Thrills and Spills

This week it was cloudy and rainy all week, which is wonderful for the folks who live here, because we’re in the 6^th year of a drought, but for Wesley, who only has 3 weeks here, it’s not so great. We took him to the Sunshine Coast on Christmas Eve for the beach experience, and hope to take him to the Gold Coast this coming week. The picture is of Wesley on a boogie board in the surf on the Sunshine Coast. Yesterday he and the rest of the Hearn and Mercer kids went horseback riding at a spot on a river that’s a popular swimming hole. Wesley swung off a rope into the water and landed on a rock, leaving a pretty nasty chunk of skin peeled away from his foot (also pictured here). We doused it in Hydrogen Peroxide, put some ointment on it, and bandaged it up. We’re hoping it’ll heal enough and the weather will cooperate enough for the planned trip to the Gold Coast and to the Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s zoo – the Crocodile Hunter). Christmas was great. With 11 people living in the house and 8 of them working, there were lots of presents.

The rest of this past week was mostly just sitting around listening to the rain. Wesley has done a good bit of hiking through the national forest across the street. Yesterday morning, before the horseback riding, I took Wesley and Jake for a one-hour hike through the rainforest at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was fun and beautiful, but most of the pictures somehow got deleted. One we did get is of Jake and Wesley together at a spot covered with boulders and a large, fallen tree, where they’ve climbed high above the trail where I stayed. One photo we lost was of a large loop of vine hanging down from a tree like a natural swing. Jake and I each got up in it and swung.

I’m including one more picture of the previous week’s trip to the Green Mountains, just for the fun of it. We have later, cooler photos of Jake with parrots, after he got used to it, but my title for this one when they first landed on him is: “Why Jake’s Not a Pirate”. You gotta love that boy.

By the way, the overwhelmingly-no-competition worst soft drink I ever tasted, a yogurt soda I bought several years ago at a Pakistani convenience store in Texas, now has competition. I bought it yesterday at a little sidewalk café at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was an Italian soft drink called, innocuously enough, a “carbonated citrus beverage.” The citrus fruit turned out to be something called chinotto, and it was unbelievably, shockingly awful. The only description I can think of is incredibly intense licorice.

Jake, who has a deeply held, life-long conviction against ever, ever trying any new food or beverage, jumped at the chance to try this soft-drink when I started spitting and saying how awful it was. Unfortunately, he agreed. But at least now I know what to say to get him to try something new. You can read about Chinotto on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinotto but don’t believe what it says about the taste.

Wesley’s “Home”!!!

Wesley arrived in Brisbane this past Thursday, the 20^th of December. He missed his connecting flight from Sydney to Brisbane and had to catch the next flight, so he got to us 3 hours later than expected, and we didn’t know why. Having never been away from us so long before in his life, we were missing him pretty badly anyway, and pretty desperate for his arrival. As a result, when we did finally get him in our arms, Karen and I both burst into tears, and he called us crazy people.

He wants to pack as much as he can into his brief time here before he leaves again on the 10^th of January for his return to school at SNU for his final two semesters. On Thursday and Friday he did a lot of hiking through the part across the street from the house, seeing parrots and giant lizards and strange trees. On Saturday we went to Lamington National Forest in the Green Mountains. Tourists there feed the birds so much that they’ll come right up and land on you, hoping (usually with good reason) for food. We saw some wonderful panoramic vistas on the way up and down the mountain.

At the top of the mountain we hiked through a dense rainforest. One of the unique features of this particular rainforest is a treetop walk. A suspension footpath bridge takes you out to a point 15 or 20 metres above the ground. You’re actually walking around in the canopy of the trees, high above the forest floor. Then you come to an especially tall tree that has a metal ladder, surrounded by a wire cage to keep you from falling. You can climb it another 20 metres to a little platform at the very top of the tree, and look out across the whole rainforest, across ranges of mountains and valleys.

On the walk we saw a couple of wallabies, which are basically small kangaroos. Then on the drive home we saw a full-sized kangaroo bounding across an open field past horses and cows. All in all, Wesley had a thoroughly full day of uniquely Australian experiences.

Today, Christmas eve day, he saw 3 or 4 wallabies on his walk in the park across the street. Later today we’ll go to the beach, and then over to the home of Roland’s parents and his sister Kammy and her husband Kevin Crowther this evening for a short worship time singing carols and so forth, and apparently a meal.

Cricket and Kangaroo

The game of cricket is a major phenomenon in Australia. The biggest thing in cricket is “The Ashes”, a competition between Australia and England approximately every year and a half. A “test match” in cricket is a single cricket game that takes 5 days to play. The Ashes consists of 5 test matches, played across a couple of months. It’s such a big deal here that on certain key playing days, internet usage by office workers increases 20-fold as workers check scores and watch video of key plays on cricket websites. It’s like the world series and super bowl rolled into one and extended across two months or so. It’s being played in Australia this time (it alternates between here and England) and literally 10’s of thousands of English fans have traveled to Australia to watch the matches in person.

The most diehard of them are called the “Barmy Army”. A weekly TV series here right now is about an Aussie who travels around to the matches with the Barmy Army of British fans. Each match is being played in a different Australian city. Baseball is derived from cricket, and cricket fans have the same love as baseball fans of endless statistics and in a game that may feature 500 runs per team, there are lots of stats. Discussion before and after the games takes as much time as the game itself.

So lunch at work these days means beating a path the few meters from the office to Roland’s parents’ place where his mother feeds us lunch while we watch cricket and they discuss the strategies of the game. I’m getting to the place where I can toss in a comment here and there like I know what I’m talking about.

Yesterday’s lunch was a salad and ginger beer (ginger ale with LOTS of real ginger in it. No, it's not like Vernor's, which is still just ginger ale, albeit a good one). The salad was kind of a chef salad, with lettuce, tomatoes, bean sprouts, apples, cheese chunks and meat chunks. The meat looked like medium rare beef steak. It was actually kangaroo steak that Roland’s mother had found on sale at the local grocery store.

My sister Janet once found kangaroo meat at a new grocery store in Dallas. She invited me over, fried it in a skillet and we ate it, or tried to. Roland had previously told me that the best steak he ever ate was a kangaroo steak at a restaurant in Australia. On that recommendation we bit into our fried kangaroo with great anticipation. It was terrible. It tasted like liver or something. We couldn’t finish it. We gave Roland the leftovers and he insisted it tasted fine – nothing like liver.

As a result of that experience, I wasn’t eager to try it again, but this steak in the salad was actually quite good. Roland’s mother said it’s especially important with kangaroo meat not to overcook it, so maybe that had been our mistake.

Kangaroos, by the way, far from being an endangered species, are so common as to be a pest here, apparently. I’m told that Roland’s brother, who lives in a small town several hours into the interior of the country, has hit as many as a half-dozen or so kangaroos on the highway over the course of one drive from there to here. Nearly everyone who lives in rural parts of Australia has a “roo guard” installed on the front of their vehicle to prevent damage to the vehicle when it collides with a kangaroo.

For Texans, think skunk or Armadillo, only 50 times bigger. And tastier.

AAARRGGHH!!! Failure!

I was just getting proud of myself for having done such a great job of establishing a routine and faithfully writing on my blog every week for three months; then last weekend I forgot.

I was going to do it on Sunday evening instead of the usual Saturday morning, because I knew Roland and I were going to take Karen and Emmy to a little roadside café on a mountaintop near here for tea after church, and I could write about that. We took a walk together through the rainforest while we were there. I forgot my camera so we relied on Emmy’s camera. It’s a new phone so she didn’t yet know how to upload her pictures to the PC for use in my blog and as it turned out, the phone takes pretty bad pictures anyway and somewhere along the way I got wrapped up in the issue of the phone and its pictures and forgot that the point was the blog. I didn’t even think about it until it was nearly this weekend. So, I’m doing two entries this week to make myself feel better about the break in routine.

The most interesting thing we saw on the walk through the tropical forest was these big, bright, vivid blue berries. It was the bluest plant life I’ve ever seen. Roland and Emmy didn’t know what they were. The internet being the amazing thing it is, I was able to come home, go to Google, click on “Images”, type in “blue berry tree Australia” and click! There was a picture of the berries I’d seen, with the name “blue quandong” under them. They’re edible but apparently not tasty, and they’re native to the rainforests of Queensland specifically.

The little café is right on a little two-lane road over the mountain. On this Sunday afternoon it was packed with motorcyclists. It’s owned and operated by this couple in their 50’s. The man is huge and loud and gruff and he and his wife both tease and joke with the customers and make it an experience to be there. They had incredibly delicious scones (hot biscuits, really, but don’t tell them. It sounds so much fancier when you call them scones.) with preserves and butter on them, and a nice hot cup of tea. Then we took our walk along the mountain path through the rainforest, past all the exotic bushes and trees with their above-ground root structures and unfamiliar berries. One kind of tree has a big parasitic vine that grows up around it and gets bigger and bigger until it kills the original tree and just leaves a hollowed out place in the middle of what looks like a big, twisted tree of its own. And of course it’s cool to look down at the steep, deep valley beside the path, that you know no picture would really adequately capture. Anyway, it was a nice little outing, and the glory of cell phones meant the kids could take a separate walk and still be back at the café when we wanted them there.

I still haven’t seen Jake’s report card, but the other kids have gotten theirs in the last day or two, so his should be here in the next day or two. It looks like my pink hair day will happen after Wesley gets here. Stay tuned.

Adventures in Ordinary Life

This week’s photos are of Jake being Jake, the view from our bedroom window and the view from our front door.

This past week had some interesting moments. At lunch at school one day, some kid threw a piece of ice at another kid, as I understand it. The kid who got hit asked who did it. Some other kid jokingly replied “Texas”, meaning Jake. So the kid who got hit by the ice physically attacked Jake, who was apparently holding his own too well, so a friend of the attacker joined in. Jacob still acquitted himself well in the scuffle, despite being outnumbered in a surprise attack. He had a little mark on his cheek and a bump on the head, but wasn’t much worse for wear.

The amazing thing was that the school responded with common sense. Dallas area schools are firm believers in “zero tolerance for school violence”, by which they mean that they punish assailant and victim alike, and call the police when a 6-year-old kicks his teacher. I actually had personal experience of those things as a parent advocate in Dallas. In Jake’s case however, the school recognized that one kid was the innocent victim and the other two were unprovoked assailants and told Jake so, and expelled the other two kids. I love this country!

To make it even better, he had a number of friends offering to go beat up the assailants for him, which offers he of course declined. And the next day, he had to dispel the rumor that he had gone after the original assailant and beaten him up after school. So in one fell swoop he managed to be completely innocent while proving he can adequately defend himself if need be, he got to be gracious in response to the protective indignation of his friends, and he got to see the depth of devotion his new Australian friends feel for him.

Karen would tell the story completely differently, of course, but to a father, it was a moment of pride more than horror.

Charlotte and Kaylah worked at the same store for the first time this week, but their schedules were so different that they actually worked together only 30 minutes the whole week. Karen distributed flyers in a couple of retirement communities a couple of weeks ago, offering to run errands and clean house for a fee. She got her first call back this week from that. And the substitute teaching looks like it’ll keep her reasonably busy right up until Wesley gets here from Texas 18 days from now! YEEHAH! We can’t wait. Life is good.

Just Another Week at the Office

I didn’t take any photos again this week, so these are just random photos taken over the past couple of months. One is just Brady Hearn’s sweet face as he poses for a picture for his mama. The other two are of a bush turkey we frequently see in the park across the street from the house, and of me at the office. I trust you can tell which is which.

Australia takes very seriously the concept of holidays. Apparently much of the construction industry takes a month off around Christmas and New Year’s Day. They use the word “breakup” here much more broadly than we do, to mean the end of pretty much anything, and it’s common to have a party to celebrate the breakup. So we had three breakup parties this past week, one for each of our three main regions, for our member builders to celebrate the end of the year’s construction season. We’d work at the office until about 2pm, then head off to the Sunshine coast beach one day, the Gold Coast beach another, and a park on the banks of the Brisbane river the third day, to enjoy cold drinks, prawns (shrimp), chips and nuts with our Trade Alliance members and suppliers until 6:30pm or so. That’s how I spent Thursday, November 23, which would have been Thanksgiving if we had been in the United States.

They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday here, and it’s kind of weird experience. The bush turkey roams the park, completely oblivious to the fact that he’s delicious. This may have been the first time in our lives that we haven’t spent Thanksgiving Day with extended family, eating Turkey, forcing down a bite of canned cranberry sauce, and watching parades and football on TV. And of course, the day after Thanksgiving is when we always put up our Christmas decorations and it was officially the Christmas season. There are just no clues like Thanksgiving and cold weather to clue you in that Christmas is just around the corner. Karen and Emmy fixed us a delicious traditional Thanksgiving dinner Friday night, so between that and three straight days of eating shrimp on the beach, it’s hard to complain.

Karen has started substituting at a nearby school for mentally and physically disabled adolescent students. She got scratched and punched and kicked by a mentally retarded autistic 13-year-old girl on the first day. Karen was perfectly in her element. It’s her ideal job. She’s a strange and wonderful woman. Meanwhile, Kaylah just started working at the same store that Charlotte works at. Six people in our three-car household have jobs, so that should slightly ease the transportation challenges.

I preached last Sunday, and the messages I preach are always mostly to myself, so it was helpful to me, at least. Tomorrow, Roland’s mother and I will visit another Nazarene church on our tour. We’re having fun.

Thoughts on Who We Are and Why We're Here

Neither Karen nor I took any photos this week, so I’ll just toss in one that Jake took. He’s never built anything or taken wood shop class in school before, but it’s one of his classes here. The school year here coincides with the calendar year, so he just got into the class for the last few weeks of the year. Nevertheless, he is deeply motivated to make good grades in all his classes because he elicited from me a promise that I would dye my hair pink and take him to the beach one day if he gets all A’s and B’s on his report card at the end of the year. Also, he’s leaning toward the idea of a career in the construction industry anyway, so he’s pretty proud of the end table he made in shop class, that he just brought home this week. It’s very nice, and for a first effort it’s brilliant.

The other picture is one from a few weeks ago, that just didn’t make it into the blog, but is representative of the kinds of meals Emmy prepares every night. This night was Chinese stir fry and lemon meringue pie – both homemade from scratch, of course.

Mainly what’s been on my mind this week, though, has been the sermon I preached this morning in our worship service. We moved here to help start a new church, and at the moment we’re just kind of preparing our own hearts before we begin looking for a sound system, a regular meeting place, and money for a proper marketing campaign for a launch service.

For me, preparing our hearts has revolved around Hebrews 11 a lot lately. That chapter is kind of the Hall of Fame of spiritual superheroes from the Bible. It talks about people who through faith “conquered kingdoms… obtained what was promised”, saw the dead raised and so forth. We want to conquer kingdoms here. We want to experience the power of God for great, glorious victories like those guys. We want a great church where lots of people experience the transforming grace of God, a place where love and joy and peace and healing and freedom and intimacy are commonplace.

But I noticed that the list of superheroes flows without a break from those who experienced victory to those who experienced only defeat, who were martyred, persecuted, tortured, destitute. And the whole list, winners and losers alike are commended in the same way, for the same faith. The faith for which they were commended was not fidelity, the faithful discharge of their duty; it was faith simply in the sense of reliance or trust. They knew unwaveringly in every circumstance that God is love and he’s on their side, and they are precious to him. It says on the basis of that faith alone, not because of whether they achieved great things, but only on the basis of their unshakable confidence in his love for them, that he “is not ashamed to be called their God.”

I learned this week that the word translated “called” means literally “surnamed”. God is so proud to be identified with us when we really know who he is, that he adopts as his own last name the fact that he is related to us. And he invites us, like the conquerors and martyrs alike, to be like him -- shameless.

Beaches, Unicycles and Music

This past Sunday after church we all went to the beach. The kids enjoyed it their way and I enjoyed it my way. My Sunday afternoon nap yields to no man’s worldly pleasures. And, okay, I know I’m overselling Australia as paradise, but I laid there under a warm, clear sky for 2 hours without sunblock and didn’t burn. AND, Charlotte’s hair is longer and thicker after 9 or 10 weeks in Brisbane than she’s ever been able to get it in Texas. Karen insists her hair is thicker, too. I don’t understand how that can be but it’s obvious.

Meanwhile, Jake and Jon are trying to learn to ride a unicycle that Jon’s pretty cousin Tahlia has mastered. I think they’re both up to about 2 seconds upright, now, but a clever photographer has managed to capture those moments.

Our intention is to plant a new church in Brisbane in 2007. That will require securing an adequate meeting place and sound board. Emmy has secured every Sunday off from Starbucks as a condition of working for them. Since she’s the primary worship leader, that was a necessary hurdle that has now been overcome. Until we have the meeting place, though, we’re settling for worship services every other Sunday morning in Roland’s parents’ living room (“lounge room” to Australians). On alternate Sundays we’ve mostly just been lounging around enjoying the time off and hoping the rapture doesn’t come on an off Sunday.

I’ve been meaning ever since we got here to spend the off Sundays visiting Nazarene churches in the area on my own, but that involves looking up the list of churches on one website, then trying to get service times from their websites if they have them, then printing out the map to get there, and I just haven’t gotten around to it. This week, however, Roland’s mother has agreed to pick me up and go with me to one of the Brisbane Nazarene churches. I’m looking forward to that.

In this entire major city only one station plays country music and none at all play the Mills Brothers or “Homespun Songs of the Confederate States of America”. As more and more of our boxes get unpacked, I now have about half of my music CD’s available to me again. Karen was hoping to convince me to put them all in storage here, but as I write this I’m listening to Ray Price singing “Funny How Time Slips Away” behind closed doors where no one else can hear – which is how they strongly prefer it.

Guns, Hills and Rain

One of the mild frustrations of trying to communicate the beauty of this place is that photos don’t easily capture three dimensions. The whole area is very hilly, almost mountainous, but the camera tends to flatten it all out. The picture of the houses in this week’s blog entry gives you some sense of the hills and valleys. The other two are just pictures Karen and Emmy took of each other in the car sometime in the past week or so. Emmy starts a new job in a few days as a shift supervisor with Starbucks in a nearby mall. In the meantime, our shipping container has finally arrived and she and Karen have been busy all week unpacking and arranging while Roland and I have been at work. Australia apparently frowns on anything remotely resembling a weapon. They’re not only holding our two rifles and a pair of brass knuckles and a metal throwing star thingy that the boys had, they’re even holding a paintball gun and an airsoft gun in their customs ARMORY! No more soft rubber sponge ball massacres in this country, boy howdy. Apparently, they don’t take it personally, though, and Wesley may be allowed to take it all back to the states with him in January.

