December 2025 – dangermouse.net

New Year’s Eve: It’s almost 2026

It’s the last day of the year. We didn’t have much to do today, particularly. I did a 5k run after breakfast. The weather’s mild and cloudy, and possibly some rain later tonight.

I made some coffee-free tiramisu variants for dessert for tomorrow’s New Year’s lunch, when some of my wife’s family is coming over again – just three of them this time. I made a chocolate and a Black Forest version, with stewed fresh cherries.

In the early evening we took Scully for a walk and decided to go down as far as one of the view points where people gather to watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks. It was less crowded than I expected, although there were several people set up there and waiting.

We used to walk down to watch the fireworks, but these days we just hang out at home. Our neighbours knocked on our door while I was cooking pasta for dinner and said they were having some guests over for New Year’s Eve and apologised in advance if it was a little noisy, and gave us a bottle of sparkling wine. Very nice of them to do that!

See you in 2026!

Playing Monkey Palace, and brewpub dinner

Today my wife went to see a stage production of Dial M for Murder. I wasn’t interested to see it, so I drove her down to the theatre for the morning matinee. Then I took Scully for a drive up to Narraweena, where one of my favourite pie shops has opened a second branch. Oliver’s Pies was originally in Avalon, which is a long drive from home, but this new branch is about half the distance, so easier to get to.

I tried the smoky pork and bourbon pie, and a butter chicken pie. There’s a small park with playground just around the corner and I sat on a shady seat there to eat while Scully guarded the area from rampant ibis. The smoky pork pie was absolutely delicious. The butter chicken was pretty good, though I think I prefer the butter chicken at Allambie Pies.

After we got home, I photographed and catalogued another block of Magic: the Gathering cards for eventual eBaying. Today was Mirrodin block; yesterday’s was Kamigawa block. I also have Innistrad block, Battle for Zendikar, Scars of Mirrodin, and Kaladesh ready to be sold.

This afternoon I played the first game of Lego Monkey Palace (my Christmas gift) with my wife. It’s a fairly straightforward game, easy to learn, but there is some very interesting strategy and a lot of choices in it, so I think it will be fun to play many times. Definitely better than any of the older Lego games that they published some years back, which were very light on actual gameplay experience.

Here’s what the board looked like at the end of the game (you build the structure during your turns throughout the course of the game):

After this we went for a walk over to the Flat Rock Brew Cafe for dinner. I had a pulled pork burger:

And I sketched this view of the front of the place (since we were sitting outside on the terrace):

On the way home we stopped at the supermarket to buy some things for New YEar’s Day lunch, for which were inviting over some of my wife’s family. We’re doing a pork roast, and needed to buy the meat, potatoes, onions. I seem to be destined to eat a lot of pork this week…

Sketching Ashfield

Today my wife and I decided to take a bit of a drive over to the suburb of Ashfield, to explore a bit, see what was there, and do some sketching.

We got in a bit of a mess because I entered a street into the car’s navigation system, having had a look on Maps and thinking it would be a good place to find a parking spot. But the nav system took us to the other side of the station, where the street continued, cut in half by the train line. This was the busy side, and there was no street parking to be had. I found a large car park next to the station, but it was a commuter park, with no charge if you had a train journey that day, but $30 for any amount of time otherwise!

So we drove around a bit, heading a couple of blocks away from the shopping area into residential streets until we found a parking spot. That done, we walked back to the shops. It was almost lunch time, so we stopped at a place called Urban Artisans Cafe and had something to eat. I drew a sketch of the outdoor seating area.

My wife was still working on her watercolour of the streetscape, so I did another quick sketch of the restaurants across the road.

I was amused by the fact that there were five adjacent buildings in a row, which were, apparently, according to the signs on them:

Shanghai Night Restaurant
New Shanghai
New Shanghai
New Shanghai Workshop
New Shanghai Night Restaurant

After we’d eaten, we walked around the block back to the car, via a sports field. We stopped at one point so I could draw an old Victorian house.

When we got back home, I photographed and catalogued another set of Magic: the Gathering cards for eventual eBaying. it took a couple of hours. I have one more set to do, I think, before I’ll list the current lot.

For dinner tonight I made mushroom pizza. And for dessert… I think I’ve about finished all the leftovers from Christmas! So I’m not sure what I’ll have yet.

Bark Avenue with friends

This morning we slept in, since we had nothing important to do in the morning. After breakfast I went for a run and completed 7.5k since I hadn’t done that distance for a while. The weather was cool so it wasn’t too hard.

After lunch we had friends over, a couple with their eldest daughter, and we all played a game of Bark Avenue together. They also brought their dog, Bella, who is a good buddy of Scully, and the two of them had fun playing together.

For dinner we had more leftovers from Christmas lunch, finishing off the lentil loaf and roast vegetables. I still have a little bit of turkey and ham to go, and then it’ll only be the sweets left!

