David Morgan-Mar – Page 148

Boxing Day relaxation

It’s Boxing Day, and that means sport. Unfortunately the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race has been cancelled this year due to COVID, but the Boxing Day Test Match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground began on schedule. India are here this year, and this game is the 100th Test match between Australia and India. It’s the second game of the series, and Australia won the first easily, but today India looked well on top, so it might turn into an interesting series.

Other than watch the game on TV, I didn’t do much else. My wife and I took Scully on a walk during the lunch break, and we waked along the creek near our place all the way down to the harbour. It’s an amazing urban bushwalk, through fairly dense wet sclerophyll forest, tall eucalypts overhead and ferns at ground level. Although it’s surrounded by houses, it’s difficult to see them, and you can in many places easily believe you’re in a wilderness.

At one point we saw a couple of kookaburras on a tree limb, and they stayed there as we moved closer. I managed to get remarkably close and took the following photo, with my phone! – not even an SLR with a long lens:

I think they were young ones, waiting for their parents to come back with food. Pretty cool. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that close to a wild kookaburra before.

New content today:

Christmas lunch, etc.

It’s Christmas Day. I slept in a bit this morning, but then got up to glaze the ham for Christmas lunch. We had a gathering of just 7 people at my mother-in-law’s place, to keep within the current COVID restrictions of no more than 10 people.

It’s a traditional lunch with roast turkey, baked ham, roast vegetables, followed by Christmas pudding. And chocolates and various other sweet treats. It’s very filling. For dinner tonight I basically just had a couple of slices of toast.

Gifts were pretty low key. Mostly people got comestibles such as mustards, sauces, pickles, chocolates, gingerbread shortbread, and so on. All stuff we know each other likes, and can use.

That’s basically the whole day. Merry Christmas from me, and Scully!

New content today:

Sourdough conclusion

It’s Christmas Eve, and that meant some cooking tasks. First cab off the rank was completing the sourdough Sourdough and Conjunctionthat I began yesterday.

After rising overnight at room temperature it looked like this (compare to the pre-rising photo from yesterday):

It rose nicely, more than doubling in size, but spread out and went a bit gooey. The next step was to try to manipulate it into a rough loaf shape on a baking tray. This was tricky because it had become quite sticky, and I needed a bit of flour dusting on my hands, and a butter knife to scrape it all off, but I finally managed to produce this:

I consulted my friend who’d gifted me the starter and he said it looked like it had been a bit overproofed. Which he said would make it sticky and not rise as much during baking, and quite sour, but should still taste good. He suggested letting the final rise happen in the fridge, which I did.

A few hours later I baked it, and after 40 minutes it turned out like this:

The bottom (not shown) was nice and browned, but the top had a pasty look. It was firm, and sounded hollow on tapping, which indicated it was baked properly, so I let it cool. Then came the moment of truth:

It was baked through, not doughy in the middle. Yes, it hadn’t risen much during baking, and so was a bit dense rather than airy. But cutting some slices and having them with a bit of butter…

It was indeed delicious! Nicely sour, and very more-ish. So it turned out edible and delicious, which is all I could ask for in a first attempt. My friend advised me to to try letting it rise for a shorter time next time, and then baking it in a hotter oven to try to brown the top a bit more. I knew sourdough would be a learning experience, but I’m happy to have achieved something worth eating on the first try. Hopefully things will just improve from here.

The next thing I had to do was make some mini-quiches, in preparation for Christmas lunch tomorrow. COVID cases have been apparently under control the past couple of days, and the NSW Government announced a slight easing of restrictions for Christmas Day, to allow people to gather with their families in the lower risk regions of the Northern Beaches (which is where my wife’s family lives). The high risk region is still under a strict lockdown, but what this means is we can travel to my in-laws for Christmas lunch as planned.

After I made the quiches, we did a quick run over in the car to drop things off, since tomorrow we’ll be wrangling an entire leg of ham. We drove over during peak hour, on a work day, on one of the most notoriously busy and congested roads in Sydney… and it was eerily quiet and deserted. Almost nobody is travelling into the Northern Beaches region, which is good to see.

Finally, Christmas Eve is traditionally the day my side of the family gathers together. But today with the various COVID restrictions, that wasn’t possible, so we had a big Zoom meeting instead. We had 8 separate groups, including my aunt in Germany, in on the call, and it was hilarious and fun.

It’s a bit of a weird Christmas Eve – one of very very few I’ve ever spent not together with my extended family. The end of a weird year.

New content today:

Sourdough and Conjunction

This morning I began making my first sourdough loaf. I started by taking 100 grams of my new starter culture:

I added 310 mL of water, 500 g of flour, and 10 g of uniodised salt, and mixed to form a dough:

The dough seems to have a good consistency. I covered the mixing bowl in cling film and have left it to rise overnight. By this evening it’s already risen a lot, I’d say doubled in size easily. But I’ll bake it in the morning.

