dangermouse.net – Page 28 – David Morgan-Mar

Last will and testament

I did a very grown up thing today: I saw a lawyer and signed my will! My wife and I decided recently that we should probably draw up wills, so we can figure out who we want to leave stuff to in the event that something happens to either one or both of us. We also did powers of attorney, which grants nominated people the authority to handle our legal and financial stuff if we’re incapacitated.

First thing this morning I did a favour for our neighbour by taking their dog out. The husband had had surgery recently on his foot and his wife had gone out very early for a family thing, so they asked me to take their dog out for a morning walk. Fortunately their dog gets along very well with Scully, so it was easy enough.

Apart from those things, my day was very routine, with six ethics classes, making some vege burgers for dinner, and not much time for much else.

New content today:

Full on comics writing

Today I mostly dedicated to bashing out a bunch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts, hopefully to do some photographing tomorrow in time for Monday’s update. I got several done, but still want to do another few for the batch.

Before that I did my 5k run. It was really tough going today. I chose the more hilly route, and it was also hotter and more humid than yesterday, so I ended up quite a bit slower.

I baked some sourdough and made fried rice for dinner. And did some ethics classes in the evening. Not that exciting for a Sunday, I’m afraid.

New content today:

Anniversary dinner and Arcs

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, so my wife and I had a special dinner out at one of our favourite (albeit expensive) places, The Bathers’ Pavilion at Balmoral Beach. Firstly, the view from the dinning room is wonderful.

We were there before sunset and so got to watch the beach and water as night fell. We started with some potato scallops, battered, sprinkled with wakame and topped with a vinegar mayo.

My appetiser was kingfish with rhubarb and pink peppercorns.

My wife had a vegetarian appetiser of wood ear mushrooms with witlof, blackberries, and black garlic. I tried a small bite and this was truly delicious.

My main was duck cooked two ways, a sliced breast fillet and duck sausages.

My wife had roasted cauliflower and kale, with…. I’m not sure what the orange bits or the sauce are.

For dessert we shared this chocolate, passionfruit, and caramel construction.

It was an indulgent and delicious dinner. We drove home and picked up Scully from our neighbours who had minded her while we were out.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning, followed by housecleaning: vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and shower, emptying (water) and refilling (crystals) the damp absorbers.

Then after lunch we went out to a fabric showroom to choose new fabric for the upholstery on our dining chairs. These chairs are 25 years old and the seats are getting worn and the foam padding is squashed and flat, so we decided to get them reupholstered. I got a quote from a company during the week, and they said we should go to this showroom to choose a fabric, and let them know what it is so they can order it wholesale for us.

The showroom was in Glebe, so after picking a fabric we walked over to Glebe Point Road to get coffee (for my wife) and snacks from a cafe. Then we headed back home.

This afternoon we tried a 2-player game of Arcs. It’s only the second time I’ve payed, after the 4-player one we did at games night a few weeks ago, and I was teaching my wife to play. So it was fairly instructional and strategy-free. (My wife won, but it was only a learning game!)

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Noises in the night…

I was woken by a weird noise just before 3:30 this morning. At first I thought Scully was being sick, so I jumped out of bed. But she was fast asleep still.

The noise sounded like a wet wheezing, like a sort of cross between a small animal and a squeeze bottle half full of water was being squeezed repeatedly to force the air out. It was so loud that I was sure it was in our bedroom and I turned on the light thinking it must be some sort of animal. I thought it was coming from under the bed. I was prepared to have to deal with a mouse or rat or something. But I searched and couldn’t find anything, until I finally realised the noise might have been coming from outside. I confirmed this by opening the window and the sound was much louder and from that direction. And then it died away.

I’m guessing it was the death rattle of a possum or a big bird that maybe a cat had caught. I’m not sure what else it could have been. But the upshot was I was now wide awake and had trouble getting back to sleep, so it wasn’t a very restful night.

This morning I taught two ethics classes, and then prepared to go into the University of Technology Sydney for the last tutorial lesson of the year on image processing. The students have their final assessment projects due tomorrow. So next week I’ll be marking those.

