Week Eighteen - 7 May

I contemplated murder this week when getting on my bike, Caleb already on board and realising that A. It is starting to rain and B. Trev has left the the bike seat at a high elevation, not only could I not breath if sitting on the seat, I wouldn't be able to reach the pedals either. Not long after this comes C. Trev has taken the spanner with him to work and D. I'm running very late. I'm prepared to get there anyway I can, despite A,B,C,D but, E. I'm developing a painful bruise in my lower back from the bike seat and F.F.F.F.F! Why don't I drive a bloody car!

Caleb, of course, found my predicament amusing, that was until I gave up looking ludicrous and took the more time consuming choice of walking, which of course included the use of his legs.

Caleb is currently studying ancient Egyptians and we're both having a lot of fun making paper pyramids, cartouches of our names, making clay obelisks and huge elephants that knock over obelisks and drop blobs of terracotta coloured poo all over the floor, thank god for wooden floors.

The chook I thought was going boy on me finally decided to start laying eggs and we are now averaging 8 eggs a day and we're going through them at a great rate. Gives us a break from pumpkin.


Some of the coffee beans to be picked, and the beginning of removing the two beans from each fruit.

It's been drizzly and overcast most of the week, so low power creation and no real improvement in rainwater levels. But heck, I can't find enough to grizzle about …. I'll have to hand over the reins and give Trev a chance to get one off his chest. Here you go misery pants, remember to press hard on the L key it stil ony barey works.

The Trevor Report

Seven weeks to go, and we're in a holding pattern. We all want it to be over now, even Linda, although she rarely admits it. We do the same things, eat the same food, milk the goat, feed the chooks. We described to someone recently the highlight of our week (the bike trip to the library), and she looked at us with a mixture of sympathy and disdain, as if it were somehow slightly pathetic; for a moment, I saw it from her perspective and it almost was. But I love the bike trips. The point is not that we go to the library, but that we do it together. It's just starting really to chafe for me that we can't have a cup of coffee while we're out. Symbolic, probably, of a deeper malaise, indicative of the fact that deep down I'm just a shallow, materialistic, resource guzzling air head, for which I feel horribly guilty. However, I still want that cup of coffee.

The Caleb Report

Caleb do you think that the experiment has been really hard?
tuhhh! Not at all.

Do you think it's been really easy?
Well yeah!

What do you like the most about the experiment?
That I'm gonna get $200 at the end.

What do you like the least about the experiment? (after a great deal of thought including references to, 'I always have to do what you say'. and when pointed out that it was not relevant to the question about the experiment …

I can't go the video shop and get a thousand videos.
(like he ever did).




Coffee while still doing the growing thing.


Week Nineteen

47 days to go…

Roasted the first lot of coffee beans this week. Supposed to be able to hear them crackle, but due to the high pitched screech of the fire alarm (the oven has to be very hot) I couldn't hear a darn thing. Some came out slightly burnt, others quite pale. But this is to be expected from a home job. The resulting brew was the right colour, and smelt more like coffee than tea and tasted (with some allowances made for the amateur status of the roaster) quite good. Certainly far better than that instant muck. Used the occasion to roast as many vegetables as possible and thankfully, failed to hear too much of Caleb's mantra, "Roast turkey too, roast turkey too" over the bloody alarm - had it been within reach it would have been unceremoniously ripped from its moorings.

Rained quite a bit this week and we are just under the May average rainfall and only two weeks in. The garden is thriving. Weeds abound. I look at them with a jaded eye and remind myself that it will only take the first good frost to stop them in their tracks. And if that doesn't happen we will have three tons of tomatoes to barter.

The corollary of the rain and 'overcastness' has been a lack of sunlight and we had to put on the hot water booster three times this week. We haven't resorted to this in two years. Impressed, we are not.

Possum hates the rain and loves letting us know. Her pen turns to sludge very quickly and I spend a fair amount of the day either cleaning out her living quarters or taking her for a walk in less squishy areas. We bring her up under the house to milk her where the pavers are clean and dry. One hazy morning we milked her and found ourselves caught up in a passionate conversation about the difference between pathos and bathos and left her loosely tied to a post. We were surprised minutes later to discover her trotting along the verandah and investigating the house though a window.

Trev puts in the hard yards, he gets a regular slog on the bike while being doused. Caleb and I stay at home learning interesting facts about how the Ancient Egyptians hooked the brain out the nose during the mummifying process, which God killed which God and what half of who was a crocodile and a jiffy is 1/100 of a second. While it would be nice to make concessions regarding Trev's steak eating opportunities we don't have much longer to go and before they can be guilt free, or relatively guilt free. (damn carnivores).

The interesting thing for us at the moment is contemplating what life will be like post experiment. Will we permanently succumb to the lures of the consumer world?

Week Twenty

We've managed to get hold of a meter that plugs into the wall and then an appliance into it. We're trying to track down where the power is going. We are still using more than we create, and it is not the norm for this time of the year. We don't feel as though we are doing anything differently, so what's going on? Found out a few things we didn't know, eg I've been religious about turning the electric kettle off at the wall for years, and giving what my family call, 'the hairy eyeball' to anyone who fails to do the same - it was for naught, it draws no power when not in use. However the microwave, which is parked right beside it, draws 3 watts when not in use - why, we don't know, it was bought because it does not have a permanent display. Now I will have to transfer my obsession to it. 3 watts seems little but over 24 hours it mounts up, a years worth of sitting there, idle, achieving nothing, ends up using 26kwh, which is sometimes all the power we produce in a week. I'd rather use it to fry chips thanks, there would be lots of chips to be fried with 26 kwh, providing of course I'd managed to grow them first.

The garden is flourishing after the rain in the last few months. Hopefully we don't get an early frost and we should be harvesting tens of kilos of tomatoes soon, instead of our trickling supply. We also have winged beans, snake beans, eggplants and peas (which Caleb is already munching on). The hong kong broccoli is a big disappointment. I bought seeds because they say the whole plant is edible, but they neglected to mention that it has a 1cm circumference head. So lots of chopped up stem and leaves in stir fries. We are also hogging into the lettuce leaves, something we can't grow during summer as the heat makes it bitter and bolt. Food at the moment is an all day think about, each idea bursts onto the scene and leaves it, booted offstage with a boo …. booooooring. But then we've always gone through food cycles like this, even when money wasn't an issue.

This week I made curried eggplant pakoras, which are yummy, but they soak up too much oil to be good for you. The usual red kidney bean kebabs, with carrot, cheese, onion, capsicum and parsley. All good vegetarian fare, but Trev's counting down the days till the next steak, and we're almost wearing the remaining days off the calendar with our eyes as we walk past the fridge.

I drove the car during the week, the first time in 2 months. It needs to be driven occasionally; mechanics orders, or we'll end up with blocked fuel injectors and other painful things. So Caleb and I did a quick round trip to the feed store and bought a bale of lucerne and a bag of grain for the chooks. On topic, we are called upon for a second unexpected trip, when Leela (Trev's daughter) needed a last minute lift to the train station. Still we haven't yet used a full tank of petrol in six months, even counting the trip to Brisbane and back early on in the piece.

Even though we have needed to spend money, it's been minimal, and while we have used the car, it has been negligible, and we have used excess power, in the scale of things it's only been a small fraction of the average families. I pulled out the calculator recently and figured out that our emergency use of town water was unnecessary, we could have scraped through on what we had. But we didn't know that at the time. I'd give it back if I could, but they don't want rainwater to contaminate the town water supply. There are fines attached.

Enough excuses, I better go bludgeon myself to help Trev shift the chook pen.


Week Twenty One - 30 May

150 days down, 31 to go.
We're all rearing for a rip snorting ending … I can already imagine the recycling bin clinking with the sound of empty bottles, the rustle of empty plastic packets and non recyclable plastic containers. The itch is now in earnest. We want some guilt free fun, even if only for a week do we emerge from our consumer hibernation and go hard …. I want a new pillow, this one has collapsed, some slippers for Caleb that fit, I want to buy Trev something nice and try make up for all sweating to work and back on a bike in the middle of summer, and now in the, two pairs of gloves are not quite enough, winter.

We've had a few close to zero temps over the week. While I do talk to the plants it's usually exhortations to ripen with the tomatoes, a pleading to grow plump and red before it's too late.

A few milestones, we've just managed to pass the 4000kwh mark of power generated since the solar system was installed in February 2003. Trev's electric bike has clicked over 2000km's since May last year. We should have one on the mountain bike and on mine, as we've done many more on those.

Our power use is still a bit of a mystery, as it is now dropping significantly with the cooler weather. We'll have to wait till summer to test the fridge again, which, along with the hard wired and unmeasurable stove, is still looking like being the culprit. Found out lots about our power usage however, things we can put to good use.


Possum in the lab lab 'paddock'

Caleb's been 'helping' me in the garden voluntarily this week. Which has been fun, if not productive. The highlight being his Hollywood death in the middle of a worm writhing pile of fresh dirt, I played along and shovelled dirt on him in an impromptu burial which was all good, and not very clean fun, until I became aware of a helicopter hovering overhead, and had to plead with him to please stand up, the police might be around any moment to investigate the backyard burial. He giggled, but stayed still enough to require a quick kick to dislodge him.

Mandarins aplenty, eggplants galore, a trickle of tomatoes, a gamut of sweet potato, peas, coriander, limes, wong bok, pak choi, chillies, a putrescence of pumpkin, eggs, milk, cheese, passionfruits, carambola's, the last of the macadamias, beans, capsicums, a few squash and zucchini, the first of the new carrots, the occasional paw paw, and the staples from bartering and we're doing just fine.

Trev's got a new mantra, it goes, 'Flesh, flesh, let there be flessshhh!", along with a pensive, "We've proved our point - don't you think 150 attempting-not-to-spend-a-dollar-days has a certain ring to it?"

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