Peacock feather dance

New blog

2011-04-18T17:30:00.002+10:00

You may have heard that we're going on a year of travel. I'm making a project of writing about river forecasters and hope to someday turn it into a book. Here's the link:

http://tompagano.blogspot.com/

I reprinted 2 of the old blog's entries on the new blog but there'll be plenty of new material coming.

How is the new cat working out?

2010-08-04T21:21:00.006+10:00

So how is our new cat working out?

I mean, I'm crazy about him, the new cat (this is Kitty, bona fide dog person, talking. I know. It's confusing.) Tom is ambivalent. Buoyantly neutral? I see hope. Soon Bentley will count a pile of fallen toothpicks and the skies will open up with fatherly love. It's imminent. We find that if we don't overfeed him fresh Alaskan crab legs (we do), he's more playful. Mommy is the same way with Reese's, so we understand what is happening.

It's easy to catch him adoring the Supreme Grand Champion Sir Keysborough Bentley Preshapotomous Kittyflake (aka "Bentley" aka "Fatty fat-n-fat" aka "Kitty Pot Pie") making a paw bouquet as he sleeps in a desk chair...but then Tom also goes and wants to, I donno, wear him like a straight man's chinchilla scarf ... and Mr. Puss Puss wants nothing of whatsoever, period.

Frankly, I don't mind washing a stack of fur-clad t-shirts for this much cuteness.

This was Tom's father's end table that we had shipped over from America. Bentley loves to hang out under, over and around it while Tom works on his computer.

He'll even shower there.

If you hold up a tasty morsel, Bentley will make like a prairie dog and beg for it. It's pretty adorable. We'll have to get a real picture of the whole thing. You'll die in love. Geez, it's hard to get good pictures of animals doing cute things.

Anyway, I've just made a blog post of random pictures of my cat.

Shoot me now. :) - Meow Meow

Skiing / Biking Weekend

2010-08-02T21:25:00.009+10:00

This weekend, I went skiing at Mt. Buller with a mob of other girls.

We love the movie The Castle. It's an Australian legend. Just thinking about it, it's hard not to sing the lyrics "We're going to Bonnie Doon" or ask "How's the serenity?". You have to watch the movie to appreciate it. My favorite line is when the dad talks about how much they all love going to their cabin at Bonnie Doon. He insists they all love it, "the dogs love it", etc. Then the camera pans to his dogs looking at the ground nonchalantly...really no indication that the dogs love the cabin at Bonnie Doon at all. Anyway, just see it, really...it's our national treasure.

We stopped for photos at every Bonnie Doon sign we could find. It drove Aimee, who took the picture, bonkers, because she likes to ride in the car with her shoes off....and it was raining.

The view from the cabin was amazing.

I tried to get everyone to wear pink cowboy hats so we could find each other easily on the slopes, to no avail. Face tattoos from our candy stash didn't catch on either, which was unfortunate...I had to scrub mine off with a nail file.

Lots of cooking and eating! Here's Huibee, who got mowed down by a snowboarder and sent home in a soft cast on her leg. She said the ski patrol guy wasn't even cute. They strapped her into a giant sled and attached her to the chair lift to cart her down the mountain. I don't think the weekend turned out quite so great for Huibee.

More eating. I'm standing in the back, on the right.

Played a lot of board games. Scattagories was fun. There were a lot of American references, like states and cities starting with a particular letter. The girls kept saying we needed to switch it to Australian terms...I would have lost hopelessly.

Peta and I faking spontaneity....the friend that took the photo didn't think we looked natural enough so she posed us.

Meanwhile, Tom when mountain biking with our friends Tony and Emma. He usually only gets to ride his bike down the shopping center road, past TGIFridays, and into his office, so it was fun for him to be out in actual nature and feel the serenity.

No two snowflakes are alike

2010-07-20T18:31:00.001+10:00

We've been on the hunt for a name for our new cat. It's a bit like naming your band. Hard to rock out with a name like "my little pony".

Lots of names were left on the cutting room floor...

Oswald

Maurice

Grayson

Brumley

Quintin

Riley

Warren Demontague

Trevin

Tribble

Va Jay Jay

Puss puss

Gar

Brody

Duncan

Trotters

Herschel

Bartram

Whompers

Boom Boom

Possum

Mephistopheles

Thor

Dexter

Cocoa

Reggie Love (... real name of Obama's big black bodyguard)

Gunther

Eyore

Moses

Mister Meaner

CC Pounder

Dorian Gray

Donkey

Slate Smiley

Mack, Gray, Argento, Frassino, Nevar, Chollo, Deuce Bigelow, Chev Chelios, Gogo Yubari, Hank Marvin, Steve McQueen and finally "Johnny Awesome".

I was gunning hard for "Mongo" but got vetoed.

I think we're zeroing in on "Bentley" as in Snowflake Bentley. He was the first photographer of snowflakes, taking pictures of individual flakes on black velvet under a microscope in a cold room in his barn in the late 1890s. He was the first to coin the phrase, no two snowflakes are alike. He wrote rapturously about the fleeting beauty of nature. Any photos you see like this came from him. He made thousands.

It's not over yet though. Typically, cats that compete for best in show have a long name that includes the breeder's name, a given name, and the owner's name, like "PopTart's Momentary Lapse of Reason Concrete Hullabaloo."

It's strictly forbidden to include an award in the name even if it's misspelled (e.g. "Mastere"). So we're going to stick it to the man by calling him "Supreme Grand Champion Sir Keysborough Bentley Preshapotomous Kittyflake."

I insisted that we need a silent numeral somewhere in the name, like a silent seven in "Key7sborough" (just for good luck, you know?) but again, vetoed by you know who (her name rhymes with "prett2y", and I'm not talking about the cat).

New Cat

2010-07-19T11:25:00.005+10:00

This is our new boy - we got him yesterday from the Keysborough cat shelter. He's 3 years old and his last owners moved house and "couldn't" bring him. We hoped to bring him home Saturday, but he was sneezing and had a runny eye, so the cat shelter lady told us he might have the flu, or even chlamydia, then made us hose down with antiseptic spray and banned us from playing with any more cats for the rest of the day. We left, tail between legs, in shame.

The shelter ladies said he is half Scottish Fold, but it looks like he didn't get the "fold" (folded ears) part...just the face fat, which is okay.

Here's what a purebred Scottish fold looks like:

awwww....

Mommy is tormenting him. Look at that fat face.

He's such a pretty cat - every hue of gray. His whiskers are dark at the roots and white on the tips. Just like mommy! A little smudge of color on his nose and mouth makes him look like he's stepping out of a black and white photo.

We're not sure what he thinks about. He seems to like to just lay around and stare at the walls a lot. Just like Mommy!

Still working on a name for him. His name was "Smokey", although we've tried everything from schmokey, the smokester, smokearooni, golden-eye smokeopolis, kiki, puss, koala bear, ghost, casper (for casper weinberger), angel paws, Bob Barker, maru-san, Chairman Meow, nothing seems to stick. Anyone have any suggestions?

New House

2010-06-21T13:46:00.003+10:00

Next weekend, we move into our new house. It is walking distance from Tom's work and is "pet friendly". It's bigger than our current flat (3 bedroom) and has an attached garage. It's only about a year old - nice clean lines, hopefully spider and roach free? I like the real wood floors. It has a central vacuum system - fancy, but we're wondering how well that really works?

Moving is a huge hassle. Tom is very busy at work and we have been entertaining a lot lately. This is going to be a hectic week. A nice thing about moving is that it does force you to clean, organize, file and arrange those pesky areas that get away from you. We had a dinner party over the weekend and apparently my Tupperware cabinet unleashed its fury on an innocent friend who was just trying to help put things away. The secret is to quickly shove the Tupperware in and slam the door closed. Her mistake was conveying vulnerability in hesitating.

Feels a little like going to the next phase of our immigration/adult lives. Talk has now turned to planning future events with friends "in the city"...it used to be a five minute train ride, now it will be about forty minutes to go downtown.

Sorry we haven't been posting much lately. Could be a few variables here: the theme of this blog was mostly about our immigration, discovering our new world, adventures in moving, etc. That's all pretty well been covered. We also wonder who are audience is and what you truly want to hear...we know everyone likes photos, so we'll try to keep those coming.

It's interesting that "news", in the traditional sense, is often bad news. By definition, occurrences that are newsworthy are going to be outliers in some form. But our blog seems to be just the shiny bits and bobbles of our real lives.

No one wants to know that Tom has taken to secretly packing and furling away the evidence after I go to bed because I didn't want boxes all over the place. Or are you guys really interested in things like my new fixation on how we're going to hang pictures in the new place when we aren't allowed to drive holes in the walls without written permission from the property manager? ***snore****

Maybe I should post a transcript of what I had to say to the phone company guy when they told me what it will cost to get our new service. It wasn't one of my most elegant diatribes, just very, um, heartfelt.

swanston st drifter

2010-06-09T21:24:00.002+10:00

This week's writing exercise was to go out with a classmate into a nearby fast food restaurant and pick someone to observe. We had about 20 minutes to write a "double tanka", an expanded version of a haiku (that's 5-7-5-7-7/5-7-5-7-7/-5 syllables per line). Here's what we came up with

In and out of doors,
drifting like a bird of prey.
Like a ghost he haunts,
muttering on silent lips.
His stare stretches a mile long,
his shirt a loose shroud.
An invisible burden,
his arms mid-cross,
not committed to the fold.
It's the season everything
wants to be inside.

Earlier that week I watched some metro workers replacing some of the rail lines. They do it at 3am when the trains aren't running.

Lit up by flood lights
working in the ink of night
tearing up the tracks
the cool hiss of hydraulic
yellow spiders march along

Grampian weekend continued....

2010-06-05T20:38:00.008+10:00

To wrap up the big Grampian Mountain birthday weekend...

There was fabulous chicken wire around a shed on the Royal Mail campus...chickens are called "chooks" here.

We picked out some $6 commemorative cheese knives from the gift store that looks a bit like the chook wire, above. It also reminds of the great metal workers I used to work with in Portland. We can't remember the last time we went on holiday and felt the need to buy a fridge magnet or snow globe....that kind of thing turns into dust gathering kibble around the house. But we practically live on cheese and dips and have lots of hors dourves parties, so these will be well loved.

There were fun sculptures on the grounds. Here's some cute fauna frolicking in it.

The motel proprietor promised that kangaroos would come to our back door (or money back!) where we stayed on Saturday night, in Halls Gap. They're in the background. Nice cow though.

We eventually made enough new kangaroo friends that we stopped "recruiting" (slamming on the breaks and careening Winston, the car, to the side of the road to take photos).

Tom loves to find water stations. Sewers? Well...close. Circle of life, Baby.

Silverband falls: A waterfall that ends up underground. What a thrill to find actual cascading water in this drought.

Chilly and a bit rainy. Romantic I guess...at least a thrill to find a second waterfall, MacKenzie Falls. Can we go back to that 10 course restaurant now please?

Did some hiking. Tom claims this tree stump was hollowed out by lightening. Funny that, there were hundreds like this along the path.

Mmmm...reservoir.

While I waited in Winston and ate leftover garlic pizza while Tom took pictures of the water guages. A true win-win!

I can't stop thinking about the food at Royal Mail and are going to go sit vigil tomorrow until they let us feed again.

Grampian Birthday Weekend

2010-06-05T19:37:00.013+10:00

After seeing Anthony Bourdaine's visit to Royal Mail in his show "No Reservations", I have been all aquiver to get a reservation here, a restaurant 3 hours north of Melbourne.

We finally got a booking and are here celebrating my 41st birthday. Tom keeps asking what I want for presents...is that so wrong that I just want to eat homegrown, organic, gourmet, Spanish / Australian food for four straight hours? It feels so right.

The town, Dunkeld has only 400 residents. I would have guessed 100. It's terribly quiet. Anthony Bourdaine says it's at the "ass end of No-where's-ville". True, that. He also calls it "quite possibly the best restaurant in Australia". So far, yes, tick that box for us.

Start watching at 2 minutes, 27 seconds...(email people click here).

Some of my favorite comments from Tony's bit here:

"I don't know if want to eat that or roll around naked in it." (Tony...lover of all things indulgent... food, booze, drugs, tattoos, travel ... and writing)
(Friend, Paul Wilson, local Melbourne chef) "And you're not a man who likes vegetables, Tony." .... Tony (in adorable, childlike voice): "I like pretty colorful things!!!" (and then he plays around in his flower salad...adorable!)
"You forget how good a carrot can be. You do. Did I say that or did I just think that? (Tony)
"Nothing felt constructed." (Tony) ...
"Make it have a reason, and at that point, stop." (Royal Mail chef, Dan Hunter)
"It's so good it's almost depressing." (Tony)

It really was like a book you didn't want to end...I was sad as each of the 10 courses drew to a close. Luckily, I ordered the omnivore degustation menu and Tom had the vegetarian...so we each got to try both.

Chef Dan Hunter designed the venue with "its own ecosystem" and "its own sustainable sourcing and food production". As we were eating the complimentary continental breakfast this morning, we saw a sous chef walk by with an armful of freshly harvested rhubarb from their massive garden ... I wanted to tackle/hug him.

How can one not wonder what leads up to toasting prohibition? Anyway, back to dinner...

Heirloom baby carrots in black cream, sardines on toast and mini pork sandwich.

Egg yolk, toasted rye, legumes and yeast with a broccoli paste. All we can think about is getting more. It's like we're chasing a sprout dragon now. We grilled the server for recipe details ... apparently we'd need a special immersion bath that keeps the egg yolk at an exact 62 degrees. This feels ever so slightly out of our skill range, notwithstanding kitchen cabinet storage capabilities.

Coral trout, brassicas (mustard greens), chicken broth and fried skin.

Fresh and dried berries, beetroot, black olives and rose petals.

The (above) strawberry and the sprout dish are among the best things I've ever put in my mouth. Fortunately, the venue also had a boutique hotel, so they only had to show us the door and pour us into bed afterwards.

I was going to ask for an I-pad ... maybe a tennis bracelet or a bike with a big rattan basket on the handlebars, but the memories of this marathon experience (and let's hope, not the fatness accrued) will last forever. No, gluttony is not good. But there is a lot right about this place and truly a thrill of my lifetime to get to be a part of it.

Even though we spent the rest of the weekend in other parts of the Grampian Mountain range, we are haunted by the flavors and determined to go back to their bistro on Sunday.

Fly away, you poor little precious quail we noticed on the ala cart menu ... TomKit is in route and hungry for more.

haikus

2010-06-01T22:32:00.003+10:00

Tom here again. This week's class involved more going out into the street and finding interesting scenes for about 20 minutes and coming back to discuss. He gave us a structured form to fit, and so here's some of the things I saw

She colors her hair

and gabs with the beautician

her man stands nearby

pacing near the door he looks

far too long in his wallet

A broken old man

hermit crabbed over yogurt

his spoon barely lifts

his mouth drops open slowly

lets it meander inside

then his eyes widen

his pace quickens near the end

he scrapes down the walls

intent on getting his fill

when satisfied he looks up

and lets out a silent sigh

(from a poster on the classroom wall)

cauliflower clouds

oppressive humidity

a featureless plain

Marge had the scrambled eggs

Ann had the mushrooms

Marge: "I don't think there's an end in sight"

Anne wondered if the wine bottles on the shelf,

arranged 3 deep, were in a particular order

alphabetical, by vintage, maybe even biographical.

"Nobody was prepared for it to go on for this long"

Anne sees a girl without sideburns

at the edge of her stool chewing too quickly

"You'd think nobody was in control" she clucked

A barista with coke bottle glasses wipes a spoon

with the edge of her neon pink surgeon's smock

"I think it's clear who should be responsible"

Anne notices an impatient blonde male behind the counter

biting his lower lip, he keeps his finger on the button

waiting for his shot to pull

The chrome coffeemaker rumbles on

his brow is the inverse of furrowed

A leather bracelet on one arm, she wonders why

his watch on the other is stopped, 3 hours late.

observations

2010-05-25T22:00:00.002+10:00

I'm taking an observational writing continuing education course just for the sport of it with a friend, Peta. The teacher John Elder is a crack up, a journalist at The Age newspaper. Tonight was our first night and there were 11 people in the class, a very broad range of ages and interests. Our first exercise was to go down to the street and observe someone and write down what you see. Peta and I watched two people next to eachother (a guy and a girl). Here was what I saw:

A 45 year old man started on the stoop of the Night Cat City, a closed bar whose portico looked like a church. He pulled a large forest green wheeled suitcase that looked surprisingly new and clean, considering that his hair was a mess, he was tanned and weathered and had many small scabs on his cheeks.

We walked easily to the corner convenience store and back, returning with a glass bottle of beer in a brown paper bag. He went through a familiar ritual of preparing the beer, rolling down the edges of the bag and crossed the street to throw the cap in a bin. On his way back he looked up and down a young fashionable girl sitting on the stoop. She was well dressed in black and gray but with a red and orange matching wool scarf and hat. [Peta remarked that she was 18 but chain smoked patiently and knowingly like an 80 year old].

