Tag: neighbourhood

Sudden cranes

I had four classes this morning, which ate up half the day. At lunch time I took Scully for a walk to get some fish & chips. We walked past the construction site of the new apartment complex that is being built and I was surprised to see that three giant cranes have sprung up over the weekend.

Three cranes

I also popped into the post office to get a box to pack an old unopened Lego set that I’d sold on eBay. It was a 1999 Star Wars X-wing set that I’d bought back then because it was on sale. I bought two of them and never bothered opening one of them. I checked recently, and unopened copies of this set sell for several hundred dollars! So I auctioned it off, and got $310 for it. So I had to get a packing box to mail it – to Switzerland! Back home I packed the set up with lots of bubble wrap. And then had to trek out to the post office again to send it.

In other news, we’re planning a trip to Tokyo next February, to coincide with one of my ISO Photography meetings. My wife wanted to go to Japan again, so she can do things while I’m in the meetings. And she invited her mother and sister to come too – they’ve never been to Japan before, so they were excited and we all booked tickets on the same flights.

New content today:

Starting marking, restarting parking

Today I downloaded the student final assignments for Data Engineering, which I need to mark over the next few days. One team submitted their video in MKV format, which is not supported by MacOS. But fortunately I have some third party video playing software which can handle it – otherwise I would have had to download something just for this. I sent a message to the professor saying maybe we should specify acceptable video formats next time.

At lunch I took Scully for a walk. I decided to mix things up a bit and walk down to Bob Campbell Oval and the “Stairs of Cirith Ungol”, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before (with photos each time).

When we reached the top of the steep street leading down to the Oval, I saw a large sign indicating the oval was closed for redevelopment work. I believe the council has a plan to replace the natural grass with artificial turf, so presumably this is that work now underway. When we got to the bottom of the hill, the entire area around the oval was fenced off. It looks like they’re demolishing and rebuilding the amenities there as well and redoing the car park and other works.

Bob Campbell Oval construction

Fortunately the Stairs of Cirith Ungol depart from the road just before the temporary fence, so we could climb up them to the street above and continue our circuit home.

A total of five ethics classes today took e late into the evening. Now it looks like Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids have not updated to new comics for today, but oddly Square Root of Minus Garfield and Comments on a Postcard and iToons have. But I can’t log in to the server to fix things – it’s rejecting my attempts to use SSH for some reason, and I can’t connect using SFTP either. I don’t know what’s wrong, so I’ve submitted a support ticket to the webhost. Hopefully things will be running properly again by morning.

New content today:

The new house being built nearby

Not too much out of the ordinary to report today: making Darths & Droids comics, a 5k run, and evening ethics classes. So I thought I’d mention some of the construction work going on around the neighbourhood where I live.

I’ve talked about the huge redevelopment where dozens of houses have been demolished recently and work is beginning on clearing the land to eventually build new apartments. But there’s other smaller works going on that I walk past regularly. At the top of the hill near where I begin my runs is a property which was an old 1960s-era apartment block, which has been demolished and is now going to host a modern retirement living complex. That’s approaching completion, with the building exterior done, and work now being done on the landscaping and (I assume) the interior fit-outs.

Down the street a bit from here there is a single house property which had until just a few weeks ago had an old fibro house on it. That was demolished and the land cleared super quickly, and now there’s a two-story house going up rapidly, using timber framing. Both storeys are already up!

Timber-framed houses are a bit unusual here. Most places are built with solid brick, so it kind of stands out as strange, watching it being built. There are two other residential homes not far away that were also redeveloped from old run-down homes in the past couple of years, and both of those were brick construction. Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how fast this new house goes up. My impression so far is that it’s been ridiculously rapid. I don’t have a photo, alas, but maybe I’ll take on this week.

New content today: