Blog or die!
picture by Plasticsturgeon
Yes, I have been slack. I forget how important it is to blog routinely, so that I stay fresh and fluid with my thoughts and feelings. Truth is, my life is in upheaval and has been for the past several months. I’m still reeling.
First, mother-in-law had a serious asthma attack, which she survived, but she is now bedridden and feeble. I surprise myself, using that word, ‘feeble’. She would have hated anyone using that word with reference to her.
And I am still dealing with the emotional fall-out from her near miss, and how my blogging about her here hurt some family members who felt it was too private to blog about. They were right. I hope they can forgive me.
Journalling has been part of my life for so long now that I feel unbalanced if I go too long without leaving some kind of record, whether I’m jotting notes in a notebook, scribbling it down on paper, contributing to a forum or blogging proper, it is some kind of compulsion. I always feel better after hitting the Publish button. I highly recommend it as a therapy.
Sometimes the words flow and I know exactly what I’m writing about. Other times the meaning evolves and it’s not until I type that summary sentence that I realise, “Oh, so that’s what this is about!” Sometimes it’s simply an emotional purge that will be lost to oblivion when I hit the X and close the window without hitting publish. I do that more than you realise, dear reader.
But it isn’t as rewarding as putting my ’stuff’, both the good AND bad, out there in the public realm and getting a response back from some generous reader saying, ‘I have been there, too’.
But after removing my offensive previous post, there were no words to fill the empty space. I felt my words had dried up, which is an unhealthy place for an aspiring writer to be. I had to get on with the business of real life, tending to the children and the daily grind of school lunches and taxi-ing them around, attending uni for myself and fulfilling the assessment requirements, plus my extra-curricular Masters project and the school P&C (which I am failing at miserably), as well as systematically working through the FBC newsletter, which I have only begun to edit, as well as maintaining relationships with my friends - who are having their own tough times - and my significant other, darling hubby, whose needs always get pushed to the back of the line when things get overwhelming. At such times you just know that something’s going to give.
So now a dose of chicken pox is plaguing the family, I have no choice but to slow down and take stock. It was a good decision to pull everyone, even those who remained pox-less, out of school and work and to just be at home as a family while we wait for the scourge to pass. This week has been a breath of fresh air. I am reminded that keeping life simple and keeping family together are about the only important things there are. Without all the rushing and driving and social obligations I am a calmer person and a better mother and all of a sudden I rediscover my inner writer and those words that have eluded me for so long begin, once again, to flow.
August 27th, 2010 - Posted in community, sustainability, grief, health, self-care | | 4 Comments
Co-operative buying
picture by NatalieMaynor
Our family have been co-operatively buying organic fruit, veg and groceries for six years now. People often ask me why we buy co-operatively.
Well, first of all, because it offers us more choice. Supermarkets control the supply of specified varieties of fruits and vegetables. It might seem like there is plenty of choice, but really, only a limited selection of what is available ends up in the supermarket fruit and veg section. If you prefer to buy organic fruit and vegetables the selection can be even more limited and produce may be of inferior quality. So buying directly from the distributor, or the fresh food market, or the farmer, gives us access to a greater variety of fresher, produce in season.
Second of all, co-operative buying offers less choice. The impulse to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits or a tub of Maggie Beer ice-cream is eliminated when you shop from a spreadsheet. Less choice keeps it short and simple. I can shop for my staples in the space of five minutes and be done with it until I collect my box a few days later.
We buy co-operatively with a network of like-minded friends. Not all friends participate in the same co-ops. Our most formal co-operative is structured as a not-for-profit association and supplies us with the majority of our fresh food, bread, dairy and packaged grocery items. We have a bank account and we use a roster system to manage the running of the co-op. Our co-op buys fortnightly and we take turns to gather and box up each others’ individual orders.
In the off week I buy our other groceries in bulk; things like toilet paper, cleaning products and the packaged breakfast cereals we’ve become addicted to.
On a quarterly basis, we open the co-op to a wider network to buy fresh organic flours, grains and spices, seeds for sprouting and assorted baking staples.
Through yet another network of friends, our family buys bulk organic meat, direct from the farmer.
It sounds complicated, and for those who love their conveniences, maybe it is. But to have a superior organic product for a cheaper price is worth it. There are other benefits too.
Our distributor complimented us saying that we’re one of the longest lasting co-operatives he’s known. Many co-operatives come and go. It can be hard for a group of people to come to consensus on decisions, and get along as well. How is that we’ve managed to exist for these past six years?
Keeping a co-operative together requires some strict rules, and quite a few bendy ones. It demands good communication of every member, and sometimes that can be hard to facilitate. It requires a sense of ownership and accountability. And it helps to be punctual and keep commitments. Goodness, why would anyone want to buy co-operatively if it requires so much personal investment?
Good question.
I find co-operative buying such a life-enriching way to shop. We’re not dependent on the major supermarket chains for our dietary choices, and we feel like we’re part of a community of people who care about where their food comes from. We’ve become familiar with each others’ families, watched each others’ children grow and shared some really good, and frustrating, times. In equal measure.
Maybe I secretly yearn for the village green, and a way of life that is more connected to the immediate environment. I don’t believe life is to be lived in isolation from my neighbours. Maybe this social way of buying fills a personal need that modern supermarkets, and their anonymous shoppers, can’t fulfil. And maybe it gives me that modicum of additional control over who gets my shopper dollar, and maybe I like having that power.
June 27th, 2010 - Posted in consumerism, community, sustainability, ritual, wisdom, friendship, money | | 0 Comments
Ethical pet food
picture by furtwangl
A friend in my network is taking her family home to New Zealand, and they cannot take “Shady” their four year old black Labrador X Kelpie with them. We agreed to adopt her and she has fit in with our family very well in all but one very problematic way: she loves chickens. Her previous family didn’t know it but she loves to chase chickens, she loves to catch chickens, she loves to romp on them and carry them around in her mouth. When they’re dead, she likes to eat them entirely–there’s no waste–unless we interfere at some point in this cycle. You can imagine, this has been very bad news for our chickens.
And it has been very bad news for Shady since this means she lives her life on a running chain while the chickens are out. We snap-decided the dog would have to go. The chickens were here first, they’re our priority, and having them free range the orchard was an important part of the design of the garden. We’d only just managed to breed some chicks for the first time. Now it’s chick: singular. And we’re down to two laying chickens from a population of nine. But I don’t want to dwell on the negatives.
I called a dog trainer for advice. He said that she’s had too many chickens now to be trained out of it. I’ve been trying to rehouse poor Shady for the past two weeks but she’s a bit of a hard sell now. And in this time we’ve seen there’s a really delightful side to Shady too.
She’s playful, and affectionate, and likes to stay close to her family. She’s undisciplined, but a good communicator. She doesn’t bark much and if she gets a bit of a run every day, she’s quite mellow the rest of the time. She’s a great kids’ dog, and she’ll roll over and present her belly for a scratch if you even so much as look in her direction. She delighted us with a flying leap off a pile of earth in the yard as she ran around with the kids like a crazy young pup. She’s managing to work her way into our hearts and I keep trying to think of ways to keep this dog away from our chickens. You’d be asking for trouble keeping chickens and then keeping a dog that kills chickens, wouldn’t you?
We’ve had our share of challenges keeping chickens here. Feral dogs and cats and foxes roam the neighbourhood at night. Rats and snakes also present problems if you don’t have a secure coop for the birds. And human error, I’m sorry to say, has lost us many birds as well. So it’s not like this dog is the first chicken disaster we’ve ever had to manage. We could pen the chickens. We could fence the dog. We could put the chickens in tractors. We could set up a perimeter dog run. We could … We could ….
At the same time, this is a situation we can avoid altogether by just taking Shady to the RSPCA and being done with her.
If only it were that simple. Do you know someone with a fenced yard who’d like a fixed, micro-chipped, vaccinated, wormed, flea-treated female dog? Please get in touch.
May 31st, 2010 - Posted in childhood, play, duty of care, sustainability, grief | | 4 Comments
On giving advice
picture by laughlin
“… I gave this person some advice, but now I wish I hadn’t. Why? Because even if I had the chance, I wouldn’t go back and give myself advice…. I’m now questioning the validity (and ethics) of writing advice for Mamas at all….”
I’m growing to love Dan Sinclair’s, Mama Magic. For a blog inspired by the system of astrology, which sits on the wrong side of my scepticism, I think we share a similar outlook in a lot of ways.
I remember all the unsolicited advice, some good, some not, that I received before my first baby was born. Sleep when your baby sleeps, look after yourself, ask for help when you need it, yada yada. I didn’t follow any of it. Why didn’t I follow any of it?
See, this is interesting to me because many of my readers, it would seem, know me through various online forums which are a cesspool of advice-seeking and advice-giving and opinionated discussion. Good stuff! I’ve surely given my fair share of advice over the years, in most cases not really knowing or caring whether the asker had followed my advice. It simply gave me a buzz to offer it.
So it would appear that giving advice is more about me than about them. And it would also appear that, since even good advice is not often followed, that offering advice at all is quite a futile and possibly even insulting undertaking.
Did I really mean insulting? Yes, I did. Because no matter how well-intentioned the advice may be, it assumes that the recipient does not possess the resources to find a solution to a problem by him or herself. It’s that old adage about giving a man a fish VS teaching a man to fish. I can offer all the content-knowledge in the world, but it’s of no value to you unless I show you the process of applying it.
So it all comes back to modelling behaviour or walking our talk - which is so much harder to do than all that talking. Enough talking from me for now. Please tell me about how you respond when someone gives you advice.
August 17th, 2009 - Posted in community, duty of care, sustainability, wisdom | | 2 Comments
First blip on the radar
picture by UCB Library Graphics
It’s end of week 2 at uni and I’ve begun writing a short story and finished reading one entire novel. I’ve even made a few student acquaintances. So far so good.
But I think I’ve just made my first uni blunder. I’m officially the over-zealous, opinionated, mature age student. I probably talk too much. It’s possible I might get on others’ nerves. Plus, I’ve already asked a minor favour of my tutor, who plainly stated he’ll let me know if I impose on his time.
And in this information age, I’m realising that taking notes in class is quite redundant when all lectures are multi-media and all power point screens, not to mention most of the required reading, are able to be accessed over the student intra-net. No more having to borrow notes from a friend if a lecture is missed. No more running to the library to photocopy articles or be waitlisted for books and journals. I’ve just submitted my first small assessment piece - yep, by uploading the file to our student bullitin board or ‘virtual blackboard’. Technology has changed the way we study and learn forever. I’m having to figure out how to be a student all over again.
August 1st, 2009 - Posted in nostalgia, play, community, sustainability, wisdom | | 5 Comments
