Monday, May 3, 2010

Typhoid Mary, house meeting, butterflys

Woke up and went straight to work from 9:30-noon. I turned in my first official time card today!! Which means I should be getting paid soon!!!

I went home for lunch and had a nice discussion with my roommates. Mostly complaining about boys, complaining about other roommates (Suzie), and whatnot. Then I took off to meet up with a friend for coffee/ hot chocolate. I was disappointed that I did not get marshmallows this time. Again it was warm. I don't think that the Aussies really know what "Hot" means. But all well.

I went to my food microbiology class and learned about predictive microbiology. Then when we finished with the lecture we moved on to next weeks lecture material. But it was kind of interesting. It was about infectious diseases. One of the things we learned was Salmonella typhi. This is the microbe responsible for typhoid fever. Humans get infected by eating food that has been in contact with contaminated fecal matter. YUM! We were told the story of Mary Mallon aka Typhoid Mary. Mary was a cook back in the early 1900s who cooked for 7 homes in New York City. There were 28 cases of typhoid fever in those homes and she was arrested and isolated and was found to be a carrier of Salmonella typhi. She was released and was forbidden to cook. So stupid ignorant Mary changed her name and continued cooking. 5 years later, she was caught and held for 23 years. She was linked to 10 outbreaks, 53 cases, 3 deaths, and suspected of many more.

After class I was going to go back to work but hunger took over and it was going to rain so I just headed home. I made a beautiful stir fry for dinner.

We have a cleaning inspection every 2 weeks and tomorrow morning is our inspection so I cleaned my assigned duty which was the right side of the bathroom (1 shower, 2 sinks, plus floors-mopped and swept). Then at 8pm we had a mandatory house meeting. This was put on by our dear friend Suzie. She was upset that people were using her dishes and not washing them. So when she went to cook she had to wash her own dishes, cook with them, and the wash them again. I do understand why that could be annoying. Instead of telling people, or leaving notes, she went to the housing assistant and had them conduct the meeting. What Suzie failed to realize is that she has managed to piss off everyone in this unit. So during our meeting the dishes came up and she politely scolded everyone. Then, everyone politely scolded her for being VERY loud in the mornings, always taking up the couch in the living room (lying on it with all of her pillows and blankets), eating other people's food with out their permission, and so on. So needless to say it was not really a fun evening. It wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. Then I came back to my room, still very bored and took some empty toilet paper rolls and construction paper and created butterflies to hang around my very plain room. All I need now is some string so I can hang them up.

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