Bits and pieces.

I'm trying to think if I've ever laughed this hard, this much, in this short of a time.

It's like my new friend Jono said the other night (after eating Molly's killer brownies): "I've been going through my history of best brownies I've ever tasted -- 'Grandma's house 2006 -- no not quite as fudgy' -- and I think these are the best I've ever tasted."

I'm going through my rolodex of laughter and I think this past month might take the cake.

There are plenty of reasons for the laughter. 

One, of course, is that everything is new. Everything seems a bit more hilarious when it's new -- the grocery stores full of elderly folk in Gordon, the 17 year olds in straw boaters walking to the train, the thousands of funeral shops (?!??) that line the Pacific Highway. 

Another factor is that I now spend my work week with the lovely Karen Stephen, a Texan transplant who found love in Aussieland -- and she is one of the best laugh-comrades I have ever encountered. Who knows how it starts, but most days K ends up with mascara streaming down her face and I'm on the floor and we just laugh uncontrollably. Molls typically starts laughing with head cocked and eye scrunched, but her laugh is out of confusion and amusement because, let's get real, whatever K and I are laughing about is probably just not quite as funny as we seem to think.

Today's primary source of laughter was largely centered around driving. Me driving in this country is pretty amusing. The skills are all there, but something about the switched-up road sides slows down the processing time, so my instincts are a little under par these days. Naturally, this elicits all kinds of "eeeeeeek" and "bleeeyyehhhghgh" and "what the frik fraks" as I make my way up and down the the PacHwy. Molls and I decided that driving in Australia is really a two man (or two gal, in our case) job. Molls is there for me -- checking my mirrors, reminding me that my parking brake is on when I putz up a hill, responding to my in-action questions ("Molls, can I turn heeeerrrrrrree? Tooooo laaaaaaaate!") with, "Sure." I need her. Knock on wood, but for all our mini-ventures, we're actually doing pretty well on the roads. Last week we had some trauma -- just trying to go one suburb to the East for yoga, we ended up in the back road with Molls reading the road atlas as I searched for a protected right turn. Then when we tried to head the other direction, just a few miles up to Hornsby, we ended up on the F3, the major highway that runs north. I meant to write a blog the night that happened, titled, "FU, F3," but I was just to exhausted from the drama and had to get to bed.

As can probably be imagined, we (and by we I mean, me) are still a major source of laughter for those around us as well. Today, we were all in Jock's car taking Hamish and Jac up to the train station, when Hames started talking about the frog that had hopped in the car. I started whimpering of course, about my hatred and fear of frogs and keeping my feet up off the floor as Jocko pulled up photos of "the type of toads that roam this area" on his iPhone. I bought it hook, line and sinker for 5 minutes at least, when he finally told me it was all a big farce. To be honest, I was shocked that he'd let me off that soon and that easy. 

Molly laughs when I admit that I'd like to bring words like "bloke" into my everyday vocabulary, and I'm constantly asking her if it's too soon for me to say, "mate" or "how're you going?" One Aussie-ism that I've locked as part of my own lingo is "good on ya" -- the verbal version of a high five. It's just such a great thing to say. When I told Peter (who goes by Farmer, since he's from the Outback) that I wanted to start saying "bloke" he started laughing too and informed me that "you just don't hear too many lasses using the word bloke, but if you want to, righto." When I gave him my best Queensland accent this arvo, he just said, "Yeah. That's a bit more pirate than Queensland. Last I checked we don't speak pirate on the farm."

Whatever the reason, the point is that this lass is living full of good laughs (and good coffee, which will have a post of its own), pulling together all the bits and pieces that make up life in a new place and loving the people that I get to do it with. 

On one of our excursions today, Molls turned to me and said, "Thank God we like each other. Just makes this whole thing a lot more fun." Yes, Molls. Thank God. Laughing alone has it's time and place, but laughing together is like pinging into the vocal chords of the universe and saying, "is life good or is LIFE GOOD?!"

It's good.