It’s not just dangerous, its lots of fun (and frightening)!

Posted by: Nic

Unfortunately, Chris was unable to out-wit or charm the US Border Security and never made it to North Carolina. Fortunately, Tim had better luck and arrived on Monday so I have spent the week so far showing him the delights of North Carolina. We spent the first day touring Duke Campus and visiting parts I hadn’t had a chance to see yet, like the Duke University Chapel.

The following day I roped Tim into helping me collect pine cones as part of the work I am doing at Duke. The work was straightforward but it was cold, it even SNOWED on us! It was very light snow but it was a novelty all the same. You can see in the pictures that we are both wearing two jackets.

After finishing the field work and ‘borrowing’ a load of fire wood from the forest we took ourselves along to the Personal Defense and Handgun Safety Center Inc. in Raleigh. This story will give you some insight into the gun culture here - We went in and told the bloke at the counter we would like to try firing a gun. We made it clear that we had never fired a hand gun before. He made us fill out a form and then proceeded to ask us what sort of gun we wanted to fire. We asked him to recommend one. He placed two 9 mm pistols on the table, along with ammo, and pointed to the door leading to the range. Hesitating we asked if some one could please show us what to do. He sighed and without moving from the counter explained the gun to us and then pointed to the range again. So Tim and I were set loose in a shooting range with two 9 mm pistols and 100 rounds, having never fired a gun before and with no supervision.

Having fired a hand gun now I can confidently say I am even more scared of guns. Considering the amount of trouble I was having hitting a stationary human-sized paper target 10 meters away I don’t trust any average American citizen to ‘defend their loved ones' from a criminal, from a distance, possibly in the dark, whilst nervous, and expect to shoot accurately.

You can see the shooting fun by clicking the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FXpoCfh7LM.

In keeping with dodgy things, Tim also smuggled in some ‘contraband vegemite’ that was much appreciated by both of us!

Nic

What could Sal possibly have to say?

Hi Darlin's

Its Sal. Nic has been harassing me to prove my existance by writing something on contrabandvegemite. Sorry for the lengthy silence, but as you'll have noticed, Nic has been doing a good job of sharing his extensive thoughts on every topic under the sun. Something he's always been pretty good at now that I come to think of it.

He spent some of this afternoon explaining to my lab mates why he's always wanted to build a solar powered fortress on a subarctic, preferably volcanic island, and then excitedly exclaimed that he was going home to make yoghurt, something he'd been looking forward to doing all day. (When you imagine this, add in a little skip and excited clapping of the hands, and you'll have the general picture of Nic's demeanour at the time). I got the impression that these lab mates think that Nic's more than a little odd, but I suppose they'll get used to him.

Other than zipping in and out of hospital, playing with the new car and being frustrated by an endless round of flat tyres on my bike, life's mostly been full of work work work work work. Not that this is a bad thing, but I guess it doesn't make very exciting reading. So, what have I been thinking about with this work? Well, for a lot of today it was how to relate the critical wavelength of a Turing bifurcation to the diffusion coefficients in the underlying equations, and why this is so much harder to do in a three-variable system than a two variable system. My fear is that I'm going to leave this PhD being essentially a mathematician, which is not something I envisaged!

I'm going to join Nic at SEEDS tomorrow which I'm looking forward to. We're planning on checking out a Chinese photography exhibition in the afternoon before heading to a friends home-brew warming party that evening. I'm hoping that we might get in some walking in the woods on Sunday morning before going to get Timmy from the airport, but we'll see how that goes.

We are full of good burritos from the Mexican Taqueria down the road. I think we're also full from the good but enormous brownie and cookie that we respectively quelled our sugar cravings with mid afternoon.

Its Thanksgiving next week and I'm quite excited to try and understand what that's all about. I like the idea of a big celebration to be happy about the good things in life - seems like a good idea to me - and there are a couple of "refugee" type events for those of us who aren't planning on just popping home for a quick 4 day weekend...

Well, Nic, hope you're satisfied...still alive, head down, ever enlarging bum up...

Smooches cherry pies

Sal

US tornado kills seven in North Carolina

Just to let you know that we are both alive and well. The tornado damage in North Carolina was a few hundred kilometers away in the south east of the state. We did get some wild weather very early yesterday morning as the storm passed through Durham County. We woke to discover the heavy rain and wind had blasted most of the autumn leaves off all the trees.

Okay, time for a rant!

Posted by: Nic

Today I went shopping to buy stuff for a dinner party we are having with our neighbours. This was made vastly easier now that we have a car. I went down to our local Target, sorry, I mean Super Target. I have been to Super Target a few times but I hadn’t really investigated fully what it had to offer. It might sound like it would be fairly easy to 'investigate what it has to offer' but you don't realize how big it is! So, whilst there, I decided it was time I had a really good look around. Unlike Australia Targets this Target sells food and alcohol. When I say it sells alcohol I don’t mean it has a bottle shop, I mean you can buy alcohol in the aisles. I did know this and have been taking full advantage of it. It also has a Starbucks (dear Starbucks, your coffee tastes like crap) and also a Chemist. Today I discovered it has an Optometrist, music and video store and also sells camping and hardware. Insane.

Whilst I am sort of on the topic of crap food, American yoghurt is vile. I don’t think Beren will ever read this blog, and most people who read it don’t know who Beren is, but Beren, being Victorian, used to have unkind words to say about the quality of Western Australian yoghurt. Well Beren, WA yoghurt is gold medal material compared with the American stuff. Sal and I have bought a yoghurt maker, seriously.

And packaging, don’t get me started on packaging! Everything is packaged so carefully I wonder if they think we will be shipping into space or something. Look at the following pictures. What we have is a packet of soap, which is packaged, and then each bar of soap is also packaged. Next, a load of bread sold to us in a paper bag, we open the bag to discover the loaf is also packaged in a plastic bag. Finally, we bought toilet paper, all the rolls were packaged up, and when we opened the package we found a second layer of wrapping (I don’t think I’ve ever used the word package so many times in a paragraph before). It isn’t just soap, bread and bog rolls though, it is everything!

And, just for the hell of it, here is a picture of Durhams only skyscraper.

The computer is go.

Posted by: Nic

Since Sal's foray in hospital things have been a bit quiet. We had been expecting Chris to visit, but due to problems with visas that may not be happening, which is disappointing. The good news is that we finally got the car! It still has some things to sort out with the dealer but other than that it is great to be mobile.

We got our new computer going and online which should make life easier. We even got the choice of stealing our neighbor’s wireless internet, although our consciences got the better of us. The legal connection is a bit dodgy though so our attempts to skype the family back home have proved disastrous. If anyone knows how to improve the quality of a skype call please tell us.

I started my volunteer work in the laboratories at Duke today. It is a bit intimidating being back in a laboratory. I did enjoy my 50/50 office and field job at the Dept for Environment and Conservation. Instead of worrying about jammed printers and being run over by tractors I need start worrying about pipetting 4 µl instead of 5 µl (dear family, 1 µl = 1 millionth of a liter) and not poisoning myself with ethidium bromide.

I spent my first day volunteering at Seeds (I mentioned this in a previous blog, but it is a community garden in Durham). It is a very interesting place, extremely starved of funds but extremely well organized and well run. The staff range from warm and friendly to excruciatingly shy. It was good to get my hands in dirt and to do some manual labor. The staff also gave me the names of some shops where ‘poorer people’ shop, which should be a nice change from faceless megastores.

Sal in the new car.

One of the gardens at Seeds.

Just to prove it happened, here is Sal in hospital. The other person is our wonderful Mexican neighbor Fernando who drove us there.

A personalized tour of the USA medical system!

Posted by: Nic

The past twelve hours have been interesting! A few days ago Sal developed a minor infection on her foot. It hurt but outwardly was nothing serious. Unfortunately it gradually got more painful and swollen until yesterday evening when the deeper tissue around it went black, a red line began to travel up her foot and her leg started to hurt. We went to the after-hours part of the Duke Student Hospital and whilst there Sal began to get cold and dizzy. They sent us straight to emergency.

They diagnosed it as 'blood poisoning' from the infection and gave her a big dose of antibiotics intravenously. She was in the hospital overnight and I am happy to report that all her symptoms were gone by this morning. She was given her own room and says the treatment was extremely good. They discharged her at lunch time and she is currently resting at home.

She has asked me to let you all know that she is okay and not to worry.

Nic

Rain rain go away.

Posted by: Nic
Tuesday morning, at about 9 AM, it began to rain. Then it continued to rain. Then it rained some more. I think by Wednesday morning our area had had just over 3.5 inches which, for people who don’t live 50 years ago, is about 90 mm. You can see the weather map below. What surprised me was how persistent it was. It rained CONSTANTLY for about ten hours! So everything is wet and humid right now. It is cool, basically jumper weather, but the second you exert yourself (i.e. ride a bike or walk to university) you get hot and sweaty.


Today I visited ‘Seeds’ , which is a community garden center in a dodgy neighborhood in downtown Durham. The garden is used by the local community and ‘disadvantaged’ children. The people there were friendly and welcoming. Since I am fit and have background in plant sciences they were really keen to meet me I have volunteered to work there a few days each week. Duke University is a bit insular and most people I have met so far are students, so I am looking forward to meeting some Durham locals.

Yesterday I was stuck at home whilst it was raining so I decided to watch a bit of US TV. I felt dirty afterwards but there were some channels worth noting. There is a 24-hour local news channel that is actually fairly good. Of course there isn’t that much news in North Carolina so it gives the latest news and weather and repeats again about 15 minutes later. There is also an amusing channel that is all in Spanish. Most of the shows are Neighbours-like but involve fat ugly men and young women with lots of cleavage, short skirts and knee-high boots. Sal has also finally got me to watch the Daily Show . Apparently we do get it in Australia but I had never seen it. It is some of the finest political/social/media commentary/comedy I have ever seen. It is similar to the Chaser or CNNNN.

There was a problem with our car so we won’t get a chance to pick it up until the end of the week. Our computer arrived early so hopefully we will have it set up by the end of the week (fingers crossed) and we will be able to skype you.

Nic

Wow, people are reading our blog!?!

Posted by: Nic (yes, still me. Sal, post something!)

Just a quick post to say we are surprised that people have actually been reading our blog! We are very touched. Hang in there, in the coming weeks we will hopefully be able to tell you about interesting things like forest trails, road-trips and machine guns.

Nic

Indian food, areoplanes and churches.

Posted by: Nic

Last night we went out for dinner with Sal's supervisor, Gaby. I enjoyed it because I hadn't had the chance to speak with him yet. He’s a lovely guy and has some interesting things to say about life in North Carolina and the United States in general. The picture below is also interesting because you can see how rugged up we are, especially me. The temperatures over the past few days have dropped below zero over night.

Another thing that is surprising me here is the amount of air traffic. I took a picture from our front porch yesterday afternoon. In the picture you can see five contrails from aircraft. There is nothing unusual about this view. Every hour of the day there is usually a couple of contrails visible.

I am still enjoying the Duke campus. I have included some pictures of the colossal Duke Chapel and also a little patch of forest near Sal’s building that I think is pretty. When people come to visit us we could easily spend a whole day walking around the Duke grounds.

One of the other PhD students had her preliminary exams today. They are a type of mock thesis defense and are exceedingly stressful. She passed so it looks like we are going out tonight to celebrate.

Dinner with Sal’s supervisor.




Contrails above Durham.

The Duke campus.

Nic is bored and waiting for Sal.

Posted by: Nic



This morning Sal and I were speculating about how much of Durham county we could cover if Sal spent her entire doctoral scholarship on croissants. It isn’t important why we were wondering this. What is important is that after a night spent drinking I often feel compelled to calculate stupid things. This isn’t helped by the fact that I suck at maths, which I assume leads to many of my calculations being wildly inaccurate. But here goes:

With Sal’s rather generous scholarship we could afford about 45 thousand croissants, assuming a price of about $2 per croissant.

I checked this morning and a croissant from the Guglhupf German bakery, near our house, measures approximately 14 cm by 10 cm. Assuming no croissant tessellation is possible each occupies a surface area of 140 square centimeters.

So if Sal’s entire scholarship was spent on croissants we could cover about 6.3 million square centimeters of Durham County, which equates to about 0.063 ha.

Needless to say, this is rather disappointing. I had been hoping our croissant paving would be more spectacular.

To address this problem I did some croissant-paving sensitivity analysis (seriously, I used Excel) and found the single factor that is having the greatest impact on the area you can pave is the price of croissants.

Conclusion, if you are planning on paving Durham Country, or anywhere for that matter, with croissants I recommend finding the cheapest source of croissants you can. Although the Guglhupf German bakery does make very nice croissants they aren’t good for paving.

Driving madness! Well, not really.

Posted by: Nic

Sal will post something eventually, I just happen to be the one with lots of spare time.

America is typically very car dependent, as I am sure you are aware, so buying a car has been high on our agenda. I wanted something big, like the Ford I sold before I came here. This was vetoed by Sal, who wanted something small. Last week we thoroughly researched what cars were available in our price range and found a nice 2000 Hyundai Accent being sold by a dealer in Raleigh, which is the town next to Durham. Here is a picture of it.

The price was reasonable and it had done comparatively few miles. In North Carolina they have a thing called CarFax, which is a police record of vehicles, which said the car was not reported to have been involved in any serious accidents and had been well maintained. So yesterday we hired a car and drove down to Raleigh to look at it.

Considering the trouble I am having even crossing the road I had been anxious about driving here. It is about a 20 minute drive down the freewayto Raleigh. Both Sal and I took turns driving and I think we did surprisingly well. We didn’t turn into on-coming traffic or do anything else life threatening or stupid. We're both feeling vastly more confident about getting around now.

We found the car dealer and checked out the car. It was in amazingly good condition with no obvious problems. We took it driving and other than a slight steering wobble, which we think was due to low tyre pressure, it was fine. The dealership was in a light industrial area and had its own workshop. We reported the wobble to the dealer, a lovely and amusing woman named Missy, who put the car in to be fixed for no charge. Missy was very friendly, professional, organized and above all else not pushy at all! I am still a little suspicious. So we get the car on Tuesday.

Whilst waiting for the car to get sorted out we took the opportunity to look around Raleigh. The bit of down town we saw was depressing. Imagine Forrest Chase without any of the cafes or shops, just buildings and wide empty streets. It was 2 PM on a Saturday and we saw only a handful of people after walking around for two hours! From the cars on the street we could tell there were clearly plenty of people around, just not walking. After leaving Raleigh late in the afternoon we encountered streams of traffic just on the out-skirts of town as people were leaving something. What could it be? Perhaps a sporting event. No, sadly, it was a giant mall. So that's where everyone was. To work you have a CBD, to shop and hang-out you have a mall. Even our American friends say this gives them the s--ts.

In Raleigh we need to kill time and eventually found the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (http://www.naturalsciences.org/), which was apparently deserted from the outside but bustling with people on the inside. We were extremely impressed by the museum. The displays were excellent and very comprehensive. They even had a big display on evolution, which surprised me considering where we are.

After visiting Raleigh we spent the evening in Chapel Hill with some of Sal’s friends. Chapel Hill is another nearby town (for the record these places aren’t distinct towns any more than Midland is a town distinct from Perth). I like Chapel Hill, it is open and filled with restaurants and pubs. We had Mexican then headed to the Carolina Brewery, which is microbrewery. It was a good chance for me to get to know some of the other Duke graduate students. On the one had these guys are very intelligent, well travelled and well read, and on the other hand crazy (i.e. one was telling me he has ten guns, seriously).

Finally, we have sorted out the blog problems so here are the pictures we were promising.

This is our group of houses, ours is the one on the far left.

This is part of the Duke campus.

And this is the autumn forest that covers much of the landscape in and around Durham.

Teething trouble!

Posted by: Nic

Hi guys, we had been hoping to publish lots of pretty pictures of Durham. Unfortunately, due to a combination of crap computers and server troubles at Blogspot (that are out of our hands) it hasn't happened yet. Blogspot has apologized and the problem is allegedly rectified. Sal and I bought a computer that should arrive this time next week. Hopefully once it arrives and we get it set up things should start to happen blog-wise.

In the mean time you will have to deal with visually boring posts.

Sal is soldiering on with her PhD. I think the two days spent baby-sitting me where she couldn’t work have left her stressed out. Meanwhile, I am over the worst of my jet lag. Things here are still freaking me out. The Americans go out of their way to add laborsaving devices and optional features to all their equipment, which results in things breaking down or becoming harder to use. This is what is currently driving me nuts. American TV also sucks worse than Australian TV, which was already pretty crap. I met a Czech researcher yesterday and we spent a while giggling about how funny America is. To be fair though NC has some great aspects (like when you ask for a large coffee you get a LARGE coffee) and scenery that I am still finding beautiful.

What’s currently happening? I found a running route this morning. The hills here are killing me! It was really cold though and all my warm gear is still on the ship from Australia. I may need to go to Target to buy some cheap stuff (yes, they have Target here). Sal and I are hosting a party tonight, which will be my first chance to really meeting a lot of people. It should be interesting seeing though we have no stuff like chairs or wine glasses. We are also seriously discussing buying a house. I am sold on the idea of buying a semi-rural property. The concept of having to protect a vege garden from deer is amusing. I have never tried venison…

Once again my lovely wife has given me jobs to do that I am neglecting because I am blogging. So I need to go.

Nic

Here I am!

Posted by: Nic

After something like 29 hours in transit and nearly missing my last plane (through no fault of my own) I arrived in Raleigh-Durham airport feeling surprisingly un-jetlagged. Sal was there to pick me up. I was extremely happy to see her face again.

The flights were fine, although I got stuck next to non-English speakers from Perth to Japan and from Japan to the USA, so the conversation wasn’t riveting. My luggage didn’t get lost, although I think the word ‘fragile’ means something different in the language of baggage handlers than it does for the rest of us. My bike bag was trashed and the bike frame was scratched has a dent in the top-tube that, although not serious, I am still hacked off about! The bike still works okay though.

What are my first impressions? They are mostly positive. It is green here! To the eyes of a West Aussie it looks something like the land around Balingup or Bridgetown. Lots of big trees – several oak species, pines, liquidambers and plane trees – with vines up their trunks. The neighbourhoods are all overgrown and leafy, nothing like the concrete jungles I experienced in California or Utah. It is also not as flat as I imagined it. It is more like Sydney in that respect.

The locals? It is a bit like being in a movie. The different ethnic mix and accents keep throwing me. The people here have generally been exceedingly friendly and helpful though.

What’s odd? Negotiating traffic on the wrong side of the road. Last time I was in the States I don’t recall it being as difficult as I am finding it now. Last time I was just walking around, this time I am trying to ride. (Who wants to start taking bets on how long it will be before I get hit by a car? Something that nearly happened quite regularly in Australia.) Other odd things? The light switches go the other way, meaning up for on and down for off. The power points don’t have switches either - to turn things off you unplug them. Toilet bowls are broad and flat, so the water it just below your bum – this is way more off-putting than it sounds. Squirrels! The little buggers are everywhere, I am trying to get a picture. We have a garbage disposal unit, although I have yet to play with it. And finally, the weather is messing with me. Fahrenheit! Begin by subtracting 32 from the Fahrenheit number, divide the answer by 9, then multiply that answer by 5. Up yours Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit and the donkey you rode in on!

Sal has given me a list of jobs to do which I really should be doing instead of blogging.

I've been attempting to post some pictures but Sal's damn computer want let me!

Nic