This morning when I went for my 5k run, my wife took Scully out for a walk. I got back home and had just had my shower and changed, when she phoned me. She said that she’d just seen a “kangaroo”, in the park right across the street from our place. It had emerged from the bushland around the creek there and come right up to her and Scully, to within a couple of metres, and then took off back into the brush. I said it probably wasn’t a kangaroo, but most likely a swamp wallaby.
There are a few populations of these guys in bushland a bit further out towards the outskirts of the city, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of them being this close to the city centre. I searched online, and the only reference I could find to wallabies being in this area was in this document from North Sydney Council, which says (Section 2.1.8, page 22):
Other notable wildlife returns to North Sydney over the past decade include the Swamp Wallably [sic], Superb Lyre-bird and the Long-nosed Bandicoot.
The report was written in 2021, so presumably the wallabies have been in the area since some time in the 2010s. I don’t know how they would have got here, because although there are pockets of bushland that could sustain a small population, they’re well separated from any other bushland by large tracts of heavily populated suburban development, that I doubt wallabies could or would travel through.
I spent some more time today preparing for our japan trip. I printed out a bunch of bookings and also maps for my wife to navigate around Tokyo to various places, while I’m working.
I also had three ethics classes. I got a message from one parent about one of the students in one of tonight’s classes. He enjoys the class but wants to free up time for other classes, so will be leaving. This was a bit sad because this kid was my longest running student, having been enrolled continuously since January 2022, over three years! I don’t know who the next longest running student is, but I have records and will work it out another day.
This morning I took Scully for a walk first thing, before the day got hot or rainy, both of which were forecast. As it happened, neither turned out to be true. I took Scully for another walk at lunch time and it was a bit cloudy and breezy, and not too hot. It felt like the beginning of the end of summer. Then when my wife got home from work we took Scully for a third walk, passing by the local mini supermarket and picking up some eggs and a cucumber.
This morning I worked on my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic: Fantasy Logic. It’s about applying logic and realistic consequences to fantasy story ideas, to see what would happen, and strengthen the kids’ skills at applying critical thinking to crafting a story. Some questions I ask:
What would happen if dragons existed in real life? How might people deal with them?
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world hides magic from Muggles. Do you think that makes sense?
In fairy tales, why does a magical wish often have unintended consequences?
You want magical items in your story, but you don’t want magical shops where people can just go to buy them. How do you explain why nobody is selling magic items?
You want your hero to have a powerful magic sword that makes them unbeatable, but you don’t want every fight to be boring because they always win. How could you make the sword more interesting?
After lunch I worked on some comics stuff, both Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids.
And I did some preparation for our upcoming trip to Tokyo. I checked out eSIMs for our phones, so we can stay connected while over there, since I’ll be working at the ISO standards meeting while my wife and her mother and sister are off exploring Tokyo on their own, so we need some way to communicate. Up to now, my wife and I have relied on WiFi spots to stay in touch while travelling, but I figured this time we’d need connection at all times. I explored a few companies and found a good looking one, which I have now purchased.
I also had an interesting discovery in Duolingo Japanese tonight. I came across the new word ちょっと. If you know Japanese, you’re probably already nodding sagely. If not, then I’ll point you at an article I had to read to understand what the heck this word is about. I feel like I levelled up in Japanese ability just from learning about this one word!
Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?
So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.
It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.
At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.
This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳
Today I had to refuel the car, and decided to take Scully on a drive to Collaroy and Fisherman’s Beach, next to the golf club there. Of course I stopped for a couple of pies at The Upper Crust, one butter chicken, and one Mexican beef. Excellent as usual.
It was hot and sunny and I expected to sit on the grass under the shade of a huge Norfolk Island pine tree that grows there. You can see it on the left edge of this photo:
But when we got there, there was an older couple already sitting there, with their dog. The patch of shade is fairly small, and Scully didn’t like the look of their dog, so we had to move along the beach a bit to the other side of the golf clubhouse and find a shady bench for me to sit on.
At least this spot gave me a good view of some Australian pelicans who were sunning themselves and drying off their wings. Among a swarm of silver gulls.
I also saw Australian ravens, masked lapwings, noisy miners, common mynas, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, rainbow lorikeets, and one grey butcherbird, all of which I recorded in eBird.
Back home, I worked on my ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Prizes and Awards”. I have questions like:
Why do people or organisations give out prizes and awards?
