Invasion of the Creepy Crawlers!

They’re taking over…

I was criticized last time for not being as normally detailed in my entry. I’ll admit, the last one was a bit all over the place. I suppose that’s worth mentioning unto itself though. When it’s time to sit down and write a new entry, when I look back on the last couple of weeks to figure out what to tell all of my adoring readers, I often find that the days sort of all just blend together. Take today for instance. I have absolutely NO idea what day of the week it is. It might be Monday. It might be Saturday. I really haven’t a clue. The only day of the week that really pokes its head out around here is Sunday, because that’s the one day a week when the locals from Alice Springs all drive out for a little weekend getaway and inundate me with requests for greek salads, Coopers Pale Ale and meat pies. Other than that, the days roll on by in a similar fashion. Now I don’t mean that in a bad way –I enjoy each day as it rolls by – but in terms of particularly exciting events to recap for you all, sometimes I sort of draw a blank.

That being said, I did title this blog for a reason. Lucky me, I’ve settled in Central Australia during a particularly horny season for the local critters out there. Babies are EVERYWHERE. Now at home that would mean little baby pigeons and squirrels. The local critters here though are a bit more worrisome that those of the New York City metropolitan area.

1)   Centipedes:

On a particularly busy Sunday, my coworker put her hands in the dishwater to wash up the plates, only to discover the hard way that an unhappy baby centipede had fallen into the water, and it stuck her with one of its venomous claws as a hello, good day madame. She did really well fighting off the pain and continuing to work. I think I would have cried. In fact, I’m sure I would have. Centipede “bites” aren’t fatal, but they can be extremely painful and can cause chills, fever, and even anaphylactic shock in people who have severe allergies to the centipede toxins. But the rotten critters are friggin’ everywhere! In addition to the bastard in the dishwater, I found one in the corner of the homestead by the coffee machine and one was putzing around by the outdoor couch that we all hang out on by our rooms. I’ve taken to catching grasshoppers to feed our pet bearded dragons – Crusty and Fiesty – and when I caught one today and put it in the lizard food jar, there was a caught centipede already in there that was literally the size of my face. It was so big that it actually made me uncomfortable just looking at it.

2)   Happy Snakes:

About a week ago someone found a baby Stimson’s python. Not poisonous, kind of cute, and actually not too unfriendly. I named the snake Flame, as someone happened to be wearing a Calgary Flames t-shirt that day. Flame lived in a bucket in the office, and we all had a rocking good time playing with him and handling him until he escaped. He’s probably still hiding in a warm spot in the office somewhere eating up the bugs, but no one has seen him since. We caught another baby Stimson’s python shortly thereafter, who was most likely one of Flame’s siblings. I named him Torch. We didn’t keep him around for too long though, Torch wasn’t as friendly.

3)   NOT Happy Snakes:

Australia is notorious for its deadly wildlife. The Box Jellyfish. The Great White Shark. The Funnel Web Spider. But of course, no list would be complete without poisonous snakes. I was walking past the kitchen the other day, and saw a yellow-colored very young baby snake wriggling towards the kitchen door. There was something about his movement that set off an alarm in my head that this was not a snake to make friends with. I sort of instinctively knew that he was the mean kind. I ran inside to go get a couple of other people to check out my discovery, and sure enough, he was a brown snake. If brown snakes bite you, you die. Or at the very least with immediate proper first aid followed by the critical medical attention, you’ll be extremely sick for days and will probably lose whatever limb the snake bit you on. Even the babies, and this guy was probably about a day old based on his size, can kill a full-grown human being. The fun thing about brown snakes is that they’re super aggressive too. If you piss them off, even accidentally, they will chase your ass down and go out of their way to nail you. We ended up shooing the baby snake away from the kitchen and into a pile of dead leaves, and there he stayed. But if there’s one newborn baby brown floating around, then there also must be siblings, and of course big mama…

About 10 minutes later, on my way to the dish room, I found one of the siblings. This one was already on his way into the kitchen. I ran to get Dean, the chef, to go and defend his territory. He swept the thing out of the kitchen with a broom and into a bucket, but it was an epic battle. The baby snake did NOT give up without a fight. I’ve never seen anything that young be so instinctively vicious. The snake wanted that broom to die. Luckily we were able to get him into the bucket (and by we I mean I supervised the process from a safe distance away…), which we covered with cling wrap so we could observe the little demon safely. Every time someone stuck their face over the bucket though, the snake went a little nuts and tried to strike. Colin, one of the owners, eventually drove into town with the snake to take him to a reptile expert to see exactly which type of brown snake he was.

A couple of days ago, Colin showed up at the homestead with another bucket, containing yet another poisonous baby snake, only this one was a different species. This time we had ourselves a Death Adder. He was found hanging out in the grass in from of motel room #2. He’s also the kind of snake that if he bites you then you die, but Death Adders are less aggressive than the brown snakes. So yeah, the resort is basically crawling with deadly baby snakes at the moment. The parents you can at least see coming since they’re large, but the babies can squeeze into ANYTHING and seem to be EVERYWHERE. Every time we walk outside we have to be mindful of where we step – any unturned leaf can have a deadly baby waiting to kill. Talk about a fun commute to and from work every day!!!

What else is new? My mother’s care package arrived, so I was restocked with double stuff oreos, skippy peanut butter, and cool ranch Doritos. I was very pleased with that. I also finally went into town for the first time last week. It was weird. The traffic! The stores! Having to pay money for food! All such bizarre concepts. I went in with the chef, the helicopter pilot, and the housekeeper. It was a nice day out on the town. Alice Springs isn’t exactly the sexiest place on the planet, but it has mobile phone reception (although stupid me forgot to top up my sim card, so I sent 3 text messages before I ran out of credit) and friggin Hungry Jack’s, so I was happy.  In other news, we’ve had insane amounts of rain recently. There have been crazy thunderstorms for the past 3 days, and the streak looks to continue until the end of the week. A lot of the roads are flooded, and people are getting stuck left and right. It’s kinda fun though! Just as long as the flood waters stay out of my room, along with the snakes and centipedes…. Apparently the creepy crawlers have been quite horny this season L

Life at Glen Helen

So I’ve been at Glen Helen for about 3 and a half weeks thus far. Still haven’t gone stir crazy yet!

I’ve finally gotten the hang of things here (or at least I think I have). I’ve made quite a few mixed drinks, and I now know all the beers we serve and where to find them in the fridge. I’ve even picked up some of the slang words for some of the beers. Australians shorten everything, even the names of beverages. I’ve also gotten really good at heating up meat pies in the microwave and restocking the refrigerators. I really enjoy restocking. I have no idea why. As soon as someone buys a drink, I have to fight the obsessive need to immediately replace it.

I’m not the world’s best gas pumper (I swear, the thing doesn’t like me and gets stuck specifically when I try and use it), but I’ve slowly gotten the hang of the whole waitressing thing. I’ve even done it en français!  It took me a while to work up the balls to do it, but there was one day at the bar where the guy was having trouble understanding the price of something, so I just switched into French. He looked so happy to not have to struggle to work out what I was saying in English. There was even one night in the restaurant where I waitressed 2 of the tables entirely in French. Explaining honeydew melon in French was not easy though. I really want to brush up on my language skills. On the few occasions where I’ve shown people to there rooms in French, there has been a lot of me pointing and gesticulating and referring to places/buildings as “things” because I can’t friggin remember the vocabulary words. It’s slightly annoying. But it’s been good fun!

I got my very first bee sting! Ironically, it happened the day after I was having a conversation with someone describing how I’d never been stung by anything, and felt that I was kind of due for it. I was down at the Glen Helen gorge with the housekeeper and the helicopter pilot, laying on my towel in the sand trying to get some color. I rolled over, and a bee must have been underneath, and I got jabbed right in the bikini line. It stung a bit at first, but then when I pulled the stinger out I winced in pain for the next half hour. But at least I now know that I’m not allergic to bee stings! Found out the hard way on that one J

I’ve also seen my first wild dingo. I didn’t quite believe anyone that they actually existed at first, since everyone else seemed to see them and I never did, but I saw one by the water hole 10 days ago or so. A dead one was also found down by the gorge yesterday. Not sure what happened to the poor little guy.

I’ve also gotten accustomed to cleaning bathrooms. I mean my own is a damn disaster, but I can make the campground, bunkhouse, and homestead bathrooms look spic and span. It’s not so bad really. You just put on the rubber gloves and scrub away!

I figured up here I’d spend most of free time reading and writing and watching all 6 seasons of Lost. But I’ve yet to open a book, and my DVDs are still in their shrink wrap. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I do with all of my time, but it does seem to go rather quickly. Heck, I even went over 2 weeks in between blog entries! I spend a lot of time with my coworkers. What we do with our time is a great question, but the time does seem to pass quite quickly. It’s the slowest time of the year up here, so there aren’t that many of us working up here at the moment. There’s the housekeeper, the currently helicopter-less helicopter pilot (the helicopter doesn’t get here till next month, so he has a lot of free time on his hands), two other girls who basically do the same job I do, the two owners, and their son who is usually a manager but is currently the interim chef, since apparently 2 days before I got here the regular chef sliced his figure and had a psychotic meltdown and ran away. Very small group, so you almost have to go out of your way to not be friends with people. Mid-day trips to the gorge for swimming and nighttimes on the outdoor couch with a drink or two seem to be quite commonplace. But I’m really enjoying it all so far. Everyone gets along pretty well (for the most part J) and it’s a cool experience. It’s almost like living in a plastic bubble though. We work together, eat together, hang out together, and have nowhere else to go. Isolation doesn’t even begin to describe it! I really don’t mind it all though. I rarely find myself bored.

Here are a few more pictures of my new little world. Here’s the outside of home sweet home:

And here is a photo of the front of the homestead. This is what you see when you turn off the main road and head into the driveway:

This is the inside of the homestead:

That’s where I work, watch tv, go “out” (sometimes we take over the bar at night for a little night out on the town…), eat my meals and vege on the couch.

Let’s see… what else is there? I was fortunate enough to be able to watch the Giants win the Super Bowl! The game was on Monday morning, so instead of Super Bowl Sunday I had Super Bowl Monday. The guy I basically replaced, a Patriots fan from Connecticut, was still here then, so I got to watch the game with a fellow American who was rooting for the other team. It was a fun morning.  We didn’t get the commercials though. Instead we were treated to random images of Australian landscapes.

And I must mention my pet! Yes, I have a pet in Australia. His name is Toilet Frog. I named him that because he’s a frog who lives in my toilet bowl. I usually see him at night. One evening one of the guys fished him out of the bowl and set him loose, but about a week later toilet frog re-appeared! I’m convinced that he’s gotten attached to me, and I’m really happy that he found his way back, even after he was given the choice of freedom.

I’m slowly getting used to the bugs here. They are everywhere. You just kind of have to embrace them. The wasps are especially fascinating. They’re quite pretty, but they’re huge. Not terribly aggressive, but their size makes them a bit intimidating. Sometimes the guys catch them and then stick them in cups in the freezer so that they can tie strings to them. Then once the wasp wakes up from its freezer coma, it flies around with a piece of string attached to it. We sure do know how to entertain ourselves out here!

 I’ve also completely planned out my journey around Australia, and am now just in the process of booking everything to secure my place. It’s going to be quite the whirlwind tour, but I’ll get to see most of what I wanted to. It’s kind of funny how with a whole year to see all of Australia, in the end I’ll be cramming 90% of my sightseeing into 2 and a half months. Time sure does fly!

That’s all for now. It’s only about 100 degrees here today…practically sweater weather!