Frontier Photo Competition

 Thank-you to everyone that gave me opinions on which photos to enter. You all agreed on two of the photos, but not the third so I chose my favourite of them. In the end, these are the three that I entered.

Frontier Photography Competition

Fronteir, the volunteer coordinators that I organised my trip to Africa through, are having a photography competition. The rules are that I can enter up to 3 photos, but they have to have been taken while I was working on the project. Only the photos I took in Namibia while I was volunteering at Naankuse are eligable (which means I can't enter some of the photos that I consider to be the most technically impressive I took while I was away), so I've picked the top 11 that I would consider entering and would appreciate your input on which 3 I should enter. Let me know in the comments.

 Violet

 My Monochromatic Friend

 Aardvark

 Cheetah Cheating Gravity

 Samira

 Neuras Vineyard

 Oryx 1

Oryx 2

 Sossusvlei 1

 Sossusvlei 2

Eagle

The Amazing Race

Tonight I've been reliving some of my time in Namibia while watching The Amazing Race. Tonight's episode was actually filmed while I was at Naankuse, but the other volunteers and myself where sent off to town for the day so we weren't in the way during filming. Its strange to be sitting at home and seeing some of the people and animals I got to know during my time in Africa on tv. Its actually really nice to be reminded that Naankuse is a real place and that I didn't just imagine my time there.

Amazing Race Flag

The kids practising the song that they would have to teach the teams.

Teddy comes to stay

So, I've been keeping myself busy with working at my new job, working as a painter/decorator for my family, and writing job applications.

My new job is boring, but kind of fun in a way. I like the fact that all you have to do is sort and count things - its strangely relaxing because it forces you to focus on what you are doing, but isn't hard or stressful. Early morning starts aren't so fun, but early afternoon finishes are nice. One of the worst aspects is finding that I want to buy most things that I am counting. In related news, I now own a rain gauge. I'm now officially an old lady who drinks cups of tea while watching Miss Marple and then goes outside to empty the rain gauge. I love it.

I have done some work painting at my brother's house and at my parents'. I'm not convinced I've been doing a very good job, but I've been trying. I think I had some weird African disease last week that made me really tired and grumpy, but when I'm feeling human I don't mind the painting work. I don't want to do it long term, but there is more work to be done at both places and I'll keep doing it unless they decide my work is too shoddy and get a professional in. The biggest problem with painting at Mum and Dad's is that my cat, Fidget, thinks that she can get involved. She had quite a lot of fun playing in the drop sheets.

Writing job applications is never fun. Thankfully, I have had another distraction to keep me from spending too much time writing selection criteria -Teddy has come to stay with me for a couple of weeks. Teddy has once before stayed with me when I was living in my sharehouse, but he's a bit shy and didn't really settle in well there. This time he has a much smaller house to adjust to and only me sharing it with him. He has settled in really well. I haven't been home much during the day, but he has been very social and affectionate in the mornings and evenings when I'm home. He has a habit of waking up at 4 or 5am and loudly demanding fish, though. I don't give him fish until I get up, but he still insists on waking me up early every morning to demand it anyway. At least that is what I think he is going on about when he meows that loudly.

Anyway, back to selection criteria. They are due in tomorrow afternoon and then I can have the weekend job application free.

So, I did. I got a boring fill-in-time-get-a-little-bit-of-money casual stocktacking job. I'm still very much working on getting a proper job, though, which will probably be a lot more difficult.

I'm still filling in my time quite well with devil volunteering, painting my brother's bathroom, and stalking a platypus. With the other things filling in my time as well, I'm not sure I have time for a proper fulltime job.

Of devils, field trips, and conferences

Since getting back from Africa, I have been keeping myself pretty busy. I have travelled around visiting family and friends (although I haven't made it down to see my grandparents yet and I'm feeling very guilty about that). Only a few days after I got home, I ended up back at work so I could spend some time at the FRE to try and spot my Ronan and catch up with my old workmates. I have always loved working at the FRE, with the exception of the ridiculous density of leeches in that area, so I was happy to be back there for the day. In order to spend that day at the FRE I had to first go into the office and fill in some paperwork to be listed as a volunteer. Apparently, that paperwork then went into the system quite quickly because only a couple of days later I got a phonecall from Bill the Biologist inviting me to come on a devil trapping trip at Granville Harbour on the West Coast. The trapping trip was good timing for me because it filled in the couple of weeks that I had no plans for so I agreed to go and help out.

I spent 10 days on the west coast in the pouring rain covered in devil poo with Bill the Biologist and Phil the Fieldy. Despite the weather, and again despite the leeches, I actually had a great trip. We got lots of devils, were kept very busy, and didn't find any with DFTD in the area yet. It was made even more interesting than usual because of Bill the Biologist being badly bitten (check that alliteration) by a devil while doing the tooth measurement. Bill's finger was quite badly injured and he had to go and get medical attention and was unable to measure and handle the devils afterwards so Phil the Fieldy and Emma the Unemployed had the opportunity to be acting biologists and do quite a bit of devil cuddling for the last couple of days on the trip.

I got back fromt the field trip and had a few days to get ready for today's presentation at the Australian Wildlife Rehabilitation Conference in Hobart. I was first speaker this morning and had to deliver my 30min talk to a room full of approx 150people. Thankfully, I quite like talking about devils so I didn't get to nervous before hand. Afterwards quite a few people (19 to be exact - I counted) come up to me at break times to tell me that they really enjoyed my presentation and to ask more questions. I'm very happy with that result. It was quite good being the first speaker as I was able to listen to all the other presentations stress free afterwards and there were a couple of very interesting topics.

All in all, its been good to be kept busy to delay the inevitable boredom that comes with being unemployed. I do feel like I need a holiday, though. Luckily for me my dad has also decided that its time for a holiday and is flying us all up to Queensland for a bit of a break the day after tomorrow.

South Africa

 My last stop in Africa was back in South Africa. One of my favourite times on my tourist half of my trip was our day spent in Kruger National Park. I would have preferred to have spent one less day in Tanzania or somewhere and had a second day to explore Kruger. Our day in Kruger included some amazing wildlife encounters, but it was also characterised by a lot of near misses. We had a near miss with both cheetahs and lions that were seen by other people only moments before we arrived in the same location and saw nothing, but the grass they had disappeared into.
Probably the coolest sighting of the day was 2 rhino, but the whole day and every animal I saw was amazing.