Meeting the new neighbours in a strange way

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d briefly met our new neighbours across the hall from our apartment. And that they had a dog and cat in quarantine after emigrating from South Africa.

Early this evening as I was bringing Scully in from a toilet break outside, I heard the sound of a dark barking from their apartment. I figured they must have their pets out of quarantine. Scully reacted to the barking by barking back, and my wife and I discussed and thought it would be a good idea to get the two dogs to meet each other and become familiar, so they won’t be barking through the door at each other all the time. We thought now was as good a time as any, and knocked on their door.

They answered, the woman coming out holding their dog – a west highland terrier which we learnt was named Sophie. Scully and Sophie had a bit of a sniff and started to get used to one another. The woman’s husband stepped out to say hello to us as well… and accidentally let the door slip closed behind him. He asked his wife if she had the key, but she didn’t. They’d locked themselves out of their apartment!

I asked if they had anyone with a spare key, and they said no, since they’d just moved to Australia recently. They didn’t have phones on them, so I got mine and found a 24-hour locksmith nearby and called to have them come over. They said they’d be about half an hour.

Rather than let them wait in the corridor, we invited them into our place. They turned out to be very nice people and we chatted about our dogs, their move from South Africa, and various other things while we waited. It turns out all their furniture is still sitting in a shipping container at Port Botany, after several weeks of delays in arriving, and then a port workers’ strike, and now customs inspection of everything they’ve brought over. The man said how nice it was to sit on our sofa – at the moment they only have some folding chairs in their place to sit on! We also learnt that their dog Sophie had only arrived at 4:30pm today, after having been flown from the quarantine facility in Melbourne, so they’d only had about an hour with her before we knocked and they got locked out!

Eventually the locksmith arrived and let them in. We felt terrible for having started this chain of events and apologised repeatedly and offered to pay for the locksmith, but they were very gracious about it and insisted on paying themselves. A bit of a misfortune, but at least we had the chance to sit and have a bit of an introductory chat. They said they’d invite us over for a drink when they get their furniture.

In other news today I received a mail order of some more board game expansions for Root. I decided to take the plunge and order some of them now in case they go out of print at some point. There are a few small ones already out of print and hard to find, but fortunately I managed to get those in the special Kickstarter edition of one of the other expansions I bought from the game store.

I had four classes to finish off the “Why?” topic for the week. And I put together a presentation to give at the next ISO Photography Standards meeting next week, on details for the meeting I’ll be hosting in Sydney in October. It was finally approved by Standards Australia, and now we can start giving delegates information on things like visa requirements, hotels, and so on. So it’s been a busy day.

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Double running early Sunday morning

My wife expressed a desire to begin running for her fitness. She already goes to the gym most days, but wanted to add some more aerobic activity. SO this morning she set an alarm and soon after 06:30 we walked up to the nearest sports oval. I’ve done some running around here, since it’s nice and flat with no hills, but I find it boring because running laps doesn’t take me past any interesting scenery. But my wife wanted to start easy.

She ran 2.5k, although she was a bit staggered when she asked how many laps that would be and I told her five and a half. I looked after Scully while she ran, and Scully wanted to run after her, but that probably wouldn’t have been great after a while, so I held on to her on the lead. My wife took it nice and slowly and managed to complete the laps with a little bit of walking in between longer spurts of jogging. After she was done I started my 5k run around the oval (11 and a bit laps), while she took Scully to a nearby cafe to get a drink.

We did some stretches afterwards and were back home before 08:00. It’s actually really nice to get up early and do something and have a feeling of achievement while the day is still young. Although given I went to bed late last night after running the D&D game, I could have used a bit more sleep!

Speaking of last night’s Dungeons & Dragons game, I wanted to mention a fun thing that happened. But I know some of my friends read my blog, and I want to possibly run the same adventure with them some time soon, so:

If you’re one of my D&D players, please don’t open the following spoiler text:

SPOILERS

At one point in the adventure they found a vampire, impaled through the chest with a magic sword. This sword was one of the main goals of the adventure, so they wanted to retrieve it. The problem was if they removed it, the vampire would be released. It was currently pinned by the sword, and could talk, so it begged to be released. The party were understandably cautious, not wanting to release a vampire who might immediately attack them. The plan they came up with involved: moving the vampire still impaled by the sword onto a magical floating disc, covering the vampire with a tarpaulin, moving the disc outside the cave they found him in, which was hidden behind a waterfall, moving him to the opposite side of the river, then pulling the sword out. They figured the vampire would have to stay under the tarpaulin as long as the sun was up to avoid dying, and then would be unable to cross the running water back into the cave that they were still exploring. A very creative plan! – I thought, and let them carry it out.

It was one of several clever things they did. I also gave their pregenerated characters a mixture of odd magic items that did weird and non-obviously-useful things, and they used several of these to interesting effect. So overall it was a good session.

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Double gaming: Root and D&D

No update on Friday because it was face-to-face board gaming night with my friends. I had four ethics classes, leading into departing to drive over to my friend’s place for the gaming. I was keen to try Root with more players, and with one of the regulars sidelined due to potential whooping cough exposure, I surveyed the likely attendees and found we had 4, the perfect number of players.

Then, a few minutes before I left, another friend said he was going to come too. So now we had 5, which wouldn’t work (without adding one of the optional expansions that allow more players, which I didn’t want to do as I haven’t read any of the rules of those yet). And then when I arrived, that last guy was just getting out of his car too. It turned out he brought a copy of Root as well! He said he’d bought it a while ago and had also been looking for a chance to play it with others.

We toyed with the idea of splitting into groups of 3 and 2 and playing two games, but I was the only one who knew all the rules. The guy who brought his own copy of the game said he’d be happy to watch and learn while the other four of us played a game, so that’s what we ended up doing. Our host made home-made pizzas for dinner and then we played.

The Cats raced to an early lead, as it seems they are wont to do. I was playing the Vagabond for the first time, after just having read its rules the day before. So I didn’t have a good grasp on my strategy, and I was helping the others with their moves to remind them of things they could do. The Eyrie crept up on the Cats and got to a point where they would have won the very next turn, but the rest of us managed to get them to go into Turmoil and the Eyrie lost 5 points, keeping them short of victory. Still, they would almost certainly win next turn. And then the Woodland Alliance stepped up. The player made some moves, said he couldn’t do much else, and then questioned what he could possibly craft from the cards in his hand. It turned out he had Sympathy in three mouse clearings, and had a “Favour of the Mice” card, which requires three mice to craft… and it removes all enemy pieces from all mouse clearings! This destroyed some 6 buildings, giving him 6 points, and victory in the game!

We finished the night with a game of For Sale, so the observer could play a game of 5 with us.

In other news, we had some work done in our garage on Friday. It’s in the basement of the apartment block, which is lit in the common areas, but the inside of our car space was very dark. Every time I wanted to go in there and store stuff or find stuff, I had to use a torch to see anything. It was really annoying. But a while back I noticed one of the other car spaces seemed to have a nice new light inside, motion controlled. So I wrote to the strata administrator and asked if we could have one of those installed as well, and they said yes. We have to pay a small installation cost, but the power comes from the communal fund. I was happy to pay the installation, and the work was done on Friday. So now we have a wonderful new light in our car space, and it’s great!

Saturday, I got up early and went straight for a 5k run, because my wife was taking Scully for a walk before heading out to the gym for a new dance class a bit later in the morning. I had my run completed and done my stretches before 08:00.

I used the rest of the morning for housework, cleaning the bathroom and shower, and then got stuck into prep work for tonight’s Dungeons & Dragons game at the local science shop. I had a one-shot dungeon to run, and wanted to make a bunch of pregenerated 3rd level characters. Last time I had 2nd level, so I just boosted their level by 1. Last time I’d printed out blank character sheets and written everything by hand. Of course some sheets ended up with player notes and doodles all over the, so I couldn’t really reuse those.

I thought I’d save myself some time in the long term by making Photoshop files of character sheets, with different layers representing the same character at different levels, so I can just switch them on and off and print out a version at any of a number of different levels, ready for play. It took me a bit of time to do this.

And then when I printed them I ran into a weird and annoying quirk of Photoshop. It saves the “number of copies” to print as part of the document. You save a new copy of the file to work on, do stuff, print it…. and it remembered that last time I printed 6 copies of the blank character sheet, so now I’d accidentally queued up to print 6 copies of each character when I only wanted 1 copy of each. I had to go into the print queue and delete all the jobs when I noticed (after 18 sheets came out of the printer).

The game went fairly well, with 4 players. But some of them were young and had to leave early, so we finished well before the shop closing time of 10pm, and didn’t get through as much of the dungeon as I hoped. Nevertheless, I shortcutted to the climax and they got to meet the God of Swords and ended up getting a super cool magical sword… with a horrible curse. And that was a suitable end to the evening.

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7 hours of online meetings…

It was a busy day today. I had five ethics classes, plus in between a two-hour agenda planning meeting for the next upcoming ISO Photography Standards meeting, which is in a couple of weeks. This is a meeting to discuss the scheduling of the agenda items, to fit in with everyone’s requirements for time to speak about and discuss the various projects, and also any attendance issues such as people only being able to attend morning or afternoon sessions because they’re attending remotely from different time zones, and so on.

I had a constraint, which is that the first lecture of this semester’s new course on Data Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney, clashes with the morning session of the second day of the meeting. I want to make sure I don’t miss the lecture and meeting the students, so I requested a couple of photography topics that I’m more interested in be moved to different sessions. This was accommodated, so that means I’ll only be missing some of the topics that are of lesser interest to me, technically speaking.

I only had half an hour between that meeting ending and the first of three ethics classes in the evening, so I had to squeeze dinner in there. I made some instant laksa and slurped it down hurriedly and was ready just in time.

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Asking Why?

I did the first three classes on the new “Why?” topic this evening. They went well, but I think it’s a bit of a brain-bender for some of the kids. It’s clear some of these concepts are things they’ve really never thought about or considered before. I had mostly kids on the high end of my age range tonight. I may need to simplify things a bit when I have classes with kids on the low age end.

Today I played another solo game of Root, with the same three factions as yesterday. This time I made sure to harry the Eyrie a bit more, with both the Cats and the Woodland Alliance, and that prevented the birds from winning, allowing the Cats to claim victory. The Alliance did a bit worse than yesterday, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of their tactics.

Root game

Not much else today. I took Scully on a long walk past the harbour shore in the morning. I made red curry broccoli and carrot with rice for dinner. Oh, I got some rye flour for sourdough – I ran out ages ago and haven’t done a rye loaf for a long time. I’m baking one right now as I type.

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A solo game of Root

It rained heavily overnight and cooled things down so today was much more pleasant than the past couple of days, although still a bit humid. I managed to go for a 5k run in the evening after my wife got home.

In the morning I worked on my ethics class material for this week, finishing off the lesson plan for the “Why?” topic.

And in the afternoon I played a game of Root. I’ve been keen to try it with three factions as I continue learning the game, so I decided to do a solo game where I play the Marquisate de Cat, the Eyrie Dynasties, and the Woodland Alliance, trying to compartmentalise my brain so I can play all three in sequence. I took photos of the game at setup, and then after each round of one turn for each faction.

Game of Root

I’ve marked the Cat movements in orange, Eyrie in blue, and I’ve added green circles to show clearings with sympathy for the Woodland Alliance. THere was some very interesting back and forth, and the game ended very tight, with the Eyrie winning, but both the Alliance and the Cats poised to reach the required 30 points on their next turns. In hindsight I think I played the Cats a bit too passive and they should have attacked more. And the Eyrie managed to make it to the end without suffering Turmoil at all, probably because the Cats and Alliance were busy antagonising each other and neither made much effort to check the growth of the Eyrie.

It was pretty fun doing this! I’m inclined to try it again, although it would be great to get this to one of our in-person board game nights and get a proper competitive game with my friends.

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Mango weather

Last night was very warm, 25°C minimum temperature, with close to 100% humidity. We slept with the air conditioner on, which we never normally do. It would have been an awful sleepless night otherwise. The day warmed up slowly since it was overcast, but midday was around 34°C and so humid that the “feels like” was almost 40°C. I just stayed indoors as much as possible and only took Scully out for necessary toilet breaks.

I finished off the “Hoaxes” ethics classes today. I’ve started work on the next week’s topic, which is “Why?” – examining the idea of seeking reasons for everything. That one should be interesting.

After my last class we had a mango for dessert – a new variety that we haven’t tried before I keep tasting notes on all the different mango varieties, and this is the tenth one, a new variety here in Australia called Scarlet Delight. My tasting notes: Smallish, red skin. Firm smooth flesh, rich tropical orange-passionfruit flavour. Small seed with not much hair.

Not much else to say. I’m just relaxing now and waiting for this overnight cool change to come through. Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler and rainy.

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Saying bye to a long-time student

I had a bit of a sad moment today. A girl who has been doing my Outschool “Critical & Ethical Thinking” class for close to 2 years has unenrolled. A parent wrote to explain that they’re moving to the UK (from Korea) and the time zones don’t work out so well, so she can’t continue the class any more. But the parent was very pleased with the class and thanked me for my work in teaching their daughter. I remember this girl at the beginning was very reluctant to speak, and took a lot of time thinking of answers, but she’s improved enormously and is much more confident and outgoing now.

In another less-than-good thing, one of my Dungeons & Dragons players was exposed to whooping cough. He’s being tested, but said no matter what he wants to skip D&D this Friday to avoid any possibility of infecting people. he said he still wanted to play and asked if we could include him remotely. We’ve done this before with another player, but this one is our mapper, and I feel like interacting with him remotely while describing the adventure locations and having him try to draw them will be too clumsy. So I suggested we postpone the game a fortnight, and convene on 23 February. Everyone agreed to this, so I made an invitation:

Invitation graphic to D&D game

The weather was a bit warm today, but the real problem will come tonight as the forecast is that the temperature won’t drop below 25°C overnight, before heading into a scorcher tomorrow. That’s definitely too warm to be comfortable for sleeping, so we’re blasting the air conditioner to cool things down before bed time and hoping we’ll survive and not wake up too hot.

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Double games days

Friday was online games night with friends and I didn’t have time to write a blog post because it was a busy day.

First thing in the morning was grocery pickup and shopping. I order online, but always select my own fruit and vegetables right before picking up all the other ordered stuff. Back home, I’d moved my first ethics class of the day 10 minutes earlier because I had another Zoom meeting starting at the exact finish time, and I needed some slop time in between because the classes always go a little bit over.

Friday: STEM Professionals in Schools teaching

The Zoom meeting was with a teacher at Loreto Kirribilli, a girls’ school not too far from where I live. This is a new school that I’m setting up a partnership with to replace Brookvale Public, where I’d been doing the CSIRO STEM Professionals in Schools program since 2012. It was good there, but (a) it was a long drive to get there, (b) I had to stop visiting the school during COVID, and (c) the contact teacher there since moved to a new school, so I basically lost tough with them. CSIRO contacted me last year to ask my status and I told them that, so they organised a new school for me.

I spoke to the school’s gifted & talented program organiser, who told me about the various programs they have there for out-of-curriculum enrichment and learning. She suggested the best introduction would be to give one of the Learning@Lunchtime talks – these are weekly talks on Fridays at school lunchtime, given by external visitors, on a wide range of topics. They advertise the speaker and topic, and any interested students can turn up and listen to the talk while eating lunch. She said they get any number from 5 to 50 students, depending on the topic (and the weather!). She sent me free dates afterwards and I said I could do one of these talks on 23 February.

After the talk, she said we could have a chat, and introduce me to the school’s science coordinator, to organise an ongoing mentorship of some students. They have external mentors come to the school at intervals convenient for the visitor—anything from weekly to once a year—and meet with a small group of students with an interest in whatever the mentor is an expert in. She said they don’t do it just for STEM topics; they had an executive from Qantas who came in and had “business lunches” with students and they all talked about business stuff. Anyway, she asked what sort of ages I’d like to work with, since they cover the gamut from Kindergarten to Year 12, and I said I’d spent my tie at Brookvale working with K-6 kids, and would like to work with older students so we could do more advanced stuff. She said she might have a small group of Year 10 students who might be suitable. But that will be sorted when we chat after the initial lunchtime talk.

Following this meeting I had lunch and took Scully for a quick walk before getting into three ethics classes in a row in the afternoon. After that my wife and I relaxed by going up to our favourite pizza place for dinner. And then back home afterwards I played online board games with friends.

Friday: Online board games

We played a game of Wingspan, and discovered that it seemed to drag a bit in the online version, because the UI enforced us taking turns sequentially, whereas when we play in person we often start our moves, and say we’re doing stuff that doesn’t interact with anyone else, and the next person can start their move. And manipulating the physical cards and components seems to flow faster than clicking a screen UI. So we were a bit tired of it by the end. But despite thinking I was doing poorly throughout the game, I somehow ended up winning, so it wasn’t a total loss!

After that we played a game of Just One. We use a bot implementation that one of my friends wrote for our Discord server. It has a much wider selection of words to guess than the official version. There was an amusing incident with two of the words.

Briefly, the game involves rounds where one person has to guess a mystery word. The word is revealed to all the other players, and they have to submit a one-word clue – e.g. if the mystery word is “banana” the clues might be “fruit”, “yellow”, “lounge”, etc. Ideally all the clues are different and the guesser has a lot to work with to get the right answer. But if multiple people give the same clue, they are eliminated and the guesser gets fewer clues. it’s cooperative, so we’re all trying to be helpful and give the guesser as many good clues as possible – but the elimination thing means it’s risky to give the most obvious clues in case someone else does the same.

Anyway, one word was “celery”. One person clued “stick” and two of us gave “waldorf”, which was eliminated. So the poor guesser had to guess based on the single clue “stick”, and ended up guessing “carrot”.

Then the next mystery word, chosen at random from a list of hundreds, was “carrot”!! Three of us suppressed laughter and gave clues, while the guesser had no idea what was happening. It turned out two of us clued “stick” (referencing the previous round!) and one clued “root”. So the guesser only got to see the clue “root”. And said, “Haha, wouldn’t it be funny if it was carrot?” And not having anything better to guess, he guessed carrot, and we all burst into laughter as he got it right!

Saturday morning

I slept in a bit, got up, had breakfast, and went for a 5k run. This was my first since Australia Day, eight days ago, as I felt my sore ankle needed a bit more time off. It felt a lot better today, and I clocked 28:14, exactly the same time as that last run. The conditions were a bit warm and humid.

After a shower I had to drive down to the local farmer’s market to pick up a home-made chocolate cake that my wife had bought there at one of the stalls. She’d walked down with Scully and wanted to walk back, but not carrying a cake. The cake was for afternoon tea with some of our friends, the ones who minded Scully the last few times we’ve been overseas. Last time they were in a temporary house while their own one was being renovated, but they moved back in at the end of November, and this was the first time we’ve visited since.

After lunch, we took Scully on a walk, and then drove over to our friends’ place for afternoon tea.

Afternoon tea games

Their updated house looked good! No structural work, but they had a complete kitchen renovation, new carpets, the wooden floorboards in the kitchen and dining rooms had been sanded and polished and looked brand new, new paint throughout, and a bunch of new fittings like built-in wardrobes, insect screens, a new back door with doggy door for their dog, and so on.

We chatted for a bit and had some crackers and cheese, and then we played a couple of games. We started with Taluva, which I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s a really clever tile-laying game, with tiles consisting of three adjoined hexes in a triangular shape. Each hex contains a volcano or one of a few different types of terrain. One your turn you draw a random tile, lay it on the expanding map, and then place one or more buildings according to some simple rules. The goal is to place more buildings than your opponents, and there’s priority for more difficult buildings, with temples outranking towers, outranking huts. The rules are very simple, but it has a lot of strategy to it and we really enjoyed it. My wife enjoyed it maybe more because she won!

Then we played Love Letter, which I’ve played before but my wife hadn’t. This is a simple game, but unpredictable and sometimes hilarious in the situations that can come up. My friend one this one.

We got back home about 6:30 pm and I made omelettes for dinner with the fresh zucchini flowers that my wife had also bought at this morning’s market. A busy but fun couple of days!

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Into February

It’s the 1st of February, last month of summer. This doesn’t mark anything particularly important, except maybe the monthly flea and tick treatment we give to Scully.

Thursday is always my busy day, with 5 ethics classes. I’ve realised my structure for this topic on hoaxes is a bit all over the place, and I’ve been experimenting with jumping back and forth in the narrative and asking questions in different orders. It’s a fun topic though and I think the kids enjoy hearing the various historical hoaxes that we discuss.

Another thing I worked on today was preparing a photo for printing as a large wall hanging for a friend of mine. He was musing recently that he likes images of doors and corridors and hidden spaces in buildings, and was considering getting something like this hang on his wall. I said that I have plenty of photos of things like that and pointed him at my Flickr account. He went through it and decided he liked this photo, of a door I took in Sintra, Portugal:

Door of Sintra

And then he realised that I’ve been selling prints of my photos, and asked me about printing and framing options and prices. After some discussion he decided to order a large print on a stretched canvas frame, around 80 cm tall. The version I uploaded to Flickr is a downscaled JPEG file in sRGB colour space. So I went back to my original 14-bit RAW camera image and reprocessed it at full resolution, and in Adobe RGB colour space for a wider gamut. I also cropped it a little tighter on the bottom and looser on the top, which I felt was nicer.

Then I had to get a quote from the professional print lab that I use and let my friend know. So he’s going to pay me for the print and in a week or so he should have it hanging up at his home. I should probably also mention that I’m happy to do this for anyone reading this who happens to like any of my photos on Flickr and would like a print.

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