There's a line in a Crowded House song "Every night about six o'clock the birds come back to the palm to talk". This seems especially true here. Tonight my taxi driver and I had a brief conversation about the Mynahs at Ghim Moh, how they always meet in the same trees, same time. I said it's Happy Hour for the birds, he said they were discussing the bird flu in Thailand counting their blessings here.
The birds here bring us so much pleasure. We're turning into serious bird geeks anyway, but the predictable antics of our regulars are so pleasing. I see ravens flying in packs past our windows from the hour of 5pm on, heading to their meeting place, I feel a need to hassle the stragglers, to remind them that they're late after 6pm.

There are a hundred more examples of Australian speechies ( I made that up but it's appropriate). Mozzies for mosquitos, Chrissie for Xmas, bikey for biker, esky for a cooler, the list goes on and on..... I wonder if that will be at all annoying when we get there? IF we get there. There is, after all, the chance that we could still be rejected for migration. I suppose if that happened we'd cry, then move to California.
We're spending this weekend readying the house for visitors next week. Very exciting. It's always good to see people from home.

Weirdie. Until the conversation with our dinner guests last night, it never dawned on me how often Australians shorten their words. We all know they're Aussies, not Australians, and cook on barbies, not barbecue -- but they also go to unis, not universities; they're from Tazzie, not Tasmania, and they eat brekkie, not breakfast. Any others I'm forgetting?

I've also noticed a Britishism from the Brit who sometimes drives me home from soccer. The "n't" contractions are used as little as possible, in favor of combining the to be and to have verbs with the subject. So it's "we've not..." instead of "we haven't...", and "Joe's not..." instead of "Joe isn't...". That's a subtler thing. Usually, he'll drop one or two of the wackier Britishisms every trip, like something being "sixes and sevens". (I wish I had written them all down.) The other day he made a wrong turn and said, "Woops, I think I dropped a bollock here..."

On a more disappointing note, they replaced the crazy Mandarin lady's voice on the MRT line that warns you to stand behind the yellow line. Of the four languages they speak it in, hers was the only one that was replaced, so they must've had complaints.

OZ. We've got two out of the three tasks completed that are required for our last steps towards migration. I'm so ready to have those stamps in our passports I practically have our bags packed already. I'm contemplating changing my blog icon to something more Australian, maybe a Tasmanian devil or a platypus. Mark's sea dragon is totally appropriate as they are only found in the sea directly south of mainland Australia, near Adelaide I believe.
We're planning a trip to Melbourne soon, which will hopefully coincide with a work contract for Mark in Tasmania (the same one he's been hoping for since last August).
We're also having dinner tonight with some work colleagues of mine who've both lived in Melbourne, to suss out which neighbourhoods might be the most interesting for us.
Melbourne sounds perfect for us on paper, hopefully the reality lives up to our expectations. Time will tell.

Yay us! Our limerick was selected as one of three winners in the Metamorphosism Valentine's Day Limerick Contest. For our encore we're working on a cure for cancer.

Valentine's Day was very nice. A quiet dinner followed by (as Marjorie mentioned) a quiet evening at home with chocolate-covered strawberries, and champagne.

In other news... Goooooooaaaaaallll! Scored again today, despite playing defense, on a decent shot from 25 yards out. Of course, it helped that the team we were playing weren't very good -- it was 4-nil at the half, and my goal made it six. At halftime our coach said he'd buy us ten pitchers later in the month if we reached 10 goals. We made it, on a penalty kick in injury time, for a final score of 10-2.

We've submitted our entry to the Metamorphosism limerick contest. Ours certainly isn't the best but at least it scans.