Day 29: Number-knots and nautical knots

Well another day in beautiful Broome and I love my wonderful husband more than ever before – he has literally saved me tonight!  I spent the day studying and finally got around to the difficult question of …. ‘describe how you can use graphs, tables and numbers to illustrate a single set of values and a double set of values.’ This is what I have to answer tomorrow, and well anyone who knows me, knows that I have … and this is the official term for it …. ‘maths anxiety’.  You may think (as Rich does) that graphs and tables are not maths, but I just have to look at them and I see numbers and numbers mean maths and I am immediately anxious.  So I decided that surely it was simply a matter of just reading the notes and then working it out …. Well when I read the notes I got more and more anxious until I was bordering on hysterical.  So the last resort was to ask for help – why the heck didn’t I do that earlier – he after all a doctor/professor.  He is absolutely brilliant – and the brilliance is in bringing the understanding to my rather basic level so I can actually grasp it and hopefully tomorrow regurgitate it  …. He used the example of our family, our ages, our incomes and our designations (fancy name for roles) and now I actually know how to do bar graphs, tables, pie charts for both single and DOUBLE sets of numbers! Oh I do love him!! 

Anyway, whilst I have been sitting in the caravan park getting myself into a knot over numbers, he was out on a boat on the deep blue sea catching a variety of rather large fish! 

Here are his words: Went out deep sea fishing this morning and initially it looked a little bleak as the first spot where we stopped there was not much happening.  After trying a few spots, the captain of the boat decided to go much further out – about an hour off short.  The captain was a pearl diver before and he had dived this area and so knew where the reefs where and what was down there.  Sure enough the second reef we went to, within minutes we (about ten of us on the boat) were hooked on giant and golden trevalli, Spanish mackerel, cobia, red roman and snapper.  I only brought three fish back because we don’t really have anywhere to keep large amounts of fish and it was very satisfying to eat one of them on the beach tonight.  See the photos as proof!!

Back to Kim …..Quite by chance, yesterday we met up with two colleagues of Rich’s.  Dannie Donaghy and his lovely wife Lucy Birkett (both Agricultural Researchers in Tasmania) with their three gorgeous kidlets (all with bright red hair) are also traveling around Australia and we bumped into them in Broome – as you do.  We invited them to join us on the beach tonight (yes you guessed it – in our cars) for sundowners and a BBQ.  It was a perfectly lovely evening with Rich showing the kids how to catch crabs and time spent star watching looking for space junk, satellites and shooting stars – not to forget the gorgeous sunset and camel trains on the beach – as a quirky little aside, the camels were wearing fairy lights – as camels do!!  I had a little glimpse into the future watching Rich bent over a crab with the two little red heads close to his as they peered into his cupped hands at the little critter there – I suspect we will have red head grandchildren and it was rather cute to see an echo of things to come – no rush Kirst and Josh – no rush at all!  J  It was a revelation how busy small children make things – Rich and I have become quite self contained and some might say ‘old’ in our childless long service leave, and I have absolute admiration for this young couple traveling around Australia with three children under five!! 

Another lovely day in Broome, but tomorrow is the big day – pray for me – two exams in one day.  So far, so calm! J