It has been a very busy few months. Here are some of the things I have done since I last wrote:

• Moved out of our apartment in Canada
• Spent three weeks in Ireland with my partner’s family – this was great fun and featured lots of music, tide pools, castles, and sheep
• Went back to Canada for six days
• Mastered the art of packing checked luggage and carry-on bags so they are juuust under the weight limit
• Said a lot of tearful goodbyes
• Flew to Australia!
• Discovered Sydney was 11°C and raining
• Immediately regretted leaving all our warm sweaters behind (“It’s spring in Australia,” we said. “We won’t need these for months yet,” we said)
• Saw all three animals I had missed the most – bats, lorikeets, and scientists – in the very first day
• Officially enrolled as a PhD student at UNSW
• Stumbled into the Sydney real estate market, where rent prices are more than double what we are used to, and only the wealthiest people can afford to buy property
• Managed to find a great little apartment for rent within our budget
• Bought out most of IKEA
• Moved into said apartment (we’re getting good at this moving thing)
• Helped to finish up 3 papers from the project Katrin, Tim, and I did last year, and 1 paper from the project Steve and I did 3 years ago
• Read at least a dozen papers on interactions between Antarctic ice shelves and the Southern Ocean – my PhD project will be somewhere in this field
• Gone out for climate beers (regular beers consumed by climate scientists) and discussed whether the Canadian or the Australian political system is more fundamentally broken
• Swam in the ocean three times, and discovered that if you put on goggles and look underneath the water you can see FISH swimming around beneath you

Things are finally calming down now, and I should have time to write more frequently. Now that my head is not so full of flight schedules and rental agreements and shopping lists, it has a lot more space for climate science, and for topics to write about here.

I am so, so happy to be back at the CCRC. It is such a friendly, supportive, and enriching place to do research. While I miss my family and the Canadian wildlife and Canadian autumn (definitely not Canadian winter), this is the best time in my life to travel and explore the planet which I spend so much time studying, and hopefully, helping.