Little notes from Heather and Martin

I've grown up with the idea that "God doesn't have grandchildren": if you want to be 'saved' you personally need to repent and ask God for help.  You can't rely on your parents' salvation or, indeed, on anything else.  Recently I've been wondering how Biblical this is.

I'm going for a walk twice a week at the moment, mostly around Oakley Creek and the neighbouring streets and shared path.  As I walk, I pick up rubbish: I ignore things that will biodegrade reasonably quickly, but gather most of the plastic, metal and glass that I see.

I have noticed that I seem to pick up similar numbers of plastic straws and plastic lollipop sticks.  These seem similar to me in terms of environmental harm: if a straw can get stuck in a turtle's nostril, surely so can a lollipop stick?  So why do I see frequent calls for a straw ban (and bans already enacted in many places overseas), yet never a call for a plastic lollipop stick ban?

Friends of ours are overseas at the moment and have asked me to care for their houseplants while they are away.  I ended up putting them all in our bedroom: I'm rather enjoying living in the jungle!


The 'bearcam' that I've watched in recent years is live again now, too, and I'm loving it.  There are currently six cameras live, giving different views of Brooks River, the salmon swimming up it and the bears catching them.  Today I had a lot of fun watching a mum with three yearling cubs (i.e. ones born last year) spend half and hour or so at the lower river.


If you'd like to join in the fun, the feeds are here.  Having so many feeds running at once might slow your computer down - if that happens you can click on the 'Youtube' logo at the bottom left of the feed of your choice.  That will open that camera's feed in a separate tab on your browser and you can close the main page down.  I find it helpful to open the comments feed in a separate tab - click…

It's been a while since I wrote anything here. Life has been quite busy and there hasn't been much time to reflect - which, on the whole, I don't think is ideal! I've been particularly busy with the Just Kai stuff. It's still small-scale really, but Just Kai does seem to be taking off: more than a quarter of the people who are now following that on Facebook are people I don't know, plus I've recently been asked to speak at a friend's church and to figure out Just-Kai-compliant catering for a conference next year :-)
But it's been busier than I really want, so I've decided to take this week and next 'off'. I'm not going to be generating any more Just Kai information (although I did answer one query that turned into a blog post over there) - instead, I'll be catching up on myself a bit and resting :-)
I'm still struggling to manage my energy these days and have 'crashed' twice so far this week. I kept things a lot qu…

Some months back our neighbour asked me if the cod liver oil she takes is slave free.  It’s been a bit of a challenge to find an answer, but I now have good news and bad news.  The bad news?  I'm not confident the brand she’s been taking is slave free.   But the good news? I’ve identified two other brands I'm confident are :-)

As well as looking into cod liver oil, along the way I looked into all major brands of fish oils and omega 3 supplements I found for sale either in supermarkets or online pharmacies.  You can read our detailed findings here.




It turns out this is a pretty complicated area from a human welfare point of view.   Most brands were keen to tell me about their quality standards and environmental standards, but it seemed few had seriously considered human welfare standards in their supply chain.   And the supply chains aren’t trivial to trace: fish oils are usually made from what’s left over after higher value parts of the fish have been removed…

Martin and I have been working hard on the Just Kai website in recent weeks.  We're wanting to break the 'Just Kai' work off from this personal blog now that people I don't know are showing such an interest in it.   I had nearly 3000 views on the 2019 Easter egg post - but I'm not going to retain those people if they have to wade through heaps of random things about my personal life to get to the content they're after!

I will continue to link my big fish research articles here, but if you'd like to be alerted to smaller, more regular updates, subscribe to the Just Kai blog here.  The latest post is my speech from the Fairfield Conference, which went online today :-)

My buying guides for fish, cocoa and sugar have also been collected there: from now on, those are the ones that will be updated, rather than the versions on this blog.

I've also set up a Facebook page for Just Kai.  I'll mainly use that to promote the blog articles, although it may also…

No photos, but I'm quite excited by a few recent developments.

As of Tuesday of last week, I'm playing the violin again :-)  I'd been doing physio exercises to strengthen my back so I'll be strong enough to play it, and I decided the time had come.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but it went reasonably well.  Since then I've done at least 10 minutes practise every weekday, working away at Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.  It's going well and I've ordered some more sheet music from the library to be going on with :-)

Also, on Friday and Sunday I rode my bike to places I needed to get to, as opposed to just riding it for exercise.  On Friday I rode to the GP for a blood pressure check (it's been a bit high and they want to check it weekly for the next wee while to keep an eye on it) and on Sunday I rode to church.  Both are about 1.5km from home (if that), so it wasn't a huge ride, but neat to be using a bike for transport again :-)

When I started s…