Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Thats just a chicken on stilts

I gobbled up all my internet early in the month, and have been unable to post anything because I keep getting disconnected from sites for being too slow. So now I have a few pictures to share, the best being what I thought was some sort of brown long legged relative to the jabiru. Being fairly short sighted I took a photo and figured I would see what kind of bird it was later. I was quite excited about it and was all prepared to send the picture to a friend who never quite got to see the jabiru's while she was in Gove.




It turns out it was a bird on a pole. Damn! I felt like a slack jawed local at a sideshow expecting to see a unicorn that turns out to be a large dog with a horn sticky taped to its head.



I also went out to see some of the drilling work being done on site, and part of the expedition involved a bridge crossing. Although the bridge had been constructed of plastic pallets which sort of floated on the water held in place with ropes. As you can imagine, we had arm loads of stuff to carry and the pallets were bobbing about in the current. I had a strange moment when I thought I was in sonic the hedgehog...



We got across (twice), with only some wet socks to show for it

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Its not aliens

On Friday (when I originally intended to post this) there was an alignment of three planets (I can't remember which ones though) which were theorised to be either satellites or (of course) aliens by the astronomers at work. I know I much prefer the aliens explanation because then I probably wouldn't have to worry about spending 10 hours in front of a computer at work.


Besides there have been many instances of unexplained phenomena that could probably be attributed to aliens. For example, I tried four new pens and none of them worked, and we went through a whole roll of paper towel in one day.


Unfortunately my photo of the stars (not aliens) didn't really work out. I think you need a special camera to take these kind of photos...

Thursday, May 12, 2011

5 hours later and I have a Katy Perry song stuck in my head

I have been horribly slack in keeping this blog updated. My grand plans for daily updates, or at least every couple of days, has been thwarted by my inability to get back into a routine. I am finding that after 10 hours at work, I am no longer able to even think coherently let alone string a sentence together. I figure either I'll get used to it, or I will become tiered enough to go to bed early and catch up on my sleep. Hurumph! I still want a puppy though.


So I thought to myself that I should get it together so I could resume my carefree blogging. This of course requires a topic, or at least an idea, something that has been eluding me lately. This afternoon on the way home inspiration finally bludgeioned me over the head- I would share the joy of carpooling with a MADD person. Let me explain...



When I was growing up, I had the misfortune to share a TV with a chronic channel flicker (this disorder is formally known as CCFD). It used to drive me bonkers, not so much the occasional channel change during the ad break, but the crazy mental flicking where the sound on the telly is broken up into incomplete words. This also results in a disco flicker, that would have had me fitting on the ground if I hadn't already gotten annoyed and left the room to read a book (I think had the CCFD suffer found you could create the same annoying effect by rapidly turning pages and trying to make out the story as the pages flashed by, they probably would stood over my shoulder flicking the pages wildly whilst commenting that if I drew a dot in the corner and moved it a bit for each page, it would look like the dot was bouncing around*).


Anyway, the point of this is that I have now identified another version of the terrible CCFDs- MADD. Thats music attention deficit disorder. This is where an aflicted person flicks through music tracks (or if that isn't possible, radio stations) never quite hearing an entire track in its entirety. At its best, the effect is like a mash-up of vaguely familiar songs that may or may not be intentional by the MADD sufferer. At worst, they wait until after the catchy bit of the song has played and then flicks. This results in not one but five horrible pop songs getting stuck in your head during a 10 minute trip. They then drop you off and leave you humming a song you just know will still be with you the following day. Damn MADD people.


*Actually they did impart this magical piece of trivia to me, along with the trick of making shrinky dinks out of chip packets on the stove. I shared both these gems with my best friend, and subsequently was banned from her house by her parents when she nearly burnt the house down attempting to shrink chip packets on the stove while they were at work.