Orange shirts, the metric system, and my first impressions of Perth

not burnt orange but oh well

So 12 days into this thing and it is still an adventure. It'll be nice when it settles down and simply becomes my life, but for now I plan on enjoying the ride. I have spent a week in Telfer and I think I will like working there. It is a good group of people in the technical team, and there is a ton, or tonne I guess, of opportunity. One of the interesting thing about working there is that everyone wears the same high vis shirt. Even secretaries and IT guys who are never in the pit. They all wear the same thing. They look like the one to the left, although the striping pattern is a little different at Telfer.

There are obviously other differences at Telfer. Everything is in metric(shocker there), which is and isn't proving difficult for me to adjust to. Sometimes my brain understands it right off the bat, other times I have to take a really long time to think through what something means. The other engineers were surprised to hear that in physics I did problems in both unit systems and figured that would make it harder. I guess so, but honestly the only thing that changes are constants. I guess I have to keep track of twice as many constants which is harder? Who knows.

Went on a "city tour" today with the reality agent who I will be working with. Looked at some different neighborhoods and generally confused the crap out of me as to where we were in the city. It is a very clean city from what I have seen, and I should be able to get a nice place right on the river just outside of downtown for not too much. Lots of cool little neighborhoods from the look of it and tons of beaches to the west of the city. Outside of downtown, which is very small, a lot of neighborhoods have a small town feel to them. By that I mean there are little "main street" type of places that are the center of shopping and resturants in various suburbs and neighborhoods. Very cool.

I have figured out mostly how to get my American sports fix between various apps on my phone, first row sports, and the Slingbox I set up in RVA(thanks CJ!). Now that we are entering the sports dead zone that is summer(baseball sucks!) it will be a perfect time to pick up a local team to follow. Winter here(remember the seasons are reverse down here) is when the AFL and the two rugby leagues play. Perth is represented by two AFL teams, one Super Rugby team(rugby union), and are working on getting an NRL team(rugby league). I am leaning towards following rugby union since I already understand and like it, but the Western Force are terrible apparently. The sit at 2-9 with 5 games left. Not sure I need another Redskins preforming type of team in my life. Although knowing you will have an awful season is easier on my mental health then Caps or Hokies type of seasons.

Moving forward I will aim to update this weekly. Some posts will probably be quick little posts about one thing, and other might be like this rambling mess. I will work on taking more pictures to share with everyone. As promised there will be pics of kangaroos coming soon, although I still have yet to see one. Seen lots of dingoes though. If anyone has anything they want to hear about specifically please let me know. I am more then happy to take requests, although until I am settled in I probably can't give very informed opinions on a lot of things.