Summer 2009

2009 has been a wet year in Durham, NC. We have enjoyed spectacular thunderstorms and torrential downpours. A bit of a contrast to the 2 year drought that only cleared up in the hurricane season last year!

The good things about all the wetness: the veggie garden is growing prolifically, there have been fireflies in amazing abundance, frogs in tremendous quantities, more snakes and turtles around than we've ever seen before...the bad bit is that the heat arrived about 2 days ago, and 65% humidity and 38 degree weather is... as bad as we remember from other years.

Zinnia, chard, blueberries... before the birds found them

Other than the veggies, we've been enjoying a gorgeous flower bed filled with a "hummingbird" mix of flowers. Haven't seen any hummingbirds yet, but the mini zinnias have been lovely. Silver beet is growing like stink, and we had a huge yield of blueberries - most of which, unfortunately, went to feeding the local birds. We might need a net next year.

The front yard and what we hope will one day be our "meadow".

You'd never know that behind that grassy bank lurks a large veggie garden! There are a few experiments going on out the front of our place - Nic got sick of cutting the grass there so we're trying to follow the adage: "don't plant a lawn, plant a meadow". Our meadow has been started with mint, bee balm, veronicas, sun flowers, lambs ears and probably heaps of other stuff that I don't remember. There's still a lot of lawn in there though...

Nic fixes up the side of the retaining wall, while Emma watches with great interest.

Nic of course is still the engine behind most of the heavy moving. Action shots!

How to be a sweet potato farmer: land, check! sweet potato plants, check! tractor o'Mexicans, check!

Of course, although Nic works hard most of the time, sometimes its just easier to hire a group of farm labourers to do your work for you...
Ok, I'm joking. Here Nic was visiting a sweet potato farmer, and its the farmer's team of workers. They're planting sweet potatoes, by hand, from the back of the tractor. If Nic's research succeeds then we might be able to plant sweet potatoes like regular spuds, (mechanically), greatly reducing costs. But also, depriving these sorts of guys farm labour gigs. "How do you grow sweet potatoes" people ask Nic all the time. "You get a tractor and a bunch of Mexicans..." he replies, in all sincerity.

I think I mentioned that this has been a wildly fecund summer? Things reached a new height of reproductive madness a couple of days ago when we found that a toad had spawned in the dog's water dish. I thought that was exciting enough, but when I told Nic you could see a light bulb go off above his head, and he raced around the side of the house. To where the wheelbarrow had been catching the water that floods out of an undersized gutter...

Mosquito problem? What mosquito problem?

Sure enough, the brimful barrow was home to hundreds of newly hatched tadpoles! Nic's over the moon and having a ball experimenting with different sorts of food. Dog food might be winning so far.

Taddies! I'm excited because I recently heard the phrase: "like trying to push a wheelbarrow full of frogs" (an alternative to "like herding cats")... and now we will be the proud owners of our own wheelbarrow full of frogs! (ok, toads)

An honorable mention from our "only in America" series... we got quite excited the other day when we realized that a cafe in walking distance, Fosters, sells beer! We've been a bit down about the lack of a "local". So we headed on down a few Friday's ago, with the dog. Fosters is this great cafe full of delicious food and very popular. But it has this one perculiarity: it is situated on a highway and has a large lawn area out the front. This lawn area is filled with tables and deck chairs... all of which also face the highway. I'm reasonably sure that anywhere else in the world, a large fence or hedge or garden would have been put up, and we'd all face away from the highway. Not here, folks. Here you enjoy your drinks face to face with the terrifying road users of Durham County...

The bizarre "highway" view behind me at Fosters. Luckily it was very quiet that evening!

Finally, one of the best things about the ginormous garden is when you get to harvest stuff. We just dug up some 10-20 kg of spuds. And they look gooooooooooooooooooood...

Nic digs a row of spudsThe spud harvest

It's Spring!

Posted by: Nic

As many of y'all know, Sal is in Australia (for both happy and sad, family and friend reasons). So it is up to me to fill people in on what's been happening. It was a snowier winter this time round compared to our previous two winters here. You can see the results. Snow in Durham is interesting for 24 hours but because it is usually only 5 cm deep it turns to mud quickly. The dog then tracks dirt into the house. This is what it looks like for the first 24 hours.


A lot of snow can be fun, though. I went up to Canada for a few days to visit Chris before he went home to Perth after being in Vancouver at the Uni of BC. We had a blast.


Winter is over in North Carolina now and spring is on its way in. All the trees are putting on new leaves and the flowers are starting to come out.



It is finally warm enough to get out and do yard work. A few weekends ago we helped a friend of ours from the SEEDS garden erect a yard for her new puppy. Sal was recovering from a cold so I put up the fence whilst she entertained our friends partners baby.


We've finally got into our garden as well. We decided to buy a huge load of compost to build up our garden beds. There aren't any pictures of the gardens yet, but as a substitute here are some pictures of us in the front garden with our friend Pia.

And in regards to gardens, I have been roped in to helping set up a community garden at a local church. This afternoon some of the other community garden members and I pegged out the new garden beds.

Spring is of course fire-lighting weather..., so our front door neighbor, Todd, and I lit a fire last night. Below is picture of Todd's wife, Kristin, showing disapproval.

And finally, my new job is going well. We are gearing up for the sweetpotato planting season, as you can see.

In like a lion, out like a lamb

This is apparently a well known expression to describe the month of March in the USA. We'd never heard of it before, but the 3 days of snow at the beginning of the month have given way to gorgeous warm weather.

Life here is pretty mellow at the moment (although Nic and I are both working hard). To illustrate, here is a day in the life of Sal, Monday, March... um 23rd I think.

7am - stab finger wildly at mobile phone until awful noise stops. Dog licks face several times, tongue goes up nose. Dogbreath is a marvellous stimulant to get out of bed.

7:45 am - coffee has worked. Breakfast is digesting. Several windproof layers later, I am on my bike.

8:15 - arrive at the office. Kim wanders in pushing her bike about 3 minutes later. She's locked her keys in her house and has some organizing to do to get a spare set.

8:45 - Focus grasshopper! Working working...

10:00 am - Gaby comes in. We talk some work, some "what happened on the weekend". He seems mildly impressed when I say that I broke up a dog fight and shooed a dodgy guy off the property having interrupted him blatantly casing our house. Something a bit obvious about standing on the front doorstep, staring through the window into the computer room, and not ringing the doorbell for 5 minutes. "Can I help you?" I shouted through the front door. "Can I mow your lawn?" he yelled back. "No!" I said. I now sort of wish I'd said: "what are you going to cut it with, your teeth?" since he had no mower to speak of. Anyway, I called the police and they were down in a few minutes, which was good.

1 pm - Stefan comes by so we can organize going to "Tribe-O" in October. Stefan's going to take loads of classes in fire twirling and juggling and that sort of thing, and I'm going to bellydance for 3 days. Don't know if we'll get Nic to come up and hang with the hippies. Apparently there is a posse that Stefan's friend Kate has organized. Fun.

1:30 pm - coffee is good in the afternoon.

4:30 pm - where did the time go? Shoot, I must have been working productively for the past 3 hours, because I have no idea what happened between coffee and now.

5:30pm - still going strong, but must get home to walk Emma.

5:45 - Emma is jumping about 6 feet in the air when I get home, bringing manky old socks to me for me to throw for her. Happily it appears that scungy mower guy has not broken into our house to steal the computer he saw in the window. Yay.

5:50 - WALKIES! We wander past Katherine's place round the corner where Katherine and her tenant Adam are putting in a "micro farm" to sell locally grown veggies to the neighbourhood. The tiller belt has broken, but Adam is upbeat. Everyone cuddles Emma. We wander down Prince Street and see the gorgeous Bradford Pear trees in full blossom, big and white and blossomy. Just gorgeous. Then we walk past the baseball diamond and check out the 6-7 year olds training for little league. So cute! But I'm paranoid about hanging around there ever since someone (Nic's Mum?) told us a story about the police shooing on adults who were watching kids play in parks in NYC in case of pedarests... and I don't want anyone thinking I'm about to turn into a child snatcher. I walk Emma into the woods and let her off the leash so she can bolt around and work out some energy, and then we walk home down Wa Wa Ave, seeing the bizarre sight of the local grumpy dog having been translocated from under a parked car, to standing happily on the garage roof. He looked seriously temped to jump off to bark at Emma, and I didn't think his hips had a hope of taking that, so we rushed on down the street, stopping to talk dogs and cats and vets with a local lady, and finally getting home at 6:30.

