family – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Easter lunch and no email

This morning we took Scully for a walk, and then I made a salad to take to my wife’s family lunch for Easter Sunday. Her mother requested I make rocket and pear salad again, as she likes it so much.

I diced beurre bosc pears, drizzled them with a mix of orange and lemon juice to stop them browning and to give some flavour, put them onto rocket leaves, added crumbled blue cheese and walnuts and some extra virgin olive oil. We took it over to lunch and it was a it. We also had roast chicken and vegetables, a scalloped potato bake, and pane di casa bread. And then there was a chocolate raspberry cake for dessert, and of course Easter chocolates, which my brother-in-law gets from a chocolatier near his place. There were Easter bilbies and small eggs filled with various flavours.

When we got home this afternoon I discovered my email wasn’t working. Two different clients (Thunderbird on MacOS ad Apple Mail on iOS) both reported errors connecting to my imap server. I tried webmail on my web and mail host’s domain, but it also reported an error message (“Server Error: STATUS: Internal error occurred.”) and didn’t show me any of my email at all. I double checked the server settings, encryption, and port numbers, and they’re all correct.

But the status page for my webhost says that both imap and webmail are both operational. So I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve submitted a support ticket saying I can’t access either imap or webmail, over 2 hours ago, but no response yet. I’m just going to go to sleep tonight and hope that it’s all fixed in the morning. Otherwise I don’t know what else to do.

New content today:

Aussie Christmas Day

This morning I spent baking a maple-glazed ham for my wife’s family Christmas lunch. It cooled enough to take in the car to my mother-in-law’s place, where we had the traditional Christmas lunch with eight people.

My wife’s nephew was back from Norway for the first time since COVID began – he’s working over there now, and he brought his girlfriend with him on her first trip to Australia. So she was having fun experiencing a southern hemisphere Christmas. After the lunch we all went for a swim at the nearby beach. It got up to 27°C today, so warm, but not really hot.

For gifts I basically got some sweets, some mustards and sauces, and some bathroom niceties (fancy bath bombs and shower gel).

We relaxed into a long, lazy afternoon of snacking on chocolates, and then the evening viewing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on TV. We just got home for the night, at 10pm.

New content today:

Christmas Eve family stuff

It’s Christmas Eve, which means the big gathering of my extended family. We’ve always had it on Christmas Eve, which makes it easy for people with partners to attend the other family’s Christmas Day events.

It used to be a gathering at on the family member’s house, but with all of my mother’s generation having now downsized or moved out of the city after the kids have moved out, nobody has a suitably large home to host it any more. So for the past few years it’s been held at a park in Sydney’s west, by the Nepean River, but we’ve missed them because of COVID. This year is the first year we went to attend the event in the park.

It’s about a 45 minute drive there on motorways most of the way. We arrived a bit after 2pm (it had started at 2, though a few people had got there early to reserve a spot in the park. They needn’t have bothered – I thought the park would be packed with people out having picnics, but we actually had the whole park to ourselves! Scully got to run around free of the leash for the whole afternoon (and now she’s super tired tonight).

It was warm there: 35.5°C. Fortunately we were sitting in the shade and there was a bit of a breeze, so it didn’t feel bad at all. The generation below me (my cousins’ kids) are all roughly teenagers, and they were playing variously casual cricket, softball, and soccer. I joined in and had a bit of a hit with the softball bat. I prefer cricket, but by the time I joined in they’d retired that and moved on to softball. We also played some quoits.

There were just a few snacks and nibbles, and the wife of one of my cousins made her famous caramel slice. Everyone else was moving on to dinner at a nearby rowing club in the evening, but we left a bit before then to drive home (where I just made omelettes for dinner).

On the way back we stopped for petrol, and I went in to pay and said, “Pump 2”, and the guy behind the counter seemed confused and said, “No, you’re 1”.

I said, “No, I checked, I’m 2”.

He said, “You’re the black car there, right?”

I said, “No, I’m the blue car at the other pump.”

The guy had a look of horrified revelation and said, “That guy who just walked out paid for your pump!”

He must have realised there was something wrong because he came back in. The guy behind the counter said, “Sorry, you’ve paid for this man’s fuel.”

And the man turned to me and said, “Merry Christmas!”

We had a bit of a giggle and the guy behind the counter sorted it all out. Unfortunately… because then I had to pay for it!

After we got home I took advantage of the cooler evening to go for a 2.5k run. I really wanted to get this done before Christmas, because this run took my total running distance for the year 2022 to 500 km! I noticed a couple of months ago that this landmark was within reach, and have been diligent to try to reach it, so that felt pretty good. Although I ran a fairly slow time in the evening heat. (25.3°C, 66% humidity)

Tomorrow we have Christmas Day lunch with my wife’s family. I’m looking forward to meeting her nephew’s girlfriend, who is from Norway and has never been to Australia before. I hope she’s enjoying the heat which has finally hit us after that unusually cold start to December.

New content today:

A Zoom and a tunnel

Friday night was virtual board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write up a blog entry. I picked up groceries, taught some online classes, and started working on a new online class for Outschool. I’m planning to run some Dungeons & Dragons or other roleplaying games for kids. D&D classes are very popular on there. I think a lot of kids these days are getting exposure to D&D online when they don’t have local groups to play with—or maybe some are getting an extra fix—and Outschool is a perfect platform for them to find adult DMs with experience running games for kids.

During games night, we played Sushi Go Party!, which I won, amazingly. And 6 Nimmt, Splendor, and Jump Drive, all of which I lost badly, unsurprisingly. We also tried a new game: VektoRace, which is an analogue car racing board game in which you use distance templates to move car tokens around a race track. It seemed an odd thing to port to an online version, but seemed to work okay. I took an early lead and the other players struggled to catch me, and we decided to quit after a bit more than 1 lap of the 3 in the race as it wasn’t particularly interesting. It’d probably be more fun with actual miniatures and a table.

Today I went to visit my mother, who lives up north, an hour’s drive away. While on my recent trip to Europe, my wife and I visited my aunt, my mother’s sister, in her nursing home in Germany. In the past year or so, we’ve had Zoom calls with her and several members of our family (organised by one of my cousins), but my mother has never been in on the call, because she’s not computer savvy and panicked when I suggested she set up Zoom on her computer. So when we saw my aunt in person, I asked if she’d like me to set up a call with her sister (my mother), and she sounded very enthusiastic about that. So when we got home from Europe, I phoned my mother to see if we could visit and take a laptop and do all of the Zoom setup for her, so she could talk to her sister. She thought that sounded great, so I emailed the nursing home in Germany and set up a call.

Today was the day, so my wife and I drove up to have an afternoon tea with my mother and then set up the Zoom call. It was scheduled for 5pm here, which was 9am in Germany. I took a laptop, and connected it to her WiFi (after struggling to find the password, before finding it written on the bottom of the modem), and ran the Zoom from there. It worked well and my mother and aunt had a rather emotional chat for a while, not having spoken to one another for many years, since the last time my aunt had visited Australia. My aunt tires quickly, so we didn’t stay on too long.

I knew we’d be leaving my mother’s around 6pm, so we decided to have dinner somewhere on the way home. Before we left, I found a nice restaurant in northern Sydney, just off the freeway exit and before the long slog through the suburbs back home. As we approached the freeway exit, we were nicely 10 minutes before our reservation – perfect timing.

But I hadn’t counted on NorthConnex. This is a new tunnel extending from the freeway, under multiple suburbs, bypassing a notoriously slow surface road. This was the first time I’ve driven back into Sydney from the north since the tunnel opened. We were approaching our exit, so naturally I moved to the extreme left lane (remember, we drive on the left in Australia). But then suddenly I was in unfamiliar territory, and wondering what the “NCX” written on the roadway meant… and before I knew it we were in the tunnel.

This is a 9-kilometre tunnel, with no exits. There was no way back. So we missed our dinner reservation, because by the time we exited and drove back it would have been half an hour or more later. And we paid a toll for the privilege. And we ended up far from home and had to take another tolled motorway to get home. So that was a bit of a debacle. We ended up stopping near home and grabbing something at an Indian restaurant for dinner. A place we hadn’t tried before which… was a bit substandard, and not somewhere we’d go again.

New content today:

Heavy rain and heavy lunch

Aldi advertised a special item available today – a dog bed. We’ve got two of the dog beds from there and Scully loves them, but she’s also chewed them a bit so they have some holes, so we wanted to get another. I drove over to the nearest Aldi store to pick one up this morning, but they didn’t have any.