We’re settling into a comfortable routine now. Roland and I work from 8-5 Monday through Friday, come home and eat whatever feast Emmy has prepared, and watch an hour of TV. Thursday night is “Family Night”, during which the Hearns retreat to one end of the house to do something together while the Mercers at the other end of the house usually play a board game together. This Friday night the kids all went to see a Hearn cousin in an apparently very clever, funny school play while the adults had a very nice dinner at a little out-of-the-way Swiss restaurant. There we were, an Australian couple and a Texas couple seated at one outdoor table and a half-dozen European college students at the next table, all being waited on by the Swiss lady who owns the restaurant along with her husband.

Saturdays I do whatever paperwork or chores or projects need to be done and get my weekly blog entry written. Saturday nights we all sit around together and watch a rented DVD and eat snack foods. This week we were going to go to the beach but a much needed rain has finally come. It’s supposed to last a week. Rain forests apparently require actual rain, and lots of it, and they haven’t had much in recent years, so this is apparently fairly important. If it lets up, we’ll go to the beach after church tomorrow. If not, we’ll have a house full of unhappy kids. We miss the folks back home, but this is really nice.

Wierd Things

One of this week’s pictures is of a rainwater tank. A lot of homes have them to collect rainwater for household use. When you live in a rainforest, that’s apparently normally a dependable water supply. Of course, it’s properly filtered and all that. One of the pictures is of a wooden lizard carved apparently out of the log it’s sitting on. It’s in a park we walked through this morning. The other picture is of a real lizard that we also saw on this morning’s walk. It was one of at least a half-dozen we saw, in fact. The woods are full of several varieties of giant, 2-foot-long lizards. To make matters worse, they have surprisingly long legs which they rise up on to run, and they run very fast. Frankly, when they’re running they remind me for all the world of those veloceraptors that chase the good guys around the kitchen near the end of Jurassic Park. I got as close as I dared, in hopes that he’d run across the picture so I could get a profile shot of him running, but I didn’t really get very close, just on the off chance that he’d run toward me instead of away from me. I don’t think he could have done anything to me if he’d caught me, but I’m pretty sure he’d have caught me.

I’m discovering that in learning the language here, you can’t just discern a general principle and then just guess from there; you have to memorize each individual pronunciation. There are differences where neither the U.S. nor the Australian position could be defended; they’re both just completely arbitrary. We pronounce “tourniquet” “turn-a-kett”. They pronounce it “torn-a-kay”. That’s probably closer to the proper French way to say that originally French word. On the other hand, they pronounce “fillet” “fill-ett” whereas we pronounce it “fill-ay”, so in that case we’re probably closer to the original French.

My one big pet peeve here is with grocery carts. I know I’m weird but I’ve always loved grocery shopping. Until now. Grocery carts in the U.S. aren’t the easiest things to steer and I wouldn’t have thought you could make them worse, but Australian grocers have turned them into an insidious instrument of torture. Each of the four wheels turns independently, 360 degrees, freely. You go through a store and you see men and women alike throwing their whole body into trying to keep their cart from wandering off sideways. No wonder they call a cart a buggy. The only wonder is how they’ve managed not to produce an entire nation of frustrated, irritable, angst-ridden, borderline psychotic grocery shoppers. Of course they have a slower, more relaxed pace of life! They have to, to make up for the emotional and physical devastation of grocery shopping.

I just got back from the store, by the way.

Boyhood Adventures and More Food

Last Saturday the kids rode horses to a swimming hole. The dads took the non-riders to join them. Roland introduced them to the joys of taking a horse into deep enough water that it’s actually swimming rather than wading. I introduced them to the joys of a rope swing. There were moments when we were pretty sure we were egging them on to levels of adventure that would have concerned their mothers, but they had a great time.

Roland and Emmy and Karen and I sit out on the patio or at a Starbucks with a cup of hot tea and enjoy the cool evenings and congratulate ourselves on actually getting to enjoy this time together to which we all so looked forward for so long. It’s good.

I’m still this weird little poverty-stricken Arkansas kid thrilled and fascinated by grocery stores stocked with exotic foods. Today I went grocery shopping with the women. On the one hand, they apparently have a fairly extensive Greek population in Australia, so the shelves were loaded with varieties of olives and feta cheese and yogurt. Also, crustaceans are apparently quite plentiful in Brisbane Bay, so the seafood section has a wide variety of prawns (shrimp) and other shellfish, and even more than one variety of oyster.

On the other hand, after extensive searching, I must sadly announce that there is not a pinto bean to be found anywhere in this modern, thriving metropolis. I’ve found something that looks close, called a Bortillo bean, but according to Wikipedia, it’s not a pinto. They have almost no dry beans at all, and the canned beans are either navy beans or kidney beans, and not much even of that. Where I come from, that’s like a city where no one sells bread or milk. And outside an oriental market, nothing here is spicy. Salsas and other foods that here declare themselves to be fiery hot will contain half of one percent jalepeno. Nothing reaches beyond what a Texan would call medium.

Still, it’s hard to complain when we haven’t had the same main course twice in the past seven weeks, except for two Saturday nights that we had hot dogs and maybe three Saturday nights that we had pizza. Think of that – 50 days and 47 main courses.

We visited a new mall today, or rather, one that has just opened a new section that makes it 3 times its former size. It includes three supermarkets as well as smaller stores selling only breads or meats or fruits and vegetables. Every food place was giving away free samples, so at 5pm with no meal served since breakfast, I’m still full. Somehow, magically, I still only weigh 158 pounds, which is about 73 kilograms, I think.

What can I say? God is good.

Flora, Food and Folks

The first picture this week is of me at the Vegemite section of a local grocery store. Vegemite comes in at least four sizes, including the large jar I’m holding, and a convenient squeeze tube. The top shelf on the right side of the picture is of competing brands. One is just a straight Vegemite clone called MightyMite. One is called Promite, which is kind of Training Vegemite for beginners. It’s a little less salty and has just a hint of sweetness added. The fourth variation is called Marmite. It’s a British product and is twice as salty as Vegemite. For any stray reader who has never heard of it, Vegemite was invented in Australia, is manufactured here, and mostly consumed here. It’s a thick, dark brown, very salty, yeasty tasting spread that is eaten on bread by practically all Australians.

The other two pictures are of my daughter Charlotte with Roland's daughter Kaylah, and a cool-looking Australian tree that Karen saw on her daily walk one day this week.

It’s very cool living in a place where any drive takes you in and out and back and forth between a typical, if very hilly, modern city, and tropical rainforest featuring signs warning motorists not to run over the kangaroos and koalas. One sees such things here in those stray, undeveloped patches of a growing city where flat, cultivated fields would be seen around Dallas.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Texas and Queensland are two states divided by a common language. Here, a cookie is called a biscuit, which is shortened to bikky as breakfast is shortened to brekky and afternoon is shortened to arvo. They do the same with people’s names, so Brett is Bretty and Dean is Deano. I’m learning on my job to talk to builders on the phone, but it’s a challenge between the facts that I don’t have a construction background and that they are very reliant on Australian slang. Jake says the kids at school are fascinated by his accent and by the fact that their accent sounds as funny to him as his does to them. Like most kids their age anywhere, they’ve never lived in another country and it has never occurred to them that we all have accents, including them. Jake said their two dominant images of Texas are the movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and of a gun in every household. Jake told them it’s actually 8 guns in every household but his home only has two guns because his dad doesn’t believe in them.

I love that boy.

Another Week in Paradise

This week’s pictures are of Karen and Emmy relaxing together on the veranda (as we apparently call patios and porches in Australia), Roland watching his home team, the Brisbane Broncos, win the Grand Final in Rugby League, and a picture of Roland and me with a dear old friend of Roland’s named Brendan Kelly. Brendan was a private school principal who attended the church Roland pastored at the time in Maryborough, Australia. They used to share a daily early morning prayer and jogging time. He counts Brendan as one of his closest friends, and one who most enthusiastically shared Roland’s understanding of grace and vision for the church. By a remarkable and possibly miraculous chain of events, Brendan has suddenly become the senior pastor of a church in Toowumba, a couple of hours from here, that has a Sunday morning attendance of 1,200 people. Roland and I visited Brendan’s church this past Sunday and had a great visit with him and his wife over lunch afterwards.

Life is good. Karen takes long walks in the park every day, surrounded by parrots, giant lizards and exotic flowers. Jake starts work today at a store that sells what he’s convinced are the clothes the cool kids wear. Charlotte’s working, enjoying the Hearn kids and keeping up with her U.S. friends on her laptop PC.

I wake up rested at 6:15, enjoy a cup of tea on the veranda and go to work at an office surrounded by raucous kookaburras making it sound like a Tarzan movie. At 10:00 or 10:30, we take a 30-minute break for morning tea and a light snack. We get home from work at about 5:30 and the house is filled with the laughter of Mercer and Hearn kids, aged 11-18, thoroughly enjoying each other’s company. August was the best month ever for my employer, Trade Alliance Group, and I expect the same will be true of September when the numbers are in. I’m starting to learn the job, so I’m feeling a little more secure on that front. It would be nice to be rich. It would be nice to be a part of a big church that we started. It would be nice to be 30 instead of 50 years old. But I’m preaching tomorrow so I’ve been thinking a lot this week about finding the love and joy and peace of God in the middle of the ordinary frustrations, limitations, grief, hope, failure and successes of ordinary daily life. And I am finding them.

Life is good.

Life in the Slow Lane

We now officially have a car. We paid $3,750 for a white 1994 6-cylinder Ford Futura Classic with 170,000 km on it, which is about 105,000 miles. I’ve included a photo of it.

For some reason, I just find it terribly entertaining to see people fall asleep in odd places or positions, so I’ve also included another sleep-related photo, this time of Kaylah and Jake asleep on the couch. TV obviously wasn’t very exciting that night. The other picture is of part of our Sunday morning church crowd from this past Sunday morning, enjoying morning tea on the veranda before the service. Brad Hearn heard me say I loved the slower pace of life in Brisbane. He responded that if I think the pace is slow in Brisbane, it comes to a complete, screeching halt where he lives, 8 hours into the interior of the country.

The photo that didn’t get taken is always the best, of course. Karen goes for a walk in the wooded park across the street from the house every day. Yesterday she saw a wallaby (basically a small species of kangaroo-type animal) bounding through the park ahead of her. Unfortunately, she hasn’t yet learned to use the camera function of her cell phone, which she had with her, so we’ll just have to take her word for it.

I’ve found one slight flaw in paradise. Although visually, the bird population here is just stunning, with lorikeets, cockatoos and kookaburras as common as crows or sparrows are in Dallas, not one of them can sing a note. It’s cool in that it sounds like a jungle, but it would be nice if some of them could whistle a tune. I’m obviously being picky. The weather continues to be perfect every day, with temperatures in the 70’s interrupted only occasionally be a brief, light rain.

And we continue to eat like kings. If every Australian eats like Emmy cooks, I don’t know why they don’t all weigh 300 pounds. Last night’s home-cooked-from-scratch dinner was salmon steaks, scalloped potatoes, asparagus with hollandaise sauce and chunks of sweet potato and pumpkin. For dessert we had pavlova, which is a crisp meringue filled with all kinds of fresh fruit, and then ice cream over that.

I came to make a living and start a church, but I stay for the food.

The Other Brad

These photos are of the bouquet of Australian flowers I bought Karen for her birthday; of Jacob pretending to be outraged at wearing a school uniform for the first time; and of Karen Mercer and Kaylah and Tylah Hearn, all of whom have birthdays between the 12^th and 17^th of September.

Jacob seems to have made the adjustment well. According to Karen two giggling girls accompanied him to the car when she picked him up at the end of his first day at school. Then he announced that he wanted to get to school early the next morning because “my friends” would be playing basketball. Charlotte seems to be enjoying her job well enough, but at the end of her first week she still doesn’t know for sure exactly what she’s earning because she’s too intimidated by the boss to ask.

Karen failed her driving test on the second attempt, but came closer than the first try, so hopefully the third time is charm. And finally, we bought a car today which we’ll pick up on Monday.

We finally got to meet Roland’s brother Brad for the first time this week. He and his family were in town for a medical procedure on their 14-year-old daughter Kamilla, who has a heart defect which requires periodic attention. This visit went well medically. Brad and his wife and kids are a sweet family. The children enjoy playing with each other and Brad and Linda laugh easily. It’s been a nice visit.

Brad is a mechanic so he very graciously helped us find a good cheap used car online and then went to the dealership with us and checked it out, drove it around, and gave it a clean bill of health. That was very helpful. As difficult as buying a used car is anyway, it’s vastly more difficult when you struggle with the accent, the jargon, and a totally alien set of procedures and forms. He made it stress free.

I’ve just managed this week to start feeling like I’m becoming useful in the office, finding things that I can do on my own that free up other people and generate a little income for the business.

So, that’s our week. Next week I’ll try to have more exotic Australia photos and adventures to recount.

Real Life Begins

The first picture on the left is of the view from my office window. The office is on the edge of Brisbane. The next picture is of the birthday breakfast Emmy and Charlotte prepared for Karen’s 50^th birthday, which was on the 15^th of September, 2006.

The last picture is of Emmy and Karen, who fell asleep watching television one night this week. An awful lot of Australian television is American stuff, usually a season or two behind. The rest is probably evenly divided between British and Australian shows. Then you’ve got one channel that just has 30-minute newscasts in the various languages of this part of the globe: Mandarin, Cantonese, Indonesian, Indian, etc. The best show on the air, though, is an Australian-produced improv comedy show in which they throw one guy with no script into a setting where the other actors are scripted and he has to ad lib his part. It’s frequently hysterical. It’s called “Thank God You’re Here” because that’s always the first line spoken by a scripted actor to the unscripted person when he or she enters the scene.

Charlotte got a full-time job this week at a store called Bargain City. Jake got enrolled in Aspley High School. They both start on Monday, the 18^th of September. We’re still doing paperwork to get the financing taken care of for Charlotte to attend Queensland University of Technology as a psychology major when their next semester starts in February.

Karen failed her first attempt at the drivers test this week and will try again Monday. I’m letting her be the guinea pig. I’ll try after she succeeds. She also got a cell phone this week. So all in all, this week we began to approach the feeling that we’re settling in and really living here, rather than just visiting.

Little Things

It’s the little daily things more than the big spectacles that make us aware that we’re in another land. Communication isn’t a problem in normal, extended conversation. If I don’t understand one little word or phrase, it doesn’t matter or I can figure it out from the context. It’s the brief encounters that stump me, though. I was buying some little thing at the grocery store yesterday and offered a $20 bill to pay. The clerk asked a question and I didn’t understand a word. I asked her to repeat it and thought I caught the word “five”. I decided she wanted to know if I had a smaller bill, and said no. That seemed to be the right answer, as she took the $20 and gave me my change. It was sad though, because I had decided I was going to try in that brief encounter to pass myself off as a native Australian. I figured I could just greet her with a passable “g’day” and then at the end say thanks with an Australian accent and she’d be none the wiser. The blank, dopey look in between probably gave me away, though. It was the second time this week I had that kind of communication problem in making a purchase at a store. In the other incident Roland was with me, and I wound up just looking back and forth between the clerk and Roland as he interpreted for me.

On the other hand, my all-time favorite soft drink now is a flavor called Lemon, Lime & Bitters, made by at least four different Queensland soft drink manufacturers, like we have competing brands of cola in the U.S. I love it.

And my wife and I just took a short walk in the park across the street. I took my camera along and got photos of a giant lizard (maybe two feet long) and several species of bird that are just normal neighborhood birds here but are awfully exotic to me. I missed shots of a couple of other species.

Karen and the kids are about ready to start job hunting, and I’ll be ready to start my job as Customer Service Manager for Trade Alliance on Monday.

We're Here!

Well, our first weekend as residents of Australia is behind us. We had a wonderful dinner with the Hearns on Friday evening featuring leg of lamb with gravy and mint sauce. Saturday morning the kids went horseback riding. On Saturday evening we went “into the city”, which means we went to downtown Brisbane, for Riverfest. It’s an annual event. It featured the most amazing fireworks display I’ve ever seen in my life. Fireworks were fired from five barges in the middle of the river that runs through Brisbane, as well as two bridges and three downtown buildings simultaneously. We saw fireworks spread out like a fan so that some of them were shooting along parallel to the water, barely above it. We saw fireworks “fountains” on the barges and massive white fireworks “waterfalls” streaming down from the bridges. The display began and ended with a fighter jet flying low over the river “dumping” fuel to create a comet tail of fire shooting out behind it, accompanied by a deafening roar. Extraordinarily impressive.

The nucleus of what will become NewStart-RiverCity church is currently just meeting every other Sunday and this was their weekend off, so we spent Sunday at the beach at Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast south of Brisbane. It was the first time Charlotte or Jake had ever seen a beach, so they had a great time. Their relationships with the Hearn children fell right back into place after nearly four years apart, so that was a great relief.

The one negative note from our first weekend is, unfortunately, a big one. Roland’s dad Colin accompanied us to the beach Sunday and toward the end of our visit to Surfers Paradise he walked from the beach to some shops across the street and, while there, fell and broke his leg. He’s having surgery to put a pin in it today and the doctors assure us he’ll be at least as good as before, but it was very painful for him, and it was hard for us to see such a dear, gracious, gentle man in such pain. A girl who happened to be passing by when he fell stayed with him until we discovered he’d had an accident, which was some time. The ambulance was already there for a few minutes before we saw it and discovered it was for Colin. The girl stayed with him until the ambulance took him away and then exchanged phone numbers with Roland so she could keep up with how he was doing. It was just very, very sweet, and a great relief.

Today we have business details to take care of, like getting started on getting drivers licenses, getting a Tax ID Number so my wages are taxed properly, and getting “visa labels” (whatever that means) in our passports. It’s something the visas and our lawyer say we need to do shortly after arrival.

The weather is perfect, and sitting out on the veranda enjoying a cup of tea together every day with dear old friends is a wonderful privilege. Life is never perfect, but right now it’s very, very good.