Today we had the use of Julianne's car again as we wanted to spend a lot of the day driving around Hervey Bay to take pictures of our lovely little town. Would you believe it! It was raining - and I don't mean just a little bit - it poured down - and for most of the morning. So, we decided that it wasn't worth going out and taking pictures of grey skies and grey ocean water (I mean, we HAVE been telling you that we've had blue skies all along - which we have - so we couldn't very well put up pics of grey skies, now could we?). :-)
We spent the morning playing card games and doing laundry. Christine, our landlady came over to tell us that her husband was watching a storm just south of us and told us that we should be careful if we were planning on going out in our car (there was a high wind warning). We ended up talking with her for quite a while. The storm/high winds never did reach us here in Hervey Bay, but apparently it did hit in a small town not far from here - it actually uprooted a greenhouse of a friend of Christine's.
We called Terri-Ann this morning to ask her if she could get on Skype so that we could talk with her and the boys. She wasn't sure if she could get on as James had connected us before and he wasn't home at the time. She was able to figure it out and we were soon talking to her and 'our boys'. It is so much fun talking with Colin and Caleb while watching their little faces. Colin loves to talk and Caleb likes to copy what Colin says and does - it's adorable. We could see Terri-Ann enjoying the boys talking with us. Colin blew us lots of kisses and then ran out of them, so I told him to make sure he has more for us when we get back to Canada. :-) Unfortunately, because of the bad weather, the internet cut out before we actually had a chance to talk with Terri-Ann. We phoned her to tell her what had happened - we didn't stay on long as it costs $2. a minute to call from our cell phone to Canada and she was also trying to put the boys to bed.
Terri-Ann told us that Mike's mom had called her to ask if we were going to be stopping in Vancouver on the way back to Toronto. So, after he was finished talking with Terri-Ann, he called his mom to fill her in on our plans. They were only able to talk for a few minutes due to the cost of calling on his cell. He reminded his mom of the web address of our blog so that she could read what we were doing on a daily basis here in Hervey Bay.
After lunch, we finally decided that we would go for a drive as we were experiencing 'cabin fever'. We ended up taking our dvds back to the library, going to the post office to get a stamp, looking for a water resistant hat for Mike to wear when he goes swimming in the ocean (couldn't find one), going for an ice-cream (chocolate dipped) at Hungry Jack's, and grocery shopping (we only needed milk today as we have enough at the granny flat to do us until we leave on Thursday - however, we also bought a 'mud cake' - chocolate cake - and some passionfruit pop). :-)
Julianne dropped us off at home and we ran into Rob Woodcott who is a member of the church. We chatted a little to him about a piece of property that is for sale on his street (he and Rosalea live in a town called Booral which is about 15 minutes from Hervey Bay - out in the country). An old woman is selling her two blocks of land - one with a house on it and the other with nothing on it - and we were wondering if she would sell just the house on the one block of land. After talking with him about wanting to wait until we buy, he suggested that we invest in gold and silver as a way to make up the difference between what we have to put down on the house and the cost of the house, so that we don't have to take out a mortgage. Neither Mike nor I are interested in purchasing gold and silver - we are not the risk taking kind when it comes to our money.
After visiting with Rob, we decided that we wanted to go through our papers that we had collected over the time we have been here - things like tourist information and store flyers and maps. After deciding which ones we are going to keep, we put them in a bag and put them in the storage bin that we have purchased which we are leaving here while we are in Canada. We added two sheet sets to the bin which we have purchased for beds for when we come back to Hervey Bay and have to find a place to rent (in case this granny flat is already rented out). We will also put cans of food in there that we don't use before we go - that way we will have something to eat when we get back.
After dinner, we watched one of our favourite shows 'Big Bang Theory' and, as usual, we laughed our heads off. That show is so funny - well, at least to us it is - and it's one of the few that we don't like to miss watching. The rest of the evening we spent completing our cruise blog (YAY, it's finally done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). We are going to do one more proofread of it before we send out the link to everyone. It has taken a LOT of time to finish it, but I think it has been worth the time and effort.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Today was our last day at church in Hervey Bay for two months - a bit of a sad day, but everyone we said 'bye' to said they looked forward to our coming back, so that made us feel good. The sacrament meeting talks were good today - they focused on the three fold mission of the church: proclaim the gospel (Elder Hurst spoke about missionary work and the importance of speaking up about the church to others), redeem the dead (Sister Pierce spoke about the importance of doing genealogy work and going to the Temple), and perfect the saints (Rob Woodcott spoke about the importance of doing all that we should be doing to become stronger in the gospel, like reading the scriptures, saying prayers, going to Sacrament, etc.). The speakers were really good and so the meeting went really fast.
During Sunday School, Trudy taught about how the Lord continues to guide the Church through revelation to latter-day prophets. She also talked about how Church correlation (everyone in the world focusing on the same thing and each auxiliary working together) was initiated and continues to operate today by revelation from the Lord to His prophets, that the purpose of Church correlation is to preserve “the right way of God” and ultimately it is intended to help accomplish the mission of the Church, which is to invite all people to “come unto Christ, and be perfected in him”. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve oversee correlation in the Church. Correlation includes: a. Maintaining purity of doctrine, b. Emphasizing the importance of the family and the home, c. Placing all the work of the Church under priesthood direction, d. Establishing proper relationships among the organizations of the Church, e. Achieving unity and order in the Church, f. Ensuring simplicity of Church programs and materials. Elder Bruce R. McConkie of the Quorum of the Twelve said that correlation is a process “in which we take all the programs of the Church, bring them to one focal point, wrap them in one package, operate them as one program, involve all members of the Church in the operation—and do it all under priesthood direction”. It is always interesting that even though we have been members of the church for such a long time, we are continually learning.
Relief Society and Priesthood was joint today as it is the fifth Sunday of the month. We watched a dvd of a talk given to Young Single Adults by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf that our branch president thought was relevant to all of us. The focus was on the importance of remembering who you are - that you are a daughter or son of God and that you are important. He also talked about dating (towards the young people in the church) and the importance of dating a variety of people so that you can find out the qualities you desire in a mate. As well he talked about continuing to strengthen your testimony by following what the leaders in the church have told us. Again it was so interesting to watch and listen to and before we knew it, it was over. We said good-bye to the friends we have made here so far and told them we would be back in February.
When we got home from church, we ate lunch and then sat down and watched the movie 'Supersize Me'. Everyone who has seen this movie has told us we would be grossed out by it, but we really weren't. To us, the movie seemed to be blaming McDonald's for the obesity and health problems that people in America (and other countries) have since the introduction of fast food. It talked about how McDonald's (and other fast food and junk food companies) spend billions of dollars on advertizing to get the kids to buy their products. They talked about how McDonald's builds Play Places to get the kids to come in there to play and then expecting food to be bought. I feel that if the kids are getting fat because of going to McDonald's, perhaps the parents shouldn't be taking them in there, or perhaps it should be a treat for them to go (like us taking Colin twice a month for a hamburger and fries with ketchup and an orange drink). Like everything else in life, self-control and moderation is the key - people need to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame others for their lack of self-control.
We were invited out to dinner tonight to Leanne and Bill Rostedt's home. They had invited a whole bunch of us over for an evening of food, fun and fellowship: President Brown and his wife, Diana, Elder Cox and Elder Hurst, Leanne's sister, Amanda and daughter, Talia, Kym and her sons, John and Ashley, their own four sons, Caleb, Reece, Baden and Ethan and a friend, Sam. We all sat around their kitchen/dining room/famly room to eat (meatballs, rice, vegetables, cake and custard) - very yummy fixings. After dinner, we chatted for a while and then we played Pictionary. We got into three teams of three and took turns drawing for our teams to get our team to say the word that Leanne had written on a piece of paper. Mike, Kym and I were on the same team. Some of the words were hard to draw/get like 'Alice Springs' and 'stupendous', but some of them we did well in getting like 'red pencil' (I got that one and drew a pencil and then to get red I drew a Canadian flag and pointed to the part of the flag that was red and Mike got it). The three of us laughed so hard as we tried to draw and get the others to try and say what the word was. It was a lot of fun.
Kym drove us home about 8:30pm (Leanne goes to bed very early as she gets up to start her day at 4:30am) and so we wanted to get out of there early. When we got home, Mike uploaded another web album to the blog with photos of the church Christmas party on it. If you want to see the captions, you have to click on the slideshow and you will see what I have written underneath each picture.
After that, we watched a great movie that we have seen before, but it was so long ago that we remembered very little of it. It's called 'Firewall' with Harrison Ford and if you haven't seen it, I would recommend you go out and rent it. It's our kind of movie - lots of action and no romance. :-) It's basically about a bank computer programmer whose family was kidnapped by a team who wanted him to transfer millions of dollars from wealthy bank clients into an offshore account. Well worth the money of a rental!
During Sunday School, Trudy taught about how the Lord continues to guide the Church through revelation to latter-day prophets. She also talked about how Church correlation (everyone in the world focusing on the same thing and each auxiliary working together) was initiated and continues to operate today by revelation from the Lord to His prophets, that the purpose of Church correlation is to preserve “the right way of God” and ultimately it is intended to help accomplish the mission of the Church, which is to invite all people to “come unto Christ, and be perfected in him”. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve oversee correlation in the Church. Correlation includes: a. Maintaining purity of doctrine, b. Emphasizing the importance of the family and the home, c. Placing all the work of the Church under priesthood direction, d. Establishing proper relationships among the organizations of the Church, e. Achieving unity and order in the Church, f. Ensuring simplicity of Church programs and materials. Elder Bruce R. McConkie of the Quorum of the Twelve said that correlation is a process “in which we take all the programs of the Church, bring them to one focal point, wrap them in one package, operate them as one program, involve all members of the Church in the operation—and do it all under priesthood direction”. It is always interesting that even though we have been members of the church for such a long time, we are continually learning.
Relief Society and Priesthood was joint today as it is the fifth Sunday of the month. We watched a dvd of a talk given to Young Single Adults by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf that our branch president thought was relevant to all of us. The focus was on the importance of remembering who you are - that you are a daughter or son of God and that you are important. He also talked about dating (towards the young people in the church) and the importance of dating a variety of people so that you can find out the qualities you desire in a mate. As well he talked about continuing to strengthen your testimony by following what the leaders in the church have told us. Again it was so interesting to watch and listen to and before we knew it, it was over. We said good-bye to the friends we have made here so far and told them we would be back in February.
When we got home from church, we ate lunch and then sat down and watched the movie 'Supersize Me'. Everyone who has seen this movie has told us we would be grossed out by it, but we really weren't. To us, the movie seemed to be blaming McDonald's for the obesity and health problems that people in America (and other countries) have since the introduction of fast food. It talked about how McDonald's (and other fast food and junk food companies) spend billions of dollars on advertizing to get the kids to buy their products. They talked about how McDonald's builds Play Places to get the kids to come in there to play and then expecting food to be bought. I feel that if the kids are getting fat because of going to McDonald's, perhaps the parents shouldn't be taking them in there, or perhaps it should be a treat for them to go (like us taking Colin twice a month for a hamburger and fries with ketchup and an orange drink). Like everything else in life, self-control and moderation is the key - people need to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame others for their lack of self-control.
We were invited out to dinner tonight to Leanne and Bill Rostedt's home. They had invited a whole bunch of us over for an evening of food, fun and fellowship: President Brown and his wife, Diana, Elder Cox and Elder Hurst, Leanne's sister, Amanda and daughter, Talia, Kym and her sons, John and Ashley, their own four sons, Caleb, Reece, Baden and Ethan and a friend, Sam. We all sat around their kitchen/dining room/famly room to eat (meatballs, rice, vegetables, cake and custard) - very yummy fixings. After dinner, we chatted for a while and then we played Pictionary. We got into three teams of three and took turns drawing for our teams to get our team to say the word that Leanne had written on a piece of paper. Mike, Kym and I were on the same team. Some of the words were hard to draw/get like 'Alice Springs' and 'stupendous', but some of them we did well in getting like 'red pencil' (I got that one and drew a pencil and then to get red I drew a Canadian flag and pointed to the part of the flag that was red and Mike got it). The three of us laughed so hard as we tried to draw and get the others to try and say what the word was. It was a lot of fun.
Kym drove us home about 8:30pm (Leanne goes to bed very early as she gets up to start her day at 4:30am) and so we wanted to get out of there early. When we got home, Mike uploaded another web album to the blog with photos of the church Christmas party on it. If you want to see the captions, you have to click on the slideshow and you will see what I have written underneath each picture.
After that, we watched a great movie that we have seen before, but it was so long ago that we remembered very little of it. It's called 'Firewall' with Harrison Ford and if you haven't seen it, I would recommend you go out and rent it. It's our kind of movie - lots of action and no romance. :-) It's basically about a bank computer programmer whose family was kidnapped by a team who wanted him to transfer millions of dollars from wealthy bank clients into an offshore account. Well worth the money of a rental!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Since we had stayed up so late last night, we actually slept in this morning and it was very nice. After breakfast, we spent the morning cleaning (oh joy, oh bliss). First, we started with the kitchen floor - I wasn't sure when the last time it had had a proper cleaning and so it got done three times: once with soap, a rinse with plain water and then again with vinegar - it sure looks clean now! :-) After that, it was time to clean the bathroom (NOT one of my favourite jobs) including the floor with vinegar. We don't have a vacuum so I couldn't do the carpets, but the tile floors are sparkling clean. :-) I was sweating by the time I was done the cleaning and so I sat down on the living room floor under the fan to cool off. Even though it gets hot here, we find that the fans are effective enough to cool the place down. Sometimes we do have to put it on 3 (high) for a little to get it cooled down fast if we are just coming in from outside and they haven't been on, but hopefully that means that we won't have to use the air conditioner a lot once we buy a house. I prefer fresh air (in a house and in a car) much better than air con (as they call it here).
After that, we played a few games of cards - we leave them on our kitchen table as we are always sitting down for a game or two - and then we had lunch. After lunch, we played some more games and then got ready to go to the church Christmas party. Everyone was asked to bring something for it (an entree or a salad) and so I decided to bring 'Char's Meal' which is pasta with spaghetti sauce (this time with hamburger) and shredded cheese melted on top. It was always a favourite with the girls when they lived at home and it's easy to make, so I figured that it was a good choice.
Christine and Chris asked us if we would go early to the chapel to help set up for the party and we were happy to do that. Since they don't have a gym yet as part of their building, they just have regular chairs to sit on during church time and so we took all of the hard plastic ones and stacked them and just left the nice soft cushy ones around the outside of the room. After that, we set up some tables outside which the food would go on and then decorated the tables and put up garlands and ornaments around the courtyard. If you have already looked at the slideshow of the chapel, you would have noticed that there is a courtyard of grass in the middle of all the buildings and that there are seats (benches) around the outside of the courtyard. This is where we held the eating part of the party.
I couldn't believe how much food had been brought by everyone (there were about 80 people there) and yet, by the time we had all finished eating, there was very little food left. Perhaps being out in the fresh air gave everyone a good appetite. It was lovely being able to hold a Christmas party outside and we were all wearing our shorts and sandals, too - wouldn't be able to do that in Canada, eh? :-) After dinner, Santa came and gave the primary children all a gift (each parent had been asked to provide a $5. gift for their child to be put into Santa's sack) and a loot bag. Then, since there were loot bags left over, the youth were asked to come up to see Santa - it didn't take long for them to get there once they realized they were getting a bag of goodies. :-)
After dessert (cupcakes and pineapple with ice-cream), we all went into the chapel where a program was presented. The children played a game of 'Bob and Statue' which they really loved playing. Basically it's like the game of Statue where you move around to the music and then have to stand still like a statue when the music stops - the difference between that game and the 'Bob and Statue' game is that when the music stops the first time, you have to bob (crouch down and be still) and the next time the music stops, you have to stand still like a statue. The game continues like that alternating between bobbing and being a statue and you have to remember which one you have to do when the music stops. The Relief Society President is also a music teacher at a primary school and so she had brought some castanets along for the children to use while they sang another song - that was fun for the children as well.
After that, we sang carols amidst readings from the Bible (Luke 2) which talked about Jesus being born. There were also some musical presentations - a trio (the R.S. president's sister and two sons), a quartet (the trio plus Trudy - another lady in our branch) and a two solos (by one of the R.S. President's sons). It was a lovely evening and I was very pleased at how many people I knew that were there even though we have only been here for three weeks. The party started at 5pm and we were finished cleaning up and home by 8pm. Mike took some photos of the party and he will put them into a slideshow tomorrow for you guys.
After that, we played a few games of cards - we leave them on our kitchen table as we are always sitting down for a game or two - and then we had lunch. After lunch, we played some more games and then got ready to go to the church Christmas party. Everyone was asked to bring something for it (an entree or a salad) and so I decided to bring 'Char's Meal' which is pasta with spaghetti sauce (this time with hamburger) and shredded cheese melted on top. It was always a favourite with the girls when they lived at home and it's easy to make, so I figured that it was a good choice.
Christine and Chris asked us if we would go early to the chapel to help set up for the party and we were happy to do that. Since they don't have a gym yet as part of their building, they just have regular chairs to sit on during church time and so we took all of the hard plastic ones and stacked them and just left the nice soft cushy ones around the outside of the room. After that, we set up some tables outside which the food would go on and then decorated the tables and put up garlands and ornaments around the courtyard. If you have already looked at the slideshow of the chapel, you would have noticed that there is a courtyard of grass in the middle of all the buildings and that there are seats (benches) around the outside of the courtyard. This is where we held the eating part of the party.
I couldn't believe how much food had been brought by everyone (there were about 80 people there) and yet, by the time we had all finished eating, there was very little food left. Perhaps being out in the fresh air gave everyone a good appetite. It was lovely being able to hold a Christmas party outside and we were all wearing our shorts and sandals, too - wouldn't be able to do that in Canada, eh? :-) After dinner, Santa came and gave the primary children all a gift (each parent had been asked to provide a $5. gift for their child to be put into Santa's sack) and a loot bag. Then, since there were loot bags left over, the youth were asked to come up to see Santa - it didn't take long for them to get there once they realized they were getting a bag of goodies. :-)
After dessert (cupcakes and pineapple with ice-cream), we all went into the chapel where a program was presented. The children played a game of 'Bob and Statue' which they really loved playing. Basically it's like the game of Statue where you move around to the music and then have to stand still like a statue when the music stops - the difference between that game and the 'Bob and Statue' game is that when the music stops the first time, you have to bob (crouch down and be still) and the next time the music stops, you have to stand still like a statue. The game continues like that alternating between bobbing and being a statue and you have to remember which one you have to do when the music stops. The Relief Society President is also a music teacher at a primary school and so she had brought some castanets along for the children to use while they sang another song - that was fun for the children as well.
After that, we sang carols amidst readings from the Bible (Luke 2) which talked about Jesus being born. There were also some musical presentations - a trio (the R.S. president's sister and two sons), a quartet (the trio plus Trudy - another lady in our branch) and a two solos (by one of the R.S. President's sons). It was a lovely evening and I was very pleased at how many people I knew that were there even though we have only been here for three weeks. The party started at 5pm and we were finished cleaning up and home by 8pm. Mike took some photos of the party and he will put them into a slideshow tomorrow for you guys.
Friday, November 27, 2009
We were lucky enough to be able to have Julianne's car for the day again today. After dropping her off at her work, we went to Crazy Clark's (like a discount store) to look for a large storage bin to leave our stuff in here when we go back to Canada. We decided to look all around the store so that we knew what we could purchase there for when we get back and have to buy things for ourselves for wherever we end up living. There are a lot of items there that are at a good price and don't need to be great quality (like kitchen utensils, etc.). We didn't find a good deal on bins, so we next went to Big W to look for one. We didn't find anything useful there either, so we next went to Coles and the butcher shop to buy our twice weekly groceries. I really enjoy going to this butcher shop - we only needed a little bit of hamburger for a couple of meals we are having and so it was great to be able to say to the woman at the shop just how much we needed and that we needed it in two lots. The woman who served us had served us last week and remembered that we were from Canada - when we told her we were going back, there but weren't looking forward to the cold, she said that she would love to change places with us. She loves the cold, she told us - she used to live in Canberra and that place is cold in the winter.
We took a few more pictures of Hervey Bay as we were driving around - we still have more to get and are hoping to be able to do that on Monday if we can borrow Julianne's car again. We would like to take a few photos of the places that we talk about in our blog, plus a few of things that we find interesting here (like an empty lot of land right in the middle of a street with houses built all around it). Once we get them all taken, we will put them in a little slideshow on the side of the blog.
