Daily update – Page 179 – dangermouse.net

Long weekend Sunday

It’s a long weekend here in Sydney! So tomorrow is a holiday Monday, but that means Sunday also feels special somehow, because you don’t have to get up early on Monday.

My wife and I did our usual morning long walk with Scully. We took a different route home, through some bushland, which we’ve been avoiding for the past few weeks because of COVID, and the large number of walkers out taking that route along narrow walking tracks. But today it felt like the right time to be ale to do it again, and it was nice.

I did more rewriting of photo walks to convert into web pages, completing walks 11. North Sydney and St Leonards Park and 12. Greenwich Baths. While researching historical details for the first one of those, I found out something amazing about St Mary’s Catholic Church in North Sydney. It looks like this:

Now, it looks like it’s built of sandstone, and I’d always assumed that was the case. But not quite!

There’s been a church on this site since 1855, when services were first held in a tent. The first church building was built in 1856 of wooden boards, supported by tree trunks, with an earthen floor. In 1868 a church was built of sandstone, which was then enlarged in 1896.

In 1938 they rebuilt the church, demolishing the old sandstone one, to create a larger church building. But they reused all of the sandstone blocks, the roofing slates, the marble interior decorations, and the stained glass. To make the new church bigger they built it of brick, and then they cut each sandstone block of the original stone church in half, and used the thinner stones as a veneer over the brick structure, to make it look as though it’s solid sandstone!

It’s amazing the stuff you can learn by researching local history.

New content today:

Winter walking

My wife had stuff to do this morning and asked me to take Scully on a nice long walk to keep her occupied. I walked down to Greenwich Baths – basically this walk that I did a photo essay on a few weeks ago, although with some extra pieces and a minor changes. It was chilly, as the weather has turned quite wintry here in the past week.

And I was surprised when we got to the baths to see an old lady, must have been in her 80s, getting ready to go swimming in the water of the harbour! As I watched, rugged up in my rugby jersey and a jacket over the top, she descended the ramp into the water and proceeded to swim laps. I’m don’t know how she even got in there, as the baths are fenced off and closed during the winter months – either she sneaked past the fence somehow, or she has some sort of secret way to get a key.

Back home, I worked on another photo essay, converting into a web page – a shortish one I did of a round I played at a local golf course. Maybe not as exciting as all the cool historical architecture I’ve bee learning about in the other walks I’ve been doing.

My wife is getting into cooking with me unable to do so (easily) because of my bandaged hand. Today she made pesto pasta with asparagus, pine nuts, and parmesan cheese for dinner, and it was really good. I should get her to cook more often! 😄

New content today:

Handy hand day

My bandaged hand gave me grief during the night, with some pain that kept me awake a bit. The thumb had become bruised looking and tender, and there were areas that felt a bit numb. It was a little bit concerning, and the fact that it’s my hand meant that I really didn’t want to risk not seeking medical attention if there was any possibility of something serious happening. And given that it was Friday and this coming weekend is a long weekend with a public holiday on Monday, I didn’t want to have to end up in emergency on the weekend rather than the hand clinic (which keeps more normal hours).

So I phoned the hand clinic and described what was happening, and asked if this was normal and nothing to worry about, or if it was potentially a problem. The doctor there asked me to come into the hospital so they could have a look. I went in, and after a short wait (maybe 20 minutes), a doctor examined my hand, removing the bandage and inspecting the stitches and the bruising around the hand. He said it looked to be healing normally and the hand looked fine, with no infections. He said the bruising was to be expected, and prodded various parts of my thumb to check the numbness. He said it was localised to an area that was not concerning, and may have been caused by the tightness of the bandage pressing on a nerve, which matches my experience with the bandage pressing a little painfully on the inside of the base of the thumb.

A nurse then cleaned and rebandaged my hand, with a lighter dressing that isn’t quite as tight, so I now have a bit more movement. It feels much better than the old one. So all seems good! I still have my appointment on Tuesday to have the stitches removed.

This evening I’m playing my fortnightly board games night with my friends, in our current COVID-safe online mode. We’ve played some games of Dice Forge, Seven Wonders, and now Kingdomino.

New content today:

Fish & chips!

My wife surprised me today by suggesting that after her morning shift of work-from-home we go out together and get some fish and chips for lunch, from the shop 10 minutes walk away that I go to occasionally. We took Scully and made a family outing of it. We bought some delicious fried food and went out to the lookout overlooking Sydney Harbour where I like to eat, and enjoyed a lunch together under a chill but bright blue winter sky, while Scully ran around on the grass, free of her leash.

It was lovely, and delicious.

I made some comics today, and uploaded a large batch of photos to convert into a web page write up of one of my recent Sydney walks, now visible on this page. I did a lot of research on the various historical buildings I’d photographed, and found a fascinating history for one of them, involving threats of demolition, counter-threats of heritage protection to make demolition illegal, and a lawsuit to settle the usage of the property. It’s amazing how little you know about places that you walk past frequently, until you do some research and learn how amazing it is.

New content today:

Blurry days

The last several days are starting to blur together in a melange of restricted left hand mobility, taking Scully for walks, and mostly working on Darths & Droids. We’ve done a lot of story planning in the past week, and I’ve written thousands of words of notes. Today I switched to actually writing scripts for comics and assembling comics, which are needed for the next week or so of publication.

I also spent a bit of time updating one of the old Sydney walks I did with a couple of new photos of an historical building. I only learnt about this building while doing research for the photos that I had taken earlier, and I decided I had to go back and find it and get some photos. It’s an old stable that was part of a 19th century estate – you can read the history and see the photos here (scroll down near the bottom for the “Valetta” stables).

