Virtually Home

January We started the new year on the south coast of Western Australia, vacationing in the region that has Albany and Denmark. We were almost two years into Australia's border closure for covid-19. We hadn't seen our family in a long time. I had a verbal job offer and plans to go for a visit to campus when Australia planned to open its border on February 5. It was summer, and we were trying to make the most of our time Down Under. The south coast is really beautiful, and though the Southern Ocean is cold and violent (and so makes for bad and dangerous swimming), it offers really stunning views and some good fishing. On New Year's Eve, we spent the day hiking in the Stirling Ranges. We considered driving to town to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve but ultimately we didn't. We had a steak dinner at our hotel's restaurant and went to bed early so we could do plenty of outdoor adventuring the next day. It's the first time I haven't stayed up until mi...

I fell a little short of my reading goal this year - I had hoped to read 45 books. I am happy with what I did, though. In 2022, I spent a lot of time thinking about songs and studying the Cherokee language. A lot of other stuff happened - we moved continents, we became homeowners, I started a new job, did a bunch of research, and spent a lot of time on teaching. What I read were mostly novels, but there are a few collections of short fiction, non-fiction works, and children's books. Here's what I read in 2022: 1. Mate Choice: The Evolution of Sexual Decision Making from Microbes to Humans by Gil Rosenthal 2. Memory's Legion by James S.A. Corey 3. Animal Behavior (11th Edition) by Dustin R. Rubenstein and John Alcock 4. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman 5. The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman 6. The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country by Neil Gaiman 7. Naturalist on the Bibbulmun: A Walking Companion by Leigh W. Simmons 8. A Spindle Spli...

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas Honeybee by Craig Silvey Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden Outlander by Diana Gabaldon Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal Space Opera by Katherynne M. Valente The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx The Lost Man by Jane Harper Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by She Who Shall Not Be Named The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz Middlegame by Seanan McGuire Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by She Who Shall Not Be Named The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson Dragonfl...

The day before yesterday, I was stuck in traffic next to a limousine following a hearse, presumably on their way to a funeral. When I pulled up next to the hearse, I looked at the coffin in the back. It was draped with a West Coast Eagles* flag! As a Sooner fan who grew up hearing the words to our fight song ("...I'm Sooner born and Sooner bred, and when I die I'll be Sooner dead!"), I thought this was both hilarious and relatable. RIP anonymous West Coast fan. A football note for foreign readers: The West Coast Eagles are our local, professional Australian Football League (AFL) team, and they're the team I've chosen to follow. Australian rules football, much more commonly called "footy*", is a full contact sport with 18 players on each team. The game is played on an oval-shaped field (like cricket! Which you probably also did not know), and looks kinda almost like rugby if you squint. The ball is mainly advanced by drop-kicking, and the field is gin...

Mask rules have come back to Perth and apparently the Delta variant of the covid-19 virus has appeared. We've entered a 3-day semi-lockdown, where masks are required indoors and some kinds of businesses are closed. People are hoping restrictions will lift after that, but I think we've been extremely lucky to contain all of our mini-outbreaks. Western Australians are feeling pretty smug about it. But I've seen a lot of maskholes around and I don't think the "success" has been due to complete compliance. It's just a matter of time until covid is loose in Western Australia. Yesterday, the mask restrictions went into place at noon. We had already bought tickets to see The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It at 2:40 in the Palace Raine Square Cinema downtown. The theatre required masks and already had social distancing built into their seating assignments, so we opted to go. I saw several people in the bus and downtown not wearing a mask. It's plausible they...

I quite enjoy noting little linguistic differences among English dialects, and being in Australia has provided me with a lot of opportunities.  Australians use a different preposition with "different" than we do: things are "different to" other things, rather than "different from" other things. It's, well, different.

 We've been in Australia 2.5 years now, and to my surprise, it feels as much like home as Minnesota ever did. I never expected to get used to cockatoos sweeping overhead -- last week, I almost collided headfirst with an endangered Carnaby's cockatoo that I startled while biking to work -- or the pink-and-gray galahs that graze in the grass like weird little cows, or driving on the left side of the road, or pints of beer that cost $14. Things have just slowly become normal.  Every once in a while, though, a thing happens and suddenly everything is weird again. The rainy season has begun. Recently, I was walking through a car park (see? just look at my vocabulary changing) and it began to rain. You know that feeling, when it begins to rain, and there is a particular smell that happens, as fungi wake up and various plants become more pungent? Well, everything began to smell aggressively of eucalyptus. My whole frame of reference shifted. I suddenly was acutely aware of how very, ...