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.