Double plus lockdown Friday

Today’s COVID news in Sydney was even worse than yesterday. 44 new cases in the 24-hour reporting period (6 more than yesterday), and more of those cases than yesterday were circulating in the community rather than being isolated as known contacts of infected people. So basically we have more people spreading the virus further. The NSW Government announced further lockdown restrictions, as well as indicating stricter enforcement.

We are now prohibited from leaving the house for any reason except (1) medical reasons, (2) to get food or other necessary supplies, (3) for work or education if those cannot be done at home, or (4) for exercise. Additionally, we are prohibited from travelling more than 10 km from home, and are strongly advised not to leave home for any shopping if we can arrange home delivery. If you do go shopping, it must be directly to buy specific needed items – browsing in shops is prohibited. If you leave home to exercise you may only meet one person who does not live in your household. You may not visit anyone else’s home, and you may not have any visitors in your home. Facemasks must be worn in every indoor location except your own home, plus on public transport, and also outdoor locations where people gather.

This lockdown is supposed to end Friday next week, but given the trajectory of cases at the moment I expect it will be extended further.

So, I spent the day at home. Which I probably would have done anyway given that it started raining today and it was extremely cold and miserable. The maximum temperature in Sydney was a bone-chilling 12.1°C, which made it the second coldest day of the year so far.

Fortunately I went out and did my weekly grocery shopping first thing in the morning, before the new restrictions were announced. Although that would have been allowed under them, since it’s food we’re going to eat. And toothpaste.

This evening we did a virtual board games night. Played a few games on Board Game Arena: 7 Wonders, 6 Nimmt, Coloretto, and also Sketchful, and an implementation of Codenames on the game’s own website.

Oh, and I forgot to mention yesterday that I got up to 365 consecutive days of Italian language practice on Duolingo. A full year since I started this daily streak. So that feels like an achievement!

New content today:

COVID Sydney update

Today the news about the current COVID-19 outbreak in Sydney got worse. New South Wales recorded 38 new cases in the last 24 hour reporting period, which is the highest number of new cases we’ve had in the past 14 months. This takes the total number of cases in the current outbreak (from 16 June) to 396. The Delta variant is spreading much more aggressively than previous variants, and in today’s daily press conference the authorities were very harsh on people flouting the lockdown rules.

I know from the context of some other countries that 396 cases may not sound like much, but here it’s horrifying. We’ve been living with close to zero cases for over a year. And Australia’s vaccination rate is the lowest of any country in the OECD – because for so long it wasn’t considered an emergency to get people vaccinated, so our acquisition of vaccine doses has been very delayed compared to most countries. At present just 8% of Australians are fully vaccinated, and 17% have had a first vaccine dose (me among those with one dose).

So we need to clamp down and stop the spread of this Delta variant lest all the good work to date go to waste and suddenly we have it running rampant through the largely unvaccinated population. This right now is one of the scariest phases of the whole pandemic for Australia.

Having said that, it feels a little odd to move onto my next topic for today, which is that I went to play golf (at a non “pitch & putt” course) for the first time in ages – since April I think. Even through the strictest lockdown here (a level we’re not quite back up to yet), golf was always available as an acceptable outdoor exercise activity, since it’s about the most socially distant sport one can play.

I went to my closest course. Normally I go first thing in the morning, when it isn’t busy, and go around the course alone. But a 7:30 am start in the middle of winter didn’t appeal to me, especially given the course is in a narrow valley and it’s very dewy in the mornings, even sometimes in summer, and I didn’t fancy playing in the wet in 8°C temperatures. So for the first time I booked a tee time later in the day, just after lunch. This meant the course was busy, and I was partnered with two strangers for the round. Fortunately, neither of them were especially good players either, so I didn’t feel too outmatched.

I played a middling sort of round, totalling 54, compared to a 55 last time I played that course back in April. So I’m moderately happy with that. And it felt really good to be outside and getting fresh air and exercise (apart form just walking) for the first time in many weeks.

In my online ethics class tonight I did the same stealing topic as yesterday. And I got some very interestingly different answers. In the lemon example I mentioned yesterday, all three students initially said that taking a lemon from the tree was stealing. But this time when I said that everyone that knew the owners of the lemon tree never used the lemons, the first kid immediately switched to, “Oh, well then it’s fine to take a lemon.” And the other two kids then followed suit in agreement. I suspect that once one kid gives an answer, others are more likely to go along with it, unless they really have a strong preconceived opinion otherwise. So that was interesting!

New content today:

Casual job application

The top news today is not necessarily the state of my throat following the tonsillectomy, but I’ll provide an update anyway. It’s continuing to be less sore, but I still have significant pain when trying to move my tongue around or—as I discovered today—when trying to suppress a sneeze. I was eating breakfast and had some residual cereal and milk in my mouth that I hadn’t been able to flush clean with dextrous tongue movements between mouthfuls, when I suddenly had to sneeze. I ended up having to clean up splatters of cereal and milk off the carpet.

My wife and I took Scully on a big walk today, getting our lockdown exercise time out of the house. We met a little puppy, just 9 weeks old, whose owners still hadn’t even decided what name to call him, thought they said they were thinking Winchester. Scully and possibly-Winchester had some fun playing a bit. She likes playing with little dogs, especially any smaller than her.

But the main thing I did today was complete the application for that casual teaching position at the University of Technology, Sydney, that I mentioned two days ago. I didn’t complete it then because I got to page 3 of the online form, after filing in simple things like my name and contact details, and found that it asked for a full curriculum vitae, including things like my philosophy of education, evidence of sensitivity when teaching students of diverse cultural backgrounds and identity, and experience teaching in a university context with feedback from students! So I deferred that to today, and spent some time sprucing up a CV and composing answers to the various questions.

I finished that just after lunch and submitted my responses and uploaded my CV, and then discovered that page 4 of the online application form requested a 5 minute video with myself answering questions about what practices are important for teachers to engage students, give a “rich example” of a teaching method I have used, give an example of when I have adapted to student feedback in my teaching strategy, and talk about why I want to teach and what benefits I would bring to the faculty!! Holy cow!

So I spent much of the afternoon writing a script and then recording a video of myself. Hilariously, the first take went perfectly… except that I thought I’d started recording when I actually hadn’t, and when I hit the record button again after I’d finished in order to stop the recording, it actually began recording. So I had to do the whole thing again from scratch.

Eventually I completed the video, uploaded that, and completed the application. Here’s hoping that after all this effort I get the job!

I intended to do some comics work in the afternoon, but I was so mentally worn out, and it was getting late in the afternoon and time to think about what to make for dinner, that I never got into it.

I’m now trying a larger fraction of Seedlip Spice 94 (mentioned yesterday) in an alcohol-free drink with some lemon juice and soda. I’m still not getting it. On a more careful sniff with more of the product in a glass, the aroma of the Seedlip is subtly attractive, with warm spicy notes of cloves and cinnamon, but the flavour is, well… pretty flavourless. It has a hint of citrus on the palate, but the spice doesn’t really come through very much at all. I’m going to persist trying it in various combinations until I empty this bottle I bought, but honestly I can’t see myself ever buying it again. In my opinion, it’s a complete debacle for the $50 a bottle price tag.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 9

My throat continues to improve. There’s little pain eating and swallowing now, but it is still pretty sore when I move my tongue around too much, and I have developed a hacking cough and it seems impossible to clear all the phlegm from the back of my throat. Well, at least it seems to be improving overall.

Today I dealt with some bathroom cleaning, and also some cleaning up of my wife’s phone. She’s been collecting thousands of photos and video clips that she’s taken over the years, and her phone was just about out of memory, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and copy it all to our desktop computer, and delete it from her phone. There was stuff on there dating back several years.

I am in the habit of copying across photos from my phone to the computer every day, and keeping the camera roll on my phone empty, but my wife has never developed this habit, despite me reminding er that if she lost her phone she’d lose all of those photos, whereas once they’re on the computer they get backed up regularly so the chances of losing them are virtually zero. Anyway, I spent a few hours going through all the photos and videos and sorting them into suitable folders on the computer. And suddenly she has nearly 100 GB of empty space back on her phone!

The other thing I did was recopy all our music and ebooks back to her phone – it seems at some point the phone rebelled and decided to start deleting music and books. For some reason the books got lost from both our iPads as well. I dunno what it is with Apple’s management of ebooks – it’s just terrible. I’m exploring some alternative ebook reader apps now, thanks to recommendations from friends.

One Friday while shopping I saw that our local supermarket now stocks a wider range of non-alcoholic drinks. (Unlike the USA, supermarkets here do not sell alcohol – you have to go to a specialist liquor store to buy alcohol. It always freaks me out a little when I visit the US and go into a supermarket and see beer and wine on the shelves.) Anyway, along with the small range of alcohol-free wines, they also had some Seedlip non-alcoholic spirits. I’ve been meaning to try these for a while, since I like gin, but you can’t exactly drink it with wild abandon. I’ve heard that Seedlip provides the same sort of herbal/spicy flavour experience of gin, just without the alcohol. But I’ve also been reluctant to try it because it’s so damned expensive. A bottle of Seedlip costs pretty much the same as a nice bottle of gin, even though there’s no alcohol in it (and hence it doesn’t attract the alcohol excise, so they’re actually grossing more of the sale price).

But now the supermarket had it right there, and I figured this is probably about the cheapest place to buy it, so I grabbed a bottle of Seedlip Spice 94. And now I’ve tried it and can make some comments…

Well. I opened the bottle and had a sniff. It’s very subtle. You obviously don’t get that whiff of alcohol carrying the other aromas like when sniffing gin, whisky, wine, or any other alcoholic drink. So it was difficult to smell much of anything, honestly – just a vague spiciness, a bit like a cold cup of herbal tea. I poured some and had a sip neat. Yeah, totally underwhelming. It tasted like someone had put a chai-spice herbal tea bag in cold water for a while. I normally have gin with soda (I like tonic, but I find it too sweet for regular use), so I added some soda and had a swig. Yeah…. okay. I was kind of prepared to be underwhelmed, but I was amazed at how underwhelming this was as a drink.

I’m not passing final judgement yet – I’ll give it a few more chances – since I have a full bottle fo the stuff now that I paid $50 for. I might actually try it in a martini style drink, with some actual vermouth, and see what that’s like.

And in another topic, yesterday while chopping salad ingredients for lunch, I inflicted a small accidental cut on my thumb. I swear, I really like these new knives I bought a while back, but I’ve been cutting myself with them semi-regularly. I’m sure I never cut myself anywhere near this much with my old kitchen knives that had trouble maintaining a sharp edge.

I see it said often that “a sharp knife is safer than a dull one”, but honestly it seems in my experience that’s simply not true. I’m positive I’ve cut myself significantly more frequently with these lovely sharp knives. It’s not like I’m a knife novice either – I cook nearly every night and have been using knives almost daily for decades. I do get the the sharp knives are nicer to use – I really love them, but dang, they love nicking my fingers.

I’ve set up a new Irregular Webcomic! poll question to explore other people’s experience with sharp and dull knives…

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 8

My throat is improving again. Today I was able to swallow almost freely, although it’s still a bit painful to chew food. I did sleep without needing any painkillers, so that was good. Basically, things are looking up and hopefully will be back to normal soon.

I spent some time today doing boring stuff like going through spreadsheets of financial stuff for tax, and filling out a job application form for a position as a casual tutor at the University of Technology, Sydney, for the job that my contact offered me a while ago.

Normally we go out for dinner on a Friday evening, and also tonight was supposed to be fortnightly board games night, but with the COVID lockdown in Sydney restaurants are all closed and our games night has been converted to virtual. So we ordered Indian food to take-away from a favourite local restaurant. I went to pick it up, and although they couldn’t have seated customers, they were doing great business with take-away orders. When I arrived there, they had about a dozen bags waiting to be collected.

The first game we played tonight was Forgotten Waters, using an implementation on Tabletop Simulator. This is a pirate themed mostly cooperative board game with some light roleplaying components. Then we played some rounds of 7 Wonders, and ended up with some Sketchful.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 7

Good news today! My throat is noticeably less sore than it has been the past two days. I can eat more easily and have more mobility in my tongue. It’s still sore and a little painful to swallow, but definitely on the upswing now.

Also good news that I should have mentioned yesterday. The surgeon at the follow-up meeting confirmed that the biopsy of the tonsil-with-cyst he removed showed no malignant cells at all. So that’s excellent news, really.

The other good news was that I got back into online ethics classes today, teaching a new class at 5pm my time, which is an hour later than the one I do on Fridays. I think this later time suits people in Asian and European time zones better, and the class was fully subscribed with 4 students just before I started. I’ve restricted enrolments to a fairly small number as the one time I had 5 students in a class it was difficult to let all of them speak about every question.

Today we discussed media bubbles, going through some short story scenarios to explain the concept and how it arises, and what effects it might have if people only ever see news stories or opinion pieces that align with what they already think. The kids were pretty unanimous that this was a bad thing, but they disagreed on what should be done about it. One kid was adamant that websites and media companies should be allowed to publish what they wanted, and that it was up to individuals to recognise media bubbles and seek out different opinions, while another kid said that the companies should be forced to provide balanced coverage because you can’t trust people to go looking for news stories they might not want to see.

My voice is still a bit croaky, but I managed to last the 45 minute class. That’s a big improvement since yesterday too, when I could barely talk at all. Hopefully tomorrow will be even better!

