Flights, flights, flights.

"Hello", says Eric to the friendly and relaxed not-so-neurotic-about-getting-to-the-airport-really-early looking woman behind the counter at the hostel's front desk.
"Good evening, how can I help you?" she responds.
"We have a 6:15 am flight tomorrow and would like to reserve a spot on a shuttle. What time would you suggest we catch it?", I respond.
"Well, there's a 3:30 am pickup and a 4:10 am pickup tomorrow. The drive can be anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes so, to be safe, I'd suggest you take the 3:30 am."
Several seconds pass as I consider this absolutely ridiculous idea. "JetStar actually recommends arriving an hour and half early for international - are you sure about 3:30 am?".
"Let me call the shuttle and see what they recommend.... Yes, they agree, 3:30 am would be safest."

As the shuttle pulls in to the airport at 3:45 am, I start thinking about how to design a quick reliable personality test for this kind of situation. All people can be ranked on a neurosis scale with the useful coordinate of "how long before an international flight should you leave for the airport". Surprisingly, Leah scores lower than I do and I am already quite a bit lower than average. Obviously, the woman behind the counter at the hostel is what a statistician would call an outlier at the far opposite end. A common approach to dealing with outliers is to report their existence but totally ignore them otherwise. The trouble is identifying them, and in this case, doing so without seeming rude or overly nosey.

Fortunately, our flight has been delayed until 9:50 am so I have some time to think about the questions that I could casually inject into conversation to diagnose such an outlier. In fact, as we'll be missing our connection in Melbourne to Singapore, we might have an entire day in Melbourne for me to contemplate this tricky problem. Or I could just babble on in a blog post about it.

Oh, and now for the requisite pictures. I took this at the beach on Stradbroke Island. I'm not sure who constructed this diorama or why but I think it's really beautiful. To give you a sense of scale, the hole is probably a bit less than a centimeter in diameter. Explanations welcome. The best I can come up with is a small and severely OCD crab.

Post-posting edit - Later in trip, we saw this sand-ball making in process. It was on the beach in Thailand. Here's a video I took. After a bit of googling, I found out that the crab is filtering through the sand for food.