Daily update – Page 166 – dangermouse.net

COVID cancellations

A while ago I’d booked a trip away over Easter, planning to do a road trip with my wife and Scully. We found a motel with a pet-friendly room at Mudgee, one of our favourite country town destinations, and a suitable AirBnB in another town making a nice loop from Sydney, with a couple of nights in each place. I also booked a couple of our favourite restaurants in Mudgee. We’ve been looking forward to this trip for a while.

But with the coronavirus situation in Australia getting progressively more serious by the day, and the very real possibility of travel restrictions being imposed, as well as the thought of possibly spreading the disease even if travel is not restricted, we’re reconsidering our plans. We decided to cancel the AirBnB today, but leave the Mudgee accommodation for the time being. Realistically I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to go, so at some point that will probably have to be cancelled too, as well as the restaurant reservations.

It’s a shame because besides having a trip ourselves, I really wanted to help the rural communities by visiting and spending some money there. The good news is that AirBnB announced just today that they’d be refunding all prepaid bookings, including the normally non-refundable fees, and they’d also not be charging the hosts for cancelled bookings (which normally they’d do, apparently). So at least both we and our cancelled host haven’t lost anything because of this cancellation.

Other than that, today I took a longish walk to a nearby suburb in search of some prebaked pizza bases, which we use to make pizzas for dinner at home. I tried to buy some the other day in my local supermarket, but they’d sold out, so I decided to try elsewhere today, and get a bit of extra exercise while at it. I found them, and enjoyed the time out in the warm autumn day.

At home today I mostly worked on writing some more Darths & Droids comics.

New content today:

Ethical dilemma

Primary Ethics has decided that ethics classes will cease from next week due to coronavirus concerns. They’ve left this week’s classes up to each individual school ethics coordinator. Mine has said that classes will run tomorrow.

However, I’ve decided that I won’t be going into the school to take my class tomorrow. I think the risks are low at this time, but still, I really don’t want to get sick a day later and realise that I may have exposed a classroom full of kids to the virus. I’ll miss the class, because even after just three weeks I’m keen to see the kids again and lead them through more of the ethics curriculum. But it’s because of that that I can’t bear to put any of them at greater risk.

Today I tended to a few odd tasks, finishing off writing annotations for the last batch of Irregular Webcomic, and queueing up a bunch of iToons submissions. And I picked up Scully from my wife’s work at lunchtime and looked after her all afternoon, including taking her to the dog park. The regulars there are still showing up each day, but noticeably keeping more distant than normal, and discussing virus-related stuff. It’s good to be out in the fresh air though.

New content today:

Adventure creation

I dedicated today to writing more of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for my gaming group. We’re partway through the adventure, and I need to write more of it before we play the next session.

I also went out to buy some groceries. The supermarket had no toilet paper at all, but there were stocks of everything else. Although apparently some people have no idea how to cook at home, since half the shelves of instant cup noodles were empty. And apparently people want to stock up on no added salt/sugar peanut butter. That’s the sort I buy. There was heaps of the regular peanut butter that most people normally buy, but virtually none of the no-added salt/sugar type. I have no idea, because normally the no added variety doesn’t sell as much.

New content today:

A day out to the north

With my market day cancelled (as mentioned yesterday), I took the opportunity to go on a short day trip with my wife and Scully. We drove north to the outskirts of Sydney, stopping first at the suburb of Berowra, which is secluded in a pocket surrounded by undeveloped bushland. We stopped first at a place named Barnett’s Playground, at the end of a street. Leading from the playground was a short walking track that proceeded to the edge of a steep drop from the ridge down to Berowra Creek far below. Here was Barnetts Lookout (no apostrophe, since designated place names in Australia are decreed to never have apostrophes – the playground, not being a designated place, is allowed to have an apostrophe).

After admiring the view for a while we took Berowra Waters Road down the hill to Berowra Waters, a tiny village on the creek. There is no bridge, and the only way to cross the creek is by boat.

Scully enjoyed the view too.

From here we drove back up the hill and further north to Pie in the Sky at Cowan, a popular roadside establishment that sells meat pies, mostly frequented by motorbike riders taking the narrow, winding old highway north rather than the newer and faster but boring freeway. Here we had lunch (I had one of the chicken, honey, and mustard pies and a Moroccan lamb pie), and also enjoyed the sky-high view east towards the Hawkesbury River and across Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park.

Tummies full, we headed back towards home, but stopped one more time, taking an unsealed road into the Muogamarra Nature Reserve. At the end of the road we left the car and took a short walk into the bush. It was peaceful and remote, and we could hear numerous birds flitting around in the vegetation. However Australian scrubland birds tend to be very active and never sit still for very long. But I waited patiently and got a few photos.

These are male and female variegated fairywrens.

We headed home, and as we drove south the weather closed in and rain fell, fortunately after we were done exploring for the day.

New content today:

COVID effects

Australia reached 200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 today, and the precautions and responses have begun to affect me. Firstly, this morning I received email from the organisers of That Great Market, where I was to have me second stall tomorrow, selling my photography prints. They have decided to cancel the market, citing both the virus precautions and also forecast bad weather, with wind and rain that would make the outdoors stalls tricky.

A knock-on effect of this is that I had booked a car hire to transport my goods to the stall (since my own car isn’t large enough). So I had to cancel the car hire, less than 24 hours before pick-up. According to the hire terms, that means zero refund – I still pay the full rental amount. So rather than making some money at the market stall to cover costs and make some profit, I’ve now had an expense with no chance to recover the outlay. The market stall booking fee is being rolled over to a later market, although honestly I can’t see next month’s one going ahead either at this point.

Next, I decided I should cancel Monday’s visit to Brookvale school. I should have gone to talk to kids about science, and run the Science Club, but for the safety of both myself and all the kids in the school I decided it’s probably better not to go ahead.

That meant I didn’t need to spend today preparing for the visit, and I used to time to finish off making the last batch of Irregular Webcomic strips that I photographed on Monday. I still need to write all the annotations, which I’ll do over the next couple of days.

For dinner tonight my wife and I went (with Scully) to a new pizza place we hadn’t tried before, 10 minutes drive from home. It’s a small place in a tiny cluster of shops surrounded by houses, and it was bustling with local business. It was good, and inexpensive, and the owner came out to have a chat with us as we ate. Our sort of place! We’ll definitely go back again.

New content today:

Sunrise at the beach

On Friday I set an alarm for 5:45, but I woke up just before 5:30. I got up, had a quick breakfast, and set out for the beach!

Sydney has a lot of beaches, and choosing the right one for a sunrise photo shoot is a matter of weather conditions, tide, time of year, angle of sunrise, personal preference, travel times, and other factors. I used an app – The Photographer’s Ephemeris – to map the direction of the sunrise from a few beaches. One constraint I had was that I had a booking for golf at 8:00 with a friend, at Cammeray Golf Club, so wherever I went I had to have enough time to drive back there, in peak hour traffic, to make tee-off.

The closest beach I could think of was Balmoral Beach, which is not an ocean beach, but a harbour beach, facing the protected waters of Sydney Harbour. I knew that Balmoral has a very small view of the open ocean, threading in between the two sandstone promontories of Middle Head to the south and North Head to the north. I checked The Photographer’s Ephemeris for the direction of the sunrise:

It was almost perfect! The yellow line to the right shows the direction of sunrise on Friday, and it threads the needle right between the two headlands. Because of the motion of the sun with the seasons, this coincidence probably only happens on a few days of the year. So with a perfect combination of convenience and opportunity, I selected Balmoral as my target. (I did this calculation the night before.)

As I drove to Balmoral before 6 am, I could see stars in the sky. At least it wasn’t raining like last week. I got to the beach and headed down to a small exposed sandstone rock platform, jutting from the sand into the water. The tide was low – at high tide these rocks would be covered with water. The sky was just beginning to lighten, but unfortunately the cloud cover was highly sub-optimal for sunrise photos:

There was a dark, thick band of cloud right on the horizon, and barely any cloud in the nearby sky above. This is exactly the opposite of what you want for shooting a sunrise: a clear horizon for the sun to shine through, and lots of cloud above for the golden and red light to bounce off and set the sky ablaze with colour. Oh well, I was here, so I shot what was available.

Early morning swimmers and joggers appeared on the scene, providing small points of interest for photos. After a while the tide started coming in, so to avoid being stuck on the rocks and having to wade back, I moved back across the sand and took photos from the path behind the beach. You can see the rocks I had been standing on in the middle of this next photo:

This was also taken with a different lens, a fisheye, for a super wide view. As the sun continued rising, it became light very quickly. I ditched my tripod (I’d been taking exposures up to 30 seconds long), and walked around, taking handheld shots.

I packed up about 7:15 and headed to the golf course to meet my friend. We played one round of the 9 hole course, having a lot of fun. It was the first time he’d been to this course, and it has a few interesting holes, which I showed off last time I wrote about it. It had rained – a lot – since that visit, and this time the water feature at hole 6 was full (compare to the third photo on the previously linked entry):

Unfortunately this meant we both landed our tee shots in the water! But I had a great tee shot at the par 3 9th hole. My ball landed on the green, pitching just 1 metre from the hole! Although it rolled a fair distance from there and I had a long putt, ending up with 4 strokes. But wow that was a great tee shot.

After golf I went home and worked on those sunrise photos, as well as some comics stuff, before preparing to head out to fortnightly Games Night with friends. We agreed to “socially distance” ourselves to minimise any disease transmission by touching as little as possible and using hand sanitisers, but of course playing board games means some interaction. Still, coronavirus isn’t very widespread here yet and it’s unlikely any of us has been exposed yet, so we felt okay with our level of precautions.

We played some games of the Throne of Eldraine Magic: the Gathering draft that we started a few weeks ago. I had two long games that both stalled with tough creatures on both sides. I ended up losing one, and winning the other, both by narrow margins. After that we split into two groups, one playing Spirit Island with 4 players, while I played Everdell with 3 players. It was a fun game, and I managed to pull together enough constructions and critters to score a lucrative 9 point bonus card, but it wasn’t quite enough – I ended up coming second with 51 points, to the winner’s 54.

New content today:

Market prep, and Star Wars

My next market day is coming up on Sunday, so I’m preparing stuff. Last time a friend gave me and my gear a lift in his large car. My car is too small to pack it in, and my friend is busy this time, so I’m having to make alternative arrangements. It looks like I’m going to have to hire a car for the day – which will add another expense that eats into my profits. But if I make as much as last time, it should be okay.

This time it’s at a different venue. East Lindfield Community Hall, East Lindfield, which is a bit further from my place. But this is this market’s established venue, where it’s been held monthly for almost 5 years, so it has an established customer base and people in the area know about it. So hopefully we’ll see more shoppers than two weeks ago at the first-time venue.

Today I also worked on Darths & Droids comics, doing some writing and then assembling the comics from screencaps. I completed three strips (although I’d done most of one before starting today), which is a week’s worth of comics in the queue and ready to be published.

Oh, I’ve also been thinking about Monday, which is my next school science visit. The coordinator has told me that the older kids (who I’ll be talking to) are studying plants at the moment. I think I’ll do a slideshow on exotic plants from around the world and their various adaptations to their environments. And I still need to find another couple of experiments for the Science Club kids as well. I’ll need to do all this probably on Saturday, since Sunday will be taken up by the market.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to try again on my abandoned sunrise photo expedition. The weather should be better than my last attempt. I’ll be getting up around 5:30 to head off before 6 am, for the sunrise at the beach. Hopefully it will be a good one!

New content today:

Ethics and comics

This morning was my weekly Ethics class, teaching Year 6 children at a nearby school. With the weather better than last week, I walked to the school, taking the chance to be out in the fresh air. This is only my third week with this new class, and I have 21 names to try to remember. I wondered if any might be away, with parents perhaps starting to worry about coronavirus and keeping them out of school, but I actually had more kids than the previous two classes, with only 1 away today.

Once they’d arrived after the morning bell, I tried to remember as many names as I could as I handed out nametag stickers again. I managed to remember most of them, but still have a few to go. Hopefully by next week I’ll have them all down.

We discussed fairness in society today, with several examples of potential new school rules regarding who would and would not be allowed to do various activities. We had a very good discussion and most of the kids were participating well, but this year I have a couple of boys who think it’s funny to be disruptive, and they’re playing off each other, so it’s much worse than just one troublemaker. I’ve been pretty strict with them so they get the message that I’m not to be messed with. Hopefully it will get better as the year goes on.

Back home, all I did the rest of the day was work on assembling Irregular Webcomic strips from the photos I took on Monday. I got most of them done, but still have a few to finish off. And that was the day!

New content today:

Salad days

I don’t really have much to report today – I was busy doing boring financial stuff. Except I made potato salad.

Boiled kipfler potatoes, with the skin on, sliced; chopped boiled eggs; diced gherkins; chopped onions and garlic, lightly fried; mild English mustard; and coleslaw dressing. I like to use coleslaw dressing instead of mayonnaise because it’s lighter and tangier.

New content today:

Comic production accelerated

It was rainy again this morning. I used the time to finish off writing the batch of Irregular Webcomic strips that I started yesterday. I decided that if I could finish writing by 10 am, I might have enough time before lunch to photograph them all as well.

It was tight, but I managed to knock out the last few jokes just in time, and then I faced the challenge of shooting 20 new strips in just over two hours. Normally I’d take longer than that, so I raced through it. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I had to run down to the garage to dig out some specialised Lego pieces to use for some of the strips – twice.

I store most of my Lego bricks in plastic tubs and storage drawers in the garage. I only have up in the house the minifigures and a small selection of commonly used set pieces. So I often need to run down to find more esoteric pieces when doing a shoot. Despite having to do this twice, I managed to finish the last photo right on the 12:00 exactly. I spent a few minutes packing up, and then decided to go for a walk to treat myself to a nice lunch at the Cuban place up the street.

The rain sputtered out in the afternoon, leaving a sky punctuated by clouds. I took Scully to the park for some exercise, and to enjoy the view.

New content today: