Nothing Super interesting has been happening here for the last couple of weeks. We had a week of 40+ degrees with a couple of days cresting 45 degrees. Even a sun/heat lover like me was wilting. It was just too hot to do anything. It didn’t even cool down enough to sleep at night. This week is much nicer being in the low to mid 30’s.

I started work in Jane Elith’s lab on Thursday and Friday last week and will continue until I depart from home.  It is a nice lab almost exclusive populated with women (which feels strange) but I feel more comfortable at ARI. I will be learning to apply Jane’s boosted regression tree method and possibly also multivariate adaptive regression splines to the flora data that I have been working with. She has had some good feedback for improving the data set by doing some basic cleaning and collapsing.

This week also ushered in the year of the ox. Happy Chinese New Year! Peter and I went down to the river front downtown to taken in the Crown Chinese Hawkers Bazaar, which was a little street fair put on by the only casino in the state. We enjoyed fresh coconut juice and then had the coconut cracked open so we could eat the cream inside. This is the first time I had done that and I was surprised at how fatty and oily the juice was, but still tasty.

Fresh Coconut

Lanterns

You may notice in the picture of the laterns that all the leaves are crispy and brown looking, that is how hot it has been. Walking down the street it looks a bit like fall. All of the leaves cooked off of the trees and are piled along the curb. It was so hot the possums were falling out of the trees and animals were burning their feet trying to walk on the pavement.

Strangely enough as the time to go home gets closer I find myself getting more homesick. I really miss friends and family and pets. However, I am already getting homesick for Melbourne! I love this city and I love this country and I am counting the days until I can return as a migrant instead of a tourist. The funny thing is that I always wanted to live in Europe because of the history and the age. Autralia, is young and raw and has none of that feeling but I love it regardless.

Better go hang another lode of laundry now. You can dry 3 or 4 loads a day here even when it’s just moderately warm because of the dry wind. It’s awesome but I am starting to see some sun fade on my more frequently hung items

love you all!

p.s. The bite healed up! so it wasn’t the white-tail spider I was afraid it was. (go read about it if you’re curious, creeps me out too much)