Taco Monday?

It's a little after ten pm.  Leah and I had dinner at the neighbor's tonight, but this time we cooked.  We made carnitas tacos and guacamole.  I think they really enjoyed them.  Tacos are sort of hard to come by in Australia and usually don't go much beyond the realm of ground beef and taco seasoning in a packet.  I'm convinced that if you set up a stand in one of the weekend markets you could make a killing with an authentic taco stand. Ah, to dream.  We usually have Tacos on Tuesday, Taco Tuesday, duh, but since tomorrow is a holiday we bumped up the schedule.

Tomorrow we have the day off for Australia day.  Jan 26th is the anniversary of the landing of the first colonial expedition that landed in Sydney.  Mush like the 4th of July back home, most Aussies will celebrate by drinking and barbecuing.  I think there are fireworks planned but I'm not sure where they are going to be. I do know that you can get just about anything you could ever want with the Australian flag printed on it right now. Every other car is flying a flag or two and shops are bursting with flag printed party supplies.  There's a real sense of nationalism in the streets.

We are quickly settling into routine with school and work.  It's nice, frankly, after months of not working and being rootless, to settle into familiar.  I'm enjoying my job.  I like the guys I work with and am learning a lot.  Leah is busy with school and I feel she already finds it challenging.  Of course she is not the type of person to procrastinate or take things for granted, so she gets after school pretty hard.  She seems to like it so far and is starting to make some friends.

Back home the NFL championships were played today, the Australian open is the big sports story here, but they are showing the games on TV.  I missed the Vikings (sorry Chucker, looks like you were right about Favre) and Saints and the Indy NY game just started.  I think I'll watch for a while even though I already know how it turns out.  This seems really weird for me to say, but I miss Football way more than I ever would have expected.  Those of you who know me well know that I'm mostly a baseball fan and football falls a distant third after Hockey. But it's so prevalent back home that you can't help but follow it.  Here, it's totally an afterthought, horse racing gets more attention.  And the lack of constant football coverage has left a void in my life that I am really surprised of.  And Hockey, as in NHL, might as well not even exist here.  You never see hockey here unless there is a really really brutal fight.

I'm still getting our photos arranged back on the computer so I don't have any to post tonight.  I've just about gotten back to where I was with the computer before the crash.  It won't be long now and we'll have the blog cranking again.  It feels like it's been a long time since I was writing every day.  Hopefully it won't take me too long to get back in the swing of things.  Being at work has given me a whole new perspective on living in Oz and I look forward to writing about it for you.

Enjoy your Monday. We'll be celebrating with our new country.