sydney – dangermouse.net

Incognito Art

Friday I had my regular ethics classes, and in the evening board games night with my friends. We assembled at one guy’s place, and the five attendees played games such as Knarr, Faraway, Landmarks. Knarr was new to me, and really enjoyable. But we only played once as it’s only up to four players and our fifth arrived partway through the first game. We played Landmarks I think four times, since we were all keen to give a go at being the clue giver in the game. It’s a frustrating role, but in a socially fun way.

Today I did my 5k run and I managed to record my third best time! 26:26. My second best is 26:24, just two seconds faster. The best is a strangely anomalous 25:59, which I set on a much flatter route that I’ve only ever tried once. And to be honest I’m wondering if the tracker GPS got the distance right. Perhaps I should try that route again some time.

This afternoon my wife and I took Scully for a ride on the ferry.

We headed into the city. The day was cool and cloudy.

From the ferry terminal at Circular Quay we walked up past the State Library, through The Domain (a park) to the Art Gallery. Nearby is a gate into the Royal Botanic Gardens, where there was an art exhibition on at the Garden Gallery: the Incognito Art Show (which I mentioned previously). My wife had submitted three pieces for the show and wanted to see what else was available, and if any of hers might be on display at the moment. They weren’t, but they probably will be at some point over the next month or so that the artworks are on sale.

We stopped afterwards at the nearby restaurant in the Domain to have a drink and a snack before heading home. We walked back and had a quick look around The Rocks while waiting for our ferry. Then we hopped on the ferry and headed home.

The sun had come out and was just setting as we travelled back.

A nice day out, but after that run in the morning and all the walking, I’m pretty exhausted!

Discovering a new beach

This morning my wife took Scully to work, which meant I had an entire morning to do whatever I wanted. I dithered a bit, trying to thin of something interesting, and ended up deciding I should probably take the chance to do a 5k run for my fitness.

I completed that by 10:30, with warm-up and warm-down stretches, and having a shower and so on. Then I looked again at the problem of finding something interesting and fun to do. I browsed around on Google Maps and discovered a tiny beach hidden in a corner of the harbour that I’d never noticed before. It’s called Hayes Street Beach (here on Google Maps), on a small bay in Sydney Harbour. It’s accessed through a tunnel between buildings, and is completely surrounded by nearby houses and shops.

Here’s a panorama of the entire beach:

And a shot of one end, which makes it easier to see the Harbour Bridge in the distance over the peninsula towards the right side.

The green building at the right houses a few shops, most of which were closed, but there was one open cafe named Thelma & Louise (after the movie) where I had lunch:

It was very expensive and the food was only average, so overall it was on the disappointing side. I also walked around the streets in this area a little, admiring some of the old houses and their architecture. Here’s a good example of the Federation Queen Anne style.

I picked up Scully from my wife’s work after lunch and spent the afternoon doing comics stuff, before three ethics classes this evening. The Names topic seems to be a good one, with plenty of spirited discussion and differences of opinion among the kids about what sort of names are appropriate or not for parents to give to children.

A close call, and exploring St Peters

After my 5k run and a shower this morning, I suggested to my wife that we could go out for a bit of a drive. She suggested exploring another inner west suburb, and decided on St Peters.

As I drove out of our driveway, I was inching carefully forwards, preparing to turn left into our street (remember that we drive on the left here in Australia, so I wasn’t crossing any traffic). Our street is fairly quiet, but the approach from the right hand side of our driveway comes around a blind corner, so we have to be careful and come out slowly, in cases someone is coming around the corner from the right. So naturally I had my eyes glued to the right as I pulled out…

And another car came racing down our street from the left. You might think this is not a problem, since it would naturally be on the other side of the street, nowhere near me. But not so. It had swerved onto the wrong side of the street at high speed to avoid a speed bump, and so was coming at me from the left. Where (in Australia) you would NEVER expect an oncoming car to be coming from. See the diagram below:

I’m the blue car, edging out of my driveway, peering right in case a car comes around that blind corner on the left side of the map. And the red car came hurtling down the street, swerving onto the wrong side to avoid the speed bump, around the wrong side of the pedestrian safety island, and came within centimetres of hitting me. Fortunately it missed. But sheesh.

Anyway, following this we drove over to St Peters and explored the area. We stopped to get my wife a coffee at a cafe named Copper, which she’d looked up before and was keen to try. Just as we arrived a horde of about 20 seven-year-old-ish boys arrived, with mothers trying to herd them in to the only table inside. This caused chaos in the cafe for about 10 minutes and was incredibly loud, as you might imagine. Eventually we managed to order a coffee and she had it on an outside table, while the kids inside sang “Happy Birthday” and a guy ran out with plates of cake for all the mothers standing outside (since there was no room inside the tiny cafe).

Then we went next door to Fuel Bakery, where I had a sausage roll and a lamb pie, which were both excellent. Then we walked around and explored the neighbourhood.

We found a crafts workshop, which did lessons for people. the woman inside was very friendly and chatted with us for several minutes. The place was in an old factory that used to press vinyl records! My wife took a business card and is planning to go back for a resin jewellery workshop one day.

Further on was a community garden, full of fruit and vegetable plots.

And back near where we had parked the car, there are these old brick kilns.

We also stopped at Miss Lilly’s cake shop in Newtown, just across the suburb boundary of St Peters, where I had a very excellent orange almond cake slice. Like really good – I’ve had a lot of orange almond cake and this may well have been the very best I’ve ever had.

Back at home, this afternoon I wrote what might be the last Irregular Webcomic! strips. I finished off the Stranger Things theme story, which is the last one to be completed. I took the photos, and will start assembling them tomorrow.

Enchiladas for dinner, three ethics classes, and relaxing for the evening…. a busy day!

New content today:

Wadanggari Park

After my ethics class this morning I went with my wife to get our next COVID vaccination booster. On Tuesday I’d seen signs at the local hospital pointing to a COVID vaccination clinic, so we went there. But… there were no signs. So we went to the main entrance to ask where the vaccinations were, and they said that they were no longer offering them, and yesterday was the last day! So we called up a nearby pharmacy and checked that they were still doing vaccinations. This confirmed we walked over there and got our shots.

My wife had a day off because she just ended a job and starts the new one next week. She went into the city to do some shopping, while I took Scully and went to the nearby pie shop so I could get some lunch. Then we went to a brand new park that was opened only last weekend: Badanggari Park. Here’s Scully enjoying the grassed area:

It’s a very nice little park with a couple of grassy areas, edged by sandstone seating enclosing native plant gardens.

Wadanggari is a native Cammeraygal clan word meaning banksia. Which is nice, but I didn’t see any banksia pants among any of the gardens. I dunno, that sees like kind of a big missed opportunity. It would have been nice to have some feature banksia trees in the park.

But then I noticed that in the really excellent looking children’s playgrounds, this enormous climbing tower is a stylised banksia flower:

And this tower is a stylised banksia cone:

The park is elevated above the local train line, and on one side of the wall below the park is this artwork, with an explanation of its cultural significance:

The patterns in the brown metal sheets are representations of the seed pods on the surface of a banksia cone. It’s actually quite neat, if you know what a banksia cone looks like. Here’s one I happen to have photographed years ago:

And here’s a flower so you can compare to the giant stylised flower above:

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’re playing the brand new Board Game Arena implementation of Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which we’re really enjoying.

New content today: