weather – Page 29 – dangermouse.net

Winter chill

Winter hit with full force today. It was rainy early in the morning, and a cold air mass had come in overnight, so it was really cold today. I had to put a jacket on to take Scully out for some morning exercise, and I’m glad I did.

The past few days have been much the same stuff for me. I’ve been writing up a lot of story planning notes for Darths & Droids, and working on sorting through my photos database. Which I’ve been mentioning a lot, so it’s kind of boring to go into it again.

So for something new, a few days ago when I was lamenting to friends how difficult it is to get the good bits out of a pomegranate, one of them pointed me at this article about a machine that uses a computer vision system to separate pomegranate seeds from the pith. While this seems like an acceptable use of computing technology to make our lives easier, I wonder where it may lead…

In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of pomegranate aril separating systems. All fruit processing plants are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they separate pomegranates with a perfect operational record. The Pomegran-Net Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 2027. Human decisions are removed from fruit processing. Pomegran-Net begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

One of the processing robots is called the Term-granate-r. Played by Aril’d Schwarzenegger.

New content today:

A very rainy day

Yesterday was very windy, today was very rainy. It’s been raining more or less all day, and has become steady and heavy during the afternoon and into the evening. It was light this morning, and I took the chance to take Scully for a walk up the street to the shops and back.

Last night when I took her out for pre-bedtime toilet, I was fortunate enough to see a meteor! I was only outside with her for a few minutes, but I habitually look up to observe the stars while outside and waiting for Scully to toilet. At the moment Scorpius is high in the sky around 10pm when I go out, and I’ve been observing it slowly climbing higher each night for several weeks as the stars wheel about the sky slightly faster than the sun. It’s one of my favourite constellations, with the instantly recognisable claws and spiralling tail, with the red heart of Antares at the centre. It’s beautiful, and it makes having to go out into the cold autumn/winter nights a bit more bearable.

Anyway, last night I looked up, as usual, to take in Scorpius above, and as I was looking, there was a brief flash and streak of white light, running across Scorpius from roughly north-east to south-west. I’ve seen meteors before and know what they look like (and I have a degree in astrophysics), and this was definitely one. So, cool!

Today I spent a lot of time going through Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, not quite frame by frame, but at least shot by shot, transcribing a list of scenes and shots for reference during story planning for Darths & Droids. I didn’t get through the whole film… I got through a bit less than an hour of it. But I noted several things relevant to our story, and had a big discussion with my co-writers via online chat, which led to some significant ideas and plotting notes. It was a day very well spent on the creative front. Now I just need to repeat that much productivity again, to complete a full scene by scene breakdown of the whole film. (I’d previously done the first 20 minutes or so prior to starting work on writing for the film.)

New content today:

A very windy day

The weather continues to be wintry here, with cold, overcast, and very strong winds today. I took Scully for a walk and it was a bit blowy. We recorded wind gusts up to 46 km/h today.

I spent a lot fo time today uploading photos and writing web pages for some of my Sydney walks, as part of the process of transferring from Imgur albums to pages hosted on my own site. I also expanded the commentary a lot, doing some research into various buildings that I’d taken photos of. In particular, this walk through Greenwich (the Sydney suburb) ended up having a lot of new historical details added.

Tonight for dinner I made a vegetable quiche. I make quiches a lot, but generally just with one vegetable, like chunks of pumpkin, or chopped spinach. A friend made some quiches recently with a variety of roasted vegetables, so I thought I’d fancy it up a bit. Here’s what I did:

Chopped potato, butternut pumpkin (squash for the Americans), onion, broccolini. Spread on baking tray, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary. Baked 210°C for about 25 minutes.
Meanwhile got some pre-made shortcrust pastry and put it in a pie dish. Placed it in the same oven after about 10 minutes, to blind bake for about 15 minutes.
Placed vegetables in pastry shell, added chunks of feta, light sprinkle of salt, then poured over 3 eggs beaten with a bit of milk.
Reduced oven to 190°C and bake 25 minutes.
Yum!

New content today:

Drizzly Saturday outing

Cold and wet weather has blown into Sydney. But my wife and I wanted to go out for a bit, just to get out of the house. We drove to the other side of the harbour to one of our favourite bakeries to get some lunch, and eat in the park a few blocks walk away, while Scully ran around and explored the grass.

I got a chicken pie and a Mexican beef pie, and a vanilla slice for a sweet treat. Check out the stickiness of the icing:

This afternoon I did a bunch of story plotting and note writing for Darths & Droids. And a bunch of housework. I didn’t really get a whole lot done as it’s been a bit of a blah day, and I’ve felt a bit tired.

New content today:

Autumnal

It was cold today. Positively autumnal. The forecast for the next week has temperatures hovering a degree either side of 20°C, which is cool for Sydney, but not quite wintery. I fear yesterday’s 27°C was indeed the last of the truly warm weather until spring.

Today was a random melange of walking Scully, housecleaning, making some Darths & Droids comics, and cooking dinner. I made an “autumn risotto” – with hazelnuts and mushrooms (shiitake, oyster, and king oyster). I was originally just going to make mushroom, but was inspired to throw in some hazelnuts by the fact that my wife was watching a cooking show while I was cooking, and the chef on there made something with hazelnuts. I overheard it and immediately thought, “Yes! That’d go great with mushrooms!” and so tossed some in. And it indeed turned out great – the crunch of the nuts adds a lot to what is typically quite a mushy dish.

New content today:

Howling wind

This Saturday evening I’m sitting inside, happy not to be outdoors as the wind howls outside. The forecast was for high winds today, and it was right. It was warm in the middle of the day, but blustery. Now it’s cooled down a lot and the wind has picked up even more. I can hear trees bending and rustling.

I spent a lot of time today trying to compile an old program that a friend of mine wrote some years ago. He tried to help me in an online chat, but we’re still stuck at sorting out some library dependencies. Ugh… this is why I hate programming.

The other thing I did was make a couple of new Darths & Droids strips. I’d hoped to get more done, but got stuck in that mire of compiling code.

New content today:

Long walk in non-rain

I wanted to see if could play a round of golf this morning as part of my social distancing exercise, but the weather forecast was for up to 30mm of rain, with heavy falls at times. So I decided not to go to the golf course, and instead set out on a longish walk, with an umbrella.

As it turned out, it didn’t rain at all today… so I could have easily played a round of golf without weather problems. Oh well. I did put together this virtual photo tour of the parts of Sydney that I walked through today.

Also, here’s a photo of Scully helping me the other day to get my Lego photos done for Irregular Webcomic.

This afternoon I worked on finishing off writing annotations for the batch of comics.

Also, me and my gaming friends organised a Magic: the Gathering draft tournament, which we drafted today using a custom online web tool built by one of my friends. We’ll be building our decks and playing games remotely using Tabletop Simulator, as a replacement for face-to-face gaming. We drafted the Dominaria set from 2018, which we never managed to do at the time in cardboard format. I think I drafted a terrible deck, but I’m looking forward to playing it!

New content today:

A warm autumn Thursday

Firstly, I forgot to post this photo I took yesterday on my walk home from the shops:

This is a house I walk past occasionally. If I had unlimited money, this would be high on my list of houses to buy. Tennis court, lovely old house itself, and look at that view!

It was warm today. Earlier in the week we had some cold weather – the first truly cold weather since before summer, as we now slide into autumn. The maximum temperature on Saturday in Sydney was only 17.9°C, which is really winter-like conditions. It’s slowly been climbing as the week progresses, and today we reached 32.1°C, with 35°C forecast for tomorrow. So summer hasn’t quite released its grip yet, but winter is definitely on the way.

This morning I made use of the fine day to play 9 holes of golf at my nearest local course. I went really well today, equalling my record best score at that course. I was very pleased with my tee shot at the 4th hole:

That’s my ball there on the left, right on the green! The tee position is just below the wooden bench in the background, and you have to hit the shot over the wooded creek gully that you can see below. I’ve lost several balls in that gully, but not today! Putting was difficult though, because the course had done what I learnt later is called “aerating the greens” – they punch a grid of small holes in the surface and lay sand over the top. This is part of the course maintenance and my friend tells me it’s done twice a year, and the greens take a week or so to recover. But it meant that today they were very lumpy and inconsistent, so I had trouble putting, although I made up for it with decent long shots. I ended up 3-putting this hole for a bogey 4.

My wife’s work is adjusting to work-from-home conditions due to COVID-19, and her job-share partner has been told to not come in this week (as she has a very long commute on public transport), so my wife is working longer hours than normal this week (as she only has a short walk to the office). She normally takes Scully in to the office (the staff all love her), but Scully gets restless with the extra hours, so I’ve been going in to pick her up around lunch time. On the way home today we stopped to have a bit of a play in the park.

Apart from all this, the main thing I did today was work on more Darths & Droids strips. I wrote a couple of new strips and assembled a couple that I’d written yesterday. We’re getting a pretty good buffer for the new movie now.

New content today:

No-photo Sunday

I woke up a bit before the 05:30 alarm this morning – I always wake up just before whenever I set an alarm, it’s a weird sense that I have. My plan was to head to the beach before sunrise and take some photos.

But I could hear heavy rain falling outside. I quickly checked the rain radar on my phone, and saw that multiple rain bands were blowing up from the south, and it was likely to be raining for a few more hours. So I decided to abandon photography plans, turned over, and went back to sleep.

We (me, my wife, and Scully) all slept until after 8 o’clock! We haven’t had a good lie-in for ages, and I think we all got good value out of the extra hours of sleep. And it was still raining when we got up, so it looks like abandoning the photo expedition was the right call.

My wife took Scully out for a couple of trips today – to the city to check out The Rocks Market, and then to her mother’s place to visit. This gave me some time to concentrate on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic strips. The goal was to write four weeks worth (20+ strips) in one day, but that’s very ambitious given how long it takes to come up with each joke. I didn’t make it in the end, but I got close. Hopefully I can polish off the last few tomorrow morning and then get stuck into photographing them.

New content today:

Rain and more rain

It rained a lot today. I sent much of the day drawing comics at home, heading out at lunch to get some fish & chips. Although it’s only a 10 minute walk and I carried an umbrella, I was pretty wet by the time I got home.

The comic I was drawing is now complete, and I’ll be publishing it tomorrow – but for now it’s a surprise.

This afternoon I took Scully to the dog park, despite the rain. This time I wore a raincoat with hood, rather than use an umbrella. Scully had her doggy raincoat on. She doesn’t like the rain. She ran after the tennis ball a few times, but then decided she was wet enough and simply turned and walked back to the car. I had to coax her over to the park with some treats, but she really wasn’t into it.

Only a couple of the regulars at the dog park showed up in the rain, and they took a short walk before heading off, since the rain was moderately heavy. It was then that I realised that even though I was fairly dry under my raincoat, the coat itself was dripping wet… and I’d have to climb into the car to drive home. I decided to take it off and toss it into the boot before dashing into the car myself without the wet coat on. By which time Scully (in the passenger seat) had shaken the water off her and coated the interior of the car in spray…

New content today: