We live in Australia!

Well, finally it has happened. We feel like we live here. It has taken almost 8 months, but we are now settled into our routines. Sophie has gone back to St. Louis after her month long visit here. We had such a nice time exploring new places in Australia and Brisbane too. When we returned from Melbourne, this just about felt like home. Now Elliott is back to school and I am into my routine of volunteering at school and playing a lot of tennis. I was telling my dad how good I was going to become - but his response was "It's just more time to practice what you are doing wrong." Tim is still swamped at work with a varied schedule, but is doing ok.

The hardest thing over the past few months has been the time change with the rest of the world as we know it. We watched the World Cup Football at all hours of the night. We would get up for a match that started at 2:00 am or 4:00 am. Wimbledon was sadly missed as the coverage started at 11:00 pm and went thru the night. This was the first Wimbledon in quite sometime I didn't waste two weeks in front of the t.v. The past month has been the Tour de France. Everyone who knows Tim is aware what a fan he is. Coverage of that starts at 10:00 and goes thru till about 1:30 am. or 2:00 am. L'Alpe D'Huez - can't miss it! So, Tim has been burning the candle at both ends - staying up till 2:00 am and then getting up for 5:00 am phone calls. Maybe by next year, this will seem normal.

But, now we feel we live here - "blog-able events" seem harder to find. So if anyone is actually still reading this - I apologize! Today, we went to Brisbane Forest Park about 25 km West of our house. It is reported there are some interesting birds there like the Bower Bird. I heard about this bird from a friend who is a keen bird watcher. Apparently, the male bird is like an architect and builds this big nest and decorates it like a groovy bachelor pad to attract a mate. The bird struts around and ...well you know where this is going. So, we head out to the park. It is very dry, and the water level of the lake is very low. We are on constant alert for the brown snake - the secondly most deadly of all snakes - that happens to live in our neighborhood. We see a few birds, but sadly I can't tell what the heck they are. Did we see a female bower bird? Did we see a Fruit Dove? Did we see a Black Cockatiel? Who would know? I took a few pictures to compare to the bird book, but of course, the bird is a blur flying off in the distance. I'm hopeless. I had high hopes for being a good blogger, impressing you with all this detail, but really, I can't do it. I guess all I can say is we went for a walk in the Bush and we saw something that wasn't a penguin.