Ready, set, glow (still waiting for that last part)

I realise I’ve been the world’s worst blogger so far this trip, but I blame Eric.  He knocked me up a few weeks before we left Melbourne, and I haven’t felt too great since the halcyonic first two weeks on the road.

I knew something was amiss when I kept almost fainting those first weeks in Tasmania.  Not expecting to fall pregnant so soon, I didn’t think too much about it and was just vaguely annoyed, particularly when Eric beat me up a hill on our bicycles.  Then one day it dawned on me what this could mean, so of course I did what any sane person would have done and thought about it obsessively for several days whilst refusing to do anything about it.

The morning we were meant to register for the Overland Track, I thought I’d better actually investigate.  After my morning wee in a nice clearing in the woods, I watched as those two pink lines clearly formed on the little stick resting on a tree stump.  I walked over to the van and said to Eric, “I think you’d better come over here.”

Thank God for mobile internet as I was able to Google “holy shit I’m pregnant” and get lots of useful information.  Google said “moderate” exercise was ok, so I figured hiking eight days with a massive pack would be right on target.  Except for the rain and my whinging knees, the first few days were fine.  It was after that that the nausea kicked in and I decided never to hike more than a few hours in my life again, and certainly not whilst carrying everything needed for survival.

The first few nights on the trail, I woke up about 3 am and panicked until daylight.  This wasn’t supposed to happen so soon!  I only got to go surfing and cycling twice.  Then with some encouragement and enthusiasm from Eric, I arrived at the conclusion that we don’t generally get to order up a baby at our convenience.  Birth control only controls the NOT having a baby part.  I’d actually been off the pill for 15 months, so as educated adults we knew this was a possibility.  With my bad plumbing, we were lucky lighting struck at all, even if it was a few months earlier than we would have ideally liked.

I’m sorry to say that the rest of our time in Tasmania will always be remembered through a haze of nausea, which was pretty much unrelenting day and night.  We spent several days on Bruny Island, then driving down to the southernmost point you can reach in Australia by road, and then back up the east coast to the ferry. We saw some gorgeous places, and I tried to do a good bushwalk every couple of days to maintain some level of fitness, but I still seemed to find myself beached in the van each afternoon staring out the window counting the minutes until it was acceptable to go to bed (8 pm, if you’re wondering).

Anyway, boo hoo, poor me.  It’s not like I’m the first one to experience this, and thank Christ I’m not at work since I’d tell all my clients to fuck off and get fired.  I’ve (mostly) gotten over the urge to accost women with multiple children and demand they tell me how the hell they could purposely do this more than once.  I still think they’re crazy, but I feel less inclined to scream at them.

We had a lovely week and a half back in Melbourne visiting friends, but to be honest, if we visited you, you know about it, and if you aren’t in Melbourne, it would be pretty tedious and boring for me to describe our round of drinks and dinners.  At least we had some news to share.  Otherwise, it would have been a bit weird to do another round of “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye” after just doing it five weeks previous.  We probably wouldn’t have told people I was pregnant since I was only at eight weeks, but it seemed much nicer to get to tell people in person than to ring them up from Adelaide once we’re (hopefully) in the clear.  I will say that being pregnant is a great way to get out of staying out past 10 pm, not that I had a very hard time leaving to go to bed early when I didn’t have a legitimate excuse.

One of our favourite visit-ees, Kaya, on the occasion of her second birthday

Another favourite visit-ee, being spoiled by Matt and Sharon

Next we spent several days in Adelaide staying with Peter, my doctoral advisor.  I usually just refer to him as my advisor, but then people just think I have some kind of new age guru who dispenses life advice.  To be fair, Peter is pretty wise and does dispense good life advice, so maybe I should just let them think that.  It was so comforting to be around someone from “home” who has known us for almost 15 years (although it does make me feel really old to realise that I’ve known Peter for 15 years), and Peter spoiled us rotten.  Did you know that you can make soy milk???  And it’s heaps better than the stuff you can buy in the store.  When we have room for kitchen appliances again, we’re definitely getting a soy juicer.  For someone who drinks a lot of soy milk and eats a lot of tofu, I was shocked to see that soybeans are so small.  For some reason, I thought they would look like peanuts.

Hollow Mtn Walk, Grampians

Pinnacle Walk through the Grand Canyon, Grampians

The night we arrived in Adelaide was the 11^th anniversary of our first date, which was in Colorado when Peter had my life in the palm of his hand.  If someone had told me before that date that I’d be married to the cute boy I picked up in the bar, pregnant, living in a van in Australia, and having dinner with Peter, I wouldn’t have believed any of it.  Hell, I saw a psychic a year ago who told me I was going to get knocked up, and I couldn’t even believe that.

Now we’re just rambling around South Australia killing time until we can collect a cuter snapshot of our unborn in a couple of weeks.  It was pretty amazing to see it dancing around on the screen at the last ultrasound and to hear its heart beating, but it basically looks like a blob in the photo.  I feel reasonably normal in the mornings these days, so we try to see some things then before I turn into a monster around 2 pm and demand a nap.  Maybe it’s good practice for Eric in what having a child will be like.  If so, he’s going to be a hell of a dad, because he is certainly taking very good care of me.

Book report 3

In addition to not writing much over the past couple of months, I also haven’t been reading much.  Most afternoons and evenings my brain feels like it’s in a jar of formaldehyde, so I either just stare out the window (which Eric kindly points at something scenic) or watch some dorky TV shows Eric has loaded onto the Tye-pad for me (bless him).  Fortunately, my period of lucidity is getting later and later each week, so hopefully I can get back to spending hours reading things I’ll almost instantly forget.

While still in Tasmania, I read Mornings on Horseback about Teddy Roosevelt’s early life by David Mc Cullough, the same author who wrote Johnstown Flood (and The Path between the Seas, a freaking awesome book about the Panama Canal, that I read just before this trip – read it).  To me, the book was mainly an interesting snapshot of family life for the extremely wealthy just after the turn of the century.  Although he attended Harvard, Teddy had no formal education prior to that.  His family travelled the world extensively and occasionally employed tutors, but although extremely well read, Teddy’s secretary described him as barely literate due to his creative spelling and punctuation.  In the numerous excerpts from family correspondence (corrected by the author, thank goodness), everyone was overwhelmingly obsequious.  I would have expected people in those times to be more reserved in their displays of emotion, but instead you got the impression each spent all of their waking hours worshipping the others.  Teddy’s letters to his mother and sisters read more like love letters, and his letters to his father and brother are just as fawning.  The entire book was full of interesting facts about how a shy boy went from wanting to be a scientist to being one of the best remembered presidents of the US, but the only other fact I’ll mention is that Teddy’s mother and beloved first wife both died within 24 hours in the same house but of entirely unrelated causes.  No wonder he wanted to run away to the West and shoot things.

In university, I read my way through the Steinbeck shelf but somehow missed East of Eden.  After reading it, I question my literary taste at a younger age.  While this book also provided an interesting snapshot of life after the turn of the century, but for the much less wealthy (farmers in the Salinas Valley of California), the characters were a bit too black and white for me.  Everyone was either pure good or pure evil – hookers who run houses of pain, inventors with hearts of gold who never profit from their ideas, etc.  Some characters transition from good to evil or vice versa, which I think was his point, I still found it hard to picture any of them actually existing.  On an unrelated note, I thought it was interesting that Steinbeck kept trying to take a stance against racism through his depiction of the main family’s Chinese housekeeper as a wise scholar but ended up reinforcing another stereotype that may not have been as common in his time: the all-seeing Oriental mystic.  Anyway, poor Lee still gives up his dream of owning a bookshop and discussing philosophy because he so loves cooking and cleaning for this family of men who seem incapable of looking after themselves.

I just finished You’re Not Doing it Right by Michael Ian Black, one of the co-hosts of my favourite non-educational podcast, Mike and Tom Eat Snacks (MATES).  MATES applies the PER system (pick a snack, eat a snack, rate a snack) during each episode, where they nominally focus on a snack but really just practice their improv skills.  Hilarity ensues.  I downloaded Ed, a TV show from 2000-2004 just because it has both of them in it, and I love it.  Anyway, this book is Mike’s autobiographical account of his challenges with marriage and childrearing.  While I think his depression gives him a somewhat darker outlook on things than I have, I still laughed out loud a number of times despite the fact that doing so kept making me cough.

I’ve just started For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke about a man wrongly transported to Australia.  He ends up in prison in Port MacQuarie where we spent several days, and copies of it were for sale at every gift shop, so I figured it must be essential Australian reading.  I downloaded it to the Kindle, so I know I’m only 12% in, but here is my synopsis so far:  Woman confesses to her husband that their son was really sired by another man, before she was married mind you.  Husband in fit of rage threatens to ruin the wife’s reputation unless the son disappears and stops using the family name.  Husband rides off into the dark to murder the real father of his earlier supposed son.  Son, on fleeing, finds the body of his true father on the roadside, and whilst trying to save him is found by villagers who accuse him of the murder.  To keep his father from sullying his mother's reputation, son gives a false name and accepts responsibility for the crime.  To keep his mother from worrying, son writes her a letter telling her he’s sailing to India, when in reality he’s on his way to prison in Australia.  What he doesn’t know is that his father dropped dead the moment he arrived home from his murderous errand, so the son could have given his true name to the police and been freed instantly as no one from such a good family could stand convicted of murder.  Instead, he’s on a prison ship whose most sadistic officer just happens to be (gasp) the cousin his father had promised to leave all his money to after disowning his son (not sure how the cousin knew this since the father keeled over shortly after finding out).  The cousin is quite angry that the new will was never finalised and thus beats up on this “random” prisoner who is accused of murdering his uncle (who somehow he doesn’t recognise as his own cousin).  Amazingly, out at sea they come upon the boat the son lied about taking to India burning, so now his mother assumes him dead and will never look for him.  I expect the book to continue in the same vein with implausible coincidences and dramatic displays of emotion, but I guess that’s kind of the charm of a book written in 1870, just two years after the last convicts were transported.

Book report 2

Since we arrived at the hut by 2 or 3 pm each afternoon on the Overland Track, we had time to read a lot of books.  Thank goodness for the Kindle when you're trying to keep pack weight down!

I started with How to Be Black by by Baratunde Thurston.  It's a satirical instruction manual that combines comedy with some serious messages about the state of race relations in the US.  I was motivated to buy the book after I heard Baratunde on a podcast.  Although raised in a rough neighbourhood of DC without a father, who was killed in a drug-related shooting, he graduated from Harvard and is irrepressibly positive while being candid about the struggles of being black in the US.

Kosher Chinese was written by Michael Levy about his experiences as a Jewish Peace Corps volunteer in a remote Chinese village.  He also manages to entertain whilst interjecting a few more serious observations about the challenges facing a nation as large and diverse as China.  I hadn't realised that people weren't free to move between different regions of China, at least not legally, and the extent to which there are racial divisions within China, which seems contrary to socialism.  

The King's Mistresses by Elizabeth C Goldsmith tells the true story of two Italian sisters, one of whom was an early lover of Louis XIV and the other of whom became a mistress of Charles II.  Both were married and spent most of their lives fleeing their repressive husbands in a time when divorce wasn't an option.  We're talking about real rebels in 17th century Europe!

Given the amount of rain we had on the Overland Track, it was a bit eerie to finish with David Mc Cullough's history of the Johnstown Flood in 1889.  Essentially, a group of ultra-wealthy sportsmen, including Carnegie, caused the destruction of an entire valley of communities, most notably Johnstown, by building a faulty dam on their fishing lake.  Coming at a time when Americans were beginning to question why a few were becoming very wealthy while most workers were still fighting for a living wage for working long days, six days a week, the flood ignited a media frenzy.  Despite being convicted in the media, though, the wealthy men were legally acquitted of all wrongdoing.

Tassie adventure continues

We wrapped up our first stay in Hobart with the obligatory trip to the Cascade Brewery and then headed down to Bruny Island, where we stayed for four nights.  The first night we stayed in a caravan park so Eric could replace Turquey's alternator.  Our fellow campers didn't know what to think of Eric in full grease monkey mode.

Turquey was much happier with some new parts and even made a 3 km drive down a beach to a remote camping area that was so nice we had to stay a couple of nights.

From Bruny Island, we went down to Cockle Creek, the furthest south you can drive in Australia.  At that point, we were closer to Antarctica than to Cairns!  We toured Hastings Caves and did a couple of short walks in Hartz National Park before heading back to Hobart via Kingston, the headquarters of Australia's Antarctic Division.  The Division has an awesome free exhibit in the lobby, including this sledge that some poor guy spent over two weeks crossing the continent on, nearly freezing to death a number of times.

Oh, and they let you play dress up!

Now we're back in Hobart enjoying city life for a couple of days, including a stay in a hotel last night.  I didn't realise how much I missed sleeping in a bed.

We're leaving again this afternoon but can't decide which direction to head.  It's tough to believe we only have a few days in Tassie left.  We've really only been in half the state this entire month and have probably only seen about 70% of what we set out to explore.  That being said, we haven't felt rushed, and this island will probably be around a while longer!