I've just stumbled on
this post by George Monbiot.
I'm too tired (and have too many nappies to get out of the washing machine) to comment, but it's worth reading if you have a few minutes.
Once you're done, go out and don't buy anything. Jokes aside, Monbiot raises a valid question: is ethical consumerism just as bad as the unethical sort it is supposed to supplant?
On the one hand, yes, for goods we would be purchasing anyway. It's far better to buy fair trade coffee if you are going to drink coffee (and lets face it most of us aren't likely to give it up, nor do we need to if we purchase it in an ethical manner), but what about those other things that are less essential (okay, so perhaps coffee was a bad example - it just feels so essential at the moment)?
How many pairs of shoes do any of us really need? How many outfits? Irrespective of how ethically they are produced and how fairly traded, surely, as far as the planet is concerned, the less produced the better.
Trade, we so often hear, is the key to poverty reduction. This is all well and good, but what if we trade the poor into riches and then curse them to live in a trashed environment. Will we congratulate ourselves for eradicating poverty despite destroying the environment?
I'm not sure where the balance is, but C's mobile phone just died and she's borrowing mine. I'm not sure I'm interested in replacing it.
It's a start at least.
The former Pope may have thought masturbation would make you go blind, which, while idiotic, at least has the benefit of being humourous.
This on the other hand, is just plain cruel and inhuman.
I can understand having a sentence lengthened for committing rape, murder or other crimes while in prison, but an extra 60 days for getting caught masturbating!
I guess we'll just add that the the litany of things wrong with America.
After a review by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions the charges against Mr Haneef
have been dropped. Despite this the AFP are standing by the advice that they gave to the Minister for Immigration which led to Mr Haneef's visa being revoked.
There is something seriously wrong with this country.
Mr Haneef gave his old sim card to his cousin before leaving England for Australia.
As far as we know, for this action alone the poor guy has spent the last 4 weeks in jail and will now be deported.
I have 18 cousins. If I was leaving Australia and any one of them wanted to use my sim card, I would have given it to them. Had this action then landed me in jail, and then subsequently deported at my own expense, I would have been pretty appalled. I would have also considered the justice system of my new country of residence to be pretty flawed.
John Howard declared today that he believed that Mr Hannef had at all times been treated fairly by the Austrlian authorities.
John Howard is a moron.
With the trip to Darwin and The Move (and chaos that has followed) it has been really hard for me to find any time to sit down in front of the computer to post. Because of this I never had the chance to comment on Howard's Emergency intervention in Indigenous affairs or on the appalling intervention on the Minister for Immigration into the Haneef case, and I have hundreds of unread posts on my bloglines accounts (actually thousands may be more accurate). I had big plans to change this last week. I was going to catch up on my favourite blogs, post a little, read the Guardian online - you know: get back in touch - when I was silly enough to answer an invitation to join Facebook.
Time passed.
Blogs went unread. Posts went unwritten. News became stale.
And I collected 'friends', send them flowers for their gardens, got bitten by a vampire, and generally wasted my precious computer time on something that I still don't entirely understand. It's addictive though. I can tell you that.
Now I must go. Lily is trying to get piglet into her mouth and he just won't cooperate.
Dear Lily
I am sorry that this letter is so late, but we have been without an internet connection for over a week.
You are now four months old. Incredible!
Actually, sometimes four months seems a little small really. Sometimes you seem so big - not size-wise (although you are lovely and chubba right now) but attitudinally. This month you have made it quite clear that you wish to be big. You have been eying off our food, grabbing anything that we pick up (and displaying a particular fondness for the telephone and anything containing water), chatting up a storm and trying to crawl with admirable determination.
We have had an incredibly busy month. We flew up to Darwin to visit two of your grandmas. We were so worried about how you would find the flight, but you were an angel. You slept soundly until just before take-off, sat up on my lap and took a bottle of expressed milk for both take-off and landing and either played or slept for the whole flight. I can't tell you what a relief that was after that nightmare first car ride to Sydney.
Darwin was great. You got to spend heaps of time with your grandmothers. You stole my mother's glasses on countless occasions and found it hilarious each and every time. You slept through every cultural excursion we took in Kakadu and through several colourful markets, but you were awake for your first trip to the beach and that is what matters. It was so great to see you standing there in your nappy with the sand between your toes. I can't wait for this summer when we can sit down together and build sandcastles.
On the way to and from Darwin we stayed with Grandpa and Grandma and you got to meet Midnight for the first time. When you are older it will seem like he has always been there, but you are actually 4 weeks older than him and don't you ever let him forget it. Freya, on the other hand, is older than you (and she won't ever let you forget it).
When we got home, just in case we hadn't completely stuffed up your routine enough, we moved house. No, it was not the best timing and you are still not sleeping properly as a result, but we needed to get out of our one-bedroom apartment and our new place is really great. This will be the place that you walk your first steps and speak your first words (unless you do those things while we are out, but you know what I mean) and I can't wait. We are already planning to get you a sandpit for the deck and I have picked out the perfect spot for your first strawberry garden.
Crazily we actually set up your cot when we moved in - the one that we dismantled after your first week at home. Don't worry though, you let us know quite clearly what you thought of that idea and so last weekend we bought a queen-sized bed. It takes us a while, but we learn.
We also set up all your books in the living room and have started reading to you after our early failed attempts. I was so thrilled when you actually enjoyed it this time around and we are working our way through the entire collection. So far Diary of a Wombat and Uno's Garden are my favourite, but you are currently more intrigued by the pop-up books. Fair enough really, I remember when I couldn't get enough of the Spot books for the same reason.
Another new development has been your method of informing me that you are hungry. For ages you used to find the nearest thing - my hand or shoulder, a face cloth, Tigger, etc - and start sucking it frantically in order to communicate to me that you were ready to feed. Only if I missed this signal would you then lose it and start crying with frustration. Then suddenly you decided to skip the communication part and went straight to the crying, which was sad for everyone. However, your latest tactic is fantastic: you have taken to flirting with me in order to be fed. Wherever you are, you will suddenly sit up, catch my eye, start smiling at me and make little chatting noises. This will continue for about five minutes until I feed you or, if I am dull enough to not understand this sudden flattering interest, you will lose it completely.
Anyway, its been fun and I'm looking forward to next month.
love
mama
xox
Thank you to Isil Simsek of
Veggie Way for passing on the Rockin Girl Blogger award to me. I am very flattered - particularly coming from such a
Rockin Blogger.
I am feeling a little stuck in nominating just five other
Rockin Girl Bloggers though... and so I thought that I would cheat (a little) and nominate five for the category of Rockin Vegan Girl Bloggers - to make it clear that there are a whole lot of other
Rockin Girl Bloggers out there.
Rockin Vegan Girl Bloggers
Kristy of
KblogAnna of
VeganistaEnny of
EnnyPenAutumn from
If I didn't have youand
The Village Vegan
I hate moving and yet it is something that I seem to have done a lot of throughout my life.
After my parents separated when I was 5 they decided to share custody (as it was called back then) and my brother and I used to spend one week with each of them - moving house every Sunday. I had this red duffle bag that I used to pack with my school uniform, shoes and homework, but I guess I must have had two of everything else. To be honest, I can't really remember, except that I was always leaving something important behind at the other parent's house and being told that I "had to learn to be more organised". I used to think that my parents should try moving every weekend and then try to tell me that lack of personal organisation was the real issue. Ultimately, however, I took it as a compliment that my parents shared custody. At the tender age of 5 I genuinely believed that it was because neither of them could get enough of me.
When I my father moved to the States I decided to go with him. I was 14 and keen for a change and for the chance to live in another country. For the first time in my life I stayed put. It was great AND, as it turned out, I was quite organised. I lived there for a year and a half, and then moved back to Australia to finish High School in Canberra and to live with my Mum.
Oddly enough, although I loved the stability of those years, something happened at University. I found it impossible to stay put. During my first four years of Uni, I moved house an average of 2.5 times a year. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and just start packing - it was like I felt compelled to move; to start over at a new address. Most of the time, however, I was just trying to save money by moving out of one address before traveling. And then there was the year that I decided to live at the snow for the Ski season and commute to Uni...
Unfortunately for me, P. isn't much better at the stability thing - despite having stayed put for much of his childhood - and so we have been moving constantly since we got together. And so it is that I now find myself, once again, surrounded by boxes (of books) and ready to move.
At least this move is a pretty good one. My mother and her partner are kindly allowing us to rent their house while they are in Darwin for the next two years. Our (very convenient) one bedroom apartment is getting a little crowded with all of Lily's stuff (how is it that such little people come with so much stuff?) and so moving into a three bedroom house with a garage and a laundry (and a veggie patch, a water tank, a compost, and a big deck!) is going to be lovely.
Now I just have to get through this weekend...
Time is not my friend at the moment.
I have been meaning to post about our trip to Darwin and Kakadu, about the government's election stunt ('State of Emergency') that seemed to overshadow our time in the NT, about the FIVE (beautiful) skirts that I purchased while on holiday, about meeting Ken and Jen (of
Club Troppo) while in Darwin and discovering that they live on the SAME STREET as my Mum, about the fact that we are suddenly moving house THIS WEEKEND and are trying to pack up around a rather demanding little munchkin, about Lily teething and feeding like a demon, but the thing is that all of these things have made blogging rather difficult.
So, now that it is late and the dishes still need to be done, all I can say is that I will try to post again before our internet is disconnected and takes a WHOLE WEEK to be reconnected at our new place.
Posts
