January 2026 – dangermouse.net

Hot and smoky Saturday

Today was warm, but also humid, making it feel significantly hotter. Although I did my 5k run in the morning, it was nasty conditions: 26.7°C, 76% humidity. I took it easy and ran my slowest time in almost a year, at 28:43. Compared to 27:05 just a couple of weeks ago when it was 21°C.

The air was also smoky, from distant bushfires a hundred or so kilometres away, blowing towards Sydney. It wasn’t too bad, but noticeable as a faint smell in the air. I paused briefly during the run to snap a couple of photos of the haze over the city.

I’d say it looked a little bit worse in person. The iPhone might be processing it to make the sky more blue rather than brown.

After a welcome cold shower and change, I worked on a new comic. But also took it easy a bit, just hanging with my wife, who was doing some sketching and watercolours.

In the evening as the weather cooled down a bit we walked over to Naremburn for dinner, eating at the pizza place there. And then it was a very pleasant walk back home as the sun was going down and a light breeze was cooling things off.

Last night I finished watching a Netflix series: Don’t Come Home. It’s a 6-part series from Thailand and it was listed as “horror themes” and recommended to me based on my viewing habits. I had it in my watchlist for ages and finally got around to starting it during the week. And it was addictive; I really enjoyed it. Each episode was compelling and I wanted to find out what happened next, and the ending episode was better than I anticipated. I don’t want to say too much about it, in case it spoils anyone who might watch based on my recommendation, but don’t be turned off if you’re not a fan of horror.

Non-critical mass games night

Tonight was the regular fortnightly online board games night, but most of my friends were unavailable for various reasons, so there were only two of us present. We played a couple of games of Pickomino on Board Game Arena, and a game of Codenames Duet.

Pickomino is a push-your-luck dice game, where you want to accumulate dice pips to select tiles of varying values, at the risk of failing if you don’t roll any new dice values to add to your growing collection. The first game I was learning the strategy while my opponent had played before, so I got beaten easily. The second game… I had atrocious dice rolling luck. You have to roll at least one of a special symbol on the dice to be able to pick a tile, which should be easy given eight dice and the fact you reroll most of them multiple times. But for three entire turns I failed to roll the symbol, and so failed to get anything! Naturally I lost this game by a large margin too. It was wildly amusing though to see it happen.

I did my usual critical thinking classes, and picked up the grocery shopping. And took Scully for a walk, sharing duties with my wife who took her on another walk later in the day. That’s about it for the day.

Pies in the park

Today I slept in a little, getting up not long before my wife went to work. I did two critical thinking classes before lunch, then took Scully out for a walk. Because it was hot, I didn’t want to have her walking on hot concrete/bitumen, so we went via a nearby park up to the pie shop where I got lunch. Then we walked back to the park and I sat in the shade at a picnic table while I ate, and Scully had time to sniff around and play on the grass.

This afternoon I spent time catching up on all my ISO photography standards downloads. There were about 50 or 60 documents that I’d had queued up, and I downloaded them all before the upcoming meeting in Tokyo at the end of February. I won’t be flying over, but will be attending via web conference.

For dinner I made quiche, but we’d run out of suitable vegetables to put in it, apart from onions. Normally I’d put pumpkin or spinach, but we didn’t have any and it was too hot to take an expedition to the supermarket just for that. So I did it with a lot of fried onions.

In between classes this evening I watched a few Italian videos on YouTube. I need to get stuck back into learning it somehow, since I completed the Duolingo course a while back and need more to keep improving.

Solid comics and online classes

Today I wrote and assembled a couple of new Darths & Droids scripts, which is good output for a single day. In the evening I did the first three classes of the new “Machines Doing Jobs” critical thinking topic. We explored the ethics of replacing workers with machines, in both manual labour and skilled jobs. We discussed history of the Luddite movement in the Industrial Revolution, and speculated on future disruptions such as robotic surgeons or police officers, and ethical considerations about safety and responsibility.

I had a partial dinner before the classes, a small falafel roll. And then after the classes I made myself French toast using panettone, and topped it with fried banana, maple syrup, and cinnamon. Delicious!

Reusing old class notes

Today I wrote up a lesson plan for the new week of critical thinking classes. I’m finally able to recycle more classes from 2021, since the last student who did one of the topics back then has moved on to my new class about current affairs, so won’t be repeating material. I’m reusing a class on “Machines Doing Jobs” (originally titled as “Machines and Robots”). I came up with some new questions for it, and combining them in I ended up with plenty of material pretty quickly.

I wanted to do a 5k run today, but forgot for most of the morning, and by the time I remembered it was almost midday. But I went anyway, as it would just get hotter in the afternoon. And despite the heat I ran a minute faster than my previous run, which was a full degree Celsius cooler (25.8°C today vs 24.8°C on Saturday).

For dinner I tried a dish that I saw on a cooking program last week: Brussels sprout curry. The recipe calls for deep frying the sprouts, but roasted them in the oven instead before mixing them with the curry sauce. I served it with some brown rice. It turned out good; another one to add to the recipe collection!

Fox news

I saw a fox today!

I’ve never seen a fox before. They are an introduced invasive species here, and sadly fairly common across Sydney, but furtive and difficult to spot. But this one was climbing the fence of the yard to the apartment directly below mine. My wife saw it first and I took some photos out our living room window.

Those neighbours have a dog and a cat, but that didn’t seem to deter this fox from having a good nose around the yard. It was bigger than I expected; I assumed foxes were a bit smaller.

I reported the sighting on FoxScan, a site that catalogues urban fox sightings in Sydney. I checked other sightings in the past year and found that the area around where I live is something of a fox hotspot:

Map of Sydney showing fox sightings

Nothing else was really as exciting today. It’s Australia Day, a public holiday, so my wife was home for work, but I still had all my usual online classes to teach. After lunch we went for a long walk together with Scully, down past the harbour shore. Thankfully it was cooler than yesterday and cloudy, although very humid. I baked a sourdough loaf and cooked hand-made pizza for dinner. I still have two more classes to teach later this evening, which will round off the topic on “Guilt”.

Hot family function

Today we had a family event to attend. The day was hot and the location is near a beach, so parking can sometimes be tricky there. We ended up in a spot in full sunshine for several hours. Which meant getting in to drive home wasn’t fun. Thankfully the traffic wasn’t too bad.

I relaxed for a bit in the afternoon before doing four online classes in a row, which took me through to late evening. So not really much else to talk about today. one of the classes was my new current affairs one, and the main things we talked about were the upcoming Artemis II lunar mission, and today’s news about the guy who solo free-climbed the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan, live-streamed on Netflix. All of the kids thought that it was a pretty irresponsible thing to do, and particularly live streaming it, thinking about the possibility of a tragedy.

A close encounter of the bunya kind

This morning I was still half asleep when I went to take Scully out for her morning toilet. My wife had left early to go to a yoga class, leaving us to sleep in. So I took Scully out, she did her business, and then we went to go back inside… and I realised i hadn’t grabbed my keys. Normally I take the spare key that sits in the hook with Scully’s lead, but my wife had taken that key with her. So I was locked out, and my wife wouldn’t be home for another hour and a half!

I sent her a message, then walked with Scully over to a cafe, about a kilometre away. I didn’t even have shoes on, just thongs (flip-flops), and didn’t have my hat or any sun protection. The cafe was busy, being a Saturday morning, but fortunately there was a small table free. We sat and I ordered breakfast, a wrap with scrambled eggs, spinach, bacon, hash brown, gochujang, and hollandaise. It was really good – I like this cafe. I took my time, then slowly walked back home with Scully, and we then had about 15 minutes to wait until my wife got home.

After that, I got changed, slapped on sunscreen, and went for a 5k run. It was warm – the temperature was 25°C, but thankfully not too humid. But I took it easy and didn’t run very fast. Once I’d completed the run, I had a bit of a walk back to cool down. I was walking near the bunya pine tree that we regularly go past when I heard a crashing sound from above. It was off to one side a bit, not directly above, otherwise I would have ducked and ran. Because a second later a cone from the tree smashed onto the road, about 3 or 4 metres away. It made a huge solid thunk as it hit the road and split open.

A bunya cone is about the size of a bowling ball, weighs a good few kilograms, and is covered with wicked spikes. The trees can grow up to 80 metres tall, and so the cones can fall from a height of over 50 metres. People have been seriously injured when they’ve fallen on them, though I can’t find any documented cases of people being killed.

Here’s the cone on the road, with the offending tree behind it:

This is the tree that last produced cones in 2022, some of which I collected for the edible nuts. They only produce cones every few years, and I’d been commenting to my wife recently as we’ve waked past it that maybe there would be some this year, although I’ve been looking up into the branches to see if I could spot any cones, and haven’t seen any. And this cone today seems to be the first one to have fallen. The cone season runs from January through March, so over the next few weeks there’ll probably be a lot more cones falling.

Back home I had a shower and started to relax and work on writing up a log of last night’s Dungeons & Dragons game. When my wife sent a message saying that Scully was ready to be picked up from her grooming session (she’d taken her up to drop her off while I was out running), but that she had gone into the city and could I go pick up Scully. So I walked out and collected Scully.

I spent the afternoon writing up last night’s D&D game session – the reason I didn’t post a blog entry yesterday. Not much else happened yesterday, beyond my five critical thinking classes, cleaning the house, and prepping for the game.

When I’d done, I suggested to my wife we walk over to the Flat Rock Brew Cafe for dinner. She agreed, so we went for a walk in the cooler air of the early evening. This time I tried the loaded beer-battered chips, which came with cheese and gravy, but I added optional pulled pork to make it more like a full meal.

They have several beers brewed in the premises on tap, and I tried the hazy pale ale tonight. They also have a 0.0% ABV dog bar for Scully!

And finally today, I’m very excited because I booked tickets to a pop concert. My first in many years. My wife and I are going to go see Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who is doing a brief tour of New Zealand and Australia. It’s only her second performance in Sydney, and her first as the headline act. Can’t wait!

D&D prep day

Well, in between teaching five critical & ethical thinking classes, in the morning and evening. I spent the afternoon going over my notes for our current Dungeons & Dragons adventure, where the group is partway through a dungeon exploration, in search of a specific magical artefact that is said to allow people to teleport. They want it so that they might be able to infiltrate the fortified compound of the despotic ruler of a nearby town, and overthrow him. If they complete the dungeon and find the device, they may move on to planning that operation, and I needed to prepare some things for that. We’ll see if they get that far, though!

I took Scully for a long walk at lunch time, down to the harbour shore. It wasn’t too hot or sunny, so was pleasant, until we got to the waterfront, where it got very windy, unpleasantly so. It was also quite chilly, for the middle of summer, but that was a nice change from hot.

For dinner I made gnocchi, which we haven’t had for a while. Just a packet from the supermarket, with some home made tomato sauce. Simple but delicious.

Discussing guilt

Not too much to write about today. I finished writing my class on “Guilt” and taught the first three lessons this evening. Kids gave some interesting examples of how people can feel guilty even when they haven’t done anything wrong, and reasons why people might not feel guilty if they have.

I went to the supermarket to get some salad supplies for my wife to make her dinner tonight, while I was teaching my classes. I made myself some fried mushrooms on toast before my classes started and am now having a snack afterwards. We have simple, separate dinners on evenings when my classes cover our usual joint dinner time.

I picked up Scully from my wife’s work at lunch time and we stopped off at Maggio’s Italian bakery on the way home, where I grabbed a slice of pizza for lunch. They also had mango-passionfruit lamingtons, which I tried as a dessert. Very nice. And this afternoon before my classes started I took Scully on a walk.

I’m starting to plan out events for the next Dungeons & Dragons session, which I’ll be running this Friday evening. I don’t have too much to plan, as they’re finishing off a dungeon that was partly completed last time. But I need some plans for what events might occur afterwards, if they get that far.

Las night I watched the movie Apollo 10½ on Netflix. I really enjoyed it! It’s animated recollections of a kid growing up during the Apollo missions. Nostalgic feel, very “slice of life” of the 1960s. Highly recommended.