dangermouse.net – Page 85 – David Morgan-Mar

Post-lockdown family lunch

This being the first weekend after COVID lockdown restrictions have eased in Sydney, it was the first time since June that we’ve been able to visit family. My mother-in-law put on a small lunch for us, plus my wife’s sister and brother, and a nephew (the sister’s son). We drove over there, and it seemed everybody in Sydney had pretty much the same idea, to finally get out of the house and visit family, or possibly to go to the beach since it was a nice sunny day. Either way, everyone was on the road, and the traffic was the worst I have experienced, not just since lockdown began, but for many a year. It was really horrible.

But we had a nice lunch, with my mother-in-law preparing some grilled chicken, roast vegetables, and salad ingredients, which we had with bread rolls for an informal sort of meal – assembling sandwiches on our bread rolls. My sister-in-law brought a range of delicious tarts from a local bakery, which we shared by cutting them into bite sized pieces. And we all caught up on what we were all doing – I told them about the recent work I’ve been doing with Outschool classes and also the university teaching work. Oh, and Scully was super excited to see the other family members too for the first time in months.

We had to leave early, because now I have classes to teach from 5pm (normally we hang out later after lunch and end up getting home around 6pm or so). I had 2 ethics classes tonight, plus week 4 of the Creative Thinking and board game design class. We’ve converged and assembled some ideas for how the game works in a bit of detail. Now I have to put together a file with some game pieces and a board that the students can print out, plus a first draft of the game rules. I’ll upload it so they can download and print it, and try playing some games with their friends and family before the next class, in which we’ll refine the design.

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The big drive!

With the COVID lockdown in Sydney having eased the most severe restrictions this week, it means retail shops are open again. My wife was itching to get to a fabric shop to buy some more material for her doggie bandanas, so we took a drive out to one of the big fabric crafts shops. I dropped her there and took Scully with me over to the coast and my favourite pie shop, which I haven’t been able to go to for 4 months. It was also the first time I’ve seen the ocean in 4 months!!

I enjoyed some lunch and walked Scully around the park and beach for a bit.

It was very nice to be out and about! After lunch, we returned to pick up my wife. She’d bought a bunch of fabric which was on sale, and is now feverishly sewing…

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Saturday morning Friday catchup

On Friday night I went out for dinner with my wife and Scully – the first time we’ve been able to do this since June when Sydney’s COVID lockdown began. We drove out to a Thai restaurant in a small suburban cluster of about 5 shops – nice and isolated from any crowds. This restaurant is only about 100 metres outside the 5 kilometre radius from our home that we’ve been restricted to since June, making it the furthest we’ve travelled from home in that time.

The weather yesterday was spectacular. We had scudding thunderstorm cells crossing the city all day. We got intense bursts of heavy rain and lightning, separated by bright sunny skies.

During my wife’s work-from-home lunch break we took Scully for a walk It was raining heavily when we left, but within minutes it had brightened up as the storm passed, leaving blue sky overhead. This shot (above) is from Greenwich Wharf, where the wind was making the water choppy and it was a bit unpleasant exposed like this.

This is from a vantage point on a street along the walk back home. More clouds were rolling in already over the city.

And a wide shot from the same spot. It’s a great view from here in a clear day, but with stormclouds it becomes amazing.

After getting home from our delicious Thai dinner, I played some online games with friends. I actually won a game of 7 Wonders, which is an unusual but welcome occurrence. It was weird because I felt like I was doing better in the first game, which I came second last in (out of 5 players), while the next game I was sure I wouldn’t win, but I did.

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Storms and banana bread

The morning here was fine. I walked with Scully up to the local shops to get some sushi for lunch. There’s a small square with some grass which is a nice place to sit and eat lunch, so I went there. It’s good having Scully with me, because this is the turf of some very aggressive magpies who hang out and try to steal people’s lunches. At first they gave me a wide berth because of Scully, but they got bolder and bolder…

They didn’t quite get close enough to steal any of my sushi, but I’m sure they would have tried if not for Scully.

Back home I made some banana bread. This time I decided to add some choc chips, and leave out the yoghurt. And I made extra certain to bake it long enough, after the one I made a couple of weeks ago turned out a little soggy in the middle.

Normally to test cakes, I use a metal skewer to probe the middle and see if it comes out clean. I’ve done it that way for as long as I can remember. But I read recently that you should use a wooden skewer, because metal is too smooth and the texture of the wood holds the undercooked batter better, so it’s a better indicator. Curious, I did a bit of Internet searching… and I was astonished to find the most common question asked about testing cakes was:

How can I test if a cake is done if I don’t have a toothpick?

Toothpick??? Who tests cakes with toothpicks??

Apparently everyone according to the Internet. But I’d honestly never heard of using a toothpick for this before. It’s weird the stuff you discover sometimes. Anyway, the banana bread turned out brilliantly this time.

As I type, there was just a huge flash of lightning and a loud peal of thunder. It’s been storming on and off all afternoon, with really heavy and violent storm cells sweeping across Sydney. Early this afternoon the weather bureau even issued a tornado warning:

THIS INCLUDES A TORNADO WARNING. […] Tornadoes, destructive winds, large, possibly giant hailstones and heavy rainfall that may lead to flash flooding are likely.

I’ve never seen one of these before. Tornadoes have historically been extremely rare to non-existent in Australia – we just don’t have the geography for them. But they’ve been becoming increasingly common in recent years. There was a very destructive one reported a couple hundred kilometres west of Sydney a week or two ago, which destroyed some properties. But this is the first time I’ve seen a specific tornado warning for the Sydney area. I strongly suspect that with climate change this is going to become more common in this region.

There was destructive hail and wind and flash flooding in parts of Sydney, but mostly west and south of where I live. We got some heavy rain and spectacular lightning here, but nothing destructive.

New content today:

Ethics of Disgust

Today is the start of a new week of online ethics classes, and this week we’re talking about the ethics of disgust. I wrote the class material this morning, and have just run the first three lessons tonight, and it went really well. This is a really interesting subject to explore from an ethics viewpoint. Disgust is an instinctive reaction we feel at certain things and situations, but it translates into actions that can affect people in illogical ways.

I go into the reasons why we feel disgust – it being an evolutionary instinct to protect us from potentially dangerous things like disease. Most of the things we feel disgust towards tend to be things with a high risk of carrying pathogens. The problem is when that instinct is transferred by association to things that don’t pose such risks, and when that influences how we behave.

I have examples including why people are advised to dress and groom well for a court appearance. Research shows that juries and judges are less sympathetic to more scruffy appearing people – and lawyers know this. There’s also differences in the way people react to other people in need of help – they’re more likely to help clean looking people than dirty looking ones. And then there’s disgust in the area of medical research – a lot of things done to further medical knowledge and save lives are things that people consider disgusting, both in modern times and centuries ago. I tell the story of how doctors used to have people go and dig up freshly buried bodies so they could dissect them to learn about how the body works – and how the dissection of bodies was deemed so disgusting by society at large that they made it illegal, thus forcing the doctors to these extreme measures.

It felt like the kids really enjoyed this lesson, and there was a lot of good discussion about the topic as we went through the examples.

In other news, it was very rainy again today. Apparently it’s going to rain until Friday, then be sunny on the weekend, and then the rain will return from Monday again! The Australian Bureau of Meteorology released a long-term forecast for the summer, indicating we’re likely to be in for a cooler, wetter summer this year, with above average rainfall and likely a lot of storms, due to ongoing marginal La Niña conditions. When the pendulum finally swings and we got a hotter, dryer summer it’s going to be one to watch.

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About cauliflower rice

I tried a new recipe for dinner tonight after seeing it on a TV show a few weeks ago: Cauliflower rice bowls with crispy chilli eggs. It looked delicious. I downloaded the recipe and read through it… and I wondered where the rice was. “Cauliflower rice” – that means rice with some cauliflower in it, right?

I expressed my puzzlement to some friends online, and they laughed at me for not knowing that “cauliflower rice” is just shredded cauliflower, designed to resemble rice. Huh. I have never come across this ever before. Who comes up with this stuff, and why did they include “rice” in the name to fool people?

Anyway, I cooked it tonight, and it turned out really nice! I am tempted to replace half the cauliflower with actual rice, though!

In other news, it was very rainy today.

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Another cold Monday

We seem to be in a pattern of spring weather where the weekends are hot and then Monday dawns cold and wet. It’s been raining on and off all day and it’s really quite chilly.

I went out early with Scully for a short walk, because I had an ethics class at 10:00, followed immediately by a Zoom meeting at 11:00 with the lecturer of the University data engineering course that I’m helping him to redesign for next year. We’re both pretty happy with where it’s going and agreed to drill down to the next level of detail – roughly describing what will be included per slide in the lecture material. We split up the weeks so that we can work on different ones according to our preferences and experience and it divided pretty neatly.

While out in the rain, I took a couple of photos:

New spring foliage of golden elm, and a bottlebrush (or Callistemon species) flower. I think this makes a nicely contrasting pair of photos: green with green background, and red with red background. (Apologies to anyone with red/green colour blindness – my colour blind proofing tool shows the bottlebrush in particular doesn’t appear anywhere near as dramatic for you.)

The other big thing about today is that COVID lockdown restrictions have eased in Sydney today. After 107 days of being unable to travel more than 5 kilometres from home, we can now travel within the entire Sydney region. But we’re still not allowed to travel outside the city. Also a lot of businesses such as gyms and hairdressers are now allowed to open again. There were huge queues at barber shops and hair stylists starting from midnight – I heard reports that walk-in appointments had waiting lists of over 5 hours. Also pubs are open again, and cafes and restaurants can have seated customers. There are restrictions on numbers of patrons per floor area, which will remain for some more weeks until they are eventually rolled back.

I didn’t take advantage of any of this but I did drive over to the nearest state government service centre (which is within 5 km anyway) to do an eye test for my driver’s licence renewal. I think I was in there for less than a minute – I went in, took a number, and it was the next number they called. I showed the lady the letter that said I needed to do an eye test. She asked me for my licence, got me to read a line off a chart, hit a button on her computer, and told me it was done.

Tonight it’s project work for the students in the image processing course. Several of the student teams have had questions about their assessment tasks and the reports they are writing, but it seems mostly they are on track and doing good work. I’m actually excited to see how they go on the image processing tasks they’ve chosen to work on.

New content today:

Game design theme decided!

Tonight I ran the third lesson of my 6-week course in Creative Thinking and Game Design. If you recall last week we had some intriguing suggested themes for the game that we’re working on. I’m happy to say that after going through and rating all of the theme ideas, we came up with three ideas that we all agreed were good for a game:

Visiting different countries
Causing trouble in school
Ruining someone’s wedding

And by consensus we agreed that the one we liked best was the last one: ruining someone’s wedding. So that’s what we’re now officially doing – designing a board game about ruining a wedding! We also came up with the goal of the game – how you win: By making as many people as possible upset. And we listed some tentative game mechanics – we might use a board to represent the wedding venue (although I’m not convinced we need to do this); and we might have cards with various objects that will make people upset, for example an embarrassing photo of the bride. (We’ll keep it clean and G-rated! So let’s say no more about that.)

The kids have homework to play with mechanics and come up with any new ideas during the week. Next lesson we’ll put them together into a game that we can start playing!

Other than that, today I worked on the current batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, assembling them from the photos I took a couple of weeks ago. I’ve now completed that batch, so I can start thinking about writing the next batch…. it never ends.

I also did some baking today. I made sourdough bread, and because my wife is keen on fruit and nut loaf I made one of those, with dried apricots and walnut chunks in it. And I made some chocolate chip cookies, which I’ve been craving for weeks. I finally got around to buying some choc chips in the last grocery shop, so today I made a batch. I dotted two baking trays with dough and put them in the oven, heated to 180°C, and set the oven timer for a couple of minutes less than the minimum baking time specified in the recipe.

When the timer went off, I opened the oven to check the cookies… and black smoke poured out! I didn’t know what had happened until I noticed the oven mode selector knob wasn’t pointing at “Bake”, but rather at the adjacent setting, “Pizza”. I know I set it to “Bake” and the temperature to 180°C, but I must have bumped the knob when putting the baking trays in or something, and when the knob is turned to “Pizza” it also automatically resets the temperature to 220°C! The “Pizza” setting also applies base heat, to crisp the bottom of the pizza dough and uses the fan to force hot air throughout the oven. So the cookies were WAY overdone.

The ones on the bottom baking tray were basically charcoal on the lower half, and unsalvageable. The upper baking tray fared a little better – they are a bit well done, but just edible. I normally like them a bit gooey in the middle, but these are baked hard through.

It hasn’t been a good week for me in the kitchen.

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Another busy Saturday

The main thing I did today was work on completing the lesson plan and slides for tomorrow’s third lesson in my Creative Thinking & Problem Solving course on Outschool. There was less prep work needed for this one, but it will be more on-the-fly discussion with the kids about the various game theme and mechanics ideas that we’re working on, mixed with some thinking techniques to help settle on a single theme and then choose a few appropriate mechanics. I hope it goes well in practice!

I also did some housework, cleaning various rooms and finally going through the pile of old paperwork on my desk to sort out what needs filing and what could be thrown away. There’s still a bit of clutter around. I really think at some point I need to declare a week off doing other things and just spend it doing a proper spring clean and getting the whole house in order again. I’ve got three new books that I have no room for on my bookshelves, until I rearrange things and potentially get rid of some old stuff I don’t want any more. The pains of living in a small place.

For dinner I tried the eggplant and haloumi tarts that I tried unsuccessfully a few days ago. I didn’t burn the eggplant this time, but it reduced in volume quite a bit, and I ended up with less filling than I expected. So they ended up with a higher crust/filling ratio, but tasted good. Next time I might try adding some more filling ingredients.

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Last pizza pickup?

Today I worked on lesson 3 of my Creative Thinking game design course. I also took Scully for a short walk in the morning, and then with my wife for a longer walk at lunch.

For dinner we ordered pizza from our favourite local pizza place, and I went up to the restaurant to pick them up. This might be the last time we pick up pizza for a while, as restaurants will be back open next week after the COVID lockdown restrictions ease. The owner of the pizza place said he was looking forward to having customers dining in again, and said they were doing a few renovations to change the place around a bit.

Tonight is online games night with my friends again. I’m losing all the games as usual…

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