Today we didn’t do very much. It was a kind of rest at home Sunday. My wife took Scully for a walk in the morning while I worked on some more comics. I’m trying to get ahead with a buffer while I can. I also planned out some more ethics class topics for the coming month, deciding to do topics on Bio-engineering, and Opinion versus Fact.
There’s really not that much else to report.
Oh, we went for a walk together with Scully after dinner, in the cooler evening. We did the big loop around the harbour shore and I did a bird count using eBird along the way. I commented to my wife that I’d counted 16 species tonight, which is higher than normal (usually around 12 or so is more normal). And I started mentioning some rarer species that I have seen occasionally. I mentioned that I’d spotted a pelican (Australian pelican) only twice in this area. As we left the waterfront and started up the hill back home, I ended my count at 16 species.
And then halfway home I looked up and saw an unusual bird circling in the sky. I thought at first maybe it was an ibis (the most likely option for a large white flying bird in this area), but then I realised the shape was wrong… It was a pelican! Seriously! Just a few minutes after I’d talked about them being so rare to spot here.
In other bird news, there are a lot of baby brushturkeys around at the moment. Their eggs have obviously hatched not long ago and now the little chicks are running around all over the place. The parents abandon them and the chicks have to fend for themselves immediately. Fortunately they’ve very well camouflaged and stick to undergrowth, so they generally do pretty well. Definitely, given the population explosion around here in recent years.
On to the headline topic: we’ve made plans to go out for lunch tomorrow. We’re going to walk down to the newly reopened ferry wharf and catch a ferry across the harbour to Balmain, and find a nice place to sit and have lunch before making our way home again.
And on Friday we decided to do something fancy and try a new place. There’s an Italian wine bar/restaurant which is highly rated and has outdoor seating so we can take Scully: Enoteca 128. It looks pretty nice! We have a booking for dinner on Friday.
The weather cooled down overnight from yesterday’s heat with a pleasant southerly change. I got up, head breakfast, and then went out for a 5k run. This brought my total running distance for the year up to an even 500 km. It wasn’t exactly a hundred 5k runs, because I did a few other distances in there: a few 2.5ks when recovering from a sore back, and a few 7.5ks when I felt extra inspired.
I began to notice a few months ago that reaching 500k for the year was a possibility, but I wasn’t quite approaching it fast enough with running only on the weekends, and needed an extra effort in December. Fortunately my wife and I have some time off in these weeks and I’ve added some extra runs in mid-week, which was just enough to bring me to the target.
After showering and changing into fresh clothes, we went on an expedition. My wife has been hankering for a December special from Tonton Bread advertised on their Instagram, a coffee bean croissant:
We hadn’t had a chance to head over there (it’s a 15-minute drive) before Christmas, so we took the opportunity today. Unfortunately they didn’t have the coffee croissant that she wanted, but they had a pecan coffee choux pastry, which she got instead (upper right in this Instagram:)
This is a croissant with a cookie strip on top, and filled with cookie dough. It’s so rich that I had half after lunch and am saving the other half for dessert tonight.
In the afternoon I spent some time housecleaning. I washed the floors of both the kitchen and bathroom, and cleaned all of the tiled wall surfaces in the bathroom, as well as the front and back of the door. I also did a bit of bookshelf rearranging to shelve a pile of unshelved recent purchases. Which involved a lot of dusting as well. It’s odd how I always end up doing neglected housework during holidays.
For dinner I fried up some vegetarian sausages, and made garlic, chilli, and miso Brussels sprouts to accompany them.
Oh, the other thing I did this afternoon was go through all my photos from day 4 of last year’s trip to Japan, process and upload a bunch, and add selected ones to my travel diary of the day. There are a lot of food photos there!
I’m able to write this post tonight because we had our fortnightly Friday night board games gathering early this week. There were only four of us who could make it, and one friend wanted to bring his young daughter along, so we decided to start at my place at 4pm instead of the usual 6pm, and finish early so they could go home before it got too late.
Because we had a young girl (about 9 years old, I’d guess – I didn’t ask how old she was), we played some lighter games with her first. We started with a game of King of Tokyo. Then we played a few hands of Uno: Show ‘Em No Mercy to start. Then while the girl entertained herself with an iPad and headphones the rest of us played a game of Evergreen. Then she rejoined us for a game of Camel Up (second edition). And finally we rounded things off with some hands of Uno Flip!
We ordered pizza during the gaming and also had plentiful snacks. I was hoping to have them eat some of the copious sweet things we have leftover from Christmas, but they brought so much other stuff that there wasn’t much room for those.
Earlier in the day we basically just took it easy, staying inside as it was extremely hot out. It reached over 37°C in the city, and just a fraction shy of 40°C in some suburbs, despite an early storm which dumped heavy rain about 9 o’clock in the morning. That just served to keep the humidity up. Another storm hit about 4:30pm, which dropped the temperature rapidly. We now have a strong southerly blowing, which will cool things more overnight. Tomorrow should hopefully be nowhere near as hot.
We did take Scully out in the late morning, after the first storm, but not for a long walk. We just went to the nearby park, where she could run on the grass and there was plenty of shade, rather than walking on hot concrete paths.
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.
