Lingo Lessons: drop the "r"

So to talk like an Aussie, the two biggest things are 1) shorten all your words and add "-ie" (as mentioned before), and 2) don't pronounce the letter "r", especially at the end of words, but sometimes at the beginning, too. So keep that in mind for the following conversation:

"Your dog is really cute - what's her name?"
"Ani"
"Oh, as in Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

What?!?

But following Rule #1, Arnold becomes Arnie, and following Rule #2 it becomes Anie. I'm still not sure why they thought we'd switch to an Aussie accent just to pronounce our dog's name and then resume our Yank accent for the entire rest of the conversation (which was a few hours), but that's OK.

So in case you were wondering, our dog is not named after Arnold Schwarzenegger. She's named after a bird called the Ani (either the smooth-billed or the groove-billed - you can choose).

New Year’s Eve

Sydney has some of the world’s best NYE festivities, and this year we decided we wanted to be part of them. Downtown gets absolutely packed (like 1.2 million people); some people even camped out the night before to claim the best spots. We didn’t have the time to be able to do that, so we decided we’d do even better – and be on a boat! So we made a last-minute decision to book a NYE harbour cruise, and managed to get upgraded to a nicer cruise than we planned on, essentially getting ~25% discount. Talk about happy new year!

So we boarded our boat and were greeted with cocktails and appetizers (both included in the price).

Ben and I were starving and decided we should get our money’s worth, so we kinda stalked a few of the people walking around with the food trays. Yes, we’re classy. So we ate our shrimp and drank our wine as we cruised under the harbour bridge, past the opera house, right by the crowded masses of people on shore, alongside all these extravagant sailboats, enjoying the last bit of sunshine (which graciously made an appearance late in the day).

And then the light show began. The family fireworks were at 9, and then the blockbuster fireworks were at midnight. And the thing about Sydney’s NYE fireworks is that they’re EVERYWHERE. There are 5 places along the harbour shooting off synchronized fireworks, then there’s a whole different set of fireworks on the bridge, and then there’s more being shot off the sky-scrapers in the CBD, so they’re in front and behind and to the side. And in case that wasn’t enough to look at, all the boats also have lights on them, so there are all these great floating light displays around you in the water. Definitely a night to remember!

We were using our cheap back-up camera, thanks to the demise of our blue camera, so our pics aren't the best but I've posted a few of them anyway. To get a sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of all this pyro-technics-mania, you should check out this video (click here).
Boats, skyline, opera house, and the bridge.

The shark boat :)


Fireworks from on bridge, fireworks in the sky, and boats in the water

Passing under the harbour bridge at the end of the night.

Happy New Year!!!

Christmas

Oh – it was Christmas?!? So this year was our non-Christmas. There was no family, no Christmas decorations in our house, no presents, no Christmas music, no snow (although the weather did get cool and drizzly on Christmas day in an attempt to make it feel more like a northern hemisphere Christmas). But our Christmas present to ourselves was finishing with the flies a bit early! So we went home and ate our fancy dinner of bangers-‘n-mac (Kraft macaroni and cheese and sausages – but they were nice lamb and rosemary sausages!) and lounged around on the couch watching bad Christmas specials on TV and enjoyed relaxing together.

Ani did get 1 present – we threw some wrapping on a bag of kangaroo jerky that we had gotten for her a while ago. Then we gave it to her to let her unwrap it, and promptly zoned out again. So she was through the paper, into the bag, and finished with 3/4 of the jerky before we remembered her (what good parents…). So that was her extra special present.

Merry Christmas!! Hope you were able to spend it with someone you love, even if it wasn’t as exciting as our Christmas. :)

A day in the life: Fly boy (and girl)

So if you’ve ever lain awake at night wondering how the food you eat might affect how soon you die, then Ben is your man. Well, if you’re a fly. He’s in the middle of a big experiment right now with hundreds of flies that each get one of 18 different diets (high protein, high sugar, high calorie, low calorie, etc.).

And since I am currently unemployed and un-thesis-ed, he’s recruited me to be his assistant. So the two of us have spent the majority of the last several weeks together in a small, hot, humid room feeding flies and counting eggs. And we still like each other!!

AND, enough of the flies have died that Ben said I might get a day off soon! So I blame the lack of blogging lately on my slave master. And the unfortunate fact that our camera met an untimely end, so I can’t employ my normal blog approach of throwing up a few pictures and then adding a few lines of text.

‘Tis the season

Christmas is really in the air! Christmas music playing in the mall, Christmas parties filling up the calendar, long sunny days, ice cream, picnics, lots of fruit coming into season – you know, all the classic indicators of Christmas.

Truth is, we really can’t get used to this whole tropical Christmas thing. We’ve been to 3 Christmas parties (one with barbeque and slip-n-slide), attended Carols in the Park (accompanied by ice cream and fireworks), reaped our treasures from Christmas crackers, but it just doesn’t feel like Christmas – especially with family far away. And we’ve discovered that most Aussies don’t know ‘Grandma got run over by a reindeer,’ so we’ve enlightened them (… and shocked them with our morbid sense of humor – although they really can’t talk).


Our friend Maria (originally from Peru) recently said something about how it feels like Christmas. I guess it all depends on what you grow up with, because for us, Christmas is snow and fireplaces and family crowded in a warm kitchen and Christmas lights lighting up the dark evenings.

A day in the life: Elephant doula

OK, not quite, but I’ve gotten 4 calls this weekend in regards to monitoring an elephant pregnancy (related to the trip I made to Melbourne Zoo a few weeks ago). There was a bit of a false alarm this weekend and their head vet is away, so essentially I got this call saying “What do you think – is she starting to go?!?” We checked over the hormone assay results and ran a few more tests, and it turns out she’s not going, yet. My guess right now is that she’ll give birth on New Year’s Day. We’ll see!

Mud Run

Time for another fun race! Last year we had our mountainous, unexpectedly snowy, windy eco-challenge down in ACT. This year we decided to go for a mud run just north of Sydney.
We kept our tradition of not sleeping before races. Last year it was due to being cold and the wind blowing our tent in and Ben's race starting insanely early. This year it was because Kerry's last day in Dubbo and the vet-block Christmas party were the day before. There was a 6hr drive between the Christmas party (which we stayed at until 8pm) and the race (which started at 9:30am), so the thing that was sacrificed was sleep.
But the race was awesome - Ben did the 12K race and Kerry did the 6K race. All of the obstacles involved making your way through mud (some of it rather stinky) and water (which was fairly brackish).

And in between obstacles, it was a pretty nice run through a forested valley. Ben said he saw someone worried about stepping in a little cow dung along the trail (before the first obstacle) and he thought "If you're worried about that, just wait!" And as you cross the finish line, you're greeted with a cold beer! So excellent race and a really fun way to get a little exercise - nothin' like getting dirty to make you smile!

Before:

After: