David Morgan-Mar – dangermouse.net

Even rainier and colder, and Scully’s teeth

Today was really cold and even rainier than yesterday. Sydney only reached a maximum of 13.8°C. Given how badly insulated Australian homes are, I was sitting inside all day, dressed in multiple layers, drinking hot tea, and freezing. I had to stop working several times just to try to warm my hands up.

And I just realised I completely forgot to do an update yesterday! Not that there was much to say other than that it was cold and rainy, though as it turned out not nearly as cold and rainy as today. Yesterday I spent time outlining my new critical thinking class for this week, on the topic of Mistakes. Then I developed a new class on the chemistry of acids and bases for that kid whose mother requested a science course for him. IN the evening I had a class and had a new student who brought my tally of countries that students are in to 60. The 60th country was Bahrain.

Oh, I also typed up a full recap of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, for the players to check over before our next session on Friday evening.

Today I just stayed inside and tried to stay warm. I did venture out in the car to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get some lunch. I did some prep work for Friday’s D&D game, looking thorugh some adventure material and thinking about where the PCs might go and what they might do. I also did some Darths & Droids comic writing.

But today Scully had to go to the vet for a teeth cleaning. She had one two years ago, and the vet at her annual checkup said she could use another one. My wife took her in in the morning and Scully was there the whole day until this evening. The vet x-rayed her teeth and found that one was cracked, so they had to remove it. So poor Scully is now woozy from the anaesthetic and some painkiller, a bit lethargic. But she ate a decent amount of dinner, so that’s a good sign. Very soft food instead of her usual crunchy kibbles. Hopefully she’ll be back to her perky self tomorrow.

Rainy Monday and very cold

I’d planned to do a run today, but conditions conspired against me. It was very cold overnight. When I got up and took Scully out for her morning toilet, I checked my weather app an it was about 7°C, but the “fells like” temperature was -0.4°C! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that “feels like” as a negative number before. It certainly did feel very cold.

The morning was clear while I was teaching my set of online classes. But by the time I finished at 1pm, the rain had moved in, and it was solid and at times heavy. I don’t mind running in the rain, or when it’s chilly, but combined it’s a bit too much. It would just be too freezing.

Instead I used the time to go over the lecture notes for next week’s Image Processing lecture at the university, which I’ll be giving while the lecturer is away. Today’s lecture was on pattern recognition and image features, leading into next week’s introduction to machine learning for image processing. I know the subject fairly well and it shouldn’t be difficult to give that lecture, but I wanted to check in case I had any questions about particular slides or topics that I wanted to ask the lecturer before next week.

I had to brave the rain to go into the city for tonight’s lecture. And it was very cold again. But I survived to tell the tale!

Finally getting ahead on comic production

I put in a few hours today in writing and making new Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up the buffer a bit. I’ve been doing them close to the last minute ever since I got back from Europe a few weeks ago, and wanted to get ahead again. I’m a couple of strips ahead now, which is good.

I realised I forgot to mention another thing I did yesterday, which was to file our tax returns for the last financial year. I’m still impressed by how fast it is these days, with the new automatic recording of everything relevant. It used to take hours to do it but now it’s just click a few buttons, enter a deduction or two, and you’re done in 10 minutes.

Today we went for a walk with Scully, about 11:00. We went to a cafe so my wife could get coffee, but I decided to get an early lunch, or brunch or whatever you want to call it. I don’t normally eat sweet things for breakfast, so this was a rare chance to get something like that, and I decided to order waffles. which came with banana, strawberries, and melted chocolate drizzled all over. They were really good, but loaded with sugar! I think it’s a good thing I don’t eat stuff like this much. (I think I can probably count the number of times I’ve eaten waffles in my life on my fingers.)

While sitting there we both did some sketching. I started drawing a car on the street, intending to make it a scene including the cafe tables, but I made the car a bit big and couldn’t fit any tables into the drawing! It went kind of wonky with the perspective too, so I’m not keen to show this one off.

For dinner tonight I made okonomiyaki, which I’ve been kind of craving for a while, but had to buy the sauce last week. Healthier than waffles!

Games night and sketching day

Friday was online board games night. We played some Jump Drive, then Space Base, and Just One.

We finished early and then I watched KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix. Some of the kids in my critical thinking classes have been talking about it and said it’s good, so I decided I should give it a go. It was pretty good, an interesting blend of modern K-pop songs and traditional Korean demon folklore. I describe it as the sort of thing you’d like if you liked Frozen but thought it could use more K-pop and demons.

Today I did a 5k run. I started thinking I could do another 7.5k, but decided to cut it short towards the end as I’d had enough. I cleaned the bathroom and shower thoroughly. Worked on some Darths & Droids comics.

After lunch my wife and I took Scully for a drive over to Balmoral Beach and we sat and did some sketching. Here’s the rotunda:

I kind of ran out of room at the top of the page so I couldn’t fit in the top of the roof! And here’s a view towards the water.

While we were there we popped into the Bather’s Pavilion to make a dinner booking for our wedding anniversary later in the year, to make sure we can get a table. This is our favourite fancy restaurant and we’ve had several other anniversary dinners here.

Back at home, my wife took Scully out for a toilet before dinner… and got stuck in the lift! In all the time we’ve lived here, we’ve never got stuck int the lift before. She used the emergency phone inside the lift, but they said it would take about an hour for someone to come. She called me on her mobile phone and I found a member of the complex’s executive committee, and fortunately she had a key to get into the lift motor room in the garage and knew how to put it into an emergency mode that made it descend to the basement and open.

She was stuck in there with one of our new neighbours, and a new new neighbour, living in the same apartment. She was moving in today as a flatmate in the other bedroom. So they got a good introduction while stuck in the lift together.

For dinner I made a chick pea korma. I adapted this recipe for chicken korma, replacing the chicken with chick peas, and I served it with some broccoli on the side for greenness. It turned out pretty well, but next time I think I’ll blitz the cashews and onions with the Bamix stick blender instead of the food processor, because as soon as I turned it on the whole sauce smeared onto the sides of the processor and the blades didn’t have much chance to turn it into a smooth paste. So it was a little lumpy, but still tasted good.

A wet walk for lunch

Today was cold and just before lunch time it started raining. This wasn’t good, as I’d planned to walk up the street to buy a few things we needed. I decided I had to go, and rugged Scully up in a warm rain jacket, grabbed an umbrella and my trench coat, and braved the elements.

I was looking for somewhere to get a nice lunch that wasn’t too expensive. Prices have been ballooning recently and it’s hard to get lunch anywhere for under $20 any more. But a nice pizza place had an $18 lunch special, so I grabbed a barbecue chicken pizza there and that was pretty good. We had to sit outside in the cold, sheltered from the rain under the awning.

Apart from that it was a fairly ordinary day, nothing exciting.

A second 7.5k run

Today I had two new online classes beginning: one-on-one tutoring classes for existing students of my critical/ethical thinking classes, whose parents requested additional material. One is doing introductory essay structuring, and the other is doing a broad introduction to science. The latter is being home-schooled and hasn’t had much science yet, so the parent is looking to introduce concepts and build up knowledge.

After those classes ended I did a run, and again decided to do 7.5k, after successfully completing that on Saturday. I recorded a time about 15 seconds faster, so that was good. And I don’t feel nearly as sore in the legs as after Saturday’s effort, so that’s better! I think I’ll try and do 7.5k a bit more regularly, although I’ll still do just 5k sometimes to take it easy.

Last night I started watching The Hunger Games prequel: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I quite enjoyed the original trilogy, and this movie is decent too. I’m annoyed by Netflix’s new UI though. I rate all the movies I watch, so I can see if I’ve seen them before – because in the early days I got confused and ended up accidentally restarting movies Id’ already seen because I couldn’t recall if I’d watched them or not before. So I relied on my rating to show me that I’d seen it before. But now the UI hides my ratings on the list page, so I can no longer tell unless I click into the movie. Very annoying.

Next three weeks class planning

Today I spent most of the day planning out critical/ethical thinking classes. I had to write up a detailed lesson plan for the new week’s topic, which is “Names of Things”. And when I started that I realised I had no topics lined up in advance for the next weeks. I usually have 4 weeks of topics outlined ahead of time so I can have them posted on Outschool to give parents an advance look at the next few weeks. But I’d run them down to zero, so I had to spend time coming up with new lesson ideas and listing some questions, which will later be expanded into full lesson plans at the appropriate week.

I came up with ideas for topics on:

Mistakes — fairly straightforward
The End of Poverty — or post-scarcity economy; what would a world be like where everything was so cheap to make that there was no point charging money for it?
Stranded on a Desert Island — how to survive alone, what would you do, how to organise a stranded group, etc.

I think they should all be interesting. I didn’t have much time for anything else. Except I took Scully for a walk at lunch time, and went to the cafe that I tried for the first time recently. hey had a chipotle chicken burrito on the specials menu so I tried that. It was good, but I should have considered that it might have avocado in it – not my favourite ingredient.