After bringing home the groceries and having lunch (we had yummy meat pies and chips from the corner store), we decided to go out to Sam's Warehouse to look for a bin and we finally found a really good one. It's large and really solidly made - we will put all of our stuff here that we don't need to take with us (like sheet sets, papers, kitchen/laundry soap, etc.) and leave it with one of our friends until we get back here.
By the time we were finished with all that running around it was about 2pm and so we hurried and got into our togs (bathing suits), lathered ourselves with sunscreen and took off for the beach. We parked at Julianne's work and went down to the boardwalk. We decided to walk for a bit along the boardwalk until we could find a better place to swim. The boardwalk is a lovely place to walk along - the city has built it so that both pedestrians and cyclists can use it and it goes on forever - it's so nice to walk along it enjoying the view of the ocean and the lovely sea breeze that comes off it.
We walked for about 15 minutes and then found the perfect place to swim - there were also other people swimming there which makes me feel better about going out in the water. We swam there for about 30 minutes and it was so wonderful. The water close to the shore was so warm, it was like bath water temperature. It was so easy to just enjoy being there and relaxing and getting cooled off. There aren't any big waves here in Hervey Bay, but there were a few little ones today and we laughed as they came in and at times bowled us over (well mostly me :-) It was hard to get out when it was time to go - and it was cold walking up to get our towels, too (I know you all feel bad for us about that
When we got home, we played a lot of card games - we really like playing cribbage (loser and winner) and we seem to take turns winning and losing (although Mike says he lets me win a lot). :-) We did watch a little tv - we watched a show called 'Wire in the Blood' - it's a cop show - we had borrowed a dvd from the library of the same show and we liked it so much that when we saw that it was on tv, we decided to give it another go to see if we liked it as much (and we did).
Some time during the evening, Mike went outside to take the swimsuits down off the line and he found that a frog was sitting on the ledge outside our patio door. I looked at the frog and he was so cute - so nice and green and smooth and he was not moving a muscle - I had to check to see if he was real after the trick that Christine played on us with the snake. When I looked at him closely, I could see movement in his throat area so I knew he was real. We watched him for quite a while wondering if he was going to see and eat the spider that was close by, but he made no move to do anything. The spider was big and ugly and so Mike killed it and still the frog paid no attention to it. Mike took a few photos of the frog and the spider and then came inside. After a while, I checked to see if the frog was still there and now there was a brown toad sitting near him and this toad was eating the spider. Mike went outside and took a few photos of the frog and the toad together (they are at the end of this blog).
I spent the rest of the night emailing - I had a few to catch up on and am still working on that - Mike watched tv, played a few games of solitaire and did a few puzzles in a puzzle book that we bought for him. I couldn't believe it when I looked at the clock after finishing up the emails and saw that it was 1am. I didn't even feel tired which was strange as I had been tired during the afternoon since we had to wake up early to be ready for Julianne. I was happy to be able to get an email sent to my teacher friends at school to let them know how things were going over here. Some of them were obviously on the computer when I sent it as not long after that, I received four emails back. I am missed they tell me and they asked me to come and see them when I come back to Canada.
Spider (on the left) and frog on the ledge outside our patio door.
Ugly brown toad and pretty green frog on the ledge outside our patio door.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night - and, would you believe it, ended up waking up at 10:40am this morning. I couldn't believe it when I called out to Mike to ask him the time (there is no clock in our bedroom) and he told me how late it was. He had woken up about 90 minutes before me and went on the computer while he waited for me to wake up. I put on a load of laundry as soon as I got up as I had to do two loads today and they had to get up asap on the line. After that, I needed to get something to eat and since it was so late, we ended up having brunch instead of breakfast and lunch.
While we were eating, Christine (our landlady) called her dog, Josie, but I thought she said 'Sue', so I answered her. She told me to be really quiet as there was a snake in the yard and she was going to kill it. My heart sank into my feet, I think. I hate snakes with a passion - I once walked ten feet around a DEAD snake. Mike and I continued to eat our brunch, and a little while later, Christine yelled to us that the snake was on our patio. I freaked some more. I quickly held tight to the screen door which was closed, but doesn't latch. Then, I closed the glass door to the patio and stood staring at the snake (and was really scared). Mike told me he would watch it while I finished my breakfast, although I was no longer hungry by this time. Mike said he was amazed at how still the snake was and I was amazed at how fat it was since it was so short.
Christine was talking with her neighbour who was in her yard and I couldn't understand why she wasn't coming back to try and kill the snake. I wanted to yell at her to hurry, but she had told me to be quiet so I thought that I wasn't allowed to make any noise in case it frightened the snake away and she wouldn't know where it was to kill it. Mike turned around from looking at the snake and was talking to me and when he turned back to look at the snake, it was gone. We were both a little worried at this point. I heard noise and Mike looked out the window and Christine was talking with the missionaries and she had the snake in her hand. All of a sudden, I realized that the snake was fake - I told Mike that I was going to have to hurt Christine. :-)
It turned out that she had seen in the snake somewhere on her property and had called her neighbour over to help her kill it (shhh, they're not supposed to kill them so we're not telling anybody here that she was going to do that :-) Anyway, she and the neighbour have a system where the neighbour uses a rake to hold the snake still and Christine then uses a shovel to cut it in half. When she tried to cut this snake, a 'bunch of eggs' fell out (stuffing). She thought that we had put it there, so she thought she would throw it on our patio and see how we would react. She figured that if we had put it there, we would laugh and she would know that it had been us. I told her then that I was going to kill her. :-) We all got a good laugh about it afterwards, but even thinking about it now gives me the heebie jeebies.
After we all settled down from that 'adventure', the missionaries came inside and chatted with us for about an hour. Elder Coy is from Adelaide, Australia and Elder Hurst is from Provo, Utah. They have been assigned to be our home teachers (they will come to visit us once a month and leave a spiritual message with us) and so today was a 'get to know you' day. We talked a lot about ourselves and our family and they shared a lot about themselves and their families. The message they left with us is how we need to keep spiritually strong by nurturing ourselves (praying, reading the scriptures, going to church). They likened us to a tree - if a tree is not nurtured (nourished) by water, sun and good soil, it will eventually weaken and die. So it is with us - we need to make sure that we continue to do all the right things so we stay strong.
We spent the rest of the afternoon writing emails, playing card games and chatting. At about 5pm, we went for our daily walk. We have decided that this is the perfect time to go for a walk since the heat of the sun has cooled and there is still a lovely breeze and it's still light. What I am finding is that when we are inside and being a bit lazy in a day, it's hard to get motivated to get out and walk. Today was one of those kind of days, so I had to just tell myself to get a move on and get outside. Once we were walking, it felt good to be out in the fresh air and to be getting some exercise. When we got home, we fixed dinner and then we watched two tv shows. The first was 'Glee' - it is such a cute show about a high school glee club. The second was called 'Rush' and it's an Australian cop show - it turned out to be a pretty good show, actually - you almost felt like you were there at times.
I still had some minutes left on my phone and it was going to expire tomorrow, so I called my mom. It was nice to talk with her (and not have to leave home to do it). I am bugging her to get Skype downloaded onto her computer and for her to get a webcam so that we can talk with each other and see each other at the same time when we come back to Australia after our seven week visit in December/January. It will likely take Mike to sort it out and get it done - my mom is not a fan of computers! :-) I have to say that I am impressed that she is actually reading my blog each day AND answering my emails (and not with short emails back, I might add!) :-)
While we were eating, Christine (our landlady) called her dog, Josie, but I thought she said 'Sue', so I answered her. She told me to be really quiet as there was a snake in the yard and she was going to kill it. My heart sank into my feet, I think. I hate snakes with a passion - I once walked ten feet around a DEAD snake. Mike and I continued to eat our brunch, and a little while later, Christine yelled to us that the snake was on our patio. I freaked some more. I quickly held tight to the screen door which was closed, but doesn't latch. Then, I closed the glass door to the patio and stood staring at the snake (and was really scared). Mike told me he would watch it while I finished my breakfast, although I was no longer hungry by this time. Mike said he was amazed at how still the snake was and I was amazed at how fat it was since it was so short.
Christine was talking with her neighbour who was in her yard and I couldn't understand why she wasn't coming back to try and kill the snake. I wanted to yell at her to hurry, but she had told me to be quiet so I thought that I wasn't allowed to make any noise in case it frightened the snake away and she wouldn't know where it was to kill it. Mike turned around from looking at the snake and was talking to me and when he turned back to look at the snake, it was gone. We were both a little worried at this point. I heard noise and Mike looked out the window and Christine was talking with the missionaries and she had the snake in her hand. All of a sudden, I realized that the snake was fake - I told Mike that I was going to have to hurt Christine. :-)
It turned out that she had seen in the snake somewhere on her property and had called her neighbour over to help her kill it (shhh, they're not supposed to kill them so we're not telling anybody here that she was going to do that :-) Anyway, she and the neighbour have a system where the neighbour uses a rake to hold the snake still and Christine then uses a shovel to cut it in half. When she tried to cut this snake, a 'bunch of eggs' fell out (stuffing). She thought that we had put it there, so she thought she would throw it on our patio and see how we would react. She figured that if we had put it there, we would laugh and she would know that it had been us. I told her then that I was going to kill her. :-) We all got a good laugh about it afterwards, but even thinking about it now gives me the heebie jeebies.
After we all settled down from that 'adventure', the missionaries came inside and chatted with us for about an hour. Elder Coy is from Adelaide, Australia and Elder Hurst is from Provo, Utah. They have been assigned to be our home teachers (they will come to visit us once a month and leave a spiritual message with us) and so today was a 'get to know you' day. We talked a lot about ourselves and our family and they shared a lot about themselves and their families. The message they left with us is how we need to keep spiritually strong by nurturing ourselves (praying, reading the scriptures, going to church). They likened us to a tree - if a tree is not nurtured (nourished) by water, sun and good soil, it will eventually weaken and die. So it is with us - we need to make sure that we continue to do all the right things so we stay strong.
We spent the rest of the afternoon writing emails, playing card games and chatting. At about 5pm, we went for our daily walk. We have decided that this is the perfect time to go for a walk since the heat of the sun has cooled and there is still a lovely breeze and it's still light. What I am finding is that when we are inside and being a bit lazy in a day, it's hard to get motivated to get out and walk. Today was one of those kind of days, so I had to just tell myself to get a move on and get outside. Once we were walking, it felt good to be out in the fresh air and to be getting some exercise. When we got home, we fixed dinner and then we watched two tv shows. The first was 'Glee' - it is such a cute show about a high school glee club. The second was called 'Rush' and it's an Australian cop show - it turned out to be a pretty good show, actually - you almost felt like you were there at times.
I still had some minutes left on my phone and it was going to expire tomorrow, so I called my mom. It was nice to talk with her (and not have to leave home to do it). I am bugging her to get Skype downloaded onto her computer and for her to get a webcam so that we can talk with each other and see each other at the same time when we come back to Australia after our seven week visit in December/January. It will likely take Mike to sort it out and get it done - my mom is not a fan of computers! :-) I have to say that I am impressed that she is actually reading my blog each day AND answering my emails (and not with short emails back, I might add!) :-)
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Today was a rather uninteresting day. We started off by putting in the laundry - we did two loads - first thing in the morning as if you don't do it right away first thing, the clothes don't have a chance to dry until late at night. The washing machine takes about 90 minutes to wash just one load, so by the time you do two it's almost noon it seems.
We spent a lot of the rest of the morning filling out my forms to register for teaching in Queensland and to supply teach once the registration is done. I have been putting this off as I hate filling out forms - they are so long and tedious. Once we got going, we realized that we are not going to be able to put in these forms yet anyway. I was hoping that I could put in what I had and just get the two things from Canada that I needed and then send them off from Canada as that would be cheaper than sending the whole package from there. As it turns out, if I don't send a criminal record check or a paper saying that I have applied for the criminal record check, they won't even look at my file. Since I can only apply from Canada for the criminal record check, I am going to have to wait until I get back there, get that plus a reference from my principal, then either pay a lot to send the forms/papers to Australia or wait 'til I get back here and then send them in.
After a few card games, Mike had to do some work on the computer so I watched 'Murder She Wrote'. Mike then took himself off to bed as he was not feeling well. He has been feeling draggy for three days now - we are not sure what it is - it could be that he's not sleeping terribly well since we are sleeping on an air mattress. It could also be that we don't have a couch to sit on (only wooden kitchen chairs) so there's no support for the neck when he is sitting down and no place to relax on.
In the afternoon, it started to rain and we were so excited - we felt like the 'natives' - we even rushed outside to take some photos of it. I would attach these pics to the end of this entry, but you can't tell it's raining - just that the pic is greyish and seems out of focus. It only rained for about five minutes, but the grass is even greener than it was before the rain - it's so neat that it doesn't take much rain for the grass to be affected.
Around 5pm, we took off for our walk - we walked for about an hour - just around the neighbourhood. Each day we are going to go for a walk, Mike checks out the map and works out a route for us to go. Today we walked along the roads for a bit, but then walked for quite a while up a greenbelt. It's amazing that here it's not like in Canada (yet) - you can be right in the city and still be able to feel like you are in the country. In this greenbelt, there is nothing besides grass and trees - it's really beautiful, and so peaceful to walk through.
Since our day wasn't that exciting and there wasn't much to write about, I thought I would share with you some of the other things that I have been keeping a list of that I thought might make interesting reading. The first is the toad population: many years ago these brown toads were brought in to this area to help curb the beetle population. They did that, however, now they are overrunning the land and they cause quite a havoc in gardens and to some animals. They are ugly things, too - we saw two of them on our patio the other night and watched them catch/eat a couple of huge beetles. The beetles were flying into our glass patio door - when we heard the noise, we went to see what it was. We then watched them (that's when we saw the toads sitting ever so quietly on the patio stones) and the beetles keep flying up and landing plop on the ground - we couldn't understand why they wouldn't use this ability to fly to get away from the toads. Next thing we knew, the beetles fell to the ground once again and the toads hopped up and in one fell swoop (or rather, gulp) ate the beetles. Yuck! Our landlord was outside the other night making a racket and when we looked out the bedroom window to see what was going on, he told us that he was killing the toads - he hits them over the head with a big stick or shovel and then scoops them into the garbage. Double yuck!!
Another interesting thing has to do with their money. There are no pennies in Australian currency. They decided many years ago to do away with them - I think it's a great idea. Goods are still priced to the penny (eg: $2.99 or $1.12), but when the total is rung up on the cash register, they round the amount up or down to the nearest 5 cents. So, for instance, if the total ends in a 1 or 2, it's rounded down to a 0 - so if the amount is $1.12 for example, they ask you for $1.10. If the total ends in a 3 or a 4, it's rounded up to a 5 - so if the amount is $1.14, for example, they ask you for $1.15. It works the same if the total ends in 6 or 7, they round it down to a 5 and if the total ends in 8 or 9 they rounded it up to the next 10. I guess in the end, it all works out fairly evenly with regards to the 'pennies' and it's a lot easier not to have all those pennies in your pants or purse. Also, I love the way that the taxes are included in the advertized price. What you see on the item you are buying is what you pay (so no more having to add 13% to your total). The amount of the GST is listed on the docket (receipt) so you know how much you are paying, but it doesn't seem as painful this way when you are buying something.
We spent a lot of the rest of the morning filling out my forms to register for teaching in Queensland and to supply teach once the registration is done. I have been putting this off as I hate filling out forms - they are so long and tedious. Once we got going, we realized that we are not going to be able to put in these forms yet anyway. I was hoping that I could put in what I had and just get the two things from Canada that I needed and then send them off from Canada as that would be cheaper than sending the whole package from there. As it turns out, if I don't send a criminal record check or a paper saying that I have applied for the criminal record check, they won't even look at my file. Since I can only apply from Canada for the criminal record check, I am going to have to wait until I get back there, get that plus a reference from my principal, then either pay a lot to send the forms/papers to Australia or wait 'til I get back here and then send them in.
After a few card games, Mike had to do some work on the computer so I watched 'Murder She Wrote'. Mike then took himself off to bed as he was not feeling well. He has been feeling draggy for three days now - we are not sure what it is - it could be that he's not sleeping terribly well since we are sleeping on an air mattress. It could also be that we don't have a couch to sit on (only wooden kitchen chairs) so there's no support for the neck when he is sitting down and no place to relax on.
In the afternoon, it started to rain and we were so excited - we felt like the 'natives' - we even rushed outside to take some photos of it. I would attach these pics to the end of this entry, but you can't tell it's raining - just that the pic is greyish and seems out of focus. It only rained for about five minutes, but the grass is even greener than it was before the rain - it's so neat that it doesn't take much rain for the grass to be affected.
Around 5pm, we took off for our walk - we walked for about an hour - just around the neighbourhood. Each day we are going to go for a walk, Mike checks out the map and works out a route for us to go. Today we walked along the roads for a bit, but then walked for quite a while up a greenbelt. It's amazing that here it's not like in Canada (yet) - you can be right in the city and still be able to feel like you are in the country. In this greenbelt, there is nothing besides grass and trees - it's really beautiful, and so peaceful to walk through.
Since our day wasn't that exciting and there wasn't much to write about, I thought I would share with you some of the other things that I have been keeping a list of that I thought might make interesting reading. The first is the toad population: many years ago these brown toads were brought in to this area to help curb the beetle population. They did that, however, now they are overrunning the land and they cause quite a havoc in gardens and to some animals. They are ugly things, too - we saw two of them on our patio the other night and watched them catch/eat a couple of huge beetles. The beetles were flying into our glass patio door - when we heard the noise, we went to see what it was. We then watched them (that's when we saw the toads sitting ever so quietly on the patio stones) and the beetles keep flying up and landing plop on the ground - we couldn't understand why they wouldn't use this ability to fly to get away from the toads. Next thing we knew, the beetles fell to the ground once again and the toads hopped up and in one fell swoop (or rather, gulp) ate the beetles. Yuck! Our landlord was outside the other night making a racket and when we looked out the bedroom window to see what was going on, he told us that he was killing the toads - he hits them over the head with a big stick or shovel and then scoops them into the garbage. Double yuck!!
Another interesting thing has to do with their money. There are no pennies in Australian currency. They decided many years ago to do away with them - I think it's a great idea. Goods are still priced to the penny (eg: $2.99 or $1.12), but when the total is rung up on the cash register, they round the amount up or down to the nearest 5 cents. So, for instance, if the total ends in a 1 or 2, it's rounded down to a 0 - so if the amount is $1.12 for example, they ask you for $1.10. If the total ends in a 3 or a 4, it's rounded up to a 5 - so if the amount is $1.14, for example, they ask you for $1.15. It works the same if the total ends in 6 or 7, they round it down to a 5 and if the total ends in 8 or 9 they rounded it up to the next 10. I guess in the end, it all works out fairly evenly with regards to the 'pennies' and it's a lot easier not to have all those pennies in your pants or purse. Also, I love the way that the taxes are included in the advertized price. What you see on the item you are buying is what you pay (so no more having to add 13% to your total). The amount of the GST is listed on the docket (receipt) so you know how much you are paying, but it doesn't seem as painful this way when you are buying something.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Today was another busy day - and would you believe it, the sky was cloudy and it didn't change all day - what's with that? :-) Last night, it actually poured rain and the 'natives' (our landlords and their neighbours) shouted for joy in the morning when they saw that it had rained. It has been ages since it's rained and now the grass in many areas looks green - it's amazing how fast the rain worked.
Julianne picked us up in her car today and, after dropping her off at her work, we dropped our videos off at Blockbuster's and then headed to Bunnings (like a Home Depot). Mike wanted to check out the cost of a few things we have at home to decide if he wanted to bring them to Australia or not. The two big things he checked out were a generator and an air compressor. He has decided to bring the generator, but not the air compressor. The cost of the air compressor is $200. and by the time he built a crate to house the compressor to move it to Australia and added the cost of moving it, it would be around cost to buy it here. The cost of the generator is $500. so he will likely have that shipped over from Canada.
While we were looking around the store (I think this will be one of Mike's new stores to go and stickybeak around when we are here), we saw this nice outdoor set that seemed to be a reasonable price. We found a guy who worked in that department and he showed us an even nicer one (yes, a little bit more expensive, but not too much) and we really liked it. It included a glass table with an umbrella in the middle of it, six chairs with reversible covers, a two seat swing, and two loungers. We are going to keep an eye on it when we get back to see if it ever comes on sale. A girl we talked to said that things are so low in cost there that they rarely go on sale, but we will keep an eye on it, just the same.
When we arrived in Sydney in October, Mike bought a cell phone with a pre-paid plan: he paid $49 for this plan and for that he got $350. worth of calls to any cell or land line and $350. to any Vodafone phone (that's the name of the cell phone company - like Fido or Bell Mobility). Since we hadn't used the phone as much as we thought we were going to, there ended up being tons of money left on the plan. So, Mike went online last night to figure out how much it would cost to call the girls from the phone. It turned out we could talk with each of them for about half an hour. So, in the Bunnings parking lot, I called Terri-Ann (no answer), Krystal (no answer), Jennifer (bingo - answer :-) When I got a hold of Jennifer she told me that Terri-Ann had just called her. When we were finished our call, I asked Jennifer to call Terri-Ann and tell her that I was going to call. Terri-Ann had heard the phone ring when we first called, but they were in the middle of Family Home Evening and so she didn't answer the call then - she did when I phoned back. When I finally got a hold of Krystal, it turned out that she had been at her acting class and had just returned home when I called the second time. It was really great to talk with the girls and get more caught up on what is happening with them.
Our next stop was to the Council offices (like City Hall) to find out what they could tell Mike about starting his own business. They were only able to supply Mike with information regarding the types of business allowed in the various zoning areas. This mostly deals with if you are allowed to have employees, if you require additional parking, or if you are allowed to put up a sign, most of which will not apply if Mike decides to open his own handyman business (which he is thinking about). The woman there wasn't too sure where Mike could go for more information, but suggested he try the Office of Fair Trading for more assistance.
Last on our list for today was to do the grocery shopping at Woolworth's. We chose to do it there as opposed to Coles (which is where we went last week) because we had to buy our Vodafone refill from Woolworth's (they give a 10% discount there). We checked out the produce there and it's not as nice as Coles and there wasn't as big a selection in the bakery section there, either. However, we do get frequent flyer miles at Woolworth's. We are going to check if Coles does something similar to the air miles - if not, we might be shopping at both stores.
By the time we were finished with all the stops on our list, it was almost 2pm and way past lunch. So, we decided to use a coupon on the back of one of our dockets (receipts) to get a pizza from Domino's. It turns out that since it was Tuesday today, they had a deal on (Cheap Tuesdays) and it was cheaper than the deal on the docket. We ended up getting a large Double Bacon Cheeseburger pizza (they don't know what large is over here - their large is like a medium pizza in Canada) with ground beef, shredded bacon and mayonnaise on a barbecue sauce. While we were waiting for the pizza to cook, I realized that I could have asked for thick crust at no extra cost (that is what I'll get next time). The pizza was very tasty - we like the way they have barbecue sauce as a choice over here.
When we were finished eating, it was time to go and pick up Julianne from work. We were a little disappointed that the time had gone so fast as we were planning on spending some time at the beach today. What we have decided now is that we will do a quick shop on Friday (when we will have a loan of Julianne's car again) and then spend the rest of that day on the beach - it will be something for us to look forward to all week. I just checked out the weather for that day and it's going to be 31C and sunny - a perfect day to go to the beach, don't you think? :-)
We spent the evening playing lots of games of cribbage (winner and loser crib), added some more entries to our cruise blog and watched a movie. The movie was called 'Wicker Man' and it starred Nicolas Cage. It's about a police officer who is asked to go to a secluded island to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. It sounded so good on the cover, but it ended up being fairly creepy. We gave it a 6.5. We have three movies left from the library to watch over the next week.
Julianne picked us up in her car today and, after dropping her off at her work, we dropped our videos off at Blockbuster's and then headed to Bunnings (like a Home Depot). Mike wanted to check out the cost of a few things we have at home to decide if he wanted to bring them to Australia or not. The two big things he checked out were a generator and an air compressor. He has decided to bring the generator, but not the air compressor. The cost of the air compressor is $200. and by the time he built a crate to house the compressor to move it to Australia and added the cost of moving it, it would be around cost to buy it here. The cost of the generator is $500. so he will likely have that shipped over from Canada.
While we were looking around the store (I think this will be one of Mike's new stores to go and stickybeak around when we are here), we saw this nice outdoor set that seemed to be a reasonable price. We found a guy who worked in that department and he showed us an even nicer one (yes, a little bit more expensive, but not too much) and we really liked it. It included a glass table with an umbrella in the middle of it, six chairs with reversible covers, a two seat swing, and two loungers. We are going to keep an eye on it when we get back to see if it ever comes on sale. A girl we talked to said that things are so low in cost there that they rarely go on sale, but we will keep an eye on it, just the same.
When we arrived in Sydney in October, Mike bought a cell phone with a pre-paid plan: he paid $49 for this plan and for that he got $350. worth of calls to any cell or land line and $350. to any Vodafone phone (that's the name of the cell phone company - like Fido or Bell Mobility). Since we hadn't used the phone as much as we thought we were going to, there ended up being tons of money left on the plan. So, Mike went online last night to figure out how much it would cost to call the girls from the phone. It turned out we could talk with each of them for about half an hour. So, in the Bunnings parking lot, I called Terri-Ann (no answer), Krystal (no answer), Jennifer (bingo - answer :-) When I got a hold of Jennifer she told me that Terri-Ann had just called her. When we were finished our call, I asked Jennifer to call Terri-Ann and tell her that I was going to call. Terri-Ann had heard the phone ring when we first called, but they were in the middle of Family Home Evening and so she didn't answer the call then - she did when I phoned back. When I finally got a hold of Krystal, it turned out that she had been at her acting class and had just returned home when I called the second time. It was really great to talk with the girls and get more caught up on what is happening with them.
Our next stop was to the Council offices (like City Hall) to find out what they could tell Mike about starting his own business. They were only able to supply Mike with information regarding the types of business allowed in the various zoning areas. This mostly deals with if you are allowed to have employees, if you require additional parking, or if you are allowed to put up a sign, most of which will not apply if Mike decides to open his own handyman business (which he is thinking about). The woman there wasn't too sure where Mike could go for more information, but suggested he try the Office of Fair Trading for more assistance.
Last on our list for today was to do the grocery shopping at Woolworth's. We chose to do it there as opposed to Coles (which is where we went last week) because we had to buy our Vodafone refill from Woolworth's (they give a 10% discount there). We checked out the produce there and it's not as nice as Coles and there wasn't as big a selection in the bakery section there, either. However, we do get frequent flyer miles at Woolworth's. We are going to check if Coles does something similar to the air miles - if not, we might be shopping at both stores.
By the time we were finished with all the stops on our list, it was almost 2pm and way past lunch. So, we decided to use a coupon on the back of one of our dockets (receipts) to get a pizza from Domino's. It turns out that since it was Tuesday today, they had a deal on (Cheap Tuesdays) and it was cheaper than the deal on the docket. We ended up getting a large Double Bacon Cheeseburger pizza (they don't know what large is over here - their large is like a medium pizza in Canada) with ground beef, shredded bacon and mayonnaise on a barbecue sauce. While we were waiting for the pizza to cook, I realized that I could have asked for thick crust at no extra cost (that is what I'll get next time). The pizza was very tasty - we like the way they have barbecue sauce as a choice over here.
When we were finished eating, it was time to go and pick up Julianne from work. We were a little disappointed that the time had gone so fast as we were planning on spending some time at the beach today. What we have decided now is that we will do a quick shop on Friday (when we will have a loan of Julianne's car again) and then spend the rest of that day on the beach - it will be something for us to look forward to all week. I just checked out the weather for that day and it's going to be 31C and sunny - a perfect day to go to the beach, don't you think? :-)
We spent the evening playing lots of games of cribbage (winner and loser crib), added some more entries to our cruise blog and watched a movie. The movie was called 'Wicker Man' and it starred Nicolas Cage. It's about a police officer who is asked to go to a secluded island to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. It sounded so good on the cover, but it ended up being fairly creepy. We gave it a 6.5. We have three movies left from the library to watch over the next week.
Monday, November 23, 2009
A bit of a work day today - sheesh, isn't this supposed to be a holiday? :-) We spent the morning cleaning - yuck!!! It took quite a while to clean the bathroom. I don't think it had been done in quite a while. Christine asked us to use this cleaner that is environmentally friendly (she made it up for us) and so we used that to clean the shower stall (walls and door and the outside of the stall as well). She has asked us to use an environmentally friendly cleaner because the water that goes down the drain (grey water) is captured and then used to water their garden (a common practice in Australia due to water shortages). I had to use a green scrubby all over the shower stall and then throw water on it from a pail and then wipe it down. And no, it was NOT exciting at all. :-) After that, there was still the sink, toilet and floor to do. It took ages to do and since there is not a ceiling fan in the bathroom, we were quite sweaty by the end of it all. I went and stood under the fan in the living room for a while just to cool off. We then figured we might as well keep on the cleaning track and so went outside and cleaned off the outside chairs (totally filthy) which took ages to scrub down with my little green scrubby. However, they are lovely and clean now and ready for us to sit outside on and enjoy the fresh air and warm sun and lovely breezes we get here in Hervey Bay. :-)
After lunch, we decided to watch the last of the Blockbuster movies - this one was called 'Body of Lies' and it starred Leonardo Dicaprio. The movie was basically about a CIA agent who was looking for the mastermind behind a wave of terrorist attacks in the middle east. We watched about half an hour of it before we turned it off. The movie itself wasn't badly done and Leonardo was good in it, but they showed a lot of people being tortured and it looked like the rest of the movie was going to be more of the same. So we decided that we weren't really into watching any more of it.
Christine called us out into the yard while we were watching the movie to show us what looked like grey clouds in the sky, but was actually smoke from a bush fire that had started not that far from Hervey Bay. Her husband, Chris, works for the local council and his job today was to watch the fire from here and to see how bad it looked like it was going to be. When we watched the news later on, it turned out that there were fires in three areas not that far from Hervey Bay. The temperatures have been around 30C here in Hervey Bay for the past week, so it has likely been higher in those affected areas which are inland from us.
While we were out there, Christine showed us around her yard. They have tons of fruit trees, vegetables and nuts growing in their yard. They have over an acre of property and much of it has something growing on it. They would like to become self-sustaining in the fruit/veg/nut areas in the next few years. She is growing some plants that we have never heard of, so it's going to be interesting to see what they look like when they produce fruit. They also have two chickens (chooks) in a pen in their yard which produce fresh eggs daily for them.
Since we had turned off the movie, we decided to watch another one (this one from the library as we had gone through all the ones from Blockbuster) - this one was called 'Wire in the Blood'. It was about a squad of detectives who used the assistance of a clinical psychologist to catch a killer of patients in a hospital. It reminded me of 'Criminal Minds', so of course, I really liked it. We did try to watch a dvd of a British comedy called 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em', but the humour wasn't funny to us - as Mike said, it was too dry. I do like some British comedy, but this one isn't one of them.
While I read the paper to catch up on all the local happenings in Big Town Hervey Bay, Mike learned how to put photo albums on this blog and he successfully did it. If you look on the right of this blog, down below the 'Blog Archive' (which tells the dates I have entered a blog), you will see three photo albums: one with just two Hervey Bay signs (more photos of Hervey Bay to come), one with pics of the granny flat we live in, and the third with pics of our chapel here in Hervey Bay (when you look at those, notice how different the building style is from what you are used to seeing in Canada). If you click on a photo album, it will open to a large size and you can click on the arrow at the top to see each photo or you can click on slideshow at the top and it will automatically run through the photos. Mike says, "to get back to the blog, you have to click the 'back arrow'."
After a few games of cribbage (Mike says he keeps letting me win :-), we went for our daily walk - we try to get in a walk every day that we do not have the use of our friend's car. Today, we walked around the block one way to go and see the outside of a house that is for sale. When we got there, we realized that we had seen the house from the outside before - it had a big green power distribution box in front of it which blocks clear access through the gate to the back yard. So, needless to say, we crossed that property off our list. We are still looking at houses in the property for sale newspaper even though we aren't going to buy anything until the exchange rate between the Canadian and the Australian dollar improves. We still haven't found anything that matches up to the 'dream house' that we found a couple of weeks ago - everything we see, I compare to that house.
We spent the rest of the evening watching two of our favourite tv shows: 'Big Bang Theory' and 'Criminal Minds'. We're quite tired today - we both almost fell asleep on the carpet in the front room today - so I think we will call it an 'early' night tonight and head off to bed at 10:30pm.
After lunch, we decided to watch the last of the Blockbuster movies - this one was called 'Body of Lies' and it starred Leonardo Dicaprio. The movie was basically about a CIA agent who was looking for the mastermind behind a wave of terrorist attacks in the middle east. We watched about half an hour of it before we turned it off. The movie itself wasn't badly done and Leonardo was good in it, but they showed a lot of people being tortured and it looked like the rest of the movie was going to be more of the same. So we decided that we weren't really into watching any more of it.
Christine called us out into the yard while we were watching the movie to show us what looked like grey clouds in the sky, but was actually smoke from a bush fire that had started not that far from Hervey Bay. Her husband, Chris, works for the local council and his job today was to watch the fire from here and to see how bad it looked like it was going to be. When we watched the news later on, it turned out that there were fires in three areas not that far from Hervey Bay. The temperatures have been around 30C here in Hervey Bay for the past week, so it has likely been higher in those affected areas which are inland from us.
While we were out there, Christine showed us around her yard. They have tons of fruit trees, vegetables and nuts growing in their yard. They have over an acre of property and much of it has something growing on it. They would like to become self-sustaining in the fruit/veg/nut areas in the next few years. She is growing some plants that we have never heard of, so it's going to be interesting to see what they look like when they produce fruit. They also have two chickens (chooks) in a pen in their yard which produce fresh eggs daily for them.
Since we had turned off the movie, we decided to watch another one (this one from the library as we had gone through all the ones from Blockbuster) - this one was called 'Wire in the Blood'. It was about a squad of detectives who used the assistance of a clinical psychologist to catch a killer of patients in a hospital. It reminded me of 'Criminal Minds', so of course, I really liked it. We did try to watch a dvd of a British comedy called 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em', but the humour wasn't funny to us - as Mike said, it was too dry. I do like some British comedy, but this one isn't one of them.
While I read the paper to catch up on all the local happenings in Big Town Hervey Bay, Mike learned how to put photo albums on this blog and he successfully did it. If you look on the right of this blog, down below the 'Blog Archive' (which tells the dates I have entered a blog), you will see three photo albums: one with just two Hervey Bay signs (more photos of Hervey Bay to come), one with pics of the granny flat we live in, and the third with pics of our chapel here in Hervey Bay (when you look at those, notice how different the building style is from what you are used to seeing in Canada). If you click on a photo album, it will open to a large size and you can click on the arrow at the top to see each photo or you can click on slideshow at the top and it will automatically run through the photos. Mike says, "to get back to the blog, you have to click the 'back arrow'."
After a few games of cribbage (Mike says he keeps letting me win :-), we went for our daily walk - we try to get in a walk every day that we do not have the use of our friend's car. Today, we walked around the block one way to go and see the outside of a house that is for sale. When we got there, we realized that we had seen the house from the outside before - it had a big green power distribution box in front of it which blocks clear access through the gate to the back yard. So, needless to say, we crossed that property off our list. We are still looking at houses in the property for sale newspaper even though we aren't going to buy anything until the exchange rate between the Canadian and the Australian dollar improves. We still haven't found anything that matches up to the 'dream house' that we found a couple of weeks ago - everything we see, I compare to that house.
We spent the rest of the evening watching two of our favourite tv shows: 'Big Bang Theory' and 'Criminal Minds'. We're quite tired today - we both almost fell asleep on the carpet in the front room today - so I think we will call it an 'early' night tonight and head off to bed at 10:30pm.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Another lovely Sunday in paradise - it can't possibly get better than this! :-)
We had another wonderful day at church - we really are feeling more and more a part of this branch each time we meet with the people at church. Today was the Primary presentation in Sacrament meeting. There were six children in the presentation - one boy, Ethan, who's 12, and five beautiful girls. It was very different from the Primary presentations I have been used to in the past (count yourself lucky to be in Orangeville, Terri-Ann, where the Primary is huge :-) The presentation started off with one of the young girls introducing the theme of the meeting and then the children and Primary leaders sang a song (one that I had heard the children sing when I was in the Orangeville Primary - 'My Eternal Family' - it's so neat know that children are learning the same songs the world over in the church - it makes me feel so connected. :-)
After the song, Ethan gave a really good talk about being a strong family - he seemed much older as he gave his talk - he spoke very eloquently. After Ethan's talk, the same young girl as before (with the help of her older sister) introduced the next part of the program which was one of the leaders, Debbie, sharing what the children had learned this year in Primary. The congregation then sang a song. After that, another young girl introduced the Primary President, Sister Newton, who spoke about strengthening the family. She also talked about how much she loved being with the children in Primary. The meeting closed with President Brown (the Branch President) talking about how wonderful children were and how they were the leaders of tomorrow in the church. One of the stories he shared at this time was about his grandson: he said that the children in the ward where his grandson attended were making covers for the scriptures and his grandson chose material with $ signs on it. When his mom asked him why he would choose that cover for the scriptures, her son said "Mom, when you have the scriptures, you are rich." Out of the mouth of babes, eh? The thing that I found different about this Primary presentation is that I am used to hearing lots of songs sang by the primary children and also more involvement by the children. I guess because they only have a few children and some of them are only able to come every other week, it's difficult to put something together. It made me appreciate the Primary that Colin and Caleb go to.
Sunday School was taught again by Rosalea and it was a very good lesson (this time I made sure to go up and tell her afterwards what a great teacher I think she is). Her lesson was about how every member is a missionary. We talked about how it's not just what you say that counts, but also the example we set for those around us. She also said that this teaching starts in the home. We made a list of all the things that we thought children should be taught at a young age so that they can be good examples in the world, too. Some of the things we thought they should be taught were: love, compassion, tolerance, honesty, work ethic, and integrity, among other things. I really enjoy the Sunday School lessons in this branch - so many people participate by sharing their thoughts!
Relief Society was taught by Julianne and it was titled 'Be of Good Cheer' from the May General Conference. It was basically about how we all face trials in our lives and how we need to remember that if we "remain steadfast and of good cheer" and make "the gospel of Jesus Christ the center of our lives", "this attitude will pull us through whatever comes our way. It will not remove our troubles from us but rather will enable us to face our challenges, to meet them head on, and to emerge victorious." "Wherefore, be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you, and will stand by you.” The talk ended like this: "Though the storm clouds may gather, though the rains may pour down upon us, our knowledge of the gospel and our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. There will be nothing in this world that can defeat us." It was a really good reminder of how much we need to remember to find the positive in all around us.
After church, we got a ride home from Chris and Chris and they invited us to lunch with them and the missionaries. We had already organized lunch, so we just brought our lunch (sweet and sour chicken, mashed potatoes and corn) to their picnic table and Chris brought out stuff for sandwiches and we just shared it all. We must have sat for about an hour and a half just eating and chatting (mostly chatting). The weather was magnificent (sunny and warm) and there was a light breeze blowing - if I didn't know better, I would have thought we were in heaven already. :-)
When we came back into our granny flat, we put on one of our Blockbuster movies, "Basic" starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. It's basically about a U.S. Army training exercise gone bad. The story was good, there was too much swearing (typical army mouths) and the ending took a little time to think about, to get what had been happening throughout the movie. I gave it a 6.5 and Mike gave it a 7.
We then did three more entries in our Star Princess cruise blog today. They have updated the program and so it took a little getting used to. Some parts of the update are better and some are not and, at times, I got really frustrated, but Mike is good at calming me down when that happens and so we were able to get through it fairly well. It's getting closer to being done which is exciting. It's been a lot of work, but also very rewarding recording this amazing journey in our lives.
After supper, it was on to another movie: '28 Days' starring Sandra Bullock. It's the story of a young woman who is addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs. After she crashes a car into a house while under the influence, she ends up sentenced to either 28 days in rehab or jail - she chooses rehab. The movie chronicles her struggles as she deals with her addiction in rehab. We both thought it was a really good story, but it moved a little slow at times. I gave it a 7 and Mike gave it a 6.5. We are finding that there are very few good movies out there. I wonder if all the good ones were made years ago - if you look up the 'AFI's 100 Movies (2008)', how many have been made in the past ten years? The answer is TWO: 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Sixth Sense'. Just goes to show that the calibre of films today are not what they used to be and that is disappointing.
