Prom

I am back from the Prom, but instead returning with a droopy corsage and hickies, I have aching legs and some good photos. There were echidnas and kookaburras and rosellas and wildflowers and swamp wallabies and emus galore.

On Wednesday night, my lab-mate Mal unfortunately hit a wombat, and by the time he had pulled a U-ey to check its status, its pouch young was running around the road in a panic. He wrapped it in a towel and together we took it to the ranger on duty. As sad as the situation was, it was pretty awesome to hold a 20cm long wombat, even if she was hissing furiously at us.

On Thursday, Mal and I took a three-hour hike around (read: up, down, up, down, up, down) a couple of rocky promontories looking for intertidal sites for his research. To get to the headland required crossing a crotch-deep river that, on our return, had dropped to ankle deep (poor tidal timing on our part). On Friday morning, we did a shore dive and I remembered how much I love boats. Again, we were looking for a site for Mal to anchor some equipment, but the bay we were diving in was really shallow so it took us half our tanks to get below 10m. After looking at some fish (which I'm getting better at IDing), I was too close to empty to continue on and so popped up to the surface only to discover that the beach had become a far off distant suggestion of sand. It was a very long swim back in. And on Friday afternoon, we were back at the headland boulder scramble but this time with steep scrubby hillsides to clamber over too. I would feel fit and strong if only my legs didn't ache so much.

It's pretty great to be home, sleeping with a warm husband in a comfy bed. I even got to sleep in this morning, all the way to 7:30am, which is a lot if you consider that I've been waking up at 5.