A Great Foraging Victory!

My dearly beloved friend Emmy has succeeded in finding pinto beans in Brisbane. I couldn’t find them in any grocery store I checked. Even my internet search found only a Brisbane university organic agricultural cooperative from which I could order pinto beans for later home delivery, but only if I paid a fee to join the collective and volunteered my time to work there. Their website featured an article extolling the virtues of agricultural practices in Castro’s Cuba and so forth. Basically, I could get pinto beans in Brisbane only if I joined the local communist party, overpaid and then waited a week or two. I decided I wasn’t that hungry, yet.

Then this week Emmy walked in with the wonderful news that she had scored a kilo of pinto beans at a local organic health food market right in our neighborhood. Victory! I can now just walk into a store any time I like and buy pinto beans. I’m cooking rice and beans today!

On the other hand, the bean dearth is one of the few flaws here in paradise (and Roland, inexplicably a bean-hater, doesn’t consider it a flaw). Karen and Emmy and Roland and I went out to eat earlier this week at a local mall. The trees lining the sidewalk at our sidewalk café were full of multi-colored lorikeets.

The next night the Mercer side of the household ate out at a nearby restaurant called the “Hog’s Breath” and I wondered if it could have been inspired by a bar of the same name in Oklahoma City, across the street from an apartment complex I lived in when I was in college. (No, I never visited the bar.) The plausibility of that question was strengthened when we ate there the other night and saw, there in Brisbane, Australia, a Diffee Motor Company license plate over our booth, among all the U.S. license plates that decorated the walls. Diffee was a car dealership near Southern Nazarene University, owned by a Nazarene family.

The final thrill Wesley was determined to experience on this trip to Australia was to get his picture taken with a pretty Australian girl on the beach, to complete the task of maximizing the jealousy of his friends back in the States. He told me he was just going to find a cute girl on the beach and walk up to her and tell her more or less the truth, that he wanted a photo of himself with a beautiful Australian girl so he could show his American friends how beautiful Australian girls are. And blast if that smooth-talking, good-looking boy didn’t do it exactly like that. Don’t know if he got her name, but he had a nice little chat with her and got the picture.