Sunday, 11 May, 1990

Dad's course continues to go well.  Two new students joined the class for four days last week - they just needed to complete one part of the course.  One of Dad's colleagues, John, joined us in the unit on Wednesday for three days.  He was teaching a different course at the airport, but joined us for dinner each night.  We had met him once before in Melbourne, where he and his family live, but it was nice to get to know him better.

I continued on with my knitting this week and have now completed five baby beanies.  I am alternating between the three colours just to give myself some variety.  I also signed up for a free online course from BYU about preparing to serve a mission.  It's actually geared to young people getting ready to go on a mission, but I figure that it should be pretty much the same for older couples who want to go.  Since Dad and I want to serve a mission when we retire, why not start now to prepare.  I have also started reading a new series of books: Rizzoli and Isles - a detective series which has been made into a tv series - I like watching the tv show and the books have turned out to be quite good so far.

Thursday night Dad and I went to the movies.  Dad's boss had remembered that I had talked with him in Brisbane about how expensive movies were here in Australia ($19. per person here in Perth) and he sent us a movie gift card that was lying around the office and expires next month.  There wasn't much showing that we were terribly interested in, but we wanted to use the card since Chris had been kind enough to send it to us.  The best of the lot seemed to be a movie called 'Chef' - it received good  comments on rottentomatoes.com.  It was an 'okay' movie - nothing to write home about - more of a tv movie-of-the-week, I thought.  I was glad that I had not spent my own money to go and see it.  We are hoping that something better will come out in the next two weeks before I head back to Canada.

Dad finished work early yesterday and so we headed down to Kings Park - an incredibly beautiful park in Perth.  They have free guided walks given by volunteers and so we decided to go on one of those.  It was a walking tour through the Botanic Gardens.  The tour guide, Margaret, was so knowledgeable about the plants/shrubs/flowers/trees in the park and so it was interesting to be on her tour.  Dad and I want to go and take another free guided tour in Kings Park tomorrow - this one is called 'Kings Park: Past and Present'.

Saturday night, we went to a see a play with our friend, Rosalea, which was put on by an LDS theatre group in her Stake.  It was called 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.  It's a British comedy play and the actors did quite a good job.  After church today, we went to Rosalea's for dinner with her children.  As it turned out, her youngest son got the time wrong and so didn't show up until after we'd eaten and her middle daughter didn't show up as she wasn't feeling well.  Her oldest daughter came along with her husband and daughter, but wanted to wait until her brother showed up to eat and we had to go early to let another of Dad's colleagues into the unit here.  So, Dad and I ate dinner with Rosalea without any of her kids.  I felt bad for her since it was Mother's Day and it didn't turn out as she had hoped.  It was a delicious meal for us, though.