weather – Page 7 – dangermouse.net

… And wintry weather has arrived

Tuesday, time to write my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes. This week the topic is “Taking Advantage”. As in people who do things like cut in to queues, or park in disabled spots (when they’re not disabled), or generally otherwise take advantage of other people by bending rules, ignoring social conventions, or generally being insufferable. I said yesterday this week’s topic would be “Mysterious Beasts”, but I was getting ahead of myself – that’s for next week.

The weather turned cold and dismal today. A cold rainy front came in mid morning and cooled things down from a top of 19°C, so that by lunchtime it was just 16°C. There was also intermittent rain all day. The forecast is pretty dismal too: cold and rainy like this for at least the next ten days. We are expecting heavy falls on the weekend, close to 100 mm.

I took Scully for a walk in a brief non-rainy period. And this evening I cooked a recipe that we call “cauliflower bomb”. The recipe is online here, although with a less evocative name. It’s one of the more complex recipes I make, with several steps of preparation, cooking, and lots of pots and dishes and utensils to wash up afterwards. I also roasted the cut off cauliflower leaves, which are delicious when roasted with oil, salt, and garlic until crispy. We had those as an appetiser before the main cauliflower itself. I mentioned this recipe back in 2020 when I discovered it, and that blog post has a photo from then.

I also did some comic stuff today, both Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! I’m cutting really close to publication time on both at the moment, and in fact missed the update time for the latter by an hour or so. Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend.

New content today:

The last perfect day of autumn…

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth… then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

Carl Sagan said this in his TV series “Cosmos”. I’m reminded of it on a day like today, when it’s absolutely gorgeous autumn weather – warm, with a light breeze, and just a pleasure to be outside. Not too hot like summer, and not yet descending into the chill of winter. And with the forecast for tomorrow being rainy and much colder, it will probably feel like the start of winter.

So today felt like the last perfect day of autumn. I had four ethics classes before lunch, but then took the chance to take Scully on a nice long walk in the sunshine, filtered through high cirrus clouds so it wasn’t stinging. We stopped at The Grumpy Baker and I got a spicy vegetable roll for lunch – like a sausage roll but filled with a kind of Moroccan spiced vegetable mix. It’s really good.

Then Scully got to run around and chase a ball on the grass by the harbour for a bit before we walked back home. She rolled in the grass a bit, enjoying the scents, but it was okay because we had planned to give her a bath this evening. We meant to do it on the weekend but time got away from us.

I spent some time making stage 8 of the Lego D&D set. This adds a door and arches around the dungeon level, and adds a roof which looks like a floor of the storey above.

I made pizza for dinner, but didn’t realise until the dough was ready that we’d run out of pizza cheese (a blend of mostly mozzarella with a little cheddar and parmesan for flavour)! So I had to make it with just cheddar and feta cheese. Cheddar’s not the best by itself as it gets oily when it melts, but spreading it sparely on the pizza works okay.

Then two more classes tonight to finish off the week’s topic on “Why don’t we?” questions. Tomorrow I write up the lesson plan for the next week, which will be on “Mysterious Beasts” – like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and so on. That should be fun!

New content today:

Autumn feelings

It was a little warm today, 27°C, but pleasant and not humid. The weather has really cooled down and become drier since summer and the days are really nice now. The few imported deciduous trees in the area are starting to turn – plane trees going their drab shade of brown, while the liquidambars are turning a lovely red and the ginkgos are starting to turn their delicious shade of butter yellow.

I took Scully on a long walk to the Italian bakery at Cammeray for lunch. I had a pizza slice and I looked for any of their delicious pasties, but they seemed to have sold out of most of them. There were some croissants and a cherry danish, but I decided to look in the cake display and found a seasonal item: a “Monte Bianco”, I guess the Italian version of a Mont Blanc. Chestnuts are the classic autumnal treat. So I decided to try that.

To be honest, it wasn’t entirely to my taste, being a mass of soft creamy chestnut puree, with only a tiny strip of biscuit base at the bottom to give it any other sort of texture. The flavour was a bit bland too. I think I like chestnuts more in the abstract than as an ingredient in cooking. it’s the first sweet treat I’ve ever tried at this bakery that I wouldn’t have again – their hit rate is usually very good.

I spent the morning writing my class notes for this week’s new ethics topic, on the question of “Why don’t we?” This is really a more critical thinking exercise this week, getting the kids to think about the reasons—which must exist—why we don’t fix particular problems in the world. Some of the questions:

Why don’t we prevent natural disasters?
Why don’t we give everyone free food?
Why don’t we switch to a better keyboard layout than QWERTY?
Why don’t we ban all pesticides?
Why don’t we keep criminals in prison forever so they can’t commit crime again?
Why don’t we have more bins in public places to reduce littering?

The hope is that the kids will realise the wide variety of reasons behind the questions: some are physically impossible, some are socially unacceptable, some are economically infeasible, some are ethically questionable, some are politically intractable, some are environmentally irresponsible, and so on.

I built stage 5 of the Lego D&D set today. The first building is now complete! It’s the whole tavern, with the ground floor and the bedroom second storey now added, with completed roof.

There’s another new figure, a human fighter/rogue/assassin kind of guy. The roof parts and windows are really well done on this model.

And here’s the interior details seen from the back (there’s no back wall, so you can see inside).

The Lego pieces are in numbered bags inside the box, and you open the bags in numerical order as you build through the instructions. So far I’ve opened the first 5 bags. As I was searching through them all to find bag number 6 (for tomorrow), I noticed bags with numbers as high as 32! SO with 5 bags done, I’ve completed building less than one sixth of this set!

New content today:

Wet Saturday, pizza, Root

It was a cold, wet day today. It’s astonishing how just a week or two ago it was still hot like the end of summer, and now the weather has turned downright chilly. I managed to find a window around 9am to go for a short run, 2.5k. I want to ease back into it a little since my back is still a tiny bit tender after pulling it a week ago. I might try for 5k tomorrow, but we’ll see.

My wife and I played a game of Root this afternoon, this time using all four factions for the first time, with robot versions of the Marquisate and the Eyrie, while she played the Alliance and I played the Vagabond. I’d been introducing new elements of the game to her slowly so she can get used to them, and this is the first time we included the Vagabond. The robot factions did pretty well and controlled a lot of the board until late in the game, but we both overtook them and my wife managed to race to victory.

I also spent some time building the next stage of the D&D Lego set. First, here’s a photo of the enormous box!

Inside are a couple of dozen numbered bags full of pieces, which are constructed in order. Here’s the first stage of construction, a tavern, showing the outside with a dwarven adventurer:

Stage 2 added more to the upper parts of the walls, the tavern sign, and a wizard character:

Today I completed stage 3, which is the upper floor of the tavern, where there’s a comfy looking bed:

But oh no! It’s a mimic!!!

I’ll try to do stage 4 tomorrow.

Tonight for dinner I made pizza – our usual with pumpkin and walnuts and chilli. We had some left over sour cream from Mexican meals in the past week, so I added some of that and a bit more chilli oil onto the cut slices after it was cooked. Very nice!

New content today:

Sending more cards overseas

Besides 5 ethics classes today, I spent some time selling more Magic: the Gathering cards. I made 4 new sales, and sent three packages off in the mail. The other was this evening, so I’ll send it tomorrow.

The only other thing worth comment today was a brief but intense thunderstorm that passed over the city mid-afternoon. There was intense rain and some extremely loud thunder where I am for a few minutes, before it cleared away and became sunny again.

My wife made minestrone for dinner using the left over vegetable soup from last night. We’ve moved from summer dishes to soups again on the nights when I have classes, as the weather cools down towards winter. The quilt has gone back on the bed already, and slippers have come out of storage.

New content today:

A hit of winter!

Showers were forecast today, but I wasn’t prepared for what actually happened. A strong cold front hit early in the afternoon, bringing rain and cold winds. The temperature dropped to around 13°C, which is like a very cold winter day for Sydney. It’s definitely the coldest weather we’ve had all year, since last winter. Tomorrow is supposed to be cool and windy, but thankfully Thursday will start to warm up a bit more again, as that’s the day I have slated for the trip into the mountains with the American visitor.

