Feathered friends

I'm starting to run out of sleep credits that I'd piled up back in my "semi-retired" days when I got to sleep in. Somehow the time outside of work evaporates into a big mysterious cloud of friends and city life, food and drinks, climbing and yoga. The time at work whizzes by - one hour turns into the next and before I know it, it's time to step into that mysterious time-gobbling cloud and reappear the next morning repeating the same thoughts of perplexity over where the previous day went.



These are some of the more unique Australian birds I saw at the sanctuary near Cairns.
1st: a kookaburra
2nd: a black necked stork with its three-week-old baby
3rd: the strange and mythical-looking cassowary
4th: a black swan

The colour of swans is another one of those backwards things about Australia. Aussies are amazed when they see white swans for the first time when they travel abroad, because swans only come in black here.

Aussie animals

I could not ask for more awesome housemates. Not only do they gobble up the food I cook, they even clean up the mess I make in the kitchen. I quite like not having to eat the same crappy food I made, for several days in a row. All this plus a gas range and a dishwasher make me one enthusiastic chef.

Here are some pretty self-explanatory pics of animals in a sanctuary near Cairns. I guess it is considered a sanctuary because there are parts where they let the animals roam free and mingle with us humans - not the koalas and crocs though.

Cape Tribulation

One of the most rewarding things I've found about blogging is randomly hearing from you. With the time zone differences, I don't often get to chat with you in "real-time", but blogging and emails have filled in the gaps quite nicely.

From the sounds of it, I am doing a wonderful job of lowering your productivity at work. So for this incredibly rewarding feeling of robbing companies of a few minutes of their employees' attention, I shall keep blogging as often as I can ;)

These are pictures of Cape Tribulation, a beach area right by the rainforest. Walking along the beach, you can spot coconuts, palm trees, small chunks of the Great Barrier Reef washed ashore, and signs that industrious little hermit crabs have been hard at work excavating tunnels in the sand.

Signs you're not in Kansas anymore

Some of the more interesting signage in the Daintree rainforest near Cairns.

1. Achtung crocodile baby! How they chose the other two languages on the sign is not apparent to me. Are Germans and Chinese statistically more likely to be eaten by crocs?

2. "Before" and "after" cassowary warnings. Someone got creative with the speedbump warning on the topmost sign. It used to warn of speedbumps, now it reminds you what a cassowary looks like if you run over one.

3. Wouldn't want to tangle with any tentacle-y creatures.