Adventures in Hervey Bay: Sunday, March 20, 2011

I went into school on Friday to teach the grade three class I had been asked to teach. When I talked with Karen, the woman at the school who takes care of the supply teaching situation at the school, she told me that she had asked for me first to cover that class. I told her that I really appreciated that - I am hopeful that I will get some more jobs this way - it sure is nice knowing ahead of time that I have a job the next day. Most of the students knew me from last year which made things a little easier for me and for them, too, I think. I found that they did a little testing of me for the first part of the day (as usual, it was mostly boys, although there was one girl who wouldn't be quiet!), but after the first break, things got much better. I found that once they saw that I had certain expectations and consequences, they seemed to be okay with doing what their teacher expected of them. I left my card for the teacher, so I hope she will call me again.

Dad spent the day at the Family History Centre. He spent some time updating the centre's computers and some more time working on his own Family History. He has been able to get more of his own family history done because of the indexing members have been doing and because information from the website http://www.ancestry.com/ is now available for free at the Family History Centre. Indexing is when people take the films or written records of government censuses, etc. and put them into databases which can be searched online. Dad is really excited about being able to add more information to his family line.

After school, Dad and I both went to get our hair cut at 'Cut It Out Christa'. She is a hairdresser who was recommended by my friend, Rosalea, and she is very good at what she does and the price is really good for HB ($20. for me and $15. for Dad). I had my hair cut by her just before we came back to Canada and it was in need of another cut, as was Dad's. We were both in and out in 45 minutes and she did another great job of my haircut and her new assistant did a nice job of Dad's. I really like the way I can say to her 'just cut it off about this much (using my fingers to show her how much) and she can do a great cut without any other instructions.

After that, we went to a restaurant to celebrate my birthday. The restaurant is called 'Hoolihans' and it's the same restaurant we went to for Dad's birthday - if it's your birthday, you get your meal for free. I had the special - curried chicken and potatoes with rice - and Dad had the chicken and king (large) prawns stir fry. We also shared some bruschetta. I was so happy that I could get the curry meal as Dad doesn't like it so we never have it at home. It was really really delicious - it wasn't too spicy, but it had tons of flavour. It was such a yummy birthday meal. Dad really enjoyed his meal, too - he said his meal was excellent. We told the waitress to let the chef know that the food was outstanding and the presentation of the food was really nice, too.

When we got home, we had a very large piece of pavlova. Dad had gone to the 'Cheesecake Shop' during the day today, and it was waiting for us when we got home from our evening out. I knew that he was buying the pavlova, but what I didn't know was that he had bought a large WHOLE pavlova (I thought he was getting a half pav). Needless to say, the pavlova was super delicious!!! :-) It was a lovely evening for my birthday. :-)

On Saturday, we drove over to Maryborough (about half an hour away) to check out a couple of furniture stores there. They have sister stores in Hervey Bay, but the ones in Maryborough are bigger and have different stock than those stores in HB. We saw a really nice loungeroom set, but it's quite expensive and we don't know if we want to spend that kind of money on a set which will rarely be used. We found some rocker/recliners we really liked, but again they were quite expensive, so we are waiting on purchasing them at the moment as well. We are thinking of driving to some bigger cities to see if we can find anything else we might like.

We had our, um, I mean MY scooter delivered today. Terry brought it up in a van and, after getting it off the van and pushing it into our garage, he put it up onto it's stand and then showed us where different things were on the scooter. After he left, both Dad and I sat on the scooter (still on the stand) and started it. It was fun sitting on it and we can't wait to get on with learning how to ride it. Dad is going to call the guy tomorrow who will teach us how to ride and then test us and set up a time for us to do that. We won't be able to do it for a few weeks, however, as the showgrounds which he uses as the training area is being used by the city for the next few weeks.

At 3pm, we went to the chapel to attend the baptism of a young woman (perhaps in her early 20's), Nicole. My friend, Robyn, and I are going to be Nicole's visiting teachers, so it was really nice to be able to attend this special event in her life. There were quite a few members there for the baptism to support Nicole, so that was nice to see as well.

We spent the evening just hanging around home. Dad and I are so busy during the week that we really enjoy having our Saturday evenings free to just 'do nothing'. Of course, we really didn't do 'nothing'. While we had the tv on, we were both doing things on our computers. I was planning a primary lesson as one of the Primary teachers had told me this afternoon that she wouldn't be able to be there on Sunday and Dad was doing research online. It was a lovely relaxing evening. :-)

This morning, we had an early interview with our Bishop to renew our Temple recommends. Our recommends had expired while we were in Canada (neither of us was happy about this as we don't like our Temple recommends to expire), so we wanted to renew them as soon as we could. We both 'passed' our interviews and so now have to have the second part of the interview with a member of the Stake Presidency who will be visiting our ward next week. It will be nice to be able to go to the Temple again - we are hoping to be able to go to the Brisbane Temple soon.

Our Sacrament meeting theme today was about revelation. The speakers talked about how revelation is communication from God to his children and that we can all receive it. A few things which we were reminded about, however, is that to receive revelation we have to keep the commandments, go to the Lord in prayer, and to listen carefully for the 'still small voice'. Once we get our revelation, it's also important to follow the promptings which we receive.

After all of our meetings were over today, Dad went to choir practice and I conducted a meeting of the Primary presidency for our first meeting since I was called as the Primary President. Now that we are back in HB, I wanted to meet with the women in the presidency so that we could all be on the same page with things that are/will be happening in our Primary here. I wanted to start some new initiatives and my first counsellor and secretary are new to Primary, so I wanted to make sure that they knew what their duties were and also for all of us to work together to come up with ideas and questions we had about how to run the Primary program here. Our Stake Primary Presidency is coming up next weekend to meet with us and so I wanted to have this meeting before then so that I could contact our Stake Primary President about any questions ahead of time. We met for about 90 minutes and were able to get a lot done which was great.

I spent the afternoon/evening working on Primary stuff - making sure that I rewrote my notes so that I had in my mind what emails I needed to write and to whom so that I could get answers to the questions which arose during our meeting today. Dad spent the time doing stuff on the net. It's been a really relaxing day for both of us which we will need since the 'madness' starts again tomorrow.