Showing posts with label weekends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weekends. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2011

It's The Small Things.

Right now, I am sitting in a friend's house, watching her two beautiful boys for her while she and her partner are out for the night. The boys are both sleeping, I'm curled up on the couch with an iced coffee, a block of chocolate and Season One of Gray's Anatomy. The Cats just won the football, and tomorrow is Sunday.

It's the small things that make me happy, and today has been full of small things....

Chatting to a friend I haven't spoken to in a while....

Taking the kids to watch some vintage racing cars race up Mt Ommaney...

Miya saying, as we watched the cars, "I LOVE this! This is my FAVOURITE day!"....

Nath and the girls going for a picnic in the park, giving me valuable time by myself.....

Having a wonderful four hour nap this afternoon while my girls first slept, then played happily....

Ordering our Autumn seed collection ready for planting next weekend....

Both Eden and Miya saying "I love you", unprompted, at different points of the day....

Looking at the housework and thinking, "It will wait."....

Counting four little green tomatoes growing on our tree....

Watching the girls pick herbs and salad greens from our garden to go in the scrambled eggs from our chickens....

What have your 'small things' been? I'd love to hear them, being the voyeur that I am....

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Food In The Belly, Food For The Soul

I write about food a lot. Food is something I devote much of my time to, as well as a significant part of our income. Food excites me, challenges me and inspires me (and sometimes defeats me). Much of our weekends are taken up with the growth, preparation, cooking and celebration of food (and by that I mean eating).

Every society has a food culture of some sort. Countries are known for their cuisine; the particular ingredients and cooking methods they employ, the rhythms and routines around meal preparation, the colour and bustle of marketplaces around the world. Early trade was centred around foods, and what was commonplace for some cultures was exotic and sought after to others. Nomadic communities based their movement around the availability of particular seasonal foods.

I believe that, by and large, Western society has lost its food culture. And we miss it, by god, do we miss it. We spend millions annually on the business of food; fine dining restaurants, specialty food stores, cooking schools, food festivals. I believe that, as we have evolved, this disconnection from food and its production that we have created has left our society feeling somewhat... hollow. We make up for it by spending more millions traveling to other cultures to experience their food culture... and when we try to recreate it with our Western tastes, we adulterate and compromise the essence of the food. Food culture is, and should be, entrenched in the soils it was raised up from.

Anyway, I was determined to write a lighter post than the last two, so I wanted to share with you some of ways we try to recreate a connection with the earth and its edible gifts in our space. These are photos from this weekend, a lovely, productive two days of pottering around the house and garden, feeding our bellies and feeding our souls.

Breakfast: fruit and honey damper with the last of my apricot sauce

Our harvest on Saturday

More bottled tomatoes - a pantry staple

Our little garden gnome, Eden

The bed we planted this weekend - tomatoes and rhubarb

Orange and date chutney simmering away - a sweet, spicy smell

Finished product - three more jars for the pantry

The beginnings of beer bottling

A clean, mucked out chook pen - and our reward!

Monday, January 31, 2011

Storm


The last post I wrote seems very ironic now, given what actually happened in our town on the weekend. While all eyes were turned towards Cyclone Bianca, hovering off the west coast and expected to make an unprecedented crossing south of Perth late on Sunday, two unrelated cold fronts conspired to unleash a storm the likes of which are rarely seen in these parts, sweeping down though the Wheatbelt and culminating in an awe-striking display of the might and power of Mother Nature that caused significant damage to a number of towns, including my own.


This storm was completely unexpected. I had gone outside for some forgotten reason, and noticed the sky was looking strange. Great, orange billowing clouds were rolling in quickly, and for one minute, I thought I was looking at a bushfire. I sent Nath into the backyard to secure some of our (many) loose objects, and I grabbed the phone to take some photos.


Within minutes, the cloud was almost upon us and it was apparent that this would be no ordinary storm. As happens in the far north of Western Australia, storm fronts early in the storm season kick up masses of dust from the dry, rain-deprived earth and push a huge wall of this dust ahead of itself as it travels along. It's not common here, but....


....this one was enormous.


I called the girls inside and closed the house up. Within minutes, the sky became as dark as night, even though it was only three in the afternoon. The power went out, and we watched from the window, the little that we could see.


As we watched from the loungeroom window, our trampoline was picked up by the wind and thrown towards us, veering off at the last minute and tumbling round the side of our house, where it became wedged. The girls at this point were very scared (and somewhat concerned about their trampoline, and I promised to break the buying ban if it had been broken) and we huddled them up in the kitchen with their teddies while we checked all the windows and doors.


After a while the rain came, and some time later the winds died down. We heard the FESA vehicles driving through town with their sirens on, checking for emergencies, and we ventured outside to assess the damage. We have (before children) lived through a couple of cyclones in the North of WA and, aside from the brevity of it, this storm seemed just as furious. Many houses lost their roofs, and many more lost fences and trees. Sheets of roofing iron were strewn across the town and roads were blocked by fallen trees.

Our front fence
The power stayed off for over 24 hours, and some houses still haven't had theirs reconnected. On Sunday, we took some of the contents of our fridge and freezer to my Mum's house and stayed until we were fairly sure that our house had had power reconnected.

Eden is still a bit shaken by the whole event. She is very concerned about the trampoline, but was quite upset when Nath retrieved it. We eventually realised that the point where the trampoline came flying towards the window where we were sitting was the first point where Nath and I acted with urgency, and she responded with fear.

Our neighbour's house
Apart from this, we are unharmed, and very lucky. We still have our house, our roof and each other. Our garden came through relatively unscathed, and the chickens and ducks were also unharmed. If nothing else, this event has served to remind me how dependent on electricity we are, and how important it is to have a stockpile and a plan to get us through events like this, if the power had remained cut for much longer.

Here's hoping next weekend will be quieter!

Friday, January 28, 2011

Another Blessed Weekend.

It's Friday. A sigh of relief. Another blessed weekend, relaxing into our family, slowing down, finishing up and preparing for another week.

Weekends are for projects, for the tasks that require time, and patience. The tasks that still our minds, slow our bodies, let us ponder life, let us enjoy the rituals of providing. 

 My mending basket

The tasks that see us sweeping hair out of our faces, shifting weight from foot to foot, while we absent-mindedly stir a pot on the stove.

Nice, ripe tomatoes for paste

The tasks that see us brushing flies away from our eyes, dirtying our knees and the palms of our hands, as we unconsciously pull weeds, examine soil and feed our garden, with water and attention.


Weekends are for children, for family, for engaging our souls. For balancing the burdens of responsibility with the need for let-loose, energetic fun, for self expression, for reconnection.

My two frocked up princesses

Weekends let us choose what we bring to the home, and what we shut out. What we leave behind, hidden in busy weekly timetables, on messy work desks. When we find time to feed our souls and our minds.

My current reading list

 Weekends are when we re-establish what is truly important to us. We do this every weekend, to keep us in check, to give ourselves something to anchor to during the busy-ness of the week ahead, to keep us in mind of why we live the way we do.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Slow Sundays

Eden sleeping to the mellow sounds of Angus and Julia Stone
After a crazy couple of days, it's nice to slow down and enjoy a lazy family, house-y day. It's a funny old day today, weather wise, with alternating rainy, stormy patches, and bursts of golden sunshine in between. The thing with lazy days, is I usually end up achieving much more than on those rushing-around, busy, un-relaxed days.

Today I have had my two little helpers underfoot on hand, lending their assistance wherever humanly possible. It can be so tricky to harness this enthusiastic energy and desire to contribute with everyone coming out the other end unharmed and un-yelled-at. Miya is at a great age now to be set to a task, and it be an enjoyable experience for her. So far today, she has sorted the clean washing into family members' piles, shredded the silverbeet pilfered from her great-grandad's garden into a saucepan for cooking and freezing, and 'helped' me with my list making.
On my list for the day is nappy washing, tomato sauce making (picked up a box of WA tomatoes for $8 yesterday at the Sawyers Valley Fruit and Veg market), loquat jam making (fresh loquats!! Such a wonderful childhood memory...), sewing (continuing the Christmas bunting for the girls I started at my mothers' group sewing night the other night) and descaling the $10 old stove top teapot I picked up at a second hand shop yesterday in Guildford.

 On yesterday's treasure hunt with my good friend Bec, I also managed to grab an entire pane of glass for a miserly $2, to be used for the solar oven, and Bec picked up a glorious wooden dollhouse with removable front for $20. These forays into secondhand and opshops are likely to become a regular event, as I have started seeing 'junk' in an entirely different light! I used to hate the clutter and non-uniformality of opshops, now I see treasures hidden in all of the dark and poky corners of these shops, and begin to imagine uses for objects I could not even begin to name!




Sunday, November 14, 2010

Some Beginnings Of Projects...

A while back, we joined freecycle. We have found our local group so helpful, and been able to source 'just the right thing' for a number of different projects we are working on. We have been gifted an old fridge that was converted to a worm farm and a battered old kitchen sink to be put into a stand for a garden sink, and have been able to offload a couple of things that would have otherwise been destined for landfill.

Weekends are great for freecycling. I love logging on to see what treasures have been listed for offer, or to see if I am able to convert some of my own junk into someone else's treasure.

This week was no different, and Nath has had a hankering to try his hand at building a solar oven/food dryer. This is mostly because the electric food dehydrator we have on loan drives him to distraction with the constant whir of its fan, and the thought of all those kW being drained over long periods of time. (Drying fruit takes anywhere between six and fourteen hours)

After some research, he decided an old oven and some mirrors were exactly what he needed to create a fabulous solar oven. We have some old mirrors lying around waiting for a new purpose in life, so it was onto freecycle to try our luck at finding an old oven.

Success! Within an hour, not one, but two locals had offered us old ovens. They sounded quite different, so we decided to grab both, and spent most of Sunday with the trailer hitched up lugging heavy old ovens around and sweeping away fat redback spiders, disgruntled at the sudden disruption to their home.

Here is a picture of Nath hard at work stripping back an oven ready to build a solar oven. It will take some time to make it look (and perform) as we need it to, and I have quite firmly reminded Nath a couple of times that there is a fine line between 'rustic' and 'junkyard'.


One of the girls who responded is a dear friend who lives on a farm, so we drove out there to have a look and raided her 'junk' pile while we were there. It makes me wonder how many farms around the country have similar junk piles that are hiding some real gems. We picked up an old wooden crate that is definitely 'rustic' as opposed to 'junk' - this will form the outside of our solar oven once Nath finishes dismantling the oven.

Also hidden on my friend's farm, and the reason we went out there with the trailer, is replacing my preserving pan as my 'secondhand score of the century'. This will be stored until we are in our own home, where it will be lovingly restored and take pride of place in our kitchen.


An old Settlers wood stove, in beautiful condition with only some surface rust, and all pieces intact. This is such a generous freecycle gift from my dear friend, and it will become a much valued addition to our future new home, as in winter it will heat the house, heat our water (you can plumb water through it to act as a water heater) and provide heat for cooking. I have visions of a lovely warm kitchen, sitting around the table eating fresh bread and jam that have been cooked on the gorgeous old woodfired oven.

Joining freecycle, as well as our local buy and sell facebook page, has given us so much more of a sense of community, being able to offer other people what they need, and gaining resources for our own projects in return.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Weekend Life

Some random pics from weekends in our part of the world.
Some of our MCNs drying on the line.. so much prettier than disposables!
Eden playing with the 'new' toy from our local Toy Library... a new Saturday morning ritual.

Our latest harvest

Miya, who won't eat carrots served up hot on a dinner plate, loves them straight out of the ground.

Our 'lolly bags' from a birthday party we went to today. I thought this was a FANTASTIC idea!
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