Everyone slept in this morning. I got up and took Scully out close to 8am, before having some breakfast and then heading out for a 5k run to try and work off some of yesterday’s food. It was a much warmer day, even that early, and my time was slow.
We didn’t do much else today. I worked on some photo processing from last year’s travel and did some comics stuff. Oh, and made a sourdough loaf. And watched some of the Boxing Day Test cricket from Melbourne. It was a really fun first session, watching the debutant Sam Konstas batting like a madman!
For dinner I made lentil dhal and rice, with spinach. Because my wife bought a whole bag of baby spinach leaves for the Christmas Eve quiches, not realising I’d bought a whole bag just to use for dinner vegetables this week. So we have a lot of spinach we need to use in the next few days.
Not much else to say. It felt like we really needed a relaxing day of not doing much, after the hustle before Christmas.
Today was all about family lunch with my wife’s family. Although Scully got a visit from the Christmas Wombat this morning.
I spent the morning baking a ham, with a maple syrup glaze. Then we had to pack it into the car with bags of gifts and all the sweet treats my wife has been making over the past few days. And drive over to her mother’s place.
Traffic was awful, unlike yesterday’s light traffic. And when we got there there was no parking anywhere closer than about 150 metres away, so we had to walk all the way back with everything carried.
Lunch was a traditional affair of roast turkey, the ham I’d baked, roast vegetables, and the zucchini loaf my wife had cooked last night. And some salad. And then dessert of Christmas pudding, with ice cream and/or cream. All very filling.
Late in the afternoon I went for a swim in the harbour at the nearby small beach. The weather was warm and sunny, but not too hot. It’s always good to go for a swim after Christmas lunch, to cool down and get the blood circulating again after the heavy meal.
We headed home a bit after sunset. Still too full to contemplate any sort of proper dinner.
Christmas Eve dawned clear and cold. The temperature dropped down to 16.5°C overnight, and it was still chilly when we got up and I took Scully out for her morning toilet. My wife then took her for a walk, while I did a 5k run. The cooler temperature meant an easier run, and I managed to record my second best 5k time, at 26:24.
After a shower it was time to cook some mini quiches to take to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering in the afternoon. My wife had made the pastry an hour earlier, and I rolled it out into a dozen small circles, which she put into muffin tins to blind bake. Then we chopped spinach and mixed the eggs and some milk to make the filling, which she poured into the pastry shells, then baked another 25 minutes.
We took care of some other last minute prep and then drove out to the western suburbs of Sydney for my family’s gathering. It’s become a new tradition to gather in a park by the shore of the Nepean River.
I’m really surprised that nobody else uses it for Christmas Eve. We basically have the whole place to ourselves every year. This time there were a few other people there, but only very small gatherings, like four people eating lunch, and a couple on a picnic blanket. Our group was a total of 21 people once everyone had arrived, plus Scully. We had finger food and snacks, and fresh fruit, plus one of my cousins’ wife had made some caramel slice for sweets – all together it was plenty for a lunch.
Some of the people played a lawn game involving throwing chunks of wood at wooden pins, while the rest of us caught up on family news and gossip. I see things about horror family gatherings, but everyone in my family genuinely gets along very well, so these events are always good fun.
My uncle does wood turning and gave us a hand-made vase:
There’s a hole in the top with a glass tube in it to hold the water and flowers.
We left after a few hours to drive back home – the trip each way took an hour so it was a substantial chunk of time. Back home I made dinner. I got an idea off the Italian home shopping network cooking videos that I’ve been watching for language practice. They made a pizza dough and then made small parcels stuffed with ricotta and something else (pancetta I think). And then pan-fried them! So I decided to make spinach and ricotta ones.
I made a Napolitana sauce with tomato, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, and a hint of chilli to go on top.
Then after eating my wife made a zucchini loaf to serve as a vegetarian main course at Christmas lunch with her family tomorrow. It has zucchini, carrots, onions, cheese, and a bit of flour to bind it together. Phew!! And tomorrow morning before heading out to the lunch I need to glaze and bake the ham.
