If it's 4 a.m., it must be Regis. A friend of mine is right now trying to become a contestant on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", at a taping at Disney World. He wants me to be his "Phone A Friend" person, so I might be getting a call, as early as 4 a.m., from -- well, I thought it would be Regis Philbin, but that just shows how long I've been out of the States. Meredith Vieira. The odds are slim that he'll be one of the ones randomly selected from the audience, but you never know. I'll be ready to Google the answer if I don't know it offhand.

I have been away from the States for a while. I just realized that last week marks two years since I've set foot on U.S. soil. Zowee. Later this year, we'll be heading back (now that it looks like I won't be getting World Cup tickets :).

Update. He didn't make it in. Oh well.

As per request, I present to you... facial hair!.

Man purse. Girls are on to something. Over the break I bought a over-the-shoulder carry bag, and I already can't get by without it. What aversion do men have to being able to carry things?

Why do dogs always develop nicknames in addition to their given names? For whatever reason, Laika is almost always refered to as "Sweet Girl" or "Dingus McDognus" in our house.

We booked our trip to Tasmania just just a few weeks back. We called a bunch of places asking about rooms, and they all pretty much laughed at us. Finally someone explained to us that the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race was going on, and the hotels in town were pretty much chockablock. Finally we started calling pubs, and found a place that agreed to take us.

When we arrived in Hobart and drove to the hotel, we found the room to have just a sagging single bed, crumbs in the carpet, etc. So we declined and tried looking around for somebody with a cancellation. We even tried neighboring towns. Finally we realized that we weren't going to do any better than sleeping in the car. We got a tip from a guy in a hostel about a good place to park along the river. So we got a bottle of wine and headed down. "Stick with me, babe," I told Marjorie. "With me, it's class all the way. Spending New Year's Eve in a Hyundai Elantra drinking wine from a thermos cup."

There were dolphins in the river, which was cool. We ended up crashing out at about 9 pm. Fortunately it was raining, which was conducive to sleep. We half awoke at midnight to the sounds of fireworks, and a few people in the park whooped it up for a while, but the rain soon drove them home.

We slept in until almost 9 am. Our booking the next night was in a caravan park down in Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, so we headed south, caught the ferry, and arrived around noon. Ah, showers and a soft bed. Bruny Island has some crazy wildlife, including white wallabies and lots of rare bird species. We took a few hikes and basically relaxed for a few days there.

The next day was unplanned, so we just decided to get a nice place in Hobart using the money we saved sleeping in the car on New Year's. Our rental car picked that evening to die on us. Consider all the remote places in Tasmania, it was fortunate for us that it happened within a block of our room. Hertz sent a man out who couldn't fix it, so they had a new car waiting for us the next morning. Good on 'em.

We then headed up to Bicheno, a nice seaside town with some great tidepools that we spent a lot of time exploring. We picked Bicheno because it is near Freycinet National Park, which we explored the next day. I love that one of Tasmania's biggest tourist attractions can only be reached via a hike.

Our last day was spent driving up to Launceston, to catch a late flight home. Again, see the pictures for a more vivid experience than my flat prose can provide. Tasmania was maybe not as different from Melbourne as we had hoped, but is definitely interesting in its own right. I wish every place was as focused on preserving their history and ecology. Traveling there, one finds oneself pondering deep questions, such as: What is life all about? Could I survive alone in the wilderness? And, is it possible to make a White Russian with soy milk?

(Birds we spotted: Tasmanian native-hens [which, as you could never guess from their name, are native to Tasmania], green rosellas, Australian gannets, little pied cormorants, white-faced herons, black swans, mallard ducks, Australian wood ducks, kookaburras, pied oystercatchers, sooty oystercatchers, masked lapwings, tons of silver gulls, Pacific gulls, a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, musk lorakeets, a ton of welcome swallows, either a pink robin or a flame robin, New Holland honeyeaters, many superb fairy-wrens, some unidentified terns, and lots of unidentified birds of prey. We walked through the habitat of the exceedingly rare forty-spotted pardalote but didn't spot any.)

Mark didn't shave the entire time we were in Tasmania. Last night I shaved his beard with creative license, now he looks Amish. Funny. I suspect it will only last the morning.