I concentrated today on getting ahead in Darths & Droids writing and strip production.
That meant I didn’t do a lot else, except take Scully for a couple of walks and make sourdough. And fried rice for dinner.
It was very cold, but the rain held off in the daylight hours. I think we are likely to get more overnight.
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Sometimes I think the weather is all I talk about here. I suppose it’s something that can be different every day, whereas some days what I actually do is just routine, without anything especially unusual or interesting. Anyway, yeah, the predicted cold and wet spell has well and truly begun. it wasn’t actually raining all day and we had a few bursts of sunshine, but it was pretty cold.
I walked Scully up to the pie shop for lunch. Normally I sit in the nearby park and eat Scully roam around a bit while I eat, but today she headed off towards the path home and wouldn’t come back. Clearly she’d had enough of the cold weather! So we walked back and I ate while we walked.
I have 6 ethics classes today, but several of them were low in numbers, because a lot of the kids are taking summer breaks in the northern hemisphere. And the morning classes are mostly US kids, and several of those have things going on this week with the 4th of July coming up. So some classes where I normally have 3 or 4 kids were down to one student.
Stage 20 of the Lego D&D set! his adds a rear wall to the first floor, and a rustic staircase that leads up to another floor above.
Hidden under the stairs is a spider!
And a rear view, showing an upper level door. I’m not sure yet why it makes sense to have a door here. Maybe it connects with the upper level of the castle section previously built.
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Today was really cold. The temperature barely reached 14°C, after yesterday’s 20°C. And it rained a fair bit overnight, and then sprinkled fitfully throughout the day. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us that this is a strong cold front, running into a blocking high pressure system that will stall it over the continent again, producing nearly identical conditions to when we had 13 straight days of rain back in May. The published forecast for the next week is heavy rain every day, and colder temperatures after the past week of slightly more mild conditions. So it’s going to be pretty awful.
I basically stayed in and tried to stay warm today. Except for taking Scully for a short walk around lunch time. (My wife took her for another just before dinner time.)
My legs stiffened up a bit after yesterday’s 5k run, following two weeks of not running. I need to try to get back into a routine of running at least once or twice a week, but it may be difficult in the coming week with the weather. It was really too cold and miserable today to even consider going for a run.
Here’s stage 19 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set that I’m still building. This is the first floor of the tower that I built the ground floor of over the past few updates.
The hole in the floor is where the staircase from the ground floor rises up and leads to this floor, when the two floors are assembled together. There’s also a… trap door!
You can see the trap door open on the left of that weird orb thing on the altar.
And in other news I booked our hotel in Tokyo for our trip to Japan in February. We passed the info on to my wife’s mother and sister, and they’ve booked into the same hotel.
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Friday night was Dungeons & Dragons night! During the day I had my usual ethics classes, and in between I prepared by cleaning up the house. It needed a thorough vacuum, and cleaning the bathroom, so that took a bit of time. I also did some last minute prep work for the game, running through the adventure quickly and printing out some new character sheets for characters who had levelled up since last time.
We had a new player join us, an old friend of mine who I played with many years ago. She was the player of the original Alvissa in the fantasy game that I based Irregular Webcomic! on, and also Paris in the science fiction game that I based that them on. One of my other regular players was Draak and Spanners, and it was the first time the two players had seen each other for a few years, so that was a nice reunion.
Our new player rolled up a character using random rolls, and decided to be a magic-user. Notgandalf the usual magic-user wasn’t present (because his player is on an overseas trip), so extra spellpower was useful. They started a new adventure, investigating an old temple hidden behind a waterfall, dedicated to an old god of swords. They didn’t get very far into it, spending a lot of time dealing with some interesting traps, some serpent people, and a nasty gelatinous cube.
Today my wife got up early because she had a special Open Day event at her work, and had to be there to set up by 8am. I spent the morning working on a report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography meeting that I attended. I need to do one of these for each international meeting, before our follow-up Australian meeting, which is scheduled for this coming Friday.
