Eddie Lizard

The other day I noticed that a gecko had found its way into our house. I pointed him out to the boys, caught him on videotape and thought nothing more of it. It seems, however, that the gecko never found his way out of the house. He has been spotted behind furniture by various family members over the past few days, looking a withered, translucent shadow of his former self. It seems that the natural predator of the gecko is Ruth, as his food supply of bugs and snakes and stuff is wiped out by my wife before he can get to them. I'm just saying that she cleans the house, not that she eats bugs and snakes. Anyway, spare a thought for poor Eddie (the sixth Webb) today.


The boys have bikes. We found them quite cheap so Ruth bought them. They were probably quite cheap because they required Churchillian perseverance to put them together. You know me. I'm not prone to exaggeration but it was probably the hardest thing I've ever done. As you can see from the photo, we had to recruit Ali (another student here) to help us. The only reason the boys have working bikes is because Ruth and Ali do not like to be beaten by mere toys. Me, I'm quite happy to be beaten. After five minutes of trying to fit a pedal into a hole that it was clearly too small for I was all for saying "Sorry boys, your bikes are broken because the instructions were written by chimps and require tools that haven't been invented yet. Stop crying. I'm going out."

Ruth taught Calvin how to use our digital camera. Nice one Ruth! Now I spend my free time deleting photos of random objects from our memory card ("Look! It's a broom! That's a good one of the toilet flush."). Actually, some of his photos aren't bad at all. He took the one above (of the bikes) for example. I'm going to display some of his better ones below.






Calvin has started at preschool and is loving it. He gets to take a packed lunch, which is the best thing ever as far as he's concerned. Furthermore, he also gets to take a packed 'morning tea'. It's quite odd. 'Morning tea' is a big deal here and a far more accepted phenomenon than it is in the UK. It feels like it should be an English thing ("More Morning Tea vicar?") but the Aussies do it properly.
On Calvin's first day he won a dancing competition and was awarded a prize by an alien. You've really got to hand it to the Australian education system.

Today we had a prolonged dust storm. It gets very windy here, and because the terrain is so flat and dry it simply whips up dust everywhere. You soon learn not to leave your windows open. One of the results of storms (of either the dust or rain variety) here is that our Internet connection can be a little inconsistent. However, the blog must go on!

This weekend was the staff conference. It meant that the staff from all of the Cornerstone sites were here at Dubbo for the weekend. It was really nice to get to meet people we'd heard about, as well as get a broader picture of the work that Cornerstone does around Oz. It just confirms for us that we're in the right place at the right time. I think that next time I write I'll try and say more about what Cornerstone is about.

The problem I have is that there's just so much that I could write. I really don't know what to say next at the moment, so I'll just leave you with a photo of the three children - plus an unexpected cameo from Doctor Octopus and Spiderman's feet!