Posts
Monday, August 21, 2006
Melissa B...
...I just saw your comment. Here, for anyone remotely interested, are the listings for our Florida properties:
Island
They use the word "quaint," so be warned.
Mainland
Please feel free to email me: marlynnemail-schola (at) yahoo (dot) com
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay?
Proputty, proputty, proputty -- that's what I 'ears 'em saay.
-- Lord Alfred Tennyson (Northern Farmer: New Style)
Island
They use the word "quaint," so be warned.
Mainland
Please feel free to email me: marlynnemail-schola (at) yahoo (dot) com
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay?
Proputty, proputty, proputty -- that's what I 'ears 'em saay.
-- Lord Alfred Tennyson (Northern Farmer: New Style)
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Unbelievable!
These pictures came via email from the co-worker of a cousin of a friend of a neighbor. The neighbor, an Australian sheep farmer, was puzzled at the disappearance of sheep on his farm.
After a few weeks of sheep disappearing the farmer decided to put up an electric fence.
This is what he found!
Heh, heh, heh.
Rumor flies.
-- Virgil
After a few weeks of sheep disappearing the farmer decided to put up an electric fence.
This is what he found!
Heh, heh, heh.
Rumor flies.
-- Virgil
Suzy Homemaker
I decided it was high time to repay some of the kindnesses done by our neighbors, and opted to present them each withone of these, the Florida State Pie (your tax dollars at work.) But to make that recipe required Graham Crackers. Australia does not have Graham Crackers. Australia does not have anything of the sort, though the local shoppers patiently suggested any number of alternatives to the frustrated Yank in the biscuit aisle. Thanks to the internet I was able to come up with this which was pressed into service, literally, as my pie crust (I’m not so obsessive as to bake the cookies and then smash them up again. C'mon.) Jorge, on one of his trips into Cairns last week to meet with Immigration Lady 2, was kind enough to honor my request for a food processor, as we have no kitchen implements other than forks, knives, and spoons, making piecrust creation nearly impossible, bringing the expense of each of the pies to around $75.00.
With the invitation to a real Australian cookout this past Friday, prawns on the Barbie and steaks from a freshly slaughtered cow, came the request for an accompanying dessert and side dish. The girls brought home two large sacks of oranges after a visit to the neighbors’ yesterday and today we’ll crank up the juicer attachment. It slices! It dices! It… Nevermind. I'm getting my money's worth.
About Jorge’s trip into town: He was granted a three-month Returning Resident Visa allowing him to travel to the US and back, to help finish up a job that has run into some difficulty. This opens the door for the remainder of us to receive Returning Resident Visas at some later date. Maybe we’ll still be back around the end of November after all?
What is more agreeable than one’s home?
-- Cicero
With the invitation to a real Australian cookout this past Friday, prawns on the Barbie and steaks from a freshly slaughtered cow, came the request for an accompanying dessert and side dish. The girls brought home two large sacks of oranges after a visit to the neighbors’ yesterday and today we’ll crank up the juicer attachment. It slices! It dices! It… Nevermind. I'm getting my money's worth.
About Jorge’s trip into town: He was granted a three-month Returning Resident Visa allowing him to travel to the US and back, to help finish up a job that has run into some difficulty. This opens the door for the remainder of us to receive Returning Resident Visas at some later date. Maybe we’ll still be back around the end of November after all?
What is more agreeable than one’s home?
-- Cicero
Monday, August 14, 2006
Daily bread
The days have slipped into routine.
Wake up
Walk kids to bus stop
Clean house, or not
Read
Meet kids at bus stop
Cook dinner
Go to bed
Oh, and do paperwork. Loads and loads of paperwork. Paperwork from two governments that love to crank out the wood pulp products in duplicate and triplicate, among them the Australian census -- which I considered fun, I love filling in all those little bubbles -- and a giant heap from the REIQ where I am applying for my real estate agency license, the equivalent of a broker's license in the US. Please don't be too impressed. You basically buy the thing. There are 17 modules of instruction that must be completed, most focusing on marketing rather than ethics or legislation. That real estate licensees are lumped under the same government division as car salesmen is rather telling. It is estimated to take from 12 weeks to 12 months to complete, although with my busy schedule, I am thinking more like 12 days.
Oh, and we also enjoy unexpected visits from neighbors popping in for a cuppa. So far, probably because we leave all the doors and windows wide open (including the one the bird still crashes into), we've been surprised by several deliverymen; potential house-buyers who've noticed the For Sale sign out front with its advice to Enquire Within (I have to remember to black that part out); the ex-Kiwi-acupuncture-student mom and her kids, schoolmates of our girls; and my German friend returned yesterday with a basket of fresh eggs, homemade rosella jam, a bible, and several religious tracts. Not only is she an ex-Catholic, a description not meant as a snipe against anyone, but as a general characterization, one other ex-Catholics can appreciate, she is Jehovah's Witness. But we won't hold that against her. The earliest version of this year's planned homeschool curriculum included a study of the Old Testament, right after the epic of Gilgamesh and alongside our classical Greek studies. And in a poke at my mom, a gentle, humorous poke, not a snipe at all, the girls spent the evening in their bedroom reading What Does the Bible Really Teach? and looking up corresponding verses in the good book.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
-- Joe Hill (from The Preacher and the Slave)
Wake up
Walk kids to bus stop
Clean house, or not
Read
Meet kids at bus stop
Cook dinner
Go to bed
Oh, and do paperwork. Loads and loads of paperwork. Paperwork from two governments that love to crank out the wood pulp products in duplicate and triplicate, among them the Australian census -- which I considered fun, I love filling in all those little bubbles -- and a giant heap from the REIQ where I am applying for my real estate agency license, the equivalent of a broker's license in the US. Please don't be too impressed. You basically buy the thing. There are 17 modules of instruction that must be completed, most focusing on marketing rather than ethics or legislation. That real estate licensees are lumped under the same government division as car salesmen is rather telling. It is estimated to take from 12 weeks to 12 months to complete, although with my busy schedule, I am thinking more like 12 days.
Oh, and we also enjoy unexpected visits from neighbors popping in for a cuppa. So far, probably because we leave all the doors and windows wide open (including the one the bird still crashes into), we've been surprised by several deliverymen; potential house-buyers who've noticed the For Sale sign out front with its advice to Enquire Within (I have to remember to black that part out); the ex-Kiwi-acupuncture-student mom and her kids, schoolmates of our girls; and my German friend returned yesterday with a basket of fresh eggs, homemade rosella jam, a bible, and several religious tracts. Not only is she an ex-Catholic, a description not meant as a snipe against anyone, but as a general characterization, one other ex-Catholics can appreciate, she is Jehovah's Witness. But we won't hold that against her. The earliest version of this year's planned homeschool curriculum included a study of the Old Testament, right after the epic of Gilgamesh and alongside our classical Greek studies. And in a poke at my mom, a gentle, humorous poke, not a snipe at all, the girls spent the evening in their bedroom reading What Does the Bible Really Teach? and looking up corresponding verses in the good book.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
-- Joe Hill (from The Preacher and the Slave)
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
More serendipity?
Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?
Just as I was lamenting my lack of support here, no family, no friends, no internet, and a husband who only humors me when I try to discuss plans for the future, we had a surprise.
The two daughters of a family in our community and our two eldest girls attend classes together, one with Grice at the primary and the other with Sarabelle at the high school, both sets simultaneously becoming friendly. The topic of pets arose and the neighbor girls learned that the new people have two cats and a hedgehog back in Florida and have been looking for a dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, to be precise. (A dog that I, crazy researching person, have been trying for years to convince my husband and children would be the perfect match and worth the wait.) The neighbor girls excitedly told their mother about the new American girls, who are very nice, don’t swear, and are looking for a dog, and the whole troop, mom, girls, brother, and their champion Ridgeback bitch came over for an impromptu visit, bearing a just-baked chocolate sour cream cake.
The mom, a German ex-pat, ex-Catholic, grinds her own flour, bakes her own bread, and makes her own gourmet cheeses from her hand-milked cows on their solar-powered, television-free, organic dairy farm. She thinks the world is going to Hell in a handbasket and was thrilled to hear of some nice girls for her daughters to befriend. She has no great affection for government of any sort so I got a “Good on ya!” when she found out we had homeschooled instead of the usual puzzled stare. We’ll be getting together again soon.
Jorge came home from work too late for a piece of cake, but early enough to enjoy some lively conversation and fall in love with the dog. The mom decided right then and there to give into requests from other breeders to mate her Ridgeback because she wants us to have a puppy.
The long arm of coincidence.
-- Haddon Chambers (from Captain Swift)
Just as I was lamenting my lack of support here, no family, no friends, no internet, and a husband who only humors me when I try to discuss plans for the future, we had a surprise.
The two daughters of a family in our community and our two eldest girls attend classes together, one with Grice at the primary and the other with Sarabelle at the high school, both sets simultaneously becoming friendly. The topic of pets arose and the neighbor girls learned that the new people have two cats and a hedgehog back in Florida and have been looking for a dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, to be precise. (A dog that I, crazy researching person, have been trying for years to convince my husband and children would be the perfect match and worth the wait.) The neighbor girls excitedly told their mother about the new American girls, who are very nice, don’t swear, and are looking for a dog, and the whole troop, mom, girls, brother, and their champion Ridgeback bitch came over for an impromptu visit, bearing a just-baked chocolate sour cream cake.
The mom, a German ex-pat, ex-Catholic, grinds her own flour, bakes her own bread, and makes her own gourmet cheeses from her hand-milked cows on their solar-powered, television-free, organic dairy farm. She thinks the world is going to Hell in a handbasket and was thrilled to hear of some nice girls for her daughters to befriend. She has no great affection for government of any sort so I got a “Good on ya!” when she found out we had homeschooled instead of the usual puzzled stare. We’ll be getting together again soon.
Jorge came home from work too late for a piece of cake, but early enough to enjoy some lively conversation and fall in love with the dog. The mom decided right then and there to give into requests from other breeders to mate her Ridgeback because she wants us to have a puppy.
The long arm of coincidence.
-- Haddon Chambers (from Captain Swift)
Blah, blah, blah update
Still waiting for the courier to deliver my external modem, a retrofit, for the privilege of hooking up to our slower-than-coconut-oil-in-winter home dial-up service.
We’ve got another vehicle, another Toyota Landcruiser, a smaller model than Mrs. Troopie that our neighbors have nicknamed “The Red Devil.” Jorge drives that so I once again have at my disposal the 4 Runner -- now called “Migaloo” (because you know, all our vehicles must have names) after the rare albino humpback whale who annually visits this area’s waters, whose name means “White Fella” in an Aboriginal language – although there is really nowhere for me to go these days. Driving on the left has become second nature, though I still catch myself starting for the passenger’s side door on numerous occasions. Then I pretend like I meant to do that in case anyone is looking.
The sun finally made a long-term appearance and boy, was it worth the wait. It is spectacularly, painfully beautiful here.
Both of our Florida properties are officially on the market. We have prioritized our list of possibilities as follows:
A) 119 acres, riverfront, ponds, 5 bedroom house, pool ($$$)
B) 40 acres, double creekfront, ponds, liveable stables ($$)
C) 5 acres, creekfront, spring, 2 bedroom house, horse ($$)
D) 80 acres, creekfront, ponds, vacant land ($$$)
E) 5 acres, creekfront, swimming hole, vacant land ($)
Whatever sells first and whatever is still available will decide which way we go. Que sera, sera.
Finally, a couple highlights from my week:
-- Cackling Kookaburras at the school bus stop
-- Overhearing big, leathery cane farmers debate which recipe website is most helpful
-- Listening to Elle surmise that the hatch in the ceiling must lead to the basement since everything in Australia is opposite.
-- Seeing the red creep into the socially awkward, techno-geek’s (wait, is that redundant?) face as he relays, after noticing my neoprene computer carrying case doubling as a lap pad, that Mac portables get so hot there have been reports of men’s genitalia being seriously burned, and then realizes this may not be a suitable topic for mixed company.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
-- Voltaire
We’ve got another vehicle, another Toyota Landcruiser, a smaller model than Mrs. Troopie that our neighbors have nicknamed “The Red Devil.” Jorge drives that so I once again have at my disposal the 4 Runner -- now called “Migaloo” (because you know, all our vehicles must have names) after the rare albino humpback whale who annually visits this area’s waters, whose name means “White Fella” in an Aboriginal language – although there is really nowhere for me to go these days. Driving on the left has become second nature, though I still catch myself starting for the passenger’s side door on numerous occasions. Then I pretend like I meant to do that in case anyone is looking.
