One proviso: When we tell Aussies that we live in a small town, they always ask, “How many people?” Their mouths literally drop open in amazement when we say, “A hundred and forty thousand.” Why? Because what Americans think of as a small town is immense by Aussie standards.

(Damn. I just looked up the population of McKinney and found out we’ve been using an outdated number that was accurate back in 2013 when we first moved to town. In the last five years it’s grown from 140,000 to just under 190,000. Crazy growth, huh?)

That makes McKinney the sixteenth largest city in the state of Texas, but if we could transplant it down under, it would rank as the thirteenth largest city in the entire country of Australia.

Back in 2014, Money Magazine named McKinney America’s Best Place to Live. That was one year after we moved to north Texas, so we feel justified in thinking our arrival may have had something to do with the award. This theory is reinforced by the fact that our previous home, San Luis Obispo, California, was named Happiest City in America back in 2010, but hasn’t topped that list since we left town.

Coincidences? We think not.

I ran across this cool little video that shows you some of the reasons McKinney is so highly-regarded. It was created by a young, local couple named Brady and Quinn Clayton as their entry in an international online competition.

So sit back and enjoy a quick look at the town we call home when we’re not out gallivanting around the world.

And to all our McKinney friends, see you tomorrow.

Update: Two of my favorite hang-outs are featured in the video. The young woman who says, “When people come here I want them to feel like they’re coming home” is our friend Sandra, who owns Snug, my unofficial office and home away from home. The guy in the black T-shirt who says, “You’re a cool dude, man” is Robert, the owner of Patina Green, a restaurant and antique store that makes the world’s best sandwich, the incredible brisket on a biscuit. Mmmmm. See you McKinnyans soon.

Another Update (January 2, 2023): McKinney’s population is now 202,000 which would make it the 14th largest city in Australia.

Yet another update (January 2, 2024): More damn people. McKinney’s population has now skyrocketed to 214,810. This has officially become insane.

This is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most spectacular setting for any movie theater in the world. It sits right at the eastern edge of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and overlooks the Sydney Opera House, the iconic Harbour Bridge, and the Sydney skyline. Giant fruit bats soar overhead and harbour cruise boats pass behind the screen.

It’s so incredibly beautiful that it sometimes becomes difficult to keep your attention on the screen.

Tonight’s film was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a great, great film. The only problem is that we’re not quite sure how it ended.

Rain was in tonight’s forecast, so the Open Air Cinema handed out plastic ponchos to everyone as they came in the gate. But it was an absolutely beautiful evening — warm with a gentle breeze across the harbour.

Well, that’s an accurate description of the weather for the first 105 minutes of the film, but with ten minutes left, rain began pouring down like sugar on my morning corn flakes. It came down so quickly and so hard that everyone in the audience was immediately drenched (everyone includes both of us).

Five hundred people simultaneously began struggling to get inside their plastic ponchos. Between the sound of all those ponchos rustling, the rain pelting down on all that plastic, and the subsequent sound being muffled by the ponchos’ hoods, I don’t think anyone in attendance has any idea how the film ended.

All I know is that Frances McDormand ended up in a car with someone I didn’t expect her to end up in a car with. (I left that intentionally vague in order not the spoil the ending for anyone, despite the fact that I am not certain how it ended.)

Luckily, Jamie and I will have a chance to correct that problem on our flight home. Qantas is showing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri on all international flights this month.

That being said, there are times you can’t help but laugh about the subject.

We were here two years ago when Donald Trump first started making outrageous statements and winning primary elections. Aussies were absolutely dumbfounded by this development. It got to the point that Jamie and I started our mental stopwatches the moment we were introduced to someone — just to see how long it would take that person to repeat the same words so many other Aussies had said to us.

”So what’s with Trump?”

We both agreed that most folks could only carry on with smalltalk for about five minutes before they asked the question. We had lunch with friends of friends one day and I actually congratulated him for making it a full twenty minutes before asking.

Two years have passed and we’re back again and Trump is now the most powerful man in the world, but most Aussies (especially the ones in the media) have still not come to terms with it. We continue to get questions about Trump. The only difference is that the wording of the frequently asked question has now changed from “So what’s with Trump?” to “So what do you think of Trump?”

Jamie and I have developed a standard answer that immediately diffuses any potentially awkward political discussions. That answer is, “Hey, c’mon, you guys have no room to laugh at any other country’s politics.”

They all chuckle and look a bit embarrassed and say, “Yeah. You’re right about that.”

Here are some of the current reasons Aussies have no room to laugh at American politics:

Five Prime Ministers in five years. At one point, as if it were some kind of third world banana republic, Australia went through five Prime Ministers in five years. And only a couple of them were elected by the people. They were, in order, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Rudd again, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull. It’s even crazier than it sounds because three of them were booted out of office by their own parties. Rudd was voted in by the people, booted by his own party and replaced by Gillard who was, in turn, booted by the same party which then reinstalled Rudd. Confused yet? Think how the Aussies must feel.

Can you prove you’re Australian? Members of the Australian Parliament are not allowed to have dual citizenship. In fact, they are required to sign a document attesting to the fact that they are citizens only of Australia. Seems simple and straightforward, doesn’t it. Well, apparently not. Since 2016, nine of the 76 members of the Aussie Senate have been forced to resign after it was discovered they held dual citizenship despite those signed affidavits. Crazy, huh?

Bill Clinton was an amateur. Australia’s second-in-command has the title of Deputy Prime Minister. The job is roughly analagous to the job of the American Vice President. It was just discovered that the current Deputy, Barnaby Joyce, has a very much younger, very much pregnant girlfriend, which came as extremely distressing news to his current wife and three daughters. But it gets worse. The girlfriend was a paid advisor on his staff. But it gets worse. It just came out that Joyce tried to hide the pregnant girlfriend by shifting her from his payroll into an even better paying job in another governmental department. In other words, she’s being rewarded with taxpayer dollars. But it gets worse. Joyce moved her into a home donated by a major campaign contributor. But it gets worse. When Joyce’s wife booted him out of the family home, he moved in with the girlfriend — into the house owned by that major campaign contributor. But it gets worse. At the same time that this guy is barely clinging to political survival,  the Prime Minister heads this week to the United States to meet with Trump. Under normal circumstances, Joyce would serve as the acting Prime Minister, but that’s obviously impossible while this scandal is in the process of boiling over. So Joyce has had to take a week’s vacation while the Prime Minister is out of the country. At this point, I’m not sure if anyone knows who the acting PM will be next week.

So how about that Trump?

Indeed.

Every time we visit Australia, we search out Australian-produced movies. Today we went into Adelaide to see a new one called Sweet Country.

Here’s how Rupert Murdoch’s news.com.au film critic described it:

Sweet Country had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year and was rapturously received by critics around the world who found a universal emotional resonance in a uniquely Australian story. It picked up a Special Jury Prize at Venice. It also won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The sparse landscapes and the ubiquitous red dust of the Australian outback, and the laconic, no bullsh*t characters that inhabit the land naturally lends itself to Westerns. While taking its cues from the genre, Sweet Country is not a conventional Western. There are no clear white hats or black hats and the climax isn’t some shootout at sunset.

A subtle but breathtaking piece of work, Sweet Country stabs right at the heart of Australian identity and the heartbreak that built this country, told through a wrenching tale of justice and injustice.

Set in the interwar era in the (Northern Territory) outback, Sweet Country is the story of Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), a quiet and unassuming Aboriginal man working on Fred Smith’s (Sam Neill) property. When a new neighbour, Harry March (Ewen Leslie), asks to borrow Sam, who he refers to as “black stock”, to help with some fencing, Fred reluctantly agrees.

Sam, his wife and his niece, spend two days on Harry’s property. A drunk and quick to anger, Harry is described by those who encounter him as “not right in the head”. He’s a WWI veteran who saw horrors on the Western Front — we know he’s suffering from PTSD, which makes his supposed villainy much more complex than it would be in a lesser film.

When events lead to Sam shooting Harry in self-defence, Sam and his wife immediately take off, on the run from the law that will surely strike him down for killing a white man. The town’s head cop, Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown), assembles a hunting party and goes after the outlaw pair.

Sweet Country is a slow burn, an almost meditative reflection on the power dynamics between the white colonialists and the indigenous population they displaced, and the long shadow of our history.

Every performance is hypnotic and layered, including all the mostly first-time local actors Thornton found in the NT while the otherworldly landscapes of the outback are beautifully captured by Thornton’s lens (he was also the director of photography).

At times transcendent and at times deeply uncomfortable, Sweet Country is Australian filmmaking at its best.

Here’s my one sentence elevator review of Sweet Country: The incredibly ugly side of life in an incredibly beautiful landscape.

I gave it a thumbs up, but Jamie found it so disturbing that she gave it a thumbs down.

I doubt that Sweet Country will ever find its way to a theater near you, but you can find it here on YouTube.com.

It can now be confirmed that Jamie and I are officially small town folks.

We spent the last four months in beautiful, idyllic villages like Broome, Daylesford, Angaston, Tanunda, Nuriootpa, Port Fairy, and Bright. Other than an occasional visit to Adelaide, which really doesn’t feel like a big city, we haven’t set foot in a town with more than 5,000 people since the middle of September.

Until today.

Oh, my god, Melbourne is supposedly glamorous and always ranks highly on those lists of world’s best cities, but we had been on the street for about ten minutes today when I turned to Jamie and said, “This must be what hell is like.” Wide-eyed and horrified, she agreed.

Way too many people crowding every sidewalk. Too many cars crawling down too few streets. Too many honking horns. Too much dirt. Too many skyscrapers blocking out the sun. Too many construction cranes dotting the horizon. Too much noise. Too many lunatics randomly screaming obscenities at the tops of their lungs.

It’s probably unfair of me to single out Melbourne. I think we would have had the same reaction to any big city.

To each his own. I know some people love the energy and excitement of a urban living, but not us.

Give us McKinney.

Give us the Barossa Valley.

Give us Green Acres.

If you’ve never had a foot massage, you’ll just need to trust me on this: There is absolutely nothing better than getting your toes fingered. Fifty minutes, sixty dollars, almost infinite pleasure.

Back in the 1960s there was a famous ad campaign based on the line, “What’s the ugliest part of your body?” The unexpected answer was “your feet.” The ads were clearly referring to the kind of feet Jamie and I have dangling at the end of our appendages. Good god, man, our feet look like four bags of walnuts.

Nevertheless, Mandi and Joy never lost their smiles.

We thanked her and then she said, “There’s a lot of construction going on downtown, and it can get very noisy, so I put you on the quiet side of the hotel overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral.”

Indeed it does overlook that stunning structure.

We were a bit tired after driving a couple hundred miles from Bright to Melbourne this morning, so we went out and grabbed a quick lunch, then returned to our suite for a brief rest.

There was a knock on the door even before we could get our shoes off. When I answered, a young woman from room service was standing in the hallway and she said, “A gift from the hotel.”

She brought in a bottle of champagne on ice and a nice note from the desk clerk.

Unlike all our other unexpected upgrades, we think we know why we were upgraded this time. The desk clerk was a lovely young woman who was born and raised in Longview, Texas, a small town about two hours east of McKinney.

Shit, howdy, y’all.

Jamie and I need your help. The future of our marriage may depend on your assistance. Here’s the situation:

We were walking along the Yarra River in downtown Melbourne this afternoon when I attempted to point something out to Jamie.

“Where?” she asked.

“Right over there next to that woman in the green top,” I answered.

”I don’t see a woman in a green top.”

”That one right there in the flowered pants.”

”Her top isn’t green,” she insisted. “It’s brown.”

”No it’s not. It’s green.”

”Brown.”

”Green.”

”Brown.”

”You’re colorblind,” I told her. “Let’s just ask her.”

So we walked up to this young woman and I said, “This may be the oddest question you’ll get today, but we’re having an argument about what color your top is. I say it’s green. My wife says it’s brown. Which one is it?”

After justifiable staring at us for a few seconds as if we were both lunatics, she said, “I’d say it’s cream.”

Jamie and I both let out howls of success. She because she thinks cream is closer to brown than green and I because I think cream is closer to green than brown.

Then the woman said, “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. Maybe it’s a light gray.”

The future of our marriage is looking a very shaky at the moment. Only you can save it.

What color is the woman’s top?

UPDATE: Now Jamie claims she called the color beige. She also claims she said light brown. I hope you’re all beginning to understand the burden I’m laboring under with this woman.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll get to see much of it because I was sick last night. Really sick. So sick that I ended up in the local hospital overnight. But before you begin to worry, I came home this morning and I’m back to about 80% now.

I went to bed at about 10 p.m. last night and got up at 1:00 to go to the bathroom. Jamie heard a crash and came in to find me comatose on the tile floor, drenched in sweat, and completely unresponsive. She said my eyes were dilated and I was shaking, completely rigid, ghost white, and my tongue was hanging out. She thought I was having a seizure — maybe because I never loosened my grip on my open iPad even after I fell down and passed out.

You won’t believe what the woman did next. She had the temerity to think there was something wrong with me and called 9-1-1. Shocking behavior from a supposedly loving wife, wouldn’t you say.

I came to just in time to hear her on the phone with 9-1-1. I couldn’t believe she was calling them, so I weakly called out, “I don’t need an ambulance. I’ll be fine.”

Then I realized that I was lying on the bathroom floor drenched in sweat and too weak to sit up. Hmmmmm, I thought, this is highly unusual. Maybe I do need an ambulance.

The EMTs worked me over for thirty minutes or so, then decided that I needed to go to the emergency room. Jamie was freaking out, thinking that I was about to die, but as they rolled the gurney out to the ambulance I was facing upward and noticed the sky.

”Jamie,” I gasped, “look up at the sky. The stars are beautiful.”

The woman thought I was hallucinating and ignored me. (But trust me, the sky up here in the mountains is crystal clear and the stars were big as beachballs. Either that or I was hallucinating.)

When we got to the ER, my blood pressure measured only 70 over 50 which the nurses said was “dangerously low” and probably due to dehydration. They hooked me up to an electrolyte drip, and put me in a room for the night.

After I had been stabilized and was resting, Jamie realized that she didn’t have a ride back to our house, so she asked about a cab and found out Bright is so small that it doesn’t have a cab company. So the EMTs drove her home in the ambulance. Only in Australia.

This morning my vitals had all returned to near normal. The doctor, who is only on-call at night, came in to see me at about 8:30 a.m. Whatever was wrong with me, he said, wasn’t the flu, wasn’t any kind of gastrointestinal issue, and wasn’t food poisoning. In other words, they know what it’s not, but not what it is.

Don’t worry about me.

I’m resting.

I’m fine.

Of course, that’s the same thing I said last night when Jamie found me comatose on the tile floor, drenched in sweat, completely unresponsive, shaking, completely rigid, ghost white, with my tongue was hanging out of my mouth.

UPDATE: Another trip to the hospital. Yeah, that last paragraph proved to be prophetic. Looks like they released me from the hospital a bit too soon, because after a very rough 24 hours, Jamie checked me back in yesterday morning.

They pumped me full of medication, kept me overnight, and threatened to keep me for some unspecified number of days that would have wreaked havoc with our travel plans. But I had a very good night and talked them into releasing me this morning even though the test results won’t come back for another day or two.

The biggest difference? All those drugs. They didn’t give me any during my first visit, but they loaded me up last night.

I’m feeling great now. So great that Jamie and I went out for a drive to a couple neighboring towns after I was released from the hospital this morning.

But we didn’t go anywhere until after I had a long hot shower and got that hospital hair under control.