STUFF

October 24, 2010 Sunday

Just a few of notes. Today in church President Robinson asked that we all fast and pray for two active families to move to Broome. He said that he is sure the reason he and his family ended up here is because Elder Fox, a senior missionary who was also the branch president, prayed them here.
Also, my computer crashed last night. I got the “blue screen of death” 3 times when I tried to boot it up. So after church today, my honey and favorite IT guy worked it over and now it works again without any of the problems it had even after Justin, the real IT guy in the branch, had worked on it. My keyboard was even restored! I’m not using that other thing we bought on top of my laptop. It is sooooooo nice.
Another thing I don’t think I’ve mentioned is the alphabet here. It’s the same as in the US; however, “H” is pronounced “haytch” and “Z” is pronounced “zed.”
The other day when we taught the Filipino family, they gave us two packages of frozen “pearl meat.” He works at one of the pearl farms and he said one of the ship’s captains had given it to them. Evangeline said she didn’t know how to cook it, so they were giving it to us. Tonight I called a couple of folks in the branch and ended up talking to Simon, an aboriginal member. He says pearl meat is “really fine” and I can cook it just like any other fish. It’s oyster meat taken from the oysters that aren’t making good pearls anymore, I guess. He said he’d been in one of the pearl shops in town the other day and saw a sign advertising pearl meat for $140/kg! So I suppose we have $250 worth of pearl meat in the freezer. I guess I’ll try cooking it, but at that price, I’m already nervous about it.
This week, as we’ve driven around, we’ve seen all kinds of junk from people’s houses and yards sitting on the curbs. Somebody told us it was “cyclone cleanup.” But that really didn’t make sense since we haven’t had a cyclone. The article in the weekly paper the other day explained that they want everything disposed of that might become “a flying object” during a cyclone. That makes more sense. Today we noticed that all the old appliances have been picked up. I guess they are doing it by recycling categories. We all have a recycle bin that we put out to the curb just like back in the states.