It’s been a bit over a year since we’ve begun our YouTube adjunct adventure to this blog. The other day Sandra suggested that you, the lovely readers of this blog, might be interested in the background story, and also something about what we’ve learned along the way. It’s been a heck of a journey, that’s for sure.
Dear reader, cast your minds back to a year ago. The world seemed different in those days. It’s hard to say exactly what’s changed since then, but the sensitive person may offer an explanation: Things were more certain in those days. Oh well, life changes and the big old world keeps on spinning around and around. Say what you will, but since the US Federal election last year, geopolitics have become interesting again!
Much moaning and consternation can be heard elsewhere – you don’t have to travel far. But blame it on my upbringing, or whatever, I’m simply not wired to be down about current events. Sanguine would perhaps be an appropriate description as to the vibe here. After all, my entire life has experienced slow economic decline. If you doubt me, there’s this irrefutable fun fact: In the 1970’s my single mother received a free part time University education, paid time off work to study, and also managed to purchase a house for my sisters and I to reside in. There was always food on the table, and that was all achieved with a single income. This collected series of outcomes are simply not possible nowadays, ergo, we’re in decline. Nuff said.
So yeah, economically I hold some reservations that wealth will ever return to the free wheeling funster days of the early 1970’s. Still, I don’t hold visions for the near future which include the sort of shanty town shacks which once hard working, then the suddenly unemployed, resided in during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. We’re probably more likely to see more rounds of further congestion, shoddy products, higher prices, and greater life administration burdens. So far that’s how things are playing out.
As previously mentioned we live a quiet life out in the forest and up in the hills north of Melbourne. It’s all very nice, and we work hard to make the place both beautiful and more importantly, functional. Our hard work and thrifty nature tends to keep the economic costs of these activities low. However, as wealth slowly declines in our civilisation, people are losing faith in the system to deliver for them. And fair enough, it may not be meeting their expectations, I get that. It’s hard for me to forget the tens of thousands of dollars the University demanded, and extracted for a license to practice my profession. All so very different from my mum’s experience.
Anyway, it hasn’t even been a year yet, but there was that US Federal election, when was it again, around November or something like that. Clearly enough people felt slighted to have voted for a change in government. There’s an old saying which is remarkably true: Oppositions don’t win elections, government’s lose them. Hmm. Probably the case here.
About maybe nine months before the election, a weird thing began happening to the blog. It appeared as though the search engines began throttling the traffic to this website. Slowly at first, then it effect accelerated. It’s not nice to be made a non-person. Looking around at other independent blogs, people were losing their minds about this traffic squeezing business. Some cheeky wag came up with the description: Shadow banning, whatever that means. And it may even be true.
Honestly, I probably brought that dog poop situation down on my own head by having links to supposedly controversial websites, one which was notably permanently taken out in some sort of weird and deeply mysterious interweb hit: Mr Kunstler’s twice weekly blog: Clusterfuck Nation. The name is derived from Military slang, which I’ve heard expressed as: Hurry up, and wait! Another aspect of my internal wiring is that I’ve got a reasonably open mind, and if people make claims, rather than getting all fired up, I tend to ask the hard question: Well, are they right? Clearly, the facts suggest that other folks feel differently.
The entire throttling thing was all taken with a dose of good grace, and the day after the election, the traffic flows returned as if nothing had happened. That was strange. But whatever. However, in the months prior to that moment, Sandra and I decided to create a YouTube channel with what is known as interweb ‘back-links’ to the blog. This would force the nice search engines to maybe acknowledge this website as real, and of no threat to anyone. So we began making weekly videos in addition to the blog.
Making videos is a completely different experience to sitting down and typing out a couple of thousand words of text. At first it was difficult to relax whilst talking in front of the camera. Guys are wired to do one thing at a time, but there were times when you’d have to talk, and like you know, do stuff. The sheer outrage! And my cover has been entirely blown, Sandra now expects me to multi-task. Talk about undocumented side effects.
For the past eleven years, usually each Sunday night I’ll sit down and write about some topic which has been on my mind during the week. It’s hard to know in advance what that subject will even be, and that’s part of the fun for the reader. Who knows what journeys of the imagination we’ll all embark upon? YouTube is different. People appear to want the same journey, but perhaps better, otherwise they’ll go off and watch something else.
We tried poking the algorithm with all sorts of topics to see what the response would be. There’s definitely a bias towards how-to videos, although some of the kitchen subjects have been total flops. People seem to like chainsaws, although I’d soon run out of ideas for new content. Even the thumbnails for the images make a difference. I’m mildly offended that photos of myself score poorly when compared to pretty click-bait images. I’ve toyed around with the idea of doing a thumbnail of me with the shirt-off, flexing the arm and chest muscles, a rifle in one arm and holding Ollie by the other, all the while looking purposefully at some animal which needs killing off in the distance. It worked for that president of the big long bear country.
Nah, what I have learned about that platform, is that it is a business. There’s an interweb meme about a child encountering a deadly animal with the line: If not friend, then why friend shaped? It’s a remarkably wise question, with deeper implications than may appear at first. We’ll see where the channel goes, but trust me, that thing may look free, but it ain’t free shaped. Hmm. Who cares though? It’s just good to have all you lovely readers here!
This week’s video is a how-to video on how we make yoghurt.
The weather this week here was filthy. We had the triple unpleasant experience overdrive: wet, cold and windy! On Monday, at least, the wintry weather held off. We headed down below to the forest edge to continue cleaning up the loggers mess. And I finally finished cutting up the largest log those remarkably messy folks left. The Meg! The chainsaw required a brand new bar in order to cut straight through the thick timber, but the job was soon done and the discs were burnt off. They’re too huge for any of our equipment to split into firewood sized chunks. And I certainly can’t lift them off the ground. Easier to roll them downhill into the fire.
If you look carefully at the small chunk which has broken away from the disc, you can see that the fungi have invaded the decades old log and began to consume it. That made for easier cutting of the hardwood, but it was still no simple job for the dirty timber rapidly blunts the cutting teeth on the chain. Glad that part of the clean up job is now done.
A good job to do indoors during cold weather is to make soap. This time around, instead of using expensive olive oil, we’re trialling the far cheaper canola oil. Proving that innovations often go awry, the first batch of canola oil made two months ago was sped up by using a hand mixer. Many people on the interweb swear by this innovation, but the results speak for themselves. The soap making process may have been faster, but the results were rubbish. It’s far better if mixed by hand slowly over a number of days. This is a great example of the engineering concept of: Good, fast, cheap – pick any two!
On Sunday, it was not raining (at first), but the wind was feral. Working outdoors is both unpleasant and risky in such weather, so we headed to a nearby mountain range to visit the delightful: Fern Acres Nursey
Such a lovely place, and the folks there are super helpful. We left with a bakers dozen of ferns to plant out. Many of those will end up in the overflow swale for the two new water tanks.
And I almost forgot to include this, but in reality I did actually forget to include the next bit in a previous blog from a few weeks ago. We took a trip to Sunbury to check out some of the places of interest. That’s the nearest big town to us. Turns out there are a few ancient Indigenous stone circle rings in the area. I’d driven past this site for years and not known what it was.
It’s a very ancient ceremonial site, and there are several of them in the area. Some of those were surrounded by housing estates, which seems really weird to me, but then I did grow up watching scary horror films like, Poltergeist.
The train line is of interest too. It was one of the earliest, mostly because it connected the very young city of Melbourne to the gold fields. Turns out there was gold in them thar hills, quite a lot actually. So the train line was economically viable, and is still in use today. There was a lovely granite bluestone bridge crossing a creek. They don’t make them like that anymore.
I doubt I’ll look as good after around 160 years of use.
We also finally discovered the location of the famous Sunbury Music Festival of the very early 1970’s. Things were probably a bit loose in those days, because I didn’t see any facilities. The band Queen even played there one year. It sure was a beautiful location though. Makes you wonder what Freddie Mercury would have thought of the location? Apparently he was quoted as saying that on the bands next visit, they’d be the biggest band in the world. Proving that one must always be careful with what they wish for.
In breaking produce news:
Another chicken has come on the lay this week. Yay! Egg production will slowly rise, until it peaks and declines by February when the chickens need to moult. At that point in time, they’ll regrow their feathers for the winter months.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 6’C (43’F). So far for this year there has been 374.0mm (14.7 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 348.4mm (13.7 inches)