Tag: pets

Gravy Day

It’s the 21st of December…

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.

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Phantom pet (carried over)

I titled yesterday’s post “New board games and a phantom pet” and then I completely forgot to mention the phantom pet!

My wife keeps getting emails from the vet about some mystery pet we apparently have named Scout. She got one yesterday, since yesterday was Scout’s birthday. A big congratulatory email, and some reminders that Scout may be due for a check-up. She said this has been going on for years, and also that whenever she phones the vet for anything do do with Scully, our actual dog, the person on the line always asks, “Is this about Scout or Scully?”

She said she’s asked them multiple times to have this mysterious Scout removed from our records, but they never seem to do it. I suggested that she call the vet and pretend to be crying and say she was upset to receive the birthday email because Scout got hit by a car and was no longer with us.

Anyway, she did phone them, but made a slightly more polite request. She also learnt that apparently Scout is a cat. I was thinking it’d be funny if Scout turned out to be a tortoise or something. But hopefully they’ve finally got the message and she won’t have to put up with Scout being mentioned constantly in the future. The only remaining mystery is how this happened in the first place.

Today I did my usual 5k run in the morning. But after yesterday’s extended 7.5k effort, my muscles were still a bit tired and also with the weather being 22°C and 80% humidity at 8:30 am when I started, I went pretty slowly.

It was warm and humid today, and in the evening we had a huge thunderstorm roll in, about 7:30 pm, in the middle of one of my online classes. I had to tell the kids that if I lost power the lesson might end abruptly.

I’m looking forward to the coming week. I’ll have more free time after finishing all the university marking last week!

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Serial dog names

I learnt something interesting the other day. Our newish neighbours downstairs have a kelpie, but we haven’t met her (the dog) until just a few days ago. I was bringing Scully in from a walk through the garage and we bumped into one of the neighbours getting out of her car, and the dog was in the back. So we had a chat and let the dogs meet each other for the first time.

The dog’s name is Chilli. Not sure if she’s named after Bluey’s mother or not. But anyway, I suddenly realised today that the previous dog downstairs belonging to the previous neighbours was Billie. I hope the next two dogs that live down there are Fili and Kili. (My friends asked me if the dog before Billie was named Allie or Ali, but alas it was Spike.)

Today was busy with ethics classes on the “Arguments” topic. It’s an interesting topic and I think is getting the kids thinking about stuff they’ve never thought about before. One girl’s mother today sent me a message saying that she’d been sent home from school sick and might miss this evening’s class. But she liked the class and wanted to attend, so might show up after sleeping all afternoon. And indeed she turned up.

I spent some time dealing with household finances, downloading about six months worth of bills for various things and saving them, and updating a tax spreadsheet with stuff. Pretty dull, but necessary.

And I started work on a special feature for Darths & Droids. I’m planning at some point soonish to release a bunch of our behind-the-scenes planning notes and director’s commentaries on individual strips, so interested readers can trawl through them and perhaps find interesting details they didn’t know, and get some insights into the creative process behind it all. it’s going to be a lot of work formatting it into HTML, so it’ll be a background task for several months probably.

And no rain for the third day in a row!

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Saving lost dogs

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention yesterday! I found two lost dogs!

After my 5k run, I stopped outside by a low brick wall to do some stretches as a warm-down. As I began, I noticed two small dogs, Jack Russell terriers, running through the park and then across the street. I thought it was a bit unusual that they weren’t accompanied by any obvious owner, but figured maybe they were following behind and were obscured by the trees along the path. It’s fairly common for dog owners here to walk dogs off-lead, so I didn’t immediately think it was anything to worry about, although it was a bit strange that the dogs crossed the street alone.

I finished my stretches and started walking up the hill towards my own home, and saw the two dogs running uphill ahead of me, again with no owner in sight. Now I thought this was weird and they might have been lost. So I followed them, hoping to catch up. Fortunately they decided to explore an overgrown area by the railway line, which didn’t have any other exits. I followed them in, making my way through the undergrowth, and tried calling to the dogs. Fortunately they were friendly and approached me. I grabbed their collars and tried to see if there was a phone number. The first dog didn’t seem to have one, but the second had a metal name tag, with a phone number on the back.

I rang the number and a man answered. I said I’d found his dogs running loose. He said he’d give my number to his ex-wife, and she’d call me to organise to get them. He said she still hadn’t changed the tags with his phone number on them. Okay… so I had to wait several minutes for the woman to call e back. I was beginning to think she wouldn’t and I’d have to cal the man again, but then my phone rang.

She thanked me for contacting them and asked where I was. I told her, and she said, “What? All the way down there?!” It was clear her dogs had wandered a fair distance from home. Then she said she’d contact her daughter to come pick the dogs up, and that she was currently in the gym at Lane Cove (a suburb several minutes drive away)! So I guessed I’d just have to wait. I had the dogs by the collars, and thankfully they settled down and sat quietly – except when any other dogs walked past, when they went crazy, lunging and barking at the other dog. I had to apologise to a couple of walkers saying they weren’t my dogs and I was waiting for the owner.

Then a few minutes later I got a text message from the woman, saying she was coming to get the dogs, because she couldn’t get in contact with her daughter. And then another few minutes later she messaged again to say the daughter was on her way! Finally a car drove up and the daughter (I guess in her 20s) got out to retrieve the dogs. They clearly recognised her and I let them go, and they jumped in the car. She was thanking me when another dog owner walked past with a mid-sized cavoodle, and one of the Jack Russells leapt out of the car and attacked the cavoodle! It was growling and barking aggressively and trying to bite the other dog around the neck. The owner was trying to get his dog away from the attack, and the woman was trying to call her dog off. Eventually it stopped attacking and ran back to the car. The man raced away a bit and then stopped to examine his dog. The woman called out to ask if it was okay, and thankfully the man said that his dog was uninjured.

It was pretty awful. I’d been holding these two dogs by the collar for 25 minutes or so, waiting for the owner to arrive and then just as she arrived someone happened to walk past with another dog that one of them attacked after I let them go. It kind of took the shine off the feeling of doing a good deed.

Today was another fairly usual day, spent mostly at home, with some walks for Scully. I did another 5k run, but the weather this morning was significantly warmer and more humid than yesterday, so I took it easy and ran almost a minute slower. Oh, and I picked up the grocery shopping for the week.

Tonight is board games night. It’s supposed to be in-person according to the fortnightly rotation, but so many of my friends are off one holidays with their families between Christmas and New Year that we’re doing it online, and there are only three of us playing. I’ve won three successive games of Jump Drive, and am now trying to win Ticket to Ride: Europe.

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