Rebas' Adventure in Ozzieland

Quick note to say that the chili was a great success. no one had ever had it before or even heard of cornbread, but they all had seconds which is the best compiment a cook can get. Yay! I like to when poeple like my cooking. jenna, an american student who was here for one term went home last night. She has been very close with the Rowbottoms, they girls just love her. Everyone was really sad to see her go. She came to bible study and then David and Lorraine took her to the Airport for her flight that left at midnight. she was nervous about her connecting flights and luggage and all that. My trip over was not so long ago that I have forgotten what it feels like. By the time she left, I was nervous too! I am so glad I don't have to do that trip again so soon. THis is getting long for a quick note, see ya!

Hello, well the proposal is submitted and I am exausted. I am sort of taking to day off, but tomorrow the work begins again. I have to prepare a power point presentation for next week when i have to give a 15 min talk on my project for the commitee, gulp. Tonight I am making Chili and Corn bread for my bible study. I have never made chili before so I just got a recipe off the internet, let's hope it is good. I am staying at the Rowbottoms like I said, but instead of staying here for 2 more weeks, I am moving again! There is a couple at church I have gotten to know a little, they live down the street from where I was house sitting and they invited me to stay with them. I dicided to go because the rowbottom's have two canadian students coming to stay with them in a few weeks and then David's dad is coming for a september. I figure i should give them a break. And the commute is a lot shorter at the Craig and Sarah's (those are their names). Craig and Sarah are movie people, so I think we will have fun, they are probably around 40 and very nice. Well, I am off to make Chili!

OK, so the deadline for my proposal is on Monday. Today I met with my three advisers and went over my paper and they gave me their impute. I feel really good. Must of what they had to say was about sentence structure and re-writing or re-organizing paragraphs so the point was more clear. I fell that I can make all these changes in the next two days and be ready to submit it on Monday. Hooray! I did it! I got a first draft out and it was acceptable! Now will the committee approve it? that is the next hurtle. on the 8th of July I will give a 15 minute presentation of my project and then the school committee(that is the school of public health) will approve it or give it back to me to revise and then it goes to the University to be approved. ahhhh! Breath Reba, breath._______________________yesterday I moved out of my house sitting house and back in with the Rowbottoms. I will stay with them for a few weeks and then move into my own house! I will have one roommate, Melissa or Mel as she is called. I still need to find furniture for my room namely a bed! I am so tired right now, I moved yesterday and as I was leaving the sister of the family who's house it is came over and for all intents and purposes but on a white glove and walked through the house. I understand that she was trying to watch out for her sister, but her attitude was very offencive. it put me in a bad humor and made me worry that I didn't clean enough (and I did clean the whole house). Anyway, I am over it now. However, cleaning, moving, sleeping in a new place, and having my paper reviewed is alot in a 24 hour period. I put it in the plan to get no work done this afternoon and have spent the last 2 hours at my desk at Uni eating my lunch at reading the 4th Anne of Green Gables book (which you might notice coming out in my writing style of this blog post). I am now going doing online things and then will go home and hang out with David and Lorraine. They are going to be out of town tomorrow through Sunday morning (they do this made dash back to get to church) so I will be alone the rest of the week. Not to worry I have plans on Saturday to go see the A-Team movie. Oh the cheese, the glorious cheese!

Hey, I got camera phone computer link to work, apparently I needed to reboot the phone as well as the computer, live and learn. so here are the pictures: The Chess Set, Me eating a meat pie for the first time, Me figuring out the left-hand turn only maze, and the koalas, I forget to mention that they had some wildlife too. There were a few kangaroos, who were all tired and did nothing but lie in the sun, and a parrot named Henry that could talk really well, we heard him say "hello Henry" and what was funny is that he had an Aussie accent. They had koalas who were really cute, I am hoping to go to a petting zoo at sometime and get a closer look at some of these guys.

Ok, I was waiting to update the blog until I could get pictures, but that didn't work. I went out last Saturday without my camera, now I do have a camera on my phone and it even comes with a USB cable and a program for your computer, yeah sure, even with help from a desk-mate I COULD NOT GET IT TO WORK!! Very frustrating, anyway. I went to a place called The Maze with some people from church. I girl named Becky invited me. It is just outside of town so it has a nice country atmosphere to it. The Maze is a park that you pay $20 to get into, once you’re in there is free disk golf, mini golf, a "giant" chess set (it only came up to my knees, but I still made my friend take a picture of me playing a game of chess and I am a piece on the board, hopefully you will see this picture one day. The guy playing chess with me is named Richard, he goes to my church and is on the worship team with me (to your questions, no, but I think he could be a friend)). And of course, Mazes, we did them all. one was made of clap board and was quite tricky, and two of them were short and came up to your waist, but the trick was, in one you could only turn right and in the other you could only turn left, it was really fun figuring out how to get out of the maze. The whole day was so much fun, playing games and it was cool and sunny. There is a restaurant there and I had my first Meat Pie (very Aussie) they are a small individual pastry full of hamburger and gravy and sometimes veg. you can get good meat pies and bad ones, sort of the equivalent of a buying a burrito, everything from Taco del Mar to the gas station. The one I ate was on par with a Reesers brand called Mrs Macs. I had such a good day. And then at night I went to an event that was not what I thought it was going to be… Jill is a girl who plays the piano at church and we are on the worship team together (please remember how casual the worship team is, I am having tons of fun being on it, but I don’t want to boast, anyone gets on the team if they can sing and are willing to). Anyway, Jill goes to another church at night and they were having some sort of yearly dinner, like an appreciation dinner or something and Jill asked if I could come help in the kitchen and do dishes. I knew she had already asked around church for help so I said sure. I was imagining a church kitchen and I some nice church ladies handling the dinner and a group of people doing the dishes, many hands make the work light, that sort of thing. Well, no. Jill picked me up at 6:30pm with Jono, a guy from church (Jonathan, is nicknamed Jono over here). The car is full of balloons, we get to the a building 20 minutes later and immediately start grouping balloons into arrangements for the doors and making centre pieces, may I remind you that it is now after 7pm and this dinner is starting at 7:30. And people keep coming in with dishes, it is a potluck and there is only one table set up full of appetizers (by the way appetizers are called entrees over here, entrees are just called mains, this confusion didn’t help) and the woman in charge starts to tell us how we are going to how we need to wait until 7:30 and then bring out the mains that are waiting in the next room. And that is when I starting asking a lot of questions. it turns out that they rent part of the building for church, and their part does not include a kitchen, just a big room with a small sink and some tables, ahem, ok, we get to hand wash dishes for 50 people with nothing but a one bay sink and some folding tables. The one good thing was a hot water tap so we had plenty of hot water all night long. The other thing was there was no one in charge of the kitchen, it was just us.Here’s the story: The church had realized that the people who should be going to the dinner where the people who always served and so they decided to get outside help so that the nice old ladies (and they had some really cute, classic old church ladies, Love them!) could go to the dinner. Great plan, and Jill’s job was to find said outside help. No problem, if I had been told. There was a major lack of organization, Jill was supposed to be at the dinner too, and it was just Jono, another girl and myself. I ran around trying to find out what resources we had and to set up the tables so we had a dirty side and a clean side. Since coming to Australia, I have met several people here who don’t bother to rinse their dishes after they wash them, you just scrap them and then wash them in a tub of hot soapy water and shake ‘em off and call it good. Of course after a few dishes the water is not exactly clean anymore, this was what happened on Saturday night. I didn’t say anything and just let it be. Soon, it was our job to take out the main dishes, there was so many and they had set up only one table. If you have ever help out at a potluck, you will know that people can get very upset if they don’t see their dish set out, we tried really hard and I think over all we succeeded. By this time I was over my surprise and willing to still have fun. I had felt very, um, incredulous (that’s a nice word for it) at the lack of planning and I hope I didn’t let it show. We ate the leftovers, yum! That church can cook! Jill came after she had eaten to help and we kept up on the dishes pretty well. At the end we had done everything but the glasses, water and wine for each person (no paper here) and we were all dead on our feet, and three young people at the party came and asked if they could help, we said yes. We shooed away the nice old ladies. All in all a fun and full Saturday, I was so tired on Sunday I didn’t do anything.

Hi all, I am taking my lunch break. this weekend I had a movie night at my house. We watched the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I had seen it before and it was very good. Not much else happened during the weekend, I went to church and then to lunch at David and Lorraie's. There is a new family at church, they moved here a few years ago and through several factors including the husband's battle with depression, the family never got connected with anyone and has been rather isolated. Someone told David and Lorriane about them and as a church we are trying to bring them in a little. On friday I am going to hang out with the wife while the guys watch the soccer game. I have also made a new friend recently. One of the girls who has been going with me to YWAM on fridays. Her name is Emmy, she is half chinese and has lived in serveral countries including India and is now going to school in Perth for art and film. she wants to make TV commercials. she is fun, I am hoping to hang out with her out side of YWAM because at church you don't have that much time to talk and it gets out at 10pm so we all just go straight home after because she works Saturdays. Emmy has a car and has given me a ride to YWAM the last few weeks. I am feeling better, I am still scared I have to much to do finish this proposal on time, but I am trying anyway. We will see what happens. Thank you so much for your prayer and comments, so encouraging!

Hi Guys, I am feel better today. I just got out of a meeting with my advisory team. It is made up of three profs. Stuart, who is my main advisor, Ranil who is food engineering, and Hannah who is Sensory. They are all great. Hannah espeically, she is very tall and has a throaty voice, sort of like Julia Childs with an Australian accent. She has lots of experience with research degrees at Curtin. She said that I should work hard and try to make the June 28th deadline. Or rather try my best and we will make a decision on the 28th. I am supposed to turn in the paper on the 28th and then on July 8th give a powerpiont presentation. She said I should think of it as the 28th is my due date for a frist draft and then if is good enough I will turn it in, and if it is not, I will wait until the next round of the commitee which is Ausgust 2nd. This is duable if I work hard. Please keep prayer that I make good on this. And thank you for your prayers so far. Stuart seems to think that if I can get past the proposal I will do just fine in the lab. Nice to get some praise, hooray for working in industry and knowing how to work! I will write again soon. Love you Reba