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