These are from the sunset that i ran off to go see after the other post.

The four in the picture are my coworkers.

On Tuesday i had my first day painting with the artists. Kathleen Kngale is the current star artist of Delmore Downs and i spent the most time helping her with her painting. She is pretty old and her eyesight is going so she needs help making sure that she has the right colors to work with and to turn the canvas every so often. She has few teeth and even less english so communicating is mostly relegated to sign language. The painting that she did the other day (above) depicts the wild plum flowers and fruit that will be blooming at some point this year. The dots stem from ceremonial designs that they paint on their bodies usually when trying to bring fruit, game or rain, or in various celebrations. The white is for the flowers of the plant and the purple is the fruit. I think she started with the orange and red on the bottom layer because that's what i handed her. 

She is quite the eccentric character, often in the store she will grab some sodas candy and a loaf of bread, say something really fast in Arrente (i think that's what they're language is called) ending with "painting money" laugh and walk out the door. One of her daughter's Elizabeth Mbitjana is also working on a painting (below) (i might have to add more pictures and writing later the internet is dying right now)

Today is sunday. That means we get the day off apparently, even though we didn't get any day off in the last two weeks. Also i think that my blog thinks that i'm still in Eastern Standard Time because it is dating my posts wrong. I guess that plays into the whole "... and a day ahead" thing. Buster is feeling much better, he even had energy to play with a snake i found in the pit of the vehicle shop. No snakes were harmed in the making of this blog post though i promise.  I played banjo for a bit and went for a few kilometer walk down the creek and across part of the property. There is a big abandoned metal barn full of metal junk and old rusted things. A tetris haven. No wait that's not right.... anyway i walked down the creek, which by the way when i say creek i don't mean to imply that there was water in it. All the creeks here are dry and only have water in them so long as it is raining. They are really just sandy flood flood channels that people call creeks. Nevertheless they are great places to find cool rocks that are just sort of red when they are on the ground but then they glow when you hold them up to the sun. Also i would like to find a feather from one of the bright green parrots that are all over the trees in the creek. I didn't find one today but i'm sure i will if i keep looking. but i'll have to write more later i think we're all going to drive out to a ridge and watch the sun set.

This is a Buster update. The crazy cattle dog keeps getting crazier. yesterday we were getting the mail from the air delivery guy.

Side note: yes we don't have a mail man we have a mail pilot. he lands on our personal airstrip every friday, hands us the mail and then flies away. definitely one of the coolest jobs around.

Anyway so Tom and i were driving the truck over to the airstrip and Buster decides he wants to come along. but we had already started driving. no matter. "the dukes of hazard was a good show." thinks buster. He then proceeds to JUMP into the window of the MOVING pickup truck and lands in my lap. he is just lucky i had the window open.

Later on we were loading some tree branches into the back of the truck to take them to the dump which is about 2 km away (a bit over a mile) and again buster decides to come along. I tell buster to stay and get back in the truck. of course buster doesn't speak english and the only thing he hears is BUSTER yelled in his direction so he decides its still ok to come along. only this time the truck is doing 30 km an hour. Funny thing is that buster was keeping pace with the car. marking the turn offs for roads are big oil drums on these metal frames and Buster jumped over one with no hesitation. they must be three feet high and at least five long and he didn't even stop for a second. the best part is that we made this trip five times and no matter how hard i tried to get him to stay, or how tired he got, he would follow us. by the last trip he was walking back.

Then last night (we finally got a bit of food from town by the way) we were making ribs and i decided to give Buster a bone with some fat on it to gnaw on. so what does he do? not only does he eat the fat. HE EATS THE BONE. It was a pretty big bone too. i thought he was just going to chew on it a bit but no. CRUNCH. he just bit right through it and kept going. needless to say i don't think he is feeling to good today but he'll be alright.

Buster had a long day yesterday.

El Senior de Las Moscas.

     The thing about the bugs here is not their size, or their numbers, both of which are formidable to be sure. It's that they have confidence. Bugs in the states submit easily to a swat or will just give up after a few casual swipes of your hand. Here in the outback its not so easy. After a quick swish of the hand and a quick shake off it's as a smart man once said "They'll soon be back, and in greater numbers." And when they come back, it's with a vengeance. They know you have an ear, and a nose and proper eyes and they are hellbent to get in on that action. I'm not sure why they want to land on those spots so bad, perhaps its because they lack all of those things and they are trying to find some way to steal them from you. I don't know. if it were as simple as wanting to find moisture then you would think that they wouldn't land on your ear, or that they would just go hang out by the pool which is always full of water and doesn't try to swat them away. I think they are just spiteful hateful and evil creatures and it's as simple as that.
     The mosquitoes are actually not that bad here, they do come out in numbers but i haven't been bitten much. The ants certainly are numerous, (it's very hard to take a step inside or out without stepping on an ant nest) but apart from the bulldog ants i saw they don't do much harm. The spiders, while also large and numerous, don't really bother us much beyond the never ending job of sweeping up cobwebs.  The various colors of beetles are enormous ( i call them lawnmower bugs because when they fly around it sounds like someone is using a lawnmower somewhere) but they mostly just die and end up in the pool. Life is just too hard for them i guess.I guess the flies taught them all to stay in line.
     It's sort of like the dinosaurs from jurassic park. The spiders are the big long necked dinosaurs just sort of hanging out in the corner being big and creepy and not really bothering anyone, the ants are like the little green dinosaurs from the second movie, they are everywhere and they bite but you can step on them and they go away. The tyrannosaurus would be the scorpions. i've yet to see a live one but i know they are out there i found a big pincer the other day. They seem pretty rare but i really don't want to get stung by one. But the true antagonists of jurassic park were the velociraptors. And i can tell you that the flies here are at the point of figuring out how to open the doors. They launch coordinated attacks from multiple angles .... "Clever girl"... and they get inside the house in large numbers when i try my best to keep the door closed. Ruthless, heartless, vicious creatures is all they are.

Sorry just had to get that out of my system. I find a lot of the bugs here really interesting and i really don't mind the big ones as i can play with them or swat them away, but the flies bother me while i'm trying to work or just walk around so in addition to stalking the living quarters with two cans of airborne insect INSTANT KILL™, i just had to get it out here.

Oh by the way i crashed an ATV into a barbed wire fence. So yeah. I was taught how to drive a manual car by a Danish guy in the outback. Actually it's the same subaru outback that my Uncle Art had for forever except with the driver seat on the other side. Then i learned how not to drive an ATV . . . from the same Danish guy in the outback. To my credit i figured out how to operate it fine. i was just in too high a gear for how rough the road was and how steep the banks on either side were and i'm not so good at turning it quickly. I tried to correct myself but alas, too late. The funny thing was that when i first got on the thing i thought to myself how much it would suck if i crashed into one of the miles and miles of barbed wire fencing that line all the roads. Truth be told it wasn't so bad. My arm is a bit cut up  and i was wearing my helmet of course so my face is ok. Also i have some cuts and bruises on my legs but i'll be fine.

Scars = street cred.

I spent the other morning traveling around the northern bit of the property cleaning out cow troughs. Hours of smelly backbreaking work, pick-axing the layers of algae off the sides of a sloshy scummy manure ridden cesspool with a shovel and broom. yes a broom. I actually had fun. Truth be told a large part of why i wanted to come out here is to be doing something more physically satisfying than clicking away on a computer for 8+ hours a day.

You can sit there and click all day long and somewhere off in the ether there are a few more 0s and 1s as a record of all your clicking. Now i'm not suggesting that i want to do this for the rest of my life but there is something really satisfying about picking the cow-pies out from the soles of your shoes and looking at the shiny new water trough that you just scrubbed said cow-pies out of, and being able to say;

"F__K yeah. I did that today."

What else happened.....oh i fixed a weed-whacker (they call them whipper snappers here) and jury-rigged the wire part so that i could whack all of the weeds plaguing the edges of all of Delmore Downs. (just the homestead part not the other million acres) and i jumped into a scummy cloudy dead bug infested pool. (it was really hot today)

Yesterday i cleaned the car shop and the generator shed. I swear im going to have the best resume after working at this place. Not only is there the art curation and preservation, there is shop managing, banking, data mining (Don keeps really good track of what the aboriginals buy at the store... big surprise it's ALL sugar) cattle rustling, cooking, dish washing, gardening, equipment repair, hotel room cleaning in the guest house, but after what went down in the generator shed yesterday i could easily get a job working for BP in the gulf. On the floor was a half inch thick carpet of dried diesel and petrol with binder of outback mud to give it mass. Tom and i used about a gallon of handy andy detergent, chemical detergent spray and 2 liters of mineral turpentine. The floor still looks bad gross but after two hours of scrubbing and scraping the globby brown gunk with the rainbow sheen film we managed to get most of it up. Then we had to deal with the years of mostly occupied cobwebs covering every square inch of well, everything. Cobwebs are somewhat like electrons or a single hair, in that you just sort of assume that they have no inherent mass. WRONG. After only seconds of sweeping our brooms were like black cotton candy. Also i thought that the daddy longlegs were big at home. its not so much the surface area in which the spiders differ its all in the bone structure. 0.25 oz of pure muscle.
I made friends with a bat that was living in the generator shed. as i would work towards it's corner it would fly around me a few times then head off to the next corner and when i got there the process would repeat.

i snapped some strings on my banjo and realized that the banjo that i bought was built for guitar strings and all i have are replacement banjo strings. which for the layman, guitar strings have little round stoppers on the end and banjo strings are thinner and have loops on the end. but i managed to use a little nail to hold the strings on and now the banjo works even better than it did before! funny how when you put banjo strings on a banjo rather than guitar strings it works better. i walked off down the road for a bit serenading buster with a song about a mummified dingo i found in a tree (which i actually found) and i just happened to see two live dingos off down the road. Buster was off like a rocket but he soon lost the trail. We had better luck with a Varanus Giganteus, the Perentie. Or as we like to call them in the States, "Big Frickin' Lizard" Against which my dearest Lucy would stand no chance. But man are they fast. I always thought of most big lizards as slow moving juggernauts like a crocodile or something but it FAR outpaced buster who is a cattle dog by trade. He did manage to corner it up a short tree at one point and i had a good shot at it's tail. I managed to just touch it before it jumped clear ten feet out of the tree and into the bush never to be seen again. But it was cool.
Oh crap its dark out now and i don't have a flash light on me. Well between the pictures that i uploaded and this book i just wrote there should be enough for my ravenous and avid readers to digest for now.(so humble i know)

i have to go make dinner anyway. or attempt to... the food situation is not much better. some might argue worse now that there is no SPAM or canned hotdogs left for protein. there might be some beans and rice. . .

Stars? i don't know if this came out or not there is too much glare on my screen right now but i set the exposure for 15 seconds. that might not have been enough even though the stars are so many and so bright. I'll try taking another pic once it isn't cloudy anymore.

That guy with the sweet hat and two week beard would seem a lot cooler if he didn't smell like sweat, cow-pies, grass clippings and chlorine. what a hippy.

i found some sweet feathers from some of the many birds from around here. i think the spotted brown one is from a hawk that Don hit with his suburban. (the feathers were in the grill of his car) and the other one i think comes from these dove/pigeon things with this long crest on their head. 

examples of views from the plane from Brisbane to Alice Springs

This is an extraordinarily clean picture of the ute (this is what they call pickup trucks in Australia "UTe-ility truck" i guess) and a picture of one of the road from Alice springs to Delmore downs.

Pictures of the sunset over the tennis court that i partially cleaned today and of the staff quarters house.

 Woof.

OK it works. i hope that the internet here will hold out and have a strong enough connection for me to upload more than 50 kilobytes of data!

Where to start? Well, i finally made it to the station for a start. Another worker here, Jesper, picked me up and three hours of beautiful scenery and dirt roads later i pulled up at the station. The only real way to describe the how remote i am right now is to say that the drive was like one of those five hour movies that you keep thinking you've reached the end but there is still another hour left. i kept thinking, ok we're pretty far out by now we must be close. and then we reached the front gate of his property and i thought oh here we are.

BUT NO.

from the edge of his property there is still another 52 kilometers to the station. and thats just going the short width of the property. on the drive i asked Jesper "so where is the edge of the property?" he pointed at a tiny faint purple mountain range on the horizon.

"its just on the other side of those." he said.

the people im working with are really cool, there are three Danish guys Jesper, Tom and i can't pronounce the other guys name . . . something with an m. and an american girl from wisconsin named megan.

And i can't forget my best friend in the entire world.

Buster the cattle dog.

from the instant i got out of the truck he was all over me. he is so spoiled, even right now he is shoving himself up against my leg looking for some attention. but he is an awesome dog, today i went for a walk up the dried up creek that is next to the staff quarters and into the bush a bit and he walked the whole way with me and chased grasshoppers. i want a dog just like buster someday. also he eats the leftover spam from my sandwiches. yeah the food situation is complicated. but more on that later. buster is a good dog.

I had a first day of work like no other i'll ever have im sure. i turned on a gas generator. watered plants. gessoed a canvas. sold canned corned beef and fanta to aboriginals and then drove 2 hours across the bush with a maniac in a truck to get some guys out of another truck with an engine fire. and that was all before 1:30.
the rest of the day consisted of me opening and closing gates for my boss to drive through, saying hello and good by to a dingo that Don promptly shot in the face, checking these big bore tanks and some dams for water levels, then watching Don shoot a cow and cut open its throat for an aboriginal kids coming of age ceremony.

just another day in the outback.

Did i mention that my boss is an initiated member of an aboriginal tribe? i bet you can't say that about your boss. apparently there was a group of them that lived next to his grandfather and through droughts he helped keep the children alive by feeding them goats milk. His family has been a very important part of the goings on around here. he helps them out with things and they keep an eye out for him and shop at his store. of course its also the only store around for a hundred kilometers.

All the aboriginals i've met here are pretty nice although they don't know much english and they sort of speak under their breath anyway so its kind of hard to understand them. They all seem to be addicted to various forms of sugar and they will come into the shop and buy candy, soda, and 1 kilo packets of raw sugar. Today mostly consisted of working the shop negotiating how much they could buy at once. They don't have much concept of the saving of and use of money and in their culture if they're brother or somebody asks for money they are obligated to accept so the station store also functions effectively as a bank for them where they can run up a tab or save money that comes in for them from the government and they can pay for things out of that. but they are VERY apt to come in and spend 400 dollars on just food soda and tobacco for their friends and it seems like they would just walk out with everything in the store if you didn't tell them that they cant spend more than is in their account. According to Don they would never steal anything but they will just run up a tab and owe huge amounts of money if not reigned in.

Also two weeks before i got here the station got the same amount of rain that they get in 6 months in the space of 4 days. i can still see damage to lots of the "roads" and in the creeks which are all already dry. but after the rains there were massive floods and Don was away in Sydney selling paintings, so they had trouble restocking the food and supplies in the store. although it's two weeks later i guess we are on some other sort of schedule out here because now that the aboriginals bought all the corned beef today we are basically down to a few cans of corn, beans, some sardines and bread and butter.

good times.

i made a sardine sandwich and was surprised to find that they dont taste that bad. just like more fishy tuna. i think megan found some frozen bacon so we might have that for dinner. luckily i stocked up on some oatmeal and instant noodles just before i got picked up in alice springs so ill be good for breakfast for the next week. hopefully don will order the next shipment of food sometime soon.....i hope....

i promise to post some pictures up as soon as i can. the internet connection is really bad so i have to post this a paragraph or two at a time and i can't imagine what a picture would take. the country here is amazing. the dirt is bright red. the grass is bright green and the sky is a deep blue. although the sun is really intense i think it will cool of pretty soon. the land is pretty flat but every so often there will be a random craggy mountain made of these weird  rounded red rocks. the trees are pretty short and are all filled with these loud white and red parrots and with hawks. there are several bats that fly around the INSIDE of the station store much like that episode of the office. i promised megan that i wouldn't trap her in a bag with one. also i found a mummified bat in an outside bathroom of the station that i was cleaning out today. when things die out here if they are not carted away piece by piece by the giant ants that cover the ground, they just dry out right where they are. we keep finding freeze dried mice under furniture and various other places. haha oh and last night i accidentally left the door to my room open and my light on. i wont be making that mistake again. i spent two grueling hours battling untold horrors trying to get at the flourescent light on my ceiling. my problem was that inorder to get them away from the light and out of the room i had to turn the light off. but then i would have no way of knowing whether they had left or to kill the big ones. and oh let me tell you. THERE WERE BIG ONES. i never though i would grow up to see a moth that would acctually crack the windshield of a car unfortunate enough to hit one but i have no doubt that these would do a number on even a suburban. i found a cockroach that could probably take off my toe if it wanted to grasshoppers could have given even the Mothras a run for their money. now i have to go out and find a broom to sweep out the carnage before the ants take over and claim all the bodies.

ill write more tomorrow i hope the stars just came out and the view is amazing even with the moon being full.

TEST POST FROM DELMORE DOWNS.

i made it to alice springs this morning and my ride was completely absent.

And now for something completely different.

I spent the other day walking around the South Bank and West End areas of Brisbane looking at stores and restaurants i can't really afford and walking through the really cool Queensland Art Museum. The buildings in Brisbane are all super modern and the QAG was no exception. It was nice to get to walk around inside such a cool building with tons of diverse and quality art. I particularly liked the paintings of Richard Godfrey Rivers.

I spent the night getting a more than a bit tipsy with some Kiwis (New Zealanders call themselves this) some Brits, Italians and an Irish guy. I actually heard the Irish guy say "Australia made me turn to alcoholism" which speaks to how big a part of the culture drinking is here.

Up at 5:00 AM to head over to the airport where i saw the first americans i've seen all week. (excluding my neighbor who i already knew) It seems like most people headed for Alice Springs are just going straight on to Uluru (Ayer's Rock) or hiking.

As far as the view from the airplane was concerned it was kind of like . . .

Beauty overkill...
Critical Hit
Finish Him.

Indescribable. I kept expecting a slow transition from the lush green forested mountains and grasslands that make up eastern Queensland to the red martian landscape of the outback. but neither was it quite a stark jump. so for the first hour of the plane flight it was all green. then suddenly there were all these bright red lines (roads i think) crisscrossing the terrain. after a few minutes the land was a crazy swirly amoebic pattern of red blue yellow and brown. with weird little ponds dotted here and there. the pattern changed from time to time to form lava-lamp hills and crazy lightning shaped flood-plains. and the kaleidoscope didn't end until we were over what i think was the Simpson desert. at this point it was a sea of wave like florescent red sand dunes with little dark green stipples of bushes. I can't believe that anyone could bring themselves to watch the in flight movie with THAT out the window. i took some pics which i will post here when i have better internet.

and so that brings me to what has been the most hair haising part of the day (for me anyway) my discovery that i really am in one of the most remote cities on the planet and i had no ride from the airport, no phone or internet and no place to stay.

after 2 hours and much walking around and asking everyone who looked like they were looking for someone, if they were looking for me, i used the ONE internet terminal in the entire airport to get Mr. Holt's phone number off his website (thank god it was there) and i took a shuttle to the YHA. (a chain of hostels in australia. not sure what it stands for.) i got the unlimited internet here (which is an investment to be sure as internet is FOUR dollars an hour most places here.) and i promptly skyped him.

Turns out he had been looking for my phone number to call me and let me know that something came up and he needed to pick me up tomorrow anyway.

So i have taken this opportunity to walk around Alice Springs a bit and see what it has to offer. I bought myself a Kangaroo leather hat. I was going to hold out and buy myself a nice Akubra hat, but alas, im not that cool. Actually it's more like i have a long skinny face and i don't look that good in hats with high crowns and wide brims. Also i have to hike around for the next 6 months and i wouldn't want to ruin it. So instead i bought a Barmah kangaroo leather hat. These are nice because you can just squish them in your bag and it will retain it's shape. Also it has a lower brim and i think i look better in it.

I also payed a visit to an aboriginal art gallery and learned a bit about the art im going to be working around. I was wondering why all the paintings seem to consist of dot patterns and the lady at the gallery said that the designs were originally part of dotted body painting designs that they would paint on themselves for ceremonies. They transferred the designs to the canvas when western art collectors started wanting to buy and collect their art.

She also told me a bit about some of the symbology that they use in the pieces. For instance a "U" shape represents someone sitting and the little rainbow shapes around the edges sometimes mean a sandy hill. To someone who doesn't know the symbology, the art can just look like random dots and lines, but every painting is both a map and a story to those who know how to read them.