For lunch, I caught a train to Newtown, where I met my brother. We had lunch together at The Pie Tin. He’d never been there before, so I recommended some of the best pies for him to try – he chose the barbecue brisket and a sausage roll. I had a Nepali curry lamb and a Mexican chicken. We were both really full, but it’s worth it since the pies there are so good.

ON the way home, I stopped off at Town hall to check out the game shop and see if they had a copy of Azul: Queen’s Garden. They didn’t. I then stopped again at North Sydney to pop into the Aldi there and see if they had the dog bed. They didn’t.

Oh, and it’s been raining almost all day. Heavy rain. We had a lot of rain overnight. There was a break in the early afternoon, but it’s now raining heavily again this evening. Everyone in Sydney is so sick of this endless rain.

New content today:

Mother’s Day pizza lunch

Today was Mother’s Day here in Australia…

(Which just reminded me to call my mother! Lucky I got to this before it was too late!)

For lunch we went to my mother-in-law’s place. My sister-in-law bought pizzas for everyone, so nobody had to cook, and we made choc-chip cookies last night to take over for sweets. It was a fairly small gathering, just seven of us, plus Scully.

That took up the afternoon, then I had some ethics classes this evening, so there’s not much more to say about today. It was a nice sunny day, but chilly. We’ve been enjoying the dry weather, but it looks like it’s going to turn rainy for the next week or so again.

New content today:

Easter family lunch

Easter Sunday is all about getting together with my wife’s family for a fancy lunch. We went to my mother-in-law’s place, which she’s just had repainted and cleaned up, and it looks really good.

We had a roast chicken breast roll with apricot stuffing, roast vegetables, and a salad that I made with rocket, pear, walnuts, and blue cheese. After that was a selection of individual cakes which my sister-in-law had brought from a bakery: salted caramel tart, lemon meringue, berry cheesecake, and strawberry sponge. And of course a selection of chocolates and Easter eggs of various types, including chocolate bilbies. These are a common alternative to chocolate rabbits here in Australia, where rabbits have a bad reputation as an invasive species.

A key thing with this gathering was seeing my wife’s nephew for the first time since 2019, since he’s been in Europe for the entirety of the COVID pandemic and this is his first trip back home. So there was a lot of catching up.

After lunch we walked down to the nearby small harbour beach, and were surprised to see that almost all the sand had been washed away – likely by the recent storms and heavy rains, combined with heavy ocean swells. So it was mostly just a bunch of sandstone rocks, left a metre or so below the normal level of the sand.

Tonight back home… I think we’re just going to have a grilled cheese sandwich or something for dinner. Too full to eat much else.

New content today:

Are we in for more rain? Yes, we are

Yesterday was not only Scully’s birthday, but my sister-in-law’s, so today we went out for a Sunday brunch with my wife’s family to celebrate.

We had a bit of trepidation, because it was at a cafe by the beach, and looking at Google Streetview it looked like the outdoor tables were protected only by flimsy sun umbrellas, whereas the weather forecast was for storms. We assumed we must have had the outdoor area booked, because we’d be bringing Scully. Checking the weather radar before leaving, it looked like we might be lucky, with a storm line moving through but clear air behind it. Indeed, it poured on us while we drove over there, but stopped by the time we got there. But we needn’t have worried, because they gave us a table well under cover – they allowed dogs into a large area under the cover of a patio awning.

Looking at the menu, I decided on eggs benedict (my usual go-to when eating out for breakfast). But then I saw a woman at an adjacent table being served a delicious looking plate of something, with a visible poached egg and a pile of chopped tomato. I checked the menu and concluded it must be the “halloumi bruschetta”, so I ordered that instead. And then when my dish arrived it was nothing like what that woman had received! I’d obviously made a mistake in assuming what it was, and so I ended up with neither my first choice meal nor the dish that looked amazingly good. Fortunately what I had was also perfectly fine, so no real complaints, just an amusing story.

