The acrobat’s daughter

In the dimness of the front row, the acrobat’s daughter sits on her mother’s lap. The acrobat’s daughter extends her small arms forward as far as she can, while her mother holds her down as firmly as she can. The acrobat’s daughter is reaching out to an acrobat on stage, her father. He stands on one end of a teeter-totter, and he is looking straight ahead. Soon two other acrobats run forward and jump on the opposite end of the teeter-totter, propelling him upwards, high into the air. He flips, he twists. He lands on the crash pad, and smiling, he raises his arms. He scans the audience, the shadowy faces and applauding hands, and spots his wife and his daughter. He smiles again. They smile back. The acrobat’s daughter claps.

So: that’s a year, then.

Well, hello.

Why yes, we have been in Australia for a year now.

Are we older? Yes. Wiser? Maybe. At the very least, we now know which way is home, and home is across the Pacific for kilometres and miles, until we’re in the Pacific Northwest again. We won’t get there for another five months or so. In the meantime, there’s still heaps to see, more to do and more often.

A roundup of past adventures:

90-Day Review

Swimming, Noosa

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I have 51,000 words to share. In the form of pictures.

Speaking of mothers

Harry’s Hut Campground, Upper Noosa River, Great Sandy National Park

My short memory, or, why this post doesn’t have a picture.

Playing to our strengths.

Aww.

 

Speaking in Tongues

When things got exciting (which it did and often), I started talking baseball talk. And that’s just not right at a cricket game.

Photo credits: Justin. I was busy running my own nonsensical commentary.

Things I Saw On My Walk Home: A List

1. A restaurant menu written in Japanese. No photos, and no English.
2. A left behind polka-dotted umbrella.
3. Kids breakdancing in front of a bank.
4. A bagel shop.
5. A pedestrian signal activator box, dangling from its wires.

Dust and Stuff

Dust: There are still intermittent dust storms, though nothing on the scale of what we saw a few weeks ago. Hazy days and cleaning up and mopping.

Cleaning Up: is also happening here. Links and catgories are currently wonky, but I hope not for long. It depends on my laser-beam focus and attention span. Speaking of attention spans, I’m finally beginning to say “haych” instead of “aych”, as in “ADhaychD”, and not “ADaychD”. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice to be understood when speaking. Um, where were we again?

Stuff: We’ve been in Brisbane nearly a year now. Eleven months. The heat and the palm trees, the leopard print and the hayches: it’s almost normal. And when life is normal, I often forget that there are still stories to tell.

Now, Don’t Go Saying That You Never Learn Anything On This Here Blog.

So! I heard from Justin who heard from some lady that there is no such thing as commercial kangaroo farming in Australia. The kangaroo meat sold at the grocery stores is hunted. With guns.

Apparently, kangaroo hunters drive around in their trucks (and by “trucks” I mean “utes“) looking for ‘roos. Once the hunter spies a ‘roo, he shoots it. After the kill, the hunter loads the ‘roo into the back of his ute and drives it around until he spies a meat locker. Then he drops the ‘roo in the locker and someone from a commercial kangaroo meat processing plant comes around and picks up all the lockers. And then you get to buy a packet of kangaroo mince at Woolies for, like, $7.99/kg or something like that.

There are probably meat inspections and tag numbers and big fat paychecks, too, but I can’t tell you that for sure. My brain didn’t retain that part of the story, or maybe I stopped listening. If you’re curious, you’ll have to ask Justin about it. I think he might have also said something about unicorns and fairies?

Oh, also, here’s an article about unsubstantiated stories and where those stories are most believed. Hello, echo chamber!

Playing to our strengths

We spent a long weekend on North Stradbroke Island, to celebrate Justin’s and my recent birthdays. We camped, we swam, we tidepooled. We read books and we played chess. We saw some animals: fish, dolphins, some birds, a kangaroo…and WHALES.

Land-based whale watching = seeing whales + feeling great.

We are so good at being on land.

Sunset photo and whale photo credits: Justin

Hand model in the crab photo: Justin

Interruptions

Hi, friends. This is just a post to let y’all know that posting’s going to be a little light for the next nine days or so. The broadband carrier we chose to go with allots and meters our usage and betwixt the five people on our network, we are running out of our allotment right about…now.

Cows, city.

Today is the first day of Ekka, the Royal Queensland Show. Apparently, for the next ten days or so, I can just walk down the street to see sheep being shorn, or cows being milked, or competitive wood chopping. I am enamoured of all these ideas. C’mon, competitive wood chopping! Almost as good as the sport of cracking melons open with your head.

My short memory, or, why this post doesn’t have a picture.

Last weekend the family shifted into hyper-tourist mode and flew up to Cairns, our port of choice for a visit to the Great Barrier Reef.  That’s Cairns, pronounced “Cans”, as Australians tend not to pronounce r’s when printed.  However, the law of conservation of pronounced consonants is generally adhered to by adding r’s where not printed.  Exhibit A: the proper Aussie pronunciation of the television show “Lar and Ahdah”.

Cairns is quite a distance north of Brisbane, north of the Tropic of Capricorn, so far north it’s in a region known as far north Queensland, or “Effin’-Q”.  We were told by the locals that, it being the dead of winter, it was a very good time to go snorkelling in FNQ.  First, the ocean pests known simply as “stingers” had migrated north for the cold season, leaving the waters safe to swim in without wearing a full-body lycra suit.  Second, the forecast indicated sunny skies, low humidity, and pleasant daily highs near 80 degrees F. 

The weather forecasts are generally pretty reliable in Queensland, especially when sun is predicted – it’s the forecasts for rain that generally turn out to be wrong.  However, shortly after we arrived in Cairns the wind started to blow and the clouds rolled in.  It rained in the evening.  The next morning, the day of our trip to the reef, it was still windy and rainy.

I say all this about the weather not because it was necessarily a bad day to be snorkelling.  Wind and rain don’t much bother the fish, turtles, rays, giant man-eating clams, and other really cool underwater stuff.  It doesn’t much bother you when you’re in the water either, except for that incessant slap, slap, slapping of waves up against your ear.  In fact, we had a really great time snorkelling, rain and shine.  The best we’ve ever done.

The weather did, however, cause the ocean to be a bit rough, which in turn caused the boat to bob up and down, which in turn caused 3 of 4 Buis and an Iverson to get a bit green.  (Joneses seem to be immune, able to drink champagne with nose buried in a book without ill effect despite the devilish motion of the boat).  This comes as no surprise to me in retrospect, as I’ve certainly had a few bad days at sea.  I’ve also been reminded of the fact over the years when the opportunity arises - most recently a friend told me he’d hesitate to sit beside me near the fish tank in a Chinese restaurant.  However, sea-sickness didn’t seem like a possibility to me until we were well underway.  In my defence, a two hour boat ride each way on rough seas isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when planning a glorious sun-drenched day snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef. 

But that’s just what there was (rough seas, that is), and even though we sailed right up to a picturesque white strip of sand full of exotic sea birds in the middle of a bright blue ocean with dark splotches of reef all around and giant turtles swimming at the surface, even though the occasional sun-breaks through the clouds cast a brilliant light on the whole scene, the thought of pulling out my camera for even a single picture never occurred to me.  Fed the fish, that’s what I did instead.

- Justin