CAR!!!

It's official! Look at my beautiful new baby:

It's only got 2 doors, but that's fine. I only plan on having a dog in the back anyway!

Today, Pauleen and I took a trip down to Melbourne. She had a couple meetings with dog people and thought it would be good for me to tag along. It was a lot of fun and now I have lots to think about. As with everything related to dogs, there are never any concrete answers to anything. Everything you think just leads to more questions.

I also learned a little bit about service dog access laws here in Australia. I've been told that assistance dogs are allowed in all public places - which I assume doesn't include places like zoos and other specific places just like the dogs in the US, but there aren't rules about puppies who are in training for future service dog work. Turns out Australians are generally so nice and welcoming that it's just not a problem. We were talking to someone from a service and therapy dog training organization in Melbourne today and he said he's never had issues with public access with his puppies.

We might be working with that group in the coming months to set up some type of program here in Bendigo, which would be a really fantastic opportunity and lots of fun. In the mean time, I'll need to learn about their training and puppy raising. Lots of fun and exciting things to come!

Next week is going to be a bit crazy. Pauleen is going back down to Melbourne on Monday for a 3rd (?) year Psychology field trip, so I will be teaching her tutorial here in Bendigo. Then Tuesday I'm down in Melbourne for Animal Ethics training which the university requires before I can work with animals. I'll be staying down there for my tutorials on Wednesday. At least now I have a car so I can drive instead of having to deal with public transit.

Home.

It's starting. I'm starting to miss home.

It actually started over the weekend - when I had a sudden craving for Cheez-It Snack Mix and discovered that Australian grocery stores don't carry it, or even a snack similar to it! Blasphemy!

So today, after I started writing this blog post, I started searching for snack mix in earnest, and discovered Amazon.co.uk. UK Amazon ships Cheez-It Snack Mix to Australia!! Too bad it's about $26 Euros for a pack of 3 boxes - which is nearly $37AUD. Yikes...suddenly I'm not sure I'm missing snack mix that badly.

Outside of missing snacks and mommy's cooking, I miss my friends and family. I've made some great friends here, and had so many fantastic experiences, but I find myself wishing my friends and family from home could be here experiencing these things with me. My mama keeps warning that she will come visit sometime before I go back in September. I want her to come now and cook me yummy food (just kidding...maybe)!

On a lighter note, two nights ago Shu had some friends over for dinner and he made tempura and another tasty Japanese dish. So much food - and so yummy! I'm going to get fat living here...

It's officially Fall - I think, and the weather is starting to get cooler. The sunsets are really pretty right now too. Our rooftop is a pretty good vantage point.

The Milky Way

I had dinner with Shu, Elie, and Rico tonight. I made them roasted rosemary potatoes and carrots. So yummy...! Shu also made a Japanese dish - oyakodon. The name translates to something about parents and children, but what it really has to do with is chicken and eggs, not humans.

The rosemary was from the garden in our backyard. So good!

After dinner we climbed onto the roof to enjoy the stars. I tried playing with long exposures on my camera and got one photo that turned out half decent... It was tough getting the focus right since you can't autofocus at the night sky.

It was beautiful! Maybe I will learn to get better at taking photos - I think I need to get a tripod...

4 weeks down

Before I begin, as you may have noticed, I've added an "About Me" section to my blog! Feel free to check it out.

This week flew by in a flash. It was just the weekend and suddenly it's Friday night again. I'm guessing the week felt super short since it was particularly busy - and I was out of the office all day on Wednesday.

I had my second session of tutorials on Wednesday. We had a lot of fun discussing controversial legal issues surrounding human-animal relationships, and spent a good portion of the class arguing about whether animals are conscious or not. The Human-Animal Relationships class is fantastic, and the fourth year honours students I'm working with tell me it's the best course at uni. Lucky me! It was actually kind of funny. I told them that I needed to be in Bundoora for HAR tutes on Wednesday, and they assumed that I was taking the class rather than teaching it.

On Monday, I have a meeting with my team of PhD supervisors - sounds a little bit intimidating, but it's just Pauleen, Tiffani (who has been super nice and is also mentoring the fourth year students), Philippe (the brilliant man who knows everything about visual perceptions), and KC (a robotics/engineering man who I currently associate with Schmackos...). All in all a very warm and welcoming, not very scary (yet) bunch, so I'm looking forward to finally getting dedicated time for us all to discuss my research plans and goals here in Australia!

This is my very first weekend with no plans, so I have time to RELAX - and maybe get started on writing up a training manual... Not doing anything is very hard for me. Plus, what better way to feel less guilty about procrastinating on stats homework.

Why Australia...?

When I tell people that I've come from California to do my PhD here in Bendigo, generally the initial reaction is "Why Bendigo? Why Australia???"

It turns out that people think I'm a little crazy for leaving the US and coming to Australia for my PhD program, so I'll try my best to do a little explaining.

First of all, I just want to clarify that prior to this experience coming up, no, it was not my lifelong dream to travel to Australia for a PhD program. I actually wasn't intending to begin my PhD this early at all. When I graduated from UC Davis with my Bachelor's degree, I was planning to take a gap year (or two) to get some "life" experience while completing an online Master's program in Applied Statistics. I was going to spend some time volunteering, maybe get a part time job working with animals - either in a shelter or veterinary setting doing behavior-related work.

Then one day, as I was perusing Facebook, I spied a link to this fantastic opportunity:

Post by Anthrozoology Research Group.

Having recently returned from an amazing week studying scent-detection in Sweden at HundCampus, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to continue learning about scent detection - plus I would get to work with Dr. Pauleen Bennett??? This could not be more perfect.

I feel incredibly lucky to have been chosen as one of Pauleen's graduate students. I am following in the footsteps of some incredible canine researchers, including Mia Cobb of Do You Believe in Dog? and co-emcee of last year's SPARCS Conference (I went to the first one in 2013 - and started this blog shortly after!). In the end, I'm not actually on the scholarship advertised above, since La Trobe generously offered me a full-funded PhD program from the university's regular scholarship pool. Lucky me!

So the simple answer to why I'm spending three years in The Middle of Nowhere, Australia? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (or once every couple lifetimes for that matter), and I'm so glad I was essentially in the right place at the right time to be on this fantastic adventure!

And for anybody wondering where Bendigo actually is, look at the very bottom, on the right side, just above Melbourne:

Thanks to this webpage for the nice map that actually includes Bendigo :)

I'm a real grad student.

So far this entire experience has been a little bit surreal - and not having done anything concrete yet, it didn't feel like I was really doing my PhD.

Today, I submitted my very first abstract to a very real conference! I have absolutely zero expectation for getting chosen for a poster or oral presentation, but it was definitely a really good experience to prepare an abstract for the application. The conference is a week-long event in August here. We're still planning to go even if nobody is presenting research, since it will be a lot of fun and a really good opportunity to meet people and hear about awesome research with animals other than dogs. Pauleen says the last time she was at an ASSAB conference she had the best time listening about people's research in ant behavior (I almost typed behaviour...I'm converting!!!) and the like. Plus, Cairns looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL. And it will be a lot of fun to travel.

I also drove a car in Australia for the first time today! Pauleen and I were headed down to Melbourne to see some participants doing scent detection training for one of her other studies, and she let me drive her car so I could start getting used to driving. It actually wasn't bad. The hardest part was getting a feel for how wide my car was so I could stay in the middle of the lane. One thing that was easier was that Pauleen's turning signal is on the left side of the wheel, just like all cars in the US. Apparently most cars in Australia have their turn signals on the right side, so that will definitely take some getting used to!

We saw lots of dead kangaroos on the side (or in the middle) of the road today while we were driving, and a couple of dead birds and a dead fox. I did not take any pictures...

Biking is hard

Pauleen has graciously offered to let me borrow one of her bikes, and today I went to pick it up from the shop where it had just been serviced and fitted with some much-needed new brake pads. Now, it's time to get in shape. Somehow biking is incredibly difficult! It was about 20 minutes to get from downtown to the uni, and I actually had to stop and take a break in the middle. I am going to be so sore tomorrow - but maybe this means I will build some muscles. I miss my speedy road bike and the flat terrain of Davis...though I'm guessing my road bike would not do me much good going up and down hills here in Bendigo.

It's likely going to be some time (at least a number of weeks) before our lab on campus is set up, so unfortunately that means I can't keep Audrey, since she can't stay at home all day by herself. For now, Pauleen's thinking I might be able to keep Audrey on the weekends - Pauleen would bring her to work on Fridays and then take her back on Mondays. I'm hoping this will work. I can't wait to have a puppy to cuddle again!

It's been a lot of fun living in the new house. Shu is so nice and I've had dinner with him and his friends the last two nights. Two nights ago, we made green curry (which turned out a little soupy, but still tasty), and some sort of Asian chicken with cucumbers and tomatoes. Yay for cooking adventures!

Not quite as pretty as the picture, but we tried!

We had a heated discussion about whether cabbage goes into green curry or not. 

Last night we went out to a pub called One Tree Hill for their Thursday special Parma Night. It was SUPER busy and we had to wait over an hour for our food...but it was yummy! Their options for chicken parma were quite a bit more creative than anything I've had back home. There was also a Karaoke night going on starting at 9pm, which was right about when we got our food. A little bit rowdy for me, but Shu and another friend Sam (from Singapore) joined in the fun - after some beer :)

Hoping to get some laundry done tomorrow - it's about time! We'll see how I fare without a dryer...

PATIENCE!! I mean, patience.

I have officially been in Australia for 2 weeks. They told me enrolment normally take 24 hours, but with the high volume it could be 48 hours.  It has been 14 days (10 of those working days) since my enrolment forms were submitted. So now I ask, why am I still not a student?

On a lighter note, I've finally made friends! My new housemate Shu is super nice and invited me over to his friends' house last night for dinner and then we just hung out and chatted until almost 11pm. Shu is Japanese and has just finished his uni studies in Nature Tourism. I didn't even know that was a thing! His friend Ellie is also from Japan but she is also half Cantonese. She shares a house with a brother/sister who were originally from Tasmania. We spent a large part of the evening discussing differences between American English and Australian English. It was interesting to find out that they can't really hear my American accent, since they're very used to American accents on TV, but I can absolutely hear an Australian accent.

Last night, I saw kangaroos on campus for the very first time! I got sucked into my work and found myself leaving the office at nearly 7pm, but luckily that meant I got to see the kangaroos foraging in the sports oval!

I'd also like to introduce you to one of my new housemates, Chairman Meow (it's a little confusing, but she's a girl):

She likes to come into my room and sit on my desk demanding pets. She's super sweet and likes to cuddle on my bed too. The other housecat is Carmax (I think) but she's much more shy and only comes to me when she's hungry, not for pets or cuddles.

Finally unpacked!

So I've been in Australia for over 10 days now, and today I finally moved into my long-term housing (bye-bye dorms forever! - I hope). It's a really nice feeling to finally settle down and stop living out of suitcases.

Everybody in the new house is super nice. The landlord isn't here very often, so it'll mostly just be us 3 students here at the house (and the 2 cats, one of which just almost deleted this entire post). The two boys are on the far end of the house, so I basically get the front of the house all to myself.

Some other fun things that happened this week --


My camera had it's very first adventures in Australia! I took some pictures of my room in the dorms as some sort of memorabilia:

The sign out front

My closet, mid-packing up.

A somewhat comfy looking couch/chair
I never sat in.

I also took my camera with me to Pauleen's. Saturday we were playing with a machine we might be using for studies later, but we were basically just trying to find out if it we could teach the dogs how to interact with the machine and test out whether the machine was working or not. I wasn't really taking pictures of the process - because I got to actually do some training! But I did get some better pictures of the dogs, including little munchkin Audrey.

Look at that face!! And the wet mustache... I'm in love. She's thinks she's one of the big dogs too.

I'm beautiful!

You may remember Baxter, the
6 month old puppy, as well.

The new experience don't seem to stop. I had hot cross buns for the first time, and I had a "real" Australian sandwich, complete with buttered bread and beet root (aka beets). Yum!

And even though I don't know how to segue into this, I wanted to share these because I especially liked how these turned out. Here are some pictures of gentle giant, Jake:

Pad Thai in Melbourne

PSA: If you look to the right-hand side right under the "Blog Archive", I've added a widget that allows you to subscribe to my blog by email. It feels tacky every time I post on Facebook that I've written a new post so I will probably stop doing that, though I know a couple people (ahem - Mommy...) who will want to know the instant I write something new. So this is for you! I've tested it out and it seems to be working, but I guess we'll see.

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It's been a couple of days since my last post, and I actually did fun and exciting things!

On Tuesday, I met up with a couple of other international students downtown. My first purely social outing here in Australia! It was fun. They were all exchange students - just at La Trobe Uni for the semester. I had been talking with one of the girls for a few weeks before arriving, so we made plans to finally meet up. We went to see a movie - which was only $10 (instead of the regular $16) because of a deal the cinema has on "Super Tuesday". Not quite up to par with the Davis movie theater's $5 Tuesday's though!

We watched The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I actually had no idea what we were watching, and basically hoped that we weren't going to see a horror film. The movie was surprisingly enjoyable, although it was really long though - we went to the 6:45 showing and were so hungry at the end of the movie since it was almost 9:00! It was also interesting to look around in the theater - it was somehow all full of old people. I must admit that I seem to find myself in these situations a lot... Maybe that says something about me :)

One of the benefits of going downtown the day before my trip to Melbourne was that I could check out what it was going to be like biking to the Bendigo railway and back home again. And what I discovered was that it was super easy to get downtown since it was all downhill, but it was much too tiring to bike back. I ended up having to get off my bike and walk the last bit home uphill because I was so tired -- I guess it's time to get back into shape!

Yesterday was my adventure into Melbourne to teach tutorials at La Trobe's Bundoora campus. Public transit takes a long time, but it wasn't too bad. It was actually sort of nice taking the train. I got my first good look at a group of wild kangaroos who were running (or hopping?) alongside the train. Before yesterday, I'd seen kangaroos along the road late at night when Pauleen and I were driving back to her place from Melbourne, but that was it. I've been told that there are kangaroos that live on Bendigo uni campus, but I haven't seen them yet. Melbourne is nice, it's definitely got that big city feel to it. It also has sea gulls (I think), which I don't see in Bendigo. I guess that makes sense since it's on the coast. Melbourne also seems to have way more FOOD! I had to stop and grab some dinner during my trek home and luckily there were about a million and one different food options at the Melbourne train station. I decided to treat myself to Pad Thai, and even though dinner with an iced tea was $15, it was definitely yummy!

I'm really excited to be leading tutes for Pauleen's Human Animal Relationships course. It's a very interesting subject and we'll be going over a lot of controversial topics. We had some pretty good discussions going for the first tute, especially in my second class, but hopefully as the semester goes on more people will feel comfortable talking and sharing their opinions.

This weekend I'm moving out of the dorms into my new house. Yay!!! Of course I like the people who are at Orde House, but the "college" life was never really for me, and now I have the excuse of being "too old" for all of that nonsense. I might also be going back to Pauleen's on Saturday to test out some training protocols with the dogs, and if I do, I will definitely bring my nice camera along and get some photos of the dogs!

Cat tax for a post full of text. This is the kitty that struts around outside of Orde House demanding pets. We're good friends.

Lagotto Romagnolos

It's Monday evening now, and after a fun but busy weekend, I finally have time to sit and write. OK, I should have had time to write last night, but I was busy cramming information about multiple regression models into my head so I could take an exam that was due today and I had left until the last minute...oops!

So much to catch up on. I guess the easiest way to make sure I don't miss anything is to go day-by-day. Warning: this is going to be a long post!

FRIDAY
Spent nearly a full day in the office - we had dinner plans in Melbourne at 7:00 so we left uni around 4:45 to give us plenty of time. The drive down to Melbourne was actually not bad and we were in the city within 2 hours. Definitely not much traffic, even at 5:00! I guess that's one of the perks of living in a somewhat rural area.

We met up with everybody at a restaurant called Captain Melville's. It was sort of crazy out front because they have a bar/pub area, but the dining area was around the back and much less rowdy. We were meeting for a farewell dinner for one of the group members, Tammie, who has just finished her PhD and is moving to work in the UK. The other people there were Kate, Vanessa, Tiffani, and Mia. All are past/present PhD students who were under Pauleen when she was back at Monash University (before she came to La Trobe). I was especially excited to meet Mia, because she's basically a celebrity and I've been following her joint blog with US canine science researcher Julie Hecht Do You Believe in Dog? for a couple years now.

After dinner, Pauleen and I headed back up north to spend the weekend on her farm. Even though she lives between Melbourne and Bendigo, it was still quite late (maybe around 11pm) before we arrived. I got to meet one of her Lagotto pups, 6 month old Baxter, but it was too dark for good pictures. Pauleen breeds Lagotto Romagnolos as a hobby. Lagotto's are quite rare but increasing in popularity both in Australia and in the United States due to their excellent temperament and the fact that they don't shed.

SATURDAY
Saturday morning, I got to meet all of the dogs, and take them walking with Pauleen on her 300 acres of property. She basically has an enormous private off-leash dog park for her dogs to run and play and explore - though they stick close to the house if nobody goes out with them. Particularly noteworthy, I got to meet Audrey, the puppy I will most likely be borrowing from Pauleen while I'm here in Australia. Audrey has just turned 3 months old, but she is a fearless little monster and thinks she can keep up with all of the big kids. She is absolutely adorable.

Adventures!

Eddie enjoying himself.

Yeah water yeah!

Once all of the morning chores were done and all the dogs had gotten some time to run around and/or go for a swim, Pauleen and her partner, Ron decided to take me (and a couple dogs) on a day-trip to a nearby tourist town called Echuca.

The 3 lucky dogs who got to come on the adventure (from left to right):
Baxter (6 months), Eliza (8 months), and Audrey (3 months).

First car ride? Check.

This was Audrey's first car ride, since she was born on the farm and hasn't needed to go anywhere yet. Lagottos (and especially Pauleen's dogs) are pretty special. Audrey is basically fearless and even though her socialization regimen has been nothing compared to what is recommended these days, she took everything in stride - the car trip, seeing traffic, even being attached to a leash for the first time.

It was fun walking around in Echuca, even though it was a super hot day. It didn't help that Audrey had worn herself out on our morning walk and was also too distracted by all of the wonderful smells in town to do much walking on her own. Carrying a puppy on a hot summer day is like carrying a hot water bottle!


SUNDAY
On Sunday, Ron and Pauleen brought me back to Bendigo, but before leaving me at the dorms, they took me around town to see all of the major landmarks and helped to make sure I knew how to get to the train station from campus. We drove by the main lake, and found the location that the Bendigo Dog Club meets in case I want to go to the meetings and get involved with the dog community here. They even took me to lunch at a little cafe downtown. I sure was spoiled this weekend!

Ron and Pauleen also lent me a bike, so I can bike to the train station or wherever I need to go. Having a bike is nice - it's like being back in Davis again (except I have to bike on the left side - yikes!!).

Next time I go back to the farm I'll bring my real camera so I can get some good action photos of the dogs. They move much too quick for my phone camera to do any good. I might be going back this Saturday to play with a new dog training machine we've gotten for a sustained attention project.


This coming week is going to be a little bit crazy. I'll start feeling like a real grad student when I'm down in Melbourne this Wednesday leading discussion sessions for Pauleen's Human-Animal Relations class, and I even get to take an adventure on Australia's public transit in order to get there. Wish me luck!!!

Too much fun!

Oops - spent the weekend on the farm and now I'm madly cramming stats info into my head so I can take my exam before it's due. No time to write an update or post pictures from all the fun we had at Pauleen's this weekend, but it will be coming after I don't fail this exam!