Escapes and escapism

I do hate when blogs I follow trail off with no further clues on what's going on in a blogger's life, so while I'm not really feeling the blogging right now, it does seem only fair to give a bit of an update. Plus I've been doing some fun stuff! In May this year I quit my job to head off on a three month overseas adventure, and then unexpectedly (but happily) found myself wrapping up not just my job but also my relationship of more than five years and our shared household. Which while sad, suddenly meant that I was free to extend the adventure. I headed off to Canada with two of my closest friends, Matt and Mark, to drive 3000 kilometres in an unreliable $400 van, and then spent 16 days canoeing the Yukon River.

It was an incredible journey; we were on the river just as spring was arriving and each day would bring fresh, hyper-colour green tree growth and more sunshine as we made our way from Whitehorse to Dawson City. We were pretty sick of canoeing by the end of the trip, but to have such an experience with good friends was unforgettable.

Once that section of the trip was over Mark headed home, while Matt and I continued on for two months of roadtripping through northwestern USA. I don't think I've had a grin plastered on my face for so many days straight in my life. We stopped each night in small towns and state or national parks, did a mammoth amount of thrift store shopping, drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of diner breakfasts, listened to a lot of music, talked a great deal, and played countless games of backgammon in campsites.

After Matt left I stayed on in Canmore, Alberta, to see whether living in a mountain town might be fun for awhile. And it is, but the pull of home is very strong as well. It's incredible to look up at the mountains and get out and enjoy them with wonderful new friends, but I miss friends and family from home, and big city life, and there are many more jobs that excite me in Melbourne. So now I'm at a crossroads, with a foot in each camp and a new decision every six hours about what I'm doing next. It's hard to make a choice when you're choosing between awesome and awesome, and to figure out whether you're opting out of making serious decisions or making the most of the opportunities you have.

Landscaping with Pallets

I'm normally terrible at taking photos before I start a project, which is always somewhat disappointing because then I don't have a reminder of how far a garden or any other project has come since I started it. So this time I'm going to try to show the start as well, and while it might not be pretty, hopefully it will at least be interesting to watch a guerrilla community garden changing and taking shape.

So this is the view as it was on Saturday morning:


The closest garden box is ours, but I'll give more details on it another time.

We had decided to build a second entry point to the garden down at our end, and luckily someone pointed out that a ramp was far better for wheelbarrow access than the stairs I'd been happily plotting. So one friend did the major grunt work and dug out part of the bank to make a rough ramp.


But another friend and I were too excited to leave it at that, so we decided to build a retaining wall from pallets, which is the main building material at the site. So we cut a pallet into three sections of varying sizes and then dug a trench area for them.

We whacked them in place, chucked in some plastic lining and scoria, gravel and earth, and voila! The perfect start to our ramp and beautification of our end of the garden.


The same view, but with a ramp!


And the great thing about a community garden is that others continue to chip in. When I went to drop off our compost this evening I noticed that someone has driven in star pickets in front of the wall, and used some astro-turf that was lying around to cover it.

Some updating to do

Due to popular demand (Hi Mum) I'm not going to let this blog just fade away entirely as it was threatening to do.

The past month has been an absolutely crazy month of weddings, I've spent my weekends in Newcastle, South Africa (that was work rather than wedding),the Huon Valley of Tasmania and Ballarat.

It's been wonderful to watch friends and family make such an incredible commitment to each other, each wedding has been amazing for its own reason. The Newcastle wedding had the most heartfelt, beautiful vows I can possibly imagine, the Tasmanian wedding was such a celebration of the entire lifestyle the couple have embraced together, and the Ballarat wedding was a completely accurate reflection of the couple's sense of humour - they had a giant novelty wedding certificate and their vows were hilarious.


So look for some updates starting now on our chooks, vegie garden and more.

These photos are from the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town. I spent three hours there on the day when I was leaving South Africa and I took a huge number of photos. And then forced Tom and my parents to sit through a slideshow of every shot when I got home - lucky them!

Weekend away

We had a really lovely weekend down at the beach recently. Isn't this pattern on seaweed amazing?


My friend Mat came down with Tom and me. He's always fantastic to hang out with because he's wonderfully friendly and positive, and he's made some inspiring choices. He and his partner Kim recently moved to Tasmania to try and live more sustainably. I really admire their choice to get out of the rat-race and work in jobs they find inspiring as part of their lifestyle. Mat does beautiful work shaping surfboards and taking photographs, you can check out some of his work at his website, Flow State.

New music

One pretty nifty thing about having my radio show has been that it has forced me to find half an hour of music to play each week. Yeah, that doesn't sound so hard, does it? But I'm one of those people who never remembers the names of bands and can't sing to save their life, so whenever I try to choose music to buy it involves a conversation of random words that may or may not be related to the band's name, and then a horrendously out-of-tune rendition missing almost all the words of the song I'm trying to remember the name of. Pretty painful for everyone involved. But I've been very diligent and have really enjoyed actually buying music for the first time in a long time, as well as taking recommendations from friends. The show has a bit of a rootsy, folksy, alternative country feel to it, which has been a fun genre to explore. Lots of Calexico, Sime Nugent, The Waifs, and the fantastic Dirt Music soundtrack created by Tim Winton to match the mood of his novel of the same title - cool concept eh?

One band in this genre that I'm loving at the moment is Power and Greig. A good friend is the slide guitarist extraordinaire in this band, but friendliness aside, I'm really digging their stuff! I think my favourite song (this week) is one called Dancer, but I also love De-burg Days.

I also find their 'sounds like' description from their myspace page a pretty humourously accurate description of our backyard at times (although perhaps minus the band-inspired epiphany!):
"Drinking boutique beers (or more likely cheap longnecks) in your friends backyard in the northern suburbs on a sunny afternoon. Still wearing the clothes you had on last night, talking about how you'd like to move to the country...again. You hear sunday drivers, a bird twittering, a banjo in the distance. Suddenly you realise that power & greig somehow encapsulate your prosaically humble yet poetically fascinating day to day existence in a three minute s(ingal)ong. What wonder! What beauty!"

Beautiful Beets

We pulled the first of our beetroot this week. Glorious ruby red and bright pink globes, destined for greatness in a starring role in Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion recipe for beetroot, avocado, walnut and pink grapefruit (and lettuce) salad.




It was one of the dishes served up last week at a big dinner for friends that made me so proud of our garden. We all sat around on those (previously posted) benches drinking mojitos with lots of fresh mint from the garden before eating a tasty meal which used garden produce in every course. Far too much was eaten and drunk and a merry time was had by all.