When I write down my notes about what I have to write about, it seems like there's so much happening right now. Hopefully things will slow down soon - but, knowing me, that's not likely. :-) So, let's get started for the past four days..........Dad had a good day at the Family History Centre on Monday. He was able to get some more indexing done. Sometimes, it's easy to read the names on the list he is given and sometimes it takes him ages to figure it out. When he is unsure about the name, he goes back and forth between the name he is trying to figure out and the other names which are written on the page. They sure did write with flowery letters "back in the day". But, he is very good at "keeping at it" and he is on track to reach the goal he set for himself this month (1,000 names). I wasn't feeling well on Monday, so I went back to sleep after the alarm went off and didn't wake up until 9:30am - and then only because I had to go to the washroom (or as they say in Australia "I had to go to the toilet" :-) I laid on the couch all day and then went to bed 13 hours after I woke up. Dad had an interview today - to be a Census Area Supervisor. The woman doing the interviewing said that 200 people applied for the job; she chose 100 of them to interview; and she is going to choose 25 of those interviewees to be the supervisors. Dad said he thought the interview went well - she will call the successful applicants tomorrow.
Tuesday, I was feeling much better and so off to school I went. I spent the day in Luise's grade one classroom again. I did some assessment with the kids and then spent some time being in the classroom helping out the kids who needed it. Luise has the four boys who are the lowest academically in the class in the front row and so it's easy for me to sit in front of them and help them as needed. The day was soooooooooo hot and humid - I love the hot - I HATE the humid!!! In Australia, when it's this hot, they don't just say it's hot or very hot, they say "It's STINKIN' hot!" :-) I couldn't wait to get home and sit under the fan. :-) Dad spent the morning mowing the front lawn and then it was so hot for him, he decided to come inside and spent the day doing more indexing. When he picked me up after school, we went to Fantastic Furniture to check out some of our furniture options we were mulling over (and being in the "air con" (Aussie for air conditioning :-) was a bonus, too). We must have been in there for over half an hour checking out our options again and trying to decide what we were going to buy. When we had decided what we were going to buy, I asked the guy there if they worked on commission because the guy who gave us the quote wasn't working that day. He told me that they did work on commission so I didn't feel comfortable ordering the items then. We came straight home after that and spent the rest of the evening with the windows/doors open wide and the fan at 'high'.
Yesterday, I didn't get a call to supply teach and so I went into volunteer with the grade ones again. I was a bit down when I didn't get a call. I had set myself a (hopeful) goal of working three days a week and here it was the third day of the week and still no job call. I went to talk to Bronwyn about it - she is always such a good listener and this day was no different. I also told her that the grade one team was not very warm. When I went in to volunteer with Bronwyn last year, the grade twos were so welcoming to me and made me feel like part of the group. The grade ones don't do this. I was talking with Natalie (grade one teacher) a while ago about this and she said that she feels it and she is part of the team. She said that when she was working part-time last year, the other grade one teachers rarely called her to supply teach for them. The four of them who are in the one pod are all older teachers (in their 40s/50s) and they seem like a tight knit group. Bec, who is also grade one, seems to have broken into their shell (she's new this year to the school), but that might be due to her outgoing personality and all the sharing of resources that she does. I can't say that I am enjoying volunteering this year - I am doing it to get to know the kids and Luise's routine so that I know what's going on when I do the contract for her later in the year. If it wasn't for that, I would go back to volunteering in grade two. Anyway, Bronwyn told me she knows how disappointing it is not to get the number of days I want to supply as she went through that for the first two years she supply taught - she also told me not to give up - who knows what the future holds. I had a better day after I talked with Bronwyn and went back at the end of the day to tell her so - she was pleased that she could help. :-)
While I was at school, Dad was very busy doing stuff around the house and outside the house. He mowed, trimmed, weeded and sprayed the lawn, cleaned the back patio area, cleaned the rainwater collection screens, washed the car, sprayed around the house with insect repellent, got rid of a couple of wasp nests, and vacuumed the house and folded the laundry. Needless to say, by the time he was finished all that, he was completely exhausted!!!
After school, we went to Elmer's Furniture. We had seen the the living room suite that we wanted online at a lower price than was quoted to us at the Maryborough store on the weekend. We finally connected with Dan who was the salesman who sold us the dining room suite and we really like him, so it was good to see him there again and to work with him on the furniture we wanted. While we were there, we looked at a bedroom suite that we had liked when we had seen it on the weekend in the sister store. The thing we really liked about it was that there is a rose made out of glass (or maybe plastic, but it looks like stained glass) in the headboard and the colour is a nice light wood. What I didn't like about it was that there isn't much of a footboard, but it seems today, it's either little footboard or a huge footboard. The price was $100. more than the one at Fantastic Furniture that we liked. But, we liked this one enough to pay the extra money. We asked Dan to find out if we could get the living room suite that we liked at the sale price, but brand new. He said he would call the bosses the next day (today) and get back to us.
We were relaxing in the evening when Dad went to put out the garbage and recycling - he came back inside and told me that I had to come outside. There on the lawn and driveway next door were tons of cane toads. I can't remember if I wrote about it last week or not, but one evening last week it was the same thing. There were nine last week when I was out there and there had to be the same or more last night. If there were some Aussie males around, I am sure they would have found something to kill the toads with (that seems to be the "thing to do" when you see cane toads cuz they are overrunning the country), but I don't like the thought of that, so we just left them - but they are not very nice looking thing and apparently they are poisonous, but only if you ingest them. Pets are the most likely to be poisoned by them, especially dogs.
Our day started off loverly as we got to Skype with Terri-Ann and the boys (James was in the picture and yelled out every now and then as well. :-) It was good to get back to Skyping - we had missed it since we have arrived back home. Benjamin kept reaching out to us (trying to get us through the screen) when he saw us on the computer. He was babbling to us - boy, what a chatterer. :-) Caleb sang us a song from his nursery school and Colin and Caleb sang a song to us which they had sang in Sacrament meeting on Sunday with another three boys from a family who Terri-Ann and James are close to - the song was "I Hope They Call Me On A Mission". They were so cute. :-) I asked them if they were going to be Elder Gawthroupes and Caleb said 'yes, but not right now'. So adorable. Terri-Ann and I were having a good chat when it was time to put the boys to bed, so she had to get off and take care of Benjamin while James put Colin and Caleb down. Colin wasn't feeling well (fever) and so we have arranged to talk with them again in a couple of days so that we can talk with Colin as well (he spent the time laying on the couch while we were Skyping).
I didn't get a call to go into supply teach this morning, so Dad and I went to do Meals on Wheels. The people there were so happy to see us and we got a nice welcome back. :-) Avis, the lady in charge, asked us to do the 'Around the World' route - it's a long one which goes around the city to homes which are not on any of the other routes. It took us about 2 hours to do the route and get back to the MOW building. We really enjoyed being back to delivering meals to seniors and they are so appreciative of us that how can we not like doing this. :-)
After MOW, we ran some errands...........to Target to buy some pyjamas which were on sale - they are actually pj bottoms (like capris) and I bought a few that I could wear around the house - some of them don't look like pjs and are so comfortable on hot days like today. We also went back to Elmer's Furniture cuz Dan had called us and told us his boss said we could get a new couch (not the one on the store floor) for the sale price - we also bought a bedroom suite, two single beds, three mattresses, four night tables, two rockers recliners and the living room suite. We are so happy :-) - we now have a full house of furniture (well, we will when we get it all - we are going to have the bedroom suite delivered next week, but the living room suite and the two rocker/recliners won't be delivered for a couple of months). Also, today, we got a call to say our outdoor furniture which we had ordered is now ready for pick-up. It feels so good to be able to have (or almost have) all the furniture we need to furnish our house - it took us so long to do the research for all of this. I am very grateful that the guy who worked at Fantastic Furniture was not there yesterday - if he was, we would have ordered stuff from him which would have been okay, but now we have furniture that we like much better. Co-incidence? I think not. :-)
I spent this evening relaxing, watching tv, typing this blog, doing dishes.........and Dad went to SES. Tonight, they did a review of what good teamwork looks like. One of the instructors gave a one hour presentation about what constitutes good and bad teams. After a break, the members broke into two groups and did two exercises: the first exercise had the instructor randomly putting out cards numbered 1 to 30 in a field. The job was for each member to take turns running from one card to the next in numerical order. Dad went first and as he found a card (it took him a long time since no one knew where the numbers were) he yelled out what number he was on. As each successive member took their turn they did the same thing so that the team members became faster and faster at completing the task because they could see where the previous team members had found the numbers. Also, those members who had completed the task could also yell to the members currently running the route which way to go to get to the next number. The second exercise had the instructor giving each team 12 famous quotes about what makes good teamwork (cut in half) and the team had to try and match up the quotes. Once they were done that, they had to see if they were right (Dad says his team had two which were not correct), fix the ones which were incorrect and then choose six which they thought were most relevant to working in SES. Dad says it wasn't as interesting as last week's session, but he knows it's important stuff that they need to review every now and then because it's important for the members to work as a team when they get called out on a job.
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