The Assimilation Game: starring Katira and Grady...and Benedict Cumberbatch

Wet n' Wild for Nat's bday!

It has been a fair bit since the last time I made a post, but I wanted to make sure I had enough material for a solid entry. As the title of this one suggests, the theme of Katira's and my last several weeks has been assimilation (unfortunately without Benedict Cumberbatch). We are now feeling substantially integrated into Canberran culture, and while that does feel like solid progress, it hasn't included huge things that are particularly exciting to share in a blog format. However, after six weeks of taking root, we have some stuff.

Probably the most significant way that we have become Canberrans is through the Kingsford Smith School, a K-10 school where Katira has been working almost full time for six weeks. As she noted in the last blog entry, signing up for anything in Australia is quite the process, but after the extensive application reviewing, Katira is a certified relief (substitute, for those who don't speak Australian) teacher, and I have worked a few days as a teacher's aide. We were having fun with our responsibility-free Netflix binging and touring of the city, but having a professional outlet has allowed us some financial flexibility in our touring options (we get paid more for relief work over here than we do full time teaching in the U.S.!). Furthermore, having a job makes us feel like we really deserve a Property Brothers Netflix binge at the end of the day. And by 'us', I really mean Katira; she has worked all but two days in the last six weeks, and I have worked...4...I WANT to work more, those are just the only calls I have gotten, I promise! Hopefully, now that we have made a lasting connection at that school, I can get some more work in the weeks to come.

 The Castles' first day of work. Note Gina the Barina in the background, our faithful steed.

What have I been doing while Katira goes off to work you ask? Well, we joined a golf course called Gold Creek (MUCH more affordable than becoming a member most places in the States), and I have been practicing there daily. Most of you know that golf is more than something I do just for fun, and working at my game is a fairly significant pursuit in my life. Being a member at Gold Creek is a cool opportunity for me to do that...unfortunately it hasn't paid off in my golf scores yet. But I'm still working at it.

Practicing with the kangaroos. That one closest to me
is a 7 handicap right now, but I've seen him improve his lie...

How do we get to work and the golf course you ask? Well, thanks to Dave and Holly, we have a fun car! Her name is Gina, and she's a '95  Holden Barina. And thanks to Josh for helping keep all of the Davis/Castle cars functioning for the price of beer.

Also, we've worked pretty hard at building a yard--much harder than is probably required, at least for me, but when you're learning how to landscape, sometimes you have to backtrack a little before you move forward.

Yard and fence I helped Ben put up to earn my keep. Many others
have helped too, most them way more efficient help than mine.

The cutest part of our life in Australia is our new roommate: Beans Bravis. A sweet little guy who is a great couch dog, he also hasn't really learned another form of playing that doesn't involve using his adorable little teeth to chomp down on things like toys, grass, knees, feet, hands, noses...but he's getting better :)

Beans the Dalmatian

To round things off, we've also done some fun stuff in downtown Canberra, taken a trip to Wet n' Wild for Nat's birthday, enjoyed community at Sunday night dinners with Jackie and Malcolm and Monday night dinners with Matt and Amy, and we recently took a trip to a Davis family hallowed ground, the lovely beach town of Kiama--that will be the subject of the next post by Katira, including the balloon spectacular that we saw on the way, coming soon!


Australian WOD: sweet as (adj) - really great--so great you don't even have to compare it to anything, as in the U.S. phrase sweet as pie; "Those Robertson meat pies are sweet as!" (Will also be useful in New Zealand, where we will be next week! "Those hobbits are sweet as, bro!")

Wife Post One: Castles in Canberra

To all our screaming fans out there waiting with bated breath for the next installment of the Castle’s travel blog: ye shall wait no longer! It is here!

We haven’t written for a while because we weren’t sure how to word the excitement of the time we are spending golfing, reading, napping, completing paperwork, napping, getting up late, reading, golfing, watching Netflix, and eating.

To be fair, we haven’t been couch-bound the entire time we’ve been here. We helped Ben and Nat lay sod in their new backyard, and the mounds of paperwork have dwindled far enough to breathe a sigh of relief. We are waiting for our final approval to begin working, and once we’ve made a little money, we will truly start adventuring around this part of the world (and contribute to groceries and such to help out our gracious hosts!). I have also taken Grady to see my old stomping grounds, we’ve checked out the local coffee shop, we went to the Ben and Jerry’s Open-Air Cinema with Ben and Nat, enjoyed a picnic and concert on the lawns of Parliament House for Australia Day, helped Nat and Ben to host a big Super Bowl party, and have generally been enjoying being unemployed for a little while. Funemployed, I think the kids are calling it? Indeed.

