How do I get behind so fast?? Blurgh!

Tuesday

I forgot to add this picture to last week's blog post. This is the awesome Angle Construction I had the kids make! It worked out SO well, and my kids all had and used one that they really understood, and got to personalize a little bit. 

The angle-ator (that's what I decided to call it - just now) Each student made their own, which helped them to understand, and then to create it. They also went on angle hunts where they got to go and find different types of angles in all sorts of places. Here's another picture below to give you an idea of how they work:

One arm is glued down (the one on the right hand side), and the left arm swivels around to show each of the types of angles (without bringing protractors into it). This style and method allowed for all of our students to be a part of the lesson, including all levels of skills. It was a successful lesson and I was pretty pleased with it overall.

Thursday

Pretty normal day, considering the craziness of the rest of the week. With sport and then the strike, then Thursdays, which the kids spend most of their time outside of the classroom in CRE, Chinese, and other things:). 

Friday

A final day of the crazy week was just as crazy as I would have expected. The kids were a little crazy, as they are every Friday afternoon. Such is life. 

However, after school on Friday, I had an awesome girls' night planned! Rachel picked me up and we headed out for dinner to Persian Flavours, an absolutely DELICIOUS restaurant. We split a huge thing of butter chicken, beef, steamed rice and Nan. It was sooooo good, but when we were leaving, this is the situation:

We were standing in line to pay, and I looked over to the take-away bar and saw someone's last name written on top of container. 

Megan: "Haha, that person's name is 'Shank'."

Rachel: "Uh, that's a Lamb Shank."

Megan: ".....what's a shank?"

We had to leave the restaurant because Rachel was laughing too hard. 

Anyway; we headed over to Tor's house where there was wine, champagne, snacks, soup, nail polish, youtube, gossip, and games!

We spent a few hours just relaxing, having some champagne, doing some nails, and watching a lot of Jenna Marbles! 

For one thing, we had a big discussion about something that I REALLY miss from home; Ranch Dressing. Sam, if you read my blog, then you would definitely comment on this part:P

This is how that conversation went...

Megan: "What I really miss is ranch dressing! I feel like that's pretty American, because I haven't found it anywhere else!"

Bec: "We don't have ranch dressing."

Megan: "What? Why not?"

Bec: "Because here in Australia we don't have RANCHES, we have FARMS. And you can't have FARM dressing!"

Yes, Thank you, Bec. However, it turns out they DO have Ranch Dressing in Australia. Obviously, not Hidden Valley (The magical place where children love to eat their vegetables), but it does exist. I know this, because today (Monday), Cathy brought some in for me. She's wonderful! 

Saturday

Saturday was pretty low key - Bec and Cruz picked me up at around 10:30, and we headed to the Knox  Shopping Center to look for a dress to wear 'out'. Although I didn't find a dress, I did get to spend a great few hours with Bec, Cruz, Rachel, and Amber wandering around and being girly:). After shopping for a while, Rachel and I headed back to her house and brainstormed some ideas for what to do that night. 

We ended up going bowling, but not before introducing me to some fatally Australian/British shows. I saw the movie 'The Castle'. It turns out that I LOVE Australian humour. Hah! We also watched the first two episodes of the show 'The In-betweeners' which is absolutely awesome and hilarious. I also love British Humour. Hah! We then went to the bowling alley and had a great time, where I absolutely flew the American Flag (I whooped on Rach). It was a great night again! I got home plenty early to have a good night and get a good night's sleep for Sunday, which is where a lot of awesome happened.

Sunday

Melbourne Museum: On Sunday, I headed off around 9:00 am to catch the train into the city in order to make it to the museum before they got busy. I made it at 10:30 to the Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia. It was absolutely fantastic! Not only did they include all of the incredible history and geography and mythology within the area and time, they brought in the actual carvings from that long ago. Amazing. They included a variety of clay tablets including inscriptions from schools, businessmen, royal scribes and even farmers. They also included the translation of each of the tablets with an explanation of the language and history.
The incredible number of exhibitions they have are amazing!!
The Mind and Body section has some really awesome demonstrations of internal systems and functions in the human body (I won't go into detail on here....). The section on the brain was absolutely incredible! It was divided into areas such as perception, memory, motivation, stress, etc. SO cool. I was glad to note that I do pretty damn well with optical illusion puzzles and brain teasers:).
The Dinosaur Walk was pretty darn cool too! Not only did it cover a variety of dinosaurs who bones remains were found in Australia, they also have a full reconstruction of the largest marsupial that ever lived. It was about the size of a rhinoceros, but looked like a wombat.
There is an Evolution exhibit that includes a lot of the work of Darwin including pages of his journal and casts/stuffed birds that he reported on, as well as another Evolutionary Scientist whose name I can't recall. Near the Evolution area was an area devoted to wild animals. Taxidermy galore! There was a stuffed every animal from every continent everywhere! The animals were organized by geography and standing on steps up the sides of every wall. The interesting part is that there wasn't any labels/descriptions/etc on any of the animals. However, I can't believe I didn't take pictures of any of the equipment used! BLURGH. This shot is of the Australian area of the room, and it's kind of an example of what the rest of the room looked like only from all different continents, and no writing anywhere else.

Sorry about the necessary neck craning to see this photo.
Anyway, they had a 5-6 monitors in the room, which looked like those telescopes you put a quarter into and you can look through, only instead of looking through the eye pieces it displays to a touch screen. You can swivel and turn the camera to look anywhere in the room. First, you point the camera at an animal, and when it's on the screen you touch it. The screen registers which animal it is, and brings up a ton of information including its location, habitat, level of endangerment, diet, and a 360 degree view (which you can rotate to see the animal from all angles). I played with the technology for a long time. It was SO COOL! Combining the visual imaging with touch screen and topic selection. I played in that room for quite a while without really reading any information about animals. Super cool. The only downside I can see is when the museum is really  busy and there aren't enough machines to go around. But, it was still spectacular! So cool...
That's probably it for the museum; now I know why people didn't want to go with me...

Queen Vic

Following the museum, I met Kylen at the Queen Victoria Market, which was cool (as always) and incredibly crowded (as per usual). Kylen got a few things but I didn't - mainly because I didn't bring any cash with me to the market (good choice on my part) - which was because the ATMs had literally 35 people lined up to use them. (Yes, I counted one of the lines).

Something Aussie

Later on we moseyed on up to a store called 'Something Aussie', which is (obviously) a tourist-y center. It was cool, but way more freaking expensive than the market anyway.

Pancake Parlour

We finally made it to the Pancake Parlour, which is a restaurant the kids have been raving about for....since we got here...and I got a hold of some coupons for it:). We found our way back to the Melbourne Central Train station because that's where the Parlour actually is, and found a really cool, funky restaurant that really didn't match its name. The pancakes were FABULOUS, the hash browns delicious, the coupons effective. We enjoyed our time, and then headed out to the aquarium!

Aquarium

We finally made it to the aquarium! Thank goodness I had the coupon (buy one get one free), because although it was cool, it was pretty small, especially compared to the Seattle Aquarium. There were some cool exhibits including:

PENGUINS! This guy slept sitting right there for the whole ten-or-so minutes we were wandering around the penguin area. He really, really looked fake, but then he opened his eyes and looked around.

Although fake-y was pretty cool, my absolute FAVOURITE penguin was this guy.

The entire time we were there, he was literally looking at his reflection in the window and moving and then looking at his reflection again, and then moving and looking back. He was for sure stalking his own reflection, and I think might actually catch it.

"Flo, move! I can't see!" - Deb (Finding Nemo)

The Cuttle Fish were another favourite...they are so weird and cool, as well as masters of disguise...

He's obviously disguised as a hand doing this...

Crazy long-necked Turtles!!

I almost died....

Twice!

Also Jellyfish and stingrays oh my!

Thus endeth the travelling for the day. But Hark! My day was not over! We panickedly got home in order to get to my netball game on time (thank goodness for Rick and Jon's quick and careful driving).

Netball

We were absolutely smashed!! We played hard, and periodically we would meet them goal for goal, but not enough. It's still fun and a great group of people to play with, especially as someone who is not...familiar with or good at the game. Not that I know anyone like that...

Anyway, fun time, long and interesting day! 

Today (Tuesday, 11/9)

Today is not only our host dad's birthday, but also our host parents' anniversary (that was planned deliberately so that he would only have to remember one date). So, we'll be hanging out at home celebrating!

Thanks for listening, hopefully soon I'll have some interesting things to share:)