Daily update – Page 164 – dangermouse.net

Standards reporting

Today was a day to work on writing my report for the recent ISO Photography standards meeting – the one that I attended virtually and had to stay up to 2am each night for four nights a few weeks ago. Part of my role in this is to prepare a report for Standards Australia on all of the things discussed at the meeting. So I basically worked on that for much of the day. Got it finished a bit after dinner.

I’m going well with reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book 6 in Italian. I’m up to page 72, and there are 216 pages, so that’s exactly a third of the way through. I’m definitely noticing that as I work my way through these books I’m having to look up fewer words, and I can work out the meanings of more unfamiliar words by context without needing to look them up.

New content today:

The storm?

The storm did finally hit overnight and we got a bit of heavy rain, but by the time I got up this morning the rain had stopped. Although it was cold and windy all day, and the rain did return at spotty intervals. But honestly it was nothing like the apocalypse that the weather bureau had warned us to expect. By lunchtime the sun was coming out again in between the odd showers, whereas I’d been prepared for a full day of torrential downpour. They forecast up to 50mm of rain today, but in the end we only got 13mm.

For a morning excursion I took Scully out to the hardware store, driving rather than walking. It’s next door to the home-maker centre which has dozens of furnishing shops as well as the pet shop, so we got to go in there too and Scully had a sniff up and down all the aisles of pet food. We got a bit wet walking between the two buildings, but not too bad. I also dropped off a box of electronic stuff, cables, light bulbs, and used batteries at the local recycling centre which is just around the corner from there too.

Tonight for dinner I recreated last night’s roast potato and pumpkin pizza. We always have two pizzas during what we call “pizza week” because the ready made bases come in packs of two. (I’m too lazy to make my own pizza bases from scratch each time.)

And then for dessert I made myself… a deconstructed rum ball!

My wife bought me a madeira cake for a treat, which is what I use as the main ingredient to make rum balls – which I’ve made many times. But this time I thought I’d try something a little avant-garde and create myself a deconstructed dessert. After plating up (and taking photos) I sat down to eat it, mixing the ingredients with a desert fork on the plate… and it was both fun and delicious! 9/10 would do again!

New content today:

More calm before the storm?

So they told us that we’d get heavy rain today. It hasn’t rained a drop, and was sunny most of the day. There was some dramatic cloud building up late this afternoon, but as of mid-evening still not a drop of rain. Supposedly we’re still in for heavy rain and strong winds tomorrow… but I’ll believe it when I see it. It was cold though.

This was the view over the city about 4:30pm.

This morning I walked up to the shops to buy a couple of things. I needed to get some batteries because the ones for the remote in our air conditioner died and we couldn’t turn the heat on or off without raiding the DVD remote for batteries – and then couldn’t control the DVD player without switching them back. And since I was going to the shops anyway, I thought I’d get some chocolate sprinkles that I want for a dessert. However when I was up there I completely forgot to get the chocolate sprinkles.

And then later in the morning I took Scully out for a walk, and I went the other direction to the other nearby shops, where there’s a small supermarket. While there, I popped in to get the chocolate sprinkles… and they had ten different varieties of cake sprinkles… all colours and flavours, but no chocolate! So in two trips to two different supermarkets I didn’t manage to get them.

I also failed to get another thing I wanted from the Japanese grocery store. I wanted ramen noodles so I could make myself some ramen for lunch. But they only had udon and somen noodles, which are thicker and thinner respectively. I made do with somen, but honestly I find them too thin. But I did use them to make a pseudo-ramen for lunch:

I even made a soft-boiled egg to put in. It turned out pretty good. And for dinner I roasted some kipfler potato slices and pumpkin chunks and a clove of garlic, before putting them on a pizza.

This afternoon I worked a bit on a new tagging system for Square Root of Minus Garfield (plus other mezzacotta comics). I made a database table and populated it with tags and descriptions. This is a project that’s been on my to-do list for ages, and I though it wouldn’t be too difficult or time consuming, and I have a volunteer on the forums who wants to go through and tag all the comics, so that makes it a good opportunity to get it done.

New content today:

The calm before the storm

That storm is forecast to hit Sydney tomorrow, but today dawned beautiful and clear. It’s clouded in and there are odd showers now, but it should intensify overnight.

Most of the morning I spent doing housecleaning and various other chores. Then I spent some time writing up a review of the sausage roll I had at the bakery yesterday, and editing and uploading a bunch of photos from my old trip to Thailand. Here’s a seafood stall in the Anusarn Night Market in Chiang Mai:

This evening my wife and I started back into watching Doctor Who. We’ve bought all the boxed sets of the recent series, but fell out of watching them some time ago, so now we’re a few seasons behind. We decided it was time to get stuck into them, and so tonight we watched the season 9 Christmas special: Last Christmas. Wow, it was really good. Definitely looking forward to watching the rest of the series.

New content today:

Exploring Hunters Hill

It was a rainy, grey Saturday morning. Weather forecasters are telling us that an east coast low pressure system is developing, and we’ll be experiencing heavy rain and gale force winds on Monday and Tuesday, and it seems to be ramping up towards that already. There wasn’t a lot of rain today though – just some showers interspersed with long breaks.

We decided to go out and find a new bakery to have lunch at today. I checked Google Maps for somewhere not too far away, and find a likely looking spot about 10 minutes drive away. My wife and I went with Scully and managed to get an outside table at Stoneground Bakery in the suburb of Hunters Hill. It seems like a nice bakery and we also bought a loaf of sourdough bread to take home and have with dinner tonight.

After eating, we decided to take a walk around a few of the back streets to give Scully some exercise and loop back the long way to the car. We passed a few interesting places on the way:

This is St Kevin’s, an old sandstone cottage, now being used as a solicitor’s office. It’s listed on the NSW heritage register as a significant historical building. Hunters Hill was one of the earliest areas of Sydney to be settled by the wealthier free settlers in the colony, and there are a lot of old houses in the area.

This was actually originally a school, known as “Toronto”, but it’s now been converted into the St Jospeh’s Aged Care facility.

Down the hill from here is Tarban Creek, which flows under the Tarban Creek Bridge (visible in this photo) into Sydney Harbour. The creek is rather wide at this point! You can also see how grey the weather was today.

New content today:

Recovery day

My sore legs were recovering from yesterday’s 5k run, so I didn’t end up doing very much particularly active today.

I did go out for the weekly grocery shop, but even that was low key, as our shopping list literally had only 4 items on it (crackers, Weet Bix breakfast cereal, arborio rice, and eggs) – although we never list staples that we buy every week, such as milk, bread, yoghurt, fruit, vegetables, and some prepared vegetarian foods. I basically browse the fruit and vegetable section and decide what strikes my fancy to cook/eat during the week and just grab some things. Today I got: kipfler potatoes, a red onion (those two to make potato salad), cherry tomatoes, a cauliflower, half a butternut pumpkin, a bunch of broccolini, several apples, an orange, a pomegranate, and three bananas. I also got some chick pea burger patties, and falafels.

I took Scully out briefly before lunch, but otherwise spent the day goofing off and making a couple of new Darths & Droids comics. Oh, and I processed a bunch of old photos from a trip to Thailand in 2005 that I took on 35mm film and scanned a while ago. This is Wat Phra Singh in Chiang Mai:

Tonight for dinner, my wife and I went out to one of our favourite restaurants, a local seafood place that does really nice fish dishes. It’s the first time we’ve been there since the restaurants closed for COVID restrictions a few months ago. Being winter, I had my favourite winter warmer dish – the snapper pie. Mmmm…

New content today:

Back into 5k

Scully seemed perfectly fine today, following yesterday’s nasty incident. So that’s good.

Also good today, I got back into my exercise “routine”. I said I’d start doing 5k runs again, at least once a week, and today I did one for this week. Previously I timed myself going up the street to the oval as part of the run, and then I completed 9 laps, which brought the total distance to 5 kilometres. But the walk/jog from my place to the oval is uphill, and in fact climbs about 70 metres in 900 metres horizontally, so that part slowed me down and puffed me out early in the run.

Instead, today I walked casually up to the oval, and only began recording my run when I started doing laps on the flat playing field. I figured I needed to about 12 laps rather than 9. I set out at a slow jog, hoping to be able to keep that pace up for the whole distance without slowing down to a walk. I was struggling by 8 laps and really had to push myself to not drop to a walk, but I managed to get to 11 laps when I decided I’d take a look at the distance to see how far I had to go, and if it was just 100-200 metres I’d sprint it out. But when I checked at 11 laps, my tracker had recorded 5.1 km, so I’d finished!

My split time for the 5k was 29:16, which Strava tells me is my second best effort (best is 29:06, back in November). So I’m pretty happy with effort after a break of so many months. My legs are pretty sore though, even after a full suite of stretches and warm down – they definitely need to get used to this again.

To celebrate – and to overcompensate for all the kilojoules burnt! – I spoilt myself with pies for lunch on the way home. I did decide to be good and only get vegetarian ones, planning to get the delicious Thai curry vegetable, and a pumpkin and lentil. But when I got to the pie shop, they’d sold out of both of those, and in fact all of the vegetarian options, except for the roast vegetable and the spinach, corn, and cheese, which is definitely the least healthy of the vegetarian pies they make, stuffed with cheese as it is (although it’s delicious). So I got one of each of those, and really enjoyed them.

New content today:

Scully bullied

Today was a bit of a blah day. I didn’t feel up to doing much, and there was a nasty incident this morning.

There’s a neighbour in our apartment block with a dog which hasn’t been socialised, and the owners usually keep it away from other dogs. The owners are very nice, and very careful about keeping their dog away from other dogs. But this morning I was taking Scully down to the grass for a toilet, and walked around a corner, and this other dog and the lady owner were right there, just a couple of metres away, and before either of us knew what was happening her dog launched itself at Scully and started attacking her!

After a second of shock I grabbed the other dog and pulled it away from Scully, gave it to the woman, and picked up Scully to check if she was okay. Fortunately the other dog is quite small too, not much bigger than Scully, and it appeared not to have actually bitten her, because there was no broken skin or blood anywhere, but obviously Scully was shaken and shocked. The owner was shocked too and extremely apologetic and asking if Scully was okay and if I was okay – I’m sure she was just as horrified as I was. She said she felt horrible and asked me to contact her later and let her know if Scully had been hurt.

Examining Scully back at home more carefully, I couldn’t find any damage at all. I guess the other dog, although it was behaving aggressively, didn’t actually bite her. Which is good. I called the vet to see if they recommended bringing her in for precautionary antibiotics or a more thorough examination, but they said if she’s not showing any signs of distress or injury then she’s most probably okay.

Apart from that, I spent some time baking a loaf of bread today. We still have one pack of bread mix from our COVID lockdown supplies to get through. I think I’ll get bread stuff occasionally still, since it’s nice having freshly baked bread at home.

New content today:

A miraculous recovery

So, two days ago I wrote about how my photography website had become corrupted due to a bad WordPress update. I decided to finally bite the bullet and start building my own site, starting with some catalogue pages to show off my work, and then think about adding shopping and payment facilities later. So I sat down and thought the first step was to blow away the WordPress and WooCommerce installs to start from a clean slate.

But first, I’d take a quick look at the WordPress code to see if I could figure out what the error was, just in case it was something I could discover and fix quickly. So I started by loading the site to see what the error message was… And the site loaded! With all my stuff there! The WordPress theme had defaulted back to the default, but my content was all there. It looked like the theme files for the theme I’d chosen were corrupted, so I deleted them and reinstalled the theme… And the entire site was back, including the customisations I’d made to the theme, with colours and header image graphics! What’s more, the admin pages now seem to be working without the intermittent server errors that I was having before the automated upgrade. So it’s actually working better than it was before.

I have no idea what happened, that made the site look completely trashed for a week or two, and then magically brought it back to life. But whatever happened, I’m happy that I didn’t have to either diagnose and debug WordPress/WooCommerce. Or build my own shop site from scratch. Phew!

Today was again cold, but also cloudy, and it’s started raining this evening. I only went out once, to take Scully for a walk before lunch, and spent much of the day writing and making Darths & Droids strips. I read another 6 pages of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Si Salvi Chi Può in Italian, making 10 pages in 2 days. Since the book is just over 200 pages long, if I keep that rate up I can finish in 40 days, so it’s not really that big a task.

New content today:

Starting a new diary

This morning I braved the cold morning air to walk down to North Sydney for a doctor’s appointment. It was pretty cold, and I was glad I wore my rugby jersey and a jacket. I was home in time to take Scully out for a mid-morning walk and play.

And then soon after I had to head off for a lunch meet-up with one of my friends. We had lunch at a Japanese place near his house, so he could walk there, but I had to drive over. It was good to catch up, as we hadn’t seen each other since about March, when the COVID restrictions began here.

This afternoon I applied my new discipline to Italian lessons. I did some Duolingo, and then turned my attention to starting the next Wimpy Kid book. I eased in, translating four pages, then – as has been our tradition – reading them aloud one sentence at a time in Italian followed by English to my wife. So she’s been enjoying the stories along with me. This one has begun with Greg lamenting the pre-Christmas holiday season, where he has to try to be good for a whole month, which is basically impossible. 😄

New content today: