My diagnosis of Hattie's injuries after the tree incident was called into question. As a result she ended up at the hospital on Saturday afternoon to have an x-ray and let someone with slightly more training than myself have a look at it. It turns out I was right all along - minor cuts and bruises, apparently though I should have strapped the little finger of her left hand to the ring finger of her left hand and not the ring finger of her right hand. This may explain why she was struggling to use it properly.
George took part in the Joondalup festival last weekend. His class and a couple of others represented the school in the street parade. The boys were samurai warriors and the girls were geisha's. Wendy, somehow got roped into doing some face painting - everyone ended up with a white face and a droopy black moustache and goatee beard... and that was just the geisha's. The Japanese teacher chose some appropriate music to accompany them on their way round, namely Kungfu Fighting (Craig Douglas) and Turning Japanese by the Vapors. Bearing in mind the true meaning of the Vapors' lyrics the song probably wasn't that suitable after all. I'm sure it would have been more appropriate if all the boys had been teenagers.
This week I have mainly been learning about parrots, two in particular. Firstly, the Galah - this is the grey and pink parrot that appears in the photo gallery on the left of this page. It's a bit clumsy and not too bright and has been known to drop out of trees - hence calling someone a big Galah, especially someone you don't know, is offensive and can lead to a flamin' row. Australians do like a bit of a confrontation, which is why they have 37 different words for 'argue' (like Eskimos with snow). The other parrot I am now an expert on is the one known as the 28. It's very colourful in blues and greens and is so named because when it calls it sounds like it's saying 28. The only time it ever makes the call is when it's going to rain which is why it's also called the rain bird. I can vouch for this, the other day when I walked to the train station they were all calling and sure enough twenty minutes later it was raining. Mind you, there were some pretty dark rain clouds around at the time. In fact, you would have to be a Galah or Michael Fish not to know it was about to chuck it down.
We recently made a bold attempt to buy a house we liked but our less than generous offer was turned down. The system for house sales over here is quite different from the UK. Basically, you put your offer in writing and if the vendor accepts it - that's it, you've bought the house, it's legally binding and there is no way out of it. This, tied to the fact that the market is slowing down and that we aren't in any hurry to move, led us to put in a very cautious offer...one that the vendors were not at all impressed with. They responded by dropping the price by $5,000 which was still $44,999 and 98 cents more than we were offering.
Disaster. Hard Jubes are temporarily out of stock - in the entire State, I think it may be my heavy consumption of them that has caused this inbalance in the demand/supply chain.
Next time: Hatties birthday, George the artist of International renown, new hairstyles administered under general anaethestic, ANZAC Day and Australian weddings (probably).
This weeks essential ipod top 5: (1) The cutter > Echo and the Bunnymen. (2) Keep it clean > Camera Obscura. (3) Rich and strange > Cud. (4) There there my dear > Dexy's Midnight Runners. (5) Twist and shout > Deacon Blue.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday, April 04, 2008
I like my football on a Saturday, roast beef on Sunday.. alright
...yes, it's my autumn almanac. Lyrics courtesy of my uncle Ray and The Kinks - just in case you were struggling with this weeks pop reference. We have now officially changed seasons, although it's not altogether obvious, all the leaves on the trees are still green, it's still sunny for the majority of the time and the TV schedule hasn't improved any.
We have turned the clocks back, officially it's an hour, but for the TV stations it's twenty years - a new series of Gladiators started this week, can't wait for Howard's Way and Triangle to get here.
The coming of autumn means the start of the footy season and as part of our integration into Aussie society, George and I attended a local game last Saturday. Despite the fact that it's a different game, a different country and a different hemisphere I still managed to get sat next to the mouthy old woman who spent the duration of the match (more than two and half hours including the breaks) shouting abuse and encouragement in equal measures at umpires, spectators and players alike. It could have been worse, I could have been sat closer to the bloke who was constantly hitting two metal dustbins with two bits of heavy duty steel pipe and shouting EAT PEARS (well that's what it sounded like to me, George reckons he was shouting East Perth but I'm not convinced). The game itself was very interesting but is clearly a young mans game, none of the players were born before 1978. I think it must be like Logan's Run and they dispose of them when the player reaches 30, I suspect that they send them to Brisbane like they do in Neighbours.
The kids are coming to the end of their first school term and they have both done really well, many of you will have already seen the certificate Hattie received for her Merit Award that Wendy sent out last week. Having got the award for concentrating hard in class last week, this week she wasn't concentrating quite hard enough in PE and managed to run into a tree. Hattie escaped with cuts and bruises, the tree however had to be humanely destroyed and has now been turned into an Ikea storage system probably called something like bjorn.
Now that the long winter nights are upon us (it goes dark at six o 'clock ) we are going to have to make our own entertainment by playing board games. I am however slightly nervous about playing George at chess because a month or so back he picked up some new tactics from an expert who came to the school. He was a grand wizard or a jedi knight or something of that ilk and he's taught George all sorts of weird new moves. I had previously heard of castling although I didn't have a clue what it was, but I'd never come across 'kangarooing' before, where you hop all round the board removing all of your opponenets pieces as you go. The good thing is that the games are mercifully short, George is now talking about playing him at poker... I don't think so.
It's not so much roast beef on Sunday, more like barbecued sausages and burgers in the park, followed by a game of cricket whilst the parrots squawk in the branches of the trees overhead. It's still slightly surreal but very good indeed.
We are definitely now into phase two of our migration, which goes by the codename of Operation Boomerang. We are well and truly out of holiday mode and are settling into the routine of daily life - work, school, footy, fishing (the jury is still out on this one - George loved it, I don't get it), and eating pies.
Pie is the national dish of Australia and very nice they are too, I can highly recomend the beef and bacon pie, the beef stroganoff pie and the beef stake pie, I ate them all in the name of research so you wouldn't have to. There's an advert on TV over here in which Hollywood star Sam Neill explains that white meat isn't good for you and red blooded Australians should only eat red meat. I Can't think why 48% of Australians are overweight.
So, all we need now in order to feel that we are here for good is to buy a Neighbours style house in a cul-de-sac, complete with swimming pool and built in Mrs Mangle. Well........
We have turned the clocks back, officially it's an hour, but for the TV stations it's twenty years - a new series of Gladiators started this week, can't wait for Howard's Way and Triangle to get here.
The coming of autumn means the start of the footy season and as part of our integration into Aussie society, George and I attended a local game last Saturday. Despite the fact that it's a different game, a different country and a different hemisphere I still managed to get sat next to the mouthy old woman who spent the duration of the match (more than two and half hours including the breaks) shouting abuse and encouragement in equal measures at umpires, spectators and players alike. It could have been worse, I could have been sat closer to the bloke who was constantly hitting two metal dustbins with two bits of heavy duty steel pipe and shouting EAT PEARS (well that's what it sounded like to me, George reckons he was shouting East Perth but I'm not convinced). The game itself was very interesting but is clearly a young mans game, none of the players were born before 1978. I think it must be like Logan's Run and they dispose of them when the player reaches 30, I suspect that they send them to Brisbane like they do in Neighbours.
The kids are coming to the end of their first school term and they have both done really well, many of you will have already seen the certificate Hattie received for her Merit Award that Wendy sent out last week. Having got the award for concentrating hard in class last week, this week she wasn't concentrating quite hard enough in PE and managed to run into a tree. Hattie escaped with cuts and bruises, the tree however had to be humanely destroyed and has now been turned into an Ikea storage system probably called something like bjorn.
Now that the long winter nights are upon us (it goes dark at six o 'clock ) we are going to have to make our own entertainment by playing board games. I am however slightly nervous about playing George at chess because a month or so back he picked up some new tactics from an expert who came to the school. He was a grand wizard or a jedi knight or something of that ilk and he's taught George all sorts of weird new moves. I had previously heard of castling although I didn't have a clue what it was, but I'd never come across 'kangarooing' before, where you hop all round the board removing all of your opponenets pieces as you go. The good thing is that the games are mercifully short, George is now talking about playing him at poker... I don't think so.
It's not so much roast beef on Sunday, more like barbecued sausages and burgers in the park, followed by a game of cricket whilst the parrots squawk in the branches of the trees overhead. It's still slightly surreal but very good indeed.
We are definitely now into phase two of our migration, which goes by the codename of Operation Boomerang. We are well and truly out of holiday mode and are settling into the routine of daily life - work, school, footy, fishing (the jury is still out on this one - George loved it, I don't get it), and eating pies.
Pie is the national dish of Australia and very nice they are too, I can highly recomend the beef and bacon pie, the beef stroganoff pie and the beef stake pie, I ate them all in the name of research so you wouldn't have to. There's an advert on TV over here in which Hollywood star Sam Neill explains that white meat isn't good for you and red blooded Australians should only eat red meat. I Can't think why 48% of Australians are overweight.
So, all we need now in order to feel that we are here for good is to buy a Neighbours style house in a cul-de-sac, complete with swimming pool and built in Mrs Mangle. Well........
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