The Great Scuba/Modeling/Spa/Cheesecake Eating Trip in Cape Schnack 2010

Tom attended a modeling conference at the coast this week (statistics and forecasting numbers type stuff, not the strike-a-pose kind, though, agreed, he does have many talents).

Our good friends, Emma and Tony built a beautiful new house in Berwick, a suburb about half way between here and the Mornington Peninsula, so we stopped over for a festive visit of cheesecake munching, card games and a peaceful rest on Saturday night. Though they put in all top-of-the-line fixtures and decked the place out perfectly only 6 months ago, they're already restless for another big project, so this gorgeous new property is now on the market...let us know if you're interested!

I like to joke that they had to build a giant, open-aesthetic mansion (and bought a manly, mammoth truck) just for their great dane puppy, Huck. He seems to have finally hit his full height and appears to just be filling out around the jowl and lip area these days. Here he is, tucked in on his own sofa, for a cool autumn sleep. Ridiculous cuteness, this one.


I tagged along for the conference to give full due diligence in exploring the many spas of Australia. The Peninsula Hot Springs was recently remodeled, and I may have finally met my match with "The Orchid" spring...at 40-42 degree Celsius (104 -108 degrees Fahrenheit). Here's a photo of it from a random stranger's blog...does he look Norwegian? Tom is always shocked how hot of a tub I can normally tolerate. Imagine how defeated I felt, merely able to but dip a toe in this nearly boiling mess! Spa fail!!! Oh, the shame of it all.

We were a bit leery of what a Royal Auto Club of Victoria resort (in Cape Schnack) might look like; it seemed odd for an insurance company, really, to run a resort, but it was gorgeous and the staff was delightful. I tried to go incognito as a true conference attendee around dinnertime and got my fill of fresh oysters, right off the boat in the bay.

Here I am in the "Prada-Gonia" (Prada style / Patagonia label) jacket that Tom got me at REI back in Portland and some cargo pants. Oh, how I miss wearing outdoorsie-wear everyday like we did in America. Women actually dress up here and I tend to look a little rough when I default to the earth toned, cotton, velcro covered wardrobe pieces I shipped over. I've gained 10 pounds since I got back from backpacking around SE Asia...good that I didn't donate those fat-pants prematurely, hmmm? No worries...I'm starting a healthy eating and exercise plan tomorrow (I am, no really, I mean it, no, really).

Some scenic photos of the property I pinched off the internet:

We had a wonderful time visiting with his colleagues from the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney. Though everyone is Melbourne has a tough time finding affordable housing, we have to be glad we aren't looking to buy in Sydney, where it is an even tougher challenge.

The trip was rounded out by a day of deep water scuba diving, where, after getting down to 30 meters, I managed to earn by Advanced Diver stripes. NOW we can consider going to Vanuatu to dive the very deeply sunk SS Coolidge wreck, though I'm hard pressed to ever want to go anywhere but the Great Barrier Reef again after our amazing time with Tom's mom there in July last year. Emma packed us two pieces of cheesecake in our Esky (Igloo cooler) "for people who pass their scuba test OR NOT...EITHER WAY" (see, that's a good friend!). Tom assumed they were both for me (and I let him), once again confirming that I married completely out of my league.

At least this dive, I didn't start hyperventilating from swimming in the cold, heavy current, flail my arms hysterically for the captain to come fish me out and then refuse to get off the boat, then, once back on shore, fall over in the surf and lay there moaning, helplessly weighted down by my gear as a crowd gathered like last time we took the course (and Tom passed with flying colors). Tick that box. Hooray. :)

celebrity thursday

Yesterday was kind of a big day, celebrity-wise for me.

We went to a lecture from Naomi Wolfe

she was on tour for the 20th anniversary of her feminist book "The Beauty Myth". We got front row center seats. We were so close that if we were to get up and walk about 30 feet, we could practically reach out and touch her. Her premise is basically that standards for female beauty are unrealistic and unattainable, but they keep women on a treadmill of buying cosmetics and going on fad diets and so on.

Earlier in the day I met two famous people from the history of forecast evaluation (how good forecasts are). Robert Winkler was visiting from overseas and we got to go to lunch

He was co-author on many papers with the most famous person in forecast evaluation, Alan Murphy (now deceased). When I was a wee young grad student, I had a grainy 4th generation xerox copy of a collection of Murphy's works and they had a big impact on my forecasting and forecast evaluation philosophy. Winkler also wrote papers with a guy named Clemen, who was one of the most famous researchers in how you combine different forecasts together, e.g. the average of 100 peoples guesses of how many jelly beans are in the jar is going to be a better guess than the best single guesser.

If I had to, say, pick one non-obvious piece of philosophy out of the air from Murphy and Winkler, it might be that one measure of "goodness" of a forecast is how well it aligns with the forecasters personal belief. A forecaster should never be in a situation where he has incentive to say the forecast should be, for example, 60% chance of flood, when in his heart of hearts he believes there's only a 10% chance. Think of it another way, a doctor should never say you have 6 months to live when he believes you really have 3... or 12.

Lastly I also finally met and had lunch with Frank Woodcock

He works for the Bureau of Meteorology. In 1976 (when I was 2 years old) he wrote a forecast evaluation paper that lead to what's called "The Woodcock Score", which, again, I read about in my early days at grad school. He was a real friendly guy and quick with a laugh. I imagine that over the years, he's seen it all.

Brr!

Melbourne temperature is getting down there. This morning it was 9 C (48 F), which apparently is the normal low for this time of year (the dashed lines above). My office itself was 16 C (60 F), which is a wee bit chilly.

Personally, I like the cold. The first year I lived in Portland, OR, I was in an old house that had a giant dirty oil furnace. We turned it on once and soot and dirt blew everywhere and it sounded like a jet engine. Instead, we would drive down to the warehouse district and round up some scrap lumber for the fireplace. It's a wonder the pipes didn't freeze.

Spa Country Getaway

Last weekend, Tom, our Kiwi-expat friend, Laura, the newish-and-yet-to-be-named-Barcelona-red-Prius and I went up to Hepburn Springs and Daylesford, about 90 minutes north of here. You may recall we visited the same area last January.

Of course, we got in on the full floaty-pool spa package and ate at the Perfect Drop again. We were excited because it was "no menus" day...you just free associate your food dreams, allergies and phobias to the proprietor, let them know how much you want to spend and they deliver a series of mind-blowing beverages and tapas, like cheesy fritters and sauce-dripping meatballs. We played Mama Mia (a pizza making card game), nestled up in giant leather chairs by the fire all afternoon. I was in charge of log stoking, which made me feel a great sense of both responsibility and purpose that friends and family are starting to question as being missing in my life.

Daylesford town center was shut down in the morning for the memorial events. Everyone was gathered around the cenotaph for speeches, military band music and so on for an hour or two. Australians take this stuff seriously- This year over 40,000 people showed up to the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance... at sunrise!

Since it was Anzac Biscuit Weekend, we were fortunate to find a room at all...Tom got the very last one (for all three of us to share) in a small town a half hour east, called Trentham. "Hotel" often means, simply, "bar, or pub", here. Sometimes it's a place of lodging. This one, was, oh happy day, both. However, they were quite strict about where you could go with your alcahol and liqour (sic).

We blew up an air mattress and settled into our new home. The room was about 15% bigger than the bed itself. Someone would have to get on the bed if you wanted to make space to open the door. A little red wine in a teacup was good to get the night started.

It was a little intimidating to venture out to the bar / restaurant area, where many of the locals had been drinking since their Anzac Day Pancake Breakfast that morning. Below in the upper left is Bazza; after he sat with us, the bartender's wife told us to look at the picture on the wall above us. Sure enough, it was Bazza on a motorbike, driving through a giant fireball. Turns out he was a daredevil stuntman (that specific event was a fundraiser for the local fire brigade).

Laura is very social and was quickly welcomed back-stage to tend bar. Part way through the night, the drinks became free because the cash register got stuck. I tried to resist the urge to pinch (that means pillage, plunder, pilfer, you get the idea) a place mat.

We all felt very welcomed by the community and bartender/owner insisted on shots all around, wherein we were introduced to something called Grayva, a Scotch Whiskey Liquor.

The next day, we reckoned we understood a little bit of how Wake In Fright's John Grant felt, Outback in the town of Yabba after his warm welcome by the locals. This is one of the original Ozploitation movies from the 70's. It captures (and stereotypes?) what goes down in rural Australian bars.

Trailer for those of you not receiving this by email, here's the video trailer:

We got the car packed up and made our way to some hiking and wilderness areas. This year, we actually saw a waterfall! The drought has pretty much dried up all the smaller waterways around Victoria. And how could we not be thrilled to see a life sized resin elephant strapped to a trailer on the way home? It was an unprecedented weekend.

We Cat Sat

This weekend, we had a cat visitor. The idea was that the cat will need rehomed sometime this year, and it would give us a chance to get to know each other. If things worked out, we would adopt him after we move to a home that allows for pets.

He is everything I like about a pet, and I'm a self-professed dog person. Here he is playing in the sink while the faucet is running. Many cats don't like water. This one thinks it's a riot.

He spent a lot of time rearranging Tom's closet. Usually in the middle of the night, he would slide the giant mirrored door open himself, scale up the shelves and fling clothes about. Then ... how to get down....hmm?

He enjoyed chasing the light from the laser pointer that Tom uses for work presentations, was interested in just about everything we were doing and he's a real cuddler. Clearly, this cat is very smart and social.

Other activities included throwing litter out of his litter box, tipping over every half-full beverage he could find (particularly dark, stainy ones), and meowing for several hours straight (1 am - 8 am).

To make important decisions, we try to both rate how we feel about them on a scale of 1 to 10. As a professional forecaster and generally objective person, Tom rarely polarizes his rating. He also seldom changes the number, not unless new information comes along.

The chances that we adopt this fun cat may improve after we both catch up on some sleep. Grrr...meow.

The stranger

On my 45 minute commute to work each way, I've taken to listening to courses on tape. I like the teaching company. I did their American History course, Great ideas in psychology and now I'm doing Existentialism and the meaning of life.

The first couple lectures about existentialism are talking about Camus' The Stranger. In it, there's the phrase "I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe". (sometimes benign is translated as gentle). I think it's a delightful phrase and it ties into my philosophy on forecasting nature. At the end of the day, you just have to know to not take life too personally. I don't think it's a cynical quote, it's quite empowering actually.

A lot of the course so far talks about how the meaning of life is life itself. I'm not sure I understand this. Just try and substitute another word... The meaning of "shoe" is "shoe" itself?

There's also a lot of talking about being in the moment and how reflection and "meta-thought" can ruin an experience. Last night I saw a number of people experience a concert while making a movie of it on their iphones, just looking through the equivalent of a viewfinder the whole time. If you weren't "there" to begin with, I'm not sure what's the benefit of having a record of it later? Tom

Recent photos of us

Tom is rooting (the American definition) through gear on our canoe trip. We both love to wear travel pants that have zip-off legs. Unfortunately, the week after being on the water for two days, he had peel-off legs. The mammoth sheets of harvested, sunburned skin laying on our coffee table right now are equally impressive as horrifying. I keep thinking there is an art project calling out there, but it's probably saying something more like, "You guys are truly the definition of gross."

Our neighbor, Laura, took this at dinner last night. I'm wearing a paisley gold-sequined kameez that we had custom made in India a few years ago with flowery lace tights and purple boots. If I were to describe my style, it would be something like "Transitional, eclectic six-year-old left to her own devices to dress herself." My bangs, or "fringe" as they call it here are at that awkward growing-out stage and pinned back.

Thinspiration

Our next-door neighbor, Laura, invited us over for dinner last night. You can read more about her story, and her daily blog here.

Laura suffered from a spinal cord injury during a swim meet when she was 12 years old. She is confined to an electric wheelchair, paralyzed in her lower body and has limited use of her arms.

Last year, she started seeing a nutritionist and eating healthy low-fat foods. She lost well over a hundred pounds in 16 months and is now at her goal weight. It's amazing how sane and rational she is about food...no cayenne/lemon cleansers or carb-free deep-fried bacon, really? Fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meats, huh? It's like all that stuff they've been talking about all this time could be true.

We had fruit salad with non-fat yogurt....

...and Laura's mom-chef, Robyn, made delicious home-made crab, ham, pineapple and capsicum (red bell pepper, it's in everything here) pizzas.

Her discipline and positive attitude are inspiring - when this girl says she's going to make a youtube.com video diary entry every day, she ACTUALLY does it ... every day! Though she's moving to Sydney in a few weeks, we're going to keep tabs as she continues to achieve great things.

the fine print

In the cafeteria/canteen at work is a microwave (featured in a past post, actually). I probably use it every other day. It's a little white LG.

To me, a microwave should really only have 3 buttons:

1. One more minute

2. Go

3. Stop/cancel

Don't need anything else. If you're cooking for less than a minute, chances are you're standing there and can just open the door when there's 37 seconds left if you need that precision. And have you ever used a power level less than 10? Or defrost? Or set it to start running 4 hours from now? Actually, I could go for a "totally power off" button- over its total lifetime, your microwave in standby (e.g. the clock) uses more energy than the cooking bit.

Today something about it caught my eye. At the top of the microwave are the "shortcut" buttons. Here you'd you'd typically press "popcorn" and it would automatically run for 8 minutes or however long it takes to turn your popcorn into a charred brick. I often wonder if they test their shortcuts on what they're really designed for, or if that facility burned down years ago.

The header of these buttons read "Aussie menus". I thought that strange coming from a South Korean company. Is it different for every country? I'm pretty sure they don't have a button for "American menus" in the US. Or so informal? What's the equivalent? "Yankee vittles"? "Kraut fare"?

So what's on the aussie menu? To quote:

dinner plate

rice

soup

casserole

risotto

pizza

Does this seem particularly Australian to you? No kanga bangas (kangaroo sausage), meat pies, anzac biscuits, chika rolls, fish and chips, or afternoon tea. No button for damper- not even a button for popcorn!

I reckon that "pizza" is vague- frozen or reheated? And what is a "dinner plate"? Isn't what's on the plate that counts? And how much different is rice from risotto that you'd need two buttons? Who is cooking risotto in the microwave anyway!

Dandenong Range

One reason we bought the new car is so we could get out of town...be more active in the great Australian outdoors. Oxymoronic? Perhaps. I swear though, we really do need to drive...to hike.

Today we went on a quick two hour hike through the Dandenong National Park. It only took about half an hour to drive to the trail head, which had this sign:

Tom kept wondering who is bringing their cat hiking and what kind of lawsuits ensued that brought cats to be pegged to dogs in the 'unwelcome' guest list?

My favorite part of the 7 kilometer loop was when the trail started to get more crowded with folks walking towards us, leading us to believe we were getting close back around to the car park. First, a woman running (how far can anyone run? surely not more than a kilometer or two). Then some people even more out of shape than us (they can't be the sort to get far from the gift shop / milkshake-serving-cafe). When we saw the three elderly men walking with canes, we could almost taste the spoils of a successfully completed trek.

Oh and forget about all the "new car rules". All the talk about keeping the car clean are so last week. We oinked down blueberry cider, iced coffees, crackers and dip the whole way home.

I did read the owners manual though. The transmission shift knob was driving me mad. Clearly, "N", "P", and "D" are "Neutral", "Park" and "Drive". So what the hell is "B"?! Is every other Prius driver scooting about in "B", reaping some kind of mammoth "benefit" that we've self-selected ourselves out of in ignorance? Was every minute of misuse shaving off pieces of some golden brick, deep inside the "bonnet"? (That's what we call the hood here. The trunk is the "boot".) Is the electric part of the hybrid triggered somewhere in the "back", turned on only by shifting into "B"?

It means "engine brake", to be used when going down steep hills. Who is using this?

Baffling.

Thinking of quitting?

This is post number 200! Woohoo!

Today in the canteen/cafeteria I saw a bulletin board with the typical workplace propaganda on it. One thing caught my eye that said "Thinking of quitting?" I thought... well, that's pretty bold. Across campus there are all these posters saying "Are you leaving us?" with a picture of a penguin (for what reason I'm not sure... maybe for the image of waddling away). They advertise the CSIRO alumni association for people who have departed from service. I can understand wanting to retain staff, but I didn't know we had a "quitting" problem that required an agency campaign.

They also had these small colorful business cards that said "Remember the 4Ds". Presumably it was a card to put in your wallet to refer to now and then.

"Delay - for at least five minutes, the urge will pass." There's been times I've been tempted to quit, but I can't say five minutes really helped. Usually I have to go home and cry myself to sleep and then I feel better in the morning.

