Back together again!

That was a long stretch! ~5 weeks. No fun - I don't recommend it to other couples. But Ben and Ani were back in Dubbo last weekend, so we were all happy again for a bit. (Now we're back to our usual depressed selves...)

So Friday we mostly poked around Dubbo doing things like this:
- going for long walks and showing Ben the kangaroos that I pass on my way to work
- picking up free furniture that Kerry managed to scrounge from people she barely knows - yay free stuff!
- hitting the op shops/salvos (in American that's thrift stores) - yay almost free stuff!
- getting our first Australian CD: Slim Dusty's "A piece of Australia"
- buying "not quite" tomatoes from the couple selling tomatoes out of the back of their truck by the zoo recently. The lady explained that they're "not quite" cookers and they're "not quite" perfect eaters, so they're just the "not quite" tomatoes - we still thought they were amazing.

Then Saturday we headed out to see what north-western NSW has to offer, and found it has quite a lot: emus, wild domesticated birds (specifically budgies and cockatiels), lots of other very cool birds, cows, red dirt, a few road trains but not a lot of cars overall, flatness, lots of space, flies.



(Yes, those are all flies on Ben's butt.)

The birds were very impressive - how can you not love huge flightless birds and blue parrots!?! And for some reason, we both found it really exciting to see wild-domesticated birds in their natural habitat.

We kind of bungled our attempt to see Macquarie Marshes, but that's OK (Peter and Betty - if you come over we'll figure it out). Then we camped in a state forest that I think we had all to ourselves (other than the cows). Ani fulfilled her duty of scaring up a roo, so then the trip was complete.


View Larger Map

Lingo Lessons: Squiz

“Take a squiz.”
“Let’s have a squiz later this arvo.”

Yep – this is my new word for the week. Guesses? It means "a look" or "a glance." So the sentences above are essentially “Go check it out” and “Let’s go take a look at it this afternoon.”

I spy: Morning commute

In case any of you forgot since the last time I mentioned it – I just thought I’d remind you that I get to see kangaroos on my daily commute. Not every day, but fairly regularly. I still can’t get over it.

The other day there was a group of roos just on the other side of a fence that runs along the bike trail. Most of them were eating, but there was one young one that was pressed right up against the fence, intently watching everyone that went by. It was very cute.

Cute Koalas

Although my current boss thinks that koalas are one of the species that natural selection should have weeded out (collective *gasp* here), they are still pretty cute and people around the world have a bit of a soft spot for them. The heatwave and the wildfires down in Victoria have had all these cute, feel-good koala stories popping up faster than cane toads breeding in Queensland. Since everyone likes a cuddly koala picture, I figured I'd share a few with you. Some of these (especially the bushfire one) may have made it around the world by now.

This link has a whole bunch of koala stories/pics - it's worth scrolling all the way through to see some of the pictures.
http://www.bicycles.net.au/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12327

I spy: teeth

I may have tooth issues, but at least I still have my jaw!


(Whenever anything dies, they clean the skull for education purposes. There are a few rhino skulls sitting outside my lab right now - always fun to walk by.)

Fruit of the day: Quandongs

Quandongs are another native Australian food – bush tucker. At least when they are processed, they taste a bit like prunes, but a little tougher. They were quite nice on a German pancake we made. As I think I’ve mentioned before, this really makes me want to go find wild quandong plants and go picking!

A day in the life: Poo girl

Today I made rhino crap tarts, pounded otter poo, sifted hippo turds, catalogued elephant pee, and analysed Indian rhino blood. And they tell me this isn’t a glamorous job! [Alternative sentence: And I spent 23 years in school for this?!?]

OK, I didn’t actually do all of that in 1 day, but you get the feel. I made rhino tarts because our black rhinos are just really bad breeders (in fact I recently heard an amusing story about a male who got things backwards and almost lost all future breeding ability thanks to a well-aimed jab of the horn), so we constantly keep an eye on who's pregnant or cycling.

We’re monitoring the otter because she’s never bred, and we want to see if she has normal oestrous cycles. It appears that she “shuts down” for big chunks of time, which would definitely inhibit breeding.

The hippo is being monitored to see if she’s pregnant. [She’s not.]

The elephant urine samples were collected when several Asian elephants were transferred from Thailand to Australia to start a breeding colony, so we’re looking to see what their stress levels did throughout that whole process. [On a separate note, since they were brought here for breeding, that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Consequently, I recently diagnosed my first elephant pregnancy! Kind of fun.]

And the Indian rhino samples are from a male that experienced a lot of problems earlier in his life: poor exhibit design, which caused him to perform stereotypic behaviours and develop major hoof issues, which led to a series of surgeries to fix the hoof problems. Then he was moved to a new exhibit and his health issues were brought under control, and he seems to be a happy rhino, now! And he's just about to get a girlfriend from LA!! So we’re going back and looking at stress levels throughout the whole ordeal.

So there ya go. And that’s just a fraction of the animals we’re monitoring. But my big disappointment of the day is the lack of synonyms for ‘poop’ in the Microsoft thesaurus. In fact, they don’t even seem to recognize it as a word. Come on, guys – no need to hide it, it’s just part of life. Haven’t they ever read “Everyone Poops”?!?

A day in the life: Fly boy

Some of you may be familiar with some of the recent research on calorie restriction and longevity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the basic idea is that all you need to do to live longer is starve yourself. The theory is that if you eat less, there are fewer harmful metabolic by-products causing damage in your body. My theory is that your stomach keeps holding out hoping that someday it will finally get a decent meal.

Anyway, Ben just recently finished writing a paper dealing with this very subject. Turns out, it’s not JUST about how many calories you eat – it matters what those calories are. If you’re a fruit fly and you eat a low-calorie diet of mostly carbohydrates, you live longer. If you eat a low-calorie diet of mostly proteins, you die sooner. The caveat is that the carb-flies didn’t have many kids; the protein-flies had a bunch.

So the moral of the story is this: if you want to live a long life with no kids – eat lots of bread and pasta. If you want to live a shorter life but have lots of kids – go eat some steak. [*Note: for anyone considering trying this approach to life, it has not been tested in people, yet.]

Coffee

Aussies do coffee, and they do it right. They’ve had a well established coffee culture for ages, and when Starbucks decided to expand their enterprise and enlighten Aussies, they were basically shut down. Today there’s just a handful of Starbucks trying to hang on in the major metropolitan areas (I’ve never actually seen one). In fact, the Aussies who have been elsewhere and experienced Starbucks coffee cannot understand why it’s so popular – they think it’s crap.

And you have to know a whole new set of terms to order coffee, here. You never just order a coffee – your choices include: short black, long black, flat white, macchiato, cappucino ... among others (if you click on the title of this entry it takes you to an Australian espressopedia).

Ben and I are flat white drinkers.

Now, this may seem to fly in the face of all the coffee-snobbery discussed above, but when Aussies make a cuppa for themselves, they often use instant coffee. Some people might use a French press with real coffee, but percolating coffee machines are almost unheard of. (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition.) In fact, they are appalled when they see US shows where people grab a cup of coffee from a percolator pot, which may have been sitting there for hours. Apparently Australians are the highest consumers of instant coffee in the world - betcha were wondering.

Quotes from the Carpenter

So I think my favourite person at the zoo – heck, in all of Dubbo (except when Ben’s here) – is Terry Priestly. He’s like the grandpa of the zoo, and he’s just a wonderful guy. He’s also the Mr.Fix-it of the zoo. He lives nearby and always honks and waves when he passes me. He's told me a few times if I ever want a lift, I can just flag him down.

So every week he posts “Quotes from the Carpenter.” I bike by it on my way in/out of the zoo, and it always makes me smile. So here’s a sample of what you’re missing. I like the bottom line.

Underwear Boy – the mama’s boy

So Underwear Boy may well be the biggest mama’s boy I’ve met. He’s 25 years old, and I think if he had his way, his mom would still be doing everything for him, short of wiping his bum. Here’s a conversation we had that illustrates my point:

UB (while washing his dishes): It’s so stupid that I need to wash dishes and cook for myself and do my own laundry. None of my friends have to do any of this stuff.
Me: Who does all that stuff for your friends?
UB: Their mom.
Me: They all still live at home?
UB: Of course – until they get married and then their wife will do that stuff. It’s not fair that I need to do everything for myself.

Oh, the injustice! And while he did cook for himself, wash his dishes (after there were so many dirty ones on his desk that he couldn’t find a spot to work), and do his laundry (kind of) – that’s about it. And I say he “kind of” did his laundry, because he’d wash a load, then leave it in the machine for a week, then finally remember it (generally because he ran out of clean clothes) and hang it out to dry, where he would forget about it for another week, and since he never used clothespins, his clothes were generally scattered across the lawn by the time he remembered them. And he probably took 75% of his laundry home for mommy to do. He never once took out the garbage, even though he generated enough to fill his own personal landfill. In fact, if the garbage bin wasn’t in its normal spot, he would just put his rubbish on the floor. If he spilled something on the floor, I’m sure the thought didn’t even occur to him that he should clean it up. And if the thought did occur, he never actually acted on it.

And aside from a basic lack of understanding about cleanliness, he also had a shocking lack of know-how about basic things. For example, he had no idea how to tie a tie. He always had daddy do it, and he came to Dubbo with a stack of ties that his dad had tied for him. One day he ran out of tied ties, so he asked Tamara to tie a tie for him. Somewhat appalled at his ignorance, she printed out directions from the internet and told him to learn to do it himself. He also had no idea how to pack when he moved out (because no doubt mom had packed the car when he moved to Dubbo). So out of desperation, at 9:00 the night before he was leaving, he went to the grocery store and came back with dozens of green bags – inside plastic bags! The next morning, the whole living room was filled with this sea of little green bags that he had packed everything in. And a few sheets in which he had tied-up his clothes.

I’ve decided to use UB as an example if we have kids and they ask why they need to do chores or learn how to do something – “Because I once lived with someone who was 25 years old and had no idea how to (insert anything here).”