7:30 - we've eaten dinner, and I'm blogging... and I have to go get Nic from the airport!

Its about 16 degrees, sunny and not windy.... and beautiful. The lamb is definitely here!

Fun in the sun continues...

Happy 2009 everyone!

Christmas has come and gone and the weather is getting warmer and more summery with every day here in Perth. It's divine weather for spending the morning at the beach, the middle of the day doing something like a siesta (aka sitting at a cafe with friends and seeing how many hours lunch can possibly last for), afternoons by the river and evenings out and about. Something like the antithesis of the weather I remember from previous Januarys in the USA. Since I spent most of those Januarys feeling jealous and miserable about how much fun my Aussie friends must have been having, here are some photos to spread that same feeling to you... and to let you know what we have been up to.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... Thompson family tradition takes us to Cottesloe Beach first thing on Christmas morning. It was a bit cool and breezy this Christmas though...


... which is why Gracie and I felt specially tough for having gone for a swim. The water was surprisingly warm, considering.

We had a bit of a mad rush on Christmas Day. After the beach we were due up in the hills at Nic's Dad's place for 11... then at Granny George's place at 12... then down at Aunty Peta's at 3... by the end of the day we were exhausted, spoiled rotten, and marvelling anew at how much family Nic actually has.

Christmas lunch at Granny George's, by the pool. The outside table had the "youngsters" - Nic's cousins, their other halves (I guess that includes me), and in this case, Gracie and Pete (my brother and sister). Oh, and Uncle Wayne, who is young at heart : )

Although I might not have been working as hard on my PhD here as I should be (ahem, that is, I have barely been working on it at all... ) we have been doing some good outdoorsy projects. Nic built a new veggie box for Mum and Dad's courtyard and we have been building new garden beds and gravelling the whole area. Its looking pretty good now - we just need to finish the reticulation (that's irrigation, yankees) and to plant.

Nic looks artistically tough, I lay out black plastic, the finished product.

We also did some boomerang throwing up at Nic's Dad's place. The George boys are pretty good at it. As for me, I throw like a girl. The boomerang did come back though, which was a first for me.

Sal Thompson, not likely to be catching a meal with the boomerang any time soon.

New Year's Eve we spent in the sand dunes about 1 hour north of Perth. Well, it used to be 1 hour north, but the city has grown so much that its now about 10 minutes north of Perth. Its quite eerie - you literally drive by the "last house" on the northern border of the city and then its just dunes and scrub (beautiful), and surveyors pegs... suggesting that the last house will not be the last for long. Depressing.

Everyone on the beach just after sunset - pretty time of day.

Camping at "the bowl" - a sheltered spot behind the dunes, just back from the beach. It looks like a movie set to me, with all those bright lights.

Fire twirling later in the evening... Nic also set off some "perfectly legitimate incendiary devices" (aka home-made fireworks), but I don't have any decent photos.

Those who've been paying careful attention might recall that ostensibly we are here for a wedding of one of Nic's best mates. Well, the "bucks party" (stag night) happened yesterday and was a bit on the non-traditional side - a full day at Rottnest (an island off the coast of Perth) and some dinner that night. Not many naked ladies, but lots of half dressed men... swimming, that is. Rotto is beautiful, I was seriously irked that this was a boys only event : (

Swimming at "The Basin", Lancer (the buck) gets ceremonially buried in the sand, the boys hit the pub, more boys in the water, Lancer with an attractive seaweed headdress...

Finally, Nic has some seriously talented cousins, and we enjoyed seeing them perform at "Clancy's Fish Pub" the other night. Emma is now a movie director, but sings the blues with the best of them, while Ben (the curly haired bloke in the background) belts out the Bass for the Waifs when he's at work. Yes, I am proud to be associated with these two. They're awse. Press play, go on...

Oh, it must be love...

Two more weeks of Aussie goodness, then back to Carolina. Back to work. Here's hoping for some motivation!