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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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A big spring clean chore done

Tuesday mornings are when I work on my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics class. This week we’re talking about Robots. Some questions:

How would you feel if your teacher or sports coach was a robot?
Are there any jobs that should never be done by robots?
If robots start doing lots of work, what will humans do?
Should we program robots to have feelings, or would it be better to keep them as emotionless machines?
If robots become as smart as people, should they ever be given rights such as voting or freedom to do what they want?
If we didn’t give smart robots rights to freedom and voting, would that be slavery?

After completing the lesson plan, I made a new Darths & Droids comic. Then took Scully out for a walk. The day was surprisingly cold up to that point. A chilly southerly breeze actually made things colder at midday than it was at 6:30 in the morning. But the sun came out around lunch time and warmed things up.

This afternoon I tackled a major spring cleaning chore. I removed all the sliding window panes (sequentially) and washed them in the bathroom. Then removed the flyscreens and washed those. Then washed the fixed panes, then replaced the screens and sliding panes. We have laminated glass in most of the windows so the panes are very heavy and it’s tricky getting them in and out and carrying them through to the bathroom. I also had to brush away a lot of spiderwebs from the outsides of the windows. And washing the exteriors of the fixed panes is tricky because we’re above ground level and I have to lean out with a long-handled squeegee. Then I also cleaned the flyscreen door and glass of the balcony doors. All this took a few hours, but now we have sparkly clean windows that look like they’re almost not there at all.

Doing that, somewhere along the way I gave myself a nasty bruise on the sole of my left foot, up near the middle toe. I probably stood on something hard while trying to heft a heavy window pane in or out. I noticed while walking around afterwards and it’s quite sore.

Tonight I had the first Robots class. I think this is going to be a fun one this week!

Oh, I think I mentioned a few days ago that we had our dining chairs reupholstered. Here are before and after photos, to show what they looked like, and how they are now.

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Last will and testament

I did a very grown up thing today: I saw a lawyer and signed my will! My wife and I decided recently that we should probably draw up wills, so we can figure out who we want to leave stuff to in the event that something happens to either one or both of us. We also did powers of attorney, which grants nominated people the authority to handle our legal and financial stuff if we’re incapacitated.

First thing this morning I did a favour for our neighbour by taking their dog out. The husband had had surgery recently on his foot and his wife had gone out very early for a family thing, so they asked me to take their dog out for a morning walk. Fortunately their dog gets along very well with Scully, so it was easy enough.

Apart from those things, my day was very routine, with six ethics classes, making some vege burgers for dinner, and not much time for much else.

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Starting mega-engineering

This morning I wrote up the lesson plan for the new week’s ethics classes, on the topic of “Mega-Engineering”. I start with potential technological solutions to climate change, such as large scale carbon capture, stratospheric aerosols, or space mirrors. Then I move on to an existing mega-project: the Three Gorges Dam. And ask about good and bad things about these things. Then go on to speculative future things like arcologies, space elevators, and Dyson spheres.

I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well. It was only one student, and she was returning after a long break. She was surprised that I remembered her!

I took Scully on a longish walk at lunch. I had a sausage roll at The Grumpy Baker. They used to be delicious, but they’ve changed the recipe and now the meat is dry and gristly and rather unpleasant. It’s been this way the last few times I tried one, hoping that it would be back to how they used to be. I think I’ll have to remember to just never buy them again. Very disappointing.

One of the LED light bulbs in the bathroom blew again today. This is the third time in about a year. I think there must be something wrong with the wiring… LED bulbs should last much longer than that as I understand it. The weird thing is: There are two sockets in the oyster light fitting. I install one daylight colour temperature bulb and one warm colour temperature bulb, so we get a pleasant mix of colour temperature. The warm one blew the first two times. Last time I switched the sockets and put the daylight one in the suspect socket. But now it’s the new warm bulb that’s blown again. The daylight one has been fine for like 3 or 4 years. Warm ones keep blowing every few months. Despite swapping sockets. A friend thinks it’s most likely humidity from hot showers getting into the fitting and messing with the voltage step-down circuitry, blowing that before the actual LED itself.

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Two extremely busy days

I missed yesterday’s post because I was so busy that I just didn’t have time for it. I had 4 ethics classes before lunch, then spent the afternoon sorting out Magic: the Gathering cards to try and get some more sold and shipped off. This time I went through all the cards from the Fallen Empires expansion released in 1994, and I found I had enough cards to assemble a few complete sets of all 187 cards in the set. These are not expensive cards, and each full set is only worth $130 or so. But selling them as sets means I get rid of a lot of common cards, of which I have numerous copies, and which would be difficult to sell in anything other than bulk lots.

I also had to quickly make an Irregular Webcomic! strip using photos previously shot, because I’d neglected to make new strips for this week on the weekend. And I did some work on new Darths & Droids strips too, to try not to fall behind on those as well. Then I had two more ethics classes lat in the evening to round out the day. And in between I walked Scully and made pizza for dinner.

Tuesday’s have been my day off ethics classes for a long time, and I use the time to write the upcoming week’s topic. But this week I begin teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney, again, in the image processing course that runs in second semester. And this year the class is scheduled for 2-5pm on Thursdays, and the travel time to get home clashes with one of my classes on Thursday evening. So I had to move that class to a new day, and Tuesday was the only sensible choice. So my deadline to get my class written was 5pm today, instead of 5pm Wednesday as it has been.

In addition, I posted those Fallen Empires sets for sale on a Magic Discord server, and got some buyers. So I had to go the post office twice – once to get packing boxes, and twice to mail them off after packing the cards carefully.

And the plumber came today to install a new kitchen sink mixer tap. Our old one had been falling apart, with the aerator coming out back in May so that the water splattered everywhere if turned on beyond a slow trickle, and recently it also began dripping. I’d bought a replacement tap a few weeks ago, and thought I’d give it a go of installing it myself, given my recent success replacing the toilet valve. But I prevaricated and kept putting it off, until finally the dripping got to me and last weekend I opened up the tap box and had a look at the installation instructions. I decided this was going to be significantly more complicated than the toilet valve, so I called a plumber.

So the plumber had to work on it for almost two hours, and he measured the water pressure in the pipes and found it to be fairly high at 900 kPa. He said that was great for nice shower pressure, but too much for a kitchen tap, and indeed the tap was only warranted for pressures up to 500 kPa. So he had to install pressure regulators on the hot and cold water pipes. And then install a bit of copper pipe so the flexible hoses of the new tap could reach. In other words, this was way beyond my means, and I thanked my lucky stars that I just called a plumber and didn’t try to do this job myself.

And then I had to make another new Irregular Webcomic! strip for tonight’s update. I really need to find some time to get ahead and buffer some strips in advance.

Oh, and I had the first ethics class on a Tuesday! Thankfully all of the students who were doing it on Thursday got my messages about the change of day and could make it, so I had three kids, talking about Shapeshifting. I think this is a good topic, because it was a fun and interesting discussion.

Oh, and in other good news, the local council here has sent us a development proposal for public comment. They are planning to build a raised speed bump pedestrian (zebra) crossing in front of my place, to replace a pedestrian safety island which has speed bumps before it on either side of the street. I think this is a fantastic proposal, because the current arrangement means that cars can AND DO swerve across the median line and onto the wrong side of the street, potentially into oncoming traffic, just to avoid the speed bumps. Because the current speed bumps aren’t aligned across the street, cars can do this chicane manoeuvre to avoid them, and the ones that do it are trying to avoid them because they’re travelling too fast. So it’s ridiculously dangerous. So I’ve submitted a public comment, saying words to this effect. Hopefully we’ll see that new crossing constructed in a few months.

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Repotting chillis and a new game expansion

This morning I took Scully on a long walk, around down by the harbour shore. The forecast was hot, so I didn’t want to take her out for long at lunch time, and got her walk in early before the roads heated up too much in the sun for her paws. I did a bird count on the walk and recorded 13 species. None of the slightly more interesting water birds like cormorants, herons, or ducks today. A lot of sulphur-crested cockatoos though, screeching loudly – those ones can really make a racket.

When I got home I photographed the remainder of the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I started working on last week. Then I turned to making a new Darths & Droids strip.

I also repotted the new chilli plant we bought a few days ago. I had a terracotta pot from the previous good chilli plant – not the scrawny recent one that never produced any chillis. I put the new plant in there to give it more room to grow. Of course this meant spilt soil al over the balcony, so I had to clean that up. I also gave the lime tree a thorough cleaning – the leaves get dirty with dust and grime so I wiped them off with a wet cloth.

This evening I did the first three ethics classes on the topic of Gift Giving. One of the most controversial questions was on regifting. Some kids thought it was fine if you didn’t like a gift to give it away to someone else, or even just throw it away, while others said you had to keep it, but maybe stick it in the back of a cupboard or something.

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Games night and plumbing day

Friday I had a bunch of classes, followed by going out to a friend’s place for in-person board games night. We played games of Sequoia, Modern Art, Istanbul, and Coup. Here’s Istanbul:

It’s the longest game we played and I think the one I enjoyed the most. It was very close, with one guy winning it just one turn before myself and another player would have also reached the winning condition (and it would have gone to the tiebreaker condition).

Today I tackled a chore that I’ve been meaning to do for a few weeks. Our shower had begun to be a bit drippy, with it getting harder to turn the water off properly. I really dislike the job of replacing the valves in the taps because its fiddly and messy, and I have to get tools from the garage. So I tend to put it off as long as possible. But I decided I had to bite the bullet today and get it done. And last time I only bothered to replace the cold tap valves, so I thought I better do the hot ones as well this time.

I started at 11:30, thinking I’d be done by soon after midday so I could have lunch. In fact I didn’t finish until after 1pm. When I unscrewed the shower cold water tap I found the reason why it had been dripping lately:

The old valve was completely mangled and worn out! Once I’d done the replacements and turned the hot and cold water mains back on, everything seemed to be working nicely. So hopefully I won’t need to do that again for a year or more.

This morning I did a 5k run, clocking 27:01 on my new route. I think this will be a faster route, without the steeper hills of the old route, nor the extended uphill slog over the last 2 kilometres or so.

This afternoon we all went on a walk up to the shops. I grabbed a gelato from the local gelato place. As I sat eating it, my wife noticed a sign at the specialist grocer next door advertising Doglato – an ice cream product for dogs. While I waited outside with Scully, she went in to take a look, and emerged with a small tub of peanut butter and honey Doglato. We gave Scully a bit, but it was frozen pretty solid so difficult to scoop out. We ended up taking the tub home and sticking it in the freezer, and will try giving Scully some more over the next few days, which will be easier with access to our kitchen utensils.

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Shower repair, day 3

The ongoing battle with the shower continues. Today I applied another coat of the grout sealer first thing in the morning. Then I looked at the silicone sealant to check the instructions. It said to use mineral turpentine to clean the surfaces before application, and also for cleanup after application. Fortunately I have some turpentine stowed away in the garage, so I went down to get it.

The bottle was ancient. I must have bought it over 20 years ago. The price label (from back when everything had individual price labels) said $2.50. The same amount of turpentine from the hardware store website today costs $5.95. The bottle was a little over half full – I would have used the rest of it years ago for cleaning up painting work.

I wiped down the surfaces with turps (common Aussie abbreviation for “turpentine”). And I remembered just how powerful turps smells, and how much I can’t stand that smell. It pervaded the whole house. The rag I used to wipe the surfaces I put outside on the balcony to avoid having it in the house and emitting more smell.

I wiped the surfaces clean with a dry cloth and then applied masking tape to make sure the silicone sealant had nice clean edges. And then late in the afternoon I tackled the hardest part, the actual silicone sealant. I needed to bring in the turps-soaked cloth for wiping up excess. I made some plastic spatulas by cutting a thick plastic yoghurt lid into round-ended shapes, and I used those to smooth the silicone into the grooves. It got a bit messy and I got silicone all over my rubber gloves, so I ended up just using a gloved finger to do a lot of the smoothing.

As soon as all the crevices were sealed, I peeled off the masking tape. Hopefully I got it off fast enough, before the sealant skinned over. Now to let the silicone cure for… the instructions said 72 hours!! SO if we wait that ling until we can use the shower again, it will be Saturday evening (it’s Wednesday today). By then we’ll have been nearly six days without a shower. Lucky we have a bathtub!

I forgot to mention yesterday that the family of the boy who I was sorting out Magic: the Gathering cards for came by to pick them up. They were headed off for the day and driving past so dropped in yesterday morning. I met them out the front of my place and handed over the heavy shoebox full of cards. The mother and the boy got out to greet me (leaving a father and a slightly older girl in the car). The kid was super excited, and he gave me a hand drawn thank you card, on which he’d drawn a cool picture of a dragon:

He’d written a thank you message inside. The mother gave me a paper bag which turned out to contain a bottle of port and a small Christmas cake. They were both very grateful, and I was happy to see the boy so excited to get the cards.

The other main thing I did today was go through photos from my first day in Amsterdam back in June. I edited selected photos and tried to figure out where exactly I’d taken them all. A lot were of random canals and bridges and I had no idea what they were when I took them. But I retraced our steps roughly on Google Maps, using identifiable landmarks to establish waypoints, and used Streetview to identify the intermediate locations. But doing this, I managed to locate the site of every photo. This was satisfying, as sometimes I’ve returned home from trips and have no way of figuring out exactly where some of the photos were taken.

I posted the photos to my Flickr album for the trip and incorporated several into my travel diary for that day, which I also updated with some of the now-identified locations.

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Shower repair, day 2

First thing this morning I washed the surfaces of the shower that I’m planning to reseal with silicone sealant, using sugar soap to make sure they’re really clean. I want to make sure the sealant sticks to the surfaces, and doesn’t peel away quickly due to any dirt or residues. The bottle says not so use it on aluminium, but I checked online and the problem is it can cause discolouration, but the risk is low if it’s wiped off quickly. So I went ahead and used it.

I inspected the areas that I was considering patching up with grout. I poked a Stanley knife into the grout, and found to my horror that it was crumbly and easily scraped out. Well, here’s something that definitely needs fixing! I’m now very glad I bought a tube of grout yesterday. I scraped out the areas of loose grout everywhere I could find them and cleaned them up.

After wiping off the sugar soap and letting things dry, around lunchtime I applied grout to the newly formed cracks, filling them up to ensure a good seal. I’ve never done grouting before, but it wasn’t too difficult, and I wiped up the excess around the edges with a damp cloth so the result looks neat and tidy.

Then this evening I looked at the grout sealer product that I’d also bought. I want to let the new grout cure for 24 hours, but there was old grout in some places that I wanted to make sure was sealed against water penetration, so I applied the grout sealer to those areas. I’ll do the newly grouted areas tomorrow.

So we’re on day 2 of baths instead of showers, and we’ll be doing the same tomorrow.

The weather was warm again today, 28°C like yesterday. We’re still not used to the summery heat, since it was unusually cold up until just a few days ago, so we stayed out of the heat of the middle of the day and took Scully for walks early and then in the evening.

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Boxing Day labour

Boxing Day is Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race day, and the Boxing Day Test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, this year between Australia and South Africa. I had the cricket on the TV for most of the day, but I was mostly occupied in the bathroom, cleaning up the shower stall.

I’d said to my wife that I wanted to reserve a few days after Christmas to redo the shower seals. We won’t be able to use the shower while this is in progress, and it will take a few days, so we’re stuck having baths for the next few days.

The problem is the clear silicone sealant between the shower hob and the aluminium frame of the glass shower screen was getting mouldy underneath, and nothing I did cleaned it up. So I spent a few hours today stripping off the sealant, scraping out the crevices, cleaning various nooks and crannies that haven’t been cleaned properly in years, so they were pretty gunky.

I mentioned what I was doing with my friends and a couple of them gave me tips and suggested specific products from the hardware store to do what I wanted to achieve. One suggested a grout sealer as well, to prevent water leaking through grouting, and I thought that was a good idea as we’ve had a very minor issue with that happening. And then he said I should actually grout the gaps rather than use silicone, but I checked and grout isn’t good for metal surfaces, so I’ll have to stick to silicone. But I did get a small tube of grout for a few minor cracks, so hopefully that will go okay because I’ve never done grouting before.

My wife and I walked up to the hardware store this evening to buy the supplies. We went late, after 6pm, because it was a very warm day and we only did a shorter walk with Scully at lunch time in the heat.

So, I spent much of the day on my knees, or kneeling down, hunched over, or sitting on the floor, and scraping and scrubbing tiles and metal fittings. I had to take several breaks to stretch my legs and back out, but got the first part of the job done. All the silicone I want to replace is removed, and the surfaces are cleaned. Tomorrow I’ll go to work with the grout, and then maybe Wednesday I’ll do the silicone sealing.

Dinner today was leftover turkey slices and potato gratin from Christmas lunch yesterday. Scully also got a bit of festive turkey!

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