Flame tree is the colloquial name for the tree species Brachychiton acerifolius, which grows in warmer coastal areas along the east coast of the continent. It’s large, and bizarrely deciduous, which bafflingly, produces striking red flowers during the plants unnecessarily leafless winter months. It also just happens be the title of an Australian song by the band Cold Chisel. In this country at least, the song is very well known.
The band was a little bit before my time, but the cheeky scamps left an impression on the population which extends even to today. True poets of the people. The song is equally melancholy and nostalgic. It meanders through the lives of folks in a small rural town, but from the perspective of a dude returning after some success in the big city. Plus the lyrics raise plenty of questions which are never answered. The idea communicated I believe is, that nothing much changes there.
Maybe that was true back then. Forty one years later and things sure are different now. The rapid rate of change can feel a bit painful. Mind you, business fundamentals haven’t altered one bit over the years. Goods and services are provided for people to purchase – that’s a simple time tested arrangement. The administration of a business however, is a bit nuts in these enlightened days. Demands placed upon businesses for data are made on multiple fronts. Deadlines are tight. Scope for errors are huge. When such systems are set up properly, maintained and work well, it’s easy. There are however, three variables introduced in the previous sentence, and it’s been remarked upon elsewhere that: people can rarely achieve perfection. Yet that appears to be the unspoken assumption behind many of the computerised systems – Let’s assume that nothing has gone wrong, or worse, it’s an event which has not even been considered. Fixing errors can be a nightmare, and trust me, they happen. Frequently.
Friends and peers have been using the naughty ‘r’ word recently. I’m not sure what you lovely readers are thinking about, but the ‘r’ in this case, refers to: ‘retirement’. A delightful situation which is ever so slightly ever out of reach for Sandra and I. That’s what having irresponsible parents looks like! Oh well. But the larger point is that when faced with the pace and expectations of the work force, I’m hearing stories of quietly quitting, or at least considering how to do so. It’s worth noting for purely comparative purposes, my own mother was retired the venerable age I’ve now reached.
Anyway, retirement is not an option for us. Sandra and I are able to manage the inevitable tension which arises from the confluence of work necessities and all of these rapid changes as best as we are able to. We do that trick by setting limits on our activities and expectations. Limits are the path to freedom. However, I’m always curious to observe how other folks cope with these same stresses.
Stress has many different faces. The other week I was embarrassed to discover myself in the middle of an interweb flame war. It escalated so quickly that I was taken by surprise. What is a flame war you may ask? Well the least emotionally charged definition I could find, and even then had to modify to take out the heat, was something like this: an unfriendly argument between two or more online users.
The argument revolved around a third parties claim that someone had developed a house which was so good, that in a cool temperate area with winter temperatures near or below freezing for the winter months of the year (with serious cold extremes), that they’d only used a few wheelbarrow loads of firewood annually. Plus apparently there was only a tiny solar power array for electricity. And that area gets way colder than here during the winter months. Look, for all I know the claims may be true, but the mind began considering unmentioned aspects to the story, such as how was heat for cooking and hot water provided. Rather ungentlemanly I called bullshit on the claims, and dared to mention extensive use of unmentioned propane fuel, but received no acknowledgement. Whatever, it’s been remarked upon elsewhere that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and those words to my mind express a general truth.
Anyway, after very brief backwards and forwards, I walked away from the discussion. Generally speaking, deeply held belief systems are difficult to talk about with people face to face, whilst over the interweb that is an almost impossibility. And there I was, embarrassed to be part of the little war. I knew better than to get involved. On the only positive note, the incident did get the ol’ brain cogitating upon what it all meant.
So, up to that foolish moment, I’d been doing a lot of paid work for the weeks prior to the end of the financial year. The computer and data demanding systems are now remarkably inflexible, and so I just had to work all that much harder than usual. What can I say, other than the additional workload clearly clouded my judgement.
But what may similar stress look like for other people? It’s hard to know really, but I had an eerie insight which suggested that relying on deeply held beliefs, is a way of putting a persons brain into auto-pilot. Once an idea gets fixed, and becomes unable to be discussed, the inner workings of the mind no longer have to grapple with the difficulty that, you know, the ideas may well be wrong. And that brain process frees up energy to do other stuff, you know, like dealing with the burdensome administrative processes which eat up hours of people’s lives these days. Candidly, rather than being a problem, this is probably a feature of our current civilisation.
There’s nothing fundamentally bad about being wrong. It happens. And does it really matter that despite my hobby and experience with hippy technologies, that other people hold differing beliefs on the same subject? Probably not. Learning to let things go is a part of setting limits on yourself. However, doing that doesn’t mean that I’ve suddenly become apathetic about our civilisation. Far from it really, because changes are taking place all around us, and at an increasingly rapid rate too. It’s hard not to notice that our major ally has re-embraced coal as an energy source. Makes me wonder if anyone has noticed? I’m yet to see public melt-downs and flame wars about that matter, but make no doubts about it, belief systems will surely be challenged.
Earlier in the week, the tail end of an east coast low storm, which has been described elsewhere as a category one cyclone, pummelled the east coast of the continent. This far south, and slightly further west, the storm was no big deal. Just lots of thick clouds and an inch of much needed rainfall. It’s quite damp outside now!
Still, all good things come to an end. By Thursday the clouds had lifted, the sun shone through blue sunny skies, and humidity hung over the valley way down below the mountain range. You could describe the air down there as ‘soupy’, and other words would only misrepresent the damp experience.
Towards the end of the week I had a couple of spare hours, and so decided to connect up the plumbing with the two newly installed water tanks.
The treated pine timber posts were installed last week, and to one of those I attached a basic low pressure garden tap. The other post has a quick connector (known down under as a cam-lock fitting) and a valve, which can be used for attaching an electric water pump. Water can now be easily pumped from these two water tanks, to any other water tanks on the property.
The recent rainfall has been good, and the water reserves are now up to around 80,000L / 21,000 gallons, with another 60,000L / 15,800 gallon spare capacity.
Eventually those two water tanks will be connected up to a roof rainfall capture system. Part of that system involves working out what to do when the tanks overflow – as they will sooner or later. To the side of the tanks, we’ve begun digging a ten foot long swale, which is basically a ditch, that allows excess water to infiltrate into the soil instead of running over the ground causing erosion. Plus the water enters the soil near to the top of the sunny orchard providing an easy drink for many fruit trees.
The scary old roto-tiller loosened up the soil. That was then shovelled into the yellow power wheelbarrow, which was then driven uphill. The swale is located in the sunny orchard and I was amazed at the quality of top soil we were digging up. Top soil went down at least two feet before reaching the clay / volcanic loam layer.
There’s still about a day of digging before the swale excavations are completed. The plan is to line the entire basin with rocks, and then plant some of the local ferns. It should end up looking pretty nice, and is a replication of a similar drainage arrangement on the other side of the farm – the one with the tall tree fern.
In breaking produce news…
This week’s video is on the subject of producing SCOBY’s (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) for both Kombucha which as a by-product produces cheap protein for then chickens consumption.
As anticipated, the chickens have ever so slowly began to come back on the lay following on from the winter solstice. That’s usually what happens here, and it was nice to see the very first egg of the season this week. And it’s blue! Hard to believe it was produced by a bantam chicken.
Many of the citrus trees are mere days away from supplying ripened fruit for breakfast. This Pomello (a grapefruit) is closest to that astounding winter feat:
A few of the youngest citrus trees had sooty mould. That’s caused by ants using aphids to farm sugars off the leaves in a mutually beneficial arrangement. It is a general nuisance for young citrus trees. Earlier today I took a kitchen scrub and using warm soapy water, gently washed the leaves. Then fed the trees with a seaweed solution. A well timed grease band around the trunk of the trees will put an end to the nuisance. The ants won’t be active again until the weather warms up in a month or two’s time.
And something is eating our many rhubarb leaves. Probably the possums, because nothing has ever eaten those toxic leaves before. Hope the herbivores have upset stomachs… Oh well, there’s always something going on.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 7’C (45’F). So far for this year there has been 348.4mm (13.7 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 326.2mm (12.8 inches)