Hot cross bun crawl

My wife had today off work as an extra day before the Easter long weekend, and I had no classes on today. We went for a big walk together at lunchtime, in search of hot cross buns. We decided to get some from each of our two favourite bakeries, which involved a loop walk across multiple suburbs, covering over 7 km by the time we got back home.

Here’s Scully along the way, in her Easter bandana.

Scully's Easter bandana

Tonight we went for dinner at our local seafood restaurant. A nice relaxing meal to kick off a double long weekend. On the way home we walked past a group of brushtail possums. A young one was in a tree right near where I was walking, and I got a fairly close photo of it.

Baby brushtail possum

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Double update: Friday/Saturday

Friday I worked on my secret project a bit, and then had ethics classes in the early evening, before virtual games night with my friends, We played Perudo, 7 Wonders, 6 Nimmt, Scattergories, Boomerang Australia. I was very surprised when I won the first game of 7 Wonders, which is a game I don’t often win. Moreso because I thought I was doing quite poorly, until the final points count at the end where it turned out that I’d won.

Today we all slept in a bit in the morning. For once in a long time we didn’t have anything urgent to do in the morning. The sleep in was really nice.

I did some writing and comic making for Darths & Droids today. And this evening we dropped Scully with the neighbours while I took my wife out for a special dinner at a nice restaurant. Check it out:

Barbecue pork, smoked trout, capers, garlic flowers:

Barbecue pork, smoked trout, capers, garlic flowers

Macadamia ravioli, cherry tomatoes, madeira, green olives:

Macadamia ravioli, cherry tomatoes, madeira, green olives

Jerusalem artichoke, black barley, hazelnuts, sea lettuce:

Jerusalem artichoke, black barley, hazelnuts, sea lettuce

John dory, green tomatoes, currants, verjuice:

John dory, green tomatoes, currants, verjuice

Valrhona chocolate, Earl Grey mousse, buckwheat, wattle seed:

Valrhona chocolate, Earl Grey mousse, buckwheat, wattle seed

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New content today:

A long walk to a cake shop

I spent today working on Darths & Droids comics, as well as teaching the last class of my current 6-week course on creative thinking and a couple of ethics classes.

At lunch I went on a walk with my wife and Scully, a few suburbs over to the good Italian bakery. I had a pie and they had doughnut-shaped thing covered in chocolate and almonds which looked amazingly good. The label said it was an eclair, but it looked nothing like any eclair I’ve ever seen. I just ordered one, regardless of what it really was because it looked so good.

It turned out to be… an eclair! It was choux pastry in a doughnut shape, filled with custard and coated in chocolate. It was delicious – actually better than any other eclair I’ve ever had. A top notch choice!

For dinner tonight I used more bunya nuts. I made potato salad with the nuts as one of the ingredients.

Bunya nut potato salad

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Proofreading and cleaning

Saturday is traditionally a day of rest for most people, but I was hard at work today, proofreading that academic paper. I wanted to get through it sooner rather than later, and give myself enough time this weekend to do some other things I want to get done. It turned out to be easier than the first paper I edited a while back, because I’m familiar with the subject material now, so it went quicker. Which is good!

I cleaned the bathroom and shower today, and my wife has been running loads of laundry all day to clean towels, and clothes, and Scully’s dog towels. I also took some product photos for my wife of a batch of the bangles she’s been working on for her Etsy shop. And took Scully for a couple of walks.

Tonight we went out to the Thai place that we like. It’s 15 minutes drive away, but it has outdoor seating for us and Scully, and the food was really good. Except now they’ve changed ownership and name, and honestly the food was not as good as it used to be. This is the fourth Thai restaurant near us that that we’ve really liked which has now closed down. There are still several others around, but none of them what we’d really consider excellent quality any more.

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Experimental pizza with peanut butter

You heard right, folks.

Broccoli pizza

A few weeks ago I had the satay chicken pizza from the menu at our local pizza place. Tonight when thinking about what to cook, I realised we had no pumpkin, my usual go-to pizza topping. But we had broccoli, and what better to go with broccoli than satay sauce? But I didn’t have any satay sauce… so peanut butter and chilli flakes to the rescue! I added some pistachios and almonds as well for crunch I would have used cashews, but we ran out of those on the weekend and I have to buy some more.

Anyway, it turned out really good! There’s not a lot of peanut butter on there – just enough to give it a peanutty taste. The sauce under the cheese is traditional tomato paste, although I spread it a bit more thinly today.

The weather continues to be rainy. Today marked the 14th day in a row of rain. We can barely remember what it’s like to have a day where it doesn’t rain.

And in what I hope is not a consequence of the war in Ukraine, Outschool did its weekly credit card payment processing of class fees, and informed me by e-mail that a payment for one of my students could not be processed. A student who lives in Russia. Occasionally I’ve received these processing error notifications, but there’s no follow-up and the kid shows up in class as usual, so presumably the parent did something and the payment went through. But this time, a few hours later I received a second e-mail saying that the payment had failed to be processed again. I’ve never received a second message like this before. It makes me wonder if the parent tried to pay again, and was denied again. I’m hoping this is not being caused by the financial sanctions being taken against Russia, and that this student won’t have to miss my classes because of this war.

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Post-super busy week: Saturday

Ah, finally, a day off.

The rain continues. It rained heavily all night, and for much of the day. I managed to get my run in during a period if relatively light rain. And I also went out with my wife and Scully in light drizzle to take some product photos of her new range of hand made bangles to match the doggie bandanas she’s been selling on Etsy. She’s planning to launch the bangles on Tuesday.

The rain is much worse further north. Parts of northern New South Wales are in flood emergencies, and southern Queensland is even worse. Wivenhoe Dam, the main water supply storage for Brisbane, went from 55% capacity to 120% in the past 48 hours. The 100% “capacity” level is defined as a safe storage level, above which Queensland Water must release water downriver. It can actually get up to 225% before the dam overflows – but they won’t let it get that high as that would damage and possibly destroy the dam. Last time this happened, in 2011, the released water flooded the streets of central Brisbane. Oh, I just checked news and a flood warning has been issued an hour ago for parts of Brisbane.

I haven’t kept track, but about half a dozen people have died in floodwater so far. Some towns have been evacuated and are preparing for the worst flooding in recorded history.

For dinner tonight I made pesto using bunya nuts, fresh basil, garlic, olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, salt, and pepper. I served it on penne pasta.

Penne with bunya nut pesto

I’ve put most of the bunya nuts into the freezer, because there’s no way we’re going to get through them quickly enough. They’re too rich to eat every day, and I think we have enough for at least a dozen meals, maybe more.

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Still full from family Thai lunch

This morning I had the third lesson of six in my current run of the Creative Thinking and Game Design course that I’m running on Outschool. We brainstormed last week, and this week converged on an idea for the game we’re going to design over the remaining three lessons. The theme? “Contradicting everything that anyone says.”

I was a bit surprised when the student picked this over “Wizards having a battle”, which I was already starting to get some ideas for. It’s a bit out if left field, but hey… I can work with anything. So we brainstormed some ideas for game mechanics and, you know, we came up with some workable ideas for how this game might work. It’s looking like a casual party-style game, rather than a “serious” board game.

For lunch today we took a trip to eat at a Thai restaurant with my wife’s family, to celebrate her mother’s birthday. It’s a place we’ve been to a few times before, and it’s very good. They have a massaman duck dish, which is delicious. Combined with all the other dishes we ordered, there was a lot of good food, and … I just realised it’s now after 9pm and I haven’t had dinner and I’m not especially hungry! Although I think I might just have a piece of toast or something in a minute.

This afternoon I worked more on the data visualisation slides that I’m doing for the university data engineering course. And did another couple of ethics classes on the patriotism topic. I think I’m finally getting the hang of this topic, as the classes are running more smoothly now. Just in time for it to end tomorrow and then I’ll have to write a new topic for starting on Tuesday!

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Bunya nut cooking

I spent today doing more slides and graphics for the university data engineering course, for data visualisation.

Tonight I tried cooking some of the bunya nuts I collected yesterday. First job was to get them out of the tough shells. I boiled some nuts for half an hour, after which the shell was just soft enough to slice in half with a sharp knife.

Bunya nut stir fry

It wasn’t easy though, and I had to be very careful with the knife. Once halved, I could flex the shell and squeeze the nut halves out.

Bunya nut stir fry

Tasting one, it’s very much like a cross between chestnut and pine nut. Firmer and not as sweet as a chestnut, but starchy like one. I stir fried them i a wok with green beans, onion, carrot, garlic, ginger, chilli, and soy sauce.

Bunya nut stir fry

And served over brown rice.

Bunya nut stir fry

It was very good!

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Collecting bunya nuts

This morning I did the usual grocery pick-up run, collecting my pre-ordered groceries form the supermarket. Then my run. And then right after that I took Scully for a short walk while my wife left for a day out in the city. She was taking a day off work and going to meet her mother for a morning tea in the city.

While she was there, I’d asked her to pick up a book for me at the gaming shop in town: Dungeons & Dragons: Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

And speaking of gaming, tonight we’re playing Tapestry in our weekly online board game night. We’d decided we wanted to play a longer game and settled on this in advance, so we could all learn the rules before we start playing.

But an interesting thing I did today was collect some bunya nuts! Bunya pines are large native Australian trees that produce large seed cones every 3-4 years or so. There’s one not far from my place, which has been dropping cones for a couple of weeks. It’s the tall dark green tree in the centre of this photo:

Collecting bunya pine nuts

Here’s a piece of one of the cones. The cones are about the size of a soccer ball, but they slowly break open after falling, and all the ones I could find had broken up into segments.

Collecting bunya pine nuts

I spent time opening the segments and extracting the nuts, which are about the size of brazil nuts.

Collecting bunya pine nuts

I collected 3.2 kilograms of nuts!

Collecting bunya pine nuts

Banana for scale:

Collecting bunya pine nuts

To eat them, I’ll have to boil them for about 20 minutes and then peel off the shells, a bit like chestnuts. The flesh inside is also rather like chestnuts – at least that’s what the web says. I haven’t actually tried eating these before. I’ll try to report here when I try them.

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Friday/Saturday double post

Friday I was very busy, doing the last part of the paper editing, so I could get it sent back to the author by the end of the working week. Then when I’d completed it and sent if off, the author wrote back to remind me that I also had their response letter to the journal to go through! So I had to do that as well, and cross-reference all of the comments regarding changes they’d made to address concerns raised by the referees, to make sure they were consistent between the edited paper and the letter. I had to change a couple of the edits I’d made. Finally I got it all done and sent off. Then the author wrote back to remind me that I had to draw up an invoice for the labour!

I had a couple of ethics classes before dinner, and then my wife and I went out to a Turkish restaurant near us to unwind and enjoy a nice meal. We tried a new dish, red lentil koftas, which I liked, but my wife thought they were very spicy.

After dinner it was virtual games night with my friends. I was joining late because of the dinner, but got in games of 7 Wonders, Kingdomino, Coloretto, Azul, and Wavelength. I neglected to post a blog entry because I was playing games.

Today my wife was doing a few things, and I took Scully out for a walk a couple of times in the morning so she wouldn’t get upset at my wife leaving. Then in the afternoon we all went for a walk together and to give Scully some ball-chasing exercise. The weather was unsettled, with intermittent sun, showers, and some heavy rain. We got caught in the rain when out with Scully, but it stopped and we’d dried out by the time we got home.

New neighbours moved in downstairs today. They have a cavoodle, and unfortunately Scully was barking and growling for much of the afternoon, hearing it running around in the yard down there. I posted a note under their door to introduce ourselves and suggest that we let the dogs meet each other some time soon, so they can get to know each other to eliminate the territorial behaviour. They messaged back and sounded nice, saying some time tomorrow would be good.

Late this afternoon I took some time to do a taste test on four bottles of gin. I’ve almost finished one bottle, and had been waiting for a chance to do this comparison test before emptying it. I was comparing Bombay Sapphire Sunset, Buffalo Vale Clair de Lune, Backwoods High Country, and Backwoods Muscat Gin (a special limited edition, no longer available). I find the differences between gins to be fairly subtle, and can only really pick it with side-by-side tasting, which is why I do this occasionally with as many bottles as I have, comparing the old ones just about to run out with the new bottles that I’ve recently acquired. The muscat one is unusual because of the sweet muscat grape infusion, but the other three are all conventional gins with subtle differences that I took notes on: Sunset was warm and spicy, with citrus peel notes; Clair de Lune is earthy and woody with lemon/lime hints; High Country was orangey, floral, and a bit grassy.

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