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.