What's up The Internet, it's your humble servant paul here, writing another update.

What have i been up to? many things, yes, many things.
I've been working some, but not enough because it's been raining. I'm working farming jobs, so not working in heavy rain is a good thing, but still,,, i need the money!
It's cold here, because it's winter. But I can handle it better than the locals, who complain so much even though it isn't even below zero. At work there was a lady who was wearing a black hat, in canada would be called a touk or something, and it said 'KIN FREEZIN on it, which i thought was funny. It was more funny because it wasn't actually freezing. I know it does snow up in the mountains, and i plan to go up to a place called Cradle Mountain sometime soon as i hear it's a world heritage site because of it's good looking scenery. There's also another mountian i'm going to climb called mount Roland. Oh and another thing i want to do, is called W.W.O.O.F ing, which is being a Willing Worker on an Organic Farm, getting to stay someplace beautiful for free and getting free food in exchange for a few hours work; but for that i'd need to save up some money because they don't pay you for the work you do.
But i'll write a bit more on the work i've been doing. With the farm work, im usually making about 18$ an hour. Which is sweet, and more sweet right now , is my setup at the backpackers residence where i clean the kitchen at night, and two nights of that is one night of free rent. And 1 week of rent is 113$, so let me calculate how much it costs for me to stay there.... about 10$ a night, which isn't bad because i have my own room, and it's a hosptal room because the place is an old hospital they rennovated.
Have i written all i can about broccoli? yeah it's kindof backbreaking, because all it is is bending over and cutting out the broccoli with a paint scraper, then throwing it in a bin carried by the tractor. The tractor can carry 10 of these huge bins at a time, and im sure a better basketball player now that i've thrown so many collys into faraway bins; not without missing the bin, and once they hit the ground they're dirty and no good. We were working in this rich red soil, and one day it was raining and we got it all over our boots and shoes; i didn't notice that i had it on my shoes, and as soon as we got dropped of at our hospital house I quickly went straight to my room so i could get to the laundry before anyone else, but little did know I had tracked mud all the way from the front door, down two long hallways to my room. The manager was really upset and he yelled at me, using kindof funny language like 'HELLS BELLS' and, 'i've had it up to my eyebrows with this mud!' and so fourth,, but while he's yelling at me, at least 3 other people tack even more mud into the place, but noone admits to doing it and everyone blames me because i was the one caught. Eventually i got a little help from one other guy, but i later found out it was two ladies who did it too but they didn't own up because of how mad the manager was. One girl was this german girl, who tracked it all up the stairs and then blamed me , even though i never went upstairs, betch. Perhaps i will go on a digression just to talk about how annoying she was....
. ...ok my first impression of this girl, she's telling a story of how she 'pissed herself laughing' at a girl who fell on her face, and just the way she told it i was like wow that's kindof harsh. Then later, almost at the end of the day, she starts cutting into my row of collys, perhaps because she notices that im about to be run over by the tractor while trying to be a hero cutting out every last one without missing anything,, and i notice her helping me, and i say Thanks, and then she goes, ' JUST KEEP MOVING' in her thick german accent. And a few days later she calls me an idiot because i think the bag around the bin is tied tight enough and she doesn't agree. And she was rude to everyone! and alot of people i worked with would talk about it behind her back; we all thought it was weird how she could be that mean and bossy even though she was the youngest person on the team. damn, she was evil. but anyways... im glad collys is pretty much over.
The farming season this year, i hear, is kindof a strange one. Like, the crop is 5 times what it usually is. Maybe more, because i heard they usually get 800 bins, and this year they got like 4500. Im not sure if this is the result of climate chage, but it seems to benefit the collyflower farmer in tasmania....
After a few days off, i decided to call up some number i got from a friend about a job, and they agree to pick me up the next day. It's picking a vegetable they call Sweeds, which is actually a turnip in canada (or as the tasmanians often call it, CANADIA). Turnip picking was a brutal job, but it was kindof fun, for the one day that i worked it. It isn't paid by the hour, but they give you 55$ per half ton bin. A half ton is a huge amount of Sweeds, but i hear some people can do 3, 4, or 5 bins a day. They give you a sharp knife, which they deduct from your pay, and some smaller buckets to fill up before dumping them in the bin. I only finished 1 bin that day, but i guess my strategy wasn't very good, and maybe if i gave it a chance i could have been getting 3 bins in a day, but i couldn't do it because i felt it was too rough on my wrists. I wasn't going about the job right because most people were filling their buckets till they overflowed and get someone to help them carry them over to the bins, while i would fill them half way and carry myself. I might have noticed if i was working next to the locals who have been doing this job for years, but instead, i chose a part of the 'paddock' (aka field) where i could pick along the fence next to a field full of cows. Perhaps if i had not been next to the cows i would not have been so distracted and i could have worked more and made more money, but, i was so amused by being next to the cows that i spent alot of my time paying attention to them and not working. At first the cows walked over, and were just kindof checking me out, staring at me. Like 20 or 40 cows! Sometimes some of them would get bored and leave , but usually there were alot of cows just 2 meters away from me! so close i could smell their stink. I thought it was cool, that they were so interested in me, and perhaps they enjoyed my whistling or beat boxing. Later i found out they were more interested in the sweeds, and when i got a small one i would toss it over and they would all fight over who got to eat it. Yes it was an amusing day next to the cows. After a day of not working hard and not making much money, i decided it wasn't worth my sore wrists and back, so that's that. No more sweeds.
Broccoli planting. This past week I didn't have work, and so i fell into a schedual of going to bed very late, staying up reading. I'll write about the books i've been reading next. But yeah, i go to bed on thursday at 4am after finishing 2 books, and i was nice and comfortably sleeping at 7 when i get a call asking me to come into work because they really need somebody. Now, usually i know ahead of time if im going to work so that i know to go to bed early, but yeah even though i was extremly tired i still went to work that day and did some broccoli work. Basically, i just walked behind this tractor that 3 people were sitting on feeding little plants into the planter, and my job was to make sure there were no gaps and that all the little plants were covered with soil properly because if they aren't they would die overnight. It was an easy job, walking around kicking dirt on plants that weren't covered right. No problem, and maybe there's lots more where that came from.
One thing that is getting annoying, is gettting my stuff stolen. I had a huge load of my laundry stolen off the line, including all my warm clothes. But now that i've been in devenport, it's my food that i need to be careful with. There seems to be a food theif staying with us, and with only about 12 people staying there, i have my suspects. It seems that everyone is getting food stolen from them, although some people could be just saying that so they would not be suspected themselves. There is this one guy that says up really late into the night, and maybe i suspect him because he wears a black leather jacket. He's a cool guy, nice to me, and he often says 'Dead Set!' which i think is funny, but im not sure about him. He says that he lost his sugar, but im like, why would someone steal only your sugar and not your milk bread and other stuff that other people seem to be complaining about. A few nights ago, the film The Fugitive, with harrison ford, was on tv, and that made me think how leather jacket dude (i forget his name) is in fact a fugitive himself, hiding out in tasmania, avoiding the law, no money and stealing food... but im not sure. Not yet. Anyways, it's really really annoying to have someone stealing your food. SO ANNOYING. I made this really good stuff with Tempeh (soybeans) and curry, making enough so i could eat it for a few days, and the next morning i find it's gone! GRRR. oh well, no use crying over stolen food...
It's now saturday, i've been at the internet cafe for a while. I bought a new 2GB USB MP3 player and i've downloaded some music and interesting lectures. I'm kindof tired of typing so i'll say goodbye for now, untill next time

