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.