I had an easy morning, spending time stretching out my back to aid recovery. It really stiffens up overnight, but loosens up again during the day. Overall it’s better than yesterday, so that’s good. I worked on some Darths & Droids comics, and made some sourdough. Actually, it was unusual because the dough turned out a lot softer and stickier than usual. In hindsight, I may have measured out 100 grams less of flour than usual, but I’m not sure. The bread turned out nice though.

Tonight I had three ethics classes, migrated from Thursday for this week only. Fewer students than normal showed up, as expected, so I had to refund a few of them. The new topic is School. Talking to school-aged kids about school, and what’s good and bad about it and stuff like that is very interesting!

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:

The Kickstarter that keeps on giving

Back in 2015 I backed a Kickstarter for a copy of the roleplaying game Delta Green. I got the book many years ago, but they keep on issuing new digital rewards for backers. I got another one yesterday – this is about the 20th or 30th PDF adventure/expansion that I’ve received for this project. And the announcement email said they’re still working on four more titles that I should receive in the future! This is not stuff that was promised and they’re late in delivering – it’s all bonus rewards that I never expected to get in the first place. Definitely a publisher that looks after its customers.

Oh, the other main news is all about the weather. We had 111 mm of rain overnight, and today’s forecast was upgraded from another 100 mm to 200 mm! The morning was steady rain, a little heavy at times, but nothing too bad. It increased in the afternoon and is expected to get very heavy overnight, until late tomorrow morning.

Board games night is at a friend’s place, but I decided not to go tonight. A combination of the traffic and heavy rain, and wanting to get some things done at home. I needed to complete next week’s ethics class topic plan early, because on Tuesday I’m planning to have a day out in the mountains with an Internet acquaintance who is visiting Sydney from the USA. He actually arrived late yesterday, just in time for this glorious stormy welcome.

New content today:

Sydney putting on the weather for a visitor

I have an online acquaintance who is currently visiting Australia for the first time. He began his trip in Melbourne last week, and spent the last four days driving along the scenic coastal route to Sydney, taking his time to enjoy the sights. He hauled into Sydney this afternoon… just in time for the start of one of our epic weather events.

The forecast is for almost 200mm of rain over the next 48 hours, with some thunderstorms and high winds thrown in for good measure. The Nepean/Hawkesbury River system that marks the western and northern boundaries of Sydney has had a “minor to major” flood warning issued. The ran started at lunch time today and was light during the afternoon, but it’s getting pretty heavy now in the evening.

This morning I had two ethics classes, and thenI tried to beat the incoming rain and send another package off at the post office. I managed to get as far as halfway home via the pie shop, where I grabbed some lunch. I took shelter on some covered seating at a nearby park to eat with Scully while we watched the rain come down. It lightened up a bit and we didn’t get too wet on the way home.

In the afternoon I did some comics stuff and prepped for this evening’s three further ethics classes. Oh, I also added a new class time on Monday nights to cater to a couple of students who needed to move from existing classes for scheduling reasons. I’m getting a bit saturated with classes, but felt I could handle one more for two long-time students.

New content today:

Weather forecast got it wrong

Yep, the Bureau of Meteorology got today’s forecast very wrong. It was supposed to be hot and sunny, 29°C. It briefly reached 25°C and hovered closer to 20°C for most of the day, under grey skies and some heavy rain.

I took Scully for a bit of a drive at lunch time, and we got caught out by the rain. I had to find a seat under shelter to eat after getting a couple of pies from the Allambie Pies shop. Scully’s not keen on rain, so she didn’t want to run around in it at the park there.

No progress on the jigsaw puzzle today, as I said I wouldn’t work on it while my wife was out at work. And then when she got home, I went for a 5k run, and then when I got home from that she went out to a Zumba aerobics class. And she brought home a copy of The Barbie Movie from the library to watch, so she’s watching that this evening.

I worked on my ethics class for this week, on the topic of Persuasion. I point out that persuading people is attempting to change their minds about something, and explore the ethics of when that’s okay, and when it’s not okay. And how people persuade others, what methods do they use, and are some methods more effective, or more ethical, than others.

And I spent some time tidying up a bunch of loose ends and tasks that needed to get done. Nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy – just mundane chores.

New content today: