Monday, March 31, 2008

countrylink = amtrak

Heading from Mullaway to Sydney tomorrow at 741AM WED to pick up Heather Sunday at the airport in Sydney. The train ride is about 9 hours from Coffs Harbour to Sydney. We will be staying at the radisson in Darling harbour for the first 2 nights and then off to who knows where.

Im starting to have pangs about leaving. Its not so much that I want to stay here and live in the sun forever. It is just that certain situations at home concerning money are becoming a force to be reckoned with. Debt is a bitch. I will be paying this one off for sometime to come. My concerns with where I will work, what are my 5 year goals, what are my 10 year goals are heavy on my mind. My christian upbringing says... give your problems to god. let him work on them for you are powerless without the force of the holy spirit. Well, I need some holy spirit now as I am at a crossroad.

I want to help the world convert to renewable energies in any way possible. This is where I'm hoping god pushes me. If that isn't it then I'm not listening correctly.

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/10/solar_revolutio.html

Saturday, March 29, 2008

isp shaping in australia

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22393874-5013037,00.html

I certainly don't like this practice when it is happening to me. Of course I am 7497 miles from silicon valley and other giant us aggregators. Singapore must be the closest aggregation spot outside of Sydney. i have no idea. 30$ a month gets you 500MB of browsing ... sounds ridiculous right! It sure does to me. For 40$ a month you get 2gb/2gb up and down. 64.95 gets you 10gb/15gb. I haven't paid much attention to my monthly download amounts in years and when i did pay attention it was to the amount of time not to the amount of bytes. Just when I thought I had run out of australian things to compare they go and shape the internet connection right while i'm using it...effectively dropping the connection speed from 512k/sec to 64k.

other australianisms

shaping = practice of limiting internet connections to dial up speeds after a customer has reached his or her monthly download limit
cooler = esky (esky is also a brand like coleman is a brand of cooler in the us)
food = tucker

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

arrawarra beach





I did some snorkeling today while Dan fished and caught some 11 inch Bream and Rebecca pranced around pretending to be a horse! Rebecca and Ben are just precious I might add. Above is embedded a picture of arrawarra at low tide. I was just off the rocks and coral in a sanctuary. Snorkeling isnt anything ive done alot of thus far in my life and in the northeast usa it can be quite boring and cold. Not so here, very warm, lots of interesting fish and assorted sea and plant life. Puffer fish, stingrays, angelfish, assorted tropical fish, leatherback sea turtles, bonito, bream, each wave that went over my head revealed new creatures hiiding in the seaweed below. Seeing the sea turtle scared me a bit at first as I was not expecting to see one at all and it was literally 3 feet from my nose as it swam out from behind a seaweed frond. After snorkeling I joined Dan in fishing with a hand reel. My first cast I lost my fish intestine bait... second cast I nabbed a tiny octopus. I thought I was snagged on something it fought so hard! Once I got it out of the water it started emptying its guts of water and spraying it right in my face. Little bastard. He got away... he must have known I am fond of him barbecued.

Had some decent thai food at reasonable prices at a spot in coffs harbour today called Thai Inthanon. Had thai lamb, octopus, and tom yum soup.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Lightning Ridge


left on march 6th and returned march 20 After packing up all of the sardines, instant coffee, dog food, and jackhammers it was off to the ridge! Dan's neighbor Malcolm came with us for the ride as he also has a claim out in the ridge. Dan Hopkins (my cousin) his dog Punky and Malcolm and I started out at 9am and arrived in the ridge around 7pm. A bit of a ride.

Driving west from coffs harbour the terrain changes from lush subtropical banana,avocado farms and palm trees to great expanses of wide open spaces marked by cotton plantations, sheep, cattle and horse farms. 1000 miles of eastern australian coast is bound by the ocean and the great dividing range. As you climb into the dividing range higher and higher the temperatures drop sharply and then slowly gets hotter and hotter as you pass Glen Innes and Inverell. Most of the towns we passed through were very small. 10-15000 at the very most. Collarenabri, Walgett, Moree, all cotton and beef rearing towns.

We landed at cousin sam hopkins in the evening around 7. Hugs all around and he was a site for sore eyes. I've only seen Sam twice in 10 years. His house is a simple ranch style flat roof jobbby with plenty of space for guests. we had a coffee and a meal then watched tv on his flashy lcd tv replete with satellite tv. Most nights we would grill some meat, microwave some potatoes and I would make a salad or we'd buy a tub of tabouleh for roughage.

After the first day of decrompressing from the ride the work really began. We had to pull out all of the tools and equipment from the claim sam was working in lightning ridge. There were 6 main modules that made up the gear

1)a 6 cylinder generator on an enclosed trailer with electric powered hydraulic setup, air compressor and welding equipment
2) dirt hoist (20 ft of triangular metal framing) odd looking contraption!
3) DIGGER (claws the dirt off the walls like a massive robotic arm)
4)bogger (carts the dirt out of the shaft)
5)dump truck (for taking all the dirt from 50 feet below the ground and away to the dirt dump)
6) pop up camper

and a 100 other things including 200 feet of massive hyrdaulic cables and thousands of feet of extension cords, jackhammers, shovels, pick axes, and assorted other tools for fixing mechanical equipment.

It all had to be moved and then re-set at the Grawin where the new claim is. We actually were not mining in lightning ridge proper rather we were in a mining area called "the grawin". Over the past 100 years of mining in the area lots of surrounding area has proved fertile opal mining with boom after boom in many separate areas making a 50km circle around lighting ridge. The area we were in was famous for seam opal deposits in sandstone. Black Opal is king here and its the reason most of the people are out there.

The ride from the ridge to the grawin was over an hour. Sam lives in the downtown area of lightning ridge near the library and grocery store on Opal st. The town lives and dies by opals and the business they bring. The town consists of a few main types of businesses: opal dealers and opal buyers. Some of the opal sellers had big murals of caricturesque pictures of the owners or of giant black opals. Names of sellers were quite demonstrative "the Black Hand" and "Parched Earth Opals"
Barbara Mccondra has a blog about life in the australian opal mines of yowah, koroit and lightning ridge. check it out for more in depthness about the day to day life of a miner and the storied characters contained there in.
http://parchedearthopals.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html


SO... The gear all got moved. We setup camp and got to it. Dan worked like a demon in the mine shaft and sam facilitated all of the fixing of gear that kept breaking. It was a team effort. I would help out when they needed an extra hand or someone to do grunt work. I was just trying not to get in the way as space is always precious underground and around the mine shaft.

2 weeks flew by. every night I slept out in the grawin with dan in the pop up camper we would light a camp fire, stargaze, shoot the shit, smoke champion ruby tobacco, cook dinner with a butane stove and top off with a bit of boxed red wine.
The pop up camper was comfortable and the mosquitoes kept away... well they stayed away because we had some rather toxic mozzy coils to keep them at bay. they call mosquitoes Mozzy's here. They have different words for everything here.

I'm writing this post from a town called byron bay and all of this seems very far away. I can hear hip hop pumping, germans and danish tourists chatting noisily and the weather is sub 90 degrees. The ridge was a different world. Byron bay is too. Im not sure I would want to live in eaither but they are nice places to visit. Byron bay is a rather resorty little spot with great beaches, nightlife, and currently a bluesfest featuring Buddy Guy, John Fogerty, John Butler Trio etc etc. The town is jam packed because of this festival and last night I slept in the front seat of some characters car. Lets just say there was late night swimming, a hike to the lighthouse overlooking the most eastern point in australia, lots of tooheys and jameson, and lots swearing. Even an encounter with friendly undercover police officers!

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

January 30 to March 3rd a retrospect

Boston:
Jesse Fish saw me off during his morning as I dropped off my car.

Brooklyn
Brendan and Devin Mullins put up with me sleeping on their spare mattress for days, thank you so much. Great to see Bwolf, VV, and Todd. Pats lost, way to go.

Chicago
Jeff and Stacy let me crash in their kitty kats launch pad for a night. Goblets of red wine and fairly decent thai food were to be had. Great to see you even if it was short on time.

Minneapolis
What can I say... i love you guys. Micah was hella sick and rebecca had her hands full with little mister squirmy McVindaloo pants aka jonah garneau. I had these nice walks along the river that kept me inspired while there in the izaak walton nature preserve
Seattle
Danielle and Scott were so fun and had a nice comfy place. We saw a bit of the city together and talked about politics, the nature of spacetime, and our sex lives. awesome. i bought a bike and left it there. ive never done that before.
Vancouver
Katie Brushett was a great hostess in between going to school. Vancouver left a big indent on me. I feel like I will be seeeing that place again. Good to see Claire K. as well. Lunch at brioche was f*ing awesome.

San francisco
I cant talk about some of the fun I had there obviously... the cia definitely reads this shit. Alex Ryan was the man of course, zip carring me around, letting me use his bike. So happy to see him with a nice lady such as Sarah. So much good food... shrimp salads at peruvian MI Lindo was the type of food that makes me want to get laid off again and go to central and south america.
Sunshine coast QLD AU
Cousin Steve and Heather were very hospitable and lived in a nearly resort quality pad... if you get a chance to go there i would advise you to stay with them. Heather will make you tea every 12 seconds and they even have tons of good healthy snack food. watch her on the canasta table tho.. she is tricky! Sitting around smoking butts, shooting the shit and watching Steve build a shed was one of those times ive been robbed of with such a far flung family... its the familiar normalcy that much of my life has missed.
Brisbane QLD AU
Backpackers hostel, canadians, guy from perth, finnish girls, china town, drunk irish guy, etc... I had fun being a tourist in this town.
Coffs Coast NSW AU
Reunited with 3 of the 5 clans that I have in australia here. I'm still here and very much enjoying it. Everything revolves around the ocean here in coffs harbour. Ive met the locals and shit, they drive tracktors, love boats, fishing, and shooting stuff. we as a human family are all the same... the ex brits anyway.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

yahau. (yet another half assed update)

in and around coffs harbour

I'm currently staying in woolgoolga.
Home of
the big banana,
many hindu sikhs
Dan, Alya, Rebecca, & Benjamin Hopkins,

fine white sand beaches and aquamarine water. I have seen wallaby's, eastern grey kangaroos (so many roadkill roos its very sad), goanna's (giant komodo style lizards that climb trees) banana and avocado trees, frangipannies (gorgeous flower that smell like sweet perfume), 15 different types of orchids. Its gorgeous here total understatement.

Not only that, ive spent alot of time reacquainting with family I have not seen in ages, also members of the family that I've never met. Hanna's kids are great... so are allan and hannah of course. They have this easy going beauty about them... although they keep real busy with all of the kids and their many activities... like nippers. Nippers is similar to the swimming lessons we have in the east only its in the ocean and they add a competitive aspect of running races and swimming races every class. I felt like I was looking in on something very east coast australian. Lots of parents milling around watching their kids and helping with running the show.

The moonee Beach reserve was fantastic, headlands similar to ones ive seen in nova scotia and newfoundland only more lush and with sea turtles and kangaroos going practically right up to the top f the headlands!

have to run now. post more soon.

big shout outs to Heather Martin. I hope you get your paper done soon.

http://www.bigbanana.com/