Speaking of houses, a friend recently went to the Solomons and they took a photo of the house we used to own and lived in for some time! Weird. And super cool. We used to do school in that bit to the side. It was on a lean back then too.
Month: <span>October 2009</span>
Just a small update on where all the ‘changing careers/suburbs/life’ thing is going. My in-laws are buying an investment property which Geoff and I will rent, which is (in my opinion) AMAZING. So we have been looking at many many houses online and have in the past week or two checked some out.
Today we went to an auction but a tentative bidding tango between a very subdued Asian man who looked at the house half way through the auction (strange much?) and a very worried looking couple we decided it probably went above what we thought it was worth. Post this, we checked out several more a suburb over – which makes very little difference in the scheme of things and it seems to be much better value.
There are a few houses I am quite keen on. Two of which have been informally dubbed ‘party houses’ by Geoff (who hasn’t even seen them) one of which would need to be pretty much entirely repainted – would totally be worth it, but it’s lots of fun looking. Basically there’s not a huge amount of emotional investment on anyone’s part, because err, it is an investment and there are HEAPS of very decents houses around so it’s mostly just until we hit one that we like, is good for renting should Geoff and I ever move out (j/k Anne) and is the right price.
I shall keep you posted.
I do get a bit over the whole ‘climate change’ stuff sometimes. There are weeks where we thrash it to death through my design course. I do assignments on sustainable waste management and water and discuss how we as designers are both pretty much the problem and the solution. It’s a theme that rocks up in pretty much every class at some point during the semester. So I was a bit ‘mi lase’ (Which basically means ‘I don’t want to’ in Solomon Islands Pijin) with the Blog Action Day theme (Speaking of which, I’m kind of a day late). Then yesterday I spied a comment on someone’s facebook about having despite tried, their carbon footprint had increased in the past six months. From there ensued quite an interesting discussion between me and another who commented on the post.
“I can’t stand it when the hippies tell us it’s so easy to be green. The only way to be effective ecologically seems to be give up our entire way of life, completely… we can’t survive without the way we have life now. Even if only places like factories, hospitals, morgues and food storage places where allowed to continue as they are (which they need too) we are still screwed. I just wish someone could come up with a better efficient form of energy that can produce stuff to the levels we need.”
and then I entered the conversation with something like “Bollocks, yes we can”. Great starter, really about getting someone on my side.
So the conversation went on and honed in on ‘Do the little things make a difference’? As much as we’d like to think the little things don’t always make a huge difference, but the idea of these things and goals like Target 155 (which surely could be lower) is about attitude change which has bigger implications for overall behaviour. At the moment I feel is fair to call out the world around me as being too comfortable, too selfish, too lazy. Myself included. There are many things in regard to climate change that revolve around changing systems that sit at a higher level than many of us operate in but these systems also rely on an attitude change. So lets start with the little things within reach.
The conversation on facebook made me realise something, I do actually care very much about climate change. And fair bit more than I’ve realised. Just perhaps this will have implications for further altering my own behaviour?
Below is an average breakdown of how you use your domestic water… click to zoom.
While I’m on about cooking. I did wind up making that poppy seed cake (see the photo). It wasn’t the same as the one I was trying to replicate and not close enough to even just omit the sour cream topping, but it was quite tasty. Sadness, the search must passively continue.
(I am on the look out for a recipe for a poppy seed cake that is really dense poppy seeds with almost a pie crust on the top it is semi-sweet, quite moist but not airy. A cafe I sometimes frequent makes it, I should probably just ask for the recipe, but I kind of doubt they’ll go ahead and give it to me.)
This was good but could be better. I’m not very good at cooking chicken, I tend to over-do it because I’m too paranoid it wont be cooked and it winds up dry/chewy. Any tips anyone?
Chicken breast strips dipped in flour, then egg/milk/garlic, then breadcrumbs/parmesan with mashed potatoes, spinach and a sauce thing of cream-cheese/gherkin-spread/chives.