* All the lovely people I know, especially the ones I've managed to catch up with this week. mmm real life friends.
* Some morning time spent with my boy.
* The end of the play is nigh!
* I walked outside as fireworks banged overhead at my work place. I imagined the people watching them saying ohhh and ahh.
* A vague glimmer of warmth in the air.
* Peppermint tea. Thanks for being so refreshing and non caffinated.
* I got all the crew I need for the coming weeks in one day.
* My little brother calls me for chats now. I like us both being grownups.
* I went to the best gig of the year so far. Wonderful sound, beautiful lighting.
* See those little green guys in the picture up there. I say hi to them every day and they are getting bigger and more delicious looking! Growing stuff is awesome.
{things to be thankful for is a post I do every Saturday. It helps me sum up my week and remind myself of all the good things in my life. Feel free to play too and leave your *thankful's* in the comments or a link to yours on your blog. I will definitely check them out. *s*}
I've been daydreaming a lot. It involves this place in the country. There's this house still for sale on Domain... It has a huge back garden completely flat and empty. I've been filling it up in my head. There's a long chicken coop at the bottom of the garden with a quaint wooden roosting house and a passion fruit vine growing along the wire fence. Also along the back fence is a massive compost heap - for the stuff the chooks don't eat and to keep my boy happy. And next to that is a potting shed. It has a fork and spade for him and her as well as shears, empty pots, packets of seeds, and glass jars of nails, screws and all sorts of handy bits and bobs.
In front the potting shed is a large fig tree and some other kind of fruit tree too... perhaps a pear, lemon or orange tree. Along one side of the garden is a huge veggie patch. It is divided up into slightly raised beds. There are tepees for beans and peas, neat rows of broccoli and spinach and rambling overflows of pumpkin and zucchini. Along the back fence tomatoes drip fruit and all are surrounded by their favourite companion herbs.
On the other side of the garden is a hills hoist centred in a sweet circle of lavender bushes which give way to other native shrubs and flowers. somewhere near the centre is a tree. Perhaps a princess gum or maybe something deciduous. Underneath it is a table for summer dinners and winter lunches and for all year cup-of-tea-mid-gardening-breaks. Between another 2 tree's is a hammock for two. And at the back kitchen steps are pots of herbs waiting to be cooked.
Miyukiis from Osaka in Japan but now lives in San Francisco. This is what she does with her sewing machine. Considering I can barely sew a straight line this is super duper impressive!
Vegetarianism.
This can be a tetchy subject and invariably it isn't me that brings it up. First up I want to say this. I am expressing my feelings, opinions as well as some hard-nosed facts here. I am not judging anyone, I may challenge you, but I dont judge anyone. Everyone is different. And everyone cares about different things. I just happen to care quite a lot about this particular thing. I've been vegetarian since I was twelve years old. I remember loving steak and kidney pies and I remember loving lamb chops covered in tomato sauce. The smell of roast chicken makes me salivate every time. I get the feeling that the reason I often encounter so much aggression from people who ask me why I'm a vegetarian is that they believe (no matter what my response is) that I am judging them. I know a lot of people think about what they eat and take it quite seriously, I also believe (here we are entering opinion territory), that a lot of people don't think about what they eat, what the consequences of there eating is (on themselves and the environment), and the huge variety of food that there is out there.
Now, I am asking you not to judge me when I tell you I have been watching Masterchef. And you know what I've noticed? Every main course that is served up has meat or fish in it. Every single one. (I may have missed the vegetarian episode, if it exists, it has to be said - but for the last few weeks its been meat all the way.) When nutritionists recommend we eat meat 3-4 times a week why is it that every meal that is prepared involves it? I have the same grudge with a magazine I buy. It has a seven-day food menu in the back and I would say occasionally it has one meat-free meal. One. No wonder people are always asking me what I eat!
I find it astounding that with all the climate change kerfuffle that is happening, the media has managed to gloss over that one of the best ways to help the environment is to eat less meat (or none). Even when it does get mentioned, no one really knows what it means. Does less meat mean once a day?
Now all this aside there are some really really good reasons to go vegetarian, or certainly cut down on your meat and eat free range.
The environment. Here are some facts*.
* Did you know that if you switched from meat eater to vego you would save more carbon emissions than if you switched from a regular car to a hybrid car.
* In Australia, we are reducing our animal species at a higher rate than any other country except the USA. The biggest contributing factor to this endangerment is habitat destruction caused by clearing land for animal pasture.
* 92% of all land degradation in Australia is caused by animal industries.
* Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the World. 67% of water in Australia is used for agriculture whereas 9% is for household use.
* It takes up to 50,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of beef. It takes 2500 litres to produce a kilo of rice.
* We each use about 500 litres a day through direct household use (toilets, showers, drinking etc). A person on an average Australian diet actually uses about 3,500 litres a day. A vegetarian uses about 1,000 litres a day.
* Animal industries pollute our fresh water supplies. In the US, factory farms are polluting rivers more than all other industries combined.
* 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia are attributed to animal industries.
* Animals produce Methane, which is, in the short term, a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Over the next 20 years Australia's livestock will produce more warming than all of our coal fired power stations!
* Grazing land takes up nearly 50% of the continent, this is in addition to the land cleared for growing hay and other food for animals. If a small fraction of that land was reforested we could "soak up" Australia's carbon emissions in a few decades.
People.
* 790 million in the world are chronically undernourished. Most edible grain is used to feed animals for meat and dairy production.
* The world's cattle consume enough food to feed 8.7 billion people. Yep that's more than the world's actual population.
* Vegetarians live 5 - 10 years longer than meat-eaters. They are much less likely to have heart disease, cancers, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.
Animal rights.
I appreciate that not everyone is into this. One of my good friends delights in wearing his t-shirt, "I love animals - they're delicious", around me. However, I challenge you to consider where your food has come from. (watch this interview!) If you don't think you could look a cow in the eye and kill it then perhaps you don't deserve to eat it. If you can't grab a chicken by the neck and break it, then pluck it and cut its head off then you don't deserve to eat it. It's about respect really. Animals are living things, I believe all living things deserve respect. Meat farming is shrouded in mystery. It is almost impossible to visit a farm or abbatoir. You know why? Because it's horrible and not what you want to associate with your dinner!
I really hope this leads you to think about where your food is coming from. Look at the labels on the food you buy in the supermarket. As Jonathon Safran Foer says... it may be cheap on the price tag, but the cheaper it is the more expensive it is to the environment. If you think of yourself as a person who cares about the environment then you are probably being hypocritical when you enjoy your big mac. If you envisage that the food you eat comes from a green pleasant field then you really need to do some fact checking. I'm tired of hearing "yeah I know its bad but it just tastes so good" by people who I know to be intelligent and informed! I think it's lame and lazy. I don't miss meat one bit to be honest. The few rare times I've tasted it in my 13 years I've been very disapointed.
For my birthday we started a saving's jar for a new fancysmancy camera. An SLR no less. An now I have my eye set on the Canon Eos500...
It's a while before the jar is at this level so I know I should shop around some more first... anyone got any recommendations?
Also for my birthday look what winged its way to me through time and space: Kodak July 1913!
Isn't it pretty much the most beautiful thing you ever saw? A work of art.
* Stunning sunsets. On 2 show days I've been going for a run (read: run, walk, run, walk) in between performances. Luckily for me its right on sunset, and I work in one of the most stunning locations in the city. Plus a sunset is a brillaint excuse to stop and catch my breath!
* A lovely weekend with my folks
* Old contacts and FREE tickets to a very cool band
* Rocket and snow peas growing in my garden
* My sweet friend Meg got engaged. Which is a brilliant excuse for another tea party.
* I got an amazing remedial massage, including cupping which I'd never had before, and its released my shoulders and neck up no end.
* The big 25km bike ride I went on with my boy on Monday. Exploring some of my city I'd never seen before.
* Ping Pong. It's my new thing and I'm loving it! there's a table at work and the boys are teaching me :)
* I find my husband so very attractive. Sorry about the overshare folks but it's a good thing, yes?!
*11 more shows to go.
* Sometimes I find this list really hard to complete. But I always do.
Photos: Chinese gardens in Darling Harbour and sunset form Observatory Hill.
{things to be thankful for is a post I do every Saturday. It helps me sum up my week and remind myself of all the good things in my life. Feel free to play too and leave your *thankful's* in the comments or a link to yours on your blog. I will definitely check them out. *s*}
Thanks for showing me the pictures of your cute dog. Though maybe next time you bring your digital camera out in public you should delete the close up pictures of your girlfriends (?!) ahem... "puppies" first.
Yours, embarrassed.
I have set myself the task of mastering muffins now that I feel I have conquered cupcakes. These are so good and relatively healthy (well that's my story and I'm sticking to it, as I eat my second for the day). These are real easy to make, except for the zesting bit, I need to get myself a proper citrus zester - scraping it out of the grater is very boring. The mix looks so pretty, cream coloured batter speckled with yellow, green and orange and finally dramatic black poppy seeds. Yum!
You need
200g plain flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
175g castor sugar
zest of 1 orange
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 lime
3/4 cup of plain low fat yoghurt I used greek style
1/3 cup of sunflower/vege oil. Make sure it doesn't have a strong flavour
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon of poppy seeds
Then
Heat your oven to 200 degrees and either grease a muffin tin or use muffin cases.
Mix the yoghurt, oil and egg in a large bowl until well combined. In a separate bowl whisk the flour, baking soda, sugar, zest and poppy seeds. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix them together until just combined. The important thing is not to beat it too well. Muffins don't need to be beaten till light and fluffy like cupcakes. Pop your mix into the muffin cases/pan and cook for 20 mins. They will go golden on top.
Recipe makes 12. Next time I am definitely doubling it!
Everyone has a favourite mug right? Right. Mine was blue with Zebra's on it. Now I know that doesn't sound flash or trendy but the thing was it was the perfect shape for tea. Just the right thickness, the handle was the perfect size, it felt good with my hands wrapped around it. I'd had this mug for at least ten years and when it was given to me it had an Easter egg in it - just another reason I loved it.
I use the past tense because last night... I broke it. Not "oh a little bit of araldite will fix that" broke it. Really broke it. I was merely fiddling with my peppermint tea bag label, as I am want to do, and was clearly a lot closer to the edge of the bench than I realised and then whoosh, smash, hot tea everywhere, mug everywhere. All I can say is that at least I only have myself to blame. And it really is remarkable that it lasted so long in all the share housing that I've done.
A favourite mug is important if a mug of tea is what you ritually start your day with. So now I need a new one.
This is a really excellent and interesting article my boy sent me. It is particularly pertinent as the election date has been announced and we are going to be bombarded with "facts" by politicians. But I find the ideas and notions in it to be true of many situations.
"Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
I'd love to go on about people I know that behave like this even when presented with solid facts, but more important is that everyone is like this. Including me. I won't give certain politicians (especially ones in budgy smugglers) the time of day - not that I've even read their policies.
"Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them."
I also find this interesting in terms of faith. How fascinating that some people can get two opposite messages from the Bible. I know people that will tell you that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. I know others (I'm one as is my husband - for the record) that know the Bible doesn't say that.
Anyway it's a curious thing. Have a read of the rest of the article and be challenged.
{via}
I was listening to Boards of Canada, he was stroking my back, eyes closed when the image of spring time, yellow canola fields in England appeared in my mind. And I remembered how if you are lucky you will see red poppies on the verge as well...
In Australia the fields are smoky green and sometimes you will come across a paddock purple with Pattersons curse.
Opposite ends of the world, both capture my heart.
