Australia

If you're one of my myriad two followers, you may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. That's because, since we were already in New Zealand, we took an extra trip to Australia. This is pretty much the same as deciding that since you're in San Francisco, you might as well visit Denver because it's nearby. But logic never reigned supreme in our family…

Did you know that Australia has 20 of the 25 most venomous snake species in the world, including all of the top ten? Or that they also have nastily poisonous spiders? And even poisonous shells? That's right, if you go beachcombing you're risking a hospital stay. Oh, and just in case you avoid those, there are immense crocodiles and the ever-popular Great White shark. It's no wonder Australia has a small population; every time somebody goes to the beach they wind up dead. I imagine it gets kind of boring after the third or fourth time you die.

Our solution was simple: since Australia is famed for its bush country, we stuck to the cities. After filling out a 12-page quiz at the airport (sample question: “Are you carrying anything we might put you in jail for? Please tell us so we can save time and put you in jail straightaway”) we headed into Sydney. The Australians had provided us with a helpful checklist of sights (I think they review it when you leave, and if you haven't petted a kangaroo and visited the Sydney Opera House they make you go back and try again). So we went straight to a performance at the Opera House. (I hadn't known that Shakespeare wrote operas, but apparently Much Ado About Nothing qualifies because that's what we saw.)

After that, we took in a bunch of uniquely Aussie destinations, such as a Sikh temple (with fiberglass domes, just like in Disneyland), a rainforest (filled with bird sounds, just like in Disneyland), and several zoos (all of which had elephants, just like in…dang it!). Whenever we got close to something that seemed like real nature, I locked all the car doors in terror and drove away as fast as I could.

But it still seemed important to see some of those unusual animals, like the platypus. It turns out that the ol' duck-bill is pretty elusive, but by using my unerring backcountry instincts I managed to track one down in a nearby zoo. I was about to reach out and tickle the cute thing when I noticed the sign above the pond.

Yep, that's right. Even the blasted platypus is poisonous! I headed straight for the airport. We were three days early for our flight, but at least we were safe.

In a few years maybe we'll try the Amazon. I plan to wear chain mail.

Earthquake Aftermath

I mentioned in my last post that the February 22nd earthquake had driven us from our home. The full story remains to be told…

You remember when you were a teenager and you discovered parties? And then alcohol? And one morning you woke up and you couldn't remember anything, but oh boy was there a mess to clean up?

That was our house, except we didn't get to enjoy the hangover.

We could have dealt with the debris, but a few parts were worrisome.

It was easier to move out. I have a distant cousin who lives nearby, so we politely asked whether he could put us up for the night. In other words, we showed up at his door unannounced.

Tom is one of the most wonderful people in the universe, so of course he welcomed us. The only problem was that earlier in the day, he came across Barbara, a young German woman who made the tiny mistake of arriving in New Zealand for a bicycle tour the day before the earthquake. When the road beneath her collapsed into a yawning chasm, Tom dove in, yanked her out of the boiling magma, and offered her shelter. So by the time we arrived, we were left with a choice between the shed, the barn, and the field.

We decided Barbara would do best in the field, and Tom and his wife could sleep in the shed. We took his bed and got cozy.

After a few days of this, though, we started picking up on vague hints that we might be wearing out our welcome. Like finding our laptops—and ourselves—in the dumpster. (I think my four-hour shower, which I took right after Tom told us there was a water shortage, might have had something to do with it.) So we called some friends in Wellington, which is comfortably far away on a different island, and asked if they had space. “Sure!” they replied, “Just drive on up!”

New Zealand is an interesting place. For example, the main route between the South and North Islands is State Highway 1. All you have to do is drive north from Christchurch:

View Larger Map

Of course, it helps if you duct-tape your car doors shut first so they don't leak quite so much. It took us about three hours to float to the other island.

As soon as we got to our friends' house, the weather turned nasty. The wind was blowing at about 90 (you pick the units), the rain was coming down so hard that the ocean was drier than the land, and the temperature was Antarctic. So naturally we decided that this would be a nice place to live. But since we're short-timers, we needed a furnished house.

The first place we looked at was such a dump that we seriously considered moving back to the destroyed house. The second was gorgeous, except it was built on stilts about a thousand feet tall, and we're just a teeny bit nervous about earthquakes right now. And it was out of our price range anyway. We were about to give up and set up a tent on the beach when we found the third place, which is perfectly wonderful (if you ignore the 17 flights of steps you have to climb to get to the front door, and the 12 more flights to the mailbox).

The only remaining problem was that we hadn't driven up with the expectation of moving, so our stuff was now spread throughout the country. A bit of luggage was with us, more was at Tom's, and a few things had been left in the earthquake house when we fled. Somebody had to collect it all.

Road trip!

My daughter wanted to be involved because she didn't trust us to get all the important stuff. She figured that if it were left up to the adults, we'd grab something dumb like our passports and forget about her collection of hotel business cards. “Fine,” I told her, “here are the car keys. Make sure you get everything.”

Since she's only twelve, that didn't go over so well with the wife. And I suppose she's right; the kid's too lightweight to close a suitcase by sitting on it. But that meant somebody else had to drive. And my wife wasn't about to enter the collapsing house, even at gunpoint. I didn't trust my daughter's aim enough to let her do the herding, so I'd have to go along. In the end, we decided to limit it to the two of us so we'd have more room in the car.

The trip down was fairly uneventful. Three hours in the house let us retrieve everything (or so we thought—a month later we know better); then we went off to Tom's for the night. The next morning we planned to run a few important errands in town before loading the car and driving part of the way back north. That's where we hit the first snag: the errands took almost all day. Snag #2 was that all our stuff didn't fit in the station wagon, not by a long shot. We had bins of food, a microwave we didn't need, some random furniture, four huge rolling duffel bags, books, linens, a bicycle, and I don't know what-all else. Oh, and a cello. Not the world's smallest musical instrument. Why couldn't I have married a flutist? Or somebody with a tin ear?

Out came the rope. The Sleepy Professor loves tying knots; maybe he's a secret bondage freak. Or just a freak. All the duffels went on the roof and everything else somehow got crammed into the back. (Sorry if your cello sounds a bit…flat, honey.) And away we finally went at 4 PM—straight into rush-hour traffic. About 39 hours later, we finally got out of town.

You can understand that by now, I was feeling a bit harried. Our ferry reservation had already been made; we had to get far enough tonight to make the dock by the next day. And we were both hungry. The roof stuff made some flapping noises, so I pulled over and tightened the ropes. After several tries, the noises were gone. We were eager to get to a hotel; my daughter's favorite TV program would be on soon. So I sped up a bit.

Suddenly there was a thumping noise outside the car. I looked in the mirror; one of our bags was cartwheeling down the road, desperately trying to catch up to us. I slowed down, but it wasn't making very good time. I pulled over and yelled for it to hurry; it ignored me. Must have been a teenager bag. It was in the oncoming lane, and a truck was headed straight for it. Thinking quickly, I grabbed my daughter and tossed her out the window directly into the path of the truck. The driver saw the orange hair waving in the wind (she has pretty awful taste), swerved, and barely missed our bag full of dirty laundry. Whew! Disaster averted. Although it's kind of too bad about the flock of sheep he hit.

After I got everything back on the roof, I tied it down really tight this time. (Good thing the cello wasn't up there. But that laundry? Perfectly pressed; not a wrinkle anywhere.) We got to the motel safely, just in time to catch that TV show, which by the way is called “New Zealand's Stupidest Drivers.”

You get one guess who was featured that night.

Baby Swans

After the latest Christchurch earthquake, we were forced to move out of our house (the landlady seemed to think we had “utterly destroyed” it—I'd be insulted, but moving was easier than arguing). After a road trip from hell that involved a car with luggage flying off the roof (really), we would up renting a new place near Wellington, which is far enough away that we can't feel the frequent aftershocks—except the ones from Japan.

A few days later we started exploring the area, which in my daughter's vocabulary translates to “visiting every library within 200 miles and checking out 50 books from each.” One library was in Whitby, which has one of those fakey man-made ponds that developers dig so they can sell “beachfront” houses at inflated prices. And in the middle of that pond were two big black swans with three little gray babies.

Now I know you've all read “The Ugly Duckling.” I don't want to spoil your illusions, but that story is NOT scientifically accurate. It turns out that baby swans don't speak English. Also, they aren't ugly, they're fluffy. And cute. (Of course, I think anything fluffy is cute. Except tarantulas, which are hairy, not fluffy. And anything with that many legs isn't natural; it should be locked up in Area 51 and dissected. In fact, that's probably where they came from; it's no accident that tarantulas are found in the desert, is it? The damn things are ALIENS.)

Anyway, back to the swans…

We didn't have a camera with us, so I decided to take my fancy expensive model over there the next day and get some cute-baby pictures before the dang things grew up and turned into boringly gorgeous adults. I had a bright idea, too: I would bring some bread so I could trick them into coming close.

Now you'd think I could manage to find some bread on my own. But my wife doesn't trust me in the kitchen. She thinks she has to do everything for me, even if it's finding a can of Coke in the fridge. That might have something to do with the whole war-between-the-sexes thing. Or it might be related to the fact that the last time I tried to make toast (in 1997), I set the teakettle on fire, melted everything in the freezer, and shattered a cast-iron skillet.

Anyway, I told her that I needed a “couple” (that's a direct quote) of slices of bread, just enough to lure the swans into range. But my wife is the sort who will invite a family of two to dinner and present them with a turkey, a ham, a prime rib, six lobsters, a huge salad, a pot of baked beans, mashed potatoes, French fries, peas, carrots, string beans, three loaves of bread, two gallons of ice cream, and a chocolate cake. And that's just the appetizers. So of course she handed me a plastic bag with all the bread we owned, and off I went.

The bread worked. As soon as the swans saw my sack, they swam right over and hung around by the side of the pond, the adults making an odd chirping noise and the kids peeping adorably as if they were about to die of starvation. The only problem was that they were too close to take pictures. And half of the bits of bread that I tossed just bounced off their backs into the water, where they didn't notice them. The papa swan got tired of waiting and started snapping at the grass next to my legs; then he tried a taste of my jeans for good measure.

That was when the ducks decided to get in on the action. And after them, the seagulls. And every species wanted to stop every other one from getting any bread. (Except the ducks, who wanted to stop everybody. Those guys can be NASTY.)

So there I was, surrounded by quacking ducks, snapping swans, seagulls shouting “mine, mine, mine,” and even the occasional sparrow hoping for a dropped crumb. The tiniest hint of tossed bread would cause a riot—and I had several loaves to dispose of. They were getting heavier in my hand. Images of you-know-which-movie swirled in my head. I had to get rid of the bread before I was torn to pieces! In a panic, I drew back my right arm and threw as hard as I could, right into the middle of the pond. Bullseye! The ducks went nuts for it.

Man, that camera sank fast.

Dodging Class

You have probably noticed (being the clever reader that you are) that this is the Sleepy Professor blog. But you may be wondering, “Why is he sleepy?” Then again, you may have already figured it out: I always stay up way too late. Judgment was never a strong point.

Since I consistently postpone my bedtime, there is only one thing that scares me more than a disgruntled student: teaching an 8:00 class. So you can understand my dismay when I learned that this semester I was given a class with the rather unusual schedule of 3-5 PM Tuesdays and 8-10 AM Thursdays. That's not because Tuesdays are lectures and Thursdays are labs. Nope, they're both exactly the same class format. Just at different times.

I'm sure that every student among my readers (both of you) is wondering why anyone would come up with such a plan. The answer is staring you in the face: the administration detests both students and faculty, and their own late nights are spent trying to invent ways to simultaneously screw both groups. Thus the current diabolically brilliant scheme.

Not to worry, though. The Sleepy Professor was up to this challenge. My first idea was to complain to my boss, who would no doubt immediately move heaven and earth, rescheduling every class in the entire school if necessary, to accommodate my perfectly rational desire to sleep until noon.

Right.

OK, an alternate plan. I'd threaten to quit! That'd show them!

“What about the rent?” asked my lovely and patient wife.

Oh.

Maybe I'd take a student poll. My boss didn't care about my complaints, but surely student satisfaction was high on the list of departmental goals. Wasn't it?

Um, yeah.

Hmmm, this was getting to be a little bit tricky. The bureaucracy wouldn't budge. Maybe I'd have to budge the school instead. I went for a walk to think about it.

Suddenly the ground began to shake. Dust rose into the air as the college's buildings collapsed around me.* And suddenly it hit me like (if you will excuse the expression) a ton of bricks: if the school disappeared, I wouldn't have to get up on Thursday!

And it worked. An unusually destructive 6.3 earthquake devastated the entire city. We all had to go home, classes were canceled, and as of this writing they are still suspended. No 8 AM call for me. I can stay up as late as I want!

Which is a good thing, because now I'm too terrorized to sleep at all.

---

*Note: Honesty in the face of an actual disaster compels me to confess that I wasn't really outside and didn't witness any collapsing buildings. The college survived the earthquake with relatively little damage, although as you probably know, central Christchurch was pretty much flattened and hundreds of people died. There's nothing funny about that.

Flooded

One of the many interesting things about living in New Zealand is that Christmas marks the start of summer. The entire country listens to songs like “Jingle Bells” and “Winter Wonderland” while they tan themselves on the beach. It's sort of like going to Wal-Mart in August, except with an ozone hole to add to the challenge.

I shopped very carefully this year, because I knew that if I didn't get my wife exactly the right present, divorce would certainly follow—or at least serious bodily injury. And I found the perfect gift: a rubber stamp that you can press into a piece of bread so that when you put it in the toaster, it gets an image of a kiwi bird. What could say “I love you” better than a kiwi toast stamp? Sure enough, she adored it. I immediately checked her into a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.

After Christmas we headed to the West Coast for a brief vacation. New Zealand's South Island is divided into two parts by the Southern Alps. The east section, where we live, is a populous but bucolic paradise of sheep “stations” (ranches), sheep stations, and sheep stations, occasionally interrupted by a cattle station. The summer weather is warm and pleasant, except when it's not, which this year seems to be most of the time.

(Note: if you know what “bucolic” means, please let me know. It just sounded good here.)

By contrast, the West Coast is a bucolic paradise of sheep stations, sheep stations, and sheep stations, with a few cows intermixed for good measure. It's true that the West is reputed to be a bit damper, thanks to the mountains that make the clouds dump all their rain on that side. But it still sounded like a great vacation spot.

OK, I'll admit it. We kind of blew the timing thing. We hopped on the “Tranz Alpine Scenic Railway” (as I've said before, Kiwis can't spell for squat) for our gorgeous ride through the mountains. Only first we had to roll past about a zillion miles of sheep stations, with only the occasional cow pie for scenic variety. But eventually we got into the mountains…whereupon it started to rain. A lot. In fact, it was hard to see anything more than ten feet outside the windows.

But did that stop me from having fun? Not on your life. I have some of the best pictures of rain-spattered windows you've ever seen. If you squint, you can see a vague blob that might be a stunning mountain vista.

When we finally got to the coast, we found out that it seems to rain all the time. We drove north to see coastal scenery, and were driven back by rain and wind. We drove further north to see seals, and were drenched. We went even further to visit the lovely hamlet of Westport, and didn't even get out of the stupid car because we would have needed scuba gear. So we drove back to the motel and settled down for a raindrop-soothed night's sleep.

In the morning, our daughter announced, “You have to look at this.” Since she says that every time she sees a new rock, we ignored her. “Really, you have to look at this.” Yawn. “Seriously!”

My wife wandered to the patio door and glanced outside. “Honey, look!” I figured it must be a really big rock.

What I found instead was one of the Great Lakes, transported in toto to New Zealand. The water was only inches below the doorsill. My wife bravely put on boots and waded in to recover the patio furniture, which was floating just beyond reach. Apparently she had forgotten that we were on the second floor; she immediately disappeared into the torrent and resurfaced a hundred feet away clutching an upside-down umbrella, screaming for me to get the luggage into the car immediately. For once I followed her advice. Then I drove down to rescue her just as she was swept into the ocean. (Some Kiwi cars come with a snorkel. Really. My only complaint is that when you breathe through it, the air has a distinct diesel smell.)

Eventually the rain stopped—just in time to climb on the train and head home. It's fortunate that the train station is built on pontoons. And that the train is inflatable.

Next time, maybe I'll check the forecast first—if it's not raining too hard to see the computer.

Eclipsed

I clicked on a Web page the other day and noticed that we were going to have a lunar eclipse. Furthermore, it would happen at 8:41 PM locally, just as the moon was rising. “Cool,” I thought. “Pictures of a blood-red moon over the Pacific!”

As you may know, some superstitious ancients believed that lunar eclipses were caused by a dragon eating and then regurgitating the moon. Nothing could be further from the truth; dragons have notoriously robust digestive systems. It's actually my neighbor's dog, who will eat anything and then leave its remains on your doorstep, who is responsible for this amazing celestial phenomenon. So you can understand that I am amazed that his behavior can be predicted with such precision. But who am I to question science? After all, it is science that gives us answers to difficult but important questions like when the tide will be highest, what makes cookies tasty, and exactly how hot the inside of your car needs to get to bake those cookies.

Anyway, the eclipse was not to be missed; never mind that we had relatives visiting. I planned the day carefully: we would meet our in-laws at the airport, drive them to their hotel, and quickly rush back home to catch the evening sky show.

But my wife, as wives are prone to do, put the kibosh on that plan. “Don't you think it's a bit rude to abandon them like that? They've been living on airline food for 24 hours. They're lucky to be alive!” I had to admit that she had a point, airline food being all too similar to what the neighbor's dog presents to us.

So there we were at 8:41 PM on December 21st, sitting in a restaurant with no windows. I would have been even sulkier than usual, except that it turned out to be completely overcast and we couldn't have seen the eclipse anyway.

…until the next morning, when my favorite news site proclaimed “Lunar eclipse tonight.” It seems that, like Phileas Fogg, I had forgotten about the International Date Line. I always thought it was a phone number for meeting beautiful and lonely Russians (the same ones who keep e-mailing me with their pictures and offers of marriage), but in fact it's a huge line painted on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, where everybody on the left side of the line (that's me) is already living in tomorrow. So, if you carefully account for my confusion, the eclipse was going to be today instead of yesterday!

Note: if you think you understood the above explanation, please put down your computer and phone your psychiatrist immediately.

So I had a second chance. The in-laws decided to dine by themselves, and the sky seemed to be clearing. I jumped into the car and drove to a good vantage point on a local hill. There I was about 10 minutes before moonrise with my camera, tripod, and goofy-looking hat. (If you're interested in photography, it's important to have a special hat; otherwise people won't take you seriously. If they do take you seriously, watch out, because they're only pretending until the guys with straitjackets arrive.)

As it turned out, I ran into a couple of minor problems. No, I didn't kill any sheep. But the New Zealand wind was determined to set a speed record, and I was on an exposed hilltop. I didn't much mind when I laid my tripod on the ground (sideways) and it immediately blew ten feet away. It wasn't too bad when a gust of wind knocked me off my feet. Only when my car rolled over on its side did I begin to think that it might be hard to get a picture.

But I'm tenacious. I sat down on a rock, braced myself, and waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, half an hour after the supposed moonrise, I got a good view of the water and saw that there were thick clouds on the horizon. No way the moon was going to be visible, eclipse or no eclipse. By the time it got over the clouds, the eclipse would be finished and it would be a plain, ordinary, boring full moon. So I packed up and drove home. No sense freezing out there.

When I walked in the house, my daughter said “Pretty neat, huh?” I looked blank; she pointed out the window to where the dog was just starting to regurgitate the completely visible moon.

Oh, great: I blew it completely. But that's OK; I'm resilient. I know how to handle failure.

I hit her over the head with the tripod.