After a lot of fussing around, I’m off to Tasmania today for work: I’ll be writing an article about Tasmania for the travel magazine I’m editing. I haven’t talked much about this magazine yet, because it’s brand new and doesn’t launch until early May. I’m having a great time working on it: gorgeous big pictures and luscious language and no mentions of technical specifications in sight.
I’m conflicted about the trip today: it’s paid for by Tourism Tasmania (yay!) who said that they wouldn’t help me go to the Styx and the Wilderness Society tour because they won’t involve themselves in contentious areas (boo!) but they’ve organised for me to go to a place called Dismal Swamp that is a tourism promotion exercise by Forestry Tasmania (boo!). It’s my first time to Tassie and I was really hoping to do it as a Vespa tour of the forests but instead I’m flying into Burnie and doing this…
It’s also first week of semester, which went really, really well… or mostly. The tutorials were excellent but I’ve had a couple of students withdraw from subjects due to time constraints or other stuff and that’s a little sad. I’m making all my Advanced Editing for Digital Media students keep blogs this semester so if you start to see new names pop up in the comments, that’s probably them.
I feel completely divorced from the Real World ™. I haven’t been watching the news or thinking about politics much at all, apart from planning to go to the Baxter protest. All my political news is coming via brief scans of Indymedia via RSS or artbroken who has alerted me to media news and ABC ickyness among other stuff. What can I say: I’m busy as hell, loving that, having a whole ton of personal bad stuff going on in the background and still recovering from my illness.
Oh and I’m missing Mardi Gras this weekend due to this trip, but bevsob and hyperpeople have instructions to party hard on my behalf and bevsob even has clothes of mine to do so…
Happy Mardi Gras, Sydney people!