Well, it’s September 1 – the first day of spring in Australia. And what a truly fabulous weather weekend it’s been! I wasn’t out and about too much at this time last year (weird to think the cancer diagnosis and hysterectomy was just a year ago) so I’m essentially enjoying my first September outdoors. A definite indicator of spring is me putting my slides aside and bringing the thongs back out!
Oh, it’s also Father’s Day here today. Mother’s Day is on the same day as in North America, but Father’s Day is in September rather than June.
Those of you on Facebook will have already heard that Hugh had a spectacular golf week last week. There is something called a “carnival” here – 6 rounds of golf across 8 days and 4 different clubs. And Mr Widdup came in 1st for net and 3rd for gross! Way to go, Sweetie, very impressive! And he pocketed over $500 for the wins – much better than the $10-15 for his wins in the woodturning competitions. I guess that’s why he spends more time at the golf course than at the Men’s Shed 🙂
While Hugh was golfing, our friends Kevin and Joanne had their catamaran, Vivacious, up at Hamilton Island for Race Week. Our friends Sarah and Young Rob were among their crew and wow, did they do well! They won Gold on one race day, Silver on another, and Bronze on yet another – and ended up with a Silver overall!
Last weekend one of our favourite yoga instructors moved to a new location, down at the Surf Lifesaving Club in Emu Park (every coastal town here has a Surf Lifesaving Club, shortened to SLSC). It’s right on the ocean (obviously :)) so even though the class is indoors, you can hear the waves – such a great way to enjoy a yoga practice! This is the view:
Our friends Lyn and Di were in the class as well and we decided to have a coffee next to the beach afterward:
As I was sitting there, I was thinking the whole scenario with the white Muskoka chairs under palm trees next to the beach seemed very familiar. Then I realised the coffee shop at the SLSC was the Honey Bee Collective – and for whatever reason, their posts appear in my Facebook feed fairly regularly. They often take photos of people enjoying their coffee in these chairs. And sure enough, we appeared in one of their Facebook posts!
This made me wonder what Muskoka chairs are called here. My very brief (as in the first item that popped up) Google search suggested that they use the American term here, Adirondack chairs. Seems like these iconic cottage chairs are fairly new to Australia.
Some new Aussie vocabulary I’ve learned recently that you might enjoy:
Schmick = flash = something in between cool and slick
Dunny = toilet
Cruisy = easy as in “I’m easy” (no, not that meaning!)
Tucker = food
That’s okay = you’re welcome
Far out = unbelievable, as in “He seriously said that, far out!” (hmm, maybe I’ve told you that one already, can’t remember)
Still haven’t found a good explanation for the various uses of “fair dinkum” – I’ve heard it conversationally a few times but still don’t have a good enough feel for how/when it’s used.
We learned tucker just last night when we were out for dinner with our friends Phil and Doiya. When Michelle and Meaghan were here, they kindly got us a gift card to use at a new seafood place down on the water:
We learned more important information from Phil and Doiya about Aussie vocab – when they say chips here, that refers to the thicker cut fries and when they say fries, that means the shoestring ones! Mystery solved, I had been wondering why chips was used sometimes and fries other times. Still confusing that they say chips for potato chips in a bag – when Aussies seem to have 3 words for every item here, they seriously couldn’t have come up with a different word to distinguish deep fried sliced potatoes in a bag??
In addition to fun vocabulary, something else Aussies do well is taxes. The tax year here ends June 30. Last year we had an H&R Block type company do our Aussie taxes because I didn’t feel like embarking on learning all the complexities of a new tax system while dealing with the health stuff. But when we saw how simple the tax form ended up looking, I thought I’d take a stab at doing it myself this year. Holy cow, is it ever simple! It is truly an “income tax” system – it is not a system of a multitude of other taxes and incentives/disincentives added on top of the income tax system. You claim your income as usual (employment, interest, dividends – same as Canada) and then deduct work-related expenses (textbooks, travel to a conference, etc.). Beyond that, you deduct charitable donations and health insurance premiums. And that’s it. It took me about 45 minutes last Sunday to do my taxes and that’s because I kept going over and over it thinking there must be more to it. And I woke up on Friday morning to the refund in my bank account. Instead of 20 pages of tiny print on a Canadian tax return, the Aussie one was 3 pages – but that’s because it printed in a large font and my work expenses were double spaced. Incredible!
OK, you’ve been waiting for the promised birds and bugs, so here we go! Check out this incredible spider:
I was on campus and heading toward this mailbox to mail a birthday card and noticed this colourful thing hanging in a web in front of the mailbox. Looks bigger in the photo but was only about an inch across. At first I thought it was something caught in the web but then Ros from work happened to arrive at the mailbox at the same time and she said it’s actually a spider and she had me check out the other side of him – it was polka dots! Once I moved to check out his underbelly, he started scrambling up the web so I couldn’t get a good photo. But yellowy-green stripes on one side and polka dots on the other, how cool is that! I looked him up when I got home – he’s a Northern Jewelled Spider. Honestly looks more like a crab than a spider.
Speaking of crabs, yesterday Hugh and I went for a bike ride along Farnborough Beach again (one of our favourite rides!) and bumped into one of Hugh’s golfing buddies. Their grandkids had found a crab on the beach:
He was less than 2 inches wide. The kids made sure they dunked him in water in between having him crawl on their hands and arms 🙂
This morning, this fella appeared on our bathroom screen (on the outside, not the inside, thankfully):
At first I thought he was a stick bug (minus a back leg) but when he spread out his front legs, I wondered about a praying mantis. The best guess I have right now is a Stick Mantis.
Butterflies are ridiculously difficult to photograph, so I had to go online to find a photograph of the ones we have a lot of in our backyard these days:
Every time I see a pretty butterfly, I have flashbacks to when we took Heather and Keira to the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara. Butterflies everywhere, it was spectacular. But then Hugh decided to rest his hand on a railing and when he removed his hand, there on his palm was the imprint of all the pretty colours of the butterfly he accidentally squished to death. Oops.
While we were having dinner last night, this truck was parked outside:
Pre-purchase pest inspections are standard here, but something I’ve never seen before is Methamphetamine testing!! Geez, I wonder how much business they do in little Yeppoon?!
Onto the birds. Lots of bluefaced honeyeaters enjoying the bird bath these days:
The kookaburras quite enjoy the pond in the back. Before and after bath photos:
There’s something about kookaburras that I just love – they always seem to be thinking!
Another bird that’s always thinking is of course the crow. We typically find the crows to be annoying because their standard call just grates through your ears and they like to use our bird bath to marinate whatever disgusting thing they’re eating. But there are 2 calls that they make that I find really entertaining and I managed to catch this guy on video in our bird bath making both sounds:
In the last blog I mentioned that magpie swooping season was starting and I finally witnessed this directly (not me being swooped at least, phew). Wow. The mail carriers here, called posties, drive mopeds to deliver the mail. While driving to work one day, I witnessed a magpie swooping two posties on mopeds while they went through a roundy (roundabout, traffic circle) at the edge of town. They are super aggressive (the magpies, not the posties :)). The posties ignored them and they’re of course safe with their motorcycle helmets on, but it must take nerves of steel to tell yourself to not react. When Hugh and I went out for a bike ride yesterday, I just kept repeating that to myself – just remain calm, keep riding, don’t try to duck or move out of the way. A bike helmet makes your ears accessible to the swooping magpies but I’m hoping because Hugh and I have the huge sun protection brims on ours, they’ll maybe not go for our ears. Fingers crossed. Hugh said even on the golf course they other day, they must have been walking close to a magpie nest and two magpies walked up to them in a very aggressive manner. It sounds funny talking about birds walking aggressively, but they are seriously a force to be reckoned with during nesting season!
Moving from fauna to flora, we seem to be growing a massive tomato hedge:
I took this photo on Friday and today the plants are another 6″ taller. We’re going to need a ladder to harvest the tomatoes. Hugh is already looking up recipes to make salsa, chutney, anything to use up the tomatoes!
We got our first lemon from our lemon tree today!
We’re trying to decide how to mark this momentous occasion – perhaps a vodka and soda with lemon or crepes with lemon juice and icing sugar. Decisions, decisions.
As I mentioned in my last blog, spring is also when snakes start to get active again. Still no sightings, thank goodness, but the university did send out their annual snake instructions:
I remember telling Susan at work how funny it was getting an email about snake awareness from my employer and she said, well, it’s probably no different than Canadian universities sending out bear warnings. It’s funny the impressions people have about Canada – pretty much everyone we’ve met here is sure that bears are everywhere in Canada 🙂
Two funny Australian posts we saw recently:
We see these in every bakery! Still haven’t tried one.
And then this one comparing regions of Australia to regions of the US – not too far off 🙂
I am very excited that in 2 months, my mom and my sister will be here and we can show them around Florida and Alabama 🙂