Shushan Bulletin 6 May 2014

The flights were pretty good. We had a seat spare between us, so we were not too cramped, Sydney to LA. LA to JFK we were able to have 3 seats each! LA was the place to queue to queue. There are 3 queues when one comes into USA this route. One for Immigration, one for luggage, one for Customs, then one to put your luggage back on the flight, then one for security to be on the same plane as your luggage, (you hope). Oh, that is five queues.

But by the time we got to our hotel in NYC that night, I was seriously shattered. But had a good night’s sleep before heading up the Hudson on my favourite train journey, Penn Station to Saratoga Springs.

Got to our place in daylight and it looked like this:

Officially it is Spring, but it has been a long cold hard winter here, everyone speaks of it,  & they are disappointed that Spring is very reluctant to appear. More than one person has said that our forsythia is the only sign of Spring around here. We did have one day last week when the temperature reached 21 C. For a brief moment.

On the weekend we froze our way through the Washington County Antique Fair and picked up a few essential items, tools for Michael, hats for me! But I felt sorry for the vendors, especially on Sunday, it was very windy & cold.

I have done very little since arriving; plenty of jobs to do around the place, and yesterday, Susie showed me the thousands of weeds I have to remove from the flowerbeds. I could be here till next winter!

Most days I take a walk. The same walk, 40 minutes. But the views will be changing, as the leaves will soon appear on the trees & fill the landscape:

The Battenkill River joins the Hudson River a bit further down

Last years corn fields , soon to be ploughed, fertilised ( probably with silage from the local dairies) and planted

I know that those of you in Sydney have had a nasty Lurch into Winter, I hope the weather is a bit more reasonable now.

As I read about the El Nino likely to cause havoc next summer in SE Australia, the impact of climate change will be discussed here. Maybe one day, just as business is being asked to boycott Russia, countries that fail to address climate change will be ostracized. Yeah, right. The bushfires experienced in the Blue Mountains last October were happening as I was experiencing a personal trauma, I cannot forget them, nor the challenges faced by communities wanting to rebuild , with new building codes for which they were not insured.