walking – dangermouse.net

A walk in Lane Cove National Park

This morning I had some free time, and my wife took Scully to work so I could use the opportunity to travel somewhere where dogs aren’t allowed. I decided to hop on the Metro and take a train to Lane Cove National Park.

This is a tiny national park entirely within the metropolitan area of Sydney. In fact, I only had to ride the train two stops to get there. It follows the banks of the Lane Cove River, one of the tributaries of Sydney Harbour. I know the main entrance area and thought I could walk there down the main road from the train station, but about half way there the road narrowed and the footpath disappeared, and there was no way I could continue without risking being hit by cars, so I had to backtrack and use an alternative route into the park.

But once there, I was greeted by the river, with forested banks on either side.

I’d taken my dSLR camera with a 100-400m lens for shooting birds. I wasn’t disappointed. There were many around, and some fearless. Here’s a suplhur-crested cockatoo:

This Australian brushturkey came right up to me. I took this photo with my phone, not the SLR.

An Australasian darter:

Australian golden whistler:

And I think the photo of the day, a superb fairywren:

I also got photos of a white-throated treecreeper and a brown gerygone, two species I’ve never photographed before, which was good, but unfortunately both photos were a bit blurry and far away, so not really worth showing off. These little birds move so fast it’s ridiculously hard getting a camera aimed at them before they move.

I emerged from another part of the park and walked to a different station to get a train back. I actually stopped on the way to the station to get lunch at a Thai place – the same premises where I used to get lunch when I was working for Canon, but they’ve changed owners and name and now the food is different. But still pretty good.

Here’s a map of the walk, as recorded on Strava.

New content today:

South Head and Hornby Lighthouse

This morning I had another free morning, like last week, because my wife too Scully to work and I’d done my ethics lesson plan. The weather was glum and cold, and I decided to take a drive out to South Head and do a bit of walking around there.

It wasn’t rainy when I departed, but by the time I got there there was squally light rain. I drove around some back streets for a bit, hoping the rain would pass. It got a bit lighter and I found a car park near the National Park to set out on the short walking track to Hornby Lighthouse.

I started at Camp Cove:

Canons were placed here to defend Sydney Harbour from attacking ships. Some of them are still here.

The rain sputtered out and I got a half decent view across the harbour towards the city:

I saw this magnificent red gum tree, the colours of the bark enhanced by the rain:

Before the lighthouse was the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage:

And then the lighthouse itself:

After returning to the car I found a cafe not far away to have an early lunch. And then I looked for a bakery to find something sweet to have after that, and found a place called Lil’ Mix in Rose Bay. They had amazing looking cookies and I bought three of the different flavours, plus a Jerusalem bagel which I took back to my wife’s work to give her for a surprise lunch treat when I picked up Scully.

I’ve just had the chocolate and salted caramel cookie and it was amazing…

This afternoon I rested up a bit before tonight’s ethics class. I made okonomiyaki for dinner.

New content today:

Bondi to Coogee Walk

Today my wife took Scully to work, so I had the entire morning free. I decided to leave early and catch the train and bus to Bondi Beach, and then do the Bondi to Coogee Walk along the coast. I took the new Metro train to Martin Place and changed to a regular train to Bondi Junction, and then hopped on a bus to the beach.

I arrived there before 9am and the weather was fine and mild, with the forecast maximum of 22°C. I began the walk at the southern end of Bondi Beach. Here’s the view looking north back to the beach.

Heading south, the first major sight is the Bondi Icebergs swimming club, with its ocean pools.

The waves sometimes crash spectacularly over these pools, but the ocean wasn’t too rough today.

Rounding the Icebergs, there’s a view looking back north over the pool to Bondi Beach.

From here the path south follows a fairly new track with boardwalks built in the last decade or two. I’ve never done this new walking path before!

The path head south around a rocky headland called McKenzies Point.

Here there are sandstone cliffs overlooking the ocean, undercut by the waves.

Around the point we can see the next couple of inlets in the coast, with Tamarama Beach (hidden) and Bronte Beach (left).

There were bunches of surfers in the rough water near Tamarama. Tamarama is the roughest and most dangerous beach in Sydney because of the geography of the bay.

Tamarama Beach itself looks like this. It’s tiny.

Rounding the next headland we get a good look at Bronte Beach. Bigger and safer for swimming. Although the sea is still a little rough today after some heavy weather over the weekend.

Circling around the beach to the south side, we find Bronte Baths. Unlike the Icebergs Club, this pool is free for anyone to use.

A wider view.

The new walking track isn’t very well signposted. I followed what I thought was the track around the pool, only to find a dead end. So I had to track back and take a set of stairs up to another path above. On the way I took this photo of the pool from the southern end.

Eventually I found the correct path and continued south past Bronte. Here’s a panorama looking back to the north.

The next sight is Waverly Cemetery, the cemetery with the best view in all of Australia. A new boardwalk takes walkers along the cliff below the cemetery. Walkers here used to have to walk through the cemetery, which annoyed the local council.

It’s a historical and very picturesque cemetery. In fact I saw a group of three guys in there filming something.

Here’s the view looking back north once past the cemetery.

The next beach is Clovelly, which is a tiny beach in a very deep, sheltered bay. Unlike Tamarama, here the long cove calms the waters so much that there were toddlers splashing in the water.

There’s another free public pool here too.

Next along the coast is Gordons Bay, which has a tiny beach, but mostly used for launching boats, not for swimming.

And around this next small headland is our destination, Coogee Beach.

The beach has this cool rainbow decoration on the main central steps down to the sand. It wasn’t far from here that I spotted one of my neighbours, walking his dog! I said hello and he was surprised to see me too. He’d dropped his partner off at some work thing nearby and was walking their dog along the beach while waiting to take her home again afterwards.

I ended my walk at a cafe in Coogee, The Little Kitchen. I had the chorizo and chick pea shakshuka, which was delicious. They also had muffins, which turned out to be strawberry and chocolate, in the one muffin! I had one of those too as a dessert (but forgot to take a photo of it).

After a relaxing meal, I caught a bus back to Bondi Junction, where I stopped to look around the shops for a bit. I timed my departure to arrive back at North Sydney on the Metro in time to pick up Scully from my wife’s work. And then I had to walk her all the way back home from there! I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing after a busy day…

New content today:

A short bushwalk at Allambie Heights

This morning I wrote up my next week’s ethics class, on the topic of Detecting Lies. I’m going to play a little game where I tell the students two “facts” about me, one of them true and the other a lie. And they have to ask me questions and try to figure out which is true and which is false. I’ve chosen a list of unlikely but plausible things. Hopefully it should be fun!

The idea is to get the kids thinking and talking about how easy or difficult it is to tell whether someone’s lying. What signs are there? How could you probe to find out if someone’s lying? What if someone invented an app that could tell if people were lying by analysing their voice, and it was accurate – what effect would that have on society?

After writing that up, I took Scully for a drive to refill the car’s fuel and to pick up some pies for lunch at one of my favourite pie shops, at Allambie Heights. I had a vegetable curry pie and a pumpkin and feta one. Last time I looked on Google Maps at the park where I normally eat my lunch there, I noticed there are some bushwalking tracks right behind it. So today I explored a short loop track with Scully. It leads into the Manly Dam Reserve, also known as the Manly Warringah War Memorial Park. The area I was in was at the top of some hills, so we had a good view over the park.

You can see the Manly Dam reservoir in that photo. I don’t think it’s used for drinking water any more – the park and reservoir are used for recreation. Here’s Scully posed on the lookout rock.

The track we walked along was mostly surrounded by heathland. Scully was not impressed.

Back home in the afternoon I sorted some more Magic cards to prepare for selling them. I also made a sourdough loaf to give to our neighbours while returning the now-empty and cleaned jar of home-made marmalade that they gave to us a few weeks ago. I took them over while the bread was still warm from the oven, and they said they’d try some tonight.

New content today:

The Temple of Swords and a big day out

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. During the day I had my usual ethics classes to teach, and in between I had to clean up the house ready for friends to come over. I did vacuum cleaning and had to clean off all the Magic cards off the dining table, so we had space to play.

We continued our adventure from last time, with the PCs exploring the Temple of Spathio, a local god of swords. They’d found a nest of snake men last time, and now explored cautiously, reaching a few new rooms which presented interesting problems. They’ve been finding magically glowing swords that have numerical runes engraved on them, and are trying to assemble a collection of all the numbers 1 to 9. One sword was spotted glowing near the top of a huge 20-foot high precarious conical tower of swords They considered playing sword Jenga, but decided they had to collapse the tower to reach the glowing sword, and did so with ropes, to avoid being on the bottom of a pile of falling swords. The collapse created a huge noise, which attracted more snake men from another room to attack them.

Last time they found two of the numbered swords, and this time I think they added three more. I won’t go into more details right now, but it was a lot of fun and the players did some incredibly clever and fun puzzle solving to get those swords. I think this is a great way to design an adventure: create a goal that the players can’t help but wanting, and place that goal inside a difficult situation that presents as a puzzle for them to work out how to get the thing. The watch them get creative with the resources and skills they have.

Today I got up and did a 5k run early, then had a shower to get ready for a day out. My wife dropped Scully off at the doggy day care place and then we headed into the city for a day of exploring together.

There’s been a lot of new development in parts of the city and my wife hadn’t seen some of it yet. We started at Central Station and walked around the University of Technology, so I could show her where I do my lecture classes, and where I’ve been eating lunches and dinners on the days when I’m in there. Then we walked through part of Chinatown and towards Darling Harbour. We stopped for a snack at Harajuku Gyoza Beer Stadium, a Japanese brewery and gyoza place that has some good food.

Then we walked through Darling Harbour and all the new development there, past the new convention centre, which replaced the old one that they tore down a few years ago. It was pretty busy with people, and mostly locals, with not too many obvious tourists, which was nice. A bit further on we hit the real tourist areas, around Cockle Bay Wharf. We continued around the Aquarium to Barangaroo – this is a new walkway that was inaccessible previously, as the area was formerly a wasteland of industrial docks. But with the recent redevelopment the area is pretty nice now.

We continued north to the new park at Barangaroo Reserve, and then cut across inland to The Rocks, where we walked through The Rocks Market. This was extremely busy, with many tourists in the area. We stopped at The Rocks Discovery Museum, a small historical museum about the neighbourhood, which we had never been in before. This is a small museum which has some displays and artefacts describing the history of The Rocks from before European arrival in 1788 to the 20th century. We were almost playing tourists in our own city, really.

From here we walked back into the heart of the city and stopped for another snack at a cafe near Wynyard. They did full lunch dishes, but I just chose a four-cheese toastie (toasted sandwich), which was amazingly good.

Then we continued south to the shopping areas, where we split up briefly -my wife went o buy some clothing while I checked out the game shop. We met in Kinokuniya book shop and after browsing around a bit we headed to Town Hall to catch a train home.

After picking up Scully from day care we were a bit exhausted. I didn’t fancy cooking dinner so suggested we go get Thai food for dinner. We drove over to Castle Cove where there’s a nice suburban Thai place with an outdoor table where we can sit with Scully. The food was good – a great way to round off a very busy day. And Scully is super tired because she’s been playing with other dogs all day.

New content today:

D&D and a big walk

Friday night was Dungeons & Dragons night! During the day I had my usual ethics classes, and in between I prepared by cleaning up the house. It needed a thorough vacuum, and cleaning the bathroom, so that took a bit of time. I also did some last minute prep work for the game, running through the adventure quickly and printing out some new character sheets for characters who had levelled up since last time.

We had a new player join us, an old friend of mine who I played with many years ago. She was the player of the original Alvissa in the fantasy game that I based Irregular Webcomic! on, and also Paris in the science fiction game that I based that them on. One of my other regular players was Draak and Spanners, and it was the first time the two players had seen each other for a few years, so that was a nice reunion.

Our new player rolled up a character using random rolls, and decided to be a magic-user. Notgandalf the usual magic-user wasn’t present (because his player is on an overseas trip), so extra spellpower was useful. They started a new adventure, investigating an old temple hidden behind a waterfall, dedicated to an old god of swords. They didn’t get very far into it, spending a lot of time dealing with some interesting traps, some serpent people, and a nasty gelatinous cube.

Today my wife got up early because she had a special Open Day event at her work, and had to be there to set up by 8am. I spent the morning working on a report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography meeting that I attended. I need to do one of these for each international meeting, before our follow-up Australian meeting, which is scheduled for this coming Friday.

At lunch timeI walked up to my wife’s work with Scully to meet her there. They had a sausage sizzle going, and I had a sausage sandwich as part of lunch. They also had people baking fresh scones, served with jam and cream, and we got a pair of those to eat as well together after my wife had finished her shift.

Then we walked from there up to Cammeray so she could get a coffee. I grabbed another small snack from Maggio’s Italian bakery to complete a piecemeal lunch. And then from there we walked home. Bu the time we got home, Scully and I had covered 6 km of walking.

After we walked all the way home, I rested for a bit before heading out for a 5k run. It’s the first run I’ve done in 2 weeks, since last weekend was so wet and cold and miserable. I took it a bit easy. But I overtook a man and woman jogging together on one street in the same direction as me. Then when I was doing the loop around the end of the peninsula, I passed them again, going the opposite away around the loop. And then coming back from the peninsula, I overtook them again. They must have taken a shorter route around the loop, because I was definitely running faster than them, but they got ahead of me somehow. And then I turned off the ain street into some backstreets that zig and zag a bit, and when I was further along, they appeared from another side street and I overtook them for a fourth time! By now they were laughing and chatting to me as I went past, and I exchanged a few friendly words, saying that I was nearly finished my 5k for the day.

This evening my wife and I went up to the local shops for dinner at an Indian restaurant. I also dropped off a couple of D&D 5e adventure books that I’m never going to use with some of the D&D players at Professor Plums. I’d organised to sell some at cheap prices to some of the other DMs there.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

3 busy days: Grand Canyon Track; Lego and games; French bakery

I’ve been busy the past few days, so have missed a couple of daily updates. But firstly, there’s horrible news from here in Sydney today: multiple people have been fatally stabbed in a shopping centre stabbing spree. I’m fine and I don’t know anybody who was in the area, in case anyone reading this was wondering.

But to better things. Thursday was very busy because I took my visiting friend from the USA out to the Blue Mountains to get a taste of the national park. I didn’t want to battle peak hour traffic by driving into the city to pick him up from his accommodation, so he graciously agreed to make his way on the trains to my place, arriving at 9am. We drove outwards, against the traffic. It took us just under two hours to reach our first stop: Lincolns Rock Lookout. This is a bare rock ledge on the edge of the cliff, looking west over Jamison Valley, so the sun was behind us, illuminating the view.

From here we drove over to a nearby pie shop for an early lunch. I wanted to get my friend to try a good Aussie meat pie, but I didn’t know any of the pie shops in the mountains. I did some research and also asked my friends, and converged on Mountain High Pies in Wentworth Falls. We both had the green curry chicken pie, which was pretty good. I tried a sausage roll, while my friend had a chocolate croissant and a cookie.

Next stop was the Grand Canyon Track walk. This had been closed following the heavy rain last week, and only reopened at 8am on Thursday, just a few hours before we got there. It’s a 10km loop walk that descends from the car park on top of the plateau down to the valley floor, then along Greaves Creek, which descends into a deep, narrow sandstone canyon for part of the journey.

I haven’t done this walk before, and was amazed at how beautiful and spectacular it is. It was very wet with the recent rain, with water dripping off overhead rocks in many places, so we got a little wet, but not soaked. At one point the canyon opens out into an area surrounded by rock, and a waterfall drops into the space from the cliffs above. The walking track actually goes around the back of the waterfall, just like in the movies (at left in this photo).

In several places the track is cut into the rock and you need to be careful to duck your head to avoid banging it. In one spot the walk goes through a dark tunnel and we had to use the torches on our phones to light the way – although you probably could have managed without light as the tunnel was only about 10-15 metres long. There were a lot of muddy puddles that we had to carefully walk around to avoid getting wet socks. In one place the stepping stones crossing the creek were submerged and people had placed other rocks on top to keep your feet more or less dry, and it was a bit of a balancing act to negotiate safely.

The walk took us about two and a half hours, and was worth every second of it. I definitely want to do it again with my wife one day, but we’ll try after a period of drier weather! After climbing back out of the valley we ended up at Evans Lookout. This has a view of the Grose Valley, which is on the other, northern side of the plateau to Jamison Valley.

We rested here enjoying the view a bit before walking back to the car. Then we drove over to Govetts Leap lookout, which has views of Grose Valley from further north.

Next we headed back from Blackheath to Katoomba, and the famous Echo Point lookout. This is the most famous spot, and the most visited by tourists, so we saw a lot of other people here.

And our last stop was Submlime Point in Leura. Another fantastic lookout spot, with views in the distance of Lake Burragorang in the river valley.

It was close to sunset now and we headed back home. My friend accepted my suggestion to have dinner with me and my wife, so I drove home and after meeting up we walked up to the local shops and had dinner at Turka, a Middle Eastern restaurant. That was really good and a great way to finish up a strenuous day of sightseeing.

On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes. After the last one I took a trip to Chatswood to meet someone who wanted to buy some of my old Magic: the Gathering cards. he was interested online, and when I learnt he lived in Sydney I suggested we meet up instead of me posting the cards to him. This was good, because he got to see the cards in person before transferring the money to me – it was a significant amount, over a couple of thousand dollars.

After that I got the train back home and enjoyed online board games night with my friends. We played a new game: Word Traveller. It’s a cooperative game where each player encodes a route through a famous city (we used the Paris board) using a hand of word cards to attempt to describe various landmarks on the gridded map. The other players have to determine the route as best they can given the ambiguities, and everyone scores points according to how many point-scoring landmarks they successfully visit. It was fun, but there’s a time limit and the second (and final) round was really tough against that limit.

Today, Saturday, I did some housework, cleaning the bathroom. We also dropped Scully in for a groom and haircut, and then took the time to drive over to Paddington so my wife could visit the markets there. While she did that I walked over to Tonton Bread bakery. I was seeking their delicious apricot/almond croissants. But when I got there I didn’t see any on the counter, so I asked the woman at the counter, “No apricot almond croissants today?”

And she looked really puzzled, and said, “Apricot? We don’t make anything like that.”

I said I’d had them there before, and she said that it must have been a long time ago. But it wasn’t that long ago.. only eight months, in fact. Well. So I got a ham and cheese danish, and a chocolate almond croissant instead (which I shared with my wife). I also got one of their delicious flans for dessert tonight.

We got home, picked up Scully, went for a walk. I went for a run too, but took it easy and only did 2.5 km instead of the usual 5, because I’m still not fully over my sore back – it’s about 95%, but I wanted to not strain it too much. And phew… I think that’s all the highlights of the last three days.

New content Thursday:

New content yesterday:

New content today:

A big walk to exercise my back

Today I had three ethics classes in the morning, finishing just before midday. After that I met up with my American friend and we went for a walk around my neighbourhood and the northern shore of Sydney Harbour.

We met at Wollstonecraft Station just after midday. I’d planned to take him down Berrys Creek to the harbour, but with the recent heavy rain that track would have been very muddy, so I suggested we take a higher street route to my favourite lunch lookout spot, and then go down into the creek valley from there. We walked around Berry Island and saw the Aboriginal rock carvings there, and then over to the Coal Loader, where we walked through one of the train loading tunnels.

From there to Balls Head, with its great lookout views of the city.

Then down to Sawmillers Reserve, with more views and a historical shipwreck.

From here we walked across to Lavender Bay and checked out Wendy’s Secret Garden, before continuing past Luna Park and down to Milsons Point and then Kirribilli. We parted at Milsons Point Station about 3:30 pm, which gave me and Scully time to walk up to my wife’s work by her finishing time of 4 o’clock. And then we all walked home together. It was a long walk – I did over 20,000 steps, but I didn’t track the kilometres. Scully and I were exhausted by the time we got home!

But all this exercise was good for my sore back. It was nasty in the morning when I got up, but this evening is feeling much better. Maybe 70% or so. Hopefully it won’t deteriorate much during the night again.

And then tonight after all that I have not one, but two more classes. I’ve added an extra at 9pm, the latest I do them, to cater to a loyal student who needed a later one. I wouldn’t do this during summer because daylight saving would push it to 10pm start and 11pm finish. But since we just went off DST, I’m okay to this timeslot for the next 6 months, and then I’ll have to re-evaluate it.

New content today:

Jigsaw puzzle done!

After neglecting it during the week. we put in a concerted effort today and finished off the 1000-piece Renoir jigsaw puzzle.

We woke up to a sunny morning, after a night of very heavy rain. The rain gauge at Sydney’s main weather station broke overnight, so we don’t have a reading for the 24 hour period, but nearby gauges registered 145 mm at Sydney Airport and 160 mm at the suburb of Canterbury. I heard the rain hammering down in the middle of the night, but it had stopped by the time I got up and the sun had come out. But there was evidence in the garage basement where much of the floor was still wet, and there were water-transported trails of sand everywhere. Part of it must have flooded like it has on other heavy rain occasions (though I don’t think as bad as those ones).

Heading out for a 5k run after breakfast, I passed a couple of small toppled trees and fallen branches. The streets looked the worse for wear, with lots of twigs and leaf litter, and torrents of water still rushing in all the gutters.

Another consequence of the weather was to completely change my plans for the week ahead. I mentioned yesterday that I was planning to take my American visitor friend up to the Blue Mountains on Tuesday. The plan was to do the Grand Canyon Track walk near Blackheath, and then go see some of the other sights depending how much time we had. But because of the weather, the National Parks and Wildlife Service has closed all of the Blue Mountains valley walking tracks until Thursday morning. They need time to check them for landslides, rockfalls, tree falls, and general safety.

This means we can’t do that walk on Tuesday. I was really looking forward to it, and my visitor is a keen hiker, and this may be his only chance in a lifetime to do these Blue Mountains walking tracks. So I shuffled my ethics classes from Thursday, moving some to Tuesday and some to Wednesday, and so I can have Thursday free to take him up to the mountains then instead of Tuesday. The other good thing about this is that the weather forecast for Thursday is dry, whereas Tuesday may have a few showers, so it should be a better day for it anyway. Now we just have to hope they don’t find anything dangerous that causes the track to be closed for longer.

For dinner tonight I made vegetable fajitas. Onions, garlic, carrot, zucchini, broccolini, cauliflower. And I tried a new ingredient, frying up strips of haloumi to add to the fajitas. The added salty crunch was good!

New content today:

A mess of a morning

Normally I take Scully (my poodle, if you’re new here) for a quick 10 minute walk around the block just before my wife leaves for work, to prevent Scully crying when my wife leaves. This morning Scully got up a bit late and I needed to take her out for her toilet about 30 minutes before my wife left for work, so I decided I’d take her on a long walk to Naremburn, and sit at the bakery there and get a croissant or something for second breakfast before coming home.

I took Scully downstairs, realised I’d forgotten my phone, but thought, “Oh well, I’m not going back upstairs just to get that, no biggie.” After Scully did her toilet, I walked with her to Naremburn. All the way I was looking forward to sitting down and having that croissant or whatever. But when I got there I realised that since I didn’t have my phone I couldn’t buy anything! (I’ve taken to using Apple Wallet to pay for things, and basically haven’t carried my physical wallet/credit cards/cash since COVID restrictions began in 2020.)

So we turned around and walked home. When I got to the front door, I realised I had also forgotten to take keys! So no phone, no keys… the only thing I could do was walk with Scully all the way to my wife’s work at North Sydney and get keys off her. I didn’t finally get home until nearly 10:00. And since I expected to be home before 8:30, I didn’t put any sunscreen on, and it was a hot sunny morning.

I thought my woes were over, but no! After lunch I went to the post office to pick up a package that was awaiting collection. I got there and because it’s December there was a huge queue. 20 people or so. I joined the end. The queue progressed super slowly because everyone was sending multiple Christmas packages. Eventually I was about halfway down the queue, and I spotted a sign saying “Parcel collection” with an arrow pointing out to the hallway. I figured I’d been standing here for 10 minutes when I could have gone straight to the parcel collection point!

So I left the queue and went out there, around the corner in the hallway and saw the parcel collection window… shuttered up, with a sign saying “After 9am, collect parcels from the main service counter”. So I had to go back in, and of course now the queue had grown even longer, and none of the people who were behind me a few seconds ago showed any inclination to let me back in. So I had to go to the back of the queue again.

15 minutes later, I was the next waiting to be served. An employee appeared out of a side door and said, “Anyone just collecting parcels?” A few people behind me raised their hands, and so did I. As the next to be served, I went first, leaving the others in the queue, and gave her my package delivery card. She took it and disappeared back through the door. Then while I was waiting, the service counter called the next three people, and they all got their packages before the woman reappeared with mine! Aiiieee!

In other news, while heading to the post office I walked past the new underground Metro station that is being built at Crows Nest. It’s been a construction zone for a long time and as the building has gone up above the underground station it’s been shrouded in scaffolding and screens. But now part of it is being peeled away, giving us our first look at the station access building.

Well. It’s not exactly what I’d call pretty.

I assumed the building above the station would be shops at ground level and offices with windows above. But it looks like a big bland wall of bricks, probably hiding a bunch of air conditioning plant or whatever else they need to keep an underground train station habitable.

Lest the day be nothing but negativity, I’m pleased to report that my lingering jet lag symptoms seem to have passed fully away, and I’ve been getting decent sleeps the past couple of nights. Oh, and the package I picked up was an American food care package from a friend, in time for Christmas. It contained a bunch of American sweets that are either impossible to get or super expensive here in Australia, as well as a big bottle of maple syrup, which is definitely super expensive here. So that was good!

New content today: