Australia Entry #7 - June 17th - July 8th, 2024

The Last Few Weeks

I’ve decided to do something slightly different with this entry. Today is July 8th, 2024 and I am currently sitting in an airport waiting for my first flight to Sydney from Melbourne. I am flying out for a non production build trip with our Australian customer New South Wales and hope to have a productive three and a half days in their offices setting up Epic for the first time for them. Given I have an hour and a half flight ahead of me, I’ll hand write this entry and upload the photos of the pages. Hopefully my handwriting is legible.

Transcribed from notes in my notebook: I’ve realized a while ago that it was inevitable for me to eventually fall back into old habits and leisurely activities that I was used to back living alone in Wisconsin. There is only so much hiking and walking and exploring that one person can handle without feeling like it is an extra job to be enjoying your hobbies. A few weeks ago I went on two hikes back to back days … one on Saturday and one on Sunday. In reality, I was committing all of my time to those hiking days. As I was cat-sitting for a coworker at the same time, I was waking up at 4:00 AM to have time to walk to their apartment and feed the cat, so that I could then take a bus/tram/train to a separate location to meet up to hike at 7:00 AM. Then, following the hikes I would have to do the same walk back to feed the cat and get back home. If it wasn’t for previously cooking dinner and preparing sandwiches for lunch, I would have likely been too tired to eat dinner those days.

With that being said, my last few weeks were filed with watching movies, shows, and playing some video games that I’ve had on my backlog. In the last three weeks I’ve put a sizable dent in some shows that were on my watchlist. I finished and thoroughly enjoyed the ending to Dark Matter’’ playing on Apple TV+. I am watching “Presumed Innocent” as it releases each Wednesday. I am almost done with “The Pacific” which had an episode take place in Melbourne, which was a pleasant surprise. I watched “The Fall of the House of Usher” while doing things like filling out the paperwork for my passport renewal forms, comparing my finances, and doing dishes and laundry. I also watched “Inside Out 2”.

Last week, I was finally reimbursed for some of the moving expenses I incurred during my relocation and so I took the chance to fill my emergency fund back up to close to where it was before. Almost everything was reimbursed that I logged, with only my computer purchase outstanding. It seems that Epic won’t pay for that, so I am happy that I was around net-even from the sale of my US computer to fund the purchase of the one here in Australia.

aside: Even on an hour and a half long flight, Qantas airlines provided pumpkin and carrot fritters that are warm and a great treat, especially for a 7:00 AM flight. I doubt any airline in the US would do that for a short domestic flight

With interest rates for my high yield savings account through Apple Savings at 4.4% and me maxing out my 401K and Roth IRA contributions every year since joining Epic, I am very happy with where I am financially. With the way I usually spend, I find myself in a situation where I want to make the most of my time out here with memorable trips. Currently, I’m really interested in trying to do some international hiking trips, with the only thing stopping me is the lack of confidence I have in my skills in multi-day trekking and the uncertainty of what I will do with my vacation days, but I realized as I looked more closely into it that the second one isn’t as much of a problem as I thought it was before, as after two years at Epic your vacation days accumulation rate increases to 1.25 days/month. Planning around weekends and quite a few trips can be done with my vacation rate at this point.

Therefore, I want to get it in writing, but my current goals are to rent out a car and do two weekend day trips. One, to Philip Island and the nearby George Bass Coastal Walk. Two, for an overnight camping trip to Wilson’s Prom. I am giving myself until the end of August to do both. To do so I’ll need to figure out rental cars here in Australia and also buy some hiking gear like a tent, sleeping bag, and learn the logistics of food and water for a longer stay out in the wild.

Beyond TV shows and movies, I also got back into video games that I haven’t played for a while because of the move. Back in February, I bought myself a bunch of singe player games that were story-rich. It took over a month, but I found the time to beat Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it’s prequel Crisis Core. Now I can’t wait for the PS5 exclusion Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth to release on the PC. I also got back in touch with friends from New Jersey and had a really long and fun gaming session playing a puzzle game called “Lorelei and the Laser Eyes” and we got o hoked that we beat the 15 hour game in two sessions and I may or may not have slept for one of those nights ;). I’m looking forward to continue to play through my backlog, with Hades as the next one on the list. The Alters also looks promising from it’s demo, which I played and recorded to put onto my youtube channel:

Finally, our team here in Mebourne had our annual Epic Picnic “EpicNic” which we rebranded as “EpicVic” here in Australia as we are in the Victoria territory here. I included some pictures that I took, but it was more hectic than I would have liked. We were out in the Melbourne Zoo, and we had an event to go and find hidden clues around different paths around the zoo enclosures, but it ended up being that we were rushing through the locations instead of enjoying the animals. After the event was over I took some extra time to check out the Australia specific enclosures. If you had not heard of it before, I recommend you google what a cassowary is, as it was a very unique bird that I was able to see in its habitat that I didn’t know existed until that day. With that, I found that I’ve been writing for over an hour and we are about to land. Thank you for keeping me company throughout this flight.