Missing the Great Outdoors…

Firstly, I must tell you that I had an excellent response to the free promotion of my book and I look forward to having some good reviews soon, which should help encourage interest in the paperback version. Thank you in advance for your nice reviews!

In truth, it hasn’t been the most interesting of days here. It’s getting colder, noticeably colder and autumnal (or wintery, to be more exact), and drizzly.This morning I fully intended to go out for a good walk “no matter what the weather” but after spending two hours or so on household chores it seemed to me that I had had a fair amount of exercise for the day, and when I poked my nose outside the door I was sure of it!  I ask you, what joy is there to be had in walking in the rain on a cold day?

I hear it is 30c in Brisbane at the moment – hot enough to not mind getting caught in the rain. When I was a little girl there were many times, perhaps when we hadn’t had rain for a long time or because it was so hot, that we children used to squeal with delight and run out in the rain to get wet. I didn’t feel like doing that today. It is days like these that I miss Australia the most – I miss the out-of-doors lifestyle.

“What shall we do?” I asked Chris, who seemed quite grateful that I’d abandoned the idea of walking in the rain.

“I expect you want to play some games?” Chris guessed right.

“Shall we play ‘Truth and Triumph’ again considering it’s a Sunday?” (You may remember from a previous blog post that that particular game is a sort of religious version of ‘Trivial Pursuit’ invented by a Reverend Paulson in Canada.)

“If you like,” answered Chris.

What a surprise! I didn’t think he would go for it – he must have been awfully grateful not to have to go out walking with me in the rain, or else he must have been incredibly bored!

Two hours later, after a lot of ‘helping’ each other, we somehow reached the conclusion – we concluded that “Truth and Triumph” is the worst game we have ever played! The combined years of our Sunday school education, plus the fact that Chris’s grandfather was a minister, was to no avail for such trivial, and often tricky, questions (one of the -answers was a ‘famous’ quote from the Reverend Paulson himself). I was hoping to get good at the game in order to one day astound my devoutly religious youngest brother with my broad knowledge of religious trivia but, after this afternoon… I really don’t think it’s worth it.

We rounded off our lazy afternoon with several games of Chinese Chequers – our own, and more challenging version in which we play two triangles each (better than three because the board gets cluttered) – and now I’m looking outside at the fading light and wishing that I’d stuck to my guns and gone out walking in the rain. Tomorrow I am going to get up early and go for a walk no matter what!