chores – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Navigating car navigation

I got up early this morning to take the car in for its annual service. I took Scully, and after dropping off the car we walked home. The goal was to get home after my wife left for work, so that Scully wouldn’t notice her leaving. We managed it, barely, as I spotted my wife leaving and walking down the street as we approached, but fortunately Scully didn’t see her and go running after her.

At home I had just enough time to eat breakfast before my ISO Photography Standards meeting. We discussed depth cameras and organising experiments for them to measure various performance statistics such as depth accuracy, resolution, noise, and so on.

After that I photographed the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. That took me until about 11:30, at which point the car service place rang up and told me the car was ready to pick up. I had lunch at home, and then took Scully for a walk back to the car place. We drove home via the bakery at Naremburn, where I picked up a half dozen fruit mince tarts. Last year we had tarts from this bakery and they were the best ones from all of the places around that we sampled.

On the drive home, I checked the GPS navigation in the car, for which I’d asked them to update the maps. The GPS location seemed to be working, but the maps layer was completely absent. I called them up when I got home, and they said to bring the car back in fr them to look at it. So I had to drive back to the service centre. I waited while they fiddled with it. They tried redownloading the maps into the SD card and reinstalling in the car, and that worked.

I came home again, and spent some time editing photos from my trip to Europe in June. I got to the ones where we did a boat tour along the canals of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. There’s a historical canal that runs through the city centre, and passes underneath several houses.

One of the houses had a glass floor and we could look up into the house!

Tonight is games night with my friends. It’s a face-to-face fortnight, but we all agreed to do online games this week, since one of the guys has COVID, and another has fears of exposure/symptoms. I just won a game of 7 Wonders, which is something quite rare, so I’m feeling good about the night so far.

New content today:

Scrambling with 2 weeks to go

I’m continuing to rush to get everything done that I need to do before we head overseas in 13 days. I worked on making several Darths & Droids strips today. I also had to wrap and package up some Planet of Hats original strips for a reader who bought them. I’ll be mailing those off on Monday.

I did some housecleaning. Went for a run to get some exercise for the first time in several days – it’s been way too cold and miserable to do it during the week past, but today was sunny and not so windy, and a touch warmer.

Tonight I boiled up another batch of my hoard of frozen bunya nuts and made pesto to have with pasta for dinner.

Oh, and here’s a photo of Scully I took last night at the Italian restaurant.

New content today:

Housecleaning, but not my own

Today I had an unusual chore to do. My mother-in-law’s place needs freshening up and repainting to remove a mould problem caused by all the recent rain and humidity. So we went over today to help her pack fragile things like glassware and crockery out of the furniture so that the painters could move the furniture without breaking anything. We also took down all the paintings and pictures from the walls, and the curtains, and we helped her remove a whole bunch of books for donating to clear out some space.

This evening I had my two usual ethics classes, plus a science class for the girl who is doing those occasionally with me. Today we built on what we did about DNA and heredity last time, and moved on to evolution. As part of this I talked about the fossil record and the dating of fossils, which built on the knowledge she learnt back when we were talking about atoms and radioactivity – she already knows how we determine the ages of rocks and fossils.

So I spent most of the day when we weren’t out preparing that lesson.

Oh, and the weather was warm and sunny! No rain!! Although the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a warning that more rain is developing, and their models indicate we could get another 100-200 mm of rain starting from Wednesday, with some of the most flood-affected areas further north getting another 300-400 mm. Everyone you talk to here in Sydney is sick to death of this endless rain.

New content today:

Good intentions, but interruptions

I wanted to do some work today on comics and university teaching material. But my day ended up a bit fractured by various chores and errands, and I never really got a solid couple of hours together to start work and get things done.

There was grocery shopping, then my run and stretching exercises. I had to write some extension exercises for the current ethics topic of tourism and send them to one of the students doing those.

After lunch I drove with my wife and Scully a few suburbs over as she had an appointment. I walked Scully around while we waited and stopped at a patisserie for a sweet treat – a sour cherry tart. Well, it wasn’t that sweet – the cherries were indeed fairly sour.

This afternoon I cleaned the bathroom and shower stall. Oh, and baked some sourdough.

This evening we went out for dinner at the local pizza place. And tonight is virtual games night with my friends. I’ve just managed to come third and win a bronze medal in our Winter Olympics themed night. I’m representing Switzerland, for some reason.

New content today:

Just doing lots of chores

Today was one of those day when you have intentions of getting things done, but you end up just running lots of little chores and not getting to anything you wanted to.

I went to the supermarket to pick up the groceries I’d ordered yesterday. Then back home I made some sourdough bread. My wife always asks me to make fruit and nut loaf, but I just want some bread that I can make a cheese sandwich with, so I rarely do it. But today I gave in and made bread with apricots and walnuts. I left it to rise outside on the balcony in the warmth of the day. It was a hotter day than we’ve been having recently, getting up to 30°C and very sunny.

I went for my 2.5k run. I took Scully in for a few hours of doggie daycare, because we had a bunch of things we needed to do that would be tricky juggling her as well. Then I had to help my wife return an office chair to her work and pick up a new chair. She’s working from home and picked up a chair last week for better posture than our dining chairs, but it wasn’t great, so wanted to swap it for a different one. I baked the loaf of bread after it had risen.

After lunch I went through some slides that the lecturer of the new data engineering course had made and wrote up some comments on them. And then before I knew it, it was time to do two ethics classes.

And then my wife and I went out for dinner. There’s a nice Szechuan restaurant near us that we used to go to sometimes, but we hadn’t been there since we got Scully, because they didn’t have any outdoor tables. But we walked past recently and they now have a couple of tables outside – probably a response to COVID. But it’s good for us because we can go there and take Scully. So we booked a table for tonight. I had my favourite dish, the chilli pepper prawns. Very spicy, but delicious.

And then back home, where it’s virtual board games night with the guys. I’ve already lost a couple of games of 7 Wonders, but I won a game of CuBirds.

New content today:

Picking up pot

I have a couple of small plants growing on our balcony:

a chilli plant which has been very productive for a few years, and
a lime tree which has not yet produced any usable fruit, but which currently has some tiny limes that I hope will continue to mature rather than dropping off.

The chilli is in a suitably sized terracotta pot, but the lime tree is still in the plastic pot we bought it in. I decided it was time to repot it in a larger pot, so I went online and ordered a terracotta pot and saucer from the local hardware store. I had to guess the size of saucer because it was impossible to tell what the correct size was from the website information. (And I couldn’t just go into the hardware store to buy them because it’s closed by COVID restrictions – you can only order online, for contactless pickup.)

Anyway, my pickup was scheduled for this morning, so I drove over to the store, stopped in one of the marked “pick up” berths, and a guy came over and asked me my name, and then brought the pot and saucer over for me. It was impressively chunky. I brought it home, but I’ve put of repotting the lime tree to tomorrow.

Next up was picking up the online-ordered groceries from the supermarket. While there I grabbed three more punnets of super cheap strawberries as well.

Today mostly I worked on more of my creative thinking course. And tonight is games night with my friends, playing online via Board Game Arena. So far I think I’ve lost 5 games already…

New content today:

Winter storm incoming

Any story of today has to be about the weather. After yesterday’s 27°C winter heat, the cold front moved in overnight, bringing rain and cold. Today’s maximum temperature was recorded at 6:02 am, at just 11.4°C, making today the second coldest day of the year (10 June was just 10.3°C). It’s now 8 pm and Sydney has recorded 37 mm of rain in the city, up to just under 50 mm at the airport. The rain is expected to get heavier tonight, with accompanying gale force up to storm force winds. Wind gusts are already up to 70 km/h on Sydney Harbour. There are fears of beach erosion with the high seas that may threaten some coastal properties.

While this was unfolding today, I had a bunch of stuff to deal with. When we moved in here, there was an in-sink garbage disposal unit, for mulching food scraps into the drain system. I’d never lived with one before, but we started using it and got used to it. But last week it gave up the ghost, the motor seizing up. I called a plumber to see if we could just get it removed and replaced with a regular drainage pipe. No problem! And home repairs are one thing that is allowed to continue under our current COVID lockdown rules, so this morning the plumbers arrived to do the job. Rather than just replace the disposal unit, they redid all of the pipes leading from the double kitchen sink to the drainage port in the floor, replacing the semi-clogged trap and the old pipes that would threaten to start leaking a some point with brand new ones. The sink drain holes also have shiny new grilles in them. And there’s more space inside the cupboard under the sink where we store all the cleaning stuff and other things (watering can, toolbox, light bulbs, candles, matches, etc), so we used that to clear away some stuff off the kitchen bench. Overall a big win!

Then at lunch time I had to go pic up the car from some minor repairs. The repair place is about 20 minutes walk away. In the pouring rain and freezing cold. They had to pick the one day of the week when it was the absolute most miserable to be outside. Well, I took advantage of having to walk over there to stop in at a pie shop on the way for some lunch. As well as repairing the car they’d washed and detailed it nicely. Which didn’t last long…

Back home, I used the newly repaired car to take Scully to doggie daycare. And brave the rain again. In the afternoon I actually did some productive stuff, writing my class notes for this week’s new ethics topic: Fairness in Sport.

Then in the early evening I went to pick up Scully. When the rain and wind had intensified. When she goes to daycare, apparently she has so much fun playing with the other dogs that she completely forgets any need to pee or poo, with the result that as soon as I pick her up she has to rush to the nearest grass and relieve herself. With the rain coming horizontally and my umbrella threatening to turn inside out. And then once both of us were thoroughly wet we climbed inside the car to head home.

Here’s Scully on a sunnier day, last Saturday (bandana by Scully xo, my wife’s Etsy shop):

For dinner tonight I tried something new: sourdough pizza dough. I’ve been making pizza dough for a while now – it’s incredibly easy and I don’t know why I didn’t try it earlier. This time I tried adding some leftover sourdough starter to the mix to see how it works, and it turned out really good!

New content today:

Cleaning house, or mailbox at least

Today I didn’t have anything big that I needed to do, which meant I had some time to deal with various small tasks that have accumulated. One of which was cleaning out my email inbox of various things that needed attention in one way or another. Such as downloading statements for various accounts, filling stuff out on my tax spreadsheet, and filing things into folders so I know where they all are. I also had some paper receipts to go through for taxation stuff, and then file away.

My wife took this fine photo of a kookaburra while walking Scully this morning:

At lunch I took Scully on another walk while I went to get a pie from a nearby bakery. And I took this:

Both of the photos are uncropped full frames from our phone cameras. Yes, I did get ridiculously close to that bird – I was holding the phone maybe 30 centimetres away from it. It was clearly semi-tame, and perhaps waiting for me to offer it some food. So I was a little lucky (but don’t tell my wife that!).

New content today:

One of those interstitial Saturdays

After the late update for yesterday, I don’t really have a lot to report on today. It was a day of mixed housework and getting a few odd jobs done.

The major unusual thing I did was to update the Irregular Webcomic! forum software version. My webhost is deprecating PHP version 7.2, and doing an enforced upgrade to 7.4. Since my phpBB install was a few versions behind, moving to 7.4 broke it, so I had to update it to the latest version. And updating phpBB isn’t a job for the faint-hearted – it’s not press a button and it all happens automatically, like WordPress. You have to download a zip file, backup your database and installation files, then modify some configuration stuff, then copy a whole bunch of files over the top of the previous version on the webhost machine, then run a database update script, then check and possibly update all your plugin extensions, and make sure everything works, and then redo any customisations that you made by editing the source code.

So it was a solid couple of hours of work. But I’m happy to report that it all went well and the forums now seem to be working fine under the new PHP version 7.4. I should keep them more up to date… Last time I neglected to update the version for several years and a change to PHP completely broke things so badly that I had to spend a whole day or more doing a complete reinstallation and migration of the database using an upgrade tool that I fortunately managed to find. That was almost a disaster, and I don’t want to go through that again.

Apart from that it was mostly housework. But my wife and I took some time to relax this evening at a Turkish restaurant up the street. They do some really nice food there.

New content today:

Instant noodles

Today was mostly a chore day. I did the weekly grocery shopping. Most weeks recently I’ve been getting falafels and flatbread from the supermarket to make falafel wraps for lunch, and I put tahini, sliced tomato, and chilli sauce on them. But today I decided I’d try something different for the next week, and make falafel salads, with lettuce and cucumber and other fresh stuff instead of the flatbread. And also in the fruit & veg section I saw pomegranates and thought why not? So maybe I’ll throw some of that in too.

And I found some fresh mozzarella, packaged in whey. I got some to try making a Margherita pizza in a few days.

A bit later I went to a new Asian supermarket that opened nearby recently. It’s really good! It’s mostly Japanese products, but there was also stuff a mix of other things. I found the Singaporean brand of instant noodles that make an absolutely amazing laksa. I’d previously got these from my regular supermarket, but they’ve stopped stocking it. Not only did they have the laksa version, they had a couple of other flavours I hadn’t seen before!

Black pepper crab and chilli crab! And they’re labelled “New! Must try!” Wow, I had to try these, so I got one of each.

At home I did a spring clean of the bathroom, emptying out the cabinets and going through all the items, cleaning off dust, throwing out old stuff, cleaning the cabinet interiors, and putting useful stuff back in neatly. I discovered that the toothpaste we get stands upright on the big flat lid! We’ve always stored toothpaste tubes lying on their side, but I tried this to save space, and it works beautifully! Now I’m wondering if everyone else has been doing this for years and I’ve just never thought of it…

New content today: