1 down 2 to go!

Hoy hoy folks,

It’s Laura. I am sitting in my office enjoying the end-of-daylight songs of the Kookaburras, who like to sing in gangs I think. When the sun is coming up and when it disappears, you can be sure to hear them…One will start off with a timid oo oooo ooo oooo, and then you’ll hear another shy one join in, and then all havock breaks loose and a whole cacophony of sounds emerges, which sounds a lot like a pack of monkeys. If you try to listen to just one of the birds in the group it’s just hilarious what actual noises come out of them…Like they’re just making any noise that they can, really loudly and really quickly. Probably not the best description of what the Kookaburras sound like, but you’ll have to come and visit to get the whole effect. It’s quite pleasant. I’ve come to expect to hear it in the mornings and it’s usually the break whistle for me at the end of the day. Australia is nice.

So, one week down, two more to go for Tim’s latest stint in northern Queensland. So far I haven’t heard from him much except for when he first arrived in Cairns and a 30 second satellite phone call on Wednesday night. He was able to tell me that he and his crew were safe (i.e. not eaten by crocs), and that they were having equipment issues. I think they broke a trailer hitch while driving on a river bank somewhere in cattle country. Two of the guys had to go back to “town” to get it fixed while Tim and the remaining crew set up camp at a new site on some cattle station. I haven’t heard anything from Tim since then, but they phone the manager of the project every night to tell her that they’ve arrived safely at their destination, I usually call her to get updates. I hope I get to hear from him soon, although I knew that on this trip there would be a lot less satellite coverage than the last one. Last week an old lady friend of ours called me a “grass widow”. For any non-golfers out there, this is what women of friends whose husbands spend all of their free time on the golf course are called. I agreed with her even though Tim wasn’t there to defend himself, which I think I stated that I wouldn’t do in my wedding vows (for everyone’s memory lapse on that one “I’ll stand by you even when it makes me look like an idiot”), I hope she knew I was kidding (about agreeing with the grass widow part, not the wedding vows)! Regardless, I’ll be happy to have Tim home. I like him a lot. Life is more fun when we get to hang out. I think that the Goob likes it better too. I think I eat more when Tim is around.

We haven’t told you about a couple of firsts for us here in Australia. The first first for us, was the receiving of our first letter from Canada the other day. It was from our friend Jean Saunders, who I like to call “Jean Jean the Cleaning Machine” (she’s a stickler for a clean kitchen). We used to work with Jean at the soup kitchen in Fredericton although she’s been working there a lot longer than we ever were, I think that she’s the longest-standing volunteer there, at maybe 25 years now. Either way, Jean is an amazing woman (Older than the queen and better looking, according to some), and brought us up to date on all of the goings on at the kitchen, including a fire in the dishwasher and a volunteer shortage this summer. So, if you’re in Fredericton and have a spare couple of hours around a meal-time, please, please, please call up the kitchen and see if they could use your help. You’d be surprised at how much fun it can be there. We’ve made some of the best friends we have from working there, and generally people that we wouldn’t have had a chance to cross paths with otherwise. And, even if you really hated it there, at least you’re helping someone (many people) less fortunate than you are, most likely. Whatever the motivation is, it can’t be a bad thing that hungry people get something to eat who wouldn’t necessarily otherwise. Back to Jean’s letter, it was nice. Letters are great to get. Thank you Jean.

The second first for us was our first Canadian visitor! Greg MacNeill was in Brisbane at what happened to be the coldest, wettest week that we’ve had since Tim and I have been here, and we were able to convince him to catch a bus to come and stay with us for a night. It was surprising just how nice it was to listen to someone with a good maritime accent…Probably what it’s like when you hear someone with an Australian accent in Canada, you just want them to keep talking so that you can just listen. Greg’s good at talking, and is doing some really cool stuff these days…We really enjoyed his company. He was woken up by the Kookaburras that usually start around 5-6am these days…I don’t know if he enjoyed them quite as much as we do. Either way, we felt dull around him. He’s in visitor’s mode and wanted to get everything done that he possibly could while here. I think that he mentioned going south to the Gold Coast one day to surf, going up north to Cairns the next to scuba dive, and making sure that he saw everything else in between. We haven’t been that ambitious since…probably well before we got here, maybe when we found out we were having a baby??? Not sure. But it was definitely when we thought that all of those cool things to do were a lot closer to home. Either way, we’ve got lots of time to explore. But it is crazy how similar the patterns and activities of our lives are here, to the way that they were in Canada. We seem to thrive on the same stuff, what creatures of habit are we. Traveling half-way across the globe to settle into our normal routine in a different setting. That’s not 100% true, but more true than we’d like to admit sometimes. Oh well.

Getting Greg to find our place was a bit tricky too. I told him to take a bus that would bring him to a stop that was about 800m away from our house (an uphill walk from our place). So, rather than leave him to find our house from the bus stop where we told him to go to, we decided that we would go and meet him at the bus stop (800m walk UPHILL, pregnant lady emphasis). Oh, I forgot to mention that it was raining BUCKETS. So, the first bus that he should have been on came and went. So, we thought, maybe he missed that one. And waited 35-40 minutes for the next one to come along. No Greg. So, we had no way to get in touch with him, it was late and we had no food ready for when he got there (making us extra fun to be around…no food = cranky Tim and Laura), and it was raining, and we didn’t know where Greg was. So we decided to walk back down the hill to our house to see if he’d tried to call or something. When we got to our street we saw this guy who looked like a drowned rat that obviously had no clue where he was staring at house numbers and a GPS through fogged up glasses. The fact that he looked like a lost foreigner with a winter jacket on in our neighborhood was the only thing that gave him away because it was raining so hard at that point that we couldn’t really make out anything like facial features. So we approached him. It was Greg. He had ended up by chance taking a bus that dropped him off at another stop, which was actually closer to our house but took twice as long to get here. So our timing was actually quite perfect except for the fact that we were all cold wet and hungry when we actually met up. And when it’s cold outside here, it’s cold inside. There is no hint of insulation in houses in Queensland based on the fact that cooling down is usually more of an issue than warming up. So 10° here is cold, as there’s no warming up inside of a snuggly heated house. I kind of miss that about Canada. I’m not sure that I miss it enough to go back to 2 snowstorms a week or anything…but it had its perks. Certainly when you’re wet down to the bone, it’s nice to have a warm fireplace to cozy up to. Once we all got food and I got a blanket, we were the finest kind.

So, we’re obviously going to have to work on travel means when all of our friends decide to come and visit. Soon, right?

I think I have gained about 2 inches in girth in the last 24 hours. Seriously. Yesterday morning I walked normally…Like pregnancy wasn’t really affecting me all that much. When I went to bed, I waddled. And I’m waddling today. This is good I suppose. The last doc’s appointment I’d had the doctor had said that my belly was a bit small for the stage I was supposed to be at (and in my head skinny Laura gave herself a high five). He’d said that if I didn’t get bigger then they would have to start looking more closely at the wee one…i.e., more ultrasounds, which M. ou Mlle. Goobert(te) does not like. I think there’s a spurt happening. Lots and lots of movement too. Especially in the middle of the night. I’m finishing off a yoga program for 2^nd trimester moms on Tuesday, I’ve really liked it mostly for forcing me to stay flexible. I’ve replaced it with an aquatic aerobics class which I love, love, love. It’s in a heated pool (which makes the workout a bit tougher) but the best part is how light I feel. It’s like I weigh what I used to. The shocker is when I jump out of the pool and find that gravity is again a factor. It would be nice to always feel buoyant, hey?

I think I’ll finish off there for the night. I miss everyone so much more when I’m here alone. But truly, this week hasn’t been bad at all. I suppose I’ve kept busy, and I’m actually kind of feeling sorry for Tim this time, because I know that there are so many things about our everyday lives here in Oz that he really enjoys that he can’t do while away. Like going to the market and eating amazing fruit salads while the sun is rising. I’ve also been able to hang out with some good friends this week which is always nice, he’s really got no choice in who he’s hanging out with up north, there aren’t that many people to choose from. And he’s making them work for him. I really hope things are going well up there.

Love to everyone, have a great week this week!

Just got a call from Tim, another 30 second satellite call. Things are going better for them and still no croc fatalities or issues even. They’ll be in a town on Wednesday or Thursday so I’ll get more info from him then when he can call from a land line. I do miss that guy. Good night!

PS. Sorry about the not many new photos thing, Tim has had the camera with him for these past couple of weeks and we just haven’t been taking many new pictures although he has lots from his work trips. We’ll fix things up when he gets back.