Daily update – Page 172 – dangermouse.net

Report writing

I had some boring work and work-like tasks today. Firstly I had to contact the gas company about our latest gas bill, which arrived yesterday. Normally the bills are around $100, but this one was almost $800. I checked previous bills, which listed the meter readings for our gas hot water meter.

Third previous bill: start 3874.04, end 3969.92, units used: 95.88
Second previous bill: start 3969.92, end 4175.98, units used: 206.06
Previous bill: start 170, end 198.22, units used: 28.22
This bill: start 171, end 4480.96, units used: 4309.96

🤔

It took me a little while to get through the phone menu system and talk to a person at the gas company. I explained there was an error in the bill, and asked them to look at the hot water meter readings for the past four bills. The woman on the other end put me on hold for a minute, then came back. “Oh yes, I can see what the problem is! We’ll cancel your bill, correct the error, and issue a new bill.” So hopefully the replacement bill will be correct. It may be slightly larger than normal since we were most likely undercharged in the last bill, although not by a huge amount.

The next bureaucracy I had to deal with was registering for the Australian Government’s announced coronavirus financial aid, which I believe covers me because I’ve previously registered as a self-employed person and I’m losing income due to my market stalls being cancelled. There are some eligibility criteria to be worked through, but I think I should be eligible. The main thing was registering an “intent to claim” as soon as possible, so that payments can be backdated once the whole procedure (which could take weeks given the load on Australia’s welfare system) is worked through. I tried to do this yesterday, but the phone line just hung up on me when I rang. Today they released an online registration portal, and I managed to use that okay.

And then I got stuck into some really juicy work – writing my report on the ISO photography standards meeting ostensibly held in Yokohama that I attended by videoconference last month. I have to submit a report to Standards Australia, summarising all the key technical discussions and items of interest to the Australian photographic community. One main one is that we’re planning to host a meeting in February 2021 in Sydney. Assuming we’re back to physical meetings by then…

The next scheduled meeting is in New York City in June, but that’s already been converted to another virtual online meeting. I was planning to travel to New York in June for this meeting, but that’s now not going to happen. Instead I’ll have to stay awake for a 9am-6pm meeting held in New York’s time zone – which equates to 11pm to 8am in Sydney. As someone who is decidedly not a night owl, that is pretty much the absolute worst possible timing for me. Roughly 10:30pm to 6:30am is my normal sleep cycle. So it’ll be pretty rough.

Anyway, I trawled through my meeting notes, the offical minutes, and all of the presentations given during the Yokohama meeting, and assembled my report, which took up most of the rest of the day.

New content today:

Another big walk

I went for a longer walk today, to get out of the house a bit and enjoy the fresh air – and also give my wife time to do her work alone in the house (with Scully). I avoided busy places and took to suburban back streets, heading in roughly the opposite direction to yesterday.

These steps lead to the suburb of Waverton. The terrain around where I live is, as I may have said before, very hilly.

The steps lead down into this forested gully, with a walking path leading up it. However I climbed another set of steps up the opposite side.

In this part of Sydney there are a lot of Victorian era terrace houses, with lovely restored wrought iron railings and decorative filigree in well-maintained versions, such as these.

I walked through Waverton to the adjacent suburb of McMahons Point, and then down to the shore of Sydney Harbour. This is Berrys Bay, a small bay on the harbour. The water is clear and you can see oysters growing on the rocks below. I walked around the shoreline to the left.

This cool little walkway joins two small promontories of public land, skirting around a bit of the shore where private property goes right down to the waterline.

It leads to Sawmillers Reserve, a secluded green space on the water, with a view across the harbour to the city skyline (visible on the left side of this panorama).

Just off the shore is the wreck of a Maritime Services Board hopper barge, which I presume was used to transport lumber from the old historic sawmill that used to occupy this location on the shore (and gave the Reserve its current name).

From Sawmillers Reserve, I walked uphill to Blues Point Road, and the Art Deco Blues Point Hotel, another the many Art Deco pubs dotted around Sydney.

There’s even older architecture around here too, such as this old sandstone cottage, which is still in use as somebody’s home. About here I turned around to walk back home. In all I was out walking for close to two hours.

At home I spent the afternoon catching up on ISO standards work, downloading bunches of reports and presentations from the last meeting, ostensibly in Yokohama, but held virtually. Tomorrow I plan to write up my report on the meeting for Standards Australia.

New content today:

Working from home

My wife started working from home today, as part of Sydney’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means both her and Scully are home during the working week (since she normally takes Scully to the office with her – Scully is much loved as the office dog), when I’m normally here by myself. It’s a bit of a change, but it wasn’t too bad. We mostly kind of ignored each other as we went about our business, so as not to disturb one another.

At one point I went for a walk to get out and stretch my legs in the sunshine. I walked over to the suburb of Greenwich, where I spotted this cool home-made climbing tree for kids.

I walked down to the water, at Bay Street Wharf:

And across to the adjacent Bayview Park, where someone has their seaplane berthed:

And here’s a view of the park, looking down to the water. Pretty nice!

Apart from the walk, I mostly worked on Darths & Droids comics today – coming up with strip titles and editing HTML code and stuff. In between keeping up to date with all the massive changes around here to deal with COVID-19.

New content today:

Darths & Droids: Episode VII

Today’s the big day! After a considerable delay, the first comic strip of Darths & Droids‘ treatment of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens begins! We’ve been working towards this for literally years now, so it’s good to get it underway.

But that comic strip was produced a couple of weeks ago. Today mostly I did two things: house cleaning, and keeping up with the multiple press conferences by the Australian Prime Minister and New South Wales Premier on updates regarding the COVID-19 outbreak. Firstly, though, I got a nice sleep in as Scully slept through the night without any sneezing waking us us. So that was good – I needed that sleep.

I cleaned the garage a bit, to make room for all of my market stall equipment: stock of greeting cards, large mounted prints, a couple of easels for displaying prints, and various miscellaneous gear such as receipt books, string, display stands, crates, and so on. I figured with no more market stalls for the foreseeable future, there’s no need to keep all this stuff handy, and I could pack it away for a while to clear up some room in the house. I cleared away a bunch of other clutter as well, and also washed down the balcony, allowing me and my wife to eat dinner outside tonight.

In news terms, it’s been a big day here in Australia, with the most drastic measures now being announced for shutting down businesses and movements of people to attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus. Basically all non-essential services are shut down from midday tomorrow, including: pubs, clubs, gyms, cinemas, theatres, church services – and restaurants and cafes are restricted to take-away service only. Schools however remain open, which is attracting growing criticism from pretty much everywhere. It’s going to be a long and interesting week.

New content today:

Up for the sunrise

Scully woke us up early again, this time at 04:00. Normally she just sleeps through the night until we get up, but not the past few nights. She didn’t sneeze, but was a bit congested. I took her outside for a toilet, which took ages, and got in a bit after 04:30. Scully and my wife went back to sleep, but now I was wide awake again.

I decided to make the most of it and do another sunrise photography session.

This time I went to North Curl Curl, where there is an ocean pool on a rock shelf, just east of the surf life saving club.

I got there well before sunrise, and there was a thin crescent moon in the sky, above where the sun would appear. And yes, as the above photo shows, there is a large rock in the middle of the swimming pool.

The pool is separated from the ocean by a concrete wall. The tide was approaching high for the day, and at this time occasional waves crash over the wall and into the pool. The above photo is a long exposure, and the dark patch in the pool on the left is a swimmer.

A white-faced heron flew onto the rock shelf next to the pool, and as I watched it fished a small crab out of the water to eat. I wasn’t quick enough to a get a photo of it eating the crab.

A few minutes later the sun appeared on the horizon and climbed up into the sky. It goes from dark to light really quickly in Sydney.

Just a few minutes later I had the camera off the tripod and was taking hand-held shots of swimmers in the pool.

And not long after that about 50 kids arrived for some sort of swimming class. They all did a few laps of the pool and then ran off again.

With the sunrise done, I headed home to process the photos. This was interrupted only by taking Scully to the vet to have her congestion looked at. We have some medication to give her to get her feeling 100% again. Hopefully tonight she’ll sleep through… and I can get a decent night’s sleep.

New content today:

Clean clean clean

There’s nothing like a shower after a hard day of physical labour.

It began at 03:00 this morning, when Scully awoke with a bout of reverse sneezing. For those who don’t know, this is a thing dogs do sometimes when their nasal passages are irritated. Rather than expel air out like humans do when sneezing, they sometimes go into spasmodic rapid inhalations to clear their passages. She’s been doing this the past three nights.

I realised today that she had a bout of this last year… around this time… and I checked our vet records and discovered it was also in March. At that time we were less experienced dog owners and took her to the vet, who suggested it might be seasonal allergy, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and a half tablet of regular human antihistamine tablets daily (they’re fine for dogs!). She settled down after a while, but by then I was awake, and I have trouble falling asleep again once fully awake. So while my wife and Scully went back to sleep, I was pretty much up for the morning.

When they went off to work, I began cleaning the house thoroughly, to get rid of any aggravating dust. I dusted the entire bedroom – including places that hadn’t been dusted for way too long. Then I vacuumed the bedroom plus the whole rest of the house – a thorough and meticulous vacuuming, not the regular quick weekly once-over. By 11:00 I was ready for the next phase: shampooing the carpet.

I went to the hardware store and hired a carpet shampooer, which I’ve done before, so I knew how to use it. I did a full wet clean of the entire house, finishing around 14:00, with a short break to grab a quick lunch. After returning the hired cleaner, I stripped the quilt cover and put the inner quilt out in the sun to air and get some ultraviolet light. It was a hot day today, which helped dry the carpet with the windows open. Hopefully this level of clean will help Scully’s poor nose and she’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight – with the help of half a tablet of Telfast.

At 17:00 I went to pick up my wife and Scully from work, because she had to bring home the entire switchboard(😳) to prepare for working from home next week, due to coronavirus precautions. Her work has been tough this week with staff preparing for this big change, so we were both pretty worn out. We decided to go out to dinner to our favourite local pizza place, to support their business in these trying times. The restaurant was emptier than usual, but not by much – rather than every table occupied it was about two-thirds full.

One thing I realised today was that for most of the world this whole coronavirus thing has been disruptive and scary for a few weeks. But here in Australia we had those horrendous fires over the summer, which really took off in November and just went on and on and on, followed by the terrible flooding which eventually put the fires out. We here in this country have been dealing with non-stop existential economic and societal stress for five months now. We were already worn down in January.

We need a break.

Tonight my wife and I needed to go out and have a nice dinner. People in other parts of the world might not be able to or want to do that at this time. But tonight we needed it.

New content today:

A warm autumn Thursday

Firstly, I forgot to post this photo I took yesterday on my walk home from the shops:

This is a house I walk past occasionally. If I had unlimited money, this would be high on my list of houses to buy. Tennis court, lovely old house itself, and look at that view!

It was warm today. Earlier in the week we had some cold weather – the first truly cold weather since before summer, as we now slide into autumn. The maximum temperature on Saturday in Sydney was only 17.9°C, which is really winter-like conditions. It’s slowly been climbing as the week progresses, and today we reached 32.1°C, with 35°C forecast for tomorrow. So summer hasn’t quite released its grip yet, but winter is definitely on the way.

This morning I made use of the fine day to play 9 holes of golf at my nearest local course. I went really well today, equalling my record best score at that course. I was very pleased with my tee shot at the 4th hole:

That’s my ball there on the left, right on the green! The tee position is just below the wooden bench in the background, and you have to hit the shot over the wooded creek gully that you can see below. I’ve lost several balls in that gully, but not today! Putting was difficult though, because the course had done what I learnt later is called “aerating the greens” – they punch a grid of small holes in the surface and lay sand over the top. This is part of the course maintenance and my friend tells me it’s done twice a year, and the greens take a week or so to recover. But it meant that today they were very lumpy and inconsistent, so I had trouble putting, although I made up for it with decent long shots. I ended up 3-putting this hole for a bogey 4.

My wife’s work is adjusting to work-from-home conditions due to COVID-19, and her job-share partner has been told to not come in this week (as she has a very long commute on public transport), so my wife is working longer hours than normal this week (as she only has a short walk to the office). She normally takes Scully in to the office (the staff all love her), but Scully gets restless with the extra hours, so I’ve been going in to pick her up around lunch time. On the way home today we stopped to have a bit of a play in the park.

Apart from all this, the main thing I did today was work on more Darths & Droids strips. I wrote a couple of new strips and assembled a couple that I’d written yesterday. We’re getting a pretty good buffer for the new movie now.

New content today:

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: