Summer time!

From experience, I know that by now the Northern Hemisphere is cold, icy, snowy, and basically covered in winter. Of course, it's still early enough in the year that Northern Hemisphere types are wide eyed over twinkle lights and frosty breath and magic. But give it another month and a few more icy mornings, freeways full of semis pumping black gas into the haze of sky, and white fluffy snow morphed into gray icy sludge that splatters the sidewalks and seeps into your boots, and all the magic will fade into the blur of chapped skin and dirty overcoats and lung-choking darkness that is winter.

Summer is glorious.

The birds love summer, too. Can you find twelve rainbow lorikeets below? They were hanging upside down eating the seeds in the trees outside our apartment.

I have been away during the week for the past couple of weeks, and I have two more weeks to go with this schedule. There is a large international workshop being held in country Victoria, about 1.5 hours away from home. I go off into rural Victoria for the week, then back for the weekend. It isn't ideal, but Tim and Jonathan are doing ok.

The place where I am staying is far enough away from the city that a short walk at dusk brings you to fields full of kangaroos.

If you know to look for them.

The first night I was away, to my delight I found that the dorms where I'm staying are right under the branches of tall eucalyptus trees where sulphur crested cockatoos spend the night. Hundreds of the birds flew just overhead and called happily to each other starting just around sunset. It was like a grand party of yellow-tinged white birds, chattering and calling and sharing the adventures of the day.

They settled down for quiet sleep around 9:30pm in the evening. And it was beautiful and fun and exciting, right up until about 5:00am the next morning, when the cockatoos woke up again and began calling and chattering. It was like a huge 5am party, with all the birds screaming loudly across the trees to tell each other about their plans for the new day. And that lasted until around 6am, by which time they had all flown away and I was wide awake. I'm going to have to live on cockatoo schedule for a couple more weeks, I think.

That's pretty much all our news. Except Jonathan volunteered at a French festival in a cookie-decorating booth with his school. And Tim and I bought a couple of cookies to decorate. Tim ate his before I took a picture, but he did point out that he was decorating an American pumpkin with an Irish flag at a French festival in Australia. Have you ever met people who are so internationally savvy?