scully – Page 8 – dangermouse.net

Gumming up the work

I had my second last Ethics class for the year today. About half the students were missing as they were attending an orientation day at a local high school, where they’ll be starting in Year 7 next year at the end of the summer holidays around the end of January. So it was a more manageable number of kids, but unfortunately the two main disruptors were still there, and I needed to assert control very firmly a few times.

And then near the end of the lesson, I noticed one of them was chewing gum! This was a serious offence when I was in school, and I assumed it’s still so now. I made him wrap it in paper so it wouldn’t stick to anything and then discard it. And I told him I’d be reporting this to his regular classroom teacher, which I did right after the lesson finished. The teacher assured me he’d take action to deal with this infraction.

It’s sad when the end of a school year comes and I know I’ll never see that class of kids again, but honestly this year has contained the worst couple of students I’ve seen in four years of teaching this course, and I won’t miss those ones. I look forward to having a new class next year, and from reports from the Year 5 teachers I think it should be a much better behaved group.

The rest of the day I worked on comics, which is kind of boring to report because I don’t want to reveal anything ahead of publication, and I spend quite a few days doing this.

In the afternoon I took Scully for a walk down to Berry Island, which isn’t really an island any more – it’s joined to the harbour shore by a low isthmus of grass that is a nice park to let dogs run around on. It’s a nice spot, by the water, with views of the city across the harbour, and a short enough but decent walk from home. Walking uphill back home is a good stretch of the legs, both for me and Scully. And the good thing is we don’t need to cross any streets, and the traffic is very light, so I can let Scully walk off-lead almost all the way home.

Looks like the Irregular Webcomic! cron job worked fine tonight, on a Wednesday. Let’s see if it fails again on Tuesday next week.

New content today:

Market day and more Scully photos

Today was my first market day since June, and only the third day this year, following multiple COVID cancellations. I got up at 6:30 and went to collect my hire car after a quick breakfast, then drove it home to pick up all my stock and gear. I was at the market by about 7:30, and setting up my stall, ready to go by 8:30.

Customers were starting to drift in already even though the market didn’t officially open until 9:00, so I thought it would be a good day – certainly better than June which was almost completely dead and I didn’t even recoup the cost of renting the stall space. I was hopeful people would be out and about and doing Christmas shopping, with our local COVID cases now reduced to zero for the past week. There were a good number of people, but honestly not as many as I’d been expecting or hoping for.

That photo was during a quiet period when I could wander from my stall for a few seconds. I made several sales, recouped all my expenses, and made a small profit, although honestly it didn’t work out to a great hourly rate. Nevertheless, it was good to make some money! And a couple of people asked me if I gave photography lessons, which I answered by saying I haven’t done so, but I would certainly consider doing it, and gave the inquirers a business card to contact me. So maybe that will lead to something.

I got home after unpacking the hire car and returning it about 15:30. It was a hot day, and I was exhausted, but my wife said Scully needed some exercise! So we went straight out to the park. And since she’d been groomed yesterday, I wanted to try to get some more photos of her running across the grass. So I took my camera and we encouraged her to run straight at me while I took photos.

This one is the best pose I captured, but unfortunately she was still a bit far away from me and doesn’t fill the frame of the camera.

This one’s much better at filling the frame, but the pose isn’t as good. And these are the best shots of about 60 or 70 that I took. It’s hard taking photos of animals in motion!

I am exhausted…

New content today:

Market eve

Tomorrow is market day – I have a stall again at The Great Market at East Lindfield. Last month’s market was cancelled because of forecast stormy weather, but tomorrow’s is definitely on.

I spent time today going through my checklist and collating all the gear I need to take, getting it set up in the garage, ready for loading into the hire car in the morning. I have to hire a care to take my stuff to the market because my own car isn’t big enough (which means another expense that I need to recoup). I also bagged some newly printed greeting cards in cellophane bags with envelopes, ready for sale. I’m hoping the cards sell really well with this market being the first one in a long time, and in the lead up to Christmas. I’d really like to sell some of the mated prints too, and I’d be ecstatic if I sold one of the large mounted prints.

We’ll see, and I’ll report tomorrow. I have to be up at 06:30 to have a quick breakfast (and make some sandwiches for lunch), pick up the hire care, then pack it, and drive to the market, then unpack and set up my stall, by 9 o’clock.

The other thing that happened today was Scully had an appointment with the dog groomer. It’s been six weeks since her last groom, and we’ve usually been doing it every five weeks, so she was getting a bit shaggier than we were used to.