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 6

I woke up this morning and felt like my throat hadn’t gotten any better, as I struggled to swallow my breakfast. But I had an appointment with the surgeon for a follow-up examination in the morning. He took a look and said everything looked as expected. He said that the pain from a tonsillectomy usually peaks around day 5 or 6 and then begins to fall off after that. Given today was day 6, that was good news!

And this evening, after having dinner, I feel like it is actually less painful than this morning. I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking or really happening, but I’ll take it either way. Here’s hoping it feels even better tomorrow.

There’s not much else to report since we’re a few days into COVID lockdown still, and it was rainy again today, so there’s no real reason to go out. Except to pick up Scully from doggie daycare this afternoon, after my wife popped her in at lunchtime for a few hours.

In between I mostly worked on a Secret Project, so there’s not much I can say about that either…

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 5

The recovery from tonsil surgery proceeds slowly. The pain may have been even worse early in the day as it was really hard to eat breakfast and lunch, but this evening I feel like it’s slightly better again. Let’s see what it’s like tomorrow. I have a follow-up appointment with the surgeon tomorrow morning to check on progress of the healing, so he’ll let me know what’s normal at this stage.

It rained today more than yesterday, which meant Scully was cooped up at home again. Except I took her out to the dog park this afternoon in what I hoped would be a break in the rain. It held off for a few minutes, but by the time we’d completed a short walk it started up again. Here’s a photo of the sky during the brief non-rainy period:

Rain clouds over Sydney

I did some work today on ISO standards, following up from the recent meeting. I have a bunch of ballots to go through, voting and recommending options to others on the Australian committee. And I did some comic stuff as well.

I cancelled my online ethics classes last Friday and yesterday (Monday) so I could recover from the tonsil surgery. My next class is on Thursday, but I’m wondering if I’ll be able to do it, as today my voice started going thin and croaky, and it was hurting a bit to talk. If I can’t talk properly by Thursday I’ll have to cancel more classes.

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 4

I slept reasonably well last night, perhaps thanks to the painkillers I took before bed. So I felt a bit more rested and alert today than I have the past two days.

However it’s Monday, and my wife was back at work – only she had to work from home because of the current COVID lockdown here in Sydney. She had equipment here from previous work-at-home stints, but when plugged in her phone/switchboard didn’t work, and it took her until 4:30pm wrestling with tech support via her own personal phone before it started working. And meanwhile the whole day she was getting voicemail messages delivered via email, because she couldn’t answer the phone and so everyone was leaving messages. So it all kind of piled up and was generally unpleasant.

Add to this that Scully got bored being stuck indoors, and it was wet and rainy outside, and I didn’t feel well enough to go on a walk, and the three of us were stuck indoors together trying to do stuff and interrupting one another… it wasn’t a particularly fun day.

Eventually I took Scully out late in the afternoon and she of course got wet and covered in grass. I had to wash her paws off in the bathroom sink.

My throat seems perhaps a bit more painful than yesterday. I had real trouble eating anything today. I made risotto for dinner because it’s nice and soft, and it still took me about twice as long as normal to eat it, wincing down every mouthful.

I don’t really mean to complain, but I’m pretty over this now and want to go back to being able to eat and chew properly and move my tongue around without it hurting so much. More ice cream tonight!!

New content today:

Tonsil recovery day 3

Last night before bed I had some of the super painkiller tablets the hospital gave me, and they definitely helped me sleep better. I slept in a little late this morning. Although the sleep was better, it was still interrupted a bit by a phlegmy throat and coughing.

Today began feeling similar to yesterday, but I think I’ve improved a little over the day. Yesterday afternoon I was really worn out, but today I think I felt a little better – although definitely not back to normal. Although I was hungry at lunch time, I didn’t really feel like eating because of the painful swallowing. I forced down a couple of small grilled cheese sandwiches.

For dinner tonight I made fried rice with broccoli, carrot, onion, ginger, and cashews. Normally I put chilli in, but I’m staying off the spicy food until my throat feels better.

COVID-wise, Sydney had 20 new cases today. Most of those were not already in isolation as close contacts, so it seems to be spreading through the community still. The hope is that contact tracing will see those un-isolated cases dwindle down to zero within the next week, thus confining the virus to people in quarantine, and then we can start thinking about lifting the lockdown.

At some point I need to go buy some groceries, but the news has been showing a lot of crowded supermarkets with people in the throes of panic buying. I’m hoping on Monday morning when people start doing work stuff that the supermarkets will be a bit more normal and I can go in and get milk and stuff without battling hordes of people.

New content today: