Seasons

Sunday November 22nd I was at Coogee beach with some friends. It was about 41C (106F), I put on heaps of sun block (SPF 30, which is high for me), and played in the water. And by play I mean, got beat up by the breakers and occasionally body surfed on the waves. It was a very busy day at the beach, but Ann, Annie, and I had fun, and later got sushi near bye.

And a few days early at Manly beach with work we made a giant turtle, lead by master sculptor Katie.

From there I travelled to the United States, in a whirlwind tour that had a stage in Boulder, CO. Sadly I don't have pictures from this awesome time.  It was snowing when I got there and I wanted to have a 4WD car, sadly I didn't reserve one originally (had asked for a Toyota Corolla) and so I had to do a hideously expensive upgrade to a Cadillac Escalade, which I endearingly named "The Tank". Hey, it's all that was available on midnight after a snowy day. Here's a picture of an earlier model:

Apparently it's one of the most fuel in-efficient cars and in 2008 was 13 mpg city / 17 mpg highway. That said, it was huge, had great traction, and I definitely felt safe. Even if I did hit something I was confident that I wouldn't be the loosing party in that crash. And with 7 seats, 4 with seat warmers, several thermostats, gps, and many other crazy features it was a nice ride for the team. I needed it to get through weather that while cold and snowy, wasn't quite this:

Now a week or so later, I'm back in sunny Australia in some nice and hot 90F weather. On the whole, I'll take the summer. Now to go out and enjoy it.

The smell of heaven

I walked to work from my hotel today (it's only about a 3rd of a mile, seems a waste to drive even when I have a car. A man needs some exercise). This is a fairly cold walk. According to the internet, it's about -4F (or about -20C for any Australians who some day stumble upon this blog), without wind chill. I did bring one warm fleece, a hat, and some gloves to help me survive. Perhaps I should have brought a scarf and some thermal underwear, but I didn't so there. Most places are nicely heated.

Anyway, so I have my short cold walk, I come into the office, and permeating the whole building is the smell of freshly cooked belgian waffles, one of the best smells in the world (possibly beat by the making of waffle cones). My first thought was that this was the smell of heaven. I can certainly say that right now, belly full of waffle, I'm much happier than I was when my frozen body managed to make it's way into the building. Now to go tackle a work project where things just like to keep getting worse. But it can't take away my waffles!

Movember part 2

Movember is drawing to a close and I've had requests for new pictures. The Mo is looking good. I'll be keeping it later than Movember so that all my friends and family in the US can have a chance to see it. Then I'll end the ridiculousness and shave it off. I hear that one of my Chanukah presents is going to be some new shaving equipment (I want to try the Merkur Slant), and I hope to pick up some Nancy Boy shaving cream in San Francisco, which I've heard some good things about. So I should be all set to shave, which I expect to please my mom quite a bit. But that day is not yet here. The first mo picture is from the beach about a week ago, and the second is from Thanksgiving two days ago.

Glebe Street Fair

About two weeks ago I went to the Glebe Street Fair, which is a street fair in Glebe not a fair on Glebe St. It's was actually along Glebe Point Rd from Paramatta Rd to St. Johns I think (I don't think it went as far as Bridge Rd, but it was a while ago so I'm not sure). When I first got there, however, it looked like it just went on forever.

A few of us wandered a the whole length of the fair, joined at times by Jono, Pat, and others. Jono got a crazy red emperor at the same store that Christie got an interesting hooded vest and they both got some comfy silk pants. I perhaps should have gotten some of those to. It was much like the street fairs I've seen in the US with a mix of booths selling food, clothing, art, and a few random ones like carnivorous plants. Christie got some Dutch pancakes with some yucky strawberries, and we all had some BBQ pork buns.

It was pretty warm out, so in good Australian tradition I went out with lots of sunblock on. I've probably worn more sunblock here than I have the rest of my life. There was even some nice live performances, though we didn't stick around to watch them. Too bad though, those old guys were fun!

After the fair we got groceries at the shops, went home, and cooked a yummy fettucini bolognese for dinner. All in all a good day.

Sculptures By The Sea

A week ago I went to Journey's Cafe where Yas works with Brendan and Christie in the morning for scones and hot chocolate (a modified Devonshire tea). We did it again today so it might be turning into a tradition. While there last week, however, Yas and I came up with a plan to head to Bondi after she got off work and go see the Sculptures by the Sea exhibit. This is exactly what it sounds like, sculptures by the sea at Bondi beach. It ran from the very end of October through this weekend.

So after Yas got off from work we caught a series of buses down to Bondi beach, wandered around for about an hour and a half seeing all the sculptures which ran from Bondi to Tamarama and back. Then we quickly hopped on a bus back so I could get home in time for all you can eat sushi (which was fun, but definitely not my favorite way to eat sushi, I think I prefer quality over quantity).

Sculptures by the Sea was amazing. The art was interesting, though I never picked up one of the pamphlets so I mostly just interpreted it however I wanted to. The placement in the environment made it so different from an art gallery. The artists often really incorporated the location into their art. Like this picture, where some of the pools are actually filled with metal:

I wasn't wowed by this table in a cage, but I loved it's backdrop of the sea. Especially in this setting where you couldn't see any beach, boats, buildings, or anything else having to do with people. Sadly, the picture doesn't quite capture the awesomeness that I felt standing here looking out on the open sea.

There was lots of other random stuff like this watch in the beach at Tamarama bay. It reminded me that I'd love to get a new watch if I can ever find one that I like. My Skagen is not wearing as well as I might like.

And lots of other sculptures that I didn't take pictures of. I love photography, but often I like to experience an activity rather than stopping to take pictures. I then have separate times when the activity I'm really doing is photography and that's why I've gone somewhere. This was not one of those times. So no heaps of pictures for you. Though if you want to see a few more you can check out my Picasa Web album.

Flora and Fauna

I was walking home the other night and saw a crazy creature that looked like a stick climbing up a building on Pyrmont Bridge Road right at Burton St. I told Christie about it today and she said it was a stick insect, which seems like an apt name to me. Sorry the picture is a little out of focus. The bug was actively crawling up the wall and the pictures is from my not-to-awesome camera phone. When he walked--I'm just randomly assigning a gender, I have no idea, nor do I need to know, how to tell what gender they are--he swayed back and for a bit.

A little bit closer to home, we've been gardening! A few weeks ago early on a Saturday afternoon Christie and I cleared out a lot of the weeds in the garden. Then we went down to the local gardening shop (Annandale Garden Centre) on Booth street and bought a bunch of stuff. In no particular order, we got zucchini, oregano, capsicum (bell pepper), baby spinach, garlic chives, flat-leaf parsley, a plant that repels some sort of bug (maybe mossies, though it doesn't do us that much good outside), and some other stuff that I can't remember off the top of my head. Then today we went back and bought a dwarf lemon tree.

Sadly we keep doing this right after noon, which is perhaps not the best time for the plants. Christie transplanted one of the zucchini into the yellow pot the lemon tree came in, and it's looking pretty poor ever since (you might be able to tell in the picture). I'm hoping it recovers but consensus is that it's unlikely. I don't know. This is more Christie's thing than mine (I'm just good at killing plants), but I'm having fun setting up the garden and asking how it's doing every few days. Maybe the green thumb will slowly rub off on me. Ann was teaching me more about how to not kill Nick's fish this past week too.

Christie also has some basil growing from seeds in the kitchen, right next to our window. That seems to be going well and in a week or two we might move it into the garden.

Though something is eating our baby spinach. I hope it doesn't also eat the basil, because we would prefer to do all the garden plant eating. Oh and I found out today we have a pineapple plant too, though it doesn't have any actively visible fruit growing, and a strawberry plant that has yet to really produce viable fruit. Everything except for the lemon tree is in a pot right now, partially because there is a possibility of people moving in a few months and Christie would want to take the plants with her rather than leave them in the garden.

The soil underneath our pots has lots of worms and lizards and other bugs though. And we bought a compost bin that has become home to a billion bugs (it's kind of scary). I want it to make dirt already! Then we can use it in our garden. But apparently these things take time. One day, hopefully I'll see dirt come out of this pile of weed trimmings and vegetarian food scraps.

Lastly, Christie said she saw a white-something-or-another-that-i-cant-remember-the-name-of spider in our laundry room this week. This is slightly disturbing as it's one of the more poisonous spiders and if you get bitten and aren't treated the bitten area goes gangrenous and often has to be amputated. I would like to keep all my body parts. So I will try and remember to be careful when doing laundry, though I already forgot when I was doing it today. Luckily our garden doesn't have too many deadly things. No drop bears or poisonous jelly fish yet.

With that I'll leave you with a video of one of my favorite songs about Australia: Deadly Animals (Welcome to Australia)

Where to find even more pictures.

So, I'm going to endeavor to keep posting pictures with my blogs, but when I go to events like the opera house open day or Sculptures by the Sea I take quite a few pictures and I'm not going to post all of them here. Since pretty much everyone I know has a Google Account, I figured I'll upload them to Picasa Web rather than Flikr, because it'll be easier if I restrict access to something to only my friends.

So if you know me (which I suspect is everyone actually reading this, at least around the time of writing) then feel free to head over and look me up on Picasa Web. As we speak I'm uploading pictures from Sculpture by the Sea to a public album, http://picasaweb.google.com/ajperel/2009117SculpturesByTheSeaAtBondiBeach#. If I take pictures with friends and family in them, they'll be restricted to only people I know, or at the very least unlisted, and I'll work that out when it happens.

And sometime soon I'll get around to actually writing a blog post about Sculptures by the Sea. I went last Saturday and it deserves a post of its own.

Movember

It's November, or for many people including myself, Movember. A month to raise awareness about men's health, and look stupid and / or sketchy with ridiculous mo's. You can find out more on the Movember website, or even donate to the cause from my donation page.

My entire team at work is participating, and on the suggestion of my house mate Christie I've gone with a large, curling mo. It all started on November 1st, when were were clean shaven. You can see me here at the end of day one, with a little bit of stubble because I shaved in the morning

While I had been shaving once a week, this gave me a mini beard each week, which isn't acceptable for Movember. So, I've been shaving every day or two. But this first week I wanted to grow out some large patches of hair before really shaping the mo. So here you can see me mid first week, growing some giant patches of hair on my cheeks, but it's not a beard!

This past Sunday, right before going out to get groceries for Sunday dinner, I finally shaped the full mo. It took a very long time in front the mirror and it's not perfectly symmetrical, but I'm happy with it. And given that I only have a safety razor and that I didn't cut myself at all, I think I'm doing exceptionally well. I've been getting lots of reactions. Half the people immediately see it and are amazed, some people it's taken being around me for a while (up to a few hours) before they notice. But it almost always gets a comment, and quite a few laughs. After first shaping it I called out from the bathroom "I look like an idiot," which of course was a great way to get my housemates to come see it immediately. Yas, Brendan, and I all had a good laugh about it. Here are some pictures from today, right after I got home from Karate.

I'm going to keep this all of November, and since I'll be in the states at the beginning of December, I might just keep it a few extra days so some of my friends can appreciate it.

Open Day at the Sydney Opera House

Last Sunday was the open day for the Sydney Opera House, and I trekked through the rain to go there with Eric, followed by a nice lunch at the Guylian Belgian Chocolate Cafe, and of course Sunday Dinner. The opera house was awesome. They had three tours, where basically you just followed a route through the building and got to look at things. Very little guidance. The first route we went on went through the opera and concert halls.

The second your went through some of the five theaters in the opera house (there's a lot going on there), and we saw some of the remaining theaters during the last of the three tours. Every space had something going on. Whether it was just scenery being laid out, some sort of music, or performances. We saw an acrobatics group, a kids ballet class, and more.

And in random spaces like stairways they had small things going on as well like a cellist playing, or some crazy unicyclists outside while we waited in lines. This third tour was centered more around the backstage area, where we happened to encounter some gargoyles. We didn't get to be in the wings of the performance spaces or really see how each space operated, which was disappointing. What can I say? I'm a theater techie still even if I don't work in the theater these days. Certainly missing it as I go to see lots of performances and spaces in Sydney.

All in all it was really fun. I definitely want to see some shows here before I go. There were adds for some dance and theater performances that looked interesting. The opera Cosi Fan Tutte is playing, which I actually worked on when I was at the Santa Fe Opera.

Ki - ow

So I'm still doing Karate, though there were times during tonight's class where I was questioning my sanity. There is some big even at the end of November where a lot of students / schools come together and tons of students are grading (I will sadly miss it to be in the US, and will stay a white belt for a while longer since Christmas breaks will follow). But, class is stepping up as we approach and we're working on grading requirements a lot for the next belt.

This means more push ups and crunches than I ever thought I'd do in an evening, interspersed with grappling of many variations, sparring, self defense, and maybe even some ground fighting. All in all enough to really work up a sweat. I'm ashamed to say that I had to stop and take a little break having gotten light headed and a little nauseous. When I got home my arms were used up enough that it was difficult to grate cheese for dinner, and shower. And I didn't even do the whole thing! Everyone else had it worse. I definitely got through more than I would have a month or two ago though. And it's only going to get harder over the next month. Well, I wanted something to help me stay fit. This is definitely doing a good job. And at the end of it I'll have a nice colored belt of some kind, and hopefully be better at self defense.

Sunday Dinners Awesome, Foodery Blog Fail

Sunday dinners are a resounding success. Last week we had eight people, yesterday had ten, if we grow any more we're going to have to institute a kids table to hold everyone. And we might have a severe place setting shortage. And we've cooked some great stuff.

Nothings perfect though. On one front, our dinner blog Sunday Foodery seems to have gone no where. Basically everyone is busy so no one takes the time to write posts. I've started drafting a few, but wanted some help finishing them, so they're off languishing in a draft form in the ether that makes up Google Wave. I'm not sure if we'll start it up again. Maybe once finals are over for my house mates. Though we also seem to have trouble following recipes, so anything we write down will be more of a guideline than a perfect recipe of what we made. I'm beginning to have more sympathy for my friends and family who cook similarly, and then get hounded for recipes. How do I know how much I put in, I just threw stuff in and it was good!

Yesterday we recreated (coincidentally) the first meal that Ginny and I cooked together: bruschetta, vegetarian lasagna, and apple pie. I guess it's a good menu (I'm sure someone better at pairing foods would disagree, but we've liked it twice now!). For the lasagna I made a cheese sauce. This consisted of me making a rue, throwing in some large quantity of milk, some butter, a ton of ricotta cheese, and then a mixture of cheddar, parmesan, and mozarrela, and a little corn starch and heating it until it simmered and the cheese melted. It was really tasty, I could barely hazard a guess as to exactly how much of anything we put in.

The other problem we face is finances. I might be able to stand paying a little extra to make dinner for my friends, but Christie and Brendan (who I split a grocery bill with) are poor college students who have to be fairly conservative with their spending. They probably could to throw dinners every week (I'm by no means familiar with their finances, just guessing from what I remember of being a poor college student), but they shouldn't have to. We've instituted a policy for dinner that guests should either pay $10 or bring a bottle of wine. This will help us pay for dinner, since feeding ten people isn't cheap, especially when you're making a meal with a fair bit of meat. We've been pretty lax on collection so far though. Gotta step that up so we can afford groceries, though I feel kinda bad asking for money when people are just friends coming over for dinner and hanging out. I try to justify it that it's a good deal, and tons of fun, and so far good food (at least in my opinion).

So, since Sunday Foodery has yet to get all the posts up, I thought I'd at least give you guys a rundown of what we've made so far. The first post on Sunday Foodery has our first dinner, homemade gnocchi with a tomato vodka cream sauce.

The next week we recreated from memory a roast chicken recipe I made back in San Francisco with Matt, and of course improvised (I've been doing a lot more of that in my cooking and baking here than I did in the US). The full menu was:

Potato & broccoli soup

Followed by:

Roast Chicken Wrapped in Bacon,
Stuffed with a mixture of grated apple and onion,
which was roasted over a selection of root vegetables (getting all the yummy juices)

Additionally a side of roasted asparagus. You can see that here:

Then for dessert we had:

Chocolate mousse cupcakes (dark chocolate mousse) and
Milk Chocolate mousse

Then a little over a week ago we decided to go with a soup theme. We had:

roasted tomato soup with garlic and a side of grilled cheese sandwiches.
sweet potato caramelized onion apple cider soup (that's probably missing some punctuation), followed by a dessert of
vanilla & chocolate pudding parfait

You can see the whole dinner setup:

And a closeup of my soup and our stack of grilled cheese:

Then last night we had the bruschetta, lasagna, and apple pie dinner that I mentioned previously. Sadly, I forgot to take a a picture of it until after we'd eating everything. The apply pie was even nicely decorated. Ann cut slits similar to that of a zia symbol onto it (minus the circle), and then made a flower & petals out of dough and decorated the center. So wonderful! Then lasagna was impressive only because of it's massiveness. It was at least four inches tall, and filled a large oval roasting pan to the brim (the one we'd previously made the roast chicken in).  We ate most of it last night too.

So that's what the foodery blog should have on it! Maybe someday we'll get those posts written. And then I'll write about all the baking we've done not on Sundays, and how messed up measurements are down here, and all the other ideas I have. For now though, I'm going to go downstairs and see what's up with the dinner that I don't have to cook, just enjoy, made by Beth. Her last dinner was tasty, and the dessert looked amazing, so I'm excited!

We don't want your radiation!

They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'm going to try and start having pictures with my posts. I do think they look nice mixed in with these stories. And interesting sights might make some good blog posts. So to start off with, I wanted to make sure that everyone knew how lucky I was to live in a Nuclear Free Zone. Gone are my worries of radiation poisoning from everyone's daily activities. Here in Annandale, I know I'm safe!

I pass this sign on the to and from work every day. I'm really curious why it's there. Why do we need to make it exceedingly clear that Annandale is a Nuclear Free Zone? At the very least it provides some amusement and distracts me from part of my 2.4 mile walk to and from work. (I asked Christie on our drive home from the shops today and she said it might be part of some protests to nuclear power plants). 

Foodery!

Yes, I know foodery is not a word, but that doesn't mean I can't use it and you can't understand me and then it will be a word. So there.

At Sunday dinner last night the idea came up to start a blog about our cooking adventures. Enter Sunday Foodery. Who knows how it will progress, but we had fun writing some posts last night and plan to continue with both cooking and writing. I'll probably defer writings about our foodery adventures to that blog now for the most part, and everyone in the house or effectively in the house has posting permissions. Check it out!

One note, all recipes will be Australianified, so be ready to translate if you want to attempt them on your own. These crazy Australians have extra large tablespoons, metric measures, call yellow onions brown onions, etc. I plan a separate post on that sometime soon since it it's seriously messed with my head.

Apocalypse

So Sydney was rocked by what was apparently a crazy, unusual dust storm about a week ago. Everything was a reddish orange all morning. I've gotten asked about it by friends and family in the States quite a few times. You can read all about it, and how some people (hopefully not seriously) likened it to the apocalypse. I guess waking up to a red world might be a little frightening. Here are just a few of the zillion news stories:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/09/23/328403.aspx
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26113952-5006784,00.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/sydney-dust-storm-from-space/

Sadly, I don't have any pictures of my own to post, and I don't really want to steal photos from someone else. I've gotten this sudden fear of getting into huge trouble for copyright infringement and a brief search for a nice photo under a usable creative commons license has failed miserably. I suggest checking out the always good big picture: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/dust_storm_in_australia.html.

What can I say, either I take the apocalypse very calmly, or I just don't know what to expect out of Sydney. When I first woke up (sometime between 5-6 though I went back to sleep after that) everything was hazy and red and I just though that it was a crazy sunrise. When I woke up again and saw how low visibility was, I figured it was a crazy sunrise and fog. If I 'd thought it through I probably would have realized that absolutely everything being red for that long doesn't really make sense as part of the sun rise, but I didn't think about it. I was concentrating on getting to work on time and not missing the bus for our 3 day offsite to Hunter Valley. So, I somehow walked through the dust storm for 45 minutes, all the way into work, without really coming to realize what it was. It's only when I got to work and everyone was talking about the dust storm that I realized anything unusual was going on. I just got here, how am I supposed to know this doesn't happen in Sydney all the time?

How to make friends and find a place to live

I arrived in Australia on a Friday in the early morning. Having no where else to go, I went straight into work. This is a disadvantage to being homeless. Then I worked. Surprise! Towards the end of the afternoon I met up with Nick at the Landsdown hotel for drinking, board games, and eventually a ride to my home for the week. A good way to start my life in Australia. It's a while ago, but I seem to remember a impromptu party back at Nick's place and not getting to bed until after midnight. Having been up since 6am or so, and still on San Francisco time that was a little rough, but I will say, I got over jet lag a lot faster this second trip because of it.

Let us call Nick's house Annandale House, cause that's what everyone else seems to call it and it is in Annandale. Everyone in Annandale House was involved in the Sydney University Science Review, Jurassic Quark. (It's worth noting that if you speak with an Australian accent, Park rhymes with Quark). Our house was basically the epicenter of set and prop design and construction. Loving theater as I do I was happy to jump in. Nick had warned me this was going on and it didn't deter me from staying with him. I helped on a number of different projects, but I the most time designing and making a set of shields and a matching standard.

I even have this nifty picture of the shields, while they were under construction in our kitchen. By day two (Sunday) I'd met all four of Nick's flat mates, and was very involved in construction. The down side of all this is that what I was supposed to be doing is looking for a place to stay. Nick was leaving the country for three months and our arrangement was that I could only stay until he had to leave, since his roommates didn't know me and all. I can respect them not wanting to have a stranger staying with them after the host leaves.

Lucky for me, jumping in and helping everyone build stuff is a good way to make friends. So by the time Sunday rolled around, pretty much everyone had said they'd be comfortable with me sticking around for a while. Room searching has now been postponed as I have a place to stay for a bit.

This living situation has turned out to be amazing, and I'm a very lucky guy. I get along really well with all of my flat mates. We cook together (we've made things like roast chicken wrapped in bacon), we play video games together (I think I've played about 13 hours of Halo 3 in the last day, most of it as part of a surprise birthday party for Brendan, another flat mate), we watch TV (finished season 4 of Battlestar Galactica), and generally hang out and have a good time. I've also started taking a Kaizen Ryu karate class in Pyrmont with Christie and Brendan. That involves lots of push ups and me getting sweaty and exhausted very quickly. Seems good for me. I really wanted to have a social life outside of Google, and I've managed to land smack dab in the middle of an awesome one right away. My house mates: Christie & Brendan, Alistair, and Yasmin and their friends that I've gotten to know have all been very friendly, welcoming, and fun to hang out with. I look forward to a lot more of it.

Back to the beginning

I felt that my adventures as food, being the inspiration for the name of this blog, should get the first post. But perhaps it would be good to go back and explain things a bit. I've just moved to Sydney from San Francisco, and this blog is for my friends and family, so that they can follow along if they feel so inclined. I suppose it's also a nice record for myself, and a chance to just write, and be amused writing up my stories in ways that I enjoy. I have no desire to chronicle every day, or even write about things chronologically. But, if you follow along, you'll hear about what happens here as I write about it, and hopefully it will be both amusing and informative (at least if you care about me).

A brief recap of the pre-move story. One day at work a long time ago I received a mass email to the company encouraging everyone to look at the opportunities to work abroad, and take advantage of them. Sounded pretty nifty to me, so it stuck in the back of my mind and I decided it'd be something I'd like to do in 2009. I only speak English, and I thought the Australian office was open for a particular nice 1-year transfer program so that became my target. (I didn't actually get the super nice 1 year transfer, so now I'm on a permanent transfer with a plan to permanently transfer back in a year or so). I was thinking sometime in the q2-q3 time frame (March-August) would be a good time to go over. I dragged my heels applying (finding an amazing girlfriend will do that to you), but once I talked to my now manager he really got the ball rolling and the next thing I knew I was filling out applications, finding records for my work visa, getting my chest x-rayed, and then suddenly at the beginning of August everything was in order and I had a brief 2 week trip to check out Sydney before the final move at the beginning of September. I think I'll mostly chronicle things from September on, but if I think of something good to write about August I will.

The most important thing about August is that I met my new team, including Nick, who was willing to let me crash on his couch temporarily while I look for a longer term apartment. Several other co-workers were willing to let me stay with them, but I liked the idea of staying with Nick, it sounded like it be an adventure. That it certainly was, and those stories deserve a post of their own.

Tasty, Tasty American

I itched everywhere. I didn't have a rash, or any sort of skin condition, just bug bites. Not even that many bug bites all told. One on the back of each hand, four on my right wrist, another four in the area around my right shoulder and neck, oh and the big bite on my left leg that I think was from a spider. The others were from mossie's (mosquitoes) or bed bugs, all from while I slept. There was some debate as to which type of bug or bugs bit me and I may never know for sure. But once you've decided you're being eating alive by bugs, well, psychosomatic itching kicks in and you itch everywhere. And it might just be bites that haven't gotten big yet so you're scared to scratch anywhere. And to make matters worse maybe you've just shown up in Australia and you have no idea what type of store to go into to get hydrocortizone cream (either a pharmacy or a chemist, I never did get around to getting any).

So I walked around for a few days with an ace bandage from the work first aid kit wrapped around my wrist so that neither my jacket, nor I, itched the bug bites on my wrist. I got quite a few questions about it. And I think I convinced a lot of Australian's that I'm a wuss. Apparently bug bites are something to be expected and just silently dealt with here. I'm slowly getting the hang of that. But at fist I was a little surprised. I mean, winter's just ending. Bugs aren't supposed to be alive in winter! What's going on?!? Well, as long as little spiders don't crawl out of the bite on my leg (which supposedly can happen), I think I'll be doing okay.

It's been about a week since the last of the bites, and they're all pretty much faded away. Now I go out at night and do my laundry barefoot. Maybe this means I'm stupid, or maybe it just means I'm getting used to life in Australia. Either way, my first few weeks here have convinced me that the fauna of Australia thinks I'm one tasty, tasty American.