600 Million Rabbits

Whew. Today's been a long, long day.

I woke up a little earlier than I wanted too today, and I felt miserably tired. I snagged the Monster I bought at Coles the other day, but it did very little for me as I sat through several hours of orientation jargon in the morning. Something here or there was semi useful, but it was basically Freshman Week One stuff all over again. Fairly certain that's no use to me. The lunch they served--I had vegetable lasagna and a roll the size of my face--was pretty good, but not really worth losing sleep over by going to orientation.

After lunch, all the Americans and I met Paul over at his office, where we individually met with the enrolment officer to fix our schedules. I think I need to fix a lab, but this semester looks like Microbiology, Marine Plant Biology, and Pollutants and the Human Environment. Large load by the looks of it, but I expect to manage. I hope and expect to have a few Americans in each class which will be nice, but we'll have to wait two weeks to see.

DYLAN #4 - Australians pronounce names much, much differently than Americans do sometimes. "Natasha" is pronounced "Nuhtahsha," almost American Southern-like. Natasha helped us with our class sign ups today.

We finished our day with a nice BBQ put on by Paul. Yup, I tried kangaroo. It was pretty good: tasted kinda like beef tenderloin. I had a couple grilled sandwiches that contained grilled zucchini, onions, eggplant, and vegetable patties (there were a few different ones). I kinda just piled things on, but all in all it was all quite good. Tomorrow I expect to go back to Coles with some of the Americans and I'll look for some vegetarian food to make some more extravagant food (like meat pies with the meat replaced with whatever I can find). I'm pretty excited. Paul's wife Kate and their 3 kids--two boys, 7 & 4, and a girl, 18 months--were there. Apparently Tim, the 7-year-old, always picks a buddy for the semester. Yeah, guess who his buddy for this semester? ME. So stoked. "You're my buddy for the semester" he told me as I was leaving after everyone else had already gone. Real cutie. I love kids. I can't wait to have my own in a few years. I mean 7 or 8 or more.

I didn't bring my camera is dinner or to orientation. Sometimes I feel really awkward carrying around my large SLR, like a creeper or something. I really wish I had brought it to dinner, because I'd like to be able to post loads of pictures. My goal is to take a whole boat load tomorrow.

Everyone is going into Perth tonight, but I'm too tired to tag along. They're going to see the opening of an art festival or something, which tragically has absolutely no appeal to me. If we were going in to poke around the city and explore a bit, I'd drag my tired butt along. It's kinda disappointing really, but oh well. I just showered and hoped that would help, but I guess I might as well stay home and try to finally fully get on Australia time (I'm feeling more tired as it is right now). I'm actually a little surprised they all didn't want to stay on campus and get drunk, but whatever. It'll be better for them to explore, right?

If I really wanted to waste water, I could spend 30 minutes stretching and go for a run since it's nice and cool right now. But by the time I got out it'd be dark. These damn ravens fly back at this hour and in the early morning in large groups making a loud ruckus. Paul was telling me people will go around killing them because they get too many in number as they live off the people on campus. Sounds fun, really. At dinner we were discussing the dramatic rabbit problem Australia's had.

In 1859, 24 British rabbits were introduced to an estate in Victoria (southwest Australia), and by 1928 the population grew to not 1 million, not 100 million, but 600 million in an area of 1 million square miles. These little buggers were a severe problem because they are nasty little grazers, which hurt the preexisting grazers like kangaroos (which are way cooler than dumb little rabbits). Some of the control measures they used included shooting, "ripping," blasting, fumigating, poisoning, trapping, erecting fences across the country (3 fences going north to south were built), and introducing a genus specific virus. The virus (called Myxoma) was fairly effective after it was introduced in 1950, reducing the population to 100 million by 1953. However, it was too virulent and therefore couldn't spread quickly enough before it killed the rabbits, and other rabbits were able to build a resistance. They're still a nuisance today.

That's a lot of damn rabbits!

We essentially have the weekend off--we could have signed up for a discovering the campus "Amazing Race" sorta thing, but a lot of the Americans wanted to go shopping in the morning for food and shampoo anyway. Which is totally cool with me, because I'd rather discover the campus by ourselves with a campus map and just have fun with it. I should be sure to wear sunscreen tomorrow, particularly on my face. My nose is nice and red and hurts a bit. I've already gotten a nice tan line forming on my arms. On Sunday we hope to go to the beach if we can manage (back to where I went on Thursday). I really want to go swimming!

It looks like I only have 3 roommates, which is awesome because some of the flats have 8 or so people which seems absolutely ridiculous. Two of them are Chinese: Linda (Yibing) is from north east China, near Korea, and Christine is from Hong Kong. Catalina the third flatmate, and she's from Ghana. I don't know her as well, but the Chinese gals are super friendly. I walked back into the flat 3 times today to see Yibing in the kitchen cooking, which she found quite hilarious. There seems to be another room, so there could be another few people living here, since Linda and Christine live together. Don't know!

[Post Script: I've decided to try to rank each day, on a scale of 0-10:
10 - Absolute best! (very rare indeed!)
9 - Fantastic!
8 - Great
7 - Good
6 - Yeah, okay I suppose
5 - Okay
4 - ...meh...
3 - Bad
2 - Really bad
1 - Awful.
0 - Absolute worst! Kittens died!]
Today: 6