No Rally Rally

The other day we had to go to a town a bit far away because Purple had an appointment there. Littletree had a friend over, so while we were waiting I took them to play in the park. As it turned out, there was a rally that day to protest a Rally (car race) that will be held in the valley. Somehow the irony of holding a rally to protest a Rally was lost on the hippies.

It was an interesting spectacle to watch, and somehow the girls got sucked in to the parade.

I don't really have much opinion about the Rally itself. It seemed that the main arguments against it were:

-That roads will be closed for several hours on the day, meaning that people can't get in or out of their homes. yep. it's a sucky inconvenience, but hardly worthy of a massive protest, IMO.

-That lots of wildlife will be killed by the high-speed cars. True, but I'm not sure just how much wildlife will be killed, yes, the Rally cars will go faster than regular cars, but the number of cars on the road will be greatly reduced on the day. This one doesn't seem to be based in any solid evidence

-That the government is spending $6million of taxpayers money to host this event. Good argument, but otoh, the government claims that the Rally will bring $30million to the area. Again, solid evidence on either side is lacking.

For me, the one argument that makes real sense is the moral objection to motor sports in general, though no one at the rally brought that up. To quote Purple: Cars are polluting, but we drive them because we need to get places and for the most part there isn't much in the way of alternatives; it's driving for practical necessity. Car races are driving - and therefore polluting - for fun, and that is what I'm opposed to.

I did get the impression that a lot of the people there were just general "protest anything mainstream" bandwagoners (and heaven forfend any of the local crew should read this and find out I'm not a *real* anti-everything hippy LOL), but at least I snapped some nice photos of the event

(thanks to my stupid broken camera that I've discovered will sometimes work *if* you open the battery cover to push on the battery when you turn it on, while spinning three times widdershins and tapping your nose. But only if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter's aligned with Mars)

Homeschool Yoga

This week at homeschool group the kids had a yoga workshop that was a lot of fun

Littletree really enjoyed showing off how flexible she is!

After the yoga one of the parents played some games with the kids, including a parachute workshop which went down really well

I was glad to finally get out of the house and do something, after having a nasty cough for a couple of weeks, mostly being home and rugged up with a steaming cup of ginger tea.

Rain

It's raining. A LOT.

I checked our rain gauge, as I do every day, only to find this:

Yep. it's at 98mm. That was at 4pm. The next morning I checked it again the next morning at 9 o'clock and guess how much rain we'd had? I don't know either! The gauge was overfilling!

We actually had about 250mm of rain (like 10") in 2 days. A lot of our area got flooded, but thankfully it was milder than the bureau of meteorology had predicted.

Yesterday the floodwaters were receding, so we made a trip to the city to catch a sale at an electrical store (I bought a new fridge to replace the old one that came with the house, and freezes everything even on the warmest setting).

On the way we drove through a couple of spots that were under a few inches of water, and one spot that was under deep water - we could only just pass in our little car

Sorry the pics are low quality - taken with my cell phone since my camera is on the blink.

I am so thankful to have a dry home! The last house we lived in filled up with water every time it rained. And our new house is really high up, so there's virtually no chance of it being flooded (though a good chance we could get stuck in it!)

It does seem ironic though, that we get all this excessive rain when most of the rest of Australia is under severe drought and water restrictions.

Boobie Nostalgia

Yesterday was one year, one month, one week and one day since Littletree weaned (on her fifth birthday).

So our nursing days are well and truly over. While I'm, glad to leave that behind me (because, really, five years is a long time), I also miss it sometimes (especially when Littletree just wont shut up it would be nice to stick something in her mouth sometimes LOL)

Here she is as a newborn:

Tandem nursing Littletree 15 months old with a 1-day-old baby whose birth I attended (her mama hadn't gotten any milk in despite our best efforts - though she did in the end)

Littletree 2 years old nursing her doll Sigalit in the Bolivian sling

In the desert near the Dead Sea in Israel 2.5 years old

3.5 years old (love those curls)

I'm so glad that I was able to give Littletree such a great start in life, and I'm grateful that I was able to re-lactate after we weaned when Littletree was 2.5 years old (a hornet stung me on one nipple and it got horribly infected and gross, so I couldn't feed Littletree anymore, but we started nursing again after a few months.

It's funny; I don't have all that many nursing pics. Probably because I take 99% of the photos in this family, and it's not too easy to take photos of oneself breastfeeding.

Also I think it was just so normal for us, it didn't seem worthy of photographing. Not to mention - most people don't like having their picture taken when they're eating!

Disaster!!! My Camera is Dying :(

Yeah, I know. It's just a thing. It's not like Littletree is in any danger or my house burned down or we ran out of tiramisu ice cream or anything drastic like that... but still... I love my camera and it's just about dead.

My darling little camera is an Exilim z70. It's fantastic. I love it to bits. It takes great pictures, it's tiny enough to fit in my pocket, it starts up fast, and takes great pictures. I take a lot of photos - yep, that's my flickr account with over 4,000 photos on it.

But lately it wont start up. I can usually get it working by taking the battery out, and the memory card, hitting it a few times and putting it all back together again. Now the lens started jamming when I try to zoom. Waaaa!

So I have to get a new one. I've been spending hours trawling camera websites, getting lost in lens angles, megapixels, zoom lengths, video functions...

I'm thinking about just buying a new one just the same as the old one, but in the newer model. I think it even comes in green ;)

Meanwhile, there might not be too many photos on my blog for a bit till I get myself a new one. I put the paypal button back on the right column so feel free to donate to help me take more great pics! :p

(remember the great ant photos I took?)

 

Majikfaerie v3.0

Today is my birthday! I'm thirty. wow. I'll have to start settling down and being responsibe ;)

My little sister, Chicky even flew in for a visit. Here I am with Chicky, my wife Química and Littletree

Last night we had a great party, a few of my friends came round, 

we ate yummy food,

played great music,

Química made a fantastic spiced apricot cheesecake as my birthday cake,

I got some awesome presents,

Had a few drinks

And things even got a bit crazy with a guest appearance of my good friend, Admiral Ansantiy III (who brought me a gorgeous green skirt and a plant)

Finally we all got cozy by the fire and chilled out listening to Jazz.

Today we went down to the market in the village and spent the afternoon listening to live music at the local cafe :) It's been a fabulous birthday!

Fill in

While the chicken soup really helped, I've still been coughing all week, feeling a bit sorry for myself and all that, so I haven't posted at all, sorry.

and I still don't have anything to post, so I'll entertain you all with a cute picture of Littletree with the lace parasol she found in a hard rubbish collection on the street (we washed it)

Purple playing flute in the park at our local homeschool group

The ever-gorgeous Química making me dinner

Purple and Littletree dancing (note the awesome incidental colour coordination)

And funniest of all; me solving a Rubik's Cube in under 2 minutes. Yeah, I know, 2 minutes is hardly a record of any sort (I think in this one it's really like 1:50 or something), and I'm really out of practice.

I learned to solve the cube in Africa, Purple told me a few tricks, and then I traveled from Cape Town to Cairo by hitch-hike, bus and once a boat, with my cube, and any time I was waiting for a ride, I would practice solving the cube. By the end of that journey I got really good at it!

Now we're all preparing for my birthday party - I'm celebrating my 30th tomorrow evening! (though my birthday is on the 17th)

Visitors

We have a bit of a full house at the moment; my ex wife, Química came to visit for a couple of weeks, and a German friend of mine from Phuket, Itera is staying with us as well.

Littletree has been having a fantastic time with Química, who arrived wearing lipstick and nail polish; very rare and exciting things for Littletree of course. (though Química wouldn't let me take a photo). And Itera, whom Littletree has been decorating and teaching ballet to.

Lately it has been cold enough to light the fire, and we're really enjoying the toasty, coziness.

And Littletree has been constantly toasting marshmallows

Should be really fun next weekend; my sister called yesterday to say she's coming up for a visit as well (of course, next weekend will be my 30th birthday, so we should have a big crowd in the house then)

Chicken Soup for the Swine Flu

I'm sick. More than a week ago I got a bit of a cough. I started sneezing like crazy, lots of yucky phlegm, headache, tiredness, aches, and generally feeling crap. After googling my symptoms, it became clear that I must have swine flu.

Being that there's a global pandemic - after all, something like 46 people have already died in the whole world, which is a lot, especially compared with the thousands who die each year from the regular seasonal flu. Especially considering the terrible avian flu pandemic that caused havoc around the world just a couple of years ago. Not to mention the 1976 swine flu pandemic that only one person died from, yet, many died from the US government's vaccine.

The government's recommendations were all basically related to buying stuff (go out and stockpile canned foods, buy flu treatments, buy face masks, and keep buying pork).

So I did what any sensible person would do - I started taking echinacea tincture, drinking ginger lemon tea, I made elderflower tea, onion and honey cough syrup, and loads of vitamin C. I went out and bought some fresh veggies and an organic, free-range, local chicken. (incidentally, the veggies I bought made a beautiful rainbow in the shopping trolley)

Thus armed, I made chicken soup. Starting with a whole chicken

Chopped it up a bit

Took my yummy veggies

Chopped them up too

and put it all into my pressure cooker with a splash of vinegar and a few litres of filtered water.

Let sit for an hour, then bring to a boil. Scoop of any foam that rises to the top, and then close the cooker, and simmer for 20 hours. Add in a bunch of chopped parsley at the end.

The final result was a wonderful, rich chicken stock. I made myself bowls of yummy chicken soup, we cooked brown rice in chicken stock, I made a yummy quiche with all the chicken and veggie bits I strained out. And froze all the rest, so now we have a freezer full of stock :)

New Bathroom

While we were overseas we had our bathroom remodelled. It just started out as having the shower floor repaired, but since we were having the shower replaced, I wanted to get a new, bigger bathtub (coz I like me a nice big tub to soak in).

See, the old bath was really small:

Once we were getting a new bath and shower, it meant a lot of re-tiling, and once you re-tile parts, it's worthwhile to re-tile the whole room, as it's almost impossible to get tiles that match ones bought in 1980 (when the house was built; mmm salmon pink!). And since we were re-tiling, and getting a new bath and shower, why not just redo the whole room. The cost was about the same in the end, and the end result is waaaaaay better.

I went for an underwater theme; more "deep ocean trench" than "seaside". The plan is to paint mermaids and seaweed on the closet doors. I got a great big enormous bathtub - it's long enough to fully lie down in, extra wide and 57cm deep! I can well imagine being able to give birth in there, and there's plenty of room for two ;)

We decided to to the painting ourselves, so that's been our project the last couple of days.

Littletree had a lot of fun painting too,

She sang this cute song about having fun the whole time

I'll post more pics when it's all finished.

Accidental Mardi Grass

Littletree's friend, Ana stayed over last night, which was nice, the girls played a lot and had loads of fun.

The catch was that I had to drop Ana back to her mother, who was working at a market stall in a village about 40 minutes away. I was fine with that... till I got to the village, only to find that the "market" was actually the Nimbin Mardi Grass festival.

It's basically a huge crowd of people/ marijuana-enthusiasts/ tourists/ crazies and assorted riff-raff who flock to this small village to celebrate cannabis and peacefully demonstrate to end prohibition. You can read the wiki page here

I'm all for that, really, as long as I don't have to personally attend. I don't like crowds, or loud noise, and I don't smoke marijuana or particularly like hanging around with people who are.

I usually avoid the entire village of Nimbin, which is a crazy kind of place, where the 1973 Aquarius festival was held (kind of an Australian version of Woodstock). Only all the hippies stayed, and the village has become a kind of hippie museum unto itself - all the shops in the main street (even the butcher and grocery store) are painted psychedelic. It's just that kind of place.

I don't have a problem with it, it's just not my vibe. So I was slightly irritated when I drove into the midst of it, unsuspecting. Not to mention having to drive around crowds of stoned crazy people trying to find parking!

When we got there, I found my friend at her stall; she said business had been really slow and she'd hardly sold anything all day. Only while I was standing there chatting with her, it got really busy. So I became the official stall customer magnet, because of course I was (as usual) dressed all in green like the ganja fairies, and somehow ended up taking care of the stall for a while.

The girls had a little play on the Nimbin Sk8 Park

And finally I drove Littletree home.