21.04.2009

As predicted by yesterday's post, Josh did wake up at 4:10 while I manage to stay in bed until the much more decent hour of 4:45am. We loaded him up and got him to the bus with plenty of time to spare. I think that he's going to have quite the stories to tell based on the men that ride the bus.

I came back home and logged on to work for about 5 hours or so. I think that it is going well so far. I basically catch everyone in the last 2 - 3 hours (or 0.50 hour for the early birds) of their day, so we'll see if I need to start staying up later to try to grab anyone at the beginning of the day.

Then I took a break and headed out for a run/walk while the air was still relatively cool. Down the street next to ours is the golf course. It took me 6 minutes to walk there. Here it is. I liked how green and quiet it was.

I've only played golf once (on our Alaska vacation last summer), but maybe we will have to take it up. Only if we can borrow others' clubs, of course.

Right across from the golf course is where the walking/biking trail starts that runs along the creek. This is Myall Creek. Kinda spooky, right? I have no clue what lies underneath that brown, murky water, but all I could imagine was coming face to face with a crocodile. Anyway, I was more interested in running along the path over to the left of the picture.

So I ran for about 10 minutes into town where I stopped to take this picture. For the past 3 days, I have been cracking up because I had no idea why someone in Australia would name their hotel this. Now, knowing the name of the creek, it's obvious that the 'M' in the sign is suppose to work double-duty for both words, but to me, forever more this hotel will be Motel Y'all.

Then I ran just 2 or 3 minutes more and hit the cultural part of town. Below is the Dalby Bowls Center. It's bowling, but with suspicious rules. Josh and I watched some of it on the telly in Brisbane, but couldn't figure out the object.

Right next door is a Anzac memorial park of which I took a picture, but decided to save until Saturday (Anzac Day). Behind the park is the pool. I did take a picture of this, but it really didn't do it justice. As you can see, there is a little kiddie play area in the front, but if you peek behind the mushrooms, you can catch a glimpse of the 8-lane, 50-meter pool. Off to the right of the picture is a grandstand of seats. It's pretty nice for such a small town. The only sad part is that it closes this Sunday for winter and doesn't reopen until September 6th.

But no worries, because right on the other side of the pool is the Dalby Croquet Club and I'm pretty sure that they don't stop playing croquet in the winter. I'm not real sure what it takes to belong to the Croquet Club (or Bowls Center for that matter), but perhaps I should be looking into it.

And then I just turn around 180 degrees from this picture and you can see the Big W. The Big W is in Dalby ShoppingWorld which is at the end of the main street of Dalby. I decided not to head over to the main street to take pictures because (a) I'm trying to keep these posts shorter and (b) I'm aiming not to run out of things to blog about. Anyway, you probably can't tell, but Big W's slogan is 'We Sell for Less'. Yeah - that's right. It's just a smaller Walmart.

And there's the creek and the pathway again so I decided to run home. I did come across this odd grouping.

I thought it was weird to find 4 different birds just kind of chilling together. Though I suppose that they are all of the duck-like species.

Also, that big one down there. Big enough to take my leg off if he had wanted to. Seriously, I walked WAY around the pathway to avoid contact with him. Look at his scary goose/duck leg - you could eat that!

And then I came across this tree and took a picture because I've only seen fake trees that look like this.

So I got home and took a shower (since I don't want to become one of those stay-at-home people who feel like they don't have to get around just because they stay at home all day), at lunch and worked some more. The guy(s) came around to check on the problems with the house, but the one guy told me that he was waiting to hear from someone else about the air con units (his words, not mine) and the other plumber guy replaced the water pump to make the water come out more forceful, but discovered that our switch was broken. Meaning the switch that determines whether we use town water or tank water. And by tank water, I mean water from that big rainwater collection tank out in our front yard. Yeah - that could explain why we were getting grass in our ice water. He left at 5 with promises to be back in the morning with the part to fix everything.

Which was fine with me since I needed to leave soon to get Josh anyway. I made it over to the park at 5:30 and he was just getting off the bus. I took a picture of his work outfit because though I think that he is incredibly manly coming home from building a power plant, those shirts that they have to wear are hideous! It's an Australian standard though so at least he fits in.

And wouldn't you know it? He saw a dang kangaroo on the ride home today! And all I've seen are birds that can swallow an appendage. His comments were that it just like a big, dumb, overgrown deer, but I'm sure that it was much cuter than that. He was tired after a long day of work. He had a induction meeting and safety briefing right when he got there - apparently, they went over all of the toxious plants that you should not touch. He worked side-by-side with the other Cablematic guy out there and appears to be learning a lot really quickly. I asked him how impressive the plant was and he said that it was pretty amazing. He did mention that he doesn't like walking the plant because there are cranes everywhere and you have to keep looking up to make sure that no one is going to drop anything on you.

After he got home, we had a good 2 hours of seeing each other before he had to head off to sleep again. So our first day of a routine seemed to go fairly well. I didn't get too bored or lonely (not with all the work I have to do) and I think that Josh is feeling better about the job now that he's gotten a day out there under his feet. So we're ready to do it again!