Leaving on a jet plane

Well, enough goofing around in WA, time to be moving on and settling down. After about 10 weeks in Perth, Fremantle and Albany, the I'll be flying off to Melbourne and work on getting settled down there. I meant to write more over the last 10 weeks but it was a bit busy. I'll have to see how it goes after getting there. There is a lot to set up and organize.

It has been a really good 10 weeks and I have seen some really great things. Dolphins on the south coast in the Southern Ocean, a few off South Beach in Fremantle, and two just a few days ago well up the Swan River in central Perth. The marsupials are quite cool. There were lots of kangaroo wandering around down south. The bandicoot that wandered around the garden was great. Then the quakkas on Rottnest Island, yeah, they were cute too.

I'm getting a good handle on the birds here after sighting eagles, osprey, honey eaters, and more parrots and cockatoos than you can shake a stick at. I could probably make a list of about 50 different species that I've seen since I've gotten here. I'm looking forward to seeing which ones are different in eastern Australia.

There has been cycle camping from Albany to Walpole, a week in a fishing shack on a cliff over the Southern Ocean, a few days on Rottnest Island, snorkeling and swimming in a lot of different bays and rivers, kayaking in a few other rivers, and hmm what else? It is nice that most museums are free in Australia, so I've wandered through a few of them.

I should be to Melbourne then pretty quickly. I'm looking for a few good concert buddies. It has been too long since I've seen many live shows. Drop me a line and tell me what bands are cool to see. So, here I come.

Where the hell is Bill? (Short billed black cockatoo) - Photo of the day

12 February 2009 - Nornalup, Australia

Just walking outside the Valley of the Giants campsite, there was a grove of trees with 3-4 cockatoos up in the trees. This one was the lookout, keeping an eye out while the other ones went about their business.

The tooth fairy and the princess (Splendid fairy-wren) - Photo of the day

12 February 2009 - Nornalup, Australia.

Maybe the prettiest bird I've seen so far is the fairy-wren. I know the parrots and parakeets are pretty but the male fairy-wrens just glow. At the Valley of the Giants campsite, there was a group of rather tame ones, the male with his harem all feeding their chicks, who would walk right up to you and cheep at you.

Lady Water and the hooded one (Hooded plover) - Photo of the day

23 Feburary 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

Hooded plovers are endangered and quite uncommon. So, it was nice to see a few of them wandering around the beach.

Do the ostrich - (Emu) - Photo of the day

11 February 2009 - Near Parry Beach, Australia

Emu are related to the ostrich and are native to Australia. They are slightly smaller. I believe they are the state bird of Western Australia. Here are a few of them.

Like cockatoos - (White cockatoo) - Photo of the day

15 January 2009 - Fremantle, Australia

White cockatoos fly around the garden here occasionally. Mostly up high in the trees but sometimes they come down low and you can see them better. I wonder if these are seasonal since I haven't seen them for a few months now.

Think pink (Galah/pink and gray parrots) - Photo of the day

18 January 2009 - Fremantle, Australia

There are a lot of these around, galahs, or pink and grey parrots. Quite noisy when they are flying and chasing each other around. Here they are working on some sunflowers near a telephone pole on a street corner.

Like a bird on the wire - (Red tailed black cockatoo) - Photo of the day

18 March 2009 - Fremantle, Australia

A few noisy red tailed black cockatoos perched on the tree in the back garden a few days ago. They are really pretty when they fly and the red in their tail really flashes. They are a little harder to take pictures of when they are in trees, the red doesn't show as much, nor does the gold speckles on their chest.

(Under The Screaming Double) Eagle-(white-bellied sea eagle) - Photo of the day

4 March 2009 - Torbay Inlet, Australia

While rowing kayaks down the Torbay Inlet, a nice white-bellied sea eagle flew overhead and then landed in a tree and was good enough to stay there as we drifted underneath. Usually you see them circling over the sea and cliffs but it was nice to see this one close up.

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree - Picture of the day

19 January 2009 - Subiaco, Australia

The laughing kookaburra is one of the birds you hear about from Australia. It is a large kingfisher. They look pretty cool, although in Western Australia they are considered invasive (from eastern Australia) and compete negatively with other native species in WA.

Just like honey (New holland honeyeater) - Photo of the day

23 January 2009 - Albany, Australia

More bird pictures, I hear you, you can't have enough of those. I guess I have a few days worth of those from various parts of Australia. Here you have a New Holland Honeyeater, they are pretty common along the south coast of Western Australia.

New Holland was an old name for Australia, originally for the whole continent and then after that everything that wasn't New South Wales (i.e. Western Australia).

Polly wants a cracker - Photo of the day

14 March 2009 - Fremantle, Australia

Back to the present day, I could probably spend a lot of time posting pictures of all the nice birds I've taken pictures of in the last few months. Australia has some good ones, lots of colorful ones at that. Walking around Fremantle, here we have an Australian Ringneck (commonly known as the Twenty-Eight Parrot) on a powerline.

Moon, turn the tides... gently gently away - Photo of the day

11 March 2005 - Wallasey, Merseyside

High spring tides pouring over the sea wall.

Nashville Skyline - Photo of the day

5 December 2004 - Wallasey, Merseyside

On a walk down the promenade near Wallasey Town Hall.

Autumn serenade - Photo of the day

14 November 2004 - New Brighton, Merseyside

Walking around the Wirral through autumn colors.

Gotta foggy notion - Photo of the day

14 October 2004 - Wallasey, Merseyside

A foggy day outside Wallasey Townhall.

In the heat of the moment - Photo of the day

3 September 2009 - Finnhamn, Sweden

The sauna, a great Scandinavian tradition. This was a fantastic sauna, hidden in a cove on the edge of the water. Heat up in the sauna and then there is a pier extending around the rock into the ocean to dive in and cool off and then jump back into the sauna again.

Michael row the boat ashore - Photo of the day

2 September 2009 - Finnhamn, Sweden

Finnhamn is a quite small island out towards the edge of the Stockholm archipelago. There are thousands of islands scattered through it. Here we are towing one of the boats (one either side, row over, tow one back, row back, leave it there) which are part of a chain of boats which allow you to hike across the archipelago. We are crossing over to a neighboring island to explore it.

Ray of light - Photo of the day

19 September 2004 - New Brighton, Merseyside

The New Brighton lighthouse on Perch Rock at the northern tip of the Wirral, across from Liverpool, at low tide.

Been dazed and confused for so long, its not true - Photo of the day

6 June 2004 - New York, New York.

In Penn Station in NYC after a long ride from Albany, just on my way to New Jersey. Better run, my train is up on the board.

Go Johnny go - Photo of the day

7 October 2007 - Denver, Colorado

Gito Gito Hustler in playing in Denver. They rocked.

Many rivers to cross - Photo of the day

10 June 2004 - Bannerman Island, New York

Some old classic photos now. I used to take the train from Albany to New York along the Hudson River a lot. One of my favorite things was going by Bannerman Island, a bit of a folly in the middle of the river, a fairly modern old looking ruined castle. A funny thing to see in New York.

Ho-ho-ho ho ho, that's the Woody Woodpecker song - Photo of the day

2 September 2008 - Finnhamn, Sweden

So excited to see this one, a black woodpecker while we were walking around the island. Pretty rare in the UK, maybe somewhat less rare in Sweden but still exciting. Taken through binoculars, so not the greatest picture, sorry.

Shoplifters of the world, unite - Photo of the day

1 September 2008 - Finnhamn, Sweden

So, we arrive on Finnhamn fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the way you look at it, a few days after the season ended. It was great because the island was almost completely deserted, maybe 10 people on it. But that also meant that the little shop on the island was closed and we only had a few days of food in our pack. Luckily there was a self service farm shop with enough vegetables (nice organic at that too) to get us through until we could find somebody who open the shop for us.

And yeah, we paid for them. Amazingly trusting, the cash box had a whole lot of krona in it.

Looks like muskrat love - Photo of the day

28 February 2009 - Albany, Australia

And here I thought bandicoots were just some video game thing, but they are quite cool little marsupials running around the yard, digging holes to eat roots and bulbs and insects. They are supposed to be nocturnal but they seem to be out at all times of the day. Not quite sure if this is a long-nose, short-nose, a bilby, or what type. I'm better at bird identifications.

Tapioca sunrise - Photo of the day

26 February 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

Well, our last sunrise at the fishing shack. We were up early to pack up the truck and leave. It poured in the night and we were rewarded with a beautiful sunrise.

Spiderbaby (yeah yeah yeah) - Photo of the day

22 February 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

I hear that Australia has the largest number of poisonous spiders, snakes, bugs in the world, or something like that. Here we have a huntsman spider, probably 2-3 cm long, which I guess normally don't bite and are mildly venomous.

I'm not sure if this is the same one we kept seeing in the shack that seemed to be losing a lot of legs. This one has 7 legs, the one we saw later only had 6. It was crawling around the rafters on the roof hunting for bugs.

I've seen it in your eyes, I've read it in books - 100 Books meme

100 books

So, this one is going around, and since I'm sort of a sucker for lists. But doing a little research, it isn't quite what it claims. The list claims to be from the BBC but it seems that it is actually from a list put together by Guardian readers (would be interesting to see how that list would differ from readers of like the Daily Mail or Sunday Times or Evening Standard, etc). The original 100 book from the BBC are below that one here. I went ahead and filled out both. It also makes this claim that the BBC only expects you to have read 6 of the 100, but that is nowhere to be found either on the Guardian page or the BBC. I assume that was added by whoever started this meme so that most people can feel smug about having read a lot more than 6. I would be surprised if most people hadn't read more than 6 of these. But then I'm surprised occasionally to meet people who haven't read more than 1 book a year (or less). That's insane.

But my totals, 49 for the Guardian list (sort of a strange list, listing both Lion Witch and the Wardrobe and the Chronicles of Narnia, and a few other examples like that). Do I get credit for having read probably 90% of the Shakespeare's plays and the 1/2 of Ulysses I read in college (I did turn in a paper on it after all)? The BBC list, I don't do quite as well, only 41 (ok 40 1/2).

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books
here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read
once. Enter a number for the number of times you read something.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Most (probably 90%)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - Half(although I did write a paper on it in
college pretending I read the whole thing)
76 The Inferno - Dante - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

BBC 100 Book Meme RAW List

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total.

How many have you read?

1. [x] - The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. [ ] - Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. [x] - His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. [x] - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. [x] - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. [x] - To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. [x] - Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. [x] - Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. [x] - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. [ ] - Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. [x] - Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. [x] - Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. [ ] - Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. [x] - Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. [x] - The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. [ ] - The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. [ ] - Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. [ ] - Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. [ ] - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. [ ] - War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. [ ] - Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. [x] - Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. [x] - Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. [x] - Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. [x] - The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. [ ] - Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. [ ] - Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. [x] - A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. [x] - The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. [x] - Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. [ ] - The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. [ ] - One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. [ ] - The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. [ ] - David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. [x] - Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. [x] - Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. [ ] - A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. [ ] - Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. [x] - Dune, Frank Herbert
40. [ ] - Emma, Jane Austen
41. [ ] - Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. [x] - Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. [x] - The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. [ ] - The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. [ ] - Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. [x] - Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. [x] - A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. [ ] - Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. [ ] - Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. [ ] - The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. [ ] - The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. [ ] - Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. [x] - The Stand, Stephen King
54. [ ] - Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. [ ] - A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. [ ] - The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. [ ] - Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. [ ] - Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. [ ] - Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. [x] - Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. [ ] - Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. [ ] - Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. [x] - A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. [x] - The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. [x] - Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. [ ] - The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. [ ] - The Magus, John Fowles
68. [x] - Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. [x] - Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. [x] - Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. [ ] - Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. [ ] - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. [x] - Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. [ ] - Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. [x] - Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. [ ] - The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. [ ] - The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. [1/2] - Ulysses, James Joyce
79. [ ] - Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. [ ] - Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. [x] - The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. [ ] - I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. [ ] - Holes, Louis Sachar
84. [ ] - Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. [ ] - The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. [ ] - Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. [x] - Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. [ ] - Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. [ ] - Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. [x] - On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. [ ] - The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. [ ] - The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. [x] - The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. [ ] - The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. [ ] - Katherine, Anya Seton
96. [ ] - Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. [ ] - Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. [ ] - Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. [ ] - The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. [ ] - Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Send me an angel, right now - Photo of the day

25 February 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

On a hike along the ocean from Pallinup towards Boat Harbour (I think there are about 500 places in Australia called Boat Harbour), I saw this cloud and ran to the top of the hill to take a picture before it disappeared.

Mother whale eyeless - Photo of the day

20 February 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

A short walk down the beach from the fishing shack, a dead whale sat in the surf. It is perhaps a baby humpback whale, looks like it has been dead for a while, quite mushy with lots of bits chewed out by sharks. It smelled pretty bad too. But amazing, even in its putrid state, it was graceful and lovely as the waves moved it around. It had probably washed up a day or so before because as the week went on, it ended up buried deeper and deeper in the sand.

I want to go back to my little grass shack - Photo of the day

20 February 2009 - Pallinup, Australia

Back to the present for a little bit, last week we spent a week staying in Pallinup, right above the Beaufort Inlet in a small fishing shack looking over the ocean. An amazing place, water from rain tanks, no electricity, etc. Apparently they have been a some what controversial Australian tradition for decades, but a lovely tradition too, primitive little makeshift tin shacks on the edge of the ocean, holiday homes that are generally shared among family and friends.

Most local councils are trying to get rid of them now, banning any building of new ones, limiting the amount of construction that can be done on existing ones, and trying to tear a lot of the existing ones down. This one is on a fishing lease, the smaller of two, the other one is use by more active commercial fishers both on the ocean and the inlet which is separated off from the ocean by a sandbar. There used to be a third shack but last year the inlet broke through the sandbar and washed away some of the cliff edge, including the third shack.

Island of lost souls - Photo of the day

31 August 2008 - Stockholm, Sweden

On the ferry through the Stockholm Archipelago on our way to the island of Finnhamn.