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.