Do prizes sometimes get given to the “wrong” person?
Why are some awards, like Nobel Prizes, Olympic Medals, Academy Awards, so famous?
Is it fair that something or somebody that wins an award will become more popular?
Should awards always go to the best performer, or should effort and improvement also count?
Oh, and new neighbours moved into the apartment across the hall from us today, after our old ones moved out just last week. This seems a very quick turnaround given that our old neighbours were told they had to leave because the owner was intending to sell the apartment. We never saw anybody come in to inspect the place or any prospective buyers or new renters. And then suddenly two young women showed up today with furniture. I’m wondering if these woman actually offered a big rental increase and the owner decided to just tell the previous ones that they had to vacate. 🤔
Today I slept in quite a bit. I had a good solid sleep and probably caught up a bit on less sleep on Friday night. After breakfast my wife requested a lift down to Kirribilli Markets with Scully, so I dropped her off before going on my 5k run. These things combined meant I went for my run significantly later than usual, and it was already 26°C by the time I started. Nevertheless, I went faster than yesterday since the humidity was a bit lower and that made it feel not so bad.
I worked on some comics, and I also spent some time thinking about a revived old project. Some years ago a friend ran a trivia quiz during one of our online games nights. I had the idea to run a quiz myself and wrote some questions, but ran out of momentum. But I ran across the half-written quiz the other day and was inspired to work on it again. I mentioned it to the guys and they were all keen. I’ve asked them all to think of and submit their individual “expert subjects”, for which I will research and craft specific questions related to that subject for each of them.
I think I’ll run it as a team event, with pairs or triplets of people, depending how many players we have. Hopefully it’s not a prime number!
I also came up with a couple of new topics for future ethics classes, which I jotted down some preliminary questions for: “Danger!” and “Always Connected”. The latter is about the modern phenomenon of everyone being constantly plugged in to communications networks, no matter where they are, in contrast to a generation or two ago when people could easily get off the grid and in fact were forced to much of the time.
Since Australia Day was on a Sunday yesterday, the Monday is a public holiday. My wife had the day off work and spent time at home doing her watercolour artwork. While I didn’t have a day off at all, and did my usual 6 ethics classes!
There wasn’t much time for me to do much else. There was some light housework, cleaning a few things, doing cooking for dinner, and so on. But basically not much else. Oh, I did put in a little work on Darths & Droids, making a comic and reformatting part of the website to move the fan art stuff to the new bonus material area.
Oh, because my wife was home all day I also spent an hour or so removing photos from her phone, backing them up on my computer. Some of them went back about three years!
Today I cycled my ethics class topic for the week, writing a new lesson plan for the topic of Peer Pressure. This is a recycled topic from a few years ago, but I rewrote the examples and added some new questions to keep it fresh. I included some new questions about online pressure, in contrast to pressure from friends.
I assembled a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch I did a couple of weeks ago. Puttered around at random.
Watched a couple of Italian YouTube videos to get some language listening practice. A 4 minute video can take me 20 minutes to watch as I pause it to look up Italian words I don’t know yet. It’s good for my vocabulary. Today I learnt words like filastrocca, meaning “fairy tale”. I knew fila meant “queue” or “row” or “line”, but I looked up strocca and discovered that it’s an adjective meaning “awful” or “sucky” or “crappy”. So a fairy tale is a “crappy row”? I checked an Italian dictionary etymology and it was unclear on the origins of the word, but suggested that it might instead have originated from strocco, which is a noun meaning a type of silk. Which is also a bit bizarre.
I also learnt the word abbozzo, which means a rough draft or sketch. As I was confirming the meaning online, I discovered to my surprise that abbozzo also has a Wiktionary entry for English, with the same meaning, stating the word is borrowed from Italian. The Cambridge Dictionary and Merrian-Webster also agree that abbozzo is used in English. I can only assume that it’s mostly a fine arts jargon word, like sfumato or chiaroscuro.
I also learnt: agrumo (citrus fruit), pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry), and the verb macinare (to grind, as in pepper). Oddly enough, it wasn’t a cooking video; it was a video about Befana, the Italian holiday that occurs on 6 January to mark the end of the Christmas season. There are a bunch of traditional Befana treats that are served on the day.
