Amanda August 24th, 2008
It’s been extremely cold here in Alice Springs for the past two weeks. When I say cold, I mean we’ve had days where the maximum temperature has been 14 degrees celsius. This is cold. (Alright. If you’re reading this and you live in Iceland, Halifax or even Chicago, I take your point. 14 C (57F) isn’t cold for you … but it is for us!).
So we haven’t done much except watch the Olympics. And we’re not going to talk about the Olympics here, are we? We’re not going to mention that we are a tad annoyed that the Pommies (the English) have more gold medals than we do (until the Commonwealth Games in India in 2010, that is, when we’ll woop their lily-white backsides), nor that we really sucked at cycling and rowing this time, when usually we’re really good. Let’s face it …
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Amanda August 16th, 2008
Do you have items in your house that simply vanish? You know, things that seem to mysteriously disappear from one day to the next, or alternatively, items so rarely encountered in your house, that they probably should be classified as critically endangered species or even as extinct?
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Amanda August 4th, 2008
This weekend (the last NT long weekend until Christmas) we did some off-track walking in the south-east Waterhouse Ranges. The Waterhouse Ranges are only 50km from Alice Springs, located on Owen Springs Reserve. We climbed a pinnacle and ate camel stew made from one of Watarrka’s former feral residents.
Owen Springs holds a special place in our hearts. It was Gadget’s first official posting as a Senior Park Ranger and is also the place where our relationship began. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know we camp and bushwalk on Owen Springs fairly regularly. It’s a large Reserve (158,000ha), so there’s lots of it to explore.
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gadget July 31st, 2008
What if God told you to kill someone? And your whole world, your epistemology, was founded on revelations from God, speaking softly in your head…
For the Morman Church, this is reality. It is part of their history, whether they like it or not.
Explaining -or more rightly- unravelling how this came to be is the task that Jon Krakauer sets himself in Under the Banner of Heaven.
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Amanda July 30th, 2008
Suplejack Station: a large pastoral property surrounded by Aboriginal Land Trusts on the north western extreme of the Tanami Desert. Last week, I was there. What was I doing there? Uranium. To be exact, uranium exploration. Which of course, requires sacred site clearances. And, since it’s Warlpiri country, this means that you need a male and a female anthropologist. So I went up with a male colleague and a second troop carrier.
We were out bush for a week. What follows is a snapshot of fieldwork in the world of applied anthropology.
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gadget July 27th, 2008
After a big bush trip, I’m back and I’ll be updating the blog with my latest adventure this week. To everyone who’s commented on the Podcast blog, thank you. I will get back to you and follow up your suggestions. Right now though, it’s great to be sleeping in my own bed again.
BTW. Kylie and Phil had a baby girl (Abbey) last Monday. Check out their blog on the blogroll.
Amanda
gadget July 19th, 2008
I love podcasts. You might have gleaned this from some of my previous posts. Podcasts inform, excite, inspire and entertain me as I walk to work, run my usual 6km, or drive the next 600km. They help me to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. In short, podcasts are like having you own personal coach or lecturer, and most of the time they’re free.
There seems to be two types of podcasts out there in the internet cloud:
- one-off, single podcasts (could be lectures from a convention or workshop)
- podshows, which are a series
So which podcasts do I listen to and why?
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Amanda July 16th, 2008
The ‘market’ wants you to own an IPod.
But what if you don’t like the bland styling, the size and you detest that stupid wheel? In other words, you will never own an IPod. So what happens when you purchase an audio product that assumes everyone in the world owns an IPod? I spend a lot of time driving and like to listen to podcasts whilst I’m going along. One podcast I listened to led me to an interesting book, which I discovered was available as an audiobook. I purchased the audiobook and downloaded it and the file manager software that went with it. Easy? No.
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Amanda July 15th, 2008
Today I received a call at work from the manager of Newhaven Station. She rang me about our blog post (7 July), following up on the comments I’d written about noisy campers. Turns out the person who read this post (wow!! thanks for reading!) was concerned about the very full campground and the noise I described, and thus decided to call up Newhaven and investigate.
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gadget July 12th, 2008
A very busy couple of weeks for us, with trips to Watarrka and Newhaven, plus the usual world of work, home and everything. I am still writing up the Sandy Blight Junction post (although I need to snaffle the photos from Gadget’s camera so I can finish this). Now I’ve got to do a Newhaven post as well -thankfully all the photos are on my hard drive already so it’s just a matter of me getting to them.
I guess the exciting news (or maybe not so exciting) is that we have hidden our first geocache. I am planning to hide a few more - Gary and I have been formulating a list of places to hide them in parks around the centre in the interests of encouraging cachers to visit parks other than Uluru and Watarrka. I mean, Trephina Gorge is begging for a cache hide, as are several locations in the West Macs that aren’t even that far from town. I also have a few ideas about where to put a couple of extra town caches.
Anyway, we have a weekend at home planned, so I count on finishing at least two of those blog posts mentioned above.
