Perils of country living

Tanya sent a joke around yesterday about men never listening. I only mention it because as I went to the gym last night the chookies were still outside, so I asked PJ to close the chookpen before he went to his course. "Yes" he shouted from the loft, after which I felt assured the chookies would be looked after and I went on my merry way.

This morning, I heard Deuce cockledoodling without it being muffled by the chookhouse, so low and behold, when I went to feed them, they were already outside, but..... minus one of my cute brown girls. Not a trace of her, no feathers, no blood, it's as if she's disappeared into thin air. I can't think what it was that took her, whether it's one of the eagles I've seen in the paddock (though I wouldn't think that they'd like to go in the chook enclosure), or a four-legged friend from the forest. The enclosure is not damaged, it doesn't look like anything got in, and the cats were all inside.

Of course there is the third option, as mentioned by Gerard when I told him, who wondered if it may have been our friendly neighbourhood Frankenstein who lives two houses down from us. This man is notoriously light-fingered and rumour has it that he likes to roam around at night peeping through windows - a bit of an issue when you don't have curtains yet on most of the windows as in our case - and likes to take things that aren't locked away or tied down in any other way.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that we now have an extra incentive to make sure the chookhouse is closed at night, whatever it may have been.

I received my camembert cheesemaking kit today. I'm so excited, but have to curb it because this weekend Graeme and Helen are visiting us from Perth, and Sunday we have treeplanting and Mattie's 2-year birthday party to go to. Next weekend it is then... But at least I can start reading the book I got with it as well, which should be nice too and should wet my appetite even more. I have about 12 litres of milk in the fridge at the moment so plenty to practise with.

We found a better way of getting Em and Porter in in the evenings. We now round up the whole herd and give them a bit of hay. We don't even have to go in the field anymore, we can just whistle and they come running. This can be a bit intimidating, especially in the case of Bessie Smith, our personal McDonalds Franchise all contained in one cow, who would flatten me without a second thought if that was necessary to get to the hay.

At first we tried to get just Porter and Em in, but although Emma is lovely and compliant, Porter certainly isn't. He also figured out pretty early on that us coming in the field means he has to go in his pen for the night, so he'd go halfway across the field, then escape, and run into the herd. Eventually we'd have a herd stampede, and we would end up having to put Emma away instead of Porter, which is not what we want to do. But when we realised that Porter was using the herd to escape (he is quite a clever boy really) we thought to try and get the herd in instead. Hay is a great incentive, and a mighty powerful motivator for cows we now know. We've been whistling as we bring it over, and that's how they now associate whistling with food.

Unfortunately young Porter is really quite a bit too clever for his own good, and he's now realised that he still ends up in his pen. So yesterday we found him at the wrong side of the fence - with the herd, but still in the main paddock. We managed to round him up, but seeing how he tried to escape twice I don't think it'll be long before he will be difficult again. PJ wants to pick up his lassooing skills again, and I was thinking of some cattle dogs to give us a helping hand. Ian reckons though that if cattle aren't brought up with cattle dogs, they will kill them to protect their young from them, so perhaps that is not quite an option either. Bugger... no easy answer! Maybe Porter has a bit of Borg in him - he keeps on adapting so we have to try something else every 7 days or so!

Talking of Porter, and the whole dilemma of 'knowing' where your meat comes from, there was this interesting article: Oliver makes us honest carnivore killers. Although I didn't see the program - we still don't have TV - I saw the Jamie in Italy series where he killed a lamb which he found incredibly hard to do, even though he's a chef and has cooked thousands of lambs by now. The Italian village he was visiting lived much closer to nature than we do, and everybody accepted killing as being part of life. It won't be long before people have to face these kind of things for real again - and they will, I have no doubt that hunger can be a very strong motivator.

Over the weekend, we had dinner at Ian and Ursula's, and we had Chippy's last calf for dinner (no, not the WHOLE calf!!). It was lovely meat, and the colour was a lot less artificial than what you see in the supermarket. If you are what you eat, it is incredibly important to actually know not only where your veggies are grown, but also where your meat comes from; That it has been fed properly (eg, cows on grass and not grains and other pellets with who knows what in it), and is not pumped full of antibiotics and what not. Interestingly enough, Ursula used to be vegetarian when she first came to Australia. She did not agree with the processing of animals in Europe (which is terrible although not as bad as the US), how they lived their lives and what they were fed. She stopped being a vegetarian now that they have their own cows, and now she knows they have a good, healthy natural life.

You can't talk about cows without thinking of the large amount of poo that comes out of them - another thing people rather forget as part of life because it's 'dirty' or 'embarrassing', even though we all do it! Read this one: An Ode To Horse Manure And Other By-Products Called Waste.

And lastly, totally not related but it made me a little homesick: Rebuilding a Dutch Tradition, One Windmill at a Time.

OK, that's it for today.... Until the next time!

About Aunties and Camembert

Where to start... it's been a while since I've written an update.

The biggest news is that I'm going to be an auntie, a real one. My sister phoned yesterday, with the news that she is about 3 months pregnant. Not entirely a surprise I must say, she has been talking about it for a while now but still, I'm a littlebit in shock. The baby is due on 18 January, and she will be 41. She's done all the tests and the baby appears healthy which is very good. She sounded very happy, and is even going to take a whole month off in August, which I haven't heard her do in a long time. It was funny though - she told me that it's not 'too late' for me either to think about this - I didn't have the heart to tell her that I really don't want them myself (for various reasons) and although I'm excited and it's different having your own sister having a baby, it's not something that I would ever contemplate (sorry mum :D) My mum needless to say is over the moon - I think she had probably given up hope of ever becoming a grandma.

As for my news, nothing that exciting I'm afraid! Work has been incredibly busy and we've been very busy renovating in the evenings and over the weekends. The progress is slow - slower than I'd like to think we can go. We're nearly ready to paint the spare room, which would be good as it is at least a visual of something actually happening.

Thanks to Jamahl, PJ found a hydronic heating guy who will start working on the heating system on Wednesday. This is really not a moment too soon as I'm watching snow fall outside the windows, and I don't think the house could possibly get any colder. The idea of heating in the house has been with me so long now that I can't quite fathom how it would possibly feel not to be a frozen icicle in a chair but still, I'm sure I can get used to it. PJ is on his second cold. I'm fighting it off, and am testing the raw milk theory of boosting my immune system to the point that I can cope better with colds.

A group of us have started to go to the gym on a regular basis in the evenings. For me personally it's so good to get out of the house. Working from home and being at home all the time makes me feel like a bit of a recluse. The worrying thing is that it doesn't really bother me that much, but I feel it's good to get out and meet up with other people, before I start going "weird" (then again, some people think I'm plenty weird already so maybe it wouldn't make a difference :D). I've started some self defense with the girls. They seem to love it, which is good, and for myself it's nice to be able to do some martial arts again.

As always you're never sure when you go somewhere else what you can continue doing. When we first went to Perth we had to try out a few martial arts clubs before we settled on Jan de Jong's club. This was good, but it was never quite the same as what we had back in London, where we initially learned our jujitsu. Now we're in Tas, and there is no jujitsu at all nearby, so we've decided we'll set up our own club. Just small, and mainly for fun. I don't think I can give up my dayjob for it, but it will be good to do training again. Chris and Lisa are going for their blackbelts back in Perth, but are looking at moving over to Tas in December/January. This is good for all of us, and means that we can still practise with some other blackbelts hopefully at a regular basis as well. PJ and Lisa love their stick work, and they are very good at it, and it will be good that they can maintain this.

I'm milking Emma pretty much every day now. I try and give myself one day a week off, just to make sure that I don't get RSI :) Quite a different cause than sitting behind the computer. Sometimes I look at what we're doing, and how easy and natural some things come. Going out and milking every day is not something I'd have envisaged myself doing 2 years or more ago, and yet here we are. And sometimes it feels like I've been doing it for years rather than weeks.

My only concern at the moment is my lack of playing the violin. I simply don't have much time, and unfortunately there are certain chores (like work) that I have to do as opposed to want to do. The house is so cold that my fingers permanently feel cold, stiff and frozen. As you can imagine, the times I do get to play it takes a long time to warm up. Another case of 'when the house is finished, and the heating is in...'. Anyway, it will come I know, it's just a short term concern I have. Talking of music... a friend sent me a link to the black cab series. From what I can see, they get people to play or sing in the back of a London cab. There was this young guy playing the violin, so I thought I'd check it out. And my God.... what a virtuoso!! He blew me away (and is quite handsome too). I was glad to read afterwards that he is a prodigy and some kind of wunderkind. That made me feel a lot better about myself. It takes some time to download, but what a tone, and what skill: One song. One Take. One Cab. And here is his website: Charlie Siem.

I like the opening quote on his website, it says:

"A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin;what else does a man need to be happy?"

Albert Einstein

That piqued my curiosity, so I did a quick Google and low and behold: Einstein also played the violin. From there I started finding all sorts of weird and wonderful websites about music and the effect on the brain. Especially this website, Music and the Brain, I found very interesting. It linked in with a book I recently read called Musicophilia which also discussed the effect of music on the brain. I was sad to find out that I don't have a perfect pitch (being able to sing a note as you think of it, or being able to distinguish a note immediately - in the sense of "my dad sneezes in a C sharp"). At a push I can sing an A, but any other notes, forget it. Then again, the next chapter talked about melodic ability and I was happier to find that people who have perfect pitch find it very difficult to play the same melody in a different key - which I don't have any problems with. It all evens out in the end.

I've ordered a camembert kit. It should arrive this week, and contains a starter culture, rennet and spores (for the outside). It will have enough to make camembert out of 250 litres of milk. So that should keep me quiet for the next month or two. Apparently it's one of the easier cheeses to make, and it's a good one to start with before going on to the 'hard' cheeses which I would like to go on to next. Still, once I have a proper kitchen it'll probably be easier to do. The soft cheeses are going well, and my butter is improving too. But after a few weeks of eating soft cheese, you can get a little sick of it. So it'll be good to try something else. I'll keep you posted.

As for some other light reading, read this article:
Three types of doomers and fantasy collapse

It cracked me up a lot. I think I'm a mixture of a Philosoper Doomer and a Do-More Doomer. Especially the section on the novel 'World Made by Hand' (Kunstler) was good. I read the book and although it was a good laugh, and this particular section hit the nail on the head. Rest assured that the world around the corner is going to be good for the middle-aged man. We'll be going back to more traditional roles for men and women, and men get to have sex all the time with a variety of (much younger) women with magnificent breasts. What more could you wish for...

Ok, I need to venture in the bathroom to brush my teeth in sub-zero temperatures, so until later....

Toodles!