Harbour sketching

Today we had an easy day. My wife and I took Scully for a long walk in the morning, and we stopped at Mary Carlson Park in Greenwich, where we sketched the view. Here’s mine:

After lunch we went for a bit of a drive over to Kirribilli, where we walked around the few blocks around Kirribilli House (the Prime Minister’s official residence in Sydney) and stopped to catch the views in various spots. You get views like this of the city peeking through the apartments:

And even the garbage bin storage areas have great views:

We ended up at Mary Booth Lookout, which has this view:

And here’s my sketch of the view:

Back home, the lift in our building is still not working. It broke on Christmas Eve, and since the next two days were public holidays we kind of expected it not to be fixed until today. We saw the truck of the lift repair guy when we went out this morning, but for some reason it’s still not fixed. Maybe there’s a part they need to get in or something. It’s a little annoying taking Scully up and down via the stairs, but fortunately she likes stairs.

Tonight for dinner I had pasta with leftover Christmas ham and roast onion and leftover cream to make a cream sauce. And for lunch it was leftover lentil-nut loaf and potato bake. And for dessert in a minute it’ll be leftover Christmas pudding with leftover custard!

Boxing Day games

After yesterday’s food-heavy celebrations and not having to get up today since it’s Boxing Day, my wife got up at 4am to do a live art tutorial session online with a YouTube art teacher in the US. She got a mention in the comments as being up at that time.

After I got up (at a reasonable hour) and had some breakfast I went for a 5k run. The weather has turned unseasonably chilly and it was only about 16°C, but that was great for running and I did a good time.

Lunch was leftover turkey sandwiches, of course.

After lunch I drove over to a friend’s place for today’s fortnightly board games event. Since it’s a public holiday we decided to start in the early afternoon. We’d planned for four of us, but one dipped out at the last second as he was feeling sick. So we had three of us, and we played a learning game of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The aim of the game is to accumulate points by doing various things to further the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, such as launching space probes and having them orbit or land on planets, scanning nearby stars with radio telescopes, correlating/analysing data using computer systems, upgrading your technologies, gaining publicity, and so on. Besides gaining points, these actions also slowly uncover traces of aliens, until about halfway through the game you discover a random alien civilisation, which unlocks a variety of other things that you can do to earn points. We got one that gave us access to sample return missions, for example. A total of two alien species can be discovered. It was fun!

After completing that game we played a game of Root. One of the other guys had played before but didn’t fully get the rules or strategy, while the other hadn’t played before, so it was a good chance for the two of them to have a learning game, without involving our other friends who have all played multiple times and have a good grip on it. I played the birds and I got into trouble early with a bad hand with no bird cards for several turns, and had a couple of early turmoils. So it turned into a fight between the other two, and ended very close. They both enjoyed it, so that was a success!

I came home early in the evening and had some of our uneaten lentil loaf for dinner, with leftover potato bake. And soon some leftover Christmas pudding for dessert!

Oh, and in other news we got a Christmas cards from one of my oldest friends, a pen-pal who lives in the USA. We visited her and her family way back in 2004, when her children were very young. Now one of the children has just received a working holiday visa for Australia and is planning to spend time here. Which means that my friend is now planning a possible trip to visit her daughter some time in the next year or so. She visited Australia way back in 1988, so it’ll be great to have her visit again.

Christmas lunch

Christmas Day! I actually gave my wife her gift last night. It’s a sketchbook that I’ve been working on for the past two months, but I couldn’t mention here because she reads this blog. I drew something to inspire her on the left page of each double-page spread, for her to either copy, or just be inspired by in some other way, and fill all of the facing pages. Here are a couple of things I drew:

A giraffe:

A lighthouse:

This morning we had to get ready for hosting Christmas lunch. First thing was taking the pavlova out of the now cool oven. It looked fine, despite the mix up with the oven mode last night. I set it aside to top and decorate later.

The next thing was making a glazed ham. I’d bought a small ham and made a glaze from maple syrup, brown sugar, dijon mustard, cinnamon, allspice, ground cloves, and basted it several times as it cooked in the oven.

After that was preparing vegetables for roasting. I parboiled some potatoes and chopped pumpkin, onions, and broccoli. We didn’t start roasting them until my wife’s family arrived at midday. They brought several other things: baked turkey, a garlic potato bake, Christmas pudding, and some fancy chocolates and some wine. Once the vegetables were done quickly baked some par-baked bread rolls (from the supermarket) and while they were baking put the garlic potato bake in to crisp up the top. Then we served things up, with cranberry sauce for the turkey and mustard for the ham.

After that we had the pudding for dessert, with custard and/or cream and/or ice cream, depending on what people wanted. And then about an hour later we topped the pavlova with whipped cream and fresh fruit for second dessert, with coffee (for the coffee drinkers).

It was only when we were having dessert that we realised that we hadn’t served the vegetarian lentil loaf that we’d made! My wife had had plenty to eat with the roasted vegetables and bread rolls and potato bake and didn’t even notice that her main dish was missing! Oh well… we’ll be eating that for dinner for the next few nights!

The guests left in the early evening and we took Scully for a walk before the sun went down. She was a bit hyped up by the day so we wanted to tire her out for the evening.

Now relaxing and deciding if I can possibly eat anything for dinner.

Christmas Eve family afternoon, pavlova drama

We had a few things to do today to prepare for Christmas. This morning my wife and I made a lentil and mushroom loaf for a vegetarian main dish for tomorrow’s Christmas lunch. There’s also going to be turkey and ham for the meat eaters, and roast vegetables.

Straight after lunch we drove out to Penrith and the park by the River there, where my extended family gather for Christmas Eve. When we arrived they were already set up under the shade of several trees, as it was very hot and sunny, reaching almost 36°C there. We had fun catching up with everyone, my various aunts and uncles, and cousins and their kids. There were about 25 people all together.

The wife of one of my cousins had made a delicious date and brandy cake, and of course some of her famous caramel slice. The cake was really good and I had a second piece of it. I showed people my sketchbook from our Europe trip back in June. We left late in the afternoon to drive back home. It’s an hour on the motorways, so it was a bit of a trip.

Back home we made a simple potato frittata with haloumi cheese for dinner.

Then I set about making a pavlova for dessert after tomorrow’s Christmas lunch. If you recall yesterday, I was reading all the dire warnings about mistakes that will ruin the pavlova, so you have to be super careful to avoid. Well, I’m happy to report that I didn’t make any of those mistakes, and the mixture looked great when I piled it on the baking tray and put it into the oven. I let it bake for an hour at the correct temperature.

But when the timer went off and I went to turn the oven off, I noticed that I’d forgotten to switch the oven mode to “bake”! It was still on “rapid heat”! Which uses the fan and additional heating elements! So I’d essentially baked it on a super fan-forced setting, at the non-fan-forced temperature.

It’s still cooling in the oven—you can’t take it out until tomorrow morning when the oven is cold—so I don’t know what it’s like. It may be ruined. Or it might be okay. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow when I go to serve it….

First day of Christmas break

Today I had I really needed to do!

I did a 5k run after breakfast. Then showered and cleaned the shower cubicle thoroughly while I was at it. My wife went off for her office Christmas lunch, at an Asian fusion place in the city. She was there basically all afternoon, getting home around 5pm.

I took Scully for a short walk, but needed to carry her part of the way because of the hot sun heating up the footpaths and roads, too hot for her paws. I let her walk on the grass and in shady areas.

In the afternoon I catalogued and photographed another block of Magic: the Gathering cards in preparation for listing them on eBay. I want to get about 7 or 8 blocks worth of cards done and then post them all at once, so bidders can go for multiple lots and combine postage. I also made a new Darths & Droids comic, the first one that will be published in 2026!

For dinner I’d planned to fry up vegetarian sausages and serve them with spätzle and sauerkraut and broccolini. But my wife was too full from the lunch to want spätzle, so we ditched that component.

Afterwards we went for a walk in the cooler air of the evening. We still needed to get a few things for Christmas cooking. We’re planning to make a pavlova, and needed some raspberries and passionfruit, and also for the roast vegetables some broccoli. We got the last two, but they were out of raspberries.

I’m a bit intimidated by making pavlova, as I’ve never made one before, and I found a recipe online which had multiple dire warnings about things, such as make sure there isn’t a single droplet of water or grease on any of the bowls or utensils, or it will ruin it. After beating the mixture, you have to shape it and get it into the oven within 5 minutes or it’ll be ruined. And when it’s in the oven you’re not allowed to have any heavy footsteps as it will cause the pavlova to collapse. And when it’s done you can’t refrigerate it, and have to eat it within a few hours. And you can’t decorate it with cream and fruit until less than 20 minutes before serving. etc, etc.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Last classes for the year!

Both my wife and I have ended work for the year! I had my last critical thinking classes today, a total of five of them, finishing off the topic “Endings & Beginnings”. And my wife was supposed to have another day of work tomorrow, or at least a morning before the staff Christmas lunch, but the boss told everyone not to bother showing up at the office in the morning, and just show up at the restaurant for the lunch, before the office closes down for the Christmas/New Year period.

So we’re both on holidays now!

Not much else happened today. It was hot again. Last night it was still 29°C at 4am, though it cooled to 23°C by 7am. Tonight the overnight minimum is forecast to be even hotter at 24°C, before another scorcher tomorrow.

I took some time this afternoon to photograph and catalogue some Magic: the Gathering cards. I’m planning to eBay some more of these and want to use some time during this break to create listings for several sets of cards at once.

Now to relax and enjoy a sleep in tomorrow!