November Arrives

We are almost at the halfway point of our trip. Right now we are at the point of our stay in Warrnambool where it seems like we have been living here forever. We know all the streets and the stores and restaurants; we see the same people on the ways to and from work every day. It is not uncommon for us to meet a friend on the street or to see them while we are about our day to day activities. Sometimes it is hard to imagine life before we landed here. But at the same time we are getting restless. We have another three weeks before we pull up stakes and move on again. Our time here has been important and well-spent, but now the days have the feeling of the time leading up to your birthday or Christmas or some other special occasion. Only a few more sleeps...

In other news, we bought a car. This is a very big occasion for me, one that warrants song and dance as I have never in my 25(that's alot) years owned a car of my own. My first car is not much to look at. The running joke when I was younger was that my first car would be a primer gray beater. This car is neither primer gray nor is it a beater. It's a little red '82 Corolla that we paid $450 for. We bought it because the advice we were given was that it would be cheaper to buy a car than to rent for our road trip. We heeded said advice and now we have the car. At the moment it doesn't start. This is distressing as I am the most mechanically challenged person of all time. Hilko and I cracked the hood the other day and tried to fix the problem. All we had was some tubing so we switch the old with the new and sat down in the driver's seating expecting the car to fire up like a bored-out GTO. Nothing. This may be a problem...Our new plan is to take the car to the mechanic and to let him know what our plan is and to ask him to lay enough healing on our frail car so as to get us around for a month. After that if it dies, it dies. Right now if it dies, we die(metaphorically, of course.)


For a while I was on a hair-growing mission. If you take a peek at the photos from eariler in the trip, you will notice the overflowing of hair coming from my head. I thought that if it let it grow there would be positive results. The opposite was true. I was thinking Ashton Kutcher but instead I got a Muppet crossed with Ronald McDonald. Needless to say, it came off and I am back to my previous hair situation. So all of you who have been telling me to get a haircut, you can stop now. I did.


Patience

I have never had a lot of patience. Never. Every now and again I have fits of patience, but they go as quickly as they come and usually they can be traced by to some type of ulterior motive. So never is a good word. I've been asking God to help me with my patience. I'm sure that we have all done this from time to time. One too many strained conversations will do that to you every time. But this is different. If I don't get some patience soon, I may go looney and run off into the Outback to spend the rest of my days with kangaroos and bushmen.
It isn't anybody's fault. It's not like anyone is out to get me or to push my buttons, it just sort of happens. When I asked God for patience, I think that there was an idea in my head that it would be a little like an injection: short, uninvasive, and only a nominal amount of pain. Reality is that my patience upgrade is a little more like an amputation. See, you can't have your way and patience. One has to go. The good news is that there has been some progress made. It's slow, painfully slow, but it is coming along. I suspect that patience is probably around the next corner, a few more awkward situations away, or maybe one or two more toes stepped on. Ironic that the key to getting patience is to wait for it.