This first picture is our campus lake in the evening. At night it has coloured lights on the fountains, but I haven't had my camera with me when they're on (the fountains are turned off while the film festival movies are playing). I learned recently that it's called a lake because of the actual ecology/hydrology of the system. Down here "lake" indicates a specific e
nvironment that the the water body on our campus fits into (just like we have "swamps", "wetlands", "bogs", "lakes", etc., the definition of "lake" includes our on campus lake).
The big event in Australia right now is the FINA World Championships being held in Melbourne (for swimming, synchronized swimming, open water swimming, water polo and diving). Everyone's hoping Australia can do really well at home. I think Russia's currently winning with 3 golds and 2 silver, Australia's in 4th with 1 silver and 1 bronze, Canada's tied for 6th with 1 silver and the US is tied for 8th with 1 bronze.
So, Australian cheese is about double the price of things like Danish and French cheese, and even that good extra old cheddar that Publix stopped selling in Florida for some reason. On the plus side, when Australia introduced taxes, they decided that the tax must be included in the listed prices in stores, so you don't have to worry about tax being added to whatever you buy, and you don't have to decide in your head whether something will be taxed and figure out what it will be.
Something that isn't more expensive than its imported version is Australian wine. Did you know that wine bottles in Australia come with screw-tops unless they are really expensive? Brands like Yellow Tail, Lindeman's and Penfold's that you know and love back home...yeah they don't have corks. I guess they figure it's not supposed to sit around for long? Either that, or they are just trying to make things easy and/or use less cork...not that many corks are actually made of wood anymore...
I saw what looked like a fat-tailed gecko today, except that it was really big...probably at least 1-1.5 feet long, and large enough you could easily hear it moving along the parking lot. So I doubt it was a gecko (everything I know about them suggests they are typically slightly smaller). But who knows. I'll try to get to the bottom of my lizard mystery soon. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me...I should learn to just keep it in my back-pack haha.
So I'm mostly reading/writing and/or preparing a presentation right now. You have up to 6 months to prepare a research proposal here for an MSc, but ideally I need to be starting my work in the field late May to early June, so I have to fast-track that a little bit. So I'm also preparing my proposal seminar while I go on PowerPoint (about a 1/2 hour presentation). To be honest, I couldn't imagine taking 6 months to do the proposal when I could be in the field actually doing stuff if I took a little less time. Maybe that's just me. One of my supervisors is one of the people organizing an international groundwater conference coming up sometime this year, so it looks like I might be presenting some preliminary findings there, which would be cool and some good experience (probably as a poster, which is the least stressful type of presentation, because people just walk around asking questions and talking). They have funding within the school to send MSc students to at least 1-2 domestic/international conferences to present, so I'm going to start looking for conferences to head to. I think there's one in Melbourne next year, which would be a cool city to get to visit!
In the next couple days I have another class (my turn to take food...I have a blueberry tea cake and some pita & hummus, which is spelt "humous" here - and "hummus" is the real spelling not an American adaptation for once), a meeting about my project at the study site with my profs, the Department of Environment & Conservation, the Water & Rivers Commission and Water Corp. (the equivalent of Ontario Hydro...or whatever it's called now...Hydro One?).
As a side note, unlike home, you don't really try to secure funding before your project unless your profs do for you. At home you apply for NSERC grants and stuff while or before applying to schools. But like home, Australia doesn't require GRE scores, etc., which makes sense, since for the most part you don't need to know 95% of what the GRE actually tests you for. I'm not going to go on a rant about how crazy it is that American schools require GRE scores for all postgraduate programs (it's especially crazy for PhD applicants who already have a Master's and published articles, etc.), but I'm happy the rest of the world is realizing there are other ways to gauge whether someone has research skills (since, you know, the GRE doesn't gauge that at all). Okay, that's the end of my mini-rant about standardized tests that don't actually prove what they are supposed to be proving.
In other news, to cook kangaroo you have to put it in oil for almost a day, and then fry. You only fry each side for about 1 minute. You can only serve it medium-rare, otherwise it's not cooked enough or over-cooked and really dry. Finally, you can only serve kangaroo during the months that the kangaroos are not eating worms as part of their daily diet. So...I recommend figuring out the worm-month thing first...
This last picture looks like this because I forgot to use the feature on my camera that compensates for any shaking that happens at night (since I've decided it's physically impossible for someone to hold a camera steady enough for a night picture to not look blurry unless there are lights above or around you), but it ended up looking cooler than any of the other pictures haha. There are bullrush type plants in the bottom of the pictures and then both actual light and lights reflecting off the campus lake, plus the "light trail" that was left behind because I don't have a tripod or anything for night-time shooting! :)
P.S. Did you know the Huntsman Spider (the hairy one I met on a sidewalk) is originally from New Zealand, and a bunch of them were sent to Hollywood to star in Arachnaphobia? It's true...that hairy spider is the cause of your spider-related fears (or at least apparently relates the most to what people describe as their worst fear when it comes to spiders - hairy, long legs, big-ish eyes, etc.). I can't believe I live with Arachnaphobia spiders...haha.
nvironment that the the water body on our campus fits into (just like we have "swamps", "wetlands", "bogs", "lakes", etc., the definition of "lake" includes our on campus lake).The big event in Australia right now is the FINA World Championships being held in Melbourne (for swimming, synchronized swimming, open water swimming, water polo and diving). Everyone's hoping Australia can do really well at home. I think Russia's currently winning with 3 golds and 2 silver, Australia's in 4th with 1 silver and 1 bronze, Canada's tied for 6th with 1 silver and the US is tied for 8th with 1 bronze.
So, Australian cheese is about double the price of things like Danish and French cheese, and even that good extra old cheddar that Publix stopped selling in Florida for some reason. On the plus side, when Australia introduced taxes, they decided that the tax must be included in the listed prices in stores, so you don't have to worry about tax being added to whatever you buy, and you don't have to decide in your head whether something will be taxed and figure out what it will be.
Something that isn't more expensive than its imported version is Australian wine. Did you know that wine bottles in Australia come with screw-tops unless they are really expensive? Brands like Yellow Tail, Lindeman's and Penfold's that you know and love back home...yeah they don't have corks. I guess they figure it's not supposed to sit around for long? Either that, or they are just trying to make things easy and/or use less cork...not that many corks are actually made of wood anymore...
I saw what looked like a fat-tailed gecko today, except that it was really big...probably at least 1-1.5 feet long, and large enough you could easily hear it moving along the parking lot. So I doubt it was a gecko (everything I know about them suggests they are typically slightly smaller). But who knows. I'll try to get to the bottom of my lizard mystery soon. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me...I should learn to just keep it in my back-pack haha.
So I'm mostly reading/writing and/or preparing a presentation right now. You have up to 6 months to prepare a research proposal here for an MSc, but ideally I need to be starting my work in the field late May to early June, so I have to fast-track that a little bit. So I'm also preparing my proposal seminar while I go on PowerPoint (about a 1/2 hour presentation). To be honest, I couldn't imagine taking 6 months to do the proposal when I could be in the field actually doing stuff if I took a little less time. Maybe that's just me. One of my supervisors is one of the people organizing an international groundwater conference coming up sometime this year, so it looks like I might be presenting some preliminary findings there, which would be cool and some good experience (probably as a poster, which is the least stressful type of presentation, because people just walk around asking questions and talking). They have funding within the school to send MSc students to at least 1-2 domestic/international conferences to present, so I'm going to start looking for conferences to head to. I think there's one in Melbourne next year, which would be a cool city to get to visit!
In the next couple days I have another class (my turn to take food...I have a blueberry tea cake and some pita & hummus, which is spelt "humous" here - and "hummus" is the real spelling not an American adaptation for once), a meeting about my project at the study site with my profs, the Department of Environment & Conservation, the Water & Rivers Commission and Water Corp. (the equivalent of Ontario Hydro...or whatever it's called now...Hydro One?).
As a side note, unlike home, you don't really try to secure funding before your project unless your profs do for you. At home you apply for NSERC grants and stuff while or before applying to schools. But like home, Australia doesn't require GRE scores, etc., which makes sense, since for the most part you don't need to know 95% of what the GRE actually tests you for. I'm not going to go on a rant about how crazy it is that American schools require GRE scores for all postgraduate programs (it's especially crazy for PhD applicants who already have a Master's and published articles, etc.), but I'm happy the rest of the world is realizing there are other ways to gauge whether someone has research skills (since, you know, the GRE doesn't gauge that at all). Okay, that's the end of my mini-rant about standardized tests that don't actually prove what they are supposed to be proving.
In other news, to cook kangaroo you have to put it in oil for almost a day, and then fry. You only fry each side for about 1 minute. You can only serve it medium-rare, otherwise it's not cooked enough or over-cooked and really dry. Finally, you can only serve kangaroo during the months that the kangaroos are not eating worms as part of their daily diet. So...I recommend figuring out the worm-month thing first...
This last picture looks like this because I forgot to use the feature on my camera that compensates for any shaking that happens at night (since I've decided it's physically impossible for someone to hold a camera steady enough for a night picture to not look blurry unless there are lights above or around you), but it ended up looking cooler than any of the other pictures haha. There are bullrush type plants in the bottom of the pictures and then both actual light and lights reflecting off the campus lake, plus the "light trail" that was left behind because I don't have a tripod or anything for night-time shooting! :)
P.S. Did you know the Huntsman Spider (the hairy one I met on a sidewalk) is originally from New Zealand, and a bunch of them were sent to Hollywood to star in Arachnaphobia? It's true...that hairy spider is the cause of your spider-related fears (or at least apparently relates the most to what people describe as their worst fear when it comes to spiders - hairy, long legs, big-ish eyes, etc.). I can't believe I live with Arachnaphobia spiders...haha.
Labels: ECU, Miscellaneous, Research
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