Sugru

Thank you Rachael for my care parcel!

I don't know which I was more excited by, the packaging or the contents.

The contents: Sugru.

Sugru feels like modelling clay, or Blu-Tack. It fixes in 30 minutes into whatever shape you mold it, and is ready to be used after 24 hours. It fixes soft because it's made from silicone. It sticks to metal, plastic, glass and ceramic. It's waterproof, dishwasher-safe, heat resistant, cold resistant, electrically and thermally insulating.

I don't write this to advertise, merely to explain.

Or if you're more image inclined:

After I fixed the ring and knife handle I was walking around the house like a woman possessed, trying to find broken things, considering what I could chip or bust or smash, just so I could mend it. I gave myself a high 5 I was so excited, when I remembered the missing bit at the bottom of the food processor.

I must admit I had hesitations at first, thinking of all the energy that goes into creating Sugru, but then I thought that anything that promotes the Repair Manifesto, over buying new gear, is definitely a good thing by me.

My Left Hand Part 2

Part 1 here.

Rednesday: History

Thank you to The Doily for this xcellent X, which I have been using as a home for my needles. I have started creating a sewing kit, and I love that your gift kicked it off.

Thank you to The Lark for the goodie showbag you gave me when I came to visit your shop. This button badge was my favourite thing of all. We are so lucky to live in this town, which may be one of the reasons I am OK about giving up air travel. If our lives here sucked, maybe we wouldn't be so ready to say no to going elsewhere??

I moved here because my older sister Kate and her family live here. It's Kate's birthday today. Hope you had a great day, Katchka!

My final thank you goes to you, PJ, for fixing my favourite ring again.

It breaks and I wonder why I don't just buy a new one. But I love how you fix it and present it to me anew each time. That it has a history of its own that I can wear.

I Didn't Know Her

Well, we arrived home from Newcastle yesterday afternoon and today I am feeling rather melancholic. We had such a fantastic time away and although it is always great to come home to where we live, I feel like I'm coming down off a great precipitous high.

Our garden is overflowing with abundance, our chooks are well fed and laying, and our friends are calling in to see how we are. And we are well. We travelled on planes that didn't crash, on legs that were strong, on bicycles that carried us far. We had a meaningful, productive family holiday, we met great people and learned lessons each day. But today I feel hushed.

This morning was Vivien Hodgins' memorial service. She is one of the Australians who died in the recent Pacific Ocean tsunami. I never met Vivien, though I have met her husband, Rod May, who's a councillor for our local shire and an organic farmer who does weekly vegie boxes.

There are so many great things about our residency that I could tell you today, so many photos I would like to post, but instead, it feels more relevant to post these photos of Rod May's hands that I took several months ago at the local Farmer's Market. Hands that are the colour of the earth.

Rubbed Out

I have a lot of red things - found, bought, stolen, gleaned, acquired, gathered. For some reason, I am avoiding the word collected. Collected to me involves some kind of purpose - one does it actively. I collect my chickens' eggs, I collect Z from school and I am collecting stepmothers to interview.

I used to collect rubbers. I still have them, in a bag in a carton in a box. Since I stopped collecting them I must have opened the box, the carton and the bag maybe half a dozen times.

I picked my niece Indigo up from school yesterday. She has just started collecting rubbers. All day I had the Ghostbusters feeling that I was going to blow her mind with my collection. I couldn't wait!

But when I had finally emptied the bag onto the table where she and Z sat, instead of bits of wowed brains splattered everywhere, there were just two underwhelmed kids, and me, the very very grown up, grown up.

My Left Hand

91 Years

We celebrated my grandfather's 91st birthday today with a lunch in Melbourne in his honour. It was a small party – just his grandchildren, partners and great-grandchildren. It was such a nice afternoon.

Check out the ice-cream cake! It had a photo of our whole family printed on it in icing. I dread to think of what the ink was made from, but I'm still alive to tell the tale.

One of the highlights of the day was hearing Z say, 'Meg, you're delicious!' as he gobbled up my icing head.

Another highlight was watching my niece Pepper tracing her great-grandfather's hand. The outline of a life well lived. The baton of providence passed on.

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.

Dancing in the Right Direction

I started an exciting new contract today and spent all day writing like a champion. I feel so invigorated and inspired after yesterday. For the second year in a row I volunteered at the local primary school for Art Attack day; just like sports day but for art, my sister Kate who also volunteered described it.

Just as it was last year, it was a great day of making, playing, dancing and singing. It was a great day but it was just one day. But why? Why is it that we still teach our kids the same things we learned and we learned the same things our parents learned? You'd think somewhere along the line we'd stop and think: Now hang on a second. We have fucked up the planet good and proper thinking this way, maybe it's time to teach our kids to think for themselves and to value what's vital, not what's going to get them a job in an economy that's sucking the world dry.

The other night in bed, PJ read me this passage from Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words:

A primary purpose of school – and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well – is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings – as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture – but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.

Art Attack day is a step in the right direction, but it's still one step forward in a straight line, when maybe what it needs to be is a dance.

Ring Ring Ring

From here.

From here.

From here.

Because I Said So

As part of my research on stepmothering, I put the prefix step – stepmother, stepfamily, stepchild – into our library's online database and borrowed or reserved every title that I found.

I have just finished reading Because I Said So: 33 mothers write about children, sex, men, aging, faith, race and themselves.

Although not just about stepmothering, I decided to borrow it anyway in hope that there would be one personal essay by a mother with inherited kids. And there was – there was one, the sole reason this book came up in the database search.

According to www.stepfamily.org, over 50% of US families are remarried or re-coupled and 1300 new stepfamilies are formed every day. Considering the statistics, I was very surprised there was only 1 out of 33 essays written from the perspective of a stepparent.

Despite this prejudice or oversight or bias or whatever you'd like to call it, I really enjoyed this collection and would happily recommend it to anyone looking for a book that sticks its hands into the guts of life in the hope it will come out bloody. Some of the writers put a glove on first, some describe their hands, their chipped or manicured nails, their calloused fingers, their moisturised cuticles. Some mothers thrust their mitts right in, while one achingly describes her stump. Some of the mothers are solo, some are partnered, some are young, some old, some with babies, some with children older than me. Some write beautifully, others barely limp along. 

Although some of the pieces were more sentimental than others, and some engrossed me while others brought on the yawns, they all felt honest as each woman described the complexity, beauty, darkness, powerlessness and utter amazement of the daily expedition she pioneers.

Strawberried

HandSome

I Heart Nadia

I heart Jake Bronstein. And I heart the Internet.

About three weeks ago, blogger-to-the-stars, Jake Bronstein, asked his readers: When was the last time you received a love letter? All you had to do was leave your address as a comment on his blog and a letter hand-written by one of his interns would be snailed to your heart.

Thank you, Nadia! Your love was successfully received.

Click for bigger.

The Tall Man

I finished reading this book a couple of days ago but wanted to blog about it today on November 19, exactly four years after Cameron Doomadgee's death, the event around which this book is based. He died while in police custody on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community off the north east coast of Australia.

Doomadgee was arrested one morning for drunkenly swearing at the tall policeman Christopher Hurley. Forty minutes later he was dead.

I share journalist Mark Dapin's sentiment:

This book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighty, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended... It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, the living and the dead.

I read this book in a few days, a testament to the absorbing story but more so to Hooper's writing. She is present in the narrative but never intrudes. She provides just enough space – between the protagonists' motivation and her own – for readers to inhabit and make up their own minds.

It's not a space I want to inhabit. It's not a series of events I enjoyed reading about. But as a white Australian I feel it is a history that I cannot turn away from just because it makes me feel uncomfortable, just because it makes me feel ashamed.

Earlier this year Kevin Rudd formally apologised to indigenous Australians. His speech began:

I move that today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment.

The Prime Minister's apology for past cruelties was way overdue. But what of the mistreatments that are ongoing? Or is that the subtext of Hooper's book's title? The tall man, aka the middle finger, extended.

Talking (About) Books

It's hard having three sisters, I'm always getting my memories mixed up with theirs. I was going to write that when I was younger I subscribed to a magazine called Ranger Rick, but I think that was my sister K. As I grew older I subscribed to Smash Hits, Mad Magazine, Fast Company and then Vogue Living.

Oh the joy of ripping open a package with my name on it!

Earlier this year I subscribed to Creative Nonfiction, whose issue number 35 I have just finished reading. It is an exciting mix of essays and blog entries on a wide range of topics. To give you an example, here is a mashup of ten of the first sentences:

Many Travel Stories Begin as an Attempt to Impress Pretty Women. I'm a little... out of the loop. There are two wooden figures on my husband's desk. Sachiko must be considered "different" here in Japan. One day in 1934, he sequestered himself in his family's greenhouse in London to perform an experiment. Two five-inch syringes with bright orange caps have been placed atop the white linen of the grand banquet table, like little sterile centrepieces. We know exactly where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E. On a cold spring day in 2002, I found a damp and crumpled piece of paper on a beach near Reykjavík, Iceland. The facts are indisputable.

It's not just the words of the book that spoke to me, but the book itself. Here, I'll show you what I mean:

Seed Hunter

Last night we watched Seed Hunter, the fantastic ABC doco about the Australian scientist, Ken Street. Street is charming and candid and oh so likable as we follow him and his team on their noble crusade.

The spiel:

As Australia and much of the world wrestles with hotter weather and a dwindling water supply, mass starvation at a global scale is on the cards if we can’t find ways to improve crop resilience. Scientists are exploring many solutions to adapt our food supply, including going back to mother nature herself to locate the genes that can withstand our changing climate; genes that, thanks to a high yielding monoculture, have almost disappeared. Australian scientist, Dr Ken Street, aka the ‘Seed Hunter’, spends his life searching for the tiny seed that could play a role in helping food producers around the world.

Two and half months ago I wrote about the harvesting of the first GM canola crops since the GM ban was lifted. Then yesterday I read that this harvested canola is now on its way to our grocery shelves.

We might think we can avoid GM ingredients if we want, but we can't. How can we when the canola oil that's being sold to us as cooking oil is not labelled as being GM? How can we when this oil is being mixed into our processed foods, and the leftover meal fed to our livestock?

While biotech giants such as Monsanto are racing towards their desired 100% seed ownership, Ken Street and his crew are scouring the globe in search of ancient seeds that will help ensure the survival of all Earthlings. There's no question as to whose team I'd rather be on.

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.

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.