dangermouse.net – Page 5 – David Morgan-Mar

Coldest day of the year so far

It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.

I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.

This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.

The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.

Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶

A decadent dinner out on a school night!

Today I spent most of the day marking university assessments for the Data Engineering course. I started a few days ago and wanted to finish it off today. I had a report to read through and then three presentation videos to watch and assign marks for. It took much of the day.

I had a break at lunch to take Scully out. I didn’t mention that last Friday I went for an annual checkup to the optometrist, and I got a new prescription for glasses to wear while using a computer screen. I left one pair of glasses there to get new lenses made, and they said this morning they were ready to pick up. But when I got there and tried them on, it we immediately clear that they’d been made for book reading distance, not computer screen distance. They checked and sure enough the wrong prescription had been used. So I had to leave the glasses there and take my second pair back home again. I’d intended to swap them and have the prescription updated in the second pair as well. Oh well.

I grabbed some sushi rolls for lunch and sat with Scully in the nearby park while I ate.

In the afternoon I realised we didn’t have enough fresh vegetables at home to really cook anything interesting. So I took Scully out for another walk and we went to the local neighbourhood supermarket. On the way we walked past this vacant lot, where a house was standing just a week or two ago:

They demolished and removed that sucker really quickly! Presumably a new, more modern house will be built there soon. It’s a nice bit of land, on the top of a hill with a view south towards the city. The centre of Sydney is just out of sight behind the other house to the left, but you’d have a good view of it from a rear balcony on a house on this block.

I bought mushrooms from the supermarket, but when my wife got home this evening, I was feeling a bit uninspired to cook anything and I suggested we do something wild, that we never normally do: eat out on a mid-week night! I suggested we drive over to our favourite French crêpe and galette place. She liked the sound of that, so we hustled over there. Being a Tuesday night, it was nice and quiet. I had a “terre et mer” galette, with chorizo, garlic prawns, cheese, and cherry tomatoes:

With a traditional cup of French cider. It was delicious, and felt really decadent, having a fancy restaurant meal on a weeknight. We also shared a salted caramel sauce crêpe for dessert, which was also great.

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!

Starting on marking assignments

This morning I did another 5k run. But after yesterday’s fast effort I took it easier and also my muscles hadn’t fully recovered, so I ended up being quite a lot slower. Never mind, the important thing is to do the exercise, not to be great at it.

I started work on marking the student assessment reports for Data Engineering. I need to get written reports and video presentations marked this week, so used my Sunday to get started. I only got one marked before my ethics classes in the afternoon, but at least I’ve started.

Not much else to talk about today – I didn’t go anywhere.

Incognito Art

Friday I had my regular ethics classes, and in the evening board games night with my friends. We assembled at one guy’s place, and the five attendees played games such as Knarr, Faraway, Landmarks. Knarr was new to me, and really enjoyable. But we only played once as it’s only up to four players and our fifth arrived partway through the first game. We played Landmarks I think four times, since we were all keen to give a go at being the clue giver in the game. It’s a frustrating role, but in a socially fun way.

Today I did my 5k run and I managed to record my third best time! 26:26. My second best is 26:24, just two seconds faster. The best is a strangely anomalous 25:59, which I set on a much flatter route that I’ve only ever tried once. And to be honest I’m wondering if the tracker GPS got the distance right. Perhaps I should try that route again some time.

This afternoon my wife and I took Scully for a ride on the ferry.

We headed into the city. The day was cool and cloudy.

From the ferry terminal at Circular Quay we walked up past the State Library, through The Domain (a park) to the Art Gallery. Nearby is a gate into the Royal Botanic Gardens, where there was an art exhibition on at the Garden Gallery: the Incognito Art Show (which I mentioned previously). My wife had submitted three pieces for the show and wanted to see what else was available, and if any of hers might be on display at the moment. They weren’t, but they probably will be at some point over the next month or so that the artworks are on sale.

We stopped afterwards at the nearby restaurant in the Domain to have a drink and a snack before heading home. We walked back and had a quick look around The Rocks while waiting for our ferry. Then we hopped on the ferry and headed home.

The sun had come out and was just setting as we travelled back.

A nice day out, but after that run in the morning and all the walking, I’m pretty exhausted!

Eclipse, by Moon Phase

Today was really chilly. Overcast, but no rain, a bit windy, and it really felt like winter is here.

After my morning ethics classes I took Scully for a walk and we went up to Moon Phase, the Korean patisserie. I’d had a sandwich at home and was on the prowl for something sweet, and they had a new special pastry today. I give you, Eclipse:

It’s a crisp flaky pastry shell, filled with yuzu curd (a little bit visible below the meringue), small cubes of yuzu jelly, on top of a very crunchy almond layer which was kind of halfway between a cookie and almond brittle. The whole thing topped with soft meringue and various garnishing bits. It was really nice. I like lemon meringue tarts as a matter of course, and this was just elevated to a whole new level. The bakers there really are something special.

One of my friends is currently in Vilnius in Lithuania. He’s flown there with two friends to follow the tour of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band from Melbourne who are touring eastern Europe. He arrived yesterday and today was the only day of their ten-day trip on which they will not be attending a concert by the band – and he said he and his friends ran into the band while walking around Vilnius, and had a chat with them!

And in minor website news, I cleaned up the sidebar on the left ⬅️, removing some out of date links and adding my Bluesky account, and updated the full index page as well.

Discovering a new beach

This morning my wife took Scully to work, which meant I had an entire morning to do whatever I wanted. I dithered a bit, trying to thin of something interesting, and ended up deciding I should probably take the chance to do a 5k run for my fitness.

I completed that by 10:30, with warm-up and warm-down stretches, and having a shower and so on. Then I looked again at the problem of finding something interesting and fun to do. I browsed around on Google Maps and discovered a tiny beach hidden in a corner of the harbour that I’d never noticed before. It’s called Hayes Street Beach (here on Google Maps), on a small bay in Sydney Harbour. It’s accessed through a tunnel between buildings, and is completely surrounded by nearby houses and shops.

Here’s a panorama of the entire beach:

And a shot of one end, which makes it easier to see the Harbour Bridge in the distance over the peninsula towards the right side.

The green building at the right houses a few shops, most of which were closed, but there was one open cafe named Thelma & Louise (after the movie) where I had lunch:

It was very expensive and the food was only average, so overall it was on the disappointing side. I also walked around the streets in this area a little, admiring some of the old houses and their architecture. Here’s a good example of the Federation Queen Anne style.

I picked up Scully from my wife’s work after lunch and spent the afternoon doing comics stuff, before three ethics classes this evening. The Names topic seems to be a good one, with plenty of spirited discussion and differences of opinion among the kids about what sort of names are appropriate or not for parents to give to children.

A new type of roasted cauliflower

Tuesday is my relatively easy weekday, where I mostly work on my new ethics class for the week. This weeks new topic is “Names”, and I have plenty of questions about the importance of people’s names, meanings of them, how people choose names for children, and what sort of names are appropriate or inappropriate.

At lunch time I took Scully for a long walk down the Greenwich peninsula. There are a few decent views of the city along the way.

The day was cold and very windy. The maximum temperature was 18.5°C, but for most of the day the wind pushed the “feels like” temperature below 10°C. It’s certainly the coldest feeling day so far this year. But blissfully the humidity dropped below 50%, for the first time in ages. Despite the cold, I had all the windows wide open to get some of that lovely dry air inside.

For dinner tonight I had a cauliflower and wanted to do something new with it. I searched for roasted cauliflower recipes with nuts, since I wanted to add some nuts for crunchy texture. I found this recipe for za’atar roasted cauliflower with dates and pine nuts. Glancing through the ingredients, the only thing I was missing (after checking the linked recipe for home made za’atar) was fresh thyme!

So I took Scully out for another walk about 4:30, just before the sun went down, to get some thyme from the neighbourhood grocery store. I can’t remember ever having cooked with thyme before—it’s a herb mostly used with meats, which I don’t cook. I told my friends in our Discord chat that I was cooking with thyme for possibly the first time in my life, and one said, “You could have said that you’ve never bought a potato before and I’d be similarly surprised.” Interestingly, I smelled the thyme, to get a sensory impression of it, and the smell reminded me of… za’atar! I’ve eaten a lot of za’atar with bread and oil—it’s a common accompaniment to bread at restaurants here. And it has this distinctive aroma, which I now know is from the thyme that is a primary ingredient in za’atar.

I altered the recipe slightly, substituting crunchy roasted almonds for the pine nuts (though I had pine nuts) because I wanted more crunch in the final dish. And I made a lemon tahini dressing to drizzle over the top.

It turned out really delicious! Another one to add to the repertoire.

Free trains into the city for book buying

Today I went back to my four online ethics classes in the morning (well, one starting at midday directly after an 11am). This had been interrupted for the past several weeks by my university teaching on Monday afternoon, which meant I had to move one or two classes to Tuesday instead. But now the semester has ended I’ve got them all back on Monday. Which meant some students could return; ones who couldn’t make the replacement Tuesday classes.

After those I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. I would have just caught the train back home, but today was a fare-free day on the trains. The New South Wales State Government announced it as a compensation for multiple train service interruptions last week caused by the bad weather. So I took advantage of this and caught a train into the city instead, to check out some book and game shops.

I planned to visit several of my favourite shops, but unfortunately a rain front was approaching and I realised I could be caught in the rain on the way home, without an umbrella, and carrying books, if I didn’t hurry. So I restricted myself to one book shop and game shop, and raced abck home. I bought one book: Raina Telgemeier’s Guts, the third of her graphic novels, and the only one so far I hadn’t bought. I realised this after I recently got her most recent work—The Cartoonist’s Club—a few weeks ago.

I had a very quick browse of the game shop, and dithered over buying a copy of the Pendragon roleplaying game book, but decided not to. Then I raced home. It was just starting to rain as I got off the train and sprinted home with my book (in a non-waterproof paper bag!). I made it without getting too wet, and the book didn’t get wet, so that was good.

Now I have another book in my to-read queue! 😃

Images of autumn

It’s late autumn here in Sydney. In fact it’s almost winter. But the deciduous trees are only just starting to change colour and lose their leaves. Most of the trees here are evergreen, so it’s only in tiny pockets that we see any colour or leaves falling. But I took some photos to show them off.

London plane trees, which just go a kind of dull brown:

Liquidambars, which are one of my favourites because of the bright red colour:

I don’t know what sort of tree this one is:

Today was also dry, but cloudy unlike yesterday’s sunshine. I did a 5k run, and cleaned the house, and baked some sourdough bread. Nothing really out of the ordinary.