The wonderful wisdom of Oz

MacGyver is diligently working on a voice over recap of the whole honeymoon trip that I may did! remember to hyperlink back here.  He's already launched a teaser clip of a shark feed in the Coral Sea.

So while we wait, I figured I'd just brain dump the stuff I thought was cool about the trip.  Since I don't really chase epic things around with my camera, I'll probably be outlinking to a bunch of other people's work and hoping they don't change their URLs and break the flow.

• Google Fi as a phone provider Just Works.  Before we could track down sim cards at the airport, our phones sent us a friendly alert welcoming us to Australia and letting us know our rates were pretty much the same as before.  GPS and maps worked reliably for about as good as any of the locals, even in remote parts of the western coast.  The only drawback was that we often had reception where we didn't have reliable power (like driving the Jucy campervan) so we put the two portable USB battery chargers through their paces.    
• 2-speed toilets.  Almost everywhere had a "big job" and "small job" designation on the buttons.  In the one park restroom I found that didn't, a helpful patron had taken the trouble of graffitti'ing toilet feature feedback on the stall wall.  
• Communism done right:  so this might be chalked up the the budget accommodations I often selected for us, but it seemed like most venues like cafes had a well-stocked book swap case.  Most hostels and campgrounds had gear swaps and "take what you need" herb gardens.  We were the only weirdos using the laundromat dryers because everyone else was cool hanging their unmentionables on communal clothes lines.  
• No Starbucks!  Initially I thought this was a code red overlooked feature, but then discovered Sydney has a cafe culture pretty similar to Rome's (Ok, much much more laid back/read the paper while you sip vs. belly up to a bar, shoot an espresso and prende a la via).  So this trip turned into a tour de Flat Whites from all the mom and pop places that had managed to run Sbux swill out of town.  That said, the Australian chain equivalent (Gloria Jeans) was abysmal, much much worse quality than Sbux and seemed to be skating by on that extended hours niche to cater to the "got up at 4 because jetlagged, why does no coffee shop open before 7?!"  
• Alt milks are also pretty common, so it is possible to dairy-free your flat white without the barista batting an eyelash... That said, I would say the dairy version was consistently tasty so probably harder to mess up.  
• Vegetarian options on every menu.  I had my happycow app thing all ready to go since I'd been reading too much Dr Gregory on how not to die and wanting to be plant-focused.  MacGyver was supportive, so it might be a selection bias in the places we chose to hike for meals, but pretty much everywhere had a decent not-even-envious-of-your-meat-entree-option for me to demolish and we ate at different places almost every meal.  It helped that the Australian preparation of bacon is limp, oily and almost Canadian in its disappointment, so I wasn't fiercely tempted.    
• "No Junk" stickers on most mailboxes.  Turns out Keep Australia Beautiful has pushed for an effort to get "throwing advertising on an owner's property without their consent is...considered litter."  We should copy that in the states.  Until then, I've got an industrial sized paper shredder on my to-do list and am contemplating if the mailbox generates enough brown matter to sufficiently cover humanure deposits.  j/k.  sort of.  
• Cow mailboxes in The Channon.  We saw a bunch of converted milk cans hung as mailboxes as we cruised to Zaytuna Farm (aka the Permaculture Research Institute).  Each one was unique and got me thinking how bucolic living in this area must be with cows grazing in knee-high grass instead of a really stinky densely packed CAFO like we see in the states.  Sadly, this memory quickly became bittersweet as a local on the dive boat pointed out how the land was that lush and productive because it was recently clear-cut rain forest and lots of native wildlife is threatened because of it.    
• Weird wildlife.  The birdsongs even sounded different.  There was a bird we took to calling the "uh-oh" bird because its call sounded kind of like a minion or person on helium watching humpty dumpty tumble off a wall.  Trash turkey/bin chicken/White Ibis seems to occupy the same niche in Sydney as pigeons do here... oddly, the hotel down the street was named Ibis, I wonder if that is a metaphor for the way the country sees travelers?  *shrug*  We saw a koala, a giant spider, and toads that seemed to live in the campground toilets/septic systems at campground #2, a monitor lizard and a couple cassowaries at Etty Bay campground, loads of pet-able joey kangaroos at a roo sanctuary/campground, a tree full of bats in Cairns one of whom has exceptional aim, what am I forgetting?  Oh yeah, all the awesome stuff we saw while scuba diving.
• Sydney and Cairns are walkable!  Ok, so that might be a bit of a stretch in that I did make us walk about an equivalent of a half marathon in Sydney one day and it is jungle humid in their summer.  But I figured we'd run up huge charges in cab fare or have to figure out how to navigate mass transit with Opal cards and whatnot.  Turned out that was totally unnecessary.  If I had to pick a favorite borough, I'd say Glebe  in Sydney is pretty bomb.  It somehow managed to convey a small German ski town feel (like Bishop, CA) with an intelligentsia vibe in the middle of sweltering summer.    
• Sydney also has a bunch of Victorian era townhomes that have fascinating little iron patios and iron balconies. 
• Plants lean the other way!  Discovered pines leaning resolutely North in the Royal Botanic Gardens which really tripped me and my general sense of direction out... Northbound means walking towards the sun at high noon, how outlandish! I found orion in the constellations out at sea but I think he was upside down.  The nice thing about plants is it looks like the companion planting of herb gardens holds globally.  I saw a bunch of combinations in the RBG herb garden that are identical to stuff that the master gardeners do here.  
• Scuba.  Granted, Scuba is more DH's fixation now, but Mike Ball made it hard to dislike diving.  Easy entries, no giant strides with 15' drops (except when the dive master let DH and other crazies jump off the top deck at the end of the trip).  Crazy comfortable water temps without all the raw knuckles from having to pull on a stinky still-damp 6mm.  Visibility for dozens of feet, enough to feel vertigo diving the walls the drop off quickly.  Tons of wildlife to watch and learn about and tons of knowledgeable folks on crew and other guests to help you figure out what you saw and hook you up with tips on spotting more esoteric stuff on the subsequent dives.

So yah, 10/10 would honeymoon again.  :) 

Operation Unless

It's about that time for New Years resolution junkies (yours truly) to formulate grand plans for the coming year... only to watch plan adherence crumble by mid-January.  Here's how I'm tweaking my approach-

1.  Pick a theme for 2018:  Unless
2.  Pick a boulder-sized project that will not be competed out by simultaneously attempting other boulder-sized projects:  Write a book
3.  Pick some supporting month-level focus areas
4.  Forge a set of daily habits to keep me on track


1.  Pick a theme for 2018:  Unless

The Lorax is one of those deceptively simple books that have haunted me.  I think the ideas this book broached made me receptive to epic challenges like training for a permaculture design certificate or contemplating starting my own Riot 4 Austerity or Zero Waste project.  The Lorax made me ultra-sensitive to things like the bleaching MacGyver and I saw honeymooning on the Great Barrier Reef.  Thanks to the Lorax, a huge constellation of ideas about sustainability and conservation can be summarized by the single watch word: Unless.   


2a.  Pick a boulder-sized project:  Write a Book

They say everyone has a book in them; I have been procrastinating on mine for years.  I would come up with excuses like "I don't have enough experience in X to pretend to be an expert," or "the experiences I gain in X won't apply to a wide enough audience to justify writing a book."  But now I've seen colleagues and authors I respect share their self-publishing journey and help lay out stepping stones for my own.  Having been retired for a year and living comfortably, I feel I'm at a place now where I can scuttle a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself to churn out enough mass-appeal best selling stuff to replace the income I used to collect while working for Initech.  So yeah, let's write a book that *I* would use as a reference.  If in the fullness of time other people want to read it or pay for the pleasure of doing so, that's an unexpected bonus. 

2b.  ...that will not be competed out by simultaneously attempting other boulder-sized projects...

This is tricky because I already have some prior commitments.  It is more realistic to look at them all side by side, anticipate if there are obvious conflicts in the direction they will take me and be clear in advance which priority would "win" if it came down to a metaphorical knife fight between them...  Since last year was a very selfish year of training for an Ironman, I have promised to support MacGyver on his objectives for this year (which revolve around a target weight and an upgraded landscape).  I'm pretty sure many of the Unless-themed activities will support or at least not work at cross purposes with this prior commitment, but it would be unrealistic to deny that there may be some friction from time to time and if a compromise couldn't be found, MacG's needs would win the knife fight.  That said, I've come to believe that a recipe for spousal harmony (or good partnerships in general) is to not to get too personally invested in changing the other person.  What you see is what you get and chalk any positive change they make up as an unexpected bonus.  This is in keeping with the general idea that you should care more about stuff that's within your immediate sphere of control rather than worrying about stuff you have second to nth order degrees of control over.  So if hypothetically, achieving MacGyver's objectives *requires* that I ride him like the sadistic taskmaster that I am, you know, to the point where I can't juggle some side projects of my own, I would be in pretty flagrant violation of the spousal harmony covenant.  This morphs from a partner project to a me-wanting-to-change-my-partner project and it might be good for me to "get a hobby."  Also, let's bury this easter egg in the middle of a blog post in a wall o'text paragraph lest the scant portion of this blog's already scant readership that knows me in person reads it-- fascinating how touchy I am on this topic, this warrants a deeper reflection when I am more comfortable oversharing, but I digress-- since the biological clock is ticking and parenting seems like a challenging fun adventure, we're exploring that whole starting a family project as well.  It seems like the majority of the books I've been voyeuristically devouring on this topic warn that we should stay pretty flexible on the expectations we set for future selves who might roll "morning sickness," "preeclampsia," and other fun dot spells that could throw a wrench in otherwise well-laid plans on other fronts.  Oh, and finally, as sort of a concession if the year of family planning doesn't work out and because stuff books up stupid early, we signed up to attempt to hike rim to rim on the Grand Canyon next October.  My thoughts on that are pretty similar to my commitment to MacGyver.  So in the broadest of priority strokes, spawn>macgyver goals>unless book>canyoneering.

Now I can run around brazenly telling people my 2018 project is writing a book.  Full stop.  No more hemming and hawing about the numerous adventures I could choose now that I've finished the Ironman and returned from honeymoon (my prior commitment evasion excuses).

3.  Pick supporting month-level focus areas

Sweet.  This is mostly to scratch that itch I have to be continuously planning something and the paradoxical paralyzing overwhelm I feel when trying to build an entire plan for the year in one sitting.  The nice thing about sustainability is I can repurpose a lot of the structured categories outlined by Astyk when she drafted her Riot4Austerity game.  She had 7 categories, but since we are in socal where Heating Gas is not quite as focal of a thing, I'll combine Gas with Electric for 6 categories and cycle through focusing on each of them for two months of the year.  Calendar events set.

4.  Forge a set of daily habits to keep me on track

I love the web app Habitica that I downloaded on Google Play.  Unlike other to-do lists, this one has sections encouraging daily rituals and habits.  However, I've found I need to prune out those sections periodically because caffeinated past self thinks I can achieve a lot more in a day than current self actually manages and because some habits just stop making sense (i.e. measuring my heart rate in the morning to figure out if I'm overtrained and need to scale back today's workout now that I'm not training).  I've found it works better to be parsimonious and get some habits anchored down to the point where inertia is carrying them before trying to layer more habits in.  It is also helpful to sequence them together, for instance by adding a series of habits to do right after waking up or at a meal time.  It is harder to add an orphan habit if there aren't other established habits to group it with and remind you to work on it.

Another framework covered in a Tedx talk I want to experiment with is the concept that you have a couple "selfs" in control of your behavior.  You have an emotional self (some books call it Chimp or The Elephant) that usually runs the show and exerts the most control when you are upset or in some way dissatisfied.  This conceptually might be why it is hard to delay gratification and choose to deprive yourself now for future rewards when you're already feeling dissatisfied.  There is the logical part of your brain (some books call it Professor or The Rider) that you can use to make plans in the future or rationalize your past.  These plans are great but if there is upsetting adversity, the emotional part of your brain can instead pressure the logical part of your brain to justify procrastinating hard stuff for the future in favor of doing more pleasurable stuff in the present.  And then there is the third part of your brain which is The Robot of inertia, muscle memory reactions and interpretations to things.  Basically, the habits and rituals that acrete over time.  When emotion and logic are in agreement, programming can be written to the robot so you don't have to use so much self-discipline and arm twisting to get stuff done.  Cool, so I wanted to find a set of habits that furthered Operation Unless and it seemed like keeping all those parts of my brain happy was a crucial condition.

Daily tasks (over coffee + breakfast)

• Emotional:  create and visit a pinterest page of inspiring pictures of projects I can attempt related to Operation Unless.
• Logical:  read/research a bit about a topic related to Operation Unless daily.   
• Robot:  journal (medium TBD) daily about this journey celebrating observations and noble failures of any projects attempted.  Worst case scenario: at the end of the year you can publish that brain dump as a deliverable... but budgeting some time later on to edit and curate would be ideal.  

So here goes!