5769

Happy Jewish New Year!

As tradition dictates, we dipped pieces of apple into honey, symbolising a healthy and sweet year to come, (the year 5769 to be precise).

Good things are indeed on their way. This afternoon we received a call from the company installing our solar panels to let us know of their arrival date.

And tomorrow PJ and I are off to Newcastle for This is Not Art.

From T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding:

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

Graffiti Games

Not long after I moved here, the bureaucrats at Melbourne City Council thought it would be a good idea to whitewash the graffiti from the streets in attempt to provide a homogenised version of the city for the tourists visiting for the Commonwealth Games.

As a protest, PJ came up with the idea of a roaming graffiti wall that he and some friends would walk through the city during the Games. Before he and I hooked up, I read the article about his graffiti wall in the paper. I cut the article out and asked him to sign it when I saw him next, but that story is for another post.

This post is about the graffiti wall panels that are being auctioned to support Kids Under Cover – a charity for homeless and at-risk youth.

The eBay auction starts in a couple of days.

Happy bidding!

Bring the Cow Out

When I first moved out of home I rented a room upstairs in a big house that had an adjoining room I used as an office. I bought a black and white cowhide to sit on the office floor in front of the fire place.

I got it cheap from a tannery because it hadn't been tanned properly. I couldn't see the problem, though when the afternoon sun came through my windows, boy oh boy could I smell it.

This is before 1998, so there was no Google to help me find out ways to get rid of the stench. So I researched it the old fashioned way – I asked my mum. Every morning before work I would take the cow over to my folks' place where Mum would embrace it, like a grandchild. And every afternoon, I would swing by to collect it. 

She tried powders and salts and fragrances and scrubs, but what she found was most effective was leaving it out in the sun. 

The cow became part of our family and the phrase, bring the cow in, bring the cow out, became part of our lexicon; to refer to the mundanity or repetitive nature of tasks.

Today the cow is still part of our family and lines the floor of our living room, when it isn't going camping or picnicking with us, or lunching with us out on the deck.

Crisis Opportunism

I am half way through reading Naomi Klein's 533 page tome, The Shock Doctrine, which seems an especially pertinent choice of books right now, given the current situation on Wall St.

The Shock Doctrine: The use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters – to push through unpopular economic measures often called 'shock therapy.'

I will save my opinions until after I have finished reading it, but just wanted to recommend you watch this clip:

T-Shirt Weather

They say that once you have survived your first winter up here your body acclimatises, making each subsequent winter a little easier. This winter was my second, and it's true, it was much more bearable than the first.

This most certainly has a lot to do with us now living in a properly insulated house, and it also has a lot to do with the current epidemic of sunny days, that has all but melted the memory of the snow that appeared on our earth just 6 weeks prior.

After a day of open windows, we closed our laptops and headed up the street to a local wine bar, PJ on his skateboard, me on my bike.

There was live music, glasses toasting the sunset, and questions of where abouts and how abouts we have been since winter transpierced.

Gone Fishin'

Meg's Eggs

Two of our chooks have started laying! 

I love having chickens so much. They are so fascinating to observe and it has been comforting to have some other females around.

I would like to dedicate these first eggs to all the pro-choicers in Victoria who are working hard on the State Government's abortion decriminalisation bill.

Porridge Picnic

Yesterday PJ and Z met me here, at the half way point of my morning walk, with pancakes and coffee on the open fire. This morning it was porridge that awaited me.

Just as we learnt a few days ago that coffee made with carbonated spring water doesn't work, so too this morning we discovered that porridge tastes much better made with water without bubbles.

500 Tablets (500 mg)

Five years ago I asked a naturopath: What one supplement do you recommend everyone should take? To which she replied, without even thinking, Spirulina. And thus began my love affair with the blue-green algae.

When I moved to the country, I was most pleased when I found out there was a guy selling it locally.

I know I bang on and on about all the reasons I love living in a small community, and I guess I do because I was born in the city where people operate with different, less personal motives. 

Here, business transactions aren't raced through because I have deadlines to meet or parking meters to feed or trams to catch. I used to live like this. But now my relationships are nurtured because there's time, and because in a town with a population of under 4,000 people, you are bound to see the people you have dealings with again and again and again.

When I buy my Spirulina, if I'm not home, J just drops my jar off on the deck. J is a photographer and one of my favourite parts of buying my spirulina from him is that he will email me through a recent photograph he's taken. Today it was of his son.

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.