David Morgan-Mar – Page 147

Looking for birds

So as mentioned on 27 December, I’ve been getting into using eBird to record my bird sightings as I walk around the neighbourhood. I’ve been recording lists of sightings every day, which is training me to keep an eye and ear out for birds as I walk around.

Up to today, I’d recorded a total of 25 different species of birds. But today as I was out walking Scully I spotted the 26th, and a rather surprising one it was – an Australian pelican! They’re common along various Sydney ocean beaches and coastal strips, but I’m inland on the harbour shore, where they don’t often come. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on the ground in this area – and in fact today’s was flying overhead. But as soon as I saw it I recognised it and was astonished that a pelican was flying so far from the sea. I watched it circle on a thermal over the harbour shore for a few minutes, wishing it would come closer so I could get a definite ID. After a while it did come close enough that yes, I can confirm with surety that it was a pelican. Cool!

Today I assembled the comics from the photos I took yesterday. It was a marathon effort, taking about six hours of solid work. The next step is writing the annotations, which I’ve made a start on, but will have to finish off another day.

The other thing I wanted to mention today is that I’ve been noticing a few discussion threads on reddit lately about colourblindness or other aspects of colour science. And I’m dismayed by how much misinformation there is and downright incorrect assertions that people make. I would be happy to provide correct explanations of things about colour and human vision, since this is part of my professional expertise, but it feels futile fighting against such a tsunami of misleadingly incorrect text. So it’s a bit depressing. I guess I should just stop reading anything about colour on reddit.

In COVID news, the Sydney outbreak seems to be being held under control, although there are still thousands of people under self-isolation orders. The number of actual new detected infections has been low the past few days, with testing numbers high. So if this continues, it looks like we have avoided an exponential spreading event. Fingers crossed!

New content today:

A big storm

Rather than just light rain today, we had a full on summer thunderstorm.

storm

That was the rain radar image at one point. It was spectacularly heavy rain and intense lightning and thunder. The thunder just kept rumbling and more lightning would add more thunder before the previous peal had died away, so it was continuous rumbling thunder for several minutes at one point. Before the storm (which hit about 4 pm) it was very warm and humid – very tropical feeling weather.

I spent the morning shooting photos for Irregular Webcomic! My wife was back at the office for work, so I had time alone to spread the Lego boxes all over the floor and generally make a mess, before cleaning it all up in time for her to come home. So she doesn’t know about the mess… except she reads this blog so now she does!

Also today I received a package in the mail, all the way from the USA. I did a food swap with a friend in the US, and they sent me a bunch of American foods, while I sent them a bunch of Australian stuff.

Some of these things I’ve had before and know I like, while some will be a new experience, including the Twinkies, Goldfish Crackers, stuffed marshmallows, Goober Peanut Butter and Jelly. And I told them I like hot sauces, so I got a cool selection of new ones to try! It’ll take me a while to get through all of this stuff.

New content today:

D&D neighbours

I ran into a neighbour from our apartment complex today while we were out walking our respective dogs. His dog is Tex, a chihuahua, and Tex and Scully get along really well. They love playing together, and running rapid circles around the park across the street. It’s always good when they play together, because it wears them both out, and we know they’re going to be exhausted and quiescent during the evening.

Anyway, a few days ago my wife ran into the same guy and he was wearing a Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt. She asked him about it, and told him that I play D&D as well. Today was the first time I’ve seen him since then, so we chatted about it a bit. He said he played when he was a kid, but stopped for many years, only picking it up again recently when 4th Edition was current. And now he organises tournaments and uses them to raise money for charity. So that’s pretty cool.

I’ve noticed for a few years prior to this that another neighbour must be (or have been) into D&D as well. In one of the garages in the basement, a neighbour has a huge pile of D&D books, as well as piles of boxes of gaming miniatures and other stuff. The books there are mostly 2nd Edition, I think, so it’s possible this neighbour hasn’t played for a while. Unless they have more recent editions upstairs in the apartment. So in my building I know there are at least three people (including me) into D&D.

Weatherwise, we had more rain again today. Although it was confined to the morning, and the overcast broke up enough for a touch of sunshine around mid-afternoon, before closing in again. Now as I write, it’s sunset, and I can see some patches of blue sky. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get heavy rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon, so perhaps the morning will be dry.

What I really hate about this type of weather is the oppressive, unending humidity. It’s not hot, but it’s always just so sticky. Towels don’t dry – you can have a shower, and 24 hours later your bath towel that’s been hanging up all day is still damp. And hand towels stay damp all day from all the hand washing and drying. The pages of books go all crinkly from the humidity, and I worry about mould growing on stuff around the house. We have calcium chloride damp removers in the wardrobes and linen closet, and they fill up with water from the atmosphere in a few days, so I’m constantly having to change them. But at least you can see they’re removing moisture from the air. I should stick some more in some other storage places, maybe.

I finished writing that batch of Irregular Webcomic! today, ready for photography tomorrow. My wife returns to work tomorrow, so that will give me uninterrupted time to get it done. We were both concerned that she’d be ordered to work from home, given the current COVID situation here, but her work has told her to come into the office.

The news on COVID in Sydney is not good today. It’s been revealed that two staff at a liquor shop were infected and contagious while working several shifts over Christmas. Over 2000 people have been contacted directly from the customer COVID contact tracing register at the store, and they and all their subsequent close contacts (family and friends) have been ordered to get tested and self-isolate for 14 days. That adds up to probably well over 10,000 people. Not all will have caught the virus, and hopefully the number will be low, but it’s concerning that the potential number is so high, and that it could easily spread further if some people are not diligent in isolating. We’ll see how this plays out in the next few days.

New content today:

Rain analysis

I’ve been talking about the rainy weather a lot lately, and I decided to have a look at just how rainy it’s been here lately. Firstly, yes, it rained again today. Not heavily, but for several hours.

Looking back over the records, since 12 December, three weeks ago, Sydney has had only four days with no rain, out of 22 (counting today). Furthermore, the forecast for the next seven days indicates it’s most likely to rain every single day.

Last summer was ridiculously hot, and sparked all those horrible fires all over the place. This summer is not only very wet, but also very cool. Maximum temperatures have been mostly in the low 20s (°C), which is cool enough that it plausibly feels almost like winter.

The other news today is the Sydney COVID outbreak continues to grow, although we had only 7 new cases today. The state government announced increased restrictions today, including for the first time a legal requirement to wear masks in most public places, which will be enforced with fines from Monday. All other states and territories of Australia have re-closed their borders to people coming New South Wales. Sydney is currently partitioned into three zones, two of which we’re not allowed to enter. In the most restrictive zone, people are not allowed to have any visitors in their homes.

With all this, I’m not optimistic about my market stall happening on 10 January. But who knows… wait and see, I guess.

In work stuff, I wrote a good amount of Irregular Webcomic! scripts today. Just a few more to polish off tomorrow, and I can do photography on Monday. I mostly stayed inside today, because of the rain, but I did go out for a brief walk just after lunch, during a break. I saw several kookaburras – it looked like a group of young ones hanging out and learning to hunt for food, under the eyes of parents. I got another photo with my phone – not great, but definitely closer than I would normally expect to get to one of these birds.

New content today:

Middle Head walk

The cool wet weather continues. I managed to get out for a decent walk during a break in the rain, driving over to the suburb of Mosman with my wife and Scully at lunch time. We did roughly this walk from Balmoral Beach up to Headland Park and back. There are some excellent views of Sydney Harbour from the top of the hill:

Apart from that I tried to write Irregular Webcomic! scripts, but wasn’t in the groove, so didn’t get many done. More tomorrow!!

(I’m actually writing Friday 1 January’s entry on Saturday morning, because last night was fortnightly games night with my friends. With COVID raging in Sydney again, we did it virtually, playing games on Board Game Arena, followed by the traditional Sketchful.)

New content today:

Codenames progress

I forgot to say yesterday that my wife and I finally conquered the Bangkok city challenge in our ongoing Codenames Duet campaign game. It took us 13 attempts and was getting to be very frustrating, sometimes losing in a sudden death final guess that could easily have gone either way. We were so close to winning many times, but never managed to make it until finally yesterday we cracked it.

Today we moved on to try Los Alamos, and we won it handily on the second attempt. Hopefully this is a sign of more progress towards completing the campaign after getting stuck for so long.

Today is also New Year’s Eve. It’s a weird one, both weather wise with another in the seemingly endless series of cool, overcast, rainy days that Sydney is having, and also with the COVID restrictions essentially putting the kybosh on any sort of outdoor celebrations. All of the harbour foreshore areas that would normally be packed with a million or more people waiting to view the fireworks are completely off-limits and you can be fined for going there. The midnight fireworks display is still happening, but almost nobody is going to be able to watch it in person, and it’s been reduced from the normal 15 minutes or so to a compact 7 minutes. And the 9 pm family preview fireworks have been cancelled completely.

The Sydney COVID outbreak continues to grow in a worrying fashion. The locally acquired cases are up to 144, with 10 new cases added today. The numbers are hovering unsteadily and it’s still not clear what sort of trend we’re currently in. I think there’s a good chance that my next market date, on Sunday 10 January, will be cancelled. Which will be annoying, but better than risking public health.

I took a long walk today with Scully and my wife. We went down to the local golf course, which is a fair walk, and up and down a lot of steep hills. I drive there when I play golf, because it’s too far to go with a full set of clubs, but it’s close enough to walk to otherwise. And I took single club and a few balls, so I could randomly hit a few shots in between players on the course. Scully enjoyed being leash-free on the course. It’s a very casual course and many people walk through it with their dogs all the time, so there was no issue there.

And for New Year’s Eve tonight we’re having a simple night at home. We always do wine and cheese and crackers on NYE, and tonight we decided to skip dinner completely and add fresh fruit—mangos and strawberries and grapes—to make it basically a full meal. Pretty decadent, but it’s fun!

New content today:

Deconstruction for renovation

The construction noise started before 9 o’clock. One of the apartments downstairs is apparently ripping their entire kitchen out. There was pretty much continuous mini jackhammering noises all day, sounding like they’re chipping away tiles or bricks or something. It only stopped at 5 pm.

To get out of the house a bit, I took the wife and Scully for a drive to a bakery partway across the city. I was looking forward to getting one of their Mexican pies for lunch, a spicy concoction with beef, kidney beans, Mexican spices, sour cream, and cheese. I think it’s the best pie they do at this particular bakery. But unfortunately they were sold out! So I had to make do with a chilli beef, which is basically just a beef pie with some chilli pepper – no other spices to make the flavour more complex. Oh well. At least we got out for a bit, and it didn’t even rain.

Tonight for dinner my wife organised a table at a local bar, where we had cocktails and some share platters of sliders, tacos, arancini, etc. This was kind of our New Year’s Eve a day early, so we can avoid any crowds tomorrow night.

Otherwise today I mostly worked on Darths & Droids. The story is getting up to an exciting part in the writing, so I was keen to get more done today. I think tomorrow I need to start work on a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts, for shooting photos next week.

New content today:

Series level

India won the second cricket Test against Australia today, levelling the series at 1-1. The next match is scheduled to begin on 7 January in Sydney, but because of the ongoing COVID outbreak here in Sydney, Cricket Australia is going to decide whether to go ahead or to move the match to Melbourne. They were meeting tonight, but have not yet announced any decision.

The game was a complete turnaround from the first Test, which Australia won easily. In this second game, India came back stronger than ever and absolutely destroyed Australia. So they certainly weren’t shellshocked by their defeat. These are two strong teams, so it’s going to be fascinating when they meet for the third game of the series.

Weather wise, it’s been a very wet day here, and cool. It’s almost not like summer at all. And there’s still no end in sight for the wet weather – the Bureau of Meteorology has basically warned everyone to cancel their New Year’s Eve plans as it’s going to be a soggy night.

Finally, I learnt today that one of my neighbours died on Christmas Day. Col was a retired gentleman who lived downstairs from us with his wife. I chatted with them a lot because we’d often run into each other around the building. But Col’s been sick with cancer and I’d seen him a lot less in recent months, mostly just seeing his wife, or their son, who had come up from Melbourne to be with his parents in this time. Col played golf at Lane Cove, the nearby course where I mostly play, and I used to see him in the park across the road from our place, hitting a few balls around for practice, and we’d stop and have a bit of a chinwag.

I’ll raise a glass for you tonight, Col.

New content today:

Boxing Day holiday Monday

Today was a public holiday, in lieu of Boxing Day since that fell on Saturday. Not that we did much anyway. I took Scully for a walk with my wife, but we didn’t make it too long, because there were storms incoming. We had some heavy rain in the early evening, and the forecast is for at least showers every day for the next week. It really is turning into a very wet summer.

I made some dough using the sourdough starter today. It’s rising now, and then I’ll put it in the fridge overnight to see if it turns out in a better state for baking tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll turn out better than the first attempt, a bit lighter and less dense.

In the cricket, India took a commanding lead today and virtually crushed Australia to a loss, although we managed to hold on to the close of play. It’s probably going to be over pretty quickly tomorrow though, with India levelling the series at 1 game apiece.

For dinner tonight I made myself pan-fried potato gnocchi with onions, a touch of chilli, and leftover Christmas ham. It turned out good, but a little dry, so I threw on some caramelised onion relish from a jar, and the result was amazing. I’m having to use either ham or turkey in all my meals to use up the leftovers!

New content today:

Back to COVID restrictions

Sydney moved back to the pre-Christmas COVID restrictions today, which means we can no longer visit my wife’s family. This lasts until 30 December, and what happens on New Year’s Eve and beyond is still to be determined. Sydney had 7 new COVID cases today. The outbreak seems to be mostly contained, but of course it’ll be another week or two before we really know for sure. And in the meantime the less people move around, the better.

My wife and I took Scully on a long walk this morning before it started getting hot. I’ve started using eBird regularly on my walks in the past few days, and it’s interesting to see just how many bird sightings I rack up in a simple walk around the neighbourhood. I don’t carry a camera, and a phone is usually not close enough to take a decent photos of birds, but I managed to get a welcome swallow this morning:

Here’s today’s list:

1 Australian brushturkey
19 Feral pigeons
1 Little pied cormorant
2 Little black cormorant
1 White-faced heron
3 Laughing kookaburra
2 Australian king parrot
41 Rainbow lorikeet
20 Noisy miner
1 Grey butcherbird
3 Australian magpie
5 Pied currawong
14 Welcome swallow

I didn’t do much else today. Watched the cricket match, cleaned up a pile of old papers and things that I’d been meaning to get to for ages. Fed the sourdough starter in preparation for making dough tomorrow, for baking on Tuesday. Played some Codenames Duet with my wife… we’re really struggling to win the Bangkok campaign game. We’ve attempted and failed 12 times now. It’s going to feel really good when we finally beat it…

New content today: