Thrills and Spills

This week it was cloudy and rainy all week, which is wonderful for the folks who live here, because we’re in the 6^th year of a drought, but for Wesley, who only has 3 weeks here, it’s not so great. We took him to the Sunshine Coast on Christmas Eve for the beach experience, and hope to take him to the Gold Coast this coming week. The picture is of Wesley on a boogie board in the surf on the Sunshine Coast. Yesterday he and the rest of the Hearn and Mercer kids went horseback riding at a spot on a river that’s a popular swimming hole. Wesley swung off a rope into the water and landed on a rock, leaving a pretty nasty chunk of skin peeled away from his foot (also pictured here). We doused it in Hydrogen Peroxide, put some ointment on it, and bandaged it up. We’re hoping it’ll heal enough and the weather will cooperate enough for the planned trip to the Gold Coast and to the Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s zoo – the Crocodile Hunter). Christmas was great. With 11 people living in the house and 8 of them working, there were lots of presents.

The rest of this past week was mostly just sitting around listening to the rain. Wesley has done a good bit of hiking through the national forest across the street. Yesterday morning, before the horseback riding, I took Wesley and Jake for a one-hour hike through the rainforest at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was fun and beautiful, but most of the pictures somehow got deleted. One we did get is of Jake and Wesley together at a spot covered with boulders and a large, fallen tree, where they’ve climbed high above the trail where I stayed. One photo we lost was of a large loop of vine hanging down from a tree like a natural swing. Jake and I each got up in it and swung.

I’m including one more picture of the previous week’s trip to the Green Mountains, just for the fun of it. We have later, cooler photos of Jake with parrots, after he got used to it, but my title for this one when they first landed on him is: “Why Jake’s Not a Pirate”. You gotta love that boy.

By the way, the overwhelmingly-no-competition worst soft drink I ever tasted, a yogurt soda I bought several years ago at a Pakistani convenience store in Texas, now has competition. I bought it yesterday at a little sidewalk café at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was an Italian soft drink called, innocuously enough, a “carbonated citrus beverage.” The citrus fruit turned out to be something called chinotto, and it was unbelievably, shockingly awful. The only description I can think of is incredibly intense licorice.

Jake, who has a deeply held, life-long conviction against ever, ever trying any new food or beverage, jumped at the chance to try this soft-drink when I started spitting and saying how awful it was. Unfortunately, he agreed. But at least now I know what to say to get him to try something new. You can read about Chinotto on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinotto but don’t believe what it says about the taste.

Wesley’s “Home”!!!

Wesley arrived in Brisbane this past Thursday, the 20^th of December. He missed his connecting flight from Sydney to Brisbane and had to catch the next flight, so he got to us 3 hours later than expected, and we didn’t know why. Having never been away from us so long before in his life, we were missing him pretty badly anyway, and pretty desperate for his arrival. As a result, when we did finally get him in our arms, Karen and I both burst into tears, and he called us crazy people.

He wants to pack as much as he can into his brief time here before he leaves again on the 10^th of January for his return to school at SNU for his final two semesters. On Thursday and Friday he did a lot of hiking through the part across the street from the house, seeing parrots and giant lizards and strange trees. On Saturday we went to Lamington National Forest in the Green Mountains. Tourists there feed the birds so much that they’ll come right up and land on you, hoping (usually with good reason) for food. We saw some wonderful panoramic vistas on the way up and down the mountain.

At the top of the mountain we hiked through a dense rainforest. One of the unique features of this particular rainforest is a treetop walk. A suspension footpath bridge takes you out to a point 15 or 20 metres above the ground. You’re actually walking around in the canopy of the trees, high above the forest floor. Then you come to an especially tall tree that has a metal ladder, surrounded by a wire cage to keep you from falling. You can climb it another 20 metres to a little platform at the very top of the tree, and look out across the whole rainforest, across ranges of mountains and valleys.

On the walk we saw a couple of wallabies, which are basically small kangaroos. Then on the drive home we saw a full-sized kangaroo bounding across an open field past horses and cows. All in all, Wesley had a thoroughly full day of uniquely Australian experiences.

Today, Christmas eve day, he saw 3 or 4 wallabies on his walk in the park across the street. Later today we’ll go to the beach, and then over to the home of Roland’s parents and his sister Kammy and her husband Kevin Crowther this evening for a short worship time singing carols and so forth, and apparently a meal.

Cricket and Kangaroo

The game of cricket is a major phenomenon in Australia. The biggest thing in cricket is “The Ashes”, a competition between Australia and England approximately every year and a half. A “test match” in cricket is a single cricket game that takes 5 days to play. The Ashes consists of 5 test matches, played across a couple of months. It’s such a big deal here that on certain key playing days, internet usage by office workers increases 20-fold as workers check scores and watch video of key plays on cricket websites. It’s like the world series and super bowl rolled into one and extended across two months or so. It’s being played in Australia this time (it alternates between here and England) and literally 10’s of thousands of English fans have traveled to Australia to watch the matches in person.

The most diehard of them are called the “Barmy Army”. A weekly TV series here right now is about an Aussie who travels around to the matches with the Barmy Army of British fans. Each match is being played in a different Australian city. Baseball is derived from cricket, and cricket fans have the same love as baseball fans of endless statistics and in a game that may feature 500 runs per team, there are lots of stats. Discussion before and after the games takes as much time as the game itself.

So lunch at work these days means beating a path the few meters from the office to Roland’s parents’ place where his mother feeds us lunch while we watch cricket and they discuss the strategies of the game. I’m getting to the place where I can toss in a comment here and there like I know what I’m talking about.

Yesterday’s lunch was a salad and ginger beer (ginger ale with LOTS of real ginger in it. No, it's not like Vernor's, which is still just ginger ale, albeit a good one). The salad was kind of a chef salad, with lettuce, tomatoes, bean sprouts, apples, cheese chunks and meat chunks. The meat looked like medium rare beef steak. It was actually kangaroo steak that Roland’s mother had found on sale at the local grocery store.

My sister Janet once found kangaroo meat at a new grocery store in Dallas. She invited me over, fried it in a skillet and we ate it, or tried to. Roland had previously told me that the best steak he ever ate was a kangaroo steak at a restaurant in Australia. On that recommendation we bit into our fried kangaroo with great anticipation. It was terrible. It tasted like liver or something. We couldn’t finish it. We gave Roland the leftovers and he insisted it tasted fine – nothing like liver.

As a result of that experience, I wasn’t eager to try it again, but this steak in the salad was actually quite good. Roland’s mother said it’s especially important with kangaroo meat not to overcook it, so maybe that had been our mistake.

Kangaroos, by the way, far from being an endangered species, are so common as to be a pest here, apparently. I’m told that Roland’s brother, who lives in a small town several hours into the interior of the country, has hit as many as a half-dozen or so kangaroos on the highway over the course of one drive from there to here. Nearly everyone who lives in rural parts of Australia has a “roo guard” installed on the front of their vehicle to prevent damage to the vehicle when it collides with a kangaroo.

For Texans, think skunk or Armadillo, only 50 times bigger. And tastier.

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.

Adventures in Ordinary Life

This week’s photos are of Jake being Jake, the view from our bedroom window and the view from our front door.

This past week had some interesting moments. At lunch at school one day, some kid threw a piece of ice at another kid, as I understand it. The kid who got hit asked who did it. Some other kid jokingly replied “Texas”, meaning Jake. So the kid who got hit by the ice physically attacked Jake, who was apparently holding his own too well, so a friend of the attacker joined in. Jacob still acquitted himself well in the scuffle, despite being outnumbered in a surprise attack. He had a little mark on his cheek and a bump on the head, but wasn’t much worse for wear.

The amazing thing was that the school responded with common sense. Dallas area schools are firm believers in “zero tolerance for school violence”, by which they mean that they punish assailant and victim alike, and call the police when a 6-year-old kicks his teacher. I actually had personal experience of those things as a parent advocate in Dallas. In Jake’s case however, the school recognized that one kid was the innocent victim and the other two were unprovoked assailants and told Jake so, and expelled the other two kids. I love this country!

To make it even better, he had a number of friends offering to go beat up the assailants for him, which offers he of course declined. And the next day, he had to dispel the rumor that he had gone after the original assailant and beaten him up after school. So in one fell swoop he managed to be completely innocent while proving he can adequately defend himself if need be, he got to be gracious in response to the protective indignation of his friends, and he got to see the depth of devotion his new Australian friends feel for him.

Karen would tell the story completely differently, of course, but to a father, it was a moment of pride more than horror.

Charlotte and Kaylah worked at the same store for the first time this week, but their schedules were so different that they actually worked together only 30 minutes the whole week. Karen distributed flyers in a couple of retirement communities a couple of weeks ago, offering to run errands and clean house for a fee. She got her first call back this week from that. And the substitute teaching looks like it’ll keep her reasonably busy right up until Wesley gets here from Texas 18 days from now! YEEHAH! We can’t wait. Life is good.