Because it’s Halloween, I thought there might be some students, at least, dressed up for the occasion at the university, being a trendy sort of place where young people do fun things. But of the thousands of students I saw, not a single one had anything. I didn’t seen a single indication anywhere that it’s Halloween. No costumes, no decorations. I know it’s nowhere near as big here as in the USA, but I was honestly a little surprised.

And in other news, I have signed up to Bluesky, which I am hoping will be a better replacement for Twitter for me than Mastodon turned out to be. If you’re interested, you can follow me here: @dmmaus.bsky.social.

The problem I found with Mastodon was that I picked a server that matched one of my interests, namely tabletop roleplaying games, but then the way the system works, my posts get shown to everyone who is also on the same server, and they all expect everyone to talk mainly about games all the time. So I felt stifled in my ability to just post random shower thoughts and wry observations, as I did back on Twitter. I could probably move to a less specialised and more social server, but it looks like Bluesky is much closer to what I hoped a Twitter replacement would be. I’ll stay on Mastodon, but I’m sure to post much more frequently on Bluesky, I think.

New content today:

Trying new pies

This morning I had some Magic cards to send off to eBay buyers. Two packages, plus one person with a local pickup option. The buyer turned out to live in the block of flat immediately next door to one of my friends. This is in Newtown, home of The Pie Tin, one of my favourite pie shops, but one which I don’t get to visit often because it’s tricky to get to. But I can use my friend’s car parking spot if he’s home! So that’s what I arranged to do.

I parked there, met the eBay buyer and gave him the cards, and then took Scully over to The Pie Tin and had an early lunch. I decided to try some new things. They had a pan-fried chicken pie with vegetables, and a tuna mornay pie. I got one of each and went with Scully to a nearby park to sit and eat. They were both really good.

Once back home I went up to the post office to send the other two packages of cards. Then my wife contacted me and asked about dinner, and I realised I should have bought eggs! So I walked up to the shops again and got some eggs, to make quiche for dinner tonight, before my ethics classes.

In the afternoon I had a visit from a guy from a place that does blinds and other window accessories. Our window blinds are aging and in need of replacement, so we booked someone to come measure up the windows and give us a quote for new blinds. I was honestly expecting him to measure them with a tape measure, but he used a laser gadget. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but there you go.

New content today:

Chinese Lebanese pizza

My back is much better today. So much so that when my wife got home I went out for a run. I took it a bit easy and only did 2.5 km, instead of my usual 5k. But it went well and I’m very happy that this episode of back pain has healed up quickly.

For lunch today I took Scully for a bit of a drive a couple of suburbs away to try a new place. I actually wanted to go visit the bottle shop to restock on some liquor, and chose a place to eat nearby. It was a Lebanese bakery, which made Lebanese style pizzas and pides and stuff. It was called Cedar Dough Lebanese Bakery, and the sign outside had the cedar tree of Lebanon on it, overlaid with Arabic text. Very authentically Lebanese. And when I went in to order something, the woman behind the counter was Chinese. Not exactly what I expected, but she was friendly and took my order for a folded pizza stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, and olives. I ate it sitting at the table outside with Scully, and it was pretty good.

In the morning before that I wrote up my next ethics lesson plan, on the topic of Hobbies. Tonight I had the first class. it went pretty well, except for one question, which I think I might have to excise from the class.

I asked: Are there any hobbies that could be harmful or raise ethical issues?
I expected: things like hunting, or trail bike riding.
I got: stealing things, committing crimes, bullying people.
In hindsight I’m glad no kid said serial killing…

New content today:

Final witchcraft Monday

I slept much better last night as my sore back felt better, and it continues to improve today.

I had my last 6 classes of the Halloween topic in my ethics class: Witch Hunts. it’s actually a fairly complex topic for some of the younger kids, and in one class today I had to take it quite slowly, but I think it was successful.

In one class, a kid was wearing a Star Wars shirt. I said cool, and asked him which movie was his favourite. He said, “Oh, I haven’t seen any of the movies. I just play the video games.” 😱

I just finished my last class at 10pm… so I’ll keep this short and go watch some TV before bed.

New content today:

Sore back recovery

I slept poorly, because I was trying hard not to injure my back more during the night as I rolled over in bed. I think I got about two hours sleep before waking to roll over and deciding to get up and stretch out and walk off the stiffness and pain. I put an ice pack on and did stretches before getting back into bed. Then I only kind of half-dozed for a few more hours without really falling asleep, and got up again to do more ice and stretching. I spent about an hour doing that before returning to bed again around 5:30am, and half-dozed again without moving.

But it helped! I was tired, but my back survived the night without getting much worse. During today I continued the ice and stretches, and we went on a big walk with Scully which gave it some natural movement. And this evening it feels a lot better. I can tell it’s still a bit tender and stiff, but it’s not painful at all. I think experience with this issue means I know how to attack it quickly and effectively to reduce how serious it is. Hopefully by tomorrow it’ll be close to normal again.

Mostly today I worked on comics. I did a Darths & Droids strip, and also photographed and assembled a week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! to cover the upcoming week. I’d intended to do a full batch of several weeks worth, but abandoned that when I hurt my back yesterday.

New content today:

Online games and a sore back

On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes about the Witch Hunt topic. I’m also asking the kids about their Halloween plans and the differences are interesting. Most of the kids not in the US/Canada don’t really have any big plans. Most of the ones there do, but not all – there were a couple of immigrants who don’t do anything, and one kid said he didn’t do anything for Halloween because it was his mother’s birthday.

I joined in online board games early in the evening because my wife and I decided not to go out for dinner. I just made some pasta at home, which gave me ore time to play games with friends. We played some Jump Drive, and one guy won all three games handily, which was okay as he doesn’t normally win that game, so he was pretty chuffed.

Then inspired by the upcoming US election, we tried Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game as a bit of fun. It’s actually an interesting abstract strategy game and I thought it was fine, but I think you’d need to play it a bit to get the strategy. Then we played Draftosaurus, which I won, and Vaalbara, which I never win because I haven’t figured out the strategy yet. We finished with a classic, Settlers of Catan, which we hadn’t played for ages. That game took a while, but I managed to win that one, so had a pretty successful night overall.

This morning I got up and had breakfast while my wife and Scully slept in. I planned to go out for a 5k run, but when I went into the bedroom to wake my wife up I bent over and hurt my lower back. I’ve done this a few times before and knew the horrible feeling when the muscles spasm and the pain shoots through the nerves. I quickly went and laid down on my front to calm the muscles down, and my wife got me an ice pack. I felt okay after a bit, but when I moved to try to stand up I could feel that it was going to be tough doing it without overwhelming pain. So I had to take it very slowly and struggled up after several minutes of tiny shifts.

Once standing, I could walk around and do some very gentle stretches to loosen up. The main problem is doing anything that might cause the muscles to spasm again, so I had to be super careful, all day. We’d planned to got out driving for the day, but had to nix that as I didn’t want to risk folding up in the car. I basically spent the day walking around slowly to relax and stretch the muscles and just avoid anything risky. Which made it hard to get much done in terms of things like writing comics or whatever that I’d wanted to do.

We went for a few short walks with Scully. Walking is the one thing I could do that works to help the muscles calm down and recover. For dinner we decided to go up the street to a local Szechaun place that we like, but where we haven’t been for a long time. I tried the sweet and sour pork for the first time (I usually get chilli prawns), and it was very good.

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Back to the university

After two more Halloween special ethics classes this morning, I had some lunch (leftover Moroccan chick peas and rice from last night) and then went into the city to the university for the second last tutorial of the semester. The students are now working on their final assessment tasks and I’m there to assist and answer questions or provide suggestions and tips. It was a pretty busy session, as many students had questions arising from the first assessment report, which they just got their marks back from. Some of the teams are well advanced and looking good for their final reports, while others are a bit behind and trying to catch up on work. Hopefully the final reports I have to mark will be high quality!

Tonight I have two more classes online. Because we’re now into daylight saving time, they’re an hour later for me and I don’t finish until 10pm. In between I’m doing Japanese on Duolingo and watching Italian YouTube videos to practice my comprehension.

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