I can sail!

As opposed to flailing wildly in a boat, which is what I've been doing for the last few weeks.  I took up a sailing course at the beginning of the month. About three hours, twice a week on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings.  Its being run by the ANU sailing club down at their boathouse on Lake Burley Griffin, a nice twenty minute cycle ride round the lake from the department (apart from the big road bridge and aggressive magpie). The course has been really good fun.  It was very windy the first couple of weeks, the first time we went out we were capsizing all the time.  This was followed by a really calm session which was just tough, but the last few have had really good winds, and when the sun has been shining has been really nice.

The capsizing has been actually quite good for us as a group, because we're no longer afraid of it, and rather good at dealing with it. Anyway, today's session was really fun, we've started having mini-races, and today I've finally feel as though I've got the hang of it.  I may not be very good, but I now know what I'm doing, as opposed to being fairly clueless the first few weeks. I'm still suprised at just how quickly you can sail upwind!

We've not been learning in little plastic toppers, but proper Lasers (and a Taser) which are fairly decent fibreglass craft, Lasers are even raced in the Olympics and are seen as very pure sailing as there's not much to the boat, its all reasonably simple. Anywho, I've been having fun, met a few people, and am now considering their intermediate course that'll start in a few weeks.

Look what they've done to Jens

Just look at him, the poor little dog!  I was round at JB and ES's last night for dinner, and to watch a recording of the Arsenal-ManCity match (they have FoxSports).  Jens has been shaved to get rid of all his excess fur.  He looks so tiny and strange.  He was very affectionate though!

Jens' before photo

Embarking on life the other side of the fence, will the grass be greener?

My IMac has arrived, and it is huuuuuuge. 27 Inch screen!, with all the bits and bobs located behind it.  Just look at it compared to my old laptop.  I spent a long while deliberating between mac and PC, and have decided to see what a Mac is really like.  So I'll be spending the next four years without a delete button or a stop button in the name of sleek efficiency, the Ctrl key not doing what the Crtl key should, an international rather than UK keyboard, and the nagging issue that its not really possible to turn anything off, not properly anyway.  On the other hand I've got a laptop style trackpad to go with it, and the things you can do with the gestures is amazingly cool, and about as useful as having a toolbar at the bottom of the screen.  Oh well!

Addendum (26/10/10): Though Mac does have a delete key, its actually the backspace key, the delete function does not exist for text.  Similarly, there is a stop button in Itunes, and a pause button on the keyboard, the two buttons serve the same purpose, which is a pause/stop hybrid which does neither of the two functions adequately, jack of all trades-esque.

Fluff is in the air

Various parts of the campus are covered in fluff today, with more fluff floating serenely through the air. And the producers of said fluff: trees.  Or at least some of them. Anyway, it looks a bit like snow, but is actually pollen (I think).  It is said that when the fluff comes then its the beginning of exam season, which it is.  Glad I'm not an undergraduate!!

It definitely feels like Spring now, its getting pretty warm, the trees and looking green, there are ducklings and goslings about complete with proud parents.  And since we've had so much rain so far this year, ending the 10-year drought, the reservoirs are filling, back to near 90% and there's even the potential for water restrictions to be lifted.  As a result Canberra and the surrounding bush is looking pretty green right now.  There's even the smell of cut grass. All the municipal grass seems to have been cut in the last couple of days, and given quite how much municipal grass there is in Canberra, thats quite an achievement! All in all its rather pleasant here at the moment.

Rain

So on Friday we had another of those really wet days that seems to occur occasionally in Canberra.  It absolutely bucketed down pretty much all day, the storm drains went wild. I stayed inside working waiting for a break in the rain that didn't come until after three pm.  The Australian weather service runs a very good radar imaging mapping thingy so it was quite good to watch the bands of rain come across this corner of the country.  In some places in New South Wales it was the wettest day for thirty odd years, and the wettest October day for a hundred.  Lots of reports of flooding, and some high winds, which of course means falling branches and trees.  As I've said before, Australia has some seriously weak trees. But apparently the rain never made the coast, got stopped by the coastal ranges, so there you go, fine in Sydney, as usual!

