cute kids

i dropped by the kinder today to pick up my payslip from a few weeks ago. my old boss said some of the girls had made me some drawings the other day so we went into the main room to go get them. a couple of the boys were finishing up their afternoon tea and walked over with their mouths FULL of food. one boy made a comment about my hair being different (i cut it last week-- short enough that i can't pull it back anymore cuz i've been being lazy for the last year or so and just pulling it back cuz its easy). a couple minutes later as i was walking out the door the other boy (who still had a mouth full of food) tried to say something to me. i couldn't understand so i came back in the room and he chewed his food up a bit more and managed to get his words out-- "your hair is beautiful.". he's so cute (even if food was dropping out of his mouth as he tried to say it).
here's the drawings the girls made for me:


i haven't been able to make anything out of the last one yet but i guess its the thought that counts 8)

end of daylight savings is confusing

we had a meeting to go to at 5pm today. just after we left the house i remembered the calendar said "end of daylight savings" on today's date so i said to zac that we need to remember to change the clocks tonite. then we got in a discussion about weather we should have already changed the clocks. we decided we should have done it this morning (or last nite before going to bed) so we were on our way to our 5pm meeting at 4pm. we figured probably most people at the meeting wouldn't have remembered and we were right. 3 people were already there. we all got in a discussion about what the correct time really was but none of us could figure it out. more people were arriving. pretty soon we had 10 of us in the room but no one knew what time it was. we were sure the time had to have already changed but no one had heard anything. part way through the meeting a girl who does pick-ups from the market after they close arrived. she asured us the time hadn't changed cuz the market had closed at 4pm and she said that was over an hour ago and the market wouldn't be wrong. i thought it would be pretty funny if melboure had got so caught up in the commonwealth games that even businesses forgot to change their clocks. i just turned on the tv now to see if i could figure out the time by looking at what's on. the programs were all ones that would be on the old time. i decided to get on the internet to figure out why my melbourne calendar says daylight savings if it hasn't really happened (or if it has and all the tv stations forgot too). i found this on one website:

PLEASE NOTE:

Due to a change in the end date of daylight savings from 26th March to 2nd April your PC will need a patch available from Microsoft due to the Commonwealth games.

so it did have something to do with the commonwealth games. i guess in the intrest of not confussing international visitors and other people going to events we get an extra week of longer days. of course it ended up confusing all of us people who didn't get the message that this has been changed.

not our cat!

we decided to go for a walk down to the creek this evening. we opened the front door to find ray curled up on the piece of carpet door mat we have (she does this sometimes-- our landlords live next door and don't want us to get any pets. i wonder how many times they've seen her sitting there). we gave her a cuddle and then set her down and started walking down the street. she followed us. we walked a little bit further and crossed a street. she was still following us. we walked a bit further. she was still there. by this point she'd passed where we think her house is. we walked until the street curved a bit. she was still behind us. once we went around the curve we kept checking but we couldn't see her. we walked up the creek a ways and then came down another street to loop back home. when we got back to our street we looked and ray was sitting on the footpath waiting for us near the curve in the road. we started laughing. ray looked and saw us behind her and started walking back towards us. the whole thing was a bit weird cuz first of all-- she's not our cat! second-- she's a cat, not a dog. cat's don't follow people, that's what dogs do.
it was even weirder when after we got home, we decided to walk to the shops. we walked down a side street and a funny little kitten-looking cat was looking at us from its yard. then it got up and started coming towards us. it squeezed through the front fence and started following us down the path-- this cat had never even seen us before! its people were outside and an older woman started telling us that that was 1 of 5 cats she has (it was the mother cat-- it looked like a baby). then a boy came and carried the cat back into the yard. we had another cat further up the road come out after us too. its kinda weird all these cats acting like they know us or something. i guess animals can tell good people when they see them 8)

T minus 9 hrs (or something like that)

so the opening ceremony for the commonwealth games is today. i'm actually kind of against the whole thing but yesterday i decided to go into the city and see all its festive tackiness.
this one is my favorite:

and the sign explaining it:
as far as you can see down the yarra river there's giant fish and arial view flags of every country part of the games

here's canada's fish, the atlantic cod. i'm assuming these things will be lit up tonite because they look a bit tacky now-- lights will fix that 8)they've also created a beach in the city (even though the real one is only a tram or a train ride away from here). they actually tore up half the grass on this lawn and imported sand and added beach hut props around. its a stage area at the art centre where bands play
i think its going a bit overboard when even the church has a giagantic commonwealth games banner hanging from it (obviously its there to try to cover up the scaffholding but its not doing a great job so it just looks like the church is another commonwealth games venue.

melbourne weather

2 days ago i was cooking in the sun and sweating trying to sleep in a tank top. less than 12 hrs later its pouring rain and then getting cold. a day later i'm freezing (i'm actually wearing socks right now-- i've only done that a couple times in the past few months and usually cuz it was really wet out and i was wearing shoes, now i'm wearing fuzzy winter socks for warmth). it doesn't look like its getting much warmer (although the sky is getting lighter again-- it went really dark for a bit) so i think i'm just gonna bundle up in a hoodie and shoes (no flip flops for me today) and head out to get stuff done.

bike vs. beach

i was supposed to do an aeolian ride on saturday afternoon and i was a little disappointed that a friend invited us to the beach and his family's caravan for the nite. zac made a HUGE effort to get saturday off work so we could go though and it was definately worth it. yesterday was i think 37C in the beach town we were staying at. the water was still kinda icy for me but i did get in twice and once i was in the waves i was usually warm-ish for a bit. the amount of people there was crazy but i guess that's what happens on a long weekend at the start of school holidays near the end of summer with temps in the upper 30s. i got to do the great australian tradition of caravan parks too (i've stayed at one twice-- both times in a tent though and only once did we even have acess to a caravan to use the fridge and stuff).


here's another weird graph of melbourne's weather. i'm glad we were at the beach for the one really hot day.

i'm free!!

today was my last day of work!!! i left on good terms with my direct supervisor and co-worker though so that was good (especially since when i do start looking into work again i'll probably need them as references). i'm already going to meet the director of another preschool tomorrow morning to put my name in for a possible maternity leave position coming up in a couple months or for casual work. other than that i think i'm just gonna volunteer places around here and do a bit of child minding (a girl who was in the kinder last year who lives around the corner from us). i'm just gonna look for jobs but not apply to just anything cuz i don't want to end up doing a job for the money and hating it and quiting and playing the whole job hunting game all over again.

pasta and resignations

we went over to zac's dad's house for an early birthday dinner for zac and lea (their b.days are 2 days apart). it was pretty impressive. he barbequed some meat stuff for lea and jay (cuz lea won't eat food if it doesn't involve meat-- and if she does, she goes to macca's right after to get her meat fix) and then he cooked the only vegan dish that he knows how to make (he started making it cuz he had to go on some diet for his liver or something a month or so ago). it was spagetti with plain tomato sauce mixed with broccoli (they way i used to make pasta when i was broke). it was really good. it was extra good cuz i know it was quite an effort for him to make (usually when we eat at his house there's very little zac can eat and just a few salad-y type things i can eat unless we bring our own food to bbq).
i officially resigned from my job today. i decided on the weekend it wasn't worth doing if i wasn't really enjoying myself so i'm taking some time off, maybe do some volunteering (i've already had a friend ask me if could volunteer for her at the sustainable living foundation) and i'm thinking about volunteering at ceres and maybe making some craft stuff to sell at the saturday market there. i've only got today and tomorrow left of work cuz school holidays are the next 2 weeks so my 2 weeks notice falls over the holidays.