2 Texans Down Under

The birds are singing, the weather is wet and windy, there’s hope for rainfall in Brisbane’s reservoir catchment areas, fuel prices are headed up, and we talked this morning with an Australian wearing a “Don’t Mess With Texas” T-shirt he bought in Dallas without knowing the slogan’s intended meaning.

In other words, my hope that we’d welcome the new year sitting in a Qantas plane about to leave LAX was fulfilled and we’re back from our summer/Christmas vacation.

Our friend Nicola met us at the airport yesterday and we used the last of our energy for unpacking. Jet lag put us in bed by 7:30 p.m. and our internal clocks had us wide awake by 4:30 this morning.

Shortly after five, with rich and various bird sounds reminding us that we are home, we went out for an hour-plus walk that turned out to be a social occasion.

We talked weather with Peter and Shane, neighbors we often see at a bench beside the Brisbane River.

I chatted with Alicia, a woman with whom we used to ride the ferry across the river to the University of Queensland.

And we got a chance to explain to a local man that the Dallas-purchased T-shirt he was wearing was originally intended to urge people in our home state not to litter, not an aggressive challenge.

It will take us a while to catch up on Australian news, but here’s some that has caught out eye already.

THE WEATHER — Three big weather systems are influencing Australian weather at the moment, highs in the west and south and cyclonic conditions in the north.

Western Australia has been dealing with temperatures over 43 degrees C or about 110 F. Strong winds whipped wildfires across a highway east of Perth, trapping a convoy of trucks and cars and killing three people. Humid Adelaide, southwest of us, began the year with a night in which the low temperature was about 86 degrees F.

Although lots of vacation plans here on the east coast have been cancelled because of rain and surf too high for swimming, the results for Brisbane, so far, have been mostly pleasant. I’m comfortable in my home office at mid-morning without air conditioning, and our temperatures over the next few days are expected to range from highs of up to 84 degrees F down to lows near 70 F.

The summer we fled Dec. 8 so we could experience Texas winter has not yet hit here with full force, and, better yet, there are predictions of rains tomorrow that may help our three water reservoirs, which continue to be only 20 per cent full.

FUEL PRICES, though, are heating up. The price of a gallon of gasoline at Brisbane pumps today is about US$4.30, almost a third higher than we were paying last week in Texas for unleaded regular.

We may soon see a price rise to US$5 per gallon, however, according to officials of the Australian Service Station Association. That is not, of course, exactly how the local headline writer put it.

He or she wrote: “Petrol could hit $1.50 a liter: servo bosses.”

Yep, we’re back. We’ve returned to the land of left-side driving, metric system measurements, and creative abbreviations.

Fortunately, it’s also a place of people who are friendly and birds that use full phrasing. — Bob