Tim Tams (and etc.)

Need to provide an update on our favorite cookies here - Tim Tams - pretty simple, chocolate wafer with chocolate around it, and some more chocolate in the center - if you bite the ends off you can suck hot chocolate through them and then they just melt apart. On the nights we don't get gelato (current favorite for Tess and John is white chocolate with melted Nutella on top) Tim Tams do the trick. The current ranking...
1. Double coat
2. Carmel
3. Dark mint
4. Original
5. Honeycomb

Tess is still surfing at school on Fridays and loving it, the girls had 'Harmony day' last week and sang their harmony song. Today they wore gold (actually, their uniforms are gold anyway) and donated 'gold' for Sydney children's hospital. Tomorrow I'm going to make them donate to the helicopter service... One week of school until Easter break, which is two weeks. We will be going to Hamilton Island at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef for a week during that time, which will be great. Tess is finishing up a project where she has to make a 'show bag' (a samples bag sold at fairs and etc.) - so she is cooking up candies from the Weasley's Wizard Wheezes shop (from Harry Potter, of course) for her project. Kate is supposed to be designing a machine to make her bed - thus far, no machine, and the bed is of course, still not made.

We went to Watson's bay (about 10 minutes from here at the entrance to Sydney harbor) on Sunday and had fish and chips at Doyle's, which has been there since the 1880s, then walked around the point to the lighthouse and cannon emplacements. Kate was quite taken with the cannons, etc. but most of all by the nude beach, where a few older men were 'hanging out'. At the end of our walk (when we paused for ice cream) she pronounced with a slight sigh that it was 'kinda boring, but at least I got to see some random old naked men'

Further bulletins as events warrant.... Interesting fact for the day, in Australia it's widely believed that a BILBY (like a possum) brings the eggs on Easter, not a rabbit (despite the fact that the country is over-run by rabbits)

Noosa

We had a weekend off - yay! We went to Noosa, where Karen and I got engaged 15 years ago - yay! It POURED rain all weekend - boo! But we still had fun... The national park there was great for a run, even in the rain, and we went to Steve Irwin's Australian Zoo where the girls got to hold a Tasmanian Devil, Koala, and spent some time in the wombat enclosure (as a guest, not an exhibit) learning about and petting the animals while they ate. It was a very cool zoo - lots of contact with the animals and demonstrations (including the crocodile's 'death roll' which was impressive - gets the animal it's attacking off its feet so it can take it to the bottom and drown it). There is also an exhibit of Australian snakes including the four deadliest (the one with the most deadly venom, the 'Fierce snake' is below - though it has a small mouth so it doesn't usually kill humans - only maim them). We also went to the 'world famous' Eumundi markets (basically a large flea market in the pouring rain, but with better food options - Karen shopped and the girls and I ate).

Canyon Day!

One of our training days takes place in the Blue Mountains in one of the 'wet canyons' called Grand Canyon - canyoning is a huge sport over here and many of the canyons aren't even marked on maps or well-charted. This, of course, leads to some injuries in these areas and requires us to go get them. (Though most of the orthopedic injuries in the Blue Mountains are actually due to elderly people stepping off of tour buses at the Three Sisters overlook and looking at the view and not their footing and they break their ankles or hip).

We wore wetsuits and rappelled into the bottom of the canyon, making our way to two trapped 'patients' that we treated and then had to haul out on litters and get to a spot where we could winch them to the helicopter (though we didn't actually winch them up for the training day). Used some interesting techniques - in a lot of areas the river was deep enough to have to swim, but with our dry bags in our backpacks and the packs lashed together we could use them as pontoons to float the stretchers along on the water. Lots of carrying and pushing and hauling of course too...and managing airways and medications and etc. in that environment was a challenge as well.  Fortunately, we ended the scenario before having to carry the victims up and out of the canyon as the hike out was a pretty good leg workout as it was...

Speaking of workouts - today at the health club a replay of the scintillating final of the Queensland 2011 open lawn bowling championships was on - hard to believe there's something more boring than cricket to watch on TV, but yes, and FoxSports found it...

wagga wagga flooding

I just got back from 3 days surprise deployment to Wagga Wagga which is about 80 minutes flight from Sydney by helo after the area experienced severe flooding. (Wagga Wagga means 'many crows' in Aboriginal - didn't see a lot though - anytime something's repeated in Aboriginal it means plural or 'lots of' so Wagga is crows and Wagga Wagga is, well, you get the picture).  It's an agricultural area and very flat - similar to the area around Fargo basically - so the water really spreads out. It was interesting to see the emergency management process and how they conducted operations compared to the United States. We helped evacuate a hospital in Urana that had become isolated by flooding and made several transfers from isolated properties and community hospitals to Wagga Wagga base hospital. Not really any critical care, and no winching, but a good experience. The hospital in Urana is essentially a nursing home - I felt badly for the people we were moving, they were having to scatter to many hospitals in the area and I'm sure many of them will be the worse for it - some were quite confused, and a little scared by the helicopter, but they all did very well, and the kindness of the staff at the home and in the eyes of the residents was touching. Flying back with the last group it was nearly midnight, and there are so few homes that it was difficult to tell where the scattered lights of the homes stopped and the stars began, aside from the full moon shining on the floodwaters. Truly beautiful! Happy to be home and get into clean socks though many had much worse problems to deal with - fortunately, the dikes held and most towns escaped massive damage...

Bridge climb and etc.

We had a nice visit from Karen's dad Dick last week, the weather was great the first day he was over and we were able to walk down to Bronte and he tried surfing for the first time, as did Karen! Both of them did really well, Karen was up like a pro, and Dick was able to catch some waves into the beach on the board, which is doing awesome! Friday despite some pretty heavy rain we climbed the Harbor Bridge, which was really cool - we could not bring our cameras with us, so no pictures aside from the ones we bought. It's an impressive system they have to get us into suits, harnesses, radio belts, etc. The bridge climb went really fast, and the views were amazing. I was boggled that the bridge was built to carry 4 rail lines, and 4 lanes of traffic (today 6 lanes of traffic, about 110,000 cars/day and two rail lines, a walkway and a bike path) back when there were only 350 registered vehicles in the city (and only 50 on the north side of the bridge!) - that's planning ahead! The structure of the bridge is just impressive - and during construction, only one person died from a fall despite the fact they had no safety or retention equipment. The person on the main girder headed up a rivet, threw it out to the person perched on the 6 inch wide spanning beams for them to catch in a bucket and then they would hammer it in, sometimes having to hang upside down to hammer the underside of the rivet flat. 15 people died from other construction-related injuries, which for its time was pretty good (100s died during construction of the Brooklyn Bridge).

new pictures!

Harbor Bridge Climb!

On Friday we climbed the Harbor Bridge. It was very fun, and it was almost like you were going to the moon or something, all the equipment you had to take! It was raining on us at the top, but that felt good after climbing a lot of steps! We learned a lot about this 440 foot tall and 3770 foot long bridge. For example, there are 6 million rivets on the bridge and an estimated 10,000 rivets that fell into the harbor! The bridge itself weighs 116,404,074 pounds! Awesome!