He took his place on the top stair of the stoop, up and behind her. He stood so he could watch her without seeming like he was staring. He stood in away from the rain but close enough to protect his luggage if it came to that. He meditated on his cigarette, spent a fair bit of time slowly rubbing his face and hair. When he was done, he flicked his cigarette in a long arc across the sidewalk into the gutter.

A visit to mt olympus

2010-05-20T15:11:00.003+10:00

John Jr. playing under John F. Kennedy's Oval Office Desk, 1963

Today I was invited to the Bureau of Meteorology headquarters to give a talk to the management committee of the research program I'm involved with. Someone described this as a "visit to mt olympus" where the titans of water and weather in Australia reside. The lineage is that I was talking to my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss. I had about 15 minutes of their time to do something a bit like an elevator pitch on what I'm doing and why our work is important.

The most surreal part of it was that the meeting was in the executive boardroom, in a posh and locked off part of the Bureau headquarters. I sat next to the person at the very tip top of the org chart for the Bureau and was video conferenced in to Canberra where there was another inner circle of Bureau and CSIRO heavyweights. The talk went well, they were very gracious and friendly.

I was surprised at how similar going to the executive offices was like it is in the movies, going into the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, Art-Deco-Empire (except a bit more Ikea). I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit star struck. The best part? I stumbled into the executive washroom (which, yes, had a lock on the door but was ajar). I didn't steal any embroidered linens, but it was a heady day in all.

Back when I was a wee grad student, I had the honor of getting seated at a banquet next to Joe Friday, the former executive of the US National Weather Service, the equivalent of who I met today. Of all the directors, he was especially revered by the people under him. As usual, no real clue who I was sitting next to at the time...

Cats vs. Dogs

2010-05-16T13:18:00.002+10:00

As you may know, Tom is more of a cat person, I'm more dog.

As the time we move to a potentially pet-friendly home grows nearer, the dialog is starting to heat up. Tom found this on the internet this morning. Can't see why he'd want a cat when he already has me?

Excerpts from the Dog's Diary ......

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 PM - Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00 PM - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 PM - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 PM - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
6:00 PM - Oooh, Bath . Bummer.
7:00 PM - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 PM - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 PM - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

Excerpts from the Cat's Diary....

Day 983 of my captivity.

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.

They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards.

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies." I must learn what this means and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow -- but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released - and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded.

The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now................

Million Paws Walk

2010-05-16T12:25:00.010+10:00

Back: Pocket, Kitty, Tom, Nesstastic, Maddie, Glen

Front: Daisy, Angel, Freddie

Photo by: Olivia (Pocket and Freddie's mom) - at Albert Park Lake

Today we went on the SPCA's fundraiser 5 kilometer dog walk, the Million Paws. I don't know that there was actually a million paws there, but Tom said it was like Dog Woodstock at least. At the starting line, we didn't dare push our way into the booth area where they were selling cupcakes, pizza, latte's and BBQ. Tom said it was as though they knew I was coming and planned the menu around me.

This proud Pomeranian-dad special ordered his custom "Outward Hound" doggie sling. Tom wondered how the plaster casting process went. Badly, I'd imagine.

There were many cute hairstyles. I cut myself off from using the word "cute" five minutes into the walk, by the way. It was becoming both redundant and repetitive.

Old English Sheepdog with a pony tail.

Little girl and poodle with matching pink bows. Awwww.

It was a beautiful morning. Lots of friendly people and gorgeous, pampered pooches. Australians are big into cross-breeding...they'll pretty much pair anything up with a poodle. One of the neatest dogs of the day was a "Roodle" (Rottweiler/Poodle mix). Something like this:

A Roodle.

The irony of all this deliberately-accomplished adorableness was that we were there to support the SPCA, you know, the place where unwanted dogs go? 200,000 dogs are "euthanized" in Australia each year. I'm not sure that's the right word though.

Tom and I loves us a Golden Retriever. Apparently they are now being selectively bred to have a white coloration. In fact, celebrity dog owner of the year, 1996, Oprah Winfrey has a few. It will be interesting to see how dogs' health issues and temperances evolve as this trend progresses.

I thought Oprah was in to cocker spaniels? When did she cross over?

Puzzle and Kitty with Star Wars characters. Rather random.

Nothing says "help nervous over-excited dogs feel safer" better than sci-fi costumes. I was not scared at all. Pocket, my loaner dog, mmnnn....?

Notice the Storm Trooper and Tusken Raider each have tiny doubles.

I pride myself on being able to identify all the dog breeds. Clearly, this is a Lhasa Apso, Pomeranian, Maltese mix. Though I think it may have actually been an Ewok that defected from the Star Wars mob...

see the resemblance?

I made a new friend.

Tom made a new friend.

He knows how much I appreciate a (1500 calorie) bottle of Ice Break Iced Coffee so I think he thought a peace offering to one of Albert Park's aggressive black swan's was a good place to start. A good time was had by all. We had to put our 'trainers' (walking shoes) on the patio to air out a bit when we got home.

The Great Scuba/Modeling/Spa/Cheesecake Eating Trip in Cape Schnack 2010

2010-05-13T19:26:00.011+10:00

Tom attended a modeling conference at the coast this week (statistics and forecasting numbers type stuff, not the strike-a-pose kind, though, agreed, he does have many talents).

Our good friends, Emma and Tony built a beautiful new house in Berwick, a suburb about half way between here and the Mornington Peninsula, so we stopped over for a festive visit of cheesecake munching, card games and a peaceful rest on Saturday night. Though they put in all top-of-the-line fixtures and decked the place out perfectly only 6 months ago, they're already restless for another big project, so this gorgeous new property is now on the market...let us know if you're interested!

I like to joke that they had to build a giant, open-aesthetic mansion (and bought a manly, mammoth truck) just for their great dane puppy, Huck. He seems to have finally hit his full height and appears to just be filling out around the jowl and lip area these days. Here he is, tucked in on his own sofa, for a cool autumn sleep. Ridiculous cuteness, this one.

I tagged along for the conference to give full due diligence in exploring the many spas of Australia. The Peninsula Hot Springs was recently remodeled, and I may have finally met my match with "The Orchid" spring...at 40-42 degree Celsius (104 -108 degrees Fahrenheit). Here's a photo of it from a random stranger's blog...does he look Norwegian? Tom is always shocked how hot of a tub I can normally tolerate. Imagine how defeated I felt, merely able to but dip a toe in this nearly boiling mess! Spa fail!!! Oh, the shame of it all.

We were a bit leery of what a Royal Auto Club of Victoria resort (in Cape Schnack) might look like; it seemed odd for an insurance company, really, to run a resort, but it was gorgeous and the staff was delightful. I tried to go incognito as a true conference attendee around dinnertime and got my fill of fresh oysters, right off the boat in the bay.

Here I am in the "Prada-Gonia" (Prada style / Patagonia label) jacket that Tom got me at REI back in Portland and some cargo pants. Oh, how I miss wearing outdoorsie-wear everyday like we did in America. Women actually dress up here and I tend to look a little rough when I default to the earth toned, cotton, velcro covered wardrobe pieces I shipped over. I've gained 10 pounds since I got back from backpacking around SE Asia...good that I didn't donate those fat-pants prematurely, hmmm? No worries...I'm starting a healthy eating and exercise plan tomorrow (I am, no really, I mean it, no, really).

Some scenic photos of the property I pinched off the internet:

We had a wonderful time visiting with his colleagues from the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney. Though everyone is Melbourne has a tough time finding affordable housing, we have to be glad we aren't looking to buy in Sydney, where it is an even tougher challenge.

The trip was rounded out by a day of deep water scuba diving, where, after getting down to 30 meters, I managed to earn by Advanced Diver stripes. NOW we can consider going to Vanuatu to dive the very deeply sunk SS Coolidge wreck, though I'm hard pressed to ever want to go anywhere but the Great Barrier Reef again after our amazing time with Tom's mom there in July last year. Emma packed us two pieces of cheesecake in our Esky (Igloo cooler) "for people who pass their scuba test OR NOT...EITHER WAY" (see, that's a good friend!). Tom assumed they were both for me (and I let him), once again confirming that I married completely out of my league.

At least this dive, I didn't start hyperventilating from swimming in the cold, heavy current, flail my arms hysterically for the captain to come fish me out and then refuse to get off the boat, then, once back on shore, fall over in the surf and lay there moaning, helplessly weighted down by my gear as a crowd gathered like last time we took the course (and Tom passed with flying colors). Tick that box. Hooray. :)

celebrity thursday

2010-05-07T11:24:00.005+10:00

Yesterday was kind of a big day, celebrity-wise for me.

We went to a lecture from Naomi Wolfe

she was on tour for the 20th anniversary of her feminist book "The Beauty Myth". We got front row center seats. We were so close that if we were to get up and walk about 30 feet, we could practically reach out and touch her. Her premise is basically that standards for female beauty are unrealistic and unattainable, but they keep women on a treadmill of buying cosmetics and going on fad diets and so on.

Earlier in the day I met two famous people from the history of forecast evaluation (how good forecasts are). Robert Winkler was visiting from overseas and we got to go to lunch

He was co-author on many papers with the most famous person in forecast evaluation, Alan Murphy (now deceased). When I was a wee young grad student, I had a grainy 4th generation xerox copy of a collection of Murphy's works and they had a big impact on my forecasting and forecast evaluation philosophy. Winkler also wrote papers with a guy named Clemen, who was one of the most famous researchers in how you combine different forecasts together, e.g. the average of 100 peoples guesses of how many jelly beans are in the jar is going to be a better guess than the best single guesser.

If I had to, say, pick one non-obvious piece of philosophy out of the air from Murphy and Winkler, it might be that one measure of "goodness" of a forecast is how well it aligns with the forecasters personal belief. A forecaster should never be in a situation where he has incentive to say the forecast should be, for example, 60% chance of flood, when in his heart of hearts he believes there's only a 10% chance. Think of it another way, a doctor should never say you have 6 months to live when he believes you really have 3... or 12.

Lastly I also finally met and had lunch with Frank Woodcock

He works for the Bureau of Meteorology. In 1976 (when I was 2 years old) he wrote a forecast evaluation paper that lead to what's called "The Woodcock Score", which, again, I read about in my early days at grad school. He was a real friendly guy and quick with a laugh. I imagine that over the years, he's seen it all.

Brr!

2010-05-03T10:47:00.003+10:00

Melbourne temperature is getting down there. This morning it was 9 C (48 F), which apparently is the normal low for this time of year (the dashed lines above). My office itself was 16 C (60 F), which is a wee bit chilly.

Personally, I like the cold. The first year I lived in Portland, OR, I was in an old house that had a giant dirty oil furnace. We turned it on once and soot and dirt blew everywhere and it sounded like a jet engine. Instead, we would drive down to the warehouse district and round up some scrap lumber for the fireplace. It's a wonder the pipes didn't freeze.

Spa Country Getaway

2010-05-02T14:59:00.007+10:00

Last weekend, Tom, our Kiwi-expat friend, Laura, the newish-and-yet-to-be-named-Barcelona-red-Prius and I went up to Hepburn Springs and Daylesford, about 90 minutes north of here. You may recall we visited the same area last January.

Of course, we got in on the full floaty-pool spa package and ate at the Perfect Drop again. We were excited because it was "no menus" day...you just free associate your food dreams, allergies and phobias to the proprietor, let them know how much you want to spend and they deliver a series of mind-blowing beverages and tapas, like cheesy fritters and sauce-dripping meatballs. We played Mama Mia (a pizza making card game), nestled up in giant leather chairs by the fire all afternoon. I was in charge of log stoking, which made me feel a great sense of both responsibility and purpose that friends and family are starting to question as being missing in my life.

Daylesford town center was shut down in the morning for the memorial events. Everyone was gathered around the cenotaph for speeches, military band music and so on for an hour or two. Australians take this stuff seriously- This year over 40,000 people showed up to the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance... at sunrise!

Since it was Anzac Biscuit Weekend, we were fortunate to find a room at all...Tom got the very last one (for all three of us to share) in a small town a half hour east, called Trentham. "Hotel" often means, simply, "bar, or pub", here. Sometimes it's a place of lodging. This one, was, oh happy day, both. However, they were quite strict about where you could go with your alcahol and liqour (sic).

We blew up an air mattress and settled into our new home. The room was about 15% bigger than the bed itself. Someone would have to get on the bed if you wanted to make space to open the door. A little red wine in a teacup was good to get the night started.

It was a little intimidating to venture out to the bar / restaurant area, where many of the locals had been drinking since their Anzac Day Pancake Breakfast that morning. Below in the upper left is Bazza; after he sat with us, the bartender's wife told us to look at the picture on the wall above us. Sure enough, it was Bazza on a motorbike, driving through a giant fireball. Turns out he was a daredevil stuntman (that specific event was a fundraiser for the local fire brigade).

Laura is very social and was quickly welcomed back-stage to tend bar. Part way through the night, the drinks became free because the cash register got stuck. I tried to resist the urge to pinch (that means pillage, plunder, pilfer, you get the idea) a place mat.

We all felt very welcomed by the community and bartender/owner insisted on shots all around, wherein we were introduced to something called Grayva, a Scotch Whiskey Liquor.

The next day, we reckoned we understood a little bit of how Wake In Fright's John Grant felt, Outback in the town of Yabba after his warm welcome by the locals. This is one of the original Ozploitation movies from the 70's. It captures (and stereotypes?) what goes down in rural Australian bars.

Trailer for those of you not receiving this by email, here's the video trailer:

We got the car packed up and made our way to some hiking and wilderness areas. This year, we actually saw a waterfall! The drought has pretty much dried up all the smaller waterways around Victoria. And how could we not be thrilled to see a life sized resin elephant strapped to a trailer on the way home? It was an unprecedented weekend.

We Cat Sat

2010-04-19T07:47:00.004+10:00

This weekend, we had a cat visitor. The idea was that the cat will need rehomed sometime this year, and it would give us a chance to get to know each other. If things worked out, we would adopt him after we move to a home that allows for pets.

He is everything I like about a pet, and I'm a self-professed dog person. Here he is playing in the sink while the faucet is running. Many cats don't like water. This one thinks it's a riot.

He spent a lot of time rearranging Tom's closet. Usually in the middle of the night, he would slide the giant mirrored door open himself, scale up the shelves and fling clothes about. Then ... how to get down....hmm?

He enjoyed chasing the light from the laser pointer that Tom uses for work presentations, was interested in just about everything we were doing and he's a real cuddler. Clearly, this cat is very smart and social.

Other activities included throwing litter out of his litter box, tipping over every half-full beverage he could find (particularly dark, stainy ones), and meowing for several hours straight (1 am - 8 am).

To make important decisions, we try to both rate how we feel about them on a scale of 1 to 10. As a professional forecaster and generally objective person, Tom rarely polarizes his rating. He also seldom changes the number, not unless new information comes along.

The chances that we adopt this fun cat may improve after we both catch up on some sleep. Grrr...meow.

The stranger

2010-04-16T12:53:00.002+10:00

On my 45 minute commute to work each way, I've taken to listening to courses on tape. I like the teaching company. I did their American History course, Great ideas in psychology and now I'm doing Existentialism and the meaning of life.

The first couple lectures about existentialism are talking about Camus' The Stranger. In it, there's the phrase "I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe". (sometimes benign is translated as gentle). I think it's a delightful phrase and it ties into my philosophy on forecasting nature. At the end of the day, you just have to know to not take life too personally. I don't think it's a cynical quote, it's quite empowering actually.

A lot of the course so far talks about how the meaning of life is life itself. I'm not sure I understand this. Just try and substitute another word... The meaning of "shoe" is "shoe" itself?

There's also a lot of talking about being in the moment and how reflection and "meta-thought" can ruin an experience. Last night I saw a number of people experience a concert while making a movie of it on their iphones, just looking through the equivalent of a viewfinder the whole time. If you weren't "there" to begin with, I'm not sure what's the benefit of having a record of it later? Tom

Recent photos of us

2010-04-09T14:36:00.003+10:00

Tom is rooting (the American definition) through gear on our canoe trip. We both love to wear travel pants that have zip-off legs. Unfortunately, the week after being on the water for two days, he had peel-off legs. The mammoth sheets of harvested, sunburned skin laying on our coffee table right now are equally impressive as horrifying. I keep thinking there is an art project calling out there, but it's probably saying something more like, "You guys are truly the definition of gross."

Our neighbor, Laura, took this at dinner last night. I'm wearing a paisley gold-sequined kameez that we had custom made in India a few years ago with flowery lace tights and purple boots. If I were to describe my style, it would be something like "Transitional, eclectic six-year-old left to her own devices to dress herself." My bangs, or "fringe" as they call it here are at that awkward growing-out stage and pinned back.

Thinspiration

2010-04-09T14:10:00.007+10:00

Our next-door neighbor, Laura, invited us over for dinner last night. You can read more about her story, and her daily blog here.

Laura suffered from a spinal cord injury during a swim meet when she was 12 years old. She is confined to an electric wheelchair, paralyzed in her lower body and has limited use of her arms.

Last year, she started seeing a nutritionist and eating healthy low-fat foods. She lost well over a hundred pounds in 16 months and is now at her goal weight. It's amazing how sane and rational she is about food...no cayenne/lemon cleansers or carb-free deep-fried bacon, really? Fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meats, huh? It's like all that stuff they've been talking about all this time could be true.

We had fruit salad with non-fat yogurt....

...and Laura's mom-chef, Robyn, made delicious home-made crab, ham, pineapple and capsicum (red bell pepper, it's in everything here) pizzas.

Her discipline and positive attitude are inspiring - when this girl says she's going to make a youtube.com video diary entry every day, she ACTUALLY does it ... every day! Though she's moving to Sydney in a few weeks, we're going to keep tabs as she continues to achieve great things.

the fine print

2010-04-06T19:24:00.004+10:00

In the cafeteria/canteen at work is a microwave (featured in a past post, actually). I probably use it every other day. It's a little white LG.

To me, a microwave should really only have 3 buttons:

1. One more minute

2. Go

3. Stop/cancel

Don't need anything else. If you're cooking for less than a minute, chances are you're standing there and can just open the door when there's 37 seconds left if you need that precision. And have you ever used a power level less than 10? Or defrost? Or set it to start running 4 hours from now? Actually, I could go for a "totally power off" button- over its total lifetime, your microwave in standby (e.g. the clock) uses more energy than the cooking bit.

Today something about it caught my eye. At the top of the microwave are the "shortcut" buttons. Here you'd you'd typically press "popcorn" and it would automatically run for 8 minutes or however long it takes to turn your popcorn into a charred brick. I often wonder if they test their shortcuts on what they're really designed for, or if that facility burned down years ago.

The header of these buttons read "Aussie menus". I thought that strange coming from a South Korean company. Is it different for every country? I'm pretty sure they don't have a button for "American menus" in the US. Or so informal? What's the equivalent? "Yankee vittles"? "Kraut fare"?

So what's on the aussie menu? To quote:

dinner plate

rice

soup

casserole

risotto

pizza

Does this seem particularly Australian to you? No kanga bangas (kangaroo sausage), meat pies, anzac biscuits, chika rolls, fish and chips, or afternoon tea. No button for damper- not even a button for popcorn!

I reckon that "pizza" is vague- frozen or reheated? And what is a "dinner plate"? Isn't what's on the plate that counts? And how much different is rice from risotto that you'd need two buttons? Who is cooking risotto in the microwave anyway!

Dandenong Range

2010-04-03T19:38:00.004+11:00

One reason we bought the new car is so we could get out of town...be more active in the great Australian outdoors. Oxymoronic? Perhaps. I swear though, we really do need to drive...to hike.

Today we went on a quick two hour hike through the Dandenong National Park. It only took about half an hour to drive to the trail head, which had this sign:

Tom kept wondering who is bringing their cat hiking and what kind of lawsuits ensued that brought cats to be pegged to dogs in the 'unwelcome' guest list?

My favorite part of the 7 kilometer loop was when the trail started to get more crowded with folks walking towards us, leading us to believe we were getting close back around to the car park. First, a woman running (how far can anyone run? surely not more than a kilometer or two). Then some people even more out of shape than us (they can't be the sort to get far from the gift shop / milkshake-serving-cafe). When we saw the three elderly men walking with canes, we could almost taste the spoils of a successfully completed trek.

Oh and forget about all the "new car rules". All the talk about keeping the car clean are so last week. We oinked down blueberry cider, iced coffees, crackers and dip the whole way home.

I did read the owners manual though. The transmission shift knob was driving me mad. Clearly, "N", "P", and "D" are "Neutral", "Park" and "Drive". So what the hell is "B"?! Is every other Prius driver scooting about in "B", reaping some kind of mammoth "benefit" that we've self-selected ourselves out of in ignorance? Was every minute of misuse shaving off pieces of some golden brick, deep inside the "bonnet"? (That's what we call the hood here. The trunk is the "boot".) Is the electric part of the hybrid triggered somewhere in the "back", turned on only by shifting into "B"?

It means "engine brake", to be used when going down steep hills. Who is using this?

Baffling.

Thinking of quitting?

2010-03-31T21:13:00.002+11:00

This is post number 200! Woohoo!

Today in the canteen/cafeteria I saw a bulletin board with the typical workplace propaganda on it. One thing caught my eye that said "Thinking of quitting?" I thought... well, that's pretty bold. Across campus there are all these posters saying "Are you leaving us?" with a picture of a penguin (for what reason I'm not sure... maybe for the image of waddling away). They advertise the CSIRO alumni association for people who have departed from service. I can understand wanting to retain staff, but I didn't know we had a "quitting" problem that required an agency campaign.

They also had these small colorful business cards that said "Remember the 4Ds". Presumably it was a card to put in your wallet to refer to now and then.

"Delay - for at least five minutes, the urge will pass." There's been times I've been tempted to quit, but I can't say five minutes really helped. Usually I have to go home and cry myself to sleep and then I feel better in the morning.

"Deep breathe - breathe slowly and deeply" I was expecting the next D to be "Don't bring a shotgun to work on your last day"

"Do something else - keep your hands busy" Working harder will set you free.

"Drink water - take time out, sip slowly" That really helps? It has to be slow sips to regain my will to go on?

Below the this there was a "Quitline" phone number. Did this mean people were standing by, ready to talk you out of quitting work? What does the Union have to say about this!

I was at a loss for words. But then at the very bottom I saw this stick looking thing with a burning ember at the end, with a buster symbol drawn through it and realized what was going on. Dawn shone on Marblehead.

Refer to my last post if you still don't get it.

smoking odds

2010-03-31T09:30:00.002+11:00

Australia has some pretty gruesome warning labels on packs of cigarettes (although not nearly as graphic as what you'd find on a pack in Brazil). I've always wanted to know just how bad smoking is for you, by the numbers. Does it raise your chance of dying from 1-2% or 1 to 50%?

Well, I have a favorite new webpage, the book of odds, where you can look up the chances of pretty much anything. So for example, in the US in recent years

Percent of people who smoke: 20%

Percent of married women who smoke: 15.2%

Percent of women with advanced degrees who smoke: 6.6%

I'm just sayin'!

So then this article talks about the deadliest cancers and your chances of dying from what. With a little help from some Bayesian Statistics:

P(S) = probability of anyone being a smoker = 20% (nevermind married women with advanced degrees)

P(C) = probability of anyone dying from lung cancer = 6%

P(S|C) = probability that, if you died from lung cancer, you were a smoker = 90%

therefore

P(C|S) = P(S|C)*P(C)/P(S) = 0.90 * 0.06 / 0.20 = 0.27

This means, if you smoke, your chance of dying from lung cancer : 27%

Conversely, if you don't smoke, your chance of dying from lung cancer: = 0.1 * 0.06 / 0.80 = 0.75%

To sum up, you are 36 times more likely to die from lung cancer if you smoke than if you don't smoke.

Savor the flavor while you can I guess!

Roach Coach

2010-03-27T16:33:00.003+11:00

So we finally broke down and got one of these:

It's only been a few days of transportational freedom. So far, I've noticed:

It's easy to get to awesome places that we otherwise didn't go to because (in spite of not being that far away) too many tram transfers tended to be involved...like St. Kilda, for pizza to eat on the shore, or the South Melbourne Market, for tasty antipasti, meats and dips.
Everywhere we've been so far has these:

I can't tell you how much I hate cockroaches. Strange, that we just went through 15 months of hoofing it...we get a car, and suddenly, everywhere we go is teaming with them.

What could it mean? Why? Why?!!!

Weight

2010-03-27T03:22:00.005+11:00

You may have heard of a category 5 hurricane... There's also a scale (category 1, 2, 3...) scale for tornadoes called the Fujita scale. F5 is the strongest tornado possible (although there's a mythical F6 "inconceivable tornado" category that starts above ~512 km/h (318 mph) but has never been used).

From what I've read, Ted Fujita, who developed the scale, was a neat guy. I could imagine him being mentioned in a Bill Bryson book, for example. I once read that on his days off he loved to do little experiments like measure and plot how his weight changed throughout the day. I saw one of these charts and it was annotated with bits like "mowed lawn", "afternoon snack". Years ago, when googling, I also saw a daily chart of weight on Robert Balling's webpage (he was a climatologist in Arizona) and thought it was fascinating.

Now, I also vaguely remember that my dad did something similar, that he'd weigh himself daily and write it up on a calendar. He had had a series of heart attacks so keeping his weight down was a serious issue. I've since read that they discourage you from weighing yourself every day, just so it doesn't become an obsession, or put you in a foul mood when there's some random fluctuation.

But I say "bah!" to all that. Why not collect the data and know and understand? So this below is my weight, measured first thing in the morning, since moving to Australia. On the left is pounds, on the right kg, with a 10 day moving average.

A wee bit of time series analysis showed that the daily standard deviation is somewhere between 1-1.5 pounds. Even more interesting, there's a negative autocorrelation, so that any rise or fall in weight sticks around on average for 2-3 days but then 10-13 days later rebounds in the opposite direction. The most I've ever gained in a day was 4.2 lbs at the end of October, followed by a record loss of 3.8 lbs the next day, so likely just water weight. It was no doubt due to beer. I can starve myself all day, but have one beer and I inevitably skyrocket the next day.

As for why it goes up and down over the long term, hard to say for sure. Looking back on the calendar, the rise in July might have been during a very busy and stressful time at work and when my mom visited. The slump in October happened when Kitty went to southeast Asia. I reckon there were fewer collateral calories during that period, as evidenced by a total absence of chocolate bar wrappers in the bed. Then new years' rise was because of a 1 week non-stop meal. More recently I've tried to cut ramen soup and crackers out of my diet.

Knowing all this, it's hard for me to say what the best weighing strategy is. I'd probably say every two weeks is fine, keeping in mind that changes of less than 3% of your body weight are within the limits of noise.

Affordability of housing II

2010-03-24T21:28:00.003+11:00

I think what Tom is saying, in the next post, is that, hooray....before we met or got married, we both bought in the bottom of the market in US. Then, when we immigrated, we were very fortunate to both sell near the the top.

If we're very lucky, we can afford to buy a new house, in the very far out suburbs, in something that looks much like this?

We do have our health though. :) -Kitty

affordability

2010-03-24T11:05:00.002+11:00

The median price of a home in Portland oregon is $265,000 usd, which is about $289,000 Australian dollars. The value of a Portland house, in US dollars, went down about 12% since we sold last year. The value in the equivalent Australian dollars, when you include how the dollar's sunk, has gone down 38%.

$289k AUD about the cost of a house in "regional victoria", i.e. the far suburbs and country outside the cities. Inside the metro area, median price is more like $440,000aud and that went up almost 18% (in Australian dollars... up 66% in equivalent US dollars) this year. Apparently, Melbourne-proper houses haven't been under $290,000 since 2002.

A Good Paddling

2010-03-21T19:15:00.009+11:00

Still needing those "sun gloves"...I've given up on sunscreen and just stay plain covered. Me in the polka dot hat, Tom in the driver's seat, behind, in our blue canoe. All our gear for the weekend in small barrels. We packed, and ate, light, for once!

This weekend we went on a canoe paddling trip with 16 other people from Tom's hiking group on the the Goulburn river, from Seymour to Nagambie. It was only about an hour from Melbourne where we met picked up our canoes. We paddled down river for about 6 hours on Saturday, stopping briefly for lunch and to wring out a few folks who capsized. They weren't worried about their wet clothes and we pitched in extra sleeping gear and food, but the ruined phones and cameras were a bit sad. Today we paddled only three hours and landed at a winery/cafe, just in time...we were tired and ready to be done...It only took half an hour by bus to get back to our cars at Seymour, though it took us 9 hours of paddling the other way! Guess there were a lot of winding bends in the river!

We reckon we made it at least as twice as far by tacking back and forth across the river with our novice canoeing skills. Being the boating genius I am (I used to be big into sailing in Portland), I kept "whinging" (whining) to Tom for not steering us properly. Being the kind teacher he is, he offered to let me sit in the driver's seat (though he does have a whole 30 pounds on me and the "bigger of the two is supposed to sit in back"). It was less than five minutes of us spinning in crazy, undirected circles before I conceded. He asked if I might now give him "5% less guff" about his steering, which (hopefully he realized), I was glad to give up. Nothing like a little perspective to sush up a complainer, really. :)

If anyone ever wants to write a metaphor about teamwork, timing, working together, etc. as it relates to canoeing, it's all there for the taking ... not as easy as it looks, for sure. I think I also did a mild amount of nagging about sunscreen, which fell on deaf (and now somewhat red) ears. But did you know that sunscreen is really pretty carcinogenic itself?

The views were gorgeous. We spotted several koala's in the trees along the way. Some might even say my koala watching distracted me from my paddling and it could be true! :)

Last week, Tom went on a 20 kilometer hike with some of the same folks. He says canoeing is like "hiking, but with your hands" and also wondered a few times if we could "swim there any faster than we're rowing". You reckon?

We're soaking in baths now, layering ourselves in bug bite cream and Aloe Vera, and trying to get re-hydrated. Even simple pleasures like a soft bed and a hot meal are more treasured than ever.

I saw two lizards, a snake whizzed right past our tent, and a new friend, Bree, said she was covered in poisonous huntsman spiders and cockroaches all night, and I didn't really freak out at all. I do want to buy a 4" deep princess-and-the-pea-style sleeping mat and blister-preventing gloves for the next trip though. That, and maybe get the kind of canoe that has a professional rower / tour guide on it, where I can sit back and just take in the scenery.

Phoenix leaving

2010-03-19T11:24:00.002+11:00

Speaking of poetry... In colorado there's a Judge named Justice Greg Hobbs, who is an authority on water law. He's also published books of poems on water and nature and so on. He's a nice guy too.

Around the time that I started reading his work, I wrote the below, describing my experience of taking off in an airplane at sunset out of Phoenix, flying over the Salt/Verde River, the farmlands and city blocks and over some of their water supply reservoirs. Tom

Phoenix leaving
presses me into the seat
a small fire in an empty riverbed
lifts a lazy cursive plume
over postage stamp blocks
single cell vehicles
course through square veins
a cigarette tip sunset
reflects on a lake
behind a dam
waiting to exhale

Go SWIFTly into that good night

2010-03-17T08:34:00.003+11:00

I'm in Canberra this week for a research planning meeting. Each of about 12 research leaders have to say something about their progress and plans on work to support the Bureau of Meteorology. I gave a talk about my work with developing better short-term (hours ahead to days ahead) river flow forecasts. The organizers encouraged everyone to bring a prop to support their talk. I wrote this poem, "Go SWIFTly into that good night"


The rivers rose throughout the night
the users woke in such a fright
The rain came down like cats and dogs
the channels choked with fallen logs
“What should we do?” they cried aghast
“Lets hope this night is not our last”
It all begins with NWP
to say what future rain will be.
Not knowing that will leave you sunk
too bad the results always stunk.

NWP is Numerical Weather Prediction, weather models. In most cases, you can say very little about future floods without a good weather forecast. Unfortunately, these models are not good about predicting rain (as opposed to temperature).


If by now you aren’t defeated
find out if the soils’ depleted.
Simulate a little bit and
find parameters with good fit

We use hydrology models to track how dry the soils are and what effect it'll have on streamflow production. These models have parameters that need to be calibrated.


But don’t catch bad habits like
helping models breed like rabbits.
Existing structures are just fine
unless you need to say “all mine!”

Most hydrology models were developed in the 1960-1970s. Over the years, everyone and his sister has made their own minor variant of these models and gave it their own name. It's a bit cynical to call these "vanity models" but often times only the developer ends up using their own model. This didn't get nearly the laughs I was expecting, probably because many of the people in the room were guilty of this.

GR4J seems fine to me
but demonstrating skill is key.
Is there an incremental gain?
Or are the results just the same?

GR4J is a great french model that is simple and works well.

 
We must say how uncertain we are
especially in leadtimes far
If the forecasts are off kilter
I recommend a kalman filter
Or maybe try your best and let
error correction clean the mess.

A Kalman filter is useful for looking at how well your forecasts are tracking the recent observed, and if there are differences, it'll say how to fix the model states. I couldn't think of a rhyme with 4 Dimensional Variational Assimilation.


We present wrapped like in a gift
as some software we now call SWIFT
SWIFT makes forecasts to be trusted
SWIFT won’t leave you feeling busted

SWIFT is the acronym of the software we're developing.


There’s one block to this thing
that keeps us from our researching
Others sure do have it easy
The whole ordeal makes me queasy
My wife slaves away very late
Squadrons of Anzac cookies she must bake
I beg for sub-daily data
and the Bureau says “uh… see you later!”

Lots of projects use daily rainfall data, but good sub-daily (i.e. hourly) data is hard to come by. Kitty bakes cookies for me to give away at work in exchange for data, but progress has been slow.... Notice how only an american could rhyme data ("day-tor") with later ("lay-tor"), as opposed to "dah-tah" and "lah-tah".


Well, if you agree to our demands
I ask now to join your hands
Give it up and cheer like fools
For Short-term Water Information Forecasting Tools!

Believe it or not I won a bottle of wine for best prop!

Girls' Weekend Getaway

2010-03-15T15:13:00.003+11:00

Back: Holly, Debbie, Kate, Alexis, Me (Kitty), Peta

Front: Sara (birthday girl), Huibee, Jen, Sherron, Aimee

Over the weekend, I went with a bunch of girls to Anglesea, a small town on the Great Ocean Road, about an hour and a half drive from Melbourne. We were celebrating Sara's birthday at her dad's beach house. I had another handful of great moments of realizing what wonderful friends I've made here. That, followed by other moments, like at 2 am, trying to sleep, wondering just how I came to have so many friends who love to sing George Michael songs at the top of their lungs on a home karaoke machine? There was lots of eating and drinking, dancing and singing, spa visits and pedicures, a music festival and gorgeous walk on the beach.

The washed-up seaweed didn't smell so good, but it was fun to poke around in the tide pools and find little creatures.

When we were packing the car, Aimee (shown above), who is on our pub quiz team, and one of the first friends we made in Melbourne, got hurt. She jambed her little finger on some luggage and it stayed bent, something like this:

She said it didn't hurt but it was pretty freaky to look at. We discussed her medical care options on the ride home and agreed that the emergency room at the public hospital would be crowded and that they'd treat every single other person but her first. She eventually called a nurses-on-call hotline and they said it was important that she get treated right away, so she did go to the ER. "Mallet finger" is apparently very common. It's caused by the tendon slipping off its place on the bone. If the splint doesn't get it back in place by tomorrow, she will have to have a minor surgery to repair it.

We also had a giant stick stuck under Debbie's car on the way home...it made a terrible noise and we were guessing it was a fan belt, that would surely lead to engine overheating and, quickly after that, explosion, then death. What a relief to find it was only a stick. All that great relaxing and then a stressful last few hours.

Next weekend, we're going on a canoe trip through wine country. Summer is winding down and we can only hope for great weather like we had this past weekend. I have to buy camping gear for this trip, which makes me want to buy a car to use to buy camping gear. Stay tuned for mammoth purchase updates.

Photo Update

2010-03-08T21:35:00.011+11:00

For you PFDF's (Peacock Feather Dance Followers) who prefer photos to my occasionally pedantic narratives...here's what's new...

Our accountant can do both American and Australian taxes. We invited Susan and her three dogs for dinner and a good visit about tax law. We'll have to file in both countries unless we become citizens here and renounce the US, which seems a little extreme. Australia's financial year ends in June, so it seems like it's always tax time.

We reckon we'll buy a house in a few months. You can't write off the mortgage interest here and yet you also get hit with sales tax, called stamp duty, as soon as you close. If we really save up, we may be able to afford a refrigerator crate in the outer suburbs. Really, the big advantage to owning here is that you can have pets. And drive holes into the walls if you want. We miss both.

Oreo, shown below, went and got his leash and waited in front of the mirror for his reflection to take him for a walk. It's much like how I often wait for my reflection to take me to the gym. He is 10 months old and a guide dog in training. Apparently he has to be on much better standard of behavior when he wears his official "Don't pet me, I'm working" vest; Susan gave him the evening off. He peed on the carpet quite a bit but we didn't care. Call him inspiration for getting out of a rental and back into our own place with hardwood floors.

One of the Golden Retrievers was just as emotionally needy as our Abbie used to be. They left enough hair behind that we can knit a scale model of them. We didn't mind that either.

I went with some girlfriends to a Picnic at Hanging Rock. There is a classic movie by the same title about some school girls that went missing in 1900. I suggested we all wear white dresses, like the girls in the movie but it was a little chilly out when I was getting ready for the train. I'm the one down front, rocking the jeans and hoodie. Boy, were Debbie and Holly (um, white dresses) mad.

We've been doing a lot of board game parties...usually combined with having other couples over and eating my Thai cooking. Ironic it's already called Tom Yum Soup, huh?

Tom is a genius at Monopoly. Here we are playing the Australian version. When he hits me with multi million dollar rents, it's a good reminder that we're on the same team in "for-reals" time. Please note the background laundry drying on the balcony; I have not cracked and bought a drier yet. I am a friend to the environment. Note I do own a white dress though.

We'll miss this view when we go back to the pet-loving / home owning world.

Our friend Glenn took all these last 5 images. Here's a link to his awesome photography blog. We were supposed to go a concert at the zoo (he specializes in wildlife photos) with Glenn and his wife, Vanessa, last night, but it was cancelled due to the massive rain and hail storms we've experienced this weekend. Instead, we had an impromptu potluck with some of their other friends and family. We were moved to tears that they even drove us home in the storm afterwards - we feel so fortunate to have such great friends here.

Speaking of which, Sara, one of my ladies pack alpha dogs, turned 33. We think this was the first time we've closed down a nightclub since college...that's 3:30 am, folks! I was destroyed the next day. We aren't cut out for this kind of thing anymore. Here's Tom and Birthday Girl Sara.

I think this photo really captures the beauty and grace this is us, dancing.

And this is why I don't do Facebook anymore. Does my future employer really need to see me doing my famous Bingo Wings Dance ....

... or Jersey Shore Fist Pump? I think not.

Stay tuned...I sense many more good things are to come. - Kitty

Whirling hail

2010-03-07T03:49:00.003+11:00

John McBride of the Bureau of Meteorology took this video of a massive hail storm/flooding in Melbourne today. The airport registered a 100 km/hour wind gust. There's been two reports of 10 cm (4 inch) hail in Ferntree gully. Parts of the ceiling collapsed in two of the railway stations downtown. Here's a picture of the rain rushing in the roof. More at this gallery.

It was just straight up daffy. We thought our skylight was going to crash in. Water leaked in the windows in about 4 places. The rain was bouncing off the tall buildings nearby and creating this whirlwind of a wall of water in the sky. Before the event was the eeriest deep green blue sky. When it broke, the sound of the hail was deafening, we couldn't hear eachother talk inside the apartment.

Flood forecasting

2010-03-03T09:29:00.004+11:00

I was in Brisbane because Queensland had recently been in floods and it was anticipating that floods might be coming up. I do research on how to make better short-term (less than 10 day ahead) streamflow forecasts. So the Bureau of Meteorology invited me up to see the flood warning office in full swing.

Here's their building on at 69 Ann St:

It's a professional and modern building, with stunning views from the 21st floor. The flood warning center shares office space with the weather forecasters. Here's one of the meteorologists at work.

I had monitor envy. The guy who does data quality control and monitoring of the rainfall systems gets to work at a station with 6 screens:

Inland queensland had been flooding on and off since Christmas. During the visit there was a weather briefing from the meteorologists, saying that there was near uniform agreement from the weather models that a major storm was going to cross down from the north coast into the interior. About 5 days ahead, the forecast was that it would drop more than 100 mm in a day, which is about 4 inches.

In addition to output from models run on some of the world's most powerful computers, there's still a lot of work that happens drawing weather patterns on paper maps with colored pencils:

Yearly average rainfall for the interior is about 200-300 mm. So, yeah, 100 mm's a huge deal, especially since the ground was already saturated!

On the left is Peter Baddiley, the head of the Queensland flood forecasting group. When the rainfall scenarios were run through the river models, the response was epic floods. However, 5 days ahead there's so much uncertainty, you try and be very cautious to avoid false alarms. Although a general alert wasn't sent out that day, high level government authorities (including an emergency management representative who had a jacket with the agency's acronym on the back) were brought in and briefed on the situation while I was there.

It brought me right back to when I was an operational forecasting in the US. Is it going to happen, is it not going to happen? Can you trust your models? Could it be even worse than the models suggest? The thrill, the drama, the anticipation. At the same time, you have to not let your emotions get in the way; Pardon the gruesome imagery, but it reminds me of this quote from the movie Jaws

"Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'."

Nature doesn't care about you. Doesn't care what you think is going to happen. You may fear this or that, or maybe last night you saw a movie about something that plants the seed in your mind of a big drought or flood. But the important thing is to be level headed and objective, pay attention to what the evidence is telling you and always be aware of self-delusion.

In the end, the rainfall was ginormous, widespread areas of heavy rainfall.

The flood response has been big too, large areas in the Major Flood category.

It reminded me that the favorite part of my last job as an operational forecaster was being in that situation of knowing that the tools I had at the time were functional but could be improved. I'd go off and do a bit of tinkering and development and then next time around we'd be better armed to know what was really going to happen. When the event finally unfolded like we thought it would, there was a mix of disbelief and ecstasy that it actually worked and we had been able to discover Truth before it happened. So rarely in life do you discover with certainty that your belief is right or wrong, often you can get by with just arguing for a convincing position. I'd like to think having that experience built character.

My father loved gambling but my mother hated it, so at the very least I got to satisfy that betting urge without losing any money!

Brisbane visit

2010-03-03T09:25:00.004+11:00

Last week I had a chance to go to Brisbane for the first time. It's the capital of Queensland, the northeast state of the nation. As cities go, it's a real looker, downtown has a mix of modern and old architecture. From the airport it was a very easy train ride to the center of town.

Queen Street is a pedestrian mall in the center of the business district, which has all the standard chain stores that Melbourne has, JB Hi Fi, Rebel Sports, Coles, etc. There's few things I enjoy more than people watching in cities. Perhaps its the professional nature of downtown, but most everyone I saw was very well put together, heels, hair, ties and so on.

That said, there was an ACDC concert and the line to get on the buses stretched for 3 city blocks- it took about a minute and a half to walk from one end to the other end, I made a video along the length of the line. ACDC's one of Australia's most famous exports and I reckon you could see 3 generations of rockers standing next to eachother.

Surprisingly tasteful public art pieces are all over.

even some impromptu pieces like this wall covered with dozens of mounds of chewing gum... all in brazen view of this guy:

Really, a "gum removal vehicle?" It was a little electric golf cart with a pressure washer and perhaps a chiller. In all seriousness, it's a clean pleasant city. Downtown was full of interesting places to eat and shop.

I almost lost it when I saw cafe Neko, which had the same name as my old cat.

This place claimed "best coffee in the city", which made me think that Brisbane was ringed by suburbs and townships with better coffee and the qualifier was the result of a court case.

But no limits to the hyperbole on this place. "Best steaks in the world"! I think I would regret going to the grave having walked by the best steaks in the world and not taken them up on their offer. Originally I was going to get the fish and chips, but I said, what the hell, lets pull out all the stops and get the eye fillet (the equivalent of filet mignon). So I ate alone, finishing off the last few pages of Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Country, a travelogue about england where he mostly wanders around in the rain, doing nothing. I read the passage about how something clicks over in your brain when travelling alone for a long time where you start talking to yourself aloud and anyone else who'll listen.

As steaks go, I probably would've rated it as a 7 out of 10. Believe it or not, but the best steak I've ever eaten was during the lunch of the annual Malpai Borderlands Group in 1999. This is a group of environmentally sustainable cattle ranchers in far southeast Arizona/southwest New Mexico. I was giving a guest talk about El Nino and Arizona climate during my Master's research in Tucson. That summer we went around to about 15 different groups, giving similar talks all over the state, but the Malpai group was unforgettable. Literally, the meeting was in a cavernous metal-sheeting walled fairgrounds building with a sea of folding chairs full of the whole spectrum of rural society, mostly leather-skinned ranchers with weathered hands like brick layers'. I had my overhead slides (yes, in the days before powerpoint) and the comically small screen provided for ~300 people was about the size of a card table. However, the positive and enthusiastic response from the crowd and the conversations I had later one-on-one were imprinting. (There were equally imprinting encounters in other cities where a native american elder closed down our meeting, declaring El Nino forecasting to be "bad medicine"... or when I incited a group of ranchers to nearly tossing folding chairs in revolt when I mentioned "global warming")

But I digress... At lunch they had a cowboy lunch with beef and corn and beans and bread on paper plates with plastic forks. I felt that I was tasting the beef equivalent of eating the freshest sashimi vs "fishy" frozen fish. I had been a vegetarian for years at that point and it was the culinary equivalent of the conversion of st paul. That was the best steak I ever had.

Ferris Wheel

2010-03-02T09:35:00.005+11:00

You're supposed to do one thing a day that you're afraid of...at least according to a quote on the trendy shopping bag my yoga pants came in. Unrelated, but want to guess how often I've worn them for yoga?

I'm slightly afraid of heights ... falling from heights, specifically. Actually, being pushed off high things, mostly. Or made to voluntarily leap from them...that would be the worst.

Our Kiwi expat friend, Laura, suggested we go on the ferris wheel downtown after a free symphony concert in the park the other night. Last time we went on a ferris wheel, it didn't go so well. I clung to the post in the middle of our cage and sobbed.

I made Tom promise not to rock the cage, thus fanning the spark of his desire to rock the cage. He was brilliant at finding ways to rock the cage while feigning innocence. It was quite inspiring and I couldn't help but forget my own terror while I tried to scare Laura by also rocking the cage, all the while claiming I wasn't. Another unmarketable skill.

Winner again

2010-02-22T09:09:00.002+11:00

I'm subscribed to a email list/blog "Mel Hot or Not", that every day or two posts a review of some restaurant or event around Melbourne. It's a thumbs up/thumbs down system, although I have to say that it's 95% thumbs up. I have to believe that there's a counter balance somewhere out in the world that's 95% thumbs down, a blog with the mission to expose Melbourne's shoddy service, tired decor, and tasteless treats, one hidden laneway at a time.

Anyhow, I was thrilled that I won their Chai Mamma giveway and have some packs of free chai headed my way! This news of course was counter balanced by the discovery of a weekend suicide-drowning of a full grown cockroach in my coffee cup at work. I'm not easily disgusted when it comes to plates and cutlery (just ask Kitty) but oh YUCK!!!

We had our friends Glenn and Ness over for Australia-Edition monopoly, some other games and home-made thai dinner. They're a hoot, hopefully we'll put up some pictures soon. I reckon Kitty and Ness are long lost sisters, they're so similar, but I'd probably flattering myself to compare myself to Glenn.

Tom

Happy Chinese New Year!

2010-02-16T16:01:00.010+11:00

We went to a Chinese New Year banquet celebration at a family restaurant last night. The food was fabulous and mammoth. Another TomKit eating marathon.

I always save room for the most important meal of the day.

This was something like course number 17, sweet and sour special fish.

Sing-Tao, the restaurant, had just purchased a fancy new black dancing lion suit for the occasion. After dinner, all 250 of us filed outside to watch it ward off bad spirits with firecrackers, mimic drinking beer out of a 5 gallon salad oil drum and make a greedy mess eating a giant plate of salad. Though it was huge fun, Tom and I were both a little traumatized, as the lion looked and acted very just like a naughty Lhaso Apso we once had, Angelina Jolie.

Kitty and the fancy new lion.

Angenlina Jolie as a puppy: demon in a cute suit.

Our friends we went with, Aimee and Sara, are on our pub quiz team. We were all just a little more than shocked when the evening's trivia question sheets were handed out and the rest of our table whipped out their I-phones and started Googling away at the answers. I guess what was worse is that we surrendered to openly cheating, yet we still lost the competition by the one point we missed for the whole evening. It made me want to go up to the table that won and totally accuse them of being cheaters. Not a proud day for my people.

Sara, Aimee, TomKit - Sara won a gift certificate to a new restaurant in town. Happy day!

There was a raffle. A popular door prize in Australia is giant platters of raw meat. You know, hamburger (called "mince" here), pork chops, sausages, etc. That tickled me for some reason. Really? Meats? Mmmm....random!

I cheat at trivia, I copy and paste stock photography. Who AM I?

Apparently, the restaurant had another festival seating the night before, and there was one grand prize that was to be won between the two nights....either Sunday or Monday. A little ten year old boy had the raffle ticket for it, which must have been thrilling for him. When he got up on stage, the family restaurant matriarch who was running the raffle announced that, in fact, he hadn't won, not for sure that is. She would open an envelope and then he would open one. This would tell us if some guy from the night before was the actual winner. It was all very confusing to us. Imagine being a ten year old thinking you're about to become "rich" and following all this. There was a kind of a communal groan of sympathy as the lady announced with her heavy Chinese accent, "And ... you .... are .... NOT .... the winner." The poor kid stood there for a while wondering what to do next, like, "Is this a hoax?".

"And you are NOT a winner!!!"......hum....

2010 is the year of the Tiger, same as 1974, when Tom was born, so he was in a special drawing for a Tiger door prize, which he won! He's not much of a drinker, but how fun is opening a red envelope that validates you're a winner (of a bottle of champagne in this case)?! Now that's more like it.

A livable city

2010-02-12T17:34:00.002+11:00

It seems that Melbourne is the 3rd most livable city in the world behind Vancouver and Vienna.

Top 10 cities

Bottom 10 cities

Rank	Country	City	Rating
1	Canada	Vancouver	98.0
2	Austria	Vienna	97.9
3	Australia	Melbourne	97.5
4	Canada	Toronto	97.2
5	Canada	Calgary	96.6
6	Finland	Helsinki	96.2
7	Australia	Sydney	96.1
8=	Australia	Perth	95.9
8=	Australia	Adelaide	95.9
10	New Zealand	Auckland	95.7

Rank	Country	City	Rating
130=	Senegal	Dakar a	48.3
132	Sri Lanka	Colombo	47.3
133	Nepal	Kathmandu	47.1
134	Cameroon	Douala	43.3
135	Pakistan	Karachi	40.9
136	Nigeria	Lagos	39.0
137	PNG	Port Moresby	38.9
138=	Algeria	Algiers	38.7
138=	Bangladesh	Dhaka	38.7
140	Zimbabwe	Harare	37.5

life after people

2010-02-11T08:33:00.002+11:00

I think Kitty watches a lot of documentaries. In particular she likes watching the show "Intervention", a reality show where people have addictions and their loved ones try to get them into treatment. A couple months ago we drew up a story board of a clip we wanted to make of us doing an intervention on her addiction for watching too much Intervention (until we realized it's already been done!). One scene involves me cracking open the door on a dimly lit bedroom, her ashen face lit by the glow of her laptop. She ignores to my pleas that I felt she was turning into a mushroom. The only response I can get from her is a faint sneer/growl when I get too close to her bedside chocolate.

So this morning when I was getting ready to head out to work I heard some new documentary in the bedroom. After listening for a bit I realized that it was a combination of "how it works" and "life without people". Some of these post apocalyptic shows talk about how long it would take for grass to recapture the pavement or how long until hoover dam burst with no people around.

This show was talking about what would happen after the disappearance of all people on Earth to... wait for it... "the holidays". It was complete with dramatic narrator whose tone was a combination of drama, pity and something sinister. Your natural Christmas tree would wither and decompose... but how long would your artificial Christmas tree last? Cue the brief history of artificial trees... a few shots of the artificial tree factory... simulated time-lapse video of tree decomposing. And those large breasted Turkeys bred for Thanksgiving? How long do you think they'd last in the wild? Let me tell you... Not long at all (buh bah bum)!

I was incredulous.... yet at the same time somewhat impressed. I give her points for being a completest. I never thought she'd finally watch her way to the end of all the material the Internet! We'll have to wait for tomorrow when they come out with new material. I'm picturing the reality show about where-are-they-now celebrities' overweight dogs after the apocalypse. How long do you think they'd last in the wild? Not long at all (buh bah bum)!

Toffee the Cat

2010-02-06T22:51:00.004+11:00

This is Toffee. She belongs to a friend from my classics book club who is getting married in July, resulting in a lot of details that culminate in Toffee needing to find a new home. He is a terribly friendly, smart, furry, affectionate cat. We went to meet him today. You know you've found a great cat when he happily lets Tom flip him over backwards and sing his "how not to hold a cat" song while he rubs his tummy and tickles his paws.

We know we plan to stay here for a while, that we loved having pets and that we'll want some fur children to love and care for. No commitment yet, but when certain people get a job and certain people get their own house, certain cats may possibly get adopted by certain people.

Tom was all smiles while we visited Toffee - that is like borderline hysteria for Mr. Stoic Composure Guy, so I hope it does work out.

Movie Dancing

2010-02-06T22:35:00.003+11:00

This dance instructor had a great smile, and abs! I convinced Tom take his hat and sunglasses off for the sake of capturing details of his expressions for blog photos...my plan backfired.

The video we took of my"Dirty Dancing" looked like I had something stuck on both my shoes that I was trying to shake off. I guess that's dirty.

Slumdog.

We went to a dance class downtown at the Docklands marina today which was great fun. Learned Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire, Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing and Michael Jackson's Thriller. I had trouble with my zombie march, though I love making those spooky arms. Tom is a good little moon walker.

One of the instructors had just come back from being on So You Think You Can Dance Australia. It's like So You Think You Can Dance (America), but the contestants outfits are slightly more garish, slightly less fashionable and they all talk adorably. Good incentive to keep us dancing if that's where they got these abs.

Next week, my ladies group is all going and we're going to add an ABBA song from Muriel's Wedding and Saturday Night Fever.

Food Experimentation Group

2010-02-04T19:35:00.006+11:00

Our waiter panders as we ponder 'which fork'.

Scallop with sweet potato wrapped in bacon. They often leave the "caviar" on scallops here and many claim that is the best part. The "caviar" is a chunk of highly disgusting pink guts that I'm glad were left off in this dish. Tom is allergic to scallops so I only have them when we go out.

Twice-cooked pork belly. Lots o belly, not too much pork.

Leek soup and crispy soldiers, toastini and fried fish. This could have been a whole meal on its own.

One of the best things we've done in terms of immigrating (our supposed theme for this blog!) is to join a heap of meetup.com groups. We're in book clubs, hiking, a women's group (Tom is kind of an honorary member of that one) and an American Expat meetup, to name a few. We've met a lot of people this way and it has really helped us acclimate.

We recently joined the "Foodie Experimentation" group, which is held at a French restaurant close to our flat. The owner of Chez Olivier, Olivier, is quite a good marketeer, and host (and photographer, thanks for the photos). I heard another meetup is held there each week, where people gather to eat, drink wine and practice their conversational French.

On Monday night, for only $33, we enjoyed an eight course dinner...four solid hours of rich, delicious foods. We made new friends with people at our table and filled out questionnaires on each dish, which will help their chefs with planning their menu and specials in the future.

We woke up the next day with butter-hangovers, if there is such a thing. That was some rich, tasty food and a lot of it. Of course we immediately signed up for next month's tasty soiree'.

Volunteering

2010-01-31T19:18:00.005+11:00

In my earlier search, I overlooked this one

The 2001 "International Year of the Volunteer" dollar. I had found the 2003 "Australia Year of the Volunteer". You have to wonder if the "committee for the year of the volunteers" gets paid.

Volunteering is an important cause given that it also got a 50 cent piece. It features a kaleidoscope of volunteers from emergency services, meals on wheels, shelters, charities (e.g. clothes donations), conservationists, sports volunteers, big brother/big sister, firefighters, and surf lifesavers.

It doesn't stop there. There's also the 2003 Australia year of the volunteer 20 cent piece. They don't just hand out 20 cent pieces. Not even the queen has a commemorative 20 cent coin!

The last of the 50 cents

2010-01-31T18:37:00.002+11:00

It's hard to believe that this blog has had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 posts about Australian commemorative coins. But I think we're near the end of the line. On Christmas morning I was treated to an easter egg hunt around the house of all the 50 cent pieces I hadn't yet found. Some are hard to come by, such as

The 1970 celebration of 200 years since captain Cook was the first recorded European to encounter the eastern coast of Australia. Apparently the one who got big fame out of the trip was English Botanist Joseph Banks. He is most famous in our circles as being a great answer to any Botanist question at pub quiz.

1988 First Fleet Bicentenary. The map reads New Holland. The stars are the southern cross. 18 years after Cook landed, the first settlers arrived at Botany Bay. Or rather, first convicts arrived. 1,403 people set out, 1,332 arrived including 18 children convicts (!), 4 of which were born en route (!!) during the 8 month journey. They arrived on 26 January, just in time for Australia Day.

2000 Millennium Year. Was anyone besides me disappointed that Y2K didn't end in total chaos?

Again with the Royalty! This is the flagpole at Parliament House. The queen visited in 2000.

And then there's this oddball. A Merino Ram's head graces this 1991 celebration of the 25th anniversary of ... Decimal Currency. Before then, they used the shilling. For almost 30 years, the Merino Ram was on the back of the Australian shilling, as a symbol of domestic agriculture. A pound is like the dollar. A shilling is 1/20 of a pound. A penny is 1/12th of a shilling. Totally makes sense, that.

More public healthcare accolades

2010-01-29T17:13:00.004+11:00

Well the bad news is that the Reece's Peanut Butter Cup -> Broken Rib -> Lung Infection debacle wears on. I still keep Tom up at night coughing. It could also be some kind of rare virus or infection I picked up in SE Asia. So my GP suggested a chest X-ray. It showed scar tissue in my lungs. Good! Nice strong sinewy lungs...they oughta serve me well for a long time. Who wants wimpy little tissue paper lungs? Everyone thinks Clint Eastwood has a nice leathery face, why can't I have nice leathery breathing organs?

Anyway, I don't know where they're going with this, but today I got sent for a CT scan, which I remember being a big deal in the US. Like you had to choke up a hunk of cancerous tissue first and then, maybe, after a series of appeals to your insurance company, you might get approved for the partial payment of getting one. My impression is that they had out referrals for those things like lollies here.

Cost to me? Free!

It was the first time I got to go to the state hospital, which was just as nice or nicer than any other hospital I've seen. The whole procedure didn't take more than 20 minutes. I ran errands on the way and the technicians actually carried my grocery bags of prawns, cheese and Thai vegetables around for me. And the giant tub of garlic dip I devoured after fasting all day for this dumb thing. I also bought a brownie on the way home. Between that and the Xanax I gobbled down when I found out needles were involved, it looks like a nap is imminent.

The only weird part was the IV of dye. They made me sign something that I was aware it would 1) make me feel flushed and hot and 2) make me think I tinkled myself, but that I wouldn't actually tinkle myself. My parents' cars have heated car seats so I know the exact feeling. Sure enough, when they started pumping in the creepy fluid, I got hot and thought I tinkled myself, but didn't. Mmmnnnn....overshare.

If anything, I feel guilty that I'm presumably not even really sick, but I'm getting this state of the art, customer-servicey-convenient health care for free. After all the time I spent in Indian hospitals doing my thesis, being the welfare plan administrator at my old job and trying to help our manufacturing employees figure out how to use their US private health plans in a way they could afford, and reading what Haitian survivors are going through trying to get patched up, it's all kind of hard to reconcile --- why me?

About america

2010-01-28T10:24:00.002+11:00

Today I came across a quote from Jeremy Clarkson, the English host of the car racing show Top Gear.

He says about America,

"Everybody's very fat, everybody's very rude, and they all offer you cheese. (Mimics American accent) 'D'ya want cheese with that?' And then they shoot you."

where's the bank?

2010-01-23T11:34:00.003+11:00

On friday I went down to southern cross, the main railway station for downtown, a hub of all the trains for the city as well as the large interstate lines that go out into the country. While down there I figured I'd run an errand and deposit a big sack of coins from the bedroom nightstand.

I stopped off at the main newspaper stand and asked where the nearest bank was. The guy replied after some thought "There's no bank here. Only ATM down there" and pointed to the other end of the station. I felt that "there's no bank here" was fairly definitive. It almost made it sound there were banks formerly but they had finally managed to get rid of them. So I kept on walking, looking for a branch, any branch.

Soon I spotted two college age kids handing out bottled water for NAB (National Australian Bank). Surely I thought these people would know. "Uhh, nearest bank. You mean the nearest NAB (shakes bottle enticingly)! Not sure. I reckon you should head downtown". Already being downtown, I figured mission accomplished. "So your instruction is to keep on wandering around until I eventually find one?" "Yep" "Why thank you, that's a great idea!" "Too easy, cheers!"

Finally I stopped in a watch repair place and asked. The jeweler appeared pleasantly surprised at the prospect of a customer but when he found out I was just asking directions he replied disdainfully "Aww, everywhere's a bank, mate!" To which I said "In that case, I'd like to make a deposit!"

I think something may have got lost in the translation, he didn't think it was that funny and eventually just walked away. A couple blocks later I found a cluster of six banks, all of them closed. Note to self, banks open at 9:30 fridays.

Haiti Quake

2010-01-18T17:42:00.004+11:00

People aren't really talking about Haiti much here. One friend asked if it was a popular travel destination for Americans and we could only think of examples of humanitarian work being done there, no vacationers that we knew of.

One of the fellows I went to school with has a business there and was in the earthquake. I don't know him well, as he lived in another city and I only saw him when we all met up for a few weeks each semester. Here are some quotes from emails he sent to another classmate:

"We barely made it. We were so close to death. Our warehouse and office building fell while we were still in it. Many employees were not as lucky. I do not wish anyone to experience what I've seen that day and the days after. Times are desperate here. Food, gas and medical supplies are extremely rare. Dead people all over the roads. We've been spending most of our days and nights helping the survivors and dead out of our company's rubbles. DONATE and raise as much as possible."

"We worked for 8 hours to remove a girl from the debris - we were so happy for her.... She had been under the rubble for 21 hours. We used our truck (the ones we use to distribute our products) to take her to a hospital. After being rejected by 5 hospitals, including the UN, a hospital accepted her. We just learned that she passed away because no one attended to her. No one had time. DONATE...."

It's pretty horrifying that Haiti had so little to start with - daunting how much suffering there must be and how long it will take to recover.

Anyway, my classmates are donating to Doctors Without Borders. Click here if you'd like to.

Trains and trams troubles

2010-01-18T15:56:00.011+11:00

"Our" train station, just up the street.

One big reason we decided on our high rent flat is that it's next to a train station. A hub of a train station - a good one that splinters trains off in lots of directions. It has a 7-11 that sells my favorite iced coffee drink, Ice Breakers (450 calories, and I have one most every day). It also has a deli that serves delicious, cheap, crispy fried chicken parts.

We mostly take trains North/South and trams if we need to go East/West. A tram is like a trolley, it runs on rails (slowly) and stops often (constantly). I don't like to transfer more than once... occasionally we're looking at 1 train + 1 tram + 1 tram + short walk. I have a special word for that, "taxi".

A tram. Note Melbourne's cartoonishly perfect

palm trees, which are everywhere.

Tom always buys a monthly pass all-zone pass, so he can ride anything he wants all day for no extra cost.

I probably have fifty pairs of shoes more than I need, but it just destroys me to not plan my training and tramming for the day in the most cost effective way. For about $3, you get a two hour window to ride any combination of trains or trams...but if you validate your punch card within 3 minutes of the hour, you can get nearly three hours out of it. So guess who mills about train stations watching the clock? The girl who talks funny with the pink shoes, yes!

Now they're changing the whole system...when we get on board either a tram or train, instead of disposable little punch cards, we're supposed to start using a credit card type thing, called "Myki". Their tagline is "Myki, it's your key". We've found the advertising and marketing people here aren't terribly sophisticated.

New hard plastic travel passes. No worries if it gets lost, your balance is tracked by fancy computers and you can get a new one, easy peasy.

Today I went to have some routine tests done at the hospital. I made a slight bookkeeping misestimation (that's my word for "spent too much over the holidays and forgot to transfer money out of savings"). So when the X-ray receptionist told me my bankcard was declined, I didn't have a melt down, but I was a little embarrassed. Everyone is really SO nice here that even these kind of things are pretty manageable. Tom straightened it out, I paid the bill, which Medicare will mostly reimburse us for, and I went to get on the tram.

Which was peppered with ticket checking agents. Now one of my worst nightmares is to be one of those passengers who gets a $172 ticket for riding public transportation without a validated ticket. What could be more shameful? I would never let this happen. I ALWAYS have a valid ticket.

So here I am, this cutting edge new Myki card holder, aglow with redemption from my last humiliation, only moments prior. I whip out my new Myki plastic wallet (very handy) and swipe my new Myki card over the tram's new Myki reader, right in front of the officer. Nothing happens. No light blinks. No sound makes. I swear I was doing this all weekend and it worked every time.

The officer, ticket pad in hand, tells me Myki isn't valid on trams. I did a quick round of "Nuh uh!...Uh huh!...Nuh uh!" in my head. This is seldom useful to play out in a real negotiation so I try to just do it in my head. I wonder if anyone on the tram also got to witness my credit card incident at the hospital? Admitting defeat, I punch one of my old paper passes with the old manual validating machines and skulk off to a seat.

Old, paper punch pass. They often get wadded up in pants pockets and stop working. Occasionally, laundered and rendered useless.

Now tonight, when I go to our board games group, it's going to cost me like an extra seventy cents. If that happens a hundred more times, guess who won't be getting new shoes?

As it turns out, the ticket policeman was right, the trams aren't using the new system because the of glitches in the roll out. I read it online. It's an all out debacle here. Seriously, this is big news for Australia. The injustice of it all. How did we not notice this before we let ourselves get roped into the whole new Myki thing?

I think I was somewhat aware of just what luxury problems I had in America. This reminds me that, in fact, I think we're even more insulated from everyday troubles here. Last night in the park, a friend asked if we thought we would stay here indefinitely. It's hard to imagine anywhere I could enjoy living more. Maybe we'd leave eventually, I guess, if something took precedence over enjoyment, which it certainly could. I'm not sure what that might be...career, family, personal development, sense of purpose, access to wider range of nifty shoes...hard to say.

It snowed

2010-01-18T10:47:00.003+11:00

Following on our heatwave a week ago, it looks like it's snowed this morning up at Lake Mountain at ~4500 feet (~1300 meters). That's just about a 2 hour ride northeast of Melbourne. This morning in Melbourne the low was 10.4 C/50 F with 30 mile per hour winds. Realize we're in the northern hemisphere equivalent of late July here!

What did we do this weekend?

2010-01-18T07:13:00.006+11:00

Tom has been moving in to his new office. I wasn't clear why he wanted the old, abandoned receptionist's area, but now I can see how much light and open space he'll have.

How fancy....an office with guest chairs in it? We're trying to picture who is going to stop by and lounge in them.

Tom even bought some decorative office foliage this weekend. Here that is called a "pot plant". That sounds funny to me, so I keep trying to correct him, "Potted plant". But no, it's one of those armageddon-proof 'pathos' varieties, and they do call them "pot plants" here. Giving up our plants in America was tough. It's good to see him letting himself love again.

More going to the moonlight cinema and pretending lollies are our teeth. We never seem to get tired of this. Here we are with friends Mel and her boyfriend, Mark, seeing a movie that made us want to take up roller skating. Last week they climbed they Sydney bridge for Mel's birthday, how fun is that!

Though she moved here from New Zealand with the requisite two suitcases a year ago, Mel was wise enough to get renter's insurance (or as they call it here, "contents" insurance). Apparently I loaned her a book or two (I don't remember them). The flat over hers flooded so, after the claim was processed, she insisted on reimbursing me for them. Books are CRAZY expensive here due to some kind of publishing protectionism thing. I'm in two book clubs, "Women's" and "Classics", and I order everything from Better World Books. Thanks to the Bank Of Melissa, a huge portion of this year's reading list is now financed! This includes:

Rebecca

Perfume

The Tree of Man

Candide

Swann's Way

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Trial

The Sun Also Rises

My Father's Moon

Carpentaria: A Novel

Barchester Towers

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jane Eyre

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Tale of Two Cities

The Woman in White

Sarah's Key

Breath: A Novel

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

The Handmaid's Tale

One Hundred Years of Solitude

This weeks dance lesson was funk. It was my favorite so far, despite the sprinkles of rain. You know when you aren't sure of the right dance moves so you just kind of jiggle around? Those are the actual right dance moves in funk. Here we are with our friends who let us house sit when we were homeless last year (after first arriving), Andrew, Dave and Beth, our Bollywood dance buddy Diane, and her husband Michael.

We had some great meals out with a few other friends....we eat out a couple times a week, but nowhere ever makes me so happy at Movida, which is downtown, only two train stops away. I'm addicted to their: Cigarillo, a baby leek wrapped in brik pastry, served with a chicken liver parfait and the Cecina, which is air cured wagyu beef, thinly sliced with a truffle foam and poached egg.

Mystery buzzer

2010-01-13T09:34:00.002+11:00

I'm moving into a new office at work in to a building that is probably from the 70s. I'm reclaiming a receptionist's area that is outside a large office that used to belong to a CSIRO chief. I've been cleaning and rearranging and just trying to make it my own so I came in a couple hours before anyone else.

The floorboards have an array of bizarre sockets and cables so that I'm guessing pretty much anything could be run through the walls, phones, internet, printers, intercoms, etc. There's even a doorbell. Given that everything is running through the internet now, I figured nobody would be using these anymore so I started cutting some of the cables and pushing them back into the wall.

Within about a half hour a bleary eyed maintenance man in overalls bursts in and says, to effect, "good lord, what's going on in here?". It turns out that one of the cables I cut was for an emergency distress signal and it probably set off a siren at the security station.

When we realized what happened there were laughs all around but he explained that this was a predecessor to the "man down" system for people that are likely working alone in dangerous situations. Mostly it's used for labs and the machine shops... However you'd often also see it in the HR and executive offices (where I am), wired up under the bottom of a desk in case someone came in and started to cause a bit of trouble (e.g. disgruntled employee, irate citizen).

Putting two and two together, I think I actually found a real-life "release the hounds!" buzzer. I'll have to be careful that I don't trip that lever to open the trap door.

Tom

heat hunting 2010

2010-01-11T17:19:00.005+11:00

Back in Arizona I used to roam around with my office mate to see if we could find the hottest spot on the hottest day of the year. Last year, at the height of the record-breaking heat wave, I tried to see what would be the hottest for Melbourne. I was looking for something big and metal and eventually found a slab at a construction site that registered 145.5 F/63 C.

Today looked like it was going to be a scorcher, so this morning I called in sick with a terrible "cold". Right around 4:30 when it appeared like the airport temperature had reached its peak (110 F, 43C), I donned my cashmere wool overcoat and hat and set out.

First stop was the tram rails at Chapel and Toorak. In theory, a great spot, but I think I'm going to give up on this one. I only had the thermometer down for half a minute before the cars at the stoplight started to honk.

Where the construction site was last year, there's a skyscraper now. On the first floor is the Outpost Cafe, a high end coffee place that has a fancy contraption that makes a cup of coffee, one drip at a time over about 4 hours.

Those black metal plates below the windows were just about perfect and they had been facing the sun all day. As I got closer I saw that a couple flies had foolishly landed on the wall and were burnt to a crisp on the spot!

And the verdict is...

165 F/ 74 C, blowing away my record last year by over 11 degrees C! In theory, that really is hot enough to cook an egg (>158 F, 70 C).

It was a banner day for old Salt and Pepper here- a grand time was had by most!

Kitty

2010-01-10T23:10:00.011+11:00

Kitty Hello Kitty

Okay...grace period over. Let's all get on board with this Kitty thing, can we?

Yet not everyone thinks I'm a Kitty. I'm not fluffy. I don't purr. Or bat my little paws in the air adorably. I'm not very histrionic or particularly provocative, as many Kitty's are.

I don't like cats.

Dare I say that anyone who refers to their grown feline as their "kitty" best be chockablock with some kind of redeeming qualities. ***cough***cough***Annoying!

In other non sequiturs, the French and Latin origins of the name "Christine" are "child of Christ". Flattering? Sure. Consistent with my belief system? Oh let's get into politics or religion on a blog post, now.

Leaving everything you own and everyone you know 10,000 miles away sure does make for a clean break. Not that there was anything I wanted to get away from in America, we had great lives there. I just figure that being human is all about choices, and I am going to make conscious ones as often as possible. So it seemed like a good time to decide what I would want to be called. It didn't seem like a big deal, seeing as how this is the same period as when I got married. Lots of women change their last name when they get married...why can't I change my whole name?

The documentary 51 Birch Street picked Kitty for me. After 54 years of marriage, the director's mother dies. He, posthumously, reads his mother's many volumes of diaries and learns that, despite what he and his two siblings took for granted, his parents marriage "was not loving. It was a functioning association." Within a year of his wife's dying, his father moves cross country to be with the love of his life with whom he had worked forty years prior, Kitty. We, the audience, never really know the whole story.

I just know that my family's story is not unlike this. There were a lot of sacrifices made on my behalf. Many people, for compelling and honorable reasons "love the one they're with." Sometimes people put their own fulfillment behind that of others, for a long time, and that is poignant for me.

So this Kitty name, it really only has significance to me, and it brings up all kinds of reminders about gratitude and the blessings in my life, balance, commitment, and family.

It's also easy for people to remember. You know, like the ABC and NPR anchorwoman Mary Martha Roberts? And let's admit it, before you meet a Kitty but you know you're going to meet one, well, the mind boggles.

Cokie Roberts

Whimsical First Name-spiration

Sometimes, instead of actually applying for jobs, I like to imagine HR directors showing my resume to CEO's of giant corporations, you know, the ones worth more than the GDP of Holland? "Here's just one heckofa crackerjack ivy league MBA we've got to pursue." This is said with a flourish and wrist twist as my CV is flung down. Then they enunciate my name. That's the part of the fantasy where I burst into peels of laughter and hilarity ensues.

I was pretending I was chairwoman of the board here.

Actually, it's just me and my classmates. It really just smacks of

"someone's too lazy to stand up for the photo", you think?

Swing dancing and baby luke

2010-01-10T21:26:00.004+11:00

It was a full weekend and we just got back from the first free summer concert/dancing in the park. It's put on by the city, happens every week, and round about 500-800 show up for it. They give fun basic lessons on a particular kind of dance and everyone lines up and does it as a group. That's how we got hooked on Bollywood dancing last summer and eventually ended up taking a class in it. This time around it was Swing dancing and we went with our dear Iranian immigrant friends Sepehr and Azadeh.

They kicked up a storm most of the evening, but I was sidelined after I just couldn't get rid of my "spaghetti arms". When Kitty held up my arm and pressed hers against it, I was supposed to give her tension by pushing back. Instead, when she pressed, I would yield and we would fall over. I suspect there's some completely obvious dancing-relationship metaphor in there but I can't quite put my finger on it.

We also went to visit our friend Catherine and her baby boy Luke. He's just picture perfect, here he's delighting at a perfect sip of aeropress.

Later we saw Herb and Dorothy, an excellent documentary about two elderly art collectors. Here's the trailer:

Movies, concerts and dancing

2010-01-08T18:17:00.009+11:00

No Moonlight Movie Picnic is complete without

Gummy Teeth, or as they are called here, "Lollies".

-Kitty, Tom and Kiwi Expat Friend, Laura -

So what are we doing this SUMMER (it was 93 degrees Fahrenheit today - still odd to have summer in January!).

Well, every Sunday night, we're going to take dance lessons in a giant downtown park. We'll learn: Swing, Salsa, Funk, Bollywood, and, my favorite, movie dances. That will include moves from Saturday Night Fever, Slumdog Millionaire, Dirty Dancing ("Nobody puts Kitty in a corner!"), Muriel's Wedding (a classic here in Australia), and Michael Jackson's Thriller. I just love the part where you do the "zombie hands with knee lifts". They line everyone up, so no partner needed. It was just this kind of class that made us fall in love with Bollywood last year, and sign up for a whole series.

We're booked up with a bunch of different friends to go to the outdoor cinemas. It's quite something, to trek about a kilometer down the road to the gorgeous Botanical Gardens with our backpacks full of sleeping bags, iced coffee, card games, blue cheese and our new favorite snack, grilled pepperoni (like pizza, sans mess). We like to get there early and stake out our turf while we picnic. "You're so American", our friend Laura says last night when I tell her we need to stretch the blanket out bigger. We're finding that Australians make for a really polite, well behaved mob. We seldom see the kind of confrontational crowd dynamics we're used to. Accidentally step on someone? No worries, Mate!

Around 8:30 pm, flocks of wild cockatoos fly over the crowd. Lovely animals, but horrible screechers. I can't believe my brother and his wife had a cockatoo for their first child. They could have raised a race horse for all the trouble and expense of that nefarious bird. It took them about a year to properly rehome it after they started having human kids....now we're the exotic ones and they're the locals.

By 8:45, the giant bats start doing their thing overhead. I was horrified when I realized what was happening the first time, though assured they are gray headed flying foxes, just going out to gather fruit, not hunt humans. Lies, all lies. Wish I'd known that 5000 of them had set up shop in our (hey, there's that American thing again?) park, and that they are protected. One meter wing spans, people. Meh...cute babies anyway.

We're also going to a number of concerts, though I tend to whinge incessantly both about the music always starts so late plus Tom likes stuff that's so cool they expect everyone to want to dance, or, at minimum, stand. Hard to believe I'm looking around for chairs and wondering where the "40+" section is. Tonight we're going to see a famous DJ who goes on at, get this, 1 am, so I'm going to start my power nap now.

There are so many great people here - we're thrilled to have such nice friends and fun things to do.

centennial coins

2010-01-02T23:26:00.010+11:00

Australia day is just around the corner (January 25th). It celebrates the first landing of the colonists. However, Australia's closest equivalent of the 4th of July (US independence day) is "Federation" on January 1st when the Commonwealth of Australia was formed out of 6 british colonies. They appear to be totally into it here, right at midnight December 31st, there were heaps of fireworks, big parties, and cheering. Loads of people were roaming the streets late into the night, completely stink-o.

In 2001 was the 100 year anniversary and it was celebrated by a set of centenary coins, one for each state. They're probably the hardest of the circulated 50-cent pieces to come by. In no particular order:

The coat of arms of Victoria where Melbourne is. From top to bottom, a kangaroo holds a crown. Two women (peace, holding the olive branch and prosperity, holding the cornucopia) support a shield containing the Southern Cross constellation of stars. The base is a grassy mound (called a "Compartment" in coat of arms parlance) and the sprigs growing out the back are Pink Heath, the official flower of Victoria.

Norfolk Island? Seems like a weird one. It's a "self governing" Australian territory, an island half the size of Manhattan with ~2,000 residents far off in the Pacific. Indeed, it's cheaper to fly there from New Zealand than Australia. From the web:

"The arms show a Norfolk Island pine, a native tree, on a rocky mount. The stars are taken from the Australian arms, as well as from the arms of James Cook, who discovered the island in 1774. The anchor, the naval crown and the bible refer to the background of the first settlers, which moved to Norfolk from Pitcairn. The division of the arms is also identical to the arms of Pitcairn. The lion on the crest wears a laurel wreath, which is taken from the arms of James Cook. The cup is taken from the arms of Fletcher Christian, the founder of the Pitcairn Island settlement. The supporters refer to the ties with Britain and Australia. The motto is taken from Matthew 25:34 ["Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."]

I would've imagined that some of Australia's seven other minor territories would've had a chance but maybe they didn't have coats of arms...or an active tourism board.

The Australian Capital Territory gets mention though. Its coat of arms is chockablock with symbolism, mostly related to government (the castle, the crown, the mace and sword). ACT's motto (along the bottom) used to be in Latin "For the King, for the Law, and for the People" until someone pointed out that the translation was actually "... and for the Mob". This coat of arms also features the white and black swans. White swans were a sign of english culture, whereas black swans are more Australian, at times even representative of aborigines.

Western Australia also uses the black swans, swimming in its natural habitat. Kangaroo paw flowers surround the crown on the top and two kangaroos hold boomerangs (again symbolizing aborigines).

More kangaroos in the Northern Territory. This blowup shows a bit more detail of what the coat looks like, but its full of symbolism of fauna, flora, and aborigine art.

Still more kangaroos in New South Wales. Some say the Kangaroo has trouble walking backwards and so is a symbol of moving forward and progress. The lion is a "British" Lion to symbolize English and multicultural roots. The motto is "Newly risen, how bright you shine" (being on the east coast, New South Wales greets the sunrise over the ocean... See also the rising sun at the top of the coat of arms). Every one of those small things in the center (lions, sheep, wheat) has about 3-4 levels of symbolism.

South Australia has a miner's pick and cogs on the right. The bird in the center is a "piping shrike", although there's nothing actually called that, it may be a Murray Magpie. Sturt's pea flowers sprout out the top and the other symbols are for grazing and agriculture.

Queensland's motto is "Bold but faithful". Two stalks of sugarcane surround the crown and maltese cross on top. According to wikipedia, no one quite knows why the maltese cross is used. The shield has a bull, a ram, wheat and gold rising from a pile of quartz. The bird is the Brolga, Australia's only native crane and the red deer is because the queen once gave Queensland some deer as a gift... and they like the queen I guess.

Finally, Tasmania! The motto is "fertility and faithfulness". The shield has wheat, thunderbolts, hops, a ram and apples. The lion on the top is holding a pick and shovel. The shield is held up by two Tasmanian Tigers, which has long been extinct. Tasmania doesn't use this coat of arms much anymore, but instead has replaced it by their government logo, again with the tiger.

Happy 2010!

2010-01-02T10:24:00.005+11:00

Lots to catch up on here, it's been a whirlwind of a holiday... We're still recovering from New Years Eve. There was a "Roaring '20s Burlesque Show" at the Royal Melbourne Hotel. We had a pre-party at our place where everyone got into costume:

Katrina, Catherine, Debi, and Sara (Mustafa took the picture but sadly didn't join us later that evening).
Kitty went as "The Madam". She had a wig that itched and therefore was thrown on the floor with a shriek and a pout, so there was some last minute emergency hair arrangement that had to happen.
Debi and Sara are the organizers of the Meetup.com's "Ladies Lounge" Group, which has been a great way to make friends. Ladies get together and enjoy eachother's company, they're always off doing interesting events and activities around town.
Despite the background looking empty, downtown was completely chockablock with revelers. The tram would pull up and there would be an audible groan from the waiting crowd when the doors opened onto a veritable human terrine. It was like out of the cartoons, a leg sticking out here, an arm dangling there.
The Burlesque Show's website says this

"Happy New Year and thanks to all who participated in the Roaring Twenties Burlesque. All the performers, DJ and MC were exceptional and the full house audience was one of Melbourne's best dressed. According to our Burlesque spies the vibe was one of the best. If you left blue tassels and feathers, let us know and to the winner of the female 'Lovely Legs' send us an email. There's a reward to for the finder of the missing Bowler hat."

You know it's a good party when your Bowler hat goes walkies.

Looking back over the years, this NYE was probably the most fun we've had. With so much expectation, NYE can often seem like an anti-climax, but Melbourne really set it off in style. Great entertainment and a room full of friends you never knew you had. I kind of have a good feeling about 2010... I do have to say though that I'm quite disappointed that we're not yet riding around in hovercars and eating our food in pills. -- Tom

How to gain 5 pounds (each) in 1 holiday weekend

2009-12-30T21:19:00.008+11:00

There is only another few days of the holiday eating blitzkrieg. A New Year's party at our house and then a burlesque party downtown, tomorrow.

When we got home from our Christmas trip today, we weighed ourselves and this is how we felt:

Nothing at all like when, on Saturday, our Scuba instructor took me back to the wet suit rack, looked me up and down and announced "SMALL". I was thrilled. Tom just shook his head, knowing he'd have to hear me relive that moment endlessly. Never you no mind that it took me a half hour to get in the thing (longer when it was already wet from the last dive). I couldn't bend my arms and my gate had this kinetic Parkinsonian thing going...by not being able to bend my knees, I'd somehow just get momentum. At one point I fell down in the surf, wearing all my gear, and simply could not get back up. I think the shame from that, and the crowd that watched, drove me to the next size up. Still, the moment will always be mine. Small. Sigh.

The scuba school, where we went for 5 advanced dives (navigation, naturalist, deep water, drift and peak performance) made us fill out a lot of forms. At some point, with Tom's contact info, in case of emergency, it asked "Relationship:". I wrote "Hostage".

We blame these people, mostly. Our British expat friends, Tony and Emma, are hellaciously good hosts and chefs. Christmas dinner lasted something like 9 hours. It was like being hobbits, what with lunch, second lunch, tea, dinner, sevensies and supper, each with a dessert in between, all blended into one giant, crazy-perfect meal. I remember hugging my final eating effort for the night, a butter cream cupcake and insisting, "It's not you, it's me. I just can't go on."

These are potatoes grilled in rendered duck fat. Uh, yum.

My plate from just round 1. I think we jiggled the camera because we were hyperventilating.

A flaming yorkshire pudding...was that the dessert for supper or sevensies....it's all a happy gastronomic blur now. Clearly, heavy cream had to be liberally applied to squelch the fire.

Tom and I went to chocolate school for the last few weekends and built these. At dinner (or was it second tea?), we smashed them with a hammer and everybody gobbled them up. The chocolatiere kept asking if I was a chef, he was so impressed with my chocolate handling skills. I didn't want to admit that, like Mary Tyler Moore, I hadn't been "around" (chocolate) so much as "nearby". Let's just say it's a medium I'm happy to work with. Can you imagine if he'd given me a "small" apron and then asked if I was a chef?

This is actually a puppy. Not even a year old. He is doing bad things to Santa. We, Huckleberry and I, happen to weigh the exact same number of kilograms. If you could see him in real life, you'd want to curl up in a ball and cry too. Tony, his dad, told us that you aren't supposed to overfeed a great dane puppy or they'll grow too fast and it will cause them physical harm. There's a lesson in there somewhere?

Between our many feedings at our friends', we hit up places like Max's at the Red Hill Estates Winery. When they put it on one big platter, six gourmet desserts almost seems appropriate.

We didn't do a lot with gifts and traditional holiday hustle bustling this year...just really enjoyed being here and with the people we were with. I know that Melbourne feels like home to me, but really, Tom is my home. That's what I meant when I wrote "hostage", I just didn't want to get all emotionally squishy on a scuba folder.

We reviewed New Years resolutions from last year and did a lot of "ditto on that one", "and that"...

And our lifelong dreams of wearing paper crowns was realized. It was a great, great Christmas.

One Year of Immigration - Holiday Weekend of Celebrating

2009-12-30T20:15:00.012+11:00

Australia pretty much shuts down from Xmas eve until mid January. In fact, the main reason we ended up living in our current flat is that the realtor for this building was one of the few people who returned our call when we immigrated at this time last year. Lucky for us though, cause we love it!

We talked about going to Antarctica over the long break, but that just seemed darned expensive. And cold. Wet. Possibly boring, crossing the Drake Passage for several days each way. Then we talked about getting camping equipment and roughing it outback, but when the reality of bugs, bats, snakes and dingos set in, well, meh. A couple possums visited us while we were at a holiday evening BBQ the other night and we (our Australian, Dutch and Iranian expat friends) were all torn as to whether they were more cat or rat-esque. They are marsupials, so technically they are more kangaroo-like than anything. Still, I was mildly frightened by them.

What we ended up doing was eating a ton of fabulous food with a few groups of really good new friends, and going to the Mornington Peninsula for a jaunt. It's about 2 hours south of us and one of those places that makes you wonder why you don't go EVERY weekend?

Really our only complaints are the volume and voracity of flies (note Tom's biodegradable fly fan, a common accessory in the park). Sadly, our sunbrella blew off a cliff and we accidentally littered. We felt badly about that. And we missed our sunbrella the rest of the day.

It was also quite sunny and hot...a bit hard to find the moderation between "overdressed / sweating like a beast" and "destined to fry / melt quickly". But how fabulous to be outdoors in this incredible setting! I'm concerned about my exposed fingers here and thinking they really should make long sleeved summer gloves:

"Draw on Tom's daypack"...a quick game for the kids:

The only way to cool him down was to get him a Bubble-O-Bill, seen here being eaten "Easter bunny style" (ears first, retains the nose):

This was a little concerning. We wondered if we could / should make a donation to limbless wallabies and what the long range bomb explosion plan is?

The Point Neapean National Park was gorgeous. We hiked in about 5 kilometers (listen to Miss Metric here!) and took a tractor-pulled people hauler back to the rental car. It was exciting to visit the site where Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming in 1967.

We don't have a fancy-pants camera with changeable lenses, but this is what you get when you shoot a picture through your sunglasses. It was a great trip.

Camel Cull

2009-12-14T15:03:00.005+11:00

There are over a million feral camels running amuck in Northern Australia, and this number doubles every 8 years. Lately, due to the drought, 6,000 of the camels have started marauding the small town of Docker River - because, get this, they're thirsty. Gack! Marauders!

They say tourists come to Australia to see "the bridge (Sydney), the reef (Cairns) and the rock (Ayers Rock in Uluru, which is about 500 miles from Docker River...that's relatively close in the perspective of the mammoth dessert landscape out there).

Apparently the parched camels are breaking water mains, knocking in air conditioners and posing a threat to "children running around and wanting to play with the camels".

So Docker River got some emergency funding. They're going to coral them all into a pen outside of town, gun them down, and leave the camels' bodies to decay there in the desert. By definition, a "cull" is when a herd or group reject certain members. I'm not clear why this is being called a cull. It just seems like a slaughter to me.

This has upset a lot of people. Some people from the UK want Australia kicked out of the G-20, which I thought was more of a financial strategy group than validation that anyone is particularly keen on human, let alone animal rights.

Never let it be said that I think I have all the answers, but I'm leaning towards spending the emergency funds on first getting the camels something to drink and then handing out some good camel family planning pamphlets.

Public Service Announcements

2009-12-11T19:42:00.004+11:00

Public Service Announcements hold a special place in my heart. My montessori school teacher wrote this one and I have been singing this song in my head, yeah, almost daily, since I was 3.

The first time we went to a movie at a theater in Melbourne, the previews included an Australian Public Service Announcement. I was about "asking questions at work". A teenage girl didn't know how to use the bread slicer her first day on the job and thought it would make her "look dumb" to ask for help. So she cuts a finger off and bleeds all over the place. I was stunned. We eventually got used to them. Here's poor Josh getting a broth bath.

We put some money aside for a car and are ready to get one any time, probably a hybrid or something fuel efficient or maybe a compact that doesn't have the long term toxic effects of a hybrid (from the batteries). That is all a little confusing, the short vs. long range economy and environmental impact of cars. I also have a recurrent premonition that Tom and I are going to be killed or severely maimed in a car accident. And we've been doing okay without one so far.

Road safety is a big deal here. There are clearly plenty of resources put towards campaigns and enforcement....speeding cameras and booze bus's (mobile alcohol/breathalyser check stations) everywhere. Tom told me about this PSA about speeding. Apparently "No One Thinks Big of You" has won a lot of awards and is credited with saving $264 million in accident-related hospital costs...plus a lot of lives. According to this article, it has "lead to the widespread practice of people wagging their little finger at speeding male drivers". Okay I'm sorry, but that just cracks me up.

Anyway, my point being...there is a kind of irreverence in advertising here that I rather like. Let's not gloss over it, whatever it is. Australia is just gonna put it in your face. If you have time, do take a few minutes to click on these - they're pretty impactful:

Though we don't get exposed to a lot of overt homophobia in Melbourne, we've noticed a lot of undertones of it in popular culture. Australian stand-up comedy, TV and movies are an anachronism to the way things were in America in maybe about the 80's. There are a lot of gay jokes and we don't get why they're supposed to be funny.

This permeates the (lack of) consciousness or the way kids talk these days. I swear, to ride the train around the time school is letting out, you'd think EVERYTHING is just SO incredibly "gay".

Here's one from America. I wish we had more like this here:

Speak Australian!

2009-12-10T05:27:00.010+11:00

Last night, we were walking to the train station, downtown in Melbourne. An unkempt old guy heard either Tom or I talking to an Australian pub quiz team mate. He looks up from what appeared to be some kind of roadside-sorting-garbage-from-recycling project and, with a gravely voice, hollers, "Speak Australian!".

What could this mean?

Though imitating an Australian accent still escapes us, we're starting to understand our new tribe better. Sometimes we even answer the phone, assuming we'll catch about half of what's said and can knit the rest together in context. Anyway, I've noticed we have actually adopted some basics of Aussie slang:

You put trash in "the bin".
One should have a "proper" dinner (apparently, according to Tom anyway, smoothies are "improper").
When there is plenty of something, you have "heaps" of it.
A combination of reasoning facts with a feeling is when you "reckon". I love this one...it has a nice way about it...who doesn't want their opinion asked...for example, "Do you reckon I should wear a sweater tonight?"
Wear your "bathers" in the pool and "trainers" on your feet to do "sport" (it's not plural, unlike "maths". Go figure.)
Men who are friends with other men are "mates", but if you don't like someone too much, he's more of a "bloke".
When you're really happy with your mate who does something especially brilliant, tell him, "you're a legend", or if you're in a hurry, drop the a and just say, "you're legend".
If you're surprised, you're "gobsmacked".
Drank too much, you're "pissed". Tired? You're "stuffed" or "nackered".
Paint your mouth with "lippie".
If it's candy, but not chocolate, that is a "lolly".
A convenience store is a "milk bar".
You can buy second hand items at an opportunity shop, aka "Op shop".
Gifts are "prezzies".
When you buy the next round of drinks, it's your "shout".
Don't be nosy, or you'll be a "stickybeak". And don't brag about your good fortune, either, you "tall poppy".
A small pup truck is a "ute" (utility vehicle).
The last letter of the alphabet is "zed".

Frankly, I feel like an impostor when I use any of these. Do the real Australians know we are just pretending to fit in when we use these words? Do they even know we don't say these things in America? Are strangers on the street going to hear us trying to use these phrases and shout us down, like Trashman? Cause that really hurts you know.

I still order a "pop" to drink (met with blank stares). I dig through my wallet for "nickels or dimes". Australia doesn't even bother with "pennies" anymore...they just round off. I might still ask you to hold the "elevator". And if I ask you over for "tea", best to clarify if you're going to get a piece of meat and some "veg", usually around early evening time, or just a "cuppa" hot water steeped with leaves.

Chances are, and only because I'm still learning the lingo, you're just getting the beverage. Maybe a Reese's if there are any left.

Asphyxiation pneumonia & Addiction

2009-12-03T20:07:00.007+11:00

Let me just quickly sum up the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup saga:

I gobbled my favorite food item in the world, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, late at night
Went to bed
Woke up choking on the peanut butter
Either cracked a rib or pulled a muscle in my chest
Laughing, couching, sneezing and taking deep breaths became unbearably painful
Went to the doctor. Was told it will likely take months to stop hurting. Was told I needed to take heaps of pain medication, because if I walked around continuing to take only short, shallow breaths, I would get a lung infection.
Didn't take much pain medication
Got pneumonia

It's called Asphyxiation Pneumonia, to be exact. Thank you, I would like my Darwin Award now, please.

Walking home from the doctor again today, I had a couple of realizations....

1) As far as we can tell, our income taxes is almost identical to what we paid in the US. Yet our (free, federally-sponsored) healthcare is obscenely good here. Our last plan was Kaiser, which Tom got from working for the US government. We could tell horror stories about them all day. Sometimes it was like we were characters in a movie, where you go to a hospital and one of the mental patients poses as a doctor. You don't go away from a medical appointment feeling so much healed, but more confused, wondering, "What the heck just happened?.

Here, our doctors' office is a block away from our flat. We pay $8 per visit because it's (by Melbourne standards) in a quasi-fancy-pants suburb. We could probably walk five blocks and see someone for free. Not a mental patient either.... a real doctor. We call them by their first names, they take their time explaining things. We'd kind of like to be friends with them...have them over for dinner or to play cards sometime. It almost seems like they want "our business" or for us to "have a positive experience and come back". I know. Talk about wacko.

I've sort of fallen behind on the details of what's going on with the whole healthcare deal in the US. I'm just saying:

Taxes - same.
Government regulated healthcare - want to give it tender kisses.

So I have really high hopes that it all gets "sorted" for you guys (that's Australian for "worked out").

2) I also realized that a good portion of the Reese's cache is still in the pantry. Tom got them up north somewhere, on a business trip. I found out he gave some away to the flight attendants on his way home...("What?! There were MORE and you let STRANGERS have them?!").

Apparently the flight attendants were so thrilled they gave him a pallet of mini-wine bottles in return. ("What are we going to do with THOSE? HOW many did Reese's did you give away again?! HONNNEY....WHY?!!). I regifted that damn wine the next day for a house warming.

As aversion therapy goes, I can highly recommend the cracked rib / asphyxiation pneumonia cure. I have no desire to ever eat another Reese's. A friend suggested would could be on to a whole new treatment for addicts of other sorts...Shooting heroin? Smoking meth? Cracked rib, pneumonia, cured. Sadly, most drug addicts go through much worse and there's still no bottom deep enough to save them.

Once I figured out how to download American TV onto our computer, Tom got concerned that I was watching too much of that show Intervention. You know, the one where people have addictions and their loved ones try to get them into treatment? I'm a human cliche'.

I really do wonder what could happen if I automatically came down with kidney stones and a middle ear infection every time I maxed out our metered bandwidth, getting us cut off from the internet for the rest of the month. Please, nobody mention the idea to Tom, okay?

Email from "Marney, the Crazy Thanksgiving Hostess"

2009-11-30T18:37:00.005+11:00

I thought this was funny....does anyone have a Marney in their family? I don't, thank goodness. Wonder if that means I'm Marney. - Kitty

From: Marney

To: Everyone

As you all know a fabulous Thanksgiving Dinner does not make itself. I need to ask each of you to help by bringing something to complete the meal. I truly appreciate your offers to assist with the meal preparation.

Now, while I do have quite a sense of humor and joke around all the time, I COULD NOT BE MORE SERIOUS when I am providing you with your Thanksgiving instructions and orders.

I am very particular, so please perform your task EXACTLY as I have requested and read your portion very carefully. If I ask you to bring your offering in a container that has a lid, bring your offering in a container WITH A LID, NOT ALUMINUM FOIL! If I ask you to bring a serving spoon for your dish, BRING A SERVING SPOON, NOT A SOUP SPOON! And please do not forget anything.

All food that is to be cooked should already be prepared, bring it hot and ready to serve, warm or room temp. These are your ONLY THREE options. Anything meant to be served cold should, of course, already be cold.

HJB—Dinner wine

The Mike B Family -

1. Turnips in a casserole with a lid and a serving spoon. Please do not fill the casserole all the way up to the top, it gets too messy. I know this may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but most of us hate turnips so don’t feel like you a have to feed an army.
2. Two half gallons of ice cream, one must be VANILLA, I don’t care what the other one is. No store brands please. I did see an ad this morning for Hagan Daz Peppermint Bark Ice Cream, yum!! (no pressure here, though).
3. Toppings for the ice cream.
4. A case of bottled water, NOT gallons, any brand is ok.

The Bob B Family -

1. Green beans or asparagus (not both) in a casserole with a lid and a serving spoon. If you are making the green beans, please prepare FOUR pounds, if you are making asparagus please prepare FIVE pounds. It is up to you how you wish to prepare them, no soupy sauces, no cheese (you know how Mike is), a light sprinkling of toasted nuts, or pancetta, or some EVOO would be a nice way to jazz them up.
2. A case of beer of your choice (I have Coors Light and Corona) or a bottle of clos du bois chardonnay (you will have to let me know which you will bring prior to 11/22).

The Lisa B Family -

1. Lisa as a married woman you are now required to contribute at the adult level. You can bring an hors d’ouvres. A few helpful hints/suggestions. Keep it very light, and non-filling, NO COCKTAIL SAUCE, no beans of any kind. I think your best bet would be a platter of fresh veggies and dip. Not a huge platter mind you (i.e., not the plastic platter from the supermarket).

The Michelle B Family -

1. Stuffing in a casserole with a serving spoon. Please make the stuffing sans meat.
2. 2.5-3 qts. of mashed squash in a casserole with a lid and serving spoon
3. Proscuitto pin wheel – please stick to the recipe, no need to bring a plate.
4. A pie knife

The June D Family -

1. 15 LBS of mashed potatoes in a casserole with a serving spoon. Please do not use the over-size blue serving dish you used last year. Because you are making such a large batch you can do one of two things: put half the mash in a regulation size casserole with lid and put the other half in a plastic container and we can just replenish with that or use two regulation size casserole dishes with lids. Only one serving spoon is needed.
2. A bottle of clos du bois chardonnay

The Amy M Family (why do I even bother she will never read this) -

1. A pumpkin pie in a pie dish (please use my silver palate recipe) no knife needed.
2. An apple pie in a pie dish, you can use your own recipe, no knife needed.

Looking forward to the 28th!!

Marney

blackbutt

2009-11-30T17:03:00.003+11:00

I'm in Newcastle this week, giving talks at the Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium. By a semi-fortunate mixup, I got here a day early.

Today I took the bus out to the Blackbutt Wildlife Reserve (strangely enough, the buses come once an hour and both buses came about 5 minutes early).

From the looks of it, almost no one strays very far from the front parking lot. They had big wombats, some dark maroon kangaroos and lots of birds in enclosures. Peacocks (above) roam the grounds freely. You could see, pet and take photos of a koala for $3.50, which I passed on.

Lucky for me, the bus driver decided that he'd let me off at the back entrance of the reserve rather than the front, making me walk through the wild part of the reserve. It was an easy walk and downhill most of the way. There was a bit of trail blazing and brush scrambling at the start when I took a wrong turn.

Within minutes, the forest was alive with sounds, buzzes, clicks, zaps, chirps and so on. All of a sudden I looked up and saw an entire tree full of large bats. The above pictures don't do it justice, but they looked like flying possums, with big orange eyes and furry bodies. They were just hanging out, scratching and stretching and climbing around, mostly hanging upside down. Occasionally a "fight" would break out (who knows what was really going on there) and sometimes they'd take flight like in an Indiana Jones movie. I'm no bat expert, but a little googling suggests that they're flying foxes, like so (not my pic):

I was pretty gobsmacked. But then I kept walking and soon realized that every tree for probably about 10 minutes of walking was totally full of the bats. Neat!

Thanksgiving

2009-11-30T17:01:00.008+11:00

Short of the mammoth "American Expat Desserts and Candy Eating Picnic in The Park" we went to a few weeks ago, we accidentally forgot about Thanksgiving. Of course we each gained about five pounds in just that one day, so it's probably good we didn't delve in any further than that.

This time last year, we were at Tom's brother's wedding in New York. The saucy brisket his new wife, Rachel, and her mother makes still haunts me. Ah, yum. We went to Avenue Q on Broadway and got to know her awesome family, who live on Long Island. It was also around that time that we were remodeling the house, taking medical exams for immigration, telling our families we were leaving and I was finishing finals for school. My hair started falling out exactly three months later. I had what was called Telogen Effluvium, which is delayed stress-related hair loss. Now, make no mistake, I love, love, loves me a bald person, but that was getting a little scary. I do not have Sinead Oconners delicate bone structure.

Anyway, back to the holiday talk.... Short of the overt gluttony, shouldn't every day be Thanksgiving? I know I'm extremely grateful for all the precious gifts in my life and I'd like to think I express it, at least occasionally. I don't necessary need pecan pie as part of this picture, though it's certainly a welcome smudge on my "I have a great life" dance uniform.

So let's talk a little about Thanksgiving here. As wee American pups we are told about the "Pilgrims" (people seeking asylum from religious persecution). I don't know if it's the Separatists or Puritans whom we are to empathize with, but I can't reconcile this part. Sure, they were religious fundamentalists that needed a place to set up shop, but does anyone know who exactly was being persecuted and by who? I don't get it.

There is some debate as to when and how the first European refugee + indigenous American eating extravaganza first happened....it was somewhere between 1619 to 1621. I think it's likely that the native Americans may have been a harvest celebration or two prior, but who knows...they were probably so busy getting crop harvests stowed away that they were too pooped to party.

Wampanoag accounts tell it like this: the tribe heard gunfire, thought the colonists may be preparing to attack, so their leader, Massasoit took about 90 of their men (no women or children) to investigate. When they realized it was actually a celebratory festival going on, the Wampanoag contributed venison and turkey.

Apparently the Wampanoag joined in an alliance with the settlers to defend them against other, less diplomatic, tribes. This after, themselves, nearly being wiped out over the previous six years by smallpox epidemics brought over by the English. The dinner conversation was probably more about the alliance and their defense strategies than anything.

Only three other countries celebrate Thanksgiving: Canada, the Netherlands and Granada. Granada's is less about eating or religious freedom - it celebrates what happened in 1983. Again, another political event where I wasn't there and I don't fully understand it. I know the United Nations vote was 122 votes for "We deeply deplore the armed intervention in Granada...it's a flagrant violation of international law and the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that state." to 9 ("Invade").

In grad school, they taught us that the UN is fairly limited in it's ability to make member countries abide by trade agreements or sign treaties or really do anything they don't want to do. I'm just trying to figure out why I keep stumbling over all these examples where the US went a different route than most everybody else.

Some of our best friends are English expats here. I'd really like to continue to mock their imperialism. It's fun! You guys don't think there's any way that could make me look hypocritical, do you?

Squall

2009-11-26T14:59:00.003+11:00

A squall line just came through Melbourne. Here was the view from my office:

It was like we were going through a car wash.

Where are the videos!?

2009-11-20T22:23:00.002+11:00

Hi all -

As much as we're fans of the "get new Peacock Feather Dance" posts via email, we've just realized that the videos we embed on to blog will not show up in your email updates....so you have to go to the actual blog to see them.

And this is a big week for them....the Southeast Asia Kitty-O Video is now posted for your viewing happiness!

http://www.tonicnotes.blogspot.com/

Mary and Max

2009-11-20T01:46:00.002+11:00

We rented this DVD over the weekend, Mary and Max and loved it. It's about loneliness, mostly. I mention it on our immigration blog because it's set in Melbourne. The voices are Toni Collette and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Heaps of spoilers in the trailer, so watch at your own risk:

Also, and especially if you're a dog lover, rent Up. It's from Pixar.

Movie theater tickets are $17 each here. Kind of makes you want to rent and watch shows on your 11" laptop, huh? Us too.

Southeast Asia Kitty-O Video

2009-11-20T00:32:00.007+11:00

Hi all -

I've been promising pictures from Asia for weeks now. Youtube.com is cracking down on copyright infringements. The Nickelback song I synchronized the images to doesn't look like it's going to get approval any time soon. This is a great song too, Breathe Me by Sia. It would be thrilling if the editing matched the music. It would also be thrilling to just get it posted and put my time towards job hunting.

As for the Hmong refugees and action items....comments encouraged....wish I had any of the immigration answers.

I know that not a day goes by when we aren't grateful for being granted permanent Australian residency within 6 weeks of applying. We haven't met anyone who has had that positive of an experience. Tom's employer is expanding his team and there is some concern around how long it takes for Visas to get approved for their new hires from Asia. It should take longer, why?

Hey, did you know that non-Caucasians were restricted from entering Australia until 1975? Also, refugees arriving in Australia without visas have historically been held in mandatory detention camps, though Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is apparently now working towards expediting requests for asylum. There is a good documentary about this, and a 15 year old Afghan boy seeking asylum from the Taliban, called Letters to Ali.

In 1951, the United Nations passed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines what constitutes a refugee seeking asylum and the responsibilities of nations in granting asylum. Though they did get on board several years later when it was amended, there is one little country who declined to sign at the time.

Sample pub quiz questions:

1) Who was that country?

2) Where can you find the words, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

3) What's another name for the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees?

(Answers at bottom of post)

And here's Nickelback's If Everyone Cared. Mainstream folk rock tends to make Tom break out in hives, but donations go to Amnesty International every time this is viewed so I try to do my part by playing the heck out of it.

1) The United States

2) The Statue of Liberty

3) The Geneva Convention

Snack attack

2009-11-19T05:36:00.003+11:00

I love these things. If our building were on fire, and we had any one hand (which we usually don't as they are had to find in Australia), this might be one of the top three items I would consider rescuing:

The dimensions of the chocolate sidewalls are simply above reproach. And the consistency is of the peanut butter filling, divine.

So when Tom brought home a modest cache of them from his business trip last week, of course I was thrilled beyond measure.

Now, as a kid, my parents didn't have a lot of random rules. They were less concerned about hair color experiments or dabbling in oh-so-cool teenage cigarette smoking...basically it boiled down to "not doing things that could permanently mess up your life".

As I recall, the biggies were: "No motorcycles, no trampolines, no skateboards and no eating peanut butter directly from the jar". That seems reasonable, right? The last one was mostly advocated by my dad, who, as a physician, knows a lot about asphyxiation. If you accidentally get peanut butter down your windpipe instead of your esophagus, there is no way to dissolve it and your lungs can stop working quite quickly.

I think we can all see where this is going.

Fortunately, it wasn't a lack of oxygen to my brain that did me in the other night, when I raided the Reece's stash just before bed. When I woke up choking, I think I was able to draw from all those years of anti-peanut butter sentiment and my body kicked into adrenaline overdrive. It knew to do whatever was necessary to cough it up. After a good half hour of retching, I lay there gurgling and lightly coughing to myself for the rest of the night while poor Tom excused himself to the couch.

My doctor says I either pulled a muscle in my chest or cracked a rib. The treatment is the same for both: essentially that's "buck up and live with the pain for between 6 weeks to 6 months".

It hurts the worst when I sneeze - that almost made me black out. That, followed by laughing, coughing and, of course, breathing. I try to take shallow little innocuous breaths, but she said that can lead to a lung infection, so I need to stay on enough pain medication to try and take deep breaths and use my full lung capacity. Let's just hope this is all sorted out by our Christmas scuba trip next month.

Tom got debriefed on the whole situation last night. You know him, he's seldom prone to hyperbole and, anymore, the odd happenings of being married to me don't tend to render him as incredulous as one might imagine. It was pretty cute though....

"So, let's just sum this up here; you cracked a rib, snacking?"

I did.

Kangaroos

2009-11-15T22:32:00.002+11:00

Last week I went to Bateman's Bay for a CSIRO science retreat. The location we were at, the Murramarang Eco Resort was pretty and far away from everywhere. In the middle of the night, I walked out on the beach and saw more stars than I can remember seeing since, perhaps, camping in elementary school. It was a new moon and the stars were bright right down to the horizon.

I enjoyed the wildlife. There were kangaroos everywhere on the site. Apparently they rummage through the trash for food. I confess to feeding them apple slices, which would allow me to get close enough to pet them. The above snap was from my cell phone. Eventually this guy got tired of me but was too lazy to get up and walk away-

One night I came up to my cabin and a mother kangaroo and her joey were on my porch, blocking my door. I wasn't quite sure what to do, but before I knew it a possum jumped onto the railing. It looked cute enough to pet, but I've heard it's bad news to feed possum. I just hung out for a bit and when they realized I didn't have food, they wandered away.

Down at the beach, I saw crabs and snails and small red sea anemones. The rocks reminded me of what we saw on the great ocean road.

Mo money

2009-11-15T21:44:00.003+11:00

This blog has had a long history of posts about Australian coins. I think I've found all the ones in circulation except the rather rare ones (i.e. less than 10 million coins minted). It make it all the more of a thrill when I find one I didn't know about. Here's some of the ones I found recently.

50 cent coin for the visit of prince charles and lady di in 1981.

50 cent piece commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995. It has a picture of "Weary" Dunlop, a prisoner of war and a surgeon, took care of other prisoners, got Australian of the year a couple years ago.

This one though was a great one:

$1 coin for the 100th anniversary of the age pension by the government. Back when it started, one got the equivalent of 22% of the average annual wage. Today it's about the same.

That coin though is a 2009 issue, meaning that it's a new coin that's been created since we arrived last year! How neat is that? It feels a bit like a close relative's has had a new child.

migration in australia

2009-11-15T18:36:00.004+11:00

Today we went to an american meetup group in the park. I ate so many Reese's Pieces I just about fell down.

But it all got me curious about the numbers behind migration in Australia. There's a news story about Sri Lankan asylum seekers who came over in a boat in April. Some of the tone of the coverage is anti-immigrant, i.e. that unwashed foreigners are overwhelming public services. There's a good program called Media Watch that did an interesting exposure on how some of the numbers floating around were confusing the total amount spent on all immigrants (a big number) and those that came on protective visas (a tiny number).

In 2008-2009 about 13 thousand asylum seekers arrived in Australia, coming in equal parts from Africa, Europe and Asia. This is compared with the 171 thousand skilled migrants and the 670 thousand temporary workers/students allowed to enter per year. From the government's website

"At the time of the 2006 Census, Australia's population was 19.9 million, with nearly one in four people [~5 million] living in Australia born overseas. Some 45 per cent of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas. Of those born overseas, the United Kingdom is the largest overseas-born group (23.5 percent), followed by New Zealand (8.8 percent), China (excluding SARs and Taiwan Province) (4.7 percent) and Italy (4.5 percent)".

Note those last numbers are not country of origin but rather ethnicity, so you could only be considered american if you were Native American Indian.

Compared to other countries, there's a lot of migrants in Australia (24.6% of the total population). Of the 77 countries with more than 20 million residents in 2000, only Saudi Arabia has a higher migrant-to-total population ratio (25.8%). Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia and Australia have almost identical population size (~20 million). Truly, Australia is small; more people live in North Korea or Nepal.

In terms of proportion, Canada is pretty high (18.9%) and America is up there (12.4%) although America's size means that the actual number of migrants (35 million) is far and away more than anyone else, practically three times the nearest competitor (Russia).

Germany has 9% migrants, the UK has 6.8%, Japan has 1.3%, and India has 0.6%. Again for countries with more than 20 million population, at 0.04% China is only beat out by Viet Nam (0.027%) for the lowest percent of migrants.

Pub quiz

2009-10-28T21:34:00.003+11:00

Today was a banner day.

As is regular on Wednesday nights, there was pub-quiz trivia-night at the Mitre Tavern, the oldest building in Melbourne (according to their website). Our team is called "Sheik Sheik Djibouti".

There are usually about seven or eight teams of four to six people each. There are six rounds of ten questions on topics such as entertainment, history, geography, sport. This week, I remarked that it was amazing that there wasn't a single question about royalty... However, I remembered that there was one question about which European country has had only female monarchs since 1890 (answer here).

There were also questions about which two (1, 2) european countries have flags that are blue and yellow. Actually there's a third.

I'm really lucky when there's questions where we need to name all the US states that border the Pacific Ocean. Or name the three US states that begin with "C". In the next round, the question was to spell Conneticuit. Ok, right the spell checker gets it now, but I was ready to go to my grave sure that it ended with cuit. I was wrong. Maybe that's why my mother (who lives in Hartford) never gets any of the letters I've sent. It's all terribly embarassing. Embarrassing even.

We had to name the five oceans and rank them by size.

The Australian actor that turned down the male lead role in the movie Ghost? This guy. Guess who else turned down the role?

Anyhow, we came in second place at the end! Or rather we were tied for second place. When there's a tie, there's a drink off. In Australia they call it "Skulling", which is something like the American "Chugging". Drink the beer as quick as you can and when it's finished you put the empty glass on your head.

Peta was elected to do the drink off for our team. She had to take down a pint. Her opponent was from england... Strangely enough, he visited last year and went to one pub quiz and had to do the drink off then and then this time it was his second time visit to the country.

It was an absolute dead heat and the room erupted. Many seasoned veterans had never seen a tie before so no one was quite sure what to do. So we had to elect a second person (Debi) from our team to drink a pot (a half pint... a jug is a double pint). Again, it was extremely close but sadly we lost by a hair.

For those of you who wondered where the guys were in all this, I'm not much of a drinker and had no clue what to expect. When I got home, I practiced on a tall glass of water and about two gulps from the bottom I spewed everywhere for what seemed like a half minute. I'm not even sure how long it's going to take to clean all this up.

So there it is, first time in the top 3 (prize was a $30 gift certificate) for team Sheik Sheik!