In transit

As foretold in my previous post, I'm currently cooling my heels in a hotel next to Sydney airport, from whence I'll depart tomorrow on the second leg of my journey back to the US. Thankfully, everything's been going smoothly so far, which is saying something in a global pandemic. I got my second COVID-19 shot on Thursday, then a travel test so I can get on an airplane to enter the US. Friday was a helter-skelter race to get everything I'm bringing with me packed so that I could hand everything else off to the movers (who were really efficient, by the way, taking just about an hour and a quarter to get everything packed up and loaded). Then I spent the night with friends, got a ride to the airport bright and early, and flew out of Melbourne at 6:30am. (I've seen some less-than-busy airports in my time, but Melbourne airport at 5:30am during a global pandemic takes the cake.)

Here's the view from the hotel Gemini put me up in, looking out over the Sydney airport.

I could think of several things to say here, reflecting on my just-shy-of-four-years in Australia, but I'm rather tired from sleeping poorly the past two nights, so I'll leave this post short. Hopefully I'll have time and energy to get something more substantial up in the next week or so. A hui hou!

An idealized Australian afternoon

As of today, it's one week until I fly out of Melbourne. Seven days from now at this time, assuming everything goes swimmingly, I'll be in Sydney, followed—at some point afterward which times zones and the International Date Line make more confusing to calculate than I feel like doing at the moment—by being back in California to visit my family for a week, before flying on to Hilo. This next week is going to be a whirlwind of activity as I get everything ready to move.

For today, however, I wanted to share a painting—well, two paintings—which I'll be mailing to my grandparents this week as a souvenir. I've been informally calling this the “Grandparental Diptych,” but let's go with “Australian Afternoon” as a formal title. I'm almost certainly not going to have time to paint this week, so these'll be the last paintings I finish here in Australia.

“Australian Afternoon,” 60×15 cm, acrylic on canvas.

It's an idealized Australian landscape rather than a specific place, with a few eucalyptus trees in the foreground (and a few Australian animals in them). To represent the hundreds of species of eucalyptus trees in Australia, I painted all three trees with different techniques for the leaves and different combinations of colors make them unique (though trees in general and eucalyptus in particular are still something I could use a lot of practice on!). I've discovered I really like doing these multi-panel pieces, such as to explore more extreme aspect ratios than you would normally find, like the 4:1 ratio here. I've got a few ideas for future works utilizing such techniques squirreled away in the back of my mind, though I'll probably have to put any painting on hold for a few months while my art supplies make their way across the Pacific.

I thought for this work it'd be interesting to try to create two pieces which could each stand on their own as an independent composition, but also work combined as you see here. I'm not entirely sure how well either aim worked out, but it was an interesting learning experience all the same—I certainly still have much to learn about composition! Anyway, time to get back to the million and one things to do before I leave. A hui hou!

Immunization update the first

Yesterday I was finally able to get my first COVID-19 vaccination shot! And yes, that probably sounds strange to my fellow Americans who've been able to get one for months now, but it's been a lot slower here in Australia. The government last year went big on AstraZeneca (which could be produced locally) with a smaller amount of Pfizer, only to run into a problem of not having nearly enough supply to vaccinate everyone in a reasonable time frame. (Two months ago, when something like 60% of Americans had received at least one dose, the rate for Australia was around 12%.)

To make matters worse, the AstraZeneca vaccine was discovered to have some extremely rare but serious blood-clotting side-effects, to the tune of 1–2 deaths per million recipients. There's always a risk with any vaccine, of course, but the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation declined to recommend it for people under some age limit, I think 50 or 60. So despite there actually being a decent (if still insufficient) supply of AstraZeneca shots, the perception developed that it was inferior to Pfizer, leading to a lot of people (even those above the age limit) putting off being vaccinated until they could get a Pfizer shot. And the much more limited Pfizer supply was initially going to more high-priority people like health workers (partly since it only had a 3-week cadence for both shots instead of AstraZeneca's 6 weeks so people could get fully immunized faster).

I wasn't eligible for a shot at all until the premier of Victoria announced AstraZeneca as being available to under-40s a few weeks ago (only took 6 lockdowns!). Though interestingly I seem to have unintentionally gamed the system: last week I signed up for an appointment for an AstraZeneca shot under the logic that even a single shot before I flew out was better than nothing, with an intention of getting a second shot in the US. This past Monday however it was announced that due to a recent delivery Pfizer was now available to under-40s, though not wanting to be one of the (literal) myriads of people canceling appointments for AstraZeneca in favor of Pfizer I didn't pay it much attention.

When I got to my appointment yesterday, various people kept asking me to my great confusion whether I wanted a Pfizer shot instead of AstraZeneca (at least six or seven times!). I didn't know that the day before it had also been announced that people who'd signed up for AstraZeneca would be offered Pfizer (at least for a short period of time, I'm not sure of the exact details). Anyway, I wasn't aware at the time that Pfizer had a 3-week waiting period, since it's been being delivered at a 6-week cadence (like AstraZeneca) here in Australia to help relieve supply shortages.

I thus figured I'd just get the shot I came for, until I mentioned in response to the nurse's small talk that I was finishing up my PhD and flying back to the US in a few weeks. She immediately mentioned that Pfizer only actually had a 3-week wait instead of 6-weeks like AstraZeneca, and that they could set me up for a second appointment in 3 weeks (which is two days before I fly out!). When I realized I could be fully vaccinated instead of just half, I finally changed my mind and accepted the offer.

So that's how I ended up unintentionally gaming the vaccination system and will be fully vaccinated before flying back to the US next month. I'm still a bit amazed how it worked out, but it's certainly a huge relief. I'm still a bit tired like last night (which I spent feeling like I was either coming down with or recovering from a mild-but-weird cold), so I should end this here and get to bed. A hui hou!

Lockdown 5.0

We're currently sitting in Lockdown 5.0 (as I've seen it called) here in Melbourne, and while I've been pretty sanguine about the first four lockdowns, I'm starting to feel the teeniest bit annoyed by this point. For those not in Victoria, a brief history lesson (going from memory, so not super precise):

1. Lockdown #1 happens in March 2020, and lasts till around the middle of May. This is The First Wave that pretty much the entire country goes through together. (It's much less worse than most of the rest of world, only notching a few thousand cases total and much less than a thousand deaths, country-wide.)
2. In June 2020, breaches of the hotel quarantine lead to The Second Wave starting in Melbourne (and a bit in the rest of Victoria). Lockdown #2 happens around the end of June, and it's The Big One, lasting until November, with peak case numbers of over 700 per day being reported at its peak (I want to say around late August?). By the time it finishes Victoria has had something like 90% of all cases in the country. It's important to keep in mind that the rest of Australia mostly didn't experience anything like this; New South Wales had the occasional flare up, and I think there might've been a few sub-week lockdowns in South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, but for most of the rest of the country there was one wave and that was basically it.
3. Lockdown #3 happens in February 2021, and it was a pretty short one; I don't remember exactly, but I want to say it was only about a week (comparable to the few that had happened in other states).
4. Lockdown #4 happens in late May 2021 and was slightly bigger, for perhaps two or three weeks. Unknown to us at the time, it helps sets the stage for the next one, as some Victorians unknowingly bring COVID-19 with them as they flee to Sydney, setting off an minor outbreak there. (The Delta strain shows up in Melbourne for the first time during this lockdown, but luckily the restrictions stamp it out before it can blow up.)
5. Sydney's dealt with the occasional outbreak over this past year-and-a-half, but they coincidentally get a case of the Delta strain that spreads in the community sometime around when the fourth Melbourne lockdown lets up. This pretty quickly blows up beyond the ability to contain it, triggering what looks to be at this point a Sydney equivalent to Melbourne's second wave, forcing Sydney into its first major lockdown since the first wave back in March 2020.
6. Unfortunately, some infected movers unknowingly bring some cases of the Delta strain back to Victoria in the early days before New South Wales really locks down, setting off another outbreak in Victoria a scant six weeks or so since the last one finished (Lockdown #5, which started July 16). Thankfully, it looks like the rapid lockdown here in Melbourne has managed to squelch unrestrained growth and it looks like we might be able to exit as planned midnight as Tuesday, as long as the large anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination protests in Melbourne (and Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane) over the weekend don't trigger too many new cases. (Sydney's likely to be hit pretty hard by this given that they keep finding people who've been out and about while infectious and they had several thousand people in a protest that got a bit out of hand, but we probably won't find out for a week or more.)

Now, the first two (Melbournian) lockdowns were last year, before there was any vaccine available. Given Australia's ability to control and quarantine foreign travel, they were an excellent way to eliminate COVID-19 from the population (and repeatedly did so, with new cases only arising from leaks in the quarantines program over time). The February lockdown was still pretty early on in the vaccination roll-out, and excusable for a population still vulnerable. By May it was starting to become evident that there were issues with the pace of the roll-out, with barely a tenth of the population vaccinated. By now, while the lockdown's still the only conscionable tool for handling an outbreak, it's becoming more and more annoying given that only some ~12.5% of the population is vaccinated. (According to the latest numbers I've seen, though it might be a week or two old at this point. It certainly hasn't climbed more than a percentage point or two, however. [Edit 7/22/21: apparently it was up to ~15% the Thursday before this post was written.]) We could be sitting in this lockdown with the feeling that this might be the last one necessary before enough people were protected not to need them anymore, but instead we have no idea when that'll happen; almost certainly not before the end of the year unless something drastically changes.

Part of the problem is the vaccine supply; Australia invested heavily in the AstraZeneca vaccine which could be produced locally, with a small order for additional Pfizer doses, but the doses available right now are nowhere near enough for everyone. AstraZeneca has been linked with (literally) one-in-a-million deaths from blood clotting in young people (under 50 or so, I think), which has resulted in it not being officially recommended for people in that age group…i.e., a very significant chunk of the population. A very constrained vaccine supply, which a large fraction of the populace can't even get without discussion with their physician, has led to this point where just over one in ten people are vaccinated, with the numbers rising glacially slowly each week. Currently, I can't even find a government vaccination site nearby that'll give me an AstraZeneca shot even knowing the risks (and the rare Pfizer doses are being prioritized for older people and essential personnel, I think—at any rate not available to someone under 40!). At this rate I might get vaccinated faster by moving back to the US around October—there's supposed to be a moderately large shipment of Pfizer does arriving in Australia that month which'll be enough to open them up to a larger age range, but that'll be too late for me. While I'm generally quite approbative of how Australia handled the pandemic in 2020 (certainly orders of magnitude better than the US did), the vaccine roll-out is a pretty dismal failure by any stretch of the imagination at this point. (Currently, Australia is ranked 38 in the OECD countries on vaccination rate…out of 38. [Edit 7/22/21: we're up to 37 now!])

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. The reality of moving in around two months is starting to sink in—I've got a video call with a moving company this week to see what I'll be bringing, and am starting to think about things like “flights” and “travel exemption requests.” I'm also still working furiously to finish up my PhD in the meantime, so it's going to be a wild ride to the finish line in the next few months here. A hui hou!

The Lockdown Life

This past Wednesday, Melbourne (and one shire to the north) went back into Stage 3 lockdown for six weeks due to rising case number of COVID-19. This is after we'd gotten all the way down a few days in early June with zero new reported cases, then a few weeks of just single-digit new cases. Then, near the end of June, we started getting double-digit numbers, which stretched into two weeks, then eventually breached triple digits just within the last week or so. In contrast, most of the rest of Australia has been completely or almost completely free of reported new cases, other than New South Wales which is still getting a low number irregularly. Practically overnight Victoria has became a pariah state, with all the other states and territories closing their borders and politely but firmly making it known that Victorians aren't welcome 'round these parts, y’hear?

It's a bit of a disappointment, considering we seemed to have beaten the virus more-or-less and were starting to open back up again. Out of an abundance of caution I didn't go anywhere since the lockdown started to lift in late May except for a single visit to friends, but as June progressed I was starting to think about heading into my desk at Swinburne to pick some things up (especially some more paint and something to paint on, as I have a very limited selection of the former and have nearly run out of the latter).

It's odd that this second lockdown hit me harder than the first one, considering I hadn't even really come out of the first one to begin with; I know friends who were starting to get out and about in the interim where it seemed like we were on top of things. It just feels more unjust somehow—those of us who've been being good for months now are forced back into lockdown through no fault of our own due to the actions of a relatively tiny amount of people who took "lockdown being lifted" for "business as usual" and ignored social distancing guidelines put in place to prevent exactly this happening. Before the lockdown, someone could be excused for not knowing what was happening amidst the confusion and unwittingly spreading the virus before becoming symptomatic; it's a lot harder to justify such behavior afterwards when they should know better.

Then as I was preparing to lead our small group Bible study Thursday night, a verse in 1 Peter I'd been looking at all week jumped out at me:

For is it better, if the will of God, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.
   —1 Peter 3:17

While it's still pretty annoying to have to forego any hope of taking a trip anywhere further than walking distance for another month and a half, I can at least agree with this in principle: I'm glad the lockdown isn't of my doing, and I don't have any lives on my conscience from spreading the virus to potential victims. It's just frustrating when the reward for doing good is the absence of a negative rather than a more tangible positive, but I suppose that's just the world we live in. And that I'd probably feel rather differently if I were in the other position.

In the meantime, it's not like I'm ever going to run out of things to do from my home: I've still got a Ph.D. to finish, papers and a thesis to write, plenty of games that won't play themselves, some art projects I should really get around to finishing and sharing, and I've started copying Brahm's absolutely fantastic “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” which is of pleasantly maddening complexity. (I find myself needing to dive into the LilyPond documentation quite frequently to figure out how to represent the various intricacies and special cases of music notation that pop up.) And hey, at least it beats being in the hospital! A hui hou!

Flowery Australian Flora

This past Sunday, due to loosening lock-down restrictions, I went over to some friends' to catch our church livestream and have lunch. As I was leaving my house, the surprisingly nice weather caught my eye and caused me to take a few photos of some of the plants in the front yard with rain from the night before still sparkling on them. The Sun was unexpectedly out—it's been rainy or overcast the past few days—and it lit up the raindrops in a really lovely manner.

I haven't been taking too many photos the past few months, so I felt like playing around a bit and experimenting with angles. Here's a bottle-brush still be-speckled with raindrops, with the blue sky in the background. A lot of stuff is blooming out-of-season this year, which is strange: apparently, in the first four months of the year, we've had more rain in Melbourne than in the entirety of 2019, and were even on track for having the wettest such time period ever. And we missed breaking the lowest recorded temperature on May 1st by a single degree (Celsius)! So it's not like it's been unseasonably warm or anything, plants are just blooming at strange times.

I don't know what kind of plant this is, I'm afraid, other than that it's different from the previous one. I was really feeling like pushing the limits of how close I could get a photo, and with the Sun shining brightly on the water droplets this came out pretty nicely I think.

And here's the culmination of my attempts to get up-close-and-personal with the plants. This is, yet again, a different plant from the first two, and I similarly don't know what it's called. (Edit: Whoops! I checked my front yard this morning and realized this is actually part of the same bottle-brush plant from the first photo.) I love the back-lighting of the fine hairs on the leaves, though!

I'm sure for my northern hemisphere readers this flowery foliage is nothing special as you head into summer, but I thought it looked nice, so have a helping of Australian flora! A hui hou!

A Year Down Under and an October Astrobite

As of September 29th I've been in Melbourne for a full year now. It's been a long year of working on my PhD, I've moved twice, and I miss Hilo's climate pretty often, but I've also made some amazing friends and discovered a facility for and enjoyment of painting I didn't know I had (about which I promise a post in the next few weeks). I've had artwork exhibited in a public exhibition, and learned that stars and CCDs are infinitely more complicated than I ever dreamed (or wanted to know).

I've done an excellent job of hiding my telescope model behind a pillar in this photo.

In other news I put out a new Astrobite today, on a paper talking about finding the mass of the closest known white dwarf by measuring its gravitational redshift (basically, how much its light is redshifted climbing out of its gravitational well). This one was pretty interesting for me, as the authors used the Hubble Space Telescope and spent some time detailing all the tiny systematic errors in its spectrograph's CCD. Detailing tiny systematic errors in CCDs is pretty much my PhD (or at least it feels like at times) so I could really empathize with what they went through to get a good measurement. I also got some nice comments from two of the paper's authors, so that was cool.


That's it for now! A hui hou!

Walking About in “The Bush”

It's been a bit quiet on the ol’ blog front recently, hasn't it? I've had a few ideas for posts in mind but never seem to find time to realize them—I've been pretty busy with a number of things lately, including a new project I'm not quite ready to show off yet but has something to do with this:

Clearly, I've started up a paint factory.

Last week I went on a nature walk with a bunch of other young adults from church, which was a really enjoyable experience. It was one of the first days showing indications of spring so far this year, and the weather was pretty much perfect. We went for a (short) walk along the Yarra River (which flows through the heart of Melbourne) through “the bush,” a thick forest of eucalypts, wattles, and other Australian flora. (The only fauna we saw were some cockatoos, including some beautiful black ones, but we did hear a kookaburra.)

The Yarra River in panorama from the trail.

I still find it amusing that—due to growing up in a small eucalyptus grove in California—the smell of warm eucalyptus (…or wet eucalyptus, or really any eucalyptus) instantly makes me feel at home. Anyway, hopefully I'll have time to post some more soon, including my secret painting project which I'm enjoying far more than I expected. A hui hou!

Redwoods…in Australia‽ Happy New Year!

Well, here's some trees I didn't think I'd see in Australia:

REDWOODS!

Yep, that's right, authentic Californian redwoods, Sequoia sempervirans, in the flesh. Er, in the bark. Back in the 1930s the Australian Board of Works planted a patch of land that had been cleared of its original eucalyptus forest with 1,500 redwood trees imported from California (along with Bishop pine and Douglas fir) in an experiment in hydrogrogy. (The experiment's results are, sadly, unknown.)

I got to experience this cool home-away-from-home forest due to some friends from church, who planned a New Year's Eve barbecue lunch with a bunch of other people out in the Yarra Valley about seven kilometers from the forest, which we explored afterwards.

They're not too big around yet, but they're already quite tall!

The redwoods are planted in regular rows, giving an interesting effect as you walk around. Otherwise, add a few banana slugs and you could almost be back in California! (At least until you get to the edge of the forest and see the old-growth eucalyptus forest all around.) I've got some other pictures from the trip that I'll post when I get a chance, but for now, I'll wish you all hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, and I'll see you all in 2018!

Edit (1/1/2018): Have a few more pictures I didn't have time to include last night:

The Yarra River, where we had the barbecue before going to the redwoods, in the beautiful Yarra Valley.

Most trees here are between 55 and 80 meters tall (180–288 feet).

One feature not usually present in Californian redwood forests are these large man-made bird nests.

And while there may not be any banana slugs here naturally, it's nothing a few minutes with GIMP can't fix!

(Banana slug picture from the last time I used the “redwoods” tag on this blog, all the way back in 2010!)

Merry Christmas 2017, Australian-Style!

Merry Christmas from the Land Down Under! Having just moved to Australia a few months ago, I couldn't quite justify the cost of flying home for Christmas, making this the second Christmas I'll be spending away from family. But thankfully I've made plenty of friends to spend it with instead, and will be heading over to the house of some friends I met at church.

Since Australia is pretty famous (or infamous) for its spiders, have a Christmas video featuring some peacock spiders…which I only just now while looking them up discovered actually come from Australia, making this serendipitously appropriate! I haven't seen any of these myself yet, though.

I actually came across this video last year but never got around to sharing it. I guess it worked out in the end though! A hui hou! Mele Kalikima a me Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!

An Australian Mountain Adventure

This Saturday I was invited on a sight-seeing trip to the Dandenongs (a mountain range just to the east of Melbourne) by a family from the church I've been attending, an opportunity I gladly jumped at.

Not the greatest picture as it was taken through the window of the car, but it gets the message across.

We stopped at a few places along the way up the delightfully winding road up the mountains, including a small town with a candy store (sorry, a “lollies shop”) where I picked up a small collection of sweets to try (purely in the spirit of sampling the local culture, of course!). Another place where we stopped for afternoon tea (read: snacks) had a large flock of cockatoos hanging around, plus a few other native birds.

These birds were quite used to being fed, and not shy about hanging around in hopes of food.

…to the point of happily jumping up on the picnic table in front of me!

It was really cool and a bit strange seeing flocks of birds flitting betwixt and sitting in the eucalyptus trees, as we didn't really have many birds that did that back in California, the only ones being the vultures that liked to nest in one particular large dead tree (and didn't do a lot of flitting among the branches, for obvious reasons).

This crimson rosella was perfectly fine walking underneath my seat, making it a little hard to photograph!

In fact, the cockatoos were comfortable enough with people to jump up your shoulder in search of food!

After our tea-time adventure, we hiked to Sherbrooke Falls in the Sherbrooke Forest National Park. On the whole, it reminded me of hiking amongst the redwoods back in California, except with eucalyptus trees instead. And what eucalyptus trees they were! I'd known that certain species of eucalyptus trees are among the tallest trees in the world (behind only redwoods), and having grown up among eucalyptus trees in California I thought I was familiar with their heights, but these trees were something else entirely. It's hard to guess of course, but I felt like many of the trees I saw had to have been at least twice as tall as the tallest eucalyptus trees I'd know previously, again underscoring the similarity to hiking in the redwood forests.

It's hard to tell and I could't get it all in one shot, but this is a tall tree.

The hike to the waterfall was quite pleasant, but the return journey was an adventure. It was a nice day when we set out, but as we started back the sky became cloudy and overcast. Soon we could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, then the tops of the trees were buffeted by an increasingly strong wind. By the time we'd gotten back to the carpark the first few large drops were falling, only for us to realize that we'd returned to the wrong carpark, having taken a wrong turn at one of the several branches in the trail on the way back.

As we regrouped to the map at the trail head and figured out where we were, the rain started coming down in earnest, followed soon after by hail! Luckily there were some other people leaving from the carpark due to the rain so our driver was able to get a ride back to the car and come back to pick us up where we were huddled beneath the increasingly-inadequate shelter of the tiny structure protecting the map as rain and hail pelted the ground around.

Thankfully we made it back through the hail and storm all right (though it was coming down fast enough to have significant water on the road in places), but it certainly made for quite the adventure! A hui hou!

Australian Creepy-Crawlies of the Redback Variety

So I've finally had a chance to see some of the things I shouldn't touch while in Australia! I went out for lunch on Sunday with a family from church, and after lunch as we were touring the yard they mentioned having noticed a redback spider a few days ago and and eagerly took me to see it where I managed to get a picture of a male and female pair (though they don't normally spend time this close together, that's an artifact of us disturbing them).

The large one on the right is a female, the smaller one is a male. Note the distinctive red stripe.

Redback spiders are in the genus Latrodectus, the widow spiders, to which the black widows I grew up with in California also belong. As such, they show very similar behavior, weaving stringy, chaotic-looking webs and being ambush predators, not being very aggressive, and generally only coming into contact with humans by accident. From what I've read their bites (of the females, specifically), although very painful, are hardly ever fatal. So that's reassuring, I guess. A hui hou!

Life in Australia

It's been just over two weeks since I arrived in Australia, and great news: I got my computer through customs and delivered this week! Yesterday (Saturday) I was able to go pick up a few things necessary to get it running again (a monitor, since I didn't bring one, and a Wi-Fi PCI-E card since I can't connect directly to the router here), and after some two hours of carefully replacing all the parts I'd removed for transport, replacing the thermal paste between the CPU and water cooler, and tentatively starting it up…it didn't work. But then it turned out I merely hadn't seated the RAM all the way back in when replacing it, and the second time it booted right up! (I vaguely remember the same thing happening the first time I built it, as it's possible to get the RAM in and have it feel solid but not actually be in all the way.)

So hooray! My computer is working again, and I can use it to write this blog post, which is a lot easier than trying to write it on my phone like the last one!

So, uh, Australia…

Well…I recognize some of these brands.

It's interesting being here. It's been about a decade since I was last out of the U.S., but I'm used to visiting countries that aren't part of the Anglosphere so it's still a different experience. Some of the oddness comes from how similar things are; I'm used to radically different architectures, languages, and cultures, but here the relatively small differences are accentuated by the more familiar settings they come in. It's strange.

It's still really cold. Well, to me anyway. It doesn't matter if it's 5° or 50° below my comfort threshold, I'm going to be unhappy either way, and my impression so far is of being cold each and every day I've been here. We've had exactly one day since the start of the month where it finally warmed up enough in the afternoon that I could put on shorts. I have no less than five quilts on my bed at night, and am thankful for every one. It's like being back in California during the winter, but at least there we had things like double-paned windows for insulation. I swear, once I finish my Ph.D. I am moving back to the tropics and never leaving again.

Some people have asked whether I have a car, and so far the answer is ‘no’. While I would absolutely like to have one compared to needing to rely on public transport, driving on the left side of the road is rather disorienting still, and I wouldn't feel safe myself driving one until I've had a bit more time to get used to traffic patterns here. I've never particularly enjoyed city driving, either, and it seems like everyone drives really fast here compared to Hilo.

