Ani's Birthday

Happy 7th birthday to Ani!!

Being the loving parents that we are, it took us about 3 months before we got around to celebrating it. And we still made her do the humiliating birthday photo with a tempting treat sitting right under her nose. But she didn't seem to mind when she got a whole meat pie - this year's "human treat" birthday present. Notice those flashy new bowls that she got for her birthday, too! (The dog she stayed with when we went to the States ate her old recycled tupperware bowls.)

Her technique was pretty amusing - she took off the top and ate it, first, then licked out all the filling, then ate the bottom crust.

She seemed pretty satisfied with her birthday present.

Spring!!!

Today, spring sprung! :) Sunny, amazing blue skies, and 27 degrees (that's 81 in US-speak)!! It was so sudden and so perfect. I love warm weather. Some people blame their moods on hormones - for me, it's all about the weather (which still probably gets back to the hormones, but that's OK). I didn't have to wear gloves or a hat on my bike ride to work (and could have gone without a fleece), I almost put on a dress to walk Ani this evening (but then got lazy), I didn't have to turn on the heat at all. And it was capped off with an incredible sunset that just kept going and going. I'm sitting outside at 10pm, completely comfortable. Happy girl.

Dear Mr. Magpie

Dear Mr. Magpie,

Despite what you might think, the more you dive bomb my head, the more I want to hurt you. You are not doing yourself any favours by snapping your beak as loud as you can in my ear, striking my helmet with your big ol' beak, or thumping your chest against the back of my head. I call myself an ecologist, and I understand your motivations, but I promise I don't want your chicks. And why don't you attack the walkers right next to me? What did bikers ever do to you? I appreciate a good obstacle course, but this is getting to be a little much.

So in the interest of yourself and your loved ones, BACK OFF!!!

Sincerely,
An intrepid bike rider

PS - If less that 9% of you are vicious attackers, why are there THREE of you along my 15 minute commute??

PPS - Why did you have to teach your bad habits to the wood duck along the bike path, too?? Seriously, what duck charges a bike??

Election Time

It’s election time down under.

“Wait,” you say – “didn’t you just get a new prime minister?”
Why yes – yes we did. Now it’s time for another one.

In order to understand the last regime change, it is critical to understand that in Australia, the person who is the head of the majority party is the prime minister.

So when the party leaders freak out because poll numbers slip a little bit and decide to oust the current Head of the party and put a new person in place, there’s nothing stopping them. And that’s exactly what the Australian Labor Party did. Almost overnight, they executed their ‘bloodless coup,’ as the papers called it. When Australia woke up on 24 June, rather than talking about Australia’s win over Serbia in the World Cup, everyone was saying “What the hell?!?” K-Rudd got the boot, and Julia Gillard became our new leader. First female prime minister.

And that was all done in preparation for the next regime change – the federal elections.

Elections have to be held every 3 years, but the prime minister can decide to hold them earlier. So shortly after Gillard took office, she announced that elections would be held 21 Aug – a mere matter of weeks away. So Australia has been a flurry of election activity. Everyone is whinging about the never-ending campaining. Seriously?? 5 weeks?? That’s NOTHIN’!!

But here’s what cracks me up. Watching the campaign ads, you’d think it was all about which prime minister – a lot like presidential campaigning in the US. But Aussies don’t vote for the prime minister. They don’t even vote for the party they want for prime minister. There is nothing on the ballot related to the prime minister. In fact, there is nothing about the prime minister even written into the constitution. You just vote for Senate and House representatives. The prime minister comes from the party that wins the majority of the seats in the House (turns out the Senate doesn’t really matter). And yet there are lots of furious people saying "I didn't vote for Gillard, I voted for Rudd!!" Well, no, you didn't.

Vegetarian

Yup - that's melon rind.

Mmm - meat!

Aussies love a good slab of meat. And if you can gamble on it, that's even better. Which has led to the creation of meat raffles.

Meat raffles are a standard fixture of any good pub in Australia. They're a weekly event, so you show up, buy your raffle tickets, and drink some beer while you're waiting for the numbers to be drawn. And if you're a lucky winner, you get to go pick out your tray of meat. The owners of the pub have to buy all the meat, and they generally don't make much off the raffles. It's just another way to draw customers in.

So the South Dubbo Tavern has one of the best meat raffles - mostly because they have the best tray-to-customer ratio I know of. Every week they raffle off 42 meat trays, and on an average night, I'd say there's around 100 people there. Ben and I bought $10-worth of tickets and won 2 trays - $50-worth of meat!! Mmmmm.

Movin' right along

Yep - it's that time again. Time to update your address book. Two years in one place was starting to push our limit - our feet were getting pretty itchy. So we up 'n moved.

Now we're happy Dubb-ites, or whatever you want to call people living in Dubbo. I got a 7 month contract at the zoo, and Ben is at the "writing stage," so he can do that anywhere. Although everyone looks at you a little funny when you say you like it (as if it's not physically possible to find Dubbo pleasant), we're really enjoying the rural NSW life.

A bit of research into moving vans revealed that it was out of the question to rent the van in Sydney and return it in Dubbo. For the few companies that did allow it, they charged a ~$5,000 one-way fee. (Yes, that's the correct amount of zeros.) Although we always love a good opportunity to throw away some money on fees, we decided to opt out of this one (just for you, Mike). Since I was already living in Dubbo, I rented a truck there, drove it ~7 hours to Sydney, we loaded up all our stuff (in the dark), slept in an empty house, and then drove back to Dubbo (me in the truck, Ben and Ani in the car).

Not only was the truck big (and Australian highways small), but it was manual AND the position of the gears was different (i.e., reverse was top left). But after ~14 hours and 1000 kms together, I got a bit attached to our little truck (or at least my ass did). I spent the whole drive singing "The Lady was a Truckie" by iconic Aussie country singer Slim Dusty, and "Bumpin' up and down in my little red wagon" (the truck had good shocks).

The side-note to all this is that when I left Dubbo with the moving truck, we didn't actually know where we were moving to. But that's another story, and we did know by the time we got back to Dubbo with our van-load of stuff.

So this is our new home: 10 Lovett Ave., Dubbo

We're paying $100 less per week for about 3 times more space. Hard to complain about that. So if anyone wants to come visit, we have lots of extra space now! It even has a little cubby house out back for Ani.