Beginning of the End.

Second to last week in Tassie. I cannot believe it's already almost over!

Monday:

Since Monday was a really nice day, that meant raking had to be done. Sighhhhhhh. Justine and Erin would rake up piles along paths, and I would follow them picking up the piles and putting them in a wheelbarrow. So lame. We didn’t finish the paths though, which means more raking on Tuesday!... Booooooo.

Adam brought me in the baby devil enclosure to show me how to catch the baby girl devil that they use for the pats at the devil feeds. She is in there with her brother and they like to hang out in the back of this impossible to get into place. You have to use a stick and separate the brother from the sister and then put a bag over the sisters face so that you can grab her. I had a difficult time with it. They were being real growly, and even tried to get at my hand. I had Adam help me eventually. Hah. Oh wellll. I’m glad I tried though, I’ll hopefully get the hang of it.

So we have little cubbies in the staff room to put our stuff in. Aussies don’t call them cubbies though. Haha. We said the word cubbies and Erin goes, “No. Cubbies are what you make with sheets and chairs and beds and stuff.” I responded with, “No way! Those are forts!” It turned into a friendly Australian vs. Americans argument about the words cubby and fort. Haha. It was awesome. How weird is it that they call forts, cubbies? Crazy Aussies.

The Toro works! Huzzah! I always wanna drive it because it’s the only automatic thing at the zoo that I can actually drive. Adam told us Erin, Justine, and I to go do branches in the Lion Tail enclosure and the baby devil enclosure. I was like, “....Can I take the Toro?!” He is the Head Keeper, but he doesn’t like saying we are allowed to do stuff just in case Rob or Dick doesn’t approve, so he said, “I’m not saying anything. You can go ask Rob if you like.” I was like, “Come onnnnn. I’ve driven it before. Whinge whinge whinge.” I was being a sook. Finally, I was like, “Well it’s not that far and I don’t want to carry the branches, so I’ll take it and it’s not like I can get in that much trouble!” Justine and Erin were like, “You rebel” and didn’t get in the Toro with me. So I went by myself. Haha. I saw Caroline and Dick and neither of them got mad. After that Erin and Justine drove it and then I didn’t get another chance to drive because they were hogging it. I was the one who took the initiative to drive it! Bums.

I had a glass shattering moment about myself thanks to Erin. There was this real cool tree, and Erin was like, “Oh I want one of those in my yard!” and I said, “Mm yeah that tree is real fun!” She said, “You refer to things as fun all the time.” I do. I’ve realized it now. It drives me crazy.

Tuesday:

Animals are dropping dead at the zoo. Rob put out some poison to kill all the wasps around the zoo. Instead some birds have died and some wild pademelons have been found dead around the zoo. One of the peacocks that walk around the zoo was found dead on the roof of the koala enclosure. Now his little friend walks around by himself and is lonely.

I felt real sick after lunch and went home early, and Erin was like, “Mm maybe you got poisoned too.” Haaa. That’s not something you say to a crazy hypochondriac. After that I was trying to remember if I had somehow been in contact with the poison at all. Luckily I couldn’t think of any possible way that I could’ve been in contact with it, so I gave up on the poisoned theory. Haha.

Before I went home early, we spent the whole day raking again! Booo. We finished it all just before lunch though, so that was good because it meant no more raking the next day. We had the zoo in pretty good shape. There wasn’t much to left to do around the zoo. For that week at least.

There was a huge group of like high school aged kids at the zoo. They saw Leia and Harrison in the chook yard, so Erin and I went and got them out to let everyone have a pat. They loved it. I loved showing Leia off, as well. She was clutching on to my shirt like she didn’t want me to let her go. It was adorable. Although, I think she was also getting a little stressed by how many people were trying to pet her, so in retrospect it probably wasn’t the best idea, but she needs to get used to people if she’s going to be living in a zoo.

So Justine had fed the baby devils a few times by now. I had not. Adam came in to work on Tuesday saying, “Caitliiinnnn I have a surprise for you later todayyyyy.” I don’t generally like surprises. Erin guessed though and was like, “Is she feeding the baby devils today?” Then Adam was all sooky and was like, “It was meant to be a surprise..” I guess he was just going to take me to the devil feed with him and then be like, “Righto, here’s the wallaby leg, now hop in!” Eek. I went home though, so I didn’t get to do it.

Wednesday:

I felt much better on Wednesday. Like a million times better than Tuesday, plus work was super awesome.

Unfortunately, I found another dead pademelon.. It was just a little baby one, too. Stupid Rob and his stupid poison.. Also, one of the Long Tail macaques is injured. There’s a huge gash across it’s chest and upper arm. It looks real bad. The monkey was just sitting there holding its arm and licking the wound. That’s all the bad news for Wednesday.

I actually managed to get the baby girl devil out by myself! Hurray me! I’ve also been holding her for pats at the devil feeds! It’s awesome.

I’ve been allowed to drive the toro around. So that’s pretty fun.

Adam took Justine and I to catch some quolls! We each got to catch a few. It was awesome. He showed us how and then let us try. Those quolls are super fast. You’re meant to grab their tails and pull the up real fast so they can’t grab on to stuff. You also can’t really hold on to them very long because they can crawl up their tail to bite you. I guess quolls are known as the chainsaws of the bush because of how sharp their teeth are. Anyway, I caught myself some quolls and it was awesome! We were meant to catch a pair of quolls to send to Melbourne zoo, so we spent majority of the day going in to different quoll enclosure to check out the quolls and see which ones we wanted to send. So I didn’t do much else on Wednesday during work besides do awesome things, and walk around to quoll enclosures. Hah.

I fed the younger devils!! I went with Adam to the last devil feed because he feeds the younger ones for the last one. I wouldn’t go in with the adult devils because they are a lot stronger and could actually really really hurt me badly if they get to me. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. I don’t know how Adam and Erin manage to feed them and talk at the same time because I was just trying to make sure they weren’t trying to get me instead of the meat the whole time. It was definitely an experience though, I’m glad I did it and didn’t chicken out!

I registered for my Fall classes! I was worried because our internet had been working great and then it stopped working all of a sudden on Wednesday morning and I found out that the zoo’s internet wasn’t working either. So I was having a panic attack about registering. Our internet was working when I got home though, so I registered and got all of my classes that I need, even though I don’t want to even take most of them.. Haha. Cursed chemistry and physics.. It’ll be a really rough semester.

I finished the Seven Keys to the Kingdom series! Huzzah! It was good. It had a decent ending as well. I didn’t actually guess what would happen. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I really like Garth Nix. Next up, I’m reading the Fablehaven author’s new book!

Thursday:

So Dick put all of the Long Tails in this little cramped cage over night, including the injured one. Four male monkeys stuck in a tiny little space.. I don’t know what he was thinking when he made that decision. When they let the monkeys out, trying to isolate the injured one so they could check it out, we discovered two of the other monkeys had injuries as well! What the heck! It makes me so mad that they are being so stupid about serious stuff. When we told Dick about the first monkey, he was just like, “Well it’s licking the wound like a dog so obviously it’ll be fine. We will just leave it for now.” Uhhhhh... what? That didn’t even make sense, but you can’t really argue with the boss man. So two other monkeys got injured quite badly because he was being an idiot. One of them has this massive gash across its back and another has a cut on its throat that Rob says isn’t deep, but Adam says that it is a lot deeper than Rob is letting on. Cody, Mel’s son, was at the zoo with Rob. So while Rob and them were checking out the monkeys, I was stuck chasing Cody around. That boy does not know the meaning of obedience. He is way spoiled. So I was running around and yelling at him. Alice, one of the ladies that works in the reception area was like, “Uh.. you have a job to be doing, why the heck are you stuck babysitting him? Why isn’t he with his mother?” It was funny. Aaron saw me chasing after Cody and was like, “Hahahah Hey mum!” It was so lame.

They finally called to get a vet out. So Thursday was full of lots of waiting and not doing much and watching. The vet came and tried sedating one of the monkeys, but the monkey pretty much refused to pass out. Finally they just sedated the one with the gash on its back, and he passed out immediately. I got to see the monkey up really close and look at his wound. It was real bad. He had lots of little bite marks other places as well. He had to be rushed to the vet’s office because he needed stitches and a drain like right away, so we took that monkey and the one with the big gash on its chest, and headed to the vet’s office. On the drive there we passed this farm or whatever that had white wallabies! I was so excited! They are just albino wallabies, and apparently are a pain to take care of because they are more prone to tumors and stuff and get sunburns, etc. They are sooooo cute though. We finally got to the vet and brought the monkeys in. The vet lady told us that we could stay and observe! So we got to watch her put stitches in a monkey! How many people can say that they’ve seen that! Ha! She had to do inner stitches in the muscles and then put a drain in and the do more stitches on the outside. It was fascinating. I’ve never seen someone put stitches in in real life, so it was really cool! If I have, then I forget.. Anyway, it was super awesome. Our last days at the zoo have been full of excitement!

It is Friday right now, and we are leaving soon to go camping with Erin and her family and her boyfriend and some other people. I really don’t know who all is going, but Erin’s family owns some property on the east coast of Tassie. Should be fun, or really really really cold.. Hah. Anyway, it’s my last weekend in Tassie! I am a little sad that I’ll be leaving soon, but I’m pretty excited as well. It’s been a really great learning experience for me here.

Bahahahahaha there was just a lizard in our living room, and Justine tried to catch it, but she grabbed the tail and it dropped its tail!!! I’ve never seen a lizard do that!! The tail still wiggled around lots after it was cut loose! SOOOO FUNNYY!!!!

In A Galaxy Far, Far, Away.

Monday:

Yeeeaaahhhhh, I haven’t written in ages. My bad.

Mostly, I’ll write little bullet points down so I remember what happened, but I didn’t do a very good job for Monday apparently. Haha. It was rainy on and off. Not too much though. It was meant to rain heaps all week long.

The rain sucked because the cars were sucking on Monday as well. We have three cars that we use around the zoo. There is the big Land Cruiser that usually has a trailer hooked up to the back and we use it to get branches out in the bush or to take rubbish and dead branches to the tip. There is the little zute, which is just this little zebra striped suzuki mini ute type thing, I’ve driven it a few times. We use it for feeding out usually, and it’s been the only reliable car we have, even though it’s quite old, as well. Rob recently bought this little Toro thing. It’s like a tiny golf cart, but it’s got a little tip tray on the back and no roof. It’s also got the steering on the proper side! So Adam and I took the Toro up to the tip to dump some stuff off because the cruiser wasn’t working properly. He let me drive! Woo! As soon as we got there though, the Toro stopped working.. So we had to walk back to the zoo from the tip. Later Adam got the cruiser working, so we took that out to the tip only to have to walk back again because something was popping under the hood. Hah. I’m pretty sure I’m bad luck. No one else ever has to walk back. They can always eventually get the cars working again. Not when I’m there though. Sighhhh.

I saw a mangy wombat when I was walking back home. It’s so sad. There’s heaps of wombats around with mange. They look like creatures from a horror film. They lose chunks of hair all over the place and then it scabs over where they lost their hair. This one that I saw had half of its face all scabbed over and nasty looking. Basically, it looked like a zombie wombat. How terrifying would that be? Zombie wombat army! Eeekk. I told Azza about it later and he was like, “Well did you kill it? You’re meant to kill the mangy ones because it’s really painful for them...etc.” I was like, “NO! I could never kill one! Plus I don’t have anything to go about killing mangy wombats with anyway.” He goes, “Kill it with your bare hands!” Ha.

That’s about all I remember that was significant and not repetition of past weeks.

Tuesday:

Rainy days mean that we have to do inside esque tasks. The management does not like us getting wet. I don’t really know why, but it makes rainy days lazier and it’s nice.... except it means super crap jobs.

The only areas that were really inside jobs that hadn’t been done lately were the aviaries and the nocturnal house and the monkey dens. Justine and I were saddled with the task of going through the zillion aviaries and sweeping them out and tidying them up and what not. We had to wear these little masks while we did it. They got real hot and sweaty and disgusting. It’s probably the most miserable job I’ve had here, maybe on par with raking the paths. Ha. Some of the birds are real noisy, which sucks. Particularly the Sun Conures. Noisy freaking birds!

Leia is doing really well. She is definitely way less scared of people. She comes straight up to me and grabs at my legs to get picked up and doesn’t even need me to stick the bottle in her mouth. She’s so intelligent. Takes after her mama. Heh. I sing the star wars song to her. The tribute song, or whatever. “Kiss a wookie. Kick a droid. Fly the Falcon through an asteroid, til the princess is annoyed. This is space ships, it’s monsters, it’s Star Wars. We love it!” I think she enjoys it. Hahah. She gives me kisses too. She licked my nose.

Azza said he had never heard Spanish before, so Justine and I were telling them some Spanish stuff. I’m so bad at just saying things, so he was like, “Well just say stuff. Like if you were having a conversation in Spanish or something.” I can’t just have a conversation by myself. That’s just absurd. So instead, I told him what things in the groceries were in Spanish. Ha.

Wednesday:

I started my paper on Wednesday. Two thousand word paper about international internships with three different sources. I hate writing papers. I’m so horrid at them. I got some done on Wednesday though.

We were talking about finding a Mexican restaurant to eat at, and Adam was saying there’s this really amazing Spanish restaurant in town. Justine goes, “Oh Caitlin when your parents are here make them take me there. I want to bum some free expensive food off of them.” Uhmmmm what in the world makes you think that I want you to come hang out with my family at all, let alone let you bum free stuff off of them. So rude. However, she did say that Leia is definitely my baby girl because she wouldn’t eat as easily from her. Sucka.

I finished the fourth Seven Keys book. I’m burning my way through them. Good books. I really like Garth Nix.

It wasn’t really rainy, but it did rain a bit on and off, so we had to do rainy day jobs. I didn’t think it could get much worse then tidying the aviaries. I was wrong. We were still working in the aviaries, but we had to scrub all of the perches in them. You know, like where the birds all hang out and poo on. Mm. Fun. So we had to get gloves and little scourers and hot buckets of water. It took ages and by the time we were done, the scourers were basically non existent. They had holes in them and were super nasty. The water looked like mud, basically. It was sick, but the aviaries have never looked better!

I touch so many dead things at the zoo. I didn’t really think about it, but I was wrapping up dead rats (that, by the way, had been alive the day before.. but had been put in the freezer..) and putting them in the freezer for the snakes and Justine and I realized that we touch soooooo many dead things. Dead chicks, dead mice, dead rats, dead birds, dead wallabies. No big. Ha. Aaron came in while I was wrapping up the rats and he picked one up and was like, “Hey! This one looks just like my old pet rat!” and he was talking about how cool his rat was. It would sleep with him and stuff. It made me want to get a little pet rat.

Dick is crazy. He gets mad about everything. He just tries to find reasons to get mad with people. He decided that Aaron doesn’t pick up the devil poos fast enough for his liking and was saying that Aaron had to time himself and then Adam had to do the same job and time himself. So insane. Aaron doesn’t even take a long time to do it. He also told Erin that she is the worst teacher ever because Aaron didn’t come out backwards from one of the bird aviaries. You’re supposed to go out backwards so that you can watch the birds and makes sure they aren’t going to escape. I don’t see how it’s Erin’s fault that Aaron didn’t come out the proper way. Aaron has been working at the zoo just as long as Erin pretty much. The management at the zoo is one that I would not want to deal with for an extended period of time.

We got a new quoll! She’s real cute and little. I was worried that they would stick her in with the big spotted tail for breeding, like they did with the other little girl spotted tail that got killed, but they didn’t. We have a full nocturnal house now. We got a ringtail possum, as well.

I finished my paperrrrrr Wednesday night. Two days before it was due. I’m awesome.

Thursday:

Suuuuuper rainy day. Didn’t let up at all. Rob kept saying, “Looks like it’ll let up any minute now.” It ended up raining so much that the gorge flooded. Hahah. Good eye Robbo. There is a pool and stuff at the gorge and it got completely flooded over. It flooded up to where the bathrooms are.

So I don’t have a good rain jacket with me, so they handed me Alicia’s big rain jacket to use for the day. It was real comfy and big. I felt bad doing all these dirty jobs in someone else’s nice jacket though. Well, really I didn’t do that many jobs. We went home early. Haha. The only thing we did pretty much is feed the animals in the morning and clean the nocturnal house. They sent Justine and I home because they didn’t really need us there. Erin and Adam spent like two hours just doing nothing, but pretending to chop up food. Hah. I fed Leia, and she gave me a nice muddy, wet snuggle. Such a good little kangaroo. I’ll miss her when I leave.

Reid came to Lonnie this weekend, so he got here on Thursday. We invited Erin for dinner, and paid for her so that she would pick up Reid at the airport so that he wouldn’t have to pay for a seventy dollar taxi. We went out to a Mexican restaurant. I got an enchilada. Strangest enchilada I’ve ever eaten. It wasn’t anything like what an enchilada actually is. It was more like a really hard shelled burrito. It was tasty though. Erin didn’t much like it. I guess Aussies don’t have the taste buds for Mexican food. We went home after that, and I passed out because I was real sleepy, and also because I didn’t really want to sit in the living room and watch tv with Justine and Reid. I haven’t watched tv at all since I’ve been here, and I didn’t really care to start with them because the tv here seems to be real boring.

Friday:

Justine made breakfast Friday morning because Reid was here. I made sausages, really they are called chipollatas or something, but they are mostly like sausage. They tasted a little different. Still delightful. Justine made bacon, which is different than our bacon, but also tasty. She made eggs and english muffins and potatoes. It was yummy.

I went in to the zoo to use the internet after breakfast to turn my paper in. It was the only assignment that I’ve actually turned in on time. Hah. I checked out classes and stuff for Fall because I have to register while I’m here in Tassie. Sooo I’m not sure what time I’ll have to register at, but I think I know, but I’ll have to sit at the zoo on Wednesday after work next week with my computer waiting until it’s midnight in Utah. So that’ll be interesting. I got to skype with Heather Rae and Dylan and Ashley and even saw Amber and Tiberius for a second. It was real nice to see some familiar loving faces. It would be a lot easier for me here if I had been able to keep in touch more with people.
Reid and Justine came up to zoo after a while. We walked around and told Reid about different stuff, and what we do around the zoo. It was fun ish. We waited for Erin to get off or work because we were all going to Georgetown to go on a penguin tour! We were going to stay at Erin’s house again and sleep in her brother’s room. Unfortunately, Erin’s brother was home for the weekend and took his room back. All four of us had to sleep in Erin’s room. Hah. Oh plus Max, her adorable dog. The penguin tour was real cool, though! We got to stand on the beach while the penguins came in for the night. They were walking right by us, like inches away from our feet! Little wild penguins! So awesome!! We saw a baby one. They look exactly like the adults, because the penguins in Tassie aren’t very big. They are the smallest penguins. Fairy penguins. The babies just have this weird fluff around areas. So funny looking.

After that, we went out to the pub. Hurray. Drunk people. It wasn’t too bad. I got bored after a while. Some girl in the bathroom told me that I have perfect teeth and that I didn’t belong there. It was so funny, and made me feel good about my teeth. Thank you parentals for all the orthodontia. My teeth are envied in Georgetown. Rad. Later some really drunk guy told me that I was “seriously gorgeous” and that him and his friends had been over there talking about it. Even later, I had another really drunk guy experience. This crazy drunk guy would not leave us alone. He kept following us around and trying to get us to come to some party with him afterwards. He told me that I have the greatest smile ever and I have massive eyes and my hair is, and I quote, “sooo straight and strong!” Bahah. What does that even mean? I have really strong hair. Thank you crazy man. He also said that I should be his first model. Justine was being annoying about all of this. She kept saying, “Oh I just can’t be around you anymore. You’re just way to gorgeous. Haaaa.” Like she really meant something along the lines of, “He obviously just thinks this because he’s drunk and a probably escaped from a mental institution!” Whateverrrrr. I’ll be glad to not be in this environment anymore. Hah.

We went back to Erin’s house. Erin wasn’t tired, so when Reid was laying on the floor and saw that she had heaps of diaries under her bed, Erin decided it would be a good idea to read some entries. They were sooooo funny! She’s been writing in her diary every day for YEARS. I was really impressed actually. I could never do that.

Saturday:

I chose to be lame on Saturday, and didn’t want to be around anyone anymore. So I stayed home when they went to check out the flooding at the gorge. I cleaned instead. It was exciting. I actually really enjoyed being away from people for once.

I have to write a “reflective journal” to turn in for my internship, so I got completely caught up on that.

At night, Justine made pizza and we watched The Mummy. Reid had never seen any of them. I actually enjoy all of the Mummy movies, even though I don’t particularly like Brendan Frasier. I think he does a real good job in those movies. I got sleepy towards the end of the first one, so I went to bed early. Hah. I’m such a wuss. I go to bed at like nine thirty or ten every night. Lame, lame, laaammeee.

Sunday:

Reid was already gone by the time I woke up and Justine was at work. I had the house to myself! Hurray!
I went to church with Jess. Cute boy, whose name is Hayden, gave a talk, which is the only reason that I know his name is Hayden. I can’t figure out how old he is. He HAS to be older than me. He’s adorable. I wish I had an opportunity to talk to him, but he goes to a different class than I do, or he teaches one, or something that is obnoxiously keeping me from talking to him. One of the bishop ric pulled me out of Sunday school to catch up and make sure I was doing well with everything. We chatted for most of Sunday school. It was pretty fun actually. Jess had to leave church early, so I was sitting with this nice lady in Relief Society. We had to get in pairs and talk about something. We had a really enjoyably spiritual chat about what we were learning about. The lesson was on one of Uchdorf’s talks. I don’t think that’s how you spell his name.. Oh well. Anyway, it was a really good Sunday. The talks and lessons were all really amazing. It was a delightful end to my weekend.

Coooooooool Title.

Monday:

More of the usual. Animal feeding, cleaning, etc.

I fed the birds with Adam because Erin and Aaron were both gone. When we got to the budgies, we discovered that one of them was dead. Poor budgie.. Adam went in there to get it. He picked it up and was like, “Look! It’s not dead!” and starts playing with it like he was a two year old and the dead bird was his little action figure.. Hah. He was pulling its wings up and down and stuff. It was hilarious/disturbing/sad. I also had to go feed the pigs with Adam. Gosh it smells awful. I’m pretty sure anyone who goes up there smells like pig poo for the next three days.. Especially Adam because he’s the only one who actually goes IN the pig pen to shovel all the poo out and stuff. Anyway, we had to put more water in this big bin they have up there that they use to get buckets of water to give the pigs. So Adam was filling the bin with one bucket, and I was using another bucket to fill the pigs water thing. I came back over to fill up my bucket after a few times, and Adam decided it would be really funny to dump water on me. He was standing in the back of the ute, so he was above me. He complete covered my whole right side with water.. I got him back, of course. So we came back to the zoo soaking wet and had to keep working. It sucked.

Justine and I were both with Adam, and he was saying that one of us had to weed Marigold’s cage.. I did NOT want to go in there. Marigold is a scary bird. She drags her beak along the metal bars of the gate around her cage which makes this awful awful like nails on a chalkboard sound. She hisses. She screams. She snaps at you. She can also be nice (apparently..) and she will let people scratch her, but mostly she’s just scary. She likes Erin though. She will hop on Erin’s arm and stuff. Anyway, so I immediately opted for whatever the second option was. Haha. Justine had to go in there, but she didn’t mind I guess. Afterwards she was saying that there was this group of boys watching Marigold terrorize her. So anytime Marigold did something like try to bite Justine, the boys would laugh and Marigold would realize that she should do it again because it’s funny. Haha. Then later a big group of women came over to her and she was being all nice to Justine, pretending that she was a little angel bird. Crazy devil bird.

I met the senator of Tassie! Haha. He was at one of the devil feeds while I was there. He started talking to me and asking me questions about being from the US because Adam always mentions that Justine and I are interns from America. So I had no idea that he was the senator, but afterwards Adam was like, “You just talked to our state senator.” So that was pretty cool.

Tuesday:

Mmmm Tuesday was also uneventful. Mulching mulching and moooorreee mulching. I had to take these bags over to the mulch piles and fill them all up. I was meant to mulch the canaries and Marigold’s cage. Luckily Erin came to help before I went into Marigold’s cage, so I just had to fill the bags and Erin mulched her cage. I mulched the canaries cage. The canaries are so cute and little. Anyway, it was real boring and I was all by myself.. Rawwrrr.

I discovered that Azza won’t go into Marigold’s cage either. Haha. I thought I was the only one who was didn’t want to go in there, but Erin said something about how he wouldn’t go in there so someone else needed to take her food. He made me think I was the only one! He even made me go in there once while we were feeding the animals together. Punk.

Yeah that’s about all that happened on Tuesday. It was really just an uneventful week I guess. I fed the Joey, but I feed her like every day. She’s so cute. I decided to name her Leia. Erin said I got to name her. So I’m naming her Leia because there is a Harrison in the chook yard with her. I want to start calling Harrison, Han.. Haha. Also, I guess turtles as pets is illegal cause they are like a pest or something, but Erin lives by a swamp and found one in her backyard and brought it to give to Adam cause Adam has lots of pets and has always wanted a turtle I guess. Anyway, so he was trying to think of a name for him and after I told him that I named the joey Leia, he decided that he was going to name his turtle Jabba. Haha. So cool.

Wednesday:

I spent a lot of Wednesday weeding with Erin. She is a super tree hugger and she was talking to me about this new pulp mill that I guess is going to be built and how she doesn’t want it built, etc. So we had a nice long chat about how in the future it will be segregated between greenies and smoggies. Hah. So there will be water fountains specifically for the greenies and water fountains specifically for everyone else. Obviously the greens would be comparable to the blacks back in the day. Erin also spent a bit of time trying to teach me the proper way to say the o sound like Aussies do.

When we were doing the groceries, Adam was super hypo.. as usual. He started throwing rolls at Aaron and I. So I was throwing stuff back at him. We had a nice little food fight, until Adam finally yielded. I’m always more competitive than I think I am..

Adam told me that my teeth are very white. It made my day. Is that sad??

I’m obviously getting very lazy with my blog writing.. When I first started I think I wrote every single day. Now I have to write a whole week in like the few days after that week. Hmm.

Thursday:

There was a new girl working on Thursday. Her name is Lucinda. She’s very tall. She asked us how old we were and then said that she is seventeen and told us that she feels sooooo young around us. Thank you for making me feel extremely old. Anyway, she doesn’t actually work at the zoo. She is doing a work placement thing for tourism, so she will be working at the zoo in the reception area every thursday for the next six weeks. She wasn’t dress properly on Thursday though, so they had her work outside with us. Hah. I don’t think she was pleased about that. She looked SO bored the whole time because we didn’t know if she was allowed to come in the enclosures with us because of liability stuffs or whatever, so she stayed outside of the enclosures and observed. We were picking up poos in the dingo enclosure. Haha. What a fun thing to observe, yeah? I LOVE the dingoes. They are so cute. White dog won’t come up to me though, or anyone else for that matter. Erin left me to do their water by myself, and it’s this huge tub thing so I had to scrub it out and fill it back up. Red dog stole my scrub brush and I had to chase her around the enclosure for quite a while. Haha. It was actually really fun. They both kept hopping into the big water tub, so it was pointless for me to have cleaned it by the time I finished.

We did lots of weeding again. Well, really we had these big clipper things and we were clipping back a bunch of blackberry bushes. Those things are painful. Stupid bushes.. Anyway, it was something Lucinda could actually do, but I don’t think she was happy about it. Haha. She wants to be a flight attendant, so I she’s getting some sort of certificate in tourism. She has to do like three different work placements before she gets that though, and she got put at the Tassie Zoo. Sooo she was super bored outside weeding with us when she wanted to be inside doing reception area and touristy stuff. Poor Lucinda.

Leia gets fed three times a day now. I hog her and feed her every single time. If that’s mean, I don’t care. Ha. She’s my precious baby roo.

Friday:

Hobart day. Justine and I packed up and Judy took us to the bus depot. Judy is sick and she has a shaved head, so she wears a wig. While we were in the car she said, “Do you girls mind if I take my head off? It’s bothering me.” Obviously she was referring to her wig, but it was just a weird sounding question. Hah. So yeah, she took us to the bus depot and we went and got our tickets for our like two and half hour bus ride to Hobart.

I started the third Seven Keys to the Kingdom book by Garth Nix. Drowned Wednesday. I finished it in the car ride home from Hobart. Hah. I’ve read a total of seventeen books while I’ve been in Tassie. I clearly have a really full social life. The bus ride wasn’t too bad. We got to Hobart, but didn’t know where to go because Aimee, another intern doing an internship through AustraLearn, was still working. She told us to meet her at the post office.. Hah. We had to ask someone where it was and try to find it. We finally found it and Aimee told us that she still had to work until like eight or nine.. What the heck! So we walked around the city. We found a map and saw that they had botanic gardens there, so we started to walk there. It was a long freaking walk! It was like an hour walk or something. However, we stopped at this little memorial place that you can see pretty much all of Hobart from. Oh my goodness! Hobart is absolutely beautiful. There is a big mountain on one side and then water on the other. All the houses are on these hills and stuff. It’s gorgeous. Anyway, we finally got to the gardens. They were so gorgeous. They were a million times better than the gardens in Melbourne. It’s a shame we were too tired to want to walk around more.. So we only looked at about half of the gardens. It was so gorgeous though. So many great plants. As we were walking back we saw a gate that said “Beaumaris Zoo” (I think) and we were like, “What the heck? I didn’t know there was a zoo here!” We knew there were two wildlife parks, but they weren’t like right in the city. So we went up to the gate, which was closed. It had all these signs all over it that we started reading. Turns out it used to be a zoo, in fact, it was the zoo that housed the last tasmanian tiger ever. LSKDFJSLDK SOOO COOOOL! I couldn’t believe that we just randomly stumbled upon this place! I was at the same place that had THE LAST TASSIE TIGER EVER. My life is full, and getting fuller.

So we walked back to the wharf afterwards (Yeah, I didn’t mention that before. We started off by a wharf.. Haha. Oh and we found a huge moderny pirate ship looking! It was painted all black and was called the Bob Barker, heh. It was a ship for those radical whale huggers that go out and try to stop whalers and stuff. They had a list on a board outside asking for different things to be donated to their cause. It had stuff like tofu and vegetarian treats on it. Hippies.) and Aimee still wasn’t off work, so we went to dinner at a place called Hog’s Breath Cafe. It was a burger place. I had a real tasty steak sandwich. We went and walked around in Target after that. Finally Aimee said she was almost done, so we went and waited outside her work. We caught a taxi to her place and left our stuff there. She lives down the street from this little Italian place that one of her friends works at and she hadn’t eaten yet, so we went with her because we wanted dessert. I had the best dessert ever! They were little Nutella calzones with ice cream. So goooood. I had so much yummy food this weekend. Random side note: they don’t have pumpkin pie in Australia. How ridiculous is that?! They don’t even have the same pumpkins as us. They don’t carve pumpkins for Halloween! What a sad life. She has a friend who has a car, so he drove us and we went out for like half an hour before we all decided we didn’t really care to go out that night. So we went back and went to bed.

Saturday:
We went to this little cafe and got pastries and hot chocolate. I have yet to have a bad hot chocolate, and every hot chocolate I have is pretty much better than any hot chocolate I’ve had in the States. There was this one place that gave me my hot chocolate with the chocolate still at the bottom and I had to stir it up and it was SO GOOOD! We went to the Salamanca Market after that. It was so cool. Way better than Queen Victoria’s Market. Hand’s down. There were all these people playing music everywhere. They were selling all this amazing hand made jewelry and stuff. There was a stall selling jewelry made from spoons and forks, and it actually looked really cool. I wanted to buy so many things!! We got some tasty taffy stuff and “the smallest pancakes”. You could get these little pancakes with a variety of different things on top of them. We decided to be wild and got fresh lemon and butter on them. It was SOOOO yummy. There was heaps of amazing stuff. I could have probably spent all day there, and probably spent all of my money there. Hah. There were some guys dressed up as spotted tail quolls. Haha. It was awesome. My first thought was, “Oh man, I need that costume for next Halloween for sure.” They were passing out flyers to save some forest.

After the market, we went to the wharf to this part that has all these little take away places that are like boats and at low tide you had to like squat down to order and get your food. It was cool. I got some chips and gravy. Mmmm. We headed to the MONA next. Museum of Old and New Art. It opened like two months ago. I guess some guy won millions and millions of dollars playing poker professionally and spent his money on building this museum at a vineyard and buying a hundred million dollars worth of art. Aimee had been raving about the museum and saying we definitely needed to go. So I was pretty excited. I enjoy museums. This was the weirdest museum I’ve ever been to. Ha. They handed you these little ipods when you got in that have all the art in it and you can look them up and read more about them and stuff, which was cool, but it kind of distracted you from the actual art because you were looking at the ipods the whole time. Anyway, there was heaps of disturbing stuff in there. There was a whole hallway that was solely filled with molds of different vaginas.. What the heck? On the visitors guide thing they marked off areas that were inappropriate for children. Some places that were appropriate for children couldn’t be reached without going through the pg-13 areas. Clearly it wasn’t planned out well. The vagina wall wasn’t even the most awkward part of the museum. I’m not going to go into detail about the other weird stuff. However, I will say that there was this machine there that someone built that they feed it stuff and it creates poo. So on the visitor guide it said, “Feeding times......*insert time*... Poo times....*insert time*” Bahaha. So weird. There was heaps of real cool stuff there though. There was a “Fat Car”. It was a super nice Porsche or something that the artist had made fat. So it looks all lumpy and gross. Hahah. Anyway, it was an experience for sure. Hahah. We left and got dinner at Burger Got Soul! I had heard about this place from a few people. It was as tasty as they said. Mmmmm. I had a blood orange drink with it. I’m sad that we don’t have much blood orange stuff in the States. At least not at like food places and stuff. Maybe at the grocery store, I guess. Anyway, it was yummy. I love blood orange drinks. We were going to meet up with Erin Saturday night cause she was in Hobart as well, but she was at her cousins birthday party. We decided we didn’t want to go out, so we stayed in and watched a movie and played hearts. Haha. It was fun.

Sunday:

We decided that we wanted to get actual breakfast. It seems like they don’t do like real breakfast. They get muffins or pastries and stuff. So we found a restaurant that had pancakes and eggs on toast, that was about the extent of their breakfastiness. The pancakes were good though. We met Erin after breakfast and Aimee went to work. Erin took us to Bonorong wildlife park. It was a sweet park. It was real tiny though. They had HEAPS of kangaroos hanging out all over the park. I think there is a lot of inbreeding going on though, some of them didn’t seem too healthy. They had tawny frogmouths there! They are the silliest looking birds! I love them! If I had a pet bird, it would be either a tawny frogmouth, a rainbow lorikeet, or a yellow tailed black cockatoo. There were also potaroos there! They are silly looking. They are little wallabies I think. Real small with pointier snouts. We were feeding it through the cage. Hah. They had a cute juvenile wombat named Morris. They also had heaps of devils. After that, we drove home. I passed out for most of the drive. I woke up just in time to see this weird house that I guess some guy built himself. The bottom half looks like a little castle wall and the top half looked like the top of like a lighthouse or something. It was bizarre. It wasn’t huge either, it was like normal house sized. So weird/awesome. I spent the rest of the day reading and went to bed early.

Zip a dee do daaa

Adam whistles that song ALL the time. It always makes me want to go to Disneyland real bad. He also whistles Yankee Doodle a lot.. No idea why.

Monday:

So it’s really freaking cold in our house in the morning, it makes it extremely difficult to find motivation to get out form underneath the cozy comforter.. Today I found it extra difficult and did not want to even go to work. I’m really glad I did though. I had a pretty exceptional day.

First of all, let me start of by saying that last night Rob left the hose on in the tank for our water, so he text Justine and told her she had to go turn it off. It was already really dark outside, so Justine goes and gets this thing out of one of her drawers. It was this little head lamp thing. Baha. She said, “I’m really afraid of the dark, like outside in the wild..” That’s not that weird. It’s pretty scary outside in the bush in the dark. Anyway, so she goes outside. Two seconds later I hear a noise that sounded like it could be a scream, but could also just be an animal. I waited a bit for her to come back inside and if she didn’t come back inside in a reasonable amount of time I was going to be worried and go look for her. She came back in and was like, “There was this crazy bird in the little thing above our door. It flew out from above me when I went outside the door.. So I screamed..” Hehe.

Okay okay. So I didn’t want to go to work, but I forced myself to get up and put on my work clothes, etc. I didn’t really want to brush my teeth or do anything involving the water because when the tank is first filled up, it makes the water really dirty and brown looking.. It’s not exactly what I like to see when I’m trying to make my teeths clean.. It also didn’t help when I took a shower and turned the water off to see a bunch of dirt on the bathroom floor. Yeesh. Anyway. Got to work, did the usual morning stuff. We found out that Rob was not coming in to work. He got suuuuuuper wasted Sunday night and therefore decided since his mum and dad own the zoo, he did not need to care about whether or not he showed up to work. He was even drunk texting Justine at like three thirty in the morning. He’s kind of a skeez sometimes. Oh well. Justine was going on about how Rob offered her a job if she ever lived in Tassie. I don’t ever work with Rob, and she works with him every Sunday just the two of them. Obviously he sees her working a heck of a lot more than he sees me working because he never does any work during the week. Not that I care, because I wouldn’t really want to work there for more than my internship. Not because it’s a bad place to work. I actually really adore this zoo, but because you can tell Rob doesn’t really care about the animals. I’ve heard stories from Erin, and she said that she has told Rob a few times that she would call some sort of place that has initials for a name and would get Rob and the zoo in trouble. Hah. I wouldn’t want to deal with a place like that. So yeah. Rob wasn’t at work today. Fine by me.

We did the morning feedings, and then the groceries. After groceries and smoko, Adam said that I could go feed the baby roo! Yes! We have a little baby girl eastern grey kangaroo! She is absolutely precious. So I made up a bottle for her and went to find her in the chook yard. She let me pick her up and set her up on my lap. She was relatively easy to feed. She kept skitzing out and throwing her head around though. So whenever she did that, she got milk all over me. My poor jacket was covered by the time she was done eating. She’s really soft and snuggly. She does have really strong legs though. This was by far theeee best part of my day. Probably of my whole time here. Haha. It was awesome!! I got to feed her again later. It was time to go home, but I asked Adam if someone needed to feed the baby kangaroo. I told him I would do it on my way home if I needed to. So I got to feed her again and cuddle her. It was fantastic. I’m planning on monopolizing all things having to do with the baby roo. Bwaha. I was imagining being able to bring her home and having this little baby kangaroo living with me and growing up to be this big roo that is my special pet. Awesomeeee.

I went with Adam to clip some birds wings. He had me try doing the first one. I really don’t enjoy the feeling of cutting a bird’s feathers.. It displeases me immensely, in fact. So I told him he needed to do it. We clipped the wings of the corellas with their massive scary pointy beaks and Sweet pea (I dunno what kind of bird she is, but there is another one just like her in there), and four cockys (cockatoos, which are actually rather freaking huge). The cockys gave us the hardest time. They absolutely did not want to be touched. One of the birds had been fighting with another one I think, because when we caught it, one of it’s blood feathers was freely bleeding. Poor little birdy. Some of the birds had feather mites? I dunno what that is. Adam just told me they had it.

We moved some steel sheets today. Aaron, Adam, and I. They are pretty freaking heavy. We had to move like six sheets. It’s really annoying because they are really long, so it takes all three of us for one sheet, and whoever is in front doesn’t realize that they drag the other people through things. I was led through trees and rocks and poles. I had to keep moving and holding the sheet in an awkward way to get past it all. Annoying. When we left I called Aaron, Azza. I had never actually called him that to his face because I always think I sound silly saying it, but he was like, “Haha cool. I like it.” Everyone else calls him that, but I guess I didn’t sound silly saying it and he was glad I called him that or something. It’s easier to say than pronouncing his name the proper Aussie way.

I had to go with Adam to clean the pig pen. Bleechhhhhh. SUCH AN AWFUL SMELLLLLLL. Seriously, disgusting.

For the devil feeds, they put the baby devil in this little bag that helps keep her calm because it’s like being in a pouch. They let us hold the bag and stuff, but never actually handle her. Today when we took her back to her enclosure, Adam was like, “How brave do you feel today?” and he let me take her out of the bag to put her back in her area. Eek! So cool! She didn’t even scratch me or anything! It was awesomeeee.

Adam also let me drive the zute! Hurray! It’s manual, so he was doing the shifting while I did the steering and clutch stuffs. I didn’t stall once! Huzzah! I just need to learn how to do the whole shifting and clutching at the same time thing.. Hmm. One day. We got a new little vehicle, which would’ve been awesome because all the other vehicles keep breaking down, but this one doesn’t work either.. Ugh. On the bright side, it was really funny because I noticed that the steering wheel was on the left side! Cool! I told everyone and they hadn’t even noticed that. So Aaron went over and sat in it and was like, “Man this is weird.” It was cool.

Erin got fired today.. She isn’t actually finishing up working there until like four days before we finish up. So she will still be around, except that she won’t because she’s taking a two week holiday to finish up some schooling stuff.. So I probably won’t be seeing much of her in the near future. However, she is having a farewell thing. So that should be fun.

That’s about all that’s happened on Monday. I did finish another book. Airman by Eoin Coiffer or whatever. He wrote all the Artemis Fowl books, which by the way I only have one left to read and they are really fantastic books. I enjoy the later ones better than the first ones. Anyway, I really enjoyed Airman! Really fun read. I couldn’t help but think about The Count of Monte Cristo the whole time though, which actually I have on my Kindle and will probably be reading soon! I’ve read quite a few books since I’ve been here. Firelight (Dragon people? Yes please. However, it was a bit more Twilightesque than I wanted it to be..), Matched (Enjoyed it. Want to know what happens. Reminded me a lot of The Uglies, which I never actually finished that series.. I will need to do that soon..), most of the Artemis Fowl books (Awesomeeee.), Airman (Also awesomeeeeeee.), The Thief (It was alright. There were some really awesome parts and some really lame boring parts. The main character thief guy is a pretty fun character.), most of Pegasus (which is actually turning out to be a more dull book than I was hoping for.. Sighhh), The Apothecary’s Daughter (Surprisingly fun read, very much like a Jane Austeny type thing), and I started reading Pride and Prejudice (Sadly, I’m not having much fun with it.. It’s a bit more boring in book form to me than the movie. I don’t think I like her writing style very much..). So I’ve read about ten ish books here so far?

I bought two movies the other day because there was a Disney two for one movie thing. I got Beauty and the Beast and Princess and the Frog. When I got back and tried watching them on my computer because, as usual, the tv was occupied. I don’t actually care that the tv is always occupied because I don’t care much for the stuff that is always constantly on. Anyway, so I put the disc in my compy and it was like, “Sucker you just bought these movies and you have to change your region on the computer and you can only do that four more times so even if you wanted to take these movies back home with you, you will never be able to watch them! HA!” I was so sad! I changed the region and watched both movies. I’m so sad that I can’t take these back with me. I love these movies and when I got them it was because I was like, “Saweeet I’ll be able to bring these back with me and I get one of them for free! Awesome!” I was tricked. Curse you world for making it impossible for me to keep these movies forever!! Maybe they would still work in dvd players though? Maybe it’s just on my compy? Further investigation is necessary obviously.

Today was March 7th. That means that my last day of work at the zoo is exactly one month away. Weeeeiiirrrddd.

Tuesday:

Miserable day.

I did not feel well at all when I woke up. I think it was a mixture of gross water and the cold and stuff. Anyway, so I didn’t feel well and I woke up later than I wanted to. So I thought I would take a quick shower and maybe that would make me feel better. It didn’t. So I text Rob and told him I wouldn’t be coming in, but I would work Friday or Saturday instead. It’s not like I have better things to do. Hah. So I went back to sleep and slept for like three more hours. I ate soup and moped around and watched a zillion movies, including Beauty and the Beast for a second time. Haha. I also started and finished the most recent Artemis Fowl. I thought it was the last one, but if that’s the last book in the series.. I’m seriously questioning this author’s idea of a series wrap up. It was a good one though. Just as stressful as the others. I think next I’ll start Garth Nix’s Seven Keys to the Kingdom series. I can’t wait until Rick Riordan’s second Kane Chronicles book comes out!! Eek! So yeah.. it was a very uneventful day, unless you count the events that occurred in the book because then it would be the most eventful day ever. I was also extremely homesick. So I tried really hard to pretend that I wasn’t. It didn’t work very well.

I have a zillion mosquito/spider bites. I’m not sure what kind of bites they actually are.. I just know that they are bothersome and I don’t want them. I have a few on my hand and fingers. Sooo random. We have to go outside to use the internet now, and I have to stand to get the signal, so I probably got them one of the times I was outside.

I had a really horrible time trying to fall asleep since I had slept through a chunk of the day. However, when I woke up this morning (Wednesday) I felt way good. So I’m glad that I stayed home and didn’t go work. Plus it was raining pretty hard yesterday, so I would’ve felt worse after work probably.

Wednesday-Sunday:

I haven’t typed anything in ages, sooo I’m not sure what stuff happened which days and what not since I have a slippery grasp on memory and what not.

Notable things that happened.. Hmmmmm.. Well there wasn’t much really.. Hah.

I did lots of feedings by myself. Go me. So now I can tell people that I have fed: a large amount of different species of birds, lion tail macaques, cotton eared marmosets, black tufted capuchins, debrazza’s monkeys, red neck wallabies, pademelons, eastern grey kangaroos (adult and baby), emus, koala, tasmanian devils (adult and baby), australian dogs (I’m not supposed to say that they are actually dingoes.. sooo I’m secretly putting dingoes on my list), wombats (adult and baby), brush tail possums, ringtail possum (adult and baby), rabbits (...not exotic.. but technically still cool because they are australian rabbits!... yeeeahhh.. it’s a stretch.. I know..), curlews and kookaburras (which are birds.. but they are cooler than most of the other parroty and cockatooesque birds that everything else we have are. Plus.. they both eat meat! That makes them special and worthy of their own spot on the list. Speaking of meat eating birds, we had to have the curlews in the round house with a duck among a bunch of other birds. So we put the curlews meat in there, and the duck started eating the meat... Hahah. Meat eating duck!), alpacas, a pony named popcorn, cows, goats, a sheep that the goats bully, tassie wedge tailed eagles (they are on this little island in the lakes behind the zoo, so we have to throw big chunks of wallaby to the island. It’s a bit far, but I managed to just barely get my first time toss on the edge! Wheee! One time after that, there were some asians watching us toss the food to the eagles and they clapped when my throw made it to the island. It was awesome.), blue tongues, quolls (eastern and spotted tails). I think that’s all.. That’s a fantastically long list! I’m freaking awesome! So pretty much the only ones that I haven’t fed are all the dangerous snakes (tiger snakes, copperhead, carpet python, red tailed boa, scrub python) and some of the monkeys (mandrills, celebes black crested macaques, long tailed macaques). Wow, I’ve done a lot more than I realized! That’s so coooooool!!! I would never have been able to feed any of those in the states! Well unless I was working at another zoo, but I think I probably wouldn’t have fed any of those as soon as I have because working at another zoo with stricter rules (which any other zoo anywhere would have stricter rules than tassie zoo.. Hah) would lead to me not getting any cool experience like I am here. Thank you Tassie Zoo. You have been kind to me.

I’ve been hogging feeding the baby eastern grey. She is such a doll! I love her! She always curls up in a little ball in my lap and when she finishes drinking her bottle, she is all sleepy and just lays there in my arms. It’s the best, basically. Harrison the little wallaby misses drinking out of bottles apparently. He hounds me every time that I’m in there! He seriously came over and grabbed onto the baby roo and was trying to pull her off my lap to get to the bottle! Crazy Harrison. Sometimes he will stand there and grab my hand trying to get my attention or something, but grabbing means that his little claws scratch my hands to death. It doesn’t hurt or anything. It just looks funny, I’ll have all these little white lines on the top of my hand for a while.

One of the devils had a lump! Eek! Devils in captivity have never contracted the devil facial tumor disease, because it isn’t genetic. So after one of the feeds, Erin came up to me and was like, “One of them has a lump... alaksjdf;lkajs” Then one of the visitors came up and mentioned it to us. So we were worried. If devils started contracting the disease within captivity, there would be absolutely no hope for them.. Luckily it was not the disease. The devil in question had some weird fluid build up in it’s lymphatic something or other. I went with Adam to catch it and move it somewhere off display. It was leaking all it’s lymphatic grossness everywhere. Sickk.

I started and finished the first Seven Keys to the Kingdom book, Mister Monday, by Garth Nix. It was fun. I enjoyed it thoroughly, in fact. I’m near halfway through the second one, Grim Tuesday, and yes, there are seven of them, one for each day. The days are all people. They can only do things in the Secondary Realm (Earth being a part of that) on their specific day. So the whole series occurs in one week, I assume. It’s pretty cooooool. I recently found out that the author of the Fablehaven series has started a new series! The first one is coming out soon!! Eek!!!

Thursday branch daayyy. I went into more of the bird enclosures than I have before because just Azza and I were doing branches. There are so many demon birds here!! Mostly the cockatoos, but there are these pink birds that I don’t know what they are called and they almost got out. I was about to go in and they were sitting next to the door, sneaky buggers. I tossed their branch in there before I went in, but then I didn’t want to go in because they were trying to bite me. So then Azza walked by and I was like, “Could you please do this branch because these birds are evil.” So he tried going in, but one of them dove for the door and Azza had to slam the door shut real quick. So we left it for Adam to do later.. Haha. One of the other birds hopped on Erin’s back later and bit her real hard. Stupid birds. The cockatoos all know how to talk, so when they hear us opening their doors they will say Hello and stuff, but they sound real creepy like they are waiting for you and want to eat your face off.. Scawy birds.

I worked Friday because I didn’t work on Tuesday. Alicia the volunteer works on Fridays, so I worked with her for the first time ever. She stole the key, so I had no key. I had to follow Adam around like a little puppy all day. Mm, I also had to pick up rubbish all over the zoo because Saturday was a big day for the zoo so the whole week we had to get it presentable.

Friday night was another night out with Erin. She took us to where she lives, Georgetown. It’s about an hour away. I don’t know how she gets up every morning early enough to get to the zoo by eight. She’s tropo. Tropo is a new word I learned. Adam called me tropo. When I asked him what that meant, the only thing he said was, “You know, like tropical, like crazy. Tropo.” I didn’t know tropical meant crazy.. Oh wells. I like the word. Tropo. So yeah, we headed to Georgetown. Erin dropped Alicia off on the way because one of Alicia’s cats had kittens. They are two weeks old!! We went in and saw them! They are quite possibly the most adorable thing that I have ever seen that is cat related. Sooo tiny. They were real noisy though. Alicia’s family is a crazy cat family. They have TWELVE cats! Sheesshhh. PLUS the three little kittens that one of them just had. PLUS a few dogs. They have this gorgeous black and white dog that has one really light blue eye and one really dark brown eye. So beautiful. After that we headed to Erin’s house.

On the way to Erin’s house, we stopped and got some foooood. We got chips (fries) and gravy. I thought it sounded weird, but it’s just like eating mashed potatoes and gravy, but not mashed.. It was real tasty. We got ready to go out and stuff then. Erin has a real cute dog. He is deaf I guess. He is tall and scrawny like a grey hound or whatever. I love him. One of Erin’s friends was having people over for pre-drinking and he lives down the street from her, so when we were ready we just headed over there. There were four boys there playing some drinking game called waterfall. When we got there they were saying that all of us had to play, so one of them got me a glass of coke. Hahah. They were cool about my not drinking so that was nice. The game itself was really funny. There was this glass full of nasty looking alcohol in the middle with a deck of cards around the bottom. You had to pick a card and each card meant something. There was lots of funny stuff going on. One boy kept having to take a drink and do push ups every time someone drew a red card and another boy wasn’t allowed to talk or else he had to talk a drink and no one was allowed to swear or they had to take a drink. It was surprisingly hilarious. After we finished the game, we headed to a bar in town.

Before we had gotten to Georgetown, Erin had told me about some weird things about people who live there and stuff. She was like, “You will see these certain things by the end of the night, and if you don’t I will be shocked.” So she said that I would defo see a fight in the bar, hear people say “Yeah boy!” but they say it weird there and I can’t quite spell it out but it sounds more like buoy than boy, and that people would drop their glasses and everyone shouts “TAXI!!!!” All of those things happened and it was so funny. There were a few more, but I don’t remember them. It wasn’t all that super fun, but it was alright. I was just dancing and stuff with everyone. This boy Ross kept buying all of us drinks, he bought me some cokes. Apparently he is super loaded. He bought Justine a few too many drinks because he was hoping to get her home with him. Haha. She was SOOOOOO drunk. She could barely walk, so we took her home real early. She spewed. We went back out cause it was still early, but when we came back she was in bed with a traffic cone next to her. She had tried to spew in it... it has a hole in both sides so it didn’t really help. Haha. Next morning she didn’t remember anything. Bahaha. I had to fill her in on the night. We also met Erin’s boyfriend. His name is Adam. I’m pretty sure that Aussies only name their boys Adam or Aaron. I met like twelve of each that night. Anyway, it was so weird because we got to the bar and Erin was like, “See that guy over there, that’s my boyfriend.” Then they proceeded to not hang out with each other except for like two seconds when she introduced us to him. They didn’t spend any time together the whole night until after we took Justine home, then he was hanging out with us most of the time and he was actually real cool. It was so weird though. If she didn’t tell me that he was her boyfriend, I would never have believed that they had been dating for two years. Hah.

The next day, we got up and Erin’s mom came in and was like, “Are either of you from California? The salami just hit some parts of California!” Bahahaha. She meant to say Tsunami.. So we’ve been saying salami instead. So funny. Not the tsunami thing though. Everything going on in Japan is so sad! I can’t believe the earthquake caused a tsunami that reaches California. That’s insane. Anyway, Erin drove us home. The zoo was having it’s 8th birthday party on Saturday. There was a bbq and balloons and stuff. Justine went in to work when we got home. I didn’t want to work. I wanted to actually enjoy my day off and get away from the zoo for once. Ha. So Erin dropped me off in town when she left. I walked around, went and saw Rango in the theaters by myself (...Yeahhhh.. I know. Sad. Also, movie tickets are like sixteen bucks here.. I’m never complaining about prices in America ever again. Ha. It’s way more expensive living in Australia. Gas here I think is around four ish dollars a gallon. I don’t really know though because they go by liter.. litre I guess.. Hah. Jess’ dad and I were trying to figure out what it would be in gallons.. basically it’s just crazy expensive.). I went to Target and got some stuff. I needed to go to the grocery store, but I wasn’t sure where the closest one was. I knew that there was one on this certain road, but I didn’t know exactly where this road was.. I started meandering to where I thought the road was. I finally found it and started walking down it.. It was WAAAAY longer than I thought it was. I walked for like an hour until I finally found the grocery store. I guess I could have stopped and asked for directions to a closer grocery store.. Mm. I enjoyed walking though. I caught a cab home, and relaxed. Justine got sent home from the zoo because they didn’t need her and they thought she should get more rest since she was barely just getting over being drunk since she had so much alcohol that she was still a bit buzzed in the morning and started feeling way sick once we got home. Haa. Sucker.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve gained any and all weight back that I previously lost. I’m a chubbo again.. Hurray..

I have to write a 2,000 word paper about the internship.. but it has to have references and stuff. I don’t want to write papers. Lammeeeeeeeee.

Seven Days A Week.

That is a song by The Sounds. I love The Sounds. Anyway, this blog is for a whole week because that’s how much my internet sucks.

Seriously, I keep putting off typing my blog stuff up so I end up with heaps of things to type. It makes me want to type things way less. Sighh. On a happier note, I just ate the most delicious apple that I have ever eaten. The grocery store said they were the first apples of the season! Mmmm.

Monday Monday Monday. Just another manic Mondayyyyy whoooaaaa wish it was Sundayyyyy cause that’s my fun daaaayyyy my I don’t have to run dayyyyyy just another manic Mondayyyyyyy.... Yeaaaaah. I am bored.

So yeah Monday, nothing too eventful. It’s hard to write new things when I do the same things pretty much every day. We do animal feedings in the morning, animal feedings in the afternoon, and between and after those we do random things through out the park which repeat each week, like branches, waters, raking, etc. This week one of those random things was mulching. Sigh. Mulching. Erin and I had to clear our and mulch the pheasant and curlew enclosures. The curlews are currently in the round house because a while ago that quoll escaped and killed the pheasants, so they feared for the curlews and moved them. The quoll was captured though, so now they are going to put the curlews back probably. So Erin and I had to make it nice for the curlews to come back to. The cages are really short so I couldn’t stand up all the way. I was hunched over for like an hour and a half. Real comfy. Oh, speaking of quolls, another one died. We put this little girl spotted tail quoll in with this huge boy one because it’s quall breeding time. Adam and pretty much everyone else had told Rob and Dick that it was a bad idea and that the girl was too young and too little and the boy would just kill her. That’s exactly what happened. So sad.

I did some feeding by myself! We’ve been allowed to do the grain animals, like the roos, wallabies, emus, wombat, rabbits, etc., by ourselves for a while, but I went and fed the kookaburras, curlews, swifties, possums, and blue tongues by myself!

The greatest thing happened on Monday. I was walking towards the devil pens to meet Adam there at the devil feed, when someone said my name that didn’t sound like anyone I work with. In my head I was like, “...I don’t know people in Tassie... Who the heck is calling my name?” I turned around and it was this little old lady from church! Haha. This is a really great thing because it means that I know people in Australia. I was really proud that I ran into someone I know. She brought the missionaries to the zoo on their p day. There were two girl missionaries and two guy missionaries. The girls didn’t even say anything to me and looked like they could care less about me. One of the guys was off looking at stuff and looked really excited to be at the zoo, so I don’t think he even saw me. The other guy was all happy and shook my hand and introduced himself and was like, “Yeah I think I’m in your ward! Cool! How are you? Etc.” Haha. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

I was driving with Aaron. I don’t remember what we were doing, but we were in the zute. There was a fly in zute and Aaron stopped paying attention to the road because he was trying to get the fly out.. Sooo we started drifting and finally I was like, “Uhm. Aaron. Tree.” He freaked and turned the wheel. It was pretty funny. It’s not like we were going fast, but I wasn’t even scared anyway. It’s like I didn’t believe that we would actually hit the tree because that would be absolutely ridiculous. The next thing I thought was, “Wow. That’s exactly how I felt right before my accident in high school when I got rear ended.” Hah. I didn’t think the car was actually going to hit me, even though when I was looking in my rearview mirror and saw that they were obviously coming to fast to stop before hitting me, I was super calm because things like that don’t happen to me. Ha. Maybe that’s a bad way to think about stuff like that. Oh wells.
So when we do the groceries, we go through all these bins that we get from the grocery store with things that are still perfectly good, but they are just about to expire or stuff like that. So we get heaps of really tasty things. It’s lots of fruit and veggies and bread, but also things like muffins and cookies and donuts and other weird things that they have here, like lamingtons, which I tried the other day and they are like sponge cake with chocolate and coconut on the outside, super yummy, or these things that look like hot dog buns with cream and jam inside them instead of a hot dog. Haha. So while we are doing the groceries we all sit there and eat the tasty things. Needless to say, I have not been eating very well.. Haha.

Since I started Monday with a song, I started thinking about whether or not I know any songs with Tuesday in it. All I came up with I’ll C U Next Tuesday by Ke$ha.. Hahah.

Tuesday was really windy and cold. In fact, I haven’t really had much of a summer here. Haha. Tassie is notoriously colder than most of Australia. Should have figured that out before I came here, but I do love Tassie despite it’s chill. Before it got windy, Adam put a list of things on the board that HAD to happen that day, it included raking and more raking and some more raking. When it got windy, he erased it from the board because it was too windy to rake. Thank you wind! The paths are really annoying to rake because they are dirt paths, but have heaps of rocks on the too.. So when you are trying to rake up the leaves, you mostly just rake up this pile of some leaves and tons of rocks, then you have to kind of pick out the leaves from the rocks. It’s pretty awful. Raking the roo paddy isn’t too awful though, it’s just freaking big. The wind caused another problem. We have a little aviary outside the staff room for a little baby gang gan cockatoo and a baby green rosella. unfortunately, the aviary isn’t really stable and there isn’t a floor.. so when the wind knocked it over, the rosella got out. The gang gang was still just hanging out in there, so we snatched him and put him in a cage inside the staff room. The rosella can’t really fly yet, just sort of pretend to fly, so he couldn’t have gotten very far. We walked around in the bush for like ten minutes trying to find him. No luck though.

The ‘Animals that Caitlin is allowed to feed by herself’ list has increased again! Huzzah! Adam lets me feed the capuchins and debrazzas by myself now. Sweet as. Speaking of monkeys, Erin and Justine got trapped in this little shed above the Mandrill enclosure for two hours. Haha. There’s a bit of a story to lead up to that. So they usually send one of us interns to go with one of the keepers and the other with another keeper to do different jobs. Erin was doing some branches or something and Adam was going to see what Rob needed and then going to pick up poo, so I piped up first and said I would go with Erin. Like ten minutes later, Adam and Justine come back and Adam is like, “So Rob and I have to leave to go catch a possum that some farmer found on his property.. Also, he wanted to swap the girls and bring Caitlin with us..” It was the first time Justine had heard that and she got a bit upset.. Haha. I have no idea why Rob wanted me to come instead of Justine, but she was like, “Why do we have to switch?! Do you guys just never want me to do any of the cool stuff!?!! This sucks! Rawr rawr rawrrrr I’m an angry person and even though I do tons of cool stuff when I work on Sundays as the only other person working besides Rob I’m going to complain because Caitlin gets to do this ONE thing over me. Raaawwwrrrrrrr.” She only actually said the stuff up to the situation sucking for her, which it did. I was worried that she would be really angry with me, even though I did NOTHING and had chosen to go work with Erin. Oh and Erin had also said, “Maybe Rob just has a crush on you Justine, so he couldn’t possibly have you around.” She was joking, and Justine’s response was, “Maybe I should try be less pretty then.” Like she was saying that she’s much prettier than I am, so I get to go because I’m the ugly duckling. Thanks! Anyway, we left to go meet Rob, but Adam had to go back and tell Erin something about the devil feed, and when he came back he was like, “I have never had somebody look at me with such hate before. Haha.” So I went with Rob and Adam. We drove for like twenty ish minutes to get to this farm. I was stoked to watch them try to catch this possum, but it was really anticlimactic.. The possum was in this little shed and there wasn’t enough room for me to even go in. So I waited by the car and five minutes later they had caught the little gold brush tail possum. It wasn’t much of a field trip out of the zoo. Hah. When we got back, we had to do all the afternoon feedings and the devil feed and penguin feed, etc. We noticed that the branches that Erin and Justine were supposed to do hadn’t been done though.. So we walked all over the zoo looking for them and couldn’t find them. Finally, we just went to go prepare food and stuff because we couldn’t afford to waste more time, especially if they weren’t going to be around to help. Adam left to go do other stuff and I prepared all of the monkey food by myself! It was cool being trusted enough to be able to do that by myself. After I finished, Justine walked in and Adam told me to come with him. He told me that they had gotten locked in the mandrill enclosure when they went to find wire to the branches. The door had been slammed by the wind when they went in there and they couldn’t open it. Hah. It sucks that they got stuck in there for two hours. That would suuuck. I don’t think there is a light in there either. So they were in a shed for two hours without light. Neither had phones either, so they couldn’t get a hold of anyone to get them out. Aaron finally found them. So yeah, excitement all around.

Groceries were exciting too. We have to wear those ugly blue apron things, so Justine went to grab hers, but when she grabbed it she screamed and I looked over at her apron and there was a MASSIVE spider on it! Seriously, it was like bigger than my whole palm. Adam went over and grabbed it and started teasing us and bringing it real close to our faces so everyone was running around squealing and laughing. I hate spiders. They are always everywhere. We were by the devil pens and Adam stopped and pointed out a massive black widow spider. Terrifying. I’m developing a nice little fear for spiders.

There was a family with two little boys there, and one of the boys had a birthday the next day. So Adam asked him what he was hoping to get for his birthday. This kid goes, “Well I would like a large box full of gold and jewels.” Totally serious. Hahaha. It was awesome! I was like, “Sweet. What would you want if you didn’t get that though?” Without missing a beat he says, “Wings.” Hahahaha. Awesome little boy. His brother then chimed in with, “It’s almost my birthday too!” so I asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he says, “I want a penguin suit!!!!!” Bahahaha. They were a riot. I want kids who say crazy things like that. So cool. The next day at work Adam was like, “I certainly hope that boy got that box of gold and jewels or wings or else today is going to be a horrible day for him.”

There’s a kick and then a scream, but it’s only in her dream. I look around and it’s youuuuu ooohhhhhhh. I can’t believe it’s only Wednesdaaayyyyy. Only Wednesday by The Crash Kings. It’s a good song AND it has Wednesday in the title.

We are building heaps of new enclosures for more tassie devils. So Justine and I have been helping here and there. Most of the time Aaron helps with building stuff because he’s a strong guy and Adam is “head” keeper so he does more keepery things. Aaron says he hates that he gets stuck doing all that stuff. He wants to do more with the animals. Poor guy. He spent most of his time this week working with Dick building the new building for the crocs and gators. So yeah Justine and I were helping Rob and Adam with some tassie devil enclosure stuff. I think it’s cause not much else needed to be done around the zoo. So Justine put screws in while I helped carry steel in for the enclosures. So heavy. We were carrying these huge long pieces, so Rob and Adam would be on the edges and I was in the middle. I’m shorter than them, so I was holding it at an awkward height. I couldn’t really hold it on my head and I couldn’t extend my arms all the way, so my arms were bent and that felt harder to do. My arms were pretty sore after that. Haha.

We were all in the staff room when Erin walked in holding the missing green rosella that escaped from the fallen aviary. Haha. She said that she was walking around and heard wings flapping and then something flew like a centimeter over her head and landed in front of her. The triumphant return of the green rosella! Rob came in later and saw the rosella in the cage with the gang gang and was so confused. It was awesome. I worked the first half of Wednesday with Erin. We did waters. Thrilling. She was sick though, so she left early.

Not much happened on Wednesday. We did the groceries, but Adam and Aaron weren’t around so Justine tried tipping one of the bins out for us, but had a hard time. Adam showed up and said something about her being a dainty little girl and not being able to do it. I laughed and she was like, “I don’t care, I take that to mean I’m skinny.” Wow okay. Adam left again, so I tried tipping one out and I could do it, barely, but I still tipped it out. Rob saw and was like, “Well I won’t be messing with you.” I was like, “Yeaaahhh that’s right!” Justine said something like, “At least I’m dainty.” I think she was calling me fat or burly or something not nice and rather rude. Thank you once again. How I adore your snide remarks.

I realize that I have been able to feed a new animal by myself in each of these days. Sweeeeet. Quolls joined the list on Wednesday. I took a bucket of little dead chicks and tossed them in all the quoll cages. I had nasty chicken juice all over my hands. Blech. Erin had to take some and chop their heads and feet off to feed the kookaburras. I wouldn’t want to do that. Hah speaking of the kookaburras, I love those guys. We fed them mice on Tuesday and one of them wasn’t hungry, so he held one of the mice in his beak until he was. It was al stretched out and not at all mouse looking after a while. Hahah. So on Wednesday he did the same thing, but with the dead baby chick. Crazy kookaburra.

I don’t know any songs with Thursday in the title.. There is a band called Thursday. That’s as close as I’ll get.

There is this volunteer that everyone else talks about sometimes, but she comes in on Fridays and Saturdays, so neither Justine or I has ever met her. Her name is Alicia. Adam says that he hates her. I’m not really sure why. Anyway, so I came back from lunch on Thursday and went to meet Adam at the devil feed. When I got up there there was a ton of people there already and this girl was holding the red bag that we hold the baby devil in. So I thought, “That’s weird, I wonder why Adam let her hold the bag.” Then the girl sees me and starts walking towards me. Hmm. She handed me the baby devil and was like, “Here you go!” I had no idea who she was. If I was smarter, I would’ve figured it out. Ha. I was like, “Uhhmm.. Righto thanks. Who are you??” It was Alicia. Surprise. So she started chatting away with me. She seems nice. She has this weird like birthmark or something on her face, and it’s pretty large. It seemed like she was tries hard to keep it covered with her hand or something. She was there with a class. I want to be in a class that takes me to zoos.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened at the zoo. I went with Adam to feed the reptiles. There is a carpet python that is extremely skinny because he refuses to eat. It’s sad. There are three tiger snakes and one copperhead at the zoo. They are the venomous ones. I kept imagining them getting through the little crack Adam had open to feed them, and them coming after me. Scary. I went into Boris the five meter long scrub python’s cage. Adam fed him, so he was busy with a big rat, but he almost dropped the rat, and I asked Adam if Boris had ever tried to attack him. He was like, “Mm yeah a few times actually.” Hah. I felt a little skiddish after that. Every time Boris moved so that he was facing me, my thoughts were, “Ohmygoshhh he’s going to drop that rat and come for me.” I made it out alive though. Haha. We moved some blue tongues into the old echidna enclosure. There were nine blue tongues in this tiny little cage, so we wanted to give them more space. Adam lifted a rock in their tiny cage and there were FIVE of them piled underneath it. Haha. At first I thought there were only three, but they kept moving and I saw the other two. Crazy lizards.

So I went to institute. Jess came to get me, but was late because she had to pick up this girl Lori and had gotten lost trying to find her house. She got to the entrance for the zoo, but Rob had locked the gate to get in.. So I had to run out there. Literally run. Ha. I was dressed nice and did my hair, and I had to ruin it all to get out there in a decent amount of time. It’s like a twelve or more minute walk to that spot. I made it out there in like six minutes. Woooo. So we were pretty late to institute. When we got there, this girl was there and told us that it had been cancelled. Hah. Laaame. So we stayed there and hung out with this girl who’s name is also Jess. It was fun. Of course, sometimes they would talk about people they knew and I would be an odd man out. They did talk about this guy who gives talks with as many Star Wars references as scripture references in them. Haha. I want to hear one of his talks! Jess that did not drive me was talking about her theory on asians. She was like, “I’m pretty sure asians are aliens. Think about it. They are super smart, they make like everything we own, they have better technology, they are all over the place because they are planning on taking it all over, they can’t drive cars because they are used to driving space ships. It all makes sense.” Hahaha. It was awesome. We talked about it for a while. I will never look at asians the same. So we left after like an hour and a half and headed back to drop me off. There were heaps of freaking possums on the road and they don’t move when they see a car coming! Jess tried avoiding them, but she did hit one of them.. It was so sad. Poor little stupid possums..

The only song in my iTunes library with Friday in the title is Black Friday Rule by Flogging Molly. Hahah. So today is Friday, and I’m going out tonight with Erin, Aaron, and Justine. It should be interesting.. We are going to dinner and stuff. They all know I don’t drink, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Erin was like, “You can get red bulls! Those are just as good as drinking anyway.” Haha. Erin text me today and was like, “Are you going to wear a dress and heels and stuff?” I wish I could get all cute and dressed up, but I didn’t bring anything like that. She brought two dresses with her to work because she is just coming up to our place after work to get ready, so she was like well you can try them on and then she asked if Justine would wear one. Justine is like way more tom boy than I am. She said that she has worn a dress like once in her life, and it was like for a wedding or something. Hah. So when I asked her if she would wear one of Erin’s dresses, she was like, “I have never worn a dress to go out in, plus it’s way too cold for a dress.” Ha. I wish she was more girly. I would get along with her better probably. Oh welllllls. I hope that tonight is fun, and not a total bust for me. We will see.

The internets are still not working well. Justine went outside with the wombat earlier and said the internet was working outside so I went outside and it stopped working right as I got out there.. Coooooool.




I’m writing this on Saturday now. I’m currently lazing about my house because I’m exhausted and I have a headache from staying up waaaay later than I’ve been up in a long time. I remember freshman year at BYU we stayed up until like three or four basically every night. Haha. Friday night I was out until four ish, and I’m exhausted. Ha. I feel like such a wuss. It was a whole lot more fun than I thought that it would be. Erin came over after work, and we got ready and stuff. I finally got to like do my hair and put a cute outfit on and do my makeup and put jewelry on. It was nice to not feel like a boy. Hah. Once we were all ready, Erin was like, “Caitlin do you want a little driving lesson, then maybe we can drive back here tonight instead of catch a taxi to my friend’s house?” Erin has a stick shift. I’ve never driven stick before. Hah. Also, you shift with your left hand instead of your right hand like in the states and also it’s the wrong side of the car.. Hah. I had a hard time figuring out the clutch. It was pretty exciting though! I got into second gear and managed to only stall when I was reversing right when I started. Once we got near an actual road, Erin and I switched because I just would not have been able to handle driving on the wrong side of the road. Ha. It was way cool though. I’ve decided that I’m forcing one of my friends with a manual car to teach me how to drive stick! So there is like two mexican restaurants in Launceston and we decided that we wanted to try going to one of them for dinner. It was booked for like the next two hours.. So we went to a little italian restaurant right across the street from us. I had really tasty pasta. It was funny because Justine was drinking wine and Erin was drinking a vodka and raspberry and I got a coke and they put a little bendy straw in it. I felt like such a little kid. After that, we went to some bar called Alchemy. It was only like nine so it was pretty empty. We all got vodka and red bulls, of course I asked for mine minus the vodka. I had a few red bulls through out the night. I was super hypo. We went to some place called the Star Bar after a little bit. There was like half weird older people trying to act like they were in their twenties still, and half way young people since the drinking age is eighteen in Australia. They had a sweet live band there. All the places we went to had live bands, and they all just played covers, which sounds lame, but they were actually all really good covers of all the songs they played. There were a few people dancing in the Star Bar, specifically this crazy lady who was dancing like she was straight outta Footloose or something. It was soooo funny. We were sitting at a table, me with my red bull and them with whatever they were drinking. A group of boys came over to us and started chatting with us. One of them was real obnoxious, the others just looked like they were embarrassed to be hanging out with him. Ha. One boy sat next to me and was chatting with me. He was like, “Could I buy you a drink?” and I was like, “Yeah for sure! Go get me a water.” Ha. He looked confused or something at first, but went and got me a water anyway. After a while there we headed to Irish Murphys. It was way more packed and had more people that seemed more like our age. Ha. Still there were heaps of younger people. Erin heard some boy talking and was like, “Oh my gosh! That boy is American too! Hey boy! Are you American?! These girls are American!” She was a biiiit gone already. Haha. Turns out this American kid is from Oxnard. Small world! He also has a brother who went to BYU Hawaii! Of course, the guy I was talking to wasn’t mormon. He chose to bash mormons instead. He kept saying, “I know Mormons are real good people.... BUT it’s so stupid blah blah blah drinking is awesome blah blah blah you should drink blah you don’t know what you’re missing blah blah” I was just like, “Mmkay I’m going to go now.” Anyway, he left and all of his friends were still there and were hanging out with us. We were all dancing and having fun. It was good even though I was around all drunk people. No one tried to pull anything on me and no one tried to get me to drink or anything. I just got to get out of the house for a night and enjoy myself and dance and have fun. So it was good. One boy asked for my number. I gave him my aussie phone number so that I can choose to ignore it if I like and I only have that number for a few more weeks. Hah. He’s really nice though. He wants all of us to hang out with him and his friends again. We will see. It’s not like I have much sway over where I go when I want to go, and stuff. So the greatest part of the night... There was this midget there. Erin saw him and was like, “Hehe I want to go dance with him!” She didn’t. Anyway that’s not the great part. Right before the bar closed, he walked right by me and he stopped in front of me and like play punched me in the stomach and moved on. Bahahaha. It was the weirdest thing ever! Justine saw it and she thought it was the funniest thing. She was laughing about it like half an hour later. She kept being like, “Haha I’m never going to stop laughing about that midget.. Hahhahaha” It was pretty fantastic. Around three thirty, the bar closed so we all went outside. No one could decide what they wanted to do, so we ended up all standing around on the sidewalk in the freezing cold (Summer is basically non existent here, by the way. It’s pretty much mostly cold.) waiting for taxis. The streets were super dead and there would be a taxi every now and then, but none of us knew what we wanted to do, so they kept leaving. Finally, us four girls hopped in a cab and went to Krista’s house and fell asleep immediately. Krista came out the next morning and had her purse on her still and was like, “I seriously fell asleep with my purse on still..” Hah. She lives in like a house house, but she has some house mates that she doesn’t really know. One of them got up really early, like seven in the morning early and made sure to make extra amounts of noise. Also, I have my alarm on my phone set to like six thirty every day, but I turn it off during the weekends. I forgot to do that so I woke up at six thirty to an incessant vibrating noise and I was so pissed and I was about to be like, “OHMYGOSHH what is that! Turn it off, will ya??!” Until I realized it was my phone. Then I was mad at myself for not turning the stupid thing off. Ha.

Why is it on a Saturday night, a Saturday night you had to go and bring me down? It’s always on a Saturday niiiigghhhtttttt. Saturday by We Are The Fury. Finding songs by certain categories is quite fun.

Saturday has been uneventful. Laundry. Playtime with the wombat outside. Subway with Erin and Justine after we went to the grocery store. I bought nutella. I’m really digging the hazelnut flavor right now. It’s fantastic. Sherwin texted me today. Sherwin is the boy that asked for my number. Apparently, him and his friends are going to come to the zoo sometime soon. Every time we tell people that we work at the Tassie Zoo, they are like, “...We have a zoo here..?” Ha. So yeah, I’m making friends and I’m enjoying it. I didn’t do much else today. I made hawaiian haystack. Singular. I like cooking. I want to learn more about cooking and baking and stuff. Also, I’ve decided that I want to learn more about photography. I don’t have enough hobbies. I choose photography as a hobby! Maybe.

Ooohhh we dance in disarray, and we dance on and we dance on. Dancing Through Sunday by AFI.

Sunday has been good. Nothing unusual, except that we ran out of water today. That wouldn’t be THAT big of a deal because Rob will just fill up the big water tank later today. It went out at the worst time possible. Yes, it went out when I was in the shower. Greeeaaaaat. Luckily, I had washed everything except my hair.. So I have not had a chance to wash my hair. I feel like a bum. Other than that, it’s been a pretty normal Sunday. Went to church with Jess. We had to leave early though because she is n five basketball teams and one has practice today. FIVE teams! How crazy is that! It was Fast Sunday.. I forgot to fast. Sighh. I did get invited to a “floro” print themed church dance in two weeks. Haha. I assume it means floral.. I dunno though.. Ha. So I’m excited. Jess says there isn’t many people at those dances though.. Oh well. Some is better than none, especially for people like me with like three friends.

Never Ending Blog Post.

Righto, there is a lot of typing to be done, and frankly it seems a bit overwhelming. Ha.

Thursday, Branch Day:

It was a good day. Same as usual. Not much out of the ordinary. There was a “keeper for the day” girl. She was from Mexico. She was very nice. It’s exciting when there is a keeper for the day because then they make us tasty snakes at smoko. We got little yummy sandwiches with our hot chocolate. Thank you keeper for the day. They made ham and pineapple sandwiches and chicken, mayo, and cheese sandwiches. They were both pretty tasty. I didn’t think people put pineapple in their sandwiches. It was good though. Since there was a Mexican girl there, Adam was attempting to speak spanish all day. Iris (She pronounced it like it started with an e.) the keeper girl taught him how to say monkey en espanol. I’ve always known it to be mono, but she says chongo for monkey. Adam has decided that he is going to name the little baby girl devil that they use for devil pats chongo. They used to have a devil named monkey. Hah. I think there is a pattern starting.

So yeah, branch day. That means that a trip into the bush for fresh branches in the crappy land cruiser was necessary. I actually really love going to get the branches. I like riding around in the cruiser. It’s a bit like riding with the top down I would assume, oh and no windshield.. So bugs hit you sometimes. Heh. So yeah, usually Adam goes to do the branches. Thursday Adam was showing the keeper for the day around, so Rob had to do it. Rob usually doesn’t do stuff. Everyone actually talks quite a bit of smack about him. Justine doesn’t like that, because she actually likes Rob. I would rather work with everyone else. Anyway, so I went with Rob and Aaron to get branches. I guess it’s leeeeeeeeech season or something, Adam always comes back with bloody spots on his pants from leeches getting him. I’ve never even thought about the leeches, but Thursday was different. Ha. We were dragging branches back to the car when Aaron was like, “Hey make sure to keep checking your legs for leeches mate.” So OF COURSE I’m going to be like, “Leeches? What? On me?!” and start frantically looking at my legs for a zillion leeches. I think I may be crazy. There actually was a leech on my leg though. So I flicked him off. They are gross. I don’t want to get my blood sucked. After that I kept obsessively checking my legs for leeches. Once we had all of the branches in the cruiser and the trailer behind the cruiser, Rob told Aaron and I to sit on top of the branches so they wouldn’t fall out. Of course, right before I climbed on, Rob was like, “Oh look!” and grabbed a leech off of one of the branches. They played with it for a few seconds and then tossed it. So now I’m thinking, “.....I’m going to get a billion leeches on me if I sit on all of those branches........ I will get sucked dry before we get back to the zoo.. goooooooood.” When we got back, I had two more leeches on my jacket. Aaron kept saying stuff from behind me on the trailer like, “Oh Caitlin you’ve got on your back!” ... Stupid Aaron. Then throughout the day Aaron and Rob would stop and like stare at my face or my neck or something, and when I asked them what the heck they were doing, they’d be like, “Leech.” Then have a laugh. Yeah yeah yeah. Stupid leeches. All I kept thinking of every time that someone said leech was in Princess and the Frog when he gets a leech on him and screams LEEEEECH! when he’s talking about his money situation with his parents or whatever. Good movie.

Amber I think sent me this video on facebook a while ago called The Creep or something. It’s a dance. I taught it to Adam because he’s a creep. He’s going to do the dance to Justine soon hopefully. Heheh.

I forgot to mention this, but on Wednesday or something, I drove an Australian car for the first time! Wheee! Hah. There was a ute that had to be moved like twenty feet... So Rob told me to move it. Usually they don’t let me drive anything because it’s all stick, but this ute was automatic, so I got to drive it. It was real freaking weird driving a car from the right side. Not really difficult though. Weird.

Oh also, I played with concrete. Hah. They are building more devil pens, so I went around smoothing out concrete that Rob put down in little crevices around the enclosure. Thrilling, I know.

So Thursday night is when mine and Justine’s flight to go to Melbourne was. Rob had said that he would give us a lift. Of course, Mel’s family was in town and they had stuff they had to do, so he gave us a lift like four hours before our flight.. We had to sit in the airport for foreverrrrr. The Launceston airport is seriously the tiniest airport I’ve ever been to. Probably. There is one security lane. One little thing to stick your carry on bags through to get x rayed. One little metal detector thing to walk through. All that jazz. Also, not one person checked my id with my ticket. I very well could have jumped someone outside the airport and stolen their ticket, and no one would have stopped me. There are three total gates I think. That’s it. Three. Hah. We couldn’t check in until an hour and a half before our flight, but luckily there was a cafe and store and stuff before the security check point. Of course, the only thing past the check point is a stair case down to the three gates. Hah. I tried a sausage roll. They have them everywhere. It wasn’t that great. The lady before me got a bag of fries (chips) with gravy. They ladled gravy into the bag. It was so strange. So we finally got onto the plane, and it took forever to leave because someone checked in their bags and then didn’t show up for the flight.. so they had to go in the plane and find his bag and get it off. Thank you mystery jerk. The flight is super short, so it wasn’t a big deal. We finally got there and Reid met us at the airport. Thank goodness because I would not have been able to find my way to his house. Reid is one of the interns that came with the big AustraLearn group. We met him in Cairns. So yeah he met us at the airport. We had to take a sixteen dollar bus into downtown Melbourne then catch a tram just to get to another tram then walk a few blocks down to his house. I was super sleepy. As soon as we got to his place, we all passed out. Hah. He is staying in a really nice house. It’s like a hotel house. There are like ten people living there, and they each have their own room that they have a key to and stuff. There is a big kitchen and living room. They have marked areas in the fridges and freezers, etc. It’s pretty sweet. It was a bit posher than my refurbished fishing cabin. Haha. Not as spacious though. So Justine (the shortest, smallest person of all three of us) dibsed the bed, which meant that Reid got the floor, and five foot eight ish little ol’ me got the teeny couch in his room. Did I fit on the couch? No. Was I comfortable? Not one bit. Did I get any sleep this weekend? Absolutely not. Thank you tiny couch.

Friday:

We woke up early ish because Reid had work, so he caught the tram into the city at like eight and we wanted to explore Melbourne until he got off at noon (Apparently Aussies think is weird that we say noon instead of midday. Noon is shorter. I don’t see why you would want to say midday). So Justine and I walked around the city, and decided to walk to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Amazing. You could spend all day there. It’s really gorgeous. Plus, it has an area called.. wait for it.. Fern Gully! Bahaha. Reid never saw Fern Gully so when we saw him later and were like, “They have Fern Gully there! So cool!” He was like, “...mhmm.. yeah cooool..” Pshh. Anyway, it would be a really cute date place. Have a cute little picnic there, and then walk around and explore the gardens. It’s a pretty freaking romantic place actually. Also, I decided that it would be a pretty great place to take engagement pictures. They had a cactus area there. I like cacti. They all look really silly. There was also a “volcano.” We saw a sign for a volcano, and we were like, “volcano! cool!” It was extremely anticlimactic. It was like a little teeny tiny hill with a pond in it. Boo. It was still kind of cool, but seriously.. why is it called a volcano. They clearly don’t realize how many people they disappoint with that title.

We passed a street called...... Batman Street! I was so excited! We mentioned it to Reid later and he ruined my hopes and dreams that it was a street fashioned after gotham city. Apparently there was some guy who had the last name of Batman and did something significant in Melbourne. I lost interest after he said, “No it’s not named after Batman.” I choose to believe it is.

There are lots of cool buildings. It’s weird. The city seemed like it was like half really old cool buildings along side modern businessy looking buildings. Kind of a bizarre mix. There was a place called the Australian Center for the Moving Image and they had a special Disney exhibit. I wanted to go look at it. Guess who didn’t care about what I wanted to do? Correct! Justine! She was just like, “I could care less about that. Let’s just keep walking.” Yes ma’am. Anything you say ma’am. If she isn’t careful.. I might just snap on her one of these days. I think I’m learning a great lesson in patience right now. I’m doing very well. Ha.

After the Gardens, we left on the opposite side that we went in on, and right outside was this big WWII memorial. It was a bit weird going to a WWII memorial for a country that isn’t mine. Hahah. I felt like I was in DC. We saw people standing on a balcony up at the top though, so we went inside and checked it out. We saw a sign for a crypt, and were like, “Yeah cool! Crypt!” It was basically just a basement with a flag. It had a sign saying that there were no dead people there though. Not really sure how it qualifies as a crypt then.. But thank you for tricking me. The view from the balcony was really quite amazing. You could see the river that goes through the city and all the big skyscrapers and the gardens. It was beautiful.

Reid got off work just as we left the shrine place. He called Justine and she was like, “Yeah well you can come meet us here then.” Uhhhh. We were on the COMPLETE opposite side of the city, and Reid was waaaay closer to where we were headed anyway. So she made him come all the way to us, just to go right back the way he came. Efficient, yeah? We stopped at a grocery store and bought stuff from the deli to make sandwiches and took the sandwich stuff to the beach and had a little pseudo picnic. It was actually really nice and relaxing. Of course, it wasn’t sunny.. sooo it wasn’t really a nice beach day. That’s okay though. I took a little nap on the beach and enjoyed being near the ocean and being out of my little zoo quarantine area. When we were walking to the beach from the tram, a drunk Aussie followed us and started talking to us. He was all, “What country are you guys from? Where are you from? What’s your nationality?” “We’re Americans.” “What the *bleep* are you doing here? *Bleep* *bleep* *bleep* Go home. Don’t you have *bleeping* beaches there!” “We are just here working man.” “Fine fine, enjoy our beaches and stuff, but don’t ever forget where the airport is!” Righto.. thanks for making us feel really welcome dood. Hah. It was actually really funny. No one has had that attitude towards us. It seems like a lot of people in Melbourne were really proud and hated every other state/country. When anyone there found out that Justine and I were living in Tassie, they very vehemently told us how awful Tassie is and how unfortunate our lives are that we are stuck there and that we should obviously rethink our lives and come to Melbourne instead. Haha. I actually really love Tassie. It’s beautiful here. It may be the “hick” state, but it’s charming and the people are a heck of a lot nicer than in Melbourne. Anyway, at the beach there was a seagull (Yes, I do understand how disjointed all of my thoughts are.) hanging out near me that was missing a foot. Poor guy. There was another seagull that chased every other seagull within ten feet of us away. Jealous little guy. It was pretty entertaining. My little AustraLearn backpack that they gave me before I came here ripped. It was just the little pocket in the front that ripped, but that was where I had put all my jewelry that I was wearing... Fortunately I didn’t lose all of it.. I only lost my pearl earrings that my uncle gave me for Christmas a while ago.. I freaking loved those earrings. I was soooooo sad when I saw the hole. I think one of the seagulls stole them. Sneaky buggers.

After that, we went back to Reid’s place, changed, and went to dinner. We went to this little Italian restaurant that was surprisingly similar to a lot of the little restaurants my family and I had gone to in Italy. We had a super cute waiter. His name is James. He came over to take orders and realized we were American, and he got so excited. Hahah. So he stayed and talked some more. By talked some more, I mean he talked mostly to me. After that, Justine and Reid were like, “Geez, get his number already will ya.” Of course, they sounded a bit sarcastic and more like they were trying to tell me that I’m a shameless flirt and they were disgusted or something. I ignored all sarcasm and disgustedness and responded with, “Well I wouldn’t mind having his number. He’s rather attractive” then I commenced drinking my water. Every time James came to check on us (me) they would make snarky comments after he left. Silly people. Other than that, we actually had a really good time at dinner. We all chatted and joked and had fun, surprisingly enough. Speaking of attractive boys, I’ve seen like a zillion since we’ve been in Australia. Before we went into the Italian restaurant, Justine had mentioned how she had not seen ONE attractive boy. Clearly she is crazy. There are so many good looking guys here. Not really in Tassie, since I haven’t really seen many boys since all I really see are animals.. Haha. So at dinner when she actually agreed with me that James was attractive, I wanted to be like, “Yeah sucka, the only boy you’ve thought was attractive wants me! Take that Wisconsin girl!” Justine has complained about how whenever people ask where we are from, they could not care less about Wisconsin, and I totally show her up by saying California. You’re right, I purposely fixed it so that I would be born in Southern California just so that I could tell people that and show up all you small town country hicks. I’m a conniving genius, really. Okay, I sound really mean when I talk about her in my posts. I apologize. She is nice and we get along sometimes. We just aren’t pals. I always feel awkward when I say things like, “Yeah I wish I had more friends and stuff around me” and she says, “Oh so I’m not enough?” She’s joking, but it’s still kind of awkward cause in my head I’m like, “Well.. yeah.... I would rather have someone who wants to be my friend living with me.. but you’re a nice girl I’m sure.” We did get along better this weekend compared to any other time. Thank goodness, because I would’ve been miserable if I was stuck in a different city without all of my distractions like a computer and ipod and books and stuff on top of having no one to talk to or do things with. We were all talking about snow at one point because they are both from places that get snow frequently, unlike southern California me. So when I had said that I didn’t think that I would like to permanently live somewhere where it snowed constantly, they thought I was a crazy person. I gave them about a zillion reasons why snow is unpleasant to live in. I do like snow sometimes. It’s fun to go sledding and it’s very pretty, but it’s cold and icy and you slip and fall in it and you have to put a ton of layers on just to take them off once you get inside a building and it makes your extremities go numb, etc. They still thought that I was crazy for not being 100% in love with living in the snow. They also started talking about how “hoity toity” southern Californians are, they were talking about it like I was not from southern California. I’ve never thought of myself as “hoity toity”.. Whatevs.

We were looking at a newspaper that someone left on the tram, and there was an article about a new game that someone came out with. It is a kissing game. It apparently uses magnets that people put in their mouths and the other person uses their tongue to bowl or something. I have no idea. It sounds extremely bizarre, and whoever came up with it is obviously a bit pathetic.

Reid has an Irish housemate. I talked to him for a bit. It was hard to understand him. Also, he dropped the f bomb like every other word. Haha. I still have a hard time understanding the Australian accent sometimes, throwing in another accent wasn’t helpful. He seems nice I guess. He was talking about how he wanted to be a personal trainer.. he’s skinnier than like a scarecrow. He then said that he decided to go in a different direction because that didn’t work out. Of course it didn’t. Ha. He watched National Treasure with us. It was on tv the night that we missed our flight.

Saturday:

So, we woke up early to go into the city and check out the Queen Victoria’s Market. I think it’s every Saturday and on like Tuesday nights or something. They sell lots of fruit and veggies and spices and nuts and meat and cheese and other tasty things. There was a little shop that was selling mini pancakes.. They looked SO good. No one else wanted them, so I didn’t get to stop and eat some.. I cried a little inside. There was also heaps of stalls selling jewelry and clothes and souvenir ish type things. Tons of cool stuff. I wanted to stop and look at a lot of the things, but no one else wanted to. It was a bit frustrating wanting to enjoy everything, but not really being able to do so to the extent that I wanted to. Oh well. It was still cool to meander about the place. After, we were going to head back to Reid’s because Justine was tired of carrying her purse because she just hates purses. (She’s a total tomboy. She doesn’t like carrying purses. She doesn’t like shopping. She doesn’t care about her hair at all. She doesn’t care about wearing cute outfits. Etc. She was talking about how a night on the town involves her throwing on a sweatshirt and throwing her hair up in a messy bun. I like getting cute. I purposely dress up and do my hair whenever I get a chance here because I don’t get that many chances. She just throws on whatever t shirt is closest to her. Not that I’m judging her for doing so, because I do that occasionally. I’m just whinging about how different we are and how I wish we weren’t so different.) Oh oh and before we went through the market, Justine had to have a coffee because she drinks coffee all the time. So we walked around a bit looking for a suitable place for her, and she did not approve of like any of the places and I was freaking hungry and wanted breakfast so every time she didn’t approve of a place, we had to leave and go look for somewhere else. After a while, I pointed another cafe out and she goes, “Uhm I really don’t like having all this pressure on me. I don’t NEED a coffee. Let’s just go to the freaking market, okay.” You just made us go to like seven different places and rejected all of them in the search for the perfect coffee, and then you say that you don’t appreciate us pointing out other places because we’re being nice and trying to get you your dang coffee and turn everything on us. Thank you. She makes it difficult to be nice to her sometimes. I’m doing my best though. Anyway, so we were heading back to the tram to go back to Reid’s place when Justine says, “Geez, can’t we walk or something. I actually LIKE walking.” So we went on a thirty ish minute or more walk back to Reid’s house because we needed to assuage the beast, I mean Justine. Finally, we got there and she wanted to sit down and relax for a bit. I just wanted to go to the zoo. So after a while, we finally headed to the tram for the zoo. Huzzah! It was a pretty big zoo actually. We stopped and got sandwich stuff to take with us to the zoo. We spent like four hours walking around and looking at all the animals. I loved seeing stuff that we have at our zoo too, and being like yeaaaaaah I get to go in the enclosure with those animals. There was a lot of stuff to see. They had lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Also, snow leopards, pumas, echidnas, red kangaroos, western gray kangaroos, pademelons, heaps of birds, PLATYPUS, seals, penguins, fishes, tons of monkeys (gorillas, mandrills, baboons, tamarins, lemurs, gibbons, spider monkeys, black capped capuchins, orangutans (Fun fact: some people call gingers, rangas as in orangutans. Hehe), etc.), hairy nosed wombats (the wombat we have at our zoo is just a common wombat), elephants (there were two little baby elephants!), turtles, tortoises, bongos, and more. They had a sweet reptile house. They had Gila Monsters! Cool! I love Gila Monsters. I was talking to Adam about the Melbourne Zoo today, and he said that they used to have Komodo Dragons there. I was so sad that they didn’t have them anymore.. They also had tree kangaroos and a red panda and a macaw and sting rays and stuff. It was a pretty great zoo. I enjoyed myself very much :D

From spending all this time out in the sun, and wearing my toms.. I got a beautiful little awkward toms tan line. It looks funny..

On one of our tram rides, there was a poster for an Italian festival that they were having that coming Sunday. It sounded super fun. They were attempting to break the world record for largest pizza! Since we missed our flight that night, we were like, “Cool we can go to the Italian Festival and hit up the aquarium!” But the airport nazis said we had to go on the next available flight. That was fine though. So yeah, flight missing. Here’s the story. To get to the airport, we had to take two trams and a sixteen dollar twenty minute bus ride. Of course, Reid had told us that it would take about thirty minutes total to get to the airport so if we left at six for our 7:50 flight, we would be totally fine. I wanted to leave earlier because I didn’t want to take any chances. They were watching Scrubs though, and did not want to leave. In fact, when six came around I had to be like, “Uhmm... shouldn’t we be leaving..” I need to start being more forceful or something. I’m way to unconfrontational. So when we finally left, we had to wait for the trams and then pay for the bus ticket and catch the bus.. It took us like an hour to get there. When we tried checking in, the little computers wouldn’t let us. When I talked to the lady at the desk she said, “Oh you’re ten minutes past the time when we close the flight. Sorry. There is absolutely nothing we can do except make you pay sixty dollars each to wake up at five in the morning tomorrow and catch a different flight that you should leave a bit earlier for this time. Mmkay? Your life sucks. Bye!” ...Yeah she didn’t really say the last bit, but she might as well have. It wasn’t a horrible situation obviously, but we had to pay for another bus ride and take two more trams to get back to Reid’s house. Justine was pissed at Reid. It isn’t totally his fault, the trams took longer than he thought they would, but she blamed him 100% for all of it. So he felt bad. Oh, and it was raining by this time. We bought ice cream and food and watched National Treasure with Irish kid. I went to bed early. Justine and Reid stayed up and snuggled or something. She was putting her leg over him during the movie and stuff. She has a “fella” back at home. Whatever.

Sunday:

Woke up early. Reid paid for a taxi to the bus place. Paid more money for another bus. Got to the airport. Made our flight. Once again, some punk checked a bag in and didn’t show up for his flight, so we all had to wait around while they looked for his bag. Finally got back to Tassie. Had to take an extremely expensive taxi back to the zoo because Rob wouldn’t come get us. The taxi driver was really nice. He was telling us about all his traveling that he has done. He has been to every country in Europe except for one, all countries in Asia except for two, multiple places in Africa, all over America, and still has more plans for traveling. How awesome is that?? I want to go everywhere like that. He had all these cool stories about safaris that he has been on and stuff.

When I got home, the first thing I did was take a nice really long shower. It was fantastic. I got ready for church and got a ride form Jess and her brother Daniel. They are super nice. I sat with their family during sacrament, and felt a bit weird because I didn’t know if they cared that I was sitting with them or not, but I didn’t really know where else to sit because we showed up late so I just followed them into their row.. Hah. The talks were really awesome. Sunday school was way good. The teacher is really cool. She remembered my name. Lots of people did actually. I remembered no one’s names except Jess. Haha. Anyway, the teacher was chatting with me afterwards for a bit and she’s really cool. I went to Relief Society by myself because Jess had to leave early. A ton of people stopped me and asked me how I was doing and introducing themselves and stuff. It was awesome. So it’s really weird because no one in Relief Society knows how to play the piano! I’m used to being in these wards that have heaps of people who are insanely musical. The first Sunday that I was in Relief Society, they asked me if I could play the piano. Hah. So yeah, we sing all the songs in Relief Society without the piano. Totally weird. They announce birthdays and stuff, so this nice lady who talked to me before Relief Society got up and she had just been reading something and was all teary eyed. She apologized and was like, “Sorry, I was just reading a note. My son is on his mission in Christchurch, New Zealand and I’m just so grateful that he is okay and that all the missionaries there are totally fine.. etc” That’s so scary that her son was there! I’m so glad that none of the missionaries were hurt in the earthquake. The death toll from that seems to keep rising. Erin said that it’s at like 150 now.

So after Relief Society, I had to find Jess’ dad because he was giving me a ride home. I had no idea where to find him. I stood awkwardly in the lobby. Thankfully people kept coming up to me and chatting. Hah. This nice boy that may be around my age was chatting with me. He’s nice, as well as a few inches shorter than me. Haha. Everyone is so friendly in this ward. I love it! The boy’s name is Danny. Some girl came over to talk to him, and so she was talking to me because she had just gotten back from America recently. She was in Orlando working at DisneyWorld. Cool! She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to me though.. Hah. I kept asking questions about it, and she would answer a little snobbily.. Oh welllll. So finally I found Jess’ dad and we left. He asked me lots of questions and we talked lots about differences between Australia and America. He served his mission in Salt Lake and was telling me stories about getting used to living there. Haha. It was so fun. Two of Jess’ brothers were with us. Luke and Joseph, I think. Hah. They were nice and chatty. Joseph is going to JAPAN with his school soon. What the heck? Why did Hart never take us to cool places like Japan for a school trip! Curse you Hart High!

Yeah this is insanely long, I don’t think there is anything else significant or funny or anything that happened. I’m exhausted.. and done with typing this post. Goodbye.