ljplicease | Climbing trees in Canberra

Today I climbed a tree in order to rescue Tristan's frisbee. It was a lot of fun, and felt like quite an accomplishment. It reminded me of two people I know who like to climb trees: Amber and Brad. It's fun to act young.

It feels as though Sydney Uni is perpetually on the verge of total revolution. There are calls to rally scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk, and posters with anti-bush / anti-howard / anti-whatever slogans calling for workers of the world to unite. One of my parents' friends from college is now a Ph.D of Marxists philosophy at the uni. We had lunch with him the other day.

I love that; It's rather refreshing after my experience in the American system which seemed much more antiseptic in retrospect. American students give me the impression of wanting to get through their four years so that they can get a job working at IBM (with their licenses to print money). I had become quite attached to that lifestyle myself before I moved out here.

I am sure that my observations have more to do with the U of A and Sydney Uni in particular than they do with the differences between American and Australian students; though I am certain that it has at least a little to do with the differences between Americans and Australians.

I spent the long Easter weekend with my dad and my two half siblings, Tristan and Lara. Tristan is 12 and is apparently a good athlete, much to his mother's surprise. Lara is 9 and she likes to play poker with Dad. I suppose I am a little bit jealous, because my father seems to be cognizant of the fact that Tristan doesn't like mashed potatoes, but after 29 years, he is still unaware that I don't like fish. I don't even really dislike fish anymore, but that doesn't change anything.

more pictures here

On Thursday I went into ANU, where my dad works as a professor in one chemistry department and as the head of the other. ANU, again, has a completely different atmosphere. Part of this, I am sure, has to do with the fact that Canberra is a small country town, despite being our nation's capitol. Dad introduced me to the guy who does IT in one of the chemistry departments. Mostly they had all of these really old computers, which will never be replaced because the interface cards only work in archaic and no longer supported operating systems, like MS-DOS. In one trash heap, he pulled out an old Osborne, and I said, "the last time I saw one of those it was in a museum!" Tyler has a better memory than me and tells me that he can actually remember them being used.

I've decided that Poker would be a good life skill to learn. Several people have mentioned to me that they enjoy "poker night". The past couple of nights Dad has been playing with Tristan and Lara (they play for Monopoly houses). I would join in, but my dad plays the game without knowing the rules. Instead I went to Wikipedia to lookup hands and probability for poker. It annoys me when people ask some question that is just begging to be plugged almost directly into Google or Wikipedia, yet lack the will power to actually do that.