Noises in the night…

I was woken by a weird noise just before 3:30 this morning. At first I thought Scully was being sick, so I jumped out of bed. But she was fast asleep still.

The noise sounded like a wet wheezing, like a sort of cross between a small animal and a squeeze bottle half full of water was being squeezed repeatedly to force the air out. It was so loud that I was sure it was in our bedroom and I turned on the light thinking it must be some sort of animal. I thought it was coming from under the bed. I was prepared to have to deal with a mouse or rat or something. But I searched and couldn’t find anything, until I finally realised the noise might have been coming from outside. I confirmed this by opening the window and the sound was much louder and from that direction. And then it died away.

I’m guessing it was the death rattle of a possum or a big bird that maybe a cat had caught. I’m not sure what else it could have been. But the upshot was I was now wide awake and had trouble getting back to sleep, so it wasn’t a very restful night.

This morning I taught two ethics classes, and then prepared to go into the University of Technology Sydney for the last tutorial lesson of the year on image processing. The students have their final assessment projects due tomorrow. So next week I’ll be marking those.

Because it’s Halloween, I thought there might be some students, at least, dressed up for the occasion at the university, being a trendy sort of place where young people do fun things. But of the thousands of students I saw, not a single one had anything. I didn’t seen a single indication anywhere that it’s Halloween. No costumes, no decorations. I know it’s nowhere near as big here as in the USA, but I was honestly a little surprised.

And in other news, I have signed up to Bluesky, which I am hoping will be a better replacement for Twitter for me than Mastodon turned out to be. If you’re interested, you can follow me here: @dmmaus.bsky.social.

The problem I found with Mastodon was that I picked a server that matched one of my interests, namely tabletop roleplaying games, but then the way the system works, my posts get shown to everyone who is also on the same server, and they all expect everyone to talk mainly about games all the time. So I felt stifled in my ability to just post random shower thoughts and wry observations, as I did back on Twitter. I could probably move to a less specialised and more social server, but it looks like Bluesky is much closer to what I hoped a Twitter replacement would be. I’ll stay on Mastodon, but I’m sure to post much more frequently on Bluesky, I think.

New content today:

The passing of a tree

I took Scully for a walk after lunch today, one of our favourite loops around the neighbourhood, which passes through a park and then past a nice bakery, then down to the waterfront by the harbour where there’s a grassy area away from traffic where Scully can run free and chase a tennis ball. Except when we walked through the park today, was different.

Here’s a photo I took back in 2020:

Brennan Park

The tree that dominates the left side is a jacaranda, native to South America, but grown all over Sydney and much beloved for their beautiful purple flowers in spring. Since that photo was taken, the paved path has been renovated, and they chose to do a curving diversion around the tree to avoid being too close to the roots.

When we got there today I was shocked to see this:

Brennan Park tree gone

This must have happened recently since we walk this way about once a week, so it can’t have been too long since last time, and then the tree was fine. It looks like it fell over, as looking at the other side you can see the large roots have snapped. Obviously the council had already removed most of the tree – it would have been blocking the path and a hazard for people. I presume at some stage they’ll remove the rest and get rid of the stump. Maybe they’ll plant a new tree there, but if they choose to just lay grass over the site, then future people might wonder why the path makes such a strange deviation for no apparent reason.

So we mourn the passing of this lovely tree. You can see in the second photo that they have also planted small jacarandas either side of the path. So hopefully in a few years we will have a nice avenue between jacarandas to replace the old one.

This morning I had three ethics classes, and this evening my last one for the next week. I’m taking a week off for Easter, so that gives me a chance to catch up on some other things. I also spent this afternoon finishing off making the last batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, which will last through the next three weeks of buffering. So hopefully I’ll get ahead start on the next batch!

Tonight I made broccoli and cashew pizza. I don’t know if Italians would be horrified or not, but it’s a nice combination, especially with a touch of chilli oil after cooking.

New content today: