a mighty wind

3:26pm: tired!
Wake up clammy when two alarms ring
Four minutes apart
And sleep is still buffering
Like the bar below videos on my old pc
Only 34% buffered at 716am today
Lately I can’t get to the place where I feel
Complete 100% running sleekly to the end
I’m jerky I stop mid-sentence
Drowning in the everything of distraction
A picture book with the last page ripped
Grover’s no good terrible bad day
On repeat
I look in the eyes of the lizard on my back wall
His stare seems wise and timeless
Maybe I need a connection to nature
I am lizard lizard is me here we are circled together
Two answers on the same crossword
But he scampers away
Before telling me anything
What a jerk I needed you close so I could anthropomorphize
You needed me far because your little heart was pounding scared
Near and far in Grover’s other simpler book
Asleep and awake in my simpler life
Not this toxic caffeinated blend
I love the picture
Stick figure man flattened by giant falling object
DO NOT TIP OR ROCK THIS VENDING MACHINE
He looks like I feel
Overwhelmed and close to death
I will give you fifty cents tiny man!
Who will give me fifty cents?

3:13pm: something other than the pig
hello all. i know the pig has sickened you for many moons now. i have boldly, on the 4th of july no less, decided to write again!

i suppose mike and i should have a lot of updates since last september...we have had a few aussie visitors since then. em and her friend dave were out in november for thanksgiving. they gave raucous thanks and em gave the poker tables in vegas what for. dave did his part by gorging on prawns at the buffet. donald and annii were in town in april and they did a lot of birdwatching. they even saw the elusive trogan three or four times in madera canyon. and dear michael bailey (the mike you like) was out at the beginning of june and he neither gambled, overate or birdwatched. he did learn how to make an excellent margarita.

oh updates. i'm boring you already LJ crowd! it's summer here and mike is out at night sneaking around the desert capturing lizards and snakes for science. i have a new-ish job as the director of community prevention education and outreach at the southern arizona center against sexual assault. my brother lives with us now and he is an entertainment/tv reporter for the arizona daily star.

ok, before your brain turns me off i will endeavor to tell you something interesting. the other day mike and i hiked to the highest point in arizona--mt. humphrey's. it was a gorgeous hike and was high enough to be above the tree line for the last couple of miles to the top. at the summit we were greeted with a storm of busy, distracting flies that ruined an idea of a picnic. one fly managed to fly its way into my nose and i was immediately transported back to oz and to the simpson desert where a fly in the nose was the norm. and it's times like these when i really miss you, australia :)

3:45pm: The demise and deterioration of Pork Chops
I suspect this post is going to offend and/or sicken some people (this means you, Chicken), but I'm OK with that. The story has everything: a brave escape, a tragic death, a run-in with the law, unforeseen redemption, and a timely reminder to properly maintain your bean shed. It needs to be told.

A few weeks ago, two friends and I went on a research trip to New Mexico. We were cruising down a country highway at about midnight when two ghostly porcine forms materialized directly in front of our left headlight. Tony locked the brakes up, but the impact was inevitable: we nailed one of the bastards right in the head. We pulled over to assess the damage, which turned out to be significant. We said a few words to commemorate the passing of this poor pig, who was probably an escapee from a hog farm in the tiny but hugely depressing hamlet of Cotton City, about 30 miles away. Poor Pork Chops. And think how lonely his erstwhile pal Hambone must now be!



About 5 minutes after leaving the scene, we were pulled over by a Border Patrol truck, a common occurrence in country so close to the Mexican border. The agent, a friendly young man in his early 20s, approached our car to determine our destination and our business. As he neared the driver's-side window, however, a subtle wave of disgust crinkled his face, and he took a step or two back. This was a natural reaction, because the truck smelled very strongly of pig shit. It seems that Pork Chops had rocketed the contents of his rectum across the side of the truck upon being hit and whipped around.



We checked on Pork Chops again on our way back to Tucson four days later. He wasn't looking so good. His body supported tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of maggots of at least 4 different species.



Then, just yesterday, we viewed the body one more time as we came back from another trip to the same site. After 2 weeks, Pork Chops had been reduced to bone and some scattered strips of leather. You could also peer through his slatty ribs to ascertain his last meal (apparently, a whole mess of beans). From a robust, 200-pound pig to skin and bones in a mere 2 weeks! Let us spare a moment to reflect upon the grim but vital efficiency of the much-maligned, underappreciated decomposers.




We were all misting up a bit as we sped away from Pork Chop's rain-slicked carcass for what was most likely the last time. And then something wonderful happened. 5 piglets scampered across the road in front of us, each one more Pork-Chops-esque than the last. We whooped and hollered, knowing that Pork Chops, and his genes, lived on. And then we frowned and grumbled, realizing that what we had just witnessed was not wonderful at all. We worried about the impact a possibly sizable population of feral pigs might have on the grasslands of southwestern New Mexico. And we wondered if the locals had bothered to pig-proof their bean sheds...

10:24am: So we've had some Australian visitors lately--our friend Michael Bailey from Melbourne came for a weekend, and then a few days later Hamlet and Michelle dropped by. We had a good time. As usual, everyone was good for some quality conversation. Audrey, Mike and I determined that gay incest should be totally cool, as long as there are no iffy power dynamics involved. The only evolutionary reason for the taboo, after all, is the risk of inbreeding; take that risk away, and the taboo should dissipate as well. Which means that really old heterosexual siblings getting it on is kosher, too.

Check out the picture of Mr. Bailey as he leaves us at the Tucson Airport, looking like a gigantic 8-year-old heading off on his first big adventure. He bought that Arizona Diamondbacks hat at a Tucson store called Lids, where some shifty homeboy clerks tried to sell him multiple baseball caps. "Why would I need two?" Mike asked. "I only have one head." "But you need them for your different outfits," one of them protested, predictably to no avail.






Seeing Hamlet and Michelle again was great, too. Hamlet was in his social chameleon mode, effortlessly blending in with the substantial Mexican-American communities in LA and Tucson. Which means he grew a big, bushy mustache:





Hamlet had a real sitcom moment at our place one morning. He came storming out of the bathroom, glasses off, his useless eyes crinkled in indignation and disgust, holding before him a bottle of amber liquid. "What's up with this mouthwash, Mike?" he demanded. "It tastes terrible." He was holding a bottle of Elmer's Sticky Out, a general-use solvent. Luckily, the stuff's non-toxic.

So our pals are now gone, and we're back to the same old grind of pulling weeds, eating delectably moist second-hand mocha cake, and working on our marriage.

9:28am: morning person
it's the haunting of the morning
the raw pulse of waking
grabbing and ripping the brain alert on its foundations
pulling it forward through the moist and creaky
doorways of your eyes.

8:37am: missing me
i'm moved to type by lovely anonymous who misses me.

it's the rainy season here and the rains tumble from thick, dark clouds in giant, sloppy drops. the humidity peaks this time as well and mike and i without a working evaporative cooler! it's warm in our house...

what is it about july in this hemisphere? the pink of the sun sticks to the sky at sunset and radiates into orange then fades to black. the mountains change like shapeshifters with every second of the disappearing light. it's de-lightful, de-lovely and de-lirious.

with sweat hiding out under my armpits and on my back i will think of you sydneysiders. i will imagine you wearing coats and scarves and thick socks. the cold smell in the air as you walk down busy cbd streets. carry me with you and i will take you with me into my hot home and swimming in my pool.

i miss you too, anonymous.

8:44am: Audrey's a great gal, and I love her dearly, but it's no secret that she's a bit of a weirdo. Her speech, for example, melds accents and idiosyncrasies in the most puzzling ways. If you heard her say, "Soap up those goats, Todd," as she did yesterday, you'd swear she was from Chicago or Wisconsin. Her inability to pronounce "sorority" ("sowority"), on the other hand, could never be construed as a geographic quirk--it's just odd. And the other day, we discovered another phrase in the same category: "pink flamingo earrings."

We were at some party, and a strikingly attractive older lady had slapped together a bold pink outfit, topped off by said earrings. Aud and I were commenting on her fashion choices later, and, for the life of her, Audrey could not say "pink flamingo earrings." It was either "pink famingo earrings" or "pink flamingo eawwings," Elmer Fudd style. The more she tried, the more spectacularly she failed, and the harder we both laughed. If you have a mystifying hole in your speech, I suppose it may as well manifest in a near-nonsense phrase that people rarely have occasion to utter.

Now I know what to get her for Christmas.

10:59am: Our elected representatives are unbelievable. The number of Americans living in poverty rose for the third year in a row (to 36 million), 45 million people don't have health insurance, we're mired in a war of dubious legitimacy with frightening, potentially destabilizing outcomes, the world faces a mounting environmental catastrophe (habitat destruction combined with climate change), and on and on. So what do our slick, tanned, easy-grinning congressmen devote their precious time to? First, debating an amendment banning gay marriage. And now, proposing a constitutional ban on flag-burning, something which almost never happens and is entirely inconsequential when it does. The wording of the proposed amendment is revealing, prohibiting the "desecration" of the flag. A sacred national symbol raises some interesting questions about the separation of church and state, as well as our incredible potential as a nation to be manipulated by patriotic propaganda (remember "freedom fries?").

But this is not just mindless frivolity; it's all very carefully orchestrated. The Republicans decided in the mid-1990s to wage a culture war. So for the last 10-12 years they have campaigned on "family values," promising to prohibit or limit reproductive rights, restrict the rights of those hellbound gay folks, inject a little more God (and a lot less science) into our schools, and so forth. And, to our eternal discredit as a supposed sentient, informed nation, it has worked. Many poor folks have been duped into voting against their better financial interests, putting in power a group of people determined to dismantle the social safety net, to further enrich the wealthy, and never to raise the minimum wage (10 years later, it's still $5.15/hour). People need to wake up and call out these hucksters and their cheap legerdemain.

Sorry for the screed. I'm just frustrated.

11:46am:
















Here are some photos from my and Pollita's recent trip to Guatemala. From top: the old colonial city of Antigua; active lava flows on Volcan Pacaya; a baby pitviper (Cerrophidion godmani) on the slopes of Pacaya; sunset over the black-sand, trash-strewn beach at Monterrico; a view of Lago de Atitlan as we descend out of the mountains toward its shores; the view from atop Temple 5 at Tikal; looking across at Temple 1 from the top of Temple 2 at Tikal.

It was a cool, if very hurried, trip. On the flight to Guatemala City, many of the folks sitting around me couldn't fill out their immigration cards, presumably because they were illiterate; the flight attendants had to do it for them. This was a somewhat sobering introduction to a country still mired in poverty and struggling through the violent legacy of a three-decades-long civil war.

But it's a beautiful country, and the people were almost all friendly. Except for the addled soul who tried to steal Pollita's water bottle in Santa Catarina, and the bus ticket-taker who tried to rip me off on the way to Antigua. And all those schoolkids in Flores and Santa Elena who have nothing better to do than yell crass inanities from their speeding scooters at Westerners walking down the street. These boorish few were more than redeemed by the likes of Manuel, a 60ish fellow who took a paternalistic shine to me on the long bus ride from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City, during which I grew more and more ill. He bought me lunch (over my strenuous objections), offered up his threadbare jacket to quell my increasingly violent shivering, and shared a cab with me to make sure I caught my next bus all right. He was a top-notch guy, and I wish him and his ailing mother well.

Pollita and I feel we gleaned a thing or two about the Guatemalan national character during our time down there. Such as: those people love to eat chicken, even at ridiculous hours. While we were waiting to board our early-morning flight from Guatemala City to LA, we noticed a lot of people carrying plastic bags containing large cardboard boxes. On these boxes was a picture of a smiling chicken gleefully offering up a plate of his own kind to anyone with the local equivalent of $2.50. These folks were buying huge serves of fried/roasted chicken at 6 in the morning. We counted between 16 and 18 people with said foodstuff. One older fellow opened his box up and delicately wafted the delectable aroma around the airport lounge, perhaps in a sponsored attempt to entice us to buy. So a bunch of people boarded our flight with these chicken boxes, and as we were disembarking in LA, we saw a fair few still carrying the plastic bags, the cardboard now absolutely sodden with grease and condensation. It seemed pretty gross to us at the time. But fair play to the Guatemaltecos--we didn't get any free food on the flight, so they were really planning ahead.

Pollita, Audrey, and I then had three days in San Francisco. We pounded the pavement, ate some high-quality fudge, did a lot of op-shopping, saw the sea lions at Pier 39, finally got some squish pennies for that demanding bastard Seb, mixed with hippies old and young at the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, and saw Cake (and the last half of Missy Higgins's last song) for free in Golden Gate Park. Pollita has pics, so she can, and should, elaborate. We had a good time. But now Pollita is gone--we've finally given her back to Amy--and we miss her dearly. I guess we'll just have to go back to Oz before too long to see her and all the rest of you bastards...

8:18pm: this and that
it's getting crazy hot here in the desert. i suppose, of course, it's to be expected, but this is my first arizona summer since 2001 and i have become slightly less hardcore. what i have done, remarkably, was decide that i was going to walk to work. it's about two miles to my new job from my place--which doesn't sound crazy, but is a tad nuts considering the temperature. it's lovely enough in the mornings, but by 5pm the pavement radiates warmth while the sun pelts me with rays and the mere existence of my clothes seems ridiculous. it's sort of cool though--like i am on some sort of reality tv show called "walk home" and i am winnning. every day i get sweatier and more aromatic, but it's the cheap way to stay healthy!

my husband (!!) has been posting to the ol' lj lately, so i thought i would post...now i see why i have not posted...hmmm...not much to say! an entire paragraph about the weather. sheesh. what's next?

sadly, post wedding, there has not been too much of note going on. i have realized that when mike is not here to navigate the remote i watch a lot of law and order. there is just something about mariska hagarty that i just love. since i have been alone a lot lately, i have also been fixated on a movie coming out called "the lake house" with sandra bullock and keanu reeves. sure everyone else i know thinks it looks bad, but i cant get the song from the trailer or the premise out of my head. in love but living two years apart!! a tragic romance! i love romance! another small change i have made while husband has been away was to get poofs and body wash instead of the old bar of soap method. i am a bit girly after all.

well, i think this is enough boring babbling. more to come after the next weekend when mike, chicken baby and i are reunited in san franciso before the baby flies back to oz and back to the love of her life! i'm not positive, but i think those two have missed each other quite a bit :)

and i've missed 8 minutes of law and order for this post!!

9:49pm: Check out this house about a mile from where I grew up in Phoenix. American patriotism, like most other aspects of American culture, tends strongly toward the unsubtle (that is, after all, a gigantic bronze eagle, most likely gripping a few hapless yet scheming Arabs in its talons). USA! USA! USA!

4:42pm: Some wedding photos, more than two weeks after it all went down. Thanks heaps to all of you who came; it meant so much to us to have you there. To those who wanted to come but couldn't: you were on our minds. Those who were there but didn't want to be: your surliness did not go unnoticed. And to those who neither went nor wanted to go: everything worked out rather well for you, didn't it?

6:20pm: so happy
the chicken baby is here. the wedding is a week away. i am paralyzed with happiness!

9:53am:





I've been working on a rattlesnake project in southwestern New Mexico, and I thought I'd post some pics of the place and a few of the critters I've seen thus far. It's a lot of photos, but, hey, I'm a pretty crapulent guy. Seb at least will feign semi-convincing interest, if he can tear himself away from his precious banana smoothies for a minute or two.  So clockwise from top left: landscape, Merriam's kangaroo rat, short-horned lizard, desert patchnosed snake, ground snake, juvenile rodent impaled on barbed-wire fence by shrike (male shrikes do this to impress females, demonstrating what good providers they would be to any prospective young), prairie rattlesnake, coachwhip, banner-tailed kangaroo rat. Kangaroo rats are the only rodents in the history of everything that do not bite and shit all over your hand when you pick them up. They are, as the pictures suggest, very sweet.

We saw Bob Dylan last night. Merle Haggard opened, and thus it was a three-hour celebration of craggy, weather-beaten world-weariness. Merle looked the part in his all-black ensemble; Bob as well was obviously going for flinty and scabrous, but he threw it all away with his curious choice of a bedazzled white cravat. The audience was a strange mix of tired old hippies, paunchy, feathery-haired blue-collar types, and try-hard young scenesters. Merle sounded really good, his deep, smooth, resonant voice somehow defying the years that have ravaged his stooped, broken-down body. It's always cool to see Dylan, but Aud and I were a little disappointed in his set. He had reworked his songs such that many were almost unrecognizable. He played keyboards the entire night, never once picking up a guitar. I know such dabbling must help stave off the boredom inherent in playing the same songs for 35 years, but I suspect most of the audience wanted to hear the versions we fell in love with. But overall we had a good time, and there were substantial bright spots, among them "Queen Jane," "Blowin' in the Wind," "All Along the Watchtower," and "Make You Feel My Love." Anyway, it was all worth it, if only to see a tiny, squirrelly, implausibly agitated old man throw his half-eaten hot dog into the drinking-fountain basin instead of the garbage can two feet away.

12:04pm: wedding ceremony help
hey friends! I am trying to write some poems and etc for our ceremony and would LOVE some honest comments on one that I recently wrote. Can you please let me know if you think it is suitable for the ceremony and if you like it? I would appreciate it heaps! I don't know what it's called...

Oh and if you have any ideas for good secular readings to include please send that idea along!

Here goes:

Into the windows of the carriage we float
Coupled passengers intertwined lives
The track is being built as the train passes over it
We glide together mixing and clashing
Sometimes the confusion leads us to wonder
Where chaos flounces and hot history ferments
I forget what my life is without your heart
An ember that I take with me
No longer forlorn or wanting
It glows and sings when I hold it
Lean toward me and I will also surrender
A part of my heart for you to embrace
We can sit in separate carriages at times
We can look idly at rustic pastoral scenes
But I hold the spark of you always
And you look at a cityscape a beach a sunrise
And clasp the most of me with you
Reunite and elide as we build that train track
Another carriage may be built
Some may be refurbished
Yet we go and go and go
Running sleeping breathing laughing kissing loving
Comforted by a lack of destination
Riveted by a hope of forever
And when there is a harvest moon we sit
And hear the strains of music that link all the tracks
Directions and misdirections
For this our life
This is our life.
Together.

4:54pm:




We've been busy the past few days, though as usual we have very little to show for ourselves.  We drove up to Phoenix for my dad's birthday on Friday, then continued on to LA on Saturday to see Belle and Sebastian play Sunday night.  We hung out with Aud's brother Albert and his friend Austin in LA, which was good fun.  Austin is currently obsessed with learning as much as he can about Scientology so as to more effectively mock it, so on Saturday night we stayed up until 3 a.m. sifting through Wikipedia entries on L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise, and the Dark Lord Xemu.  L. Ron Hubbard has some really choice quotes on the record.  For instance: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous.  If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."  And: "Let's just see how stupid they really are!" (In response to a friend's objection that nobody would be dumb enough to pay for progressive levels of spiritual enlightenment.)

Belle and Sebastian were really good, as were the New Pornographers, who opened. Then B & S did a short in-store show at Amoeba Records on Monday at 3 p.m., which we stuck around for.  We didn't get out of LA until 7 p.m., which got us back into Tucson at 3:30 Tuesday morning.  And Tuesday night (=last night) we saw Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at a small venue in Tucson (picture above).  They were tremendous, well worth the voluminous ink that's been spilled on them
over the past few months.

Anyhow.  A few weeks ago we flew out to Indiana with my dad to visit my grandparents; it was the first time I'd seen them since I left for Australia nearly 4 years ago.  And my cousin Kathy, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years, drove in from Champaign, Illinois, where she's going to grad school.  So it was really good to catch up (see Kathy-less photo above).

My grandfather got caught in a tornado in 1963.  He was driving a Keebler truck through the Indiana cornfields when a twister barreled straight toward him.  He decided his best course of action was to hunker down in the cab and wait it out.  He was thrown through the windshield and onto the front pages of the local rags ("Area man survives tornado").  I'd heard the story for years but had never seen the pictures until this latest visit.  There are a lot of pictures.

Also, my grandparents' kitchen sink stopped up during our visit.  The plumber we called in to fix it was a very personable, extremely loud fellow who sounded exactly like Randy Quaid.  He mentioned that he wanted to set up a corn stove in his house, an idea that I suspect rarely strikes anyone outside of the American Midwest.  And he mentioned that he tries to buy American whenever possible.  Clothes present special difficulties, he explained, but he tries: "I went to the store the other day, and the only American-made things there were those luau shirts--I don't know what you call them.  And they cost $75! It's hard, I tell you.  It's hard."  Every other manufacturing job may have been outsourced, but at least the factories churning out horribly overpriced "luau shirts" are holding the line.  God bless America.

9:17am: So my friends Dave, James and I were reminiscing recently about the solid 40 minutes of fun we had a few years ago playing a remarkable boardgame called "Outdoor Life." Outdoor Life tests players' knowledge in many key areas, such as fly-tying, firearm use, firearm safety, firearm maintenance, and firearm purchase. But the best question we could recall was the following: "Which animal is dumbest: deer, hawk, or fox?" Dave guessed deer, but the correct answer, apparently, is hawk. It's hard to imagine an intelligence test that accurately gauges the mental capacity of three such different animals, and it's even harder to imagine the good folks at Outdoor Life carrying it out. Maybe they simply mean "easiest to kill."

10:33am: writing
hmmm...last night i started to write about the beauty of friendship, but my mind wandered to broken friendships instead. ahem:

Into the ether all fades away
A web of melancholy dancing tourniquets
Rotund and puffy pastry flaky like spanikopita oozing
So taut and hot the blister weeps
And in the valley of my sleep a tigress gently nuzzles
Forlorn and pockmarked teenage lust
A wholesome dirty phase
Captured crookedly on a borrowed digital camera
The night it swirls and memory jigs
A jigger full of liquid angst
Remember me as one who taught you
Gentle confines of your nonchalant cool
Taken scraped torn from my skin
What ills you in the pit of you
What moors inside your brain
Harbored in the soul of you
Always anchored to a cheetah running
Ever moving never knowing
A fall without a crash
Leave me in the dusky dusty doorways of the day’s end
Fend for yourself with unmarked maps and broken compass
Go and let the years slide and tug at the elastic corners of your features
See me in the future’s dream through hazy cobweb music
A thought a glimpse forgotten how
To match the name up to the face.

1:44pm:



So we're settled in Tucson now, with a house and temporary jobs and everything. I'm wandering the desert looking for endangered pineapple cactus, and Audrey is trying to squeeze money out of hard-working American families during dinnertime on behalf of the Arizona League of Conservation Voters. The area I'm working in is a thoroughfare for illegal immigration and drug smuggling, and as a result it's littered with empty water bottles, baby-food jars, and dilapidated bikes. And nail clippers, for some reason. I wouldn't have guessed they'd be a high-priority item for border crossers, but what do I know? Very occasionally, we see the back of someone crashing through the bush. A few years ago, when I was doing reptile and amphibian surveys in southern Arizona national parks, we stumbled onto a couple having sex in the dirt beside a ruined Native American dwelling. Regrettably, on this job we haven't yet been treated to such an unfettered expression of the divine gift of love.

The first picture above is a restaurant near the University of Arizona here in Tucson. Chicken Baby's American odyssey looks like it could turn into a search for her roots, a la "An American Tail." The other two photos are from our recent trip to Alabama to visit my sister, her husband, and their new baby. We spent our time playing with the baby, touring the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast (shockingly, much of it is still rubble 6 months after Katrina hit), and going to a Mardi Gras parade (of which my sister, a local news personality, was the Grand Marshal). The parade was fun but also a bit disturbing; to our outsider eyes, it seemed to crystallize the distinct lack of progress the South has made in the arenas of race relations and social justice. To wit: the parade consisted of white folks atop elaborate floats hurling trinkets to a crowd of poor black people, who scrambled madly for the beads, moonpies, and bags of peanuts that landed in their midst. We have a long way to go.

Also noteworthy: we went with a few friends to the National Roller Derby championships yesterday; they were held here in Tucson. In the finals, the Texas Rollergirls handily defeated the hometown Tucson Saddletramps. I was impressed with the entire spectacle; I was expecting a pseudosport which hung its appeal on campy catfights and gratuitous flesh-flashing, but these ladies were serious athletes. They skated fast and well, hit each other hard, and took the whole thing very seriously. They also sported some incredible names, such as Tara Hymen and The Muff Thumper. Apparently a whole subculture has grown up around roller derby in the States; it's linked with the punk scene, and it attracts a lot of female fans. Anyway, it was good fun.

4:08pm: we are going live baby
http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/AudreyChing&MichaelWall

Check us out for wedding updates!

4:54pm: our whereabouts











So here are some pics of our trip to Hawaii. We had a good time and did a lot of camping, hiking, swimming, etc. We got to spend time with Audrey's Auntie Alice and Uncle Frank, which was great, and our friends Jeff and Tiffany, which was not. Only joking. Jeff and Tiffany live in Phoenix, but they just happened to be in Hawaii at the same time we were. Such serendipity should be remarked upon.

We also made another friend, Cody (in the dancing-natives photo, he's the one in the middle with the enormous grin). Audrey sat next to Cody on the flight to Honolulu, and they hit it off, talking for 6 straight hours. Cody is a really good guy and a lot of fun. He lives on Oahu and volunteered to show us around. We went over to his house one night and were impressed by the size and number of his Samoan relatives. During the two hours or so that we were there (about 10-midnight), 4 different dudes, each one bigger than the last, wandered into the kitchen, grabbed a gigantic plate of food out of the fridge, offered us some, and then wandered off again to some unspecified place.

After Hawaii, we stopped in LA for a few days to catch up with our friends there. Thanks to Mr. Smells and Handsome Craig for putting up with us for so long; we had a really good time. But now we are back in Arizona, looking for a place to live and something to do. Also, at some point we're going to have to do some planning for this wedding thing we've gotten ourselves into. We shall see.

We miss all of our Australian friends and family dearly. Drop us a line when you can, so the miles and miles between us don't mean quite so much.

for giziggles: www.gizoogle.com

10:40am: family fun in sydney!

















hmmm...wish i was a bit more techno savvy because i cant figure out how to post these so they are not just in a column. anyway, some pics of mom, dad, annie, me, mike, cousin rita, auntie margaret, cousin emily, seb (he's like family!) and seb's snake abubla. we all had such a great time hanging out and enjoying the sydney summer over christmas and new years. im so happy that everyone had a chance to get together and share quality family time!

10:07am: finally some simpson desert pics!












here are some photos from the simpson desert trip. mike making eyes at a lovely goanna (varanus eremius)...a beautiful knob tail gecko (look at those eyes!)...the infamous "fly killing hand"...me looking my desert best holding a ningaui (little marsupial)...and the worlds tiniest goanna the brevicauda!

1:03am: So now it's 2006, only a month or so away from the Winter Olympics, which suck.

Audrey's family--Annie and her parents--have come and gone. As far as I could tell, a good time was had by all. Annie fed a kangaroo mountain bread and yanked a tick out of my head. The kangaroo never came back after its untraditional meal--it's probably lying in a ditch somewhere, its affronted belly burst and bleeding. We drove all around and ate entirely too much, and it was great seeing Auntie Margaret and Audrey's dad embrace and talk for the first time in 30 years.

Rita flew in to Sydney as well, and she and Audrey's folks met for the first time. So it's been a pretty special time. Seb's wonderful family had us over on both Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Seb makes a mean chicken schnitzel, but it's not in the same class as his mom's.

Also of note: we saw Russell Crowe and his backing band, The Original Fear of God, on Dec 27 at the Vanguard in Newtown. We went for the novelty factor, and in most respects we weren't disappointed. He told a few amusing stories, played a bunch of forgettable songs, including one about the ghost of Richard Harris playing rugby for Ireland, and got progressively drunker as the night wore on. I would post a photo of the performance, but we don't have any good ones, thanks to some blue-nosed old slapper. The Vanguard doesn't permit photography, but Auds started taking some pictures anyway. Law and order were to prevail, however: some mildly drunk middle-aged woman with a blonde flip lurched over and waggled a bony finger in Audrey's face. "No no no no no no no!" she cried. For some reason Audrey regarded this demented crone as an authority figure--she hid the camera away in her bag and averted her eyes.

Our friend Mike Bailey is currently in Sydney, and we're having a good time. I should write that boy's ideas down--he's got the entrepreneurial spirit like some folks have syphilis. Money-making scheme A was tremendous, but money-making scheme B was even better. You'll see.

Back to the States (well, the quasi-state of Hawaii anyway) in 9 days. Craziness. In some ways I'm ready to go back, but in others I'm nowhere near. We're going to miss our Australian friends tremendously. No good will come of dwelling on it...

10:42am: excitement! thrills!
we've been pretty slack with the live journal lately, but that's primarily because we haven't been around. we just got back from the simpson desert a few days ago--we went out there to assist research on small-mammal ecology and to swat flies. people who have been reading this know that i love to quantify things, so it shouldn't shock folks to learn that i spent a couple of afternoons counting the flies i swatted at our hot, dusty camp. one day, i killed 1280 of the persistent little fellows. chin liang ("the squirrel") killed about the same number, but it made no observable dent in the fly population. they just kept coming. it was amazing.
the desert was amazing as well, and we saw all kinds of cool stuff--we'll post some pictures soon. we can't really do it now, as we're spending the next five days on the south coast of nsw with some pals (and aud's sister annie). audrey will soon welcome even more of her family to australia--her mom and dad are coming for a week on christmas day. it promises to be good fun.
more later when we have more time and more facilities. i promise a photo of my fly-killing hand after all the carnage.