Cold November Rain

Howdy Doo everyone.

Pardon the month-long hiatus, (insert whatever excuse will make you happy here). Given that blogging has been a good way to keep our friends that we don’t get to talk with very often up to date with our lives, and a number of you keep reminding us of that (thank you so much), and on the whole we’re writing about living in a place that’s pretty foreign to most of you, we’ll try better to keep up.

Tim is back from a week spent in Northern Queensland. Overall, I think he had fun, but he’ll have to tell more about it when he gets his butt in gear and actually writes a post. From my perspective, his being away is getting easier to manage. For one thing, he’s rarely gone for more than a week at a time anymore (no more 3-4 week stints) and secondly, Edie is a whole lot more entertaining to hang out with 24 hours a day. She’s also way more social so we can go out with other kids and she’s pretty happy to play with them rather than hang off of my hand or hip. There are three of us (‘us’ being new (relatively speaking) moms) living on our street, our kids are all under the age of 2 and we can now rotate shifts of watching 2 or 3 kids so that one or two of us moms can take a break while husbands are at work/away/whatever. That’s a big help when Tim is gone. So, while Tim is away the missing Tim factor is still quite high, but it’s more because I just really like him and his company rather than because I’m going to scratch my eyes out in frustration due to too much mom overtime.

Well, it’s coming on summer here in Australia, and despite the fact that we’ve been here for almost 2 years, it still feels weird to think that we’re in November right now. It’s just not right. Thankfully we’ve only had a few scorchers so far, but they’re getting more and more frequent. Soon we’ll have to start implementing the 30 degree factor again; when the day’s temperature is predicted to climb over 30 degrees, Tim goes to work between 5 and 6 am so that he can get home mid-afternoon and we can get out to the coast to cool off. A nice attribute of the summer coming on however, is the abundance of rain that comes with it. Our 5000L raintank which we use only for laundry and watering plants was empty as of a month ago (ummmm, we do a whole lot of laundry around here). It’s already half-way full once again. The best part about all of the rain is that the majority has been falling at night, with Mr. Sun out nice and smiley during the day. The best of all worlds!

And speaking of watering plants, I’m sure the question that is burning in all of your minds is this- how is that lasagna garden coming along? And I am so happy to report that it is thriving! We planted basil, cilantro, oregano, dill, and lemongrass seedlings and took in a refugee garlic plant from a plant-propagation lab at the university. Unfortunately the cilantro couldn’t handle the heat, it croaked, but the rest took very well and they are now quite happy at home in our garden. I did have an incident with something attacking my dill plant overnight while Tim was away. Every morning Edie and I would go out to take a look and all of the branches would be broken off. I’m not sure why it stopped happening, but it has, and the plant seems to be recovering well. So I’m finally getting my green thumb back, all it took was planting stuff in a pile of poo and rotten food (honestly, if this experiment hadn’t worked I would have really started to question what I’ve learned (learnt, in Aussie-spell) in my mazillion years of schooling). So, Miss Edie and I put on our gardening shoes (my flip-flops, her pink rubber boots) every morning and late afternoon to go and give the garden a drink. Edie likes to carry the empty buckets back and hook them over the faucet. She is SOOOOO cute. She also likes to pull of Basil leaves, which is not as cute.



Oh yes. I almost forgot. Given that we were in Canada last Christmas, we’re rather wondering what to expect this year, it being our first yuletide season spent in Oz. We’ll keep you updated as the season progresses but the weird thing that we’ve already noticed is that if you go into a shopping mall right now, you’d never know if you were in Australia or North America. It’s the exact same! Did someone say Christmas decorations? Yep, the same. Santa’s workshop? Check-check; the same. Crowds of nitwits? Heck ya. The same. Outside, of course, you’re sweating buckets, but as soon as you enter a mall it’s like you’ve walked into this alternate universe this is attached to no specific hunk of ground or climate. Oddly enough, it seems that Christmas in Australia draws the same imagery as it does in North America, and lots of it is associated with snow and evergreens. Is this weird to anyone else? I’m certain that given too much time in malls here at Christmas time (something I hope we don’t actually experience), we’d forget where we were. It’s a weird, creepy and altogether unsettling feeling. Bah humbug.


To counteract our grizzlies over malls at Christmas, sadness about not being home and general malaise in dealing with commercialization of this holiday (Linus said it so well), we’ve decided to decorate a potted plant for our tree this year with homemade decorations that Edie has promised to help us out with. We’re looking forward to building some new family traditions into our new family this year. We’ll keep you all posted on those...We've also been invited to spend the actual holiday with friends about 4 hours north of us, we've accepted and are excited to spend Christmas with people we really like.


I’m going to keep this post shortish and catch you up on some pictures. Enjoy! I hope that you’re all doing well. And congratulations to Jen and hubby on the arrival of your new boy Marko! Welcome to the other side. You’ll never look at a screaming infant the same way.

Love,

Laura

PS. We don't have any way of showing how many times each book on our reading list is read by us. I would just like to point out that these days Miss Edie is requesting Bud The Spud at least 4 times a day, in our best Stompin' Tom voice to be sure.