agghhhhhh

My dad's log cabin in Oregon where I spent part of my younger years...
Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp

Wow this sumer has absolutely flown by. I think I am in the middle of a whirlwind. I want to update my blog more, but only feel like I am being responsible in doing so when I'm on top of my work, which feels dreadfully behind. So, here I am just to give a quick update. This is Shark Week so all my Animal Planet blog posts were on sharks (between 8/7 and 8/3), which was fun! I love sharks! Check them out if you can! As always I love comments, so post some comments - let me know if anything resonates!

Next Tuesday I fly to the Pacific Northwest and am more than a little excited! My dad is getting married to his soul mate, Bev, and I'm delighted for them! And I'm more than excited to be back in the Oregon air, and go hiking, and hopefully see the seashore. I'll try to update from there, but my basic plan is to fly into Seattle, Washington where I'll stay with my cousin in Tacoma and her two cute kiddos (her husband Ross in in Iraq for his second tour of duty, so prayers for him are much appreciated!). Then I'll spend the next few days alternating between working in Portland at a wifi coffee shop hotspot, visiting some friends, and spending evenings with my dad and Bev. I am hoping to get to the beach!!! Oregon's coast is incredibly beautiful, and it's been a long while since I've feasted my eyes on its shores so even if I have to go alone I probably will go. My dad gets married Saturday. As you may recall my last trip there in December I got snowed in!!

While there, I have helped organize a get together for writers in the Pacific NW, some of whom are driving in from out of town! This should be a blast. We're going to Wildwood Recreation Site on Mount Hood which looks amazingly beautiful. Here's a brochure that may take abit to download. Then after a half day hike, heading to Hopworks Urban Brewery, Portland's first eco-brewpub with organic hand crafted beer, and a sustainable building powered by 100% renewable energy. Coolio!

Then it's back to Tacoma to visit my cousin again before flying home. It should be a much needed respite from the drab suburban scenery of Houston... I would say the heat but it had been a scalding 108 in Portland! I heard it had cooled down to a high of 80 so let's hope and pray it stays that way! I hope to get a bit of work done in between my visits and explorations, too.

I took a bunch of pics from my birthday party in July and my trip to Dallas to visit my mom, stepdad and niece. I'll upload as soon as I get some time. I have to do "personal" things like this in micro-steps because I have soooo much work to do!! I'm sure I'm not the only one to have felt that way before. :)

shark mysteries

Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp
Richard looks up while Mike deGruy and Sanjayan hold down a whitetip shark. Dean is in the background hanging off the back of the duckboad.

Last night I got to see the final product of the documentary filming that I witnessed part of when I first went to Australia in April, Mysteries of the Shark Coast (You can read my Expedition Shark blog live from the field here) I watched the show at my friend Melody's house because I don't have cable anymore! It was so cool to see it, and be like, "I remember when they filmed that!" and "Oh ya! I remember when he said that!" I am in the background in several shots, very very background but I'm the only blonde in the show so if you see some blonde hair quickly flitting through the scene, that's me. We're going to watch it again Saturday - woohoo! How cool is that. This photo to the right, I think Cat Gennaro took it, or maybe Sanjayan, but that is what I was wearing in the documentary thyough there are also a couple places where I'm wearing a black sarong, in one scene I was walking through the shot (oops!) bringing out my extension cord so I could upload the photos and blog entries via satellite phone to the US!

Alanis is coming to Texas - yay! Well I had something else to say but I can't remember so this is all for now. If you watched the show, let me know what you thought!

cassowaries and sharks

Copyright (c) 2006 Wendee Holtcamp
My adorable kids under a ginormous staghorn fern in the rainforest in the center of Australia's Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island - and a World Heritage Site.

I'm starting to get excited about my upcoming trip to Australia! I leave August 5th for a couple days in L.A. and then on to Australia. I am going to spend a few days in Mission Beach and talk to people who are working on cassowary conservation. Cassowaries are an endangered bird that lives in the rainforests. They are relatives of emus and ostriches, and really cool. And there's only around 900 left in the wild! The recent Cyclones that have struck the Australian coast have wreaked havoc on their habitat, and many people started feeling sorry for them and started leaving fruit out to feed them. Well that turned out to not be such a good idea... it led to a lot more car strikes and dead birds. So feeding cassowaries was recently made illegal. There's a rehabilitation center led by the Australian Rainforest Foundation that works with injured birds, and I'm trying to also meet with some biologists studying the birds.

I first learned about cassowaries when I was at the School for Field Studies (SFS) Center for Rainforest Studies in Fall of 1990 as a college student, and was fascinated that they're the only bird that can "scarify" certain rainforest seeds. Many seeds must pass through the gut of an animal to germinate, but some rainforest trees have fruits with seeds so large that only the cassowary can eat them. There are not any large mammals in Australia and the cassowary is the biggest animal there! So if it goes extinct, many rainforest species may go extinct also.

Speaking of SFS, remember how I went back to the Center when I had a couple extra days at the tail end of the first trip in April, after the shark blog work, and I gave a talk to the current students? Part of this "Visiting Alumni" program was that I also write a short article about the visit and my career for their Alumni newsletter, and you can read it here, Wendee Finlay Holtcamp: Return to Warrawee.

Also mark your calendars, the documentary that was being filmed during my shark blog work, Mysteries of the Shark Coast (formerly called Expedition Shark) airs in the U.S. during Thursday of Shark Week which is July 31st at 9pm EST, and that is 8pm my time (Central)! We're having a viewing party!! Unless I got cut out, I may be in the documentary background as the "shark nurse" handing biologist Richard Fitzpatrick tools as he surgically inserts the radio transmitters into the whitetip reef sharks at Osprey Reef.

Last year during the 20th anniversary, Discovery Channel got a lot of grief because they focused so much on shark attacks. This year they changed their tune and focus much more on conservation and the ways we humans have attacked sharks!

(Image Copyright (c) 2008 John Rumney)

Last but not least, check out the new Sharkrunners Game Season 2: Australia - the Great Barrier Reef, which I wrote the "facts" for... it is all based on the actual data Richard et al collected on real sharks, their movements are tracked from the transmitters that were put in while I was at Osprey Reef! (they put some in at other times too, but... still! Cool!)

bird by bird

I had checked out the Shark Week 20th Anniversary DVD set from the library and finally got time to watch a couple of the shows. I hesitated as to whether I should watch this, because I really do not feel scared at all about the prospect of swimming with or diving with sharks, so I wondered whether it might just be best to stay in a state of total oblivion as to what I'm getting myself into, rather than sitting around watching shark attack shows!

But I decided to watch. At first I just watched a nice sweet documentary about various sharks - the gentle giant whale sharks, the smaller reef sharks, manta rays, and a bit about great white shark natural history. Ho hum. Then I decided, what the heck, I will next watch the Shark Attack show.

Big Mistake!

Just kidding.... Actually, it didn't scare me at all either. I did learn some things that were quite interesting. For one thing, most shark atacks occur at the surface when people are swimming and thrashing about or surfing. Underwater, as I will be, you're at much less risk since you are not kicking and appearing to be a struggling prey item. One one of the shows, one shark diver regularly swims really close to tiger sharks - the second most aggressive shark - and believes it to be safe.

What scares the bejesus out of me is staring at the ginormous stack of receipts from 2007 that I have to now organize and compile for my income taxes. I am only home for 6 more days before leaving for Australia (there's a trip to Colorado and Palo Duro Canyon in there first). How the heck am I going to get it done, with all the other things I need to do?

In the writing classes I teach, my students often talk about feeling overwhelmed at the task of knowing where to begin. There are so many angles to tackle learning to publish in magazines. We analyze the magazines themselves. We come up with saleable ideas. We work on our writing, and we work on query letter writing. So with all these things, it can simply seem overwhelming to get started and to just sit down and do it. But that's what you gotta do. Just start.

Anne Lamott writes in her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, (which is one of my favorite books and absolutely hysterical) about how her brother had this huge report due on birds that he's waited until the last minute to do. He was in near tears sitting at the kitchen table, overwhelmed. Their dad came up and said to him, "Bird by Bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

I like to call them microsteps . Often an overwhelming task can be broken down into something more manageable when you set microsteps, and accomplish them one by one. Bird by bird.