scully – Page 4 – dangermouse.net

The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

Today after lunch I took Scully on a slightly different walk. I checked a map to find something a bit new to do, since we’ve covered many of the same old walks so many times. I realised there was a place we could go about the same distance but that we haven’t done very much.

This walk goes down a steep street down a valley towards a sports field nestled by a creek at the edge of the harbour. But up the hill a bit is this little fern-lined valley.

That’s the street, which is narrow and doesn’t have much traffic, as it leads to a dead end at the sports field.

To go back uphill, we climbed the Stairs of Cirith Ungol:

I don’t know the real name (if any) of these stairs, but that’s what I call them. They’re cut into the sandstone and are pretty steep. Today they were covered with leaf litter as well, which made the footing a bit treacherous. (There’s another mention of them here.)

Scully handled it okay though. That’s her at the top, the little black blob. Although this isn’t the actual top of the stairs – there are several more beyond what you can see. Eventually it opens out into a street, and we can walk back home from there.

In other happenings today, I had a bunch more ethics classes on the brain uploading/transhumanism topics. Made a comic. And had enough time left over to finally format my Japan travel diary from June into HTML web pages. I haven’t embedded any photos yet, but if you’re curious you can read the diary here. Actually, I posted most of it to this blog back in June, from Japan. If you read it then, you probably don’t need to do it again now.

New content today:

Scully by the water, new Japanese food

At lunch today I took Scully for a walk down to the park by the water. The pigface plants were flowering:

And here’s Scully by the water:

After dropping her off at my wife’s work in the afternoon I went into the university in the city for tonight’s image processing lecture, for which I’m on tutor duty again after delivering last week’s lecture. Today we start three weeks of material on machine learning and its application to image processing, recognition, and classification. But first I had to have dinner!

I’ve decided to try a different restaurant every week for this semester, and not just go to the same old places repeatedly. There are plenty in the area, so I shouldn’t run out, and it’s a good chance to try new places. Tonight I found a Japanese place which Google described as “bustling”. Only when I got there it was completely empty.

Probably because I had to eat at 5pm, to make sure I could get to the lecture by 6. I had agedashi eggplant and tempura udon.

It was pretty good! And now I know a good Japanese place near the university.

New content today:

Scully bath time

We had a big Sunday sleep-in today. Scully didn’t even get up until about 9:30 or so. We took her for a walk to the Naremburn bakery for lunch. It was a lovely day and I wore just shorts and a T-shirt for the first time since before winter. Spring is really in the air already.

After getting home we gave Scully a bath. She’d rolled in a few things the past few days, and we wanted to clean her up a bit. There was a bunch of other housework stuff to be done as well today. Not much really worth writing about.

Oh! I ran 2.5k today, and clocked 11:59. The first time I’ve run under 12 minutes since back in March. So that felt pretty good. (Afterwards, definitely not during!!)

New content today:

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.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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.

New content today:

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!

New content today: