All in a name

Last Friday, we went downtown for dinner, drinks and a movie. While walking up Bourke street, a shop sign caught my eye. It read surfdivenski. I assumed that Divenski was the name of a famous Australian surfer of Polish descent until I noticed that a second sign in the window read Surf Dive & Ski. I like my version of the shop name much better.

Further down the road, I saw a billboard advertising a gentleman's club called the Spearmint Rhino. Z thinks it makes for a great euphemism, as in: He gave her the spearmint rhino (wink wink). I have no idea what that means and I don't want to think about it too hard.

In other entirely unrelated news, spring arrived on Friday. Suddenly it's warm and sunny. We haven't used the heater in six days, we were able to dry two loads of laundry on the line outside, and we spent the weekend gardening and sitting in the back yard playing Carcasonne with my neighbour/lab-mate. He has the extended game which is so much more complicated and interesting than the simple version we've been playing.

It's really nice to not be cold all the time, though I do worry that we're in for another rip roarin' roastin' toastin' never ending summer. That should make Z nice and happy and me lethargic and sweaty.

Bed

We are settling into Melbourne in all sorts of ways. One of our recent and rather large investments in this city has been a new mattress, a king-size doona (comforter) and cover. Buh-bye mid-night blanket thievery. Hello bright red and orange Indian-style bedroom!


This may not seem like a big deal to you, and you probably don't care, but for us it marks a turning point. We're no longer buying any old cheap crap to sleep on and live with. We have a bit more money and we're spending it to be a bit more (OK, a lot more) comfortable. This is also the first big joint purchase of our marriage, which is funny considering all our friends who are buying houses right now. We're transitioning from everything-we-need-is-in-a-backpack to choosing a country and city to live in, to renting a house, to having jobs, and now a real bed. And soon, we might even have a real car.

Aussification

Three things that indicate that I'm feeling more at home Down Undah:

1. I drive on the left hand side of the road in my dreams;

2. When I type an URL into my browser, I automatically add a .au to the end, whether or not it's needed;

3. I can drink three beers and not feel a thing.

Not so far up/down

I've been in a lot of airplanes lately, what with the trip around Australia and the visit to SF - oh, and don't forget the side-trip to Boston and Maine. You'd think at this point that I would have enough frequent flyer miles to earn a free one-way business class ticket to the moon. But alas, the different airlines make for no miles worth a hoot. Z flew all the way to NY and back and around Australia on one airline and now has almost but not quite enough miles for a one way trip to Sydney (a 1.5 hour flight). This further supports my theory that frequent flyer programs are a bunch of baloney.

On the charter flights to and from Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, I got to sit up front with a splendid view of the cockpit (on one flight, I actually sat in the co-pilots seat, where I had to refrain from making jokes like, "Hey Mr. Pilot, what happens if I grab this lever and pull like this?"). These premier seats gave me a splendid view of the altimeter, which is when I had a big realization: 300ft above sea level isn't that far up. In fact, it makes the water look close enough to touch. So what, you ask? Well, the maximum workable depth for most scientific research projects is about 70ft, which is literally just skimming the surface albeit in an upside down kind of way. Floating in a small plane 300ft above the ocean and miles below the upper reaches of the atmosphere underscores just how not-deep (uh, the word I'm looking for is shallow) most of us will ever go. And the kicker? When you're down at 70ft, the surface feels a very long way away, especially when the water's murky. It was quite a powerful experience to realize just how shallow I am. When I'm diving, that is.

Living the single life

I always thought that I would live alone at some point in my life, certainly before I got married. Living in SF killed that idea off right smart - it was just too expensive. And then Z and I started dating, moved in together, got married, and I realized that I would never have the chance to live alone, to see what that was like. Until this week, that is. First impressions? I didn't like coming home to a cold, empty house. There was no-one to hear about my day. Then I discovered that if I cooked dinner, I also had to do the dishes. No fair! Late on Tuesday night, I crawled into bed, a bed that was missing a heater. I had been reading for about five minutes when I realized that I was lying all the way on my side, with the blankets neatly shared between both halves of the bed. With a giggle and a grin, I moved into the middle of the bed and gathered all the blankets into a bundle around me. Now, I thought, This is something I could get used to!

A long way to go

Allow me to share exactly how far it is from Melbourne to New York with the following, riveting story:

Yesterday morning, I woke a little before 7am, had a quick shower and a cup of tea, and drove Z to the airport. On the horizon, the rising sun lit the edge of a big cloud turning it brilliantly gold. I left Z at the terminal, battled rush hour traffic on the way back home, and had some breakfast. Then I rode to school, had a two hour meeting with the high school student I'm mentoring, spent a scintillating three hours editing an Excel spreadsheet, and another three slightly more scintillating hours watching lab-mates practice their presentations. The ride home was through crisp winter air, underneath bare-limbed trees silhouetted against a dusky sky. I made myself some dinner, did the dishes and headed down to the pub for trivia night. The pub was packed and, thanks to a new smoking ban, full of breathable air. After a few too many beers, I walked back home, thankful to not smell and feel like an old ashtray, and crawled into bed to read for a couple of hours. Eight hours later, I woke up, checked my email and headed back to Uni. I spent two hours working on a manuscript, another hour editing that damn Excel file, and caught up with the people who share my office. I was sitting at my desk eating lunch when I an email arrived from Z saying that he had reached his Manhattan hotel.

And that, my friends, is how far it is from Melbourne to New York.

Brain is mush

A lot has happened since I last posted. I've been to three places that have been on my Must Visit list for a looong time: Kata Tjuta, Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef. I spent two weeks with Z's parent and god-parents, making up information about Australia and laughing more than I've laughed in a while. I found my new favourite annual sporting event where I watched some of the crappiest footy I've ever seen. My weekly pub trivia group miraculously placed first in one of the three rounds, though we came in third overall -- again. And I learned that I've had part of my master's thesis provisionally accepted for publication in a scientific journal. I got the reviewers' comments back upon return to Melbourne and discovered that I had about a week to respond. I've spent this entire week working on the document, making changes to figures, tables and text, and then changing the changes, and changing the changes to the changes, ad nauseum. The biggest struggle has been keeping the damn thing under 6000 words. As of about noon, I was down to 6024, and spent the next couple of hours identifying 24 words to cut. It's now at a respectable 5,986. The unfortunate side effect of this process is everything I write turns dry and scientific, no matter how hard I try to make it witty and lighthearted. I swear, science is killing my creativity. Soon enough it will be printed an on its way back to the editors. Maybe then I'll be able to post something decent...

Making News

This may be my favourite headline of all time:

Orlando Bloom Hoping to Grow Out of Elf and Pirate Roles, Perhaps Play Dancing Cat on London Stage

From here.

Missing You

From a description of Bay to Breakers:

Some participants were motivated to run fast and others were motivated to drink beer in imaginative ways -- such as while doing a handstand over a keg in a shopping cart on the corner of Howard and Fifth streets.

Oh, how I miss you San Francisco. I miss your crazy residents (except for the certifiable wackos whose curses fill your rather squalid public buses), your sanctioned public looniness, your familiar steep and winding streets, and your abundant taquerias. I miss the friends who are similarly attracted to your aforementioned qualities and who choose to live in and near you. Hopefully, we will all see each other again soon.

Stoopidhead vs. the braggart

One of the issues I've been struggling with lately is feeling stupid. Like most PhD students, I find that the more I learn, the less I know. However, feeling stupid is, well, stupid considering that all the evidence points to me not being stupid. Yes, I feel stupid for feeling stupid. I'm smart like that.

Z has been "gently" encouraging me to get over this by saying things like, "Get over it already!" I've been doing my best to heed his advice but it's a challenge. Whenever I start feeling clever, I either immediately do or say something really dumb or, more insidiously, start to feel like a proud braggart. This leads me to my question de mois:

How does one act smart and clever without coming across as a know-it-all jerk?

Got any answers? I sure don't.

For me, this goes back a long way. I remember winning the maths prize in year 8 and dying on the inside as what little social standing I had evaporated. There was nothing cute about a smart girl in middle school. Being smart incurred much ribbing and I quickly learned to down-play my grades when I couldn't hide them. I really only stopped doing this during the final years of my masters, though I rarely volunteered to share my marks.

This all came to a head last week when I attended a reception for recipients of the University's prestigious scholarships. There are about 1,000 post-grads at the University, 350 of which have been granted federal scholarships. I'm one of the 350. Of the 1,000, 11 were awarded a prestigious scholarship; I'm one of those 11. Hearing these statistics out loud made me realize that someone, somewhere thinks I'm smart (I can hear you groaning at that sentence, Z). I need to remember this when I find myself unable to articulate a complex scientific thought.

One of the difficulties is that I'm me and so am completely unqualified to assess how well (or not) I present myself and my thoughts. I don't know if I come across as a bumbling idiot or a brilliant scientist, though can guess that it's somewhere in between and highly reliant upon my caffeine intake. Yes, it's true: caffeine does make you smarter.

I've recently realized that this only matters so much, is so important, because science is what I want to do with my life. This is what I enjoy doing. If I'm not good at this - or am only mediocre, I'll feel like I'm wasting my time. I want to accomplish things and feel like I contribute; if I'm only ever fair to middlin', I won't feel like I'm doing the best thing with my life.

Fortunately, someone somewhere thinks this is a good thing for me to do. Perhaps one day I'll realize that they're right.

Commitment? What commitment?

From Day in Pictures.

This could start a war somewhere else

I finally dropped the boat off for repairs today. It's taken this long (this being about four weeks!) to get the approval from the department to not file an insurance claim. It has been an incredibly frustrating process.

On my drive down to Williamstown, I saw a billboard advertisement for a web-site that lists homes for sale and lease. The caption read something like, "It's so easy, anyone can find a new home." The photo was of a man in a nicely tailored grey suit sitting on a chair. The model's head had been replaced with that of Dubya. I'm glad to see that Australia is not above publicly mocking his stupidity. Now if we would all just get around to recognizing Howard's stupidity in the upcoming election...

Plastic crap

We have been trying unsuccessfully for the past few months to get a credit card. My credit rating in the States is good enough to get me a card with a $28,000 limit, but here no-one will even consider my applications. So, we got a debit card instead. Yes that's right: our bank account came with an ATM card only; the debit card is extra. Do you remember the last time you saw an ATM card without a credit card logo on it? Me neither. When the cards arrived, Z called up and activated them. Yay! We can now do things like make on-line purchases and order concert tickets. Today I used my card for the first time to make a reservation at a house down near Wilson's Prom. Like all my credit card applications, my little debit card was rejected. A little panicky, I checked our account and found it adequately stocked with moola. So I called the bank to find out what was going on. I was informed that I hadn't linked the card to my account.

Say what???

Yes folks, it's true. The bank sent me a card, allowed me to activate the card, but never connected the card to any money thereby making the card a completely useless piece of plastic taking up space in my wallet.

Media Cottons On to Scientists' Predictions

The press is full of bad news about global climate change (I'm not calling it "global warning" any more because every time there's a cold snap, people say, "See? There's no such thing as global warming."). When we got back to the land of newspapers after our trip around the world, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more news coverage of environmental problems. 'Suddenly' the mainstream papers were talking about fisheries collapse and carbon emissions. That sort of coverage has only increased; it seems almost weekly that an article discusses the seriousness and severity of global warming. I guess the media has finally caught up to what scientists have been saying for a couple of decades now.

A couple of months ago, I came across this article that talks about the larger-than-predicted spike in greenhouse gas emissions in 2006. That has me worried because there are all sorts of positive feedback loops that could kick into action, speeding up climate change suddenly. OK, not as suddenly as "The Day After Tomorrow" but more quickly than current models predict. For a great discussion of these (and a really great scary novel), read "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery.

In January, an article in the NY Times quotes Dr. Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge, as giving civilization no more than a 50 percent chance of surviving until the year 2100. Meanwhile Brisbane is on stage 5 water restrictions - stage 5 of 5. I don't know what happens next. There are very real concerns that hydropower plants supplying Sydney will have to close down if there isn't rain in the 18 months. A couple of months ago, the cover of our local paper The Age proclaimed that the Great Barrier Reef is facing extinction. But don't worry, according to Howard climate change is not a major issue and Australians aren't the biggest emitters of carbon - we're behind the US and China. What he fails to mention is that our total population is around 20 million so it's no surprise that we're emitting less carbon than two vastly more populous nations. Unfortunately, on a per capita rate, we're number two.

There's only one piece of good news I can glean from all of this: I chose the right field. If I'd chosen to study coral reef fish ecology, I'd be seriously worried about job stability. All those days spent diving in cold murky waters may reap a pay-off yet.

File this post under the category: glass one eighth full.

Enculturation

We've been in Melbourne for six and a half months, though it feels like so much longer. I'm pleased to say that I no longer look the wrong way when I cross the street - though I haven't done that for quite some time. I've recently being to perceive cars in American movies as driving on the wrong side of the road. These steps towards being comfortable in Australia are balanced by my inability to hear American accents - they still sound "normal". And every now and then I'm surprised to hear someone near me sound Australian. Last week I called a pub to make a dinner reservation and nearly laughed out loud at the guy on the other end of the phone - he was so Australian. Real okka, if you know what I mean - which you probably don't. In addition to excellent 'roo steak, the same pub offers a bogan burger, a bogan being the Aus equivalent of American white trash. The burger includes a grilled beef patty, breaded and fried chicken, fried bacon, fried potato pancake, and canned beetroot all in a bun with a cocktail umbrella on top. Everything about it screams class. Just thinking about it may be bad for your cholesterol. I had this pub recommended to me by one of my lab-mates. The German post-grad in my office overheard us discussing this and we then had fun trying to define the word "bogan" to someone who had also never heard the terms "white trash" or "trailer trash". I think we got the idea across with some swearing and pantomimes. I'm glad to be a cultural ambassador when I can.

The curse of the clothes horse

As I have mentioned before, I lost all my clothes in the mold incident of '06. I have, however, managed to beef up the wardrobe in the past few months, in part on my own, and in major part thanks to various parental figures. One person in particular took me on a wonderfully exorbitant shopping trip where I was bought an absolutely fabulous tank top costing at least three times what I would ever pay for a tank top. It makes my boobs look great and is interesting while not being overwhelming, thereby wearable with pretty much everything: jeans, skirts, work, play. Because it was expensive and because the tag says to, I always wash it by hand. Yes me, washing things by hand. Shocking. I wore it out to the pub last night and so it smelt like an ashtray this morning. Playing at being a dutifully responsible adult, I decided to do some hand laundry this afternoon in an effort to avoid the cigarette smells becoming a permanent part of the fabric. In addition to the tank, I washed my new favourite long-sleeved top from Anthropologie (a birthday present), some French lingerie and a couple of other things. When I do hand laundry, I'm exceedingly careful to keep the colours way the hell away from the lights, which is what I did today. So, I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed, careful not to rub too hard or wring too much. And then I carried the items out to dry and discovered that my two favourite shirts and my expensive lingerie are covered in big, ugly, brown stains.

Swearing furiously, I returned to the laundry room to soak them again. And that's where Z found me, crying and banging my head against the window. He stood looking at me like you look at something that's about to explode in a big bad terribly no good way. Which is pretty much what I felt like doing, so his concern was justified.

At first I didn't understand what had happened. Then it came to me: the culprit is the fucking laundry basket we use to carry clothes out to hang on the line. It has left brown stains over all our clothes, stains we thought were caused by the oil seal failing on the washing machines we bought from the cheapo dirtbag salesman on Syndey Rd. You know, the three washing machines we went through before finally stomping into the shop and demanding our money back for them and the fridge which was also, at that point, not working. We couldn't at the time understand how three - three! - washing machines in a row could fail on us. Now we do...

Truth be told, I don't feel so bad for giving cheapo dirtbag salesman such a hard time. I mean the fridge really was befucked. And, as Z pointed out, even the repairman thought all of the washing machines were blown.

But my clothes! I feel cursed. What Egyptian goddess of the outfit did I piss off while we were at Karnak? Or is it a Congolese esprit de costume upset that we bought that wooden statue? What the fuck???

Perhaps it's time to have an exorcism. I think I'll begin by feeding that laundry basket to the goats.

Field games

There are certain phrases, casually bantered around any science facility, that make no sense at all if you stop and think about them. Take, for example, one I use frequently: in the field. As in, "I won't be able to catch up over lunch tomorrow because I'll be in the field." Field? What field? When have I ever done research in a field? And what does it mean to be in the field anyway? Wouldn't it be more correct to say on the field?

This really has nothing much to do with anything at all - it's just one of those things I've been thinking about when I'm not thinking about the massive ginormousness of the project that I've signed up to do. I had a three hour meeting on Friday with my supervisor at the guy in charge of running Victoria's marine parks. I left feeling under qualified and overwhelmed, not the best of combinations. It did however, shift the way I think about this project. I no longer think of it as a university course; it's become a research project that I've been hired to execute. Because they are paying me so poorly, they've sweetened the deal by agreeing to give me a nice piece of paper and a title change when I'm done. Perhaps surprisingly, this little change in perspective actually makes the whole thing easier. I like doing research projects - figuring out which questions to ask, how to ask them and then how to figure out the answers - but I'm not sure at all that I like getting a PhD; that sounds far more difficult. So, I play little mind games with myself (and the other self who so pleasantly agrees) and think about the foolishness of language in an effort to make it all feel better.

one of us ... one of us ...

In one of my favourite Raymond Chandler passages, he describes a drunk dame setting a glass down on a coffee table saying, "She was eight inches wrong".

I managed to do the same thing today, but with a boat. As in, I launched it but was five metres wrong. Which is to say that the boat came off the trailer and onto the ramp rather suddenly and rather not in the water. No damage to the prop. No crack in the hull. "Just" some big old scrapes down to the lightly shredded fiberglass.

What happened? As I've always done, I disconnected the boat from the tailer before we backed down the ramp. But this is a different boat, a lighter boat, one that's back heavy and, evidently, overly anxious to get in the water. So, it parted with the trailer prematurely. Reuniting boat and trailer would not have been possible without the stranger who stopped to help out. As we began the muscle-aching task of winching the boat back into position, it looked like we might actually be winching the truck down the ramp instead. Fortunately, truck did not share boat's desire to get wet.

My lab-mates, all of whom have been involved in similar "minor" mishaps, say that I'm now christened; I'm officially one of the crew. There wasn't so much grinning or joking from my supervisor when I told him - more standing around the boat and saying, "That's bad."

As bad as the damage is, the timing is even worse. This comes on the heels of an incident last week in which our other boat got swamped. This means that the lab is out of boats at a time when they are needed for field work and when the ocean conditions are actually good.

The day wasn't a total loss as we still managed to go diving - we did a shore dive with an entry that involved dropping over a 5'5" wall and scrambling over several metres of large boulders. The entry wasn't really the problem; it was the getting out that was difficult. My graceless clambering had an audience of 15 Japanese tourists, a Scottish family and a small group of young boys. After spending an hour and a half floating weightlessly, it's difficult to find one's land legs.

I spoke to Lumpkin on the phone when I got home. He cheered me up by sharing one his dad's quotes with me:

There are two kinds of boaters: those who have run aground, and those who haven't yet.

Is it still called running aground if you weren't in the water in the first place?

Before you buy a house...

Use this map to check out the effect of different sea level increases around the world - including in your own back yard. In particular, look and see what happens to the Netherlands with a sea level rise of 1m. Ouch.

(More details about the map here.)

Uphill both ways

I have a pretty easy ride to Uni: it’s a fairly flat route that takes me through parkland via quiet back streets. It takes me a little over 15 minutes to get to school – on a normal day. Then there are things like this:

(Image from here.)

Note the hurricane to the south of Australia. That would be the first hurricane to ever effect southern Australia. The edge of this storm has been buffeting Melbourne with seriously strong winds, causing the sections of my ride that I usually coast down to feel like a steep uphill slog. And they blow my light road bike all over the road. Not fun. About a third of my way to Uni today, my quads were insisting that I’d just climbed Twin Peaks.

And that's just what's happening on land. Western Victoria is supposedly getting pounded by 20ft waves. A buoy near the entrance to Port Philip Bay (close to Melbourne) recorded a 7m (~21ft) wave this morning. And the experts on diving in Victoria say that March and April are the best months to dive!