For dinner tonight I wanted to use up a bunch of sourdough starter discard which I’ve accumulated in the past few days while trying to freshen up my sourdough starter. I mixed it with some extra flour and baking powder and formed it into simple flatbread which I pan fried and served with some lentil dhal, as a sort of substitute naan. It worked pretty well!
The weather was hot today, forecast to be hotter tomorrow, with a late storm to cool things down before a few cool and rainy days filling the rest of the week.
Finally, there’s a hotel in Berlin that really doesn’t want my business. I’ve emailed twice about a conference rate (for the ISO Photography Standards meeting there in June, which I’m planning on attending) that I’ve been told they have, and they haven’t answered. The info from the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) is that you have to book by email to get the conference rate; you can’t just book on the web site. I may have to look at other hotels.
I just completely forgot to do my blog post yesterday until it was too late. I had a day full of working on comics stuff, and avoiding going outside as much as possible because it was very hot.
However I did have to go out in the morning to drop the car off for an annual service, and then walk home in the heat – it’s about 25 minutes walk away. And then in the afternoon I had to walk back to the service centre to pick the car up again. There was an additional expense as the car needed a new battery installed, but otherwise it’s in good condition.
The heat broke with a cool change overnight, bringing some rain. Today was gloomily overcast all day, much cooler, and threatening rain, although there was barely a sprinkle. The Bureau of Meteorology today issued a report that La Niña conditions had returned, which may indicate increased rainfall for the remainder of the summer. I’d been enjoying the relatively dry conditions for the past few weeks, after the rain-soaked and very humid summers of the past four years.
Today I did some more comics stuff, making the first strip of Episode IX for Darths & Droids. I ran out of things to make lunch with at home, so had to go out and decided to get some pies. But when I got there the pie shop was closed! Probably still on a Christmas break. I ended up getting some Vietnamese rice paper rolls instead. Then I caught the Metro to my wife’s work to pick up Scully and walk home from there with her.
Tonight I restarted my online ethics classes, after two weeks break for Christmas and New Year. The new topic this week is Journalism. With questions such as:
Is it generally more important for news to be reported quickly, or accurately?
What purpose does journalism serve in our society? Why does it exist?
How can we tell if the news we see is really true?
Has the Internet made journalism better or worse?
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.
The record-breaking heatwave affecting inland Australia made its way to the east coast today. Inland suburbs of Sydney touched 42°C, but it remained a bit cooler nearer the coast where I am, thankfully, in the low 30s. But the humidity was still over 50% in the hottest part of the day here, whereas inland it dropped into the 20s for that dry heat effect.
Knowing this was the forecast, I took Scully out for a long walk around 7am, before it got too hot. We did the Waverton loop, going around the harbour shore. There’s one house that we pass where the owners always plant sunflowers, and they were in bloom.
The birds were out in force in the morning, especially by the water. I spotted this group of eight little black cormorants… or was it seven with a clever imposter??
(Spoiler: It’s a silver gull.) I did a couple of bird counts for eBird and recorded 18 different species.
Back home, I sheltered in the air conditioning for most of the day. working on Darths & Droids comics. I want to get ahead because there’ll be some time spent story planning for Episode IX when we start that very soon. And I need to build up a buffer for upcoming trips in the new year.
This evening I had the first class of the final week’s critical & ethical thinking topic for the year. We’re just having fun this week, with hypothetical “What if?” questions, getting the kids to think through logical consequences of weird scenarios. For example: What if social media likes were used as money? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was? What if everyone had a twin who it was impossible to tell apart?
The last one generated some very interesting discussion. One kid said people could commit crimes and nobody could be punished, because it would be impossible to know if you arrested the correct twin, and you’d have to avoid punishing the incorrect person. But another kid suggested that if it was truly impossible to tell the twins apart, they might be treated like a single person, and share one identity, one bank account, one job, etc. And if either one committed a crime, both would be punished. Actually all of the questions generated interesting discussions of the consequences. So it was a lot of fun. Perfect for the last class before Christmas.
Just after 8pm the southerly buster arrived with force. This is the local name for the cold front coming through from the south which rapidly reduces the temperature after a hot day, and brings cold strong winds and thunderstorms. We had very close lightning and loud thunder, and about 30 minutes of absolutely torrential rain, before it eased off. Thankfully it’s a lot cooler outside now, although the humidity has skyrocketed back around 95%. Tomorrow is forecast to be much cooler than today, around 25°C. Phew!