I took photos immediately before and after the grooming:

She’s almost two different dogs!

New content today:

Puppaween!

Scully’s doggie daycare place had a special Halloween party today. (I guess they didn’t want to do it on Saturday – probably because they get a lot fewer customers on weekends.) We haven’t used them for a while, but given this special event, we decided to book her in for the full day experience.

They take photos of the dogs in day care and the activities they do and post them on Instagram. Here are a couple of dogs enjoying pumpkin bobbing!

Pumpkin bobbing dogs

And here’s Scully with a couple of friends:

Scully and friends

She came home at the end of the day dog-tired!

In other events, I had a Standards Australia meeting today, to discuss photography standards with the Australian committee. Mainly in these meetings I report on events and technical discussions from the most recent international meeting – in this case the virtual meeting in September that was supposed to be in Finland. In these meetings we also decide how Australia will vote on various standards drafts that have come up for international ballot for approval.

Finally, my wife and I (and Scully) are leaving Sydney tomorrow on a short road trip, to spend a long weekend away to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I’ll try to do diary entries each day, but if I’m too busy or run out of time, then I’ll report when I get back home.

New content today:

Sneaking out for high tea

Scully was due for a groom at the dog groomer’s place today. We dropped her off at 10am, and my wife and I decided to use the time to sneak off into the city and get a high tea at The Palace, a fancy tea room in the Queen Victoria Building.

We took a train into the city, which felt a bit weird because we haven’t used public transport much at all since COVID-19 began. Normally on a Saturday morning the trains would be fairly full, especially getting close to Christmas like this. But today they were fairly empty, with only a handful of people spread out at sensible distances inside the carriages. And the city itself felt really empty, rather than the usual bustle of people.

But we had a good tea. I have to admit that when the servings came out, I was a little underwhelmed at the portions, having expected a bit more. But the food was very rich, and by the time we finished it, we were both very full and didn’t need anything else.

Indeed, although we began at 11am, it pretty much did us for lunch and we didn’t need anything until dinner time. Although I had an early dinner, around 5pm, because my friend organised a game of golf with another friend of ours, at the par-3 pitch-and-putt course where we’ve gone several times. And for something different, we played a twilight/evening game today, under the floodlights that they have at the course.

It was interesting and fun, although occasionally it was difficult to see where a ball went. I played moderately well, scoring 81, 2 strokes off my best on the course of 79. I would have done better except for a terrible blow-out 7 on one hole where I tried to pitch the ball up a slope to the green three times, falling just centimetres short each time and having the ball roll back down the hill to roughly where it had started.

The sunset was nice, but the moon rising in the east was amazing, a deep red colour due to smoke in the air from controlled burning operations taking place at the moment, to forestall another bad fire season over the summer.

Oh, an I also baked a batch of brownies today, both to take to golf and share with the guys, and also for a family lunch gathering that we’re having tomorrow.

New content today:

Housework (and running poodle)

Yeah, the title pretty much sums it up. Vacuum cleaning, washing up, laundry (my wife did that), changing bedsheets, cleaning the bath, cleaning Scully (haha – we gave her a bath). And for dinner I made risotto, which is 15 minutes of prep followed by a solid half hour slaving over the stove, constantly stirring.

It was pumpkin risotto, with toasted pine nuts and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I make risotto a bit – it’s not hard, but it is time and effort intensive. Today’s one turned out very nice. We had a bottle of white wine open, so I added a splash, which you should do, but it’s rare that we have a bottle open, so I usually don’t. The real Reggiano cheese from Italy makes a difference too. I bought that recently to replace the Australian brand of parmesan that we usually buy.

Oh! One other thing I did today. I’ve been meaning for a while to try to take some photos of Scully running towards the camera, using my DSLR in AI Servo focus mode, so it tracks moving objects. So today I went out with my wife and Scully, and we found some grass where I could lie down and aim my camera at Scully while my wife tells her to sit and stay, and then walks over to where I was lying, and then calls Scully to come over. We used our special “cheese command word”. This is an emergency recall command, which we always reward with cheese, and it’s pretty much the only time she ever gets cheese, which she loves. So when she hears this word – “Schnell!” – we picked a German word so we never say it accidentally when talking – she comes absolutely running flat out towards us.

We repeated this exercise 4 times, and I took a bunch of photos rapid-fire. About half of them turned out blurry, but… we got a couple of very nice shots.

Definitely going to try this again another day.

New content today:

5.4k run

It was about time for another 5k run today, and the weather was fine, so I set out early, leaving home before 9 am. Unfortunately I miscounted my laps again today, although this time instead of thinking I’d finished when I still had a lap to go, I accidentally ran an extra lap. Since I sprint for the last half lap or so, I didn’t have the advantage of having that faster half lap included in my 5k split time, so my time was a bit slower today, at 27:16, my fourth fastest.

After that I walked up to my dentist’s office and gave the receptionist a pack of photo prints for the dentist to look through – hoping to keep it in his mind to select one of my photos to redecorate his waiting room (as mentioned last week).

This afternoon I did some comic writing stuff, and then took Scully to the dog park for a walk and playing time with other dogs. The park we got to is 5 minutes drive away. Usually on the way there Scully just lies down in the passenger seat of the car, but on the way back she’s worked up and stands up, putting her paws on the centre console to get a view out the windows. Today she learnt a new trick… she stood on the radio button, turning it on and…

Well, let’s just say that Scully has learnt how to Rickroll me.

New content today:

Greenwich Baths and a new bakery

Scully and I went for a long walk together this morning, while my wife had some things to do. We walked all the way out to Greenwich Baths, which is about 3 km from home, and then back again. ON the way I took this photo of the harbour from Manns Point Park:

As it happened, this is my 13,000th photo uploaded to Flickr. I’ve been a member for about 13 years, so that’s pretty close to 1000 photos a year.

This afternoon we all went for a drive, and we passed a nice looking bakery, which we decided to stop at and see what they had, on the way to my mother-in-law’s place for afternoon tea. It turned out to be a patisserie type bakery, as opposed to a boulangerie type bakery. The French have the right idea with two different words for these two things. Unfortunately here in English they’re both labelled as “bakeries”, and there’s no way to tell if a random bakery that you go to will sell bread, or cakes, or both, or one and not the other, or what.

Anyway, they had some lovely looking lemon meringue tarts and salted caramel tarts, and we got some to take over for the afternoon tea. We ended up spending most of the afternoon there. It was a lovely afternoon, sunny and warm in the sunshine, although slightly cool in the shade.

New content today:

August is the windy month

August is always the windy month in Sydney. There were some showers around today, but it was mostly dry – but it was very windy. I walked up to the supermarket to buy some milk and eggs first thing, then took Scully for a walk down to Berry Island. We didn’t stay there long though, because of the wind whipping straight across the Harbour and blowing off the water.

So we walked back home along more sheltered streets. Scully is good at walking home, and we usually let her walk off leash along routes that she knows.

One thing I noticed while out today is that new green spring growth is starting to appear on some of the deciduous trees. In particular, a lot of magnolias are starting to finish their flowering run and produce lots of green leaves. The last few days have been cold, but there have already been a few spring-like days earlier, and we should be getting temperatures up to 22°C or so later this week.

Today I received a mail ordered book: the Star Wars: Age of Rebellion roleplaying game core book. I got the other two core books in the line—Edge of the Empire and Force and Destiny—cheaply at a closing down sale, and have really been enjoying reading them and looking forward to running some Star Wars games, so I decided I had to have the complete set. It’s always fun and exciting getting a new roleplaying game book!

New content today:

Last meal…

Today was a pretty routine day. I took Scully for a walk, lost a tennis ball in the Harbour… on my very first throw as well. There’s a park I take her to next to the water, and the grass just runs up to an edge and then drops off into the water. I try to avoid having the ball roll off but I must have lost half a dozen balls in that water. And once it’s in, there’s no way to get it back (without a fishing net on a pole or getting very wet). So rather than have her chase the ball, I just had to run around and have her chase me to get some exercise.

I spent much of the rest of the day writing Darths & Droids comics, chatting with co-authors on our Discord server.

And I had my last meal… until Thursday. I’m into the final day of fasting before a colonoscopy on Thursday. I can’t eat anything on Wednesday, though I need to have lots of water and stuff with sugars and salts in it to stay hydrated.

So tonight for a last meal I made something a bit special for dinner. Pancakes with mushrooms. It sounds weird, I know, but I got the idea from a vegetarian restaurant we went to some time back. They had a dish that was a small stack of savoury pancakes, topped with a medley of fried mushrooms in a delicious sauce. It was delicious, and I’ve copied it and made a similar dish at home a few times. It fit within my pre-colonoscopy-week dietary restrictions and I decided it would be a nice treat.

New content today: