In exciting news for people who love animals, people who love Australia, or people who just love strange looking creatures with funny names, Sydney’s Taronga Zoo have announced that they’re now looking after a 40 day old puggle (that’s zootalk for ‘baby Echidna’ to you and me). Its name is Beau and it was found in a caravan park on the central coast. Presumably not on a surfing holiday, given Beau’s tender age.
Beau the Puggle
Although, Beau might have been relishing an early taste of freedom – in what seems to me like a pretty severe form of grounding, adult female Echidnas generally “stash their young in a burrow from about 50 days old”, according to experts from the Zoo. And they don’t let them out for months. Although, they do home deliver food to their puggles, so that’s a plus.
Feeding time at the zoo.
And while we won’t know whether it’s Mr Beau or Miss Beau for some months yet, we do know that young Beau has a healthy appetite – according to the Zoo, “Beau resembles a mini vacuum cleaner, going back and forth making sure every drop of milk is sucked up – contributing to its ever growing belly”. You go, Beau.
Oh, Beau
So, there you go. A little story about Beau – from a trailer park on the central coast to a prime harbourside pad in Sydney, without the constraints of gender or hair. Good luck to you, pretty puggle.
You can check out more photos and videos of Beau on the Taronga Zoo website here.
I’d never heard of the Color Run until my friend Anne asked if I’d like to join her team – when I checked it out online, I saw that it looks bizarre, crazy, colourful, fun and very very very different to a normal fun run. So, of course I’m in. They call the Color Run (American spelling – it’s really bugging me not to write ‘colour’, believe me) ‘the happiest 5k on the planet’.
According to the organisers, there are really only two simple rules: (1) you have to start the run in white shirts and (2) you have to finish the run covered in colour. I love their big picture explanation: “Runner/walkers begin the 5k at the start line like a brand new pristine coloring book. By the end, they look like they fell into a Willy Wonka… tie dyed… vat of colored goodness. We are the creators of an all new paint race phenomena!” Of course, they had me at Willy Wonka.
So, how does it work? Apparently, “each kilometer of the event is associated with a designated color: yellow, orange, pink, or blue. As the runners/walkers reach the Kilometer COLOR RUN Zones, they are blitzed by our volunteers, sponsors, and staff with COLOR. All products are 100% natural and safe. You can eat the stuff if you’d like (we have tried it and don’t suggest it, it is surprisingly high in calories and leaves a chalky aftertaste). Of course, we save the best for last, ending the race with a color extravaganza of epic proportions.”
Basically, you run 5km and every km, people jump out and shoot or throw coloured powder all over you. This is the first time the run has come to Australia, after being rolled out across the USA. The first Australian Color Run is in Melbourne in November and we get our turn in Sydney in February. I’ve registered and, by the looks of the peeps in this promo video, better make sure I don’t have any appointments for the rest of the day…Let me know if you’re in Sydney and want to join in the colourful fun!
And so, it has happened. After keeping up my running program while I was on holidays and feeling great about the fact that I was injury-free as I ran further and further, I have hit a snag. And by ‘snag’ I mean ‘inflamed bursar’. At least, I think that’s what the physio called it when I visited on Wednesday. I was confused as I always thought a Bursar was that old guy at school in charge of collecting the fees and managing the books, but seemingly it’s also the name of little sacs of fluid in your body that help the tendons or muscles (or somethings) move smoothly. Until one gets inflamed and makes you walk like a cowboy / old grandma; and hurts when you sit down and stand up; and hurts when you move your leg in bed; and hurts when you get in and out of cars. Yes, it hurts.
No more running for the Pinkies – for now.
But it hurt even more when I went to see the physio. He seemed like such a nice young man on introduction – he asked me lots of questions and got me to do some tricks like standing on one leg while he tried to push me over. Fun stuff like that. My hip was already a bit sore when I arrived – I confessed to him that I’d felt as though it was getting better before the appointment and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to describe the pain to him, which would have wasted his time. So, I cleverly decided to hop up and down on the bad leg a few times – and man alive did that do the trick. It did seem like a good idea at the time, I swear.
These Wexford donkeys were the last to see me running – for now.
Although I obviously knew that the injury site was around my hip, I wasn’t sure what the appropriate clothing would be to allow the physio to do his work. He said that I’d need to change into shorts and, hey presto, he produced a box of shorts from somewhere in the office. A box of other people’s shorts, of all colours and sizes. I told him I’d try a few on as if I was having a fun day at the shops, but as I shuffled through the box, I realised that although there were a range of different sizes, there was only one length. And that was probably best described as ‘pole dancer short’. Now, I’m a pretty conservative lass and I’m not known to flash my lily white pins around town, so it was only the promise of ending the annoying pain that saw me get into a pair of teeny tiny turquoise shorts and try to look both sporty and confident at the same time. All while managing a distinct lean over to the right to avoid inflaming my injury.
Anyways, the physio then proceeded to poke and prod and ultrasound and massage and release fire ants and thunder bolts and daggers. At least, that’s what it felt like, but there probably weren’t any thunder bolts. And then, like all good practitioners, he encouraged me to “just relax”. ARE YOU FOR REAL, MAN? It was like a crazed attack and I had to put my hands under my head so that I wouldn’t punch him in the face. I told him that’s what I was doing and he laughed and said he had never been hit yet. Lots of attempts, apparently, but none had connected. It sounded like a dare to me, but I battled on and tried to pretend it was all fine. Unfortunately, a poker face is not one of my talents, so he kept apologising as my face must have contorted into a series of loony grimaces.
That’s how I felt too, baby.
And just when I thought the torture was over, he returned with a heat pack and an ice pack and placed them both in the neighbourhood of the injury. I’m not sure how those two things don’t just cancel each other out – it seemed a bit like trying to serve baked ice cream for dessert – but he left them on for a while and disappeared. I lay there on the bed, with my head on the pillows, and dozed off into a slumber. NO, I DID NOT. I lay there on the bed that’s really a table, in my borrowed shorts that were probably for a pole dancer, with my head on two pillows that have surely supported the heads of many other victims, with the medical equivalent of baked ice cream on my hip.
Pigeons often get a hard time – whether you mock them as ‘rats with wings’, or snigger as they rummage through school rubbish bins to try and salvage some dinner, they’re not exactly the most admired in the bird world. Except for racing pigeons – those guys are just amazing and I don’t think I’ll ever understand how they ‘work’. Anyways, a recent pigeon post on designboom caught my eye and I thought I’d share it here.
In a nutshell, German artists Julian Charriere and Julius von Bismarck (how’s that for a great name?) came up with a project they called “Some pigeons are more equal than others” during this year’s Biennale in Venice. In a daring PR campaign to make the pigeons ‘less offensive’ and more attractive to visitors, they took some of the birds from the Venetian piazzas into specially created booths and spray-painted them in different colours. Birds of spray, if you will. (Sorry.)
It’s an interesting idea and it definitely changes the whole look of the birdies. But, like ladies dressed up and fake tanned for a day at the races, the bright packaging will fade and true colours will be revealed before too long. And pigeons will be pigeons. Here are some of the photos – see what you think.
You can check out the designboom post here, with lots more photos of the multi-coloured pigeons.
I mentioned a little a while ago that I bought some ridiculously bright pink running shoes in an attempt to run faster. After a reasonable testing period, I am thinking of writing to the manufacturer to tell them that THEIR SHOES AREN’T WORKING PROPERLY.
As a bit of background, I am not what you’d call a natural athlete. It is not a genetic gift with which the children in my family were blessed. I mean, you know, we can all walk without bumping into stuff, but we weren’t really runners or netballers or footballers or gymnasts or swimmers. My younger brother and I were t-ball players (and I don’t even know if that version of junior baseball exists anymore) and I played volleyball and a teeny bit of tennis in high school. Where the coach was the same creepy old dude that had coached my mother when she attended the same school some decades earlier, so it wasn’t exactly Wimbledon.
The Bay Run, Canada Bay in Sydney. [Image from NSW Govt Planning & Infrastructure]Anyways, a few years ago I started to run a bit because it seemed like the thing to do. I felt like I was still too young and too dog-less to be going for walks, and running always looked pretty cool. When I watched other people doing it, that is. I was running a few times a week for a while there (the Bay Run in Sydney was my stomping / slumping ground) and my fitness improved and I remember feeling fairly self-righteous after I exercised. But then I fell off the wagon. And the cruel thing about a long break in exercise is that it’s not like riding a bike – your body (well, at least, my body) doesn’t pick up right where it left off and say, ‘oh yeah, we’re running again – I remember this, let’s go’. Not even close.
Path to Mosman Bay. [Image from Sydney Diary Star]So now I’m starting again. Along a beautiful track, with my new shoes, the Pinkies, for motivation. And since I’m a bit older, I don’t want to risk getting injured or collapsing on the side of the road, so I’m following a training program called Couch to 10k. I had started with a Couch to 5k program a few years ago and I liked the gradual increase in intervals, so that the running kind of snuck up on you. And I also liked the way they encouraged you to take a day off every other day.
I found an app called 10K for Pink – it’s a free app that someone somewhere had recommended and it’s pretty good – I’m up to Week 6 of the 14 week program now. It’s great because I can just concentrate on breathing while I play my music and a lady in an upbeat voice interrupts at intervals to tell me what to do – “start running”, “start walking”, “you have one minute left” and my favourite: “start your cool down”.
If the Pinkies aren’t exactly making me faster, at least they’re super-light, which must surely mean that it’s a little easier to lift my feet. And it also means that I have no excuses when I go on a couple of trips later this year – the Pinkies will be coming with me, tucked into my suitcase and ready to run in the northern hemisphere. Since the first trip is in a few weeks, I thought I should introduce the Pinkies as (a) it will help to keep me running, now that you know and (b) they may post from their travels if they run across any everyday sparks. And if you’re thinking of running, you can check out the Couch to 10k program that I’m using here. It did seem like a good idea at the time!
everydaysparks 