Thanksgiving

We don't have thanksgiving in Australia, and I wish we did. Not because of the feast (because just between you and me, if I was going to come up with a dinner that everyone had to eat once a year, I'd pick better than green beans and candied yams...), but because of the opportunity to have everyone turning inwards and upwards with feelings of reflection and gratitude.

I'm thankful for so many things. I sometimes forget how much I am, and how much I have, and how much I enjoy. My family, friends, my knowledge of and testimony of my Heavenly Father and Saviour. My talents, opportunities and experiences. For music, for this beautiful, beautiful world, and for the tender mercies and teachings of the Spirit, and for prayer. All of these things bring me so much joy. I'm grateful for Jenna and the other two upcoming Munro/Easthopes, I'm grateful for technology, I'm grateful for my church callings, I'm grateful for Christmas. I'm grateful for rain, and running water - for their sounds and smells. I'm grateful for chocolate and watermelon and avocado (although I'd be just a tad more grateful if they were calorie-free), I'm grateful for my ward and the blessing it is to hear from church leaders. I'm grateful for the holiday I'm really looking forward to next year (and for the blessing it will be to escape the office for a month!). I'm grateful for my job, and the things that I've learnt. For my home, my bed, my desk, the kitchen, bathroon, family room. For the roof that covers it all, and the airconditioning that makes it so pleasant. For my car, for my education, and for my ability to read and have access to so many wonderful books. I'm grateful for a sound mind and a (relatively) healthy body. For the freedom, peace and sense of community and belonging I enjoy here in Oz. For the other wonderful places I've also been blessed to visit and live. For the tooth that's finally stopped hurting. For a lack of green beans and candied yams on tonight's menu. For laughter and humour and a Heavenly Father who's love I've never doubted.

Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuwid8_O8dk. It's become a new favourite for me. They just get better and better, don't they? :)

And then drop me a line and tell me what you're grateful for....

xo Tammy

Chair Soccer in the Backyard

A few Saturdays ago, the family came over and we spent an hour or two playing Chair Soccer in the backyard. Nothing overly special, but it was a fun way to spend a few hours :) The general gist of the game (and you'll quickly see why I'm willing to play this kind of soccer), is that everyone has a chair that you place in a large circle, and everyone has to defend their chair. If someone manages to kick the ball so it hits your chair, than you're out and you have to sit down. Naturally, I usually don't stray too far from my chair... :)


Anyway, here are a couple of photos I took that afternoon, and 2 little videos I took on my digital camera. Obviously, they're not the best quality videos, but I thought they were kind of fun. The first one is just showing some of one of the games (it shows one of the few times when Jessima got out actually - she's pretty good at the old soccer, but she was trying to be careful since she's pregant), and the second shows a bit of video of Abby the beautiful (very) pregnant lady, followed by a random bit where the ball goes over the fence and everyone suddenly nominates Ben to go get it, followed by a little bit of Jenna toddling around the backyard. It's a miracle she wasn't hit by the ball actually...


Enjoy! xo Tammy


PS. Okay, I'm having trouble with the videos - sorry :( I'll see if I can load them as a separate entry under this one, but otherwise the photos will have to do :)

Video - Gorgeous Abby

A Day at the Beach

A few weeks ago we had our Stake Youth Beach day, and in spite of my standard 'I hate sand' (almost as much as Jess hates snow... so that's a lot!), it was a really lovely day, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself :) Rather than plan a lot of structured activities, we just picked a sheltered beach on the spit down on the Gold Coast, where there's a roped off shark net area with a platoon for the kids to jump off and swim around in. We also set up beach volleyball, and hired a bunch of water craft (canoes, kayaks and water bikes) for the kids to play on. It started at 8 (so us leaders were there at 6:30am), and went until about 1pm. It was a really gorgeous day, not too hot at all (we're only in spring after all), and there was plenty of shade. I had a lovely lazy time chatting with kids and other leaders, and just relaxing! We put on a steak burgers lunch for them all, and had cut up watermelons for dessert. I've pasted some photos from the day bellow... watercraft, the 5 Priesthood Leaders it took to light the BBQ, shots of the beach and a picture of my brother Oliver :)

My assignment for the day was the watermelons, and I wish I'd thought to take photos of them! Bethany and I stopped by the local IGA on our way home from work the night before the activity, and filled (and I mean 'filled') a shopping trolley with watermelons! In fact, we emptied the stand, leaving only 3 lonely looking watermelons in the grocery department. It was really funny when we got to the checkout - everyone was laughing at us, and quite a line formed behind us while they processed them all. Everyone was in a friendly 'thank goodness it's Friday' mood I think, because there was no shortage of jokey banter between them all... my favourite was the two biker guys who said to us "You know you'll be known as the watermelon girls from now on!" *raucous laughter*
Anyway - lovely day all round. Even if it was at the beach!
xo Tammy

The plan...

Greeting blog followers!

*Insert standard apology about how I'm sorry I haven't written for ages because I've been really busy etc. etc*

I've been up to a fair bit lately, and have actually kept you in mind with photos of the odd activity here and there, but these photos/stories never seem to get themselves onto my blog

*Insert standard excuse about how I'm too busy to write blog entries because my job is taking over my life etc. etc*

I'm just loading the photos onto my computer now, and I was thinking I'd write a mammoth entry about all the things I've been doing etc. etc. , but I think we all know that if I do that, the entry will be 13 pages long, and most of you won't have time to read it all. I'll also be unlikely to post again for another month or so... so instead, I think I'll write a few separate posts, and put them on time release, so they publish a couple of days apart for the next week or so. How's that?! I like the plan because it means I'll get more comments than if I just post once :D

But to give you a couple of tidbits now (because I know you'll all be going crazy with suspense waiting for the next posts.

(Which I should actually warn you aren't going to be THAT exciting... I mean, I haven't won an international trip or had dinner with the Queen or anything...)

I have been released from my Stake Young Women's calling, which was a little sad (I've really enjoyed it), but I've been called as the 1st counselor in our ward YW presidency - which is really exciting. It's going to be busier (ward callings always are!) but it'll be really nice to work directly with the girls for once - it's much more hands on, and I'm really excited to be working with Brodi (our president) and Sulla (our second counselor), so I'm sure there will be more stories to follow on that front.

I should also warn you that I've been signing up for choirs left right and centre at the moment, and I just realized that I'm likely not to have more than 1-2 nights a week at home over the next 3 weeks! I hadn't quite made that connection as I was signing up for them! But it should be fun anyway, if I don't die of exhaustion (I have a habit of biting off more than I can realistically chew, unfortunately)... I haven't done any real singing in a long time, so hopefully this will help renew my vocal chords a little :)

HANDEL'S MESSIAH
I've signed up to join the QLD Choir for a short stint for a concert of Handel's Messiah on Saturday 21st of November. They like to swell to a 200 voice choir for this concert, so they let people join, and I figured I could handel (get it, 'Handel'), I figured I could 'handle' a 3 week stint. I did it last year, and they perform in City Hall with a Baroque orchestra and 4 fabulous soloists, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm also doing it with a work colleague who was keen to sing with a choir, and so I'm singing alto to keep her company. Rehearsals will be Monday and Thursday nights until the concert. The only down side is that I won't actually be able to make the concert itself, because:

ELDER COOK YSA FIRESIDE
The apostle, Elder Cook is coming out to Brisbane over the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of November, and on the 21st (Saturday night), he's having a fireside just with the YSA (finally, an upside to being a YSA!). Anyway, I'm playing the piano for the YSA choir that will be singing at the EMP chapel. Quite excited about that - haven't played the piano for a choir for a long time! Rehearsals are Wednesday nights for the next three weeks.

GENERAL AUTHORITY STAKE CONFERENCE
And then, either Elder Cook or Elder Gonzalas will be speaking at a special stake conference for my stake on Sunday the 22nd of November. So I'm signing with the Stake Choir for that fireside. Rehearsals are Sunday nights until then.

CHRISTMAS FIRESIDE
My stake is having a Christmas musical fireside on Sunday December 20th, and the Stake Choir will also be singing for that, so after the stake conference, we'll continue rehearsing Sunday nights until then. Except for fast Sundays and Sunday the 22nd of November, when there's a stake youth fireside about using technology, and I'm giving (and need to prepare actually!) a workshop about social media and how to and to NOT use it...

YOUTH NIGHTS FOR YOUNG WOMEN
Are every Tuesday night, so those are blocked out in the calendar now... forever :) I went to the first one last week, and it was really fun. We were doing a night about first aid (to follow up on the Sunday lesson 'Health Care in the Home' and mum came in and took the workshop (she used to be a nurse, so she knows this stuff really well!). And of course, mum did a great job :) My favourite was when she put talcum powder all over her hands and then shook hands and touched people left right and centre to demonstrate how germs spread. We were all covered in powder and not a little freaked out about ever letting people near us ever again!

SO, that leaves Friday and Saturday nights free :) There's a few Youth Stake dances, Ward YSA activities and family things sprinkled through there (Abby's baby shower is coming up soon...), but otherwise people will just have to catch me in December :)

It should be a fun month - I really love Christmas :)

Okay - so your worst fears were confirmed, and I wrote a 13 page blog entry anyway. I'm afraid it wasn't very exciting... just another logistical information blog!

*Heavy sigh... did you really expect anything different?!*

But if it makes you all feel better, I think I've used the blog to organize my head a little better, and I'm now feeling better organized... so there's your silver lining!

Okay, I will take my leave to go and write other entries to post on timed release....

*If they don't appear, it means I never actually wrote them, because this entry has been going for AGES... but check back in a day or two anyway... *

xo Tammy :)

So how 'bout that weather?!

Wednesday morning was a gorgeous clear morning. And as I drove to work, I heard on the radio that other parts of Australia was having some really bizarre weather. Apparently there was a tornado in South Australia, A couple of earthquakes in Melbourne, bush fires in North Queensland, and a dust storm in Sydney. I think I thought something like "I really love this country!" but otherwise, I didn't think too much about the crazy weather.

When I got to work though, I heard a bit more about Sydney's little dust storm. Apparently Sydney woke up that morning to an orange world! Overnight, high easterly winds were bringing the red dirt in from Australia's inland deserts, and dumping it all up and down the east coast. Here are a few photos from online news sources. You'll see the dual photo of the Sydney Opera House (how it normally looks, and how it looked in the storm), one of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and a famous one (that I keep seeing everywhere) of that woman going for a run under the Harbour Bridge. Pretty crazy stuff!

A few hours later, we heard that there was a good chance that we'd get a bit of the dust storm hitting Brisbane, although not as bad as Sydney. By lunch time, I couldn't see the high rise city buildings on the other side of the river! Our dust storm was more yellow than orange, but here's a few photos (again, from online news sources). I picked a couple of the Story Bridge, because I work right under the bridge on one side.

What's strange about the photos is that you can't see any of the cliffs or buildings that you'd normally see in the background - pretty surreal! The dust didn't come inside toooo much, although you could taste it in your mouth, and the light coming in through the windows made everything seem a surreal amber colour. Visibility was down to about 100metres during the middle of the day. Luckily, people were home at our house, and shut up all the windows, but a lot of people had left their windows open in the morning when they headed off to work - and did they have a mess awaiting them when they got home that night - a layer of dirt over everything in their homes!

As the dust was coming in, I looked out at the park across the road and saw a bunch of elderly people having a picnic (the nurses and bus indicated that they'd come out for a lovely outing in the city). Obviously the didn't stay long! But they had a few of us worried as they dragged their oxygen tanks back to the bus!

The 'storm' lasted over a 2-3 day period up the entire east coast of Australia. At it's peak, they estimate that 75,000 tonnes of dust were being lost from the Australian continent (out into the pacific ocean) ever hour. That's crazy. Scientists are still arguing about what that will do to the barrier reef. If your interested in the details of the storm (and they're fascinating), look at the wikipedia entry. Do you know what I thought was strangest of all though? That we didn't know it was going to happen in advance. I'm a bit of a weather report junky, and I can always tell you what the weather is looking like for the next couple of days, but no one in Sydney really knew it was coming till they woke up that morning! We just knew it going to be windy :) And I didn't really know it was happening in Brisbane until I noticed the light in the office changing, and then went to look out the window.

It had subsided some by the time I drove home, but visibility was still low. As I walked out to my car, there wasn't really anyone around on the streets, and everything was really quite. The street definitely had a bit of a spooky nuclear winter thing going on. The air was really heavy, and the lights all looked really eery (and beautiful) as they shone down through the dust.

So there you have it. The dust storm that didn't hurt anyone, but has left behind a huge mess, and was incredibly interesting.

We should all encourage mum to post a post about an experience she had in a severe dust storm when she was a little girl and her family lived out in the desert - it's a really fascinating story!

xo Tammy

Um, are you sure you work here?

On Friday night my friend B and I decided to celebrate the end of the week in style: a girls night out with dinner and a movie. There's a plaza with several restaurants where the movie theatre is, and after wandering around for 20 minutes (we had to look carefully at each restaurant before we picked one), we decided on a Mexican place that looked really fun.

I'm all about the ambiance, and this one had oodles of it, and I love Mexican food. B had never had Mexican before, and was using her 'weekly-diet-free-day' on our outing, and her pre-requisite was that she be able to get a steak and mashed potatoes, and since this place was a Mexican grill, it was perfect. We went in, were seated, ordered some drinks, and settled in to look at the menu. There was no Caesar Salad, so it was obviously going to take me a while to decide what to get, but we weren't in any particular hurry, so it was fine. The menu was like a 17 page book, so it was taking a while to get through it all. B had zeroed in on the steak menu, and didn't take long to settle on the T-Bone with Mashed Potatoes and Corn. B absolutely loves corn, and once she saw it on the menu, that's all she wanted. I was tossing up between a couple of more Mexican dishes, and was close to deciding on a chicken Quesidilla.

Then the waitress arrived. She was a really contentious looking girl, with dark hair pulled up in a tidy bun, a fringe (bangs), and dark framed I-use-a-mac-computer type glasses that she pushed up her nose every 30 seconds. She could tell I was still trying to decide (pretty obvious, since I'm turning the pages back and forward and B's saying things like "yeah, just get that one. Or, okay, sure. That one.... Just pick one", more patiently than anyone should have to). So our waitress offered to give us some menu suggestions.

Waitress: Okay, well, let my start by just telling you what not to order. Definitely stay away from the xxxxx because we really don't do a good job with those. And whatever you do, don't order the xxxx - they're disgusting!

Us: Ahh, okay. (Wow, okay, but I'm glad she told us if they're that bad).

Girl: And our xxxx have no taste, at all - whatever you do, stay away from those! And definitely not the xxxx - they're really soggy. And we always overcook the xxxxx here, so just skip past that entire page. And (and here's my favourite one) stay away from anything with seafood in it, because the seafood we serve here is totally (she then made loud gagging noises for 10 whole seconds).

It was at about this point, that I (attempting to hide my delightedly confused smile) actually glanced to my left and my right looking for the hidden camera! Surely this girl was a paid actress for a candid camera stunt. This girl was hilarious! Was she for real?!

Me: Ahh, okay. Well what is good here.

Girl: Okay. I'd totally recommend the Quisidillas. But not the seafood ones because -

Tammy: (cutting her off before the gagging could start again) - yeah, no, not the seafood. I'll get the chicken.

B: And I was going to get the T-Bone with steak with the mashed potato and corn.

The girl hesitated....

B: What's wrong?

Girl: Well. The T-Bone steak is always really, really, really dry. I'd stay away from that one if I was you. Why don't you get the xxxx steak instead.

B: (her smile faltering just a little) uh, well, okay, but I really felt like the corn, and that only comes with the T-Bone.

Girl: No - you don't want the corn - trust me! Our corn is terrible!

B's face fell, and her shoulders slumped, and I lost it! I just started laughing - I couldn't help it! I couldn't even hold it together until after she walked away! It was like she was playing some private game with herself to make sure we didn't order anything. Or maybe the owner of the restaurant once killer her mother and this was her idea of revenge!

But the girl didn't even notice my laughing, because she was still talking:

Girl: - Trust me. Go to Woolies, buy yourself some corn and cook it up at home. It'll be way better than what you get here!

A debate ensued. The girl was pretty set on the xxxx steak, but B was worried that the sauce on the xxxx steak was too spicy (and the girl concurred of course), so they finally fixed on the xxxx steak, but with the T-Bone sauce. And B wouldn't budge on the corn and potatoes. The girl gave a long suffering sigh, pushed her glasses back up her nose again and finally left us.

20 minutes later, we got our food: B's steak was dry, her corn was no good, and the potatoes (which the girl hadn't said anything about) were the worst of the bunch - completely flavourless! (I advised B not to mention it to the waitress though - surely she didn't need another menu item to add to her list of never-order's!)

My dinner was completely and utterly delicious :)

Moral of the story: totally pays to listen to crazy waitresses! Although I'm not entirely sure that I shouldn't mention her to the management before she completely does them out of business...

xo Tammy