It's warmed and sunnied up here in Sydney, so we took an evening stroll. It gets dark by 5:30 still, but you still know the Ocean is waving along side of you. We took the lights off our bikes as makeshift flashlights in case it was too dark.
Ollie the dog is barely visible in this photo, wearing a light up collar. He listened to his owner the way Charlie listens to us when we want him to come, which is how we know Ollie's name.
Charlie is still in the midst of an allergic reaction that blotches up his face whenever he goes outside so he hung out with Mike and me today. I took him to a cafe on campus where I had a $2.20 can of Coke (I've cut back since arriving to the prices of pop/soda here - it's $17 for a 30 pack) and he had $0.85 Cadbury's chocolate chip :-) . There, we had the option of watching The View on the big screen tvs - yep, Whoopi and Barbara. Somehow, that didn't take the sting out of our expensive guilty pleasures!
School news...I'm not sure how school funding works around here overall, but it is the case that there are a lot of extras. Every excursion (field trip) and incursion (speaker/presenter that comes to school, next week is Insektus - the bug man) requires a permission slip and money. Daniel will be doing tennis on Fridays during sports and that required dollars too. Molly's teacher asked her if we could send the slips and $ in in envelopes from now on - I guess Mrs. Monkhouse is tired of my makeshift folded up slips of paper (if only she could see our flashlights) with firm instructions not to drop it and to give it right to your teacher. We don't really have spare office supplies lying around, I'm not very good at origami and we don't even have any junk mail envelopes to recycle - although we have received 2 pieces of snail mail in our 3 weeks' time!
Just one more peculiar difference between US and Australian public schools...at the risk of violating the copyright of Carl's Cafe by Dianne Bates, Molly was reading to me tonight from her 1st grade home reader and we came across this passage:
"Two, four, six, eight, bog in, don't wait!" Rodney and Jeffrey chorused as Carl ladled out the food.
"You've got to say your prayers first." Kelli-Ann said.
Rodney was just about to shovel a forkful of food into his mouth.
"Its called grace and it's like prayers. If we don't say it before we eat, then we'll get dead and we won't go to heaven, " Kelli- Ann insisted.
"All right then" we chorused, just to keep her quiet.
Kelli-Ann recited a very long story about starving children.
"Hurry up, Kelli-Ann, or I'll starve to death, " Rodney interupted.
"Amen."
I'm not quite sure what to say about this. Perhaps it speaks for itself? G'night mates!
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