Ticks and Turkeys

In the last few weeks, Eric has definitely had the more interesting of experiences. He got to crew for one of the sailboats that races on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It was a lot of work, but he had a great time. He also realized the bay is a lot bigger when you're in the middle of it than when you're on the shore. They did well in spite of the penalty turn they had to do for cutting someone off (not Eric's fault).

One of the other things Eric got to discover was he had picked up a tick on his neck from walking through the woods. He was successful at removing the whole thing without my help (I was at work). We also discovered that Australia has some really bad ticks (what a surprise!). You have to worry about Lyme disease with ticks all over the world, but Australia has a paralysis tick. It can kill animals; not so much humans, but being a little paralyzed has to fall in the category of "bad news".

The worst part of the whole thing for me was that Eric emailed me at work that morning to relate his little episode. After quickly realizing I'd shared a night's sleep with a tick, I spent the entire rest of day imagining I had a tick somewhere on my person. I'm sure people at work were wondering why I looked so disheveled, but they did not know I was busy trying to keep everyone safe by checking my hair a thousand times for invading creatures!

While I'm on the icky little critters subject, Eric has been helping with a construction project at the church and what an eye-opener that's been. They pulled a panel off and found two large snake skins. Leaves you wondering where the former owner is these days. They also found cicadas so large they should be required to have a pilot's license before they take off. There were lots of spiders and when they uncovered one in particular, an Aussie helper said "Probably ought not to mess with that, it won’t kill you, but it might get you close to death."

Mess with a spider? As if! As it turns out, young Aussies seem to think this is a perfectly ordinary and sporting thing to do. Remember Charlotte? Well, a relative of Charlotte got into the church and one nice (and nutty) young man herded it onto the palm of his hand (what?!) and calmly walked it out of the church.

We had the couple we met at the Newcastle church over for a substitute Thanksgiving dinner last Saturday. Getting ready for this was a lot harder than Thanksgiving back home. We found out that completely plucking the turkey is optional here and those quills don't give up easily. In the scheme of things we were just thankful there were turkeys to buy even if it was something like $3 a pound - yikes! We also discovered that in spite of their love of pumpkin, they don't sell it in a can. Eric tried to explain to a clerk that he was looking for this so he could make a pumpkin pie, and their response? "Why would you want to do that? That sounds gross!" Eric ended up baking and pureeing the pumpkin himself. There's no Crisco equivalent so we had to use butter for the crust. Eric also had to make the french-fried onions you put on top of the green bean casserole from scratch - no such thing here.

On the plus side, Ren and Glynis genuinely enjoyed the meal. Ren and Glynis had never had turkey before; we can hardly fathom that in our home environment. Ren had never had pumpkin pie before and said he really liked it. Glynis had tried it once before so she was an easy convert to our American ways.

Speaking of things new to Aussies, Eric made oatmeal cookies and took some with him to the construction project to share with the other guys. It was mostly young men from the church and we were dumbfounded to find out they'd never had oatmeal cookies before! It seems like such an unremarkable (but always enjoyable) thing in our world, but they loved them and were threatening to break into our place to get more!

The main thing of interest I've done in the last few weeks is play in the championship of the soccer league at work. Because it's at lunch and it's a military environment, you quite often have teammates unable to get there due to meetings they can't get out of or being on deployment. Such was the case on Monday for the semi-final where the other team couldn't even field a full team of 6. This meant we easily moved on to the final, but what goes around comes around, and for Wednesday's final we found ourselves with just enough to play.

It was a really hot day and we were feeling quite out of gas by halftime. Our halftime strategy adjustment was to limit our runs forward and see if we could hang on and get to penalty kicks because no one had anything left. We got to full-time successfully without being scored on, but lost on a crazy shot in the first overtime period. Bummer! I was very proud of our team even though we lost because the other team was all men while we were split evenly between men and women and I think I was the oldest one out there (certainly by the way I played, but I think even by age!). The biggest downside of the final is the next league doesn't start until February which gives me ample time to get completely out of shape again. Ugh!

We arrive back home on December 14th for 2 1/2 weeks. I don't care that I'm going to freeze my arse off - I can't wait to see everyone. I just have to get through 2+ more weeks of work. The countdown starts soon!