On the way

Greetings from Singapore airport!
It has been a pretty nutty week, I've been to Byron Bay the last 2 weekends for a hens weekend and the corresponding wedding, with a week in Brisbane in between to get some gear for this trip and to attend the funeral of an awesome guy who was in my year at uni. He was one of the 'secial people' in our year, and tragically died three weeks ago. So it has been a week of ups and downs.
I have just finished the first leg of the trip to Heathrow, can't believe the next leg is almost twice as long!
gotta run for now, hopefully I'll be able to put some photos on here in the near future..........

6 hours to go!

Well, all is packed and ready, and all I have to do now is actually get some sleep and hear my alarm at 4:15 in the morning!
I finished my 7 week stint at 4 Paws vets with a splenectomy (removal of the spleen) in a dog with a suspected bleeding tumour, though it looks more like it had actually been kicked and ruptured when I got in there. Yet another 'first' for me to do this surgery without any assistant. Pretty exciting really!

From now on I'm not sure when I will next get to post on this website, and I suspect photos will not be easy to put on here until I get set up at Buxton.
But do stay tuned and I'll put up the next post when I can. The two shots below are just a couple of things I going to miss...........

Cute photo of by Sheba cat 

The house I'm saying goodbye to 

Monday was an exciting day. One of the other vets and I did our first pinning of a broken leg in a cat. Its femur was snapped in half, so we went in and put a pin up the middle of it, as well as a couple of bits of wire around the fragments to make it nice and stable. (Sounds simple, hey?:) 2 hours later, I as closing the surgery site............

Our tools resemble a carpenter's kit!

T-minus 3 days

Gee whiz, it's three days till I leave Townsville, and it seems like there is so much to do! (probably because there is). I have just got back from an a 'small group' (like a bible study) that I have been going to for the last 3 weeks, and I am really sad that I will not be spending more time with that great group of people. I seem to remember as I left Victoria that I wouldn't be uprooting my whole life again in a hurry, but it feels like I'm doing that when I leave here as well!

The good news is that I HAVE A JOB!! :) I start on the 19 June in Buxton, which is in Derbyshire, about 3 hours north of London and 45 minutes south of Manchester. It is 50:50 small:large animals, with mainly dairy and beef cattle, sheep and a small amount of equine in the large animal department. Buxton is a town of about 21 000, in the centre of the Peak District, which is famous for it's beautiful scenery, rock climbing, caving, hiking etc, so it should be an exciting place to explore while I'm there. It is a locum position, but could be as long as 7 months, depending on how things pan out. So that is really great to have organised before I head off, and to know that I will be able to replenish the coffers, which I think I will need to do by then! I have some more photographic evidence of work, which I will post on here when I get the chance................

More visitors!

'Fitzgerald's Hotel' was fully booked last weekend! Mum had one of her best friends from school in Engand and her husband staying, and My good friend Josie, who I was at Cromwell College and also lived with at uni aso came to visit! Our friend Craig, from our old church in Brissie was also in town, so we caught up with him too.

Breakfast on our deck with Di and Alan Cooper, Jose and mum 

WIth Josie and Craig on top of Mount Stewart 

I have been working too!

Although I lack the same photographic evidence that I have been working hard, I promise I have! We have seen some interesting wildlife cases, one of which was a bluetongue lizard that was brought in having been hit by a car. from the pic below, he was very lucky!

A blue-tongue lizard that came in with head trauma. it has lost a few scales and had a split lip, but the boney structures of the skull look intact on x-ray! 

Gone with the Wind

We headed north to Cairns and the Atherton Tablelands on the May day long weekend to visit family and friends up there. We passed through the areas worst hit by Cyclone Larry. Even 6 weeks after it struck, the whole area looks like it has just happened. there are tarps on every second house, trees broken or uprooted and random bits of corrugated iron and tin from rooves and sheds scattered about the countryside. Houses are still being cleaned out, with piles of possessions, sometimes whole housefulls of furniture, appliances and belongings sitting in soggy heaps waiting for collection. The near-constant rain since the cyclone hit has slowed the clean up operations, and has further water damaged buildings.

The rail bridge over a river north of Innisfail - see all the lumps on the bridge at the back - that is plant material that was washed downstream and caught on the bridge when the water level was above the road!

a bald raintree - but 6 weeks on there are already signs of re-growth 

These hills are supposed to be covered with a lush dark green rainforest. They look threadbare and moth eaten as all the leaves have been blown off the trees. It will take ages to restore the ecosystems that were dependent on the canopy to control light levels on the rainforest floor.

6 weeks on, the banana are recouperating well, but you can still see all the decapitated ones 

This is the house where I grew up. doesn't look too bad, except there was a huge pile of possessions out the front, so I assume there was some water damage (the front fence is gone too!) 

A roofless house 

Thsi is a huge tree, those roots are taller than me, but it was still ripped up from the ground 

The front door of the church hall looks fine, no signs of damage, except the sign warning of danger...... 

... but if you go round the side you can see why! The stage at the back was where we did our Sundayschool Christmas concerts and things, and the room in the foreground was a kitchen. 

This is where I learned ballet for 8 years when I was younger. (wasn't quite as well ventilated back then!) 

Milla Milla falls - it is hard to take a bad picture of these, they are so symmetrical! this looks like a little oasis amongst all the destroyed rainforest. 

'Golden Orb' spider - this was about 20cm long and wide! They have yellow knees (you can onlyjsut see them here, they are on the underside), and really coarse webs that are hard to break.  

Lots o' water

I met up with some new and old friends to go up to Wallaman falls, a couple of hours north for Anzac day. It is the largest single drop waterfall in Australia. Last time I was there was for a 10 day 'Outward Bound' experience about 10 years ago (that makes me feel old!), and there was significantly less water going over the falls back then. The wet season has been amazing up here, I can't belive Townsville is still looking beautiful and green this late in the year (why am I leaving again?). Here are some pics of the view from the lookout (the only downside to a good wet season is getting wet, and low clouds obscuring the view!).

.. 

the coulds give it an eerie atmosphere... 

Hi, haven't had much time to keep you up to date, but here's a picture I took just outside Innisfail, where cyclone Larry hit. I'll put some more on here when I get the chance, we are just getting the place ready for soem friends of mum's visiting from the UK....... 

moo 

The cows look different up here........ (still very cute!)