Things we’ve learned/taken a refresher course on:

• Sod is freaking heavy. And super dirty.  Because it’s basically…dirt. The first 4396 rolls aren’t really that heavy, but when you try to pick up the 4397^th roll, it suddenly weighs about 874 kilos (not pounds; we’re Australian now, and I don’t like math, but I’m pretty sure that’s accurate), and you have to hold it against your shirt and scratch your arms up with the roots because you don’t lift weights (Katira) or you can still hold it away from your cleaner-than-Katira’s shorts and flex your arm muscles like a show-off (Grady), but either way you’re going to end up covered in mud (literally from your toes to your hair – your hair!), and by the time you’re 2/3 done with what didn’t used to look like a big lawn, you don’t care all that much about how straight they are until you get to the last strip and it doesn’t quite fit, and you have to go back and fix all the other ones, and you should have tried harder in the first place, and thank goodness we put on sunscreen and I need another glass of water, my god it’s hot out here, when did it get so hot, and hey, this is actually kind of fun, but I’m glad I’m not a landscaper for a living. I don't know if I'm cut out for it.

Grady and his trench-digging jackhammer

• Note: The yard looks awesome (except for a couple spots where Nat and I accidentally made sinkholes trying to move the sprinkler), and we are so happy we could help. As long as this grass takes, we will maintain that standpoint. If it doesn’t take, and it has to be replaced, we might mysteriously disappear for a couple days when they drop off the new rolls.

  

  Nat and Cat moving the sprinkler. Cat is "helping."
  Nat discovered that army crawling over to the sprinkler doesn't leave sinkholes. Kinda muddy though. Now we are using the super innovative pieces-of-wood-as-stepping-stones-so-we-don't-ruin-the-new-lawn-while-Ben-and-Nat-are-on-their-cruise method.

• 
  
• 
  
• Australians are pretty into paperwork. And these special declarations where you sign things that say you’re not a liar and cross-my-heart-hope-to-die this information is correct as far as I know. So far, to apply to substitute teach in Canberra, we have had to apply for our Working With Vulnerable People (WWVP) registration, which we need to apply for our Teacher Quality Institute (TQI) registration, both of which we need to apply to the Education and Training Directorate to become Casual Relief Teachers. All of these applications are anywhere from 26 to 200 pages long (but no kidding, the Casual Teaching app was legit 26 pages long), and all of them require the same certified copies of original documents and blood types and spirit animal identification and star signs, etc. But I think this only increases your sense of relief when it’s done. We are holding our breath for the final response, and then we can go meet principals and sell our mad sub skills to the local schools!

• Cujo no longer lives on the path that leads up the hill (“The Blue-Tongue Lizard Path," in family vernacular, due to the fact that one used to live there when we were kids. Fun fact: he might still be alive. We did not see him, but lizard life spans suggest it is possible, but not super likely.), but as Grady pointed out, it was highly unlikely that, even were that dog to still be living after about 20 years, he would still have the energy to viciously snarl at innocent children just trying to get home from school. Also, even as an adult, that hill is steep! I had fun leading Grady along the paths we took as children and showing him where we used to play.

  

  Walking up the hill to our old neighborhood

  
  

  

  Looking out over "New Macgregor" from "Old Macgregor"

• People are really nice at Australian golf courses! A couple courses have already offered us free trial rounds so we can check out their course (which we eagerly took advantage of!), and they all know Grady and greet him by name when he comes in to practice. One pro shop guy at Belconnen even paid for my round when I joined Grady for the back nine!

This little family lives at the Gold Creek Country Club. They enjoying drinking from the puddle next to the practice green, dodging scary ravens, and distracting people with their cuteness while they are trying to hit from the driving range.

• There’s nothing quite like looking for a lost golf ball with 200 shrieking sulphur-crested cockatoos mocking you (mockatoos) from the gum trees lining the fairway and soaring back and forth overhead (because they know they are even louder in motion). If you have never heard the cacophony of a flock of these majestic birds (they are beautiful, I’ll give them that), click here or here (or the other links in this paragraph) for a little taste. 

