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If the human mind was simple enough to understand,

we'd be too simple to understand it. (Emerson Pugh)

this is not reality

February 9, 2009

Statewide Bushfires - February 2009

This weekend just gone is one of those that will be etched into memory. History book stuff.
Saturday was the hottest day in Melbourne on record, the hottest temperature I’ve ever experienced at 46.4deg Celsius (115.5deg F). The hot wind hit you in the face like a hot iron. Clothes on the washing line smelt like clothes straight out of the tumble drier. When Dean and I walked to the shop, it was like a ghost town.

News of the fires made me uneasy, and then more and more and more uneasy. The fire in the Bunyip State Forest was getting bigger, and the expected cool change was bringing a change in wind direction. As such, Mum and Dad in Neerim East were under a CFA Urgent Threat Message: “…may be directly impacted upon by this fire”. I felt like I was going to be sick when their road was mentioned on the incident updates. Later we found it out it wasn’t their road at all, but this wasn’t until Sunday after they’d spoken to the neighbours. They had the sprinklers going on the roof and bags packed ready to go. Heavy smoke and ash and embers - bits of burnt bark falling from the sky 20cm and longer. They lost power and the landline phone.

Other towns were obliterated in separate fires. It seemed the entire state was on fire, east to west and north to south. So many lives lost and they’re still counting. The fire is still consuming public and private property and everything in its wake, despite the best efforts of the emergency services and volunteers. I don’t know anyone personally affected by the death toll yet, though I know people whose relatives have lost everything.

I’m my father’s daughter. Although the farm is now relatively safe (dependent on wind changes and the like, of course), thoughts of what could’ve been haunted me all last night. The wind is a fickle creature and if that southerly had kept itself up… When my parents ventured out on Sunday, to check on neighbours and their property in Drouin, they discovered if they’d wanted to leave during the night it would have been practically impossible with the number of trees over the road. What if…? I feel sick seeing pictures of burnt out cars, knowing many of them were not deserted. Dad felt the same, I know, when I left New Orleans 24hrs before Hurricane Katrina hit. I thank my lucky stars that they’re safe, and grieve for those who were far less fortunate.
Worse than Ash Wednesday? Worse than Black Friday? What will Saturday 7 February 2009 become known as?

jen at 3:13 pm

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November 13, 2008

Back in the game

You know what? Dating is kind of fun, despite the emotional roller coaster than can come with it.

Yesterday afternoon, hot day, meeting after work for a walk on the beach. I’m walking around with the biggest goofiest grin ever.
Tomorrow night? Dinner at his place. Will I be able to concentrate at work tomorrow? I don’t think so!

jen at 8:34 pm

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November 3, 2008

Sweetness

Sweet, beautiful things. Oh, Sundayschool makes me want to spin in circles with her beautiful posts… but so many lovely links!
Two blogs from Lobster and Swan:

Both make me swoon. These! These are the little paper ephemeral bits of art I’d love to create. What would I do with them? It doesn’t matter - these thoughts come from the practical cautious doubtful side of my mind and get in the way of my actually creating.
So many ideas. You have no idea just how much paper and bits I have hoarded away. Soon.

jen at 4:53 pm

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November 2, 2008

Goals

I’ve been thinking, amongst other things, a little about goals. I’ve been thinking about what I want. In life, in general terms, in specific terms. Sometimes when my thoughts have been meandering around a topic for a while, I’ll have a little thought bubble burst into my head like some kind of mini epiphany. As I pulled into my street on the way home from work, this was what popped into my head: you’re probably not going to get anything you want unless you specifically state it.

Now, this may seem blindingly obvious to some people - the goal-focused people who have pretty much always known what they want and how to strive towards it. That’s never been me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I finished school. I didn’t have a job in mind when I finished uni (so much so that I put it off for another year and did an honours year). It’s not as though I haven’t achieved things in life to date because I’ve done plenty well in pretty much everything I’ve undertaken; there’s just few and far between things that I’ve said to myself, “Right-o! This is it, this is what I want and this is how I’m going to get there!” And when I have set and achieved a goal (the one thing that springs to mind is weight loss, when I lost ~30kg in ‘04/‘05), the steps to get there and end point have been all a little wishy-washy, and have been more about what I don’t want rather than what I do want.

All this thinking stems from a work/life balance seminar I took a few weeks ago. How can you achieve work/life balance (or any kind of life balance for that matter), if you’re not clear on what it is you want out of life?

This is still a work in progress, and there’s likely more to come on this topic.

jen at 1:00 pm

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October 21, 2008

How my garden grows

I really love having a garden, even the small courtyard out back & deck-with-pots out front satisfies my green thumb. It relaxes me; time passes and before I realise, it’s getting dark (or raining) and I need to go inside. Here’s what I’ve got growing: rhubarb, silverbeet (chard), capsicums (peppers), tomatoes (regular & cherry varieties), zucchinis (courgette / squash), three types of perpetual lettuce (cos, red oakleaf, and some frilly leaf variety), pumpkin (which decided to grow out of the compost), and a multitude of herbs (chives, parsley, coriander, basil, oregano, tarragon, lemon balm, mint, thyme). I think we’re going to have fresh produce coming out of our ears in a couple of months. I also planted some marigolds and nasturtium seeds as companion plants; the nasturtiums aren’t doing too well - the leaves start out pale green and just keep getting paler until they die.

I was relieved to discover I hadn’t killed the worms in my worm farm. I built it about a month ago, based roughly on this instructable. There didn’t appear to be a lot of action aside from a whole lot of fruit-fly type bugs each time I lifted the lid, and so I worried that I’d let it dry out, and then I worried that I’d over-watered it. This evening I discovered all good things take time (and I needn’t overcomplicate things; particularly things as simple as a worm farm). Really, what kind of action-packed excitement was I expecting from a worm farm? When I opened the bottom drawstring, there was plenty of compost / worm casing goodness. I sorted out the good dirt and put the worms back in the top; my plants will love this tasty dirt.

I’m grateful for my patch of dirt and to at least start creating some self-sustainability.

jen at 8:33 pm

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