Super busy Monday

I started work at 8am, with four critical/ethical thinking classes online. With a break in between that took me up to 1pm, when I had a break for lunch.

Then at 2pm I had another online meeting, this time for Standards Australia where I’m still chairing the Photography committee. I had to report on my attendance at the Berlin ISO meeting back in June, going through all of the technical and administrative discussions there. And some other business related to adopting Australian standards based on international ones.

Then before 5pm I went into the city for this evening’s image processing lecture at UTS. I stopped along the way at a Japanese restaurant near the university to get dinner, and had some gyoza and takoyaki with rice, which was pretty good.

The lecturer is going to be away in two weeks, I learnt today, and he asked if I could fill in and give that week’s lecture. It will be on pattern recognition and machine learning in image processing, the introductory lecture to two further weeks of machine learning algorithms and procedures. This is lecture 5 in the course; in previous years I’ve given lectures 3 and 4, so I’m expanding into later material.

Time to relax before bed with some non-thinking TV…

Fading like a flower

I had a busy Sunday. I really want to get ahead with buffering strips for Darths & Droids but have been unable to since I got back from Europe due to having so many other things to do. But today I managed to make two complete strips from scratch, which gets me one ahead of where I was.

It used up a lot of time though, and ended just before my first critical thinking class this afternoon. Then I had a break during which I cooked dinner, followed by three classes in a row. My brain started to fade halfway thought the second last class, and I was spacing out a bit trying to navigate my list of questions for the kids. I tend to jump around a bit, especially if the kids raise issues that I wanted to address in later questions; I bring them forward and then jump back. So finishing the last two classes was a bit of a struggle. Anyway, I managed to do it, though I wonder if the kids noticed or not.

For dinner I made pasta with pesto, and for added vegetables I used some of a wombok (or Chinese cabbage, or, apparently, napa cabbage, a name I’d never heard before) that I had in the fridge. It worked fairly well. Now I’m thinking of using wombok cooked German-style as a side for spätzle.

When all you have is a wombok, every dish looks like it can use a Chinese side.

Rainy running and Pathfinder session 3

Friday night was games night, and although this week was scheduled as face-to-face in the fortnightly rotation, we played Pathfinder online as it was a good day for all of the players to attend. This is the campaign my friend began running back in March, with the second session in May. In this third session we continued exploring the underground complex we’d been led to by a map last time.

We entered a chamber with an ominous skull-shaped platform above surrounding water, with an ominous statue looking down at it. Here manifested what we learnt to be a projection of a demon-like figure, with horns and wings. He was talkative and tried to cajole us into signing contracts for power in an ominous-looking floating book. In exchange for this power, we were to spend eternity in his servitude after our deaths. We spent enough time looking at the book to notice that Nana Slimebristle seemed to have signed such a contract, although with many crossed out parts and emendations added in. This was the Nana whose grave we’d found in session one, empty, with the dirt pushed aside as though something within had climbed out.

With this puzzle piece falling into place, and the demon thing starting to threaten us to sign the book or else prepare to die, we noped out of there quick smart, basically turning tail and running. We managed to get away without being caught, so that seemed a sensible course of action. While deciding what to do, we felt a force drawing us north, where we found a cave and decided to camp for the night.

Orcs attacked during the night and we had to fight them off. Partway through the battle an old, haggard, kinda undead looking woman appeared and helped us. Yup… it turned out to be Nana Slimebristle. We talked and she seemed teed off at the demon Vrasted, so we offered to help her. She suggested we travel north to the mountains to retrieve a magical thingy of hers that she’d lost there or something. And there we ended for the night.

Earlier in the day I’d done the usual grocery pickup and critical thinking classes. After completing my morning batch of classes, I drove with my wife and Scully over to Mix Deli, the new outlet for Lil’ Mix bakery, where we got some lunch: cream cheese filled Jerusalem bagel and a mushroom pie, and some blueberry banana bread for sweets. It was incredibly busy, I think because we were there at the lunch rush, which we might not have been before.

It rained heavily overnight and showered on and off all day today. I tried to pick a dry period to go for a run, but failed dramatically. It began raining almost as soon as I left the house and was heavy for most of the run. Nevertheless, I exerted myself and did 7.5k today instead of my normal 5k. It felt longish, but I didn’t feel too bad afterwards, and completed the distance in just over 43 minutes.

This evening I did a sketching challenge with my wife. We both started on a drawing at the same time of this old photo I took at Bronte Beach:

I just used a 2B pencil and here’s my effort:

My wife is still working on adding watercolour to hers.