An Ache Compounded and The Birds of Paradise

I write this post from a kneeling position, nursing a very sore posterior--my punishment, I suppose, for playing hooky from the library not one, but TWO days in a row. Let me explain.

I became the proud owner on Friday of a gently-used, glorious beach towel at church basement sale.  Towel is not even an adequate descriptor....it's more like a blanket.  Here it is drying on my balcony (you can only see half of it).

The procurement of such a towel means that spending extended periods of time on the beach has become a much more tempting enterprise. Being somewhat fair-skinned, I am very diligent about sunscreen, but on Friday (perhaps in my excitement over finding the perfect towel), I neglected the backs of my thighs in a big way. Long story short, I came home on Friday night to find a large swathe of lobster-red on my upper thighs where I had missed.  Yowtch! In the absense of Aloe vera, I got the brilliant idea to apply Voltaren gel (a potent N-SAID gel, normally used for muscular pain) as a kind of salve, failing to read the fine print that says "AVOID SUN EXPOSURE ON TREATED AREAS OR YOU WILL DIE."  So while Voltaren is very effective on sunburn, if you then expose that area to the sun, it basically causes your skin to fry at an alarming rate.

So today, when I went down to Cronulla Beach, after a generous dose of Voltaren, I ended up doing something I rarely do:  sunbathing.  Generally I am lukewarm on this activity, but today just happened to be the day when 1) I started a really good new novel and 2) all the seaweed and kelp in the Pacific Ocean decided to wash up on shore.  I tried to swim several times, but kept getting stuck in big floating forests of seaweed and was sufficiently weirded out.  So I have now arrived home from my would-be pleasant day at the beach, with an ache compounded: a Top-Notch Burn on top of a Really-Quite-Bad Burn.  And to top it all off, I have a long day of Archive Sitting at The Royal Agricultural Society tomorrow.  Joy.

So to take my mind off my woe, I'll now talk about how awesome the birds are here.

My room has a large set of French doors that opens onto a balcony overlooking some woods by the train tracks.  I live in Cronulla, which is about an hour south of Sydney's CBD.  It's a quiet area, about half a kilometer from the Cronulla shops, half a kilometer from the Bundeena Bay, and about a kilometer from Cronulla Beach itself. From about 4pm to 8pm every evening, and again from 5am to 9am in the mornings, the avian population comes alive.  It took a while to get used to, in the same way that it took getting used to when I lived next door to the Hyde Park Fire Department my first three years in Chicago.  It's that loud.  For the first week or so I was here, I would awake every morning at around 5 am thinking that I had been transplanted to some Guatemalan rainforest filled with howler monkeys and scarlet macaws. I didn't think that Australia had wild monkeys, native or naturalized, but every morning in my half-awake grog, I began to doubt.  "I need to Google this," I would say, and then drift back to sleep, and then forget. But one day, while indulging in one of my very frequent Archive Mindwanders, I did look it up.  There are no howler monkeys in Australia.  There are, however, Kookaburras, which sound exactly like howler monkeys.

The Kookaburras are the loudest, but more common are the lorikeets and other parrots that hang out in the adundant supply of gum and bottlebrush trees in my neighborhood. Look at this video, and you'll see what happens when you leave out some bird seed on your porch.  The little green guys are the lorikeets, and the big-headed fuzzy ones are the kookaburras.

Here's what happens when a kookaburra "laughs":

Then you have the Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo, a giant bird that makes an awful racket and wreaks havoc upon City garbage bins (they an empty one in its entirety, black bear style).

Then you have the more run-of-the-mill (but not really) Australian Ravens, which sound, depending on their mood, like bleating sheep, crying babies, or (a somewhat dark thought) the piteous wails of this woman who was in the Alzheimer's ward with my grandmother. : /

I've never really been much into birds, but I'm kinda into them now.  I suppose it is in my genes.  My dad used to sit out on our front porch for hours looking at birds with a pair of expensive binoculars (though not recently, I've noticed), having a particular affinity for woodpeckers.  And my maternal grandmother (and grandfather) found profound joy in the robins, bluejays, and cardinals in her back yard.  She would watch them intently from the little windows above the kitchen sink.  So as I observe all these new and raucous birds of paradise, I think of the avian enthusiasts I've loved.

Oh Hai!