scully – Page 4 – dangermouse.net

Scully’s dental

Friday was online board games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. We played a host of the usual suspects, plus a couple of new ones on Board Game Arena: Exit Strategy and Gang of Dice. We also played It’s a Wonderful World, which we’ve only played in person before. I much preferred the last one, and not just because I had a runaway victory.

Exit Strategy was basically just multiplayer kingmaker – it became clear at various stages that certain players couldn’t win, and then the only real choices they had were which other players to drag down. We all agreed after one game that we probably never want to play it again. Gang of Dice is a Yahtzee variant with some push-your-luck twists. It was amusing enough and may get another run but it wasn’t a super compelling game. It’s a Wonderful World is a proper game, with some depth and strategy, and mostly about building up your own position rather than tearing other players down.

Friday was also an important day for Scully, as she had her teeth cleaned by the vet. For dogs, this is a general anaesthetic procedure, so she was there most of the day so she could recover before coming home. She was fine afterwards and got spoiled with some boiled chicken for dinner after not having been able to eat all day. They did some x-rays because apparently some of her adult teeth haven’t erupted yet, which is unusual for her age (5 years), but they said there was nothing to be concerned about.

Today I spent much of the day writing new Darths & Droids comics. I need to try and get ahead because we’re running a bit close to zero buffer at the moment. It rained a bit, but we took Scully on a couple of walks around the showers. And my wife went to the community garden again and brought back some more random vegetables. We used some radishes and green leafy things for a salad tonight with our minestrone.

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Emergency bath day

We gave Scully a bath yesterday because it had been a few weeks since her dog grooming and she was starting to get a bit “dog smelly”.

Today I took Scully for a bit of a drive at lunchtime, to a place with a good pie shop near a soccer field that is usually empty, so its a good place to let her run around and do some ball chasing. There were some kids from the adjacent primary school doing some sort of PE lessons on part of the field, but we started down the other end. We slowly migrated towards the middle of the field, where there’s a cricket pitch installed. I tossed the ball over the pitch and Scully ran after it…

And stopped at the perimeter of bare dirt around the pitch and did a face-first dive and roll into the dirt. She did a full on dust-bath. It was already too late to stop her, so I didn’t even bother trying to call her away. And so she continued rolling and wriggling in the dirt! Eventually I had to pull her away since she wasn’t stopping. She was covered in brown dust and bits of grass. Aiiee!!

So when we got home I had to give her another bath. A lot more dirt came off her into the bathwater than yesterday. So she definitely needed it. Hopefully tomorrow I won’t have to give her another bath!

Apart from that I took it bit easy today. It’s been a busy last few days and I think I needed to slow down a bit. I’ve also found and booked a small apartment in Rome for our week there after the ISO meeting in Finland in November. And I signed my contract for casual teaching this semester at the University of Technology, doing the Image Processing course again. That starts… this time next week! I’ll be doing it on Thursday evenings again.

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Fame!

Today I wrote my new lesson plan for the older kids’ ethics class, on the topic of “Fame”.

What else? Oh yes, Scully had her annual vet checkup and vaccination today. The vet said she’s in excellent health, but she needs a teeth clean some time soonish. We look after her teeth with special food and in fact I brush her teeth with a doggie toothbrush and doggie toothpaste… well, most nights although I skip it occasionally. Anyway, her first teeth clean after over 5 years is better than some dogs who need a teeth clean annually. If you don’t know about dog dental care, it’s not like a human dentist clean – they have to put the dog under general anaesthetic, so it’s a fairly big deal. We’ll have to book it in some time in the next month or two.

Also today I baked more bread, using some rye flour that my wife picked up on the weekend. And made pumpkin and lentil soup for dinner. It went well with the bread, still warm from the oven.

Oh, and I did a 2.5k run. A little faster than the ones I did on Friday and Saturday, but still a way to go to get back to my pre-trip form.

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And a reasonable first day of winter

It was supposed to be warm today, 23°C forecast, but the temperature barely reached 19°C, and it was overcast until the late afternoon. It didn’t feel too bad though.

Today marks 5 years since Scully joined our household!

Here she is this afternoon. I remember the day we picked her up from the breeder. It was a really really cold day, out in the countryside. We stopped on the way back to eat at a cafe, having to sit outside because of Scully, and wrapping ourselves in blankets to avoid freezing. I think it was like 4°C or something.

For dinner tonight I made a fancy meal: roast pumpkin with home-made labne, a sage and burnt butter sauce with home-grown lime, pomegranate, and toasted pepitas.

I’ve been wanting to try making labne for ages. I bought some cheesecloth a while back, but this is the first time I’ve tried using it. I put a large tub (900 g) of plain yoghurt, mixed with about a quarter teaspoon of salt, into the cheesecloth yesterday, in a large sieve, and let it drain over a bowl in the fridge overnight.

Today I ended up with almost 300 mL of whey drained off the yoghurt (leavig I assume about 600 g of labne), which I used instead of water to make a loaf of sourdough (which is still rising, and I’ll bake soon). So I’ll be interested to see how that turns out too.

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Scully’s 5th birthday!

Today was the Big 5 for Scully! (Not the big 5-0, just the big 5 🤣) She got a wrapped gift from our neighbours, which she had fun tearing the paper off, revealing a… llamacorn. Yeah, a rainbow coloured llama-unicorn toy. She got into it and gave it a good chew so that was a hit.

I slept poorly during the night. The COVID has moved up to resemble a bad head cold, with blocked sinuses and dripping nose. I could lie on my back without my nose running, but I’m a side sleeper and don’t feel comfortable lying on my back and can’t fall asleep that way. But whenever I rolled into a comfortable positions on my side, my nose would start running within a few seconds and I had to jump out of bed, grab some tissues, and blow my nose. Rinse, repeat.

The annoying thing is I don’t feel especially sick – under the weather certainly, but not a complete mess – but I just can’t get a restful sleep. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since I first noticed symptoms on Wednesday. Today I didn’t have any more feverish spells or hot sweats, so I think things are on the mend. I’m hoping I can really conk out and sleep soundly tonight. My sinuses are still badly clogged, but hopefully not as runny as last night.

I decided to cancel ethics classes tomorrow, and also for Tuesday and Wednesday, because now I’ve cancelled more than half a week, so I figured I should just go ahead and cancel a full week’s worth, and shuffle my topics forward a week so none of the students actually miss out on any of the topics. I’m almost certain I won’t be able to go into the university tomorrow to teach Data Engineering there either.

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COVID day 4

Still feeling pretty miserable, though the symptoms are at least an ever-changing cavalcade of new sensations. Today I woke up with my sinuses and ears blocked. The throat doesn’t feel as gluggy, overtaken by sniffling, nose-blowing, and a general stuffy head. Again the morning was easier, but I developed feverish chills and aching muscles again in the late afternoon. Definitely not a pleasant disease, this.

Today was the New South Wales State election. Fortunately I’d gone up with my wife on Wednesday to a pre-polling station and cast my vote then, so I didn’t have to go do it today. We’ve had a conservative government here for the past 12 years, and looking at the very early results being counted as I type, it looks like a foregone conclusion that they’ll be voted out.

I took Scully for a short walk in the morning while my wife went out to pick up an item she’d ordered. She didn’t tell me about this until she got home with it: It’s a gift for Scully for her 5th birthday, which is tomorrow. It’s a new dog bed sewn out of some of my wife’s old clothes.

The idea is that her scent is all over it, so it’ll be familiar and comfortable for Scully to snuggle on.

Tonight we ordered some Indian food for dinner. We almost never order food delivered, but seeing as I can’t go out to a restaurant and didn’t feel too enthused about cooking myself, we decided it would be a good idea tonight.

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Scully’s naughty adventure

Today Scully had a bit of an adventure. I took her for a walk at lunch time, up to the shops so I could get some lunch. When we come home, I usually let her off the lead just before we come into the apartment building. I did this, went to open the door, turned around, and she wasn’t there!

Near the front door is one of the ground floor units with a garden, and it has a gate in the fence. I noticed it was ajar…

Scully had wandered in and explored their garden! I didn’t want to go into their property so I was trying to call her back from the gate. Then the lady who owns the unit came in from the street. I’d actually seen her walking out as we came in – she must have just popped out briefly to do something and left her gate ajar. I said I was sorry but my dog had wandered in the open gate. She went in o find Scully, and looked all around the garden, while I waited at the gate. And then she went inside, because she had also left the patio door open, so Scully had gone inside!

She found Scully and shooed her out, and then I called her over. Fortunately this lady knows Scully and likes her, so she wasn’t upset and said it was all fine. But oh dear.

The other interesting thing today was the third lesson of my six-week Creative Thinking and Game Design course with my current student. Last week she said she liked Werewolf and Mysterium, and we brainstormed some game theme ideas, which ended up including “solving a murder mystery” as one idea.

This week I suggested an alternative twist on the theme: getting away with murder. All the players are murderers and have to try to avoid being found out. She loved the idea, and after some discussion of other potential themes, she decided that’s the one she wants to go with. So we’re now designing a game about getting away with murder! You may remember the previous times I’ve run this course, we ended up designing a game about ruining a wedding, and a game about having a family argument. Kids really like selecting the slightly perverse themes!

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Database problems and an early day

I didn’t write a post yesterday because the databases on my web server were running intermittently and I couldn’t access this blog. It seems better today.

Yesterday Scully had her grooming session at the dog groomer. My wife dropped her off but I picked her up. Though when I got there my wife messaged that they’d sent her a message that Scully wasn’t ready yet and would be another half hour. I read this message after I’d pulled up in front of the groomer, so I had a half hour to kill. Rather than drive home again and then back 10 minutes later, I went to the nearby home centre to browse around the shops for a bit.

We finally got home just after my wife left for a pottery class. She’s been doing a beginner pottery class for the past few weeks, and signed up for another few weeks to try it some more. She still hasn’t brought home any of the results, so I’m very interested to see them!

This morning I got up almost two hours earlier than normal, because my wife left to go to the first gym class of the day before work, and normally Scully just sleeps through until she returns home an hour and a bit later. But today Scully jumped up and was insistent to get up and go outside, so I had to get up and take her out.

I had to fill out a police background check form today for Outschool, for the annual renewal of that as a requirement to teach children. Fortunately I had scans of my passport and driver’s licence already, from when I did it last year, so it was pretty quick and easy.

Oh, and one of my students today in the USA said that there was an ice storm happening outside as we were doing the class. He looked out the window at one point and sad he thought a tree had just fallen onto their swing set! I said if anything happened and he needed to go he could just disconnect and go – no need to explain to me. But it was okay, at least until we completed the class. Pretty freaky stuff.

Yesterday I also took some photos of my bookshelves full of roleplaying game material, since people were posting them on reddit and Mastodon, so I thought I’d post my collection.

This first photo is mainly Dungeons & Dragons stuff. The 1981 Tom Moldvay version of Basic/Expert D&D; Advanced D&D (1st edition); D&D 3rd edition; D&D 5th edition; a bunch of Goodman Games’ Original Adventures Reincarnated; Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics; Call of Cthulhu 40th Anniversay Classic Edition; and a bunch of miscellaneous adventures and stuff.

This shelf contains some Kobold Guides; Star Wars Roleplaying (Fantasy Flight Games); Star Trek Adventures (Modiphius); James Bond 007; Goodman Games’ Crypt of the Devil Lich; and some D&D boxed sets.

These shelves are almost all GURPS 3rd edition; with some Munchkin d20; and a Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia.

And these are the rest of the GURPS 3rd edition books; GURPS 4th edition; some miscellaneous books; Toon; Delta Green; Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (West End Games); Metamorphosis Alpha; Call of Cthulhu 6th edition; Paranoia 2nd edition; Blue Planet.

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Ferry trip for lunch

Today I decided to retry that aborted ferry trip that I attempted with Scully before Christmas. This time the ferries were running, so we managed to get to our destination: the suburb of Woolwich. It’s literally only one stop and two minutes on the ferry, but it’s across the Lane Cove River, so it would take a good 15 minutes or more to drive there.

From the Woolwich wharf we walked ten minutes up the road to the nearest cluster of cafes and the local pub to get some lunch. It’s up a hill with a good view over a large yacht dock towards the city centre.

I’d checked for a place to eat with Scully before we left, but the place I selected only had outdoor tables in the sun, and they were also doing some renovations which involved a loud drilling noise emanating from the interior which would have been unbearable if I’d sat there to eat. So we continued on a few doors down to another cafe, which had shady tables and no drilling noises. I had a chicken burger, which came with chips. I regret to say that it wasn’t very good: the burger was small and the chicken dry, and the chips were a bit cardboardy. The waitress asked me how it was as she cleared the table and I mumbled “it was good” as I avoided eye contact.

This prompted me to ask my friends on Discord what they do in the same situation, a poor meal and a query form the waiter. They all agreed they’d just kind of mumble “good/fine” and make a mental note not to go back to the same place, rather than actually tell the staff that the food wasn’t great.

Anyway, after eating, Scully and I walked back to the wharf to catch the ferry home again.

In the above photo you can actually see our destination – the green headland on the left. As I said, two minutes on the ferry, but a significant driving distance.

This evening I had the first three classes of the new week’s ethics topic on medicine. I feel like this might be a trickier topic than I thought and I may have to tweak my lesson plan a little to encourage more discussion from the kids.

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Lunch in the city

Today was cold. Really cold for December in Sydney. The temperature didn’t even reach 20°C – it topped out at 19.9°C. It was also windy, and there were a few drizzly showers, so it felt even colder – the maximum “apparent temperature” was only 14.7°C. Don’t forget it’s summer here. We’re supposed to be having days over 30°C at this time of year. Today actually felt like the middle of winter.

Despite this, we had to venture out to the city for a birthday lunch for my brother-in-law. We took Scully in on the ferry. Here’s a shot I took as the ferry approached Circular Quay:

We disembarked and walked south through the streets to lunch. We passed through Martin Place, the central square in Sydney, where the city’s giant Christmas tree is:

Before heading to lunch we stopped off at Hyde Park so Scully could run on the grass a bit and do a toilet.

We also stopped off at a game shop to buy a copy of the second edition of Camel Up, that I’d ordered from them a couple of weeks ago.

While we were in there, a woman and her daughter, about 12 years old, came in and the mother was asking the staff for assistance with buying some Magic: the Gathering cards for the daughter, who wanted to start playing the game with her friends. The staff gave some advice about various decks they could buy. After the staff had finished the mother and daughter browsed around a bit and I approached and said I’d overheard that the girl wanted to start playing Magic, and I said I had an old collection with hundreds of old common cards that weren’t worth my while trying to sell, so I could let her have them for free. The woman was extremely grateful and I gave her my email address so she can contact me to arrange to pick them up some time. I was happy to help, especially for a young girl who wants to get into the game.

We had lunch at a French place, sitting outside because of Scully. Although we were under an awning, the drizzle got us a bit wet, and it was very cold in the wind. The food was good – I had a burger and chips, and then waffles and hot chocolate for dessert, which were both really good.

After lunch we walked back to Circular Quay to catch the ferry home again. Scully had a fun day out, walking through the city and riding the ferry. This evening she’s completely exhausted!

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