Day 22 - Laundry Adventures and the Cane Toad

A Paper Tree
(check the bark)

April 30th, 2015

Here’s where things are probably going to start getting boring. Yes, I’m forewarning you. There will probably be less to say about each day. Some of you may welcome this, as a lot of these are rather long-winded. I had finally run out of socks (still going strong on underwear) and have recycled my clothing enough to this point that I finally caved on doing laundry. Yeah, that’s right, 2/3 of a month and I have yet to actually do it. Eat me.

After hitting up the bank and Gym, I talked with my housemate, French Alexander, who informed me of how much the laundry was, gave me some detergent, and the directions to both the grocery store, and the free bus stop.  Yes, they actually have free busses.. but only in the business district; screw the bloody students! Here, Coles is not a book store or whatever it is in NA, but a grocery store chain. I wander down there, stopping at the discount chemist to buying some laundry detergent. As is usual, I crowd sourced people around for information. When you hear “tomato sauce” what do you think of? To me, it’s interchangeable with pasta sauce. Here, it’s ketchup. I asked a random Australian guy, who seemed rather amused at the question, where I could find what I needed and what it was called. He laughingly obliged. It's pasta sauce.

Redemptorist Monastery
(I hear there's a retirement home in the back)

I think I’ve gotten used to the little jolt people seem to get whenever I open my mouth and speak. I usually try to read the people around me, see what I can tell, and whatever. Like most people do, I think. I’ve noticed that whenever I speak within earshot of random passersby, there is typically a brief moment where you can see/feel that they just noticed my accent. ‘What! That’s not common!’ sort of perking up. At first, I was a little self-conscious of it, but now I’ve gotten back to just acting normal around it. “Hey, where can I find a jar of olives?” *1 second clue-in* “Oh, they’re over there.” Might start making a game out of it, but it’s somehow helped with any self-consciousness I had about speaking in public. It kind of makes me laugh a little, internally, that I can bring a mild surprise to someone without even speaking directly at them. Moving along…

Church near my house

The dryer here sucks, which was expected. Ended up putting the stuff through 3 times and it was still damp, so now I have a nice range of clothes hanging around my room. I made a pita, drank this instant coffee 3-in-1 mix I got from Tran’s, and read comics all afternoon.

Seriously though, today was boring. Instead of talking about today, let me give you some fun facts about the Cane Toad that I had learned yesterday, but neglected to include:

The Cane Toad: A foreign, pain-in-the-ass species that has flourished exceptionally well in a good chunk of Australia (I think), but has been successfully kept at bay out of Western Australia. These Ugly Mofos are HUGE and they eat both small animals and crops. This leads us to how/why they were brought here in the first place.

The first story I was told was this:

The Brits, being so insightful and loving their games, brought over foxes and rabbits to hunt. Fascinating. Apparently, the rabbit population eventually got out of control, so what’s a good way to defeat this scourge? Introduce another, of course!

Enter the Cane Toad, whose paralytic saliva helped to immobilize their prey, and then be consumed. Then they moved on to eating crops and all sorts of other things. Liz told me that her cousins would go around with golf clubs, smashing them, which seemed like it might have been fully encouraged by the Gov. Gross.

Like a stampeding flock of Dodrio

This is False, but I thought was entertaining enough to list. The real reason that I just found was something a bit more reasonable: The people in the state of Queensland were having a lot of problems with beetles eating their crops, and were looking into methods that were less harmful than chemicals. This was the 1930's, so even DDT wasn't invented, so you can imagine how bad the stuff they were using might have been. Enter the Cane Toad, which thrived and expanded around the North Eastern chunk of the continent.