Ad-libbing dinner

It’s Monday, and the start of another week in COVID lockdown. My wife is working from home, while I had an online ethics class at 9:00 this morning. The issue was that she is set up on the dining table, which is behind me when I’m doing my Zoom lessons, so the kids would have been able to see her. So I used a background replacement to hide her and the room. This was the last lesson of media bubbles – I start a new topic with the next lesson, which will be on stealing.

Today I mostly worked on Darths & Droids, writing and producing a full 3 strips, a week’s worth. Which is pretty productive – that takes several hours of work.

For dinner tonight I tried ad-libbing a recipe, based in a quick glance of something on a cooking show I saw on TV. I basically just saw sweet potatoes, cut in half, with the inside scooped out, and stuffed with… something, I couldn’t’ tell what. I decided to go for a stuffing of mixed beans (kidney, lima, chick peas, and something else – it was a can of “4 bean mix“), fresh corn cut off the cob, and chopped cashews. I made up the recipe basically from scratch.

Sweet potato stuffed with beans, corn, and cashews

It turned out really good! My wife loved it and asked if we could have it again another day. Here’s my recipe:

Ingredients

  • 1 large sweet potato
  • half a can of “4 bean mix” or similar, kidney beans, pinto beans, etc
  • half a cob of corn kernels
  • about 1/3 cup cashews, coarsely chopped
  • cumin
  • sweet paprika
  • cinnamon
  • a small chilli

Method

  1. Wash the sweet potato and slice in half lengthwise. Bake at 240°C for… I thought it would take maybe 20 minutes, but it was more like 40-45. Until soft enough that you can scoop the middle out, leaving boats.
  2. Meanwhile mix the beans, corn, and chopped cashews. Season with ground cumin, paprika, and a little cinnamon and salt. I also added a small chopped chilli.
  3. Save the scooped out sweet potato for another day. Spoon the bean mix into the boats, drizzle with olive oil. Bake at 180°C for 10 minutes.

I just served it with some steamed broccoli, but you could do it as a side for a meat dish if you wanted, or make it a vegetarian main with something else on the side.

New content today:

Casual job application

The top news today is not necessarily the state of my throat following the tonsillectomy, but I’ll provide an update anyway. It’s continuing to be less sore, but I still have significant pain when trying to move my tongue around or—as I discovered today—when trying to suppress a sneeze. I was eating breakfast and had some residual cereal and milk in my mouth that I hadn’t been able to flush clean with dextrous tongue movements between mouthfuls, when I suddenly had to sneeze. I ended up having to clean up splatters of cereal and milk off the carpet.

My wife and I took Scully on a big walk today, getting our lockdown exercise time out of the house. We met a little puppy, just 9 weeks old, whose owners still hadn’t even decided what name to call him, thought they said they were thinking Winchester. Scully and possibly-Winchester had some fun playing a bit. She likes playing with little dogs, especially any smaller than her.

But the main thing I did today was complete the application for that casual teaching position at the University of Technology, Sydney, that I mentioned two days ago. I didn’t complete it then because I got to page 3 of the online form, after filing in simple things like my name and contact details, and found that it asked for a full curriculum vitae, including things like my philosophy of education, evidence of sensitivity when teaching students of diverse cultural backgrounds and identity, and experience teaching in a university context with feedback from students! So I deferred that to today, and spent some time sprucing up a CV and composing answers to the various questions.

I finished that just after lunch and submitted my responses and uploaded my CV, and then discovered that page 4 of the online application form requested a 5 minute video with myself answering questions about what practices are important for teachers to engage students, give a “rich example” of a teaching method I have used, give an example of when I have adapted to student feedback in my teaching strategy, and talk about why I want to teach and what benefits I would bring to the faculty!! Holy cow!

So I spent much of the afternoon writing a script and then recording a video of myself. Hilariously, the first take went perfectly… except that I thought I’d started recording when I actually hadn’t, and when I hit the record button again after I’d finished in order to stop the recording, it actually began recording. So I had to do the whole thing again from scratch.

Eventually I completed the video, uploaded that, and completed the application. Here’s hoping that after all this effort I get the job!

I intended to do some comics work in the afternoon, but I was so mentally worn out, and it was getting late in the afternoon and time to think about what to make for dinner, that I never got into it.

I’m now trying a larger fraction of Seedlip Spice 94 (mentioned yesterday) in an alcohol-free drink with some lemon juice and soda. I’m still not getting it. On a more careful sniff with more of the product in a glass, the aroma of the Seedlip is subtly attractive, with warm spicy notes of cloves and cinnamon, but the flavour is, well… pretty flavourless. It has a hint of citrus on the palate, but the spice doesn’t really come through very much at all. I’m going to persist trying it in various combinations until I empty this bottle I bought, but honestly I can’t see myself ever buying it again. In my opinion, it’s a complete debacle for the $50 a bottle price tag.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 9

My throat continues to improve. There’s little pain eating and swallowing now, but it is still pretty sore when I move my tongue around too much, and I have developed a hacking cough and it seems impossible to clear all the phlegm from the back of my throat. Well, at least it seems to be improving overall.

Today I dealt with some bathroom cleaning, and also some cleaning up of my wife’s phone. She’s been collecting thousands of photos and video clips that she’s taken over the years, and her phone was just about out of memory, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and copy it all to our desktop computer, and delete it from her phone. There was stuff on there dating back several years.

I am in the habit of copying across photos from my phone to the computer every day, and keeping the camera roll on my phone empty, but my wife has never developed this habit, despite me reminding er that if she lost her phone she’d lose all of those photos, whereas once they’re on the computer they get backed up regularly so the chances of losing them are virtually zero. Anyway, I spent a few hours going through all the photos and videos and sorting them into suitable folders on the computer. And suddenly she has nearly 100 GB of empty space back on her phone!

The other thing I did was recopy all our music and ebooks back to her phone – it seems at some point the phone rebelled and decided to start deleting music and books. For some reason the books got lost from both our iPads as well. I dunno what it is with Apple’s management of ebooks – it’s just terrible. I’m exploring some alternative ebook reader apps now, thanks to recommendations from friends.

One Friday while shopping I saw that our local supermarket now stocks a wider range of non-alcoholic drinks. (Unlike the USA, supermarkets here do not sell alcohol – you have to go to a specialist liquor store to buy alcohol. It always freaks me out a little when I visit the US and go into a supermarket and see beer and wine on the shelves.) Anyway, along with the small range of alcohol-free wines, they also had some Seedlip non-alcoholic spirits. I’ve been meaning to try these for a while, since I like gin, but you can’t exactly drink it with wild abandon. I’ve heard that Seedlip provides the same sort of herbal/spicy flavour experience of gin, just without the alcohol. But I’ve also been reluctant to try it because it’s so damned expensive. A bottle of Seedlip costs pretty much the same as a nice bottle of gin, even though there’s no alcohol in it (and hence it doesn’t attract the alcohol excise, so they’re actually grossing more of the sale price).

But now the supermarket had it right there, and I figured this is probably about the cheapest place to buy it, so I grabbed a bottle of Seedlip Spice 94. And now I’ve tried it and can make some comments…

Well. I opened the bottle and had a sniff. It’s very subtle. You obviously don’t get that whiff of alcohol carrying the other aromas like when sniffing gin, whisky, wine, or any other alcoholic drink. So it was difficult to smell much of anything, honestly – just a vague spiciness, a bit like a cold cup of herbal tea. I poured some and had a sip neat. Yeah, totally underwhelming. It tasted like someone had put a chai-spice herbal tea bag in cold water for a while. I normally have gin with soda (I like tonic, but I find it too sweet for regular use), so I added some soda and had a swig. Yeah…. okay. I was kind of prepared to be underwhelmed, but I was amazed at how underwhelming this was as a drink.

I’m not passing final judgement yet – I’ll give it a few more chances – since I have a full bottle fo the stuff now that I paid $50 for. I might actually try it in a martini style drink, with some actual vermouth, and see what that’s like.

And in another topic, yesterday while chopping salad ingredients for lunch, I inflicted a small accidental cut on my thumb. I swear, I really like these new knives I bought a while back, but I’ve been cutting myself with them semi-regularly. I’m sure I never cut myself anywhere near this much with my old kitchen knives that had trouble maintaining a sharp edge.

I see it said often that “a sharp knife is safer than a dull one”, but honestly it seems in my experience that’s simply not true. I’m positive I’ve cut myself significantly more frequently with these lovely sharp knives. It’s not like I’m a knife novice either – I cook nearly every night and have been using knives almost daily for decades. I do get the the sharp knives are nicer to use – I really love them, but dang, they love nicking my fingers.

I’ve set up a new Irregular Webcomic! poll question to explore other people’s experience with sharp and dull knives…

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 8

My throat is improving again. Today I was able to swallow almost freely, although it’s still a bit painful to chew food. I did sleep without needing any painkillers, so that was good. Basically, things are looking up and hopefully will be back to normal soon.

I spent some time today doing boring stuff like going through spreadsheets of financial stuff for tax, and filling out a job application form for a position as a casual tutor at the University of Technology, Sydney, for the job that my contact offered me a while ago.

Normally we go out for dinner on a Friday evening, and also tonight was supposed to be fortnightly board games night, but with the COVID lockdown in Sydney restaurants are all closed and our games night has been converted to virtual. So we ordered Indian food to take-away from a favourite local restaurant. I went to pick it up, and although they couldn’t have seated customers, they were doing great business with take-away orders. When I arrived there, they had about a dozen bags waiting to be collected.

The first game we played tonight was Forgotten Waters, using an implementation on Tabletop Simulator. This is a pirate themed mostly cooperative board game with some light roleplaying components. Then we played some rounds of 7 Wonders, and ended up with some Sketchful.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 7

Good news today! My throat is noticeably less sore than it has been the past two days. I can eat more easily and have more mobility in my tongue. It’s still sore and a little painful to swallow, but definitely on the upswing now.

Also good news that I should have mentioned yesterday. The surgeon at the follow-up meeting confirmed that the biopsy of the tonsil-with-cyst he removed showed no malignant cells at all. So that’s excellent news, really.

The other good news was that I got back into online ethics classes today, teaching a new class at 5pm my time, which is an hour later than the one I do on Fridays. I think this later time suits people in Asian and European time zones better, and the class was fully subscribed with 4 students just before I started. I’ve restricted enrolments to a fairly small number as the one time I had 5 students in a class it was difficult to let all of them speak about every question.

Today we discussed media bubbles, going through some short story scenarios to explain the concept and how it arises, and what effects it might have if people only ever see news stories or opinion pieces that align with what they already think. The kids were pretty unanimous that this was a bad thing, but they disagreed on what should be done about it. One kid was adamant that websites and media companies should be allowed to publish what they wanted, and that it was up to individuals to recognise media bubbles and seek out different opinions, while another kid said that the companies should be forced to provide balanced coverage because you can’t trust people to go looking for news stories they might not want to see.

My voice is still a bit croaky, but I managed to last the 45 minute class. That’s a big improvement since yesterday too, when I could barely talk at all. Hopefully tomorrow will be even better!

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 6

I woke up this morning and felt like my throat hadn’t gotten any better, as I struggled to swallow my breakfast. But I had an appointment with the surgeon for a follow-up examination in the morning. He took a look and said everything looked as expected. He said that the pain from a tonsillectomy usually peaks around day 5 or 6 and then begins to fall off after that. Given today was day 6, that was good news!

And this evening, after having dinner, I feel like it is actually less painful than this morning. I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking or really happening, but I’ll take it either way. Here’s hoping it feels even better tomorrow.

There’s not much else to report since we’re a few days into COVID lockdown still, and it was rainy again today, so there’s no real reason to go out. Except to pick up Scully from doggie daycare this afternoon, after my wife popped her in at lunchtime for a few hours.

In between I mostly worked on a Secret Project, so there’s not much I can say about that either…

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 5

The recovery from tonsil surgery proceeds slowly. The pain may have been even worse early in the day as it was really hard to eat breakfast and lunch, but this evening I feel like it’s slightly better again. Let’s see what it’s like tomorrow. I have a follow-up appointment with the surgeon tomorrow morning to check on progress of the healing, so he’ll let me know what’s normal at this stage.

It rained today more than yesterday, which meant Scully was cooped up at home again. Except I took her out to the dog park this afternoon in what I hoped would be a break in the rain. It held off for a few minutes, but by the time we’d completed a short walk it started up again. Here’s a photo of the sky during the brief non-rainy period:

Rain clouds over Sydney

I did some work today on ISO standards, following up from the recent meeting. I have a bunch of ballots to go through, voting and recommending options to others on the Australian committee. And I did some comic stuff as well.

