Maybe moving soon. Maybe.

When we began this blog, way back in the dark ages, we were renovating a house as we moved from one continent to another with a small child. We're moving again. This time from one apartment to another in the same building, and with a very tall young adult. Pretty much the opposite in all respects of that first move. Except we are renovating again. 

We bought the apartment two years ago, rented it back to the couple who owned it while they took a short time to finish renovating the apartment they were moving into. Then there were delays, lockdowns, covid, and delays. And we are finally renovating our apartment with the hope of moving there by Christmas. 

The last time we redid a home, we stripped out a dark kitchen and replaced it with light wood and white countertops. This time, we stripped out a dark kitchen and replaced it with white. So far just white. There will be black accents, because we are modern. (?) And the black looked good.

But today, we just have kitchen cabinets:

The countertop will be black engineered stone, to match the black double oven. 

We are still choosing tile, but it is looking like a matte white subway tile. For a very bright white kitchen. With modern black accents. 

There have been other choices. Ceiling fans. Carpet (gray). A mantle for the fireplace (black stone).

We also chose a light for the entry way. The entry was designed in the 1930s for a 1930s light.

We went out and found a 1930s glass light to hang there. 

Still coming: Paint, carpet. Finished flooring.

It looks really good, and we are excited to maybe be moving soon.

 Maybe.

Endings

When given the opportunity to take on a new, challenging task, you stare deep into the future and imagine how it will change your life while it is going. There will be times when you don't know enough. How will you learn? There will be times when you aren't strong enough. How will you grow? You cannot guess at all the challenges, but you can envision the struggle, and you can decide whether the struggle is worth it. 

And if the struggle is worth it, you step in, and you wade through, and you lose face when you are stupid, and you lose sleep when you are worried, and you grow in ways you did not imagine, for years and years....

And then the task ends. 

The end. 

Walk away. We're finished here. 

What? Just like that? 

But what about all those years!?

In 2016, newly arrived in Australia, a supervisor suggested I apply for a research fellowship. I thought it was a stretch, but I took it on. And won it! Starting in mid-2017, I received four years of funding and opportunities to grow my research in ways it had not grown before. I worked hard for four years, learned a lot, took on students and postdocs and really became more of a research leader. 

And quietly in July, the fellowship ended. The end! Walk away. 

What? But what about all the lingering ideas?

In 2017, I was asked to step in as Chair of the national Women in Mathematics group in Australia. What, me? Surely I don't know enough about advocacy, media engagement, leadership, for that? But I was assured that I knew enough, and someone was needed, and I would be enough, and pretty please? So I stepped in. I had to learn. I became a face for equity. I did what I could to help, through unexpected crises. I learned to do fancy management buzzwords, like "pivot" in a pandemic. I survived.

And then, quietly, the position ends. All that fear, all that work, and I'll step down in January. The end. Walk away. Someone else can lose sleep over it now. 

What? Just like that?

Here's a really big one. In 2003, I chose to get pregnant. There was no way to see the monumental shifts this would create in life. The sleepless nights. The worries over childcare. Tears over scraped knees, fights with friends, the elation at the child's successes! The devastation at the failures. Carving out spaces for another new human over three different continents. 

And quietly, Tuesday is his last day of high school. 

 Just like that!

All grown up, and a more brilliant human than I ever could have imagined, and ever could have foreseen. 

Somehow, the endings are not as evident from the beginnings as I suppose they should be. When facing the huge task, it never really seemed we would every get here, to the end. And yet here we are.

What?

Survival! How we lived through Melbourne's largest earthquake

Yesterday, Wednesday 22 September 2021. 9:15am. 

I had just finished an online meeting with New Jersey and was composing an email in my bedroom/office. 

Jonathan was online down the hall in the living room with a friend: they were about to work through an old English test in preparation for their upcoming Victorian examinations. 

Tim, through the wall in his office, was in a meeting with China. 

When the walls began to rumble, I thought it was a large truck parked outside the balcony.

There is a garden outside the balcony, no place for a large truck. I stood up. 

The balcony doors were shaking hard. Definitely no truck. 

Meanwhile, Jonathan back in the living room heard the window behind him start to rattle. 

Helicopter, he thought. 

Tim, through the wall in the office, thought the neighbor's washing machine must be going into overdrive. 

Back in the bedroom/office, I crossed to the window and looked out, feeling everything shake. 

Earthquake?

Surely not an earthquake in Australia.

...

Earthquake!

I opened the door to the hallway and called down to the others.

"What's happening? Earthquake?!"

Jonathan's friend felt it. He left the call. Jonathan came running out of the living room. 

Tim felt it. He paused the call. 

Earthquake!

My computer monitor, on its monitor arm, was bouncing up and down. The doors were rattling hard. And now Jonathan and I were jumping up and down. 

Earthquake!

The shaking stopped.

We burst into Tim's office.

Surely that was an earthquake. He opened a geological website. No earthquake reported.

Jonathan and I went down the hall to my office and opened the local news site. No earthquake reported. 

We checked the local geological website. No earthquake reported. 

We checked Twitter.

"Earthquake!" from Melbourne.

"Earthquake!" from Melbourne.

"Earthquake?" from Sydney! Sydney felt it? Woah!

If they felt it all the way to Sydney, an eight hour drive away, it must have been HUGE!

Tim ended his meeting and came to join us bouncing up and down in my office in excitement. 

That was an earthquake!

Jonathan showed us a picture on his feed of a building nearby that had some bricks knocked off of it. Woah! Bricks knocked down! Like a serious earthquake!

Someone else posted a picture of a knocked-over lawn chair. "We will recover!"

Within a half hour, the geological sites had confirmed an earthquake, magnitude somewhere between 5.8 and 6.0 (they eventually settled on 5.9). In our excitement, we missed the two most notable aftershocks: 4.0 at 9:30am, and 3.0 at 9:55. 

Around 9:50, after 45 minutes of bouncing up and down, I sighed and said I'd better get ready for my next meeting. 

Jonathan sighed and said he'd better go try that practice exam. 

Tim sighed and said he'd better get back to work.

And that was THE END.

Melbourne, a couple of hours after the earthquake. I don't see any damage. Do you?

 

Coworker

I've been working from home a lot. 

When I work from home, every hour or so I stand up and walk over to the window to rest my eyes, watch the view, see what is happening. 

I discovered that I was not the only one watching the window regularly. Frequently, I found someone else at the window: 

 ... a medium sized spider hanging on its web.

I am not a big fan of spiders. Still, this one didn't move much. It became nice to say hello on a regular basis. She and I seemed to have an understanding. She would watch me, I would watch her. And she would not move much. And so the workday passed. I introduced her to my instagram followers as my coworker.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. Lazy day in bed. 9am, poking my phone.

Suddenly a huge black spider crawled over my shoulder and down my chest. 

There was much screaming and flailing about.

And more screaming and more flailing.

And I flung the phone and jumped off the bed and dusted myself over and over.

Tim found an upside-down medium-sized spider under the window and squished it. 

Jonathan was awake. 

"Who was murdered?" he asked when I walked down the hall soon after. (I was up -- might as well get breakfast!)

My coworker.

A few days ago, I cleaned out the remnants of the web on the window. 

Now I watch the view from the window alone.

New step counter

My cheap little step counter died a long time ago. I had been carrying around my heavy phone when going on walks or runs, and thinking I needed something better. Because I've been counting steps for years, I could probably justify spending some money for a fancy fitness tracking watch. And then after a few weeks of eyeballing fancy fitness trackers, there was a weekend half price sale, and I bought one!

Finally. A device meant to watch my fitness for me. It would be so much better and more accurate than my phone or cheap step counter. I immediately took it out into the park to go race walking. In the past, I found that my cheapo step counter, and my phone, were terrible at tracking steps while race walking. Finally with an expensive device I could figure out how far I really went, how many steps I really took. 

But after a long zig-zaggy walk through the park, it only gave me 3000 steps. My phone in my pocket gave me 6000 steps for the same walk. To add to the insult, I came home and it told me it had auto-detected a workout! Good job spending 30 minutes on that elliptical trainer!

So ok. It didn't seem to count steps any better. In fact, it was significantly worse. But no worries -- the fancy fitness tracker came with a built in GPS! I would take it race walking again, but I would turn on the GPS and let it track me all over the park and it would see how fast I was walking and call it a speed walk, not an elliptical trainer.

This time I left the phone home, and just went on the long walk -- me and the tracker. A few minutes in, it buzzed me and let me know it couldn't find a GPS signal, and was turning off. Argh! 

I looked it up, and people online also complained about the poor GPS signal. To really track your workout, you needed to bring along the phone GPS as backup. 

So I did that. I did that too. It mapped out my whole route!

But it still only gave me 2840 steps. 

My phone gave me 4308 steps.

The fitness tracker? You can see that it thinks I went 2.42km. But then I tracked a slow walk later that day:

And it gave me 2.64km for what is clearly a much shorter distance. (It also says I went walking straight through the soccer club buildings and then across the muddy field, so also not so accurate.)

I sat down at the computer, and mapped out the zig zaggy walk carefully. It said the whole walk was 3.2km. From there I could figure out my speed: about 6.4km/hr, or 15 minutes per mile. Long way to go before I reach Olympic race walking levels, but definitely faster than my usual walking speed. Still no idea how many steps, but probably at least as many as the phone gave me.

You would think that the fancy expensive new device could figure that out for me. 

I did a search, and the online race walking community is also disappointed. Faster people than me have had their workout auto-detected as elliptical or even a bike ride. And poor step counting.

Disappointing. But oh well. Maybe I'll just take up a new sport. Like elliptical training.

Watching the Olympic opening ceremonies a year late

We are only two hours ahead of Tokyo, so a pretty reasonable timezone for viewing the 2020 Olympics here in July 2021. I turned on the TV and there was dancing in Tokyo. I left it on while I poked my phone on the couch. The dancing and lights show was kind of interesting. But it didn't completely grab my attention until the teams started walking in. 

In the background, they were playing Final Fantasy IV battle victory music. From the 1990s. From my teenage Final Fantasy video game playing years. I called Tim -- "They're walking out to video game music!" He came in just to see, and then couldn't leave. It was the costumes. The costumes from all the different countries. And trying to remember where a particular country was located. 

There were a lot of countries whose costumes were not embarrassing. Australia, for example, was fine. Not embarrassing. Probably comfortable. Described by one news site as "Girl scout chic." 

Not Italy. Italy's costume was bad. Pizza bellies. Very embarrassing. I feel sorry for all their athletes. 

 

Latvia also got to wear plastic bags over tin foil. Not really a great look.

 

To my surprise, I kind of loved the burnt orange jumpsuits of the Netherlands. I would probably wear that.

After Tim and I had been sitting there for about half an hour fascinated by countries and costumes and video game background music, Jonathan walked in and said he was going to bed. And paused. And then within the next half hour, he was sitting on the couch with us and wondering out loud if he should go get the globe out of his bedroom to try to identify all the smaller countries.

We forced ourselves to turn it off after Japan entered the stadium last. The ceremony continued, but it was 11.30pm, and we just didn't have the stamina. 

But now, twelve hours later, I still want to get myself one of those red and white robes worn by the women from Palestine. 

Another stay-cation

 I was going to be working in Sydney this week. But Sydney had a bit of outbreak of covid-19, so I took a vacation instead. Jonathan is on school holidays, but Tim is working. So with a last minute change of travel plans during a busy time of year -- we're doing another stay-cation, Jonathan and I. For Jonathan, that seems to look like lots of homework. For me, it looks like puzzles.

And long walks and TV shows and movies. 

Today marks the half-way point in the week. I will probably take some of next week off, too. I was meant to be in Sydney for three weeks. Now zero weeks. Oh well. More puzzles for me.