Every Car Has a Breakdown

This last week has had a few ups and downs. Recently our car odometer and speedometer just stopped working. To add to that, while parking Matt scraped the side of the car on the brick which broke off some side panelling. It could be worse! Just like cars, people have breakdowns as well and that has kind of been my story this week.

The week started pretty nice with a fun jewellery making class with the young women. They all came up with some great ideas and I only wish I had taken a picture!

The following night I went out with the sister missionaries. Cate went with one sister and I went with the other and we drove off to visit church members that no one has ever seen before. Sometimes a church ward receives records for people, but the person or family never shows up. Often the person has moved or become inactive. Although we had no luck with one person not home and the other had moved, it was a fun time.

Thursday is when my theoretical car started breaking down. Over the last week at uni I had been looking at the tiger audio and video recordings that I had obtained from Taronga Zoo. Additionally I had completed a critical review which is worth 10% of my final Master of Research marks. Both of these tasks were getting me quickly discouraged. I realised early on that the tiger videos were placed well, but there was a small likelihood I would get a tiger in view with them vocalising. Struggling to think of a solution to get better videos, Jennifer told me that she had looked at my critical review and there were a lot of things to be fixed. This was my "breaking point."

Somehow all of my stress over many things got unloaded on this one paper and I just started crying! Eventually I calmed down to just fix the paper and be done with it, but I knew that there was not much else I could do about it.

That night Matt took me out to get ice cream which always helps when you're having a hard day. The next day I felt a bit better as I went to the R workshop and surprisingly remembered quite a bit from my statistical class. The rest of the weekend I decided I just needed a break from life and all the other stressors so I did some cleaning and laundry and caught up on some TV shows I had missed.

Feeling better by Sunday I was sad to hear many of our missionaries are being transferred this week. I'm at least hoping the new ones are singers so our choir doesn't disintegrate! They all bore their testimony during sacrament meeting and it was wonderful. Matt also bore his testimony which made me so proud of him! The Lord has really blessed us as he was able to have work all last week and this week he will start working for a new painting employer that we hope to be very long term!

Monday was good as I finished reviewing loads of tiger videos and found there are some very interesting vocalisations going on. I definitely think there is something worth investigating with these vocalisations. Also, I talked to my supervisor Jennifer about what I've found and we have some new ideas for getting better video.

Monday night was also our "Come Dine with Me" dinner for April. We had a yummy lasagna, salad, chocolate mousse, and pavlova! It was a great dinner and of course some fun conversation! Two more to go!

Last night I had fun with the Young Women as we planned our upcoming sleepover activity while playing Jenga and eating popcorn. In the end I was the one that tipped it over, but I'm surprised it lasted that long!! Again...I'm just sad I didn't catch it on camera.

Well I hope everyone has a great week and that for all those LDS members out there that you take some quality time to read or listen to all the General Conference talks! I'm excited!