A pair of card sharks.

Well the weather has gone, its sitting over Sydney causing mild mayhem, having dumped tons of rain on the coastal cities on the way down.

One small place close to this house sit is called Springbrook. In 3 days they had 1.4 meters of rain. That is around 45 inches of rain!

Now, the sun is out, the air is very humid, things are heating up again, and the grass is growing like crazy. One of the amazing things about Australia is their grass. It can be dead, dry brown grass, even to the point of dry ground, but give it a decent shower of rain and its green in a couple of days.

We went for a drive round Coomera River yesterday, and the river is not far under the bridge and the lake and the river have combined into one huge brown muddy area. It must take the run off from quite a large area of housing.

 

Bundaberg is taking a pounding, still terrible flooding there, but most other places are seeing their rivers drop.

Peter and I play a lot of cards. When you move from one house sit to another, you can’t take too much stuff, but a few packs of cards are easy to carry around. For a while we will play one game, and then change to something different. At the moment we are playing a game called ‘hand and foot’.  http://www.ehow.com/how_2085502_play-hand-foot-card-game.htmlhttp://www.ehow.com/ehow-mom/

It’s sort of like Canasta, where you have to make runs of numbers. Seven of one number, regardless of suit makes one run. If you have seven 9’s with no wild cards, that’s a red run and worth 500 points. If you have some wild cards (jokers or twos) then it is a black run and worth 300 points.

 

 We are inclined to change the rules to suit ourselves. So we decided that before you could pick up the foot you had to have one red set and one black set laid on the table and before you went out you had to have two black and two red sets laid on the table.  We also play with four packs of cards instead of two, so we have more chances to make runs and get higher scores.



 

Today after cleaning the pool, Peter doing some tidying up outside and me doing some work inside, we decided to get out the cards. The plan was for me to win, well my plan anyway, but Peter had other ideas.

 

 You can see here the half-finished sets of cards on the table. You can also see some finished sets on the table. There is also an empty small red bowl, and two coffee cups….after all you need a cup of coffee to get the gray matter churning satisfactorily.

Unfortunately, this picture below says it all. It’s not my hand with the thumb up, but I blame him for my losing. After all, he put out the nibbles in the red bowl, some sort of corn chip covered in some chilly hot spicy stuff. Fair blew my brains out! I’m pretty smart, but I do need my brains to beat him at cards.