We had another wonderful day at church - we really are feeling more and more a part of this branch each time we meet with the people at church. Today was the Primary presentation in Sacrament meeting. There were six children in the presentation - one boy, Ethan, who's 12, and five beautiful girls. It was very different from the Primary presentations I have been used to in the past (count yourself lucky to be in Orangeville, Terri-Ann, where the Primary is huge :-) The presentation started off with one of the young girls introducing the theme of the meeting and then the children and Primary leaders sang a song (one that I had heard the children sing when I was in the Orangeville Primary - 'My Eternal Family' - it's so neat know that children are learning the same songs the world over in the church - it makes me feel so connected. :-)
After the song, Ethan gave a really good talk about being a strong family - he seemed much older as he gave his talk - he spoke very eloquently. After Ethan's talk, the same young girl as before (with the help of her older sister) introduced the next part of the program which was one of the leaders, Debbie, sharing what the children had learned this year in Primary. The congregation then sang a song. After that, another young girl introduced the Primary President, Sister Newton, who spoke about strengthening the family. She also talked about how much she loved being with the children in Primary. The meeting closed with President Brown (the Branch President) talking about how wonderful children were and how they were the leaders of tomorrow in the church. One of the stories he shared at this time was about his grandson: he said that the children in the ward where his grandson attended were making covers for the scriptures and his grandson chose material with $ signs on it. When his mom asked him why he would choose that cover for the scriptures, her son said "Mom, when you have the scriptures, you are rich." Out of the mouth of babes, eh? The thing that I found different about this Primary presentation is that I am used to hearing lots of songs sang by the primary children and also more involvement by the children. I guess because they only have a few children and some of them are only able to come every other week, it's difficult to put something together. It made me appreciate the Primary that Colin and Caleb go to.
Sunday School was taught again by Rosalea and it was a very good lesson (this time I made sure to go up and tell her afterwards what a great teacher I think she is). Her lesson was about how every member is a missionary. We talked about how it's not just what you say that counts, but also the example we set for those around us. She also said that this teaching starts in the home. We made a list of all the things that we thought children should be taught at a young age so that they can be good examples in the world, too. Some of the things we thought they should be taught were: love, compassion, tolerance, honesty, work ethic, and integrity, among other things. I really enjoy the Sunday School lessons in this branch - so many people participate by sharing their thoughts!
Relief Society was taught by Julianne and it was titled 'Be of Good Cheer' from the May General Conference. It was basically about how we all face trials in our lives and how we need to remember that if we "remain steadfast and of good cheer" and make "the gospel of Jesus Christ the center of our lives", "this attitude will pull us through whatever comes our way. It will not remove our troubles from us but rather will enable us to face our challenges, to meet them head on, and to emerge victorious." "Wherefore, be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you, and will stand by you.” The talk ended like this: "Though the storm clouds may gather, though the rains may pour down upon us, our knowledge of the gospel and our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. There will be nothing in this world that can defeat us." It was a really good reminder of how much we need to remember to find the positive in all around us.
After church, we got a ride home from Chris and Chris and they invited us to lunch with them and the missionaries. We had already organized lunch, so we just brought our lunch (sweet and sour chicken, mashed potatoes and corn) to their picnic table and Chris brought out stuff for sandwiches and we just shared it all. We must have sat for about an hour and a half just eating and chatting (mostly chatting). The weather was magnificent (sunny and warm) and there was a light breeze blowing - if I didn't know better, I would have thought we were in heaven already. :-)
When we came back into our granny flat, we put on one of our Blockbuster movies, "Basic" starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. It's basically about a U.S. Army training exercise gone bad. The story was good, there was too much swearing (typical army mouths) and the ending took a little time to think about, to get what had been happening throughout the movie. I gave it a 6.5 and Mike gave it a 7.
We then did three more entries in our Star Princess cruise blog today. They have updated the program and so it took a little getting used to. Some parts of the update are better and some are not and, at times, I got really frustrated, but Mike is good at calming me down when that happens and so we were able to get through it fairly well. It's getting closer to being done which is exciting. It's been a lot of work, but also very rewarding recording this amazing journey in our lives.
After supper, it was on to another movie: '28 Days' starring Sandra Bullock. It's the story of a young woman who is addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs. After she crashes a car into a house while under the influence, she ends up sentenced to either 28 days in rehab or jail - she chooses rehab. The movie chronicles her struggles as she deals with her addiction in rehab. We both thought it was a really good story, but it moved a little slow at times. I gave it a 7 and Mike gave it a 6.5. We are finding that there are very few good movies out there. I wonder if all the good ones were made years ago - if you look up the 'AFI's 100 Movies (2008)', how many have been made in the past ten years? The answer is TWO: 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Sixth Sense'. Just goes to show that the calibre of films today are not what they used to be and that is disappointing.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Today was another busy day. We started off by going to a baptism of a woman named Terrie Ann White. When I read the program with her name on it, I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she went by Terrie or Terrie Ann. She said she goes by both, but that sometimes she adds her middle name Ann because she gets 'teased' because Terry White is the name of a chemist (drug store) chain here. I told her that I would remember her name since it was the same as our daughter, Terri-Ann, even if it was spelled differently.
The spirit at the baptismal service was so strong and I was so happy that we had come. It took me back to how I had felt when I was baptized back in 1974. I remembered that I had written in a journal that I had felt lighter when I came out of the water and that I had felt that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I suggested to Terrie Ann that she go home and write down how she was feeling this day. She told us later that she felt so special, like a princess, with how the focus was on her on her special day.
After the baptism, we were invited to go over to Amanda Brown's home for a luncheon in honour of Terrie Ann's baptism. It was really nice to be invited and it gave us a chance to talk with some more members on a more personal level since there were just a few of us there (about fourteen). It's nice when we can be a part of smaller gatherings as we get a chance to really talk with people and get to know them better. The food was really yummy, too - Amanda had cooked steak, chicken legs, and sausages on the barbecue (the barbie :-) and salads and bread. I felt a little bad for Terrie Ann because she had to go even before lunch was served because people were coming to her place from quite a ways away and even though she asked them not to come, they still showed up. I told her that we would enjoy her luncheon in her absence. :-)
While we were at the luncheon, I got a phone call from Julianne asking us if we would like to go out for supper with her and her husband, Clive. I told her we would love to do that - I always like to go out for a good meal and with good company. I thought this would be a good way to get to know Julianne a bit better and for us to meet her husband. We went to the Hervey Bay RSL club - they always have great roast dinners there and tonight was no exception. They had roast beef with gravy, roast potatoes, carrots, cauliflower with cream sauce and peas. It also came with a very warm yummy roll with butter. I gave my cauliflower to Mike and he gave me his peas. It was really delicious! We enjoyed talking with Julianne and Clive and ended up talking way past finishing our dinner. We checked out the desserts, but Julianne and I decided that the cost of what you got for the portion size that you got was not worth it. When we told Clive this, he invited us back to their house for dessert (ice cream with chocolate sauce and nuts or peaches). It was a really lovely night out and we told them that we would like to do more of these get togethers once we come back from Canada.
One interesting thing that Clive told us tonight is that he is an identical twin, but that he and his brother did not share the same birthday. That would be easy enough to understand because twins could be born minutes apart: if the first one was born close to midnight, the second could be born just after midnight. What was amazing about his story, though, was that he and his twin brother were born eight HOURS apart. This was back in 1951 and neither his mom nor the doctor knew that she was having twins until after the first boy was born. I have never heard of twins being born hours apart - I thought that was amazing!
The spirit at the baptismal service was so strong and I was so happy that we had come. It took me back to how I had felt when I was baptized back in 1974. I remembered that I had written in a journal that I had felt lighter when I came out of the water and that I had felt that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I suggested to Terrie Ann that she go home and write down how she was feeling this day. She told us later that she felt so special, like a princess, with how the focus was on her on her special day.
After the baptism, we were invited to go over to Amanda Brown's home for a luncheon in honour of Terrie Ann's baptism. It was really nice to be invited and it gave us a chance to talk with some more members on a more personal level since there were just a few of us there (about fourteen). It's nice when we can be a part of smaller gatherings as we get a chance to really talk with people and get to know them better. The food was really yummy, too - Amanda had cooked steak, chicken legs, and sausages on the barbecue (the barbie :-) and salads and bread. I felt a little bad for Terrie Ann because she had to go even before lunch was served because people were coming to her place from quite a ways away and even though she asked them not to come, they still showed up. I told her that we would enjoy her luncheon in her absence. :-)
While we were at the luncheon, I got a phone call from Julianne asking us if we would like to go out for supper with her and her husband, Clive. I told her we would love to do that - I always like to go out for a good meal and with good company. I thought this would be a good way to get to know Julianne a bit better and for us to meet her husband. We went to the Hervey Bay RSL club - they always have great roast dinners there and tonight was no exception. They had roast beef with gravy, roast potatoes, carrots, cauliflower with cream sauce and peas. It also came with a very warm yummy roll with butter. I gave my cauliflower to Mike and he gave me his peas. It was really delicious! We enjoyed talking with Julianne and Clive and ended up talking way past finishing our dinner. We checked out the desserts, but Julianne and I decided that the cost of what you got for the portion size that you got was not worth it. When we told Clive this, he invited us back to their house for dessert (ice cream with chocolate sauce and nuts or peaches). It was a really lovely night out and we told them that we would like to do more of these get togethers once we come back from Canada.
One interesting thing that Clive told us tonight is that he is an identical twin, but that he and his brother did not share the same birthday. That would be easy enough to understand because twins could be born minutes apart: if the first one was born close to midnight, the second could be born just after midnight. What was amazing about his story, though, was that he and his twin brother were born eight HOURS apart. This was back in 1951 and neither his mom nor the doctor knew that she was having twins until after the first boy was born. I have never heard of twins being born hours apart - I thought that was amazing!
Friday, November 20, 2009
Another busy day today - we were able to borrow Julianne's car again which was great! After dropping her off at work, we went to find the Tourist Information place. We were on the right road, but we turned left instead of right and ended up going out of town. It turned out well, though, as we went by the 'Welcome to Hervey Bay' sign and so we were able to get a photo of that. We also took a pic of a 'Hervey Bay' sign which showed a whale as part of the sign (Hervey Bay is well known for their whale watching tours). One of those photos is now on the top right of this blog page. We are going to take some more photos of Hervey Bay next week so that you guys can see some of the places I am talking about in this blog.
We did find the Tourist Information place and we were able to sign up for a 'Resident's Discount Card'. It's called a Staycation card as well and we can use it to get discounts for accomodation, attractions and activities, dining, and businesses and services in the Hervey Bay area. The idea is that they want you to stay in Hervey Bay for your vacation and so they give you discounts to all these things to entice you to 'staycation'. There's really not many discounts that we will use, but it's nice of them to give these cards out to those of us who live here. We also received a 'Welcome to Hervey Bay' package which had in it: local maps, guide pamphlets and booklets about local services, parks and visitor's guides, and a handy little pocketbook which has a yellow pages, white pages, maps and postal code directory in it.
After that, we went and did some exciting shopping. To Aldi's to get some canned goods, to Sam's Warehouse to get some sheets and a clock, to Big W to get Mike a swim shirt and to Coles to get the rest of the groceries. We also went to the local butcher's and I asked the woman behind the counter if I had to cook my chicken right away and not leave it in the fridge when I bought it from the butcher's. I told her how earlier this week I had bought some chicken on Monday and left it in the fridge 'til Wednesday and it went totally off. She said that chicken will not last long in the fridge at all and that I should cook it today (which I did). Since we didn't use a butcher when we were in Canada, I guess I am going to have to figure it out as I go. I did talk to Julianne about it and she said that she freezes everything as soon as she gets home. For now, we cooked the chicken tonight and the hamburger as well - we ate the chicken tonight and will eat it again tomorrow and the hamburger in spaghetti sauce on Sunday night. It was frustrating to have to throw the chicken out last Wednesday, but I guess I have to get used to using it right away if I want to use the butcher since we only have a small fridge and no freezer. The butcher's meat seems way fresher and the one that we go to has really good prices even compared to the major supermarkets.
After bringing everything home and putting it away and having lunch, it was still only about 1:15pm and we didn't have to be back at Julianne's work until 3:30pm. I suggested to Mike that since it was such a hot day (31C today) that we get changed into our togs (bathing suits) and head down to the beach for a swim. We decided to park the car at Julianne's work and then walk to the water (her shop is right across the road from the beach). We weren't sure what kind of swimming it would be there (shallow or deep), but it didn't matter to us as we just wanted to cool off and enjoy the ocean. It turned out that at the time we went, the tide was quite far out and so we ended up basically sitting in the water up to our waists. It was really nice to just sit and relax and chat while we cooled off. We were only there about half an hour, but it was very refreshing. It's such a treat to us right now and I hope that we don't start taking it for granted. On Monday, we are going to ask Julianne if we can use the car again and this time we are going to do our shopping quickly so that we can go and spend a few hours at the beach.
I had to catch up on my emails today, so I spent some time this afternoon (after Julianne dropped us off) on the computer while Mike played some cards games at the kitchen table. When he had played all the games he could, I told him I would get off the computer so that we could make dinner. After dinner, we were taking down the swimming towels off the line when Chris and Christine asked us how we liked their new purchase. They had bought a small pool to put in their backyard for when they get really hot and just want to take a quick dip to cool off. We got to talking with them and after a bit they asked us if we wanted to sit down at their picnic table and try some of the hummus that Christine had made. I told her we would try it but that I am quite fussy when it comes to food so that she was not to be offended if I didn't like it. The hummus was made from chick peas, lemon and paprika and she served it with rice crackers. It smelled good which is something I always do with new foods (if I don't like the smell, I don't taste it) and so I took a small bit of hummus on a cracker. It actually tasted quite good and so I had some more. We ended up chatting with them 'til about 9:15pm - they are a nice couple and we had a really good time chatting and getting to know each other better.
When we came inside after our visit with them, we decided to put on another one of our movies that we had rented from Blockbuster. Tonight's choice was 'Anchorman' starring Wil Ferrell. I went to 'Rotten Tomatoes' to see what kind of percentage they got from that community and they got a 65%, 69% and 83%. Well, for us, we couldn't even rate it as we thought it wasn't funny at all and stopped watching it after about half an hour. I couldn't believe that people thought it was good or funny - to us it was just plain dumb and not even the funny dumb, either. I am glad that we only paid 99 cents to rent it, that's for sure.
We did find the Tourist Information place and we were able to sign up for a 'Resident's Discount Card'. It's called a Staycation card as well and we can use it to get discounts for accomodation, attractions and activities, dining, and businesses and services in the Hervey Bay area. The idea is that they want you to stay in Hervey Bay for your vacation and so they give you discounts to all these things to entice you to 'staycation'. There's really not many discounts that we will use, but it's nice of them to give these cards out to those of us who live here. We also received a 'Welcome to Hervey Bay' package which had in it: local maps, guide pamphlets and booklets about local services, parks and visitor's guides, and a handy little pocketbook which has a yellow pages, white pages, maps and postal code directory in it.
After that, we went and did some exciting shopping
After bringing everything home and putting it away and having lunch, it was still only about 1:15pm and we didn't have to be back at Julianne's work until 3:30pm. I suggested to Mike that since it was such a hot day (31C today) that we get changed into our togs (bathing suits) and head down to the beach for a swim. We decided to park the car at Julianne's work and then walk to the water (her shop is right across the road from the beach). We weren't sure what kind of swimming it would be there (shallow or deep), but it didn't matter to us as we just wanted to cool off and enjoy the ocean. It turned out that at the time we went, the tide was quite far out and so we ended up basically sitting in the water up to our waists. It was really nice to just sit and relax and chat while we cooled off. We were only there about half an hour, but it was very refreshing. It's such a treat to us right now and I hope that we don't start taking it for granted. On Monday, we are going to ask Julianne if we can use the car again and this time we are going to do our shopping quickly so that we can go and spend a few hours at the beach.
I had to catch up on my emails today, so I spent some time this afternoon (after Julianne dropped us off) on the computer while Mike played some cards games at the kitchen table. When he had played all the games he could, I told him I would get off the computer so that we could make dinner. After dinner, we were taking down the swimming towels off the line when Chris and Christine asked us how we liked their new purchase. They had bought a small pool to put in their backyard for when they get really hot and just want to take a quick dip to cool off. We got to talking with them and after a bit they asked us if we wanted to sit down at their picnic table and try some of the hummus that Christine had made. I told her we would try it but that I am quite fussy when it comes to food so that she was not to be offended if I didn't like it. The hummus was made from chick peas, lemon and paprika and she served it with rice crackers. It smelled good which is something I always do with new foods (if I don't like the smell, I don't taste it) and so I took a small bit of hummus on a cracker. It actually tasted quite good and so I had some more. We ended up chatting with them 'til about 9:15pm - they are a nice couple and we had a really good time chatting and getting to know each other better.
When we came inside after our visit with them, we decided to put on another one of our movies that we had rented from Blockbuster. Tonight's choice was 'Anchorman' starring Wil Ferrell. I went to 'Rotten Tomatoes' to see what kind of percentage they got from that community and they got a 65%, 69% and 83%. Well, for us, we couldn't even rate it as we thought it wasn't funny at all and stopped watching it after about half an hour. I couldn't believe that people thought it was good or funny - to us it was just plain dumb and not even the funny dumb, either. I am glad that we only paid 99 cents to rent it, that's for sure.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
We woke up early this morning as we were hoping that Julianne would have received my phone message last night and would be here at 8:30am so that we could use her car today. As it turned out, she didn't show up at that time. She did phone me later and told me that she had left her phone at work and she doesn't have an answering machine at home. She told me that we could use her car tomorrow. As it turns out, that will be good cuz we can have the car for the whole day as opposed to the half day we would have had the car today.
First on our list was to get the laundry done. Since we have to hang all our clothes, we have to start early in the morning. We were able to get three loads done today - even though our front loader takes over an hour to wash one load. We are using a eco-friendly detergent called 'Earth Choice' and it works really well. You have to buy a special soap here on the property because 'grey water' (recycled water) is used for washing clothes. I am not sure if the front loader is the reason why the clothes came out so white or if it's the soap or a combination of the two. It's weird watching the clothes wash, though, as the soap is low-sudsing and it doesn't look as if soap is being used at all. The reason that the front loading machine was installed here is that it takes way less water to do a wash and they are often in a water rationing mode here.
We spent most of the day working on our Princess Cruise blog - we are getting better at doing it without having to make corrections, but the only time we have been perfect is one day that had no photos. :-) We have completed 17 days now which is great - we will keep working on it every day. Mike and I agree that we don't have time for a job right now - we are too busy! :-)
For lunch today, we heated up two cans of soup - minestrone for me and moroccan lamb and couscous for Mike. When I tasted mine, the liquid part of the soup tasted horrible. When Mike tasted his, it was so spicy, even he couldn't handle it. We decided to throw them out and eat some Chunky soup instead. We are definitely having to try different brands here - sometimes the food tastes good (like what we're used to) and sometimes it's just off. Don't know why they just don't have all the foods I like here. :-)
We did take time this afternoon to watch one of our six movies that we rented at Blockbuster. We decided to watch a comedy called 'Are We There Yet?' It was about a single guy who falls for a single mom and ends up driving her kids from Oregon to Vancouver, B.C. to meet up with her there. It was an okay movie - we gave it a 6.0 - one of them typical kid movies where the single mom's kids don't like anyone who likes their mom, gives him a hard time, he wins them over, blah, blah, blah. But, it was better than last night's movie, 'About A Boy' which we gave a 4.5.
Since we had to eat our supper for lunch, we decided to go to the local convenience store which is also a take-away. After looking over the menu very carefully, I decided on a sausage roll, chico roll and chips (french fries - see, I'm talking Australian already :-) and Mike had fish and chips. All of the take-away was quite tasty. When you get chips over here, they often come sprinkled with chicken salt rather than regular salt. It tastes like they add chicken powder (like Bovril or Oxo in Canada) to salt - it's really tasty.
We spent the evening watching tv - yes, we do really like all the shows we watched. There's a new show called 'Glee' that I really like - about a glee club in a high school. Then we watched three hours of CSI - Miami, Vegas, and New York. All three of the episodes were connected to each other and so the stars of each show were on the shows of each other.
First on our list was to get the laundry done. Since we have to hang all our clothes, we have to start early in the morning. We were able to get three loads done today - even though our front loader takes over an hour to wash one load. We are using a eco-friendly detergent called 'Earth Choice' and it works really well. You have to buy a special soap here on the property because 'grey water' (recycled water) is used for washing clothes. I am not sure if the front loader is the reason why the clothes came out so white or if it's the soap or a combination of the two. It's weird watching the clothes wash, though, as the soap is low-sudsing and it doesn't look as if soap is being used at all. The reason that the front loading machine was installed here is that it takes way less water to do a wash and they are often in a water rationing mode here.
We spent most of the day working on our Princess Cruise blog - we are getting better at doing it without having to make corrections, but the only time we have been perfect is one day that had no photos. :-) We have completed 17 days now which is great - we will keep working on it every day. Mike and I agree that we don't have time for a job right now - we are too busy! :-)
For lunch today, we heated up two cans of soup - minestrone for me and moroccan lamb and couscous for Mike. When I tasted mine, the liquid part of the soup tasted horrible. When Mike tasted his, it was so spicy, even he couldn't handle it. We decided to throw them out and eat some Chunky soup instead. We are definitely having to try different brands here - sometimes the food tastes good (like what we're used to) and sometimes it's just off. Don't know why they just don't have all the foods I like here. :-)
We did take time this afternoon to watch one of our six movies that we rented at Blockbuster. We decided to watch a comedy called 'Are We There Yet?' It was about a single guy who falls for a single mom and ends up driving her kids from Oregon to Vancouver, B.C. to meet up with her there. It was an okay movie - we gave it a 6.0 - one of them typical kid movies where the single mom's kids don't like anyone who likes their mom, gives him a hard time, he wins them over, blah, blah, blah. But, it was better than last night's movie, 'About A Boy' which we gave a 4.5.
Since we had to eat our supper for lunch, we decided to go to the local convenience store which is also a take-away. After looking over the menu very carefully, I decided on a sausage roll, chico roll and chips (french fries - see, I'm talking Australian already :-) and Mike had fish and chips. All of the take-away was quite tasty. When you get chips over here, they often come sprinkled with chicken salt rather than regular salt. It tastes like they add chicken powder (like Bovril or Oxo in Canada) to salt - it's really tasty.
We spent the evening watching tv - yes, we do really like all the shows we watched. There's a new show called 'Glee' that I really like - about a glee club in a high school. Then we watched three hours of CSI - Miami, Vegas, and New York. All three of the episodes were connected to each other and so the stars of each show were on the shows of each other.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Today was a stay-at-home day, but it was still a busy day. Our day started with a call to our boys (and Terri-Ann and James :-) We used a great computer program called 'Skype' which allows us to see and hear whoever we call via the computer. We had emailed Terri-Ann yesterday to ask her if she could get on Skype today around 7pm her time. When she logged onto her computer and into Skype, we could tell and then were able to 'phone' her. Soon we were looking at her on our computer screen and then soon came Colin and Caleb into the screen. It was awesome to be able to see them and talk with them! We will definitely get a lot of use out of Skype when we are here and they are there.
It was so cute watching Colin sticking out his tongue and talking with him about school and his friend, Devon. Colin says he likes school which makes me happy since I always love to hear that a young child loves school. Hopefully that feeling will stick with him for a long time. He shared a french song with us (Bonjour Mes Amis) - one that I remember the girls singing when they were young and attending french immersion school. Caleb was trying to talk with us, too - thank goodness Mommy was there to translate for us. I asked Colin what he would like us to bring him from Australia and he said 'a train' - seems he is still really focused on trains, so I am going to have to do some serious looking in the next couple of weeks. :-)
The boys soon left our conversation to continue playing with Daddy and their grandpa (James' dad) and so Mike and I were able to have a long conversation with Terri-Ann. It was great to be able to see her and talk with her at the same time. We talked for over an hour and finally we had to say goodbye cuz we could see that Terri-Ann was tired and it was time for her to go and have a rest. James and his dad were going to put the boys down to bed, so Terri-Ann could go and just take care of herself.
After our chat on Skype, Mike and I began putting my journal from our cruise and the photos online. We had no idea that it was going to take so long. I thought it was just going to be a matter of cut and paste, but it has turned out to be so much more. What we have decided to do since this is a one-off journal (just about our thirty day cruise from San Francisco to Sydney) is to write the journal backwards starting with the day of arrival in Sydney. When it is completed, the journal will then run from our first day to our last as when you write a blog, the latest entry is at the top. We first have to upload the photos which means we have to go through all the photos that we took on that day (sometimes there are over a hundred or more per day). Then, we have to write captions under each of the photos that we have chosen. Then, we copy and paste my journal from the computer. Then, we have to publish it and see where we need to adjust the formatting. And just when we think we have it down pat, something happens and we have to spend a lot more time fixing an entry.
We spent most of today working on it 'til almost 7pm, stopping only for lunch and supper and a few games of cribbage. So far, we have only completed seven days which means that we have 23 days to go. It's going to be great once it's done and I want to print it out when we get back to Canada and make it into a book, but it's going to be a very time consuming exercise. Good thing we have all the time in the world right now, eh? :-)
We watched a video after supper tonight called 'About a Boy' starring Hugh Grant. I am glad that we only paid 99 cents to rent it from Blockbuster. We did end up watching it right through just to see how it ended, but it's not that interesting a movie. It's amazing how you can read the back of a dvd case and think it sounds really good and then it turns out not to be. Anyway, we have five more dvds to watch from Blockbuster, so we are hoping that they are better than this one was.
After the movie was over, we turned on the tv to watch 'Criminal Minds'. It's one of our favourite shows. Last night, after watching another tv show (Lie to Me), we talked again about how we don't want to watch tv just for the sake of watching it. That show is okay, but it's not one that we really like, so we have renewed our plan to only watch tv if it's something we really want to watch. I feel like I wasted my time last night watching that show and I don't want to do that. There are other things we can do like playing games and reading that would be a much better use of our time.
It was so cute watching Colin sticking out his tongue and talking with him about school and his friend, Devon. Colin says he likes school which makes me happy since I always love to hear that a young child loves school. Hopefully that feeling will stick with him for a long time. He shared a french song with us (Bonjour Mes Amis) - one that I remember the girls singing when they were young and attending french immersion school. Caleb was trying to talk with us, too - thank goodness Mommy was there to translate for us. I asked Colin what he would like us to bring him from Australia and he said 'a train' - seems he is still really focused on trains, so I am going to have to do some serious looking in the next couple of weeks. :-)
The boys soon left our conversation to continue playing with Daddy and their grandpa (James' dad) and so Mike and I were able to have a long conversation with Terri-Ann. It was great to be able to see her and talk with her at the same time. We talked for over an hour and finally we had to say goodbye cuz we could see that Terri-Ann was tired and it was time for her to go and have a rest. James and his dad were going to put the boys down to bed, so Terri-Ann could go and just take care of herself.
After our chat on Skype, Mike and I began putting my journal from our cruise and the photos online. We had no idea that it was going to take so long. I thought it was just going to be a matter of cut and paste, but it has turned out to be so much more. What we have decided to do since this is a one-off journal (just about our thirty day cruise from San Francisco to Sydney) is to write the journal backwards starting with the day of arrival in Sydney. When it is completed, the journal will then run from our first day to our last as when you write a blog, the latest entry is at the top. We first have to upload the photos which means we have to go through all the photos that we took on that day (sometimes there are over a hundred or more per day). Then, we have to write captions under each of the photos that we have chosen. Then, we copy and paste my journal from the computer. Then, we have to publish it and see where we need to adjust the formatting. And just when we think we have it down pat, something happens and we have to spend a lot more time fixing an entry.
We spent most of today working on it 'til almost 7pm, stopping only for lunch and supper and a few games of cribbage. So far, we have only completed seven days which means that we have 23 days to go. It's going to be great once it's done and I want to print it out when we get back to Canada and make it into a book, but it's going to be a very time consuming exercise. Good thing we have all the time in the world right now, eh? :-)
We watched a video after supper tonight called 'About a Boy' starring Hugh Grant. I am glad that we only paid 99 cents to rent it from Blockbuster. We did end up watching it right through just to see how it ended, but it's not that interesting a movie. It's amazing how you can read the back of a dvd case and think it sounds really good and then it turns out not to be. Anyway, we have five more dvds to watch from Blockbuster, so we are hoping that they are better than this one was.
After the movie was over, we turned on the tv to watch 'Criminal Minds'. It's one of our favourite shows. Last night, after watching another tv show (Lie to Me), we talked again about how we don't want to watch tv just for the sake of watching it. That show is okay, but it's not one that we really like, so we have renewed our plan to only watch tv if it's something we really want to watch. I feel like I wasted my time last night watching that show and I don't want to do that. There are other things we can do like playing games and reading that would be a much better use of our time.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Well another busy day - well, a busy mid-day at least. We took ages to get ready and when it was around 11am I was ready to leave. I was planning on phoning Terri-Ann to talk to my boys when Mike said it was after 8pm in Orangeville. I told him it was only 7pm and then I realized the mistake I had made: Queensland does not do Daylight Savings Time, so although Orangeville is 16 hours behind Sydney, it's only 15 hours behind Hervey Bay. So, by the time we would have gotten to the phone booth, Colin and Caleb would have been asleep. Sheesh! :-) So, we went to the phone booth anyway and were going to call Krystal and Jennifer to see how they were doing. When we got there, there was a man using a concrete saw to cut through concrete on a renovation job being done right next to the phone booth. So, off we went towards town.
Our first stop was at the library - we wanted to get library cards and I wanted to find out whether they had a book club. I enjoyed the one I used to belong to in Bolton and I was hoping that I could join one here. We got our cards with no problem using our driver's licenses as I.D. I talked with one of the librarians about the book club. They actually have a number of book clubs, but only one that meets at the library. The woman told me that that book club was full, but that if I emailed her, she could tell me about other clubs in town. There is a 'book chat', but that's just people getting together over a 'cuppa' (cup of tea) and sharing with each other good books that each have read. I prefer to read a book and then get together to discuss it. So, I will email this woman tomorrow and find out about the other book clubs and then contact them and find out about the February book since I won't be here in December and January. Before we left the library, we borrowed seven dvds which we can have for three weeks.
Our next stop was to Blockbuster's Video to get a card from them. Again we used our driver's licenses and our rental agreement from the granny flat and we were issued a card. We then rented 6 movies - they are only 99 cents on Tuesdays and they are good for a week. We didn't rent any new releases as we would have had to return them tomorrow and we wanted to stay home tomorrow. Besides, there wasn't much in the new releases that interested us - and what did interest us, we had already seen (mostly on the planes we have travelled on in the past while).
Loaded down with our 13 videos, we walked home. I find that it's much easier to walk to town than home. :-) One thing is that we went a different way getting to town and it was more flat than the way we came home. And by the time we had walked to town and then all around town, we were tired and it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other by the time we were almost home. My feet were sore and I couldn't wait to get my shoes off. On the way to town, the sun was shining and there was a beautiful strong breeze blowing. By the time we came home (at 3pm), the sun was shining even stronger (it reached 33C today) and there was less breeze, so we were sweating really well on our way home. I love the heat, but I love the breeze with the heat even better. :-)
We spent the rest of the evening after dinner watching the dvd of the first season of the tv show 'MASH'. Mike and I used to both watch it when we were teenagers and we really enjoy watching it. We watched 7 episodes and it was really nice to 'go back in time' and just relax after our busy day in town. We are doing a lot of walking here in Hervey Bay on the days we don't have Julianne's car and, although it hurts our feet, we really do enjoy walking and feel that if we keep doing it, our feet won't hurt so much after a while.
Now, you think we would be losing weight (and maybe we are with all this walking we are doing), but we are also enjoying a very nice Australian cookie that we love - Tim Tams. They are two cookies with chocolate in between them and then they are covered with chocolate as well. They are sooooooooooooo delicious and they are sooooooooo hard to resist. But, tonight, we finished them all up and we won't buy anymore, so hopefully, the walking will do its job and we can get back into our pre-cruise clothes. :-)
Our first stop was at the library - we wanted to get library cards and I wanted to find out whether they had a book club. I enjoyed the one I used to belong to in Bolton and I was hoping that I could join one here. We got our cards with no problem using our driver's licenses as I.D. I talked with one of the librarians about the book club. They actually have a number of book clubs, but only one that meets at the library. The woman told me that that book club was full, but that if I emailed her, she could tell me about other clubs in town. There is a 'book chat', but that's just people getting together over a 'cuppa' (cup of tea) and sharing with each other good books that each have read. I prefer to read a book and then get together to discuss it. So, I will email this woman tomorrow and find out about the other book clubs and then contact them and find out about the February book since I won't be here in December and January. Before we left the library, we borrowed seven dvds which we can have for three weeks.
Our next stop was to Blockbuster's Video to get a card from them. Again we used our driver's licenses and our rental agreement from the granny flat and we were issued a card. We then rented 6 movies - they are only 99 cents on Tuesdays and they are good for a week. We didn't rent any new releases as we would have had to return them tomorrow and we wanted to stay home tomorrow. Besides, there wasn't much in the new releases that interested us - and what did interest us, we had already seen (mostly on the planes we have travelled on in the past while).
Loaded down with our 13 videos, we walked home. I find that it's much easier to walk to town than home. :-) One thing is that we went a different way getting to town and it was more flat than the way we came home. And by the time we had walked to town and then all around town, we were tired and it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other by the time we were almost home. My feet were sore and I couldn't wait to get my shoes off. On the way to town, the sun was shining and there was a beautiful strong breeze blowing. By the time we came home (at 3pm), the sun was shining even stronger (it reached 33C today) and there was less breeze, so we were sweating really well on our way home. I love the heat, but I love the breeze with the heat even better. :-)
We spent the rest of the evening after dinner watching the dvd of the first season of the tv show 'MASH'. Mike and I used to both watch it when we were teenagers and we really enjoy watching it. We watched 7 episodes and it was really nice to 'go back in time' and just relax after our busy day in town. We are doing a lot of walking here in Hervey Bay on the days we don't have Julianne's car and, although it hurts our feet, we really do enjoy walking and feel that if we keep doing it, our feet won't hurt so much after a while.
Now, you think we would be losing weight (and maybe we are with all this walking we are doing), but we are also enjoying a very nice Australian cookie that we love - Tim Tams. They are two cookies with chocolate in between them and then they are covered with chocolate as well. They are sooooooooooooo delicious and they are sooooooooo hard to resist. But, tonight, we finished them all up and we won't buy anymore, so hopefully, the walking will do its job and we can get back into our pre-cruise clothes. :-)
Monday, November 16, 2009
Today was another perfect day - oh wait - yesterday was perfect - so...today must be beautiful. :-) We have seen a few clouds, but they always seem to be surrounding the city rather than over it. Today I told Mike that I was getting bored of a blue sky every day. ;-)
We borrowed Julianne's car today to do a few errands and our first stop was to Dundowran to see the house that we love and to see how much traffic there would be in the morning in that area around school time. As it turned out, we got there too late as the students were already in school. We did take a second look at the outside of the house and I still love it. We also took a drive around the neighbourhood and found a house for sale by the owner. We phoned the number on the sign out the front and made an appointment to go and see the house. It turns out that the house is quite nice - four bedrooms, family room, lounge room, kitchen, dining room, but no shed. Also the kitchen wasn't quite as big as the other house we like just around the corner. The price sure was right, but we are going to wait and see if this other house comes down in price since they have to leave here by the beginning of January.
After we had seen this house, we went back for another look at the house we like and while we were sitting there, the woman who owns the house (Noelle) came out and asked us if we wanted another look inside. I said 'yes' since I couldn't remember some things about it. I still love it and hope that it's THE house - of course, if it's not, I know that something better will come along. Noelle and I had a great chat about our situation and her situation, so now it will just be a matter of wait and see.
Our next stop was the Department of Motor Vehicles. We have exciting news! We got our Queensland driver's licenses today and they are good for five years! We were so thrilled to be able to both get them. We knew Mike could based on the different kinds of identification he had, but we weren't sure if they would use two passports for me (I have a Canadian and an Australian passport). The lady at the counter checked out both of them and said that they would work just fine. Of course, our photos on our licenses aren't that good, but who has nice driver's license photos. :-)
After that, it was just a rush of visiting different stores: Sam's warehouse to pick up sheets and a laundry basket and to look at furniture on sale just to see their quality; then, to a variety of electronic stores to try and find a cord for Mike's shaver (no luck); River's, to try and find a church shirt or two for Mike (no luck there - mostly long-sleeved shirts on sale and we were looking for short-sleeved ones); Big W to buy a fly swatter and night light (for the bathroom to see in the middle of the night as it's really dark out here at night); Woolworth's to get some more groceries. Near there, we went to a butcher's to buy some meat. When we were there the other day, I noticed that they sold boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $9.99 a kg and that is a good price here. Australians love their butchers and this one will be getting a lot of our business, I think, as their prices are really good, they are really nice people and their meats look really fresh.
After picking up Julianne and dropping us off at our place, we spent the rest of the day just hanging out at home: playing cards, on the computer, reading and a little tv watching. Gee, it's nice to be able to relax every once in a while. ;-)
We borrowed Julianne's car today to do a few errands and our first stop was to Dundowran to see the house that we love and to see how much traffic there would be in the morning in that area around school time. As it turned out, we got there too late as the students were already in school. We did take a second look at the outside of the house and I still love it. We also took a drive around the neighbourhood and found a house for sale by the owner. We phoned the number on the sign out the front and made an appointment to go and see the house. It turns out that the house is quite nice - four bedrooms, family room, lounge room, kitchen, dining room, but no shed. Also the kitchen wasn't quite as big as the other house we like just around the corner. The price sure was right, but we are going to wait and see if this other house comes down in price since they have to leave here by the beginning of January.
After we had seen this house, we went back for another look at the house we like and while we were sitting there, the woman who owns the house (Noelle) came out and asked us if we wanted another look inside. I said 'yes' since I couldn't remember some things about it. I still love it and hope that it's THE house - of course, if it's not, I know that something better will come along. Noelle and I had a great chat about our situation and her situation, so now it will just be a matter of wait and see.
Our next stop was the Department of Motor Vehicles. We have exciting news! We got our Queensland driver's licenses today and they are good for five years! We were so thrilled to be able to both get them. We knew Mike could based on the different kinds of identification he had, but we weren't sure if they would use two passports for me (I have a Canadian and an Australian passport). The lady at the counter checked out both of them and said that they would work just fine. Of course, our photos on our licenses aren't that good, but who has nice driver's license photos. :-)
After that, it was just a rush of visiting different stores: Sam's warehouse to pick up sheets and a laundry basket and to look at furniture on sale just to see their quality; then, to a variety of electronic stores to try and find a cord for Mike's shaver (no luck); River's, to try and find a church shirt or two for Mike (no luck there - mostly long-sleeved shirts on sale and we were looking for short-sleeved ones); Big W to buy a fly swatter and night light (for the bathroom to see in the middle of the night as it's really dark out here at night); Woolworth's to get some more groceries. Near there, we went to a butcher's to buy some meat. When we were there the other day, I noticed that they sold boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $9.99 a kg and that is a good price here. Australians love their butchers and this one will be getting a lot of our business, I think, as their prices are really good, they are really nice people and their meats look really fresh.
After picking up Julianne and dropping us off at our place, we spent the rest of the day just hanging out at home: playing cards, on the computer, reading and a little tv watching. Gee, it's nice to be able to relax every once in a while. ;-)
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Today is Sunday and as Sunday is supposed to be a 'day of rest', that is exactly what we did. We were up at 7:30am to get ready for church as it started at 9am. We are only a 15 minute walk from the chapel and so we left at about 8:35am so that we could be there with 10 minutes to spare. When we were seated and there was about five minutes left until the meeting was going to start, one of the counsellors got up and asked for reverence. As soon as he said that, you could have heard a pin drop and it was like that until the meeting started. Usually, in most wards we have been in, there would still have been a little chattering, but not here.
There were only two speakers today as the counsellor who was conducting the meeting asked his son (who had just received his graduation diploma from seminary) to bear his testimony. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when his dad said he would be doing it before the first talk. :-) It was a typical youth testimony - short and mostly about being thankful he had gone through seminary and gratefulness for his seminary teacher. The first speaker, Sue Coates, is in the Relief Society presidency and she spoke about the Proclamation of the Family - about how important it is to remain close to your family. The second speaker, Brother Carr, spoke about his spiritual experiences over his life - he was baptized into the church, went away from it for a number of years, and then became active again after one of his sons became ill.
Sunday School was taught by Trudy Yuginovich - the lesson was about doing your family history. She talked about how it's up to us to use the resources/tools that the church provides to start/continue/complete your genealogy. It's something that I have been thinking about doing for ages and now that I am planning on supply teaching instead of full-time teaching, I am thinking that this will be the perfect time to input all the information I do have into the church program and then continue on with it. In fact, my dad's cousin, John Leggo, lives in Sydney and my mom has asked me to get what I can from him regarding my dad's side of the family. I have spoken to John and we are going to meet up in the week before we head back to Canada this time so that I can get a copy of what he has.
Relief Society was taught by Nerida Sweeney - she taught a lesson about Joseph Smith and the feelings he had as he taught the Saints the things they needed to know. She is a good teacher (just like Rosalea was last week) and it's great to be in those kinds of lessons. Joseph Smith is one of my heroes not only because of what he did in restoring the gospel to the earth, but also because he was persecuted so much and yet he kept going in the face of adversity. One thing I learned in this week's lesson about him was that he loved the children and they loved him. He seemed to treat them with respect and showed them that he cared about them.
Chris and Chris gave us a ride home, although we would have walked home if they had not offered. It was another beautiful day today (or was it another perfect day today? :-) Mike says he can't remember from one day to the next if it's a beautiful day or a perfect day that day (the motto here in Queensland is 'Beautiful one day, Perfect the next'. :-) The rest of today we have just been hanging around our place playing cards, making shopping lists, and planning what we are going to be doing tomorrow since Julianne is loaning us her car again. I love Sundays!!! :-)
There were only two speakers today as the counsellor who was conducting the meeting asked his son (who had just received his graduation diploma from seminary) to bear his testimony. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when his dad said he would be doing it before the first talk. :-) It was a typical youth testimony - short and mostly about being thankful he had gone through seminary and gratefulness for his seminary teacher. The first speaker, Sue Coates, is in the Relief Society presidency and she spoke about the Proclamation of the Family - about how important it is to remain close to your family. The second speaker, Brother Carr, spoke about his spiritual experiences over his life - he was baptized into the church, went away from it for a number of years, and then became active again after one of his sons became ill.
Sunday School was taught by Trudy Yuginovich - the lesson was about doing your family history. She talked about how it's up to us to use the resources/tools that the church provides to start/continue/complete your genealogy. It's something that I have been thinking about doing for ages and now that I am planning on supply teaching instead of full-time teaching, I am thinking that this will be the perfect time to input all the information I do have into the church program and then continue on with it. In fact, my dad's cousin, John Leggo, lives in Sydney and my mom has asked me to get what I can from him regarding my dad's side of the family. I have spoken to John and we are going to meet up in the week before we head back to Canada this time so that I can get a copy of what he has.
Relief Society was taught by Nerida Sweeney - she taught a lesson about Joseph Smith and the feelings he had as he taught the Saints the things they needed to know. She is a good teacher (just like Rosalea was last week) and it's great to be in those kinds of lessons. Joseph Smith is one of my heroes not only because of what he did in restoring the gospel to the earth, but also because he was persecuted so much and yet he kept going in the face of adversity. One thing I learned in this week's lesson about him was that he loved the children and they loved him. He seemed to treat them with respect and showed them that he cared about them.
Chris and Chris gave us a ride home, although we would have walked home if they had not offered. It was another beautiful day today (or was it another perfect day today? :-) Mike says he can't remember from one day to the next if it's a beautiful day or a perfect day that day (the motto here in Queensland is 'Beautiful one day, Perfect the next'. :-) The rest of today we have just been hanging around our place playing cards, making shopping lists, and planning what we are going to be doing tomorrow since Julianne is loaning us her car again. I love Sundays!!! :-)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
This morning, I went to a Relief Society Homemaking meeting. There were 20 sisters in attendance which I thought was a really good turnout since the whole branch only has about 75 members. We were in a tiny room so we were all sitting quite close together in a circle. The sisters first shared their Christmas celebration tradition; then one sister, Lynn, asked if we could all introduce ourselves as she didn't know many of the sisters (she is in Primary so she doesn't get to mingle with the sisters on Sunday) and so we all did that. Two of the sisters in the circle realized that they had gone to Primary together many years ago when they had been in the same ward, so they got to chatting afterwards. Next, some of the sisters shared some Christmas crafts that they had brought with them. I am not into crafts, but there were some cute ideas that I could use for my classes when I get back to teaching. I am going to talk to the sister that shared them tomorrow to see if I can borrow them and write down how I would make them. We ended the meeting by singing some Christmas carols. The Relief Society President, Leanne Rostedt, told us that she was supposed to show us how to make a gingerbread house, but that she had had a horrible week and so hadn't had a chance to get all the stuff together to do that. I got a chance to know some more names of the sisters in the branch, so that was nice.
Later in the afternoon, Chris and Chris (our 'landlords') asked us if we would like to go swimming at the beach - they often go of an afternoon - so we jumped at the chance as we have been here over a week and have not been once to swim in the beautiful ocean water. The time was about 3pm and so by the time we got there, it would have been about 3:15pm. There were a lot of waves this time - the past two times we have been here, we hadn't experienced that, so it was nice to be in the water and be able to 'body surf' - the waves weren't that big, but it was still nicer than still water. The amazing thing that we noticed was that the water was so warm - Mike even commented that it was warmer than most people keep their swimming pools. The weird thing, though, was that there were pockets of cold water which really took me by surprise when I came upon them. Mike and Chris started chatting about airplanes and his wife, Chris, and I started talking about her family. We stayed in the water for about 45 minutes just chatting from one subject to the next. The only down side for me was that I kept getting salt water in my mouth (it's hard to talk and keep your mouth closed at the same time) and I kept gagging. One time I even brought up a noodle or two from lunch (yeah, I know, yuck!) and that's just how I felt as I was gagging. I hope to get in the water a few more times before we head back to Canada.
When we got home, and after we changed, we walked down to McDonald's - we thought we would support the charity of McHappy Day today - for every Big Mac that was bought, McDonald's would give $1 to Ronald McDonald House. We love Big Macs, but don't like to eat them that often since they are so unhealthy, so this way we felt we could eat them and feel good abour our choice since we were supporting a good cause. :-) The good thing, too, was that we had to walk 45 minutes there and 45 minutes back and so we got in some good exercise to counteract the fatty calories we consumed when eating the Big Mac. ;-)
When we got home, Mike watched a show he likes here called 'Mythbusters' - the hosts of the show try and replicate old wives tales and myths to see if they can be 'confirmed', are 'plausible' or are 'busted' (not possible). One such experiment they did in tonight's show was using this red dust that they use to make fires for special effects in movies/tv and burning it in a bucket that is sitting on ice. The myth was that when the burning powder contacts the ice, that it would cause an explosion. The hosts had worked in special effects for many years and didn't think this was plausible. Much to their amazement, when the fire in the bucket got hot enough, it melted the bottom of the bucket and when the fire hit the ice, there was a HUGE explosion. So, this was 'myth confirmed'. While Mike was watching that, I wrote some emails to try and catch up on my correspondence.
After that show, Mike and I changed positions, and I watched a favourite British show of mine that is on tv here called 'The Bill' and Mike did some work on the computer. I had first seen 'The Bill' on a visit to Australia many years ago and I really like it. It's your typical 'cop show' which is my favourite type of tv show. I have always loved cop/detective shows even as a teenager. I used to watch 'Mannix', 'Ironside', 'Hawaii Five-O, 'Streets of San Francisco', 'Adam-12' - shows like that when I was younger and this has carried on over the years. My favourite shows today are ones like 'Law and Order', 'CSI', and 'Criminal Minds'.
Later in the afternoon, Chris and Chris (our 'landlords') asked us if we would like to go swimming at the beach - they often go of an afternoon - so we jumped at the chance as we have been here over a week and have not been once to swim in the beautiful ocean water. The time was about 3pm and so by the time we got there, it would have been about 3:15pm. There were a lot of waves this time - the past two times we have been here, we hadn't experienced that, so it was nice to be in the water and be able to 'body surf' - the waves weren't that big, but it was still nicer than still water. The amazing thing that we noticed was that the water was so warm - Mike even commented that it was warmer than most people keep their swimming pools. The weird thing, though, was that there were pockets of cold water which really took me by surprise when I came upon them. Mike and Chris started chatting about airplanes and his wife, Chris, and I started talking about her family. We stayed in the water for about 45 minutes just chatting from one subject to the next. The only down side for me was that I kept getting salt water in my mouth (it's hard to talk and keep your mouth closed at the same time) and I kept gagging. One time I even brought up a noodle or two from lunch (yeah, I know, yuck!) and that's just how I felt as I was gagging. I hope to get in the water a few more times before we head back to Canada.
When we got home, and after we changed, we walked down to McDonald's - we thought we would support the charity of McHappy Day today - for every Big Mac that was bought, McDonald's would give $1 to Ronald McDonald House. We love Big Macs, but don't like to eat them that often since they are so unhealthy, so this way we felt we could eat them and feel good abour our choice since we were supporting a good cause. :-) The good thing, too, was that we had to walk 45 minutes there and 45 minutes back and so we got in some good exercise to counteract the fatty calories we consumed when eating the Big Mac. ;-)
When we got home, Mike watched a show he likes here called 'Mythbusters' - the hosts of the show try and replicate old wives tales and myths to see if they can be 'confirmed', are 'plausible' or are 'busted' (not possible). One such experiment they did in tonight's show was using this red dust that they use to make fires for special effects in movies/tv and burning it in a bucket that is sitting on ice. The myth was that when the burning powder contacts the ice, that it would cause an explosion. The hosts had worked in special effects for many years and didn't think this was plausible. Much to their amazement, when the fire in the bucket got hot enough, it melted the bottom of the bucket and when the fire hit the ice, there was a HUGE explosion. So, this was 'myth confirmed'. While Mike was watching that, I wrote some emails to try and catch up on my correspondence.
After that show, Mike and I changed positions, and I watched a favourite British show of mine that is on tv here called 'The Bill' and Mike did some work on the computer. I had first seen 'The Bill' on a visit to Australia many years ago and I really like it. It's your typical 'cop show' which is my favourite type of tv show. I have always loved cop/detective shows even as a teenager. I used to watch 'Mannix', 'Ironside', 'Hawaii Five-O, 'Streets of San Francisco', 'Adam-12' - shows like that when I was younger and this has carried on over the years. My favourite shows today are ones like 'Law and Order', 'CSI', and 'Criminal Minds'.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Whew, my feet are really killing me tonight! We went for a VERY long walk today!! Mike needed a haircut and so, after asking our 'landlords' for recommendations, we headed off downtown. When we got back home, Mike went on our gps program to figure out how far we had walked and it was 4km there and 4km back. And, not to mention, but there were a number of hills mixed in there as well. Somehow, on the way down, I didn't notice the downhills, so I was surprised when we came home and had to walk up a number of hills. :-)
When we got to the barber, we found him sitting in a chair and he didn't even get up when we came in. After telling him that Mike wanted a haircut, he got up and walked into the area where he actually cut the hair. He was an older gentleman (about 70) and once he got Mike in the chair, he started up a good chat - turns out he has been here 30 years and quite likes it here. I thought he did an okay job on Mike's hair - it's not what we're used to back in Canada, but for $12. here, you can't complain too much as the average men's haircut is $20. Just as an aside, the taxes are included in everything you buy here and there is no tipping.
After that, we walked over to Coles (one of the two big supermarkets here) to grab a few things we were running out of) and then to Big W (like Walmart) to get a few things that we needed around here (pegs, tea towels, dish cloths, hangars, toothpaste). Our last stop before walking home was a stop at Hungry Jack's (Burger King) to get an ice-cream 'for the road'. :-) It only costs 50c and so that's a cheap treat.
I bought the pegs because I now have to hang all my clothes on the line once they are washed. Very few people dry their clothes in a dryer over here as the weather is so warm all the time and the cost of electricity is quite expensive. I am a bit of a slow hanger upper when it comes to this, but I am sure that I will be able to do it faster the more experience I get. Mike actually hung our stuff up yesterday as the clothes line that is up outside our granny flat is really high and I can't reach it. Our clothes were dry really fast - it was amazing to me how quickly they did.
After we arrived home, Julianne came by with a tv and dvd player - she had called me in the morning before our walk to tell me that she had two tvs and asked us would we like one plus a dvd player to use while we are here. We jumped at the chance simply because sometimes we are so tired in the evening and just want to veg in front of the tv. She also told us that Blockbuster has a $1 per video special on Tuesday nights, so we are going to have 'Video Nights' every Tuesday - I am sure we can find something to rent for that price.
One thing that I have to get used to here is having to turn off all the switches on the plugs after we finish using them. The voltage is 220 volts here and so all the outlets have an on/off switch on them. This is because of the high voltage, but also to conserve power. So, for instance, when we are not watching tv, we turn the switch off and that stops the small power draw for the instant on feature.
After dinner, we did watch a little tv - when we were at Ruth's in Sydney, she had some dvds of a program called 'Midsommer Murders' - it's a british detective show - and we quite like them - tonight they had an episode of that on tv. There are five stations here that you can get 'free to air' as they call it. SBS is a multicultural station (like Omni TV in Toronto), ABC1 is a public broadcasting station (like TVO in Toronto) and Channels 7, 9, and 10 would be your regular tv stations (like ABC, CBS, and NBC). It would be easy to watch tv all the time if we wanted, but we decided tonight to only watch tv when we really liked a program - not to have it running all the time.
When we got to the barber, we found him sitting in a chair and he didn't even get up when we came in. After telling him that Mike wanted a haircut, he got up and walked into the area where he actually cut the hair. He was an older gentleman (about 70) and once he got Mike in the chair, he started up a good chat - turns out he has been here 30 years and quite likes it here. I thought he did an okay job on Mike's hair - it's not what we're used to back in Canada, but for $12. here, you can't complain too much as the average men's haircut is $20. Just as an aside, the taxes are included in everything you buy here and there is no tipping.
After that, we walked over to Coles (one of the two big supermarkets here) to grab a few things we were running out of) and then to Big W (like Walmart) to get a few things that we needed around here (pegs, tea towels, dish cloths, hangars, toothpaste). Our last stop before walking home was a stop at Hungry Jack's (Burger King) to get an ice-cream 'for the road'. :-) It only costs 50c and so that's a cheap treat.
I bought the pegs because I now have to hang all my clothes on the line once they are washed. Very few people dry their clothes in a dryer over here as the weather is so warm all the time and the cost of electricity is quite expensive. I am a bit of a slow hanger upper when it comes to this, but I am sure that I will be able to do it faster the more experience I get. Mike actually hung our stuff up yesterday as the clothes line that is up outside our granny flat is really high and I can't reach it. Our clothes were dry really fast - it was amazing to me how quickly they did.
After we arrived home, Julianne came by with a tv and dvd player - she had called me in the morning before our walk to tell me that she had two tvs and asked us would we like one plus a dvd player to use while we are here. We jumped at the chance simply because sometimes we are so tired in the evening and just want to veg in front of the tv. She also told us that Blockbuster has a $1 per video special on Tuesday nights, so we are going to have 'Video Nights' every Tuesday - I am sure we can find something to rent for that price.
One thing that I have to get used to here is having to turn off all the switches on the plugs after we finish using them. The voltage is 220 volts here and so all the outlets have an on/off switch on them. This is because of the high voltage, but also to conserve power. So, for instance, when we are not watching tv, we turn the switch off and that stops the small power draw for the instant on feature.
After dinner, we did watch a little tv - when we were at Ruth's in Sydney, she had some dvds of a program called 'Midsommer Murders' - it's a british detective show - and we quite like them - tonight they had an episode of that on tv. There are five stations here that you can get 'free to air' as they call it. SBS is a multicultural station (like Omni TV in Toronto), ABC1 is a public broadcasting station (like TVO in Toronto) and Channels 7, 9, and 10 would be your regular tv stations (like ABC, CBS, and NBC). It would be easy to watch tv all the time if we wanted, but we decided tonight to only watch tv when we really liked a program - not to have it running all the time.
Our First Week in Hervey Bay: November 5 - 12
Thursday, November 5, 2009
We touched down on the runway at about 5:30pm tonight in Hervey Bay. We were disappointed to learn that no-one from the hostel would be able to come and pick us up (we were told that we would be picked up as we had booked for two weeks, but the young girl at reception told us that she was the only one there and couldn’t leave), so we took a shuttle to The Friendly Hostel.
We had stayed here last December when we had come here to check out if Mike could handle the heat of summer (he could) and loved this little place. The ad on the internet said if you like to party, don’t come - and it was right - everyone was so nice who stayed here last time and they were also very quiet. That’s why we decided to stay here again.
We were really pleased to be assigned the same room as last time, too. We knew that we would get a good cross breeze in this room, so we really wanted to stay in it. After dumping our suitcases and changing out of our good clothes (you have to dress up when you are flying on an employee pass on Qantas), we walked to our local small supermarket to buy something for supper. We bought meat pies (what else :-) and baked beans and passion fruit pop. It was delicious.
We spent the rest of the evening in front of the tv. We were really tired from the travelling (and having to spend three hours in the Brisbane airport in between flights) so we just wanted to veg for the evening. Our ‘apartment’ is made up of three bedrooms and they are full up. We said ‘hi’ and chatted a little with some German girls (a lot of German kids travel around Australia) and there are also a couple of guys in the same room as they are - 4 single beds to a room. The other room also has a king bed in it (two singles put together) and there is a woman in it - we don’t know if there’s anyone with her. People who stay in hostels are usually really friendly which is nice.
Friday, November 6, 2009
This morning we walked to McDonald’s - we didn’t have any food as of yet and so we thought we would go there to get some breakfast and also to check out our emails as they have free wireless internet access there. We spent a couple of hours between the two of us (but, it was mostly me :-) and it was nice to get a little bit more caught up with emails to family and friends. They are trying to get the wireless system reworking again at the hostel, but they have yet to fix it.
After eating and emailing, it was time to do some shopping. Mike wanted to get some new running shoes and I wanted to get some capris. Both of us were successful after a couple of tries. We then went to the bus stop to try and get a bus pass for the week, but the bus pass machine wasn’t working on the bus we had to take to the grocery store. The bus driver was sweet and gave us a free ride.
When we got to the mall which had the grocery store in it, we noticed that there was a Medicare centre there so we stopped there first. We wanted to find out what we had to do to get Medicare so if we got sick or had to see a doctor, we were covered. It turns out that they want to know that we have moved to Australia rather than just visiting. We need to fill out a form and then provide them with documentation to prove we have moved here, like: closing out of a bank account, selling a house back in Canada, quitting a job back in Canada, getting hired here for a job. We will get all that stuff when we get back to Canada. Right now, the woman at the centre said to keep any of our receipts if we need to see a doctor and we will be reimbursed later.
Next on the list of our very exciting day :-) was a trip to Woolworth’s which is a grocery store here. We shopped for three days as we prefer to eat proper food rather than junk food. We picked up meat pies, pasta and rice packages, spaghetti and sauce, yogurt, fruit, milk, orange juice, lunch meat, cheese, bread and condiments. We are making up a menu for three days at a time as that is as much as we can keep in the fridge here as we have to share it with the others in our ‘apartment’ at the hostel.
After we were done at the grocery store, we thought we would try and take a bus to get us back to the hostel; however, we had too much stuff and so we got a taxi. It cost us $8.00 to go 2km - expensive for sure but we had no other choice at that point. Next time we go we won’t need to get as much and so we can walk home. We got staples like condiments and OJ and margerine, etc. and we won’t have to get those again while we are here, so it should be fairly easy to bring back what we need for three days.
By the time we got back to the hostel, it was 3:30pm and way past our lunch time. We could have eaten out, but we really didn’t want to so after putting away the groceries, we made ourselves a dagwood sandwich (meat, cheese, tomatoes, cucumber, and for me, beets) - it was very tasty!
We didn’t want to stay inside after eating so we decided to take a walk along the Esplanade (tons of shops and right across from the beach). We stopped at a few real estate places along the way to find out about houses they have for sale/rent. At one of the stops, we were given a newspaper that listed all the houses for sale in the area plus those who are having an open house tomorrow. After walking along one side of the Esplanade (the shops side), we crossed the road and walked down along the beach. It was so lovely to be walking beside the water (I am going to love this part of living in Hervey Bay! :-)
When we got home, we looked through the real estate newspaper and wrote down all the houses for sale that we want to look at and the ones we liked which have open houses tomorrow. Mike used the GPS to locate the houses on our map so that we could make a plan as to how we are going to get to each one tomorrow.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Whew! What a long day this has been. We were ready to go at 8am and collected some bikes/helmets from the fellow (Unrich) who works here - they are free for guests at the hostel, but you can only get them from 8am and have to have them back by 5:30pm as they are not equipped for night riding. We decided that since we hadn’t yet been able to rent a car that we would ride out to Eli Waters, where we were going to check out open houses and some new builders. The first hill was really hard for me and so I ended up walking up it, but I got better as the day went on. The bike was a 6 speed bike and so I was able to change gears when I needed to, to make it easier to pedal.
The first house that we were going to check out was on Bunya Ct., but as soon as I saw it and the area, I decided that I wasn’t interested in living there. It is in the older part of Eli Waters, we found out later, so we didn’t even stop for the open house. The second house was on Figbird Grove and, although it did have five bedrooms, there were issues with grout and carpeting that we wouldn’t have been interested in taking on. There was also no garage attached - it had a two car shed in the back, but that would mean we wouldn’t have been able to add another shed for Mike to work in.
The next house was on Endeavour Way and it’s a nice street with lots of lovely houses and the yards were well taken care of. The house itself was lovely, but the kitchen was way too small. I want lots of room to cook since I quite enjoy doing that - lots of cupboards and lots of counter space. One plus it did have was a lovely screened in patio which I would love to have.
The third house (on Dove Way) we looked at was really spacious - it had a lovely big living room, dining room area plus a nice kitchen and eating area. It only had three bedrooms (we are looking for four), but they were good sized rooms and we could easily put a mattress up in the dining room area if we needed to (if we had a lot of guests at once). It also had a detached garage and so there wouldn’t have been room for Mike’s shed.
We were so thirsty by this time that we stopped at a local shopping centre and went into Woolworth’s to get some water. We also decided that we should get some sunscreen since we were going to be out all day. I am really glad we did do that as we did have some sunburn on areas that we didn’t get enough sunscreen on and I would have hated to be burned like that all over.
Next, we checked out three builders. The first one was in an over 50’s gated community. The guy was a good salesman, but Mike and I both knew while he was talking that it wasn’t for us. First of all, you didn’t own the land. Second, you had to pay a weekly fee of $129 (they do things in weekly amounts here as opposed to monthly like in Canada) which goes up each year - it went up $4 per week this year. Third, the blocks of land they were built on were really small. Also, Mike would not have been able to put up a shed.
The second one (Villa World) sounded really amazing - great prices for what you got - we could have gotten a four bedroom, two bathroom, two car garage house for $300,000. Again though Mike would not have been able to erect a shed and the lot sizes were small. We don’t want a large amount of land, but we don’t want to feel like we are in our neighbours lap, either. Later on, we learned from the third builder (Coral Homes) that the Villa World homes are mostly purchased for investment purposes and then rented out by the owners. Apparently, according to this fellow, if you live in an area that is mostly inhabited by renters, you can get lots of problems.
So, it was a bit of a disappointing house hunting day overall, but at least we did learn some things. That’s the great thing about being able to be here - we can check out various things before we do any buying. Actually, after today’s venture, we are more likely going to rent for a bit - mostly cuz the Australian dollar is just too high right now, so we wouldn’t gain as much from our money as if we left it in the bank. Also, there is just nothing out there that we are interested in. I know that we will know the right house to buy when we see it and nothing has caught our eye just yet.
We were so sore from riding our bikes - bum, knees, legs - that we decided to head on home. It was a 5km trek back home and I made it all but the last half a kilometre. I just couldn’t pedal one more time. That wasn’t too bad, though, since by this time we had been out about 8 hours. What was cool was that it didn’t seem weird to be riding on the left hand side of the road - I was a bit worried about that and now I feel comfortable in doing so. The only hitch to today’s bike riding was that I failed in my first round-about. I thought that Mike was going to enter the round-about, but he stopped and I couldn’t stop in time so the front tire of my bike scraped his leg. I did, however, do really well in the other round-abouts we had to negotiate.
We decided to just relax for the rest of the evening. We did call Rob and Rosalea Woodcott, people from church, to set up a time for them to come and get us to take us to church tomorrow. They also invited us to dinner at the same time, so we will have a lovely home cooked meal tomorrow night. They were the couple who invited us to dinner last time we were here and they made us a full Christmas dinner.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Rob and Rosalea picked us up this morning at 8:20am and took us to church. As soon as we got there, people came up to us to greet us. The people in this ward are so friendly. Our meetings were great - just like everywhere else you go in the church. Rosalea taught the Sunday School lesson today on doing your genealogy and temple work. She started off the lesson with a little skit about an ancestor wanting her to do the temple work for them. It brought the message to life and that is what people will remember, I think. Relief Society was taught by the R.S. president and it was about how we can all make a difference in others’ lives - sometimes it only takes 5 minutes to make that difference.
We also got another invitation to dinner from another member in the ward which will likely happen next week. All three times we have attended this ward we have come away with dinner invitations. I miss Orangeville ward, but I think that Hervey Bay is going to help me with that. Another lady came up to me and said that she was so happy to have us here - she said that she remembered me saying two years ago that we were going to come and she was so happy to see that we had kept our word. She said that she likes it when people do that as she is so disappointed when people say they will do something and they don’t follow through. Other people in the ward came up during our time there and talked with us and are very happy that we are going to move into the ward. One lady even said that they needed more younger people in the ward - it was nice to be considered as young. :-)
After church, Rob had business to take care of and Rosalea had choir practice, so they arranged for another member, Julianne, to drive us home. That actually worked out well as they (Rob and Rosalea) had invited Julianne to dinner along with us and this way Julianne would know where to pick us up when it was that time. When we got home from church, we just hung out at the hostel looking at the real estate newspaper and doing menus and shopping lists for tomorrow.
Julianne picked us up right on time and took us out to Rob and Rosalea’s. They live out of town about 15 minutes from us on a large piece of land in a place called Booral. We would like to live out there, but because the land sizes are so large, they’re quite expensive to buy. Rob and Rosalea got an amazing price on their house because the house was in a state of disrepair. Rob is able to not to have to work and so he spends all his working hours fixing up the house. It’s a lovely large house and Rob has done quite a bit of work on it and it’s looking really nice. The two of them love to work outside as well and they have done a great job planting trees and gardens on the property. There’s been a big change since we were last here in December.
We were just about to sit down for dinner when they got a phone call and it was a young couple, Chris and Chris, who hadn’t been in the ward long and they were a bit lonely so Rosalea asked them to come to dinner as well. It was really nice meeting so many new people and being able to be in a more intimate setting than church so we really had a good time to get to know them over dinner (lasagna, salad, bread rolls and mud cake for dessert) and after dinner. We spent a good deal of time picking their brains about where to live - Chris (male) works for the local council and they have been working on a plan as to which of the areas would be affected by flooding and so he advised us not to buy in those areas. One of the worst to be hit would be Eli Waters which is where we have been looking, so we know that that area is now out.
Chris and Chris have a little granny flat and have said we can rent that out if we would like (even for just a couple of weeks right now and possibly after we come back in February). Julianne also offered the use of her car while she is at work every day. She would pick us up at the hostel, drive to her work, then we could have the car as long as we came back to pick her up at the end of her work day, and then she would drive us back to the hostel. We feel so blessed right now - things are really coming together for us. :-) We are going to see if Chris and Chris can rent their place out to us sooner and if we can get our money back for next week from the hostel (which we paid when we got here). If that works out we could save money and be in our own place. We do like the hostel, but it would be nice to be able to have a place by ourselves.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Caleb is two today, but because we are half way around the world, he actually doesn’t turn two until tomorrow here as we are 15 hours ahead of Toronto time. So we will call Caleb in our tomorrow morning to wish him a Happy Birthday. It’s hard to believe how fast the time has gone!
Today was a busy day and a lazy day if that’s possible. We started out the day deciding to go ahead and rent the granny flat from Chris and Chris, so we called them and asked them if we could move in on Thursday as that is when our week is up with the hostel. They said that should be fine and so we asked Anrich at the hostel if we could get a refund for one week and he said it should be no problem since we gave them more than 24 hours notice. We were so pleased about that since it will only cost $165 a week to stay at the granny flat compared to $300 a week to stay at the hostel.
Next on the list was a visit to a house that we really liked in the real estate newspaper - the real estate agent picked us up at the hostel to take us to see it. On the way, she found out we were from Canada and she commented to me that she wondered if that was why we looked so much younger than we actually were. She said my skin was not sun touched like many in Australia - she said exposure to the sun makes you look older. She asked me how old I was and said that I looked like I was 40. You should have seen the smile on my face. :-) The house is in Craignish which is out in the country and about 20 minutes from Hervey Bay. The houses out there are most often way out of our price range, but this one was just slightly above what we want to pay. I had a strong feeling that we should go and look at it and I can see why now that we have seen it. It’s on a block of land that is half an acre with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a double car garage - and it has enough land to put on a 2 car colour bond shed for Mike. It’s only 3 years old (the house) and it’s really a nice lay out. There is carpet in the bedrooms, but the rest of the house has tile for flooring which I love. The tiles are an orange/rust colour which doesn’t show the dirt (which I also love). The kitchen cupboards are a brown colour (that I don’t love), but there are tons of them. There is also lots of counter space to prepare food on and a HUGE pantry. There is no separate lounge room which we would like, but the family room area is quite big. The only thing is that the price is higher than we wanted to pay ($369,000). But, the guy has had it on the market for 8 months and so he might be willing to go lower in price. Then again, he started at $389,000, then lowered it to $374,000 and then again this week to $369,000, so he might not be willing to go down to $350,000. Time will tell, I guess.
The next stop was to talk with someone about a mortgage and the real estate agent drove us to a bank so that we could do that. We gave the woman our information and she put it all through to the head office. She told us, though, that she can’t see any reason why it won’t be approved as it’s not a large mortgage and Mike is getting enough of a pension to cover the cost. Now we just have to decide if we are really going to put an offer in on the house in Craignish.
We spent some time walking along the Esplanade and went into a couple of real estate companies. We touched bases with a woman who we had talked with a couple of years ago and set up a couple of appointment for tomorrow to see houses that she has listed that fit our criteria. We also spoke with a couple of other agents at other companies, but nothing really popped up. It’s strange how there were tons of houses for sale here before we sold our house in Canada and now there are so few. Anyway, I have faith that we will find the house we are supposed to buy and things will go smoothly once that happens. Sometimes, though, it is hard to wait until that time.
The rest of the evening we spent relaxing. We had a delicious dinner of spaghetti which I can never get enough of. Then we just watched tv and vegged. I know we are going to be very busy running around tomorrow, so it was nice to just do nothing tonight.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
What a busy day it was today, but it was a really good one! First off, Julianne picked us up in her car, drove us to her shop and then let us have the car for the day. It was so great to have a vehicle to drive ourselves around in - and boy did we take advantage of it. We first went to Fantastic Furntiure and I can see why they call it that. We found some fantastic deals and I think we are going to buy most of our furniture (if not all) from there. We found a three seater couch and two lazy boy recliners; a bedroom suite (queen size bed, two night tables and a dresser) and a dining room suite (table and 6 chairs. They also sell mattresses there and there is a great sale on one right now which I wish I could buy, so hopefully they will have a similar one when we are ready to get one.
Next we went to a store called Good Guys which is electronics and appliances. Again we were able to find some good deals here and they will give you an even better deal if you pay them cash. This is where we will buy our fridge, washer, dryer, tv, computer monitor and a mini stereo system. The third store we went to was Big W which is kind of like Walmart. We checked out the cost of all the stuff you have to buy for each room in the house like dishes, pots, etc. for the kitchen; towels for the bathroom; sheets, blankets for the bedroom; broom, mop for the floors, etc. It’s going to be great to be able to do one stop shopping.
We also stopped at the Department of Motor Vehicles to see about getting a driver’s license for Queensland. We have to show three forms of identification plus a statement from a landlord saying we are renting from someone plus give them $75. to get our license. There might be one blip for me, though, as they want me to show an original of my Australian citizenship paper and it’s in Sydney. I am going to take a certified copy of it even though they say that’s not good enough - you never know - I mean I can’t get an Australian passport unless I am an Australian citizen so that should count. We’ll have to wait and see on Friday when we go back there.
We saw a couple of houses with the first real estate agent that we found way back two years ago. Neither of the ones that we saw were suitable. The first one was lived in by renters and they just don’t take good enough care of a house. That’s something we are going to have to keep an eye out for in the future when we are looking for a house.
After all that running around, we went back to pick up Julianne from work and then she drove us back to the hostel. We had another night of vegging as we were both tired from our day and in fact went to bed early.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Another busy day house hunting. We went back to Harcourt’s so that Virginia Porteous, our agent at that agency, could take us to see a house in Craignish. The house was made of wood and was a Queenslander (a house raised up on blocks) so right away I knew it was not going to be for us. The views were great and the land size was great and the huge three bay shed was great. But the house was very old and would take a lot of work to keep up. She also showed us another house in Point Vernon, but I didn’t like the layout of that one. The door leading to the garage was off the lounge room and they didn’t have a family room.
Next it was down the street to Elder’s Real Estate. It’s funny how things work here - when we went to an open house last Saturday, we happened upon a house that was being shown by Tom McLeod from Elder’s. While we were there, he took our information down and called us today to see if we were thinking of putting an offer in. We told him ’no’ to that house, but said we had some more we would like to look at that were being shown by someone in his office. When we got to the office, we realized that another agent who worked there, Terese Payne, had shown us a house that she had listed. So we were in a quandary about what to do. Another real estate agent from the office saw us outside and came to talk with us to see if he could help us. We told him our situation and he said that it didn’t matter who we went with as long as his company could help us. He said he would get Tom. When we went in, I saw Terese and told her the situation just so she didn’t think that we didn’t want to work with her. I felt bad, but it’s just the way it happened.
Anyway, as it turns out, Tom is a really hard worker and managed to get us in to see three houses, all of which we liked and which suited us based on what we want in a house. The first one we saw was in a place called Dundowran which is on the edge of town. It’s a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage and has a 2 bay shed as well. I loved the floor plan a lot: it had a separate lounge room, four bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, dining room and family room. The laundry room was in the garage which I thought was odd, but I could live with that since I loved the layout of the rest of the house. Mike liked it all, too, but he really liked the two bay shed that he could use for his handyman business if he decides to take that up. The other two houses (one in Kawungan and one in Point Vernon) were pretty good but didn’t measure up to the one in Dundowran. Tom dropped us off at the hostel afterwards and said he would keep in touch about how things are going with those houses, especially the one in Dundowran.
After such a busy day, we decided to just relax for the evening. We made dinner and watched a bit of tv before we came in our room. I answered my emails and Mike fiddled on his phone - putting in all the agents’ phone numbers. It’s been a very busy week - it’s hard to believe that we have been here for 7 days already. We are still loving Hervey Bay - it was a balmy 25C here again today with a lovely afternoon breeze. Mike keeps telling me he is not leaving Hervey Bay. :-)
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Today we moved out of the hostel and into our little granny flat. Our friend, Julianne, let us use her car again and so it was easy to get all of our stuff out of the hostel (and we didn’t even have to pack it perfectly :-) and into the car and over to our new little home (at the back of Christine and Chris’ house). It’s really quite cute - it has a lounge room, kitchen/dining room, bedroom and bathroom. There is only a little fridge right now as they didn’t know that we were coming, but when they found out, they offered to rent it to us even though they needed to get a few more things for it. They don’t have a stove or a microwave, but they do have a two burner cook-top, so we are going to have to do all of our cooking on that for our meals.
Christine was really kind and made sure that we had all of the things we needed in the kitchen to cook and eat with as we had nothing. She also arranged for us to have towels, and bedding and borrowed a blow-up bed from Trudy (another member of our branch here) that we can use for the three weeks that we are here. There is a desk in the lounge room for us to put our laptop on so that we can type easily on it. There is a little table with chairs in the kitchen and Christine provided us with a tablecloth to put on it. We feel very blessed to be able to have a place of our own if only for the next three weeks.
After dropping our stuff off at the granny flat, we went grocery shopping. We couldn’t buy much for the fridge as it’s too small, but we were able to get a lot of canned and bottled stuff. There are only two major supermarkets in Australia, Coles and Woolworth’s, and a lot of Aussies think that they are in cahoots with each other. Their prices have gone up over 40% in the past 9 years. There is a store here called Aldi which we went to today as they have much cheaper prices on canned and bottled goods (I couldn’t believe the cost of those kinds of food at the two grocery stores). We did go to Coles afterwards to pick up some meat, milk, fresh fruit and vegs, and eggs (I wasn’t sure about buying these things at Aldi, but Christine said that they are okay there so in the future, I will spend more money at Aldi).
After dropping off Julianne’s car back at her work (she drove us back home), we decided to walk up to the local strip mall to see what was there, what they had to sell, and what the prices were like. There is a chemist, a bottle shop (like LCBO), a convenience store (very pricey), a bakery and a butcher (Australians still love their local butcher). While we were there, we got a call from a real estate agent saying that she had a house for us to see, so she picked us up at the mall. The house was only supposed to be about three years old, but it looked much older than that. We didn’t like it at all. Our agent dropped us off at home and then we decided to take a walk the other way from the first mall and ended up at a convenience store that had much better prices and also did take-away (take-out) food. We are definitely going to check out their meat pies and sausage rolls. :-) We are getting lots of walking in since we don’t have a car very often, but it’s great cuz my capris certainly are feeling looser these days. :-)
We ended up having a late supper today - we just got to doing things (emailing, playing cards, talking with Christine and Chris) and so we didn’t eat until almost 8pm. When you are on holidays, though, you can eat whenever you want. :-) We don’t have a tv here and when we were walking today, we talked about how we were going to miss that. The funny thing is that so far we really haven’t. After eating and doing up the dishes, we played some cards (cribbage) and then while Mike went on the computer to check out the Canadian/Australian exchange rate, I read some info on Hervey Bay that Christine gave us to check out. Now, it’s 10pm and we are tired, so we are heading off to bed (and we don’t even have to dream about lovely warm weather tomorrow because it will no doubt be a beautiful warm sunny day - I don’t think they make any other kind in Hervey Bay). :-)
We touched down on the runway at about 5:30pm tonight in Hervey Bay. We were disappointed to learn that no-one from the hostel would be able to come and pick us up (we were told that we would be picked up as we had booked for two weeks, but the young girl at reception told us that she was the only one there and couldn’t leave), so we took a shuttle to The Friendly Hostel.
We had stayed here last December when we had come here to check out if Mike could handle the heat of summer (he could) and loved this little place. The ad on the internet said if you like to party, don’t come - and it was right - everyone was so nice who stayed here last time and they were also very quiet. That’s why we decided to stay here again.
We were really pleased to be assigned the same room as last time, too. We knew that we would get a good cross breeze in this room, so we really wanted to stay in it. After dumping our suitcases and changing out of our good clothes (you have to dress up when you are flying on an employee pass on Qantas), we walked to our local small supermarket to buy something for supper. We bought meat pies (what else :-) and baked beans and passion fruit pop. It was delicious.
We spent the rest of the evening in front of the tv. We were really tired from the travelling (and having to spend three hours in the Brisbane airport in between flights) so we just wanted to veg for the evening. Our ‘apartment’ is made up of three bedrooms and they are full up. We said ‘hi’ and chatted a little with some German girls (a lot of German kids travel around Australia) and there are also a couple of guys in the same room as they are - 4 single beds to a room. The other room also has a king bed in it (two singles put together) and there is a woman in it - we don’t know if there’s anyone with her. People who stay in hostels are usually really friendly which is nice.
Friday, November 6, 2009
This morning we walked to McDonald’s - we didn’t have any food as of yet and so we thought we would go there to get some breakfast and also to check out our emails as they have free wireless internet access there. We spent a couple of hours between the two of us (but, it was mostly me :-) and it was nice to get a little bit more caught up with emails to family and friends. They are trying to get the wireless system reworking again at the hostel, but they have yet to fix it.
After eating and emailing, it was time to do some shopping. Mike wanted to get some new running shoes and I wanted to get some capris. Both of us were successful after a couple of tries. We then went to the bus stop to try and get a bus pass for the week, but the bus pass machine wasn’t working on the bus we had to take to the grocery store. The bus driver was sweet and gave us a free ride.
When we got to the mall which had the grocery store in it, we noticed that there was a Medicare centre there so we stopped there first. We wanted to find out what we had to do to get Medicare so if we got sick or had to see a doctor, we were covered. It turns out that they want to know that we have moved to Australia rather than just visiting. We need to fill out a form and then provide them with documentation to prove we have moved here, like: closing out of a bank account, selling a house back in Canada, quitting a job back in Canada, getting hired here for a job. We will get all that stuff when we get back to Canada. Right now, the woman at the centre said to keep any of our receipts if we need to see a doctor and we will be reimbursed later.
Next on the list of our very exciting day :-) was a trip to Woolworth’s which is a grocery store here. We shopped for three days as we prefer to eat proper food rather than junk food. We picked up meat pies, pasta and rice packages, spaghetti and sauce, yogurt, fruit, milk, orange juice, lunch meat, cheese, bread and condiments. We are making up a menu for three days at a time as that is as much as we can keep in the fridge here as we have to share it with the others in our ‘apartment’ at the hostel.
After we were done at the grocery store, we thought we would try and take a bus to get us back to the hostel; however, we had too much stuff and so we got a taxi. It cost us $8.00 to go 2km - expensive for sure but we had no other choice at that point. Next time we go we won’t need to get as much and so we can walk home. We got staples like condiments and OJ and margerine, etc. and we won’t have to get those again while we are here, so it should be fairly easy to bring back what we need for three days.
By the time we got back to the hostel, it was 3:30pm and way past our lunch time. We could have eaten out, but we really didn’t want to so after putting away the groceries, we made ourselves a dagwood sandwich (meat, cheese, tomatoes, cucumber, and for me, beets) - it was very tasty!
We didn’t want to stay inside after eating so we decided to take a walk along the Esplanade (tons of shops and right across from the beach). We stopped at a few real estate places along the way to find out about houses they have for sale/rent. At one of the stops, we were given a newspaper that listed all the houses for sale in the area plus those who are having an open house tomorrow. After walking along one side of the Esplanade (the shops side), we crossed the road and walked down along the beach. It was so lovely to be walking beside the water (I am going to love this part of living in Hervey Bay! :-)
When we got home, we looked through the real estate newspaper and wrote down all the houses for sale that we want to look at and the ones we liked which have open houses tomorrow. Mike used the GPS to locate the houses on our map so that we could make a plan as to how we are going to get to each one tomorrow.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Whew! What a long day this has been. We were ready to go at 8am and collected some bikes/helmets from the fellow (Unrich) who works here - they are free for guests at the hostel, but you can only get them from 8am and have to have them back by 5:30pm as they are not equipped for night riding. We decided that since we hadn’t yet been able to rent a car that we would ride out to Eli Waters, where we were going to check out open houses and some new builders. The first hill was really hard for me and so I ended up walking up it, but I got better as the day went on. The bike was a 6 speed bike and so I was able to change gears when I needed to, to make it easier to pedal.
The first house that we were going to check out was on Bunya Ct., but as soon as I saw it and the area, I decided that I wasn’t interested in living there. It is in the older part of Eli Waters, we found out later, so we didn’t even stop for the open house. The second house was on Figbird Grove and, although it did have five bedrooms, there were issues with grout and carpeting that we wouldn’t have been interested in taking on. There was also no garage attached - it had a two car shed in the back, but that would mean we wouldn’t have been able to add another shed for Mike to work in.
The next house was on Endeavour Way and it’s a nice street with lots of lovely houses and the yards were well taken care of. The house itself was lovely, but the kitchen was way too small. I want lots of room to cook since I quite enjoy doing that - lots of cupboards and lots of counter space. One plus it did have was a lovely screened in patio which I would love to have.
The third house (on Dove Way) we looked at was really spacious - it had a lovely big living room, dining room area plus a nice kitchen and eating area. It only had three bedrooms (we are looking for four), but they were good sized rooms and we could easily put a mattress up in the dining room area if we needed to (if we had a lot of guests at once). It also had a detached garage and so there wouldn’t have been room for Mike’s shed.
We were so thirsty by this time that we stopped at a local shopping centre and went into Woolworth’s to get some water. We also decided that we should get some sunscreen since we were going to be out all day. I am really glad we did do that as we did have some sunburn on areas that we didn’t get enough sunscreen on and I would have hated to be burned like that all over.
Next, we checked out three builders. The first one was in an over 50’s gated community. The guy was a good salesman, but Mike and I both knew while he was talking that it wasn’t for us. First of all, you didn’t own the land. Second, you had to pay a weekly fee of $129 (they do things in weekly amounts here as opposed to monthly like in Canada) which goes up each year - it went up $4 per week this year. Third, the blocks of land they were built on were really small. Also, Mike would not have been able to put up a shed.
The second one (Villa World) sounded really amazing - great prices for what you got - we could have gotten a four bedroom, two bathroom, two car garage house for $300,000. Again though Mike would not have been able to erect a shed and the lot sizes were small. We don’t want a large amount of land, but we don’t want to feel like we are in our neighbours lap, either. Later on, we learned from the third builder (Coral Homes) that the Villa World homes are mostly purchased for investment purposes and then rented out by the owners. Apparently, according to this fellow, if you live in an area that is mostly inhabited by renters, you can get lots of problems.
So, it was a bit of a disappointing house hunting day overall, but at least we did learn some things. That’s the great thing about being able to be here - we can check out various things before we do any buying. Actually, after today’s venture, we are more likely going to rent for a bit - mostly cuz the Australian dollar is just too high right now, so we wouldn’t gain as much from our money as if we left it in the bank. Also, there is just nothing out there that we are interested in. I know that we will know the right house to buy when we see it and nothing has caught our eye just yet.
We were so sore from riding our bikes - bum, knees, legs - that we decided to head on home. It was a 5km trek back home and I made it all but the last half a kilometre. I just couldn’t pedal one more time. That wasn’t too bad, though, since by this time we had been out about 8 hours. What was cool was that it didn’t seem weird to be riding on the left hand side of the road - I was a bit worried about that and now I feel comfortable in doing so. The only hitch to today’s bike riding was that I failed in my first round-about. I thought that Mike was going to enter the round-about, but he stopped and I couldn’t stop in time so the front tire of my bike scraped his leg. I did, however, do really well in the other round-abouts we had to negotiate.
We decided to just relax for the rest of the evening. We did call Rob and Rosalea Woodcott, people from church, to set up a time for them to come and get us to take us to church tomorrow. They also invited us to dinner at the same time, so we will have a lovely home cooked meal tomorrow night. They were the couple who invited us to dinner last time we were here and they made us a full Christmas dinner.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Rob and Rosalea picked us up this morning at 8:20am and took us to church. As soon as we got there, people came up to us to greet us. The people in this ward are so friendly. Our meetings were great - just like everywhere else you go in the church. Rosalea taught the Sunday School lesson today on doing your genealogy and temple work. She started off the lesson with a little skit about an ancestor wanting her to do the temple work for them. It brought the message to life and that is what people will remember, I think. Relief Society was taught by the R.S. president and it was about how we can all make a difference in others’ lives - sometimes it only takes 5 minutes to make that difference.
We also got another invitation to dinner from another member in the ward which will likely happen next week. All three times we have attended this ward we have come away with dinner invitations. I miss Orangeville ward, but I think that Hervey Bay is going to help me with that. Another lady came up to me and said that she was so happy to have us here - she said that she remembered me saying two years ago that we were going to come and she was so happy to see that we had kept our word. She said that she likes it when people do that as she is so disappointed when people say they will do something and they don’t follow through. Other people in the ward came up during our time there and talked with us and are very happy that we are going to move into the ward. One lady even said that they needed more younger people in the ward - it was nice to be considered as young. :-)
After church, Rob had business to take care of and Rosalea had choir practice, so they arranged for another member, Julianne, to drive us home. That actually worked out well as they (Rob and Rosalea) had invited Julianne to dinner along with us and this way Julianne would know where to pick us up when it was that time. When we got home from church, we just hung out at the hostel looking at the real estate newspaper and doing menus and shopping lists for tomorrow.
Julianne picked us up right on time and took us out to Rob and Rosalea’s. They live out of town about 15 minutes from us on a large piece of land in a place called Booral. We would like to live out there, but because the land sizes are so large, they’re quite expensive to buy. Rob and Rosalea got an amazing price on their house because the house was in a state of disrepair. Rob is able to not to have to work and so he spends all his working hours fixing up the house. It’s a lovely large house and Rob has done quite a bit of work on it and it’s looking really nice. The two of them love to work outside as well and they have done a great job planting trees and gardens on the property. There’s been a big change since we were last here in December.
We were just about to sit down for dinner when they got a phone call and it was a young couple, Chris and Chris, who hadn’t been in the ward long and they were a bit lonely so Rosalea asked them to come to dinner as well. It was really nice meeting so many new people and being able to be in a more intimate setting than church so we really had a good time to get to know them over dinner (lasagna, salad, bread rolls and mud cake for dessert) and after dinner. We spent a good deal of time picking their brains about where to live - Chris (male) works for the local council and they have been working on a plan as to which of the areas would be affected by flooding and so he advised us not to buy in those areas. One of the worst to be hit would be Eli Waters which is where we have been looking, so we know that that area is now out.
Chris and Chris have a little granny flat and have said we can rent that out if we would like (even for just a couple of weeks right now and possibly after we come back in February). Julianne also offered the use of her car while she is at work every day. She would pick us up at the hostel, drive to her work, then we could have the car as long as we came back to pick her up at the end of her work day, and then she would drive us back to the hostel. We feel so blessed right now - things are really coming together for us. :-) We are going to see if Chris and Chris can rent their place out to us sooner and if we can get our money back for next week from the hostel (which we paid when we got here). If that works out we could save money and be in our own place. We do like the hostel, but it would be nice to be able to have a place by ourselves.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Caleb is two today, but because we are half way around the world, he actually doesn’t turn two until tomorrow here as we are 15 hours ahead of Toronto time. So we will call Caleb in our tomorrow morning to wish him a Happy Birthday. It’s hard to believe how fast the time has gone!
Today was a busy day and a lazy day if that’s possible. We started out the day deciding to go ahead and rent the granny flat from Chris and Chris, so we called them and asked them if we could move in on Thursday as that is when our week is up with the hostel. They said that should be fine and so we asked Anrich at the hostel if we could get a refund for one week and he said it should be no problem since we gave them more than 24 hours notice. We were so pleased about that since it will only cost $165 a week to stay at the granny flat compared to $300 a week to stay at the hostel.
Next on the list was a visit to a house that we really liked in the real estate newspaper - the real estate agent picked us up at the hostel to take us to see it. On the way, she found out we were from Canada and she commented to me that she wondered if that was why we looked so much younger than we actually were. She said my skin was not sun touched like many in Australia - she said exposure to the sun makes you look older. She asked me how old I was and said that I looked like I was 40. You should have seen the smile on my face. :-) The house is in Craignish which is out in the country and about 20 minutes from Hervey Bay. The houses out there are most often way out of our price range, but this one was just slightly above what we want to pay. I had a strong feeling that we should go and look at it and I can see why now that we have seen it. It’s on a block of land that is half an acre with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a double car garage - and it has enough land to put on a 2 car colour bond shed for Mike. It’s only 3 years old (the house) and it’s really a nice lay out. There is carpet in the bedrooms, but the rest of the house has tile for flooring which I love. The tiles are an orange/rust colour which doesn’t show the dirt (which I also love). The kitchen cupboards are a brown colour (that I don’t love), but there are tons of them. There is also lots of counter space to prepare food on and a HUGE pantry. There is no separate lounge room which we would like, but the family room area is quite big. The only thing is that the price is higher than we wanted to pay ($369,000). But, the guy has had it on the market for 8 months and so he might be willing to go lower in price. Then again, he started at $389,000, then lowered it to $374,000 and then again this week to $369,000, so he might not be willing to go down to $350,000. Time will tell, I guess.
The next stop was to talk with someone about a mortgage and the real estate agent drove us to a bank so that we could do that. We gave the woman our information and she put it all through to the head office. She told us, though, that she can’t see any reason why it won’t be approved as it’s not a large mortgage and Mike is getting enough of a pension to cover the cost. Now we just have to decide if we are really going to put an offer in on the house in Craignish.
We spent some time walking along the Esplanade and went into a couple of real estate companies. We touched bases with a woman who we had talked with a couple of years ago and set up a couple of appointment for tomorrow to see houses that she has listed that fit our criteria. We also spoke with a couple of other agents at other companies, but nothing really popped up. It’s strange how there were tons of houses for sale here before we sold our house in Canada and now there are so few. Anyway, I have faith that we will find the house we are supposed to buy and things will go smoothly once that happens. Sometimes, though, it is hard to wait until that time.
The rest of the evening we spent relaxing. We had a delicious dinner of spaghetti which I can never get enough of. Then we just watched tv and vegged. I know we are going to be very busy running around tomorrow, so it was nice to just do nothing tonight.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
What a busy day it was today, but it was a really good one! First off, Julianne picked us up in her car, drove us to her shop and then let us have the car for the day. It was so great to have a vehicle to drive ourselves around in - and boy did we take advantage of it. We first went to Fantastic Furntiure and I can see why they call it that. We found some fantastic deals and I think we are going to buy most of our furniture (if not all) from there. We found a three seater couch and two lazy boy recliners; a bedroom suite (queen size bed, two night tables and a dresser) and a dining room suite (table and 6 chairs. They also sell mattresses there and there is a great sale on one right now which I wish I could buy, so hopefully they will have a similar one when we are ready to get one.
Next we went to a store called Good Guys which is electronics and appliances. Again we were able to find some good deals here and they will give you an even better deal if you pay them cash. This is where we will buy our fridge, washer, dryer, tv, computer monitor and a mini stereo system. The third store we went to was Big W which is kind of like Walmart. We checked out the cost of all the stuff you have to buy for each room in the house like dishes, pots, etc. for the kitchen; towels for the bathroom; sheets, blankets for the bedroom; broom, mop for the floors, etc. It’s going to be great to be able to do one stop shopping.
We also stopped at the Department of Motor Vehicles to see about getting a driver’s license for Queensland. We have to show three forms of identification plus a statement from a landlord saying we are renting from someone plus give them $75. to get our license. There might be one blip for me, though, as they want me to show an original of my Australian citizenship paper and it’s in Sydney. I am going to take a certified copy of it even though they say that’s not good enough - you never know - I mean I can’t get an Australian passport unless I am an Australian citizen so that should count. We’ll have to wait and see on Friday when we go back there.
We saw a couple of houses with the first real estate agent that we found way back two years ago. Neither of the ones that we saw were suitable. The first one was lived in by renters and they just don’t take good enough care of a house. That’s something we are going to have to keep an eye out for in the future when we are looking for a house.
After all that running around, we went back to pick up Julianne from work and then she drove us back to the hostel. We had another night of vegging as we were both tired from our day and in fact went to bed early.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Another busy day house hunting. We went back to Harcourt’s so that Virginia Porteous, our agent at that agency, could take us to see a house in Craignish. The house was made of wood and was a Queenslander (a house raised up on blocks) so right away I knew it was not going to be for us. The views were great and the land size was great and the huge three bay shed was great. But the house was very old and would take a lot of work to keep up. She also showed us another house in Point Vernon, but I didn’t like the layout of that one. The door leading to the garage was off the lounge room and they didn’t have a family room.
Next it was down the street to Elder’s Real Estate. It’s funny how things work here - when we went to an open house last Saturday, we happened upon a house that was being shown by Tom McLeod from Elder’s. While we were there, he took our information down and called us today to see if we were thinking of putting an offer in. We told him ’no’ to that house, but said we had some more we would like to look at that were being shown by someone in his office. When we got to the office, we realized that another agent who worked there, Terese Payne, had shown us a house that she had listed. So we were in a quandary about what to do. Another real estate agent from the office saw us outside and came to talk with us to see if he could help us. We told him our situation and he said that it didn’t matter who we went with as long as his company could help us. He said he would get Tom. When we went in, I saw Terese and told her the situation just so she didn’t think that we didn’t want to work with her. I felt bad, but it’s just the way it happened.
Anyway, as it turns out, Tom is a really hard worker and managed to get us in to see three houses, all of which we liked and which suited us based on what we want in a house. The first one we saw was in a place called Dundowran which is on the edge of town. It’s a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage and has a 2 bay shed as well. I loved the floor plan a lot: it had a separate lounge room, four bedrooms, an office, a kitchen, dining room and family room. The laundry room was in the garage which I thought was odd, but I could live with that since I loved the layout of the rest of the house. Mike liked it all, too, but he really liked the two bay shed that he could use for his handyman business if he decides to take that up. The other two houses (one in Kawungan and one in Point Vernon) were pretty good but didn’t measure up to the one in Dundowran. Tom dropped us off at the hostel afterwards and said he would keep in touch about how things are going with those houses, especially the one in Dundowran.
After such a busy day, we decided to just relax for the evening. We made dinner and watched a bit of tv before we came in our room. I answered my emails and Mike fiddled on his phone - putting in all the agents’ phone numbers. It’s been a very busy week - it’s hard to believe that we have been here for 7 days already. We are still loving Hervey Bay - it was a balmy 25C here again today with a lovely afternoon breeze. Mike keeps telling me he is not leaving Hervey Bay. :-)
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Today we moved out of the hostel and into our little granny flat. Our friend, Julianne, let us use her car again and so it was easy to get all of our stuff out of the hostel (and we didn’t even have to pack it perfectly :-) and into the car and over to our new little home (at the back of Christine and Chris’ house). It’s really quite cute - it has a lounge room, kitchen/dining room, bedroom and bathroom. There is only a little fridge right now as they didn’t know that we were coming, but when they found out, they offered to rent it to us even though they needed to get a few more things for it. They don’t have a stove or a microwave, but they do have a two burner cook-top, so we are going to have to do all of our cooking on that for our meals.
Christine was really kind and made sure that we had all of the things we needed in the kitchen to cook and eat with as we had nothing. She also arranged for us to have towels, and bedding and borrowed a blow-up bed from Trudy (another member of our branch here) that we can use for the three weeks that we are here. There is a desk in the lounge room for us to put our laptop on so that we can type easily on it. There is a little table with chairs in the kitchen and Christine provided us with a tablecloth to put on it. We feel very blessed to be able to have a place of our own if only for the next three weeks.
After dropping our stuff off at the granny flat, we went grocery shopping. We couldn’t buy much for the fridge as it’s too small, but we were able to get a lot of canned and bottled stuff. There are only two major supermarkets in Australia, Coles and Woolworth’s, and a lot of Aussies think that they are in cahoots with each other. Their prices have gone up over 40% in the past 9 years. There is a store here called Aldi which we went to today as they have much cheaper prices on canned and bottled goods (I couldn’t believe the cost of those kinds of food at the two grocery stores). We did go to Coles afterwards to pick up some meat, milk, fresh fruit and vegs, and eggs (I wasn’t sure about buying these things at Aldi, but Christine said that they are okay there so in the future, I will spend more money at Aldi).
After dropping off Julianne’s car back at her work (she drove us back home), we decided to walk up to the local strip mall to see what was there, what they had to sell, and what the prices were like. There is a chemist, a bottle shop (like LCBO), a convenience store (very pricey), a bakery and a butcher (Australians still love their local butcher). While we were there, we got a call from a real estate agent saying that she had a house for us to see, so she picked us up at the mall. The house was only supposed to be about three years old, but it looked much older than that. We didn’t like it at all. Our agent dropped us off at home and then we decided to take a walk the other way from the first mall and ended up at a convenience store that had much better prices and also did take-away (take-out) food. We are definitely going to check out their meat pies and sausage rolls. :-) We are getting lots of walking in since we don’t have a car very often, but it’s great cuz my capris certainly are feeling looser these days. :-)
We ended up having a late supper today - we just got to doing things (emailing, playing cards, talking with Christine and Chris) and so we didn’t eat until almost 8pm. When you are on holidays, though, you can eat whenever you want. :-) We don’t have a tv here and when we were walking today, we talked about how we were going to miss that. The funny thing is that so far we really haven’t. After eating and doing up the dishes, we played some cards (cribbage) and then while Mike went on the computer to check out the Canadian/Australian exchange rate, I read some info on Hervey Bay that Christine gave us to check out. Now, it’s 10pm and we are tired, so we are heading off to bed (and we don’t even have to dream about lovely warm weather tomorrow because it will no doubt be a beautiful warm sunny day - I don’t think they make any other kind in Hervey Bay). :-)
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