I cancelled my online ethics classes last Friday and yesterday (Monday) so I could recover from the tonsil surgery. My next class is on Thursday, but I’m wondering if I’ll be able to do it, as today my voice started going thin and croaky, and it was hurting a bit to talk. If I can’t talk properly by Thursday I’ll have to cancel more classes.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 4

I slept reasonably well last night, perhaps thanks to the painkillers I took before bed. So I felt a bit more rested and alert today than I have the past two days.

However it’s Monday, and my wife was back at work – only she had to work from home because of the current COVID lockdown here in Sydney. She had equipment here from previous work-at-home stints, but when plugged in her phone/switchboard didn’t work, and it took her until 4:30pm wrestling with tech support via her own personal phone before it started working. And meanwhile the whole day she was getting voicemail messages delivered via email, because she couldn’t answer the phone and so everyone was leaving messages. So it all kind of piled up and was generally unpleasant.

Add to this that Scully got bored being stuck indoors, and it was wet and rainy outside, and I didn’t feel well enough to go on a walk, and the three of us were stuck indoors together trying to do stuff and interrupting one another… it wasn’t a particularly fun day.

Eventually I took Scully out late in the afternoon and she of course got wet and covered in grass. I had to wash her paws off in the bathroom sink.

My throat seems perhaps a bit more painful than yesterday. I had real trouble eating anything today. I made risotto for dinner because it’s nice and soft, and it still took me about twice as long as normal to eat it, wincing down every mouthful.

I don’t really mean to complain, but I’m pretty over this now and want to go back to being able to eat and chew properly and move my tongue around without it hurting so much. More ice cream tonight!!

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 3

Last night before bed I had some of the super painkiller tablets the hospital gave me, and they definitely helped me sleep better. I slept in a little late this morning. Although the sleep was better, it was still interrupted a bit by a phlegmy throat and coughing.

Today began feeling similar to yesterday, but I think I’ve improved a little over the day. Yesterday afternoon I was really worn out, but today I think I felt a little better – although definitely not back to normal. Although I was hungry at lunch time, I didn’t really feel like eating because of the painful swallowing. I forced down a couple of small grilled cheese sandwiches.

For dinner tonight I made fried rice with broccoli, carrot, onion, ginger, and cashews. Normally I put chilli in, but I’m staying off the spicy food until my throat feels better.

COVID-wise, Sydney had 20 new cases today. Most of those were not already in isolation as close contacts, so it seems to be spreading through the community still. The hope is that contact tracing will see those un-isolated cases dwindle down to zero within the next week, thus confining the virus to people in quarantine, and then we can start thinking about lifting the lockdown.

At some point I need to go buy some groceries, but the news has been showing a lot of crowded supermarkets with people in the throes of panic buying. I’m hoping on Monday morning when people start doing work stuff that the supermarkets will be a bit more normal and I can go in and get milk and stuff without battling hordes of people.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 2

Today wasn’t as good as yesterday. I didn’t sleep very well again, although better than the previous night, I think. In the morning I felt okay, and I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully before lunch. But by the time we got home I was feeling very tired and worn out, and was walking very slowly.

I’ve been feeling fatigued all afternoon. I didn’t really feel like eating at lunch time, but I forced down some toast about 3pm, which was difficult as it’s becoming more painful to swallow food.

I’m going to take it easy and basically lie on the sofa and watch TV for a bit.

Oh, the other big news is Sydney is in full COVID lockdown again, as of earlier this evening. The latest outbreak has reached 82 cases, and the whole city, plus the immediately surrounding areas are now in lockdown for two weeks (at least). No leaving home except for (1) essential work or education that can’t be done from home, (2) medical reasons, (3) shopping for necessary supplies, or (4) 2 hours a day of exercise, within your local council region.

Hopefully this will get the outbreak under control. Although I’ve had one AstraZeneca vaccine shot, I need to wait 12 weeks – until September – for my second. My wife is booked in for a Pfizer vaccine in a couple of weeks, and she can have her second dose just 3 weeks later, so she’s going to beat me to full vaccination.

New content today: