HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM KANGAROO EXILE

Since postage is ridiculous for Holiday cards from Australia I decided to send some holiday cheer over the internet this year :)

It's been very difficult getting into the Christmas spirit this year.  It just doesn't feel right.  The forecast temperature for Christmas day is just under 100 degrees F.  Hanging lights and putting up a tree really helped.  We went out, took a holiday pic, and tried to have our own winter wonderland.
 

The sun burns bright, are you hiding?

In the road, an egg is frying.

Try as we might, it's always a fight

Finding shade in this sunny land.

It's true that we can never build a snowman.

Maybe we can build one out of sand.

The sandy beach while fun is always crowded,

At least we all can get a lovely tan.

No need for warmth, by the fire.

The temp is climbing higher.

It's a wonderful sight, when on comes the night,

Living in this hot and sunny land.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Solstice, or whatever you all celebrate this time of year. 

Tag! You're It!

Early arrival to a locked gate

Soldier Boy

 On Saturday Vinny and I had the privilege of going to an outdoor Laser tag at Battlezone Laser Tag for his friend Jordan's birthday.  As it turns out Jordan's birthday is in January, but that is in the Jan/Feb high summer - this way of thinking still causes my brain to skip a few cogs - and the temperature outside for an activity such as this will be absolutely unbearable in January.

So the party is now, in November, at 90F degrees, in the bush, in the brutal sun, while wearing a full suit of coveralls and carrying an immensely heavy (for a child) metal laser rifle.  I've seen on their website pictures of groups playing at night.  That may be the way to go, but then all the little nasties are out at night too. 

The day started with us being picked up by the birthday family and being driven to the park outside of town.  Along the drive I noticed that the outlying lands around Perth aren't really much different from the outside lands around Lexington or Louisville, just minus the color green, red clay is replaced by sand, and you can swap the species of bush and tree. Other than that, you'd never guess you were in a totally different area.

Aaron took a peek at the presents.

 The only thing about it that makes one realize they aren't in Kansas anymore are the flies.  These flies are vicious.  Each one of us was chaperoned by our own, individual squadron of the little buggers, and they were taking their orders to heart.  Landing on your glasses. Trying to get into your nose.  Landing on your lips.  Crawling down your shirt. Biting you. Afterward I kicked myself for failing to take a picture of them. If only you could understand. For example, shortly after we arrived, Jordan's father had six flies on his back at once. He had at least four buzzing around his head.  Don't forget the two on his hands and the two or three hovering around his chest.   You brush them away and all they do is try to fly into your nose or ear just to make you mad.  When I'm lucky I can maybe smack one down, but it seems to call in several of its buddies.  Something about the death pheromone, I guess.


I did my best to warn them all that they should enjoy life now, soon they will need to hide, as one day in the future grandpa will come, and he will bring with him his amazing talent of killing flies bare-handed.  Flies, your days are numbered.  If you live more than 24 hours, that is.

Good times

What it boils down to is everyone becomes a horse.  We snort and neigh and jerk our heads to get the flies off our faces about once every ten seconds.  My glasses have suffered as they have been knocked and thrown off my face so many times during the furious flailing and swatting. I'm fortunate they have not been dashed against the rocks or concrete yet.  I like these frames.

Jordan's parents set up the reserved table and chairs and we all sat and awaited the fun to begin.  All the kids were excited about the opportunity to shoot each other.  I was glad to see this social phenomenon was not monopolized by the United States.

The participants were directed into the tents to receive their uniforms.  I took Vinny inside and found him the appropriate size.  He put on the coveralls, found a hat, and had his face painted.  He was rip-roarin ready to go.  He didn't seem swayed by the fact he'd be shooting either.  I remember my cap guns and whatnot, and wish they had these laser things when I was a kid, and I think I turned out okay.

When I was young we had our cap guns.  Even though I fondly remember the hours of loading those long red paper strips into the guns and smelling the sweet aroma of gunpowder after the boom, these newfangled things are quite nice.    I can still remember the day my brother got the cap revolver with the cap rings that you stuck in and pulled out.  I thought that was better than sliced bread.  And then was the indoor laser tag in Lexington and in Knoxville.  But this was a totally different experience.

Sir, yes Sir!

The drill sergeant went over safety rules, first for how to take care of your body, second how to take care of your friends, and third how to properly use the weapon.

It was then that Jordan's mom told me one of the kids couldn't play as he wasn't feeling well, and she wanted to know if I wanted to take his place.  Thinking it would good to be out there with Vinny - I thought he might be scared - I agreed and went and found the uniform stand.

I told the young woman there to give me the biggest size she had.  She apologized that they weren't in Australian sizes, but American, and then I thanked her and told her that would work best for me. After hearing me speak she figured it out.

I got the coveralls on and picked my weapon.  They had many true-to-life replicas with the laser systems welded on.  These weapons were heavy.  I picked the biggest one I could find.

The black team.  Vinny is in the front, second from the left.  Property of Battlezone.

We split into two teams, red and black.  When the drill sergeant was splitting up our table, he asked me which was my child, and I pointed to Vinny, and he immediately put us on opposite teams.  He gave me a thumbs up and said "You'll thank me later," smiling.  I guess he figured I wanted to shoot my own son.   Sure.  Why not.

Vinny and his friend Aaron, Jordan's brother, were on the same team, and Aaron's dad was going along with Aaron, so the three of them formed their own little squad.

The red team.  I'm in the back row with the rifle pointed up.  Property of Battlezone.

I had to sign an indemnity waiver and also a gag order prohibiting me from discussing how the company operates or how the weapons work, but I will say that each weapon had a fully functional red-dot scope and that made things easier, but I wish I'd have found my tiny dot before halfway through round 2.

Both teams.  Property of Battlezone.

We had our pictures made and headed off to round one.

Vinny in the back.  Property of Battlezone.

Round one was just red team vs blue team in an open field.  Each team started at opposite ends and had to make their way forward.  I took a position wide and to the rear, a good place from where I could see as much as the field as I could, and I looked for Vinny.

I never saw him.  I did see his friend Aaron though, and Aaron's dad, who soon seemed to be fixing Aaron's gun a lot.  I found out later that Aaron didn't like the weight of his gun and his dad took it and was using it to shoot people, but he left the sensors on Aaron.  As small as Aaron was, he could keep low or hide and his dad just stood there beaning people.  I bet that was fun.

I was one of the last to flush out.  They had to send four of their members my way to push me out of my position.  They were the young ones.  It became clear to me the black team's strategy - to charge the younglings forward ahead and then to bring their adults in the rear.    Boo.

Big, colorful target. Property of Battlezone.

Round two involved protection of a VIP, namely a commander.  By that time I had taken my coveralls down and tied them around my waist, allowing my patriotic red, white, and blues to shine in the twilight's last gleaming, one of the battlezone ladies asked me if I wanted to be the VIP.  I guess they wanted the biggest colorful target they could find, and I agreed.

My personal guard and I located and dug in at a ruined structure somewhere in the bush.  From our vantage point we could get a good idea from which directions the black team attacked and when.  I split what players I had into two groups to watch the right and left flanks and my guard and I watched from within.  I called for some volunteers to go foward, one for recon and one to push.  It was nice in that structure.  We found some viewpoints from where we could watch and fire and keep our sensors covered.

Property of Battlezone.

It paid off in the end.  I kept an eye out for Vinny but never saw him.  The only time a black team member got a hit on us is when a boy was brought into the structure sick, flushed, with symptoms screaming of heat exhaustion.  I called for the rest of my guard -one to get him back to the main tent- and as we were helping him out the door of the structure one of the black team popped me.  Didn't kill me, just popped me.  So no 100 bonus points for them. Bad karma for them for trying to pop me when removing a truly sick child from the field.

The third and final round was a free for all against a battlezone team.  The goal was to survive.  You could kill one of the battlezone members but they had two guns each and had more lives than you - as they represented a well-known robot from a well-known movie franchise starring a well-known Californian governor.  I had found Vinny by this time and he and I took to the bushes and hid.  The sound of gunfire was everywhere, and as it seemed to get louder we'd get up and duck-and-cover our way around behind the action.  We came across the structure my guard and I had occupied in round 2 and Vinny recognized it, so I knew he was out there, but I never had seen him.  He said that he got shot a lot.  The guns didn't keep track of individual points so I'm not sure if he tagged anyone or not, but he said he had to keep running up and running back.

After a while the sound of fire ended and we made our way to the home tent where we realized that the game had actually ended ten minutes prior and we were the last to arrive.  This was the longest laser tag encounter I've ever had.  We were in the bush for several hours.

Vinny wanted Mama to see his cupcake

The battlezone crew cooked a sausage "sizzle" - a cookout- and we got grilled hot dogs and drinks, but we were so exhausted from the heat that we didn't eat anything.  We sipped some water for a while, and when the cupcakes came around for Jordan's birthday Vinny had his.  He didn't get sick.

The drill sergeant came around and announced who won the rounds.

Red team won both competition rounds (the first two)!

Everyone won the third round, as most humans survived.

As the party wrapped up we helped clean up and carry all the stuff back to the car.  Along they way, tired of batting flies, I told Aaron's father I had a new strategy, to EAT the flies, and sure enough, not ten seconds later, a fly decided to oblige.  Straight into my mouth.   At least I ate something that day. 

Someone's Been Sleeping In My Bed

Vinny's stage debut was on Friday.  He had been selected alongside a few other children to play Papa Bear in front of his school.  He was very afraid.  I did my best to assure him that all would be well, no one would be judging him, and just to cut loose and have fun. 

As you can see he got dressed up in a black shirt, nice pants, suspenders, and his scooby doo hat.  We ended up putting some face paint on him too.

The assembly went well.  The children started out by singing the school creed song*:

This is our school
[mumble mumble incoherent]
love with another, love with mankind
[mumble mumble incoherent]
this is our school.

*per Vinny's understanding of the lyrics. 

They then stood up in pairs and recited a few lines about respect, tolerance, and appreciation.  Later they sang a song about the nursery rhymes they were involved in. 

The boys and girls then acted their parts for Goldilocks and the Three Bears, followed by Little Red Riding Hood, in song.

There were enough bears and lumberjacks and wolves and red-smocked girls to shake a stick at.

Vinny's greatest reinforcement, I am sure, was the uproar of applause and hooting and hollering.  After that, they sang the national anthem of Australia.

again, per vinny:

[mumble mumble incoherent]
[mumble mumble incoherent]
[mumble mumble] Australia.
[mumble mumble incoherent]
[mumble mumble]
[incoherent]
Australia.


After the performance I took Vinny into the co-ed bathroom in his classroom to get the face paint off.  Four girls came in halfway through the removal, said they had to change, and one said:

"Vincent is the only boy in our class who can see us in our underpants."

And not thirty seconds later there were around four five and six year old girls topless in their underpants showing off what six-year-old-stuff they thought they had to my son who happened to be smiling from ear to ear.

After telling them repeatedly to put their shirts on I realized, with a sigh, what a wonderful time I was going to have in about ten years.

More Pictures:

Bowing and Proud

Cottesloe Beach Strikes Back

Vinny wanted to head back to Cottesloe Beach, so we decided that we would head out on Saturday.  It was a beautiful day.  Spring has moved into summer here, but the temperature isn't too high yet.  The sun, however, is brutal, and if you're out in the sun, it really can drag you down quickly.  We had heard from several people that the best times to go to the beach were in the morning and in the evening, so we decided to get up, have breakfast, and head over to the beach early.

We dressed for the beach, but since we have no car still, we wore our beach clothes on the bus.  Vinny asked worriedly, "what will people think of us on the bus?"  My response was simple.  "I think they'll be jealous because they want to go to the beach too."  He liked that answer.  So we sat on the bus in our swim trunks and Tshirts and made our way to the Esplanade bus/train station. 

At esplanade we jumped onto the train to the Perth Underground, then switched trains to head out to Cottesloe.  On the Freemantle line was a young couple, I'm assuming on their honeymoon, who sat near us.  The woman sat next to Vinny; she was very graceful and beautiful, and every time she turned to Vinny and smiled he'd turn away and bury his face in my side as hard as he could.  They told me they were from Taiwan and were going to Cottesloe, but didn't know exactly how to get there.  I'm assuming she knew we were the two to ask.  No one else was sitting around in swim trunks.

We talked a bit about Perth, about Cottesloe, and then decided that I'd show them how to get there.  The young woman kept wanting to get vinny's picture.  She was really impressed with his eyelashes and kept telling him how cute he was, and he turned every shade of red known to humanity.  I told the young man he needed to watch out as Vinny is well-known to be a charmer of the ladies.  He laughed and agreed.

Vinny let her get her picture and we made our way to the beach.  We told them how to get to the beach and made our separate ways.

The day was beautiful.  We started off getting ourselves nice and covered with sunscreen.  I had messed up last year in getting vinny covered and he got a bad burn on his back (you could even see my handprints in the burn, even) and I was determined to not let that happen again.  He's very white by nature, but after all of the sunscreen, he was nearly a ghost.
 

The beach wasn't deserted, yet it wasn't crowded either.  People were playing beach volleyball, surfing, boating, sunbathing, swimming, picnicking, you name it.  We made our way close to the waterline and I put down the blankets.

Vinny immediately wanted to get into the waves, so we walked into the water.  On the toes it was chilly, but as the waves would crash in, if you allowed yourself to just walk out a bit, the waves were warm.  It took Vinny a while to get used to the waves.  The water would come seeping up and he'd scream and run back.  To try to make it easier we sat down right on the edge and let the water run past us, but as the tide was coming in, it wasn't long before small waves were rushing and slapping us in the chest. 

