Desert Mandala: Life In Central Australia

gadget May 23rd, 2010

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Sorry folks….I know we haven’t updated this page for awhile but hopefully at least one of us will from now on. Life has been hectic since the thesis was handed in, there’s been holidays, work, more holidays and of course I’m still waiting to find out where I will sit in Parks and Wildlife after our organizational review. So sit back, come and visit once in a while and we’ll try and get back on track.

I’ll put up a post soon on our most recent travels, that is along the Oodnadatta Track in April. After starting at the junction of the Borefield Road (from Roxby Downs) we met up with family and friends, who had never really been bush and took them on an adventure through the upper region of South Australia and then into the Territory….be back soon

• Bemusing , Games we play , Uncategorized , fun
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gadget July 19th, 2009

It’s something I’ve always wanted since I started gaming … a space to call my own.

The culmination of a host of Ebay purchases, an old dot matrix printer desk and some old steel along with a bit of my own effort has produced my very own gaming chair. Completely portable, able to be broken down to shift around, it has its own power board (surge protected), speakers in the chair or if I want to really rock my world, external speakers with small subwoofers, good enough to hear the bad guys creeping up on me and a 22″ LCD screen.

The reclined seating position enables me to have separate hand controllers: one is the mouse (providing look around capability and selection aids); the other, a usb programmable controller which, once setup, enables the user to sit back without having to reach for the keyboard at any time during a game.

So what have I got? Stress relief and fun all rolled into one.

I’m sure I could even sell something like this …

Already I’ve had concerned females saying: “… don’t show this to my partner…”. They say we’ll never get any work done if he gets one of those! One of those very same women however did suggest something very worthy. She asked: “Where is the stubby holder?” Good point. I said via Facebook…it’s on the drawing board…now.

I’m sure I’ll come up with other mods but for now…. it’s a far better place that I find myself in.

Lock n load…ooo ahh!

• Bemusing , Games we play , fun , geekdom
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gadget December 21st, 2008

Well the year is nearly over. Frustratingly, my job is still in limbo with no clear direction as to where I’ll be and what I will be doing 6 months from now. I have enjoyed the challenge of managing one of the Territory’s iconic parks and have gained much experience in dealing not only with my staff but the broader corporate and tourism sectors. Personally it has been a good year with our trip to Bali in April, where again, much fun was had and prompted me to purchase another toy for the garage.

• Bali , Bemusing , Kings Canyon , corporate culture , fun
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Amanda February 20th, 2008

Last night, the frog was back in the bog.

I went to get the camera again to take a photo for the blog, but it jumped down the s-bend and ….

…oh well.

No piccie of frog in the bog for the blog. 

• domesticity , fun
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Amanda February 17th, 2008

Well, hello there.

Most of you know that as well as being an anthropologist, for the past two decades (18 years) I’ve worked in the fitness industry. I’ve seen lots of fads come and go, and I think after all this time I have a good idea of what works. So here’s my list of “the Big Five” tips for losing weight and getting fit:

• Don’t diet!! For most people, a ‘diet’ is something you go on a for a fixed amount of time. You go off the diet and return to your usual lifestyle and the weight starts to go back on. Instead of a diet, I’m advocating a lifestyle change. That’s right: change forever your eating habits and those of your family. Don’t buy soft drinks, juice, chips, cakes unless they’re for special occasions and have only one alcoholic drink per day. Don’t starve, but replace these high fat, high sugar things with low GI carbs, lean meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. I can guarantee  you’ll notice the difference in a few weeks. And throw away your scales. I don’t own any. I went 7 years without being weighed and judged myself from my clothes and how I felt.

• Eat breakfast every day. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Ask thin people if they eat breakfast. Now ask someone ‘larger’. I’m not sure of the underlying psychology, but there’s a number of studies that have shown that overweight people don’t eat breakfast. Eat breakfast and do it AT HOME – not at Macca’s!

• Don’t eat starchy, carbohydrate-laden food after lunch. Carbohydrates are not your enemy. They are not inherently bad for you; however, they are ENERGY FOOD and if that energy isn’t being used, then guess what your body does with it? Stores it away for later usage as fat. My rule is: no bread, pasta, potatoes, rice etc with my evening meal. Just vegetables and a slightly larger serve of meat. It takes your body a lot more calories to digest protein than it does carbs – and unless you plan on running night marathons or being a nocturnal animal, you don’t need the quick, easy energy you get from  starchy carbs post-midday.

• Do weight training exercises at least twice per week. That’s right girls, weights. Why? Because it creates lean body mass. Lean body mass (muscle) burns calories just to exist, including when you’re asleep. Thus, you lose fat without noticing! Weight training also helps ward off osteoporosis and the body’s aging processes, such as sagging skin and muscle loss. There is also evidence to suggest that weight training exercises are associated with increased mental function in the elderly. In other words, you should be doing BODY PUMP (PUMP) or something like it for an hour, 2-3 times per week for the rest of your life. I said lifestyle, didn’t I?

• Go for a 30 min brisk walk -or preferably a jog- four times per week and one yoga/stretch class per week. Cardiovascular fitness helps to burn off fat, but also decreases stress, assists with stimulating the immune system and can assist with treating depression. You need to do at least 25 min of cardio exercise (where you are just starting to perspire and where you can still talk or whistle) before you exhaust the supply of sugar energy in your blood. Once you’ve done this, you start to use fat tissue as an energy source. Simple. HOWEVER: I mean walk very fast so you sweat and keep it up for 30 min. Not the pace you use in a shopping centre or on the golf course. I mean WALK. If you can jog or run, then do so.  On stretching or yoga. Flexibility -stretching- is that ‘other’ kind of fitness that often gets ignored. Stretching helps prevent injuries and keeps you limber as you get older. When you’re 80, you’ll be able to bend down and get the pegs off the ground you’ve dropped whilst putting clothes on the line. That’s got to be something!

Now if I don’t know you – and you just happened to have stumbled across this post, make sure you check with your doctor before undertaking any exercise if you’re: over 45, are a smoker, have high blood pressure or any heart condition or any medical condition that may impede you in any way.

So the big message is: it’s got to be your LIFE. Fitness and health can’t be a diet you go on to lose weight for your wedding day. That is just setting yourself up to fail. It’s got to be the way you live life.

…Ok. I’m getting off the soapbox now.

• fun , gym
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Amanda February 6th, 2008

I am one of only eight people in Australia who HASN’T seen Titanic.

• coffee & raisin toast , fun
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Amanda February 6th, 2008

Ok. So it’s old news to some of you, but not to me.

They moved the Big Merino (in Goulburn, NSW) down the road about a kilometre from where it used to be.  It’s right next to MacDonalds, just on the top of the bypass south of the town. This happened in April last year, and was funded by a consortium of local businesses. It was done because with the by-pass of Goulburn by the Hume (in about 1992), visitation to the big woolly boy (actually, as he has no genitals, I’m not so sure it’s male) plummetted.

So they moved him (it). I was shocked when I drove through Goulburn in January and thought I’d investigate.

Anyway, here’s a link to the Wikipedia page about the move if you’re keen to read more:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Merino

So now you know why they moved the Big Merino. I am sure you were all losing sleep over it.

Perhaps we need a BIG something in Alice Springs to boost our apparently dismal tourism figures? (Thanks no doubt to the fallout from the NT Emergency Intervention). Perhaps we could have:

• the Big Caterpillar
• Or the Big Camel.
• Or the Big Greencan
• Or the Big Shopping Trolley

(my apologies if you don’t ‘get’ the last two – locals will know what I’m talking about).

• Central Australia , fun
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Amanda February 5th, 2008

This is total self-indulgence, but it’s kind of therapeutic. So here goes:

  Continue Reading »

• fun
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Amanda December 20th, 2007

I read recently that if you have more than 20% of your workspace taken up by personal items, then you are percieved as not being professional. I also read recently that women who don’t apply more layers of make up than there are geological strata in the MacDonnell Ranges are also seen as less than professional. For these pieces of wisdom, I say thank you feminism, thank you Hollywood and thank you soulless corporate culture!

I have to admit, I fail on both counts. Anthropologists who engage in remote area fieldwork don’t need to impress with inch-thick foundation and other pore-clogging gunk. Just some sunscreen and a bit of lip balm will do. As for my office…

To upset the corporate clones, I collect snowdomes.

That’s right … those symbols of everything that was tacky and wrong about tourism in the 1960s and 70s … snowdomes. I currently have about 65 of these little guys in my office, stacked neatly on my bookcase. Whilst most of them I’ve collected myself, friends and family have thought of my eccentric habit and have brought them back from all over the world (like Hawai’i  and Bosporus). They’re surprisingly hard to come by in Australia nowdays, which is why I occasionally have to resort to something like the tiny porcelain thimble (from Port Pirie in South Australia), a tiny gold stature of a merino ram (from Goulburn in NSW) or a miniature tea pot (from Woomera in South Australia).

From time to time someone – I think it’s our cleaner, the walking American stereotype- plays with them and upsets my arrangement. But mostly, people tend not to notice them until they’re mid-sentence in a conversation with me and say: “Oh, wow! I’ve never noticed those before … how wonderful!”

And you know what? I’ve never had anyone tell me it’s not professional.

• corporate culture , fun
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Amanda December 16th, 2007

For me, one small slice of heaven is finding other bloggers out there who share my frustration with shameful grammar, apostrophe abuse, and fools who couldn’t park a finger up their nose. I also harbour a penchant for Engrish (yes, that’s right Engrish not English) signs. Imagine then my delight in discovering a treasure trove of likeminded people who equally take offence at apostrophe abuse, quotation mark overuse and twats who can’t park or string together a few paltry words in an intelligible sentence. I know, I’m teasing you, so without further ado, here are some gorgeous blogs and websites for you to check out:

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/ 

If you EVER feel inclined to enclose a word, a phrase or an entire sentence in quotation marks, be sure – be very sure  – you actually understand what quotation marks are used for. HINT: it isn’t for drawing attention to your product or message unless you want to look like a complete dick.

 ... hmmm, I wonder just what kind of “service” you get at this station?

http://www.apostropheabuse.com/

http://www.apostrophism.com/

These two blogs address the peeve dearest to me: the misuse and/or ignorance of humble apostrophes.

When I learned how to use an apostrophe back in 3^rd grade, it made perfect sense to me. You have a noun (like dog) and to show that the dog owns something, you used an apostrophe: the dog’s ball. If there are two dogs each of whom owned a bone and you wanted to say that the bones belonged to the dogs, you put the apostrophe AFTER the plural noun: the dogs’ bones. Again, this tells you that the dogs OWN the bones. Not that there’s two dogs.

It’s not rocket science. Ahhh… but for some people, apparently it is!

A common apostrophe abuse seems to be where morons … I mean … people apply a rule that is something like: use an apostrophe on every noun ending in a vowel. Thus: tomatoe’s (more than one tomato) or PIZZA’S. For godsake!! The pizza’s WHAT? What does the pizza own? Tell, me because I really want to know. Another abuse is found with common abbreviations: CD’s; DVD’s; TV’s.  This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Putting an apostrophe in CD’s still indicates ownership: the CD’s what? Its cover, maybe? The correct plural abbreviation is: CDs, DVDs, TVs, and the same with dates: 1970s, 1990s, 2000s.

The other way in which apostrophes are used is for contractions –when you joint two words together or leave out part of a word. That’s not hard to grasp either. That’s = that is. Don’t = do not. You’re = you are. Wasn’t = was not.Got the picture?

The only slightly tricky one is ‘it’s’. It’s = it is. Its (no apostrophe) is a possessive pronoun: its ball, its chair, its den, its furry headpiece. Easy.  If you can drive a car, use email, read a freakin’ recipe book, you can damn well stop being so lazy and use an apostrophe correctly.

Similar to apostrophe abuse is a phenomenon that seems to be confined to the USA: the use of lower-case ‘l’ in signs. Check out this blog for a graphic explanation:

http://lowercasel.blogspot.com/

Do lazy, careless drivers who couldn’t park a finger in their ear, let alone their cars in a supermarket car park annoy the crap out of you? Then this is the blog for you:

http://badparking.wordpress.com/

(We could actually start a lazy shopping trolley/random shopping trolley blog in Alice Springs, but that’s a rant for another day!).

Finally two more blogs, one from the world of lame church signs and my favourite broken English website. You know those really, really bad signs that churches put out on near the footpath to shame/motivate/guilt you into going to church … like ‘Jesus: Thermonuclear Protection’? Well, in America (as you might expect) these are at plague proportions (hah! I made a clever joke):

http://crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com/

And of course, what would this post be without a link to my all time favourite webpage about really bad English signs written by non-English-speaking people:

http://engrish.com/

• fun
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