weather – Page 14 – dangermouse.net

First day of spring and… it’s cold

As one of my friends commented, it’s just like Sydney to have 27°C days in winter, and then the first day of spring arrives and it’s cold. We had a strong cold southerly wind blowing all day; it barely reached 18°C and it felt even colder than it really was. It won’t last though, we have a forecast for 25° days again in the next week.

It was another pretty bog-standard Friday. I picked up groceries in the morning before my first ethics class. Then I had a break in which I did a 5k run. I’m doing these more often now, mixing them up with the 2.5k ones.

My wife actually came home at lunch time to work from home for the afternoon. And then we went for a walk with Scully over to Naremburn, and the Flat Rock Brew Cafe for dinner. It was busy with a lot of people having Friday drinks, and many of them had brought dogs as well, so Scully got a bit excited and barky for a while until she settled down. The food is pretty nice pub food, and now I’m really full after a chicken schnitzel topped with bacon, fried egg, tomato sauce, and cheese.

Tonight is board games night online with my friends. I’ve just joined and am waiting for them to finish a game in progress so I can join in. It’s been a pretty full week, with not too much out of the ordinary to report.

New content today:

Hot and bothered

The weather, that is. Today the temperature reached 27.3°C here in Sydney, which made it the hottest winter day for 8 years. It didn’t last though. A cold front came through mid-afternoon and dropped the temperature, bringing with it violent thunderstorms. Most of the storms passed south of us, so we didn’t see a lot of rain, but we certainly heard some loud thunder. Parts of Sydney got hail, and over 50mm of rain.

I spent most of today writing lesson plans for the next week of ethics classes. The younger kids are getting a class on “Rules”, and the older kids a class on “Cancel Culture”. Here’s the opening for the Rules one:

Some time in the future, a country named Florin has citizens who value freedom very highly. They have a system where people can propose ideas, and then everyone votes on them. One day someone suggests that to be truly free, there should be no rules. The people vote to try this out for a single day.

The Rule-Free Day is announced a month in advance. The rules are: there will be no rules! Parents will not be able to tell their children what to do, or what not to do. You won’t need to go to school if you don’t want. There are no rules of politeness. There will be no laws, so you can do anything you want and the police won’t stop you.

Saskia and her friends are excited by the Rule-Free Day. They’re planning to go out first thing in the morning and do exactly what they want all day! They’ll eat chocolate for breakfast and then go to the amusement park and climb over the fence and go on all the rides without paying. They’ll go into the kitchen of their favourite fast food place and make themselves hamburgers and huge bowls of ice cream. It’ll be such a great day!

Questions for the class:
What could go wrong?
Does a society of people need to have rules? Why?

There’s a lot more, but I won’t paste the entire lot here. I’ve run this class three times already tonight, and it’s generated some very fun and thoughtful discussion from the kids.

I also chased up an order I made a while back for some roleplaying game books from a local game store. They said they could get them in stock, but I hadn’t heard from them. I sent an email and they said they still didn’t have them, but the guy found one of them with a different distributor and said he could order that one and it should arrive in a week or so. So I said please do that, and we’ll just have to see about the others.

Finally, a photo, which I took last night, just before doing my lecture at the University of Technology Sydney:

I did the lecture in a room on the 5th floor of the new building on the right.

New content today:

Fancy lunch with free dessert

During my three classes this morning, my wife messaged and asked if I wanted to meet her at a local restaurant for lunch, during her work break. So I took Scully up and we sat at a table outside. The weather was nice. And the restaurant turned out to be having a “23rd birthday” special for the month of August, offering either a free glass of wine or dessert with any lunch menu item. They’re actually open for breakfast and lunch, but not dinner. They used to be open for dinner years ago, and we enjoyed going there a few times, but since they decided not to open for dinner any more we’ve rarely been back, so it was nice to try it again.

I chose a barbecue pulled pork burger, and the dessert, which was a sticky date pudding. The burger was good, and the dessert was too, although not very big. I wonder if it was a special smaller serving for the free offer.

This afternoon I assembled another few Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last batch of photos I took, which will last for this week. For next week it’s time to write new strips and take more photos again.

In weather news, I ran across this mid-range outlook forecast by the Bureau of Meteorology, showing October-December this year.

2023 Oct-Dec forecast map

Yeah, it’s gonna be a hot summer.

New content today:

Winter chill back in the air

Monday morning is full of ethics classes, finishing off the topic of “What If?” about alternate history.

After those and eating some lunch, I took Scully for a walk. I was thinking of a longish walk, but a look at the weather outside and a consultation with the rain radar changed that plan quickly, as there were heavy rain showers incoming. So instead I took her on a shorter walk around past the corner store supermarket, where I stopped in quickly to get a Portuguese tart for a treat (for myself). It was fairly large, so I had half and am saving the other half for tonight. Besides threatening grey clouds, it was chilly today, much colder than the balmy days we’ve been having the past couple of weeks.

I finished up another Darths & Droids comic this afternoon, which puts me a week ahead on the buffer now, so that’s good. And then I took it relatively easy for a few hours, just relaxing. Scully got another walk in the evening before my 6pm Game Design class, the second of 6 lessons. This one’s going well, and the student came up with some really intriguing ideas for potential game themes, including: writing a diary; being a pessimist; managing a hotel; and reading biographies or speeches of famous people and quoting them. I have no idea how that last one would work as a game, but it’s very interesting.

Tonight my wife and I are going to watch the Matildas’ round-of-16 match against Denmark in the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Hopefully it’ll be as exciting and in favour of Australia as last week’s game against Canada!

New content today:

Hot winter day

The most notable thing today was the weather. It was warm. The temperature reached 25.2°C in central Sydney, and up to 26.4°C in some suburbs. That’s pretty warm for the middle of winter. It could have qualified as a summer day. It was nice, but a bit worrying.

This morning I went to the supermarket to do a manual grocery shopping. I missed the window for my usual order to pick up on Friday morning, and didn’t manage to organise anything yesterday so today I just decided to go in and do the old fashioned thing of walking down the aisles myself to grab stuff. I didn’t get a lot, because I wanted to be quick. Just the few things on the shopping list, some staples like milk, and some fresh fruit. I didn’t get any vegetables because with my wife’s haul fro the community garden yesterday we have plenty to last the week.

I did a 2.5k run, in the balmy warmth. A week ago I was running in 11°C, today it was 22°C. Made a comic, did 3 ethics classes this evening, and that was pretty much a day.

New content today:

Early nesting lorikeets

According to my iPhone Health app I walked almost 13,000 steps today – the highest daily amount since I got back from Japan 3 weeks ago. It began with a 5k run this morning, when I decided to double my more usual distance. I took it easy so I wouldn’t get too worn out in the second half, and it wasn’t too bad.

Then at lunchtime I took Scully on a longish walk, doing a circuit around through a park, past cafes, down to the harbour shore, then back up through a bushwalk. It’s a circuit we do often, but it’s been made longer in the past few months by some work to upgrade a series of old sandstone steps that lead down from a street into a deep gully. There are steps up the other side leading to the park, but the steps down have been closed for a while due to the construction work.

While the work was in progress we had to take a detour of about 300 metres up the street to another set of steps and then back along the bottom of the gully. But today for the first time the new steps were open!

We stopped at a bakery-cafe for lunch. Normally at this place I just buy a pie or a sausage roll. But today I actually looked at the menu and selected the chicken schnitzel burger. It was okay, but not great. I think the pies are better.

While eating, I was sitting at a table outside on the footpath, facing an elderly lady who was also sitting alone at the next table over. Feral pigeons lurk around this place, looking for crumbs, and they’re bold in attempting to steal food. Twice one jumped onto the old lady’s table, surprising her so much that each time she actually screamed in shock. The first time she shooed the birds away and commented to me how much she hated pigeons, even though she was a bird lover. The second time she gave up and moved inside the cafe to finish her meal. I didn’t have that option since I was sitting outside with Scully, so I waved the pigeons off with my hat a few times. I too love birds, but pigeons really don’t fall under the umbrella, and I’d happily see them all eliminated from Australia if it were possible.

After eating we continued to the harbour shore where I threw a ball for Scully to chase a few times. She was a bit distracted by another dog she could see on the grass in the distance though.

On the way home through the bushwalk section, I spotted a rainbow lorikeet sitting on a tree. It didn’t move as I approached, so I began to suspect it might be guarding a nest. And as I got closer, it moved and a second lorikeet emerged from the tree hollow!

This is definitely a mated pair, either choosing a nesting site, or perhaps already guarding eggs. I managed to get even closer for another photo.

Now this is quite weird, because normally lorikeets don’t start nesting until spring, or perhaps August at the earliest. It really has been a strangely warm winter this year. Many flowers are already appearing: magnolias (which are normally early), camellias, azaleas, lavender, cherry blossoms – I’ve seen all of these the past few weeks. We’re supposed to get 23°C for the next few days (which I noted today was the same maximum temperature as London).

Then this afternoon I went for another walk with my wife and Scully, before my ethics classes for the evening. Phew, I feel like I’ve had plenty of running/walking today!

New content today:

Coldest day of the year

Sydney recorded 5.2°C overnight, making it the coldest day of the winter, and the year, so far. It warmed up a bit and the middle of the day wasn’t as cold as yesterday though.

I taught my first class on The Singularity this morning, with some of the older students, and it went well, with plenty of smart discussion by the students.

For lunch I walked Scully up to the shops near my wife’s work and had a Japanese lunch set at one of the restaurants there. They have a lunch special where you get miso soup, rice, salad, and a hot food item, like karaage chicken or pork katsu or teriyaki salmon or whatever. I’ve tried several of the options and was looking to try something new. One of the options was listed on the menu as “jumbo kaki”, and the photo showed what looked like Panko-crumbed croquettes.

I looked up “kaki” on my phone and found it meant “persimmon” in Japanese… but I didn’t think it would be persimmon croquettes. While pondering this, the waitress arrived to take my order, and I asked her what was in this dish. She looked, thought for a second, and declared the croquettes contained “beef and pork”.

Readers who know Japanese at this point: 🤔🤨

Anyway, I ordered the “kaki”. It came with a small bowl with a thick sauce. I tried one, dipping it in the sauce. Sure enough, the sauce tasted a bit like persimmon I thought, so maybe that explained the name in the menu. But the croquette filling definitely wasn’t beef or pork. It was something vaguely animal proteiny, but resembled more like a mushy mass of giblets or something than a cut of meat or a minced meat. It didn’t taste bad, so I just kind of tried to ignore whatever it might be and finished my meal.

When I went to pay, another waitress was at the pay station, and she said, “You had the oysters, right?”

Internally I was thinking, “Oh, that’s what it was!” As well as, “The other waitress really should have known better and not told me it was beef/pork.” Fortunately I don’t mind oysters, although they’re not a food of choice, and honestly if I’d known what the dish was I would have ordered something else. But I just thought now what if I’d had a seafood allergy or something? Anyway, I paid and didn’t say anything. (Also, fortunately I’m not allergic to seafood, although if I was I’d be a lot more careful confirming ingredients in restaurants than I am.)

Looking it up again now, I see that the Japanese “kaki” has several meanings. To quote Wiktionary:

柿: persimmon
垣: fence
牡蠣: oyster (edible)
夏期: summer period
花卉: flowers
火器: firearm
夏季: summer
火気: fire
下記: following
花期: flowering season
花器: vase
和気: harmonious atmosphere

Now I’m pondering a serve of harmonious atmosphere croquettes.

In sports news, the FIFA Women’s World Cup has just begun, with a surprise win by New Zealand against Norway in the opening game in Auckland, and Australia now taking on Ireland here in Sydney. I might go watch the game, and then switch over to the 4th Ashes cricket match in England.

New content today:

Caramel slice photos

Here are some photos of that caramel slice I made last night.

First, the base has been baked in the left, and I’m making the caramel filling.

I think the base is meant to be a bit more uniform in colour. I could have mixed the flour, coconut, brown sugar, and butter more thoroughly. But it didn’t affect the texture. Second, here’s the caramel filling after baking:

And then here are the final cut pieces of the slice, with the chocolate top layer:

And it tastes delicious! Overall I’m really happy with how it went.

Today I spent much of the day writing up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Japan, for Standards Australia. I have a meeting next week to fill in the Australian experts committee on all of the events from that Japan meeting.

And finally today, I know that much of the northern hemisphere is currently in the middle of record-breaking heatwaves. The stories have been shown here about heat in southern Europe, east Asia, and North America. But here in the south it’s winter at the moment, so we’re not especially hot, but we are also experiencing highly unusual warmth for this time of the year. It actually really feels like spring already, and it’s confusing many of the plants, with potentially devastating consequences for our crops. There was a story about it in the news today.

New content today:

Rain and wattle

It rained today. Not much, but a few passing showers, occasionally mildly heavy for a little. I managed to avoid it on my morning 2.5k run, and taking Scully out for a walk after lunch.

A noticeable thing in the area is that the wattle trees are now in full flower.

Australia’s colours are green and gold, and now in midwinter is when we see why.

Not too much else to report today. It was mostly routine, keeping up with Outschool class planning, teaching, cooking, baking some sourdough, and other usual activities.

New content today:

New comic, new ethics

I was busy today, finishing off my lesson plan for tonight’s ethics classes on Heroes and Villains. Followed by writing, photographing, assembling, and uploading four new Irregular Webcomic! strips – enough to last for the rest of this week. I’d only buffered up to yesterday before I went overseas to Japan, and I wanted to fill the rest of the week with new comics if I could.

And then I worked on some Darths & Droids as well, as the buffer is close to zero. And I started work on the ethics plan for the older (13-15) kids, on the topic or Privacy. I’ll have to finish that one tomorrow.

In between, I took Scully for a walk up to the shops. Today was cold and rainy, so she had her padded raincoat on, and I had an umbrella. I’d had lunch at home, but was considering buying a special limited edition spiced apple scone from the bakery. They look great, but I realised the only place to tie up Scully while I went in was a wet bench where the lead would get wet and Scully would be in the rain, so I decided to ditch that for today and maybe try it another day soon.

I didn’t have time for much else. I’m scrambling a bit to fit everything in that I need to do to get back up to normal weekly speed after my trip.

New content today: