BATWATCH 2008

Hi folks!

It’s another week for us in Brisbane, and more fun and not-necessarily-exciting stories to tell you all about that we’re gonna tell you anyway. First things first, we’ve been writing these stories for a while now with the goal of keeping people up-to-date with us livin’ in the land down under. I’ve recently been saddened to realize that when I ask certain people whether they’ve been following our blog, I get the “the what, now?” response. “The blog”, I say. And I get the confused and slightly disgusted look (or at least that’s what I imagine the look to resemble). So it seems to me that the word blog, is a very unattractive word. I’m going to pull a Tim on everyone here and insert the origin of the term according to our good friend Wikipedia. For some reason, somewhere, someone felt like recording their thoughts and posting them on the web would be a good idea. And it appears that other people like the idea of reading these posted thoughts, and the concept of a web-log was born. And given that we’re all lazy by nature and love to shorten things if we possibly can, especially here in Oz (perhaps it was an Australian who was responsible…wouldn’t surprise me one bit), we get the word blog. Ugly, ugly word. No wonder people who haven’t been introduced to the concept of a blog, don’t generally have great feelings towards it. Regardless, I hope that these adverse feelings can be overcome. On with our week!

So, I think it’s official, this past week was a bit of a downer. Whether it’s the residual effects of jet-lag, or we just miss home a lot, or because other outside circumstances are rather unpleasant right now, I think it was my first week of real-life sadness in Australia. A very close friend of ours lost her father early last week, and I think that it really set the tone for the week. It made us (or at least me) insanely homesick, and we really just wished that we could have been home with our friend to help her through. On top of that, I was dealing with what we’ve now figured out was an all time low point for hemoglobin production in my body. Meaning, I didn’t have enough iron in my blood (due to baby production) to even give me the energy to get out of bed, so I couldn’t eat, which was in turn making me more anaemic, a yucky cycle. Thankfully, we got to the bottom of that quickly, but it was a very scary couple of days for me. I had horrible thoughts of what might be happening to the wee one inside simply because I felt so wretched. It turns out that the wee one was living the high life off of my iron reserves. In some ways, a baby is a bit like a parasite in that it lives off of your nutrients. It gets the goodies first, leaving me with the leftovers. I suppose that’s best in the long run. And maybe the parasitism never actually stops…I think this is where my mother starts smirking because I realize now what raising a little ‘me’ might entail.

So bad things considered, we didn’t actually do very much at all last week. No adventures to fruit-themed parks, no fun hikes or swims, etc. But, as the week went on we were both feeling a little more energetic and decided to try to explore more city on the weekend, as there is lots we haven’t yet seen. Our plans, I think we can safely say, were thwarted by the bus system. The metro here runs a reduced schedule on the weekends, especially Sundays, and I think that without pointing any fingers, we “miscalculated” the time that it would take us to get to where we wanted to go. So we didn’t get far. Actually, we didn’t even leave the bus stop on Sunday afternoon…We gave up after waiting for 40 minutes for a bus that wasn’t coming for another 20 (after we realized, again, not pointing any fingers, that that bus ran every hour on Sunday’s, not every half hour).

Overall, we can say that we got to have some down-time last weekend, which I think was well needed. It also allowed us to start to tweak a new hobby here in Brissy. I like to call it BATWATCH. When we first got to Brisbane, I noticed one night as I was walking to the food mart, that there were lots of very quiet crows flying overhead. Except these crows looked like the symbol for batman, and were silent, which should have tipped me off, I suppose. I didn’t think too much more of it until Tim and I were on a walk on another night and he noticed these crows…And then we both realized that we were being idiots. These were bats. The biggest bats we’d ever seen and there were tons of them. I don’t know much about these critters, or why they like the sky over our place, but every night around dusk, there are droves of them that fly overhead. It’s like we live under a freeway for bats. Some of them are low flyers, but most stick pretty high up and I know that bats are kind of scary, but you’d be amazed to see this in real life. They’re not diving for our necks or anything, so I think they’ve got to be quite harmless and probably much more interested in the bugs than the humans. Let’s hope. So we’ve actually been trying to capture them on film for the purpose of allowing you guys to see what we see every night…But our efforts have been in vain. Most digital pictures are completely black, or have a little speck in them that you might think was a bat but can’t really tell, and our efforts to capture the event on video camera gave even poorer results. You can see a plane going by, but nothing else except for some clouds really…And there’s the fact that we both sound like wieners on video camera, and are just terrible bat commentators. We’ll work on our bat photography, but in the meantime, check out this link. Apparently there’s someone in Brissy who thinks that batwatch is a fun hobby too.

Another fun thing that we’ve been able to observe here in our own house is what we think is a family of lizards. The first time one darted down the wall, I thought that it was kind of weird to be sharing our house with lizards that we’re not sure aren’t poisonous or something. But the more I’ve seen them, the cuter and cooler they are. Most nights I end up in a staredown with one when I turn on the bathroom light, it is a bit freaky when it first happens but I guarantee that these little guys will win your hearts.

So ya, come and visit! We have bats and lizards.

The nice thing is there has yet to have been any spider incidents or sightings in or near the house. I figure that as long as we support the bats and lizzies, the spiders will be taken care of. Predation can be a very good thing. Go predators.

I think that I’ve started to gain a baby belly. I certainly have the trucker’s appetite to support my new weight gain, and I love the excuse of eating for two. To Tim’s dismay, I’m actually competing with him for food right now…Meaning if I get to the leftovers first, there’s no question that there will be nothing left when I’m through with them. I think I shocked him the other night when I asked if he would stop eating so that I could have more leftovers in the morning. Poor thing. He’s been hounding me since he first met me to eat more, he had no idea what he was asking for. Since we’ve been asked by a number of folks, I’ve added a belly shot so that you can all get a good look at my progress in chubbiness. Belly shots are hard. As you’ll see by the picture, I cannot keep a straight face while Tim is taking a picture of my belly. I either look really mad or can’t stop laughing. We did have a doc’s appointment the other day and were quite excited to hear the baby’s heartbeat. It’s fast. I think we’ll have a livewire on our hands.

That’s about all for this week.

Please keep in touch and take care. Lots of love.