After the brunch the rain held off, so I went for a walk with my wife and Scully along the beach to the centre of the suburb. There was a Sunday market on to look at, and I tried some gelato from a new place that looks like a high class Italian gelateria. They had some very interesting flavours to choose from. I tried the Black Forest (I can never go past Black Forest), and the pavlova with berries. After carefully shaping each scoop into the paper cup, another staff member wiped the freezer display case clean of any stray drips or blobs of gelato, to keep the entire thing looking immaculate and pristine. I’ve never seen that at a gelateria before! It was very good. I’ll have to go back again and try more of the flavours.

Back home, I managed to get my run in before the rain settled in for the remainder of the afternoon and evening. We’re supposed to get another 100 mm or more of rain over the next week. And it’s worse news for the flood-hit regions further north, which are expected to get much more rain than that. The TV news tonight said the worst-hit regions were now expecting another 80–160 mm in the next 6 hours, to be followed by more in the next days. The Bureau of Meteorology says that another east coast low pressure system seems to be developing – the same type of system that caused the ridiculous amounts of rainfall and flooding a few weeks ago. And this is with the land already now saturated. I guess we’ll see how it develops.

New content today:

A busier Christmas Day

Getting things out of the way early, I did my 2.5k run first thing this morning. On the way out, I noticed one of my neighbours setting up a picnic in the park across the street. When I’d finished my run and returned home, he was all set up, and minding the site until his family arrived. I asked if I could take a photo to show people what an Aussie Christmas morning looks like:

It was already warm, and best to stay in the shade. He said they were going to do brunch, and pack up by midday, to avoid the heat of the middle of the day.

After completing my run and stretching exercises, my wife wanted to take Scully out for a walk before we packed up and headed to her mother’s place for Christmas lunch. We took Scully down to the waterside park near us, and back. Then because we’d gotten all hot and sweaty walking, we had showers, before packing the car and driving over to my mother-in-law’s place.

Christmas lunch was a traditional roast turkey and vegetables, sliced ham, and also the lentil nut loaf that I’d cooked yesterday, with my home made tomato relish. And for afters we had two desserts: a chocolate hazelnut pavlova (from La Pav), and a Christmas pudding, with choice of ice cream and/or cream. Most of us had a piece of both. And then we retired to the sofas and people had coffee, served with Christmas fruitcake and chocolates.

Yeah, I’m still pretty full, and won’t need to eat any dinner tonight! We also have a lot of leftovers. And of course gift goodies. Mostly we got food stuff – nice treats to eat and actually use, rather than gifts that nobody is sure if anyone else really wants.

Scully got a bag of goodies too, including some new dog toys, some yummy treats, and… an art set from Picasso Paws! This is a kit with a couple of small canvases, tubes of paint, and ziplock bags that you seal the canvas and paint inside. You smear peanut butter or whatever on the outside of the bag and your dog licks it smearing the paint all over the canvas, to create a cool artwork. We’ll try it some time over the next few days and I’ll show you the results.

After a few hours of lounging around, digesting in the afternoon heat, we headed home. Actually it wasn’t too hot today, only 29°C. I’ve had a lot of much hotter Christmas Days in the past. The weather is actually supposed to turn tonight and be cooler and rainy for the next few days.

New content today:

Low key anniversary

Today is our 25th wedding anniversary. We’d planned, a couple of years ago, to take a big trip to Europe, and spend our anniversary somewhere nice – maybe Venice or Vienna or something. And have a really fancy dinner at a good restaurant.

Well, thanks COVID. Of course we’re just sitting at home. And tonight I had the last tutorial session of the UTS image processing course that I’m helping teach, so we couldn’t even go out for dinner. My wife took the day off work, and I tried to book a fancy restaurant for lunch. I tried about a dozen top class restaurants in Sydney, but not a single one of them opens for business on Mondays. So in the end I chose a nice, but not really fancy, restaurant close to home, so we could just walk there. It’s actually the same restaurant that we ate in the night before we got married, and we’ve had a few anniversary dinners there, so it was kind of fitting to revisit it for this anniversary.

Apart from that, my day was rather hectic. I did the last online ethics class of the week on the topic of enhancing sports performance. I scrambled to make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip in time for tonight’s update. And I dealt with a lot of questions from students about the final project for the image processing course. They were asking stuff right up to the last minute of the scheduled tutorial time tonight.

At least tomorrow should be a bit less busy.

New content today: