Which way does the water flow?

My future brother-in-law, Matt, asked and so I obliged. My best guess as to why he asked is because he wanted to know how the water drained. Well, I've done some research (both hands-on and via Google). There's a theory that the Coriolis effect means that the water drains counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. But apparently this is just a myth - the Coriolis effect doesn't have an effect on that small of bodies of water.

Also, here in Australia, the toilets flush with such force that the water just goes straight down.

Note the "big flush" and "little flush" buttons on top of the toilet. It's on all of them. They are serious about saving water - did I mention the drought that Australia is in?

Also, when you need to find the nearest lavatory, then you need to ask 'Where is the toilet?' and not 'Where is the restroom?'.

I did also take a video of the bathtub draining and you can see (after I disturb it a little bit) that the water does indeed drain clockwise.



If you want to take this as scientific evidence of the Coriolis effect in action, then feel free to. I'm going to trust the info I got on the internet though.

Josh likes beer

Josh got sick last week. Either some nasty bug that was going around or food poisoning. He tried to blame it on my cooking, but it turns out that the guy that sits next to him was out of work the exact same day for the exact same reasons. Let's just say that he won't be eating free vendor food that sits out on their kitchen table anytime soon.

But out of that experience, we actually found a beer that Josh will drink.


Roo likes it too.

I thought that it was Root Beer when he first picked it up since ginger is a root, but it's actually the other word in the title that's a synonym.

Wednesday 22.07.09 - Random Notes

Did I mention that I started taking golf lessons? Every Wednesday, I drive to Toowoomba for an hour lesson at 10:00 am. It takes about an hour to get there and an hour to get back, but when you think about it, if we were still in Atlanta a 2 hour commute to get somewhere and back would actually be considered pretty good.

Anyway, the golf lesson is just a ladies' beginner class. There were suppose to 5 of us in it, but it's only me and 2 other (older) ladies. It's pretty fun. My favorite part is that the instructor has decided to call me 'Becs' even when I distinctly introduced myself as 'Rebecca'. It's 'Nice job, Becs' or 'Becs, how you going?'. I told Josh about it and he said that it seems to be an Australian thing to add an 's' or 'y' to the end of people's names. Some of the guys out at the power station have the habit of calling him 'Joshie'. I don't think that he's told them that only his relatives are allowed to call him that.

In Dalby, it's been just plain hot the past couple of afternoons. Yesterday, I went for a run at 3:00 and it felt like summer (okay, maybe late spring). Today it was scheduled to get up to 24*C. On nice days like this, I open the sliding door next to the kitchen so that I can get a nice breeze and kind of pretend that I'm working outside. And with the door open today, I could hear my favorite part of Wednesday coming down the street.

Every single Wednesday, the Home Ice Cream truck comes clanging through the neighborhoods. I first heard it about 2:00, but it must have been a long way off because he didn't make it into our cul-de-sac until 3:15. The Dalby ice cream truck isn't like your normal American ice cream truck. In America, they normally play a nice melodious song and let the little kids run up to buy their favorite treat. Here, it's just a big bell clanging (like the one on the schoolhouse in 'Little House on the Prairie') and they don't sell single treats. They sell BOXES of ice cream.

My best guess is that it's for the housewife who realizes that she doesn't have any ice cream treats in the ice box and doesn't want to run up to the nearest Coles/Woolworths to buy some. I haven't bought any from him yet (as evident by my picture taking covertly from behind our water tank), but I know that there's going to come a day when I'm running down the street with my $5 note. My bet is that it's going to be mid-December.

3 Months

On Friday, we hit 3 months of living in the country. The time has completely flown by and when both Josh and I tell people how long we've been here, we can't believe that it's already been 3 months.


I think that we both feel like we are starting to fit into our life here. Josh is busier than anyone can even imagine with work and I think that he sometimes wonders how it is all going to get done. My work is going well (at least I think so) and I find that I am actually getting more done without the distractions of the office. We are both meeting more people and have enjoyed our few trips out of town.


It's been 3 months and we've managed to stay out of Gaol so everything has to be good.

More Birthday Presents

I've been terrible about updating. I have a backlog of blogs that need to be edited and published. I'll try to do it over the next few days.

First though - Josh received some packages in the mail on Monday. His parents had sent him some Australia-themed 30th birthday gifts.

He got mousepad and a koala poster.

And we both got mugs of boxing kangaroos. We're going to love drinking our morning tea out of them.

I especially love our 'kangaroo crossing' magnet. Now we can finally hang up the picture of our adorable nephew and niece that we miss so much.

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

What we do on the weekends that Josh has off and we don't go anywhere, but just stay around Dalby.

We play dominoes.

And we play cards. Both alpino and rummy 500.

And we play golf. Sometimes twice.

This weekend, we went on Friday and Saturday. On Saturday, it ended up being almost 80 degrees. It was wonderful weather!

And we don't play with the yellow practice balls.

Sometimes, we even get around to cleaning the house.

This past weekend some cleaning got done, but most of it got carried over to this week.

And that's mainly because I convinced Josh to go on a walk with me on Sunday afternoon. The weather was perfect again and we needed to get out of the house.

We walked along the creek and made our way down to the park. Josh and I spent a lot of times on the swings. He even managed to jump out of the swing without damaging his back or knees.

I had a bottle of water next to my swing and this little 3 year old boy came over and started to pick it up. I had to explain to him that it was my water. I'm not sure if he understood me or not.

On our walk out to the park, we finally got our first good look at a kookaburra. They are scary, meat-eating birds.

This one let us get pretty close to it until it flew off.

Macca's

So I'm sitting at home this morning doing my work and talking to my 2 sisters over Skype and all of the power suddenly went out. Everything. Which meant that our wireless was out and that my computer was going to have to run off stored power for however long it needed to. Luckily, we have our back-up wireless broadband and I was able to hop on and let Josh know that we had no power. His reply was to forward an email from Monday informing all tenants of a planned outage from 9 to 3 because of some maintenance.

So I continued to work for a few hours off of a dim screen and the mobile broadband. And then I found out that apparently McDonald's was suppose to have free wireless. I figured that I could ride my bike up there (Josh had the car today) and charge my computer and sit for a little while.

Now, you might think that I'm such a westerner for going to McDonald's, but seriously - Aussies love their Maccas (fyi - I just found out from a sign today that they call it Maccas. They are so funny) because every one that we have been in has been CRAZY. And the Dalby location didn't disappoint. There was barely a seat empty in the place. I found one outside, but was finally driven inside because of the little bitty lizards running all over the bricks.

Also, in every McDonald's, there is something called a McCafe. It's like a little Starbucks in each store. Australians, much like Europeans, love their coffee. And they love taking tea breaks.

So I sat at the Macca's for a few hours reading my book. The working there didn't go so well since it was impossible to find a plug-in and I didn't see any signs for wireless internet, but I managed to pass the time pretty well.

Power came back on at 2:35 - about 5 hours after it went out.

Australian is Funny - Part 7.

By the way, this is one of the examples where I find 'Australian' making it's way into my everyday language. If I'm with Josh, I'll tell him to push the trolley over this way.

Happy Birthday Josh!

Yesterday was my husband's 30th birthday. I think that the story goes that back in 1979 his mom was told that she could have Josh on July 3rd or July 5th, but that the doctor really didn't want to come in on July 4th. So July 3rd it was and what a great idea because it meant that it was easy to take extended weekends and not work on your birthday or sometimes you actually got your birthday off as a holiday when the 4th falls on a weekend.

Until you move to Australia.

Josh had to work yesterday. He was very tired when he got home.


The orange in his hand was his birthday gift from the guys at work. Also, as a side note, please ignore the lack of real furniture in our house. Cardboard moving boxes and a kitchen chair work just fine as side/coffee tables, thank you very much.

He already knew about his golf clubs since we spent 2 hours in the golf store swinging and looking and putting and swinging and changing out drivers and swinging and purchasing. Then we spent another hour at the driving range that day. Then we spent another 2 hours playing 9 holes last Sunday. He played the best 9 holes he ever has with them. I think it was a good investment.

I also got him a golf towel as little, unknown gift since it poured last Saturday and we were in dire need of one.

He changed out the driver that was part of the package for a square driver. So it's red while the rest of them are blue.

And yes, I actually got on the ground to take this picture.

Some more little gifts - That 70's Show Season 6 and 7 (we're big TV on DVD fans).

And a set of double-6 dominos.

I can't control craziness in the pictures.

Also, happy birthday to ME!

I spent most of my holiday day trying to figure out how exactly I was suppose to be making Josh's birthday dinner of boiled shrimp....excuse me, prawns.... and hashbrown casserole. Especially considered that Old Bay seasoning isn't allowed in Australia due to a quarantine on some of the spices. I believe that you can buy Zatarains somewhere, but not any of the 2 Dalby grocery stores.

So I trusted the internet and made my own. And since I also has trouble finding cheesecloth, I went ahead and used another internet suggestion of knee high panty hose. It turned out fine.


The prawns were big! Here I am pointing at them.


They had their heads and eyes on still which is not how we typically partake of them, but I couldn't find any fresh, shells on, heads off ones.


These were okay, but not as good as the ones from the Alabama shore. Hopefully we'll be back next summer to have some.

As for the hashbrown casserole, they only sell hashbrowns in those big chunks (not in strings or southern style), but I did find some potato wedges and I think that it was fairly good. The cheese situation just isn't working down here though.

I believe that cake made up for everything though. Then again, when doesn't chocolate make everything better?

And since there are only 2 of us, we'll have it for days and days.

I heart math

Let's just note that it's a good thing that I majored in math for undergraduate studies - otherwise these darn conversion might have killed me by now.

I've gotten pretty good at estimating the temperature outside - double the celsius, subtract out 10% of the original number, add 32. That means that 18C is really like 66ish F.

And I can approximate how long it will take us to get somewhere when the GPS gives us kilometers remaining. When the little lady in the machine says 'Continue 60 kilometers', what it really means is - multiply 60 by .62, that puts you at about 37 MILES to go, don't freak out and think that it's longer than it really is.

But start throwing reversals in there or uneven numbers and my mind goes all kattywhompus. Such as running a 9.8 pace on the treadmill. I know that a 10 showing means that it's 6.2 miles/hour, but 9.8 is just too many decimals for my mind to handle WHILE I'm also trying to run.

I also find this true when I'm trying to cook from a recipe. Which is why I find myself just winging dinners. But last night, I wanted to make some cornbread to go along with our chili (which first of all, yay to me for finally finding the kidney beans in the grocery store).

Knowing that I wouldn't be so lucky as to find a pack of our go-to Betty Crocker Cornbread Mix, I had my fingers crossed that there would be any type of corn meal. Luckily, I found some polenta and just hoped that it would be simliar enough - after all, it did say corn meal on the package and it was yellow.

Then I had to come home and actually follow the recipe so that I could hope to have something similar to cornbread come out of the oven. All of the liquids are pretty easy because I made sure to get measuring cups and teaspoons that have the American standard on them. But when the recipe calls for 1/2 stick of butter, I first have to remember how many TBSPs are in a stick (since butter here is sold in blocks, not sticks) and then convert that to grams.

I find myself back and forth from the counter to my computer googling things like '4 tablespoons is how many grams?' and ending up at websites like this. Because let me just show you what the knobs on our oven look like:

Not only do I have to worry about converting 400F to Celsius, but I also have to figure out what 'Fan Grill', 'Grill', 'Fan Forced' and 'Fan' mean (I've got 'light' covered). I've pretty much have been cooking everything on 'fan forced' since it seems to heat the most evenly and I just watch and check every 3 minutes.

The cornbread turned out pretty good. We ate the pieces around the edge because the middle was a little soggy.

The whole experience makes me wonder why on earth they brought Americans over here to build a power station. If my cornbread turned out soggy, what's going to happen on first fire?