The life and times of Miss Emma

Posted by: Sal

Hi everyone! We have had a couple of recent additions to our US family. The first is Grace, who has been with us for nearly 3 weeks now and has just about finished her work at the Duke Asthma and Allergy research centre. She now knows more about your airways than you ever wanted anyone to know. Those of you who know Gracie know that she's quite the cutie, but our second addition might just be the cutest newcomer to grace our household yet: an 8 week old puppy that Nic found stray in east Carolina. Nic seems to have wanted to call a dog Emma for several years, and since this lady wandered in from "down east" its only appropriate that she should be "Miss Emma" to most folks (and "ratbag", "sweetie", "bloody dog", "gorgeous", etc. to those of us in the privileged position of house training her).

The point of this blog post is really just this: to show you how darned cute she is. Enjoy!

How cute is this dog? Nic seems pretty darn happy she's wandered into our lives. She's working on her "tough" face, but the facade falls down when she sleeps.

Its cold here now, so Emma likes to sit inside Nic's jumper. Gracie manages her very well (left hand photo). And check out the little head resting on Laura's feet (right hand photo).

Thanksgiving and other fun stuff

I had an All-American Thanksgiving this year which, yes, means an “as much as you can physically eat and then dessert” Thanksgiving. My stomach might have been complaining, but my tastebuds weren’t. Yumbo.

Cold ham, hot turkey, sweet potato salad, pomegranite salad, stuffing, mashed spuds, broccoli gratin, pumpkin pie, cranberry pie, chocolate pound cake... yum

It wasn’t really all All-American, as I was staying in the mountains with two lovely Australian girls, Pia and Sylvia, at the gorgeous home of Lisa and Tom and Case and Will – a great American family who worked for Save the Children for years and years and have lived in more countries of the world than most of us will visit.

Poor Will and Case were regularly relegated to the boot of the car in order to ship the Aussie invaders around

Nic, alas, was confined to Durham, so we indulged in a weekend of girly pleasures, poring over the beautiful shops in Asheville, eating delicious food and generally having a lovely time. It was definitely nice to spend some time with established American families and able to enjoy the view from a particularly gorgeous house looking over the valley that Asheville is in.

Pretty pretty view!

Me and Sylvia having a fun holiday.

So, I haven’t been working quite so hard lately… but its been pretty nice!

XOXO

Sal

In your face people not in the boreal forest!

Posted by: Nic

Okay, I used the title of this post in an email already, but I liked it so I thought I'd use it again. This post involves boreal forests, a relatively famous scientist, cows and dead birds. Lets begin...

I went hiking a few weekends back with some of the Duke crowd. Sal wasn't able to come unfortunately. Our hiking destination was Linville Gorge, a wilderness area that was too steep to bother logging so it has basically the only old growth forest in the state. We went for three days and had a ball! The weather was beautiful but the walking was tough given that the trail was rocky and uneven went up and down 300 to 400 meters. The trail was also poorly marked which meant having to think and navigate. The picture below is the guys napping on a cliff looking into the valley.

The famous scientist I mentioned was Professor Norman Myers. I had never come across him but his wikipedia entry describes him as a British environmentalist and authority on biodiversity. He is Professor and Visiting Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and at the Said Business School, Adjunct Professor at Duke University and holds visiting professorships at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford and Berkeley. He is and has been a senior advisor to organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the White House, scientific academies in a dozen countries, influential politicians (including six prime ministers and presidents) and business leaders worldwide. He has publicized his work in hundreds of scholarly papers and popular articles and 19 books (sales of these books, over one million copies). So there you go. He was lecturing to Sal's class and some how he ended up having dinner with us, as you can see from the picture below. Despite how the picture looks he was a friendly and interesting dinner guest.

The logical thing to follow a famous scientist is cows. I have started field work again and this picture was taken at my field site near Reidsville, North Carolina. The town of Reidsville, population 14 thousand, was once a major rural center and wagon route but has since suffered local recession and decline like many small North Carolinian towns. The town is sprawling, run-down and ugly (sorry any Reidsvillians) but the land around it is beautiful. We have a field station nestled in the rolling hills west of the town. I tried to capture the landscape and fall colours but didn't get a good shot. These cows are in the field next to a patch of canola I am working on.


Finally, Thursday was Thanksgiving, the best holiday in the USA in my opinion. Every one typically spends Thanksgiving with their families, which mean university students leave town. So the previous weekend the Duke crowd had a gathering. The picture below is from the party.

I had been invited to go deer hunting over the Thanksgiving weekend so Sal opted to go to the mountains with a friend. The hunting trip was canceled at the last minute so I got to spend this long weekend by myself. Luckily our neighbors invited me over for dinner.


That's all for now. Not long before Arwen and Gracie arrive for a visit and then we are off to Chicago!

One year in!!!

Posted by: Nic

Well, today is Halloween and my one year anniversary in the USA. It was feeling very unlike it did when I arrived then oddly we went from warm days of 30C to overnight lows around freezing in a few days. We still have trouble getting over how variable the weather is here and how quickly one season changes to the next.

Mean while, we just got back from a trip to Washington DC where we met up with some other Monash Scholarship winners. Below is Sal with the other winners, left to right, Rosie, David, Danielle, Andrew and Sal. The picture was taken in the World Bank, where Danielle works as a lawyer.


Through some family connections Rosie was able to arrange a tour of the Australian Embassy. The picture below is of the main entrance hall. The Aussie diplomatic staff were really friendly, and being a Friday afternoon they didn't want to work so they chatted to us for an hour.

In Washington DC everything is really expensive so we managed to stay with wonderful a friend or ours, Doshi, a former Duke student who now works in DC. Here are Sal and Doshi sitting at a cafe in Old Alexandria, which is just across the Potomac River from DC.

Amongst the highlights of the trip were the Holocaust Museum and the USDA main offices. The Holocaust Museum was thoroughly upsetting, although not all that different from what happened to the aboriginal people in Australia - different methods, same intention. For me though seeing the USDA was the best part of the trip, don't ask why, it just was.

We were the only scientists in the group of awardees. They had no serious interest in the Smithsonian so while they did other group activities I took Sal back to the National Botanic Gardens. Here is a cute picture of Sal looking at..., something not obvious in the picture, and me giving thanks to a Coffee tree.

Truck crash 'n' bears

Posted by: Nic

Today I went to Rocky Mount (the town nearby) to collect our stuff from the truck. I snapped this picture. My only message - drive at the speed limit, leave a stopping distance and always pay attention! I hate to think what would have happened had I been speeding.


On a cheerier note, BEARS! Whilst at the field station today we came across this mother and baby bears.

Sal says to say hi!

The Shakori Hills Festival

Posted by: Nic

Howdy! With the craziness of the past three days it is nice to have something positive to blog about. Due to my sore wrist we decided it would be best not to work in the community garden. On hearing that we wouldn’t be there Kavanah offered us two tickets to the Shakori Hills Festival. So Sal and I went along and spent most of yesterday surrounded by hippies and having a good time listening to great music.

Before I get into those pictures however we should probably have some pictures of the drought. We STILL haven’t had any rain to speak of and pretty much every county in the state is under draconian water restrictions. The picture below is me next to the main dam that supplies us with water. As you can see it is about 2 meters below normal levels.



These pictures are from the Shakori Hills Festival. I realize this first picture is of a car park but it gives you some idea of what the area looks like. Getting back to the drought, the paddocks all looked distinctly Australian (i.e dry, dead and dusty).


One nice thing about the festival was the huge number of children there. This is Sal with one little friend we made.

There was a diversity of good music on all the stages, although a lot of it involved either a fiddle, double base, guitar, mandolin and/or banjo.

Blogger has just given the option of uploading videos to the site, so below will hopefully be a video of some bits of the festival. The highlight of the festival for us was the band Scythian. Their music is a bit hard to describe but you can see it in the video.

Car accident

Posted by: Nic

The old blog has been a bit quiet lately with Sal starting classes and me traipsing around the state planting canola. It is unfortunate that our first entry in a while is a bad one.

Ironically, I was coming back from having planted my very last trial driving a large F350 pickup and towing a trailer with a piece of equipment on it. I am not sure exactly what occurred but I was looking for a freeway exit, the sun was in my eyes and I ran straight into a slow moving truck. The truck driver was fine and so was his truck. I am more-or-less okay but the pickup was totally destroyed.

I guess we get lucky sometimes.

Sorry, no pictures.

Visitors

Posted by: Nic

Sal has started classes again after her summer break and I am gearing up for our canola planting season. Then add to this the steady stream of Australian visitors we’ve had and it has been a busy past few weeks.

Cam Beeck was here for a week. We a great time showing him the sites of Durham. One highlight was an meat eating competition at a Brazilian BBQ - the less said about that the better though. I also dragged him around NCSU where he helped me with our canola research plan. I wanted to show you some pictures but my old Canon digital camera isn’t compatible with my new laptop running Vista.

Mum and Graeme were also here for the past week and a half. They claim to have had a great time touring around Durham, Raleigh and other bits of NC. I took them over to the community garden and they had the chance to met the team. Here is a picture of Gray with Obie and some of the teenagers.

Gray, Anthony, Marquyse, Crystal, Dante and Obie drying chillies.

Mum, Gray and I took a drive up from Raleigh through Virginia to Washington DC. We stopped along the way at Fredricksburg, VA, to see some Civil War monuments. It was interesting to learn more about the US Civil War. The Fredricksburg area saw some heavy fighting during the war. The picture below is a monument on one hill where 3000 men died in a few days. Tragic.

Washington DC was very interesting. We drove up on the Saturday and spent some time just sight-seeing around the capital - the Capitol building, Smithsonian, White House and Washington Monument. The next day we spent about seven hours at Museums. I managed to pack in the National Air and Space Museum, the National History Museum and also the National Botanic Gardens.

The US Capitol Building.

Dog Days of Summer

We are now in the throes of the dog days of summer, a northern hemispheric name that links the time when Sirius (the "dog" star) rises at dawn with the most stinky, humid and hot weather imaginable (also known in Scandinavia as the "rotting days", for obvious reasons).

The dog days have been around since Roman times and are described as a period "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies" - Brady’s Clavis Calendarium

We've taken a slightly less hystrionic and more literal interpretation of the phrase - we've been flirting with the idea of adopting a dog. Our neighbour Lara picked a lost dog up in the mountains and brought her home. We've established that she is not fatally ill with heartworm (good), nor microchipped (and therefore untraceable to a home). Lara is firstly seeing if someone with more money and room can take the dog in, but we're the fallback option if that's not possible. We're definitely enjoying taking her walking (despite the heat), and she's very very friendly, if not so well trained...

Lara and "Sylva", the dog

In other news, Nic and I are happy to have reached a more elevated position... when we sleep! Nic spent today building a bed frame for us, so for the first time in over a year I'm sleeping off the floor!

I'm super duper impressed by husband's efforts here - he was sawing and screwing and bolting and doing all sorts of manly stuff all day (and looking very nice in a fancy carpenter's belt while he did it too!) . There Nic, I said it. I'm super, duper, impressed.

The many stages of building a bed... cutting, laying it out on the lawn, testing the assembled frame in the bedroom, piling the mattress on top and feeling proud of yourself!

Finally, I cleaned and roasted the seeds from the sunflowers we had planted earlier in the summer today. They're quite fun to eat because you need to shell them... like pistachios.

A Little Visit to the Big Apple

Posted By: Sal and Nic (but Nic is only semi-conscious)

We have just been to New York. The city that doesn’t sleep. We didn't either.

We were only there for 3 days and don’t feel like we’ve seen much of it. When you have managed to see/do:

• The United Nations
• The Statue of Liberty (ok, from the shore, not the island)
• The wonderful Duke Ellington Orchestra playing sweet swinging jazz at the famous Blue Note Bar
• The even more wonderful band that was playing at the Zinc Bar (a little underground gem that the barman at the Blue Note put us onto)
• Chelsea (replete with notorious “Chelsea Boys” aka disgustingly cute gay couples, and the "Cupcake" teashop for you Sex and the City watchers)
• The Natural History Museum
• Classic standup comedy at the also famous Comic Strip club (where Seinfeld is filmed doing standup at the start of each episode)
  
• Turkish food at an outstanding restaurant (greeted by the head waiter with: “Australians? We kicked your ass in Gallipolli”)
• The East Village
• 5^th Ave and the Flatiron Building and the Empire State Building
• The Museum of Sex (MoSex)
• Central Park

and you still don’t feel like you’ve seen much of it, you know you’re in a very big, diverse and fundamentally interesting place. Now, here’s a bunch of photos…

The rather well known UN Building, NY.
We searched long and hard for the Aussie flag out the front, to no avail.

A rather inspirational set of carvings opposite the UN building

Architectural gorgeousness (and bizarreness) abounded

And we saw the icons - the Flatiron building (left) with its strangely two-dimensional appearance, and the big-old Empire State building (right), with obligatory hoardes of crowds. It is big. Really quite big.

Experienced (but hot and tired) subway catcher waits for the train to Penn Station

Nic appeared to revel in the architectural interest of the East Village

And we were both pretty amazed by the sunbathers in Central Park

Of course we were aiming to spend a lot of quality time with Mr. Kim George, but he had other distractions of a Canadian nature to be dealing with... a rather lovely gal by name of Clare. Luckily she was cool so we all got to hang together.

And now we're home... and term starts again for Sal really soon (and she's not really that excited at the prospect of taking classes again). And Nic has food poisoning, which we can either attribute to a rather dodgy sandwich on 5th Avenue, or to his failure to wash his hands scrupulously after exiting the subway. Actually, I think we were all guilty of this failure of basic hygiene, but it was Nic who was using his hands most voraciously for eating later. Hopefully he'll be back on his feet soon!

As usual, we'd love to hear from all and any of you out there. Stay cool. Durham is like a Turkish Bath at the moment, so we won't be. Staying cool, that is.

Sal and Nic

The Mountains

Posted by: Nic


You told us you wanted badly filmed home movies shot mainly inside a car, so that's what we've got for you here. It is a movie of our recent holiday to the mountains.

The 4th of July

Posted by: Nic and Sal

Hiiiii! Sal doesn't have any more conferences to go to until December, and is quite happy about it. We could show you pictures of Maine but despite taking the camera she only took 3 photos..., of buildings..., out of focus. She had a lovely and productive time though and is now planning conversations with crazy people in Israel.

In other news, this Wednesday was July 4th, ID4, Independence Day. So we went to a BBQ at our friend Meg's house. We cooked up sausages and lit fireworks. You can see a movie of our fireworks shenanigans here. Below is a picture of Sal and our friends.

After the BBQ we walked into down-town Durham and watched the City of Durham fireworks display. It had a down home and local feel. There was even a minor accident, as you will see in our video.

On the work front, Sal is trying to plan a paper and a literature review, trying being the operative word. Nic has hired two college students to do his work for him, and here they are.

This is all you get!

Posted by: Nic

We wrote a long post the other day only to lose it all when the computer froze. So instead this is all you get - we're still alive, happy, working hard and trying to get a home loan.



Oh yeah, and happy 4th of July!

Oz madness, well, kinda.

Posted by: Nic

It has been a busy week for Sal. She is trying to get ready to attend a Gordon Research Conference on Non-Linear Science, in Maine, whilst also spending every morning at the community garden volunteering at the Seedlings Kids Summer Camp.

I am less busy, having just hired workers to do all my work for me..., I mean help me with my work.

Unfortunately we don't have pictures of any of this, so instead here are some pictures of Trav and Jac Hatch (the Aussies), who visited us last week.

This is Trav and Jac at our place shortly after they arrived. Jac was still a bit jet-lagged.

We took them out to see the sites of Durham. The highlight was undoubtedly the dodgy Mexican joint down the road.

And in further community garden news I am am helping to build a large gate with our new friend Snooky, the carpenter.

No time for play

Posted by: Nic

It's been no time for frivolity. For starters, it’s canola harvest season, so I’ve been driving up and down to the coast a lot, and of course now that I’m project leader I’ve been busy with project management.

Firstly though, before stuff got nuts we went for a walk in the forest with friends. Now that the weather is more like Brisbane than Tassie it was a hot and sticky walk. It was nice though, as you can see.

The other interesting happening right now is that the fireflies are out! Chris Jones tells me that you do get fireflies in the rain forests of Qld, NSW and Vic. I was unaware of that, but I did know you don't get then in WA, so Sal and I think they are really cool. I tried to take a long exposure picture of them in our garden but they did't show up. So instead I had to take this picture from wikipedia.

Back to the canola harvest, the farm harvested their field of canola and were really happy with the result. I don't know where the snakes are going to live now though.

Unfortunately, we had small canola plots so we had to harvest them by hand using a mower, which you can see in the picture. I am so glad that work is over. Next year I am getting a small plot combine.

Finally, the day we harvested a pair of huge helicopters kept flying past. I managed to get a picture of them below.

South of the Border...

Posted by Sal

Its a tough life when the six monthly meeting of the scientific organisation that is most relevant to your own work is held in Mexico. Even harder when the specific venue is Acapulco.

Now admittedly going to Mexico and seeing only Acapulco is like going to Queensland and only seeing the Gold Coast (although marginally better than going to Cancun in that at least Acapulco is a real town); but for monolingual me it was a good opportunity to do "Mexico Lite" and feel comfortable and safe while getting a small introductions to the fun that awaits in the US's nearest neighbour.

Oh, and the conference was good too.

View from the hotel room - yep, it was hard.

We went to see the cliff divers at Quebrada - they launch themselves off the top of this cliff into an 11 foot channel, timing the dive so that they land just as a wave rolls in... terrifying and amazing. The sunset was pretty good too.

Finally, I took a day off from the conference and visited the 'real Mexico' - only a short bus ride from Acapulco's tourist strip. Careening bus rides around sheer cliffs, goats on the road, dust, eroding edges of the strip... ahhhhhhh. It was reassuring to know that I was back in a developing country and not in the strangely artificial world of Acapulco (*As an aside, Ciaran asked me what I thought of Acapulco while we pondered the week's experiences over beer on a Friday night... my unthinking response was: "a breast implant" - all about artifice catering to overblown fantasies). Anyway...

My destination was Pie de la Cuesta a lovely area with an unspoilt (but dangerously rippy) coast, and a beautiful huge estuary/lagoon full of birdlife and surrounded by mangroves. I spent a very lazy 5 hours on a boat travelling around the lagoon and slowing pace down to measuring time in "Mexican Minutes"... beautiful. Yep, it was just as tranquil as it looks.


Home safe and sound now and looking forward to the next conference - up in Maine in about a month, with a reasonable chance of actually learning and doing something; although sadly fewer opportunities for beach side discos.

Adios amigos... (as you can see, my Spanish has greatly benefited from the experience)

Sal