A poem

it's 3.23 in the morning
and i'm awake
because my great great grandchildren
won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?
-Drew Dellinger, 'Hieroglyphic Stairway'.

Rather relevant to me atm as i'm starting to get into the activist side of things a bit more.

The cakefest is over

I'm beginning to think that i've set myself up for an exhausting few months every years-all five kids birthdays fall between December 30th and April 5th. Add another week either side and you also have the husband's birthday, Christmas and Easter-but at least I now get a break until December!

Shorty had a pirate ship cake for his third birthday. It was pretty quick and easy to assemble, but I gave up on getting black icing-I wondered beforehand how successful tinting white icing black would be, and I don't think you could without twelve bottles of the stuff. As it was the icing started sweating black liquid whenever it was out of the fridge for a couple of minutes.

My task before the next round begins is to find a better replacement for butter cream-one that is easier to use and doesn't taste like animal fat! Since I stopped eating meat butter tastes revolting.

We also didn't do the handmade presents this year-we've had too much on our plates lately and some things had to give. But I will definitely be reinstating it from now on, giving shop presents is very unfulfilling and the two of the girls actually asked where the presents were that we'd made. No more babies so we can get back to normal life!

Now I get to REALLY go feral

The block we got knocked back on a month or so ago now has a completely unconditional contract on it and will settle in two weeks. After a saga stretching months it's a little hard to believe, I keep thinking something else will go wrong. It all turned into this really cool, old fashioned process in the end-the current owners came back, we went up to the block for a night and had a BBQ with the neighbours, we ditched the idiotic CWB and applied face-to-face with a local bank and got it with no issues-it was such a nice process compared to the usual faceless production line churning out of forms. So in two weeks we'll be out in the backblocks on solar power and tank water, with perfect peace and tranquility and masses of wildlife.



One little tiny corner in all it's awesomeness :D

Plus, not much creation has been wielded here lately-however, the new little button to your right will explain that. Lots of things have been done and are still being done to get that happening!

Why am I not surprised?

That the government is spending obscene amounts of money on broadband? Hardly a pressing task IMO. But it keeps the punters happy, and that's what matters when you have a limited term.

Even worse is that it's come at the same time as the Wilkins Ice Shelf news. Which is really scary as it has climatologists saying we're hooning down the global warming path at a much faster speed than first predicted.

But i'm sure that when we're all four metres underwater we'll appreciate being able to access YouTube that bit faster.

Science mania

We went to a Questacon 'do here at the library the other day, and science is the new obsession of the house. The kids all had a ball, it's well worth going to one if you get the chance. Am not happy I didn't know about it when we were in Canberra last year!

Science of course, means experiments. This was a nice easy one to do with young kids.
The bottom is treacle, middle is coloured water and the top is vegetable oil. If you put it in in the order treacle-oil-water you get a better result as you can see the layers seperate. We then dropped in some Lego (which you can see), a marble, a frozen pea, and numerous pieces of pasta (numerous because Shorty kept dropping the ones he wanted to eat in there, forgetting he couldn't retrieve them.) They sat on different levels so we could have a good chat about weight and density, which has carried over to then talking about floating/sinking in the bath and sink.