"Deep breathe - breathe slowly and deeply" I was expecting the next D to be "Don't bring a shotgun to work on your last day"

"Do something else - keep your hands busy" Working harder will set you free.

"Drink water - take time out, sip slowly" That really helps? It has to be slow sips to regain my will to go on?

Below the this there was a "Quitline" phone number. Did this mean people were standing by, ready to talk you out of quitting work? What does the Union have to say about this!

I was at a loss for words. But then at the very bottom I saw this stick looking thing with a burning ember at the end, with a buster symbol drawn through it and realized what was going on. Dawn shone on Marblehead.

Refer to my last post if you still don't get it.

smoking odds

Australia has some pretty gruesome warning labels on packs of cigarettes (although not nearly as graphic as what you'd find on a pack in Brazil). I've always wanted to know just how bad smoking is for you, by the numbers. Does it raise your chance of dying from 1-2% or 1 to 50%?

Well, I have a favorite new webpage, the book of odds, where you can look up the chances of pretty much anything. So for example, in the US in recent years

Percent of people who smoke: 20%

Percent of married women who smoke: 15.2%

Percent of women with advanced degrees who smoke: 6.6%

I'm just sayin'!

So then this article talks about the deadliest cancers and your chances of dying from what. With a little help from some Bayesian Statistics:

P(S) = probability of anyone being a smoker = 20% (nevermind married women with advanced degrees)

P(C) = probability of anyone dying from lung cancer = 6%

P(S|C) = probability that, if you died from lung cancer, you were a smoker = 90%

therefore

P(C|S) = P(S|C)*P(C)/P(S) = 0.90 * 0.06 / 0.20 = 0.27

This means, if you smoke, your chance of dying from lung cancer : 27%

Conversely, if you don't smoke, your chance of dying from lung cancer: = 0.1 * 0.06 / 0.80 = 0.75%

To sum up, you are 36 times more likely to die from lung cancer if you smoke than if you don't smoke.

Savor the flavor while you can I guess!

Roach Coach

So we finally broke down and got one of these:

It's only been a few days of transportational freedom. So far, I've noticed:

1. It's easy to get to awesome places that we otherwise didn't go to because (in spite of not being that far away) too many tram transfers tended to be involved...like St. Kilda, for pizza to eat on the shore, or the South Melbourne Market, for tasty antipasti, meats and dips.
2. Everywhere we've been so far has these:

I can't tell you how much I hate cockroaches. Strange, that we just went through 15 months of hoofing it...we get a car, and suddenly, everywhere we go is teaming with them.

What could it mean? Why? Why?!!!

Weight

You may have heard of a category 5 hurricane... There's also a scale (category 1, 2, 3...) scale for tornadoes called the Fujita scale. F5 is the strongest tornado possible (although there's a mythical F6 "inconceivable tornado" category that starts above ~512 km/h (318 mph) but has never been used).

From what I've read, Ted Fujita, who developed the scale, was a neat guy. I could imagine him being mentioned in a Bill Bryson book, for example. I once read that on his days off he loved to do little experiments like measure and plot how his weight changed throughout the day. I saw one of these charts and it was annotated with bits like "mowed lawn", "afternoon snack". Years ago, when googling, I also saw a daily chart of weight on Robert Balling's webpage (he was a climatologist in Arizona) and thought it was fascinating.

Now, I also vaguely remember that my dad did something similar, that he'd weigh himself daily and write it up on a calendar. He had had a series of heart attacks so keeping his weight down was a serious issue. I've since read that they discourage you from weighing yourself every day, just so it doesn't become an obsession, or put you in a foul mood when there's some random fluctuation.

But I say "bah!" to all that. Why not collect the data and know and understand? So this below is my weight, measured first thing in the morning, since moving to Australia. On the left is pounds, on the right kg, with a 10 day moving average.

A wee bit of time series analysis showed that the daily standard deviation is somewhere between 1-1.5 pounds. Even more interesting, there's a negative autocorrelation, so that any rise or fall in weight sticks around on average for 2-3 days but then 10-13 days later rebounds in the opposite direction. The most I've ever gained in a day was 4.2 lbs at the end of October, followed by a record loss of 3.8 lbs the next day, so likely just water weight. It was no doubt due to beer. I can starve myself all day, but have one beer and I inevitably skyrocket the next day.

As for why it goes up and down over the long term, hard to say for sure. Looking back on the calendar, the rise in July might have been during a very busy and stressful time at work and when my mom visited. The slump in October happened when Kitty went to southeast Asia. I reckon there were fewer collateral calories during that period, as evidenced by a total absence of chocolate bar wrappers in the bed. Then new years' rise was because of a 1 week non-stop meal. More recently I've tried to cut ramen soup and crackers out of my diet.

Knowing all this, it's hard for me to say what the best weighing strategy is. I'd probably say every two weeks is fine, keeping in mind that changes of less than 3% of your body weight are within the limits of noise.

Affordability of housing II

I think what Tom is saying, in the next post, is that, hooray....before we met or got married, we both bought in the bottom of the market in US. Then, when we immigrated, we were very fortunate to both sell near the the top.

If we're very lucky, we can afford to buy a new house, in the very far out suburbs, in something that looks much like this?

We do have our health though. :) -Kitty

affordability

The median price of a home in Portland oregon is $265,000 usd, which is about $289,000 Australian dollars. The value of a Portland house, in US dollars, went down about 12% since we sold last year. The value in the equivalent Australian dollars, when you include how the dollar's sunk, has gone down 38%.

$289k AUD about the cost of a house in "regional victoria", i.e. the far suburbs and country outside the cities. Inside the metro area, median price is more like $440,000aud and that went up almost 18% (in Australian dollars... up 66% in equivalent US dollars) this year. Apparently, Melbourne-proper houses haven't been under $290,000 since 2002.

A Good Paddling

Still needing those "sun gloves"...I've given up on sunscreen and just stay plain covered. Me in the polka dot hat, Tom in the driver's seat, behind, in our blue canoe. All our gear for the weekend in small barrels. We packed, and ate, light, for once!

This weekend we went on a canoe paddling trip with 16 other people from Tom's hiking group on the the Goulburn river, from Seymour to Nagambie. It was only about an hour from Melbourne where we met picked up our canoes. We paddled down river for about 6 hours on Saturday, stopping briefly for lunch and to wring out a few folks who capsized. They weren't worried about their wet clothes and we pitched in extra sleeping gear and food, but the ruined phones and cameras were a bit sad. Today we paddled only three hours and landed at a winery/cafe, just in time...we were tired and ready to be done...It only took half an hour by bus to get back to our cars at Seymour, though it took us 9 hours of paddling the other way! Guess there were a lot of winding bends in the river!

We reckon we made it at least as twice as far by tacking back and forth across the river with our novice canoeing skills. Being the boating genius I am (I used to be big into sailing in Portland), I kept "whinging" (whining) to Tom for not steering us properly. Being the kind teacher he is, he offered to let me sit in the driver's seat (though he does have a whole 30 pounds on me and the "bigger of the two is supposed to sit in back"). It was less than five minutes of us spinning in crazy, undirected circles before I conceded. He asked if I might now give him "5% less guff" about his steering, which (hopefully he realized), I was glad to give up. Nothing like a little perspective to sush up a complainer, really. :)

If anyone ever wants to write a metaphor about teamwork, timing, working together, etc. as it relates to canoeing, it's all there for the taking ... not as easy as it looks, for sure. I think I also did a mild amount of nagging about sunscreen, which fell on deaf (and now somewhat red) ears. But did you know that sunscreen is really pretty carcinogenic itself?

The views were gorgeous. We spotted several koala's in the trees along the way. Some might even say my koala watching distracted me from my paddling and it could be true! :)

Last week, Tom went on a 20 kilometer hike with some of the same folks. He says canoeing is like "hiking, but with your hands" and also wondered a few times if we could "swim there any faster than we're rowing". You reckon?

We're soaking in baths now, layering ourselves in bug bite cream and Aloe Vera, and trying to get re-hydrated. Even simple pleasures like a soft bed and a hot meal are more treasured than ever.

I saw two lizards, a snake whizzed right past our tent, and a new friend, Bree, said she was covered in poisonous huntsman spiders and cockroaches all night, and I didn't really freak out at all. I do want to buy a 4" deep princess-and-the-pea-style sleeping mat and blister-preventing gloves for the next trip though. That, and maybe get the kind of canoe that has a professional rower / tour guide on it, where I can sit back and just take in the scenery.