Tag: home

A tough Monday

It was a tough Monday today for a collection of reasons. Some I don’t want to talk about, but annoying thing was my garage door, which broke last Friday. I contacted the owner’s corporation of the apartment block, and they said they’d book a repairman to come and fix it. I got copied in on a response from them, saying their company was on Christmas leave until Monday 12th (today). They could come fix the garage on Saturday, but they would charge emergency rates – I don’t know what that would be, but could easily be two or three times as expensive. As I contribute to the maintenance fund as an owner, and I didn’t need the car urgently, I said it could wait until Monday.

Then I got an email saying they could send a repair guy on Monday, between 12 and 3pm, and could I be present to give them access. I said I would be busy (teaching online classes), and could they come Tuesday, since I was free all day Tuesday. They said Tuesday was no good, as the repair guy had a funeral to attend, and so wouldn’t be working. They also said that if I just leave the door unlocked, they could fix it without me needing to open it up. My individual garage is in the basement, which has a security door at the driveway. I said that would be fine, and they could get the committee chairperson to let them into the basement to access my garage space.

Wind forward to today. I’m in the middle of teaching a class with a bunch of kids, and my phone rings. I can’t answer it, so I silence it. A transcribed message pops up as an alert window – it’s the garage repair guy calling to say he’s on his way. Half an hour later—still teaching the class—my phone rings again and I silence it again. This time the transcribed message says he’s here and can I call him back to let him in. A few minutes later my door buzzer rings. I ignore it, since I’m still in the middle of teaching a class. By the time the class ends ten minutes later, and I try to phone the guy back, his phone is engaged and I can’t get through. So I don’t know what’s going on.

I had to take Scully out for a walk, so I did that. But partway through it started raining, gently at first, but getting heavier. So I turned us around and we skipped about half of the walk. When we got back we went in through the basement and I checked our garage door, and it had been fixed. So I guess the repair guy managed to get in and do the job. I taught three critical thinking classes during the day, and two more late in the evening.

Another negative thing: There’s a dog in a house across the creek that’s been howling all day, every day since a couple of days after Christmas. Just close enough to us to hear it from our place. So at least two weeks now. There are dozens of houses closer to it than us, and I would have assumed that some of the residents would have notified the local council about it, for the noise at the very least. I’m really quite upset that some poor dog seems to have been left there while the owner has gone on vacation, maybe with a friend popping in once a day to feed it. Maybe if it continues tomorrow I’ll call the council myself and see if anything can be done, though I don’t expect they have the authority to break into someone’s house to get a dog.

Luck, and bad luck

So, you know my critical and ethical thinking teaching topic for the week is “Luck”. I did five classes today, and had a couple of new students join, both of whom enjoyed the class, so that was good.

Immediately after the last class ended, my plan was to drive over and pick up a friend and take us both to Friday board games night at a third friend’s place. Well… I got down to the garage, put my key in the lock of the garage door, turned the handle, and heard a pinging sound. When I pulled the door to open it, nothing happened – it was still locked. Despite the handle being turned. I couldn’t get the door open. I presume the cable that connects the handle to the door latches on either side broke.

So, unable to get my car out of the garage, I had to cancel games night. With two of us unable to come, it derailed the whole evening for everyone.

I messaged my wife, who was out walking Scully, that I was still at home and the car was stuck in the garage. She messaged back and asked if I wanted to meet up with them and we could walk up to get some dinner at a restaurant. So we went to our favourite seafood place and were lucky (hah) that they had a table free outside so we could sit with Scully. The meal was lovely as usual.

The evening is very very warm though. It’s 25°C after 9pm now, and according to the forecast it’s not going to drop any lower. At all. 25°C all night, until it starts heating up again about 6am tomorrow. We got to a bearable 33°C in the city by the coast, but it reached 42.5°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow is going to be much worse. 42°C in the city, up to 44°C in the suburbs.

There are dozens of fires burning across the state, but thankfully none at emergency status – unlike Victoria, which has 23 emergency warnings active.

We’re not planning anything tomorrow but staying home in the air conditioning.

Start of the heat wave

We have a forecast heat wave hitting for the next couple of days, and the heat ramped up today, reaching 37°C in parts of Sydney, although it was cooler near the coast (where I am) at around 30°C. Tomorrow and Saturday however will be much hotter here though.

Today was hot enough. I took Scully for a walk after my morning online classes, and when I checked the temperature of the roads she had to walk across I decided it was too hot for her feet and I carried her for some sections. She was hot and exhausted when we got home. (As I was!)

I had another go at the magnet glue residue on the shower today, this time with turpentine. It got all of the black tarry stuff off, but there’s still a strip of pure adhesive from what looks like it might have been some sort of double-sided tape they used to attach the magnet. The turpentine didn’t seem to have any effect on that. So maybe tomorrow I’ll have a go with a hair dryer and scraper to try and get it off.

However, the good news is the shower door stays closed just fine without the magnetic strip, so maybe I don’t need to reattach any magnet there and just cleaning it off will be fine.

Cleaning sticky residue

Today I tackled another small job at home that I’ve been meaning to do for ages. The shower has a swinging door that is held closed by a pair of magnetic strips along the top. But the glue or whatever holding the magnets on has been decomposing into a sticky, tarry black goop and the magnets have slowly been sliding downwards and the goop was getting on the glass. So I decided to pull the magnets off and remove the goop.

After about an hour of rubbing with eucalyptus oil I managed to clean one side pretty well. I thought the other side would be okay too, but for some reason it’s much more tenacious. I worked on it for about an hour, and halfway through changed to acetone since the eucalyptus oil didn’t seem to be doing much, but there’s still a lot of sticky residue left. I gave up and will try again tomorrow with turpentine.

Apart from that, not much to report. I did a 5k run in the morning and did some comics and made a digital version of another travel map. For dinner I made a spicy chick pea and tomato stew, which I served with some fried haloumi for saltiness and crunch. It turned out pretty good.

Dealing with old maps

Today I had my usual slew of Monday critical thinking classes to teach, with not much free time. I did walk up to the nearest grocery store for some fruit, since our fruit bowl was empty. I got apples, peaches, bananas, and blueberries.

This afternoon I started work on cleaning up a drawer of my filing cabinet. Our goal is to empty it out, either discarding or scanning things, so we can get rid of the filing cabinet and replace it with a smaller thing to hold some board games. I have two different types of maps: road maps from our various road trips in several countries; and a collection of National Geographic maps from when I subscribed, from 1984 to around 2010 or so—something like 70 or 80 maps.

The road maps contain highlighter lines marking all the roads we followed, so we have a record of where we’ve been. I don’t want to discard the information, so I started work on copying the routes over to graphics files with map backgrounds taken from Google Maps. I completed our big road trip in the USA, from Yosemite National Park to Seattle. I have a few others to do such as New Zealand, the UK, and a couple of trips in Europe. Then I can get rid of the paper maps.

As for the National Geographic maps, I asked if any of my friends would want them, either for themselves or their kids. One friend asked his children and one of his girls went wild, super excited at the thought of getting a big bunch of maps. She really loves maps and is now really keen to get them. So the friend is going to come over and pick them all up to give to her.

Putting the fridge back

My first job this morning was getting some masonite boards form the hardware store, to be used to go under the fridge as it rolled back into place int the kitchen, so as not to damage the newly sanded and finished floor. I measured how big they needed to be to fit the rollers of the fridge, while not being too big to lay down in the kitchen entryway. I checked the hardware store website and discovered they had masonite boards pretty much exactly the right width, so that was good.

But then I went down and measured the car and discovered that the boards probably wouldn’t fit in it. (We have a small car.) I didn’t want to drive to the store and buy the boards and then be stuck in the car park not able to fit them in. So… my wife and I walked up to the hardware store with Scully. I bought the boards and carried them home. Thankfully masonite is pretty light and it wasn’t too difficult, but it was over 2km of walking with them.

When we got home I laid the boards on the new floor and rolled the fridge in and around the corner and back into its niche. It worked nicely and kept the floor from getting scratched, so it was a success.

Now the fridge is back in the kitchen, but having had it in the living room for a week I’ve been turning to the living room to get cold things all day, instead of going into the kitchen. Particularly egregious when I was cooking, and instead of just turning around to the fridge right behind me, I started walking out to the living room!

Around lunch time we walked up to the art supply shop because my wife wanted to get some folded watercolour cards with envelopes, to paint Christmas cards for people. I found some 0.5mm markers in two shades of grey and sepia, which I bought to complement my black markers that I use for sketching. I think these will be very useful for architecture scenes.

Three online classes this evening, with an hour’s break for dinner, which was pasta tonight, with a mushroom tomato sauce. I was reflecting that it was only fairly recently I learnt that people who make tomato-based pasta sauces aren’t all chopping fresh tomatoes. And there’s a thing called passata that people use as a shortcut, that you can buy in jars in the supermarket. I’ve always chopped fresh tomatoes and combined with a little tomato paste, and still do.

Braving peak hour on the Metro

First thing this morning, after a quick breakfast, I walked up to the Metro station and caught the train into the city. I wanted to get to the hotel we stayed in last weekend and retrieve my lost phone charger, and then get back home before my first online class at 10am. So I had to depart before 9:00 and ride in with all the commuters headed to their jobs. I expected the train to be fairly crowded and it was. I had to squeeze on, but there was still a little room – I’ve been on more crowded trains before. And after only one stop a lot of people got off so it wasn’t so bad to the next stop, where I alighted.

The hotel had my charger neatly wrapped and labelled and I had it back quickly after walking there from the Metro station at Barangaroo. And then I headed back home.

After my classes, I went down to the storage room in the garage. When we had our front door replaced a while back, the paint job was a little sloppy and I wanted to clean up the bits around the locks and the door number and touch up the paint in a few places where some white undercoat was showing through. Yesterday I’d run into the handyman who does a lot of jobs around the complex and asked if he had any of the door paint left over. He said yes, and he’d leave the can in the storage room where I could see it. So when I went down today I found it there by itself in the workbench.

I brought it up and then set about cleaning up the door. I used a knife to scrape paint off the metal surfaces of the locks and handle and the door number, and also some of the excess glue from around the edges of the door number. And then I retouched those areas carefully with a small paintbrush to make them neat. It’s small changes, but makes a big impact on the appearance. After finishing the painting I took the paint can back down to return it to the storage room.

Apart from that I did my classes today. This new topic on “What is a Sandwich?” is really fun and the kids are enjoying it I think. I had one kid in a class this evening from Hong Kong, and I was glad she was safe from that horrific fire that destroyed several apartment towers there today.

A city staycation

Friday was a busy day. The floor sander arrived at 07:00 to start work on resurfacing our kitchen floor. It’s wooden parquetry and well overdue for a sanding and recoating with a protective finish. Because of the sawdust generation, I spent time in the morning from 6am covering things with plastic drop sheets, and taping the kitchen cupboards shut so dust wouldn’t seep in the cracks and cover all our crockery and cookware. The guy arrived on time and I let him into our garage (through a security door) to unload the gear and park his van.

Once he got started, my wife and I left, taking Scully on the ferry into the city to a hotel we’d booked for the next two nights. The floor was being coated with polyurethane to protect it, and we wanted to be out of the house for a couple of days to avoid the chemical fumes. We got a fairly fancy hotel right in the middle of the city, on the harbour shore. It allows dogs, which was the main criterion, but we thought a fancy city staycation would be kind of fun.

We got to the hotel early and dropped our overnight bags, as we couldn’t check into our room until 3pm. Then we went out for a bit of a walk around. We were hungry so stopped at a cafe near the hotel to get a second breakfast. They had French toast with a choice of either berries and ice cream, or bacon and maple syrup. I rarely ever have bacon, but this sounded intriguing and I decided to try it. It was pretty good!

Then we walked around The Rocks, the historic area where the first settlers built. We stopped in at The Tea Cosy, a place that does tea and scones, and had some of the scones with cream and a lemon and vanilla jam, which was really nice. I’m sure we must have spent some time in between these two meals – they weren’t right after one another!

Oh yes, we browsed around for a long while in the art supply store. It was drizzling and we wanted to be under cover. And then while we were there I got a call from the floor sanding guy, who had finished the job and left our key inside as we’d instructed… and then discovered he couldn’t open the garage door to get his van out! I had to try calling four different neighbours before I found one at home to go and let the guy out!

In the afternoon we checked into our hotel room. The hotel is pretty fancy, and our room has a dog minibar, with a bunch of things including dog treats, poo bags, dog cologne, dog wipes, a licky mat, and a few other things. But like all minibars, everything was overpriced, so we didn’t use any of it (having brought our own things for Scully). Our room is nice and has a water view, although on the side of the hotel away from the Opera House, so we don’t have a view of that.

From 4pm I had a couple of online critical thinking classes to teach, using a laptop and the hotel WiFi. The earlier classes I’d postponed until Saturday. After the classes we went to dinner at the hotel restaurant, which also allows dogs in an enclosed area out of the elements, which was good because it was cold and rainy. The food was excellent. It was online board games night with my friends, but I didn’t join in this week.

Today we are a bit tired because Scully didn’t sleep well and was growling through the night at all the strange noises in the hotel. The first thing we had to do was actually take her back across the harbour to her dog grooming appointment. Yesterday we’d caught the ferry over, but today we hopped on a bus. Unfortunately dogs aren’t allowed on trains, which would have been the most convenient, but they are allowed on buses. I dropped my wife and Scully there and then headed back into the city and the hotel for the classes I’d postponed from yesterday. I’d be teaching those while she was waiting for Scully’s grooming to be done.

After the classes, my wife called and said she was back in The Rocks and getting some lunch. I went out to meet them and then we came back to the hotel briefly to drop some things. With the rest of the afternoon free we went for a walk up to Observatory Hill, where the historic old Sydney Observatory is. We passed several wedding parties, doing photography in various scenic locations. At the observatory, we sat and did some sketching, until interrupted by rain. We took shelter in the covered pavilion until the shower passed and completed our sketches.

Then we walked back to the hotel to relax with a complimentary drink from the bar, and my wife added watercolour to her sketches, while I typed this up.

Tonight we’re going to a nearby pub for dinner, which allows dogs inside, so Scully can come with us. It’s been a nice holiday-like weekend so far, and hopefully dinner will be good too.

We walked out to the Australian Hotel pub, where we’d reserved a table. They had typical Aussie pub food and I tried their take on the classic chicken parmigiana, while my wife had a pizza. The atmosphere was lively and a lot of people came over to say hi to Scully, who was nestled in a blanket on the floor. I did a quick sketch of the bar while waiting for the food and my wife did one too and began painting it. A somewhat drunk guy came over and was complimenting her on the artwork and suggesting she could draw him and his mates, who were standing at a table next to us. After eating our dinners, she did start drawing them, and he came over and offered to buy the drawing off her! But it was in her sketchbook so she didn’t want to let it go.

After dinner we walked back to our hotel through The Rocks. It had rained but now stopped, and there were puddles reflecting the lights and Christmas decorations, which was really nice.

Preparing for a weekend staycation

Today I had 5 critical thinking classes.

In between I was making preparations for tomorrow’s kitchen floor sanding and spending the weekend away to allow the sealant to cure and the fumes to dissipate. I went out and bought some plastic dropsheets to cover the furniture to keep the sawdust off, and I’ve taped them over the bookcases to keep the dust off all the books. First thing in the morning before the workman arrives I’ll drape more over all the other furniture.

I also checked and updated Zoom on my laptop so I can run some classes at the hotel on the weekend. And printed out my class notes (normally I just have them open in another window on my desktop machine).

Oh and took Scully for a couple of walks of course. And made pasta for dinner, and whatever else that ate up the rest of the day. I feel like I’ve been flat out and not had a moment to rest. And we need to be up at 6am because the tradesman is arriving at 7 to start sanding the floor!

Planning the final mini-renovation stage

Monday was so busy and I finished my critical thinking classes so late (10pm) that I forgot to write anything here because I was so keen to relax and go to bed. I did a bunch of classes and in the in-between time I made a Darths & Droids comic – the one that’s going live tonight. The buffer ran down to nothing during all of the house painting work a couple of weeks ago, and then with moving all the furniture and books and stuff back in I haven’t had time to get ahead.

Today I made another comic (so I don’t have to do it at the last minute tomorrow!) and also finished a lesson plan for essay writing, which I had another class of this evening. We concentrated on reducing wordiness and writing solid conclusions. I feel this completes much of what I teach about essay writing, and I’ve let the kid’s parent know we should probably take a break for a few weeks to let the student work on his skills.

I also started looking at arrangements for Friday, when our wooden parquetry kitchen floor is being sanded and recoated. I kind of knew that the polyurethane coating is toxic and we’d have to keep off the floor for a while, but I wanted to check exactly how long. Turns out we can’t move the fridge back into the kitchen for three whole days! And… the fumes released will be dangerous for the first 48 hours, and it’s generally advised that you don’t live in the home during this period!

So tonight I’ve been looking at dog-friendly hotels that might have vacancies on Friday and Saturday night—only the two most popular nights and therefore the most expensive…

A few places were booked out, but I found one in the city in the historic Rocks district, that should be very nice. It’s really close to all the good stuff in the middle of the city, and we’re going to treat it as a city staycation. It’s also only 20 minutes on public transport from home, so we can dash back quickly if we need anything.

Unfortunately we’d invited friends over for board games and afternoon tea on Saturday, and we’re going to have to tell them we can’t host any more, and reschedule it. Oh, and I’d already rescheduled all my Friday online classes to Saturday because of the floor sanding, so now I’m going to have to take a laptop and do them from the hotel!