Not Much Happening

I am up watching the Olympics.  Actually, more specifically, I am watching what Channel Nine will allow me to watch; mostly swimming and equestrian!  It is more like watching the Toddlers and Tiaras show about toddlers doing beauty pageants, lots of tantrums and spitting of the dummy (pacifier).  I am not sure why we feel the need to initially pick on the athletes look or body shape and then venerate them.  It is the Olympics, people!  If they weren't world class athletes, they wouldn't have qualified!  I generally love watching but I miss having cable, where I can actually watch some of the lesser televised sports, like water polo.  It saddens me that we watch some sports almost exclusively, to the extent that I have seen the same losing 4 X 100 Freestyle race about sixteen times, but they haven't managed to show any soccer, or water polo or..... Anyway, you can get the frustration.

I am in a holding pattern at the moment, waiting for things to happen around me and unable to do anything to speed it up or affect the future at all.  I think some of it is that I am just tired. Outreach, week at work and then Outreach again is a bit crippling but at least it will be all over for the year!

Saturday Slow Down

It feels like it's been forever since I opened my computer!  I have been on Outreach in Cairns for the last week and Saturday was just about catching up!  I am now watching the Olympic games and loving it!  I love the idea of the games.  I love that the torch is lit the same way as it was in 776 BC, although I imagine finding a priestess of Apollo is likely a little harder to find, esp a virgin one!  It lasted a thousand years then and it would be lovely to see it last that long again.  The games have already survived world wars, depressions, pandemics, cold wars and the egos of thousands of elite athletes! I get a little annoyed by the coverage by the TV channels but I guess that they play to the majority and I have rarely been in there!  At least I can go to a friend's house (She has Foxtel) and they have eight channels playing different Olympic coverage so I might be able to see some waterpolo and not have to only watch beach volleyball and swimming!

Levi is not going to outgrow asthma this winter.  We dodged it a little by returning to summer for a big chunk but it is back in full force now!  It is hard when he is sick and I am on Outreach, because his options for staying home are limited.  I can only listen to him cough on the end of the phone and hope he does ok at school.  Naturally he survived!  I still feel bad.

Today is a quiet one.  We will do little boring things like shopping for the week and homework.  At least tonight, we get to go to Sizzler with friends!

South Bank

Today we went to South Bank to ride on the 'Wheel of Brisbane'.  It is kind of like the London Eye but smaller.  We went with friends who had a coupon for a half off.  When we got there it was closed, so after all that we didn't get to ride anyway.  It didn't really matter.  It was a beautiful day and the kids ran around happily chasing birds and each other and we sat in the sun and chatted.  It was a lovely way to spend a day.  You can see in Levi's eyes that he is still tired and we are both getting better but not quite there with the jet lag thing! 

The boys are so fun together and spent a lot of the afternoon conferring with each other about forts and what they were going to do to take after the seagulls again.  Just young child play.  Play that I love.  The kind that doesn't require adult interaction or direction and that seems to be as fluid as possible.  Next week I am on Outreach in Cairns for the week.  Levi will sleep upstairs for the week and I will work long hours.  It's fine but I miss him when I am gone!

Still Struggling!

As you can see by the lack of blog posts, nights are still really hard at the moment!  I get to about nine at night and feel like I am really dragging.  It means that I drag myself to bed and catch up a bit further on sleep.  Levi is doing a bit better than I am, for which I am extremely grateful.  I think that in the next few nights I will try to stay up longer and see if I can switch it before IO have to go on Outreach next week.

Outreach to Cairns is not ideal the week after I got back for lots of reasons.  The biggest is that it doesn't give me much time to help with the organization or planning of it all.  The smallest reason is that I am still 'off' in my timing and sleep/wake cycle.  This time it was moved because the OT that I am going with is pregnant and we had to move it so she could still fly. 

Today we went back into normal weekends.  Levi has soccer and then we are catching up with friends.

 

Getting Back to Normal

We are gradually getting back to a schedule that resembles normal.  The first day back was exhausting.  Levi coped with most of the day at school but when I went to pick him up he was lying at his desk.  His teacher said that he had only been there for about ten minutes but I took him home a little early.  I am still struggling to stay up late enough and waking really early.  Really early! Two in the morning usually but I can generally get back to sleep for another hour or so.  Still I end up being wide awake at about five in the morning.  Levi continues to drag at night along with me so we try to keep each other up!  It is just that much harder to stay up after he has gone to bed. 

It has been raining pretty steadily since we got home.  As this is the dry season, that is a little odd but not completely odd.  The causeway is lapping over but isn't running over yet, but I suspect will be by the morning

Back to Oz

This was our last day in USA.  Levi and I flew out at two in the afternoon, so we had some time in the morning to play.  We went to the park and played on the play structure and then when it was too hot to do anything else, we played in the water at the splash pad!  It was a great way to get running around before having to sit for the next, well, forever!  Levi got the option to travel in the convertible and he was very happy to exercise that!  So off he went in that and the rest of us went in the bigger car.  It was so much fun.  The playground had a snake thing that flexed at two points and the trick was to try to walk from one side to the other or alternatively, hold on for dear life as your brothers try to shake you off by violently moving it up and down.  They also had a flat bench on springs.  It was hard enough to stand still on it because any inherent tremor would get magnified until you were unable to stand.  We tried to hop the length of the bench.  I got about three quarters of the way before falling. 

At the splash pad, the boys pretty much had it to themselves for most of the time.  It meant that they could play wilder, older games in the water and not feel as if they were putting other kids in danger.  They played and played until we had to go to the airport.  It all made for lovely exercise prior to the flights.  The flights were a bit harder than normal.  First off we were flying Virgin Australia rather than Qantas and I suspect that we won't make that mistake again.  When we got to LAX we had been booked in separated seats.  So Virgin in their wisdom had booked my seven year old son a whole bulkhead away from me.  I jumped up and down and finally we got seats together but it meant that we were in the center.  Nothing to prop Levi against so he could sleep!  Eventually I got him sleeping by pulling him up on my lap and holding his legs bent.  Every now and then, I would not be paying attention and the sleeping boy would stretch his legs out, planting his foot on our next seat neighbour's jaw!  Sorry!

Ah well!  You live and learn, and fly Qantas! 

Scienceworks

Levi, Evan and I went to Scienceworks.  It is a science and discovery museum and we all loved it.  We made bubbles on, in and around us.  We climbed a time wall.  We tested our bodies in all different ways.  We raced wheelchairs and we played with sand!  It is just lovely.  We have about three days left of summer and then Levi and I fly back to winter in Australia.  The last few nights have been late ones as people come over to connect before we leave again.  It is great to see everyone.  Because this trip has involved lots of 'going away' time, the 'here' time has been fairly limited and we are trying to squeeze time out of thin air!

After Scienceworks, we went to Lithia Park in Ashland to eat lunch and have a play.  We were racing through a path that Evan had designated as the competitive one and I grabbed the fireman's pole and it caught my skin.  My palm has a big blister now, and all because I am too inherently competitive to allow a 13 year old and a 7 year old to beat me!  That will teach me!   Well for a minute anyway!

Brotherly Love

This is the Popsicle that Ross made!  One for Evan and one for Levi!  They were so big that Levi couldn't really lift it very well to eat it!  It was made from three existing Popsicles, water and Fresca all blended together and frozen.  Levi got about an eighth of the way through before he had to stop.  Now he is very gradually working on it every night.

Floating the Rogue

The day after I got back from Florida, we all went on the Rogue river to do a bit of floating and gentle rapids.  Levi needed to be with me more than usual because he had missed me and this trip was much longer than he had been away before.  That was OK because I had missed him too.  It was a perfect day on the river.  The water is pretty cold (especially for my pansy ass), but the sun was warm so it was fine.  The kids even got in and swam for a bit.  The rapids on this part of the Rogue would barely make it to grade two.  They are fun to play with but you would have to drop sideways into them and then do things wrong to capsize.  Then if you did capsize, the river is so forgiving that you just swim to the nearest eddy and get re-situated!  Levi sat in the front of my kayak and had a canoe paddle, because the kayak ones were too big.

He loved being on the water but I am almost sad (OK I am sad) that he has grown out of using the word 'hyaking' instead of 'kayaking'.  Now he barely says any words that are mispronounced and although I wouldn't stop this progression if I could, I still miss his babyhood!  We floated/paddled down for a couple of hours and then stopped for a snack and a swim and then went the next two hours to the take out.  At one point in one of the more rambunctious rapids, I leaned forward to paddle just as Levi turned his head and leaned back to talk to him.  My paddle hit him right on the edge of his left eye.  It was enough of a rapid that I had to concentrate and I had to say to him;                                                                   "Honey I know you are bleeding, but I need to get to the end of this rapid before I can do anything"

Yep good parenting in action!  Anyway it was just a scratch and he is fine!  All in all it was a great day on the river! 

Florida 3

I had a few days staying in Florida City.  It is a little town, right on the very edges of the Everglades National Park.  It has a little Alligator farm that was farming gators for their skins but they also had a tourist side.  They had a trip on an airboat that was really fun and we saw a bunch of wild alligators.  The photo above is of all the babies together in a pen and the photos below are the wild ones.  It was great to see them in their natural environment.  The Everglades must have been an impressive place back before most of the water flow was blocked.  It will be great to see if it gets back to that state now they are returning some of that water.

There are boardwalks everywhere!  You can just stop the car and get out and go for a walk.  There are a few guided ones.  I did the Anhinga trail with a guide and multiple loud people and several kids who spent the whole time either fighting with each other or whining at their parents that they were hot!  Then I did the trail again by myself!

Florida 2

Later that day, I drove further south and stopped along the way to do the walks that were signposted.  In Florida in the summer, it is less about walking and more about giving blood!  The mosquitoes were large in number and each smack on your leg would kill three to four, but it was worth the walk.  Windeley Key has a fossil reef in a quarry that was dug.  They got part way through using the rock and realised how incredible it was.  It was amazing how easy it was to tell the different corals apart, even in rock.                                                                                   

The time difference was still kicking me.  I was waking really late and struggling to go to bed before midnight each night.  I wasn't trying too hard to change because I knew I would be back soon enough, but the early dives were hard work!

This was the second dive.  Actually part of why I wanted to dive here.  I had spent some of the first day finding someone that was going out and convincing them to dive it rather than snorkel.  This is Christ of the Abyss, a bronze statue that prays for those lost at sea.  It is a replica of another statue in the Italian riviera.  It was just beautiful.  The visibility was perfect and the lighting, everything just fell into line.  The statue is covered with fire coral now, so it is hard to touch without a poison oak type reaction, but I wasn't there to touch it, I wanted to photograph it!  My buddies were pretty relaxed about letting me hang around the statue (although we did look elsewhere that dive as well), but I was just amazed at the whole idea!  It is just awe inspiring to see art work placed where you have to work a bit to find it. 



 Then we went to a reef called Horseshoe reef.  Guess what shape it was in?  Anyway, it was great!  Barracudas, Moray Eels, teeming fish of all description... just what you want when diving!  I found the reef less colorful than the Australian Great Barrier Reef but with many more fish.  The other difference was the sharks.  I have rarely dived in Australia without seeing a shark.  Not big ones, just black and white tip reef sharks, but here I never saw any.  One of the Dive instructors on the boat said that they rarely see them.  Still it was a brilliant place to dive!

When I was done with the diving, I rented a canoe and did a 'canoe trail'.  I had never heard of a specific trail set out like that for canoes, but it was great!  It meant that my arms and my legs both got a work out that day!  The trail is through the mangroves and because you can be almost silent, you have some hope of seeing wildlife.  I saw birds and fish but what was the best part was the silence.  There was no noise at all, but the birds and frogs.  Drifting along in complete silence, just listening to the world as it is now and how it would have been tens of thousands of years ago.

Florida

Initially in Florida, I spent the whole time inside!  I was at a conference that went for four days!  I love catching up on the research and things but staying inside on sunny days is very hard.  Staying inside on sunny weekends, well, even harder!  The conference was on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, in the Marriott.  I was staying in the smaller cheap hotel, next to the Marriott! 

When the conference ended, I rented a car and drove to Key Largo.  I was staying there for three nights, to do some diving.  Key Largo has reef and wrecks and I really wanted to see both.  The first dive was to the Benwood.  I thought it was the Benbow for the longest time but luckily I was put straight!  The Benwood's story is here and is about two ships running without lights in WW2 crashing into each other.  It was really fun to see what 70 years of coral and hurricanes can do to a ship. 

Coral worms just fascinate me.  They are beautiful but can quickly hide if you just waft your hand near them.  I love it. 

Lizard fish

The guy I was diving with on my first dive was an instructor on the boat.  At one point he reached over and picked up this shell and handed it to the girl he was instructing.  I about had a stroke!  In Australia, you never touch shells, unless you are really sure they are good and dead!  I am used to Cone Snails and I had to wait a bit as I settled before I could let him put the shell on my hand.  After a little bit, the crab started exploring with little scratchy feelings on my palm.  It just reminded me how different an ocean it is!

The Benwood was used as target practice during the war.  Not all the bombs exploded.  By now the ones that didn't were deactivated, but they still litter the sea floor.

Not wanting the anthropomorphising this too much, but doesn't this fish look like he is saying "What?"