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.