Friday morning I did the grocery shopping. The old fashioned way, since I forgot to order online for pickup, so it took about half an hour longer than just going to the supermarket for the pickup. The day was rainy, and I had four ethics classes to teach.
Then it was heading out to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. We went to the place of the guy who recently moved into his newly built house (on the same property as his old house). He has a nice dining table and laid a felt mat on top for gaming on. We started with a game of Notre Dame, which I’ve played before but not for many years.
It’s a worker placement game, and your workers activate various powers, but you are restricted by first having to draft cards related to the placement areas, so you only have a limited choice of zones to place your workers each turn, rather than free choice. I scored a lot of points early on, but got stifled for resources in the late game and everyone else overtook me, so I ended up coming last of five players. A sixth friend arrived about halfway through the game, and we stopped to eat delivered pizzas for dinner. When we resumed we started a six-player game of Ticket to Ride: Asia, which plays as a team game with three teams of two.
In this variant of the classic game, each team has shared racks of tickets and train cards, and also a secret hand which you’re not allowed to share with your teammate. You have separate turns, but are working together to build your routes. It gave an interestingly different dynamic and was a lot of fun. My team leapt to an early lead… but you can guess what happened. We got overtaken and ended up coming last! Oh well, at least we all had fun.
Today was another partly rainy day, with unsettled weather set in here for the next few days. The sky is rapidly changing between sunny and grey clouds that threaten rain.
After a 5k run in the very humid conditions (82% humidity and 24°C) I cleaned the bathroom and then tried to write a Darths & Droids comic strip. I got stuck with writer’s block for a few hours – it was torturously slow going. I managed to finish it off in the afternoon.
For dinner we walked with Scully over the Naremburn, 2 km away, to have a simple meal at the pizzeria there. So I ended up having pizza two nights in a row. Not that I’m complaining.
Tonight we watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie on Netflix: Vengeance Most Fowl. I’ve always liked all the Wallace and Gromit films, and this one was brilliant as always.
I’m able to write this post tonight because we had our fortnightly Friday night board games gathering early this week. There were only four of us who could make it, and one friend wanted to bring his young daughter along, so we decided to start at my place at 4pm instead of the usual 6pm, and finish early so they could go home before it got too late.
Because we had a young girl (about 9 years old, I’d guess – I didn’t ask how old she was), we played some lighter games with her first. We started with a game of King of Tokyo. Then we played a few hands of Uno: Show ‘Em No Mercy to start. Then while the girl entertained herself with an iPad and headphones the rest of us played a game of Evergreen. Then she rejoined us for a game of Camel Up (second edition). And finally we rounded things off with some hands of Uno Flip!
We ordered pizza during the gaming and also had plentiful snacks. I was hoping to have them eat some of the copious sweet things we have leftover from Christmas, but they brought so much other stuff that there wasn’t much room for those.
Earlier in the day we basically just took it easy, staying inside as it was extremely hot out. It reached over 37°C in the city, and just a fraction shy of 40°C in some suburbs, despite an early storm which dumped heavy rain about 9 o’clock in the morning. That just served to keep the humidity up. Another storm hit about 4:30pm, which dropped the temperature rapidly. We now have a strong southerly blowing, which will cool things more overnight. Tomorrow should hopefully be nowhere near as hot.
We did take Scully out in the late morning, after the first storm, but not for a long walk. We just went to the nearby park, where she could run on the grass and there was plenty of shade, rather than walking on hot concrete paths.
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.
Friday morning I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I take Scully up to meet my wife at the gym nearby after her early morning class, but her gym has closed down and so this week I just went up alone. Berries are all pretty cheap at the moment as they’re in season, so I bought punnets of blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries as part of our fruit haul. (Also two varieties of apples, bananas, and an orange. I skipped the mangoes this week.)
During the day I had four ethics classes on the Alien Invasion topic. One kid who a few weeks ago in the Robots topic was obsessed with rounding up and destroying all the robots because they were evil and wanted to enslave humanity, this week decided that when aliens come to Earth we need to round up all their robots and destroy them.
For dinner we decided not to eat out, but rather to get take-away from Green Gourmet, a vegan Chinese restaurant that we used to frequent before we got Scully. Unfortunately they are on the highway and don’t have outdoor tables, so we’ve never dined there with Scully. While my wife and Scully waited outside the front door and I went in to order, I explained this to the woman who took my order, pointing at Scully outside. But she said it was no problem, we could bring a dog inside to eat at one of the indoor tables! And she said if the front room was full, there was a small room out the back where we could eat with Scully too.
Having dogs in the indoor dining areas of restaurants is not normal here. In fact, strictly speaking it’s not allowed according to the law (apart from service dogs), but some places are more accommodating about it than others. Which is why we normally have to sit at an outdoor table when taking Scully. But now that we know that Green Gourmet will let us take Scully in, we can go back to this place. They have some delicious meals. We took home some vegetable and faux-pork steamed buns, Szechuan deep-fried cauliflower, and a hotpot dish with protein balls and vegetables. And rice. It was really good, and there was plenty left over for my dinner tonight too.
While eating I joined my friends online for board games. We played a game of The Castles of Burgundy. It took me a while to remember the rules, but I did pretty well, coming second of four players. We tried a new game, Rallyman: DIRT, but none of us knew the rules and it was too tricky to work out quickly enough, so we abandoned that for another day. We moved on to Just One, and had an absolutely awful start to the game.
Three of the first four words were guessed incorrectly, despite none of the five clues being duplicated (and hence removed) in each case. In fact, weirdly the only clue that was duplicated in the first 6 or 7 rounds was “Rumpelstiltskin” (for the word “spinning wheel”). We ended up scoring only 8 correct answers in 15 rounds. Pretty awful going. Then we moved on to Jump Drive and played about five or six games, of which I won two. I also had one miserable game where the winner ended on 97 points, while I only had 28!
Today was awful, weather-wise. It began with a loud thunderstorm that woke me up at 5:30. By the time I got up and had breakfast and was ready for my 5k run, it was already 24°C and 94% humidity. It was really oppressive and difficult to run. I felt very slow and thought I’d be lucky to stay under 30 minutes, but was surprised when I managed 28:15. I was absolutely soaked with sweat though! I had a cold shower immediately, and then another one about half an hour later after I’d cooled down some more.
I worked on Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! strips today. I have enough of the latter written to do some Lego photography tomorrow.
We went out for a walk with Scully just before 5pm. It was gloomy when we left, having been raining on and off all day, and I thought it wouldn’t be too bad, but the clouds parted and the sun came out as we walked and steamed things up. The temperature had stayed around 25°C most of the day, but now while walking around it warmed up to almost 29°C, and with humidity around 80%. It felt like the times we were in Bangkok, or the Amazon jungle. Really, really draining just to walk at a normal pace.
In other news, the agenda for the next ISO Photography meeting in Tokyo in February has been released. This is the last thing required for me to get travel funding from Standards Australia for my trip there. So hopefully that will be processed soon. I’m beginning to really look forward to being in Tokyo in February, where it will be nice and cold!
The weather has turned from hot and humid to warm, rainy, and very humid. At least it’s not as hot as Monday to Thursday. Friday was cooler, but very wet. There was a huge thunderstorm around midday, and I had to warn students in my ethics Zoom class that if I disappeared it might be because of a power blackout. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but there some very loud cracks of thunder during the class.
Today has been ridiculously humid. It dropped as low as 87% in the mid-afternoon during a break in the rain, but it’s back up in the high 90s where it’s been most of the day. It was 99% and 21°C when I did my 5k run at 9am this morning. Which made it really draining as breathing deeply while running was like in a sauna.
Friday night was games night at a friend’s place. I took Arcs and we played a four player game, with three of the same players as last time when we all learnt it, and one new player. He picked up the idea quickly and actually ended up winning.
The game took a while to play, and by the time we were done the host was tired, so we didn’t play anything else.
Today, I played a game of Root with my wife. She tried the Marquise de Cat this time, after having played Alliance for the past several games. We used the clockwork expansion bots to fill it out to four players, and it’s the first time we’ve used the Alliance bot player. I played the Vagabond, so we also had a bot Eyrie. The bots started very strong and quickly raced to the lead two places in points. I was really afraid the Alliance bot would win the game. But my wife played a timely Dominance card and secured three mouse clearings with about six cat warriors each and managed to win just before the Alliance could get enough points.
For dinner we went up to Organica and had some pizza tonight. It was sprinkling lightly when we went there, and also on the way home. At least it was better than heavy rain.
In other news: I saw today that Elon Musk has threatened to buy Hasbro and hence Dungeons & Dragons, after his recent unhinged anti-woke rant about D&D. I honestly cannot think of a worse thing for the game. But I rest easy knowing that there are so many roleplaying games out there that people will continue enjoying them in wholesome ways no matter what Musk does.
But I just wanted to point out that I predicted this over 8 months ago! Irregular Webcomic! #5157:
Friday was the fortnightly online games night with my friends. I was a bit late to it because my wife went into the city after work to do some Christmas shopping, and then headed back on the Metro to Crows Nest, where I met her with Scully.
We went to a nearby wine bar for dinner, a place called Knird which we’d wanted to try for some time since they opened a little while back. We managed to get a table out on the alley where it’s located so we could sit with Scully. We had some glasses of wine and ordered a few of the small bites and sharing plates form the menu. The food was all really good and the wines nice. It was a little expensive, but a very pleasant dinner and way to end off the working week.
We made it home a little after 8pm and I joined in the online gaming. We just played some of the old regulars: Just One, Jump Drive, 6 Nimmt.
Saturday morning I got up a bit earlier than usual. After breakfast I went for my 5k run, so I could get back home and have a shower before driving up the coast to my mother’s place. We met her and my brother for lunch at a local pizza place. We had a good lunch and caught up with things. I don’t see my family very much so it was good to have this lunch together.
As we left, my wife said she felt like stopping somewhere along the way home for coffee. I used my phone to search for cafes in the area, but almost every single one was closed. Most closed at 3m on a Saturday. This is one of the super weird things about Australia, compared to most other countries. Nearly all the cafes here close mid-afternoon – it’s virtually impossible to find one open after 3pm.
I did manage to find one, and it had a good star rating, but it was 20 minutes drive away, so we took a scenic route back to the freeway, stopping off there for the coffee. When we got there, it turned out to be more like a general store in a tiny backwater, but they had a coffee machine and my wife got her coffee. After that it was another 20 minutes back to the freeway to drive home again.
We got in around 5pm. I made quiche for dinner, after which we walked Scully in the cool evening air. Today was pretty warm, around 30°C. And when we got home we gave Scully a bath.
Friday night was board games night, hosted at a friend’s place. During the day I did my usual ethics classes. This current topic of Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities is really good, and I think the kids are enjoying it a lot more than they expect when they hear the topic title!
I had to do a bit of tidying up some issues with university assessment marking, after consulting with the professor about them yesterday. And I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning, and at lunch took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip shop, where I had a chicken burger for lunch.
After the evening ethics classes, I took Scully over to my friend’s place for games night, since my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We had six people and split up into two groups of three. The others played Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, while my group of three played Concordia, an old game from 2013 that I haven’t tried before. It’s a game of the Roman Empire, with each player in charge of a family aiming to settle and build towns across the Mediterranean. You have a hand of cards and each turn play a card to choose an action, such as moving colonists and building towns, gaining money and/or resources, or buying extra cards to add to your hand. The extra cards both give you more options and also the cards are used to score points at the end of the game, so there’s a lot of inter-relationship between the different things you can do. It was fun, and I ended up coming second of three, behind the guy who had played before and explained the rules, so I was happy with that.
Next all six of us played a game of The Gang. This is a new game and is, weirdly, a fully cooperative version of Texas Hold’Em poker. Everyone has a poker hand built up using Texas Hold’Em rules, and at each “betting ” phase you instead take a numbered chip (from 1 to the number of players) based on your estimation of how good your hand is. If you think your hand is likely the worst, you grab the 1, if you think it’s the best, you grab the 6 in this case (with 6 players). People might disagree – if someone else takes the 1 chip but you think your hand is probably even worse, you can take the chip off them. You’re not allowed to talk about your hands, you just take the chips. If you get your chip taken off you, you can take it back, or you can settle for a different chip. In this way, people sort of jostle and evaluate how confident the other players are, and may settle for different chips than they initially thought. This phase only ends when everyone is happy (more or less) with the chip they have.
Then you reveal some cards (Texas Hold’Em style), and have another phase of chip grabbing. The chips for the first round stay there, there are new sets of chips each betting phase. The fourth of these phases is the final one. At the end of this, everyone has their final chip – the older chips are disregarded at this stage and only serve to remind people during the grabbing phases what people thought their hands were like at the time. Once the final chips are settled, everyone reveals their hands. If they rank in exactly the same order as the final chips, the players win the round. If there’s any mistake, the players lose. The goal of the game is to cooperate and win three rounds before you lose three rounds.
It took a bit of getting used to, and we lost three rounds in a row, but I think by that time we had a better grasp of how to play and judge each other’s chip grabbing. I would have been good to try a second game, but the others wanted to move on to something else.
We then played Platypus, a cooperative party game where you need to give clues using a hand of cards to let the other players identify a mystery thing from a set of eight. That was kind of fun, a bit like a Codenames-light. That ended the evening.
This morning I had to go get a blood sample taken for some testing. I thought I had to fast overnight, so went first thing when the pathology place opened at 08:30. And then the woman who took the sample said my doctor had ordered a basic test that didn’t require fasting!
I was home by 9 o’clock and had my delayed breakfast, then went for a run. I decided to push myself and do 7.5k instead of my normal 5k. I took it fairly easy and found the distance fine without getting too worn out. It wasn’t as fast as the previous times I’ve extended to 7.5k, but that was okay.
After having a shower and cleaning the bathroom and shower stall, I settled into making some comics. I also spent some time cleaning and polishing our dining chairs. We just had them reupholstered because the seat padding was getting flat and hard, and a couple of them had the seats falling off the frames due to loose screws that couldn’t be tightened due to stripping the plywood screwholes. So we decided instead of discarding them and buying new chairs, we’d get them reupholstered with new fabric and stuffing. I found a place not far from us, and they picked the chairs up on Tuesday, and were done and ready to bring them back by Friday! I’d hoped that they’d clean off the wooden frames, which were a bit dusty, but they came back with the same dust still on them! So I cleaned them up carefully and rubbed some furniture polish into them.
For dinner tonight my wife and I went up to Organica, an Italian/Greek kind of restaurant near us (which I’ve probably mentioned before). Tonight I tried the lamb shank, in red wine and tomato sauce, with mashed potato. It was really good, the meat tender and falling off the bone.
Friday was online games night. My wife and I went out to the local pizza place for dinner and I joined in games with my friends when we got home. We played El Grande and then Just One. People were in and out a bit doing things so we had a few interruptions.
The other main thing I’ve been doing both yesterday and today is continuing to mark university image processing assignments. I powered through the remainder of the undergrad ones today, both the written reports and the presentation videos. Now I only have three postgrad teams left to mark, but these will take longer because they have to submit individual video reviews of papers, rather than a single team video presenting their work. So I have seventeen 20-minute videos to go, having marked just four so far. So it’ll probably take me well into next week.
I did a 5k run today, barely scraping the distance under 27 minutes, which is a good time for me. Especially given it was 22.4°C and 75% humidity.
We had fajitas for dinner. I planned to do this to use up some halloumi which we’ve had in the fridge for a while. But when it came to chopping up the vegetables and cooking them up, I completely forgot about the halloumi!
Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, so my wife and I had a special dinner out at one of our favourite (albeit expensive) places, The Bathers’ Pavilion at Balmoral Beach. Firstly, the view from the dinning room is wonderful.
We were there before sunset and so got to watch the beach and water as night fell. We started with some potato scallops, battered, sprinkled with wakame and topped with a vinegar mayo.
My appetiser was kingfish with rhubarb and pink peppercorns.
My wife had a vegetarian appetiser of wood ear mushrooms with witlof, blackberries, and black garlic. I tried a small bite and this was truly delicious.
My main was duck cooked two ways, a sliced breast fillet and duck sausages.
My wife had roasted cauliflower and kale, with…. I’m not sure what the orange bits or the sauce are.
For dessert we shared this chocolate, passionfruit, and caramel construction.
It was an indulgent and delicious dinner. We drove home and picked up Scully from our neighbours who had minded her while we were out.
Today I did a 5k run in the morning, followed by housecleaning: vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and shower, emptying (water) and refilling (crystals) the damp absorbers.
Then after lunch we went out to a fabric showroom to choose new fabric for the upholstery on our dining chairs. These chairs are 25 years old and the seats are getting worn and the foam padding is squashed and flat, so we decided to get them reupholstered. I got a quote from a company during the week, and they said we should go to this showroom to choose a fabric, and let them know what it is so they can order it wholesale for us.
The showroom was in Glebe, so after picking a fabric we walked over to Glebe Point Road to get coffee (for my wife) and snacks from a cafe. Then we headed back home.
This afternoon we tried a 2-player game of Arcs. It’s only the second time I’ve payed, after the 4-player one we did at games night a few weeks ago, and I was teaching my wife to play. So it was fairly instructional and strategy-free. (My wife won, but it was only a learning game!)
On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes about the Witch Hunt topic. I’m also asking the kids about their Halloween plans and the differences are interesting. Most of the kids not in the US/Canada don’t really have any big plans. Most of the ones there do, but not all – there were a couple of immigrants who don’t do anything, and one kid said he didn’t do anything for Halloween because it was his mother’s birthday.
I joined in online board games early in the evening because my wife and I decided not to go out for dinner. I just made some pasta at home, which gave me ore time to play games with friends. We played some Jump Drive, and one guy won all three games handily, which was okay as he doesn’t normally win that game, so he was pretty chuffed.
Then inspired by the upcoming US election, we tried Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game as a bit of fun. It’s actually an interesting abstract strategy game and I thought it was fine, but I think you’d need to play it a bit to get the strategy. Then we played Draftosaurus, which I won, and Vaalbara, which I never win because I haven’t figured out the strategy yet. We finished with a classic, Settlers of Catan, which we hadn’t played for ages. That game took a while, but I managed to win that one, so had a pretty successful night overall.
This morning I got up and had breakfast while my wife and Scully slept in. I planned to go out for a 5k run, but when I went into the bedroom to wake my wife up I bent over and hurt my lower back. I’ve done this a few times before and knew the horrible feeling when the muscles spasm and the pain shoots through the nerves. I quickly went and laid down on my front to calm the muscles down, and my wife got me an ice pack. I felt okay after a bit, but when I moved to try to stand up I could feel that it was going to be tough doing it without overwhelming pain. So I had to take it very slowly and struggled up after several minutes of tiny shifts.
Once standing, I could walk around and do some very gentle stretches to loosen up. The main problem is doing anything that might cause the muscles to spasm again, so I had to be super careful, all day. We’d planned to got out driving for the day, but had to nix that as I didn’t want to risk folding up in the car. I basically spent the day walking around slowly to relax and stretch the muscles and just avoid anything risky. Which made it hard to get much done in terms of things like writing comics or whatever that I’d wanted to do.
We went for a few short walks with Scully. Walking is the one thing I could do that works to help the muscles calm down and recover. For dinner we decided to go up the street to a local Szechaun place that we like, but where we haven’t been for a long time. I tried the sweet and sour pork for the first time (I usually get chilli prawns), and it was very good.
