Lost On A Winding Road

The rest of the year is penciled in except for the exact details concerning the hours around New Years Eve. I'll be in Singapore is as much as I know at this point. If you want to see me in Singapore that's about the best chance of it.

I'm off to Chicago this Saturday and I'm back Sunday week. Monday after that I've got another conference at Hua Hin in Thailand (NTS: bring golf clubs) and I'm there until Saturday 13th. That means I might get back in time for Zouk-Out, the Singapore beach party slash dance-fest slash concert on Sentosa! Should I survive that, I fly down to Melbourne Sunday 14th, evening (the upgrade certificate just came through, excellent!) and I'm there until the 28th.

Yep, four days in Singapore in December.

There was only one week in Singapore for each of October and November, two weeks in September. No wonder I have no exercise and diet routine. Anyone want to rent my apartment?

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I'm in the Dubai Emirates Terminal again running down the laptop's battery typing this as I listen to Powderfinger, the dreamy rock of Dream Days At The Hotel Existence which I haven't listened to for a few months, hence the blog post title - what a great album for romantic ruminating (caught up with an ex-gf while I was in Geelong last time and was just looking over her pictures in Facebook…)

Nobody knows how it feels today
Nobody sees how our hearts break

Sometime you do see it. Nuff said.

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BTW, it was much less of a hassle tonight to find an empty cubicle in the toilets in the Emirates Lounge. Tuesday night is obviously not peak hour.

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Had a great deal of fun destroying my shoulder tendons today. I was back at the Vets - I obliquely mentioned it in my Facebook comments. Horsey stuff.

There is an Arabian horse stud outside Kuwait city that is just starting to pick up its breeding program again after Saddam and his Iraqi soldiers killed all the horses that were there. Two Dutch vets have been working for just on a year and are getting the place back on track. Today they wanted to see if it was possible to do 3D of the foals in utero! Just for the heck of it.

We brought a machine in and, while the groom shaved some mares' bellies for us, I tried to set the expectations to an appropriate level - nice and low. I had to scan up under the mare: it was bloody tough to keep pushing the probe into the belly to keep contact. My rotator cuff is killing me.

Suffice to say the images were pretty crap, making the effort moot. It's hard enough to get good images reliably on a gravid human let alone a gramnivorous quadruped that wants to kick me in the balls first chance she gets (did I mention the ex-gf?). The first one was too pregnant - 7 months (gestation is 11 months) and the foal was too big to fit on the screen. The second I struggled with for ages only to find out she wasn't even pregnant.

Here's me scanning the third of the Arabian show ponies, only 4 months pregnant - not sure what the horse version of the niqab is for.



And here's the closest to what I could get of the foal's face with the 3D. This may be one of the first 3D pictures of a horse in the world, by the way… certainly it is the first I've ever done.



Yep, that's the eye. The side of the face is sort of coming towards us, on a bit of an angle but the tip of the snout is off screen in the front... trust me.

Battery terribly low. I'll explain the image further when I catch you later…

E@L