Yes indeed, at 1:05pm AEST 13th May 2026, the magic email we’d been desperately hoping for arrived – we were granted Permanent Residency! I have been very stressed about this and when the email arrived, I cried uncontrollably for 30 minutes straight. We were down to 9 months left on our work visas, so in the zone of having to plan for a possible return to Canada. Most things were in our favour for being granted PR: being in a skills shortage category, working in a regional area, and having the support of my employer. But our ages were most definitely not in our favour. So a huge thank you to Australia for letting us stay – we promise to continue being active contributors to society!
After the email came in, I tried reaching Hugh but he was away on his annual golf trip and I had to leave a phone message for him (which he has saved because he can barely understand me as I try to speak through tears). He messaged back later in the day because he also was too choked up to speak!
That night I was playing pickleball with the girls and my friend Lyn gave me a fabulous Aussie gift pack:
And my friend Ruth got me some vegemite! We have a big party planned for a few weeks from now. Quite incredible to think that we have 80 people on our invitation list. A testament to the amazing community we now call home that we’ve made so many wonderful friends!
The next morning I was driving to work and there was the biggest rainbow I have ever seen and it was over top of CQU. It was a full rainbow and really large but what made it stand out the most was how wide each band of colour was – have never seen anything like it. This can only be explained by the world helping me say thank you to CQU for bringing me to the wonderful world of Oz 🙂
All right, back to Hugh’s golf trip. This year the 24 guys spent the week not far from here, just 6 hours south on the Sunshine Coast. They stayed in a beautiful location:
They get divided into teams – one for Australia and one for NZ. Our friend Kevin lured Hugh to the NZ team. Well, you can imagine the uproar on the Wed night when the guys learned that the Canadian who plays for the Kiwis just became an Australian permanent resident 🙂 Even better, after the 5 full days of golf, Hugh won!
And here he is holding his trophies, wearing the NZ golf shirt we picked up when were were there in 2025, and with his new Aussie cap:
Those of you who know me know that I love collecting funny signs from anywhere I travel. Hugh took this one for me while he was on his golf trip:
Oh almost forgot, before I leave the topic of golf, before leaving for the Sunny Coast, the boys had continued to make great gains on The Stimulator in our shed (fortunate that we get to continue living here so everyone can keep using this!):
And the day after Hugh got home from his trip, another rainbow appeared, much smaller this time, but shining over The Stimulator in our Shed:
While on the topic of sports, I’ve started taking fortnightly pickleball lessons. Despite having played off and on for 5 years, I’ve never actually taken a lesson. Well, it makes a difference! And so does a fancy new paddle. There are 8 of us each week with Coach Charl:
Hoping to really have my game in stride in time for the Pickleball Festival in July!
Hugh and I continue to organise a pickleball league on Wed nights. We’ve now got so many people coming out, I’ve had to create a ladder system and post signs to keep everyone moving in the right direction!
My system can now manage any number of players on any number of courts and have next to no downtime for anyone over the course of the hour while simultaneously gradually moving people to play with similar-skilled people. And just like in curling, some nights you’re on the skilled end of things and some nights, well, let’s just say win or lose, you still get to have wine afterward 🙂
Still on the topic of sports, I continue to enjoy watching Rugby League (not to be confused with all the other forms of footy here!). I still struggle because it’s so fun to watch but there’s so much chance for brain injury. I’ve been learning about their HIA (head injury assessment). Note that they say “head” instead of “brain” – I personally think they should say brain to make it very clear that brain damage is happening, no more euphemisms here. The HIA protocol is decent (shocking that it only came into effect in November 2025) but as they say, “a test can’t undo a concussion” (again, they should say brain injury here, scrap the word concussion).
Anyway, aside from the risk of brain trauma, I’ve learned a few interesting tidbits about this game:
- The penalty box is called the “sin bin.”
- When they report the weight of a player, they say “kegs” whereas Canadians would say “kilos” (not really, it would of course be pounds!).
- When the commentator says, “Penalty Brisbane” – that means the other team did something bad and Brisbane benefits, not the other way around! It’s hard enough to figure out all the rules of the game as it is but you can imagine hearing “Penalty Brisbane” and trying to figure out what Brisbane did wrong and then seeing that Brisbane gets the ball – my poor brain was so confused!
- When a team gets the ball across the goal line, it’s called a “try” – I think it should be called a “done”, they didn’t just try, they got it done 🙂 A try is worth 4 points and, similar to American football, you then get a chance to kick a conversion for 2 points. What is curious after this is that the team who just scored gets the ball back! Again, imagine my little brain trying to figure out what happened such that the scoring team got the ball back. Nothing, that’s just the way it works.
Still on the topic of sports, how about the Australian mixed doubles curling team winning Gold at the Worlds! Gee whiz they played well. The women’s team made it to the Worlds earlier this year and were even written up in ABC news (ABC = Australian Broadcasting, not American). They were quite awful but the mixed doubles team was spectacular. Will be interesting to see how curling grows here with that gold medal in our pocket.
All right, let’s talk weather. March to May is technically autumn here but we’ve had a few cold winter-like days recently. By “cold” I mean 13-14 C in the morning, brrr!!! Socks, slippers, long pants, and cardigans have come out! By mid-to-late morning it’s into the 20’s and then you peel the layers off. But 14C genuinely feels cold to us now and we close the windows at night when it gets down to that. An unusual thing has been wildly fluctuating humidity. At my pickleball lesson last Monday night, it was a nice 21-22C but the humidity was 94%! That is really rare here (common up in Cairns, but we don’t often get over 90% here, and definitely not in the fall/winter). My pickleball bag had been hanging on the fence and it was coated in condensation. There was a hot humid day at work a month or two ago and my glasses fogged up when going from inside to outside – exactly the opposite of what happens in Canada in the winter! But then we’ve had other days where it feels like Arizona:
I heard from my friend Chris S in Ontario and she said they had frost on the windows this weekend – this late in May!! What a brutal winter season it’s been in southern Ontario this year.
I had my Blues playlist on the other day and it brought back so many memories of watching live bands play in southern Ontario! Could always count on our friends Liz and Paul as well as the Gulch gang to head out to soak up great local music. The musicians I probably miss the most seeing are Chris Chambers, Jack de Keyzer, Tone Deaf, and David Gogo. In Yeppoon we have mostly solo acts and not very much Blues at all. Sometimes we get a 4-piece classic rock band. Rockhampton gets a lot of cover bands and we saw two great ones this month. First was a Fleetwood Mac cover band we saw at the Great Western hotel. The band was fabulous and we got to meet the drummer because he’s friends with our friends Sarah and Matt. The Great Western was a neat venue – it’s a rodeo place and where we were sitting for the concert was in the bull ring. Will definitely need to go see some bull riding one of these days (again with the struggle relating to a sport that causes brain injuries). Check out this massive ceiling fan they had:
There were two that size (estimating at least 15 ft in diameter) in the arena and both were off when we arrived. When they turned on, the temperature dropped several degrees practically instantly! The Great Western is a steakhouse in addition to being a rodeo and we had dinner there with Kevin, Jo, and Sarah (Matt was working the lights for the band that night):
Earlier that day Kevin, Jo, Hugh, and I had gone to the horse races in Yeppoon:
I’m not much of a gambler so I don’t let Hugh bet much on each race but I really should have this time because we had a winner every single race! We came out a whole $12 ahead 🙂
I went to see a CCR cover band with my friend Lyn while the boys were away golfing and they were incredible too – the lead singer really had the sound nailed. So I am getting a live music fix from time to time, but southern Ontario really is spoiled for incredible choice really close to home.
We went to see the production Fawlty Towers at the Footlight Theatre in Yeppoon the other week. So well done!! And Manuel really did steal the show:
Footlights was a fabulous 1960’s style dinner theatre. I say “was” because we learned the week after Fawlty Towers that it’s being sold. I hadn’t really known about it until Fawlty Towers came there but it was a great venue and the food was really good too. I imagine it’ll be sold for housing but it would be neat if someone could keep the concept going.
Speaking of going out for dinner, I’m not sure if I’ve told you about the public holiday surcharge most restaurants charge here:
This is because the overtime pay is so high here. You get paid 150-200% for weekend work and 200-250% for public holiday work. So it’s not surprising that restaurants have to jack up their prices! We know people who just work casually on weekends because they earn so much, they don’t need to work the rest of the time.
Speaking of eating, you’ll be relieved to know that Hugh didn’t have to prepare and freeze piles of lunches and dinners for me this year when he was away on his golf trip. My independent living skills have been resurrected with this fabulous new addition to our kitchen – the Thermomix:
Man, is it fun to use! Crazy expensive but a BRILLIANT invention. And I just needed one quick reminder lesson from Hugh on how to use the Breville coffee maker and I made my own fabulous flat whites while he was away:
Not so good at making a pattern in the milk, though.
Still in the kitchen, check this out:
The last of the aluminum foil (aluminium foil here or al-foil for short) from the container ship! It caught my eye when I took it out of the drawer because of the French on it!
You’re probably wondering how our pineapple is doing – so far, so good!
I think it’s grown 4-5 cm since the last blog. Not ready to pick yet (need to see some yellow at the base and the inner leaves should pull out easily when it’s ripe) but I’m so excited it’s gotten this far! Oh, the piri piri pepper plant it’s growing under, the one that’s only supposed to grow to 2 feet tall, is now 5 feet tall.
In other foliage news, our bougainvilleas are blooming so brightly right now:
And our enormous aloe (I think it’s a candelabra aloe) has developed razor-like teeth:
We picked this plant up from somewhere, don’t know what it is, but it looks like it would eat you if given a chance:
Check out the size of our elephant ears plant!
This is a desert rose, beautiful when blooming:
But we also have some plants that we used to grow in Ontario as well:
I mentioned last blog that some St Andrew’s Cross spiders had finally returned to the yard but hadn’t yet made the full crosses in their webs. Well, now they have!
Such an interesting phenomenon!
In other backyard-critter news, we have a lizard of some sort hanging out:
Not very big, probably just a foot from nose to tail. But quick! Was hard to get a photo. He thought he was well camouflaged here and stayed still for a moment for me.
Now let’s talk about my favourite things, birds. I think I need to stop sharing photos and videos of crows with you because you’ve got them in the northern hemisphere. So these will be the last, but I encourage you to watch crows more closely as they really are smart and fascinating birds, once you get over their annoying caw-ing sound. We have some new fronds growing on our foxtail palms and the birds love landing on them. The crows try but they don’t realise that they’re just too heavy for the new spikes so they don’t usually last long:
This one discovered he could peer into our front window:
Here’s a video of a crow doing some thorough preening:
And these were just fun to watch:
They aren’t pulling at the tubing that brings water to the pond and bird bath as much anymore so they perhaps finally learned that it’s what keeps their water clean for them. But they do still bring bread to marinate in the bath, sigh.
Here is a pied butcherbird (my favourite songbird) looking all fluffy after his bath:
And then this magpie had absolutely no fear of Hugh at all:
One of my favourite birds continues to be the laughing kookaburra but it’s REALLY hard to get a video with the sound of their laughing because once they start and I run to get my phone, they’re done. But Hugh found this video online and it really showcases the amazing sound they make: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1259354696411486
Now imagine a dozen of them making that sound at the same time at night. I still remember the first time hearing that days after we arrived here – I was sure there were wild monkeys outside!
In large bird news, an emu has appeared in a paddock on the road to Rockhampton. “Paddock” means field here (see Jo, I remembered!). He’s a good size and his neck is blue. I knew cassowaries had blue necks but I hadn’t seen an emu with one, so I did some googling. This video shows what the blue neck looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKuFjGhWgk. It’s the natural colour but it’s usually covered under feathers. It is mating season right now and that’s apparently when emus start showing off their blue necks. There is a sign on the highway saying that emus are likely to be seen in this paddock but it’s typically been very rare to see one. This one is there checking out the traffic almost every morning (sometimes with its mate) – so much so that there are regular comments in the Yeppoon Community facebook group. I’ve even seen him within metres of a worker and truck installing new hydro poles in the paddock and within metres of a woman in an ATV taking photos of him. Now, everyone on Facebook has been calling this one Edmund or Edward the Emu. But after reading this really cool information page on emus, I’m wondering if it might actually be Esmerelda the Emu.
Jeepers (that’s a nod to you, Shanda :)), I’ve still got notes of all sorts of things I need to remember to tell you but once again, the blog is getting long. So I’ll leave it there for now. Hugh’s been watching the ice hockey playoffs (you have to say “ice hockey” here otherwise field hockey is assumed) and noticing how well the Habs are doing. Hugh’s brother Gary was a huge Montreal fan and it’s been over 30 years since they won the Stanley Cup. It’s a little emotional seeing them play so well and knowing that Gary isn’t here to witness it. But then, maybe he’s the one pulling some divine strings and the Habs owe him one 🙂