Vinny thought a picture of his feet buried would be superb.

Looking out over the water

Vinny wanted to take a break from the water and went back into the sand.  He wanted me to bury him in the sand with only his head poking out.  I told him that he might find that a little bit scary because when you do that, because of the weight of the sand, you can't move, and have to be dug out.  He said it'd be ok and to go ahead.  So I dug. And dug.  And dug.  Eventually there was a hole deep enough for him to sit within and have his shoulders above the sand.  He sat in the hole and I got the "before" picture.  I'm glad I got that one because once I started filling him in and got the sand up to his arms he wanted out.

There was a family with two little boys, maybe three and four years old, who sat next to us.  The boy asked Vinny to play with him and Vinny agreed.  He let Vinny borrow some buckets and they went about building a sandcastle. 

They'd run up to the water, grab some water in the bucket, then run back.  Again the tide was coming in, and you can't tell from the pictures, but some of these swells are absolutely huge.  People say Cottesloe is good for surfing and getting knocked around and bruised, and it's true.  I went out into the swells a bit to help with the getting of water and to stand there if one of the boys got washed away.  I'm glad I did that, because one of the boys, the younger of the two who wasn't playing with Vinny, was not ten feet in front of his mother and a larger, unexpected swell came in and hit him.  He fell into the water and was pulled back into the water, but I grabbed onto him when he was sucked past me.  He made it out of the water and his father, in the best Australian chipper attitude looked at him, smiling, and said, "wow those are some big waves, aren't they?"

That is one thing I like about it here.  It does seem like everyone helps watch out for everyone else, at least in our part.  And the boy wasn't yelled at.  He didn't learn to fear the surf, only to respect it, and I'm sure that when he goes in again he'll be thinking "i need to watch the waves" instead of "i'm staying out of those waves."  It reminds me a lot of the line from Batman Begins:  "Why do we fall?  So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

Vinny and I got back into the water and played around for quite some time.  We got hungry around lunch time and packed ourselves up and made our way up the drag to find a place where we'd both enjoy what we ate. 

Eventually we found a cafe where they served both pancakes and hamburgers -as well as tons of other things, including guava and passion-fruit smoothies, which are very good.

Pancakes as big as your head!

Vinny got a stack of pancakes covered in maple and cream, and I got some sort of hamburger.  It wasn't the Aussie, but it was big nonetheless, and it was served with potatoes.  We both got milkshakes.  I need to point out that milkshakes here aren't ice cream you drink through a straw.  It's more like whipped, chilled milk of various flavors.

The food was so good that I told Vinny we had to bring Mama there sometime and he told me that no, we needed to keep this a secret from Mama, because this was a secret place for we men to go.  I told him ok, we could do that, but he might want to change his mind because those pancakes were quite good.

Yuuum.

After lunch we went along the shoreline to a playground and spent a few hours there.  During the time at the playground, lots of cars drove past, lots of scantily-clad women were everywhere and there was this one apartment balcony right across the street and two stories up where four young guys had gathered. 

They were the types that wanted attention.  When the prettier ladies would walk past, they'd turn up their music, hoot and holler to the "girls," and even sometimes run downstairs and cross the street and introduce themselves, trying to get one or two to go back up to the apartment with them.

There was one woman who was incredibly beautiful, standing on the sidewalk, waiting.  They were hooting down to her and she ignored them.  Then one came running down to her and put on his best charm, showing his chest, six-pack, and extended his peacock feathers and she didn't seem very impressed at all.

In a simple twist of fate, a young man, very lanky, very white, very geeky, pulled up on a moped.  She threw her arms around him and got on the back of the moped, and they sped away.  The look on the bonehead's face as they left him behind screamed "wtf?"  All I could think of doing was shouting, as loudly as I could,

"NERD POWER!"

But I didn't.  I wasn't in the mood to get my butt kicked just to prove a point.

They kept on and on and fortunately by the time we left, no one had been foolish enough to go back up to his apartment.  I'm sure that might have ended quite badly.

We decided to take the bus back.  We saw that the bus would actually run us back to the Esplanade station.  We hopped on the bus and for my first time at least got a tour of the western side of Perth's estuary.  Vinny, on the other hand, as tired as he was, fell asleep.

He told me later that he really enjoyed the outing.

It was a great day.

More pictures:

Patrolling for Great Whites

Even birds like the surf

Waiting for our shirts to dry

This beach is absolutely beautiful

I think this is Rottnest Island... not sure though

Sleepy boy