When I come across neat facts, I make notes of them on my phone. When they correspond with photos I’ve taken, they get into the blog pretty quickly. But when they don’t, they sit as notes waiting for a day when I don’t have many photos. Well today some that have been sitting there for months finally get their moment to shine 🙂
I’ve previously mentioned how much fun Aussies have with words. The speech path in me wants to see brain scans of the vocabulary sections of Aussie brains compared to North American brains – there has got to be a difference! Here are some fun Aussie words for you (hopefully I’m not repeating any I’ve previously taught you):
Squiz (my favourite new word) = quick look as in “I’ll have a squiz at that.”
Stickybeak = a nosy person as in “She can’t mind her own business, she’s such a stickybeak.”
Cruisy = easygoing as in “He’s pretty cruisy so may not get back to you quickly.” (as in the plasterer who is really good but is cruisy so who knows when he’ll get around to calling us back)
Mexican = Person from New South Wales or Victoria who comes up to Queensland for our great weather (called Mexicans because they come from south of the border 🙂 ) The first time I heard people talking about Mexicans in Yeppoon, I couldn’t figure out why so many Mexicans would come all the way here. Then someone explained.
Pedantic = excessively focused on minute details (usually uttered by someone who is being pedantic and trying to excuse the fact that they’re being pedantic 🙂 ) – I don’t think this is necessarily an Aussie word, but I’ve never heard it except here, so I’m not sure.
Hey = eh (only in Queensland and the rest of Australia makes fun of Queenslanders for this linguistic trait but I love it because it’s used just the way “eh” is in Canada and, as many of you know, it appears regularly in my speech – so I just need to learn to put the “h” in front and I’ll blend right in 🙂 )
OK, I do have some photos for you. I mentioned last blog that despite March 1 being the beginning of autumn (they don’t say fall here, just autumn), it’s been quite warm this month. Saw this post on Facebook:
And I won’t be pedantic by pointing out the spelling error 🙂
We went to KFC the other day for the first time since moving here. Chicken is the same, mashed potatoes and gravy are the same. But the coleslaw is different. The taste is fairly similar but it’s not the neon green colour it is in North America – you can sort of see the colour through the container on the left, it’s just a normal coleslaw colour:
Speaking of fast food, McDonald’s is very similar to North America as well – except it’s crazy expensive! A sausage n egg mcmuffin with hash brown and coffee is $13.30! Breakfasts here are very expensive in general (same price as lunch – usually $20-28 not including coffee, which is another $5) so I guess maybe relatively speaking, McDonald’s breakfast isn’t that expensive, but still. Even factoring in that the price includes tax and there is no tipping, breakfasts are still really expensive. Used to be one of my favourite things to do, go out for breakfast, but not here. Fortunately, Hugh makes really good breakfasts.
Speaking of expensive, while wine is priced similarly to Canada, beer is super expensive. In a restaurant, you pay almost the same for a glass of beer as you do for a glass of wine. Buying a case (called a carton here) is expensive too. They’re typically in packs of 30 instead of 24 but you’ll pay $60 for a carton of regular Aussie beer and $75 for an import like Corona. 6-packs are around $25. At least it’s not as expensive as cocktails – a small cocktail is usually over $20, often over $25. Normally my drink of preference is wine but Hugh and I started a pickleball league of sorts on Wednesday nights and I always feel like a beer after that, so just have to get used to the idea of beer being the same price as wine!
Speaking of pickleball, our club hosted a pickleball event for International Women’s Day a couple weeks ago. We had a blast! It was way hotter than it should be this time of year, even from 4-7pm, so we were sweaty but had a lot of fun – and we were all in purple for the day:
Here I am with pickleball stars Barb and Tanya (you can see the sweaty sheen on my forearm and neck!):
We introduced Rob and Barb to pickleball about 18 months ago and they have become absolutely amazing players!
The same day as the IWD pickleball event, Hugh and I got up early to go down to the foreshore to get a sunrise photo to send back to my SLP team at McMaster to help kick off their MMI day:
While I was working on getting a perfect shot, a couple teenage girls arrived and were waiting for the Yeppoon Lagoon to open later at 6am. They came over and asked if we’d like them to take our photo – love seeing such kindness in teenagers!
While we were walking along the foreshore one day, we saw this:
There are lots of containers you can return for change here so instead of throwing them into recycling or trash in public areas, they’ve installed these contraptions on the trash bins so you can leave them there and then if someone is collecting them to take to the containers for cash facility, they can easily grab them. Will be interesting to see how well they work – seems like a great idea in concept.
Hugh is away on a 2-week golf trip with his golf buddies right now. They flew to Sydney and have covered a lot of ground this week (about 750 km since leaving Sydney on Monday):
Tomorrow they pick up 4 more golf buddies and start heading toward Melbourne. Hugh reports that the courses are fantastic – great courses and great ocean views. They’re playing in competitions all along the way and Hugh seems to be finishing in the top 3 everywhere! All his practice coupled with his new Aussie-made irons seems to be paying off. But more importantly, golf courses down south apparently have fun creatures just like up here:
Leigh – do you know what either of these are?
And if you need some cuteness in your day, check out this echidna:
Part porcupine, part anteater!
With Hugh being away, I had to learn how to use our Breville coffee maker. I am happy to report, I’ve got it nailed!
Well, I don’t stand a chance of making a pretty design on top, but at least I’m grinding the beans, frothing the milk, and ending up with a delicious morning beverage. Andrea – you’d be very proud 🙂
In other household electronics news, I was very excited to get my Tesla charger installed earlier this month!
All the years owning a Tesla in Canada and I never had a charger because the condo corp wouldn’t allow one, I just had to plug it into the wall and trickle charge. Now I have proper charging and with the solar here, it’ll cost pennies to fuel up. Hope to have the Tesla in 2 months, have really missed driving one. It will be interesting, though, because I think the turn signal in Teslas here is on the left just like in North America. So we’ve finally gotten used to it being on the right and now we’ll have to unlearn that! It is definitely hard teaching old dogs new tricks 🙂 A few weeks ago, I walked up to the car, opened the door, sat inside – only at that point realising I was sitting on the passenger side! Usually I catch myself way sooner than that 🙂
Oh that’s another Aussie/UK thing – spelling all the words that end in -ize in North America as -ise. Only when you have to change that habit do you realise how many words end in -ize!
Speaking of cars, it’s interesting seeing which cars are here and which aren’t. Heaps of Toyotas, Subarus, Mitsubishis, Mazdas. Barely any Hondas at all. But then head to New Zealand and there are Hondas everywhere. Weird.
Tomorrow, Jo, Llew, and I are heading to Rocky for lunch and to see the musical Rent. I’ve been to the Pilbeam Theatre a couple times and it’s always a great experience. We have some talented local actors and singers and there isn’t a bad seat in the theatre. Plus, going to the theatre here (it was the same in Sydney) is so easy – they’re not hyper about checking your tickets a million times, it’s so civilised (not civilized :))! It’s the same at airports when flying domestically, you just breeze through and only show your boarding pass when boarding and you never have to show ID. It’s taken us a long time to get used to only arriving 15 min before the show at the theatre and 30 min before a domestic flight. We love it!
I of course need to include a bird photo. We had noticed that our irrigation lines in the flower baskets on our fence kept coming out. It can get windy along there, but the lines are a few inches deep in the soil so it didn’t make sense that they were blowing out. Well, we discovered the culprit:
Bit of a stickybeak, in more than one sense of the word :). As much as magpies can be annoying (like when they swoop you while on your bike during nesting season), you really do have to appreciate how darned smart they are. Made me glad we don’t have those Kea parrots from NZ, they would make a mess of our irrigation lines.
I thought I would show you some photos of the fun plants in our gardens. We still get a kick out of how many plants look like they belong in a Dr Seuss book or Tim Burton movie.
Here we have a fun plant in the foreground but in the background is our lime tree – which seems to be producing a lemon:
We have heaps of lemons growing on the actual lemon tree and very few limes on the lime tree, and now one of those limes seems to identify more as a lemon. Will have to google to see what’s up.
In between the lemon and the maybe-no-longer-a-lime tree, we have some pineapples growing:
The big one in the middle is the first one we put in. I feel like we’re getting close to the 18 month mark, which I thought was how long it took for pineapples to grow, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of pineapple there yet, hey. (Look at that, I got the ‘h’ in front! BTW the letter ‘h’ is pronounced “haych” here, not “aych”, which really probably makes more sense.)
When we first moved here, I was in awe of all the foxtail palms everywhere – they’ve always been my favourite palm. I didn’t know what they were called, I always just called them fuzzy palms (and funny enough – it turns out my sister has always called them fuzzy palms too!). When we got our house, our friend Rob gave us the best housewarming gift ever – 2 fuzzy palms that he’d been growing from scratch. They’ve grown A LOT in the past 18 months. The photo on the left is today and the one on the right was in mid-to-late 2023, The trunk diameter has more than doubled and it’s about 50% taller. These photos really don’t capture the difference well. The plant pot on the right is about half the diameter of the one on the left (we’ve had to re-pot the palms twice now).
All right, I think that’s about it for today. I’ve been watching the Canada-Korea semi-final curling game – yay, Team Homan! It’s been so nice being able to watch curling live with the women’s worlds being in Korea, just one hour behind our time zone. Our friend Canadian Bill stopped by earlier and I had the qualification game on the TV. Bill is from Saskatchewan and so of course knows and loves curling, but he’s lived here for a couple decades and he couldn’t believe his eyes seeing curling on TV – what a huge smile it brought to his face! Just like us, even though we absolutely love our new lives in a tropical paradise, every once in awhile something tugs at our heart strings and we miss our home and native land. Sending our love to you all!