The World's Longest Blog Post

Saturday brought with it an odd experience for me. It begins with me, waking up and looking outside. I'm thrilled that it's a gloriously sunny day, and immediately decide not to waste it but instead go on a jog. No sooner do I set foot outdoors then I realize it is not, in fact, a beautiful day, but rather an extremely cold and impossibly windy one-- and are were raindrops flying into my face despite there being no rainclouds! Go back inside and poof! beautiful weather again. Go outside, what feels like sleet.

My neighbors must have thought I was crazy after about the fourth time around, but I finally sucked it up and did that run despite being nearly swept away by the wind. I have to say it was well worth it-- as I started off I just caught a glimpse of a kangaroo joey climbing back into its mother's pouch before she scrambled off the path!

But look! Pretty rainbows

Sunday I went on a little field trip with Tiantian, Melanie, and a visiting professor-- Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve! On the way there, Melanie warned Parviz and me about drop bears, which are a bit like predatory koalas. They hide out in overhanging trees and wait for prey to walk underneath, then plop! they land on your head and attack. Interestingly, they tend to attack tourists rather than native Australians, partly because foreigners don't have Vegemite (which is repellent to the creatures) in their system and partly because they're more gullible. For the record, these animals 100% exist; take a look at these articles featured on two very credible websites:

http://australianmuseum.net.au/drop-bear

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/04/drop-bears-target-tourists,-study-says/

However, it was a pretty chilly day (Tiantian was scraping ice off her car when I met up with her) so the drop bears were hiding with the rest of the animals. Although we didn't see any koalas in trees, we got what Tiantian refers to as "the guaranteed koalas", the ones kept in an enclosed space pending rehabilitation. They were cuddling up to each other for warmth, but after a little bit a couple of them moved around, revealing an 8-month-old joey! So much cuteness, almost as much as the kangaroos.

Such beautiful symmetry, and you can just see a cute little nose poking out!

This is the enclosure. Apparently they had one koala they removed which somehow kept making it back in and no one could figure it out. Finally, one day a tourist spotted her climbing up a nearby sapling until it bent beneath her weight, then making a flying leap (as much as koalas are able) onto the next tree. Her motive? The only non-neutered male was still inside.

I'm about to go into koala overload, fair warning. I just have so many cute photos that are nearly, but not quite, identical!

Nope, not comfy anymore... streeeeeech

Little Joey decides to say hello....

...then snuggles up again

Mamma keeps her eye on us...

...then everyone goes back to sleep. Life as a koala is hard, y'all.

We walked through a couple of the habitats to see what there was to see.

They had the most fantastic boulders.

I'm not kidding-- these things were huge!!

Here's a swamp wallaby that crossed our path.

Flock of cockatoos in the distance. On the way back we passed about 20 pecking around the median-- so weird to see them wild here!

Here is where we finally saw, from a distance, the elusive platypus.

If the video quality doesn't suck, you can see one swimming along, then ducking under the water surface again.

This one you have to watch multiple times-- each time you can make him out better! Again, assume the video quality is ok on this blog.

Before heading out to lunch, we made a stop by the telescope facilities at Tibindilla. Funded by NASA, these include both the largest dedicated radio telescope and the "largest steerable antenna dish" in the southern hemisphere!

Driving in., we were asked to turn off all transmitting and receiving devices... felt like an airplane.

This is Deep Space Station 43, 70 meters in diameter. It is used in conjunction with similar apparatus in Goldstone, CA, and Madrid to allow constant two-way communications with all sorts of spacecraft (including the currently famous Juno). Since there are only three such telescopes in the world, they are only useful for deep space, although they do help with some Earth-orbiting missions.

Most of the time with this network is used for communications, but when we got there the resident astronomer was actually using the telescope for his own research-- he'd secured a nice 7-hour slot for himself! Apparently that doesn't happen often though.

There was also a small exhibit. I won't include much, but I thought that the vacuum-packed astronaut crackers were funny.

And that's quite enough from me.

P.S. I leave Saturday for Cairns-- off to see the Great Barrier Reef!