Permaculture Class, part 1

I began my first permaculture class today. Here are the highlights:

The ethics of permaculture:

Care of earth
Care of people (consider others)
Fair share

The Camphor Laurel tree, for example, shares its root system with other plants and trees. So if you poison it, you also may kill every other tree in a 100 meter radius!

1. Observe [nature] and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield [eg food or enjoyment]

This class is free. We meet every other week over 10 weeks. I ran into two people with whom I'd previously volunteered in bush regeneration and community gardens.

I believe growing food [well] is a largely lost skill among Westerners. Perhaps if I become better at it, I can pass on the gift of permaculture gardening to others.

Here's a neat quote from Bill Mollison when asked to define "Permaculture":

It's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.

You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

Read more here, here, or here.

Locked Out

Several months ago, I locked us out of the house we rent. Later that day I recorded the story of what happened. This is that extraordinary video:

Climb 18 July

Climb

I'm going to bed now and in a few hours I'll hitch a ride down to near Nowra to climb rock outdoors. I finally made up a video of last time I climbed outdoors in April. The beginning of the video is climbing in Hangdog Rock Climbing Gym with Mick on Thursday.

Ella's Signs

Today, I woke up to Ella’s voice at 6:15 AM. She’s running late today. I found her standing in her cot/crib. When in the dark she saw me she made a squeal of inhalation and excitement. I changed her nappy/diaper. Normally, she’s screaming through this part of the morning b/c her nappy’s very wet and she’s very hungry for Mama’s milk. It was much easier this morning for some reason. Instead of screaming, Ella was jabbering on to me about something and using sign language we’ve been trying to teach her. She did the sign for “I want,” “more,” and I think she did the sign for “milk,” though that was hard to see in the dark. She was also using language resembling English words like “more.” Did she say, “I love you, Daddy. Please take me to Mama’s milk soon?” I’m not sure. I was still pretty tired and struggling to open my eyes at that point. Or, did I dream this whole thing?

One thing's for sure, she's precious to me, as is her Mama. Both of them amaze me.

The Problem of Maintenance

I got home last night at 2200h. I drove to a small town about 45 minutes away where Bob was waiting in his shed for me with the timing belt kit, idler pulleys, water pump, and engine oil filter.

It took a while to remove everything to get to the timing belt. Releasing many of the bolts was easier said than done. At some points we were underneath the car. It was up six feet up in the air. And I held some kind of socket-welded-to-a-crow-bar tool on the bolt while Bob hit the end with a 10-pound sledgehammer as we tried to turn the bolt and remove the crankshaft sprocket. After a neighbor came over, hit it a few more times with a hammer and with the rattle gun. Then, he repeated the process a couple more times. Out came the bolt. All the instructions said were, "Now you can remove the crankshaft bolt." LOL. It wasn't quite as simple as the instructions implied.

The other two bolts were not quite as tight, but they were much harder to reach. We spilled a couple liters of coolant while changing the water pump, but that didn't take long. I also met a neighbor of Bob's who's a retired British Specials Forces dude and another neighbor of Eastern Europe descent who was a mechanic for 18 years. And Lorna prepared morning tea, lunch and dinner for us. We ate dinner on the floor of the shed and got right back to work.

Thankfully, putting it all back together didn't take as long as it took to remove everything. I got to have some good conversation with Bob. He said, "I've experienced some intense pressures in my life, but nothing like Christ went through. To think that he went through those pressures out of love . . . well, I say "Thank you" an awful lot." I've known Bob and Lorna since 1998. At least since then, Bob has been helping people work on their own cars for little to no pay and developing a sense of community among his neighbors.

Mulch Day at Home

I worked in my own garden Wednesday. I’ve been volunteering in bush regeneration and giving some community garden help. But my own garden was/is becoming overgrown.

It’s the same way with what some of my new Australian friends are saying about Christians. “They want to tell you how to live, but they don’t want to change themselves.” I haven’t heard that quote quite that directly, but that’s the sentiment I seem to get when someone’s honest with me.

So I went to Bunnings and bought mulch. I brought it home and pulled weeds starting at the end of the front garden that had the least weeds and the most lizards. I enjoy an occasional lizard poke out of the plants to tharn (ie stare at me with fear) for a second and then scurry back into hiding. It’s less overwhelming and more enjoyable to start where it’s easier to make a change.

I poured out 120 litres of Eucalyptus mulch over the semi-weeded area in the lizard zone.

I also weeded around our food plants in the back. Then, I spread a 30 litre bag of moisture retaining mulch around strawberry plants, Thyme, shallots/spring onion, kale and some lettuces, potato, and two choy sums I planted from roots in our refrigerator. Oh, I also mulched this around a lemon tree that looks pretty bad and it seems is under chronic ant attack. Bizarre. I found four dead slugs in the jar of honey/borax I left by the tree to kill/deter ants. No dead ants. I threw the jar away after I licked some of the honey. Just kidding.

I also removed some huge branches (hacked up with my rusty box cutter) from the palm type tree and the purple flowering tree. I threw them on the ground to dry in the sun so I can tear them up for mulch later. I also worked in the compost heap. There were some old, dead branches and bits of Grevilia tree. I hand mulched these and covered the food scraps and lawn clippings we’d piled up in one spot. It was quite a relief to bury the slimy, rotting pile of food scraps before we attracted rats or even ravens.

Here are some pictures of some of what I just described:
Food plants in the back:
Hacked off palms/POMs:
The lizard area in front. Can you see the big one?

Photogenic Kids

One day in May I went walking and climbing around with two precious kids around the harbor. They were very photogenic and we were all giddy because we hadn't seen each other in a while. I believe we saw birds of prey out over the water and a police patrol boat zipping around.

Stories of Alexander the Great, part 1

I volunteer at the site of a former builders tip/landfill. It's a huge mound of barely buried construction refuse on a small part of what used to be Tom Thumb's lagoon (What once was 500 hectares of lagoon is now 5).

Some interesting men and women volunteer with me. One man I find particularly interesting is Michael (pictured above). He grew up in Postwar Macedonia/Yugoslavia . . . anyway, somewhere in the ballpark of where Alexander the Great was born.

But, Michael is at least almost as interesting as Alexander the Great. I'll share one story today and more later.

Michael is telling me while we're eating lunch that yesterday he was working on his hill again up in the trees and tall kikuyu grass as primary/elementary school children were walking along the path below. As they were following their teacher, the five and six year olds looked neither to the right nor to the left. But Michael was hiding in the grass just a few feet above them in the tree shadows watching them like a tiger. Somewhere on the left (in the picture) is where Michael was hiding. He slowly raised up so that if they looked, they'd be able to see him from the nose up. One girl with spider like senses turned to the left suddenly. As she looked right at the wild looking man in the grass, he sunk smoothly back down into hiding. But he could still see her through the tall blades of grass. She mentioned what she'd seen to her classmates who all stopped and started staring into the grass trying to find him. Some of them, of course, didn't know why they were stopped and were just looking around at butterflies or asking the person next to them, "Why are we stopped?" So, this little girl was busy telling and the news was passing down the line.

Michael said eventually the teacher, a male, came over to the girl who'd witnessed the bush animal. She made the teacher bend down so she could whisper in his ear. The teacher looked into the grass as she pointed to where she'd surely seen whatever it was. At which point Michael slowly raised up once more so that he was only visible to them from the nose up. At which point a boy looking intently to where the girl was pointing shouted, "TARZAN!" Then, there was more great commotion as everyone saw what the little girl had witnessed. The line moved on anyhow and Michael was left laughing in the grass before he got back to work pulling invasive species out or planting or whatever it is he does on his hill.

Not as Big gives way to Gong Alien

I got tired of blogging my old way. The old blog was morphing already, but I felt the need for a new start, a new pattern. The old blog was called "not as big as i am." This new one is called "Gong Alien."

I used to write reflections of processes going on in my head. Now I want to tell more stories instead of explain concepts and I want to just log my daily life without getting too abstract. I want to observe and share what happens in my life, but I won't always analyze every little thing. I'll also try not to just post links to other stuff on the internet unless it's a recent video from my life. So, . . . . I hope this new blog will be more day-to-day life focused.

So, I want to introduce myself just for the purpose of seeing where I'm at in my life's journey right now. Instead of explaining where I've been (a lot), I'll just display my present, what I'm seeing right now.

I'll try to post pictures and tell about my day starting in the next post.

By the way, I'm a 34-year old (for now) alien living in Wollongong, Australia with my Australian wife, Nicole, and our daughter, Ella. Also, our son is with us, but he's yet to be born. I'm an alien living in the Gong. This is my life.

Here's my first picture: