Kangaroos like Moose

You've got to be kidding me.  I took a job as a "row weeder" for $16/hour for 12 hours a day.  Good money, right? True, but this might be THE most boring, mindless job I've ever had.  What's row weeding, you ask? Well, there's a tractor engine that has 4 arms that extend infront of the body and inbetween rows of cotton.  Each arm has a seat mounted with a fibreglass covering to protect from the worst of the sun.  The row weeder is driven from one of the arms that has one peddle for forwards, neutral and reverse and the other pedal has two buttons, one pivots left and the other pivots right.  Incredibly simple.  And you spray weeds within the cotton with an herbacide - nothing to it.

What I really wanted was to come here and loose myself and just experience something different while making money.  But I get here and within seconds of getting into the field I was told that I would be trained to drive the tractor and getting my own crew to be in charge of. What? I queried, this isn't what I signed up for.  I wanted to be told what to do, where to do it, when to do it and how to do it.  But I was left to my own devices to sort things out.  Luckily enough it wasn't particularly complicated and I managed to figure everything out and everything ran smoothly.

All I can say is bless Apple - I think my iPod saved my sanity.

I'm in a town called Mungindi - about 8 hours west of Brisbane.  However, I'm staying at a bar called the 2 Mile Hotel - aptly named because it is 2 miles from town (funnily Australia is metric - but that doesn't seem to matter out here).  The worst part is that Mungindi is a border town that lies between 2 states, New South Wales and Queensland.  That doesn't seem that bad, right? However, there is a time difference as you cross that border (which is actually a river).  So we live on Queensland time, but work on New South Wales time.  On the field at 6:30am means a 4:00am wake up.  It hurts a lot.

I've seen wild emus, kangaroos and the biggest spiders that are alive.  People here treat driving at night like we do, except that where we are concerned about moose hitting the car up north, they are concerned by 'roos.  Where we have raccoon roadkill, there is kangaroo roadkill all over the place.  But I have seen the most amazing stars and the best sunrises and sets that I think possible (because of the bush fires ~300km south of us the sun goes red at dusk and dawn).

Headed back to meet up with Kev in Brisbane tomorrow - excellent!