Gone Whaling

I have been a very bad blogger this month. I’m sorry. Prepping new lectures for the courses that I’m co-teaching has taken more time than I thought, primarily because I’m covering the material more deeply than before. Getting home each night, I have been trying to be a good dad and husband until my loved ones fall asleep, and I have slowly put together several shelving units that we bought from Ikea a few weeks ago. We still don’t have any of our things yet…the container ship should have arrived last Thursday, so we’re just waiting for ours to clear customs, which can take 5-15 days.

Our weekends have been very full. The pictures here are from our whale watching trip on Aug 5 with the Clarks. We went on a great cruise put on by the Australia Zoo, which was Steve Irwin’s home. It was a bit surreal on the way out of Mooloolaba to watch videos of Steve from the last series he was working on--called something like “The Ocean’s Deadliest Creatures.” Unfortunately, the sea was choppy that day, and a lot of people were filling up the vomit bags that were readily available. Although we never saw a whale breach the water, we did see several pods of humpbacks during our four hour cruise. Will had a mostly good time, although he was more excited by the water spray than anything else. His mother fared more poorly, but was still happy we went.

This past weekend we went to the Ekka, a sort of state fair for Queensland. It goes on for 9 days, and has a huge mix of livestock competitions, exhibits, scary rides, and “Aussie” food. We tried a Dagwood dog, which I think is just a corndog, downed some “old style” ginger beer, munched fresh strawberries, and licked an ice cream cone together. We took a brief walk through the showbag pavilion. This must be uniquely Australian. Many companies (e.g., Cadbury’s, magazine publishers) throw together bags of goodies from their company and sell them in all sorts of combinations that cost between $2 and $20 at gigantic booths, with hundred of people moving like cattle from booth to booth. V. also watched a sheep shearing demonstration while I was soothing Will after he got some sunblock lotion in his eyes. I really would have liked to watch the butcher show--in which several cuts of meat were to be lectured about--but we had to cut our trip short due to our son’s next fastly approaching crash.

Thanks for being patient with my blogging. And I do plan to reward you with some new pictures very soon. Late last week I received a copy of the new iLife, which has some great features for posting photos on the web. I hope to have it mastered soon, complete with a new way to view our photos…