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It's always great seeing meteors when you're out at night!
As for seeing M83 what sort of light pollution are you observing under? For galaxies I'd say sky darkness is king, followed by aperture. If you're under suburban light pollution you'd be looking for a very faint smudge, probably detectable only with averted vision. I bit more power may help, if you're confident you're in the right spot I'd try powers up to about 100x and wiggle the scope slightly while using averted vision. The core of M83 has a quite decent surface brightness for a galaxy and that's what you'll see, the spiral arms are quite a bit more difficult to see than the core.
For other galaxies I'd recommend going after M104 if you haven't already, it has the highest surface brightness of any of the larger galaxies that I can think of so should be the easiest to view. It takes high powers well and has high contrast detail to see.
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