Week 23: Assaulted

Guess what...It's Karl again! I know you're as excited about reading this as I am to write it. To change things up a bit, I'm going to start with the word/words of the week.

Word of the Week

This is a two word Word of the Week.

Winge and Sook

These words are interchangeable, and they are often used together...often times they are.
Winge is used to describe people who whine and complain a whole lot. Winging is the verb form of the word winge. Someone could also be described as wingey. So, to review (and clarify), you can be a winge, you can be wingey, or you might start winging. Got it? Good.

Sook rhymes with cook. Sook is also used to describe someone who complains alot. It just doesn't have as many forms as winge. Sook is the only form that the word comes in...Kinda like the word deer. haha.

So, now that you know the defintions of these words, you are probably dying to figure out how they go together. Well, it's easy. If anyone has spent more than 2 hours with Brittney, you know that she can be a wingey sook. But no one could ever say that about me.

On with the show...

OK, OK...I know I'm supposed to write something crazy since I haven't written you guys in a while, but I don't have anything except the truth. So...not much has happened since our return from Sydney. We've had friends from home get married, others get engaged, and one unexpected friend even has a girl friend...from the sounds of it, she's the girl of his dreams. But since I don't want to jinx him, I'm not going to mention his name. Besides that Brittney is STILL bruised from paintballing, and I'm still pushing trolleys. As far as football goes, our team played really well this weekend...we tied the undefeated Warriors of Nunawading 6-6. Good luck pronouncing it because I'm not sure I even have it right yet. I have a little story to tell you guys, but I have two rules that you must follow while you're reading this: disregard grammar and believe everything that you read.

So........

Moments before I finished my shift pushing trolleys, an elderly woman with an arm full of groceries proceeds to walk down the sidewalk at a slow pace, to say the least. As she moves towards her destination, this little old lady of about 85 years begins to drop her groceries unknowingly.

Since all of the trolleys are put inside, for the most part, and I have some time to kill, I decided that I could be of help. I'm a young, strong, American male, of course I can be of help. I figure this way I can make myself feel good, help a little old lady with her groceries, and at the same time give the United States a good name (even though she'll probably think I'm Canadian).

So I approach the old lady, picking up her groceries as I go, and I say to her, "Can I help you with these ma'am?" She turns to me with a smile and keeps walking without saying a word. I kept following her picking up her groceries along the way. Eventually, I was carrying all but one bag. We finally reached her car. She must have parked in the farthest spot from the entrance of the store, but at least she wasn't parked next to anyone. As we reached her car, she unlocked it, opened the door, and she proceeded to put her one bag in her car. She must have forgotten that I was helping her because she closed the door before I could even attempt to put my bags in. When she turned around, she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Scared the shit out of me.

Like I said, she must have forgotten that I was helping her. She slapped me once across the face and kicked me in the shin. I was surprised that she could even pick her foot up, let alone kick me. The woman shuffled the entire way to her car for crying out loud. Anyways, I finally calmed her down and reminded her that I was trying to help her. She held her hand over her chest and began to laugh hysterically. So I'm standing there with a couple handfuls of groceries and an old woman laughing at me.

As I stood there with my mouth hanging open, I felt something poke me in the back. Before I could turn around, I was yanked into the back of a van by two mammoth sized men. As they proceeded to throw me into the van my head not only hit off the top of the van, but it hit the hard metal floor as my head snapped back upon landing. As the van drives off, I'm dazed and confused. A sliding window from the front opens up, and I can't make out what the men are screaming at me because of all the commotion. Besides that they were speaking Australian. With feces running down my leg, I begin to scream at the top of my lungs "I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING! WHAT ARE YOU SAYING!? STOP YELLING!"

At that moment, all of the noise ceased and a shotgun reared its head through the sliding window. I heard a voice from the front seat very calmly say, "Tell us what you reckon you saw, mate." As the urine stained my pants, I began to tremble (it was just too warm). I said, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Watch your language," the man with the shotgun said. "WHAT DID YOU SEE!?"

I had a hiccup in my voice now, trying to hold back my tears and I said, "I didn't see anything, sir. I promise. Please spare me, I just got married, and I'm here in Australia with my wife, and she's pregnant." I don't know what the heck made me say it, but it must have worked. The shotgun backed out of the sliding window and the window closed.

With laughter coming from the front seat, the van proceeded to move along its path. We drove for about 15 minutes before the ride got bumpy. I had calmed down until this point. The driver slammed on the breaks, and suddenly the front doors slammed. Not long after, the back doors opened up. There were three of them, but I couldn't make out their faces since it was dark. All I could see is that all of them were much bigger than me. Two of them grabbed me, pulled me out of the van, and slammed me into a tree. No, they did not ask me to squeal like a pig...they told me to. Just kidding. So, I'm standing there face to face with the masked men. Two of them were holding me against the tree and the third approached slowly with his head lowered. As he got about an inch or two from my face, he slowly raised his head and said, "I'm going to ask you one more tiome noicely, mate. What did you see?"

With tears filling my eyes and the lights of the van shining brightly on my face, I very calmly took a deep breath and gritted my teeth. I said to him, "I don't know what you're talking about, mate." I don't know what made the word "mate" come out of my mouth, but it did. He hit me once in the face, and the other two each took a shot to my stomach. They held me up one last time. The third one got in my face and whispered, "No worries, mate." And they ran off.

I was dazed and confused, and I didn't get a license plate. I began walking back towards the city lights. It just so happened that I was about a 20 minutes walk from our dorm. I walked in unscathed besides the fact that I literally smelled like piss and shit (excuse my language). One of the guys in the dorm walked past but didn't seem to notice that my manhood had just been taken. I walked into the room, and, as usual, Brittney was sitting on the bed crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, "My period is on time."

Thanks for reading,

Karl

Week 22: Playing catch up

Once again I must apologize for the blog not posting last week. I checked it on Friday, and I could see it. But it wasn't there on Tuesday when my Mom called, so obviously something went wrong. Something I forgot to mention last week was that I am learning so much more about football here than I have watching football at home during the last three years. There are several reasons: they're no announcers; Carol, Claire, and I worked as the chain crew three weeks ago; and during our east coast adventure, I filmed all of the boys' games and many of their practices (refrain from the mother-in-law comparisons. Please take no offense, Debbie, it's just too early in our marriage for me to turn into you just yet!)

Before I finish telling about Brisbane and Sydney, let me briefly discuss what happened over the weekend. I got my first semester grades back: two As and a B. Not my best, but probably worthy of the amount of work I put in, and there's definitely no grade inflation here:) Now, the real work begins as I write my thesis. At least I don't have any classes this semester! To celebrate our returning home, 12 friends from the dorm and Karl's regular football team drove into the bush to play paintball. (The close readers will remember me discussing how Karl can conned into buying these paintball tickets for a place 3 hours away.) If you like stomping around in mud, attempting to dodge plastic balls of paint, undoubtedly getting pelted with them anyway, and playing war, then you would have loved paintball. I had never been, and most likely will not go again. BUT, in spite of getting my four-day old bruises that still hurt, I had a great time. Other than these exciting bits of news, we've just been playing catch up with the "real" world.

Brisbane
After our tumultuous Gold Coast trip, Brisbane was smooth sailing. The national team was a bit smaller in build and younger than the last team, but they were there to play football. The boys had never experienced 2 a day training sessions and the luxury of having position coaches (there were 6 coaches in total.) Most thought it was greatest thing. One of Karl's linebackers told him that he'd learned more about football in the past five days than in the 2 1/2 years he'd been playing club ball. While the team did learn heaps, they didn't win either of their two games against Americans. But, they did score a touchdownn which is better than most Australian teams do against American opponents. I don't have any wild stories to tell about these boys because as I said earlier they were there to play football, and most of the time they were too tired to do anything. I did get a crash course on sewing patches on their jerseys (without a machine, too!)

Sydney
Karl and I had a great time doing something besides football for the last three days of our trip. We arrived at Sydney on a Sunday to find that our hotel was in the infamous red light district, Kings Cross. However, it was steps away from a train station and a McDonald (or Maccas as they say here.) We spent most of the first day wondering around the harbour, getting acquainted with the place and doing a bit of shopping. We even ran into one of our friends from the dorm. In a city with 5 million people, thousands of tourists, and several harbours, we found each other! After catching a small dinner at one of the few moderately expensive places to eat, we went up the Sydney Tower, a tall, skinny building with an observation deck plopped on the top. It had a beautiful view of the city at night!

On Monday, we traveled an hour on trains to see the 2000 Sydney Olympic Park. It was big, nice, and empty. Quite a disappointment. If we had gone on a Tuesday or Thursday, we could have had a trapeze lesson, though! After traveling the hour back to the city, we went to the city's botanical gardens and strolled around for a bit. Then, we took some more pictures of the Harbour Bridge (I think Karl took 75 in all) before meeting our friend and her mom for dinner. After dinner, was the Sydney Opera House and a chorale show! I think we all had more fun setting up the tripod and timer and taking pictures of ourselves in front of the bridge and SOH. The SOH is gorgeous, and it doesn't seem real!

On our last day, we did several things. First, we toured one of the first homes built in Sydney in 1823. Then, we took a ferry to Darling Harbour and yes, Karl took pictures of the bridge as we passed under it. Once in Darling, we peeked into the Chinese Gardens but didn't pay the $7 cover charge, tried to see an IMAX show, and finally stopped in the Outback Center. It was basically a HUGE tourist shop with everything outback and pretty authentic. Besides the fact that we're now obsessed with Aboriginal art, there was a free diggereedoo show! I'm not sure if I've explained what a diggereedoo is yet, so here it goes. It's an Aboriginal musical instrument that is made by termites eating through a large tree branch. Once the branch is hollowed out, they play it kind of like a trumpet but the bottom sits on the ground. The guy who performed for us was amazing. He was an authentic human juke box. He made bird noises and talked while continually playing the instrument. Hopefully, the video we took will be small enough to email. He was amazing! After his fantastic show, it was time for us to climb the bridge! It was awesome!!! It's a three hour ordeal to climb the bridge, but it's definitely worth it. The view was amazing, especially since it was daylight on our way up and nighttime on the descent. At the top, we were standing above the busiest strip of highway in Australia at rush hour. Yes, the bridge does wobble a bit, but don't worry, we're attached to it by cables. We ended our day by visiting the Sydney Aquarium, and it was great, too! Karl in all seriousness took over 100 pictures there. There were glow in the dark jellyfish, Nemo and friends exhibit, seals, Great Barrier reef animals, and an underwater shark tank with sharks and six feet long and wide sting rays floating above you. So cool! The only thing we could do to top off such a great day and trip was to ride a ferry and get gelato for the train ride home (Italian ice cream)!

Well once again, I win the award for longest post ever. I think Karl will guest write again next week. You guys need some excitement.

WORD OF THE WEEK

Two words for the week this week. Our first word is sick. We all know this word, but young Aussies (and probably Americans, too) use this word like cool. When they say something is sick, they don't mean it's disgusting, just like cool doesn't really mean cold or chilly. It means they really like it. Our second word is the real meaning of diggereedoo. Today, we know it as the musical instrument, but for the first European settlers it meant a little more than that. When they said diggereedov (notice the Irish spelling change:), they were saying "black man playing a stick." Kind of fun, eh?

Thanks for suffering through the detail. Sorry no pictures directly on the blog page. Karl updated the picture spot instead. Enjoy!

Britt

Week 21: More than halfway done!

Alright. I'll admit it. I'm a big fat liar. No quick little blog for week 19. Karl said I wouldn't find the time, and for the only time in our married life, he was right. It turns out that we had a quite the busy weekend. Our residence had an end of the semester party on Friday night, Saturday we went ice skating (yes, there is ice skating Down Under, and I'm much better Karl), and Karl of course had a game on Sunday. The game was really exciting because both teams played well, and our team won, 22-14! The most exciting part is that Karl broke his finger! How fun, eh? That meant that Monday he skipped work to visit the doctor's office. The doctor told Karl that is was a good thing he wasn't wearing his wedding ring during the game because he would have had to cut it off. Over three weeks later Karl's ring still doesn't fit because of the swelling, but at least there isn't a game this weekend, so he can rest. So, as you can imagine, all of the packing and preparing for our two week adventure occurred on Tuesday, and no blog writing occurred.

Gold Coast (Down Under Bowl w/ Victorian Team)
We started our latest adventure on Wed. 29 at 5:00 a.m. We had to get up so early to catch our cheap 9:05 a.m. flight at an airport far away. With Claire's help we arrived in plenty of time, but we soon realized how much time we had to spare. Our airport was closed because of fog, so our plane didn't leave until almost 1 p.m. By the time we got into Gold Coast, the team's first practice had already been canceled because of the delays. No worries, we had two scheduled practices for Thursday, and the game wasn't until Friday afternoon. After getting up at 5:30 for brekkie (breakfast), Thursday's morning practice was canceled because of rain. This turned out to not be just any rain, but the greatest rainfall the area had seen since 1974! All the down the coast, people were trapped in their cars, the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and Sydney airports were flooded and obviously closed, and prime minister declared it a natural disaster. So much for going to the beach. As you could probably guess, afternoon practice didn't really happen either. Karl had flashbacks from the national championships as the team conducted walk-thrus in the hotel's parking garage. Friday morning we woke up at the same unGodful hour to once again have practice canceled because all the known practice fields were flooded.

The game went on as scheduled somehow, and the boys were not so prepared for the Kentucky team they played against. On, I forgot to mention that six of the 34 boys had gotten sick with the Rhino flu (a severe flu disease named after patient zero, James "Rhino" Styles). The whole situation was compounded by the fact that many of the players were a bit scared to play the Americans. After all, it is our game; the Americans lift weights; and many of them were college scholarship players. The game ended 33-0, but that doesn't really show how well the boys played outside of the first quarter. The Aussies didn't play on winning, so after the game it was all fun as they traded jerseys and hats with the Kentucky boys. I even met a Greenwood player was would be playing at Western next year, and a Logan County boy who would be giving up his football gear for Phi Delt letters. He was definitely stereotypical of both the "LC" and Phi Delts.

After morning practice on Saturday, the team and I got to go to Dreamworld. A theme park that tried pretty hard to be Disney World. They had the train that circled the park, a Main Street entrance, different worlds, a Tower of Terror, etc. It did have some good rides, though. Their Tower of Terror (left) is "one of the fastest rides in the world. The Tower's electro-magnetically powered 'Escape Pod' accelerates its passengers to a massive 160 kph in seven seconds before it climbs to almost 38 storeys high." The Claw was awesome! It's description: "The first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, The Claw (right) is the most powerful pendulum on the planet. You'll be propelled 9 stories high, swinging up to 75km/h while spinning 360 degrees." It looked kind of fun almost relaxing, but once it started I was so scared! Being upside down nine stories in the air while spinning was nothing relaxing, but definitely worth doing. We went on some other rides, but these were the best! After the park we went to a steakhouse, Karl and I's first in Aussieland. We got 650 gram steaks (454 is a pound), and the players didn't think I could eat all of mine. I proved them wrong, and I finished mine before Karl! While I didn't eat any of the fries or salad, I did finish my ice cream dessert. Definitely a good day!

Sunday was more practicing for the boys, and laundry for me and the team managers. The laundry took almost 4 hours, but I finished my third book during that time. Monday was of course, 4th of July. The Down Under Bowl puts on a parade, and in spite of no fireworks, it was nice. The boys played their final game that afternoon. Even though they lost again to a Southeast combination team, they had fun and really had improved their playing. It would helped to have our quarterback, but unfortunately he fell victim to the Rhino disease, too. The picture is John Murphy (head coach) and Leo Mancini (football friend and Tony Soprano look alike).The boys celebrated their last night in Gold Coast by all going to this bar called Shooter's (legal drinking age is 18 and most of the guys were 18-20). I wasn't going to go but I got talked into it, and I had a fantastic time. Leo and Karl decided to pretend it was my birthday, and Leo kicked off the celebration by buying me a Bailey's based shot. As they started singing Happy Birthday, the boys joined in. Then, they joined into the shot buying frenzie. Each time someone bought me a shot they all sang Happy Birthday again. They sang it so many times and so loudly that the management thought it was my 21st and brought out a tray of 21 shots and 3 shakers of alcohol and wished Happy Birthday. I just laughed and said thanks:) The funniest thing is that most of the boys really thought it was my birthday when it actually was one of the guy's birthdays. Even the equipment manager thought July 4th was my real birthday for days. What a trip!

I was going to write about being in Brisbane, but this is really getting too long. I'll write about that and Sydney next week. It will be on Wednesday, I promise. Girl Scout's honor. Very quickly, I'll share one of the many new words we learned this weekend.

WORDS OF THE WEEK

Scone. Most of us probably have heard of a scone, but we only think about it in the biscuit like sense. We also would pronounce it with a long o sound. Well, the Aussies pronounce it like scon, and it can mean thick skull. Keryn said something like this to Karl when he was pretending to not understand something she was saying, "Can you get it through your scone?" I also learned a new word for brown nosing, but I can only remember the hand gesture for it right now. You put one hand on top of the other and wiggle your fingers. I think it's an imitation of some sort of bottom feeding fish:) We also learned the real meaning of kangaroo: "I don't know what you're saying". The aboriginal people said kangaroo when the European settlers asked what the hopping creature was because they couldn't understand the words coming out of their mouths.

That's about enough fun information for now. Miss you!

Britt