The sun finally made a long-term appearance and boy, was it worth the wait. It is spectacularly, painfully beautiful here.
Both of our Florida properties are officially on the market. We have prioritized our list of possibilities as follows:
A) 119 acres, riverfront, ponds, 5 bedroom house, pool ($$$)
B) 40 acres, double creekfront, ponds, liveable stables ($$)
C) 5 acres, creekfront, spring, 2 bedroom house, horse ($$)
D) 80 acres, creekfront, ponds, vacant land ($$$)
E) 5 acres, creekfront, swimming hole, vacant land ($)
Whatever sells first and whatever is still available will decide which way we go. Que sera, sera.
Finally, a couple highlights from my week:
-- Cackling Kookaburras at the school bus stop
-- Overhearing big, leathery cane farmers debate which recipe website is most helpful
-- Listening to Elle surmise that the hatch in the ceiling must lead to the basement since everything in Australia is opposite.
-- Seeing the red creep into the socially awkward, techno-geek’s (wait, is that redundant?) face as he relays, after noticing my neoprene computer carrying case doubling as a lap pad, that Mac portables get so hot there have been reports of men’s genitalia being seriously burned, and then realizes this may not be a suitable topic for mixed company.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
-- Voltaire
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Bringing you up to (really slow dial-up) speed
Why, hello again! Let’s see, what has been going on since iWeb imploded…
HEALTH AND SAFETY
Jorge had a head-on in Mrs. Troopie. A “smash-up” they call it. He’s okay, the other driver was okay, but Mrs. Troopie, well, we’ll be keeping her for spare parts. Jorge has decided that she is the Best Vehicle Ever and one day we’ll get another one. For now, he’s got the 4 Runner and I’m home playing the role of farm wife, modern farm wife with her MacBook Pro, keeping myself warm cooking up huge meals for the family’s tea time. (Your main early evening meal, or dinner, is “tea,” which may or may not include that particular beverage; a light bite later in the evening is “supper.” Tea may be had anytime but is referred to as “a cuppa.” On the job Jorge gets a 30-minute “smoko,” a midmorning break originally named in the old days for a cigarette break but smoking is not permitted anywhere these days, and not lunch but a 15-minute “sit down.” Got it?)
I thought we were living in Australia, but apparently we’ve made a wrong turn and ended up in Scotland or Ireland or the Pacific Northwest or some other lovely, green, wet, cold place. The locals are freaked out by the weather. The paper has already run their special pull-out pictorial supplement titled, “The Big Wet,” chronicling the unusually high rain falls, flooding, and ferocious cyclones. I suppose everyone thought that meant it should be over by now, like Bush’s, “Mission Accomplished,” but, no, it continues to drizzle and I am forced to cook to justify turning on the gas stove, our only source of heat. We are all adapting, resigning ourselves to constant sogginess and bad hair lives, but I am wondering what the lack of sunshine will eventually do me. Will I need a sunlamp? Vitamin D supplements? Antidepressants?
Hornblower…?!
PROPERTY
For nearly the same price (check currency conversion rates here) we can choose one of the following, all in the same neighborhood – the same super wet, green neighborhood henceforth known as Green Acres -- all available as lease/purchases or with extended closings:
A) The house we are in now – 6.5 acres, seasonal creek, concrete block house in need of major renovations, too close to highway. $360,000 AUD
B) Beautiful custom built house, 3.5 acres, small but enlargeable pond, well back off road. ASKING $360,000 AUD
C) 40 acres, two clean permanent creeks, liveable stable for use during construction of a house or easily convertible to a house, well off the road. Owner has maintained old logging and mining trails through this and his adjoining 160+ acres for fabulous walking/horseback riding. ASKING $360,000 AUD
Do I even need to tell you which one has us most excited?
Another really tempting one is:
-- 119 acres with a five bedroom house, granny flat (2 bedroom apartment downstairs), inground pool, great raised bed vegetable gardens, pastures, ranch hand quarters, numerous other outbuildings (barns and such) four dams (ponds), one kilometer of river frontage bordering the property with a side branch of the river running through the property, and all the necessary equipment, fences and squeezers etc., for running a few head of cattle. Just outside the rainforest, much drier with more sun and less rainfall. One end of the property is located at a major crossroads (some highway noise) which makes for good development potential (ability to subdivide a few riverfront acres that would essentially pay for the place), and the other end is "downtown," referring to the center of a village with 225 people in it. This one is $550,000 AUD and would pretty much take all we’ve got but is a bargain for the price.
I think I’ve seen every inch of property in the Green Acres surrounds; I should be a real estate agent. Oh, wait, I am, though I only seem to spend money.
SCOOL
The girls started their first full week today (Monday, July 17). Grice and Elle go off barefoot (though I make them carry their Crocs in their backpacks because the thought of using the school toilets without shoes on makes me gag) and Elle wears her uniform hat from the moment she goes out the door until she comes home, looking like Corporal Agarn on F-Troop.
Sarabelle went off to her first day of high school last week adamantly refusing to make any friends because that would make it that much easier to return to her old friends in the States, and because we’ve seen Mean Girls, and came home that afternoon excitedly telling tales of all the nice girls she had met. She’s already volunteered to be a buddy to the Japanese students coming in a few weeks and has asked her Japanese teacher for all the lessons she missed from the first half of the year so she can communicate better with the visitors. Sarabelle ended up in Grade 8, a recommendation by the Deputy Principal, so that she will be with same aged peers –- something she assured me is “quite important at this age” -- and because Grade 8 students sample all the electives before choosing their classes in Grade 9. Sarabelle thinks school is pathetically easy, for example her homework assignment was six pages of coloring in fractions, so is certain she will have straight A’s on her first report card. For an assignment to write twenty historic events – we used our Greek timeline and threw in major events in American history i.e. the Declaration of Independence, creation of the Constitution, Civil War – the teacher commented, “We don’t care much about American history, we’ve got our own.” Sara and I had a laugh about it, because we know ours is so much more exciting and interesting being based on revolution and rebellion… What have they got? Convict settlements. Take that Mrs. Stick-up-yer-arse. You can despise American culture all you want, I do, just don’t disrespect my Founding Fathers, got it? She’s also been penalized (penalised?) by another teacher for her American spelling. It’s “artefact” not “artifact” and “civilisation” not “civilization,” but again we had a laugh because Sarabelle, Miss Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee Participant, had one whole week to study and learn the new, correct Australian spelling. She’s got Hippocratic Writings and Archimedes and the Door of Science tucked under her bed, and both she and Grace eagerly agreed to work on at least one lesson from their Saxon Math every weekend. I’m not worried.
Grice is now halfway through Grade 6 and Elle halfway through Grade 1 though they just finished Grade 5 and Kindergarten, respectively, back in Florida. Grice received the sweetest card her second day from a little girl, a classmate, who lives across the street, stating that she would like to be Grice’s friend and eventually have her over after school. Elle received a journal to record her nightly reading and in the space reserved for comments on her very first assignment wrote, “I liked it but next time I need a harder book.”
So, they’re doing just fine, thank you.
A relatively new development in Queensland education has been the inclusion of religious lessons in the curriculum. In order to please everybody, or most anyway, families are given a choice of Catholic, general Christian (Protestant), Baha'i, or Non-religious training for their once-a-week class. I speculated the Non-religious class may be basically a free period and was told, oh, no, the children may silently read or work on their homework. Yeah, that's what I thought. I initially chose the Baha'i instruction, which teaches there is one god that all major religions worship and that all prophets of various beliefs are mouthpieces for this one being, though there are differences in the interpretations. The class examines the commonalities between all religions and focuses on values, specifically living The Golden Rule. My kids nearly had a stroke (as I’m sure my mother will when she reads this) and insisted they go for the Non-religious (free period) class, which also happens to be the class that 95% of the other students are in. Whatever.
WILDLIFE
We’ve got a pair of Little Kingfishers, brilliant blue and white birds, which according to our identification book are not often seen. These two are very visible here, perching on our garden fence and divebombing the minnows in the fishpond. The one we assume to be the male, the bigger of the two, crashes into our living room window at least 20 times a day. At first we thought he was attacking his reflection. We think he must be braindamaged. If he wasn’t before, he sure is now. We’ve got to find a way to scare him away from that window.
CURRENT EVENTS
What in the world is going on out there? Without cable television, a high-speed home internet connection*, NPR, or any factual, unbiased newspaper to read, I am in the dark about the goings-on in the rest of the world. Australian news is mostly national and then mostly sports related. Sunday evening dinner at a local pub gave us our first glimpse of the situation in Israel. As one patron said watching the cable broadcast of launching missiles, “Five minutes of the evening news can ruin your whole day.”
We sure hope Grice and Elle’s former Florida teachers have postponed their trip to Israel and that all their family is safe and sound.
* Two-year contracts with hefty penalties and expensive disconnect and reconnection fees are the norm here, so until we find our final destination we are still using the internet café in town. Now that we only have the one vehicle, trips into to town are few and far between.
The sun did not shine,
it was too wet to play,
so we sat in the house
all that cold, wet, wet day.
-- Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess)
HEALTH AND SAFETY
Jorge had a head-on in Mrs. Troopie. A “smash-up” they call it. He’s okay, the other driver was okay, but Mrs. Troopie, well, we’ll be keeping her for spare parts. Jorge has decided that she is the Best Vehicle Ever and one day we’ll get another one. For now, he’s got the 4 Runner and I’m home playing the role of farm wife, modern farm wife with her MacBook Pro, keeping myself warm cooking up huge meals for the family’s tea time. (Your main early evening meal, or dinner, is “tea,” which may or may not include that particular beverage; a light bite later in the evening is “supper.” Tea may be had anytime but is referred to as “a cuppa.” On the job Jorge gets a 30-minute “smoko,” a midmorning break originally named in the old days for a cigarette break but smoking is not permitted anywhere these days, and not lunch but a 15-minute “sit down.” Got it?)
I thought we were living in Australia, but apparently we’ve made a wrong turn and ended up in Scotland or Ireland or the Pacific Northwest or some other lovely, green, wet, cold place. The locals are freaked out by the weather. The paper has already run their special pull-out pictorial supplement titled, “The Big Wet,” chronicling the unusually high rain falls, flooding, and ferocious cyclones. I suppose everyone thought that meant it should be over by now, like Bush’s, “Mission Accomplished,” but, no, it continues to drizzle and I am forced to cook to justify turning on the gas stove, our only source of heat. We are all adapting, resigning ourselves to constant sogginess and bad hair lives, but I am wondering what the lack of sunshine will eventually do me. Will I need a sunlamp? Vitamin D supplements? Antidepressants?
Hornblower…?!
PROPERTY
For nearly the same price (check currency conversion rates here) we can choose one of the following, all in the same neighborhood – the same super wet, green neighborhood henceforth known as Green Acres -- all available as lease/purchases or with extended closings:
A) The house we are in now – 6.5 acres, seasonal creek, concrete block house in need of major renovations, too close to highway. $360,000 AUD
B) Beautiful custom built house, 3.5 acres, small but enlargeable pond, well back off road. ASKING $360,000 AUD
C) 40 acres, two clean permanent creeks, liveable stable for use during construction of a house or easily convertible to a house, well off the road. Owner has maintained old logging and mining trails through this and his adjoining 160+ acres for fabulous walking/horseback riding. ASKING $360,000 AUD
Do I even need to tell you which one has us most excited?
Another really tempting one is:
-- 119 acres with a five bedroom house, granny flat (2 bedroom apartment downstairs), inground pool, great raised bed vegetable gardens, pastures, ranch hand quarters, numerous other outbuildings (barns and such) four dams (ponds), one kilometer of river frontage bordering the property with a side branch of the river running through the property, and all the necessary equipment, fences and squeezers etc., for running a few head of cattle. Just outside the rainforest, much drier with more sun and less rainfall. One end of the property is located at a major crossroads (some highway noise) which makes for good development potential (ability to subdivide a few riverfront acres that would essentially pay for the place), and the other end is "downtown," referring to the center of a village with 225 people in it. This one is $550,000 AUD and would pretty much take all we’ve got but is a bargain for the price.
I think I’ve seen every inch of property in the Green Acres surrounds; I should be a real estate agent. Oh, wait, I am, though I only seem to spend money.
SCOOL
The girls started their first full week today (Monday, July 17). Grice and Elle go off barefoot (though I make them carry their Crocs in their backpacks because the thought of using the school toilets without shoes on makes me gag) and Elle wears her uniform hat from the moment she goes out the door until she comes home, looking like Corporal Agarn on F-Troop.
Sarabelle went off to her first day of high school last week adamantly refusing to make any friends because that would make it that much easier to return to her old friends in the States, and because we’ve seen Mean Girls, and came home that afternoon excitedly telling tales of all the nice girls she had met. She’s already volunteered to be a buddy to the Japanese students coming in a few weeks and has asked her Japanese teacher for all the lessons she missed from the first half of the year so she can communicate better with the visitors. Sarabelle ended up in Grade 8, a recommendation by the Deputy Principal, so that she will be with same aged peers –- something she assured me is “quite important at this age” -- and because Grade 8 students sample all the electives before choosing their classes in Grade 9. Sarabelle thinks school is pathetically easy, for example her homework assignment was six pages of coloring in fractions, so is certain she will have straight A’s on her first report card. For an assignment to write twenty historic events – we used our Greek timeline and threw in major events in American history i.e. the Declaration of Independence, creation of the Constitution, Civil War – the teacher commented, “We don’t care much about American history, we’ve got our own.” Sara and I had a laugh about it, because we know ours is so much more exciting and interesting being based on revolution and rebellion… What have they got? Convict settlements. Take that Mrs. Stick-up-yer-arse. You can despise American culture all you want, I do, just don’t disrespect my Founding Fathers, got it? She’s also been penalized (penalised?) by another teacher for her American spelling. It’s “artefact” not “artifact” and “civilisation” not “civilization,” but again we had a laugh because Sarabelle, Miss Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee Participant, had one whole week to study and learn the new, correct Australian spelling. She’s got Hippocratic Writings and Archimedes and the Door of Science tucked under her bed, and both she and Grace eagerly agreed to work on at least one lesson from their Saxon Math every weekend. I’m not worried.
Grice is now halfway through Grade 6 and Elle halfway through Grade 1 though they just finished Grade 5 and Kindergarten, respectively, back in Florida. Grice received the sweetest card her second day from a little girl, a classmate, who lives across the street, stating that she would like to be Grice’s friend and eventually have her over after school. Elle received a journal to record her nightly reading and in the space reserved for comments on her very first assignment wrote, “I liked it but next time I need a harder book.”
So, they’re doing just fine, thank you.
A relatively new development in Queensland education has been the inclusion of religious lessons in the curriculum. In order to please everybody, or most anyway, families are given a choice of Catholic, general Christian (Protestant), Baha'i, or Non-religious training for their once-a-week class. I speculated the Non-religious class may be basically a free period and was told, oh, no, the children may silently read or work on their homework. Yeah, that's what I thought. I initially chose the Baha'i instruction, which teaches there is one god that all major religions worship and that all prophets of various beliefs are mouthpieces for this one being, though there are differences in the interpretations. The class examines the commonalities between all religions and focuses on values, specifically living The Golden Rule. My kids nearly had a stroke (as I’m sure my mother will when she reads this) and insisted they go for the Non-religious (free period) class, which also happens to be the class that 95% of the other students are in. Whatever.
WILDLIFE
We’ve got a pair of Little Kingfishers, brilliant blue and white birds, which according to our identification book are not often seen. These two are very visible here, perching on our garden fence and divebombing the minnows in the fishpond. The one we assume to be the male, the bigger of the two, crashes into our living room window at least 20 times a day. At first we thought he was attacking his reflection. We think he must be braindamaged. If he wasn’t before, he sure is now. We’ve got to find a way to scare him away from that window.
CURRENT EVENTS
What in the world is going on out there? Without cable television, a high-speed home internet connection*, NPR, or any factual, unbiased newspaper to read, I am in the dark about the goings-on in the rest of the world. Australian news is mostly national and then mostly sports related. Sunday evening dinner at a local pub gave us our first glimpse of the situation in Israel. As one patron said watching the cable broadcast of launching missiles, “Five minutes of the evening news can ruin your whole day.”
We sure hope Grice and Elle’s former Florida teachers have postponed their trip to Israel and that all their family is safe and sound.
* Two-year contracts with hefty penalties and expensive disconnect and reconnection fees are the norm here, so until we find our final destination we are still using the internet café in town. Now that we only have the one vehicle, trips into to town are few and far between.
The sun did not shine,
it was too wet to play,
so we sat in the house
all that cold, wet, wet day.
-- Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess)
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