Australia day

Friday was a public holiday. No work, and there were fireworks. It Australia's national holiday, for celebrating all good things Australia.

It's an awkward holiday, though. For traditional reasons, the day is celebrated on the anniversary of the English landing in Australia in the 1700s. But that also marks the date that the English began their instigation of a brutal policy of genocide. Over decades, they systematically murdered estimates of between 250,000 to 3 million people. Native Australians see the date of the holiday as a date of mourning. And I agree with them. There is nothing to celebrate about European policies towards native peoples. There has been a push to change the date of the holiday, to something that all can celebrate and something that doesn't represent the beginning of genocide. And I think that is a very very good idea.

And yet knowing that, I still really really appreciated the three day weekend. I kept stopping and smiling all day Friday, remembering that I didn't have to go to church the next day. That I still had a Saturday and then a Sunday before the work week started again.

We went to the beach. We were planning to go further south, down the Mornington Peninsula, but we looked up the water quality and it was poor further south of the city -- I have no idea why. The more urban beaches were clean. Jonathan didn't want to go to the closest beach. He has decided he doesn't like that one. So we took a bus a little further and tried a new beach.

Because of the public holiday, public transit was on a reduced frequency schedule. We walked about 30 minutes up the coast to get back.

And caught the tram outside of Luna Park.

Our beach timing was good. It started raining hard soon after we got home. And that was a problem, because we had planned to go see the fireworks in the evening. Perhaps they would be canceled.

We went out anyway, equipped with umbrellas. The crowds were thin. But the festivities were still on. Dinner at the food trucks. Music and entertainment. In the rain.

And then fireworks! I didn't take pictures of fireworks. I didn't want to waste time trying to get that perfect shot when I could be enjoying the show.

But I took a picture of the harbour as we headed back home.

Happy Australia day, Australia. We are grateful to you for all the good you do. And we remember those who mourn on this day as well.

Summertime

On Thursday, my colleagues in New York moved up our remote meeting, because they were at home with a snow day. My social media shows pictures of snow and ice in various northern places where friends and family live. It is kind of bizarre to look at the pictures and realise how completely distant those pictures lie from our reality.

It has been hot here. A couple of days were uncomfortably hot, but mostly it has been beautifully hot. Shorts and T-shirt and sandals and a cool breeze blowing in the window. Blue sky, green glass, white puffy clouds. Evening walk around the park watching the bats fly in, listening to the birds making their dusk calls. That type of hot.

Schools are still out for summer. Our school aged child has been reading, skating, actually practicing the piano again, watching videos, getting bored. I think it has been good so far. Summer break is short here, though. He goes back to school at the beginning of February.

As for me, I've been teaching summer school. January summer school. It's fun to say that. The January school involves honours and postgraduate students from all over Australia, coming to take more advanced and specialised classes in one place. It has been very fun to teach. I've picked a topic I really love, not too far from my research. And there are about thirty or forty people attending, asking really good questions, getting excited as well. When you teach regular classes, there are always a few students who are only there to get a grade, and who don't really care. But here, everyone seems to care and everyone seems to be learning and having fun. I wish I could do all my teaching in an intensive summer school unit.

Biking

I made no new year's resolution about biking. Sure, I had some vague plan to continue exercising, but there was no biking on my new year's resolution list.

On the 2nd day of January, my train stopped running. No train, for maintenance purposes, for more than two weeks. Buses were replacing trains. Expect the journey to take 75 minutes longer, said the transit authorities.

So I spent a long time looking at maps. If I rode my bike to the train line just to the north, I could take that train out to a stop near the university, then ride the bike the rest of the way from there. The map estimated about 20 minutes to get to that train line, 20 minutes on the train, then a 20 minute ride to work. That looked totally reasonable. And 40 minutes of biking would be good for me.

It turns out that I am separated from that next train line to the north by a huge gully. I had no idea. At the bottom of the gully is the freeway. There are very few ways to cross the freeway, but a handful of busy roads run past it. So there I was on my bike, riding along a very busy road to the bottom of a gully, to a freeway underpass, to a very steep and very long hill on the other side. The sun was beating down. The cars were zooming by. And I was in lowest gear, riding in the gutter, trying to get up that hill. It was miserable. Worst bike ride ever. And then, since it was a gully not a hill, I had to do a very similar trip in the afternoon in reverse.

The next day I started out on the bike resigned to do the same trip again. But glancing at my watch as I climbed the steep hill to get to the train station, I realised I had just missed the train, and the next one was in 20 minutes. So I decided to keep riding, slightly downhill to the next station. And that took less time than expected, so I rode to the next, and then I crested a hill to see the long bike-only trail that crosses from the central business district to the eastern suburbs. If I took that bike path rather than the 20 minute train, I would be off of all the busy roads. I would ride along the bottom of the gully, and I would pull off before it got too steep at the end. There would be trees and grass and streams, not trucks and asphalt and horns. So I took it. I rode the bike trail the whole way to work, aside from 15 minutes in the suburbs at the end. It took me about 90 minutes to bike to work that day, but there was no steep hill by the freeway with the traffic.

I took the weekend off from commuting. By Monday, I had decided I should just take the bike path from home -- skip all the steep hills. I packed soap and a towel and a change of clothes, and I left very early in the morning. After one hour and twenty minutes, plus shower time, I was there. It felt great. I even passed about a dozen elderly people riding for pleasure on the bike trail. I was fast. I was strong. I was going to do this thing and be in amazing shape before the train was back up and running.

On Tuesday, I got on the bike and ouch. Saddle sore. But again I packed the change of clothes. I rode to the bike trail. After about 15 minutes my saddle was numb. And after one hour and nineteen minutes I had arrived.

On Wednesday, I packed the change of clothes and got on the bike and ouch. Really saddle sore. And somehow, all those little hills along the bike path seemed a lot steeper this time. And although there wasn't that one steep hill at the end, this time I could feel all the little steep hills, and the overall accumulated rise in elevation.

And I started noticing that I didn't look like the other people on the trail. Those other people, they had bright yellow shirts and tight black pants. They carried small light packs, or even saddle bags. And they kept passing me. I could hear them pull up behind. I could hear their pedals stop as they waited while I wheezed my way up the little hill. And then as soon as they could, they whizzed off and disappeared up the trail.

Their bums didn't look sore -- were their seats more padded? They pedaled fast, too. I couldn't pedal like they did. Their bodies were machines that pedaled. Whereas me, I was a machine that pedaled a little, sweated a lot, wheezed, and wiggled around trying to adjust to the fact that there was a giant stick with a plastic seat-shaped-thing up my butt.

The ride on Wednesday was really bad. I kept thinking thought I'd go numb to the saddle-sore thing, like I did the day before. But I didn't. After the first hour on the bike, I tried to rotate my body so that the stick-up-the-butt was poking somewhere else. But there aren't many options for where that thing can poke. And I learned that it's better to leave it where it is than have it poke you in the sphincter. Just saying.

On Thursday ... I couldn't do it. I couldn't couldn't. I tried to talk myself into it, but my legs hurt from pedaling. My shoulders hurt from carrying my backpack. My wrists hurt from jostling on the handlebars. And I won't even talk about the awkward places that hurt from having a stick poked up them.

I took the bus. The bus only took about an hour and ten minutes. And I didn't have to shower at the other end.

On Friday, I took the bus.

Now that it is Saturday, my legs don't hurt. My arms don't hurt. My shoulders don't hurt. And those awkward places where the bike seat pokes -- they don't hurt either. Maybe I'll ride my bike on Monday.

Or maybe not. After all, it never really was a new year's resolution anyway.

Early morning flame thrower

At 5.00am this morning, I found myself lying awake in bed, listening to the noise of some sort of machine outside.

At first I thought it might be the helicopter that lands at the hospital on the side of the park. But it wasn't loud enough to be a helicopter.

Then I thought it might be a street sweeper. They drive up and down the road on the far side of the building in the early morning hours. But it wasn't constant enough to be a street sweeper.

What it really sounded like was a flame thrower.

And as I lay in bed wondering why there was a flame thrower outside my window at 5.00am, a sudden realisation came to me.

Balloons! The balloons are back!

For the three summers we have lived here, hot air balloons have often launched from or landed in our park. Now that we are well into summer again, it must be hot air balloon time again.

Since I was awake anyway, I jumped up and grabbed my camera and ran out into the field where I could see them.

There were five of them, dark and massive against the sky, taller than the mature trees lining the field. When the flames came on, they lit the entire balloon.

Slowly, one by one, they lifted.

And floated away.