This post was written over a week or so, saved as a draft in my email because i didn't get too much time on the internet to write all i wanted to write.

So i'm now in davenport. much has happened and i've not got much time to write.

The reason i left Launceston was because i couldn't find a job, despite much searching and applying. Many places said they'd call me back, including various jobs as a pruner of grape vines, a job picking gum tree nuts off the old growth forest floor, a takeaway shop (greasy food and sammiches), Taxi driver, Cafe staff, and delivery driver of dominoes pizza. Many of these places said they would call me back and then didn't. Finally I found a job planting onions, which i wrote about in my last post a bit, and then that ended and i moved to davenport to do collyflower picking. I'll write about that a bit later...

But i'll write a bit about my last days in launceston. I moved back into the Launceston backpackers, a nice place that has a piano and some nice people staying there. I stayed there before during the summer and it was crazy full of people, and it was nice to be there during the quiet season. I met alot of canadians too, including a group of students doing volunteer work (although i do'nt think they were required to work all that hard, because they told me they did tree planting, and said they planted about the same number of trees in a week that i did in one day). A couple of things really do annoy me about backpackers: one thing is getting my stuff stolen- i've had my sweet little tape player with the speaker on the side stolen, and one day i had most of my laundry stolen off the line which was a terrible loss- i lost all my sweaters, or, as the australians call them, 'Jumpers'. Also, it was all too easy to lose food. This one time during the summer months i put my bag of groceries that i bought into a box in the fridge, because it was the only free space there, and later, after all the groceries disappeared, i found out that this was the FREE box, only it didn't have a sign on it telling me that it was the FREE box. i might have written about that in here before, but it still annoys me because there should be some warning to someone who might mistakenly put his groceries in the free box by accident, perhaps a sign that says FREE would have worked... and there's always the possiblity of getting your food stolen, because i can't watch my stuff all the time... and another annoying thing is how i always get my food covered in crap from other peoples food on the higher shelves in the fridge- like my bag will be full of some sticky mystery liquid, milk, or blood from some nasty meat. GROSS. There are some nice people though, and the thing about traveling is you'll always meet new people.

So now im in Davenport, working the collies. I'm staying in this backpackers that used to be a hospital or something, and because it's the off season, there aren't many people staying there, and i have my own room, which is great. There aren't alot of people here which is nice, and there is a comfortable common room with a fire place and sweet tv satellite. One annoying thing, i've noticed it alot but especially here, is pee on the toilet seat! i guess some people never learn.
Last night was friday and i went out after a friend gave me some vodka here. There was a girl i wasn't all that attracted to who was kindof being friendly with me; i think she's a really cool girl and everything but we're much too different for it to work i think, and she swears so much! The tasmanians swear alot generally, and she's not as bad as some that i've met. One word that i find harsh is the word CUNT, but locals here don't seem to mind it, and they tend to use it in speech often. Perhaps i'll write a bit more about speech differences at the bottom, as i have been doing in earlier posts. I've been doing alot of reading as well, and have read just under 20 books since i got here, and i have a pile waiting to be read as well - the libraries here are great, and i've been taking advantage of their books as well as their internets.

One time i was in this takeaway shop and i saw what i thought was Cosmopolitan magazine, or Cosmo, the womans magazine. I thought i'd take a look at it, because sometimes i like to read those types of magazines; even though i don't like to be seen reading them, i feel like i'm spying on women by reading their trashy mags. anyways,, it wasn't cosmo, it was Cosmetic surgury magazine, a thick glossy magazine devoted to plastic surgury with really nasty before and after pictures. It's something i've never seen before, i wonder if they have it in canada.

I'm sure most people know of the Tasmanian devil, but maybe not everyone knows it's giong extinct. It's kindof gross how it happens, but i guess the tassie devil is a kindof gross animal in the way it lives. See, the tasmanian devils eat other dead animals, and when they're eating a corpse of a wallaby or kangaroo or whatever it is, they fight and bit over the corpse biting each other. But the thing is, this biting and fighting over food causes the spread of an infectious disease, or, it's like a mouth cancer.

Here are a few more speech differences i've noticed. When someone on TV is announcing the weather, it is either cold/rainy/cloudy/whatever OR, FINE. And another thing i've noticed on the news is they say, 'and now we move on to sport', like in canada we have the SPORTS part of the news, but in australia, it's just SPORT, and australians love their SPORT, especially FOOTY (haha).
I've also noticed some differences in names- i can't remember where this came from, but there was a man/ woman couple named MIF (the woman) and HAMISH (the man); apparently Hamish is a common name for a guy. weird eh? I also might have written about these two guys i met, named ASHLEY and COOKIE; in canada, ashley is a girls name, but i guess it's more of a guys name here, and cookie i thought was a weird name but apparently it's only a nickname- at the the time i thought, 'it's weird how australians name their kids 'COOKIE'.
There's something about australian speech; it's not that they're lazy when they're talking... or maybe they are talking in kindof a lazy way, but it's not like there's anything wrong with it i guess, it's just different. Like, when a word ends in A, like the word area, or australia, an australian would say the word as if it ended in an ER, like AIRYER, or AUSTRALIER,,, and to oppose this, if a word ends with ER, like the words worker, eater, killer, filler, ,, those words would be said, WORKA,EATA, KILLA, FILLA, or whatever. i think that's a strange difference. Also, if someone says the word NO, they actually say NOY, like as if they were saying soy, like the soybean kind of soy. I had a bunch more examples but my hands are cold and my time on the internet is up....