  

  A couple cockatoos being all cute and quiet. Look at these suckers. They're all like, "you think you're gonna sleep in? Haha, nope!...You think you're going to still be sane after searching for your ball for like 3 hours to the tune of the mockatoo soundtrack? Haha, nope!"
  
  
  

      To wrap up this inaugural wife-post, I want to give a huge shout-out to Ben and Nat, not only for putting us up in their beautiful new home, but also for arranging some fun activities for us in our first couple weeks down under. The first weekend we were here, Nat and a couple of her friends took us to the Australia Celebrates Live concert on the lawns of Parliament House with a delicious picnic. It was a beautiful evening, and was a great summer treat after having left snow and ice mere days before that.

Feeling like patriotic Australians at the Australia Day concert at Parliament House

Australia Day Sunset over the lawns of Parliament House

 Then the next week, they treated us to a night at the Ben and Jerry’s Open AirCinema, where we had dinner, drinks, and ice cream under the stars and watched St. Vincent (as well as thousands of huge bats swooping overhead—Grady later admitted he was quietly FREAKING OUT). We are enjoying being roomies with you guys!

Movie under the stars!

Pre-movie drinks with The Bravis Hotel owner-managers

Stay tuned for more on teaching in Canberra, travels in Australasia (and maybe even Middle Earth!), and Adventures With Yard Work, Episode 2: Fencing!

How ya goin?

If you think there is a better time for me to write my first blog post than when my wife is alternating rounds of bug spray with mad (yet skillful!) waving of a hand vacuum to oust the bedtime swarm of flies from our room, then you'll be disappointed, because that's exactly what is happening right now.

Our nine bags (140 kg) in our new room!

As disastrous as that sounds, I have to confess that our journey to (and in) Australia has so far been quite smooth and uneventful. After hauling our nine bags through the Sydney Airport and onto the bus to Canberra, we really haven't had to work very hard; these flies are the first obstacle to befall us, and to be honest, they're the smallest flies I've ever seen, like teacup pig-flies, and my mom and dad always said 'don't sweat the small stuff'.


Speaking of sweat, today it reached 31° C at our home in Canberra (for my friends in the US who don't know Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion, that's about 138° F...take my word). Today was also my first chance to try my hand at driving in Australia! Well, I did drive for a bit last April when we were here for Ben and Nat's wedding, but apparently, getting used to the driving differences isn't just like riding a bike. You can get the hang of going the wrong way pretty quickly because it just makes sense when you get into follow the flow of traffic, but the controls feel very awkward to me. I walk to the left (wrong!) side of the car to drive 75% of the time, and once I'm in the car, it takes me a solid minute to reorient myself with where things are before I can start it, and even then, I continually hit the windshield wipers when I'm trying to signal, and I smack my right hand into the window when I'm trying to reach down for the gearshift, which I frequently jam into an unintended gear with my clumsy left hand. Every time I screw something up, I am momentarily paralyzed in thought, trying to analyze what in the world I just did, then fix it, then avoid driving into head-on traffic; without Katira's help, I certainly wouldn't have survived! So, even though 31° C isn't the hottest I will experience down under, when combined with the constant vigilance required for me to not be an involuntary car assassin, I definitely needed a dry shirt when we got home.

Earlier, I said that our trip has so far been smooth and uneventful, and I need to amend that; it certainly has been smooth, but there have already been so many wonderful events:
     -we opened our first new Australian bank account
     -we played our first Aussie round of golf together at what will probably become our home course
     -we had a wonderful home-cooked meal with our gracious hosts on our first night here
     -we haven't died
Many more awesome events to come :)

Australian Word of the Day (WOD): arvo - afternoon; "Make sure you close your windows in the arvo so no mozzies or teacup pig-flies can get in and muck around!"  

First round of golf at Belconnen Magpies Golf Club! That tree behind my head
 is in the middle of the fairway on #1, and there were plenty of magpies, and
even worse, Cockatoos, which will mock you while you're looking for your ball

On the Manly Ferry last April, soaked from a rocky voyage. Note
the Harbour Bridge over my shoulder and the Opera House left
of the bridge