Annual Report 1992

Hargrove “End of Year” Letter January 9, 1993
The Hargroves
6100 Bend of River
Austin , TX 78746-7201

Please note our address. Some of you who should know better still haven’t got it right. Next year, we are going to publish your names. This isn’t the first time we have published this letter a bit late. We hope that you haven’t been too worried waiting. This way, you will have the luxury of reading it without the bustle of Christmas to interfere.

Charles: Finished his Year of Living Languorously and decided to go back to school. He is now a grad student in Archæology at UT. First, he went on another dig to Belize during the summer. The most interesting thing to come out of the dig was probably the Common Potoo, a curious bird that Linda and Jim have never seen but want to. He decided that he had enough of living at home and found an apartment of his own. Now we see him only when he has laundry to wash, needs to eat, or wants to watch the Atlanta Braves on TV.

Claire: Continued her policy of traveling to foreign lands. This time, she took a semester and studied in Brisbane , Australia , which is about as far from Austin as she could get and remain on the same planet. She’s still trying to learn new languages. Try this for size: “Vegemite on toast is fair dinkum tucker for brekkie.” [1] By December, she had visited most of the continent, acquired a boy friend, completed her courses, and taken a vacation. Linda and Jim decided they needed to go there and make sure she came back.

Linda: Found out the bad part of her educational plan: she couldn’t use her credit for Math 100 at Rice to satisfy the requirements for Nursing. So she struggled through a correspondence course in algebra, with a tiny bit of help from Jim. Panic struck the morning of the final exam. Ask Jim about being waked up at 6:00 to help with the problem, “What time after 10:30 will the two hands of a clock be at right angles.” Jim’s first reply was, “My watch doesn’t have hands; use your own.” Having finished her BSN – with sufficient honors to be inducted into – Linda is now embarked on an MSN degree. Then she hopes to be a “nurse practioner.” Jim hopes she can support him for a while. In the meantime, she has a part time job admitting clients for Hospice Austin. Hospice is a holistic program offerin g c are in the home for terminally ill patients and their families.

Jim: Has abandoned his search for the answer to the question, “Why is there anything?” Now he is working on the simpler question, “Is there anything?” His search has led him from readings in Chaos Theory, Quantum Reality, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, and similar topics, to trashy murder mysteries. He is still trying to cajole his Sparc-10 at work to produce abstruse geophysical pictures, while producing ever more Mandelbrot wallpaper [2] on his beloved new PC. In a last desperate attempt to reduce his cholesterol count he has resorted to exercise, returning to tennis. He even signed up for the “B” league, somehow wound up in the “A” league and found out what a doormat feels like. His current goal is to beat his father. This is taking somewhat more time than expected.

Noteworthy Events: Dama Lil’s 76th birthday party in Minneapolis , which was supposed to be a 75th, but wound up being another project delivered late. Granny and Grandad’s 50th Wedding Anniversary in Houston , an intimate gathering of a few hundred friends.

Christmas, 1992: The Return to Oz: Since we had to go to Australia anyway, after a hiatus of 16 years, we decided to make a mega-tour out of it. First, we scheduled a week long diving trip to the Coral Sea for Christmas week itself. Then we scheduled a few birding trips around the rest of the time. Altogether, we managed 20 days of real vacation, two days traveling, and a couple days of reality adjustment at the end. This used up all of Jim’s vacation and most of his AAdvantage miles. Charles meanwhile decided he preferred skiing with his friends. He had snuck in a visit down under with Granny and Grandad during his year off.

A mere 30 hours of traveling were sufficient to take us from Bend of River to Brisbane , where Claire met us. A long night’s sleep and a two hour drive later, we were relaxing in the cool rain forest of Lamington National Park. The O’Reilly family has operated a guest house there since 1911, and know the area well. They have enticed Regent’s Bowerbirds to a feeder outside of the dining room. A great way to start the day is eating breakfast and watching one of the most beautiful birds we know. We spent three days there, then took nine hours to drive back to Brisbane , birding occasionally along the way. This convinced Claire to opt out of the serious birding trip.

In Townsville, we tallied some tropical birds before heading out into the Coral Sea . An annoying high pressure system that ultimately spawned a small cyclone created 2 meter waves for the 10 hour trip to Flinders Reef. It was all worth it, though, when we saw a great variety of sea life including Lion Fish, sea snakes, Loggerhead Turtles, heaps of sharks, and a bewildering variety of corals. The food and accomodations on the Spoilsport exceeded expectations. Even the Christmas parties were fun.

While Claire enjoyed time with friends on the beach at Noosa, Linda and Jim started a series of birding marathons lasting from dawn till way past dark . First, with Anne Lindsay, our guide for two days, we went to Royal National Park in the Sydney surburbs, where we got a great look at a Superb Lyrebird, a Carpet Python, and some nocturnal mammals. We then drove – on the wrong side of the road – to the Capertee area for honeyeaters and such. This day ended with an 8½ hour drive to Deniliquin, NSW. The latter isn’t quite “beyond the black stump,” but it’s a close as we’ve ever come to the real outback.

In Deniliquin, we managed to find an outstanding 172 species of birds in three days, thanks to Phil Maher, who knew not only every bird in the area, but where to find them. The best bird of the trip was probably the Malleefowl, one of Jim’s most wanted. The Plains Wanderer, though, is probably the rarest bird we saw. Phil specializes in showing this to people. We finally saw both a female, the large colorful half of the pair, and a male, after three hours driving around a paddock in the dark, shining a light on anything that moved.

We spent our two final days in Sydney with the Burtons , friends of Granny and Grandad. If you want a more complete report on the trip, write us a note. Alternatively, mention any one of the following items when you see us and we’ll regale you with stories:

Red-browed Firetail Greater Glider Royal Hotel of Capertee Tree full of Honeyeaters

We hope you are well, and we wish you the best for 1993. By the way, regular readers of these letters will recall that we used the Fleetwood Mac song Don’t Stop as a theme years before Bill Clinton did.

[1] Translation: Vegemite is a peculiarly Aussie (pronounced “Ozzie”) concoction derived from yeast, as a byproduct of beer production. It is definitely an acquired taste. “Fair dinkum” means “good;” “tucker” is “food;” “brekkie,” of course, means “breakfast.” If you figured all that out by yourself, “Goodonya!”

[2] A wallpaper image is displayed as a background by Windows. The free program Fractint creates great images from the Mandelbrot Set, a mathematical construct of great simplicity that generates extraordinarily complex designs. When we get a color printer, we’ll send you a sample.