First start with what you see…

 

Hi All

 

Here we all are again assembled and accounted for. I have nestled a few more blogs into my RSS Feed Reader on my never ending journey towards morphing my online reading habits into my real life interests of this moment in time. I am reading Ruby Wax’s book “Sane New World”. I read her autobiography and when a book can take you from deep soul searching to squirting your mouthful of booch (I am also attempting to drink my way through 12 litres of kombucha in my fridge as we need the space!) over the rug as you half choke on something hilarious it’s well worth a read in my opinion. I like to multi-task. Sane New World is an amazing survival story. Ruby has had several mental breakdowns and suffers from depression. Rather than take her meds like a good little Jewish girl she has decided to find out just what makes the brain tick and despite the humour that keeps this book ticking along nicely (still more booch to clean up off the wall…) blends seamlessly into this amazing woman’s search that took her from lying on a psychiatrists couch (while he ate a corned beef and mustard sandwich behind her and mumbled “Hmmm?”) to enrolling in Oxford university to study the science of the brain in order to tame her own. What a woman! And to think I just thought that she was funny…

OH how I love Mr Michael Leunig. I hope he translates to the wider world as he is one of our Aussie gems that is well worth sharing. I hope that he isn’t in a mind to sue me for sharing his images with the wider community. I hope that should he ever stumble across humble little broke Serendipity Farm that he will take pity on the poor mindless adoring fool that pinched his image without permission but who couldn’t help herself because no-one out there says it like Mr Leunig 🙂

It’s now Wednesday and I am racing against time to pull a blog post out of the air. The air is decidedly cooler here today and if Bezial wasn’t sprawled upside down on the deck I would actually shut the sliding door. I love this crisp cool air because it lets you think clearly. I am thinking that I need to get my crochet hook into some wool soon and get started on the slipper boots that The Snail of Happiness  shared with me recently. I have plenty of wool, now I just need to find the time. Isn’t it always the case that when you have sufficient of one part of the equation, you don’t have enough of the other?

This is what my precious babies looked like prior to Steve forgetting to shut the shed door…sigh…

This summer has seen Steve helping a friends mum move into her house and has seen narf7 home alone. Much like Macaulay Calkin, narf7 home alone is not a good thing. For one I am slightly stir crazy and for two I can’t do a whole lot without Stevie-boy when it comes to the great outdoors. Our summer was long and dry and the garden suffered tremendously but now that the temperature has cooled down somewhat we are on the case and are knocking out some of the chores that need to be accomplished before winter hits home. We NEED that water tank up and collecting rain ASAP and we need the trailer that it is now residing in to collect leaf mould from the bottom of the property horse manure from a farm down the road and seaweed from a beach for the garden. I need to pull out all of the summer crops and make way for the winter crops including garlic and potato onions that are champing at the bit to be in the ground

Here are the large “Christmas decorations” that herald the entry into Serendipity Farm. They are kind of a statement and a warning at the same time “Your not in Kansas any more Dorothy…”

This is the delicious and most splendiferous load of wood that killed the moth eaten sock under the bed. We gave it a decent burial and then it was right back to working out how on EARTH we are going to transport all of these logs back to the house from the front of the property…looks like Stevie-boys Easter weekend might be all booked methinks…

Steve and I have been a little overwhelmed by the scope of the job at hand. It would seem that if you leave something for long enough it thinks it owns the place and takes possession. The blackberries and spear thistles are a point in case. They are everywhere…again…we had a few pressing inside jobs to do and once we had cleared out the spare room (isn’t it funny how they seem to magnetically attract “stuff”?) and Steve’s music room (another “stuff” gatherer) and we liberated the wood box from its big black house spider inhabitants and several pairs of my shoes from their big black house spider inhabitants (“Eek!”) we started to feel a bit better about it all. I think it’s the starting that is the hardest bit. It’s not hard to keep going, just start

I couldn’t resist sharing this “Lumberjack” image with you all and if you have 10 seconds to spare here’s the song itself…Steve and I? I will leave you to make up your own minds on that one 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL7n5mEmXJo

Another gratuitous woody shot with our resident parkour expert Bezial taking full advantage of this delicious and delightful pile

Steve will be helping his friends mum fill and plant out an amazing series of large water wicked garden beds that he designed for use on her rooftop garden. He has been taking images of the process so that I can share a blog post with you all once the job is complete. So far the beds have been made and the plumbing installed. It isn’t like ordinary wicked garden beds where you have an overflow that bleeds out onto the soil below because there ISN’T any soil below and so a complex drainage system was cooked up between Steve and the plumber and an effective “fix” for this problem was achieved. It’s quite an exciting idea and very water wise. I will keep you informed about it as it starts to come together

Getting the wood box ready for a steady stream of wood that will grace it’s hallowed circumference over the next 6 or so months. Note Steve has a trusty helper and is wearing a belt. The belt is because he obliterated his top button on his trousers thanks to (in his own words folks) “too much beer and too many potatoes”

The helper extracts his payment…

Steve has a saying now “First start with what you see”. Apparently it was something from one of the Hannibal Lector movies. I am not entirely sure whether to be alarmed or not by his thought pool but have decided to go along with this idea anyway as I am not exactly brimming over with idea’s myself. I have decided to have my eyes surgically removed. Steve is on a jag. He has decided that we are going to clean up/fix up what we can see surrounding our house. Steve can apparently see a whole LOT surrounding our house! Without eyes I will see relatively little…it’s an idea born of desperation and the knowledge that Steve on a cleaning jag is a terrifying creature.

“Yes? Can I help you?”
“I didn’t think so…zzzzzz”

I have started reading “Zero Waste Home” a most interesting concept. I love the idea of minimising our waste out the wazoo. I love it so much I follow blogs about it. I trawl the web to find interesting ideas for how to reduce and remove packaging. I love it so much it makes me smile whenever I find another way to do something myself that doesn’t involve packaging or anything that needs to be thrown out in any form. The book highlights the divide between the haves and have nots however. It is very hard to get someone who has very little money to stop using coupons to save money and to stop accepting those little free shampoos and conditioners at hotels. The reason being that a lack of money tends to foster a need to hoard. I often wrestle my inner desire to snaffle up the little shampoos (and I usually lose). It is much easier in a country like Australia where you just don’t have coupons. I watched a few television programs about people who clip coupons for a living and couldn’t believe how complex it was…it was like undertaking brain surgery or teaching an astro physics class except the brains were cauliflowers and you bought 75 of them in order to get them for free. I still can’t get my head around it but then it doesn’t matter if I do or don’t because we don’t have coupon’s to clip

Bezial balancing precariously on his sofa that Earl redecorated by eating half of the other sofa cushion. Bezial doesn’t like Earls design. He does however like the nice red dog cotton filled dog blanket that I picked up from the thrift shop on my last visit.

Sticky the stick insect who is refusing to yield his pots to the greater good

I think it is within everyones realm to be able to reduce their impact on the environment. Even baking the odd loaf of bread and choosing to buy a paper bag of lentils from the health food shop rather than throw a plastic bag of them into your trolley at the supermarket. The family in the book apparently only produce a “quart” (4 litres to us metricamacated folk) of refuse a year and that’s all recycling. The family downsized, got rid of their lawn, only buy things in containers that they provide, buy their meat from the butchers in mason jars (I can only begin to wonder what “Nige” would do if I headed in to his shop and said “can you fill this with sausages please…” 😉 ) but kudos to them, they decided to minimise their consumption and waste down as low as they could go. It’s possible. So is living for 5 years without having a shower but at the end of that time you might not want to have anything to do with the triumphant creature that emerged. I think it’s all about balance. I buy my flour and potatoes in bulk in 10kg brown paper bags. I reuse those bags as recycling bags until they are in tatters and then I snip them up and add them to the compost bin.

We get boats chugging up and down the river as it is the only way to get to Launceston by water

We buy 14 loaves of white supermarket bread a fortnight. Not for ourselves but to feed to our chooks. We are in the process of working out what to do with all of those chooks because they are costing us $163 a month to feed and that is only seed. If you add the $14 a fortnight for the bread and $3 a fortnight for the butter it’s a grand total of $197 a month for boobity boo chickens (NO idea how many we have but I recently counted 43 little baby chicks along…) and only 1 of them is laying eggs at the moment. She does her best but our grand total of eggs at the end of the fortnight tends to be around the dozen mark (if we are lucky) so that means that we are paying $98.50c per dozen. Now it doesn’t take me too long to work out that this amount might be a tad high and I don’t even eat eggs! Something has to give. If we reduce the chook population we reduce the price of the food as well. We only need about 8 chooks to do what we want around here and the rest are superfluous. I am considering offering our excess to the local Permaculture group. We have some very pretty chooks and I know that they will appreciate them. I will keep you posted. What I was trying to illustrate was that sometimes mindless habits take on lives of their own and you end up paying a HUGE amount for something that you are pouring a lot of work into for very little return.

“So Steve is going to head into town to go shopping and leave me here eh? Well I might just have to show him my displeasure…”

“I will just steal this piece of driftwood in order to exact my revenge…”

I just took a break to make some homemade pasties for Steve’s dinner tonight. I try to cook as much as I can from scratch because that’s a good way to reduce packaging and get better quality food cheaper. I added some cheese to the pastry that we buy in big blocks. I am wondering if anyone local knows where to buy cheese unwrapped. I know that you used to be able to buy it from the supermarkets but I don’t do the shopping and I doubt that Steve would stand still enough (especially if there was a line) to ask the deli person about it. I am going to have to wait until I go in myself. I have a large bag full of plastic bags etc. that I need to get turned into plarn. I don’t know what I will do with the plarn but I am leaning towards making crocheted shopping bags out of it. I have 3 large crochet hooks and only really needed the smallest for my latest project but it was more economical to buy 3 than it was to buy a single crochet hook. If anyone can explain that to me I will be grateful as I can’t for the life of me work out why it costs more for a single plain crochet hook than it does for 3 metal pastel ones. I keep meaning to start making them and then suddenly the time disappears somewhere and I can’t crochet or read or lay on the floor on my back twiddling my thumbs like Pooh bear any more.

AND he didn’t clean it up! 😉

We took the dogs down to have a look at the enormous wood pile and Earl is more interested in the fact that the gate is open and he might get a walk

I am sure that I am not the only one who hits 3pm running as a steady crescendo of “creation” occurs. By 6.30 when dinner is all served and is being munched contentedly I am starting to feel pretty tired after my long day and it is the norm to find me fast asleep on the couch by 7.30 which is a shame because the only television program that I actually like, Master chef U.K. is on then and I usually miss the end because I have to drag my sorry tired derrière off to bed. The other day I took possession of a wonderful red cast iron casserole dish with a lid as well as a cast iron frypan from Jan who I walk with in the morning. She most generously gifted me the pair as she had just purchased some new cookware that she was happier with and I was the lucky recipient of these lovely cooking implements. The casserole dish is wide and not too deep and will be perfect for cooking in Brunhilda when she is up and running again. It seems like all things point towards this being a winter where narf7 gets cooking bigtime. I have to animate El Camino my lovely white sourdough starter that the wonderful Chica Andaluza  sent to me and I am also going to experiment with my homemade kefir as a leavener. I have some very interesting experiments on the cards involving breads made with vegetables, cakes made from strange and interesting ingredients and all kinds of vegan experiments courtesy of all of the recipes that I have been collecting via the blogs that I have been following avidly and Pinterest where I won’t admit to how many boards or pins I have needless to say its “a lot”.

The lovely cast iron casserole dish and cast iron frypan that Jan gave us and 6 cauliflowers. Don’t ask. That’s what happens when you are vegan and eat by the season and cauliflowers are $1 each and when you get them home you realise that there is no room in the fridge…sigh… the apples in the cava fruit bowl are strange and wondrous. I haven’t ever eaten them before and they are an interesting meaty textured apple with very little juice but they are sweet at the same time. Not quite cooking apple but not really something that you would wax lyrical about so I am grating them into my breakfast buckwheat porridge and for that purpose they are just “perfick” 🙂

Well I think that might be all for today folks. I can’t seem to just “stop” at 600 words like blog posts are supposed to settle at. I don’t know who thought up this magic quotient but they didn’t have 5000 muses all babbling for airtime in their brain like I do and I would like to keep my sanity for at least another week. Have a great week folks and here’s to sunshine for you northern lot and blissful rain for us southerners 🙂

 

Do you think Mr Leunig would mind if I shared another most worthy example of why I love this man to bits? I hope not…oh well, “In for a penny, in for a pound!” as my old gran would have said! 😉