The other good news today is that the clouds obliterating Sydney’s view of the grand conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn for the past week finally lifted today. Only they lifted higher into the atmosphere, forming a thin haze over the sky. Nevertheless, I went out tonight with my camera to see what I could, and managed to get a few photos. Here’s the best one:

You can see Jupiter, all four Galilean moons, and Saturn. Saturn looks elongated by the rings, but you can’t really tell they’re rings. Here’s the same photo labelled:

It was a pretty crappy view, honestly. Always through cloud haze, and sometimes the planets would disappear altogether as thicker cloud wisps drifted across. But it may be the best I get, because the forecast for tomorrow is more evening rain, and then rain every day for the next week. But at least I got to see it.

New content today:

No conjunction for you!

I’m sitting here just after sunset and wondering if maybe tonight’s the night I get to see the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction…

But no, the cloud cover is about 90% at the moment. I’ll give it another hour or so, by which time it’ll be too late. I’m not confident though.

I spent most of today working on the Secret Project, making good progress, but of course I can’t talk about it. I also fed my new sourdough starter, in preparation for beginning a loaf tomorrow.

That’s about it. COVID numbers were 8 new cases in Sydney today, continuing yesterday’s downward trend. No cases of mysterious origin. Hopefully this cluster is contained and the cases will die out over the next week. The real issue is that nobody knows what sort of restrictions will be in place in Sydney for Christmas Day. The NSW Government has indicated that if it weren’t for Christmas, we’d already be in a lockdown extending over that date, but they’re leaving any such decision to the last possible minute in an effort to keep things as open as medically advisable for Christmas. So we continue to wait and see.

New content today:

Kicking off sourdough

I got into a discussion with a friend today about baking, since I was baking some bread this morning, and he’s been doing a lot of experimenting with sourdough ever since COVID restrictions began. My loaf was just using a prepared bread mix from the supermarket, which comes with yeast. I’ve made this a few times and it’s not difficult. Here’s what today’s loaf looked like:

I said I might try starting some sourdough at some point, and my friend offered to bring over some of his sourdough starter. I said that’d be great, but no rush, but he said he was looking for an excuse to get out of the house and go somewhere different. So he brought some over!

Yes, he named it Bébé Fett. He also typed out some instructions for me on how to feed it and pointed me at a couple of YouTube videos for how to bake bread with it. So I’ll try it out some time in the next few days (when we run out of the loaf I baked today).

In other news, my wife is back to working from home following the new COVID restrictions and advice here in Sydney. We had 15 new cases today, but the NSW Government hasn’t announced any big changes to restrictions. I suspect they’ll wait until Wednesday before announcing that the Northern Beaches lockdown and other restrictions will have to be extended over Christmas.

While staring out the window, she called me to look at a kookaburra that had perched on a tree outside. I grabbed my camera and took a few photos:

Finally, in today’s grab bag of stuff, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to get a look at the amazing conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn… because it’s been raining here in Sydney every day for the past week, and it’s been overcast every single evening. Right now as I type this it’s evening and would be a great time to go out and see it… except it’s raining again. And the forecast is basically for rain for the next week. 🙁

New content today:

A possible lockdown Christmas

Today: 30 new COVID-19 cases in Sydney. All confined to the Northern Beaches area, so no sign of it spreading into the rest of the city yet. All of Sydney has gone back into restrictions on gatherings of people, but no enforced stay-at-home order yet. Home gatherings are banned in the Northern Beaches, and restricted to 10 people in the rest of Sydney – but all these still expire by Christmas Eve. I suspect they’re avoiding announcing restrictions extending into Christmas Day in the hope that they won’t be necessary, but I expect they will most likely be extended.

Another complication for us is that I was tagged to make a glazed ham for Christmas, and that ham is sitting in our fridge awaiting the cooking. But if we can’t see our family over Christmas, I’m going to end up with 4 kilos of ham to consume by myself (since my wife is vegetarian, and Scully won’t get any because it’s too salty for dogs). I’m already starting to think about what I can cook that I can easily add some ham to…

In other news, I threw together a quick technobabble generator, using the mezzacotta generator codebase. The good thing about this code is if you have an idea, you can execute a basic proof-of-concept in about 5 minutes. Adding all the vocabulary goodies is what takes most of the subsequent development time.

I also did some lockdown baking, rather than go out to the shops for a loaf of bread. I made damper:

I forgot that I used to make a double sized batch, and it turned out rather small – most of it’s gone already after my wife and I had lunch.

Oh, and to end on a sunny note, some sunflowers I noticed while out walking Scully this afternoon:

New content today:

Sydney lockdown

Following yesterday’s COVID news, Sydney had 13 new cases of COVID-19 reported today, taking the total in the current outbreak from 28 to 41. The NSW Government announced an enforced stay-at-home order for the Northern Beaches area, from 5pm today until midnight on Wednesday 23 December, and flagged that it may be extended to all of Sydney tomorrow, depending on case growth in the next 24 hours. As it is, we’re under stay-at-home advice – which is basically a strong recommendation to follow the same rules, but not enforced.

The lockdown area includes my wife’s family, so we’re forbidden from seeing them until at least the day before Christmas. At the moment it’s just wait and see whether we’ll be able to have our planned Christmas lunch or not.

Before all of this was announced, we dropped Scully off for a pre-Christmas groom at the dog groomer. So now she’s all clean and has short velvety fur. Luna, the poodle next door, also got a haircut today, and her owners had her done with a Dutch poodle cut, with shaved face and paws (but without the puffy lion balls of hair). She looks very different from the puppy cut that both Scully and Luna have had for the past couple of years.

Apart from that I mostly stayed in, since it’s been a rainy day on and off, as it has been all week. The humidity is ridiculous – I’ve been holed up at home with the windows shut and the dehumidifier on. But I’m getting a good amount of comic writing done!

New content today:

Screaming COVID halt

The only news in Sydney today is the resurgence of COVID-19. After several weeks of zero or close to zero new cases(*) in Australia, yesterday we had 18 new cases suddenly appear in Sydney, and today they’ve announced another 10 cases. DNA testing indicates the cases are related to a USA strain of COVID, so it’s most likely that someone working in the airport/quarantine area has acquired the virus from an incoming traveller from the US and then spread it into the community.

(*) Locally acquired cases. There are cases who have arrived from overseas and are in quarantine from arrival.

The cases are clustered in the Northern Beaches region of Sydney, in the north-east of the city. That whole region – home to over 250,000 people – has been ordered to stay at home for the next three days, leaving only for essential business such as buying groceries or medical issues, and the rest of Sydney has been advised to avoid travel into the region. All contacts of the known cases and people who attended the same public venues as them have been ordered to get tested for COVID and self-isolate. Other states of Australia have already announced travel restrictions and quarantines or complete border closures to NSW residents.

Several people I know have told me that their families have cancelled their planned Christmas gatherings and travel plans. My wife’s family all live in the Northern Beaches region, so it’s not clear at this time if we’ll be able to have our planned Christmas lunch with them or not.

The next day or two will be crucial to knowing if we have this outbreak under control or not. 28 cases doesn’t sound like a lot to non-Australians, I’m sure, but after weeks of essentially zero new cases, this has got everybody edgy again.

[Written later] In further news today, I received notice that the market where I was to have a stall on Sunday has been cancelled. It’s not in the Northern Beaches region, but it is close, and several of the stallholders would have been travelling from there so couldn’t make it. The market organisers have cancelled both because stallholder turnout would be well down, and of course to avoid potentially spreading the virus further.

Not only was I expecting to make a good profit from Christmas shoppers, which will now be zero, I’d booked a hire car again to carry my stock and equipment to the market. So now I have to cancel that, and since it’s within 48 hours I only get 50% of the fee refunded. So instead of making a nice profit, I’ve made a loss.

And also in response to the news, my friends and I decided that we should convert tonight’s planned face-to-face board games night into another virtual online game session.

So, it’s been a bad day collectively for the city, and individually for me.

New content today:

Not being bored

On reddit today I came across a very interesting explanation of why we get bored (versus why lizards can sit there all day doing nothing, apparently without getting bored):

Most organisms are in a constant struggle for energy. Obtaining energy is dangerous, you have to leave your safe burrow or go risk injury in a hunt. That’s why many organisms develop strategies for minimising the risks they need to take. And one of the most popular strategies is simply having simple, low demand physiologies, slow metabolisms and generally low energy needs.

Warm blooded animals are fairly unique. We’re like a car with the engine constantly running. That means we’re ready to go from zero to 100 right away but we’re also guzzling gas constantly, even if we’re standing still. That’s why warm blooded animals need to constantly eat.

[Boredom is] really just another evolutionary adaption. There’s no advantage to boredom if your survival strategy relies on doing nothing. Boredom is essentially the inability to articulate what is a meaningful activity for you right now. It motivates you to change whatever it is you’re doing and find something meaningful or productive to do.

That lizard isn’t questioning what it should be doing. It’s surviving by doing nothing and not wasting energy. Humans on the other hand have so many needs that doing nothing is nearly always the wrong thing to do, so you get bored.

(My emphasis.) Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool.

I got up early this morning and went to the nearest golf course at 6:30, playing my now usual two simultaneous balls on each hole. I scored a par on the very first hole, and thought it might be a good day, but things went a bit downhill after that. My totals were 50 and 58 – the 50 is good, but 58 is not as good as I’ve been scoring lately.

When I got home, before 9 am, I was so hot and sweaty that I had to have a cold shower. The weather has been warm this week, but mostly ridiculously humid. It’s not actually too hot – but once you do anything you start sweating and it just doesn’t evaporate. I guess the “cooler, wetter” La Niña conditions for the summer are here.

I continued today working on Darths & Droids writing. I’ve been doing a lot of story planning this week, and it’s starting to pay off with the next few strips I’m having to write, because I know exactly what plot elements they need to touch on.

New content today: