First Impressions

It is wonderful! But very hot। I don't do well with the sun and on our first camping adventure I managed to burn myself in a zigzag zebra strip pattern all over my feet. It actually looks pretty cool. So we've been out to the aborginal camp and up to Lakefield national park (where Steve Irwin worked). We were testing water quality in the national park and had to be very cautious because there are HUGE, as in 18-20 feet long with wide jaws that will swallow you whole, crocodiles all over the park. We weren't allowed to stand near the waters edge for more than a few minutes and we always had someone on the lookout for floating "logs" or eyes peeping out of the water. At one of the spots we saw some eyes watching us so we rushed through our sampling and high tailed it back to the car where we grabbed some binoculars to check out our first crocodile sighting. It was a little disappointing though when we realized it was a baby crocodile and only two feet long or so at the most.

That morning we ate breakfast with an inquisitive wallaby that rummaged through our fire pit until he found the burnt remains of a veggie burger from the night before. Can't imagine it tasted all that good. He hung out with us for a while and got close enough that we could see where something had taken a bite out of his left ear.

As we were driving out to our camp site through the park we passed large stretches of land that had been burnt down by controlled fires. They tend to regulate the land like we do in California by using controlled blazes to prevent wildfires from spreading through unmanageable distances but these fires were too early in the season to have been started by rangers. They start burning at the beginning of the wet season when there is some moisture in the air. Right now we are in the dry season and everything is brittle and very flammable. We asked some rangers about it and they said the fires may have been started by pig hunters who illegally hunt the feral pigs in the park and use the illegal fires to flush them out. Or they could have been started by the traditional owners of the park, the indigenous people. Just last year ownership of the park was handed over to the aborigines and now a power-struggle has begun between the mostly white rangers who have the resources and experience of running the park and the traditional owners who have a connection to the land but don't have the resources to manage it or the memory of how it used to be used by their elders. It's a really interesting political situation and one that we can learn from in the states.

There have been so many new sights and sounds and experiences that I'm still sorting through them all and will post more soon. Right now I'm really enjoying one Aussie custom of having a "cuppa." Before starting your day you have a cuppa. If you go to a friend's house you have a cuppa. If you're feeling peckish or bored have a cuppa. If you're off-roading miles from civilization and stuck on a sand dune and must haul your car out of the sand you stop and have a cuppa first. Which leads me to my favorite Aussie experience so far: Off-roading. Flying around in the back is good fun but next time I want to drive!

Blogging Bug

It's been a while but the blogging bug has bitten again. It really only bites when I'm going off somewhere new. Otherwise, I see all you people regularly and my stories are really much better in person. Sunday the 14th I'll be heading off to OZ/NZ with my friend Michaela for a year of adventure in anticipation of the ego-crushing experience I hear is the norm at law school. I'll be adding pictures and updates to chronicle our adventure. In the meantime here's a sample of what we'll be doing in OZ sent to me by Christina, the amazing woman we'll be working with in Cooktown!

Hey girls.. Just thought i would give you an idea of what you are in for when you arrive in Oz.. The day after you get here we are hopping on a boat to get dropped off on an isolated beach about an hour north of here (the road goes along the beach and I don't want to ruin my car).. We are getting dropped off at an aboriginal camping group where I will be training aboriginal youth (12 - 20) in scientific surveys of the coastal country.. You guys will be camp assistants and can come along with me and learn what I am doing since you will have to do some of it while i am gone.. There will also be people doing kayaking and sailing training and if the weather is good we will get to sail out to local islands. there will also be video training exercises.. How cool dies this sound? WE'll be camping there for 2 or 3 nights and then trekking back to Cooktown on Friday. the following Monday we will be driving to a remote National Park and testing the water quality in different parts of a massive river system for 2 days. Then we get back and head straight out into the sea grass meadows for 2 days of monitoring and sampling seagrass.. Then on Friday the 26th it's off to the Wallaby Creek Music Festival where we will camp in the rainforest with my bellydancing group the Typsy Gypsys... 2 days later I leave and you guys become babysitters for Sundi.


Happy dance! Happy dance!

Thank God I'm Already a Citizen

I love teaching ESL. I love teaching citizenship. And most of all, I love teaching my students. But teaching middle-age Chinese speakers about US citizenship in English is no easy task. English is hard!

Forget for the moment my embarrassment at trying to explain to my students (who are all a good twenty to thirty years older than me) what a prostitute is, what it means to solicit a prostitute, and the definition of a habitual drunkard. Let's focus instead on the funny things my students say when trying to learn English. Here are three of my favorites:

Q: What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
A: The Bill of Rice

Q: What are the two main political parties in the US?
A: The republican party and the demonic party

Q: What form of government does the US have?
A: A reproblem

I was lucky to have some of the best students around; Mr. Hahn, who wore awesome gold-rimmed glasses; Ms. Ho, who would giggle into her hand after answering a question and always tried to help the other students with hand signals; Ms. Chen, who answered every question half in Chinese and half in English; and Ms. Yeung, who passed her test and is now a US Citizen!

Success!

(Boy am I glad I don't have to learn English or be tested on the Constitution cause I might not pass!)

Sex on the beach...

...Sorta.

For Mother's Day weekend my mom and I decided to hike down to Stinson from Mt Tam and stay at a little B&B by the ocean. We left after school on Friday and made the 2 mile hike in good time. There was a little hiccup when we got to Stinson and couldn't find the B&B but after an hour of wandering the streets (and I use that term loosely) of Stinson we found it. And I'd just like to say that we wouldn't have wandered nearly so long if Stinson had proper street signs! You know, ones that actually mark a continuous street.

Anyhow, our B&B was great and the proprietor was awesome. He had a story for everything and everyone and would often says things along the lines of "Oh, no way, I knew a guy who looks just like you, he was arrested for embezzling 60 million from the bank he worked at and then ran off with his attorney who left her husband and they lived together on a boat in the amazon and had fourteen wild children and there was a monkey..."

On Saturday we grossly overestimated our hiking abilities. After a revolting breakfast of some sort of meat product and eggs we decided to hike to Audubon to see the birds. Now on the map Audubon is not that far from Stinson, at least by car. Even by foot it is only about 8 miles away.
But the first 2.2 miles are straight uphill and the last 2 miles are straight downhill. So on our hike, which we fondly dubbed the Hike from Hell, we vetoed the idea of walking to Audubon and decided instead to hike about a mile and a half on the Coastal Trail and then head back down to the beach via a fire road. So after walking straight up a cliff for about 2 hours we walked in the baking sun for another hour and found ourselves on a fire road that in places was not wide enough to walk side by side.

And that brings me to the title of this post, "Sex on the beach" or rather, sex in the forest. It was mid-afternoon, our knees hurt, we were hungry for something other than trail mix and apples, and our calves screamed from the effort of not slipping on the gravel and flying down the "fire road" on our behinds. My mom started doing something funny. She kept saying "look to your left, look, Kate over there, look on the left!" My mind was split between focusing on the trail and fantasizing about a swim in the ocean and I didn't see anything. When I asked her "what?" she didn't reply so I kept looking to my left, down the hill but I didn't see anything and she still wasn't answering me. I didn't know what was going on and in frustration said quite loudly, "Mom! What am I looking at?" And at that moment I saw them. Stretched out beneath a tree going at it like squirrels, or some other woodland creature. I tried not to laugh but honestly, as my mom said, "they weren't fifty feet off the trail!" Hmmm, not something you usually see or want to see on a hike with your mother...Happy Mother's Day Mom!

Jamaica Bay

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Center is in Queens near JFK airport so I thought it would be a nice break from the city but it was a little disappointing. It's a very small circuit around a small lake surrounded by the bay on three sides and a highway! on the other. Wherever you are on the track you can see the city and you can hear airplanes going past. But there were all kinds of birds out and I saw a few frogs so that was fun.

Nyack Hike

Here are some pictures from a hike I took with my friend Lisa in Nyack around February or March. These photos don't do justice to the beauty of Nyack or show how exciting it was to walk through the bare trees and spot a patch of fresh white snow on the ground!

I'm Baaack!

I made it back to beautiful San Anselmo in one piece! My flight arrived at noon yesterday and I spent the rest of the afternoon helping my mom teach her first graders about tidepools. We made all kinds of seaweed from construction paper, balloons and toilet paper rolls. After an hour with the kids I realized I do NOT have the energy to be a first grade teacher. I don't know how mom does it! Just the prep time alone is enough to wipe me out. Then again, I had just come off a 5.5 hour flight from NY with zero sleep...
I was so exhausted last night that I went to bed at 8:30pm. Kind of sad. But I woke up at 5:30 this morning to go running and this afternoon mom and I are heading out to west marin to go hiking for the weekend. Then I have five days until Laura's wedding. The next day is a family party and a couple days later I head to Europe! It’s so great to be back!

Books on Record

The Road- Cormac McCarthy 2/08
A Moveable Feast- Ernest Hemingway 2/08 Loved it!
Love Over Scotland- Alexander McCall Smith 2/08
In Defense of Food- Michael Pollan 2/08
The Last Season- Eric Blehm
Looking for Alaska- Peter Jenkins
A Walk Across America- Peter Jenkins
I'm A Stranger Here Myslef- Bill Bryson
In A Sunburned Country- Bill Bryson
Delaying the Real World: A Twenty-Somethings Guide to Seeking Adventure

Poems! Songs!

The best part about having a blog is that I can post whatever I want on it, no matter how random. It's also a good place to store little tidbits I don't want to forget about. So in the spirit of randomness and tidbitiness here we go:

When Irish eyes are smiling

When Irish eyes are smiling
Sure it's like a morning spring.
In the lilt of Irish laughter,
You can hear the angels sing.
When Irish hearts are happy,
All the world seems bright and gay.
And when Irish eyes are smiling,
Sure, they steal your heart away.


Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

-Maya Angelou

Possibly the best Maya Angelou poem ever. As for the Irish Eyes song, I just think it's cute. Especially when someone like Harry Connick Jr is singing it.

The End of the World

This is the funniest flash movie I've ever seen! It came out a few years ago and I just found it again thanks to Max. Still just as funny. Take a look-see.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end

"Fire ze missiles!"