for the past several games. We used the clockwork expansion bots to fill it out to four players, and it’s the first time we’ve used the Alliance bot player. I played the Vagabond, so we also had a bot Eyrie. The bots started very strong and quickly raced to the lead two places in points. I was really afraid the Alliance bot would win the game. But my wife played a timely Dominance card and secured three mouse clearings with about six cat warriors each and managed to win just before the Alliance could get enough points.

For dinner we went up to Organica and had some pizza tonight. It was sprinkling lightly when we went there, and also on the way home. At least it was better than heavy rain.

In other news: I saw today that Elon Musk has threatened to buy Hasbro and hence Dungeons & Dragons, after his recent unhinged anti-woke rant about D&D. I honestly cannot think of a worse thing for the game. But I rest easy knowing that there are so many roleplaying games out there that people will continue enjoying them in wholesome ways no matter what Musk does.

But I just wanted to point out that I predicted this over 8 months ago! Irregular Webcomic! #5157:

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