Having Less

Since I made the decision to try to be more and do less, I have been thinking about other ways I might be able to uncomplicate my life. I have never been a hoarder and I live in a house with an uncompromising lack of storage, but over the years I have managed to hold onto many an item that I figured I might need again one of these days.

On Saturday, Z's school had a garage sale and auction to raise money for furniture to fit out their recently renovated art room. It was the perfect excuse for me to go through my history of accumulations so as to pass onto new owners, that which I no longer need to possess.

How about you? Do you have any de-cluttering tips for me?

Our Own Drum

Terra Firma

We would like to plant fruit trees along the east end of our social warming fence, so today I spent several hours digging at the hard clay ground that's littered with shale. It took me ages and my hands are now so sore, but it was so invigorating, I can't wait to get stuck into it again tomorrow. Usually this kind of physical work is PJ's domain, but today it was mine. Helped along by some friends.

The ground is so hard, I don't know how our potatoes grew in it last year. While I was digging, I found some leftover from that crop that we are going to replant elsewhere for their hardiness and taste.

I had such a great day. The most difficult part of it was deciding what to do with all the worms I found: feed them to the chooks (I like to watch them suck them up like spaghetti) or put them back in the earth where they'll work to turn the hard ground into gold.

Hand of Meg

Apart from a bush walk with Z early on and a visit to the library after lunch, we spent the whole day indoors today. While it poured with rain and hail outside, we made a chocolate cake, had some friends over to help us eat it, read books and played cards.

The only heater we have is a small gas one that keeps the house at an ambient 20˚C. Our windows are all double glazed and the floor, roof and walls are well insulated so our happy house was super warm today, despite the near snowy conditions outside.

After hanging a load of washing on the clothes horse in front of the heater, all the windows fogged up. We had some fun writing messages to each other on the glass. I had the idea of writing my blog name and using it as the header, but as you can see it didn't turn out that well.

Here is a photo of my monster hand the day we had the heater installed just over a year ago.

Turning Over Old Leaves

Pickled Tink

I recently read a personal essay by a woman who wrote that she felt the most feminine she ever felt when she was breast feeding her baby. This got me thinking about my own sense of femaleness and when I feel the most feminine I can feel.

My first thought was when I am with PJ and although I like this answer (and proximity), I am striking it from the record because I am looking for an answer that is just to do with myself and not in relation to another.

But maybe that's impossible, because a large part of my feelings about my femaleness feel constructed and composed; learnt and not innate.

I am Meg, and although I am obviously female, I don't live my every day cognisant of my gender. Or maybe I do but it's so ingrained in my self that I'm not conscious of it.

And so, I have started keeping a list of times when I feel conscious of my femaleness. On that list is when I was pickling our homegrown cucumbers two weeks ago. (And yes, I can see the irony of the phallic cucumbers.)

Readers of this blog will know I don't own a single cook book and that I like to roam google's hallways in search of a recipe to follow. But for my cucumbers it was different. My friend Jo lent me some cook books including Stephanie Alexander's book of her mum's recipes, which is where I found the one I based my pickling concoction on. 

I know men who pickle and preserve, but when I did it, I felt connected to a whole history of women, including my dad's mum, Nanna Jo-Jo, who was a fabulous pickler.

Also, because pickling was once, and still is in many parts of the world, an act of preserving produce for out-of-season months and long journeys, there is an element of vitality added to the recipe; the survival and preservation of a people, and along with them, their time-honoured ways.

Floating

We spent the afternoon down at the lake again today; swimming, reading, listening to the Hottest 100 playing on a nearby stereo.

Doesn't this look like heaven? I love that this is practically our backyard.

These three girls floated by on their cloud and I had to snap a photo.

Between My Toes

To Market, to Market

Before I departed the city and moved to these hills I would often come up and stay with my sister K and her family. My favourite thing to do on a Sunday was walk around the market that even bustles in the winter months.

When I moved up here I would ride my bike there; my basket brimming with perishables for the week on the downhill home.

When PJ and I first got together he was working weekends and I would roam the market alone, pining to walk the aisles with him arm in arm, like so many of the touristing couples who visit.

This morning we three rode bikes and skateboards to the market. The journey homeward was a little more slow going as we had kites and new fishing rods to contend with.

We didn't have much luck catching fish at the lake, though I managed to catch up on some reading and to catch some ZZZZs in the quiet of the late afternoon.

OH&S

PJ is about a quarter way through rebuilding an old shed and turning it into a dwelling for a friend. He was working on the roof today, so I was recruited to be the Occupational Health & Safety officer. I spent the afternoon standing on scaffolding and helping. 

The morning was springlike, dreamy and still. I sat on a rug nearby.

I read

 and took this photo of my hand.

Of Everyday

I had a night in Melbourne then PJ came to meet me yesterday. I spent some great time with my family, but still it was so nice to come home last night, especially to this heart, that PJ had arranged on our bed out of socks:

Today we spent the day embracing the domestic, both inside the house and in the garden. It rained on and off. When it was on we went in, and when it was off, we went out. Our chooks pecked around us. At one point a currawong flew into the chook house to eat the remnants of our breakfast scraps and became disoriented, repeatedly flying into the chicken wire, until PJ shooed it out.

Not that other days feel unreal, but today felt especially real - a beautiful quiet day, living in the country. I was born and bred in Melbourne, but still I feel very unsettled each time I go and then come home. Today was a gentle day of resolutions.

Gustave Flaubert said,“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” My work is not necessarily violent or original, but I agree that there is much to be said for fashioning one's life from uncomplications.

Creative Resistance

A few nights ago, to coincide with National Homeless Person's Week, the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle went out armed with bags of finger knitted wool, seeds, painted banners, ribbons, cups, cameras and chocolate, to engage in some creative resistance against the rampant land speculation which is wreaking havoc in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray.

I take my hand-knitted hat off to them and to all the other craftivists making amazing things in the name of social justice.

Keep knitting the good knit!

Nooks and Crannies

I used to shop at garage sales and op shops and markets.

I still do. But where I used to do these things to save money (I had a travel addiction I was always saving to fund), I now do more as a way of living.

I choose to live in a small community where there are no chain-stores or billboards. Not just because I am anti-consumerist, but because I am not a fan of the visual intrusion.

I have just had my contract extended another week. I am thankful to have more time to work on the project and to work with my team.

Although I knew what I was getting myself in for when I took on the role, working in Melbourne is hard. Getting up early to catch the 6.30 bus and getting home 13 hours later is exhausting. And is something I will have to do every day next week as my home computer is still broken (though Apple is sending me a replacement).

A month ago when I was thinking about how I'd go working full-time, I wrote: "I don't want quality time or me time," which I now see was just naive.

When I lived in the city I was good at this - filling my time to the brim. But I am a country girl now who still loves shopping at garage sales, but needs a lot more quiet to live in.

Slow

PJ received a call about the caterers.

He is giving a paper next week at an international poetics conference at the State Library. The event is fully catered and on the forms he had to fill out, he was asked if he had any dietary requirements.

He wrote Slow Food - a term the organiser had never heard, and which had completely baffled the caterers. The caterers!

Think Fast Food, he told them, and it's the opposite.

Today's blog post was going to end here, with a nice wrap up about the fast food approach to everything that once was nourishing. I even thought about composing a victual verse.

But. My laptop died this morning (for the third time in its two year life). Lucky for me PJ is not working from home today and I am able to get a few things done on his computer. Though I am unable to get my work done as the software I need has gone too.

And so. I am forced to revert to the analogue. To take deep breaths and go about my offline business. To. Slow. Right. Down. And notice all the things that I haven't been noticing.