housework – Page 5 – dangermouse.net

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.

New content today:

Houseworky Saturday

After putting it off for a bit too long, I decided the house really needed a clean today. I vacuumed the floors and cleaned the bathroom and shower, and tidied up a few things generally.

My wife went for a walk to the fortnightly local growers’ market and brought home some zucchini flowers. So I planned a dinner to use them while they’re fresh from the grower. I made pasta with a sort of carbonara-inspired sauce, but using the zucchini flowers and no meat. It turned out very nice, but could have used some explosive hits of salt from something like bacon/pancetta. I think next time I’ll try adding some capers.

I worked a bit on Outschool stuff, liaising with parents to schedule new classes and to reschedule existing ones to fit new constraints. I also scheduled two new instances of my course on creative thinking and game design, to start in the week of 6 February. If anyone reading this has kids aged 11-14, check it out!

This afternoon I watched England turn the fifth Ashes Test into yet another debacle in Hobart. Dear oh dear… I hope they can rebuild the team and be a bit more competitive next time.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve – end of 2021

I don’t really do end of year retrospectives, so let’s just cut to the chase and see what I did today.

I got up early and headed straight to the supermarket. I managed to book the earliest available timeslot for grocery pickup, which I took because I figures the earlier in the morning I’m there, the fewer potentially COVID-infected people will be around. I grabbed my order and was out of there within about a minute. I also popped into the bakery and grabbed a loaf of Vienna style bread for a special dinner for tonight.

After getting home, I went for my run, and then after that I finally had breakfast. This is very unusual – I normally have breakfast within a few minutes of getting up, so I’m not used to waiting any length of time before eating in the morning.

Continuing from yesterday’s window cleaning, I did more spring cleaning stuff. First I attended to the balcony door and glass panels. I took the sliding insect screen door off the track and washed it clean, then cleaned all of the glass door panels. After remounting the screen door, I continued washing the balcony, which is really a job I should do more often as it collects blown leaves and dust quite quickly.

Inside, I decided to clean out some wardrobe space which has been dedicated to keeping boxes from products such as our cameras, iPads, phones, and laptops. I kept the boxes in case we ever sold the items, but given that we’ve sold exactly zero in 20-odd years, I figure maybe it was time to just get rid of them and reclaim the storage space for something useful.

I took Scully for a walk over lunch while my wife went to the gym. We went over to the fish and chip shop where I got some fish & chips for lunch. I ate at my favourite local lookout spot, with a view over the city. it was a warm sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky. Fortunately, after some vandal poisoned the shade trees at the lookout spot a few years back, one new tree has grown to provide shade on the bench where I sit again.

Back home, I realised there was something I needed to do by the end of the month! The Outschool Dungeons & Dragons group that I run for kids has a monthly adventure writing challenge, and for December I posted a challenge to write an adventure featuring a spooky lighthouse. I said I’d post my own adventure at the end of the month, so now I had to write one. I knuckled down and typed out 100 words of adventure material in a few hours, which I then formatted with some of my own photos as illustrations and exported to PDF, before posting it to the group. Phew!

For dinner tonight, New Year’s Eve, we have something special. For starters I used the figs I bought the other day to make grilled figs with ricotta and honey:

After that was the main course, baked brie in bread with hazelnuts and honey:

Just look at that melty cheese!

That’s the way to put back in all those calories burnt doing exercise and housework today!

It’s now still a few hours before midnight and 2022. I hope you all have a good New Year’s Eve, and that 2022 brings us all some relief from this miserable pandemic thing.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve eve

I spent much of today wrangling Matlab with various datasets, writing code and extracting statistics. I’m working on developing student exercises for the Data Engineering course at the University of Technology, Sydney, for the next semester (as I’ve mentioned a few times before). I ran into some issues with the datasets that I’m using, and need to figure out how to deal with them. Some of the numerical data is aggregated across multiple entries and needs to be divided according to an indexing variable… eh, it’s a bit complicated, and I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Troy by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Trojan War, and third in his series of Greek mythology. (I’m very much looking forward to the fourth book, which will cover The Odyssey.) He begins with the earliest causes of the war, and of course ends after it concludes and the Greeks begin heading home.

I’ve never read The Iliad, but I know it’s Homer’s epic covering the Trojan War. However I was very surprised that about halfway through the book, and most of the way through the war, Fry mentions in a footnote that “This is where Homer’s Iliad begins”. And then about 3/4 through, before the war is over, and even before the Trojan Horse is mentioned, there’s another footnote: “This is where Homer’s Iliad ends”. I checked and it turns out that The Iliad indeed doesn’t cover the whole war – it only covers a relatively tiny slice of a few weeks towards the end of the ten-year siege of Troy. So that was an interesting discovery.

The next book on my list is William Shakespeare’s The Merry Rise of Skywalker, the 9th in the series of Shakespeare-esque retellings of the Star Wars movies by Ian Doescher. It’s reminding me of a few things from the movie, that have prompted new ideas for Darths & Droids. So I’m reading it with a notebook by my side to write down things to include in the planning for our comics.

I took Scully for a walk around lunch time, and then another with my wife along as well before dinner.

Dinner tonight was “leftover veges fried rice”, to clean out the fridge before new groceries tomorrow. We have special plans for tomorrow’s dinner for New Year’s Eve. We often do a cheese platter and crackers thing, but this year we’re going to try some baked brie and crusty bread as a variation.

Oh! And the other big thing I did today was clean all the windows! (I was sitting here typing and wondering what I did all day, and forgot about it until now!) This is a fairly big job, since we’re two floors up, so to clean the outsides I need to remove the moveable window pane, then remove the insect screen, and then lean out the window with a long-handled squeegee. I wash the moveable pane in the bathroom, and also the insect screen, and then replace them all, and clean the inside of the fixed pane with window cleaner. Then repeat for all the other windows.

The other part of the job was replacing the rollers on the moveable pane for the bedroom window. For some reason the rollers keep seizing up and so after a while the window only opens by sliding, rather than rolling on wheels, which makes it much more difficult to open and close. The rollers come in little plastic cartridges, which slot into the window pane frame. But the fit is very tight. Last time I just hammered them in, but that made them difficult to remove today. So this time I decided to sand them down a bit to make them fit a bit more easily. Fortunately I had some fine sandpaper in the garage.

Anyway, with all this wrangling it took a few hours to clean and repair the windows. But now they’re so shiny clean that it looks like empty holes in the walls. Of course they’ll end up dirty again before too long…. but that’s life.

New content today:

Late spring cleaning

Today I started a belated spring clean of the house. I’d booked a carpet shampooing machine, hired from the local hardware store. I’ve used these machines several times in the past, and it really brings the carpet up nicely. I like to try and do it a couple of times a year, but I think it’s been longer than that.

After breakfast and vacuuming the house thoroughly to remove any loose dust and lint, I picked up the shampooer at 9am. Once at home, I filled the machine with hot water and carpet shampoo, and began the tough work of spraying the carpet and sucking up the water and dirt. If you’ve never done this before, imagine using a vacuum cleaner, but three times as heavy, including the hose and nozzle bits. And you have to scrub it back and forth on the carpet with pressure, and multiple times. It’s serious physical work, hot and exhausting. After an hour or so I was dripping with sweat and ready to quit. Fortunately my place is not large, and that completed the job.

I emptied out and cleaned the shampooing machine for return to the hardware store. The minimum hire is 24 hours, so I could have returned it tomorrow, but didn’t want to have it hanging around, so I took it back to the hardware store at lunch time. The guy there looked at my receipt for the refundable deposit.

He said, “You’re returning it already?”

I said, “Yeah, my place is small. I finished it in a couple of hours.”

He said, “You know you’re supposed to wait until the carpet dries, and then do it again. And then do it a third time, until the water comes off clean, so you know the carpet is clean.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll do that next time.”

He said, “You’re not cleaning a rental before moving out, are you?”

“No, it’s my own place.”

He said, “Oh, well that’s okay then. But next time do it properly.”

Huh. The dozen or so times I’ve hired one of these machines, nobody’s ever told me that before. But honestly, one go over the carpet was exhausting enough. I can barely imagine doing it again in the afternoon, and then again in the evening!

I basically spent the afternoon relaxing my tired muscles. Until heading out for a 2.5k run after my wife got home. And for dinner I made a pasta with broccoli in a tomato sauce.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

A day without water

At 5 pm this evening, one of my neighbours knocked on my front door. She’s on the owner’s corporation executive committee and was here in an official capacity, to tell me that Sydney Water was doing some work in the street and that all water would be turned off for our building from 6pm to midnight.

My thoughts rapidly progressed from “okay, that’s not long, no problem” through “wait, how am I going to cook dinner?” to “oh crap! Wife and I both need to have showers, and I need to get a sourdough loaf-in-progress made and kneaded and then clean up the mess before 6pm!!”

I spent the next hour running around like crazy, having a shower, filling a bunch of water jugs and containers, making sourdough, washing up mixing bowls and utensils, cleaning the kitchen generally, and then filling the sink with hot water so after we ate dinner I could at least put the dirty dishes and utensils in there so they don’t dry out and go all crusty. Fortunately we had just enough warning, and I got everything done in time.

It’s actually been a wet day, with light to medium rain in the morning and afternoon. There was a break of a couple of hours around midday, which we timed well for a long walk with Scully. Apart from that I’ve been looking at material for tomorrow’s image processing course lecture and the accompanying tutorial for which I’ll be teaching. The first real work looks straightforward enough, about image compression formats and simple preprocessing operations such as contras adjustment and histogram equalisation. Tomorrow I’ll play with the MatLab code and make sure I can manage it all.

In COVID news, NSW recorded 262 new cases, which is lower than yesterday’s 319. The numbers are still bouncing up and down, although with an overall upwards trend, so it’s not clear if this is actual good news yet.

A friend pointed out to me today that the USA has again recorded over 100,000 new cases in one day, which just sounds absolutely crazy. I’m here giving daily horrified reports of how we’re dealing with a couple of hundred cases where I live, and other parts of the world are in much worse situations. I’m thankful that we’ve really had it relatively easy in Australia compared to many countries, while at the same time concerned about the cases we do have. It’s an odd sort of disconnect. I guess I just can’t really imagine what it must be like to live in a place with roughly a hundred times as many cases per capita. I think I’d be too scared to leave the house at all.

New content today:

Home alone

My wife was out for much of today, for a yoga class in the morning, and to go see a movie with her mother in the afternoon. She took Scully to yoga as normal, but I had time with Scully all afternoon.

I worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and assembling. And I also did some prepwork for the upcoming ISO Photography Standards meeting – downloading and reading documents, and writing up comments on drafts.

In a piece of home maintenance, I swapped out all the batteries from all the remote controls and put in new ones. I’ve decided to do this once a year, whether the batteries need changing or not, to avoid leakage ruining the remotes, after I found some batteries in one of them had started leaking and corroding the terminals. Fortunately it wasn’t far gone and I cleaned it up, but I don’t want to risk this again, and would rather just get new batteries annually to prevent the mess and inconvenience of losing a remote to corrosion.

New content today:

Saturday breakfast out

This morning my wife had an appointment up the street, and suggested I walk with her and Scully, so I could look after Scully outside while she went in. So we did, leaving early, before we’d had any breakfast.

Afterwards, she suggested that rather than go home, we continue walking to North Sydney and have breakfast at a cafe near the library. Normally on a Saturday I have a very simple breakfast of Weet-Bix with milk. But when I go out I like to order eggs benedict, because I can’t be bothered making it at home, so it serves as the “fancy breakfast” that I get on the very rare occasions when I buy breakfast. Eggs benedict traditionally comes on a muffin, but it seems people like doing all sorts of weird variations these days – sourdough bread seems to be popular. But this one came on a brioche bun, which is kind of the opposite direction, being softer than a muffin, rather than harder and chewier like sourdough bread. It was a little odd, but okay.

We didn’t get back home until after 11 o’clock. Then I wanted to go into my Saturday housework, cleaning the shower and bathroom, vacuuming the carpets and floors, changing the damp absorbers in the closets. I also cleaned up the balcony and washed the floor out there, so it’s nice and clean. Which was good because tonight we ate dinner out on the balcony, in the cool evening air – something we don’t do often enough.

Oh, here’s one of the drawings from last night’s game of Sketchful, by one of my friends – you need to identify the thing being drawn. I completely failed to guess the answer, but all the other players managed to get it. It’s two words, (4, 3) letters.

Answer

MEAT PIE

New content today:

Cleaning the carpet

Today was dominated by cleaning. I vacuumed the house to get all the loose dust collected, and then I attacked the carpet with a carpet shampooing machine that I’d hired from the local hardware store. I do this about every 6 months to rejuvenate and deep clean the carpet. It comes up nice and fresh, but it’s a few hours of hard work. Although the day was cold again, I was bathed in sweat by the time I’d finished the cleaning.

After returning the carpet cleaner to the hardware store, I treated myself to lunch at a Japanese place near there. And then I took it easy for the afternoon since I was kind of worn out.

New content today: