Down to single digits...

Just a week and 1 day left and I'm getting excited about coming home. Things are going well here in Australia though. This past week, I had the opportunity to go on a trip with Ed and Joyce (and Tash and Andrew) up to Cairnes (pronounced Cannes). It's in the northern part of the country. We flew up on Monday afternoon, checked into our hotel, then grabbed a nice dinner and did some walking around. The next day was the exciting day! We were picked up by a bus at our hotel which took us to our boat! The sun is even more intense than it is here where I've been staying in the Brisbane area. So as we're on the boatride (sitting inside), we're putting on the sunscreen. The Aussies have a saying, "Slip, Slop, Slap." It means slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. In the area where we were, if you're in the sun for 20 minutes, you can burn to a crisp! It's that intense. Anyway, the boat then took us out to Green Island where Andrew, Tash and I snorkeled from the beach. Now I can say that I've snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef! We saw some neat looking fish, a couple of starfish, and a shark! Thankfully, we weren't in the water when we saw the shark :-) After snorkeling, we came back to the hotel and relaxed for a bit and then went out again that night. They have nighttime markets in the city, so we hit those up for a bit that night. The next day we didn't have much time, so we grabbed breakfast at a little cafe in town and then headed to the airport. All in all, it was a good trip.

This Thursday is my last day to teach RE. We are doing a Christmas lesson and making the class a special one. Tash and I will get together tomorrow and get all the details taken care of, but we wanted to do something a bit special for them since it's the last class. We will spend part of the time telling the Christmas story and then the last part of class will be fellowship time.

I'm also working on some last minute projects before I go. I have pretty much finished up the church library. I'm just working on getting a binder put together of all of the pages in the spreadsheet. And I'm doing various other jobs for Ed and Joyce. Some require making copies for future Sunday school lessons and I'm also doing some letterboxing (which means going from house to house and putting a church flyer in the mailboxes). You can actually put stuff in people's mailboxes here, unlike the U.S.

Well, I'll probably have one more post before I finish up my "Life in Oz" blog. After that, I'll take a break from blogging and maybe start up again after I'm Mrs. Michelle Dietrich!!!