We've Come To A Land Down Under

 Hello Everyone,  We have absolutely adored our 14-year-old, 100cc moped, that we've previously written about. However, it was a bit of a squeeze to get both of us ~6ft people on and it struggled to get up that one hill leaving Bondi. With these things in mind, it was time for an upgrade. This improvement to our quality of life has involved the purchase of a motorcycle.  Mopeds and motorcycles are quite common in Sydney as lane filtering is allowed and most transit occurs on streets less than 60 km/hr (~35mph). The purchase of our moped has increased our mobility, but Ferg has been the only one with the license to ride/drive it. I would sit pillion but was not allowed to operate the vehicle on my own. I ended up taking my learner's course in order to get my motorcycle license and ride/drive by myself. The motorcycle learner's license, or "L's", as it's called, was a two-day course where 5 others and I learned how to ride a motorcycle. After I and 4 of the ...

Hello people, I got a new job.  So long are the days of MilkRun and riding my bike in the rain. It was good while it lasted but it was time for a change. I first started looking for a job back in March and was doing interviews several days a week. After several rounds of technical and behavioral interviews, I was able to land a job! Let me tell you about it.                                    Zoomin' to the office for my first day The company I work for is Aginic . They are a "... diverse crew of creative data analysts, data scientists, designers, engineers, delivery coaches, and cloud technicians that love to combine our technical skills to solve problems". There are only around 100 people spread out between the headquarters in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. Everyone I have worked with thus far has been incredibly nice. They are a technical consulting company so the work is done on a p...

 Quick Post. Allison and I made ourselves a traditional American meal for our first 4th of July in Australia. Here is the burger recipe, BOOM .  Sadly, I wasn't able to bring my freedom fry cutter to Sydney so I had to cut these fries by hand.  Quick post gets a quick fun fact. Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of Australia.

Ok, so the actual game didn't go that well for Sydney. They didn't look that good and lost 61 - 75 in a low scoring showing for the Swans. On the bright side, I was able to catch this video of how the ball is put back into play after it goes out of bounds. When the game was over, all the fans were given the opportunity to take the field. We made our way down and got a better perspective on how big the field actually is.                                            With the game over, we made our way to the bus that took us home. It's so nice to not have to worry about parking at events like these. Having a reliable public transit system has been awesome. On our ride home, we talked about how fun the day had been. Until next time Swans. Ok. Fun fact time.  Hello Team, I'm writing this blog today about Australian Rules Football, aka Footy. If you haven'...

Sunshine Coast We took our first trip/vacation in Australia to the Sunshine Coast, Queensland for a long weekend, on the 19-22 of May. The Sunshine Coast is an area along the coast of East Australia, about an hours drive north of Brisbane and an 1.5 hour flight from Sydney. We chose this location because of it's proximity to the Australia Zoo!  This is the zoo that Steve and Terrie Irwin started together and what launched the Crocodile Hunter that we all know and love. We visited the Australia Zoo as a Christmas present from my parents (thanks Mom and Dad Loch). The zoo was absolutely incredible. They had all the iconic Australian animals as well as American Alligators and an Africa section. See some of the highlights below: Seychelles Giant Tortoise - 40 year old 'teen' brothers. This species lives 150+ years! Lemur on Bindi's Island. This area is completely surrounded by water as the lemurs will not swim (maybe that's why they're only found on Madagascar). The...

Hello Everyone, Ok, we're bad content creators. We are very behind. I would promise that I will keep on top of it and put out more posts but, well, you know. Good news, we have lots to share. Anyway, as you can tell from the title, this one is about the Sydney Sea Life Aquarium.  Our last post talked about the Sydney Zoo and how our original intention was to visit the aquarium instead. This post is all about our trip back to the CBD to visit the exciting water animals. Getting there was as easy as, bus, train, short walk. Getting in was as easy as, "take our money". In no particular order. Here are some pictures and some commentary on a few. So each one of these penguins had a different color tag to identify them. On the wall < picture not found> , there was a board with penguin names and personalities so you could actually ID each penguin.  This is called a sawfish. Pretty neat.  This penguin was posing for everyone.  This dude looked really happy with his sli...