Officially Employed!!

Yaaaaay!

I am pleased to announce that I am starting a 6 month contract next week! It's a social media position for a University here in Australia.

I am really excited about this opportunity! Not only is it exciting to be doing 100% social media, but I will be working with college students and groups that are light years ahead of everyone else in this field!

Anyway. I'm excited. I'll have more stories to share once it starts. But for now I must go shopping for business clothes. Because unlike Seattle, people here can't get away with wearing sweat pants to work.

fyi:fly

(qantas)

Working in Oz

a friend of mine in LA keeps an architecture/designer blog, recently told me that about two jobs are listed in the whole of the United States every day.  That friend is moving to Melbourne.  I was fortunate enough to get a job after looking for a couple weeks and started within a week of arriving in this city.  Admittedly jobs aren't following out of pockets and littered along the road, but after being in the job market for a year back in Seattle the grass is greener in the other hemisphere.  

i am now probably melbourne's newest building surveyor and probably its only unchartered surveyor.  i wouldn't be surprised if i'm also the only one from the United States as it seems to be a profession based in the UK affiliated with the Royal Institute or Chartered Surveyors (probably with the addition of an extra vowel such as a "u" somewhere to make it more British).

back in the states, I feel that architects often straddle the roles of designers and project managers.  most of us probably went to school for the glamorous "designer" roles we thought architecture would be.  getting into the workforce, however, you find that three years of learning architectural history and theory, sketching, watercolors, cardboard models, and mountains of trace paper do very little to prepare you for life as an indentured autocad servant, or anything remotely construction or project management related.

i digress.

i've since made a leap over that threshold into the building/construction side of things working for a property consulting company.  this largely involves inspecting commercial and industrial properties and composing reports that are appended to new leases or used to facilitate end of lease settlements.  i'm not going to lie--it sounded rather dry when i first heard it, but i'm actually liking it quite a bit.  i'm usually out on site a couple of days out of the week, and have even had the opportunity to travel to Perth recently.  there's just something so nice about seeing the buildings in person and getting out of the office and away from the computer monitor to do it.  getting out to site wasn't ever really a big consideration to me, but i think i'm going to be looking for it wherever possible. my work in the office only scratches the surface of the services the company provides.  we do all kinds of reports, some of which include environmental/sustainability reports, and technical due diligence reports.

being in a new place, professionally, has gotten me to rethink my academic and career goals.  i spend a lot of time working with property management and investment professionals, and have more chances to dabble in construction management.  while my placement here is only a temporary contract position because of my visa, i'm very excited to see where this path takes me!

just throwing it out there:

seek.com.au

mycareer.com.au

Iced Coffee

So. One of the things I was warned about when I arrived was Iced Coffee in Australia. As all of you Yanks know, iced coffee is a delicious way to get your caffeine without sweating.

Exhibit A:


Of course this became more relevant in the Seattle summers working in an non-air conditioned warehouse in South Seattle..but I digress.

Seeing as Australia is hot most of the year, I was sure they would be Kings of chilled Coffee. But. But if you order an iced coffee here you get a smidge of coffee, ice cream, and milk. It's more like a root beer float.

Exhibit B:


At first I was offended. And saddened. It didn't give me a caffeine fix...it was dessert that all Australia cafes served.

But now, it's 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon. I just made some french press. And instead of milk, I added ice cream. Totally guilt free. Because I am immersing myself in Australian culture...that's what this year is about, right?

The Highest Low Ever

i am too poor and too proud to have an iphone, however if i did it would probably have looked like this yesterday:

that apparently is a screenshot taken from our friend Drew's iphone (i'll admit that however he did that--it's pretty damn cool).  although the night time forecast looks a little more promising, do not be fooled!  last night Melbourne broke its record for the hottest night ever.  we were there at the front lines in our top floor apartment with no cross breeze.  perhaps we were lucky not to have a cross breeze because when it's that hot it feels more or less like a convection oven.

the news this morning showed that the overnight low at 5:57am was 32.3 degrees centigrade or for you folks back home: 90 degrees fahrenheit.  that was the COOLEST it got last night.  this is not to mention all the heat radiating off of everything in the apartment.  putting my contacts in this morning was dipping my finger into an exceptionally warm puddle of saline solution, and reaching for the cereal gave me a box of surprisingly warm nutri-grain.  salvation in refrigerated milk.

i ate top ramen tonight to save up for an air conditioner.  poo.

I want to ride my bicycle--I want to ride my biiiike!

For Christmas this year, we got some bicycles!  This has been an awesome development for us since we haven't really had any mode of transportation for the past couple of months.  Unfortunately the bikes we got were used bikes off of gumtree (uk/aus craigslist) and are probably as old as we are.  Above, we are changing the inner tube of kara's bike that went flat within the first week of riding.  Adding to the list are the derailleurs which for one of us cannot stay in one gear and the other cannot reach all the gears.  My pedals also make a strange clicking noise with each rotation, and there are whole bunch of noises coming from the rear sprocket which I am pretty sure is harming my bike further with each turn.  It's been fun, however, to exercise the marginally mechanical side of me while relatively easy on the wallet--thank god I didn't get a motorcycle that was as old we are.

Aside from thrilling trips to the grocery store, we're starting to see more of the city.  Yesterday we did a 20km loop around West and North Melbourne.  If we can stay on task with our posting, you'll be seeing more of those posts soon!

Welcome to 2010!!

Our New Year's Resolution is to post soon.

New Year's Eve Torches at Crown