I've included a few pics of the storm drains today, a leaf got stuck on my phone's camera lens so the images aren't great.  These pics are after the storm when I attempted to go home, and the water level in the drains was already doen by six inches or so from its peak when I cycled in, in a gap between bands of rain.  The drains are almost back to normal now, but they seem to take a few days to get right down.  Hopefully I'll include another post in a couple of days of some after pics (or should that be before?).

Anyway, Canberra is going to be very green this spring, its already getting that way.  The impression I'm getting is that its not going to be this way every year.  Its the beginning of a La Nina year (though in my climatologist opinion I'd say the Indian Ocean Dipole is having more of an effect right now) and so may remain fairly wet. Don't go booking any holidays in Queensland in the new year, thats for sure.

Slightly afraid of birds

So the Australian magpie is a bigger meaner viscious version of the UK one (which I am enamoured to via childhood related nostalgia).  I mentioned when I first arrived that it was swooping season.  During spring the male magpies become very territiorial and have a tendancy to swoop on the helmets of cyclists which they see as a threat. Some people tie cable-ties to the top of their helmets in the belief that the magpies only attack the top-most part of the cyclist.  Though a lot of people doubt that actually works.  There are even stories that some of the more vicious magpies have been known to stick their beaks inside people's ears when attacking.  Not all male magpies do this and its been interesting to find out just where the vicious ones are, there is one on the eastern side of campus I know of, for example.

(Photo from lonebiker.dk)

I was cycling back from a sailing course on Lake Burley Griffin on Sunday and got swooped twice in one trip.  The first was scraping round on the top of my helmet before I even noticed, the second was much more noisy and just flapped around a bit.  The trick is to just keep on cycling and get out of their territory as quickly as possible, though this was trickier when I was at traffic lights for the second swoop!  I would say it was good I was wearing my helmet but there's the possibility its actually the helmets themselves which the magpies find threatening.

Anyway, since this double swoop on Sunday, I've kind of become ever so slightly scared of birds, flinching when I see a shadow of one flying low nearby and the like!!

The Gender Gap

It was the RSES student conference on Thursday and a chance to find out exactly what everyone else is up to, and hopefully finally work out who everyone is. In order to fit in most of the department's grad population and a few of the honours (aka 4th years) students, talks were limited to just eight minutes, which is nothing.  I trimmed my Pliocene ENSO talk down to what I thought would be suitable, and still only really got through half of it!  As you might expect there were some really good talks and some really dull ones.  The dullness being from the Petrologists in the first session, but it picked up through the Tectonicists (!), Physicists and Environmentals.

There was also a BBQ after, on the departmental BBQ (which I find fantastic!) and then beers on into the evening for those who stayed. Overall it was a good day, but most of the people I kind of already knew, those who hide away, still hide away! Oh well!

What was very interesting to note was that of the 37 talks over the course of the day, 19 were guys, 18 from girls, which is damn good for a science subject.  At grad level in RSES at least, there appears to be no real gender gap.  The corresponding stat though, was that there were only three talks for which the supervisors were female.  Above the post-doc level, the gender gap, especially in this department, is huge. Is this something that needs active change? or will the gender gap grow itself out? or both, of course!

Jens

I couldn't leave the kind hospitality of JB & ES without a post concerning Jens, their very adorable dog.  His name is Jens, named after the cyclist Jens Voigt, but his name is frequently affectionatly lengthened to Jento (as in Ianto) or Jentle.  He's a crazy dog, but very friendly, always pleased to see you, and generally out to lick any piece of bare flesh he can lay his tongue on.  He enjoys making you open the back door so he can go outside and then want to come in (with a hilariously adorable two legged frantic scrape against the glass pane), only after he can no longer see you waiting with the door open for him. He hates being left alone, is petrified of being in the car, even when we are taking him for a walk.  And when he's on his lead he has a very frantic excited attitude, pulling you along, running from person to person to check we're all there and then bounding off as far as his lead can carry him (about 2m) before attempting to run along on his hind legs, his fore-legs waving in the air being held back by the collar on his neck.We've had some good times over the past three weeks, especially playing tug of war with his favourite toy.  He doesn't let me win very often! I'm going to miss him!

Also, its been a fantastic three weeks with JB and ES, they've really helped me settle in to Australia and Canberra.  They've applied no pressure in finding my own place, letting me find somewhere that I actually think is a nice place to live.  I also feel as though I've been introduced to Canberra from the local perspective rather than the student one, which is always a great alternative viewpoint from which to learn a new city.  I wonder how many international students ever end up with as much local knowledge as I already have, having spent three weeks in the real world!  I am very grateful to them.

JB and ES also had a cat called Bentley, but frankly its Jens who'll always have a special place in my heart!

The meaning of Manchester

The lack of posts over the last week has mainly been due to me moving house.  I'm finally into a new place, my own place.  Its in the suburb of Lyneham, one of the more studenty districts, but the place is close to the suburb of Dickson and Dickson shops, a larger shopping area than most of the suburbs have, with an entire street of asian restaurants, multiple Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, Lao, Thai etc etc.  It even has three, yes three, different Vietnamese restautants.  Plus a host of Oriental Supermarkets.  Its much more bustling atmosphere than quiet family friendly Hackett kind of makes it the Cowley Road of Canberra, and its pretty much where I've ended up. (Not that its at all *like* Cowley Road but you get the idea).  I ended up making two huge (over $100 dollar) supermarket runs to get suitable food stocks, plus another to buy some Manchester! Manchester here is bedding, pillows, pillowcases, duvets (or dooners, or quilts), basically all bedroom linen and soft furnishings.

To go with my "Manchester" I've got a new mattress, which required the help of JB and his car just three days after leaving! It came from Kambah, a suburb thats outside of Inner North so a chance to take a look at one of Canberra's other "towns".  I didn't quite realise how spread out the eight or so towns that make up Canberra are.  Inner North, the one I'm in is spread-out, nicely spacious and low density, full of parks and wide verges, but its not overly spread-out.  Neither are the other towns, but the gaps between them make Canberra a really spread-out city and one you couldn't ever hope to traverse without a vehicle. You really can't see many buildings from the larger parkways that link these towns.  They could be, and to a certain extent are, completely separate entities.

Unfortunately the mattress stank of cigarette smoke. So far it has taken an entire bottle of fabreeze, and three days outside and the smell is beginning to fade.  Another bottle of fabreeze should do the trick, then I'll have a mattress that actually fits my new bed! I've been lucky in that JB and ES have loaned me some furniture, a bed and a desk that were sitting unused their garage, until they need it back.  If it weren't for this I'd be spending a serious amount of money at the moment.  I've still been spending loads, just not quite as much as I could have. Very few rooms in Canberra come furnished, which is frustrating, but it does mean that anything I do buy is mine for the full duration while I'm here, rather than face leaving stuff when moving house.  Makes life easier for landlords too I guess.

My shopping spree continued in Civic (the centre of both Inner North and Canberra as a whole), where I picked up all kinds of various bits and pieces you never normally think about, but are actually pretty necessary.  Things like clothes-hangers and a bin. I did get a nice fruit-bowl though! Plus I've finally got my replacement pair of jeans after ripping a brand new pair when I came off my bike last week.

Yet despite all this activity, its been a pretty boring weekend, all of my new housemates have been away at some point.  Its been a second successive three-day weekend, which would normally sound good, but when you've been doing as little work as I have in the intervening week is actually pretty pointless.  I now can't wait to get back to work tomorrow and get some stuff done.