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June 18: midwinter gathering

2016/06/18 Danielle 0

It’s not quite midwinter yet – the solstice is officially a few days off – but we’re very close to the longest night of the year. It’s dark in the morning when I get up, and the sun sets remarkably early. But winter isn’t quite the same here as it is in Europe; in WA, winter is the season of growth and fertility. Summer is when things die and hibernate to survive through the heat. So in spite of the cold nights, and the periodic rain (more than average so far this winter!), I like winter.   I like the […]

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June 10: Art and Happiness

2016/06/10 Danielle 0

Everyone understands the need and desire for nourishing food, to provide us with energy and amino acids and essential nutrients. That’s pretty straight forward. But as a social species, we actually need more than that. We have needs that go beyond the physiological – we need things like acceptance, love, appreciation, and autonomy. We seek happiness, or self-actualisation, or a sense of belonging and community (or all of these things, they’re not mutually exclusive). We create meaning for ourselves out of the things we do, because we need our actions and our lives to have meaning.   There are many […]

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June 5: community and support

2016/06/05 Danielle 0

Yesterday was the 5-weekly cat food run. Four ox hearts from the meat markets, and 2 beef livers, which then had to be cut up and minced. We were a bit low on taurine – I need to order more, which I didn’t realise until we started making up the mix – so we added extra lamb hearts to the mix in place of some of the minced beef. Heart is rich in taurine, and taurine is an essential amino acid for cats. So we borrowed my parents’ mincer and spent a couple’ve hours cutting and mincing and mixing and […]

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BlogJune 2016

2016/05/27 Danielle 0

A very dear friend of ours is participating in BlogJune this year, and I figured we’d do so too. So this June, expect one post per day.   The plan is to complete (at least) one task on the farm or house per day, and record it via the blog posts. At the end of the month, we’ll have a pretty detailed story of our progress for June 2016. I’ll try to put photos up where I can, although not everything we do around here is photogenic. Today’s task, for example, was mucking out the chicken coops. I don’t think […]

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if not you..

2016/01/18 Danielle 0

This weekend just passed, I attended an event called GenghisCon. It’s a small science fiction / speculative fantasy & gaming convention, which runs every year in Perth. It’s run every year for the last 15 years, which is a pretty impressive run for something which gets no funding or support from any corporate or government body. Every year the committee (elected at the previous convention) does fundraising to make sure there’s enough money to pay for the venue and insurance, and organises a program of events to run at the convention, including discussion panels (on anything and everything from how to […]