Aussie word of the day: mozzies (mosquitoes)
G’day, Mates! Hope you’re all well. Sorry we’ve been out of touch for so long. Guess we just didn’t have the heart to write for awhile following the election. By the time we’d recovered sufficiently from that, Jamie was consumed with writing (and Laura with editing) a spur-of-the-moment grant proposal. In any case, we HAVE been thinking about all of you and hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving here was very low-key. It was a school day for the girls and a workday for Jamie, so we squeezed in dinner in the evening. We managed to track down an organic turkey breast, but some of the other traditional favorites fell by the wayside – just can’t get cranberry sauce shaped like a can or Libby’s pumpkin puree Down Under (their loss)!
Things are really starting to wind down here in preparation for Christmas. The girls have just one more week of school for the year. The new school year starts in late January. We’re not certain yet, but it looks like Sara (May) will be moving to grade 4 (in a grade 4/5 composite class), and Joanna will be moving to grade 1 (in a grade 1/2 composite class). Sara (May) continues to enjoy school tremendously and spends the weekends longing for Monday to come. Joanna’s really coming around at school. This week, she’s attempting five full days for the first time. Her new teacher recently began insisting that Prep students play with other Prep students at recess, and that’s helped her a lot. (Before that, Joanna’d been gravitating to Sara (May) and her friends for security and usually ended up making a nuisance of herself.) Now, she has many friends in her own class. In fact, she’d like to invite at least ten to her birthday party – yikes!
Jamie’s work continues to go well. In early February, he’ll be traveling with others in his lab to a conference in Canberra to talk up his blue beam. The lab continues to take its daily coffee break promptly at 10:30 -- now outside at an on-campus café, rather than a few blocks away at a dingy little shop. One of his lab mates just received a Fulbright post-doc (the only one awarded to an Australian) to work in Bill Phillips’ lab. [For you non-Huntingdon folks, Bill Phillips is a Juniata College alumnus who won the Nobel Prize in physics in the late 1990s.] Jamie is now learning at least as much about cricket as he is about optics, since the season is in full swing. The tests (games) are on all day on the lab computer, with something “exciting” happening every few hours. Maybe. He even made it out to a practice wicket for a few practice swings, giving all a good chuckle.
Laura’s having a terrific time working with Sara (May)’s class for “maths” a couple days a week. She’s developed quite a following among the weaker students, who race over to her when she arrives and beg to get to work with her. (Sara (May), meanwhile, does her best to ignore her.) When not at the primary school, Laura’s been devoting the bulk of her time to having, recovering from, and seeking treatment for migraines. Ugh! She’s not only been seeing the naturopath for massage, herbal preparations, vitamin and mineral supplements, acupressure, and acupuncture, but she’s also begun getting lymph drainage therapy locally and is seeing an osteopath for back and neck adjustments. Surely SOMETHING will start helping someday. In the meantime, we’re trying to remain positive, but it is rather challenging for all of us. Our support network here is getting stronger, so that helps a bit. We remain glad that we didn’t let these #*!^@% migraines stand in our way of coming here.
We’ve had a couple of really nice daytrips since we last wrote – one to Sovereign Hill and the other to Yarra Ranges National Park. Sovereign Hill, in Ballarat, is basically a Victorian gold-rush-era (1850s) equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. It’s full of interactive attractions – nine-pin bowling with wooden pins, “lolly” (candy)-making demonstrations with free samples, gold-panning in a simulated stream, underground mine touring, etc. Yarra Ranges National Park contains the headwaters of the Yarra River, which flows through Melbourne and is the source of much of the city’s water. Highlights of the park included a climb up a fire tower on the summit of Mt. Donna Buang; a bushwalk among snow gum (gum = eucalypt) trees, massive old-growth mountain ash trees (a kind of eucalypt, nothing like our mountain ash trees), and myrtle beeches (yes, really); a drive past the toboggan run (to which people drive an hour and a half from Melbourne “to go to the snow,” in July and August); and a walk along a 300m-long raised metal walkway through a temperate rainforest full of gigantic tree ferns. (See photo at Pictures)
We’re still having a hard time convincing ourselves that Christmas is just around the corner. Sure, there’s a lot of cheesy red and green stuff in the shops, and we ran into Santa on the tram yesterday, but without the familiar natural seasonal cues, it just feels like a city-wide Christmas in July sale. Maybe after a few years, we’d learn to associate cricket-playing with Christmas, but we’re not quite there yet. Nor have we quite grasped the concept of mozzie repellent as a holiday accessory (for those festive barbeques at which people sing carols while holding lighted candles, waiting in vain for the sun to go down). Just in case you were wondering, Aussies DO sing all those wintry carols (even “Winter Wonderland”), decorate with fake snow, etc. They even interject all the same silly stuff into “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that American kids do – with the exception that Rudolph goes down in history “like a dinosaur,” instead of “like George Washington.” (We found it particularly interesting that his nose even glows “like a light bulb” here, since Aussies don’t even SAY light bulb normally – they say “light globe.”)
Hope you’re enjoying the beginnings of the holidays and not getting too stressed out by everything that this time of year brings. We are finding our minimalistic expectations for this year to be a very good thing and highly recommend them to all! (Yes, this e-mail is in lieu of a card.) Take care, and all good wishes for the new year, in case we don’t get our act together to write between now and then.
Love,
Laura, Jamie, Sara (May) and Joanna
Jamie White
Associate Professor of Physics, Juniata College
While on sabbatical: Senior Fellow
School of Physics, Melbourne University
white@juniata.edu
For family news: http://faculty.juniata.edu/whitej/Australia.htm