Objectively, I can tell that the public transport system in Melbourne is quite good. There's a train system radiating out from the center like dendrites on a neuron. Buses run in roughly concentric arcs around and between train stations. I live about a mile from the nearest train station (Mitcham), which I can either walk to or take a five-minute bus ride to. Then it's a twenty-minute train ride to Glenferrie train station, which is basically on the Swinburne campus. Trains and buses are pretty good about being on time, and there's an app that can plot a course for you by public transport between two addresses and look up when any particular service will be running. All payments are handled quickly and efficiently by a system involving a personal “myki” [sic] card, which you simply hold against a payment screen to wirelessly deduct money from (or add money to, when necessary).

The Victorian train network around Melbourne. Swinburne is on that blue branching line to the right (as am I).

For an introvert who abhors crowds and likes his personal space, it's not as bad as I feared, most of the time. The buses I take are pretty empty much of the time, and as long as you avoid the rush hour crowds the trains aren't usually too crowded either. You might not be able to find a seat, but there's usually room to stand un-crowded. Occasionally it's extremely packed, and that's double-plus-unfun, but I'm learning to time things better to avoid it.

Taken from Glenferrie train station, looking east. The building on the right with the little arches is where I work.

Victoria's not as flat as the interior of Australia, and Melbourne sprawls across a number of little hills and gullies, but it's no Hawaiʻi either; there's no looming mountainous presence off in the distance to admire, though the Dandenong mountain range (maximum elevation: 633 meters / 2077 feet) sits a little ways off to the east and can be seen from some vantage points. There are some nature preserve areas and parks within walking distance of where I live (where I got to hear a kookaburra for the first time) and out in the suburbs there's a lot of plant life so it's not too industrial or urban.

(I've also heard magpies for the first time, and boy do they have the coolest warbling sound. I'll have to try to record it sometime in the future; it sounds like malfunctioning sci-fi robot!)

Well, this post has gone on long enough, and I need to see about some other things (first order of business: getting a desk for my computer, I'm getting cramped sitting on the floor) so I'll end it here for now. A hui hou!

Edit (7/11/17): you can't see it in the picture of the vending machine, but I discovered one key difference between vending machines here and in the U.S.: the ones here take credit cards! Now I can't avoid them simply by virtue of not carrying convenient amounts of cash around with me…

Made it to Melbourne!

Well, I made it to Melbourne safely. I've spent the past few days recovering from two days of travel and getting over jet-lag—even the mere 4-hour time difference between Hilo and Melbourne has been making me tired very early in the evening and waking me up while it's still dark.

However, I'm getting over that, and yesterday I took the train into the Swinburne campus to start the enrollment process and officially get started on my Ph.D. in astrophysics.

That's the building I'll be in.

There's a lot to take in here in Australia. It's colder than I was expecting, even though I saw the forecasts—I'd just forgotten what it was like to have the temperature be cold all the time, and I find myself already pining for the comforting warmth and humidity of the tropics (and looking forward to moving back there as soon as possible).

The view from my desk.

I could go on about a lot of things, but I'm still getting tired fairly early and requiring a lot of sleep, so I'll save it for another post. (Hopefully I can get my computer through customs and set up soon so I can use a real keyboard again rather than my phone!) Anyway, a hui hou!

Flying to Australia

Today (assuming everything works out) I set out on my trip to Australia, which will involve crossing two imaginary but important lines on the earth's surface: the equator and the international date line. The former I've never crossed, and the latter I haven't crossed in around 18 years.  It's…pretty cool, and hopefully I'll be able to enjoy it better once everything is packed up and I'm actually on my way. Packing is a very stressful process, but once everything's all ready to go there's a certain feeling of que sera, sera that sets in at least. I am looking forward to crossing the equator for the first time and reaching the southern hemisphere.

Not much else to say, really, at least that I can think of while writing this a few days in advance just before packing up my computer. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, bags (and me!) get where they need to, and I'll be able to post when I get there, maybe even with some photos! A hui hou! See you in Australia!

Edit: it was a little hard to tell on the animated map, but it looked like we crossed both the equator and international date line within a very short of each other, possibly as short as half an hour.

End of an Era, in More Ways Than One

Last Friday, September 15, was the last day for two things: my employment with ASIAA, and the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn.

Cassini was launched in 1997, when I was eight years old and firmly in the grip of my first passionate love of astronomy, focused on the planets in the solar system. It took seven years to reach Saturn so I had plenty of time to find out about it and years to look forward to its arrival at my favorite planet in the far-off future of 2004. When Cassini finally reached Saturn I remember reading all about it, about the Huygens' probe's successful landing on Titan, the first such landing on a solid body in the outer solar system, and the incredible pictures being beamed back from Saturnian orbit. And over the past thirteen years I've watched as any number of amazing discoveries were made and awesome photos taken.

Saturn from Cassini in 2016; photo by NASA (public domain).

Cassini was originally slated for a four-year mission, from 2004 to 2008, but its outstanding success allowed it a mission extension first to 2010, then an additional seven years beyond that. I was fifteen when it got to Saturn, and it came to feel like a a constant: multiple rovers landed on Mars, Messenger flew by Mercury a few times, New Horizons sped past Pluto, several other missions blazed brightly briefly in the public consciousness like shooting stars but the whole time Cassini was there, quietly taking pictures and measurements and redefining our knowledge of Saturn and its gorgeous system of rings and moons, constant like the cosmic microwave background.

This video gives a brief overview of the mission.

To me, having grown up with Cassini it's strange to think that it's finally gone; no more news stories with the latest eye-catching pictures, or amazing discoveries it made (although I don't think we've exhausted the scientific value of the data it sent back yet, not by a long shot). I didn't keep particularly close tabs on it as the years went by (partly due to that perception of permanance)—and only found out about the end of the mission a few days ago in fact—but I generally kept up with the major discoveries, and all in all I'm going to miss that intrepid probe.

But fuel, and NASA's budget allowance, eventually come to an end, and so too did Cassini's incredible mission. And coincidentally it happened on my last day of work with ASIAA, where I've been a telescope operator for AMiBA for the past six months (exactly!). It feels like the end of an era, in more ways than one, as I'm now busy preparing to move to Australia to start graduate school in just over a week.

My final picture of the YTLA, taken a day before on the 14th. 

People keep asking me if I'm excited, or telling me how excited I must be. Being free of work has left me free to face the reality of moving and all the many things still remaining to be done in the next far-too-few days. My internal emotional state seems to be a quantum superposition of many confusing and conflicting feelings, and observing it usually yields a value best approximated by “abject terror,” so I try not to do that too often.

For some reason people seem to ascribe to me a confidence and adventurousness I can only dream of possessing in reality. The truth is I am a man who finds blessed comfort in routines and the thought of breaking all of them—simultaneously—terrifying in the extreme. I find travel (especially alone) highly stressful, necessitating as it does the disruption of so many comforting patterns, though at least for the past eight years it's only been between my current and my childhood homes; now I face the looming specter of leaving everything I know behind to travel somewhere I know no one. Perhaps some people would find that exciting? All I know is that it doesn't feel like excitement to me.

Sorry, that got a bit philosophical towards the end didn't it? It's not all so doom-and-gloom as this probably makes it sound. I should get back to preparations—I've got a lot to do before next Wednesday! A hui hou!

Life Updates, August 2017

Well. Where to start? It's been a busy couple of weeks, and we're just getting started…

I've talked about how I applied for grad school at Swinburne University in Melbourne back in January, and I think I've mentioned that I was accepted and have been slowly jumping through all the hoops related to enrolling. Last week, I submitted my request for a student visa. This Sunday, four days later, I got an answer back that it was approved (way faster than I was expecting!).

The visa was the last hurdle before I could actually move to Australia, so things are only going to pick up speed from this point on. This week I put in my resignation at ASIAA (with a final day of September 15) and am starting the process of moving internationally, which I last did when I was eleven. (I'm currently looking at a move around the end of September/beginning of October.)

I've got some more blog posts in my head that I just never seem to find time to write down so expect some more things from me this month, though it may get a bit sparse around here for the next few months as I deal with the moving process and start my Ph.D. This weekend is also really busy for me because my soon-to-be-officially advisor, Dr. Michael Murphy, is remote-observing on Keck I this weekend and as soon as I post this I'm going to drive up to Waimea to observe from the Keck base facility for the next two nights. (Hopefully I'll have a little time to take pictures while I'm up there!)

Busy times! A hui hou!