Good'ay MN Freeze!

I hope this letter finds everybody in warmth and happpiness. The seasons are a changing down here in southern Western Australia. It's starting to get a bit cooler and the days are getting shorter as autumn wears on. It's been a little while since my last update and a lot has happened since then. I have since begun playing in the local golf league here in Mt. Barker which is every saturday afternoon. The golf is a bit different down here as most of the course in the country have sand greens instead of grass greens and I'm still getting used to playing on them. Also on saturday mornings I've been helping out with the local Auskick program, which is a junior developement program for kids from ages 6-10. It's a lot of fun to get out with the little tikes in the morning and kick the little footy's around. It's pretty cute as they always are asking me to talk with my accent, so I just ask it right back for them to talk in theirs. Work is going pretty good too as I am still working with the local brick paver here in Mt. Barker and we've been doing quite a few random jobs from driveways, to chimney's, to pathways. I should be getting out to the vineyards in a couple of weeks to start pruning the vines.

As far as the football so far, our team hasn't been doing to well. We lost our first four games including the game against Mergen's team in which we lost by less than a goal, pretty sad really as we had a few behinds late in the game that could have sealed it for us. Anyways, we caught our first win this past weekend against a team who beat us by 88 points the first time around and it felt really good to finally get a win under our belts. I've been steadily improving from week to week and have been moving all over the field. My first two games I played at center half forward inthe reserves side scoring 3 goals and 2 goals respectively. Since then I have been playing on the league side and have been playing alright so far. I played okay in my first league geame, but it was easy to tell that I wasn't used to the pace of the league side games. By the end of the first game I was pretty much up to pace though and have since been playing well in the last two games. Two weeks ago I was moving from the backline to the forward line and ended up getting a couple marks in the last couple minutes at full forward and was able to convert them into two goals, eventually getting the goal of the day award for the last minute goals. In our league game yesterday I played at full forward for the whole game, except for the little bit when I came off because I split my head open on somebody's elbow (which ended up needing five stiches later that night), and played okay. I could have taken a couple of more marks but ended up kicking three goals on the day so all in all it was an okay day, I ended up getting goal of the day again so that was pretty cool. It felt incredible to ge our first win as most of the teams been beating us by quite a bit, so it was a big relief to finally bring it together for four quarters and play a solid game. The pace of the game is a lot quicker over here as teams will play on a lot more often from the marks and there is always somebody supporting the player going up for the mark presenting themselves by running through for the quick handball of to be their for support if they spill the mark. It was a great weekend too because my mom was over here for the weekend, capping off a two week trip in Australia to visit my brother and I.  I hadn't seen her for two months and it was great to have her there for our first win of the season.

Thanks for all of the support and e-mails from everybody back home! I promise it won't take as long for me to post the next update, and if anybody has any specific questions as to how the trip is going feel free to e-mail me at wern.andrew@gmail.com 

Best of luck with beginning of the season and train as hard as you can!

 - Tiger