At lunch timeI walked up to my wife’s work with Scully to meet her there. They had a sausage sizzle going, and I had a sausage sandwich as part of lunch. They also had people baking fresh scones, served with jam and cream, and we got a pair of those to eat as well together after my wife had finished her shift.
Then we walked from there up to Cammeray so she could get a coffee. I grabbed another small snack from Maggio’s Italian bakery to complete a piecemeal lunch. And then from there we walked home. Bu the time we got home, Scully and I had covered 6 km of walking.
After we walked all the way home, I rested for a bit before heading out for a 5k run. It’s the first run I’ve done in 2 weeks, since last weekend was so wet and cold and miserable. I took it a bit easy. But I overtook a man and woman jogging together on one street in the same direction as me. Then when I was doing the loop around the end of the peninsula, I passed them again, going the opposite away around the loop. And then coming back from the peninsula, I overtook them again. They must have taken a shorter route around the loop, because I was definitely running faster than them, but they got ahead of me somehow. And then I turned off the ain street into some backstreets that zig and zag a bit, and when I was further along, they appeared from another side street and I overtook them for a fourth time! By now they were laughing and chatting to me as I went past, and I exchanged a few friendly words, saying that I was nearly finished my 5k for the day.
This evening my wife and I went up to the local shops for dinner at an Indian restaurant. I also dropped off a couple of D&D 5e adventure books that I’m never going to use with some of the D&D players at Professor Plums. I’d organised to sell some at cheap prices to some of the other DMs there.
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I ticked off another overdue bit of housework today: cleaning out the fridge. I took an hour or so to remove everything from the shelves and trays and door compartments. I removed the glass shelves and washed them clean with detergent, dried them, and put them back in. Cleaned out the vegetable crisper drawer of all the little bits of old vegetables that had accumulated. And wiped down every other surface until the whole thing is as new. I did it in stages, moving things around inside the fridge so that I didn’t have to leave cold things out on the bench for an hour. There was just enough room. I had to do it just before a weekly grocery shop, because if I tried to do it tomorrow after shopping there would have been too much stuff in there.
Not much else to report for today. The rest of it was pretty much the usual old stuff. Ethics classes in the morning and evening. Walking Scully at lunch time. Made a sourdough loaf.
Oh, I did work a little on my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, preparing for tomorrow night’s game. I added up all the treasure from last session, assigned shares and experience points, and determined that the two dwarves in the party and the cleric retainer all levelled up. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s game!
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We’ve been having trouble with the deadlatch on our front door for a while. Normally you can turn the lock on the inside and have it hold in the open position so that you can then use the same hand to open the door handle and open the door. But for a while now it’s been slipping from the hold-open position and relocking the latch, so you need a second hand free to hold the deadlatch open at the same time as opening the door handle. Meaning you can’t exit with anything in one hand.
I’ve been putting it off for a while, thinking I could try removing the deadlatch and seeing if there was anything I could adjust inside to enable the hold-open mechanism and stop it from slipping. Well, this morning I finally got the screwdriver out and removed the latch body from the back of the door. I looked inside and saw that the hold-open mechanism relied on a friction catch between a rotating plate and a surrounding fixed plate. It seems like the metal has worn away slightly with age. I’d been hoping I could just tighten a screw or something, but this looked like it had just worn out with usage.
So after having some lunch I went to the hardware store and bought a new deadlatch. This turned out to take some time, because it’s one of those items that isn’t on the general shelves, because it’s valuable or for security reasons or whatever. There’s just cards that you have to take to the service desk, where they give you the item.
Of course there was a huge queue at the service desk. Eventually I got to the front of the queue. I could see the deadlatches on a shelf behind the counter. I could have reached them, but the woman who served me was shortish, so she couldn’t reach them. I thought she’d use a stepladder, but no. She had to go get a powered lift – one with a stand-on lift platform on top of a moving vehicle thing. It was parked outside the service counter a few metres away. The queue of people waiting to be served was in the way, so she had to get other staff members to help her clear everyone to a different waiting area, so she could drive the lift through.