My hand has been giving me some pain today, and last night while trying to sleep. I keep trying to do little tasks using my left hand, and end up with some sort of muscle twitch that aches for a while. I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t have full movement or strength in it yet.

New content today:

Winter chill

Winter hit with full force today. It was rainy early in the morning, and a cold air mass had come in overnight, so it was really cold today. I had to put a jacket on to take Scully out for some morning exercise, and I’m glad I did.

The past few days have been much the same stuff for me. I’ve been writing up a lot of story planning notes for Darths & Droids, and working on sorting through my photos database. Which I’ve been mentioning a lot, so it’s kind of boring to go into it again.

So for something new, a few days ago when I was lamenting to friends how difficult it is to get the good bits out of a pomegranate, one of them pointed me at this article about a machine that uses a computer vision system to separate pomegranate seeds from the pith. While this seems like an acceptable use of computing technology to make our lives easier, I wonder where it may lead…

In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of pomegranate aril separating systems. All fruit processing plants are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they separate pomegranates with a perfect operational record. The Pomegran-Net Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 2027. Human decisions are removed from fruit processing. Pomegran-Net begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

One of the processing robots is called the Term-granate-r. Played by Aril’d Schwarzenegger.

New content today:

Photographic archaeology

Monday! Today I discovered an old folder full of animal photos from a visit to the zoo back in 2009, and it had a bunch of photos of birds that I hadn’t recorded in my bird photos database. So to scratch the itch of completionism, I ended up spending much of the day processing the bird photos I hadn’t done before, posting them on Flickr, identifying the species, and doing some coding work to make it easier to enter them into my database.

I also went for another longish walk, and along the way I passed an electronics shop, so I went in to buy some parts to make a small LED light to attach to Scully’s collar when going out for walks at night. Because she’s black, and some of the streets around us a dimly lit, it’s almost impossible to see her in some places where we walk after sunset, which is much more often in winter than in summer. There are commercial dog lights you can buy, but most are too bulky and heavy for Scully. I bought s smaller one last year, but it was so badly constructed that it fell to pieces the first time I tried to turn it on! I returned it for a refund.

Anyway, I figured I could make one myself, so with a bit of assistance at the electronics shop I got a selection of LEDs of different brightness, some resistors, a battery holder for a CR2032 button battery, one of those batteries, and a micro PCB switch. I’ll borrow a soldering iron off one of my friends and make myself a super-light and cheap light to attach to Scully.

New content today:

Evil plots

Sunday morning saw another sleep in. I slept with my bandaged hand tucked under the quilt for the first time – it felt a bit weird but was okay. Better than resting my arm on top where it was cold all night the last few nights. The fingers are getting more flexible and stronger, and I can now type with two hands, although only using one finger on my left hand.

My wife and I went for another big walk with Scully this morning, though not as long as yesterday.

Well, that photo is actually from yesterday, but it’s nice so I thought I’d share it today.

This afternoon I spent dedicated to brainstorming and plotting more Darths & Droids story material, with some of my co-writers. We wrote almost 2000 more words of story notes, and now have a significantly better plan for how the story progresses through Episodes 7 and 8.

My wife cooked dinner again tonight. Pea soup, with fried halloumi as a vegetarian substitute for ham/bacon. It was delicious… and I’m not just saying that because I didn’t have to do any of the work. 🙂

New content today:

A long walk and a rest

Saturday is officially “no alarm Saturday” in this household, and we all slept in until almost 8 o’clock this morning. After getting up and having breakfast, we (my wife, Scully, and I) went for a nice long walk for some exercise and fresh air. The day was beautiful – a clear, brisk, late autumn day with puffy white clouds in the sky.

We walked basically this route which I covered in a photo walk essay a few weeks ago. With some bits added on to take us from our home to the start and end points as given in that page. The total walk was 9 kilometres, and took us a solid couple of hours, with a break for my wife to grab a coffee at a cafe on the way.

This afternoon I worked some more on Darths & Droids, writing up a bunch of story planning notes, based on thoughts from the past few days that hadn’t been recorded yet, and I made a couple of new strips.

And this evening my wife cooked the cauliflower dish that I was preparing on Wednesday when I sliced my hand with the kitchen knife. The offending cauliflower has been duly punished by being baked with a miso glaze and consumed with pomegranate, chilli, mint, and toasted sesame and sunflower seeds. Yum!

New content today:

Doing things one-handed

So there are a lot of things you can’t easily do with one hand out of commission. Washing yourself is tricky, especially since I have to keep my left hand dry. My wife helped me put a plastic bag over my left hand and tape it so I could have a shower, but then I realised I couldn’t wash my right arm. And squeezing shampoo out of a bottle into your one good hand is really difficult.

The good news is that when I woke up in the morning, all of the numbness from the anaesthetic had worn off overnight and I had full sensation in all fingers and thumb again. The thumb and forefinger had still been a bit numb when I went to sleep. And there’s not much pain. But I can’t really use my left hand for anything that requires any strength at all – I can’t hold anything in it or put any pressure on it.

I worked a bit on Darths & Droids today, managing to make a strip, although using Photoshop one-handed is a challenge as so many of the commands involve multi-key combos or holding down keys while clicking and dragging.

My wife had to do the grocery shopping, while I minded Scully, after she finished her work shift at lunch time. (I’ve been doing all the shopping recently.) And we went out for dinner tonight for the first time since COVID restrictions shut restaurants back in March. We had Indian food, and it was delicious. The waiter, seeing my hand bandaged up and in a sling, offered to bring me a spoon to help eating, but I said I’d be fine with a knife and fork, and sort of managed okay, using one utensil at a time.

And relaxed tonight watching The Last Jedi with my wife, to prepare for a home viewing of Rise of Skywalker on the weekend, which she missed seeing at the cinema last year.

New content today: