Absurd pictures of people you don't know

So finally I am getting around to posting some Tusa Christmas party pictures. I have been working like crazy lately, which has actually been pretty good, since I finally feel like I really know what's going on at work. I mean I've always been alright, but I feel like I'm actually getting good at my job... which of course means it's about time for me to leave. But we are officially planning to come back in February-ish and work for a couple more months. Okay, pictures!

The party was at a "secret location," and we were just told to dress to get wet. So, we all met in a parking lot, and the "Ultimate Party" double-decker bus showed up.
We've seen this bus around town full of college-age kids dressed in ridiculous outfits. Not really what I would expect for a company Christmas party, but whatever, it's not like I have a real job. Obviously everyone sat upstairs. The funniest part of the bus was definitely the boom box that was playing total mid-nineties hits, including "Lovefool" from Romeo and Juliet, "Barbie Girl," and others.

Anyway, we got there, and "there" was a cable water-ski park.

Which basically means that there was a big square lake with little zip-lines going around the top, which you could hold on to while water skiing or wake boarding. I opted to watch people in the water, and I stayed dry and drank a lot and had fun.

Fun definitely included the super-awesome jukebox that included such hits as Achy-Breaky Heart and I Would Do Anything For Love (both of which were played that night).


Now I'll just show you lots of pictures of my friends.

Matt opted for water wings for his wakeboarding.



Adrian wears his camo hot-pants all day on the boat. I think they are hilarious.



Joel is one of our skippers, and Nicole is his girlfriend. She's awesome, he's my least favorite person to work with, but he's okay outside of work. You should recognize Adrian from the shorts.



Justin is much bigger than Asako.



The British boys I work with, Nathan and Matt, appropriately eating fish and chips.


God I wish these pictures had turned out better. Caine, one of the skippers, tried to ride around the water-ski thing on this inflatable dragon. Once he fell off, they went to pick him up on a golf-cart. The pictures of him actually on the dragon didn't turn out at all, but here they are with the dragon on top of the golf cart.



Ben tried to drink a beer while wearing a beard and santa hat, with a fake topiary reindeer on his head.


Said topiary reindeer got decorated with everyone's empty cans and bottles.



Asako (who was hammered) did an accidental godzilla impression, running over and tearing all the bottles off the reindeer, cuddling it and telling us it was her boyfriend.

Anyway, the pictures go downhill as everyone gets more and more drunk. So... a couple more shots of my friends.


Miho looks obese in this picture. She's not. But she is the funniest little Japanese girl I have ever met. She just left Tusa, which we are all very sad about.


Tina and Al. Tina is kind of bossy, but she's alright, and she's the only other English speaking girl on the boats. Al has a tattoo of a "made in Australia" tag on one shoulder and a Southern Cross constellation on the other. Guess where he's from.


Nicole and Asako on the dragon that Caine tried to ride.


The night ended with a bottle of Sambuca being passed around to all the staff... which ruined everyone's day the next day at work. Anyway, that was the party, fun times were had by all. I was completely hung over for the next day, but so was everyone else, so it was okay. Alright, there are more, but that's probably enough.

PS. I'll be back in the US in less than two weeks!

Merry Christmas! Already!

We have a Christmas tree! So I know it's not Thanksgiving yet, and I know my mom will probably never forgive me for setting up the tree before December, but we did it anyway. We saw it at Cole's (the grocery store) for $9.98, which is like 8 dollars US. Including ornaments, tinsel, and lights! So of course we had to get it. And I told Jon that we HAD to wait until after Thursday (which I'm pretty sure is Thanksgiving) to set it up. But after dinner (which was a basil pasta that we made from scratch, which turned out pretty well), I just couldn't wait any longer. So here are my excuses:
1) Australians don't celebrate Thanksgiving, therefore it has no bearing on Christmas (although we have been talking about the menu for Thursday, and are considering inviting people over for it... not that we actually know any Americans that we like.)
2) Cole's has had Christmas decorations and Christmas food (seriously, like "Merry Christmas" cakes) out since early October
3)Tusa already had their Christmas party (ridiculous pictures to come!)
4) Mom already sent us advent calendars
5) Most importantly, we are leaving Australia in like three weeks, so we needed sufficient time to enjoy the tree
and also 6) Jon and I won't be spending Christmas together, so we had to get it in now

So whatever, those are my excuses. Mostly I am still an impatient little kid and I wanted to set it up. And you know what? I'm happy with it.

Fake tiny tree...

Plus decorations...

And lights!.... (ps. Jon is shirtless because it is HOT because it is summer here. Which is totally wrong for Christmas.)

Equals Christmas! Yay!

So now we are listening to the Mormons singing Christmas carols and Messiah and all that, and I feel very Christmas-y. Now it's time to plan the Thanksgiving menu! Bye! I'll post ridiculous Tusa Dive Christmas party pictures soon!

The world's most dangerous bird

...is, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the Cassowary. It is native to Tropical North Queensland, although I gather that there are very few left. Basically they can grow to like 6 feet tall, look sort of like Turkey-Emus, and are super deadly. For instance: a boy was killed in the rainforest by a kick in the chest from a cassowary. Or, a more interesting story that I heard today: this martial-arts expert had a weird fascination with fighting Australian animals. He had snuck into zoos to fight kangaroos, etc. He decided to go up against a cassowary and was found dead in the cassowary pen by the zookeepers. Crazy. This is an intense bird. So, needless to say, Jon and I have been kind of obsessed with seeing these weird looking, super dangerous birds. The Rainforest Dome was supposed to have one, but they didn't. The Sydney zoo didn't. We were disappointed.

But... today, we went up to the rainforest via the "Skyrail," which was hokey but fun. They had a bird habitat. The bird habitat had two cassowaries. Obviously we went. We started asking the guy at the front all sorts of questions, like whether they ever had cassowary feedings that we could watch or whether anyone ever got hurt. He said there were no feedings, but that every now and then, they will come up and take a grape from you. The male was busy guarding the eggs, but he said the female was still out and about. We bought a food bag for $2 that included seeds, nuts, grapes, and corn cobs. He said not to expect anything, but that we were welcome to try.

And try we did.

Here's our first glimpse of the cassowary through the trees.

Jon holds out a grape, to no avail.

We get bored and feed other birds.


Return to the cassowary. It's still far away, I just get better at using Jon's camera. Check out the deadly claws.


The cassowary is intrigued by the grape and the "cassowary calls" that Jon tries to make up.
(I should point out that he can get squirrels and other woodland creatures to come to him by making noises. It's kind of cool and also pretty creepy.)


Almost there...


Success! High fives all around. Except for the cassowary, who would destroy us with a high five.

I fed the cassowary a corn cob. We weren't sure we liked each other, though. (I realize this looks a lot like the rainforest dome picture. Except this bird is actually scary.)

See? Mutant dinosaur-emu-turkey.


Creepy.

Anyway, we ran out of corn cobs, grapes, and peanuts (which the guy at the front was amazed that we got it to eat).

We played with some other birds.

For some unknown reason, one decided it would be a good idea to land on my head.

And this one had a mullet.

So, even without the birds, it was a pretty neat trip.

We took the Skyrail up to Kuranda...


and we took the scenic train back down.


We saw some nice waterfalls...

and the most ridiculous sweater ever.


Rainforest. Yay!

Sydney photos

Hi all!
Not much to report, except that Jon and I, as part of our on-going one-year anniversary celebration, just went to get massages at a spa in one of the hotels down the road. It was really nice, even though the massage was called the "Su Su Wave Melody" (which Jon pointed out sounds more like a karaoke bar than a massage). I guess it's supposed to be an Aboriginal thing. It was also a little pricey, but they gave us a local discount when they saw our address! So we will definitely be going back. Anyway, Maisie sent the Sydney pictures... here they are.

Here's me and Maisie at a bar on our first night in Sydney...

This is what Jon and I would look like if we were penguins!



And some giraffes...


Maisie, Loren (who I think is a friend of Jenny's/Maisie's friend Avery), Ben (who Ryan has been hanging out with), me, Ryan, and Jon at Three Wise Monkeys on our last night in Sydney.


The zoo has a really cool view of the city. Also, where did my boobs come from? (Grandparents, disregard that comment).


The four of us at the Eastern, some trendy Sydney bar.


Another random cute picture of me and Jon...

Anyway, that's pretty much what we did... also, we took the GRE Bio. Hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Dive dive dive

Okay, I'll come clean right away. The real reason I'm posting is to share the coolest picture ever. It's the zoomed-out version of my facebook picture, so I'm sure it looks familiar to some people. I just think it's awesome, though. If I look intense, it's because I'm really pissed off at my students. I'm swimming back down from the surface where I had to have one of them picked up by the rescue boat. Not a big deal, but frustrating. And see? I really do dive all day. I'm not just making it up. I'm sure you thought I was.

So I finally have a normal day off! It's been like two weeks. I mean I got days off for Sydney, but we were pretty busy. Then I got a day off on Thursday, but I went out on the boat anyway. It was actually pretty fun, I was taking Jon out to work on getting him certified as a diver. Which I did, and he's actually very good at it. Which is a good thing, because last night I took him out for a night dive. The timing for his certification was not an accident; last night was the Tusa coral spawning trip. Without getting too marine bio-y on y'all, this is basically what happens. In short, corals reproduce in a couple of different ways, but one way is sexual reproduction, which they only do once a year. The corals all release their eggs into the water on the same night. This happens for a variety of reasons, including that they want the tides to not wash the eggs too far from the reef, and that if they all spawn at once, there is too much for predators to eat, so a higher percentage survives. Got it? So scientists predicted this weekend for the annual spawn, and this is what it's supposed to look like:


I say supposed, because it didn't happen. We went out and did two night dives, and it was still pretty cool, but there was definitely no spawning going on. Jon did an awesome job, the first dive we went on was very shallow (which is harder than deep, actually), and very crowded, but he was great, especially considering it was his fifth dive ever. The second dive, Matt (who I work with), Jon, and I went off in the opposite direction to look for sharks. We found one, which is apparently an epaulette shark. It was probably three feet long, and it looked like this:


We didn't actually take that picture, although Matt took a lot of really cool pictures, which I will hopefully get, and post along with Maisie's Sydney pictures. Anyway, so we found one shark, some pretty cool other stuff like a baby octopus that inked just a tiny bit when I touched it. Oh and sea turtles who would not leave us alone. That was kind of fun. After the diving, all the staff who had come out just for fun went down to the rooms below and slept. Because we had all worked that day, and then just stayed on the boat for the night dive. Which means we were all on the boat from 6:50 AM Friday to 2:30 AM Saturday. Poor Matt had to work today. Oh well. Good times were had by all, despite the lack of spawning.

Pictures! Friends! Terrorist threats!

Hi! Sorry for being such a slacker... I'm sure anyone who actually checks to see if I have posted has quit by now. Sorry! I worked a whole lot last week, and then I went to Sydney... so I've been busy. Tonight I had to attend a presentation on why the Cairns marina might be a terrorist target. Sounds unlikely to me, but they did start the presentation with the beginning of Team America, which seemed a little inappropriate, but whatever. The new Japanese girl who I work with, Fumi, who doesn't speak much English, leaned over to me in like the first five seconds of the clip and was like "Oh, Team America!" I was pretty surprised. So apparently I'm supposed to look out for suspicious behavior. In case someone attacks Tusa III.





Anyway, I got this absurdly official looking ID. To work on a dive boat... come on guys. They also didn't actually warn me before taking the picture. Oh, well.





Anyway, more exciting things! Like Sydney! So we went to take the GRE Biology. We stayed with Jenny's friends from college, Ryan and Maisie. Their apartment actually made me feel way better about ours (sorry, guys, if you ever read this), mostly because they got most of their furniture from off the street. They also pay a good bit more than we do for an apartment that is much smaller than ours. I guess that's the difference between Sydney and Cairns. Oh well, it was awesome to have a free place to stay, and we had a lot of fun with them. We went out on Thursday, our first night there, and took some pictures:





We also took the subway. And wore very similar shirts. Also, my arms are ripped from lifting tanks all day.






We went out to a couple of bars, and Jon and I tried to not be the lame old people that we are, since Maise and Ryan are all night partiers. At one point, Maisie's boyfriend Danny (the guy who isn't Ryan in the picture) came to pick us up in the "company car" (which was the catering van for the restaurant where he works.)

We thought it was hilarious. We were also drunk. Please notice that Danny, the only one not drunk, is wearing a jacket. Sydney was freezing! It's supposed to be late spring! After years of opposition, I actually bought a pair of Ugg boots because of the cold. Well, they aren't actually Uggs, they're fake. And they're not actually boots, they look more like slippers. So really, I'm okay, since they are neither Uggs nor boots.



Anyway, lots of fun, stayed at a hotel on Friday night, took the GRE Saturday (it went pretty well, I won't have a score for like 6 weeks), went out again Saturday night, was so hung over on Sunday that I threw up twice on the plane (no idea why, I really didn't drink that much). I remember there being all sorts of funny things that I thought would be great for writing about, but I either can't remember or they aren't that funny. For instance: we're going into a bar around 2 in the morning, and Ryan and Maisie warn me that they might ask me how many drinks I've had. So, very prepared, when they asked, I confidently said "three" and held up three fingers. The truth was more like 6, so I was very matter of fact about it. That became like a catch phrase for the weekend because I was so proud of how composed I was. Anyway, when I write it, it's not funny at all. So I'll stop there. Maisie took pictures at the zoo, which will hopefully be coming soon.

Also, I have friends! (Well, I work with them. But still-- friends!)



Because I know at least Mom will want to know, the one in the brown is Tim, blue is Ryan, and green is Ben. I don't know why Ryan looks like he's about to die, also he's about to get that cast off soon. Ben is flicking off the camera because Ben cusses like a sailor even though he looks like he's 12. Tim is the one who moved back to Tasmania, which I'm sad about because I loved working with him.




Alright, that's it for now. I'll try harder to write more, and I'll add more pictures when/if Maisie sends them.