Then there was this other thing we did...

So obviously the cat was way more important, but also, we bought a house.

It was quite yellow.


But then we painted it.


We were quite lucky it was yellow, actually, because it didn't show well, and we got it for the lowest price paid for a house in this suburb for over a year. Even though it was in perfect structural condition.

Another example of the yellow:


After after the de-yellowing:

The bedrooms benefited both from a de-yellowing, and an un-horribling of the curtains.

The garden is small but pretty (and almost entirely native, with an automated drip watering system). The location is great: a quiet street one block from a nature reserve, with a 20 minute bicycle ride along cycle paths through parkland to the university. The neighbours seem quiet and maybe interesting: they keep ducks and chickens and their wireless network is named UnexplainedBacon.

There's central heating, which is relatively uncommon in Australia, and delicious this time of year—although I nearly died of shock when I saw our first gas bill.

I think we're going to like it here.

Christmas greetings and wotnot. Also: eep!

Greetings from "Oh my god what are we doing holy fuck we are buying a house" land. Yes, it is said all in one string without any punctuation, just like that. Well, maybe there is punctuation of the sort that doesn't have an appropriate symbol other than *%&?!

Yesterday we got pre-pre-approved for a mortgage. This seems to consist of a verbal "She'll be right, mate" from a guy named Matto. (Oh, Australia, I do like you quite a lot actually.)

We haven't found the perfect place yet, but we have now seen a lot of imperfects, and have a very clear idea of what perfect will look like. It will not, for instance, be lacking any sort of heating system, insulation, and functioning ceilings. It will also not smell like Old People. I am currently in love with something completely impractical, but I think that's pretty standard practice when one is house shopping, and I'm sure I'll get over it.

In other exciting news, I made the world's best sourdough bread tonight, and recipe therefore will be posted here forthwith. (Hurrah for two pretentious adverbs in a single sentence! I should win some sort of prize. Perhaps my prize will be another piece of sourdough bread, and a glass of the quite remarkable krupnik from the recipe found here.)

This is why I only go to the hairdresser once a year

Hairdresser: "After this cut, I'm off for the day. I'm going to go to the supermarket and buy a family-sized block of chocolate and eat it all by myself."
Me: "I'm impressed! I think I'd feel awful if I ate that much chocolate at once!"
Hairdresser: "You mean you'd feel guilty? Because of cheating on your diet?"
Me: "Oh, no, I just mean I'd feel sick. I'm not on a diet."

She steps back and looks me up and down. "Really? Huh."

Then, five minutes later:

Hairdresser: "So, I'm moving house right now, and it's so stressful."
Me: "I know what you mean. Do you live on your own, or share?"
Hairdresser: "On my own."
Me: "Well, then at least moving doesn't mean worrying about whether your new housemates will be crazy people, huh?"
Hairdresser: "Crazy people? Oh, like Chinese or something?"
Me *blink blink*: "No, I mean CRAZY* people."
Hairdresser: "Oh, like gays."
Me: "What??? No! Like people who steal your underpants or label the toilet paper or insist that you vacuum the cat or something."
Hairdresser: "People like that are probably druggies. You have to watch out for druggies."
Me, carefully: "Uh huh?"
Hairdresser: "Yeah, my mum's a druggie."
Me: "Oh, really? I'm sorry. That must be hard."
Hairdresser: "Yeah, like she's on these anti-depressants and vitamins and stuff. The doctor prescribes them, but it's just as bad as pot or meth, you know?"

File under "not going there again". Which is sad, because she did a cute cut:


___________

* Like hairdressers, for instance.

Snakes! In a box!

At a market the other day, we found this guy looking quite unperturbed by the fact that one of his snakes was making a break for it:

The very next day, we got to see this beauty in the wild.

Yes, we just spent the weekend up North.

Here is one reason why we didn't go swimming. (Yes, this was also in the wild, on the Daintree River.)

This was another:

And just for good luck:

Skiing

Some photos from our cross-country skiing trip the other day:

The road on the way there, looking stereotypically Australian and as though we weren't likely to find any snow any time soon: nah, mate.
To be honest, we were still several hours drive away from the snow at that point. (I'm so envious of people like Bardiac who can step outside their door in winter and ski.)

More of the Australian stereotype:
I wish we'd got photos of the kangaroos in the snow as well, in order to collect the full set of stereotype, but they hop hop hoppity struggled away before we had a chance to wrestle our cameras out.

Some of our group spent a lot of time having little rests in the snow.

This is the same guy. I was having a good laugh at his expense while examining this photo, until I saw the tiny flat smudge of yellow about a third of the way from the right. I zoomed in, and yes, that is me. Face-planted.

And the real result of the day: my arse-bruise. More of an upper-thigh bruise, really, but arse-bruise sounds much more exciting.

More (photos, not arse-bruises) here.

How to communicate with the natives

Lately I've been spending a lot of time poking around in elderly grammars and dictionaries of Aboriginal Australian languages. Here are a few of my favourite (i.e. most horrifying) finds:

From a language sketch from 1858, the following sentences are translated (since presumably these are the sorts of communications one might need to make with the "natives"):

"Now my blackfellows, make haste and get your breakfast. We will be going."

"Go and fetch them, there's a good fellow!"

"You are lazy! Dry your trousers!"

"Come here tomorrow and cut me some wood and me give you white money."

From a book of a similar age, the paradigm for "you are a harlot, she is a harlot, they are all harlots".

And from the latter book, a word is given that is translated as "intercourse, in both the good and the crude sense".

(And here was me thinking that the "good" sense was the crude sense.)

Hop hop hoppity PLOP

Kangaroos hopping (well, struggling, really) through the snow are awesome. And kind of surreal.

I did a ridiculous amount of cross-country skiing (a.k.a. cross-country face-planting) today. With a fresh dump of powder and perfect weather, it was the best day I've had in ages.

Photos later. Including my spectacular arse-bruise.

At least I'm not teaching. (Now with bonus jellyfish).

Things are weird around here. The students are back. It's orientation week.

Today that meant llamas.

I have no idea. But there were llamas outside our building.

Also, undergraduates.

The llamas looked like they were more heavily into personal hygiene.

And while we were having a civilized department dinner in a local restaurant tonight, be-grass-skirted undergrads with Hawaiian leis around their necks came rushing in, ordered water, chanted incomprehensibles loudly, downed the water, and ran away giggling.

As well as the students, baffling things happened to me in a supermarket.

Specifically:

The copy on the back reads: "Instant natural jellyfish is a kind of seafood of high-protein and lowfat, containing indispensible trace elements iodine and iron. To human beings, it has the unique refreshing and crisp and tender and smooth tastes of its own."

And this woman is obviously having a little astonishment (and perhaps a sexual fantasy) brought on by the crayfish in her soup:


You too will have to remove your strappy top when faced with our instant noodles. Or jellyfish, as the case may be.

Ooooooooooh...

... free money!

Am I meant to feel guilty that I plan to squirrel it away rather than spend it to stimulate the economy?

Strategies I've been forced into thanks to this ****ing heatwave

Bringing a towel to work and taking cold showers every few hours.

Sleeping in the lounge with the balcony doors and curtains wide open (verdict: does not help).

Bringing a laptop to work and working in the air-conditioned tea room instead of my heat-trap office.

Stealing fans from other people's offices while they are out to lunch.

Setting out bowls of ice-cold water for the cockatoos to bathe in when they show signs of impending heat stroke. (Honestly, there is nothing more piteous than a panting cockatoo, wings stretched away from its body, drooping against your window.)

Giving up and going home to lie under the air-conditioning.

I always harbour fond hopes he might decide to go inside and do my filing

Probably only of interest to locals

I've been trying to find out what you can legally do in Australia to get money for a car that is unroadworthy, but still basically functional. NOWHERE online is this information forthcoming. So I thought I'd put up a short post here detailing what I've found out, in the hope that it might be useful to other people searching for the same information.

It seems you might be allowed to sell a car "as is", without passing a roadworthiness test, but you still need to have it inspected by a mechanic, and give the buyer the mechanic's list of what needs to be done to make it roadworthy; also you have to take reasonable steps to ensure that the buyer does not drive the car home from the sale: i.e. you can be prosecuted if they drive it with your knowledge. This all seems like too much hassle and expense for a car that is probably only going to sell for $300. Note: I was also unable to find out whether this is true for the ACT*—the information in this paragraph is based on what I could find out for some other states.

Inside the philosophy factory told me that charities in the USA will sometimes buy old cars, since they can sell them for scrap. This doesn't seem to be the case here.

Wreckers vary wildly in terms of how much they will give you, or whether they want your car at all. Nonetheless, this turned out to be the best option. I called 10 wreckers around the ACT. Most don't even answer their phones. Five did: two didn't want the car; one was willing to give us $80; one offered $50; and one (Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers) offered $200. (You can guess which one we went with.) The two wreckers who didn't want our car at all also recommended trying Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers, so I guess they are the biggest or otherwise most likely to buy cars.

Incidentally, the wreckers who offered money for the car were only interested once I told them we could drive the car over to them. If your car is undriveable, I think you'll be lucky not to have to PAY someone to take it away.

_____________

* Note: I'm deliberately including my state here, despite my anonymity. Otherwise this post is pretty much useless in terms of people searching for relevant info. However, I'm still avoiding using my city's name, as I prefer google searches for [CITY] + [UNIVERSITY] or [CITY] + linguistics not to list this blog in their results!

Caveman with a million dollar view

We were in Sydney in the weekend and on a walk around the coast near Bondi beach, we came across this guy living in a cave amongst the rocks.


He didn't seem to mind people taking photos, although I felt a bit guilty treating him like a tourist attraction. The only information I've been able to find out about him since is this story, which doesn't give a lot of details. The short version is, his name is Jhyim Mhiyles (he likes the letter y because it supposedly represents the trinity), and he has been living there for eight years.

Given that you'd usually pay upwards of a million dollars for a beachfront property at Bondi, I think he has found an brilliant alternative!

At least if the academic career doesn't work out, I'll still be able to eat

One thing that I'm proud of from 2008 is that for the first! time! ever! we succeeded in growing big leafy things on our balcony. This is the fourth year we have tried, and usually by now, the second month of summer, sad little stunted seedlings would have succumbed to caterpillars and neglect, and would be shriveling weedily in their pots, waiting for us to dump them in the bin.

THIS summer, the view out to our balcony now looks like this:


Let's have a little tour, okay?

On the left we have the herb table.

This is mostly a success (especially because I threw out the shriveled, wormy lettuces before taking the photo). The coriander (called something different by Americans, which word escapes me right now) is the only disappointment. It went to seed within a couple of weeks, despite frequent pickings. And now it is covered in aphids and caterpillars and about to win a free trip to visit the lettuces. The chives, on the other hand, are clearly bent on world domination, and the basil grows faster than we can eat it.

Next to the herbs grow the beans.


They too appear to have ambitions of taking over the world, starting next Tuesday. We had to keep lashing on more and more poles to the balcony for them to climb, and now they have truly run out of space and are climbing each other. I think our upstairs neighbours will shortly be very surprised.

Next come the stunt tomatoes.


I call them my stunt tomatoes because they are both stunted, and yet performing feats of tomato production that defy the odds. Compare these to...

...the zombie tomato in the corner:


I do not understand this plant. It is a survivor from last year that kept producing tomatoes all through winter while we were waiting for it to hurry up and die already so we could reuse the pot. We didn't water it for a full six months, yet it did not die.

Its extra year of growth time means it has become bigger and scarier than any tomato plant I have ever seen. I can't reach the top of it even on tiptoes. Again I am forced to wonder what it will do now it has run out of balcony. It also has an unusual growth pattern of spurting up 30 or 40 cm overnight, accompanied by a corresponding die-off of leaves around the bottom. You can see that the leaves are now dead up to around the halfway mark, although the dry brown sticks down are still indomitably sprouting tomatoes.

So all in all I am ridiculously happy with our balcony garden this year. Not only is it pretty and shady (and allergy-inducing), but it is feeding us. We pick the tomatoes and beans every second day, and the container below shows an average haul:


This might be laughable to anyone with a garden or a large family, but it is more than enough for the two of us, and more than my balcony has ever produced in the past.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and quarantine my coriander.

And now for a more high-brow topic...

Um, EW. (Arachnophobes should probably not click over.)

Two words come to mind, and they are STEGOSAURUS HEAD

Lots of people around here take the dorky approach to deterring magpie attacks.


Every spring I mean to take a picture of this and forget, so this year I've settled for the shameless-theft-from-someone-else's-blog approach (credit for photo to Toowoomba Bicycle Users Group Blog).

Stylish as these cable ties are, I've always been a little too self conscious to try them myself.

This year, however, prime magpie swooping territory is (a) the lower half of my street, (b) the service station where I fill up my bike tyres, (c) the main crossing to university, and (d) the road near the building where I go for various seminars and meetings. This means I sometimes get swooped six times in one day.

You won't lose respect for me if I go the scary spiky route, will you now? Right? Right???

Afternoon office visitors

"Hi! Mind if I invite over some friends?"



"This is Flappy. He and I go way back."



"I saved his life this one time, when—oops, there he goes again. Grab hold, Flappy!"



"It's okay now. Everything's under control. Hope you weren't too worried."



"Now, about that birdseed... Whenever you're ready. We'll just be waiting here."

Open letter to visitors to this city

Dear visitors (including, but not limited to my in-laws),

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is not a tourist attraction; it's a political protest. While I don't suppose they object to people dropping by to express support, you don't get to whine about them not looking the way you had expected, not having the views you think they should have, or not being "able" (or perhaps willing?) to give you a potted history of the region.

Yours a little bit horrifiedly,
StyleyGeek.

There haven't been enough parrot photos lately

So I thought I'd show you the collection of things I keep on my office windowsill: some dying cacti, a blue sparkly thing on a string, and... a greedy cockatoo.


He's pretty good about waiting his turn until the rosellas have finished their meal.


But then it's all, "DUDE! It's ME! Look! I'm here!"


...and, "Do you think maybe some more of that birdseed could find its way to the OUTSIDE of the window? Kthx bai."

A bird in the mail is worth two in the window

This awesome blogger sent me a present!

It arrived yesterday, was thoroughly inspected, and pronounced acceptable.



(They are salt and pepper shakers, in case you can't tell.)

Thank you, ITPF!