'Roos
13 November 2004
Kangaroos
For being so tired last night, I certainly didn’t sleep very well. I woke up several times in the middle of the night to find it absolutely pitch black and totally silent. When I say we’re secluded, I’m not kidding. In fact, it was a grim realization that I needed to go to the bathroom because therein began a five minute careful crawl to the bathroom, trying not to wake up Chris and the rest of the household by crashing into something…like the wall. Chris had climbed in bed when I went to brush my teeth, and she was sound asleep before I got out the door. She didn’t move again all night, and eventually slept twelve hours straight.
This morning, I got up shortly after 8 and found Dan sitting on the couch, reading. I wrote my postcards (yes, some of you are already getting postcards – once I find stamps and send them), and then set up my computer to surreptitiously run a few more stages of the N6 tutorial. Lyn and Tom arose around 9:30, and we all had toast for breakfast, accompanied by Lyn’s wonderful apricot jam, and multiple hot cups of tea. It was very windy and cold, and I happily scalded my mouth on the tea. For the rest of the morning, I mostly just hung out, reading, and sitting on the couch. Tom made another few pots of wonderful pressed coffee, and Chris stumbled in around 11:30. Dan and Tom did some yardwork and Chris and I talked qualitative research and coding. It’s so great to talk to people who know what I’m talking about when I begin to enthuse about NVivo. In fact, Chris gave me a tremendous idea of how else to use the search function.
A note here about my current companions: Chris is from England. She looks tremendously like someone I won’t name (no, not Voldemort), so I keep doing double takes, but after 48 hours, I’m thankfully starting to see her as herself instead of someone else. And every time she opens her mouth and has a tremendous British accent, I realize she’s Chris, so that’s good too. In any case, we’re sharing a room here at Angahook – two twin beds. Chris is 29 years old, and works for the CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) which is funded by the government. She teaches and trains in multiple software packages including N6, NVivo, Atlas, etc., etc. So she has a great knowledge base. I look forward to the training week with her, and she has suggested we meet up on that Wednesday in Brisbane to sightsee.
Dan is from Florida, and, although he seems to know the Richards’ very well, he sometimes to ask a lot of obvious (to me) questions about Australia and life here! Still, he is very nice, as well.
We had odds and ends for lunch, then more coffee, then took off for the Erskine waterfall. This meant traveling a bit more along the Great Ocean Road, and it was beautiful. The weather was being weird, and had been all day – very windy, but alternating between bright sunshine and blue sky, and then, twenty minutes later, a tremendous downpour, then bright sun and blue again, then rain – but when we reached the forest, it was momentarily dry. We walked a path down to the falls through beautiful woods, with great straight eucalyptus trees and gigantic ferns. It smelled wonderfully botanical. “250 steps over steep terrain” (said the sign) later, our shoes were muddy, but we were at the base of the falls. After climbing back up, we drove to Lorne to get fish from the pier for dinner. Driving home, we saw a rainbow over the pier and into the ocean.
Then, we stopped at the real Airey’s Inlet and took a brief walk on the beach, again, in between rain sessions. I was starting to feel really tired, and Lyn and Chris determined it would do me good to be trekking outdoors for a bit.
On the way home, we found a mob of kangaroos grazing. (Tom says a group of kangaroos is a “mob”, although Lyn referred to them as a herd.) We pulled over and watched them for half an hour. There were about twenty of them, and we watched several of them box each other. It was great to see them and the light was beautiful. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera. Well, that’s a misstatement. I did have my camera. But I’d forgotten the battery which had been charging overnight. However, Chris did have hers, so the pictures that I will post from today are from her camera.
The weather is still iffy, and Lyn noted the “absence of auroras starting”. Apparently, the aurora is spectacular down here currently, and Tom says there’s a phenomenal place to see it, but if it’s cloudy… It doesn’t get dark until 8:30 or so here, either, which is so nice compared to 4:30 dusk in Boston!
Dinner is being prepared behind me. The fish we bought rubbed with herbs and olive oil and barbequed. Tomorrow, we head to Melbourne proper and I hope to get my computer talking to my camera again, and get some of this stuff posted on the blog where it belongs!
Kangaroos
For being so tired last night, I certainly didn’t sleep very well. I woke up several times in the middle of the night to find it absolutely pitch black and totally silent. When I say we’re secluded, I’m not kidding. In fact, it was a grim realization that I needed to go to the bathroom because therein began a five minute careful crawl to the bathroom, trying not to wake up Chris and the rest of the household by crashing into something…like the wall. Chris had climbed in bed when I went to brush my teeth, and she was sound asleep before I got out the door. She didn’t move again all night, and eventually slept twelve hours straight.
This morning, I got up shortly after 8 and found Dan sitting on the couch, reading. I wrote my postcards (yes, some of you are already getting postcards – once I find stamps and send them), and then set up my computer to surreptitiously run a few more stages of the N6 tutorial. Lyn and Tom arose around 9:30, and we all had toast for breakfast, accompanied by Lyn’s wonderful apricot jam, and multiple hot cups of tea. It was very windy and cold, and I happily scalded my mouth on the tea. For the rest of the morning, I mostly just hung out, reading, and sitting on the couch. Tom made another few pots of wonderful pressed coffee, and Chris stumbled in around 11:30. Dan and Tom did some yardwork and Chris and I talked qualitative research and coding. It’s so great to talk to people who know what I’m talking about when I begin to enthuse about NVivo. In fact, Chris gave me a tremendous idea of how else to use the search function.
A note here about my current companions: Chris is from England. She looks tremendously like someone I won’t name (no, not Voldemort), so I keep doing double takes, but after 48 hours, I’m thankfully starting to see her as herself instead of someone else. And every time she opens her mouth and has a tremendous British accent, I realize she’s Chris, so that’s good too. In any case, we’re sharing a room here at Angahook – two twin beds. Chris is 29 years old, and works for the CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) which is funded by the government. She teaches and trains in multiple software packages including N6, NVivo, Atlas, etc., etc. So she has a great knowledge base. I look forward to the training week with her, and she has suggested we meet up on that Wednesday in Brisbane to sightsee.
Dan is from Florida, and, although he seems to know the Richards’ very well, he sometimes to ask a lot of obvious (to me) questions about Australia and life here! Still, he is very nice, as well.
We had odds and ends for lunch, then more coffee, then took off for the Erskine waterfall. This meant traveling a bit more along the Great Ocean Road, and it was beautiful. The weather was being weird, and had been all day – very windy, but alternating between bright sunshine and blue sky, and then, twenty minutes later, a tremendous downpour, then bright sun and blue again, then rain – but when we reached the forest, it was momentarily dry. We walked a path down to the falls through beautiful woods, with great straight eucalyptus trees and gigantic ferns. It smelled wonderfully botanical. “250 steps over steep terrain” (said the sign) later, our shoes were muddy, but we were at the base of the falls. After climbing back up, we drove to Lorne to get fish from the pier for dinner. Driving home, we saw a rainbow over the pier and into the ocean.
Then, we stopped at the real Airey’s Inlet and took a brief walk on the beach, again, in between rain sessions. I was starting to feel really tired, and Lyn and Chris determined it would do me good to be trekking outdoors for a bit.
On the way home, we found a mob of kangaroos grazing. (Tom says a group of kangaroos is a “mob”, although Lyn referred to them as a herd.) We pulled over and watched them for half an hour. There were about twenty of them, and we watched several of them box each other. It was great to see them and the light was beautiful. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera. Well, that’s a misstatement. I did have my camera. But I’d forgotten the battery which had been charging overnight. However, Chris did have hers, so the pictures that I will post from today are from her camera.
The weather is still iffy, and Lyn noted the “absence of auroras starting”. Apparently, the aurora is spectacular down here currently, and Tom says there’s a phenomenal place to see it, but if it’s cloudy… It doesn’t get dark until 8:30 or so here, either, which is so nice compared to 4:30 dusk in Boston!
Dinner is being prepared behind me. The fish we bought rubbed with herbs and olive oil and barbequed. Tomorrow, we head to Melbourne proper and I hope to get my computer talking to my camera again, and get some of this stuff posted on the blog where it belongs!
posted by Jen at 6:39 PM
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