chirp chirp chirp

yesterday, me and the missus drove to flinders for a lab picnic.

it's kinda funny, because we thought flinders was about a forty-five minute drive away. it took us two and a half hours.

ha ha ha.

flinders is on the coast, which is pretty far i guess. melbourne is actually on a giant bay, so you gotta drive far to get to the open ocean. although this bit of the open ocean is blocked by phillip island so, uh, yeah. we drove there. most of the lab people were diving when we arrived (two hours late) so we were worried that we'd driven for 2.5 hours only to miss the party.

then they emerged from the deep like giant suckfish.

i'm not sure there is actually a thing called a suckfish, but there should be.

the real excitement happened a bit later, after we ate snags, which are actually sausages. that's when i played my very first bit of cricket.

i know! you're all saying, "cricket? why that's the most exciting game in the universe! it's like skeet-shooting basketball on rollerblades!"

true. so true.

i'll tell you what. pitching overhand, which they call "bowling" (do not try it this way at your local bowling alley), is tricky to get the hang of.

if you're american, you've likely never thrown a ball this way. go outside now and try it with a hefty rock. swing your arm up over your head backwards without bending your elbow and try to hit a pram or something. it's hard! i managed to eventually combine speed with accuracy to throw like a spastic baboon; so i fit right in. today my shoulder hurts.

this particular photo is of christian, one of bartlebee's labmates who organised the barbie. you can see her in the background fielding with impressive lackluster. the guy in the foreground in the tintin t-shirt is steve, her advisor. he's also american and we were equally sucky at cricket.

i also tried batting. i was better at batting as i've played golf with angry woodchucks and a two-by-four and cricket is much the same.

this is joel batting. he also just started in steve's lab. it's his cricket set and he was a tiny bit better than me, but that might also be because no matter how hard i tried i always instinctively ran towards first base. there is no first base in cricket. when you get a hit, you rush the mound while holding onto your bat. so i'm not sure why the bowler wouldn't try to hit you since you're going to charge him with a hefty piece of wood regardless.

in the photo, that's taylor behind joel heckling by saying things i had to think about before they made any sense. like, 'you swing like a dunny door!' which i heard as 'you swing Adenny Dour' and assumed Adenny Dour was some famous cricketer i had never heard of. then i got it. hah! those wacky australians! i need to introduce them to my brother. he knows from heckling.

anyway, i knocked a few bowls pretty far which made up for the fact that my hands are oddly reflective when it comes to catching. and lo, i had the fun.

here's a group shot of everyone:

from left to right only to prove that i can remember the names: steve, joel, vanessa, dean, christian, taylor, bartlebee, jody and in front, malcolm.

hey! that's a lot of names! i must be a cricket star.