December 2006

One hundred and one thousand bureaucratic small steps for the Council, and double that for ourselves and we are now much closer to being the owners of a strawbale home ... and we still haven't so much as laid a bale or dug a hole! But we're not complaining (there are too many other worthwhile things to complain about in this world without adding councils to it). But six months after they went in (we were told 6 weeks).... the plans have come back out again. Released into the world dazed, confused, faces pale, their long A3 sized pages flapping in the wind ... and they are now firmly tacked to the side of our shed wall looking appealing to me, but holding Trevor prisoner instead.

They do not look appealing to Trev, who reiterates
'You do realise don't you, what kind of fear this house holds in my heart, don't you'. I wave him off dismissively with reiterations of my own, 'the you're clever, you're resourceful, strong...' stuff. But he's not convinced. I figure once we start he'll lose the fear. It's back to small steps, and don't pop your head up too often to look for progress.

Unfortunately Caleb has given us a strong incentive not to follow his lead. He did exactly that last week while running along the Dover wharf. Kept his head down, watched his feet (he says doing that makes him run faster) and he ran right off the end. We all saw him disappear off the end with no idea what it was he was falling to. It was night time and all my horrid mother instincts rose to the fore (I screamed quite a lot as a response). By the time we got to the side it was to see a frightened face staring back up at us while he tried to swim against the tide and the weight of his clothes dragging him down. But (big, capable, nothing is too much, he can handle it all, Trev) rescued him and we all laughed off the fright. Caleb is still talking about his brief flight, we're just happy he didn't hit rocks, break any more limbs or get eaten by a passing shark.





Anyway, I have yet to get back to the complaints department. I have a few this month. Actually there must have been 40 or 50 complaints, they were running around the bathroom at night eating the soap, chewing a hole in the bottom of the washing machine and then through the wires, (Trev, whose very handy with.. well anything and is well qualified to build houses) soldered those back together, and removed their nest (mostly comprising Caleb's missing socks) from under the fridge, and vacuumed all their little poo poos each day, I bought my first ever bottle of disinfectant and I damn well used it. Lots. Then the crunch came... we opened up a drawer in the main shed and found it had been chewed through, and so had all our packs of CD's, heaps of Caleb's games, my back up CD's... chewed, eaten.. I think in revenge as we made darn sure not to leave anything edible around they decided to mow through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire instead. Harry seems to have been incapable of any handy 'cd-romo repairo' spells unfortunately and he and his game shall remain forever trapped in the damaged silver disk. Hermione would have known what to do. Anyway, it was the last straw... and that's what we did. We moved them all. The 246 bales that are beside the shed. Trev and I moved them all on Monday - took us most of the day, as we had to move them twice, once out of the shed, complete with a box full of little rat babies, and then took the pallets off the floor and placed them away from the shed and then the strawbales back on them. Nuju was in rat/mice heaven. The local kids were in rat/mice heaven. I did a whole lot of girly screaming and leaping around. Anyway, by the time the day was over, there were many corpses, but there were survivors. We know because they all decided to congregate in scared little clumps in the bathroom. Enter bathroom, scream loudly, perch on edge of toilet, pee very quickly... and listen to Trev mutter on about hippy bloody herbal remedies, plaster of paris and icing sugar, my &*%$. It's true they had stopped eating it, I thought it meant they were dead, but no, it meant they had become very pissed off at the low level of cuisine offered and had gone away and recruited an army to drive us out. Well... after several nights of hearing the territorial disputes in the bathroom and what sounded like a snake gargling on a few we hit the hardware store up for the hard core poison. They've eaten boxes of the stuff, their poo has turned green and still they cavort! However, the demise of many has dropped their numbers and sometime in the next few days toilet visitations will once again be a peaceful process.

Yesterday was 35 degrees celcius (95 farenheit) and as Trev was off sailing, Caleb, his mate Shaun, Nuju and I headed for Surveyors Bay. We ended up picking up a couple of hitchhikers dressed in traditional German wear - think white shirts, black waistcoats and lederhosen, with cute black hats and long curly walking sticks. They're doing a 3 years and one day travel around the world in order to fullfil a traditional quest before starting their own cabinet making businesses. Which would have been a great conversation to continue if I hadn't forgotten we had to pick up Nuju and take him with us and when we added a very excited dog to the back seat the mix was fairly volatile, with squeals and squeaks from Cal and Shaun who were being scratched to death while Nuju tried to eat their ice creams - and did you think that would make them eat it faster ... well no, so the backseat debacle lasted longer and was far more painful than required. But we got there, and it was beautiful. But peace was not to last long. I'd deliberately driven past all the picnickers and their toy dogs and driven right to the other end of the beach to avoid them. By the time I'd got out of the car and locked the doors both boys and the dog had high tailed it to the beach and all the way back to the picnickers where I could see a line of chaos as people tried to avoid the dog who was running around grabbing sausages off plates and small children and Caleb and Shaun stood hopelessly by. Of course I rush onto the scene spluttering and angry and everyone pops up their heads to look at me, and bugger me, I know half of them. Most embarrassing. Retreat back to beach still spluttering and the kids have disappeared again and Nuju is in the process of wrapping a long lead around a womans legs until she's incapable of kicking him as he chases her Shitzu around and around her. I rescue the woman, I try hard not to kick the dog. I scream at the kids to come back. I send the lot of them into the water and try close my eyes when Nuju runs up to sleeping beachgoers and shakes himself over top of them. He catches their balls and runs away with them, he chases seagulls and falls over people... a couple of trying hours later people are starting to kick him and I decide it's time to go. Nuju promptly falls asleep in the back of the car and behaves with perfect decorum the rest of the way home.

It was a beautiful day - after all my efforts with sunscreen and small children, I'm the only one to get burnt. Today it's raining and overcast and my jumper is back on.

December 17

Chooks. We've had a real chook theme happening. It started with a neighbour recently selling us two hens, unseen, and discovering on seeing them that they were past their egg laying days and we put them out to pasture, literally. We were happy for them to scratch around and add a bit of phosperous to the phospherous low soil, but one decided to sit under a tree and shake her head (and I swear I could see her muttering under her breath). We decided she had developed Parkinson's and a couple of days later we found her in a permanent state of quiet at the back of the pen and we buried her near a grape vine.

Chook number two was a bit lonely. We watched her trying to get in with the other two chooks we've had in the moveable chook pen for months now, but when I trialled her in there, feathers were quick to fly and she quickly decided that getting back out was a higher priority.

We rescued four young chicks from a local 'chook factory'. We got them young, before they lost the instinct to scratch but not before they lost they very ends of their beaks. But they seem to cope OK, except, of course, the lonely chook decided vengeance was hers and she took great delight in walking around the area pecking them. This persisted for several days so we tossed her out of the area they were in and behind an electric fence, one that Nuju wouldn't go through and figured she'd be safe enough there. Nuju, by the way, is a bird dog and likes nothing more than sitting on the other side of the fence and producing large amounts of drool as dinner chases flies around the paddock. But, getting back to the lonely, non egg producing chook, she decided to try get as close as she could to the place she knew best, and managed to navigate the electric fence and was promptly pounced on by a salivating canine. I've walked out the shed and seen Nuju running along with a chicken by the wing. I've pounced on the dog. the chook has run under the car, and by the time I've tied the dog up and come back to rescue her I haven't been able to find her, crawled under the car, lifted the bonnet, tried to see if she had crawled into the wood pile of which there are many places to crawl, to no avail. Five hours later I have to go pick Trev up (he's out sailing again), and I've still not found her, so I've started up the engine, revved it lots and then when nothing has eventuated, driven off. I'm not sure if she had already crawled into a small space and died of shock or if she hung on under there for 400 metres or before succumbing to gravity. I ran her over.

This is the worst track record we've had with non-deliberate chook deaths yet. But there were more to come, Caleb's favourite chookie, pictured above, was taken by a hawk the following day - so we had to put the remaining wee chooks into a pen - which wasn't very effective as the smallest one figured out how to hop in and out of the chook wire. One became crook and sat sadly under a tree for a day, we couldn't pick what was wrong, we bought it inside, where it was warmer, but it looked grim, till I wondered whether it might be crop bound, checked and sure enough, a hard extended, lumpy crop. I applied olive oil to said chicks gullet and massaged the crop gently till said lump desisted and within an hour it was back on all claws.



Now we have two new New Hampshire chicks, and they are the cutest little lumps of fluff. They're only 3 weeks old now and have decided I'm mum. I lie on the bed attempting to read and they crawl up my sleeves peck at my eye, or on one occasion attempted to pick my nose. Nuju of course is strictly out of bounds, and needs a lot of rehydrating whenever he sees them around. Not to chase chooks is going to be an impossibility for him, we'll have to be especially vigilant.

December 23

Not much to say - we've had a stinking hot and humid day yesterday ... and gee it's getting very dry. But they're talking triple figure rainfall in the next few days. Christmas day included. Still nothing to complain about compared to some. Trev's kids Ehren, 23 and Leela, 18 arrived yesterday and will be with us for 10 days in Ehren's case and possibly permanently for Leela.

I've managed to track down 10 new copies of The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil DVD. There are not a lot of places you can buy them in Australia and it's a positive look at how Cuba responded to their Peak Oil issues in the 1990's. What happened there is a remarkable story about how community joined together creating community gardens and converting farms to organic agriculture, and rethinking non-fossil fuel based transport etc. The part I love is how farmers/producers are now reverred and are financially rewarded rather than ripped off.

There is a related free interview with Megan Quinn about Cuba's Peak Oil triumph at You Tube, which is a great insight into what happened there. And you can buy the 53 minute Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil DVD here. There is plenty of info available about Peak Oil issues, I tend to be drawn to the positive rather than the doomsday variety - and this DVD is a powerful look at what Peak Oil might mean to us as a society - eventually a healthier, more community minded lifestyle for us all, especially if we start moving towards it now.



Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New and even more sustainable than you are now ... Year!

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