The Decision of All Decisions

My End of the Story -- Carrie 

The Decision

It all began right before Thanksgiving 2011. No this is not some fantasy novel in which I find that I have magical powers, or use a closet to travel between alternate realities. John and I had been in Boston for almost two years. We loved the outdoor activities and art scene available to us in the Northeast, but knew Boston wasn't the place we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. I am in the midst of pursuing my Master's in Fine Arts. My program enables me to live and work wherever so long as I can travel to Vermont twice a year in order to present work to my colleagues. So as John's post-doctorate position at Boston University came to a crossroads of either begin new research projects or move on, we decided to consider the possibility of change. John came to me one night beaming with excitement. He found the perfect job! Oh yea, it was in Australia. He asked me if I thought it wise for him to apply. Could we honestly see ourselves moving around the world if he got the job? I said sure. We can do anything, right? It feels as if a minute went by. All of a sudden we were getting letters of support from family members to help our visa application process, we put everything up for sale, and began the moving process. We're moving to Australia!

Summer Plans

The decision to move to around the world was quickly followed by questions of when do we move. My school is designed such that I travel to Vermont twice a year for intensive 10-day residencies and follow it up with a six-month semester at 'home' working with someone in my area. It worked best with my school schedule that I stay in the states until after I travel to Vermont in early August (currently here!). In addition to that, prior to knowing about Australia, I had promised one of my dearest friends from college, that I would be in her wedding in September 2012. John also wanted to spend a bit of time with family prior to moving around the world. We decided that John would make the trip and begin work on July 30th and I would follow him in early September. Our move from Boston happened in late May. Our plan was to stay with our parents, me in Illinois and John in Michigan, for the summer. We drove to Illinois, went to a wedding and then began our summer excursions. Here are some pictures from the last two months...

This is a photo form before we left Boston. While this didn't seem to fit into my above writing, it is still exciting and important to note... John and I got engaged this spring!! While we didn't plan to match our outfits on this wonderful day (the above photo is just after he asked me to marry him), we do intend to coordinate the rest of our lives in order to be together.

Right after getting to Illinois with our moving truck, John and I went to my cousin's wedding.

A photo from my sister, Kelly's surprise 30th birthday party. All of her close friends came in for a weekend winery tour in St. Louis, MO. Girls only! John did not join us.

John and I took a trip to Yosemite with his parents. It was a wonderful week of hanging out, hiking, and rock climbing.

We are about to climb in Yosemite!

John surprised me and made my engagement ring out of Rosewood. I made him one too. I think the rings are a perfect indicator for who we are as individuals, and they are beautiful.

The beginning of our first big climb in Yosemite. 1,000 ft later, we were tired!

One more Yosemite photo!

After Yosemite, John and I went our separate ways for a while, visiting families and such. We were fortunate enough to keep crossing paths. In a few days time, however, John will be making the trip to Sydney and I will stay behind for another month and a half. It will be exciting to hear his stories and anticipate joining him in our new home, Australia!

More to come soon. Cheers, Carrie.

It's always tomorrow in Australia

I've spent a lot of time reading about Australia to prepare for our move. I've learned some interesting things about Aussie food, sports, taxes, wildlife, and politics. (Well okay, the tax stuff isn't really that interesting- just necessary, but the rest is pretty good.) I'll write about some of these things in the future, but not today.

Today I want to write about something that I find unreasonably fascinating and perplexing about moving to Australia: time. Specifically, some kooky temporal oddities occur when traveling or communicating between the US and Australia.

Time travel via the international date line

My flight leaves Dallas on July 30th and arrives 15 hours later in Brisbane on August 1st. Let's get over that 15-hour flight for a minute, because what I really want to focus on here is this: I will not experience July 31st, 2012. The date will simply not exist for me. It's gone. Poof.

Now I remember learning about the international date line in 6th grade geography and I understand the basic concept that we need an arbitrary line on the planet that divides one day into another if we're going to have a globally coordinated system of time. But still, isn't losing an entire day strange? The upside is that when I fly back to the US and cross the date line in the other direction, I will arrive before I left Australia. That's a pretty neat trick there, and it's nice that the date line will eventually give me a free day to make up for the one that it stole.

Time travel in the 16th century

The same thing happened to the crew of Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth from 1519-1522, long before the international date line was established. Magellan and his crew sailed west from Spain, around the southern edge of South America, west into the Philippines (where Magellan was killed), west across the Indian Ocean and past Africa, and then north back to Spain. When the crew finally returned to Spain, they discovered that the date had inexplicably moved one day forward. It was September 6th, 1522 in Spain, while the crew thought it was September 5th. Magellan and his officers kept careful daily diaries, but when these diaries were examined, no error was found. The diaries contained daily, successive recordings that accounted for every single day of the journey. Quite literally, the crew had experienced one day fewer than the Spanish public by sailing around the world.

I think that's just kooky.

What time is it in Australia?

Let's say you live in, oh I don't know, Michigan, and you want to call me in Australia. Let's say it's 9 pm in Michigan. Well, the internet says that Sydney is 14 hours ahead of EST, so it's 11 am tomorrow in Sydney. So call me up and I'll tell you about the future. If it's 9 am in Michigan, it's 11 pm in Sydney; please don't call me because I'm lame and I go to bed early.

But wait, how is it possible that it's 9 am in Michigan and 11 pm in Sydney, on the same day, as Michigan and Sydney are separated by the international date line? Don't they have to be different dates? The key is that time zones circle the Earth going from west to east, opposite the rotation of the planet. Your brain needs to mentally travel from Michigan to Sydney the long way around the planet. If you're eating breakfast in Michigan at 9 am, it's lunchtime in Europe, dinner time in the Middle-East, and bed time in Australia. So the title of this post was not entirely correct- I suppose I should have titled it "It's always tomorrow in Australia, except when it's not."




gif animation is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line

About this blog

Carrie and I started this blog in an effort to stay connected to friends and family as we move 10,000 miles from Boston to Sydney. We're off on an adventure, and we'd like to share our stories with you.

About the name: Kooks R&D
   
The "R&D" part is easy- it's just the initials of our last names and a not-so-subtle play on "Research and Development".

The kook part might take some explaining. Surfers sometimes call beginners of their sport "kooks". This is normally meant as an insult, and is applied to a newbie that doesn't know what their doing, doesn't respect the unwritten rules of a surf lineup, gets in everyone's way, and makes mistakes that endanger the lives of everyone around them. So in most surf circles, "kook" is definitely a derogatory term. As you might expect, this is not why we chose to label ourselves "kooks".
   
A more gentle description of a kook is someone who passionately jumps in to explore something new, without the precaution of a detailed plan. A kook doesn't methodically prepare for each new experience, she just decides to go, and enjoys the self-discovery and adventure. A kook has hope, determination, and a willingness to fail. A kook would much rather try something new and make a complete fool of himself, rather than competently "accomplish" the same thing over and over again. In this sense, Carrie and I aspire to be kooks.

Kooks down under

We've never been to Australia- in fact, we've never been anywhere close. We've never even been south of the Equator or to the Eastern Hemisphere. Like most Americans, we didn't think very much about Australia, and we certainly weren't trying to move down under. Then I saw a job ad for a research position in a new environmental institute in the University of Western Sydney, and my job skills matched the position perfectly. I was such a good fit, in fact, that a number of colleagues e-mailed me the announcement, just to be sure that I had seen it. I applied, interviewed over Skype, and was offered the job. Carrie was enthusiastic about living abroad (I'll let her tell her side of the story), so we accepted the position and committed ourselves to spending a few years in a country that we've never seen. As kooks, we're excited to jump right in and enjoy the adventure.

What to expect from this blog

We will try to capture the flavor of our life in Australia on this blog. We'll post about our travels in Australia and Aussie culture. We tend to spend a lot of time outside, so expect a fair number of posts about hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, and other things that we've yet to try, like canyoneering. I'm hoping to get involved in the traditional Aussie sports to some degree (rugby, cricket, or Aussie-rules football), so I'll post about being a total teem sports kook. I'm a scientist and Carrie's an artist, so we'll probably post on those topics as well. Generally, we'll post our research and development of kookdom down under.

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