Parks and swooping birds

If you have children, you have to love this country. Check out this park! Excellently maintained (I haven't seen one park with overgrown grass or weeds, or any broken play equipment!), decent toilets, and they have that squishie gym type stuff on the ground around some of the equipment where it is likely that a child may trip and fall. The rest is surrounded by mulch to make a fall softer.

This is Epic Park in Moe (about 20 minutes from our house on the Princes freeway towards the East). The kids and I met with a new homeschooling friend (K) and her children there for lunch today, and we had such a good time that it ended up being a whole day outing - we only left there at about 4.45! Needless to say two households had a very basic meal tonight for dinner, as time sortof caught up with us - and I didn't even take any meat out of the freezer before we left.

Now for the swooping birds part of the post....

Gian got 'swooped' (a common term here, as it seems to be a common experience) - meaning a bird came down and 'swooped' at him. The culprit was apparently a butcher bird, and according to K they are not usually the swooping ones, but this one obviously learnt some bad habits from his neighbours! Apparently it is quite a scary experience, as they come at you from behind, and they make a pecking sound with their beaks, and then they go for your head! Poor Gian got the fright of his life, ran to me like the wind, and after he calmed down he decided to walk around stick in hand for self defence :-). Must say - that was a first for me too!

Other than that the three of us have rosy cheeks tonight, as we didn't expect to 'kuier' for so long, and it was quite cold and overcast - so all three of us got a bit sunburnt.

Oh - learnt an Aussie expression - if you call someone an obnoxious pill, it is someone who is unpleasant, and 'hard to swallow'. :-) And another dinner/tea/supper lesson.... if you have your hot meal in the middle of the day over lunchtime, it is also called dinner. So not only is supper actually called dinner, lunch can also be dinner :-). Now go chew on that one!

Till next time... when we will hopefully have wireless internet that is more consistent than having to use a USB modem that works off cell phone towers! One downside of living in a very fast growing area is that the number of new homes quickly outgrow the adsl port capacity of the telephone exchange - which is what happened to us - so no super fast and lots of bandwidth ADSL for this home just yet (what a blow to this huge video sermon files downloading family!). So - we have a wireless broadband company coming tomorrow morning to see whether we have a clear line of sight to one of their towers - which could mean we would have second best at least.

Which reminds me of something else - in Aus the government is committed to everyone getting good broadband internet access, so if you live in the sticks and you don't have access to broadband internet of the same standard as those living in metro areas, the government will subsidise you to get sattelite internet, and it will end up costing you the same as normal ADSL - cool hey? Unfortunately we don't qualify, as we should be able to get wireless - but I thought it was cool nevertheless.

And that is all from me today folks, til next time....