My wife, having this week off work, spent much of today in the kitchen, making various Christmas treats. More of the chocolate date balls she made yesterday, and some rocky road.
On the other hand, my day was full of online classes. My normal topic week goes from Tuesday to Monday, so I wanted to have the Monday classes before finishing for the year. Four during the day, and two late in the evening.
We also had to go out driving for a couple of chores. Altogether, this pretty much filled up the day. There wasn’t really a spare moment to do much else.
This morning I slept in a bit. I’d had an early rise yesterday and Friday and needed to catch up a bit, so it was good to snooze a bit. After getting up and having a quick breakfast I went for my 5k run. It turned sunny and hot later in the day, but the morning was overcast and pleasantly cool for the run, which was nice.
After lunch we drove over to my mother-in-law’s place to take a bunch of Christmas goodies. Christmas lunch is there, and we’ll also be taking a bunch of food that day, so we thought it would be good to get a head start and take some of the other stuff today: drinks, gifts, and whatnot. Traffic was light, with a lot of people already away for Christmas vacations. But my mother-in-law lives adjacent to a popular walking track along the harbour shore, and that was very busy, with a lot of people enjoying the sunny weather and scenery along the walk.
When we came home my wife started Christmas cooking, making some gingerbread with bits of dried fruit in it, and some chocolate date balls with a white chocolate topping. I think she’s got something else planned too.
Oh, I forgot to mention Scully had her pre-Christmas wash and groom yesterday, and is looking neat and trim for the big day too.
One of the most culturally significant days in Australia before Christmas: Gravy Day. This comes from a song by one of our most iconic songwriters and performers, Paul Kelly. In 1996 he released a Christmas single, “How to Make Gravy“. It’s a very unconventional Christmas song – the lyrics are a letter being written by a man who won’t be home for Christmas…
Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well
It’s the 21st of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I’ll be out of here by July
Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don’t let ’em cry for me
Heck, just listen to it.
I don’t think I need to say anything else. If that’s not immediately one of your favourite Christmas songs then you have no heart.
Yesterday was Friday online games night, after a regular day with four ethics classes for me. Im doing an end-of-year hypotheticals class, where I just ask kids “What if?” scenarios and ask them to think about the logical consequences. One question I asked is “What if everyone knew exactly when they would die?” Most kids gave sensible consequences such as people would be depressed, or they would party for the last month of their lives. But one kid absolutely could not be dissuaded from trying to avoid the fate. He kept saying, “on the day, you don’t go anywhere, stay at home so nothing happens to you”. I repeated over and over again that you die anyway, nothing you do can stop it. And he’d just give some other way to try to avoid it. Oh well, I suppose he was still exercising his thinking skills!
In the evening we went out for dinner to our local pizza place. It’s the place we go to most often and we like to support the owners, who have been having a tough time since COVID messed up the restaurant industry. They’re having a break over Christmas and returning to reopen the restaurant on 15 January. We wished each other a Merry Christmas as we departed.
Then for games I joined three friends online and we played some games of Jump Drive. I lost the first two horrendously, with scores like 24 points while everyone else was well over 50. The third game I only came second last, so I called that an achievement and we moved on.
We tried a new game called Ratjack, which is a rat-themed version of blackjack with some twists. Cards have values from 1 to 12, but each card also has a special ability, things like stealing cards from other players, or swapping cards, or adding values to the numbers or whatever. Each turn you draw a new card to make a hand of 2 with the one card you had left over from last turn, and then choose one to play, either face up—in which case you do its special ability—or face down—in which case you don’t, and the score doesn’t add to your total. The goal is to reach 25, or to make opponents bust by going over 25. Some of the cards also have abilities that turn face down cards face up, or vice versa, so those cards are still definitely in play. It was okay, but suffered a bit from down-time while waiting for everyone else to think about and play their turns. I ended up winning.
Then one of the guys begged an early bedtime and three of us continued with Castles of Burgundy. Since we played this just a few weeks ago, I actually remembered the rules and could play without fumbling around in the early rounds. However I soon dropped into last place. But I scored a large region worth a lot of points late in the game, which neither of my opponents did, and so I managed to end up winning. My first ever win with this game, so I was very pleased.
This morning I did my 5k run. The weather was warmer but not as humid, and it wasn’t so draining. I ran down to the wharf and back, which is the harder of the two routes I usually do because of more hills. I’m up to a total of 480 km for the year so far. I’m hoping to be able to get four more runs in before the end of the year to make it an even 500.
I spent a bit of time today doing Darths & Droids story planning stuff, to prepare for Episode IX. I made a graphical timeline of important events, and it got pretty complicated and convoluted. I’ll show this off in the future after we finish writing and publishing the comics for the last movie, but it’s full of spoilers so I can’t show it off now.
After lunch I spent a couple of hours working on cleaning the car. It hasn’t had a wash or vacuum for far too long and was looking pretty grubby. So I gave it the full treatment: vacuuming all the debris out (mostly sand and tiny bits of twigs, leaves, bark, etc), washing the exterior, drying with a chamois, detailing the interior to wipe off dust everywhere, applying leather cleaner and then protector to the seats and other leather surfaces, glass cleaner on the interior window surfaces, then waxing the bodywork, and finally polishing.
Oh, in other news, remember the issue with our phantom pet named Scout? How our vet thought we had another pet called Scout? And my wife called up and got them to remove it from our records?
Today she got a Christmas message from the vet, wishing Scully and Scout a Merry Christmas!!
It turns out that this is because our vet used to have two premises operating under the same business, and we often switched between the premises as they have different advantages (one has longer operating hours, the other is more conveniently located). But earlier this year they separated into two separate businesses, but both have copies of Scully’s records. We learnt about this a couple of weeks ago when my wife got a message saying that Scully was overdue for her annual vaccinations. But that wasn’t true—she’d been vaccinated during her annual checkup in July—but at the other premises.
Anyway, because of that, it turned out that we’d only removed Scout from one of the vet’s records and not the other one! But… and this is very odd… the first one said that Scout was a cat. This one, when my wife called up to remove Scout from our records, said Scout was a rabbit. So I don’t know what’s up with this mysterious Scout.
We had a rude awakening this morning, when Scully threw up on the bed, around 6:30. Normally my wife gets up about then but I sleep in a bit – but today I had to leap out of bed and deal with Scully being sick, and strip off the bed linen and get it in the washing machine. Scully seems okay though, she recovered quickly and ate her breakfast with gusto.
I had two ethics classes in the morning, then went for a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work (as she’d taken her with her after breakfast). I worked on some more Darths & Droids stuff again, trying to get ahead and start thinking about the start of Episode IX, which is coming up very soon.
I also spent some time searching for a traditional tea ceremony experience that we can book for Tokyo. My wife’s mother and sister are travelling with us at the end of February, and neither have been to Japan before. They are keen to try some cultural experiences, and thought a tea ceremony would be good. So I searched and found a few places in Tokyo that offer this. The range is quite broad, with some offering kimono dressing as part of it, others not, some traditional tatami mat seating on the floor, others table seating. I need to confirm with everyone what they would prefer before narrowing it down.
Last night I started watching Dune Part 2 on Netflix. Since Part 1 is no longer on Netflix, I read the plot summary on Wikipedia to remind myself. I’m very glad I did, because I would have been so confused without the refresher. But with it, I think I’ve followed all the important points of the story. I’ll watch more tonight, but at close to three hours running time I think I’ll have to split it over three nights of watching.
Today was thankfully much cooler than yesterday. We had a stiff breeze blowing and the temperature only reached around 24°C. Rather than having the air conditioning on all day, I had the windows all wide open. It rained a bit in the morning, including when I went out for a 5k run. I managed a much faster time than any other recent run, in the cooler air.
Then I drove over to the nearest Aldi supermarket that has parking – there’s one a bit closer but it’s in a business area with lots of office buildings and impossible to park anywhere nearby. So I almost never go into Aldi. But I wanted to today to pick up a Christmas ham. I also grabbed a few other things while there: a Christmas stollen, a panettone, and some brie and sliced turkey for making lunch sandwiches.
After eating a lunch of turkey and brie sandwiches on my home made sourdough bread, I walked up to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. And when we got home I worked on some more Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up a buffer.
I made some pesto pasta with broccoli for dinner, before my three ethics classes in a row, which took up the evening.
The record-breaking heatwave affecting inland Australia made its way to the east coast today. Inland suburbs of Sydney touched 42°C, but it remained a bit cooler nearer the coast where I am, thankfully, in the low 30s. But the humidity was still over 50% in the hottest part of the day here, whereas inland it dropped into the 20s for that dry heat effect.
Knowing this was the forecast, I took Scully out for a long walk around 7am, before it got too hot. We did the Waverton loop, going around the harbour shore. There’s one house that we pass where the owners always plant sunflowers, and they were in bloom.
The birds were out in force in the morning, especially by the water. I spotted this group of eight little black cormorants… or was it seven with a clever imposter??
(Spoiler: It’s a silver gull.) I did a couple of bird counts for eBird and recorded 18 different species.
Back home, I sheltered in the air conditioning for most of the day. working on Darths & Droids comics. I want to get ahead because there’ll be some time spent story planning for Episode IX when we start that very soon. And I need to build up a buffer for upcoming trips in the new year.
This evening I had the first class of the final week’s critical & ethical thinking topic for the year. We’re just having fun this week, with hypothetical “What if?” questions, getting the kids to think through logical consequences of weird scenarios. For example: What if social media likes were used as money? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was? What if everyone had a twin who it was impossible to tell apart?
The last one generated some very interesting discussion. One kid said people could commit crimes and nobody could be punished, because it would be impossible to know if you arrested the correct twin, and you’d have to avoid punishing the incorrect person. But another kid suggested that if it was truly impossible to tell the twins apart, they might be treated like a single person, and share one identity, one bank account, one job, etc. And if either one committed a crime, both would be punished. Actually all of the questions generated interesting discussions of the consequences. So it was a lot of fun. Perfect for the last class before Christmas.
Just after 8pm the southerly buster arrived with force. This is the local name for the cold front coming through from the south which rapidly reduces the temperature after a hot day, and brings cold strong winds and thunderstorms. We had very close lightning and loud thunder, and about 30 minutes of absolutely torrential rain, before it eased off. Thankfully it’s a lot cooler outside now, although the humidity has skyrocketed back around 95%. Tomorrow is forecast to be much cooler than today, around 25°C. Phew!
Today was very warm. Much of Australia is enduring an heatwave, with the highest temperatures we’ve seen in five years (the past four summers have been cooler and wetter thanks to La Niña). Some towns in western New South Wales today were expected to potentially break their highest ever recorded temperatures, around 47°C. Inland suburbs of Sydney got into the high 30s, but fortunately the coastal strip was significantly cooler, reaching only 29°C in the city. But the humidity remains stupidly high, so it felt oppressive being out there.
After two morning ethics classes, I walked with Scully up to the fish & chip shop, and grabbed an Express Post envelope from the adjacent post office for mailing some documents. I didn’t want to walk back with the large envelope, and a box of fish & chips, and have to carry Scully over the parts of the road and footpaths that were baking in the sun and would have burnt her feet, so I ordered my lunch to eat in at the outdoor tables. Although these are shaded, it was so hot and humid sitting there that the sweat was just rolling down my face and body.
I got back home in time for my afternoon classes. After those I completed writing up a log of the previousDungeons & Dragons session that we played back in October, which I hadn’t yet written up. Thankfully I’m now fully up to date with the campaign logs, all 12 sessions played so far. Next time we meet we should be starting a new adventure, which will be nice. Although the party has to contend with a curse placed on them by the God of Swords: to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die! My players are a fairly moralistic group, so this presents them with a significant ethical dilemma. They’re not just going to go around and slaughter the next 9 people they come across. It will be very interesting to see how they deal with this.
For dinner I made a cool falafel salad. I tried boiling two eggs to add to the salads, but I think I must have set the stove too low to simmer them, and the first one I tried to peel was too soft-boiled. I boiled the second egg for another 5 minutes and it came out fine, so we ended up with half an egg each instead of a whole one in our salads.
