Bartlebee

Action

2008-10-12T17:50:00.004+11:00

I've been home alone today; Z went climbing with some friends. I've been sick for close to three weeks so don't really mind the forced solitude and inaction. It's been hot here today - hot and windy. It feels like the first day of summer and I spent some time sitting out in the sun in a tank top and skirt. Luxury! I've opened the front and back doors, creating a wind tunnel through the house in an effort to warm up the freezing interior. I love brick homes in summer when they stay cool, but in winter they are just so cold.

Needing some sound to occupy the emptiness, I put on the CD we bought from the Abayudaya who we visited while we were in Uganda. It takes me back to the Friday night services we attended in the tiny synagogue on the hill. The music - oh the music! Effortless African harmonies envelopping us as the sun set. I think about the lives of the people we visited and can't help but feel like all of my problems are those of a spoiled, white, middle class, westerner. This music puts it all in perspective. If I listen closely, in the background I can hear the buzz of cicada and the occasional goat bleating. It reminds me of heat and dust and green lushness; of matooke and beans and long bus rides; of long days and short sunsets and tremendous storms; of bright sarongs and spending a whole day sitting under a tree talking with the Rabbi who had just burried a child.

It also leaves me itching to do something. This is the feeling I encounter most often these days: an eagerness to be doing something. And no, analysing PhD data doesn't count. We caught up with an old friend of Z's yesterday and his Australian wife. She asked me over lunch what I wanted to do when I'd finished my PhD. In responding, I realized how much my answer has changed in the last few months. I used to say, with little hesitation: research. It's true, I love learning things and exploring the natural world. But that, right now, doesn't feel like enough for me. It feel too, well, academic: obscure, removed. I want to do something with this life. At least I can try to right some of the wrongs - it's the least I can do.

I've been especially inspired lately by Lumpkin who's spending this month in Colorado volunteering for the Obama campaign. He's turned words into action. I want to do the same and yet feel so stuck in PhD-land. It's so full-on that I rarely have energy for much else. I guess I'm just ready to be done. Really ready. I'm ready for the next stage, the next thing. I did the maths yesterday and realized that I'm one month short of half way, assuming it takes me the full 3.5 years, which seems a realistic assumption. Sometimes these past 20 months feel like they've flown by, but more often it seems to have been an eternity. Can I hold out for another eternity? When I think about the reward, the answer is an unhesitating YES. When I think about the reality of all that I have to do, some part of me shrivels.

I guess I'll get back to that data entry.

Reboot

2008-10-04T18:53:00.005+10:00

Well hello. I haven't seen you in a while. I thought I'd drop by for a quick visit. Maybe we can share a cup of tea while I tell you about my day. It's been a nice sunny Saturday here in Melbourne, a perfect day to garden. In fact, after a few hours of back breaking bending, the garden's in: zucchini, capsicum, tomatoes, spinach, spring onions, jalapenos, snap peas, green beans, basil, oregano, dill, lettuce, mint, thyme, parsley, coriander, and a lone strawberry plant that held on from last year. It's not nearly as big as K&K's garden, but then again I'm not as insane as them and I don't like cucumber quite as much. It's incredibly satisfying to grow food. For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to try being self sufficient for a while - to entirely survive on things that I can grow and make. It's not feasible now - and may never be, so I have to find satisfaction in my urban vege patch.

I've been thinking a lot about the state of world lately (it's hard not to with a financial meltdown, a global weather melt-up, and a looming election), and have come to the conclusion that I am deeply concerned. Deeply truly worried. I think it tinges everything I do, creating a base mood of No Good. I feel like we need a massive massive massive system overhaul: we need to change the way we do everything. Z and I were talking about this last night. He painted an inspiring picture of a city without cars, where all the black tops have been reclaimed and turned into wildlife corridors, grazing pastures and vege patches. As I was driving (ahem) to the nursery today, I tried to picture the streets without bitumen. I saw sheep grazing and trees full of birds and lots of big vege gardens. There would still be arterial roads and bike lanes and pedestrian walkways. But it would be quiet and green. Can you picture it?

So: a cultural, societal, governmental reboot. I think that we need to become truly local again. It's globalisation that's doing us in: the sheer expenditure of resources to make, for example, a cell phone chip in China using coltane ripped from the jungles of central Africa for resale in Melbourne is boggling. Tied into this is the imbalance of power, in which corporations have all the control. They don't care about you or me, just making money. Can we overhaul corporations? Maybe. Would it be easier to tear them all down and start again with a different structure? Maybe not.

But enough talk, enough thought. What about action? How do we make such massive changes? How can we start living locally? What can I do? I certainly think about almost everything I buy and use; I try to only buy produce that's grown/raised in Australia; I ride my bike whenever I can; I am registered to vote in two countries; I'm getting a PhD in ecology. But it doesn't feel like enough. Or rather, these actions feel like the equivalent of playing the viola on the deck of the Titanic as she sinks: inadequate to say the least. Z and I talked about the need for Homo sapiens sapiens to turn a corner. The problem is, see, that we're in this huge ship and it's going to take years and years to start around the bend. And I'm not a patient person. I want to know that things are going to be OK -and if they're not, I want to be doing things - big things - to make sure they are.

So, in summary, it's been a lovely sunny Saturday here in Melbourne to think about the state of the world while planting what I hope will be a productive and delicious garden. I hope we get to catch up again soon - it had been too long.

The greeness of the grass

2008-07-03T13:06:00.004+10:00

Z got into a discussion last night about whether or not we should adopt a dog when we return from the States. I should probably have described this as a "discussion" as it was rather heated. We do not have permission to have a dog in our current rental which is a source of some anxiety, especially considering that the vacancy rate in this town hovers around 1%. However, the likelihood of getting caught is small and there's a chance we could bluff our way out of a situation by claiming the dog is really mum's. Or we could ask the agency that manages our rental for permission to get a dog. But if we are told no and get a dog anyway, wouldn't it be worse?

It took me a while to figure out the subtext of our "discussion". Neither of us is particularly happy here right now. I am wondering why the hell I started this PhD in the first place and whether I want to finish it. Z finds his work tedious on a good day, and we both feel a lack of deep social satisfaction. So what are we doing? What am I doing?

Earlier this year, my fieldwork monopolised my time and energy. During my trips, I was busy and surrounded by interesting people. And yet, towards the end of the field season, all I wanted was a predictable schedule that had me spending most of my time in a warm, dry, stable office. And now that I have that, I'm bored out of my skull. The grass always seems greener.

I fear that this adage can be equally applied to our situation in Australia. I've been toying with various improbable scenarios lately. For example: we (used in a global sense) run out of fuel. There's a last flight back to the States. Do we (used in a local sense) board that plane? Or: One of us is diagnosed with a serious something. Do we stay or go? It was this latter thought experiment that made me aware of some of the complications. In the States, we would have no health insurance. In fact, if one of us got sick and we were living in the States, it would make a whole lot of sense to return to Australia. As much as I miss my friends and the general population of the Bay Area, there are serious downsides to living in the U.S. of A. Health insurance, for example. Higher costs of living and smaller pay checks. A pitiful two weeks off per year. Life lived at a hectic, full-throttle pace. Traffic. Over crowding. Crap coffee.

But how much do these things matter? What actually matters? To me? To us? What are the most important things? And if I'm so damn unhappy, why aren't I doing something to fix the situation?

I suppose I am. I have a holiday coming up. Perhaps the vacation and distance will enable me to look forward to being back here for another couple of years. Or maybe, being back in SF will seem like a too short taste of something delicious.

So, do we get a dog? No really, this is all related. So much of my life at the moment feels like something to tolerate or survive or get through in order to get to the good stuff. That's no way to live: waiting for something better. Putting off getting a dog until we own a house or have stable jobs or know which continent we want to live on seems like one more way to delay pleasure. Not only that, but dogs have this innate ability to find joy in the most mundane things (half a tennis ball, for example). Having a dog would add an immediacy and purpose to our day-to-day existence here in Melbourne. Is that too much to ask of a furry bundle? Perhaps. Would the dog make any difference? Perhaps.

What will make a difference is a vacation. 12 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes and counting...

Logorrhea

2008-06-30T14:50:00.002+10:00

The challenge du jour is to incorporate the following into daily conversation:

1. Erinaceous: Like a hedgehog

2. Lamprophony: Loudness and clarity of voice

3. Depone: To testify under oath

4. Finnimbrun: A trinket or knick-knack

5. Floccinaucinihilipilification: Estimation that something is valueless.

6. Inaniloquent: Pertaining to idle talk

7. Limerance: An attempt at a scientific study into the nature of romantic love.

8. Mesonoxian: Pertaining to midnight

9. Mungo: A dumpster diver - one who extracts valuable things from trash

10. Nihilarian: A person who deals with things lacking importance (pronounce the ‘h’ like a ‘k’).

11. Nudiustertian: The day before yesterday

12. Phenakism: Deception or trickery

13. Pronk: A weak or foolish person

14. Pulveratricious: Covered with dust

15. Rastaquouere: A social climber

16. Scopperloit: Rude or rough play

17. Selcouth: Unfamiliar, rare, strange, marvelous, wonderful.

18. Tyrotoxism: To be poisoned by cheese

19. Widdiful: Someone who deserves to be hanged

20. Zabernism: The abuse of military power or authority.

From here.

Grrr

2008-06-19T11:11:00.003+10:00

It has been two weeks of rampant grumpiness. I am equal parts I-hate-everything and I-want-to-curl-up-into-a-ball-and-cry. When vigorously mixed, you get a lovely dose of not-much-fun. Please take a moment to send Z your thoughts on the most sympathetic channel you can find.

I need a vacation.

2008-06-15T15:52:00.004+10:00

I married a zombie.

Please hold

2008-06-10T11:21:00.002+10:00

A couple of weeks ago, my external hard drive died. As it was within warranty and only served to back up all my data, it wasn't such a big deal. The replacement unit arrived over the weekend and today I'm transferring all 100+ of my fish videos from DVD onto the hard drive. You know that window you see when you're copying a file between locations on your computer, the one that tells you the "Time remaining"? It's usually terribly inaccurate, right? Well, I was just informed that it would take 37551 days and 22 hours to complete a transfer. That's about 103 years. And the count is going up. I think this is what is referred to as a lost cause.

A first

2008-06-09T10:01:00.002+10:00

On Saturday evening, Z and I met up with just about all of our Melbourne friends to celebrate Mr. Z's birthday. There was drinking involved (it is Australia after all): lots of wine and a couple of beers. We got home around 1:00 and crawled into bed. Z fell asleep immediately. How could I tell? The incredibly loud snoring was a hint. I'm sure all the neighbours could tell just as easily. I tried the usual tactics to counter over-active nasal passages: the nudge, the elbow, the kick. No go. I had to resort to sleeping on the futon in the office. I felt bad about leaving the bed, not so bad once I realized I could still hear him through the solid brick wall between the rooms. This is the first time we have slept in separate beds under the same roof. Next time, however (and I presume there will be a next time) he's the one getting the boot.

This is hell

2008-06-07T12:20:00.003+10:00

Two weeks ago I went to hell on a boat near Melbourne. It happened like this:

Day one: The high for the day is 16C, much less if one takes into account the very chilly southern wind. The water is 14C. There is no sunshine. It is very, very choppy in a very, very unpredictable way. This makes getting in for dives difficult as we are constantly (and literally) being thrown all over the boat. It also makes us all (even CJ who has never felt queasy on a boat) feel at least mildly sea sick. Despite the fact that I am in a dry suit, I am very cold after my first dive. As I get into the water for dive two, I slip and snap the back plate on my BCD (the vest that holds the tank and provides buoyancy). I have a spare BCD on board but it will take me a while to get it set up, so I send in another diver and sit out dive two. It is cold. I have a choice: duck out of the wind into the semi-enclosed space in the bow and get terribly sea sick or sit out in the open and get hypothermic. I choose the latter and get sea sick anyway. While I throw up I realize that this is my version of hell: the boat won't stop moving; the wind won't stop blowing; my body won't stop violently shaking - and I am about to go diving. I keep falling asleep though it is less like napping and more like passing out. The guys surface from dive two and I get ready for dive three. I am attempting to add a weight to a weight-belt when I realize that I am no longer functioning; I look down and discover that I have mis-threaded the weight, a task as easy as looping a belt through a buckle. I mention that maybe I shouldn't dive. The guys look at me and tell me that I look like hell: shockingly white with blood shot eyes and the violent shakes. The verdict: no diving for me. I get out of my dry suit and into gortex while the guys do another dive. The violent shakes calm to uncontrollable shivers. I sit on the boat thinking about quitting; no data is worth this much pain. After their dive and on the way home, we go to pull in the camera and discover it is stuck, wedged into the reef. Despite the cold and the sick, I jump in for a dive to free it. Then we go back to the house in which we're staying.

Day two: We get up before dawn to do it all again. On our way up the estuary at low tide we run aground. I jump in to push us off the sand bank. At the time, it seems like no big thing. Later, I realize it was a sign from on high to TURN AROUND; GO HOME; GIVE UP. Being blind to such omens, we continue on.

Out on the open water, there is weak sunshine and less chop. I am wearing more layers but still get unbearably cold while in the water. I don't know what's happened to me; Monterey is far colder and I used to dive that in a wet suit. Is this what happens when you get old? In between dives, we all discuss the appeal of terrestrial research. Dive two takes place in about 3m of water under crashing waves. It is not fun to be thrown repeatedly into rocks while trying to take measurements. In fact, it is so not-fun that it earns a prize: The Worst Dive of the Entire Six Month Field Season. Because I don't have my BCD with its integrated weights, I am using a weight belt. This causes my back to contort into an incredibly painful position which the cold cements into place.

At the end of the day, we go to pick up the baited camera that I dropped in at the beginning of the day. Because my wrists and back are all screwy, CJ pulls up the frame. He gets it to the side of the boat and says, "That's not good." I rush over to look over the side and see the frame minus lid and minus camera. Which is to say, minus $3000 camera. We all swear. I immediately start getting into my gear and jump into the water. I get to about 3m and realize I can't equalize - my left ear won't clear. I surface, leaving John on the bottom completely unaware of what's going on. CJ gears up as quickly as possible and jumps in. They spend about twenty minutes searching. As they surface, I see they are holding something colourful - the camera! I think. But no, it's just the lid for the frame. Perhaps the camera is positively buoyant? We search the surface for it, zig-zagging our way towards the beach, following the waves and wind. We decide that a couple of us should swim in to shore and search the beach while the other two drive the boat around to the launch ramp, get in the car, and come to pick up the searchers. I volunteer to go in along with John. We pull on fins, masks, snorkels, and throw some food and phones into a dry bag. We have a surf zone to get through before the beach. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that we extremely buoyant in our dry suits; diving under breaking waves or any kind of swimming is impossible. Instead, we are tumbled into shore like flotsam - or is it jetsam? We get there eventually and start to walk. I hear my phone ring; it is CJ calling from the boat to ask where the car keys are. "Could you please tell me that they are not in the dry bag in your hand?" he begs. We all let out a collective "D'Oh!" but with more expletives. CJ suggests that one of us hitch a ride to the boat ramp while the other continues to search. I agree, hang up and relay this message to John. There's a pause. We look at eachother: dripping wet and covered in sand. No-one will pick us up. So I call CJ back to tell him that I will drop the keys off a nearby bridge into the boat as it passes underneath. It takes about 1/2 an hour to walk to the bridge in the heavy dry suit. Dropping the keys goes well (you thought we'd lose the keys, didn't you?) and then I start walking toward the boat ramp, a few miles away. Somewhere along the way, my phone battery starts to beep its last warnings. It is my only form of communication with the car. The sun sets. I keep walking. I feel like I walk forever, but it's probably only about 45 minutes before the car appears. I am nevertheless absolutely exhausted.

Meanwhile, John has been walking down the beach, on soft sand in his heavy dry suit. He climbs all the way up a set of stairs from the beach to the road before realizing that he is no longer in possession of his phone. Returning to the beach as the last rays of light are fading from the sky, he finds his phone bobbing gently in the shallows. This explains why our frantic calls to reach him have not been answered. We have no idea where he is; he has no idea where we are. I walk down cliff stairs to the beach looking for a lone figure in the twilight: no luck. I call again: no luck. When I try for about the 6th time, John answers and we talk - me on dying mobile, he on drenched mobile. He gives us an idea of where he is. It takes a while but we eventually find him in the dark.

I call Z to tell him that we're off the water and relatively safe. Upon hearing about our day he asks, "What did you do - piss off Shiva?"

Back at the house, I realize that my back is truly rooted; I can't straighten it. I swallow massive quantities of ibuprofen and crawl into bed at 8:30. In my exhaustion, I wonder if I haven't in fact died; that I will wake up in the morning to the start of the previous day; that I will be stuck in an eternal cycle of hell, unable to do anything except repeat these horrendous days over and over and over again.

Day three: We wake up at 5:30 and do the whole thing again. This third day, however, has much less hypothermia, fewer bouts of sea sickness and, of course, we have no camera to lose.

Ah, the glamorous life of a marine biologist. Doesn't it sound like fun?

Return

2008-04-22T19:07:00.002+10:00

I just returned from three weeks on Gabo Island, which is in far eastern Victoria near - well, not near much of anything. One could almost walk from the island to the mainland, though once on the mainland it would be a serious walk through national park to reach the nearest town of Mallacoota, population 1000.

View Larger Map

I'm still adjusting to being back in a city and a house that is not overrun with mice. At night, there are no penguin calls to provide the treble to the deep rumbling bass of surge pounding granite. Wind does not howl through the turbine outside my window. I am not down at the dock by dawn watching sea eagles hunt and falcons hover motionless in counterpoint to the fluttering of the kestrels' wings.

I'm at a loss of what to say other than it was completely awesome. I loved being out there, even though the toilet was 200m away down the hill in the dark and the mice would thump around my room chewing through everything at night. I miss the wild solitude of the place and am already scheming my return. I posted some photos here and hope to write up more in the next few days.

Work

2008-03-30T14:37:00.003+11:00

Originally uploaded by bartlebee

What do you wear to work?

Boulders metaphorical and actual

2008-03-21T16:32:00.004+11:00

I've just spent seven days out in the field and accomplished the equivalent of one day's worth of work. I'm not nearly as frustrated as I would expect. I still care deeply about my project but no longer care about the day-to-day setbacks. And boy are there a lot of them. I've been working down at Wilsons Prom where I haven't been able to gather enough hands to push the boat into the water off a beach that's a 3-minute drive from my cabin. Instead, I've been using a launch ramp that's a 1.5 hour drive away by road, and then a 2-3 hour drive by boat. On Tuesday these numbers added up to make a 14 hour day in which only 2.5 hours were spent doing research. A businessman would describe this as extremely low ROI and urge that you invest your monies elsewhere.

Also on Tuesday, half of my thumb went numb while I was holding on to the throttle of the boat. At first I thought it had gone to sleep, but considering it's yet to wake up I can only assume that it's a nerve rather than blood issue. Or it's really hungover and needs a good long nap.

Despite the long boat ride, Wednesday was a day that reminded me why I'm doing this sort of work. The ride down the east coast of the Prom in the early morning light was gorgeous: steep tree-clad slopes pitching down to meet the water in a line of rounded rosy granite boulders. Sitting on turquoise waters between camera drops watching surf wash up on crescents of yellow sand. A dive that was tropical in clarity: those same rosy boulders forming steep underwater cliffs down to soft sand, the sides covered in undulating kelp. A school of 100+ silvery salmon slowly circling me, my bubbles making a hole in a swirling salmon donut. Days like these act as intermittent reinforcement and keep me going. It would appear that I only need a couple a month - I'm not a very demanding person.

In the middle of all of this I feel a strong well of confidence lurking just under the surface, a bit like one of those boulders I suppose. It makes me feel solid and allows me to achieve a Buddhist-like detachment when it comes to delays. The confidence is there because I'm actually getting stuff done; despite immense hurdles and set backs I'm actually pulling off this project. I can't help but feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. I received a lot of positive comments after I gave a talk to the department a couple of weeks ago, which has also contributed to my general well-being. I guess I am like a pet: all I need to be happy is intermittent reward, positive reinforcement, love and food.

Well, almost happy. I would also like my thumb back.

Three unrelated paragraphs

2008-02-06T10:15:00.000+11:00

Lumpkin and I were IM'ing a while back and discussing our brilliance. We are, in fact, each of us so smart that we are occasionally incapable of functioning in real society. When I walk into the wall it's because I'm a genius; when Lumpkin falls down the stairs, it's because he's a genius. We are genii.

The weather this week is abysmal: 30 knot winds and 4m seas. I was hoping to get three days of diving in but don't think I would be able to get out from the harbour in these conditions, leaving me high and dry. It feels like a week off though I'm still working pretty darn hard. I've been watching a lot of footage from my baited underwater cameras and it's taught me a lot about life. It's true; you can learn from the fishies. For example, I'm sure you've often found yourself up late at night pacing and asking yourself why, why do the fishes school? Doesn't that just make them an easy target for a big-mouthed shark/whale/seal/fish? After trying to count fish that are a-swirling together I'm happy to report that schooling does confuse a predator. Being a predator of sorts, school-like behaviour makes me unhappy. I would prefer that the fishes swim slowly past my camera in orderly rows, pausing so that I can identify them.

I've managed to spend a fair bit of my week filling out lots of forms. All of Australian health and safety departments require that risk assessment forms be completed before any activity can be undertaken. This involves identifying risks and things that can be done to mitigate the risks so that all risks are L for Low by the time an activity is undertaken. Yes, it's as pointless as it sounds. There's one risk, namely Dangerous Marine Animals, that always has us stumped. The consequences of the risk are severe though the chances of anything happening are extremely low, still a High risk overall. And what the hell are we supposed to do to mitigate against this risk? On one form, I wrote down "prayer, hope". A colleague routinely writes down, "vigilance". This is the same colleague who mitigated a risk posed by a teenager carrying around a fully cocked spear gun with "stern words". It's just as well our dive safety officer doesn't have time to read the forms!

Hit it!

2008-01-28T12:29:00.000+11:00

I had a dream that I was playing tennis in the Australian open, except that instead of a racket I was using a wooden spoon. I wasn't very good.

I'm home for three days, catching up on sleep, watching fish videos, recharging camera batteries and readying myself for another four days in Apollo Bay. I imagine that this is largely what my life will be like for the next four or five months: home for a couple of days a week, gone for a few weeks a month. The transition back to home hasn't been especially smooth. On the boat, it's Go Go Go and I'm in charge, making lots of snap decisions and generally running the show. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why coming home has met with a few hiccups.

Today is the Australia Day holiday, which I am celebrating in true Aussie style: by doing nothing much at all. Actually, I'm at work and planning to meet up with Z and friends in the park in a few hours. We finally managed to find a frisbee and I'm looking forward to running around like an idiot for a bit. And drinking some beer. At least that part of the day will be true to the Aussie spirit.

Just peachy

2008-01-20T20:51:00.000+11:00

It's raining peaches in Melbourne - well, in our yard anyway, thanks to the neighbours' tree which has leaned well over into our back garden. Last year we didn't get any ripe peaches - just a few rotting in the garden beds. This year's a different story. I've been picking a few every now and then, letting them ripen to a delectable sweetness on the kitchen counter. On Thursday I went out and picked everything I could reach, which was enough to take a big bag next door, put two bags in the fridge, pack a third bag for the weekend, and stew enough for ten servings of delicious, cinnamon and rum flavoured fruity goodness. There are still more on the tree. Anyone want some peaches?

We spent a very relaxing weekend with friends A and M whose baby F is just about the cutest kid I've ever seen - but only because I haven't seen your child lately. We were down at Venus Bay, about 2.5 hours southeast of Melbourne on the coast. The weather was not so great, though I did manage to go swimming twice. The second time was very brief and afterwards my skin burned with an icy fire. I felt so alive.

Tomorrow, I'm off down the coast in the other direction to do a week's worth of work in Apollo Bay. Even though there's a good amount of stress and worry to my days, I have to admit that my life is pretty awesome. Peaches and beaches. It doesn't get much better than that.

Shiny, purdy, new

2008-01-06T11:33:00.000+11:00

Since that last post, things have taken a turn in the upward direction. Sure, it was hard to go down, but I'm talking really UP. By Wednesday evening I had figured out that much of the problem lay with my laptop - at 3.5 years old, the DVD drive is not working consistently, the power cord is befracked, and the touchpad is wonky. Z and I decided it was time to get a new computer, but that we would wait another six months or so to save the money by buying one in the States. In the meantime, I would buy a new DVD drive for a couple of hundred bucks. I explained all this to my supervisor on Thursday morning when I ran into him in the hallway. His response? Just buy a new laptop - and get reimbursed from the grant.

Say what?

Yes indeedy. I'm getting a free laptop. And it's much, much more of a laptop than I would ever buy myself because the grant will pay for it to have all sorts of fancy media capacity - extra RAM, a super fast processor, a big hard drive, and lots of dedicated video RAM. And yes, I can now use RAM in a sentence, and most of the time I'm doing it correctly.

And I should be thrilled and happy, right? Part of me is - we'll call this part the little person sitting on my right shoulder. And what is the little person on my left feeling? Schizophrenia? Well, yes, but also mild disgust at our consumerist society. Despite my best efforts to avoid the quick thrills of retail therapy, new and shiny things are appealing. When I find myself attracted to new things, I feel like I've been sucked into the world in which happiness can only be found in a new pair of shoes or a new kitchen gadget. I don't like that world nor do I want any part in it. These two little people do battle over my head which leaves me feeling a little woozy.

I swear I can hear my dad reading this while sighing with disappointment and telling me to Just Get Over It Already and enjoy the new laptop.

Which I will. In a couple of hours.

Woot! Woot!

Sucky Suckity Suck

2008-01-02T13:06:00.000+11:00

I am having a very bad day. It's so bad that it's hilariously funny; I find myself sitting in the computer lab, shivering with cold from the overzealous air conditioners, laughing hysterically with tears streaming down my face. Thanks to Kevmo for providing the comedic interlude. He's had two coffees and a coke and is pretty funny to chat with. He's also helping me figure out this motherfucking shit stinking bitch of a problem that I'm having transferring my movies from miniDV tapes to DVD. I've already enlisted the help of my dept tech guy, a coworker who does this sort of thing, and friendly BennyG whose credits include a real, honest-to-god movie. BennyG talked to people who know people who know this shit and we concluded that I have all the right equipment and that none of it works. At least I'm now able to capture movies from camera to PC, a process that took two weeks to figure out; two weeks of reading manuals that said things like "Simply plug in the iLink cable" or "If you're having connection problems remove the iLink cable and plug it back in". Yeah thanks a lot fuckwad. So no problem capturing movies. Now I'm having problems burning DVDs that my computer can read. It used to work just fine and occasionally still works - but then it doesn't. And the swearing begins. It is the most frustrating thing in the world. Kevmo suggested, "For your phd you could make a fish art piece scaled with corrupt DVDs of all the data since you couldn't deliver the real project due to technical difficulties." I think that might be the most awesomest idea I've ever heard. I just need to transfer over to the Faculty of Art.

Meanwhile, the bike shops weren't open for a week meaning that I still haven't been able to get a new bike "iron" to replace the one that broke, meaning I still have a flat tire. It's been two weeks. I tried to fix it again this morning using a spoon - and then I broke the spoon and the second tire "iron". I rode in on Z's bike which made me appreciate my bike more and realize just how desperately Z's needs a tune-up. It changes gears all on it's own; what a clever bike!

Arrived at work to discover that student email is down. Still down. It's been at least FOUR days. It's only email. Or perhaps I should say, we're only students. I'm sure there's an explanation of the problem and an estimated fix time - in my inaccessible inbox.

I think I need a beer. Or five.

Surviving

2008-01-01T11:41:00.000+11:00

We spent new years eve day huddled in the front room in the dark, curtains drawn, playing scrabble and drinking frozen fruit shakes. I felt a bit apocalyptic, justified by the fact that it hit 45C (113F) yesterday according to the Abruzzo club sign. Our lovely brick house stays a good ten degrees cooler than outside, maybe a bit more in the hallway, which is great but means that it's still 35C (95F) inside. Who knew that hot could feel so cool? Around 4:00 we ventured out in search of real air conditioning, choosing to see the French film Tell No-One (Ne le dis à personne). The film was very good - and did I mention that it was air conditioned?

Stepping back into the furnace afterwards was literally breathtaking; I could feel myself cooking. At a friends' birthday in the park a few days ago we were chatting about growing up in Australian summers. Someone remembered that we used to put the sprinkler on in the back yard and spend the day running through it. With the current drought, no-one even owns sprinklers - or if they do, know that they will face a neighbourhood lynching committee should they use them. There are other memories and survival tactics from childhood - like the closing of curtains and doors, mango in the freezer, a love of bathroom tiles.

Last night at 10pm we were still sweating, sitting on our neighbour's porch drinking various alcoholic concoctions and talking about the intensity of the day. It wasn't any cooler when I went to bed at 3am. Thank god I bought us a fan a few weeks ago.

Today is meant to be cooler but I just stepped outside to water the very withered tomatoes and got slammed by that wall of heat that only 100+ days can deliver. There's a cool change coming this evening when we'll finally be able to pull back the curtains, open the windows and doors, and emerge from our cocoons to enjoy the 24 hour respite from the heat.

Rain

2007-12-03T15:31:00.001+11:00

Rain
Originally uploaded by bartlebee

It's stormy in Melbourne today. It started with a staccato of big, loud drops around 4:30am. Since about noon, we've had squalls of thunder with rain that bounces knee high and dark threatening skies. I'm in heaven, as are all the birds and trees and gardens.

I'm working from home today and honestly not getting much of anything done. Last week I helped install some artificial reefs that a couple of my lab-mates are using. They are composed of milk crates filled with bricks and concrete pavers, and each one weighs 40kg (that's 88lb for the metrically challenged, and damned heavy for the rest of you). Two days of lifting those between loading dock and trailer, trailer and dolly, dolly and boat, and then moving them around on the sea floor understandably knocked me out. On Sunday I helped to facilitate a fish count for a local community group and it was the first time I'd been snorkelling in about six months. It was also the first time I'd ever ducked under breaking waves (albeit not on purpose) with a mask on. Watching the froth curve above and over me was beautiful. The snorkelling site was two hours from our house and the driving in excessive heat without a working a/c probably contributed to the not-so-lovely evening migraine I developed. It was hot last night, too, which meant that I didn't sleep all that well. All of this adds up to me "working" from home today.

Last week, Z and I took Monday off to visit the town of Daylesford, about a couple of hours north of the city. It's main claim to fame is natural mineral springs, which we managed to find despite the shoddiness of my ten-year-old memories. It's really bizarre to drink fizzy water out of a tap out of the ground. After lunching at an awesome bakery (best bread ever) we wandered around the convent gallery, admiring Dalis and Chagalls and laughing at Goddess-mandala thingies. The best part of the day, however, was lying on a patch of grass in the sun overlooking the lake, listening to kookaburras and repeating, "It's Monday and I'm not at work!"

In other news I had a whole afternoon of optimism about my project after a particularly good meeting with my supervisor. Now that's over and I'm back to lightly worried. This weather, while great for garden and wildlife, turns the ocean at my study sites into a frothing mess.

Speaking of frothing mess (or lack thereof) Hed and Eather sent us cans of pumpkin for Thanksgiving. Hooray! This year it won't take three days to make pumpkin pie! Hooray!

pumpkin
Originally uploaded by bartlebee

Pics

2007-11-11T19:40:00.000+11:00

I've posted photos from my trip to Pt. Campbell to Flickr. I'm also constantly expanding my collection of Melbourne photos. Enjoy!

Day-tah!

2007-11-09T20:03:00.000+11:00

I just got back from my second trip of the week to Pt Campbell, a small town on the coast about 3.5 hours SW of Melbourne. This week isn't over for me and I've already driven 1000km. Wheee! Pt Campbell is famous for the Twelve Apostles, of which Z and I saw about three on our trip to Apollo Bay earlier this year. The first visit of the week was to meet some local contacts to talk about my project. Meeting the contacts lead to today's trip out on a boat to get the first honest-to-god data point of my project. Hooray! Not only did I get to drop off my camera (and find it again) but I also got a free tour of the 12 Apostles with a group of American tourists who, as best I can gather, were on a National Geographic photography outing of some sort. They all appeared to be retirees except for one guy from South Carolina who looked like he was in his 20's. Which one of these things is not like the others? You're correct! It's the young guy who chose the wrong holiday.

Allow me to repeat the brilliant news de jour: I have data (or day-tah! depending on how sleep deprived you/I am). Turning the corner into data collection is a huge relief; I'm over the anticipatory hump of dread in which I was mired last month. (This is what sleep deprivation does to my metaphors: I've got corners and humps and now swamps! Hee!) Today felt a little bit like cheating; it was just so easy. It's the part where I have to organize divers and gear and get into the water myself that's most of the headache. Even the getting up at 4am was - well, let me be honest: that part sucked. But hey, I get to go to bed at 8:30 with dignity - whatever dignity I have left anyway. I'll post pictures later this weekend.

Prom

2007-10-27T08:52:00.000+10:00

I am back from the Prom, but instead returning with a droopy corsage and hickies, I have aching legs and some good photos. There were echidnas and kookaburras and rosellas and wildflowers and swamp wallabies and emus galore.

On Wednesday night, my lab-mate Mal unfortunately hit a wombat, and by the time he had pulled a U-ey to check its status, its pouch young was running around the road in a panic. He wrapped it in a towel and together we took it to the ranger on duty. As sad as the situation was, it was pretty awesome to hold a 20cm long wombat, even if she was hissing furiously at us.

On Thursday, Mal and I took a three-hour hike around (read: up, down, up, down, up, down) a couple of rocky promontories looking for intertidal sites for his research. To get to the headland required crossing a crotch-deep river that, on our return, had dropped to ankle deep (poor tidal timing on our part). On Friday morning, we did a shore dive and I remembered how much I love boats. Again, we were looking for a site for Mal to anchor some equipment, but the bay we were diving in was really shallow so it took us half our tanks to get below 10m. After looking at some fish (which I'm getting better at IDing), I was too close to empty to continue on and so popped up to the surface only to discover that the beach had become a far off distant suggestion of sand. It was a very long swim back in. And on Friday afternoon, we were back at the headland boulder scramble but this time with steep scrubby hillsides to clamber over too. I would feel fit and strong if only my legs didn't ache so much.

It's pretty great to be home, sleeping with a warm husband in a comfy bed. I even got to sleep in this morning, all the way to 7:30am, which is a lot if you consider that I've been waking up at 5.

On

2007-10-23T17:05:00.000+10:00

It has begun. It started on Monday the 8^th of October, a date to be remembered. That was the week I got home every night after 7:00pm and spent every day too busy to eat or check e-mail or make a phone call. Last week was the same and it culminated in some seriously hard core field work and the chance to trial my BRUV frame for the first time. The frame itself worked brilliantly, though I had some technical difficulties with the camera. It looks a bit like a small tank complete with gun turret, earning itself the obvious name The Tank, though the nickname I like best is the Dalek. I’ve been home for a couple of days and head out again tomorrow to do more fieldwork down at Wilsons Promontory. I think I will be around the week after, hopefully doing day trips though there may be an overnight or two in there somewhere. The following week, I’m off down the coast in the other direction to Pt Campbell for a few days. And this is what it will be like until May 2008. I was feeling really warn out until about Friday afternoon when we loaded up to the boat, wriggled into still-damp wet suits and headed out to catch a slack tide. The conditions were some of the best I have ever seen – on the surface, that is. There were ripples instead of waves and it was sunny and warm. As we motored out I got a glimpse of how enviable this life I lead is – how wonderful it is to be on a boat instead of in front of a desk in a cube in an office in a tall building full of desks and cubes and offices. It has recharged me and has me almost looking forward to this field season. Sure, I’ll be tired. Sure, there will be all sorts of technical difficulties and mechanical troubles and tired arms and legs and backs. But I’ll be out in the sun, swimming with the fishes. It sure doesn’t suck.

Hazzah!

2007-10-12T19:24:00.000+10:00

My BRUV* frame is done! Done! Done! Done! After weeks of planning and two full weeks in the workshop, I can report success. This week I've felt like a kid who failed shop class and was assigned to a summer intensive; I've been in with the tools from 9:30am to 7:00pm for four days and haven't turned on my computer in three. My back aches, my hands ache, my feet ache, my legs ache. But it's done! And now, it's the weekend and I can relax. Coz the frame is built!

As you can probably guess, I've been pretty wiped out this week, as the following anecdote will cleverly illustrate. On my way into Uni this morning, I started digging through my bag for my keys. They weren't in the usual pocket, or in any of the other places they could be. Damn, I thought, I've left them at home. So I dug out my phone to call Z to make sure that I hadn't dropped them on the tram. As I was dialling I looked down at my hands and discovered my keys sitting there. That's right: I'd been holding them the whole time. I almost wet my pants I was laughing so hard!

And then I went and wielded power tools. Probably not a brilliant move as my scratched and beaten hands will attest.

Did I mention it's done??? I'll take pictures at some point so you have a better idea of what the hell I'm talking about. Then you can Ooh and Aah appropriately in the comments.

But until then, I think I'll have another glass of wine, thank you very much.

(*BRUV: Baited Remote Underwater Video.)

Chicken Little with a Sting

2007-10-08T19:49:00.000+10:00

I spent all weekend gardening. Out the back, we now have tomatoes and strawberries growing, and a herb garden that includes mint, rosemary, thyme, basil, coriander (cilantro), and parsley. Our front yard is no longer a dirt box that the neighbour's cat can use for her bidness; it's planted with all sorts of flowers: clumping flowers and creeping flowers and scented flowers and bushy flowers. It took me about three hours at the nursery to choose what to buy. I find it really difficult to imagine how things will grow and what they will look like in a month when faced with something small and green in a pot. It was exciting to work in the front garden because there's a flowering gum that arches over our yard. As I worked, drunk bees fell from the sky with alarming frequency. When I first saw a bee stumbling around on the ground I thought it was injured. Then I saw another one, which I thought was the first one in a different place. After the fifth one I figured out what was going on, and then had to forcefully resist the urge to look up.

Some of the less pleasant side effects of gardening (thankfully not including bee stings) are an aching back, arms and hamstrings. Last night I went to Pilates, which I've decided is just a fancy word for sit-ups, which is a polite way of saying abdominal torture. Usually I enjoy at least part of the class - or perhaps I just enjoy thinking about the day that I could maybe perhaps do one of those more advanced exercises. But yesterday, it was pure torture; y'know, one of those gym classes where you spend the entire time thinking, I paid for this???

Speaking of paying, we have copies of our new lease to sign, which list our rent at the old price - as in, without the 10% increase. We think it's a mistake, but aren't going to say anything just in case no-one else notices.

Beech Forest

2007-09-29T18:41:00.000+10:00

Today Geelong schooled Port Adelaide in the AFL Grand Finals. If it's any consolation (and I'm sure it's not), Port Adelaide set a new record for losing margin in a grand final - something like 120 points. I think the problem is that their mascot isn't; they're called The Power. It's hard to say "Go the Power!" and easy to say "Go Cats!"

Last weekend we took a second anniversary trip down the Great Ocean Road, which Z thinks isn't so great or so ocean-filled. I did, however, manage to find him his first wild koala sighting. While driving. In the rain. I'm talented like that.

While driving the long way home on Sunday, we passed a sign that said "Beech Forest". I remembered mum telling us something about a great hike she and Ken took in Beech Forest. So, off the paved road we turned, winding our way up and down a bumpy road through various types of forest, none of it particularly beechy. After about 40 minutes we popped out onto a paved road where we found a sign next to a house that read, Welcome to Beech Forest, population 106. This is, of course, when we pulled out the map only to discover what was now quite obvious: Beech Forest is not a forest; it's a town. We decided to one day start our own town called Scenic Waterfall or perhaps Koala Viewing Platform. It will be an industrial strip mining centre a long way off the main highway. But it will be well signed.

We did all of this driving in our newer car. It has four working windows, a radio and CD player, and it starts without needing a choke or a prayer. You'll find a picture of it as well as pictures of koalas (say, awwww) and various other things in my Flickr account. Link is to the right.

Galvanic potential

2007-09-18T14:48:00.000+10:00

I have bought and used countless nails and bolts and nuts and washers in my lifetime. Whenever it comes time to buy such hardware, I find myself in that aisle of the hardware store (you know the one: it's lined with small drawers and tubs filled with fasteners), glossing over terms like "galvanized" and "cadmium plated" to make a purchase based on size and price. Oh, how things have changed. For the past week, I've been designing a frame to hold an underwater camera. The camera and frame will form a BRUV, or baited remote underwater video station. It's like its name says: it gets dropped into the ocean with bait and left to film all the creatures that are attracted to the mushed pilchards (mmm, mushed pilchards). The frame will be made out of aluminium (note the extra "i" and pronounce accordingly when speaking to men at the hardware shop) and bolted together with, um, well.... er. What was that about galvanized screws?

So, I've been learning about galvanic potential and oxidation and corrosion and which metals can be in contact with eachother given area ratios and the presence of salty water. It's all quite, uh, illuminating. I've also had to buy a protractor and graph paper; I'm amazed that anyone sells that stuff any more, but thank god they do. I've been using trigonometry (SOHCAHTOA anyone?), which I barely remember since it's been about 15 years since I last thought about it. And I've been trying to think and draw in 3D.

And what have I learned? I have learned that I am not an engineer. And I've had a helluva good time learning that. It's been a nice to pull out the pencils rather than the journals; to draw rather than to type; to think about aluminium fitting together rather than communities of fish species interacting. But at the end of the day, it's very clear that I'm an ecologist.

All in a name

2007-08-29T17:19:00.001+10:00

Last Friday, we went downtown for dinner, drinks and a movie. While walking up Bourke street, a shop sign caught my eye. It read surfdivenski. I assumed that Divenski was the name of a famous Australian surfer of Polish descent until I noticed that a second sign in the window read Surf Dive & Ski. I like my version of the shop name much better.

Further down the road, I saw a billboard advertising a gentleman's club called the Spearmint Rhino. Z thinks it makes for a great euphemism, as in: He gave her the spearmint rhino (wink wink). I have no idea what that means and I don't want to think about it too hard.

In other entirely unrelated news, spring arrived on Friday. Suddenly it's warm and sunny. We haven't used the heater in six days, we were able to dry two loads of laundry on the line outside, and we spent the weekend gardening and sitting in the back yard playing Carcasonne with my neighbour/lab-mate. He has the extended game which is so much more complicated and interesting than the simple version we've been playing.

It's really nice to not be cold all the time, though I do worry that we're in for another rip roarin' roastin' toastin' never ending summer. That should make Z nice and happy and me lethargic and sweaty.

Bed

2007-08-24T10:09:00.001+10:00

We are settling into Melbourne in all sorts of ways. One of our recent and rather large investments in this city has been a new mattress, a king-size doona (comforter) and cover. Buh-bye mid-night blanket thievery. Hello bright red and orange Indian-style bedroom!

This may not seem like a big deal to you, and you probably don't care, but for us it marks a turning point. We're no longer buying any old cheap crap to sleep on and live with. We have a bit more money and we're spending it to be a bit more (OK, a lot more) comfortable. This is also the first big joint purchase of our marriage, which is funny considering all our friends who are buying houses right now. We're transitioning from everything-we-need-is-in-a-backpack to choosing a country and city to live in, to renting a house, to having jobs, and now a real bed. And soon, we might even have a real car.

Aussification

2007-08-23T09:52:00.000+10:00

Three things that indicate that I'm feeling more at home Down Undah:

1. I drive on the left hand side of the road in my dreams;

2. When I type an URL into my browser, I automatically add a .au to the end, whether or not it's needed;

3. I can drink three beers and not feel a thing.

Not so far up/down

2007-08-01T12:10:00.000+10:00

I've been in a lot of airplanes lately, what with the trip around Australia and the visit to SF - oh, and don't forget the side-trip to Boston and Maine. You'd think at this point that I would have enough frequent flyer miles to earn a free one-way business class ticket to the moon. But alas, the different airlines make for no miles worth a hoot. Z flew all the way to NY and back and around Australia on one airline and now has almost but not quite enough miles for a one way trip to Sydney (a 1.5 hour flight). This further supports my theory that frequent flyer programs are a bunch of baloney.

On the charter flights to and from Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, I got to sit up front with a splendid view of the cockpit (on one flight, I actually sat in the co-pilots seat, where I had to refrain from making jokes like, "Hey Mr. Pilot, what happens if I grab this lever and pull like this?"). These premier seats gave me a splendid view of the altimeter, which is when I had a big realization: 300ft above sea level isn't that far up. In fact, it makes the water look close enough to touch. So what, you ask? Well, the maximum workable depth for most scientific research projects is about 70ft, which is literally just skimming the surface albeit in an upside down kind of way. Floating in a small plane 300ft above the ocean and miles below the upper reaches of the atmosphere underscores just how not-deep (uh, the word I'm looking for is shallow) most of us will ever go. And the kicker? When you're down at 70ft, the surface feels a very long way away, especially when the water's murky. It was quite a powerful experience to realize just how shallow I am. When I'm diving, that is.

Living the single life

2007-07-08T12:02:00.000+10:00

I always thought that I would live alone at some point in my life, certainly before I got married. Living in SF killed that idea off right smart - it was just too expensive. And then Z and I started dating, moved in together, got married, and I realized that I would never have the chance to live alone, to see what that was like. Until this week, that is. First impressions? I didn't like coming home to a cold, empty house. There was no-one to hear about my day. Then I discovered that if I cooked dinner, I also had to do the dishes. No fair! Late on Tuesday night, I crawled into bed, a bed that was missing a heater. I had been reading for about five minutes when I realized that I was lying all the way on my side, with the blankets neatly shared between both halves of the bed. With a giggle and a grin, I moved into the middle of the bed and gathered all the blankets into a bundle around me. Now, I thought, This is something I could get used to!

A long way to go

2007-07-04T16:05:00.000+10:00

Allow me to share exactly how far it is from Melbourne to New York with the following, riveting story:

Yesterday morning, I woke a little before 7am, had a quick shower and a cup of tea, and drove Z to the airport. On the horizon, the rising sun lit the edge of a big cloud turning it brilliantly gold. I left Z at the terminal, battled rush hour traffic on the way back home, and had some breakfast. Then I rode to school, had a two hour meeting with the high school student I'm mentoring, spent a scintillating three hours editing an Excel spreadsheet, and another three slightly more scintillating hours watching lab-mates practice their presentations. The ride home was through crisp winter air, underneath bare-limbed trees silhouetted against a dusky sky. I made myself some dinner, did the dishes and headed down to the pub for trivia night. The pub was packed and, thanks to a new smoking ban, full of breathable air. After a few too many beers, I walked back home, thankful to not smell and feel like an old ashtray, and crawled into bed to read for a couple of hours. Eight hours later, I woke up, checked my email and headed back to Uni. I spent two hours working on a manuscript, another hour editing that damn Excel file, and caught up with the people who share my office. I was sitting at my desk eating lunch when I an email arrived from Z saying that he had reached his Manhattan hotel.

And that, my friends, is how far it is from Melbourne to New York.

Brain is mush

2007-06-29T15:49:00.001+10:00

A lot has happened since I last posted. I've been to three places that have been on my Must Visit list for a looong time: Kata Tjuta, Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef. I spent two weeks with Z's parent and god-parents, making up information about Australia and laughing more than I've laughed in a while. I found my new favourite annual sporting event where I watched some of the crappiest footy I've ever seen. My weekly pub trivia group miraculously placed first in one of the three rounds, though we came in third overall -- again. And I learned that I've had part of my master's thesis provisionally accepted for publication in a scientific journal. I got the reviewers' comments back upon return to Melbourne and discovered that I had about a week to respond. I've spent this entire week working on the document, making changes to figures, tables and text, and then changing the changes, and changing the changes to the changes, ad nauseum. The biggest struggle has been keeping the damn thing under 6000 words. As of about noon, I was down to 6024, and spent the next couple of hours identifying 24 words to cut. It's now at a respectable 5,986. The unfortunate side effect of this process is everything I write turns dry and scientific, no matter how hard I try to make it witty and lighthearted. I swear, science is killing my creativity. Soon enough it will be printed an on its way back to the editors. Maybe then I'll be able to post something decent...

Making News

2007-05-31T19:58:00.000+10:00

This may be my favourite headline of all time:

Orlando Bloom Hoping to Grow Out of Elf and Pirate Roles, Perhaps Play Dancing Cat on London Stage

From here.

Missing You

2007-05-21T14:04:00.000+10:00

From a description of Bay to Breakers:

Some participants were motivated to run fast and others were motivated to drink beer in imaginative ways -- such as while doing a handstand over a keg in a shopping cart on the corner of Howard and Fifth streets.

Oh, how I miss you San Francisco. I miss your crazy residents (except for the certifiable wackos whose curses fill your rather squalid public buses), your sanctioned public looniness, your familiar steep and winding streets, and your abundant taquerias. I miss the friends who are similarly attracted to your aforementioned qualities and who choose to live in and near you. Hopefully, we will all see each other again soon.

Stoopidhead vs. the braggart

2007-05-16T16:56:00.000+10:00

One of the issues I've been struggling with lately is feeling stupid. Like most PhD students, I find that the more I learn, the less I know. However, feeling stupid is, well, stupid considering that all the evidence points to me not being stupid. Yes, I feel stupid for feeling stupid. I'm smart like that.

Z has been "gently" encouraging me to get over this by saying things like, "Get over it already!" I've been doing my best to heed his advice but it's a challenge. Whenever I start feeling clever, I either immediately do or say something really dumb or, more insidiously, start to feel like a proud braggart. This leads me to my question de mois:

How does one act smart and clever without coming across as a know-it-all jerk?

Got any answers? I sure don't.

For me, this goes back a long way. I remember winning the maths prize in year 8 and dying on the inside as what little social standing I had evaporated. There was nothing cute about a smart girl in middle school. Being smart incurred much ribbing and I quickly learned to down-play my grades when I couldn't hide them. I really only stopped doing this during the final years of my masters, though I rarely volunteered to share my marks.

This all came to a head last week when I attended a reception for recipients of the University's prestigious scholarships. There are about 1,000 post-grads at the University, 350 of which have been granted federal scholarships. I'm one of the 350. Of the 1,000, 11 were awarded a prestigious scholarship; I'm one of those 11. Hearing these statistics out loud made me realize that someone, somewhere thinks I'm smart (I can hear you groaning at that sentence, Z). I need to remember this when I find myself unable to articulate a complex scientific thought.

One of the difficulties is that I'm me and so am completely unqualified to assess how well (or not) I present myself and my thoughts. I don't know if I come across as a bumbling idiot or a brilliant scientist, though can guess that it's somewhere in between and highly reliant upon my caffeine intake. Yes, it's true: caffeine does make you smarter.

I've recently realized that this only matters so much, is so important, because science is what I want to do with my life. This is what I enjoy doing. If I'm not good at this - or am only mediocre, I'll feel like I'm wasting my time. I want to accomplish things and feel like I contribute; if I'm only ever fair to middlin', I won't feel like I'm doing the best thing with my life.

Fortunately, someone somewhere thinks this is a good thing for me to do. Perhaps one day I'll realize that they're right.

Commitment? What commitment?

2007-05-10T10:28:00.000+10:00

From Day in Pictures.

This could start a war somewhere else

2007-05-01T12:22:00.000+10:00

I finally dropped the boat off for repairs today. It's taken this long (this being about four weeks!) to get the approval from the department to not file an insurance claim. It has been an incredibly frustrating process.

On my drive down to Williamstown, I saw a billboard advertisement for a web-site that lists homes for sale and lease. The caption read something like, "It's so easy, anyone can find a new home." The photo was of a man in a nicely tailored grey suit sitting on a chair. The model's head had been replaced with that of Dubya. I'm glad to see that Australia is not above publicly mocking his stupidity. Now if we would all just get around to recognizing Howard's stupidity in the upcoming election...

Plastic crap

2007-04-24T13:09:00.000+10:00

We have been trying unsuccessfully for the past few months to get a credit card. My credit rating in the States is good enough to get me a card with a $28,000 limit, but here no-one will even consider my applications. So, we got a debit card instead. Yes that's right: our bank account came with an ATM card only; the debit card is extra. Do you remember the last time you saw an ATM card without a credit card logo on it? Me neither. When the cards arrived, Z called up and activated them. Yay! We can now do things like make on-line purchases and order concert tickets. Today I used my card for the first time to make a reservation at a house down near Wilson's Prom. Like all my credit card applications, my little debit card was rejected. A little panicky, I checked our account and found it adequately stocked with moola. So I called the bank to find out what was going on. I was informed that I hadn't linked the card to my account.

Say what???

Yes folks, it's true. The bank sent me a card, allowed me to activate the card, but never connected the card to any money thereby making the card a completely useless piece of plastic taking up space in my wallet.

Media Cottons On to Scientists' Predictions

2007-04-23T20:34:00.000+10:00

The press is full of bad news about global climate change (I'm not calling it "global warning" any more because every time there's a cold snap, people say, "See? There's no such thing as global warming."). When we got back to the land of newspapers after our trip around the world, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more news coverage of environmental problems. 'Suddenly' the mainstream papers were talking about fisheries collapse and carbon emissions. That sort of coverage has only increased; it seems almost weekly that an article discusses the seriousness and severity of global warming. I guess the media has finally caught up to what scientists have been saying for a couple of decades now.

A couple of months ago, I came across this article that talks about the larger-than-predicted spike in greenhouse gas emissions in 2006. That has me worried because there are all sorts of positive feedback loops that could kick into action, speeding up climate change suddenly. OK, not as suddenly as "The Day After Tomorrow" but more quickly than current models predict. For a great discussion of these (and a really great scary novel), read "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery.

In January, an article in the NY Times quotes Dr. Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge, as giving civilization no more than a 50 percent chance of surviving until the year 2100. Meanwhile Brisbane is on stage 5 water restrictions - stage 5 of 5. I don't know what happens next. There are very real concerns that hydropower plants supplying Sydney will have to close down if there isn't rain in the 18 months. A couple of months ago, the cover of our local paper The Age proclaimed that the Great Barrier Reef is facing extinction. But don't worry, according to Howard climate change is not a major issue and Australians aren't the biggest emitters of carbon - we're behind the US and China. What he fails to mention is that our total population is around 20 million so it's no surprise that we're emitting less carbon than two vastly more populous nations. Unfortunately, on a per capita rate, we're number two.

There's only one piece of good news I can glean from all of this: I chose the right field. If I'd chosen to study coral reef fish ecology, I'd be seriously worried about job stability. All those days spent diving in cold murky waters may reap a pay-off yet.

File this post under the category: glass one eighth full.

Enculturation

2007-04-22T12:42:00.000+10:00

We've been in Melbourne for six and a half months, though it feels like so much longer. I'm pleased to say that I no longer look the wrong way when I cross the street - though I haven't done that for quite some time. I've recently being to perceive cars in American movies as driving on the wrong side of the road. These steps towards being comfortable in Australia are balanced by my inability to hear American accents - they still sound "normal". And every now and then I'm surprised to hear someone near me sound Australian. Last week I called a pub to make a dinner reservation and nearly laughed out loud at the guy on the other end of the phone - he was so Australian. Real okka, if you know what I mean - which you probably don't. In addition to excellent 'roo steak, the same pub offers a bogan burger, a bogan being the Aus equivalent of American white trash. The burger includes a grilled beef patty, breaded and fried chicken, fried bacon, fried potato pancake, and canned beetroot all in a bun with a cocktail umbrella on top. Everything about it screams class. Just thinking about it may be bad for your cholesterol. I had this pub recommended to me by one of my lab-mates. The German post-grad in my office overheard us discussing this and we then had fun trying to define the word "bogan" to someone who had also never heard the terms "white trash" or "trailer trash". I think we got the idea across with some swearing and pantomimes. I'm glad to be a cultural ambassador when I can.

The curse of the clothes horse

2007-04-15T17:38:00.000+10:00

As I have mentioned before, I lost all my clothes in the mold incident of '06. I have, however, managed to beef up the wardrobe in the past few months, in part on my own, and in major part thanks to various parental figures. One person in particular took me on a wonderfully exorbitant shopping trip where I was bought an absolutely fabulous tank top costing at least three times what I would ever pay for a tank top. It makes my boobs look great and is interesting while not being overwhelming, thereby wearable with pretty much everything: jeans, skirts, work, play. Because it was expensive and because the tag says to, I always wash it by hand. Yes me, washing things by hand. Shocking. I wore it out to the pub last night and so it smelt like an ashtray this morning. Playing at being a dutifully responsible adult, I decided to do some hand laundry this afternoon in an effort to avoid the cigarette smells becoming a permanent part of the fabric. In addition to the tank, I washed my new favourite long-sleeved top from Anthropologie (a birthday present), some French lingerie and a couple of other things. When I do hand laundry, I'm exceedingly careful to keep the colours way the hell away from the lights, which is what I did today. So, I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed, careful not to rub too hard or wring too much. And then I carried the items out to dry and discovered that my two favourite shirts and my expensive lingerie are covered in big, ugly, brown stains.

Swearing furiously, I returned to the laundry room to soak them again. And that's where Z found me, crying and banging my head against the window. He stood looking at me like you look at something that's about to explode in a big bad terribly no good way. Which is pretty much what I felt like doing, so his concern was justified.

At first I didn't understand what had happened. Then it came to me: the culprit is the fucking laundry basket we use to carry clothes out to hang on the line. It has left brown stains over all our clothes, stains we thought were caused by the oil seal failing on the washing machines we bought from the cheapo dirtbag salesman on Syndey Rd. You know, the three washing machines we went through before finally stomping into the shop and demanding our money back for them and the fridge which was also, at that point, not working. We couldn't at the time understand how three - three! - washing machines in a row could fail on us. Now we do...

Truth be told, I don't feel so bad for giving cheapo dirtbag salesman such a hard time. I mean the fridge really was befucked. And, as Z pointed out, even the repairman thought all of the washing machines were blown.

But my clothes! I feel cursed. What Egyptian goddess of the outfit did I piss off while we were at Karnak? Or is it a Congolese esprit de costume upset that we bought that wooden statue? What the fuck???

Perhaps it's time to have an exorcism. I think I'll begin by feeding that laundry basket to the goats.

Field games

2007-04-15T13:38:00.000+10:00

There are certain phrases, casually bantered around any science facility, that make no sense at all if you stop and think about them. Take, for example, one I use frequently: in the field. As in, "I won't be able to catch up over lunch tomorrow because I'll be in the field." Field? What field? When have I ever done research in a field? And what does it mean to be in the field anyway? Wouldn't it be more correct to say on the field?

This really has nothing much to do with anything at all - it's just one of those things I've been thinking about when I'm not thinking about the massive ginormousness of the project that I've signed up to do. I had a three hour meeting on Friday with my supervisor at the guy in charge of running Victoria's marine parks. I left feeling under qualified and overwhelmed, not the best of combinations. It did however, shift the way I think about this project. I no longer think of it as a university course; it's become a research project that I've been hired to execute. Because they are paying me so poorly, they've sweetened the deal by agreeing to give me a nice piece of paper and a title change when I'm done. Perhaps surprisingly, this little change in perspective actually makes the whole thing easier. I like doing research projects - figuring out which questions to ask, how to ask them and then how to figure out the answers - but I'm not sure at all that I like getting a PhD; that sounds far more difficult. So, I play little mind games with myself (and the other self who so pleasantly agrees) and think about the foolishness of language in an effort to make it all feel better.

one of us ... one of us ...

2007-04-03T17:57:00.000+10:00

In one of my favourite Raymond Chandler passages, he describes a drunk dame setting a glass down on a coffee table saying, "She was eight inches wrong".

I managed to do the same thing today, but with a boat. As in, I launched it but was five metres wrong. Which is to say that the boat came off the trailer and onto the ramp rather suddenly and rather not in the water. No damage to the prop. No crack in the hull. "Just" some big old scrapes down to the lightly shredded fiberglass.

What happened? As I've always done, I disconnected the boat from the tailer before we backed down the ramp. But this is a different boat, a lighter boat, one that's back heavy and, evidently, overly anxious to get in the water. So, it parted with the trailer prematurely. Reuniting boat and trailer would not have been possible without the stranger who stopped to help out. As we began the muscle-aching task of winching the boat back into position, it looked like we might actually be winching the truck down the ramp instead. Fortunately, truck did not share boat's desire to get wet.

My lab-mates, all of whom have been involved in similar "minor" mishaps, say that I'm now christened; I'm officially one of the crew. There wasn't so much grinning or joking from my supervisor when I told him - more standing around the boat and saying, "That's bad."

As bad as the damage is, the timing is even worse. This comes on the heels of an incident last week in which our other boat got swamped. This means that the lab is out of boats at a time when they are needed for field work and when the ocean conditions are actually good.

The day wasn't a total loss as we still managed to go diving - we did a shore dive with an entry that involved dropping over a 5'5" wall and scrambling over several metres of large boulders. The entry wasn't really the problem; it was the getting out that was difficult. My graceless clambering had an audience of 15 Japanese tourists, a Scottish family and a small group of young boys. After spending an hour and a half floating weightlessly, it's difficult to find one's land legs.

I spoke to Lumpkin on the phone when I got home. He cheered me up by sharing one his dad's quotes with me:

There are two kinds of boaters: those who have run aground, and those who haven't yet.

Is it still called running aground if you weren't in the water in the first place?

Before you buy a house...

2007-04-02T09:20:00.000+10:00

Use this map to check out the effect of different sea level increases around the world - including in your own back yard. In particular, look and see what happens to the Netherlands with a sea level rise of 1m. Ouch.

(More details about the map here.)

Uphill both ways

2007-03-30T12:36:00.000+10:00

I have a pretty easy ride to Uni: it’s a fairly flat route that takes me through parkland via quiet back streets. It takes me a little over 15 minutes to get to school – on a normal day. Then there are things like this:

(Image from here.)

Note the hurricane to the south of Australia. That would be the first hurricane to ever effect southern Australia. The edge of this storm has been buffeting Melbourne with seriously strong winds, causing the sections of my ride that I usually coast down to feel like a steep uphill slog. And they blow my light road bike all over the road. Not fun. About a third of my way to Uni today, my quads were insisting that I’d just climbed Twin Peaks.

And that's just what's happening on land. Western Victoria is supposedly getting pounded by 20ft waves. A buoy near the entrance to Port Philip Bay (close to Melbourne) recorded a 7m (~21ft) wave this morning. And the experts on diving in Victoria say that March and April are the best months to dive!

Endings

2007-03-28T08:20:00.000+10:00

I've been thinking a lot about Nina this week, since Lumpkin told me she was killed in a mountaineering accident last Friday. She was such a sugar-loving, vivacious person who not only made us welcome in Wellington, but pretty much convinced us to move there in the first place. I loved walking through the city with her, learning about all the things that could be done to make a city more pedestrian-friendly. Like those pavers that we teased her about when we were out with Jason and Paul.

There was another death last week, though not as tragic I suppose. My good friend Alicia's Granny Annie died. I spent a fair amount of time with her when I was young, playing cards and learning Mah Jong. I don't know any of my other friends' grandparents like I knew Granny Annie. She was 89 and had suffered from Alzheimers for years. In fact, Alicia told me that one day while she was visiting, Granny Annie told her, "You look a lot like Alicia", to which she replied, "I am Alicia!". In some ways she had been gone for a while.

At Granny Annie's memorial service, Alicia's mum shared the story of Granny Annie's life. What struck me most was how hard she and her husband worked. Annie's husband would open their shop every morning until it was time for him to go to work, which is when Annie would take over for the day. When Allen got home from work, he would take over from Annie, working in the shop while Annie prepared dinner and took care of the kids.

Hearing that made me realize how luxurious our lives are. We have choice like perhaps no other generation has had choice. This choice comes with the pressure to figure out what we want to Do With Our Lives. This makes it so much harder. There's room to waffle and room to change our minds and room to worry about what we're doing. Back then, you had to work - and hard - every day. No room for lengthy sabbaticals to ponder your life's direction.

I see this in my grandmother too. She's in her late 80's and definitely losing her mind, but still she weeds her enormous garden and takes care of Vince and Sam (the alpacas). I know that she also spends the occasional day in bed, which she entirely deserves but would never, ever, ever have happened even 10 years ago. She has a work ethic that puts mine to shame - so much so that it makes me question whether I even have one!

And this is balanced by hearing about Nina's death, which makes me want to live to the best of my ability Right Now. You never know when the end will be. How to balance these two lessons? How to find the medium between working hard and working toward something you love? Perhaps that's called a PhD.

So, this is some of what I've been thinking about: death and change and the different forms of loss. Saying, "I'm sorry" at Granny Annie's funeral wasn't right - she had a good long life and a good death. And then there's Nina, just turned 30. Saying "I'm sorry" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Questions

2007-03-12T21:50:00.000+11:00

Science is all about asking questions. There's an art to devising a brilliant question with far-reaching repercussions that can be answered through a simple experiment. Failing that, there's a process to taking a big question and simplifying it into testable components. The trick is to make sure that each of those components is still interesting, otherwise you're likely to find yourself in the middle of an experiment bored to tears and wondering how on earth you're going to convince anyone that this is ground-breaking research. It's all about making a little part of a little experiment tie in with the big picture.

Honing this ability to ask good research questions is a necessary part of the PhD process and what I've been working on for the last five weeks. Today my big picture just got a whole lot bigger. In a meeting, I was asked by one of the department's more senior professors what I want to do at the end of the PhD. Perhaps foolishly, I answered honestly - I believe my exact words were, "I have no idea." If only I had given my internal editor a chance to disagree! Fortunately, the other grad student in the room also had no idea. We were both then scolded and told that this was unacceptable. Everything we do during this PhD, all the choices we make, are supposed to further us along our career path. Do we choose to TA in order to gain valuable teaching experience in preparation for a job as an academic lecturer? Do we work with government agencies to lay the groundwork for a position as a researcher? Or do we network like crazy with industry so as to get in the door there?

All I can say is, Uh...what? It's time for me to really start thinking about this stuff? I thought I had another few years!

This question of "career" feels so antithetical to who I am. Or perhaps it's merely that the word "career" instantly brings to mind a desk-job at some large firm where I spend a good part of my time weasling my way up the ladder of promotions and raises. In other words, it sounds bloody awful.

I do know that there are other options out there and, in fact, that's why I'm subjecting myself to this three (and a half) year research program. I guess my attitude towards the What Comes Next has been very much a wait-and-see. Today as I was mulling this over in my over-worked neural circuitry, I realized that the wait-and-see attitude is devoid of hopes and aspirations. Instead of going for my dream job, I have been planning to see what's available when I get out (saying get out like that sounds way too much like this is a prison term). How passive! I'd much rather live striving for something than waiting for whatever shows up. That isn't antithetical to me at all.

But there's a catch: I have to decide on something, and I'm notoriously hopeless at making decisions (just ask my husband). I really don't want to be strapped down to some career path, which is part of my resistance to making a decision - it just seems so final. And yet, if I don't start thinking about this I may realize what I want too late to get there. There aren't so many positions open each year for marine ecologists.

Once again, this PhD is showing me how little I know. Thanks a lot.

Competition

2007-03-11T14:40:00.000+11:00

As you may know, Z is trying to make it as a freelance writer here in Melbourne. The competition is really tough. For example, check out this guy.

International law

2007-03-06T19:20:00.000+11:00

I went out diving again this week, something that I'll probably be doing once a week until winter sets in. Instead of taking out the lovely zodiac, we took out the Nerita, a rust bucket that handles like a cantankerous old lady with osteoporosis and Alzheimer's. The kick-ass boat I used at my previous school was called the Cypselurus, which is a mouthful and also a genus of flying fish. In contrast, Nerita is the genus of a marine snail. Which would you rather use?

As we head out of the harbour, I notice that boats motor on the right-hand side, in contrast to terrestrial traffic which drives on the "L for left". This makes sense to me - there has to be some kind of international rule to international shipping lanes, and picking the right-hand side of the waterway sides with the majority of the world. Then I notice the two buoys marking the exit to the harbour: the red marker is on the right and the green on the left. I double check to make sure that I'm not dislexyasizing. I'm not: it's the opposite to the States where every boater is taught "Red Right Returning". So much for making waterways international.

At the dive site, we (eventually) anchor and start to gear up. My lab-mate C pulls out the brand new international "diver below" flag. I've never seen this flag before in my life. "Don't you use the red flag with the white stripe?" I ask. C has never heard of that flag. E, who's done some surf life saver training says, "Oh yeah. I've seen that flag. I think it means shark in the water".

I agree

2007-03-06T18:07:00.000+11:00

Confession time: I talk to myself. You're probably not surprised because you most likely talk to yourself, too. Recently, however, I've caught myself agreeing with myself. As in:

- I think I should have sushi for lunch today.
- I agree.

I miss the days of simple internal monologues. This feels a few steps closer to clinical. And what happens if I start disagreeing with myself? That could get ugly.

I've also recently had to come to terms with the fact that I have very little intuitive sense of left and right. At 31 years of age, I still need (and I do mean need) to look at my palms and spell out the "L" for left. This is difficult to do while driving, which is why I need my directions to be littered with large gestures.

And I'm getting a PhD?

- Who's idea was that?
- Well, it wasn't mine.

Martian invasion

2007-03-03T12:45:00.000+11:00

I went diving yesterday to help a colleague out with his research. While he counted fish along a transect, I explored. I saw my first wild sea horses - saying it like that makes me imagine them galloping past in a storm of turbulence, leaving a trail of silted water in their wake. As cool as they are with the whole "pregnant" male thing, they couldn't compare with seeing one of these:

It's a giant cuttle, Sepia apama (photo from here). When I first came across hovering just above the bottom, I had no idea what I was looking at. Its coloration and the raised skin flaps on its back made it look like part of the reef,though the fin along the bottom of its mantle rippled continuously. Its tentacles and arms were curled up into its face, and it sat starting at us with its strange eyes. At one point, my dive buddy and I moved to one side, and it moved so as to remain facing us. Was it an animal? Responsiveness suggested yes. Was it a fish? Completely the wrong shape. A vertebrate? Sure didn't look like any vertebrate I'd ever seen. An alien from Mars? Maybe. A Cephalopod? Distinct head region suggests probably - but far less interesting than the alien from Mars hypothesis. An octopus? Nope. A squid? Also nope. We surfaced and I asked my partner what it was. Fortunately, he recognized the creature. Unfortunately, he's from France and doesn't know the English word for it. Neither did the other guy on the boat who's from Germany. When I suggested cuttlefish, there was general consensus, backed up by the guidebook when we got back to the truck.

This may be one of the coolest things I've seen underwater in quite some time. It can't get over how otherworldly and alien it looked. Perhaps Martians have invaded Earth and have been classified as Cephalopods. It sure would explain their intelligence and looks. Come to think of it, Martian invasion would explain the intelligence and looks of a lot of people too. For example, Tom Cruise. No, wait - hasn't he expelled his aliens?

Summer? Winter? Who can tell?

2007-02-28T16:45:00.000+11:00

It is still summer here in the southern hemisphere - unless you live in Canberra, apparently. A few weeks ago, a similarly ferocious storm a couple of hours north of Melbourne cracked the windshield of my aunt's car. While I certainly wish it would cool the hell down, I hope it doesn't happen quite so violently. Though, of course, there would be something amazing about experiencing the downpour of that much ice. In fact, the more I think about it, the better it sounds. I take it back: can we please have a massive hail storm here in Melbourne?

The good kind of stormy

2007-02-21T18:15:00.000+11:00

I fear that I am becoming one of those people who gushes about how much they love their yoga class at every opportunity they get. But I do love it, even when just sitting there hurts in places I didn't know existed. I've tried to get into yoga at other times but it's never stuck. This time, it feels positively gluey. Perhaps it's the teachers, though one is so soft spoken and flexible that I can't quite hear her and when I try to imitate her moves, discover that my body does not do that. Perhaps it's the type of yoga - this is my first time with Iyengar yoga, having tried mainly Hatha in the past. Or perhaps it's that I let my body get into such a state of un-fit that anything feels restorative.

I rode home after class into a menacing grey sky with a fresh wind from the south at my back. I am now trying to coax said breeze into the house to cool everything down. Meteorologists are predicting that the drought will break this autumn - a colleague told me that one meteorologist is even giving a date for the break: 23rd of February. While I don't believe anyone can give a date for the end of a drought, I do believe that climatologists can look at the weaking El Nino conditions in the Pacific and correlate this to an increased chance of rainfall in southeastern Australia. This is great for the birds and the bees, but not so good for those of us who commute by bike.

On Sunday, Z and I drove across the city to watch The House of Flying Daggers in the botanic gardens. About halfway between home and park, an intense gusty wind rocketed the car. The temperature quickly dropped 14C (~25F) and it began to rain. Sure enough, the screening was canceled, though we did get to have a wonderful walk in the drizzle through the gardens. There's nothing like a cool breeze and rain after a weekend that spent most of the time over 100F. I am so very ready for winter.

The rapid change reminded me of watching a storm roll in across the ocean toward us while Z, Lumpkin and I were in the Perhentians, Malaysia. I've never seen anything like the clearly defined wall of cloud that approached us, massive and towering, like something out of The Day After Tomorrow. As we watched it approach, Z said that he didn't think it would rain on us. Ha! After the usual burst of wind heralding its arrival, the front let loose with such a downpour as to grey out the boats moored about 20m offshore.

While perhaps not quite so picturesque as a tropical island, Melbourne certainly has the stormy weather covered. How I love the thunder and lightening and aliveness to the air as the atmosphere roils. Now if it would just cool the fuck down.

Body meet Mind; Mind, this is Body

2007-02-16T15:57:00.000+11:00

For the first time in an embarrassingly long time, I have taken up regular exercise. (Hooray me!) In addition to riding my bike to Uni, I've been taking a couple of classes (like yoga, pilates) a week. I also hope to start swimming regularly. The side effects that I've noticed include an increase in consumption of hydrating fluids, crepuscular muscular fatigue, and an augmentation of available diurnal energy. However, contrary to what previous studies have found, I have not enjoyed more restful nocturnal episodes. The other night I kept Z up with my tossing and turning; little did he know that I was fighting off dream-sharks. Last night he woke me up and said that I was doing that sit-up-while-rolling-over thing - repeatedly. Let's hope this researcher notices a temporal attenuation of this mildly deleterious side-effect.

As you can probably tell, I'm getting into the swing of this whole research thing. This morning, I went to a post-grad orientation. I find orientations to be such hit-or-miss events. Often, 99% of the information will be useless, but that 1% will be so valuable as to make the hours of boredom worth it. At other times, 100% is useless. Today was one of those rare orientations where about 80% was useful information. Among descriptions of various courses and services, I learned what happens if a student and supervisor fall in love. I have to thank whomever it was that asked that question for the outrageous laughter than ensued. I also learned that the completion rates for PhD's hovers around 50%. The professor who presented this information urged us to not be dismayed. Dismayed? I thought. Isn't that supposed to be a challenge? Just like being told that the number of women in the sciences drops off radically after the master's level. I guess my attitude is something like: Ha! Take that!

I've also recently begun to string together bits and pieces from the various topics that I'm interested in. At first I thought that I would have to make a decision to study one thing or another. I've begun to see how they might all slot together into a unified whole. This is very exciting in a very nerdy, scientific sort of way. Which is perfect, because I'm exciting in a very nerdy, scientific sort of way.

How getting a PhD is like trying to get a truck out of deep sand

2007-01-30T16:58:00.000+11:00

Today I had lunch with an old friend who's also a scientist, also a woman, and who also did her postgraduate work at Melbourne Uni. When she heard that I am feeling more than a little lost, she said that everyone feels this way at the beginning of a PhD program, particularly one without coursework. She thinks she did about 10% of her PhD in her first year (and about 80% in the final six months), which sounds about the same as my master's. At the beginning, there's so little guidance, so little structure. I suppose the main goal of this first year can be succinctly summarized: know more. So I'm reading and taking notes on what I'm reading and looking for more things to read and then reading them and taking notes and reading more. This process involves little action, little doing. And the more I read and learn, the more I realize how little I actually know. At the end of the day, it's all quite unsatisfying.

Which brings me to today's metaphor. This first part of a PhD feels a lot like trying to get a truck out of sand: lots of going nowhere interspersed with brief moments of movement that, ultimately, don't really get you anywhere either. And the whole time, your heart's beating fast enough to blow a rib because you're so afraid of being stuck in this place permanently. And you're trying all sorts of different approaches (reversing, rocking, sticks under the wheels, rocks under the wheels) but with a certain overtone of panic that makes it hard to give any one approach the time and attention it requires, all the while cycling between fear (How long before someone comes along?) and intense jubilation (The truck moved - it's going to wo--). After what feels like an eternity, you wear yourself out enough to calm down and commit to one approach. You dig several layers of rocks in under the tires and, miracle of all miracles, you manage to pop out of the hole you're in and you're rolling - you're rolling! - and you can't stop or turn around or do anything but drive steadily forwards until you're back on solid ground.

Not that I've ever been in this sort of situation.

Day One

2007-01-23T19:12:00.000+11:00

Things you want to know:

- The woman whose desk is next to mine studies kangaroo fertility - or more correctly, she studies kangaroo birth control. I kid you not; her dissertation involves dosing roos with hormones that are identical to the pill.

- My supervisor apologized for my office, which contains brand spanking new desks, a huge window, and my own file cabinet. He started to apologize for the desk chairs - which were not designed for use in the bowels of a dreary office building housing an underfunded government department in the 50's, do not come with wires to poke me in the bum, and do not list dangerously to port - but I cut him off. My office used to be in a trailer, I explained - a trailer that during one particular deluge, started to float. I kid you not.

- I remembered to wear pants.

Things you don't want to know:

- The basement houses a room of aquaria full of venomous marine creatures. Occasionally, the marine tech walks in to find undergrad's from other departments wandering around looking at the tanks. When he asks them what they're doing they usually say something like, "We heard this room was here, man, and we heard it was really cool." He's asked for locks to be installed on the door because there's only one thing worse than finding random students wandering through your lab: finding random students passed out in your lab.

- The same marine tech told me about a student taken by a shark a couple of years ago while at his dive safety stop. There was also a student who lost a leg. (I should not be blogging about this - the family is going to freak.) Both occurred in South Australia, and the leg loss occurred after the divers were spear fishing near a seal colony. I will not be diving in SA, nor will I be spear fishing near a seal colony - or really doing anything in the water near a seal colony. And I have already promised my husband that I will not let myself get taken by a shark.

- I remembered to wear pants.

2007-01-22T11:35:00.000+11:00

Early this morning I woke up with a jolt of panic: I was late for school. Except that school doesn't start until tomorrow - and here it's not called school, it's called Uni. My friend A keeps reminding me of that. She also corrects my pronunciation of the word "mobile" - as in, cell phone - to make sure that I enunciate the "ile" part of the word, which I tend to swallow making it MObl rather than moBILE.

This has nothing to do with anything much at all. There will be no pithy sentence that ties this together with the fact that we scored a dresser yesterday off a NY'er who lives around the corner and who advertised it on Craiglist, a service that I wish more people in Melbourne would use. I feel like I unpacked for the first time in a year and a half.

This also has nothing to do with the fact that I'm addicted to spider solitaire and that I will have to uninstall it this evening or risk never finishing my dissertation.

Which reminds me that I'm starting my dissertation tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a doctoral student. And presumably, one day I will be a doctor. In case it wasn't completely obvious, this fills me with nervous, jittery excitement. I'm sure that tonight I'll have one of those dreams where I'm giving a presentation to my colleagues only to realize half way through that I'm not wearing any pants.

Oh verr

2007-01-17T18:38:00.000+11:00

I am done with my temp job. Let me hear a chorus of "Hallelujahs". Lumpkin suggested I steal a t-shirt on my way out the door, one that read "Foster's - Australian for Cow Urine". Lumpkin makes me laugh. There is only one thing I will miss from that job and he sat a few rows away from me. Boy was he nice to look at. But I am more than happy to give up eye candy and air conditioning for the glamorous life style of an underpaid, overworked grad student.

Other wonderful things in my day include the cool breeze wafting in through the back door. Stepping out of the office today, the air felt heavy as if it really wanted to rain but couldn't quite get over the habits formed by eight years of drought. Droughts are addictive.

Speaking of droughts, I arrived home yesterday (bearing ice cream) to find my large tomato plant wilting miserably in its pot, it's leaves shriveled and dry. I rushed to the rescue with a bowl of gray water (we recycle the dish water) and less than ten minutes later, the plant was back to its rabid splendor. I swear it grows half a foot a day. If you notice that I haven't posted in a while, send clippers and a machete.

And that's about the news from here. It is refreshingly cool. I have a five day weekend and then - ack! I start my PhD. Oh shit. I hadn't really been thinking about that. For every "oh verr" there's and "oh god".

What's in a look

2007-01-13T19:35:00.000+11:00

When you've lost all your clothes the phrase, "I have nothing to wear" takes on new meaning. I'm working hard to regenerate my wardrobe but it's a struggle. Part of my problem is that I don't want to look like everyone else. On the tram to and from work, I am surrounded by hoards of identically dressed women, none of whom have a style I want to even come close to emulating. Think: Marina chick in a southern Californian mall. On a good day, I'll see a couple of women wearing an outfit that I like, which makes for pretty slim pickin's inspiration-wise and complicates this whole fill-up-the-wardrobe thing. When I try to go shopping, I end up rejecting over 90% of the clothes most shops have on offer. It's all the same! It's all U-Glee! And then there's the fight against the urge to buy the safe clothes, the things that look good but bore me to tears.

After reading this article, I realized that what I'm actually struggling with is defining my own style. I have never - NEVER - been a style junkie, or a fashionista, or someone who can name more than three labels - and that's on a good day. My uniform until a few years ago was a t-shirt and jeans. Now I own heels and even occasionally wear them. Admitting that I do appreciate clothes and want to feel confident in what I'm wearing has been a big step for me. Actually leaving the safe comfort of t-shirts and jeans for clothes that are stylish and opinionated is one hell of a struggle.

One of the first steps is admitting that I like clothes. Hi, my name's Bartlebee and I like clothes. Having never been to AA, I'm not sure what comes next. Perhaps recognizing that fashion does matter, that what I wear does matter, and, most importantly, that it's ok that it matters. This part is a work in progress.

If you like fish...

2007-01-13T18:12:00.000+11:00

... here are two particularly novel ways to show your love. If you like music as well as the fishies, then try this lovely fish tank piano. If seeing a piano reminds you of the hours of practice that you were forced into by a mother who could tolerate your tantrums and still get her way, hours you would rather have spent in the bathroom, then perhaps this fish tank will be more
to your liking.

Proof that moving countries is hard even when you allegedly speak the language

2007-01-09T19:19:00.000+11:00

Exhibit A: The following conversation, which ensued after I pulled my morning snack from my bag.

Colleague: Oooh! What’s that?

Me: A scone.

Colleague: But what’s wrong with it?

Me: What do you mean, what’s wrong with it? Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s a scone.

Colleague (poking scone): But it’s so flat.

Me: Aren't scones supposed to be flat?

Colleague: No they're not.

Me: They are in the States.

Colleague: They’re not over here.

Me: Then what do you call what I'm eating?

Colleague: I dunno. Is it a muesli slice?

Me: What’s a muesli slice?

Colleagues: A slice with muesli in it.

Me (under breath): Well that's helpful.

Colleague: That has muesli in it, doesn't it?

Me: No, just oats.

Colleague (looking at me like I'm a moron): Right. So, it has muesli in it.

Me: Yeah?

Colleagues: So it's a muesli slice.

Me: Of course. How could I be so silly? Why yes of course this is a muesli slice.

Bleak

2007-01-07T10:31:00.000+11:00

My brother Lumpkin just sent me an email. He's sitting at home in his shorts with all the windows and skylights open. He lives in New York. It's January.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

On Christmas day, Melbourne and NY shared the same temperature. Middle of summer; middle of winter. I am starting to think that my Master's advisor may have been serious when he told all of his grad students to buy land in Manitoba.

I had a nightmare a few years ago in which The End had come. My friend KC and I were in a tent in the middle of an apocalyptic desert surrounded by blowing sand and searing sun, applying duct tape to the zippers to try and keep the toxic winds out. And then we huddled together, recalling images from our favourite hiking spots: the towering green freshness of the redwoods; browned California hills scattered with wildflowers and scraggly oaks; the glacier-smoothed granite of the Sierras. And we cried at the loss which was so much greater than our own lives. I woke up soaked in desolation.

I am still occasionally gripped by panic at the thought that the Earth is going to hell in a hand-basket. Or more correctly, that Homo sapiens is going down and taking most things with it. And then I get an email from my bro and I realize that this is actually happening. This is not some nightmare. This is not a thought to try to avoid in order to feel better. This Is Actually Happening. Will politicians wake up in time to avert the worst of it? I don't know. Can I do much more than I'm already doing? I don't know - we have green power, barely drive, vote for people who understand environmental issues, and shop with a conscience. Is it enough? I don't know. Do I feel hopeful? Rarely.

Prognosis: bleak.

Black

2007-01-04T21:34:00.001+11:00

The new look of my blog may be bright and colourful ("clownish" according to Z), but my mood certainly isn't. After a week off between Christmas and the New Year, I am back in the tedium that is my temp job. No matter how many times during the day I repeat, "Six days left ..." it still sucks. Even Si's "I am in my happy place" Ikea-faring mantra does nothing to help. It's also hot hot hot except at my desk where I sit literally shivering all day. Have I mentioned that I don't like my job?

I suppose I can't wholly blame the job for The Mood. It's been skulking around for a couple of weeks now and as much as I try to shake it, it won't be shook. So, I garden and bake and organize the kitchen's stock of dried goods into neatly labeled jars and, when that's done, find myself staring into the blackness above our bed and, when I get tired of that, pacing the hallway through the witching hours. I'm sure the insomnia-induced exhaustion doesn't help.

And I'm also sure it will pass - I mean, eventually it has to, right? Until it does, I'm staying close to home and (here I quote Mr. Sassyass) missing y'all terribly.

The good kind of censorship

2007-01-01T13:38:00.000+11:00

From Lake Superior State University's list of banished words for 2006, comes the following:

Halthy Food
Someone told Joy Wiltzius of Fort Collins, Colorado, that the tuna steak she had for lunch "sounded healthy." Her reply: "If my lunch were healthy, it would still be swimming somewhere. Grilled and nestled in salad greens, it's 'healthful.'"

And my other favourite:

Combined Celebrity Names
"It's bad enough that celebrities have to be the top news stories. Now we've given them obnoxious names such as 'Bragelina,' 'TomKat' and 'Bennifer.'" -- M. Foster, Port Huron, Michigan.

"It's so annoying, idiotic and so lame and pathetic that it's 'lamethetic.'" -- Ed of Centreville, Virginia.

Lamethetic is a great word - watch, they'll have to ban it next year!

Night Out

2006-12-29T18:32:00.000+11:00

Last night we watched The Neverending Story at the Rooftop Cinema which was a very cool venue - actually, it was downright cold, but also cool in the less literal sense. The movie was not as magical as it was when I was a ten-year-old bookworm, but it has survived the tests of time better than The Labyrinth. As with most older movies, it is essential to apply liberal doses of imagination to the not-so-special effects. Take, for example, the part when Atreyu tells the scary wolf-creature that he'd rather go down fighting than be taken by the nothing. The wolf leaps toward him, snarling as the wind of the nothing tears tree from rock. The audience sharply inhales and - cut to Atreyu pushing the large, dead wolf away, its legs sticking out at right angles from its torso as it lies on its side. The whole audience, with the probable exception of the young girl sitting in front of us, laughed out loud.

On our way home, a guy around our age got on the tram and loudly asked if there were any English on board, which there weren't (I quickly decided that I'm Ameralian). A couple of stops later, someone got on wearing an English cap. Our "friend" immediately started singing "Four nil four nil four nil four nil" to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. I guess we won the cricket! The guy wearing the cap turned out to be an Aussie, too, and they soon joined voiced in a rousing rendition of "Yellow Submarine" except the chorus went, "We all live in a convict colony, a convict colony, a convict colony...."

It’s Australian for Christmas

2006-12-25T09:56:00.000+11:00

When I was about 10, my mum, sister and I moved out of Melbourne to live with my grandmother on her farm near Woodend. One Christmas, my grandmother arranged for one of the neighbours (actually, the only other people living on our dirt road) to dress up like Santa for the benefit of me and my sister. I think that both of us were too old to actually believe in Santa, though there was still something cool about a guy dressed in red with a big bushy white beard. Sometime in the early afternoon, a ute (pick-up) carrying Santa made its way down our driveway with many a Ho Ho Ho. My grandmother, being quite proper, said, “Oh Santa, how nice of you to drop by! Would you like a glass of sherry?” Santa replied, (you’ll have to give this your best Dundee impersonation), “Naaah, but I’ll have a beeeyah.”

This ... again?

2006-12-22T08:08:00.000+11:00

This quote comes from an article about the EU's proposed airline green taxes:

"Qantas takes its environment performance seriously and is fully aware of the debate around climate change as an issue of global significance," [Simon Rushton] said.

What debate is he talking about? There is no debate about the fact that climate change is happening and rapidly. And I dare anyone to argue that it isn't an issue of global significance. If only Qantas took science as seriously as it purports to take its "environment performance".

Say what?

2006-12-21T18:17:00.000+11:00

I was just awarded one of these:

The Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarships

The trustees of the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust have donated funds to establish special scholarships for outstanding women who are entering postgraduate study. Two scholarships are available annually and are normally awarded to the highest-ranked female recipients of an APA or MRS entering a:

1. scientific/technical discipline, and
2. a humanities/social sciences discipline.

This is in addition to the scholarship I've already been given. I am in total disbelief. My husband is not surprised. Which is not surprising. But the money sure as hell is. As is the swing from "How are we going to pay rent?" poverty to "Let's buy a dresser and a new mattress and some clothes to go with that suhweet coat Head and Ether sent" prosperity. It makes by brain go all blooey and my heart beat quickly - which is a good thing. Surprises like this are good for my health.

All in a Name

2006-12-21T15:34:00.000+11:00

Some companies work for a humanitarian cause or to create an innovative product or to do offer service. While ultimately the goal may be to make money, they can at least say they’re doing something good along the way. The company I work for appears to exist only to make money. Sure, they’re providing a service that certainly beats the service provided by the likes of Philip Morris, but selling booze is a job that each brewery or winery could do on their own. This conglomeration exists to make money, most of which ends up in the pockets of a select (male) few. It is demoralizing to show up to a desk every day in order to help someone “general manager” rake in bucketfuls of cash.

In addition to General Managers, QA specialists, VP’s, Marketing Coordinators and the like, I have come across several funny titles in my work. I particularly like “Shifty Bugger”, though that’s obviously a joke. Obviously quite serious is “Knowledge Manager”. Uh. Does this employee even know what she does? Can she take herself serious with that title? And then there's my favourite title: “Cellar door”. I wonder if he gets paid to revolve.

And just in case I started to think that funny titles only happen in business, Lumpkin suggested that I get work as a Whale-Vomit Specialist. How truly brotherly of him!

Speaking of names, if one wants a cup of coffee here in Aus, one usually orders something called a “flat white”. Because I can’t drink milk, I end up ordering soy. And because drinking caffeinated coffee makes me twitchy enough to give Z grounds for divorce, I usually end up ordering a decaf flat soy white. It’s an embarrassing drink to order – makes me think of stuck-up people in LA. It’s also quite a mouthful. So Z has given my coffee drink a new title: very flat yellow.

In summary, my family suggests that I be a Whale-Vomit Specialist who drinks Very Flat Yellows. I'm trying to see this as positive. And failing miserably.

Culture

2006-12-18T20:12:00.000+11:00

I just finished reading a great book, "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks. For those of you who haven't read any of his Culture books I highly recommend them - and this one in particular. It's been interesting to contemplate how life would be if there was no danger, if there were no rules, if death wasn't a lingering threat. What is added to our lives by our mortality? What do we gain? When I was an earnest (ahem) young girl, I remember swearing to my skeptical third grade teacher that, were the future to provide me with a choice, I would opt to do the housework myself rather than letting a robot take care of it for me. I felt then that I would lose some essential aspect of living by relinquishing any part of my existence. Nowadays, I would jump at the chance to have something scrub my toilet, iron my clothes and wash the dishes. But how far would I want to take that? How would it be to live in a society in which there was no need to work unless one was inspired to do so, a society which also has a lack of need? Want to live in a grand house over looking a fjord? No problem. How about a houseboat floating in a sea of jello? No problem - until you find yourself living there, surrounded by jello.

At this point in time, life in the Culture sounds pretty appealing. I would love to have the luxury to immerse myself in various pursuits without the pressures of time/mortality and money. I would learn all about linguistics so that I could better understand the formation of accents and dialects. I would open my own restaurant and try being a chef for a while. I would spend a few hundred years, because that is how long it would take, learning how to draw a decent representation of the world around me. And I would study the fishes in the deep blue sea.

In some ways a PhD does afford this sort of luxuriating. I am getting paid to spend three (and a half) years studying something that I find fascinating. The down-side is that this is just one thing I'm fascinated in - one of many, many things. Some people hear their calling loud and clear; for others there is no calling, just a mumbled cacophony of interesting things to do.

Which brings me to another point that's been making lazy laps around my cranium. I have been asking myself recently if fish/ecology/biology/science is really it for me. Maybe I won't enjoy it as much as I would enjoy owning a specialty organic farm? What I have come to realize is that there can be relief in just making a choice. It doesn't have to be the right choice (is there ever an obvious Right Choice?), it just has to be a choice. And once the decision is made, you can be on the move towards something. Perhaps the particular something doesn't even matter as much as the having chosen it. And so I find myself on the bring of beginning a dissertation in marine ecology...

Which isn't to say that I won't try cooking commercially at some point, or that I won't live on a farm again or - well, ok, so the linguistics thing is probably out.

Don't say that

2006-12-07T20:29:00.000+11:00

My Dad is in Hong Kong for a trade show, which he tells me is terribly boring but for the booth girls dressed in leather. When he tries to read my blog, he gets and error message from a Hong Kong url. Certain countries that we visited during our travels didn't like blogger either - I tried to log on for days from Addis Ababa, though that may have been less to do with censorship and more to do with the generally craptastic state of that country.

Speaking of censorship, the company I work for has a "no denim" policy. Seriously. No demin allowed. This makes my brain go waggawaggawhaaa? Dictating what employees can and can't wear to work?!?! That is the most stupid thing I have ever heard. I work for a company that it doesn't trust its employees to choose their own clothing. How hard can it be? Got a big sales meeting? Pull out that suit and tie. Work in IT where the closest thing you get to a person is that email in your inbox? Wear whatever the fuck - sorry, phuck you want. And I don't just don't get it. It takes time and money for someone to come up with a "no denim" policy, time and money for someone to write up a proposal for the exec team, time and money for the exec team to give the ok, and more time and money to communicate to the suckers - uh, I mean employees. This is certainly the most corporate corporation I have ever worked for - and I hope this is as corporate as it ever gets for me.

It's almost enough to make me want to shave myself a mohawk and dye it green and get a Polynesian face tattoo and an excessive septum piercing. Almost.

Speaking of body manipulations, I had the pleasure of having eight electrodes strapped to my chest for a twenty-four hour period this week. It happened to be incredibly hot the day I got hooked up to the heart monitor - I still have a couple of spots on my chest that looked like they had an unfortunately close encounter with an octopus. And no, you can't see. That may have been the only period of time where I actively wanted my heart to do it's syncopated hiccup routine. And did it? Not that I'm aware of. This morning, though, about 15 hours after I removed the heart monitor, it does it again. Should there be a next time where I try to sleep without crushing the machine or choking on the multiple wires, I will be sure to ask my body to misbehave earlier.

On the nose

2006-12-03T17:25:00.000+11:00

A lifetime or two ago when Z and I were exploring the South Island, we had a special anniversary dinner at a fabulous restaurant recommended by Mr. Sassyass. We ordered a bottle of local wine and were enjoying it when I decided to red the label. In addition to listing flavors like plum and berry, it listed the words "canned apricot". Canned apricot??? This lead to a hilarious competition to see who could come up with the worst wine description ever. I think the winners were a palate of last year's oysters, and a nose of seal colony.

Today, I was reading through an article describing the top 100 wines of 2006 and found the following:

2004 Carmel Road Monterey Pinot Noir ($20)
Nicely balanced, this wine is aromatic (basil, plum, red cherry and pencil lead), softly fruity (pie cherry) and spicy, with a hint of tar on the lingering finish.

Mmm... just what I want my wine to taste like: pencil lead and tar.

I Cannot Read the Clouds

2006-11-22T19:24:00.000+11:00

One of the difficulties with moving to a new country/state/city/neighborhood (if in SF) is not knowing how to read the weather. Each morning, I look out the window and try to guess what the day will bring. Thick heavy clouds and wind should equal cold and raining. Brilliant blue sky and breeze should equal warm. But it's Melbourne where the weather is, as they say, changeable. Adding to my weather confusion is the fact that at work I sit by wonderfully large windows, which offer fabulous views of trees and sky, and under the less-than-wonderful air conditioning vent. It can be downright cold at my desk - chilling, sneezing cold.

Yesterday, I watched as the trees outside the window threatened to join me at my desk, invited in by a viscious wind. The heavy grey clouds lit the middle of day as if it was dusk. Imagine my shock when I stepped outside at 5pm into a sauna. The air seemed to have taken on a personality - that of a sulky, brooding, tempestuous child. It was thick and tropical. The wind rushed in ferocious bursts blowing dust into my eyes. And then it began to rain a little - or more correctly, occasional drops of water hurtled from the sky. The result felt like pins and needles as cold droplets hit very warm skin.

When we got home around 11pm, the thermometer on the Abruzzo club's sign said it was 27C. And today? It's been beautifully sunny and breezy - and cool; this morning it was 16C. I may just have to concede this match: Melbourne weather 2, Bartlebee 0.

Where you from?

2006-11-19T09:42:00.000+11:00

My job has reduced me to once-a-week blogging. The company has all the bells and whistles to prevent me from doing anything other than work while at work - with the exception of Troublonia and Sassyass, I can read no blogs nor gmail nor any other fun sites. And last week I discovered that emails containing profanity are also blocked - Z tried to send me an email about the American election, an email that contained the words, Fuck Yeah. As Si says, we'll have to start spelling it phuck instead. Remind me to never work for a company that mistrusts its employees so overtly (temping doesn't count).

There's a man that sits near me with a North American accent. I found out the other day that he's from Canada - thank god I didn't just say, Where in the States are you from? I hear Canadians will turn you into a bear skin rug if you do that. I find his accent comforting and familiar. My ears are now primed to hear North American while I'm walking through the Melbourne streets - just like my ears pick up any Kiwi/Aussie accents while I'm in San Francisco. It's another reminder of how I'm neither one nor the other, but somewhere inbetween. Ameralian? Australican?

Z and I were discussing citizenship the other night and decided that what makes someone a certain nationality is when the actions of that country are embarrassing - when you feel vaguely responsible for the stupid things you read about on the news. I know that I've always felt that way about Australia - the Whites Only immigration policy, kowtowing to Bush's agenda, etc. - though it has faded in the last few years. But when Bush does something idiotic, I don't feel a sense of personal responsibility or shame. Despite what my passports might say, I am perhaps not yet truly American.

I am American enough to host Thanksgiving though. No way am I passing up on that holiday! We have to hold it on Saturday so that I have enough time to cook - I think the plan is to start on Wednesday night. Also on Saturday I get - no, have to vote. This will be a first for me - I have never in all my thirty years cast a vote in a political election. Will I feel more connected to this place afterwards? More ready to feel shame? Maybe. But I'm sure it's nothing a few pieces of pumpkin pie won't cure.

Be still my beating heart

2006-11-10T19:24:00.000+11:00

Today I feel vaguely human. This may not sound like the vast improvement that it is. Yesterday was an out-of-body experience. And Tuesday and Wednesday were so completely full of fear that I could barely think or feel or breathe. Today, I managed to make at least one joke and then giggle about it. I've struggled over whether or not to blog about this, but considering it's a pretty major thing, I've decided to write it out.

On Monday night I got home late after spending an hour and a half talking with the professor at Melbourne Uni with whom I hope to work. After wolfing down half a roast chicken from the shop around the corner, Z and I sat relaxing on the couch. He had had a particularly shitty day and I was trying to cheer him up. Suddenly, my heart did a strange little hiccup thing, the thing it's done every couple of months for many years - but this was the first time it happened while I was sitting up, not lying on my back. It's a lurching gurgle that feels like a pooling in my chest, but it's usually over so fast that I barely have time to register panic before I'm fine. This time was different: it kept going. I put my hand on my neck to feel my pulse in an effort to figure out what was going on. I could feel it steadily beating until it wasn't beating - then it would pick up again - and then stop - and then start - and stop. It kept on going like this and my breath started to catch, so I took a few deep breaths mainly to see if I could. Z and I were continuing to chat, though he stopped and asked me if I was taking my pulse. I said yes - and then, "My heart's doing this... thing." It kept on doing that thing for a couple of minutes but then settled back to it's normal rhythm. And then I felt completely fine. Z, however, was aghast, mainly because I had never mentioned this to anyone particularly someone with a medical degree. I really have never thought much of it; figured that lots of people have funny things like that happen to their hearts. It had been getting more frequent, though, and had firmly made it onto my mental mention-when-I-next-see-a-doctor list.

Z asked what we should do. I had no idea. I was sitting there on the couch in my pyjamas feeling perfectly fine. I was joking about the incident, down-playing it. It was late, after 9:30, on a night before a state holiday. I didn't know who to call, so I tried my mum (out of town, mobile off), my step-mom (mobile not working) and my dad (I sent him a text). Then I noticed a deep and subtle ache in my chest. It was at that moment that I truly understood the gravity of what had happened - truly got that my heart had just acted very strangely. My heart: that vital organ that pumps that vital fluid to the rest of my vital body. This, I decided, was not something to be messed with. Knee pangs can and should be ignored; heart hiccups are not in the same category.

So I got dressed and threw some things (large sudoku, book) into a bag and told Z that I thought we better go to a hospital. He suggested I call first. I pulled open the phone book (look what dial-up will reduce a person to!) and tried the Royal Women's Hospital but the number was no longer in service. So, I tried another number and after an age it was answered by a woman at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She gave the number of an advice nurse. After ten minutes a very calming and friendly nurse came on the line. He asked me a bunch of questions in a soothing tone and then put me on hold. He came back on the line less than a minute later and uttered the very ominous words, "Now, I don't want you to panic". He proceeded to tell me that he was calling an ambulance. I panicked. Completely. My hands started shaking, my jaw locked, I grinned (like lots of other animals, I smile when I'm scared), I stopped thinking. I do remember asking if that was completely necessary - couldn't I just drive myself in? "Noooo," he replied. "We don't want to peel you off from around a tree."

Z jumped into gear, packing a bag with toothbrush, books. He opened the front door and turned on the porch light; I sat on the couch trying to get a grip on myself. Not too long later, the paramedics arrived at the house. I walked to the door to let them in, still shaking with anxiety. I had been able to tell myself that nothing bad was happening right up until the word "ambulance" had joined the evening. Since then, I had been literally a nervous wreck.

The paramedics were very nice, also equipped with calming voices. I remember them walking in and saying, "Madhavi?" I think one of the first questions they asked was how old I was - it was a nice question that I knew the answer to. They stuck some electrodes to my chest and asked what had happened. I explained as best I could. My hands continued to shake and I kept thinking about how stress causes heart problems, that I needed to calm down, but even the words "heart problem" wound me up.

They took my pulse. The EKG read-out came back fine. They explained that this happens to a fair number of people, and went on to chat about several people they work with who have arrhythmias. They tried to blame it on caffeine - but I'd had my normal three cups of tea during the day, the last one around 3:30pm (it was now after 10pm). They suggested chocolate, alcohol and smoking none of which I had used that day. They even tried for jet lag but we explained that we'd flown in from NZ and that a two-hour time change simply cannot last three weeks! At this point, I was starting to calm down; I think I'd lost some of the big-eyed panic that I've been told about in every SCUBA class I've ever taken.

Eventually they left, telling me to see my GP soon - not Tuesday because it was a holiday; Wednesday would be fine. Z has brought up this point several times since in an effort to reassure me: they did not take me to hospital then and there, they did not even insist I see someone as soon as possible. Just soon.

I've been so attuned to my chest ever since - I feel everything, analyze everything. As instructed, I went to see a doctor on Wednesday who sent me off for a bunch of blood tests. I will wear a shoulder halter EKG for 24 hours in December (the earliest one is available). I only hope that I will get some answers, though I'm not at all sure that I will. I guess ruling out major things will be fine, too.

The panicky fear is still present, but I don't feel it all the time. I'm remembering that a cup of tea or a piece of chocolate does not mean that I will immediately drop dead. And the worst exhaustion from the shock of it all appears to have passed - that was yesterday when I had to fast before getting my blood taken. Me and fasting don't get along at the best of times, and this has certainly not been the best of times.

So, there's no need to panic. Seriously. Lots of people really do have heart arrhythmias. And if I can not panic, so can you.

Engaged

2006-11-08T20:21:00.000+11:00

On the tram on the way home from work the other day, I looked out the window into the gardens and saw a statue of a man who looks like he's in the middle of a wind-up to throwing the hammer: his knees are bent at right angles and he's leaning back as if against a great weight, almost into a sitting position. The only point anchoring the figure to the ground are his toes, but the weight is all on one side in a way that defies gravity. I remember that statue from way back when I used to live in Melbourne and I'm pretty sure I've even described it to various people in the States. And there it is again, out the window on my way home from work.

And that perfectly sums up what it's like to return to a city you used to live in once long, long ago - a place where they almost speak a different language: vaguely familiar things keep appearing. On Friday night, I walked into the women's restroom at the bar behind some girls who were chatting about the fact that last time they came in, all the stalls were engaged. It took my beer-heavy head a while to remember that engaged = occupied. And chockah means full and a dunny is a toilet and a pot is a half-pint (though I have no idea how to order a pint!) and one doesn't call someone back, one rings them back. And Uni and school are not the same thing; school is for children. It's hard keeping all of this straight and I grew up here.

Yayboo

2006-10-31T10:19:00.000+11:00

We moved into our new house on Thursday and spent the next three days with exactly one piece of furniture: our very nice bed. On Sunday we got some chairs - chairs! I'm writing this while seated in one at our dining room table next to a cup of tea and a crumpet. The house is very much liveable at this point - if you ignore the completely empty front room.

With all the house hunting and then house setting up and all the other stuff that goes into moving country, we haven't had a whole lot of time to explore Melbourne. But I can tell you that I really like it so far. Sure there are some quirky annoying things, but people are really friendly - really friendly. In fact, we have friends - friends! There's also a lower middle class here that simply does not exist in San Francisco; ads on TV entice people into certificate programs in construction. While it's hard to pinpoint exactly what this adds to a city - flavor? bargains? less snobbishness? - it seems clear that it's a good thing. Another good thing is that there are no Walgreens or RiteAids - just smaller, more personal pharmacies.

On the down side, Melbourne street signs are the size of a dollar bill and placed in the darkest part of an intersection at an angle that makes them legible only to an acrobat on a pogo stick. It makes for some interesting driving experiences in which tension in the car mount as I try to remember which side of the road to drive on and how to shift gears with my left hand while Z struggles with the maps and geography of a city he barely knows. Ah, fun.

While Melbourne may get a D in street signage, it gets an F minus in street numbering. Unlike the States, blocks are not numbered by the hundreds. This is merely annoying. What really sucks is that the numbers for a street will often start over in a new suburb. This means that there's a 203 Lygon Street in Carlton and, a few blocks north, a 203 Lygon Street in Brunswick. This has got to be the most stupid thing EVER. Who's idea was that???

But despite the road issues, I like Melbourne. I like the diversity, the comfort, the friendliness and the plethora of interesting things to explore. We have been here three weeks and haven't even scratched the surface of places to see and things to do. On the Yayboo Scale it falls clearly in the Yay.

Here

2006-10-23T09:52:00.000+10:00

People keep asking me to blog, but I’m yet to be inspired to prose by this transition. There’s been too much going on for our little dial-up connection to capture, though I’ll now try to do my best.

It’s both strange and completely normal to be in Melbourne. My accent has returned quickly making it easy for me to pass as a local. The problem is that I have no idea how things work here, and I’m quickly discovering that it can be quite different to the way things work in the States. For example, I passed a bank branch last week with a sign in the window advertising new, extended hours. I glanced at the times listed and noticed that “extended” in Australia means M-F 9-5:00pm. Yep, that’s right: they don’t close at 4:30.

There are lots of other small things, like the traffic and pedestrian lights which last much longer than in SF. I find myself racing toward the corner when I see the light go green only to realize that it will stay green for a while and that there was no need to hurry.

The rental process here was also different. As far as I can tell, at least 99% of all properties are let through a realtor. They are responsible for showing the property at open houses, which are approximately every two weeks and last a total of about 20 minutes. We’ve had a few frantic days rushing between properties.

We found exactly one house that didn’t have something wrong with. “Wrong” in other buildings included a bright, apple green kitchen, which may sound fun but wasn’t; a hole in the wall; carpet that looked like the padding used under a carpet; a construction site next door; the most hideous tiles of swirled purple; a shower cubicle the size of my leg – just one leg; a bedroom in the attic accessed by a rickety ladder leading through a small hole in the ceiling; and most commonly, having to make the choice between living and dining rooms. But we did find one place we liked and so we applied for it. There weren’t many people at the open house, a refreshing change from other properties that were so full of prospective tenants that you could barely see the rooms. And, shocker of all shockers, we were chosen to be tenants! We sign the lease tomorrow.

Why so shocking? Well, Z doesn’t have a job and can’t legally work for the next couple of months while we wait for his residency to be processed. I’m a temp. We just arrived in the country and don’t have enough of a credit history to qualify for a cell phone plan. So, we got references sent in from the States and are paying two months rent up front. Eek! The good news is that we won’t need to pay rent until December.

And we move in on Thursday. Us and our four bags, two mugs, one bowl, one spoon (stolen from an airline), and brownie pan. We have a dining table and chairs coming this weekend, a couch set at my grandmother’s house, and we’re borrowing a bed that’s a little too small for either of us to get a good nights sleep. The obvious missing item is a fridge, which we’ll need to get on the sooner side.

And the place? It’s great. It’s a terrace - one of those places that has houses right against it on both sides. It’s brick – a novelty after years in the earthquake-prone bay area. It has a large kitchen/dining/living room with exposed brick, a skylight, and a wall of windows looking out on our twee yard with a couple of rose bushes, a wooden deck just waiting for a bbq, and the all-important clothes line. We have a bathroom with bright blue sink, toilet and tub, a laundry room, bedroom with built-in-robes and a nice office in the front. And, inexplicably, under the maple tree in the very small front yard, is a black bowling ball.

I still can’t believe we got it and that it’s so nice and that we’re going to be living in it in Melbourne for a few years. I can only assume that one day this will feel more real. Until then, I'm here. Just here.

The last voyage

2006-10-06T10:33:00.000+10:00

We leave for Melbourne tomorrow morning, early. The excitement has changed to palpable tension. This flight brings our lollygagging to a close; reality and routine are about to become the norm. I both look forward to and dread the metamorphosis. There will be bills to pay and deadlines and most mornings will begin with an alarm. But that alarm will soon sound in our own home where we will (hopefully) be sleeping in our own bed.

I also portend some tension between Z and I. Moving to Melbourne is like going home to me. Though I haven't lived in that home for 15 years, I still have a vague sense of my way around and rough idea of what to expect. I am Australian, after all. Z, on the other hand, is not. Not only has he never lived in Melbourne, he has never lived out of the States. To him, Melbourne seems like a long way from home and full of foreign people, foreign customs and foreign accents - including mine, which is about to get a whole lot stronger. He will be the one who occasionally won't understand people, including me. Here in Wellington, we shared our immigrant status and miscomprehension of the "natives" and their "customs". In Melbourne, we will be in decidedly different boats. To take the metaphor too far, we will need to learn to row at the same speed.

So, while I will be itching for a home and more than a little anxious to find one, Z will need to take time to feel out the city and to gauge what it will be like to live there. I want to charge ahead; he wants to hold back. I'm sure that we will negotiate this with some element of grace though all will not be roast chicken and apple pie. I need to remember to go easy on him; I know how difficult it can be to move countries.

But soon enough, I suppose, I will be able to cook that dinner for my love in our new home. The tension will have been negotiated, the routines set and comfortable. And then we can start planning our next big adventure.

Ha!

Now I understand

2006-10-04T09:59:00.000+10:00

So *this* is what they mean, those hardened Wellingtonians, when they intone the word "Southerly" with grave misgiving. Lying in bed this morning, I watched the curtains sway gently as the howling wind blew through the tightly closed windows and the plastic seal that J&A cleverly put up to insulate against winter. In the bathroom, I listen to the washing line spin in manic, squeaky circles and feel air stir against my skin. At the doctor's office, the radio tells me to expect gusts of up to 120kph. Walking home, I literally get blown sideways as I cross the school playground. For once, the locals and I look similarly cold and miserable in our hats, raincoats, scarves and gloves.

This afternoon, Z and I are going to take a bus out to the Cook Strait to see what kind of recklessness this gale has stirred up in the ocean. Until then, I'm huddling in some blankets next to the heater with my laptop on my thighs for added warmth and a cup of hot ginger to toast my insides.

Losing time

2006-10-01T07:29:00.000+10:00

It's been a very bizarre morning and it's only 10:23am. I woke up at 7:20 this morning, groaned on the inside and lay in bed for a few minutes trying to fall back asleep. I opened my eyes again, ready to surrender to wakefullness, and looked at the clock: 8:56. Huh? I would swear that I hadn't fallen back asleep and that I was lying there awake for under 20 minutes. I seem to have lost an hour and a half.

Thinking about this is enough to kick my brain into full awake mode so up I get to make myself some tea.

First stop of the day to check e-mail and my usual blog and news sites. I need to actually accomplish a few things this week, so I give myself an hour to play on-line before tackling various items on my to-do list. I glance at the computer clock: 10:23. Huh??? I look at the clock on the Mac and it reads the same time. By my calculations it should be 9:23. Perhaps daylight saving time has kicked in - or ended? I can never figure out which section of the year is which. So I check the local paper on-line: nothing. I check another local paper: still nothing. Have I unwittingly entered the twilight zone?

Google - ah, Google, has the answers as it always does. It is indeed the end of daylight saving time. The fact that eNZed does not advertise this on the cover of its newspapers goes hand in hand with the fact that all its banks close at 4:30pm and are not open on Saturdays. Clearly, if the banks stayed open later the newspapers would tell us when it's time to change our clocks.

I take this as another sign that it is time to move to Melbourne where they have discovered the key to world peace and a solution rampant global warming.

Rack o' Spice

2006-09-29T09:08:00.000+10:00

We'll be leaving for Melbourne in a little over a week (8 days to be precise). I'm excited, mainly by the thought of settling down somewhere. It's been close to a year that we've been travelling and I'm a wee bit tired. I've been slaking my nesting urges by looking at pictures of Melbourne rentals, even though I am admittedly getting a tad ahead of myself. While in Oamaru, we purchased a nice little print of a Kauri tree and I proceeded to amuse Z by pretending to hang it on an imaginary wall in our non-existent house while walking down the street. It will go nicely with the beetles we bought in Christchurch.

Back in Wellington, I stopped by the Med Food Warehouse to pick up some more cumin (for the fabulous four-dish Indian dinner I cooked) and was overwhelmed by the thought of actually setting up a house. When was the last time I really and truly started from scratch? Probably when I moved off-campus to Foster Court with K&K - then there were five of us with at least eight local parents willing to donate various items. That was in, let me think, 1996? Good lord, it's been a while! And now there are two of us and one local parent, two of us who currently possess exactly no furniture, no bedding, no pots, no pans, no utensils, no towels - not much of anything, really, except clothes, shoes, dive gear, a couple of laptops and some books of crossword puzzles (essential).

I imagine us signing a lease and moving in to our new home. It's the easiest move we've ever made, dragging in our four bags. There we are on our first night, sleeping on the floor wrapped in sleeping bags we borrowed from someone. We get up in the morning and don't even have the capacity to make ourselves tea because we have no pots, no spoons, no cups of any sort. Want some water? Better cup your hands under the kitchen tap. Want a shower? Too bad - we have no towels. The house is completely empty but for us and our four bags, which we stack into "desks" and perhaps a "table".

What triggered this thought? Spices (duh). I was thinking about what goes into making a working kitchen and spices are definitely up there. This got me thinking about spice racks which made me realize just how many essential kitchen items we don't have. Okay okay, so "spice rack" may not be essential, but there are plenty of things we don't have that are. I suppose we'll empty out mum's old jar collection and become depositories for all the crap various friends and acquaintances were going to throw out. And we'll scour the local Sallies and garage sales and whatever passes for Craigslist in Melbourne. And then, one day, we'll wake up in a bed and, after drying off with our own towels after a shower, we'll cook up a big spice-laden breakfast, which we'll eat sitting on chairs around a table that is not made of an old suitcase.

And one day there will be world peace and a solution to rapid global warming.

A girl's gotta dream, y'know.

Tour de Sud

2006-09-27T11:44:00.000+10:00

We just returned from nine days exploring eNZed's South Island. Despite coming down with the flu about twelve hours before our departure, I had a grand time. Getting the flu was worth it for one reason: it's been a while since I've seen Z smile so largely when he started calling me Croakie. Croakie quickly gave way to Squeaky which passed its baton to plain old Stuffy. There's not quite so much smokey-piano-bar-alto glamour in Stuffy, but she's apparently here to stay.

But I digress from my stories from the south...

1. Franz Josef Glacier
We drive south down the west coast in pouring rain. The land is brilliant green and the steep rise to our left is shrouded in mist and covered in lush growth. Every now and then, the clouds lift a little to hint at the immenseness of the peaks they hide. We arrive in town and learn that the rain has closed all access trails to the glacier so we check into a hostel and sit in the lounge to wait out the drenching. Z drinks beer with some friends; I take a nap. At about 5:00, the time when my stomach wakes from its lunch-induced torpor to request more food please, Z pokes his head outside and realized that the sky has lightened from ominous to pale gray. We jump in the car and drive up to the parking lot at the foot of the glacier. We pant our way through the drizzle up the trail to a look-out. And all of a sudden we see it: a curve of ice that seems to be caught in mid-flight down the mountain. It seems a live, wild thing. Around us are lush forests snaked with waterfalls that are incongruous with the tongue of ice. The clouds rush by occasionally clearing to give us a glimpse of a jagged snowy peak high above. We are the only people present and the silence seems not so much peaceful as like the inhalation before a roar.

2. Milford Sound, Fjordland
The drive to Milford is jaw-droppingly awesome. We start out of Te Anau in the sun, though we can see where the clouds have gathered around the peaks ahead. We drive along a wide, U-shaped valley crisscrossed by a small river and carpeted in brown tussocks. The steep sides are covered in a lush beech forest that drips with moss and lichen. Slowly, the walls around us rise as does the windy road we drive. And then we are in high country where the walls are sheer black rock glistening with water falls, too steep to support anything more than the odd grass and brave shrub. All around us we see where avalanches have rolled down from precarious cirques of snow. I drive about 10kph so that I can lean over the steering wheel to stare straight up through the windscreen at the towering walls above us. Right before the tunnel, we see the avalanche that closed the road the day before. A solitary man in a small yellow tractor works to clear it. We pass from daylight into the dark tunnel. Water drops from the rocky ceiling as we bump over the barely-paved road which is inclined just enough so that our headlights don't illuminate it at all. I drive almost blind into the depths of the mountain, thinking suitably dwarfish thoughts and gripping the wheel tightly as neither of us dare to breath much. Out the other side we are greeted by fog swirling around a sheer rock wall that's easily 1200 feet tall. The canyon we drive down is wet and damp and it feels like the glaciers only just packed up and moved out. All is raw rock and icy stone and cold water. By the time we reach the water, the rainforest has returned to cloak the sheer cliffs in lushness.

3. Riverton, pop 1850
It's a long drive south from Milford to Riverton, a drive that begins by skirting the impressive peaks and wide lakes of Fjordland and ends in the pastoral greeness of sheepland. For no particular reason, we decide to spend the night in Riverton. The bar-tender and hotelier is a woman named Caroline whose purple and gray streaked curls don't quite hide the fact that she's in her 40's. She and everyone else we meet in town is exceptionally friendly. The folks gathering in the bar for their Saturday night out all say hello and ask where we're from and where we're going. I'm more used to locals ignoring us - Riverton is a welcome change. We have a large room upstairs at the back of the pub with a fabulous view over the wide river that turns into a maze of sandbars at low tide. Unprovoked, Caroline gives us a run down of dining options in Riverton - all five of them. One is described as the "second best restaurant in New Zealand" and another supposedly serves (gasp!) salad. We opt for the salad and are halfway to the bar/restaurant when we decide that we can't face another crappy pub meal even if it claims to contain vegetables. So we jump in the car and drive out to the best place in the South Island telling ourselves to hell with the money. We've been warned that we might not get in, it being Saturday night and all. However, it being Riverton in low season, we are of course seated immediately. We both get glasses of wine and delicious entrees (mains) that are not battered and fried and re-battered and fried again, and finish off with a piece of moist honest-to-god chocolate cake. Total tab? $70. That's Kiwi dollars. We actually check the menu to make sure they didn't undercharge us. We return to our hotel, turn on the hot blankets, take blissfully hot showers that come with decent water pressure and crawl into bed together happy and content.

4. Penguins - at Milford Sound and in Oamaru. Yellow-crested and Yellow-eyed, they all look ridiculous waddling on land.

5. Lambs. Everywhere. Including one that was probably less than an hour old with mum still in labour right by the side of the road.

6. Taking Sassyass's advice and eating a spectacularly good meal at Cook 'N' With Gas in Christchurch. Their tag-line should read: Stupid name; great food.

... And so much more! Check out our pictures up on Z's site.

Brought to you by the letter Yee

2006-09-06T18:58:00.000+10:00

I have what is possibly the most boring job Ever. I am temping at the hospital, which seems like it could be vaguely interesting, but is in fact not. It is Boring. It is my job to wade through stacks of patient and doctor letter, enter addresses and other information into an Excel spreadsheet, do a mail merge, fold the hundreds of letters and stuff them into envelopes. Did I mention that it's boring? Even reading about bizarre diseases does not add interest, though it does make me realize how many people in this world are sick and how fortunate I am that those who are close to me remain healthy. Listening to my coworkers answer phone calls and schedule outpatient visits adds the only glimmer of anything to an otherwise dull day. Yesterday, I heard the following half of a phone conversation:

"Could you give me your patient ID number, sir?"
....
"W."
...
"Was that S as in Sam?"
...
"OK"
...
"What was that last letter, sir?"
...
"Could you repeat that for me?"
...
"One more time?"
...
"Yee? Yee???"
...
"I'm sorry sir. I don't understand the letter, yee. Could you repeat yourself?"
...
"Yee?"
...
"Sorry, sir. I still don't understand. Could you use the letter to spell a word?"
...
"What's that? Yee?"
...
"Could you try to spell something with it?"
...
"Spell something - like R is for Roger and robot and rolling and red and rabbit."
...
"No- No -- Can you spell something for me using the letter?"
...
"I don't understand, yee. Can you please spell something using the letter for me?"
...
"Can you please spell something using the letter, yee?"
...
"Spell something - like, G as in George?"
...
"No, sir. Yee is not a letter."
...
"OK. We'll go through this by process of elimination..."

And that right there was the highlight of my week, because photos of patients with massive lumps on their skulls do not count as highlights.

Quote of the century

2006-09-02T12:56:00.000+10:00

We have known for some decades that the climate change we are creating for the twenty-first century was of a similar magnitude to that seen at the end of the last ice age, but that it was occuring thirty times faster. We have known that the Gulf Stream shut down on at least three occasions at the end of the last ice age, that sea levels rose by at least 300 feet, that the earth's biosphere was profoundly reorganized, and we have known that agriculture was impossible before the Long Summer of 10,000 years ago. And so there has been little reason for our blindness, except perhaps an unillingness to look such horror in the face and say, "You are my creation."

- Tim Flannery in The Weather Makers

I fear we will blow away

2006-09-02T09:25:00.000+10:00

It is really windy today. Really. The gusts are shaking the house. The good news is that the wind is from the north - the mercury is not in freefall. That does not, however, mean that that I can feel my fingers or toes. But it's much warmer than it's been - in the sun and out of the wind, it's quite decent. On Friday, I was able to be outside with skin exposed - by skin, I mean my neck. And on Wednesday, I could have worn a t-shirt if I'd been smart enough to put one on when I left the house instead of the usual layers.

I think we may be nearing an answer to the question that keeps Z up at night and wakes me up early in the morning. There are still a few things that need to fall into place, so I'm certainly not going to broadcast any premature predictions here. I will, however, say that it is going to be one helluva relief to be playing house rather than playing ohmigodwhatthehellarewedoingwithourlives.

Ramble

2006-08-30T16:46:00.000+10:00

Went on a nice hike with an American friend today. We took a bus from the CBD up the first big hill to Brooklyn, where we started walking through residential and suburban neighborhoods until suddenly we were in the bush on a track that wound along steep ridges covered in scrubby bush, flowering gorse, pines and grass. The weather was gorgeous - still, clear and sunny. We climbed up to the turbine and I admired the view over Wellington harbor and neighborhoods. I turned to walk back to Z and realized that the white formation off in the distance was not a cloud: I was looking at an conical, snow-covered mountain on the South Island. Hiking with layers of misty blue and white mountains in the distance, I couldn't help but think of LOTR. Yes, I am a dork. After walking for three hours, we made it down to the coast along the Cook Strait. I dipped my hands in the water and discovered that's it's cold enough to make Monterey proud. There was nothing about it that said, Come on In!

Five hours later, I'm back home with achier legs and stickier shirt. I like how close we are to hiking here. No need to get in a car at all. I could use more walking in my life. And yet the jury is still out on eNZed.

What confuses the whole situation for me is how much I've changed over the past few years. There was a time not so long ago that I thought I wanted to live on a big chunk of land far away from other people. I don't think that's the case now at all. In fact, I'd rather live in a city where I can access just about everything I need by foot, bike or bus. I think it's a greener way to live.

That's the other thing I'm thinking a lot about: carbon dioxide. I'm reading a great book, The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery, that discusses global climate change. It's scary and fascinating and it certainly has me thinking about everything in a different way.

Including where I want to live. Perhaps I should look on this as growing pains. I'm trying to adjust to a new mentality, which is just as awkward as a toddler learning to walk. And much less amusing.

I Love This Place/I Hate This Place

2006-08-24T07:07:00.000+10:00

Tuesday
We start a process of exploring Wellington's neighborhoods one by one to figure out where we would want to live should we decide to stay here.

Newtown: Thrift shops, dime stores, kebabs, chippers and good coffee. All in all we give it the big blah.

Over the hill to Kilbirnie: much bigger and bland as they come. We head into the organic food shop which is very small but stocked with brands I recognize, including corn chips that are not flavored with cheese product.

Melbourne seems better and better.

I write to Vic prof to express real concerns about my ability to engage in a project with a field component due both to conditions (gale force warnings one out of every three days in the Cook Strait) and a dive program experiencing growing pains. Would it be better at Melbourne Uni?

Tuesday night is cold - really cold.

Wednesday
First thought of the day: We should move to Melbourne. I write to two profs at Melbourne Uni.

Then I get a comprehensive response from Vic prof in which he more than adequately addresses all of my questions and then proceeds to introduce me to his other students. Wellington sounds great.

We walk over to Brooklyn, take a wrong turn and end up panting up a really steep hill where we are rewarded with views of the Cook Strait. Despite the fact that we're several miles from the coast and on top of a hill, I can see the white caps. We wind through residential streets to the "center" of Brooklyn which is fairly appealing and features a malay/chipper/thai/chinese/burger joint. More cute houses and lots of parks and I realize that I wouldn't mind living here as long as we were on the lower part of the downtown side. Living in Wellington for three years doesn't seem so bad.

We hit downtown at about 5:00 and it's full of people leaving work. I am wearing about four layers not including hat, scarf and coat. We pass women in skirts and light coats and feel like we're the coldest people in Wellington.

We realize that there is no hidden section to Wellington that we have not yet discovered. Nope, what we've seen is what we'll get, which is a polite way to say that it's small. Really small. We wander in search of somewhere to get good appetizers for a decent price. Nothing. More nothing. We eat in some cafe and realize that every one is much younger than us. Most people our age live in London or Sydney. Maybe we should follow their lead.

We end up back at the Dubliner which is quiet and comfortable. Z mis-orders, and we sip at a beer that tastes like it had an unfortunate run-in with a gewurztraminer and work our way through yet another crossword puzzle. We agree that Wellington may just be too small, though if we ended up here for a PhD program it wouldn't be bad. Melbourne would probably be better.

Back into the cold we go to meet Neener. We walk in circles until we realize that there are two burger kings and she meant the second one. She introduces us to more of her friends. They are outgoing, interesting, occasionally incomprehensible (hate sounds like "hit" and a "pin" is a pen) and two of them are hilariously drunk. We sip cocktails in a bar straight off the set of LA Confidential and talk. It's a fabulous night and we have a great time. And everyone agrees that it's really cold, which makes us feel much less wimpy.

Walking up the driveway we see scorpio twinkling overhead near a smudge of the milky way. Z and I agree that we will probably stay here.

Thursday
I get a response from a prof at Melbourne Uni who has a really interesting take on my research questions and is currently seeking funding for a similar study.

Melbourne?

Disproving a hypothesis

2006-08-22T07:43:00.000+10:00

By my calculations, we have a little over two weeks in which to decide whether or not we are staying in Wellington. That will leave us with about a month to find our own place to live. Two weeks!?!? Eek!

How does one go about making decisions of this magnitude? What should one look for in a place to live? What's important to me? To Z? To us?

My best approach to answering these questions is to resort to the use of science. In science, you don't set out to prove anything but instead strive to disprove a hypothesis. Using this method, I assume that we are staying in Wellington and spend the next two weeks trying to find a reason to leave. A good reason to leave, because our back-up plan (Melbourne) may not be any better. If we go to Melbourne hoping it makes up for some of the things lacking in Wellington, we may be sorely disappointed. However, if we go to Melbourne because we've found something that really won't work for us in Wellington, we're more likely to not regret the decision to move on. (Those who know me well may recognize another situation in which this same approach was employed - I'll leave you guessing.)

We'll see how this fine principal works when put into practice - if I can put it into practice!

In other news, I have been conditionally accepted into a Ph.D. program at Victoria University in Wellington. The conditional part goes away when I secure funding in the form of a scholarship. I'll know about that by early December, though my potential advisor said I have a really good shot. Basically, it looks like I'll be starting a PhD program in January. Excuse me while I emit another EEEK!

This is good news - I think. It does make the committment to being away for three years feel more real. When I was in SF, the time and distance were more abstract. Now that I'm faced with the reality, I feel bewildered. In the end, I suppose all we can do is make a decision and live with it. After all, three years is only three years.

Gumboots, "Mounts" and Brooklyn

2006-08-17T19:09:00.000+10:00

We arrived in Auckland four days ago. Our friend Sean introduced us to NZ by taking us out to Karekare beach. It was a day where rain and brilliant sunshine fought for control of the skies. The ocean was wild and big; from the beach, we looked up at a mass of seething water. Mist and foam blew across the black sand and cliffs, and the tea trees were bent to a uniform height that made the hills look like they were covered by a manicured hedge. From the beach, we walked to a waterfall that spilled down a black, rocky cliff into a peaceful green pool. If Hawai'i and Scotland had a love-child, it would be NZ.

On our second day in Auckland, we took the ferry across the bay to Devenport where there was really nothing much to see or do. We did, however, climb "Mount" Victoria which is one of several very small volcanoes jutting up from Auckland's neighborhoods. Even Mainers would laugh at the designation of "Mount" for these bumps. I think they probably stand at an elevation of 120ft. On a good day.

On Wednesday, we caught the train down to Wellington. On the way, our naps were interupted by announcements made by a woman who sounded like a man and who therefore made me think of Eddie Izzard, and another couldn't pronounce her "r's" which left me wondering if towns like Wairaparara were actually Waiwapawawa. They told us about the sites as we passed them: the town in which the annual sheep shearing competition is held (note, to your left, the lovely and large statue of someone shearing a sheep); numerous tunnels and viaducts (length, date of construction, and height described free of charge); the carrot-growing region of NZ; a length of track that completed a spiral to get up a grade (oh the excitement!); and, my favorite, the site of the annual gumboot throwing competition. Indeed, an entry for the Guiness Book of World Records was made right there when someone tossed a size 8 gumboot 74 meters.

The train also passed by some truly impressive (and active) volcanoes covered in snow. Off in the distance, a perfectly conical peak poked its head through a ring of clouds, while next to us, a huge and scraggly mountain rose from the flat lands surrounding it. There were double rainbows and hours of rolling green farmland covered in sheep and the occasional wild peacock. It was a pretty ride.

And now we're in Wellington where it is neither windy nor particularly cold nor raining. Today, we hiked through one of the city's many green belts to another "Mount" Victoria and sat at the top in the sunshine looking at the city through the branches of a tree that someone had cleverly planted right in front of the view point's only bench. We sat and talked and tried to come to terms with the fact that we have just moved halfway around the world. Excitement, nervousness and overwhelm and vying for control of my mind at any given moment - that is except when sleep wins, as it does at around 8:00pm!

Wellington seems to have a lot of interesting people, at least to look at, though it is disappointing to discover that the 80's resurgence that has gripped the 20-somethings of America has also taken root here. Enough with the polka-dot bubble skirts and skinny jeans with heels! Enough stripey shirts with big belts!

There are also lots of cafes and restaurants and pubs. The aforementioned train operators told us that Wellington actually has more cafes and pubs than New York city -- per capita. Wellington also has Brooklyn, which, as it turns out, is right next to Central Park. And, Wellington contains perhaps the only immigration office in the world staffed by friendly, smiling people who really are there to help. So far, I'm liking what I see. Now I just need to find me a Ph.D. program.

You too can experience the wonders of our first four days in NZ by checking out some pictures here (listed under 2006 - the honeymoon is over, folks).

Just kidding - the light was a train

2006-08-01T04:44:00.000+10:00

There I was thinking that everything was good. And then Z's computer woes got worse. And worse. And then hit total suck rock bottom bad. So instead of watching the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean from our camp site in Big Sur we spent the day in Circuit City transferring data from old hard drive to new laptop. But hey, it wasn't so bad. In the end, the new computer worked and the data was saved and we were treated to a fantastic meal and so everything was fine.

On Friday we drove to LA through the baking Central Valley. We were dreading the trip until Z realized how lucky we were to be in our own car (borrowed from Z's parents - far better than a rental) and not in some cockroach-infested dusty bus on a broken seat for 14 hours. Six hours later we arrive in LA in one piece despite the loveseat that someone dropped into the middle of our lane at the bottom of the grapevine, and me sandwiched between a truck and minivan. Hooray for good brakes!

And we see Aunt Sylvia (one of the kindest people I know) and enjoy her airconditioned house and eat some food before heading over to our storage unit to pick up a few things.

Or so we think. Turns out that the world had some more suck for us.

Back in Ethiopia, I remember Z telling me that there'd been a small flood in the storage room but that everything was OK. I didn't really give it too much thought. We were, after all, in Ethiopia and therefore unable to do a single thing. And hey! Everything was OK, right?

Well, it turns out that it isn't all OK. More than a few boxes were completely rotten, the cardboard disintegrating in our hands and cockroaches scuttling around inside. And the contents? Beyond rescue. Some of the stuff doesn't matter - it's just stuff, after all. But those four scrapbooks of mine? Gone. That great photo of Z with Steve Martin? Gone. My clothes? Gone. Z's shoes? Gone. We filled a dumpster with boxes and mould and scrapbooks and photos and clothes and broken plates and a rolling pin that looked like it belonged in a mycology lab. And it sucked.

Before we left on our honeymoon, we pared down our belongings to the essentials - the important stuff. We have now pared down some more. There's some lesson here about detachment but hell if I can stomach it right now.

After some discussion, we arrived at the conclusion that we needed to find another storage space. Which meant renting a van. Except no-one will rent a cargo van for a one-way trip (we find this out at Enterprise after speeding from Woodland Hills to Van Nuys to catch the store before it closes (at NOON on a Saturday) and to get the last cargo van available). And all the trucks have been rented because it's the last weekend of the month. So I call and call and call as Z washes out a box of kitchen stuff and repacks it. And I call. I find some woman with a heavy Russian accent who offers to help secure a U-Haul van. She says she'll try her best and call me back. Then I get through to Budget in Northridge and they have a truck - but we have to get it today. As in right now. So, back in the car to go speeding off to Northridge. And yay! We have a truck.

So we go and have a wonderful evening with Tano and Holly and Header. The latter is sweet enough to bring me a brand new dress that she bought to make up for the fact that I'd just lost all my clothes. Z approves of the plunging neckline.

Sunday morning rolls around. We are not driving via Santa Barbara where I was supposed to meet up with my advisor to go diving at Santa Cruz Island. No, I've had to cancel that, too. Instead, I'm in the shower when Z comes in to say there's some woman on the phone with a heavy Russian accent who's threatening to charge us for a U-Haul truck because we haven't come to pick it up. Oh, and good morning.

At this point, I want to give the world the finger. Instead, I call the woman back and she yells at me. I apologize for upsetting her and she yells and I apologize again and let her yell some more. She never says anything about charging us - I don't think she will. I think she just needed to get angry.

So, we load up the truck with mouldy stuff and head out of LA, stopping for a delicious breakfast at 1:00pm at Burger King (shudder) - but there's nothing else in the strip mall hell that is the valley. And we drive home past Cowshwitz up I-5, me bopping away to the iPod (not mouldy) and Z listening to my damp CD's. We unload into Z's folks' garage with their help and find parking for the truck on a Sunday evening in Russian Hill. We fall into bed at 9:00pm.

This morning, I returned the truck and had to fight the woman at Budget over "damage" to the truck that I did not do nor notice when I inspected the truck in LA. She points it out to me several times and I can barely see it. It's the kind of thing you would only notice if you were used to looking at trucks - compartively, I can see that the piece is bent. But just looking at one truck, I can't tell. Fortunately, her manager agrees with me and I leave with our full deposit.

And now I'm sorting through out stuff, removing the mould, doing loads and loads and loads of laundary, and carrying stuff to Henry the drycleaner and praying that he'll be able to salvage the good stuff. My moms-in-law has been a fabulous help, braving bags of mouldy, still-damp sheets and helping to sniff-test Z's clothes (that takes a brave nose).

As for me, I'm just trying to remember that this is a new week. And I'm trying to believe that it's all going to be OK. I mean, at some point, things have to get easier for us, right???

That light is not a train

2006-07-26T08:40:00.000+10:00

On Friday, I sat in the central quad at San Francisco State University reading scientific papers and wondering if I had really graduated. After getting most of the way through a paper authored by a Kiwi professor with whom I'd like to work, I went and talked to my old advisor. The excuse for the meeting was to discuss the manuscripts that I'm preparing from my theis, though we quickly got off-topic to discuss things like my wedding, travel, and how diving in CA compares to diving in the tropics (CA wins, btw). Our on-topic discussions were interesting, too. We chatted, of course, about my friend the treefish and all the questions that are left unanswered by my thesis. If it's true that good research leads to more questions, my thesis must be downright brilliant!

It was a fantastic day. I realized - remembered - that I love doing science. I love discussing experimental designs; I love learning about the latest research; I even love manipulating and analyzing data. I really enjoy engaging in the particular kind of thinking that doing science requires. (Someone's going to make a nerd joke here and to you I say, Bringit!)

Before Friday, I had decided to get a PhD because I couldn't figure out what else I would do. All the jobs that looked interesting required a PhD, and the jobs I could get with a MSc would be primarily administrative. So the PhD seemed like a no-brainer. But it didn't seem like fun.

Since Friday, I have been excited about the PhD not only because of where it will get me, but also because it will be fascinating in its own right. And let me tell you what a huge relief it is to be excited about the future rather than feeling lost and full of dread.

While Z extracted data from the dead hard drive of his brand new laptop (long and very sucky story with what looks to be a happy ending - fingers crossed), I sat in the sun and read E's New Zealand Lonely Bollocks guidebook. Wellington sounds beautifully arranged on steep hills overlooking a harbor (sound familiar?). There seems to be all sorts of things to do, from music and pubs to art galleries and theatre. I'm really looking forward to it, despite having a dream about a dead body in the bathtub of my rickety NZ house. Who know what that was about!

All in all, it feels like the blinding light that has been shining directly into my face for the last year might not be a train. I can't help but feel like this is a positive development.

Rolling in Sheep

2006-06-29T11:44:00.000+10:00

Back in October, I thought I was being so clever to avoid all the "What's next?" questions that accompany any major life change - like marriage or graduation or moving house/country. I laughed me all the way to Africa in my cleverness. I laughed from Africa to the Middle East, and from there to Asia and even laughed in Australia. Well, the laughing stopped about three days after we landed at SFO. All those questions weren't avoided so much as they were postponed. We have since had a head-on collision, them in their Hummer and me in my Geo Metro. (They won.) I am now mired in a morass of WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?

While it may not sound like returning to SF for the summer was a brilliant plan, it has managed to answer one question about where I want to live: Not here, at least not right now. It seems that almost everywhere we've been has been a whole lot of "Not here". Which begs the question, "Then Where?" The answer is contained within a multidimensional scatterplot with axes like (but not limited to) job availability, job likability, friendliness quotient, distance from family, minimum temperature, proximity to water, language barriosity, and cost of living. It's a complicated business trying to make decisions for two people.

On Monday night, waiting for the 49 bus (our new Muni friend which I already hate), Zack pointed out that I have street humor. This is not to imply that I have a potty mouth (which I do, but that's not the point), but rather that my humour is spur-of-the-moment, spy-a-shiny-thing-on-the-ground-and-pick-it-up in character. At least I usually laugh.

And on Saturday, Bill taught us a new game the name of which I've already forgotten but which was great fun. It involved Zack rolling in sheep. And we haven't even got to New Zealand yet.

To Excess

2006-06-21T06:36:00.000+10:00

Our first day in Melbourne, we head to the supermarket with mum. I'm excited about cooking dinner and we need supplies. I forget that this simple errand can induce culture shock. And it does. There are aisles and aisles and aisles and they're all full of food. At least, I think it's food. Everything is wrapped or canned or otherwise packaged and there's no smell. I compare this experience to that of most Africans and get a taste of the shock of immigration. Not only must it be a hard adjustment to make personally, but also there are friends and family still at home who do not have access to such excess.

On Saturday night in San Francisco, we head over to our old 'hood to play ring toss. On our way back to Muni we pass Marcelo's and find we can't pass up on a slice of pizza. We sit at the window seats watching the Castro scene as a mopey song plays in the background. Again with the excess. There are shops like Marcelo's all over the city, full of food for the purchasing. I remember the pizza Z ordered in Lallibela: a piece of bread with a mainly ketchup sauce and about three small slivers of grated cheese. Not really comparable to Marcelo's at all.

And then yesterday, we walk over to Union Square in search of a watchmaker and I realize just how much capitalism sickens me. There are all these people who have too much money and then these other people who are busy finding ways for the people with too much money to part with their money, all in order to make more money that they can then spend on things and stuff that they don't actually need - but there are people whose job it is to convince them that they do actually desperately need sunscreen for their dog. It's all disgusting. And the worst part is when I realize that somehow they've sunk their barbs into me, too.

Ah, the joys of reentry. I think I'll have some lunch.

Camera Shutter?

2006-06-13T09:35:00.000+10:00

David Attenborough rocks for many reasons (I'm dead serious). This clip of a lyre bird is one of them.

The Other Side

2006-06-12T12:17:00.000+10:00

In the early 1940's, my paternal grandfather was given a 48-hour leave from the base where he was a mechanic for the RAF. He and another serviceman walked past a theatre and decided to go in. They dug into their pockets for change but were quickly told that they didn't need to pay. They were given front and centre seats ... at the theatre recently featured in the movie Mrs Henderson Presents. He said his eyeballs still haven't popped back into his head.

He and my grandmother have been married for 63 years. They met in Blythe when she was 14 and he was 17 and moved to Australia with three children in the mid-1950's. In Adelaide, they got off the boat with a single trunk and $50.

We spent two days with them in Adelaide, which, along with Melbourne, is having the coldest June since the 1800's. Some places are recording the coldest temperatures ever. I'm so glad we're here to feel such important history being made. My toes are not so glad. Despite socks and nearby heating, they remain frozen. But I digress.

My grandfather had lots of stories to tell. He told us about their friends dog who only eats chicken breast (cooked and diced) and who needs to be walked every night at midnight. He told us about where he was on D-day: his squadron moved from Iceland to a loch in Scotland in terrible weather. He said that when someone in the squadron was killed, you would say that he had gone to have a Burton - a type of beer. This allowed all the men to keep a stiff upper lip, which is a vital part of being British.

It took me a while to realise why seeing Nana was strange. In the past, she's been so motherly - going out of her way to take care of me. This time, it was she who needed to be taken care of. She's much more frail and her memory is not what it used to be. She asked us at least three times per day when we were moving to Tasmania. While her memory may be declining, her cooking has certainly improved, most likely attributable to my grandfather's heart attack. She can no longer use as primary ingredients bacon, cheese, butter, cream, bacon and cheese. All of our arteries are glad.

There are magpies a-plenty around their house and they have trained my grandparents quite well. In the morning, they warble just outside the back door and are rewarded with bread for breakfast. Then they warble for morning tea. And for lunch. And afternoon tea. They have quite a racket going. In the mornings, Z and I would wake up to their songs and extricate ourselves from the guest bed, which is older than me. It was impossible to avoid rolling downhill into the centre of the mattress, though sleeping close together (with pyjamas, socks and sweaters on) helped keep us warm. There were still windows in the house open despite the bitter cold.

The first morning I opted for a shower to warm up. The trickle of water dribbling out of the tap was barely hot without any cold water on at all. But I guess it's all a part of sucking it up and not complaining. As my grandfather likes to say, Keep a stiff upper lip.

Standards

2006-06-07T15:55:00.000+10:00

We just returned from a visit to my maternal grandmother's house in Kyneton, about an hour NW of Melbourne. I have always been nervous about introducing people (read: males) to my grandmother as she used to adhere to a standard of etiquette that would make Miss Manners swoon. When I was little, the most commonly heard phrase at the dinner table (which was set formally every night) was, "How would you behave if the Queen was here?" I had noticed, while in Malaysia, that Z manipulated his cutlery with his elbows somewhere up around his ears, a move that would have guaranteed a, "Where are you flying to, dear?" said pointedly, with snide haughtiness. This from the same grandmother who begged me not to marry an American as that would give me more reason to not return to Australia.

Needless to say, I was nervous to introduce the two of them. I had nothing to worry about. Last night, my grandmother said that she would like to keep Z. No, she had no need for mum and I to stay; just Z, thank you very much. I think what really enamored her was his ability to dry dishes. She just wouldn't stop going on about how her husband would never - Never! - have done anything in the kitchen; that was women's work. How things have changed! I would never - Never! - have considered marrying anyone who wouldn't help out in the kitchen. And I don't know a woman who would.

She's softened up a lot, my grandmother has. She's a bit wobbly on her feet and a looks a lot more frail. She has trouble thinking of the word she wants to say. Yesterday she was telling us a story about entertaining important guests when she lived in Malaysia. The food was taking a long time to appear so she went into the kitchen to see what the problem was. She found the cook on his hands and knees picking up (and here she fumbled) white stuff from the floor. What is that stuff called, she asked us? Rice? we guessed. Pasta? Spaghetti? Noodles? Rice? Finally, I said potatoes - and she was off to finish the story. She had the cook hurriedly wash the potatoes and serve them because the guests had already waited too long for the food. There was so much emphasis on looking right in that social circle and at that time. This also explains why she once served tea after seeing a cockroach floating in the tea pot: she couldn't admit that there were vermin in the kitchen! But don't worry - mum cooked the food on this most recent visit. Nothing fell on the floor or came into intimate contact with any kind of insect. I think.

It was great to see my grandmother again. I came to Australia in 2001 and saw her for what I thought would be the last time. I've seen her twice more since. To say that I'm glad she and Z had a chance to meet would be an understatement.

She's intent on being remembered - she wants to give her things away to people who will treasure them and use them. She gave us a beautiful silver pitcher that, she explained, allows one to have the wine decanted and ready to serve as soon as the guests arrive. Like I need things to remember my grandmother by. She will always be with me through her stories, her love of animals, her table manners and that stubborn streak that runs thick through the blood of this family's women. While looking through some old photographs, Z pointed out that she and I looked alike as young girls. I think it was the set of our jaws. I've never seen that resemblance before; it's one more way to remember her.

End of Travellator

2006-06-03T13:32:00.000+10:00

We are in Australia, Melbourne to be precise. It is winter down here. Yesterday must have been a mild day because other people were walking around in t-shirts and light jackets. Emphasis on Other People. I sported four layers including woolen jumper (sweater to you yanks), long coat and scarf. In Malaysia, our a/c was set to 20C; here the heater is set to 20C. And everyone talks funny. I am doing my best to resist reverting to full-on Aussiedom knowing that communication between me and my husband would quickly devolve to grunted Huh's? and pantomime. So far, so good: we are still talking.

I have received many curious e-mails about my sister who moved to Melbourne with her husband in January. Despite the fact that we are all in the same house, I have seen her for all of 15 minutes (she was exhausted) in the three days we've been here. Hiding out? Who? Where??? Z has been great at reminding me exactly how much things have improved: she is talking to two members of the family (mum and her partner); she is working; she is not lying in a ditch somewhere. And yet, of course it is hard for me. I did not see her at her worst which means that now she appears as a shadow of the young woman I used to admire so much. I know that there was a huge dip between 2002 and 2006, a dip which I thankfully did not have to witness first-hand. Compared to that dip, she's doing brilliantly. But for me, it seems like a down from her former glory. It's sad; it's hard. And I'm trying not to let it completely rule my time here nor my emotional well-being. So, tonight we are going to stay with Alicia and Mick for a few days. It will be great to see them both; they are wonderfully fun people.

In other news, there are hilarious photos now up from the time we spent with Lev. They're on Z's site and we will hopefully be moving the rest of our photos to the same spot in the next month or so. Emphasis on the Or So.

It's interesting to be entering this new phase of our travels. In this part of the world, the moving walkways found at airports are called Travellators. En route to the car park in Melbourne aiport, a recording of a woman's voice sternly warned of the End of the Travellator. In Singapore, they had bright red signs. I took them as signs - as in Signs, of the end of our Travellator. I just need to remember to release the brake on my luggage-laden hand cart.