photography – dangermouse.net

NZ trip recovery day

I got a good night’s sleep last night – my first one since leaving home last Friday. I got up just before my wife left for work and took Scully out for a walk to the local grocery store to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables so we have cooking supplies for the next few days until our regular grocery shop.

Today I finished off my critical thinking/ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Written Text”, which is talking about writing and writing systems. The questions for the kids touch on the invention of writing, the effects of writing on civilisation, writing in different languages, and modern developments such as the fact we all type way more than we handwrite these days, and what effects abbreviations and emojis have on writing.

I also made a new Darths & Droids comic. And I copied all my New Zealand photos off my SLR camera and phone onto my computer. I processed some of the SLR bird photos.

Here is a New Zealand fantail:

Variable oystercatchers (which vary from all black to black-and-white pied):

Australasian gannets:

And a house sparrow, which is not that exciting as it’s an introduced species and very common, but at least I got close to it:

For lunch I took Scully for a walk to the pie shop, since I didn’t have any bread at home to make sandwiches. I’m baking a new sourdough loaf and will have fresh bread tomorrow. It was drizzling gently as we walked up. The weather forecast for the next few days is wet, with heavy rain of up to 70 mm predicted for Saturday.

The clutching tendrils of summer

We should be getting cooler weather with autumn progressing here, but today was one of the last gasps of summer. Overnight we had the highest March minimum ever recorded in Sydney, 25.9°C. We slept with the air conditioning on all night, which is a rare thing. I don’t imagine we’d have got much sleep without it.

By the time I had my 5k run this morning it was almost 28°C, making it another slow and exhausting one. And by mid afternoon we approached 37°C. There’s supposed to be a cold front change coming through after midnight, but until then it’s supposed to still be almost 30°C at midnight. Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be much cooler. But the Bureau of Meteorology says this isn’t the end of summery conditions, and we’re going to have more hot spells throughout autumn.

In the middle of the heat I went to the lighting showroom to pick up our new light fixtures, which we’d ordered last weekend. I got a message yesterday that they were in from the warehouse, so I drove down to get them.

Some of the new light fittings say that they are DIY installation, not requiring an electrician. I checked and they involved simply unscrewing the existing light battens, fitting the lightshade over it, and screwing the thing back in. No need to touch anything electrical at all. However when I tried to do this, the shade didn’t fit over the existing batten base. So I think new smaller battens need to be installed, which is indeed a job for an electrician. I’ll call one tomorrow to make an appointment for them to come around and install all the lights.

DIY electrical work is simply not an option in Australia. I know that in some countries you can do your own electrical wiring work if it’s not too complicated, and honestly I feel confident that I could most probably do this job of changing the light fixtures. But here it’s illegal to do so. Anything that touches electrical wiring must be done by a licensed electrician. Otherwise you’ll void your home insurance and be liable for fines up to $40,000. So absolutely not something I want to mess with.

Three more ethics classes this evening, and some Indian curry vegetables with rice for dinner.

And some more Japan photos! Takeshita Street in Harajuku:

Okonomiyaki, before self-cooking:

And after:

In the restaurant Sakura-Tei:

Followed by dessert from a crepe place on the street:

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Starting on post-ISO meeting work

Today I did some comics stuff for Darths & Droids, and I also started work on follow-up things for the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Tokyo. I had to download and look through a huge bunch of documents – all of the presentations that were made during the meetings in Tokyo, summary files, and so on. It’s something like about 50 PDF files. The next task is summarising them all for my report to Standards Australia, which I’ll try to get done in the next few days.

Speaking of Tokyo, here are some more photos from my trip, which I processed and uploaded yesterday. These are all from the first two days.

Flying out of Sydney. It’s a pretty good view of the city from the take-off flight path. This is an edited version of the photo I posted while I was over there in Tokyo (straightening the horizon and improving the colour and contrast).

View from my hotel room in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

Sake barrels sent to the Meiji Jingu shrine from manufacturers all over Japan.

Torii gate at Meiji Jingu.

A procession of monks for the Emperor’s Birthday.

Inside the Meiji Jingu shrine.

A walk near the zoo

This morning we all slept in a bit. I think we needed a final catch up of sleep after the working week straight after returning from Tokyo.

I did a 5k run, but it was a slow time. The humidity was overwhelming at 90%, about 23°C.

I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic.

After lunch my wife and I went for a short drive to take Scully out for a walk somewhere different for a change. I planned to go down to Bradleys Head, which has a nice area to walk around and good views of the harbour, but I forgot that it’s part of the Sydney Harbour National Park, and so no dogs are allowed. So instead we parked near the bottom gate of Taronga Zoo and walked along a bush track around Whiting Beach to Little Sirius Point. The view here is pretty good!

Also today I’m baking sourdough, with rye flour for the first time in a long while. I ran out some months ago and haven’t managed to buy more until yesterday when we walked back from the lighting place and passed the bulk foods shop.

More Japanese birds

Today I worked on the next Darths & Droids strip, then got stuck into finishing off processing and uploading photos from my last day in Tokyo. I also went through and found all the photos I’d taken of birds, and identified all the species. Some of them were a bit tricky, since I only got shots from a distance with my phone. But I’m pleased to say that overall I added seven new species to my list, plus a Eurasian coot, which I’ve photographed in other countries but not Japan.

Including brown-eared bulbul:

Eurasian teals:

Tufted ducks:

And common pochard:

At lunch I took Scully for a walk to the hardware store, where I had some new keys cut for the new lock that will be installed on our new door when the fire safety people come to replace our old door on Friday. Unfortunately when I got back home and tested the new keys they didn’t work! The supplied keys have six places where the metal has been removed to set a new level different from the blank. But the cut keys only have metal removed from the five spots closest to the back of the key. There’s a whole spot nearest the tip of the key which wasn’t ground down. So now I’m going to have to go back and either get them properly cut or my money back and go somewhere else. This time I’ll take the actual lock with me and test them in the shop before leaving.

This evening, fried rice for dinner, followed by three ethics classes.

Getting back in the swing Tuesday

I got another good sleep, although I went to bed a bit late due to not finishing ethics classes until 10pm last night. Tonight should be an earlier night.

My first task today was writing the new lesson plan for the new week’s classes. The topic this week is “Always Connected”, discussing the modern phenomenon of being able to contact and be contacted at all times, no matter where you are, thanks to mobile phones and devices. I start with a story about myself, and the fact that when I was the age of the kids in the classes, I had a pen-pal. I think I’ll have to explain what a pen-pal is! And how over time, as technology advanced, we moved from exchanging letters to e-mails, and then onto social media. And along the way I ask the kids about the effects of this technology change on how we communicate and our well-being. In the afternoon I had two classes to finish off the “Danger!” topic from last week, then in the evening the first class on the new topic.

After completing the plan (before the afternoon classes), I went for a walk with Scully up to the pie shop to get some lunch. They had a new special today, a peri-peri chicken pie. This sounded great so I tried one, and it was indeed very good.

I also spent a bit of time processing some photos from my last day on Tokyo. Here are some from Nezu Jinja shrine, in Nezu, Tokyo. The entrance, with the market:

Torii gates:

Torii and a pavilion overlooking a koi pond:

Ema plaques and the main temple building:

A warbling white-eye. Taken with my phone!:

Exploring Summer Hill

This morning I did a 5k run. I wanted to beat 28 minutes and put an extra effort in and ended up recording 26:46, which I was very pleased with.

Afterwards, my wife and I went for a drive over to the suburb of Summer Hill. She had proposed we go there to look around as it’s a place we’ve never been before. We wandered around several of the streets, checking out the shopping area and some residential streets. We found an amazingly good patisserie, called simply the Summer Hill Village Patisserie. While we were looking hungrily at the pastries in the window, the woman inside stuck a note on the window right in front of our noses: “Special: 3 items, $3 off; 4 items, $4 off”.

So we had to go in and get three items! My wife got a croissant, while I decided to make this lunch and got a cherry danish, and a sfogliatella filled with ricotta and candied orange peel (top right in above photo). We sat in the small square across the street to eat them, and they were delicious!

Walking around, we admired the architecture: a mix of Victorian terrace houses:

Victorian/Federation hybrids:

Federation Free with classical columns:

Art Deco:

And modern murals:

It was a fun and interesting slice of Sydney history.

Back home I had three classes this evening, punctuated by an hour break in which I made Thai red curry Brussels sprouts with rice for dinner.

New content today:

The backwards day

After last night’s storm, the rain continued through the night and cold winds blew in. Today’s maximum temperature was at 1:30 am, at 21.1°C, and it just got colder from there. The minimum temperature was at 1:00 pm, at 18.3°C, and then since then the rain and wind has eased off and the temperature has climbed again! We may set another maximum later this evening. Very weird.

It really was a big storm. By this morning there were still over 100,000 properties without power. This was combined with industrial action by our train drivers here in Sydney, who didn’t exactly strike, but did a go-slow on the train network, so this morning we had heavy rain, a lot of trees and power lines down, and reduced capacity on the train network. So it was pretty miserable for anyone having to commute to work.

After two classes in the morning, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, in the rain. We went up to the pie shop, which has been closed for a few weeks over Christmas, so I haven’t had my regular fix. I like the spicy ones, so chose the butter chicken and Mexican beef ones today.

In the afternoon I processed some more photos from 2023’s trip to Japan, and used some of them to fill in my travel diary page for the day. I really want to get all the photos from that trip sorted before I go to Japan again next month! Here’s an amusing photo that I didn’t put into the diary:

And in other travel news, I’ve managed to book a hotel in Berlin for my June trip. The first hotel never got back to me about the corporate rate, but the second hotel I emailed got back the same day with full details and took my booking when I replied to confirm. So good business to them, and none to the first one that never responded! I can leave that trip for a while now and think about it again after we get back from Japan. I still have some things to organise for our itinerary there first.

New content today:

Cool dinner for a hot day

The start of summer continues to be unusually warm and humid. I decided to make a cool dinner tonight, a couscous salad. I had to message my wife to pick up some cucumbers on the way home from work, but I had everything else I needed. I made the couscous and added the chopped cucumber, a diced tomato, some feta cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and also a little bit of mango to provide sweetness. Normally one might put raisins or dried cranberries or something in, but I had a fresh mango and decided that would work. It did, the resulting salad was pretty good.

I did another new Darths & Droids comic today. I also spent some time tidying up language notes for Italian. I’ve been keeping notes on grammar and usage in OneNote, but I’ve slowly been transferring all of them to Obsidian. All my Japanese notes are there as I started Japanese more recently, but I had a lot of older Italian notes. I have to copy them across and reformat them, and I added some improvements while I was doing it.

And I also processed and uploaded more photos from last year’s Japan trip. This time going through my iPhone photos from the same day, adding shots of things like food and stuff which I didn’t use my SLR for. I also added several photos to that day of my travel diary, which you can now see here.

Here’s a food photo which didn’t make the cut into the diary.

New content today: