Pookie

Z loves this book. It was a gift from our friend Vivienne who had it when she was a girl.

Pookie is a little white rabbit who, after a nasty storm, tells Winter to go away and never come back. But then, when Winter shows no sign of returning, and Autumn is followed by Spring, "the Woodland Folk realised what trouble they were in."

"Who will wash away all last year's old leaves and rubbish?" they asked each other anxiously. "Who will spread a blanket of snow so that we can sleep snugly underneath in our cosy homes? We cannot manage with just Spring, Summer, Autumn... and then Spring again! Flowers cannot get ready to flower again without a rest during the Winter! Hedgehogs and Dormice and Squirrels and lots of other Animals must have their winter sleep!"

I used to be like that. If Winter wasn't going to go away, I would fantasise about migrating to some place tropical for a few months. But now that our plum tree is starting to bud and the time we have to lock the chooks up is getting later and later each night, I am sad that Winter is leaving, and that the bushfire season will be upon us so soon.

In this illustration Pookie is asking Winter to please come back to the woodlands, because the animals have realised that they need him. I don't know that I would go so far as to ask Winter to stay longer, but I am surely going to miss him when he leaves.

Equal Love

Photo

Yesterday was the National Day of Action for Same-Sex Marriage, which culminated in 150 couples getting illegally wed outside the Australian Labour Party National Conference in Sydney.

I am ashamed of the Australian government's policies on many issues, but I am especially regretful of its refusal to budge on its homophobic Christian stance on gay marriage and same sex civil unions.

Have you seen that video that's doing the rounds at the moment of the couple and their bridal party dancing down the aisle? It's oh so cheesy, but I must admit that I have clicked replay on it more than once. There's something really lovely and liberated about the way the bride dances down on her own; no man to give her away, she's doing it on her on terms. My one wish for that couple is my one wish for all couples: that their love and commitment to one another be mightier than all the statistics stacked against them, and more honourable than our policy makers are.

Next Blog

I just clicked Next Blog on my Blogger toolbar and this is the first post that came up:

Sleepy Pooh Bear

This is a sweet little clock. The pooh bear on top lights up as a night light and it has an alarm and radio as well. I bought this one at the Goodwill store in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. It was stuck in the furthest corner of the store, upside down with a big hunk of clock on top of it. I couldn't just leave it there, so I took it home, cleaned it up, and added it to my collection. :)

From here.

Our Underarms

Tallest Cookie Tower

I'm a bit obsessed with Cathie's Anzac cookies. I have made them three times in the last week. As soon as they have cooled on the wire rack they are gobbled by whomever's around, which is a bit of a bugger as I'm keen to try to break Ashley Klinger's world record of 28 homemade cookies stacked high.

Baking not your thing?

Eric Matyjasik set a new world record for unzipping his pants 162 times in 30 seconds. Silas Hyde completed 83 armpit farts in 30 seconds for a new world record. Bill Geist took 13 minutes, 4.75 seconds to fully dissolve a Pep-O-Mint Lifesaver on his tongue, for the gong.

Interested in breaking a record of your own? You are sure to have much fun merely deciding which one over at The Universal Record Database.

Turning Over Old Leaves

A Farm for the Future

Last night PJ and I went to a gathering organised by the Hepburn Relocalisation Network where we watched a fantastic film called A Farm for the Future.

The film is about wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking's investigation into how to operate her family's farm in the UK without using fossil fuels.

She attends a soil conference, she talks to a guy from the Post Carbon Institute, she visits permaculturalists and forest gardeners and other farmers who are making the change from big tractors and monocultural crops to gardens teeming with life and biodiversity.

Inspiring stuff!

I recently read that the UK is undergoing a gardening revolution, which makes complete sense. Because if this is your average modern industrial farm, of course more and more people are going to opt to grow plots of food for themselves and their families in their backyards. Monocultural paddocks such as this are completely oil dependent and therefore completely obsolete as a future model.

One Candle

My friend Crumbs and I have been friends since we were five. (That's 30 years!) Today her daughter celebrated her third birthday, so Z and I went down to Melbourne for her party. 

It was an afternoon of privileges – to have such lovely friends and to have known them all for so long, to have all this party food to eat, and to be able to travel by car, four trains and a tram in absolute safety without a hiccup.

Not so for so many. When we arrived in Melbourne we were met by 2,000 of Melbourne's Indian population who were protesting against the rising number of violent attacks against its community.

The protest began at the Royal Melbourne Hospital where an injured Indian student is battling for his life, and concluded at Parliament House with a candlelight vigil in support of the 500 Indian students who have been attacked over the past four years.

As we celebrated the wonder of Crumb's three year-old and sang Happy Birthday, I quietly dedicated one of the candles on her cake to the 500 students and their families.

Harmony Day

Yesterday mid-morning I went up to the local neighbourhood house for Harmony Day. Although the official day was on March 21, for logistical reasons, we celebrated it here yesterday.

One of the highlights of the festivities was chatting to the ten Togolese new immigrants over cups of tea and scones and finding out all kinds of things. For example, in Togo, babies are named according to which day of the week they are born. Incidentally, when I was in Thailand I learnt that babies are named after the position in their family, eg one or two etc.

As new Australians entering the workforce, it was thought that the Togolese should know a little about Aussie rules football, so they would be able to participate in conversations around the water cooler. This was another highlight of the day: Listening to O talk about the clubs and what kind of person generally barracks for each one, and why they have the mascots and colours that they do.

After our guests had selected which teams they were going to barrack for henceforth, we all participated in a handballing competition. Me, the little Aussie tomboy who went to my first and only ballet class as a kid in my football gear, came last.

ChillOut

I love living in a small community. It's like living in the heart of a city that doesn't have any suburbs.

I love this town's terrain and small population and I also love that it's a popular tourist destination that attracts weekenders in the thousands.

This weekend our lovely town is playing the hostess with the mostest to around 25,000 gay and lesbians who are here for the twelfth ChillOut festival, the largest gay and lesbian festival in regional Australia.

And today we played the hosts with the mosts to Sharon and Deb, who are visiting from their lovely home in Tasmania, next to my folks' place.

These Are My Mistakes

I have just started reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Here's this from page 19:

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own values to live by, and the same holds true with me. These differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It's not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply.

As I've gotten older, though, I've gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it's precisely because people are different from others that they're able to create their own independent selves.

Reading these words makes me want to write publicly about a recent fight I had with one of my sisters.

Some brutal things were said that sliced and pried and beheaded. They were projected in anger but were propelled by love. Families, especially close ones like mine, are perhaps too concerned with each other's happiness, but with the dynamic of four sisters, maybe it just goes with the territory.

I guess this post is part confession, part acceptance and part apology. I said things that were unkind and I wrote hurtful words I can't retract. These are my mistakes and when I've finished analysing them with regret, I will add them to the list of other mistakes I have made. I will look at them from time to time and I will feel sorry, but also OK about the fact that I made them and did them and yelled them and penned them, because they are mine now.

I have learnt that people's definition of honesty can vary hugely and, even though I reeled at some of the things that passed between us, I am thankful for her arrows that reached their target because even though they hurt, they needed to.

Ketchup on Everything

I once broke up with a guy who later told me he wondered what would have happened had we ever wanted to move in together because he didn't think he could have lived with all my red things.

I mentioned this to PJ before he and Z and I moved in together and he laughed dismissively saying he loved me and we'd work it out.

I found the above illustration on I love you but... – a site capturing people's idiosyncrasies and the way they can sometimes give us the shits.

The ketchup on everything made me think of my red predilection and PJ's attitude towards it. And the way family and friends sometimes do maddening things that we accept because they're a small part of a big package that we love.

Between the Houses

When the first missionaries came to this land two centuries ago, they stole the Dreaming from the Aborigines and replaced it with the fear of God. They called the rituals that they didn't understand, bad. They took something that was untamed and joyous and put a barbed wire fence around it.

This fence was around Z this morning. He woke us up with breakfast in bed again. He was so chuffed with himself. 

"Oh my God," PJ or I said, I can't remember who, when Z told us that he had also made his own breakfast and for the first time ever, his own lunch.

Even though PJ and Z's mum's differences were so great as to cause them to divorce, on the whole the parenting Z receives in our house and his mum's is similar in style. Though of course there are some major divergences.

"Don't say Oh my God," Z said to us. "God is a rude word."

This issue has come up before and each time, PJ and I have explained that even if you believe in God, to say Oh my God is not being rude, it's just an expression.

Z's mum doesn't believe in God, but being the daughter of religious missionaries, it's not surprising that she censors Z according to her parents' conservatism.

I think Z's mum lets Z have a bit too much sugar and watch too much TV, but these differences are so minor compared to this indoctrination; compared to this suffocation of innocent Dreaming and the instilling of fear of something that doesn't exist.

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.

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!

The Blog Baton

I am a huge proponent of small business not corporatised business in the same way I am all for local and regional autonomy, because the dissemination of power means more diversity and more choice for more people.

Which is one of the reasons I love living in the country: the decentralisation of sovereignty, and why I love being a part of the blogosphere: the decentralisation of information.

Last night I taught the final class for this term's course on blogging. Just as I felt when I taught English in Thailand, I felt so proud when my students got the hang of what they were doing.

Here is a snapshot of what some of them are doing:

www.claudiasgreenacres.blogspot.com

www.hotartglass.blogspot.com

www.bookcamel.blogspot.com

www.nottheadvocate-jab.blogspot.com

People Like Us

Last August PJ and I went down to Tassie to stay with my folks. At the end of our trip, we were packing our things before heading to Launceston where we were going to hire a car for a few days. My dad called PJ into his office and showed him a piece of paper. It was a subscription to Dissent magazine, a gift from him and mum for PJ's birthday. (Later PJ joked that he thought my dad was giving him the bill for our stay.)

Today after work I headed to the post office where this latest issue arrived in our PO box. Oh the joy of seeing PJ's name, not just on the address label but on the table of contents and page 20, where his article Lalgambook: the Djadjawurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil is featured.

Also in this issue is an interesting article by the social policy researcher, Robert Salter called, Moving beyond the limits to solidarity: a social investment approach. In it he writes:

... new forms of communication make it easier for us to build communities of interest in place of the locality-based communities we once relied on. So we are more able to select with whom we associate, and more often that not these are people like us.

My whole adult life I have been scouring the globe for a community of like-minded people. I blog surf, read books, magazines and the paper, I meet people and watch movies in the hope of learning new things and finding kindred spirits. But what if I am wrong? Maybe to really learn new things I should be seeking people who are nothing like me, whose opinions are entirely different from my own.

Hello .edith

Yesterday, the organisation that oversees the Internet, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), unanimously approved the move to introduce domain names other than .com, .org, .net and 21 other suffixes we have come to be familiar with.

Some people are predicting a goldrush mentality to develop.

.countries, .cities, .brands and .names will in early 2009, be available to the highest bidder.

Just as we now can't imagine life without the Internet, I bet soon we'll be wondering the same thing about the multiplicity of domain names, whether for good or bad, or just plain confusing reasons. 

But what I think will definitely have a positive impact, is ICANN's decision to allow extensions in languages other than English, with characters other than the 37 Roman ones currently available.

It really makes me wonder if the virtual world will become the last bastion of diversity.