Huntinglea Charity the Almighty Snob

Daisy, the new Toggenburg and Charity, the Anglo Nubian
We finally have a new goat. We would have been happy with some mongrel beast with a set of good looking udders, but it was not to be. We ended up with Charity, Anglo Nubian royalty and a royal pain in the bum with it. She won first prize in the first milker section at the Royal Hobart Show probably a year or so back. But she became an uneven milker and she has one teat that needs a rebore it's so narrow. She takes forever to milk. That would be OK if it wasn't for the fact that she's behaved like such a cow the other goats will have nothing to do with her. She roars her displeasure constantly even after nearly a month of being on the property.

Daisy, our other newish goat, is young, unflappable, and ignores Charity's derision and continues to offer the hoof of friendshi. For her troubles she bites poor Daisy on the ear and generally shoves her around. Bella sees Charity coming, puts her head down and horns out and lets her know Butt out!

Still, we have 2.5 - 3 litres of milk a day, a fetta factory coming on and Charity has finally learnt how to jump into the goat palace for a milk (you think goats are agile, but it's not necessarily so).

On the up side she has a gentle character with humans, friendly with us as she is haughty with the Toggenberg's. She'll get there, but the next goat we buy won't cost $300 and will hopefully be a little less self-important.

The Beehive Dive

They're all dead, I didn't count them but over several weeks the 80,000 or so bees died. We watched them weakly walking around or trying to remove some invisible irritant from their bodies, and then they died. I watched them in the garden stumbling over flower heads, and drooping with exhaustion. We watched them pile up in front of the hive in the hundreds, then thousands, dead. Finally it was down to a few hundred or so surviving bees and the queen. But her reign was nearly over. A descent of healthy robber bees, and the few hundred died trying to protect the hive, from invasion. I saw the queen one more time clambering about on her own, no retinue of devoted followers. Then she too was just another corpse.

The reason - pesticides, somewhere within the surrounding 3km either forestry or Gunn's has aerial sprayed, or someone has had enough of the summer wasps and has doused them in Baygon, the kind of poison bees and wasps take back to their hives and which destroys them all, or it could be that the Cherry orchards thin their sprays with Carbryl, another death to bee treatment.

It was very sad. I've said it before, you can't throw a hive of bees a ball, you can't cuddle them, and they don't have big soppy eyes, but they are an entity of their own, and their demise was really very sad, and a crappy indictment on our poisonous lives.

The wax and honey left in the hive was pulled out and discarded due to pesticide residue which will continue to kill future bees, the frames have been boiled and scraped till all the wax is off and I've ordered a new queen. She arrived with four or five worker bees in a queen cage, a wooden cage with a candy plug that the bees eat their way out of. By the time they have done so the couple of frames of new bees and the accompanying workers I've been given by a local beekeeper will have become accustomed to her smell and will accept her as their own.

No honey this year, it will be a battle for the new hive to establish itself without me robbing them. Very disappointing, and the question now is, 'what say someone sprays, baits or poisons again and my bees happen to have their working party in that area of the woods on that day?'

Go home and spray - you'll never know, the hell where bees and colonies go.

The Book Arrives!

Well one of them does anyway - however, this was as a small parcel, the others, in a box, were sent at the same time so I'm anticipating that they will arrive tomorrow, and will be straight back out again the following day to hopefully arrive in the letterboxes of those poor people who ordered it anytime back as far as early April.

Thanks again for the patience of those who've lasted through the last nearly nine months!

House progress

It's happening - Trev's up on the roof everyday - the big common rafters he's beaten back to 8 remaining out of 37. He has a three rafter a day challenge, so hopefully not to far away before it's nil. They are all 'birds mouth' joints, and Trev enjoys measuring them exactly so that when they go up they fit snuggly, or as I hear him exclaim from the roof line , 'Fit like a finger up a bum!' - not sure where he got that particular expression from.

Then 24 creeper rafters on the roof hips, then its roofing mesh, sisalation, battens, insulation, sisalation and roofing iron. Then, later on down the track Solomit straw panel lining inside the house. All up 8 layers or levels of building - no wonder Trev tends to focus on the undone rather than the completed.

I've been home for the last month, so good to be able to do some of the dogs body work. We had hoped to have the roof completed by Christmas ... still possible, good weather and back providing.

The White Stuff diet ends...

It ends, and not before time - it was getting very difficult - it's the last few days that are always the hardest. But it was worth it - I've discovered how much energy I have when I'm not eating sugar and wheat - since I've gone back to both I've noticed a quick decline. So I'm going to reduce my intake of both till I find a happy medium (supposing there is one). I lost a kilo, which was a nice side effect, and I'm still eating more fruit as a snack rather than a roll or sandwich. We had a little bit of an outbreak of chocolate, but really, it's been good to break old habits.

While salt reduction was the hardest - by far. Which was a surprise. We did reduce it, but roast vegetables were always dusted off with a bit of added sodium. a serious addiction. However, whether it was the added energy and the additional running around I did or reduced salt my blood pressure levels dropped quite significantly. The time period coincided with a month off work, and starting on co-enzyme Q10 capsules, so not too sure that I can lay the benefits all at the white stuff diet.

We mucked up, of course, almost goes without saying. Someone handed me a lemonade on a hot day and I drank it, not till I polished it off did I have that, 'Oh', moment of, 'that tasted good because it's loaded with dissolved sugar.' Doh! Trev got up late one night and smuggled a vegemite roll into his maw - but ended up admitting to it.

Wheat is difficult because everything seems to have it incorporated somewhere - almost all lunchtime items are bread based and it takes some thinking ahead to not end up losing weight simply because your food imagination completely fails you. Sometimes it would be nice, when tired, to whip up a dinner of pasta, or homemade pizza, or just soup with cheese toasties. Still, one night Caleb decided to help out and made us a lovely chickpea curry that we're all keen on. Thanks Elliot from Rollercoaster.... a definate 5mmm, out of 5mmms.

Smart Burn

Found this in the local hardware store - some of you might have seen it on the New Inventors where it won an award. I'd LOVE to know how it works, as without knowing the science behind things I tend towards the skeptical, especially with such an impact as this has. It's a short metal tube with 'something' inside it that is placed in the firebox of a wood heater, but not near direct flame. It reduces carbon emissions from the chimney. While not an answer to burning unseasoned timber any reduction in emissions has got to be a good thing. So we spent the $45, cleaned out the chimney so it had a clean start and we'll check again in three months to see if there is any reduction in soot. We'll let you know. If you've already trialled this product please let us know how you feel its spiel holds up to reality.

Mass Extinctions Underway

This is from The Australian newspaper - you can read the full article here The story leaves me feeling despondent and strangely, for me, mute.

Mass species extinction 'is under way'
October 03, 2008

PARIS: Earth's animal and plant species are vanishing at unprecedented rates, evidence that the planet is facing a tsunami of mass extinction, experts gathering for a global conservation conference have warned.

Whether through habitat loss, pollution, hunting, or indirectly by global warming, humans are squarely to blame for what may be the first major die-off in 65 million years, they say.

From Sunday, more than 8000 ministers, UN officials, NGOs, scientists and business chiefs will brainstorm for 10 days in the Spanish city of Barcelona on how to brake this loss and steer the world onto a path of sustainable development.

The World Conservation Congress, held every four years, will also release an update on Monday of the famous Red List on biodiversity, deemed the global standard for conservation monitoring.

“The evidence is overwhelming - and we have really good data now - that what we are seeing is probably a mass extinction,” the sixth in 450 million years, said Michael Hoffman, a mammal expert at IUCN who worked extensively on the Red List.

The current pace of dieoff is 100 to 1000 times higher than the so-called “background rate” of extinction - the average rate, over millions of years, at which species bite the dust.