School Activities and a Flight to the Outback, 17-8-05

Original email August 17, 2005

So how long has it been? Last time i wrote you all, Danny and I had just been married a year, and that was 4 months ago? Wow, time flies...... so does my husband :) he he he :) hmm... cheesy start was it? ok, give me another try, i haven't done this in a while.

So I'm nearly 3/4 of the way through the school year now. And i guess I'm about as attached to these kids as I've ever been to any kids I've ever met... probably moreso. Theyr'e generous and emotionally needy and and brilliant and beautiful...and many more big sweeping generalisations. Of course, take into account that when I say, "they" I'm referring to about 40 individuals that I work closely with between the two schools. So every day is different, and every group of kids is its own interesting story. so to give you a bit of a better picture, I've put heaps of photos of them on my website to accompany this letter...otherwise, i'd never finish writing!

There are a couple of really exciting things going on at both schools at the moment.
Last term at Junction Park (the school with the blue uniforms) we had a visit from "Farmer Joe." A bunch of trailors full of baby farm animals drove onto the school grounds one morning, and set up camp on the sports field for the day. Donna and I are the ESL teachers there, and together we took a group of about 30 of our students to see the animals. Well! What an adventure that was for them! One 6th grade student, Sarah, had grown up on a farm in Africa when she was much younger, so to her the animals were familiar. To all the rest of our 9-13 year olds, it was as if aliens had brought their pets to class to show off. They bounced from goat to chicken to calf in a noisy whirlwind of excitement and fear. I got a LOT of photos of that day .

So after the kids had gone home, Donna and I started dreaming....and after we'd managed to find some private fundraising (Donna's husband's company ), and done heaps of planning, we decided to take the animal experience to a higher level. On the 25th of August (next Thursday), we are taking our ESL students in grades 2-7 to the Australia Zoo. The Steve Irwin zoo. It's about an hour up the coast from our school, and it's going to be a major all day event. We are ALL excited! say a prayer for us.... i'll let you know how it goes. (Donna is the other ESL teacher I now work with at Junction Park. have i mentioned that? can't remember. She's fantastic.)

At Stafford, the school that's just around the corner from our home, I'm getting to know a lot of the teachers pretty well. We all live in the area, and we go walking together down by the creek. Well, one of those teachers I've been spending a bit of time with, she teaches the 7th grade. And she's the kind of over-achieving teacher who tends to plan extravagent productions for the kids to get involved in. so somehow, I've been talked into helping to put on the year 7 play. I'm in charge of costumes. This week, I'm in the midst of trying to organise spy hats, trench coats and all kinds of feather boas -- and the show must go on in about 3 weeks. so i'll let you know how that goes too :) i should be able to get some fun photos of that!

So that's teaching at the moment. It's always full-on. But I'm getting much more confident working with those middle-school aged kids. and i absolutely love my job. And now I have a group of 1st and 2nd grade Afghani students who recently transfered in, so i'm working with a bunch of littlies again. photos of all those guys on the website too :)

Back to my husband who flies...and he's been doing it a lot. lessons just about every weekend. He's passed the week-long medical exam (that was the most intense medical exam i've ever heard about and been so glad i did not have to go through :) -- and now he's on track to get his CPL (commercial pilot's license) by the end of this year. November we're hoping. Then we'll be on to the next set of unknowns -- finding a job where he can fly little planes and rack up an unimaginably large number of hours, so that in a few years time someone might want to train him how to fly really big jet planes. so where we'll be and what we'll be doing in 2006 is, at this point, quite literally up in the air :)

In the meantime, Danny's got to do a few Long Distance cross-country flights to get up hours. So a couple of months ago we packed up and flew out West to Roma - about 400 K's away. (you can figure that out in miles if you like. it was only about an hour and a half flight.) It was just the two of us -- my husband the pilot and myself the navigator and photographer of the trip. It was the first time I'd been further West than the Dividing Range, and I was really looking forward t getting a peek of the outback. I was not disappointed.
I loved watching the landscape change below us -- from green valleys to wide stretches of farmland in the strangest shapes and patterns I'd ever seen... in all the shades of red earthy colours.

That country is dry, flat bush. except when it rains. And when we arrived, it had been raining for 3 days straight -- unknown to us. We decided to land on the grass landing strip -- translation: ankle deep mud airstrip landing. We were immediately greeted by the chunks of earth flying up and landing all over the plane. We were a bit nervous that we wouldn't make it to the tarmac-- what would we do if we got stuck in a muddy runway on a sleepy saturday afternoon miles away from anyone? unfortunately, i haven't read that bit of the worst-case scenario guide! I was't going to have a push an aeroplane out of the mud, was i?? (by the way, if you happen to have that handy guide, and you do find any helpful advice on misfortunes involving small aircraft, please let me know. it's always good to know, just in case!) luckily, we didn't have to find out what that would be like this time. we made it to the paved runway with nothing worse than a completely mud-covered tail.

Roma is a biggish little town (about the size of Morris MN, maybe?). It was the perfect quiet getaway for us that weekend. There's not much there now I guess -- except history, cows, oil rigs, and pleanty of wide open space. We took some lazy strolls around the town. I loved the old buildings. (more photos on the website). What fascinated me most were the bottle tree memorials -- hundreds of trees planted all over the town. The trees grow well in the drier parts of the country, and they're shaped like bottles from the water that is stored in the trunks. Each of these trees in Roma is a memorial to a young soldier who died fighting in World War 1. They are beautiful reminders of the heart of the town and of a time when there were apparently quite a few more people too.

Now I'm going to come out of the past, and review some future events for a bit. You may already know about these things, but I really like to talk about them anyway!
First, as many of you know, my sister Loren is expecting her first baby -- a son they're going to call Noah -- late September/ early October. We're really happy for her, and I just wish that I could be there for the birth. But I WILL get to meet Noah in December when his uncle and auntie from Oz come up for a visit.

We're coming to Minnesota from December 9th to the 29th. 3 weeks. I'm SOOO excited!!! We would love to see as many of you as we can in that time. I'm already dreaming of all the time I can spend catching up with friends i miss, eating the yummy foods I miss, playing in the really cold snow I miss...sometimes :) we're really looking forward to it.

And before we leave for the Arctic North, we'll have another nephew to meet as well. (his name will be a surprise.) Dom and Dominika are having a baby boy in late October/early November. Nikita (the new baby's 7-year-old sister) is absolutely delighted. She walks around with science books, showing everybody pictures of what the baby inside her mum looks like now.

And I think that's about all the news from us at the moment. oh, -- i almost forgot the weather news. That's always an important tidbit: The last 2 weeks the weather has been unforgivably cold! It got right down to 40 degrees in the middle of the day once! i tell ya. One guy ACTUALLY said to me "Cold enough for ya?" I just stared at him. How did they get that Minnesota slogan all the way down here?! and then i thought, "yes, it is cold enough for me actually. This is about as cold as I want to be." (I'm going to be such a wuss when I visit in December! oh dear!) But, the August winds are here now and soon they should blow the warm weather and tropical flowers back, and all will seem right with the world again.

There are many photos to go along with this edition. WAY too many to attach. So have a look at the website. In the photos and captions, you might find more little stories that I didn't have the energy to tell the long way (If you're interested). Like a trip to sea world and a hail storm that rocked Brisbane and actually looked like Snow on the ground. And there's some shots of the Cross country races from back in April ... I couldn't remember if you'd seen those or not. Anyway, enjoy the photos :)

Hope you're having a beautiful end to the summer.

It's always so good to hear from you!!

with joy,
Alicia and Danny