Then she tried to start the lift. It wouldn’t turn on. She called for some other staff to bring over another powered lift from elsewhere in the store… The whole time I’m thinking to myself if you just let me behind the counter I can reach up and grab the lock off the shelf myself.
Anyway, eventually I got the new deadlatch and took it home. Now, how difficult was it going to be to replace the old one? Well, I already knew how to remove the rear lock mechanism from the door-mounted plate, so I did that again. Then came the trickiest part…
Removing the new latch from the plastic clamshell case. I started using a screwdriver to kind of tear the plastic open, but slipped and sliced my finger. I got two slash cuts on the ring finger or my right hand, and had to go put iodine and a band-aid on it. I got my Stanley knife to teach the clamshell case a lesson and managed to extract the new latch without further injury.
I took the new latch rear assembly and stuck it on the existing door plate, screwed it in tight, and ta-da! The whole job was done in less than 5 minutes from getting the packaging open. Tested it and it works fine. I didn’t bother removing and replacing the front barrel, so we can still use our old keys to get in. The rear key barrel uses the new keys, but that’s okay. If it means saving $200+ labour cost on a locksmith doing the same (5 minute!) job, I’ll live with it.
I also did some cleaning up today. I have to get the place into shape for Friday night, when friends are coming over for our next Dungeons & Dragons session. And tonight started the “Prejudice” topic with three ethics classes.
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This morning I worked on a lesson plan for the coming week of ethics classes. This week’s topic will be “Prejudice”. I did this topic back in 2021, when I had almost entirely different students. I still have one student who was doing my class back then, so he’s done this topic before. But I figured I could reuse a bit of the material and revamp it with some new stuff to keep it fresh. So I mashed together the old lesson and some new scenarios and questions.
Then I did forward planning for future topics, adding one on “Psychic Policing”. This is inspired by Minority Report and similar ideas. If precognition was real and proven, should we arrest people before they commit crimes? I did a brief outline of some sample questions to post on my class’s upcoming topics list. I’ll write up the lesson in detail in a few weeks when it cycles to the top of the list.
This afternoon I struggled with writer’s block on some Darths & Droids scripts. I’m trying hard to get ahead, but sometimes a single joke takes 3 or 4 hours to write, and there’s just nothing you can do about it but knock your head against a wall.
For Scully’s lunchtime walk we went up the hill to the shops, because I needed to restock some medicinal products from the pharmacy. And we went on another walk with my wife when she got home from work. I considered going for a run, but by the time I could set out the sun was already going down and it would have been dark by the time I finished. Not to mention really cold. I guess I’ll have to leave running again until the weekend.
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I had four classes this morning, which ate up half the day. At lunch time I took Scully for a walk to get some fish & chips. We walked past the construction site of the new apartment complex that is being built and I was surprised to see that three giant cranes have sprung up over the weekend.
I also popped into the post office to get a box to pack an old unopened Lego set that I’d sold on eBay. It was a 1999 Star Wars X-wing set that I’d bought back then because it was on sale. I bought two of them and never bothered opening one of them. I checked recently, and unopened copies of this set sell for several hundred dollars! So I auctioned it off, and got $310 for it. So I had to get a packing box to mail it – to Switzerland! Back home I packed the set up with lots of bubble wrap. And then had to trek out to the post office again to send it.
In other news, we’re planning a trip to Tokyo next February, to coincide with one of my ISO Photography meetings. My wife wanted to go to Japan again, so she can do things while I’m in the meetings. And she invited her mother and sister to come too – they’ve never been to Japan before, so they were excited and we all booked tickets on the same flights.
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A while back I heard about a new Korean movie called Parasite, which was described as a horror movie, and was extremely well received and getting excellent reviews. I like horror movies, so this sounded good, and I made a mental note to check it out if I got the opportunity.
It arrived on Netflix a while back, and I had a look at the information page. Which described it as a comedy, and a story about a family who scam their way into living in the home of a wealthy family. This didn’t sound like a horror movie at all! So I ignored it for a bit.
But recently some other things pushed the film back into my consciousness, including a passing mention somewhere that described it as a thriller. Now my curiosity was up. I Googled “Parasite movie” and tried to avoid anything that would spoil too much of the plot. One of the top suggested searches was “Is Parasite a horror movie?” I clicked that, and some of the summarised hits on the search page were even more curious. It seems that some people do describe Parasite as a horror movie, while others don’t, and there is some confusion among people asking as to whether it is a horror movie or not.
Well, this was all intriguing enough that I decided to start watching the movie last night. I got a bit over half way through before it got too late, and plan to watch the second half tonight. So far…. well, it’s entertaining enough and in fact I would describe it as a comedy more than anything else. There’s certainly no horror or even thriller aspect at all yet. Now I am wondering if there’s some bizarre twist in the second half that will come out of left field that turns the whole movie so far into some sort of psychological horror.
I’m avoiding any spoilers now, but I’ll be watching the second half right after writing this, so I’ll soon know what the story is. I just find it really bizarre how all over the place are the attempts at genre classification for this film.
In other news, today was, again, cold and rainy. There was a break in the rain after lunch and I took Scully for a walk, but luckily took an umbrella because the heavens opened again while we were out. I now have two pairs of shoes and socks that are so wet that I don’t want to put them on again. And they’re taking forever to dry because of the humidity.
My wife was out for most of the day at a felt-making class. She came home with a felt scarf with interesting patterns all over it. I used the time to work on some more Darths & Droids, trying to get ahead on the writing.
And then had three more ethics classes this evening, on the topic of “The Countryside”. I was asking the kids about the differences between life in the countryside, compared to the city. Usual answers were things about less shops, less people, less pollution, more nature, etc. Tonight one kid was from Korea and he said in the city, after school you have to go to Math Camp, or if you’re an adult you have to go to your second or third job. But in the countryside there won’t be any after-school tutoring, and you might just have one job as a farmer!
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Saturday was not only bitterly cold but also very wet, with almost constant heavy rain all day. We took Scully for a walk after lunch when the rain stopped briefly, but by the time we got home we were wet enough to have to change our clothes, despite having ventured out with raincoats and umbrellas. We had to give Scully a towelling off and blow dry.
Yesterday was online games night, so I didn’t write up an entry for Friday. I did ethics classes, adding a new class at 10am, which had two students in it. For dinner we went out to a newish restaurant near us, on the ground floor of one of the new apartment towers that went up over the past few years, a place called Organica. We sat outside because Scully was with us, and it was pretty cold. I was rugged up in my warmest winter coat.
I had the crispy skinned porchetta, with maple beetroot mash, pearl couscous, and a raisin salsa. Not usually the sort of thing I go for, but it was marked as a specialty on the menu, and I thought why not? It was really delicious!
My wife had some gnocchi in a tomato sauce, which was richly spiced when I tried a bit. We were pretty happy with the meals and the venue, and plan to go back in the future. They are also a patisserie, and we got a chocolate cannoli to take home for my dessert. And that was delicious too.
There was one drawback to this dinner. Around 1am I woke up, feeling nauseated. I started feeling hot and sweaty, and waves of nausea rolled over my head. I felt close to throwing up, and had to get up and get dressed and go sit on the lounge with a bucket just in case. I’m pretty sure it was because of the fattiness of the meal, plus all the cream in the cannoli. I had my gall bladder removed many years ago, and I get spells of nausea like this a few hours after eating fatty meals as my body tries to digest it without the help of enough bile. But this one was the worst I’ve felt for a long time. I managed to avoid vomiting, but it took about half an hour for my stomach to settle enough for me to go back to bed. By this morning I felt fine.
Except for the cold weather. Yesterday was the solstice, and the end of the first three weeks of winter (by the Australian system). New reported that the first 21 days have been the coldest start to winter Sydney has experienced since 1989. And then today we had almost 60 mm of rain. Pretty miserable stuff.
I spent some time today working on new Darths & Droids comics. Also discussing story planning with my co-writers for Episode IX, which will be ramping up as we approach the end of Episode VIII.
For dinner I made a lentil dhal with rice and broccoli. I added some coconut powder to the dhal this time for a bit of a change of flavours, and it was really nice.
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