The cohabitation between the aboriginals and the australians is not good at best. In the city anyway. The aboriginals just sit around the middle of town some painting and trying to hustle tourists, some drinking and being belligerent. This is probably spurred on by the attitude of ignorance and misunderstanding that many of the australians seem to have towards them. from what i have heard the aboriginals who live in town are those that have been ostracized from their clans for alcoholism and drug use and that many or most live more traditionally in clans in the bush. but i actually saw the A.S.P.D. swing by real quick and pick up a guy who didn't really seem to be doing anything, not 30 feet away from me as i at dinner at an outdoor restaurant. of course i have also heard that the city can be very dangerous at night and that you run a risk of being mugged even if you are in a group. i will probably stick close by tonight as i've got to get up early to be picked up and off to the station tomorrow morning.

wow i just wrote a book.

In the rest of the world you feed bread to ducks; In Australia . . .

those are bits of apple by the way.

    Brisbane so far has been extraordinary. It had been dreary and raining up until i got here and yesterday and today have been beautiful. The air temperature here is very nice but the sun is super intense. i've already got a bit of a sunburn. after the last post i took a walk down the river side for probably like a mile or two then went and checked in at what is probably the best hostel in the city. I say the best because its down a suburban street and the neighbors don't want a huge party hostel so it attracts more chilled out people. plus from the front porch there is an awesome view of the suburbs on the hill/mountains just outside of town. If you want to go and hang out at the pub its only two blocks away but it is really nice to have cool people to hang out with who wont also steal your stuff. 

 All the houses around town have all their doors and windows just wide open. There aren't really any bugs which is weird considering how tropical the weather and the plants seem. There are flowers and fruiting trees everywhere populated by really weird birds and by tons and tons of little lizards. Lucy would be right at home here. This city (and perhaps more of australia) seems to have struck a good balance between nature and civilization. All the buildings and even many of the houses in surrounding suburbs have very modern designs and yet all of the yards and parks seem to be exploding with life. Huge tropical flowers and all kinds of birds everywhere. There is so much more diversity to the life even in just the downtown area than the sparrows crows and squirrels that you find at home. 

If anyone needed proof that this really is just a pale blue dot, i have it for you. Last night i hung out with my next door neighbor from home. She has been traveling around australia for the past few months and was just passing through Brisbane for the night on her way to Sydney. It was nice to catch up for a bit even if it was brief. 

Everyone here is friendly and personable, i think the warm open tropical atmosphere really gets to you after a while. Besides my neighbor, i haven't met any americans, most people at this hostel (if they arent from elsewhere in australia) seem to be either New Zealanders or British. There are also a lot of Germans and a few Irish guys. Today i learned that there was a huge National Forest and botanical park a few kilometers from town and i was able to talk a german friend of mine into walking there with me. The original plan was to walk there and see the botanical gardens and then hike up to the top of Mount Coot-Tha which is connected to it but by the time we got done with the huge and beautiful gardens we were so hot and tired that we just took the bus back. 

This spider was attacking from the sky.

I am starting a list of interesting/cool/generally noteworthy things that i find here. I promise that i will add more than just weird types of animals and plants. Although that is a large part of it. anyway in no particular order

Cool things in Australia:

1. Half submerged trees (i think they grew that way)

2. Walking on the left side of the sidewalk (because they drive on the left i guess they walk on the left as well)

3.Birds that sound like monkeys (i havent seen the birds yet but i've heard them and i don't think that there are any monkies here.)

4. Not only do a lot of the houses leave there doors and windows open but i've seen several stores that only seem to have three walls or are at least very open to the outside.

5. the crosswalk button at traffic lights makes a really satisfying click sound when you push it. 

6. they still have pay phones here

7. there do seem to be cicadas here but there must be a rule that says "only one cicada per tree and only one cicada can make noise at a time." because i haven't heard more than one at a time.

8. Mint sauce? (i saw rows of this at the grocery store and a british guy here said it's a british thing. still im kind of iffy. he said it goes good on beef)

9. im not sure if this is a general australian thing but the swimming pool at this hostel has salt water in it.

10. kiwis are really good here. the ones i got from the grocery store yesterday were so green they were almost blue. M-O-O-N that spells delicious.

Greetings from the WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!

Just as i suspected. I am chronologically disoriented in more ways than anyone could have ever suspected. I have no idea what day or time it is but i do feel great!

BUT.

The plane ride was great. Good food, mediocre inflight movie (pirates 3) no one was sitting to my left so i got two pillows and a seat to lean over in. Brisbane is much like a smaller, Cleaner, more modern and cleaner version of miami. minus the beach, and yes i said cleaner twice. Pictures to come later after i check in to my hostel. Right now it feels like it's 4:30 but its actually 9 o'clock in the morning. also i have been up for like 8 or 9 hours anyway. but..... oops the internet is cutting in and out. ok well i will post more later as i take pictures and check in to my hostel.

On the eve of the missing day.

Welcome all! This is the effective FIRST POST on my blog before leaving for Australia. So for those of you from holland, uzbekistan or oklahoma, or if you happen to be a piece of robo blog-trolling software; a bit of backstory.

I have lived all of my life in what is essentially a forested area, and i have not so secretly always wanted to go live in the desert for a while. (i know what's up obi-wan.) Well now i have my chance. I am going to work on a cattle ranch in the middle of the Australian outback for the next few months. I can't speak too much as to what i will find there besides poisonous animals and cattle, but therein lies the adventure. Hopefully i won't meet any poisonous cattle. Or the dreaded Eagle-roo.

                                                         *Eagle-roo courtesy of Andrea B and Belle C.


Not only will there be cattle, there will be art. Delmore Downs Station, about 270 km north of Alice Springs, NT is very near the aboriginal area known as Utopia. Don Holt the owner of the ranch has amassed an extensive collection of art from the locals. (http://www.delmoregallery.com.au/) This is of particular interest to me as I am an artist by trade myself (brittirick.com) and an appreciator of anything creative.  Again, more on this as i learn it.

Here is where the craziness begins.
Today (its 12:06 AM) is officially and literally the longest day of my life. Once i board the plane at dulles, i will fly for several hours one hour back in time. then after a layover of a few more hours i will continue my journey 6 more hours back in time. At this point i will hit the international dateline (with Keith Morrison. BAM i will skip an entire day and go from (dawn? midnight?) on the 5th of march to early morning on the 7th. From here i will continue going back in time 2 more hours. somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 flight hours with possibly 6 hours of layover time. And if you're not in a cold sweat by now, hold down your toupee. . .

I won't even be there yet.

Yep, i've planned my trip so that i will have a few days in Brisbane of figure-out-what-the-heck-day-it-is-and-sleep-off-my-jet-lag time. After this i will board another plane for one more trip back in time. A half hour. as in 0.5 That's right i will be in the fuzzy time-netherworld know as the Australian Central Standard Time Zone. Dotted around the planet here and there are a chosen few time-zones that protect the rest of the world from the unspeakable horror of not having the sun be at it's highest point in the sky at noon. This is the true nature of my work.

So armed with only a banjo and what fits into my backpack* (which turns out to be a lot), i will set off for the opposite hemisphere of the planet. I will be using this blog as one of my primary forms of communication with the rest of the world so stay tuned for more!

Also I would like to take this opportunity to thank my awesome cousin Marina for helping set all this up. (she worked at delmore downs for a few months at the end of last year)

                                                 * 6 months worth of stuff

                                     
several pairs of clothes
sleeping bag
tent
tent footprint
sleeping pad
sandals
socks
tilley hat
knit hat
1 Eagle-roo action-figure (not to scale)
head lamp
contact lenses and a butt-load of contact solution
my laptop and charger
1 copy of franny and zooey
1 copy of the stand
1 copy of robinson crusoe
1 copy of the inheritors
a carry on backpack
banjo (name to be determined)
some printed out music to learn
sketchbook
travel watercolor set with brush
pencil pouch with pens and stuff
a camping towel thing
various knick-knacks including but not limited to:
cellphone charger, camera picture downloader,
banjo strings, an ipod, toothbrush . . . etc

that's right. it ALL fits in the backpack with the exception of the banjo itself. and im reasonably sure that it's less than 50lbs. (i hope)