Welcome Home, Kady and an Ode to A Lady Reveals Nothing

I know you think you have great friends.  And maybe you do.  But mine are better.  Guaranteed.  After 8 months away, they welcomed me home with a weekend place to stay, lunches, dinners, shopping, pedicures, drinks, and even a 'Welcome Home, Kady' party.  I was invited to my friend Kerrie's house, and all I knew was that there would be a 'surprise theme'.  I was having a hard time guessing what it could be...maybe everybody would wear a costume and we'd eat food and drink drinks from another culture? 

The night came and Josette told me that I would have to be blindfolded once we got in the car.  Ha!  So we WEREN'T going to Kerrie's!

We were going to Otter's in Northeast Minneapolis...where all my friends were waiting with a big sign, happy smiles and KARAOKE.  My favorite favorite favorite activity in the whole world. 

Teri even sang me a very special version of REM's It's the End of the World as We Know It, for which she had altered the lyrics to be based on this blog.

Try to sing it in your mind to the tune of the REM song.  I'm also including clickable links to the original stories from this blog so you can read up on anything that might interest you:

That's right it starts with Australia, koalas, snakes, and an aeroplane and Kady Hexum's not afraid.

Peeing in a wetsuit, listen to yourself burp - Don't forget the wombat, Tonka was the wombat.  Rollin in a SmartCar, grunt, no speed, the tires start to clatter just like a moped.  Pack on your back, but you bought a rolling suitcase, and an ugly stinger suit with really long arms.

Spank Me galley, smell of gas don't strike that match we might all blow up.  Fale fale sugar cane, and coconut juice.  Scuba diving, sun burn.  Solo now.

Uh oh, brewery, hitchhikers, bicycle with a motor.  Kady cooks, but serve yourself.

Hiking glaciers, listen to your finger bleed dummy with the monkey and the cat poop coffee.  Right?  Right.  Your Thailand buses, Summer-isms, snake wine, bed bugs, waterfall photos.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it.  And more to come.

Sick O'clock watch the oscars, don't get caught in Cu Chi tunnels.  Slash and burn bus rides, listen to your stomach churn.  Pee behind a bull dozer, Korean drinking, Seoul fooding.  Eating fish intestines.  Jjin jil bang naked showers.  Light a candle, back in Minnesota.  Mess up guest room.  Watch your dad eat squirrel meat, uh-oh, this means Relax Underwear.  Acted a fool at Angkor Wat.  Kiss my grits I'm a waitress.  My dad has a uterus.  Offer me some Crocs, offer me a date after fart and I decline.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it. And more to come.

The other night I dreamt of Jen Aniston's fan light.  Then I went to zip line.  Diaper and high heels.  Dengue fever.  Granada 6.  Policeman with a Cerveza.  Turd burglar, I'm sick, Machu Picchu, boom!  You went around the world and dreamt of Ben Affleck.  Right?  Right.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it.

It's the end of the year as you know it. And more to come.

Reformed Woman

I used to have quite a messy bedroom.  Click here to read an old story from the archives that cracked me up the other day...  I'm just so glad I've changed my ways in the past year.  Turned over a new leaf, you might say:

Costa Rica, March 2011

Minneapolis, June 2010

Australia, February 2010

The Year in Review - 2010

You thought I couldn't make it, right?  365 posts in one year.  365 days with no real income.  100 showers.  EW!  You know it.

But here I am.  One year ago today, I quit my job and spent the following month selling everything I owned to prepare for a monumental trip around the world.  It was really hard because I liked my stuff.  I had good stuff.  The kind of stuff it takes years to accumulate.  Like my wine rack.  It took me forever to find a perfect wine rack that fit perfectly in the corner of my dining room.  Most wine racks only hold like 6 bottles of wine.  Or they're ugly.  But patience paid off and I found one on Craigslist.  And my dining room table.  I got it at a World Market that was about to close.  I found a couple of vintage blue bucket chairs that framed my fireplace perfectly from Vintage Modern Living out of Minneapolis.  All of my artwork - collected from local artists and friends...well, those I kept.  You can pry them from my cold, dead fingers.  Or the cold, dead fingers of the five or six friends who are graciously storing them for me at the moment.  And the clothes.  The clothes!  Since I've been wearing the same four outfits for about a year, I think back to my cram-packed walk-in closet with definite longing...

But really, I'm not feeling too too extra nostaligic at the moment.  Because even though I gave it all up, I got so much more in return.  For your viewing pleasure, some of the highlights of my 2010:

I got to hold a koala in Australia!

...hiked on a glacier in New Zealand

...experienced amazing hospitality, the world over.  (Samoan man sharing coconut from his yard.)

...saw Angkor Thom in Cambodia

...learned to surf

...went horseback riding in Guatemala

...swung from a rope into crystal clear waters in Laos

...watched a boat go through the locks at the Panama canal

...faced some very real fears.

...saw these buildings in Kuala Lumpur I've been dreaming about for years

...fed an elephant

...rode a motorscooter around Thailand

...learned to SCUBA

...Zip Lined in Nicaragua

...quality-timed it with my mom and dad

...and got to spend all summer with my favorite little boy in the whole world

What was your favorite blog post from 2010?  Comment me, I'm totally curious!  Here's mine.  Drum roll please.  Here, for your re-viewing pleasure:

Click here for my favorite blog post of 2010.

It's not over yet folks.  I'm not planning to go home anytime soon, so stay tuned for more zany adventures, fear-facing, and of course, more poop stories.  I haven't even begun to tell all of those.

"Business Cards"

My friend Matt designed some information cards for me before my big trip so that I could share email/facebook/blog information with people I met.  When I was staying in Sydney Australia, the grandson of the couple hilariously taped TONS of my cards to his door.  I didn't even notice it until it was pointed out to me, but OH how we laughed.

Here's the little turd who did it.

The Fischers

And here is the big turd who put him up to it.

I Heart Trees

(You may remember this poem as the one my shop teacher made me memorize and recite for too many tardy arrivals to his class. But I never forgot it.)

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast

A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. -Joyce Kilmer

And Hal, my dad.  My dad makes trees.  In fact he's kind of obssessed with them.  I call him Johnny Appleseed, because he's constantly planting trees.  Sometimes he just cuts off a branch of one tree and sticks it in the ground, and voila!  A new tree!  A tree that you better not accidentally scrape with the lawn mower because then you pretty much killed the tree and he'll never forgive you.  I often wonder if he would be as mad if somebody scraped ME with a lawnmower.  Probably not.  He'd probably suggest it was somehow my fault because, stupid, I got in the way. 

Remember this old Hal-ism? "I don't mind killing animals, but I hate killing a tree...unless it's already dead and I cut it up to burn it."

Maybe this is where I get my love for trees.  I love them.  I love taking pictures of them, and seeing their silhouette against the sky.  This year I have seen so many amazing trees.  Here are my favorites:

Bali

Australia

New Zealand, South Island

New Zealand, North Island

Cambodia

Laos

Korea

Panama

Samoa

Singapore

Thailand

But my favorite? My absolute favorite tree in the whole world? This little momma, located in International Falls, MN, on the way up to my job at Island View Lodge. I got to drive by this tree almost every day this summer. I kept meaning to take a photo, but never got around to it. You can't really see it in this shot, but there is a huge crook in the neck of this tree.  I can't get enough of it.  Finally, when I went to dinner with my parents at Island View, I made my dad pull over the car so I could take this shot in the rain. Me and dad and my tree.



Kady's Book Club

Books I have read/am currently reading on this trip:

The Thorn Birds / Colleen McColough -- Loved it.  Long amazing epic novel with all the twists and turns.  Plus it mentioned places in New Zealand and Australia where I visited.  Tragic tragic tragedy.  I cried, and then cried some more, all that good stuff.

Flannery O'Connor short stories -- What is this lady, depressed or something?  Her stories are totally bleak and I think I could have gotten more into it if I had been in my cozy basement in front of a fire, instead of trying to have a GOOD TIME on vacation.  Of notable mention was 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'...bleak bleak bleak, not Cormac McCarthy bleak, but bleak enough.

First They Killed My Father -- Super good, but a sad and gutwrenching account of a little girl whose family lived in Cambodia in 1975 when the crap hit the fan and the Khmer Rouge started killing doctors and lawyers and people with glasses and everybody who used to be involved with the previous government, including the little's girls dad who was a police officer.  Then they forced everybody to work on farms and rice fields and starved them into working extra hard so they could ship off the rice to China in exchange for weapons.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan / Lisa See -- A book about Chinese footbinding and man oh man the disgusting description of the footbinding is worth the whole read.  And at the end there's a nice lesson for anybody who has ever had a friend.  Woman-abuse at it's finest.  Thanks, China.

The Bible -- trying to read it all in one year. Not finished yet, obviously.  Too slow at times, too fast at others, but overall I give it a thumbs-up.

Bastard out of Carolina / Dorothy Allison -- sad little tale of a girl in the South whose momma marries the WRONG dude.  Seriously the wrong dude.

A Child Called It -- yikes. Hope you like abuse and neglect, and poor writing/publishing/editing.  Nuff said.  I didn't like this book.  Forgive me for saying this, but it could have been horrible-r.  If the writer was any good at writing.  I wanted to feel bad for him, really I did.  But I kept noticing editing mistakes where I should have been noticing burning on the stovetop and starvation and abusive alcoholic parenting.

Zeitoun / Dave Eggers -- A fair to middlin' book about Hurricane Katrina.  If you're a Dave Eggers fan, you'll love it, but if you're not, I feel dumb 'recommending' this book.  It's good, but not AWESOME.  Good points: great storytelling, and might help an ignorant American like myself understand what a Hijab is and why not all Muslims are what you might have thought they were. 

Sanctuary / William Faulkner -- I consider myself to be of average intelligence, but keeping all of the characters straight in this knockout of a story was difficult.  Too many characters get introduced and Faulkner will call somebody by their name in one sentence and call them 'the man' in the next and you never know he's talking about the same dern person.  Great book, not a 'light read' by any means.  Save this one for the middle of winter when you're snowed in.  And prepare to get very angry with a certain character named Gowan, and another one named Temple, though it really wasn't her fault.

Love on the Rocks / Victoria Henry -- was desperate for a book and traded for this one.  Absolute rubbish, indulgent rubbish.  Do not read this book.  Unless you want to be caught up in a naughty little light beach read that you won't be able to put down, that is.  I hated it.  And I loved it.  Don't read it.  Here's the cliff notes:

Lisa, a beautiful 5'2" curvy beauty, storms off her modeling job.  She is sick of being hit on all the time.  George, a successful and gorgeous businessman, storms off HIS job.  He is sick of screwing over the little man, and having to grin and bear it.  Turns out Lisa is George's girlfriend and the two of them decide to leave for a weekend at the oceany coast of England and end up choosing a run down hotel called 'The Rocks' because it's raining really hard and they have no other choice.  They fall in love with the place, and decide to buy it.  But Bruno, a rich local wanted to buy it.  But they buy it.  George's WIFE Victoria Snow shows up with her daughter, destitute because her boyfriend throws them out, penniless.  We didn't know George was married, and we hate this woman and her impetuousness.  But soon we realize that Victoria and George really do belong together, especially after she gets PREGNANT and then jilted Lisa falls in love with Bruno, and they buy out George's interest in the newly renovated and wildly successful 'The Rocks' hotel.  Oh, and in an annoying subplot Bruno's brother Joe accidentally dies after HE has an affair with a girl and gets HER pregnant, and she tells nobody until the baby is two years old, but everybody's happy because they miss Joe so much and now he has a SON!  The End.

Oh, and because of that STUPID INSIPID book, I have had "Love on the rocks...what a surprise....do ditty do...look in your eyes" in my head for TWO WEEKS!

Australia Photo Special

 Click here to view some of my photos from Australia

Nails, I Hardly Knew Ye'

Look at these suckers!  Long, luxurious nails!  That NEVER happens to me.  But somebody said in the sun and humidity your nails grow.  Anyway, I couldn't stop staring at them every single day.  Plus I'm super tan right now (for me) and that made it worse.  I guess my head was getting too big and I needed to be knocked down a peg because all of sudden one day the middle one ripped, and I lost the ring I just bought for $120 that looked so nice with the nails.  You can kind of see the rip in the photo.  So now I'm back to my boring old self.

p.s. The ring is found and being mailed to me here in New Zealand.

Funny Money

This is just a slight complaint.  Something somebody should have asked me about first.  Before they made it the NATIONAL MONEY of Australia.

Below, in a terribly out of focus photo, you will see, from left to right, the American Dime, the Australian five cent piece, the Australian 2 DOLLAR coin, and then the American Nickel.  Now, why is the 2 DOLLAR coin so small?  So people will lose it and then other people will find it and then be super happy? 

Now, spend a month in Australia, and get used to the tiny 2 dollar coin and the larger 1 dollar coin.  Proceed onto New Zealand where their money is the EXACT opposite.  Below, on the top row, we see a New Zealand one dollar coin, smaller as it's supposed to be then the larger 2 dollar coin.

Bottom row: Australian 50 cent piece, which is HUGE, then the Australian one dollar coin, and lastly the Australian 2 dollar coin.  Can anybody make sense of this for me?

(**Interesting to note that the Australian 50 cent piece still has a picture of Lady Di and the Prince of Wales on it.) 

On my first day in Australia, I bought something for $5.80, (let's say...) and gave the woman a $10 bill.  She handed me a handfull of coins.  I need my change, I say.  You've got it, she says.  Oh, you gave me just the change, I need the bills, I say.  Then she explains that I have all the change.  Of course I was hugely embarrassed, and thus began a month of carrying around six pounds of coins in my purse.  Not realizing of course that there's like $50 in there.

Peeing in a Wetsuit

As I mentioned before in this earlier blog post, whilst sailing on the Spank Me, I didn't want to use the on-board disgusting bathroom and neither would you.  What other options is a person left with?

One:

Pee in the ocean.  This time of year, however, most reputable companies require their patrons to wear a stinger suit at all times in the water.  This prevents death by jellyfish sting.  So, more clearly, your only actual option is to pee through your stinger suit into the ocean.

One Size Fits...Most?

 

OK so fast forward.  We were off the Spank Me and on Reef World, where we stayed overnight in the lap of luxury.  Our private room had crown molding for Gosh sakes.  BUT, when the ferry that brings the day-trip people from the Mainland to Reef World is there (from 11am to 3pm), we were not allowed to use our awesome private bathroom, inexplicably.  Instead we had to use the disgusting ferry bathroom.  Not much better than Spank Me, and so here we are back to my pee story.

During my entire first dive (wearing the neon blue stinger suit pictured above) I was completely unable to go to the bathroom.  Oh and by the way, after all the one-day people left and it was just Teri and me on the boat (the only overnighters), I saved a nice darker-colored Stinger Suit off the rack so I wouldn't be stuck with that gross neon-blue getup again.  Also I hung it in the wind so it could dry properly from use the day before.  There's nothing worse than putting on a wet used stinger suit.  Anyway.  On the second day, on the second dive, I had to pee really really bad.  I had to pee the whole entire dive.  But listen, after 32 years of telling your body "Don't pee in the pool!" it's really hard to revert back to "it's OK now, go ahead and pee in the pool".  When we were almost finished, and approaching Reef World at the end of the dive, I realized that I would have to use that gross ferry bathroom if I didn't take action soon.

I got to GO.

OCD got the one-up on tradition and I decided to go.  Unfortunately it was in the staging area where they teach you scuba skills before you go on your dive.  I let it all go.  Standing there on a metal platform thing, in the ocean, waist-deep, I started peeing.  And I kept peeing.  And peeing.  And peeing.  I pretended it was taking a long time to get my fins off.

People were starting to wonder what was up with me.  I lied and told the gorgeous red-headed dive instructor that I needed to "do that thing with my hair", where you smooth it back in the pool because it's messy from swimming.  But in truth I was still peeing.  For what seemed an hour.  Teri was ready to get out, and was looking at me funny like 'let's go' (and by the way she was not in danger of getting in the pee at all, she was in a different area.  I'm not a total jerk.) 

Then suddenly I jumped!  Right behind me, and by the way I'm STILL peeing, were two other divers with their goggles right in my butt.  They were also returning from their dive.  I was so embarrassed because I felt sure they could see the pee cloud around me.  And also I felt bad because, well, you know.  But I wasn't done peeing yet!  I tried to move around as much as possible to disseminate the pee, and I tried to do it so that they wouldn't know what I was doing.  I was sure that they were.  Kind of like, "oops, sorry, didn't mean to be in your way, NOTHING funny is going on...heh heh...."

I WAS forced to actually do "that thing with my hair."

Later Teri and I cried laughing because I finally admitted to what was really happening and she said she was wondering why I was so surprised when the other divers arrived, and also why I insisted that we go snorkeling immediately after we got out of the water from diving, and then why I was done snorkeling after 30 seconds.  (Rinsing!)

So Here Is What I Learned About Wombats

Wombats are generalists, meaning they'll eat a variety of foods.  (A koala is a specialist, only eating eucalyptus leaves.)  They dig holes under the ground and live in burrows.  They have the same cartilidge plate in their butt that a koala does, but where the koala uses his for sitting, the wombat uses his for protection.  A shield.  They can run 40-50kph!!  So if a dingo is chasing them, they start running!  And then stop!  And the dingo gets knocked out.  Also they sleep in their burrows with just their butt sticking out.  So the dingo can chew and chew at their butt all it wants, but the wombat will not feel it at all.  And the dingo gets nowhere.  If a dingo happens to get into the burrow, the wombat lets him.  He lays on his back, very still.  Now the dingo gets all the way on top of it to go for the jugular.  At the last minute the wombat uses it's strong legs to KICK! the dingo up into the air and knock it out on the ceiling of the burrow (or hopefully crush the skull.)

Plus they are cute!  I got to hold this little guy, named Tonka.  His mom was hit by a car, and a passerby checked to see if she had a little nugget in her pouch, and sure enough, there was Tonka.  He is being raised at the sanctuary.  He is 12 months old and bottle fed.  In the wild the wombat stays by the mother for 2 years.  He was so sleepy!  He fell asleep twice in my arms.  And then they were bottle feeding him they had to shake him awake a couple times because he just dozed off.  While eating.

So Here is What I Learned about Koalas

Of course a koala is a marsupial, which just means that the babies develop mostly in the pouch, and are not "placental" mammals.  They are born a naked jellybean, only 2 inches long, and possessing two claws, which it uses to make its way to the pouch, where it will spend the next 6 to 7 months turning into a real koala.  The opening of the pouch on a koala is downward, as opposed to a kangaroo's upward facing pouch.  But the two teats inside swell up and prevent the baby from falling out.  However if the baby is unfortunate enough to fall out, the mother does nothing to help it.  She will let it die.

Of the almost 700 varieties of eucalyptus, the koala eats about 70.  There is not a lot of nutrition in the eucalyptus leaf, and since that's all they eat, the koala has almost no energy.  Its brains are pretty small.  They are stupid, slow and sleep 21 hours a day.  But so cute!  (See above).
Eucalyptus is toxic, even for the koala.  In order to not be poisoned from the leaves, the koala has a bacteria in its stomach to protect it.  A baby koala is not born with this bacteria.  How does it get there?  Well, I'll tell you:

They eat their mom's poop!  Diarrhea poop!  Normally the mom koala takes about a week to digest one eucalyptus leaf, because it moves so slowly through the colon.  It comes out dry like a rabbit turd.  When the mom has a developed, ready-to-come-on-out baby in the pouch though, her body AUTOMATICALLY smooshes the leaf through faster, creating diarrhea, which the baby eats, (made easier by the fact that the pouch faces downward and it's face is practically right in the way).  So -- after the baby spends 6-7 months in the pouch, finishing their development, they are ready to eat some poop and get their stomachs ready for eating eucalyptus leaves.  Then the mom just poops and poops and poops and the baby eats it for 6 weeks.  Then the baby climbs onto the mom's back and lives there for 12 months.  Now the mom figures the baby is ready to be on its own and so she claws and bites at the baby if necessary to make it leave.

The End!