Froggy Tuesday

Today Gam and I had an awful, awful trip to the city for Gam to sit the licence for a learner driver's permit. It was pouring rain, there were smokers concentrated under all the sheltered areas, and the sheer number of the bastards we had to walk past made our lungs sore and my hair smell of smoke. On top of that, one of Gam's slides broke when we were almost at the Queensland Transport office and nowhere near a shoe store. We ducked into the Big W across the road to buy a pair of cheap thongs only to find out that they only sell men's footwear up to a size 12 (Gam is a 14), and all the size 12 thongs had sold out, so he bought a pair of size 11 thongs and went to sit his licence test. Even the small amount of walking that entailed nearly crippled him, so afterward we went to the Zelus store to buy some slides to replace the ones that had broken (they were admittedly on their last legs, they just chose a very bad time to die).

Several good things came out of the day- Gam did pass his road rules test, and also discovered that he can sit a practical driving test straight away and progress straight to an open licence, meaning he's been told 3 different things by the 3 different Queensland Transport people he's spoken to on the matter. The poor lady at the counter was very helpful, but it sounded as if the rules were different not only for every single country, but also depending on how long a person has been in the country- the convoluted path to discovering the correct information to give nearly did her head in. Nevertheless she was very pleasant.

On our way home it had stopped raining and as we walked up the hill to our place I spied a green tree frog on the road. Just as I did, a cyclist nearly ran it over, and as I was about to pick it up a car turned into the street: the frog was right in its path and made no attempt to move. My frantic gestures, if not the frog's presence, were noted by the driver, who managed to swerve around it, and I hurried to pick it up, not sure if it might have even been previously injured.

It seemed fine, so I made the decision to take it back to our place and put it in our back balcony garden- we have a cylindrical fishbowl with water weed that breeds mosquito larvae for our fish and a nice canopy of sweet potato leaves as well as a few other plants and broken terracotta pots (placed there for our original lizard, Fatso) that should provide a nice damp, froggy habitat. I've never seen a live green tree frog in all our time living in our current place (though I've seen a frog or two as roadkill), so it will be nice to have one living in our backyard. I thought about releasing the frog into the main garden of the complex, but there is no permanent source of fresh water there, and it's more at risk from cats, so hopefully our place will provide a nice home for it. And I hope it eats the cockroaches that venture over the balcony wall and into our garden. I hate cockroaches.

When I tried to encourage it to leave my hand and climb into the garden it climbed up my arm like it was a tree, but it didn't take much prodding for it to clamber down into the nice wet bed of dead leaves under the sweet potato canopy. Here's hoping our new frog is set for a much longer and happier life than it appeared it was about to meet on the roads of St Lucia!