Last week I left off that I was going to
Symbio Wildlife Park with my supervisor and her daughter. It's a very small park and we saw pretty much everything in the few hours we were there. Here are some of the highlights from that:
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| The only tiger in a large enclosure |
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| This peacock just sat calmly and let us take pictures |
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| Two echidnas...the yellowish one is an albino |
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| Wallaby with it's baby |
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Red-necked wallaby
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| Koala |
Unfortunately, we decided that the tiger enclosure is simply too large to try and do audio/video recording and the effort would not be worthwhile for just one tiger that likely won't vocalise much. Nevertheless we had a good time petting some wallabies and exploring. Additionally I picked up a cute stuffed cheetah and a tiger mug so I'd call it a successful trip.
The rest of the week seemed to drag along after that. I finally finished going through my 200+ audio clips and listed each one on a spreadsheet. The only issue is I still have no idea what to call some of them. Without the videos I'm not sure what is going on and some sounds I started describing as a snotty snarl, or a loud puff of air when I had no idea what else to say about them. Later a tiger book I purchased arrived giving a classification of all feline vocalisations including the tiger. I read them but I was more confused because their descriptions and mine didn't match so a moan could be a roar. Without spectrograms to visually see each call it is impossible to really know what the author considered a moan or not. Hopefully my research can become a sort of standard for what tiger vocalisations are classified as.
Other than listening and categorising audio files I also spent a lot of my free time reading. Besides my travel time reading I was able to spend some nights finishing some books my sister recommended. I read
As You Are,
A Glimmer of Hope,
Edenbrooke, and
Blackmoore in about 5 days. They are quite short so other than staying up an extra hour than normal at night it didn't take much work. To sum it up it was like reading a ton of different Pride and Prejudice like stories and I loved them! It was also fun to call up my sister when I could and discuss the different books.
Easter weekend is a serious holiday weekend here with Good Friday (the Friday before Easter Sunday) and the Monday after Easter as public holidays with everything closed. I went to uni on Friday anyway and it was actually really nice to have the whole place quiet and I got a lot done. We had the sister missionaries over for dinner that night and for the first time ever my slow cooker roast turned out amazing! It was so good we didn't have much left over! Other than the food I had a great time chatting to the sisters about missions. Matt spent Friday and Saturday painting a neighbours house so he only had time to quickly drop by to eat. It's always good to have the missionaries over.
As for the rest of the weekend Matt and I didn't really do much. We bought a bunch of chocolate and the traditional
hot cross buns for the weekend and did a little bit of needed shopping. Saturday night we rented
Ender's Game. It was good, but I barely remembered anything from the book.
On Sunday I directed our first choir performance at church. We sang "
He is Risen" and I think it all went well. I'm not the best director but I am learning and so are the choir members. Later I had a lesson with the young women. I had spent the weekend collecting materials for resurrection eggs - plastic eggs with an item and scripture in them to represent a part of Christ's death and resurrection. In the end we talked a lot about conference, and apostasy and restoration that I decided to leave out that part of the lesson. Oh well, perhaps they will be useful next year.
I bought a whole bunch of
lindt truffles to give to the choir, but I forgot to give them out after practice. I also bought lindt eggs for our young women since I was teaching. In the end Matt and I had loads of chocolate left over. That day we ate so much chocolate that we felt sick later. Not exactly how I had intended to celebrate Easter.
After all the Easter holidays it is back to regular work and uni schedules. All is well and I'm excited for this weekend because there are some big plans!
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