housework – Page 6 – dangermouse.net

Darths & Droids: Episode VII

Today’s the big day! After a considerable delay, the first comic strip of Darths & Droids‘ treatment of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens begins! We’ve been working towards this for literally years now, so it’s good to get it underway.

But that comic strip was produced a couple of weeks ago. Today mostly I did two things: house cleaning, and keeping up with the multiple press conferences by the Australian Prime Minister and New South Wales Premier on updates regarding the COVID-19 outbreak. Firstly, though, I got a nice sleep in as Scully slept through the night without any sneezing waking us us. So that was good – I needed that sleep.

I cleaned the garage a bit, to make room for all of my market stall equipment: stock of greeting cards, large mounted prints, a couple of easels for displaying prints, and various miscellaneous gear such as receipt books, string, display stands, crates, and so on. I figured with no more market stalls for the foreseeable future, there’s no need to keep all this stuff handy, and I could pack it away for a while to clear up some room in the house. I cleared away a bunch of other clutter as well, and also washed down the balcony, allowing me and my wife to eat dinner outside tonight.

In news terms, it’s been a big day here in Australia, with the most drastic measures now being announced for shutting down businesses and movements of people to attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus. Basically all non-essential services are shut down from midday tomorrow, including: pubs, clubs, gyms, cinemas, theatres, church services – and restaurants and cafes are restricted to take-away service only. Schools however remain open, which is attracting growing criticism from pretty much everywhere. It’s going to be a long and interesting week.

New content today:

Clean clean clean

There’s nothing like a shower after a hard day of physical labour.

It began at 03:00 this morning, when Scully awoke with a bout of reverse sneezing. For those who don’t know, this is a thing dogs do sometimes when their nasal passages are irritated. Rather than expel air out like humans do when sneezing, they sometimes go into spasmodic rapid inhalations to clear their passages. She’s been doing this the past three nights.

I realised today that she had a bout of this last year… around this time… and I checked our vet records and discovered it was also in March. At that time we were less experienced dog owners and took her to the vet, who suggested it might be seasonal allergy, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and a half tablet of regular human antihistamine tablets daily (they’re fine for dogs!). She settled down after a while, but by then I was awake, and I have trouble falling asleep again once fully awake. So while my wife and Scully went back to sleep, I was pretty much up for the morning.

When they went off to work, I began cleaning the house thoroughly, to get rid of any aggravating dust. I dusted the entire bedroom – including places that hadn’t been dusted for way too long. Then I vacuumed the bedroom plus the whole rest of the house – a thorough and meticulous vacuuming, not the regular quick weekly once-over. By 11:00 I was ready for the next phase: shampooing the carpet.

I went to the hardware store and hired a carpet shampooer, which I’ve done before, so I knew how to use it. I did a full wet clean of the entire house, finishing around 14:00, with a short break to grab a quick lunch. After returning the hired cleaner, I stripped the quilt cover and put the inner quilt out in the sun to air and get some ultraviolet light. It was a hot day today, which helped dry the carpet with the windows open. Hopefully this level of clean will help Scully’s poor nose and she’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight – with the help of half a tablet of Telfast.

At 17:00 I went to pick up my wife and Scully from work, because she had to bring home the entire switchboard(😳) to prepare for working from home next week, due to coronavirus precautions. Her work has been tough this week with staff preparing for this big change, so we were both pretty worn out. We decided to go out to dinner to our favourite local pizza place, to support their business in these trying times. The restaurant was emptier than usual, but not by much – rather than every table occupied it was about two-thirds full.

One thing I realised today was that for most of the world this whole coronavirus thing has been disruptive and scary for a few weeks. But here in Australia we had those horrendous fires over the summer, which really took off in November and just went on and on and on, followed by the terrible flooding which eventually put the fires out. We here in this country have been dealing with non-stop existential economic and societal stress for five months now. We were already worn down in January.

We need a break.

Tonight my wife and I needed to go out and have a nice dinner. People in other parts of the world might not be able to or want to do that at this time. But tonight we needed it.

New content today:

Housework Saturday

Yeah, not that much exciting today. I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the house, changed the bedsheets, all that sort of boring but necessary stuff.

I also spent the afternoon writing and making new Darths & Droids strips, for the start of Episode VII. Which I can’t show you because that’d be giving stuff away early.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to get up early and head out to the beach to do some sunrise photography. I’ve packed my gear into the car already. I’ll get up at 5:30, grab a quick breakfast, and head out. I haven’t done a sunrise session for a while, and have been itching to go do one. This is a good time of year because it’s still warm, and the sunrise is getting later as autumn progresses, but daylight saving hasn’t ended yet, pushing sunrise back an extra hour. So sunrise tomorrow is a relatively late 6:49. With no traffic, I should be at the beach soon after 6 am, in plenty of time.

The only wildcard is the weather. Tomorrow is forecast to be “partly cloudy”, which is the ideal weather for sunrises, but of course it could be overcast, or rainy, or clear at that time, none of which is good. And there’s no way to tell at 5:30 when it’s still pitch black. You just have to go and hope for the best.

New content today:

Busywork

I did a bunch of small odd jobs around the house today. One was drilling some holes to mount a kitchen gadget on the wall of the kitchen. I’ve been putting this off for a while because I hate drilling into brick – it’s really hard without a hammer drill, and I don’t want to buy a hammer drill for a couple of holes. I took my time, letting the drill bit cool down between roughly 30-second drilling sessions. It eventually made holes deep enough and I screwed the gadget to the wall, clearing off some benchtop space that’s been occupied for several weeks.

I did some ISO Standards work on a photography standard that requires reading and commenting on. I did a bunch of configuration for my photography web shop. I did some prep work for my school science visit on Monday.

I went for a walk and saw some more storm damaged trees. Over by the creek not far away from my place, two enormous trees, about 30-40 metres tall, had fallen over.

These were huge trees, but fortunately they fell in the middle of a park, away from any houses or power lines.

Oh, a snippet of chat conversation I had with friends today:

SI: Can they get any genes from the bones or is that just Jurassic Park nonsense?

Me: No, DNA doesn’t survive that long.

SI: Oh even in the movie it was inside a mosquito in amber or something I think?

Me: Yeah. It’d still decay in there. Google says DNA base pair bonds have a half life of 520 years. So after 1000 years you only have a quarter of the genome left. After roughly a million years you only have a handful of intact bonds left – not enough to work with.

DMc: What if the DNA has been travelling at relativistic speeds though?

Me: Well yes, samples extracted from dinosaurs who travelled at 0.9999c to a distant star and back should be fine.

DMc: Cool, my startup idea is still feasible.

New content today:

Long weekend Saturday

I had a bit of a sleep in this morning, and did some housework… and just relaxed a bit. The only real “work” stuff I did was to write a bunch of rerun commentaries for Irregular Webcomic! strips that will be coming up in the rerun rotation soon. So not much else to report.

It’s a long weekend because tomorrow is Australia Day, and part of being Australian is having the Monday off when a public holiday falls on a weekend, so you don’t miss out.

New content today:

Comics and kitchen gadgets

Today was a designated comic writing day, as I started work on the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! Besides that, I jotted down some notes for ideas I had for D&D adventures, and did some ISO photography standards work.

My wife and I went out on an expedition to the hardware store to get a tap reseating tool, which I hope will fix some annoying dripping tap behaviour at home next time I change the washers. I also got some generic brand humidity absorbing crystals (calcium chloride) to keep the moisture absorbers in the closets topped up, especially as our summer turns from hot and dry to hot and humid.

Near the hardware store is a council recycling centre, which accepts waste such as batteries, cables, light bulbs, appliances, and so on. I have a small box which I fill with stuff and take there every so often. I decided to take it along today, knowing that the centre is open on Mondays. But when we got there it was closed, with a tiny piece of paper stuck to the door saying they’re closed over the Christmas/New Year period and won’t open again until 3 January. That was slightly annoying.

And near both is a kitchen supplies shop. I only went into this place recently, and was amazed at all the gadgets and stuff in there, so this time I took my wife and showed her how cool it was. We bought a jar opening thing for unscrewing stubborn jar lids, and some new chopping boards.

Tonight for dinner I made vege fajitas, with onions, carrot, zucchini, cauliflower, mushrooms, and some of our home grown chilli. Turned out well!

New content today:

Hmm, what did I do today?

Not much. I started installing a MacOS update this morning, and it stalled for some reason. I let it run for a few hours in case it was just slow, and while I waited I just sat on the lounge and watched the Australia v New Zealand cricket match on TV. I had some leftover Christmas ham on sandwiches for lunch, and about mid-afternoon I finally decided to hard shutdown the computer and restart it. That fixed the problem and it installed the update okay after that (taking about half an hour to do so).

I made tomorrow’s Darths & Droids strip and uploaded it to the web server.

Oh, that’s right! The other thing I did with most of the morning was housecleaning. Vacuuming the house, washing the balcony (there was so much ash from the bushfires on it, fine-grained and gritty), then emptying the vacuum cleaner and washing the dust receptacle. Then I decided to clean the air filter in the vacuum cleaner, and discovered that the sponge-like filter which is supposed to last “the lifetime of the cleaner” had deteriorated and crumbled into a fine powder when I removed it. So I have to get a new filter before I vacuum again. I also cleaned the air filters on the air conditioner, which were pretty clogged with dust.

You know if you have an air conditioner, you’re supposed to clean the filters every now and then, right? Maybe you better check it!

This afternoon my wife and I walked up the street with Scully, stopping to exercise her a bit on the way, throwing a tennis ball for her to chase in a local park. There’s a small park on a hill, with terraced grass levels that she can run up and down. Getting her running up the hill chasing the ball is a good way to tire her out quickly! Then we went to a local bar for dinner, having some nice wine and some share plate style food, which was nice. They even let Scully into the interior courtyard! It’s very unusual for eating establishments here to allow dogs inside; normally we have to find places with tables outside on the footpath, which limits our dining out options a bit. (Or get a dogsitter, which we’ve done a few times when going somewhere fancy.)

New content today:

Hyper-cleaning

Today was a serious housecleaning day. I started work on cleaning the windows, flyscreens, and blinds around 10 am (after doing a quick dash up to the shops for some groceries in the morning). Normally I remove the sliding window panes, wash them on both sides, the remove the flyscreens and give them a brush with a dustpan brush, then clean the fixed panes inside and out, and then put it all back. I do this job maybe a couple of times a year.

Today I decided to wash the flyscreens rather than just brush them off. This meant I had to keep them out for longer, which delayed putting back the sliding window panes as the screens need to go back in first. And so in between I took down all the vertical blinds and washed those, soaking them in bleach, and then rinsing them off and hanging them out to dry. Oh, and as well as washing the glass balcony windows and sliding glass door, I removed the sliding flyscreen door and washed that too.

I took a break for lunch, and another to take Scully to the dog park around 4 pm, and then another break to cook and eat dinner. The cleaning job wasn’t finished until the blinds got reinstalled after dinner, around 7:30 pm.

So that was my day… How was yours?

New content today:

Cleaning and painting

I achieved a lot today – most of it housework and home handyman stuff. I gave the kitchen a thorough clean, removing everything from the benchtops and dusting, removing crumbs, etc., then polishing the stone. I emptied the crumbs out of the toaster, scrubbed everything clean to get spots off: toaster, kettle, cooktop, rangehood, splashbacks, pasta jars, food processor, microwave. I moved the microwave and cleaned underneath it. I scoured the sink with steel wool. Cleaned the cupboard doors. Even cleaned the window sill. It’s a big chunk of work, but it’s nice having a sparkling, spotless kitchen.

Then I did another round of painting, both white on the ceilings, and the off-white of the walls, over the various repairs we had done a while ago. This should be the final coat, so I tidied up the paint tins that have been sitting around for weeks and threw away the paint-spattered dropsheet. There was also laundry folding, loading and unloading the dishwasher, and some vacuuming.

In between all this I went for a walk to get some lunch. I got fish and chips, and instead of walking to my usual eating spot on the cliff overlooking the harbour, where I was pestered by magpies last time, I walked to another location, a steep climb down the hill to the water’s edge on the other side of the peninsula.

It was really nice here! I thought there was a path connecting it to the next park around the shore, and I tried to go there to walk back via that way, but I couldn’t find a path through the bush on the steep bank. I suspect there might be private property in between going all the way down to the waterline, making it impossible to walk from one park to the other along the shore, which is annoying. So I had to backtrack the way I came.

New content today: