We made a short visit to Washington early last week (Sunday-Tuesday) and are now back in Carrboro until a family reunion in mid August in Kentucky. The trip to DC was for a pair of meetings for Marc, and we were also able to stop in and visit friends.

We stayed with Ambrose in northern Bethesda and enjoyed his hospitality, watching movies together (including a really depressing documentary called Darwin's Nightmare about fisheries in Lake Victoria and their effects on a port town in Tanzania), attending concerts (Shuwen and Ambrose went to hear the Old 97s, which Shuwen describes as alternative-country), and eating good food and drinking good local beer at the Rock Bottom Brewing Company restaurant in Bethesda.

We also managed to see Lara (Shuwen's old DC housemate) over a dinner of shellfish and her mother Mansureh, who cooked us her signature saffron rice to go with a tasty chicken-tomato-okra stew for lunch Monday. Keith joined us for dinner at Rock Bottom; he's working in DC now at NIST on a pretty nice post-doc and likely to be there at least a couple more years.

Marc's meetings went well; the first was concerning his work on the Nile and some economic analysis that will be ongoing with that, the second was an interview for a post-doc position in Bilbao, Spain at a new climate change research institute that is being headed up by an environmental economist who has been influential in the literature on green accounting and sustainability. Though it is too early to make any decisions about future employment for us (after all we have dissertations to write and a full search to conduct), it is good to have some early options.

August, with all the southern heat and humidity, is a good time to start harvesting things from our garden and more widely, our compound. The fig tree in the complex is now producing hundreds of sweet figs a day, so we have been eating those with breakfast, ice cream desserts, and Shuwen made a fig pie last night that is delicious! These figs are underappreciated; it seems like few people actually collect from the tree even though many of the figs are now beginning to fall to the ground or being enjoyed by the birds living in our area.

We have also started getting our heirloom hillbilly tomato crop as well, and made some fried green tomatoes yesterday. The tomato plants did suffer some damage last night unfortunately, when high winds knocked over the support trellises that we have set up.