Kerry in Epping, part 2

So the wedding we went to was for Anne - she's in Ben's lab and just recently defended her PhD, but is still working in the lab. We spent most of Saturday trying to figure out how to look nice. We don't have a lot of practice at it, and we left all our nice clothes in the US so we didn't even have that to help us out. Kerry had it easy - Ben had shared her dress situatuion with Maria (his lab manager) and they arranged for me to go play dress-up at Maria's Saturday morning. With Maria's wardrobe and Ben and Alex' (Maria's son) opinions, I was set in no time. Then it got harder - we had to go tackle Macquarie Centre for pants, a shirt, and a tie for Ben and shoes for Kerry. In the end, I think we both managed to look halfway decent.

The wedding was gorgeous. The ceremony was outside by a little gazebo in this pretty wooded setting.

But more importantly, the food was fabulous! It was a buffet dinner, with salmon and beef fillets and ravioli and lasagna and roasted veggies and paella... and other stuff. And dessert was just as crazy - tiramisou, lemon tart, berry stuff, chocolate stuff.
The lab members - fat and happy. Maria (who I borrowed the dress from) is on the far right.

And instead of a wedding cake, they had these great cupcakes (Anne and Aaron both study spiders):

Kerry in Epping!

Another long blogging hiatus - must mean that Ben was around to distract me!!

And indeed that's exactly what happened. Last weekend I headed back to Sydney - partly for a friend's wedding and partly for a dentist appointment (but we won't talk about that).

So I flew out of Dubbo Thursday night - left work 45 min before the flight, biked to a friend's house, changed clothes, she drove me to the airport... and I still got there in plenty of time. Gotta love small airports. There was no wait at the check-in counter, and they didn't even have a security station. And the train ride from the Sydney airport to Epping took about as long as the flight (1 hr).

Friday we hung out at the beach. It was a perfect day for it - Ben and I even played in the water a bit (though it was still a little cold).

Meanwhile, Ani the Water-baby (for anyone who hasn't witnessed her hatred of swimming, I am being totally sarcastic) went and sat on the beach towels. Maybe she was playing life-guard? Maybe she was working on her tan? Whatever she was doing, she clearly wasn't interested in the water. Later she went and laid right where most people were walking along the beach and just watched the people and dogs as they went by.

Then the craziest thing happened late in the afternoon - all of these man-of-wars started washing up on the beach. One second there weren't any, then the next second there was a whole string of them. They looked really cool, and their sting was pretty mild (yes, we do know from experience).

Chip Sandwiches

Today I had my first chip sandwich, and this is definitely one of those foods that makes you realize why Aussies are now leading the world in obesity. So first you buy some chips (fries) from a chip shop. They're generally wrapped in a few big sheets of paper to help soak up all the grease. Then you take generic white bread and spread butter on both pieces. Add a good layer of chips - you can also add chicken salt (which is huge, here) or tomato sauce (ketchup) to your liking. Place the other piece of bread on top, and eat! So for anyone out there seeking to optimize your intake of carbs, fat, and salt – I suggest you try this. [Ironically, I was introduced to this food phenomenon by three rather skinny people.]

Note: This is a stolen picture. I didn't have my camera with me when I was introduced to chip sandwiches, and I just don't have it in me to recreate the experience merely for the photo.

Farmer’s market

Dubbo has one of the best farmer’s markets that I’ve seen. It happens the 1st and 3rd Saturday of every month, and in addition to the normal assortment of fruit and veggies, the market also attracts local olive groves, local wineries, a bread guy who has record lines and sells out every week, a free-range pork guy, mustard makers – everything!

This week I bought a sweet potato the size of a small house, some sugar pears, homemade banana bread with passionfruit icing, and lime cordial made by a lime grove up the road, which happens to be the largest in all of Oz. I’m really excited about the cordial, because my mouth always seems to be dry, no matter how much water I drink. So you just add a tiny bit of this to your water and get a refreshing citrus burst! Brilliant!

Fruit of the day: Sugar/Paradise/Seckel Pears

I’ve never seen as many types of pears as I have here. So here’s another one: baby Sugar Pears. They are super small – I feel kinda like Tom Hanks in “Big” when he eats the mini-corns. But they’re quite good. Some of the more ripe pears almost have a bit of almond flavour to them.

Bike tyres

So there’s this plant (vegetation, not factory) out here that has decided it would be a really good idea to produce these awful, spiny-things. I’m not even sure what they are, structurally, but they are evil. They get stuck in your feet and make you bleed and make your dog limp and hold her paw out and look up at you so pathetically. And they seem to have an exceptional affinity for bike tyres.

One of the first things Tamara told me was to go get this stuff called Slime and put it in my tyres. I kept thinking “OK – someday I’ll leave work early and get to the bike store before it closes since nothing stays open late, here,” but I never made it. And for a month, I was just fine. Then I got a spine. I pulled it out right away and thought it would be fine since I have big, fat hybrid tyres and not little 10-speed tyres. But the next morning – sure enough – flat tyre. So I pulled out my bike-repair kit and changed the inner tube and still got to work on time… and Tamara decided to buy some Slime for me. Then on the way home, I got another spine! Before I even had a chance to use the Slime! So after walking the rest of the way home with a flat, the first thing I did after dinner was Slime my tyres.

This is the coolest stuff – you squeeze ½ a bottle into each tyre, spin it around, and it acts as a clotting agent. So I didn’t even have to patch the 2 inner tubes that had been punctured – this stuff just plugged them right up! And since then, I’ve gotten at least a half-dozen more spines, and when you pull the spine out, a little green dot appears and plugs up the hole – it’s the best!

House of the week

OK, hopefully I’ll be staying at this house longer than a week! I knew the other housing situations were temporary, but this one should be a little more long-term. I’ve moved in with one of the keepers who just bought a house and wanted a flat-mate. The room is a little small, but that’s fine for a few months. And I’m sleeping in a bunk bed. I never would have guessed that at 30 I would be sleeping in a bunk bed on a semi-permanent basis, but hey, as long as I’m horizontal, I’m fine with that.

And the best thing is that she has air conditioning. I have a fairly high heat threshold and have never been a big A/C person, but in this kind of heat, it’s been brilliant.


So in addition to Kristie (the human), I share the house with 2 birds, a whole gang of stick insects, and occasionally a dog. The birds are great – Roy (yellow) loves head scratches and Lily (grey) gives kisses. Then there’s 2 more wild-ish birds out back – one is named Spew (because he kinda looks like that) and the other is currently nameless.

Stick insects

The Power of Nature

We've had one aunt write to ask if we were surviving the heat, one aunt write to check if the floods were causing any damage, and one aunt write to see if we were safe from the fires. First, let me just say how much it means to know we're still in your thoughts, even though we've disappeared to the bottom of the earth! Second, we are both doing fine in our respective places. Australia has had a rough go of it lately, but right now New South Wales is OK.

Queensland (to the north) has been suffering through cyclone season. [The last one was named Ellie - you're famous, grandma!!] From what I can tell, it's not a particularly unusual summer for QLD - they always get storms and flooding. But it's still hard on everyone, I'm sure.

Victoria (to the south) is just the opposite, and is setting records left and right (and not necessarily records you'd want to be setting). Last month they had an unprecendented heatwave, with some bush towns hitting 125F. Then the heat and dryness (with the help of some lunatic arsonists) transformed into the worst bush-fires Australia has ever seen. They are anticipating that the death toll will rise to at least 200 - more than triple the worst year before this. And while the fires aren't in Dubbo now, large clouds of smoke have covered the town in a haze for a few days. There has been an impressive mobilization of aid efforts in town, too: truck drivers volunteering to run supplies down to Victoria, fund-raisers all over, and every store in town (jewlers, grocery stores, etc.) designating times when all of their profits will go to fire victims.
This is actually a photo from 2006, but gives you an idea of the smoke cloud generated by the fires.

So for right now, New South Wales is sitting in the middle of these two devastated areas, but is doing fine. However, bushfire season isn't over, yet, and there has been a lot of talk about it in town (probably more of a threat for Dubbo than Sydney). Let's hope that the rain up north decides to make its way south... and fast.

A fellow US-Oz transplant blogger (whose blog I quite enjoy) has provided a visual aid appropriate for this entry.

Adventures around Dubbo

So the other nice thing about having Ben here is having a car to do some exploring a little further a field. Since I was house-sitting for Tamara, we just did day trips, but we got to see a little more of the area around Dubbo.

Friday, in search of a bit of respite from the heat after a long walk with Ani, we left her at home to rest and we headed south to Wellington Caves… since caves are cool. [They’re cool in both senses of the word, but we went there for the temperature-cool, not the hip-cool.] It was a pretty cave, but not long enough or deep enough for any of us on the tour. We all would have been happy to stay down there another few hours.


They also had a small aviary there, and even though they were in the shade, most of the birds looked like they wanted to go crawl into a freezer for a few hours. I don’t know if you can tell how puffed this galah is, but he’s not comfy.

But one cockatoo was quite social and curious, and decided Ben (or rather Ben’s hat) was his new best friend.


Saturday we went for a bit of a drive. We didn’t have a map or the GPS, so we just drove and turned where we felt like turning – down dirt roads, past farms, over cattle grates, through dry river beds – until we hit a cattle gate that was closed. So then we went home.



And Sunday we went to see the zoo, since I’d only seen parts and Ben hadn’t seen much at all. The circuit is ~6km, and you can drive, bike, or walk. So we grabbed 2 yellow bikes – the nice old fashioned ones that don’t have gears and you pedal backwards to brake – and headed out to see the zoo.

Keeper feeding the monkeys on one of the several monkey islands.

Ben with an elephant (… you’re not the only one, Anna!)

Hot koala

We ran in to the new zoo vet and her husband doing the exact same thing! And since we’re all new Dubb-ites (don’t know if that’s really the term) we decided to test out one of the local restaurants with them later that night. We went to Sticks and Stones – a wood-fired pizza place – and had some great pasta and pizza. Most of the evening was spent comparing notes about bringing our beloved pets over to Oz, and how they were coping with the heat.

Fruit of the day: Peaches and nectarines

Just outside of town, there’s a wonderful stone fruit orchard (Sunnyside Farms) that has great fruit and great prices. We got ~20 peaches and 20 nectarines for $16. So we have plenty – if you want any nice ripe fruit, just let us know! Although, just like that crate of mangoes we got, they seem to be disappearing pretty quickly.

Ben and Ani in Dubbo!

Sorry for the lack of new postings lately – it’s been a bit busy lately. There was Ben’s visit, revising/submitting a lynx chapter, training a student in the lab, moving again, getting Tamara to answer all the questions I realized I had after 2 weeks alone in the lab – all in the past week. So we’ll get to all these things, but we’ll start with the most important, first: Ben!!

Four weeks and two days (no, I’m not counting) after he left me here in Dubbo, Ben finally had a chance to get back out for a visit. He had gotten his first paper to a stage his advisor was comfortable with, so Dr. Phil said “Why don’t you go finish writing out in Dubbo.” So Ben grabbed Ani, hopped in the car, and drove to me! He arrived last Wednesday night and left Monday morning, so we had a good long visit together.

The first day he came out to the zoo with me, and he pretended to write while I pretended to work, but the rest of the time we just played. And tried to stay cool. We did a lot of pinkie-hand-holding – it was just too hot to have any more of our bodies touching. And the killer part was that Tamara’s place doesn’t have A/C. So we did a lot of walks to the river with Ani so we could at least get wet, if not quite cool.


We ate late dinners out on the back patio, enjoying that time of day when it starts to get cooler and the sky gets pretty and time slows down a little.

And we shared the house with 2 cats, so that kept Ani a little distracted from the heat. Mr. Underwear couldn’t get over the fact that Ani and the cats were not at each other’s throats the whole time. Merrick was not thrilled about having Ani there, but Scrappy had no qualms about it.