A Package From Australia

My wife walked in from work yesterday and announced that I had received something from Australia. It was a small package from an old friend who had spent a year as an exchange student at my high school. We'd recently found each other again via Facebook, and now I was receiving a mysterious package from her. Truthfully, I was mostly confused because I didn't know that people still mailed things to each other... I thought everything had turned electronic. I find that now, if I sit to write a letter, my hand begins to cramp within minutes. Who needs that kind of pain? Anyway, then I was confused when we opened the package and money came out. Had I won some sort of Australian sweepstakes? Did Pam still owe me money from that one time at Siuslaw... you know...? Had Fremantle beat Brisbane and Pam felt obliged to send me coin, even though we hadn't bet on the game?? Then we found a picturesque postcard contained within explaining the reason for the package. She thought it'd be great if my boys collected coins that they could add Australia to their collection. In truth, we spent most of the time looking at the water on the postcard and wishing that we were in Australia swimming... but then we remembered that Discovery Channel episode about the great white sharks and thought maybe that would be a bad idea. Or those deadly jellyfish... or swimming kangaroos... The coins gave me the opportunity to quiz my 6 year old son Alex on his geography. I began with the easy question... In which country do we live? He responded confidently with 'Oregon'... Ok, that's a state. Which COUNTRY? I erroneously believed that if I put stress on the word country, he would come to his senses and realize that we live in the United States. He did not... I explained that the coins came from an entirely different country in an entirely different part of the world - the Commonwealth of Australia, a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the mainland, which is both the world's smallest continent and the world's largest island, the island of Tasmania, and numerous other islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. I further explained that Australia is a technologically advanced and industrialised nation, a prosperous multicultural country that has excellent results in many international comparisons of national performance such as health care, life expectancy, quality-of-life, human development, public education, economic freedom, and the protection of civil liberties and political rights. He, of course, glazed over. Then I held up pictures of Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman and he understood. I followed up by pouring us both a tall glass of Foster's and we savored the rich nectar that comes to us from that nation. We had a nice afternoon yabber about the attacks on Frances Nelson, one of the most respected legal identities in South Australia. Alex thought that after hearing about the attacks launched against her this week by senior state ministers, from the Premier down, that she sounded a little bit like a crackpot. I countered by telling him that was grossly unfair given the pioneering lawyer has been chief of the state's parole board since 1982, meaning that she has been reappointed and served under six premiers, three Labor and three Liberal, during almost three decades. He remained unimpressed, so we watched some footy on the tele and screamed every time one of those wankers made an error.

To Pam, thanks for the package. These two septics tanks are very grateful.