Post 1: Australia Bound

Note: This entry was written Saturday (7/17/10) at 2:30 pm (D.C. time).

I am moving to Australia for a year in about five hours. I have started this blog, because I think it will be another way to keep in touch with my friends and family. I am not so great at corresponding via traditional methods like telephone (or even email). Also, blogging is kinda fun.

Accompanying me to Australia is my wife S. I got married recently, but S and I have been together for over three years. There were a few breaks (or as I like to put it, we have a discontinuous relationship graph), but no need to get into that now. Suffice it to say we are happy to be together. We will be having a proper wedding in summer 2011, but we went to the courthouse a few weeks ago and made things official -- turns out it is a lot easier to have somebody move with you to a foreign country if you are married.

It also turns out it is quite easy to get married in Virginia. The entire process took about 30 minutes. We got a license at the Arlington Courthouse, walked across the street, met with a very nice gentleman named Gerald Williams (a name I will never forget since there is a former major leaguer of the same name), who performed a brief but sweet “ceremony” in his office and signed our license, then we walked back across the street, had our license verified and put on file, and that was that. BFF, only instead of a cheap half-heart necklace, we have expensive rings. (And our rings are not even that expensive relative to what one could spend. Shopping for wedding rings was a man-we-as-a-society-sure-have-some-strange-financial-priorities moment for me.)

Now, we are going to Australia, because I got a one year post-doc position at a university there doing research on the logistics of coal excavation. (I probably won’t be doing math, per se, but the work should be math-y.) I have set three goals for Australia: do some good research/publish, see some cool stuff, do not be attacked or poisoned by a wild creature. The last one is particularly important. I don’t know much about nature, and I have this fear of ending up on youtube: “Jackass Mauled by [fill in wild creature].” I saw a video of a guy trying to feed a kangaroo, and it reared back on its tail and kicked him, slashing his legs with its razor-sharp claws. I don’t want to be that guy. I’ll probably stick to the bigger cities for the most part. I’m not too big on the great outdoors anyway – not that great, in my opinion.

Well, I’ll end my first post here. There will be more to come.