Monday 2 December 2019
An unusual weekend
Saturday 23 November 2019
A cycling cap for me!
Sunday 10 November 2019
Sabbath-keeping and care-casting
Saturday 5 October 2019
A birthday, family, sadness and spring growth
My Aunty Elspeth and cousin Karlene were also visiting Auckland that weekend. Here they are with Martin at the Oakley Creek waterfall (although they're looking at the waterfall, so it's not visible in the photos). It was neat to share something so special to me with people who appreciated it so much :-)
Then on Monday morning a friend from university, Rachel, who'd been ill with a heart condition for some time (she'd been ill with it her whole life, in a way, but much worse recently) died in her sleep. Here's Rachel (at the front - it's Jo at the back) at our place for my birthday a few years back. She was a kind person who was good at noticing people and watching out for them - I will very much miss her and I expect many others will, too.
And spring has come. Here's the view in our street, plus a few close ups of one particularly impressive blossom tree that I was savouring a day or two ago.
Tuesday 10 September 2019
When life sends you lemons ;-)
I love the vibrant yellow in the jars :-)
Sunday 18 August 2019
Things I'm learning as life gets rather busy
I've been thinking a lot about how to respond to all this. On the one hand, I firmly believe that God healed me so that I can do this work. So just ditching it doesn't feel like a good option. But it also all feels like a bit much and I don't believe God wants me to burn out, either.
What to do?
Thursday 8 August 2019
Speaking about Just Kai at Ponsonby Baptist
Monday 5 August 2019
A lovely Saturday
In the morning, we went to visit our friend Andrea for breakfast at her place in New Lynn. Getting there involved initially biking along Ash Street (which is pretty busy and not that pleasant) but then taking a cycle way through Ken Maunder Park. That bit was really nice - biking along the edge of the Whau and seeing mangroves and ducks, and going across a fun bridge where they'd given the metal decking a grippy surface by embossing it with a repeating pattern of slightly cartoonish numbers :-) We could have talked all day once we got there (although settled for simply making Andrea late for her next appointment...) and are keen to catch up again before too long. On the way back we passed kids playing Saturday morning soccer at the the Lynn Avon club, then stopped at the Avondale library to pick up some more violin sheet music for me :-)
In the afternoon we went to the Hollywood theatre in Avondale to watch Inna de Yard, which was showing as part of the NZ International Film Festival. It was a documentary about a bunch of reggae 'greats' getting together to record an album, and interspersed their music (both at someone's house in the hills above Kingston and at a theatre in Paris) with various of them reflecting on their lives. The music was fantastic! I don't exactly follow reggae, but one of my friends in Pittsburgh was from Trinadad and she introduced me to it, so I knew I liked it. And there was a lot of joy in it, if also a lot of poverty and hardship. These people live with so much violence - a particularly sobering story was one guy telling how horrified he was to see someone get shot in his front yard, only to have his friend point out that the 'someone' was his own sister.
I think the musicians were all also rastafarians, and Far-I and Jah-jah were referred to frequently. I would like to have understood more of that.
And, going with the rastafarian theme, almost all of the musicians had impressive dreadlocks (although they don't seem that common in Jamaica as such - not that many people had them in the street scenes), creating a need that doesn't exist in my culture: very tall hats. There was a wide range of capacious head coverings - from crochet slouch hats to head wraps to exceedingly tall baseball-style caps - to accomodate everyone's voluminous hair :-)
If you'd like to see more, there's stills and links to the trailer here.
All up I biked about 13 km that day (including heaps of up and down!) and managed fine, although I was struggling to stay awake during the second half of the movie - it was fascinating, but all the exercise had made me super-sleepy!
And apologies for not blogging for so long. The Just Kai stuff has been very time-consuming recently, although that should calm down a bit from the middle of next week :-)
Saturday 6 July 2019
God saving people because other people are righteous
Friday 5 July 2019
On plastic straws and lollipop sticks
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?
Wednesday 3 July 2019
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 - clicking across to that when something interesting happens is very helpful in understanding what's going on.
Enjoy!
Wednesday 19 June 2019
Bits and pieces
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 :-)
All the soft toy people fit comfortably in its basket :-)
I rode it along the shared path yesterday, and got so many smiles and cheerful greetings :-) I’ve ridden that route at more-or-less that time quite a few times and that hasn't happened before: I think the new bike makes me seem more approachable :-)
I’m getting stronger and fitter and learning lots of things, but it still feels like there's a lot to learn. At the moment I'm working on trying to get off the bike so that my right foot is on the pedal and near the top of the pedal's arc, so I'm basically ready to get going again as soon as I stop. I just don't seem to be able to figure that out. But I've figured out plenty of other things, so we'll get there!
I’m enjoying the violin. I’ve now got two pieces I can satisfyingly just play and two more I’m working on.
Friday 14 June 2019
Slave- and child-labour free fish oil/omega 3s
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, and oil from different sources seems not uncommonly to be mixed together.
Further complexities were in the labelling of oil. A lot of fish oil is sold as being ‘Norwegian’: however, it turns out Norway is a major hub for the re-processing of fish oil, as well as being a major fish oil fishing nation. So ‘Norwegian’ oil may have been made from fish caught on Norwegian boats (which have excellent labour standards) or it could have been caught who-knows-where and simply re-processed there. You don’t know if you don’t ask.
It doesn’t help that the two major certifiers of fish oil basically only certify working conditions in factories (rather than on fishing vessels), even though all the worst abuses happen at sea rather than on land. And abuses can be severe: fish that produce lots of oil are typically cold-water fish, occuring in deep sea far from land. Ships are frequently at sea for months on end, making these fisheries at very high risk for forced labour: workers can be tricked onto them and then have no way to leave.
Still, I did find three companies Just Kai can recommend:
- Clinicians make their oil in Norway, from fish caught in Norway;
- Ethical Nutrients make their oil from fish caught in low-risk jurisdictions (mostly Peru), and has strict responses to human rights abuses when they are found to occur;
- Blackmores visit the fishing vessels that catch their fish in port and audit them for human rights abuses.
You can read my full article here or download a summary pdf of my findings here.
Friday 31 May 2019
Formalising Just Kai
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 get some unique content. If you want to like that, it's here.
Just Kai has also signed up to Twitter. As well as promoting blog posts there, I'll use it to re-tweet articles relating to modern slavery and child labour. I put one up today about modern slavery in the UK, featuring a number of people forced into very everyday jobs.
Exciting times!
Wednesday 29 May 2019
More milestones :-)
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 seeing the physio earlier this year, he wanted to know what my goals were in seeing him. Eventually I came up with being able to:
- go tramping;
- use my bike for transport;
- play the violin.
Saturday 11 May 2019
Citrus leaves
I've long known that kaffir lime leaves are edible (and widely used in Thai cuisine), but I'd assumed there was something special about them. But no! The essential oils that are present in the zest of citrus fruit are also in the leaves, so grapefruit leaves taste like grapefruit, lemon leaves like lemon etc.
You don't generally eat them as such: you infuse the flavour then discard the leaf, just like with bay leaves. So you can pour boiling water over the leaves and drink them as tea; simmer in stews, curries or milky puddings; wrap meat in them before baking (apparently salmon wrapped in lemon leaves is super-yum) or even put a layer of leaves in the bottom of the pan when you're baking a cake and let the flavour infuse up through the batter.
Friday 10 May 2019
I'm sick
Martin probably caught the same thing, but he only had one and a half days off work earlier this week.
Maybe periods of illness like this will also be part of my new normal? I can think of a number of occasions in the distant pre-CFS past where I had 1-2 weeks in bed with a virus or tummy bug. Now that I'm out in public more again (and now that my immune system is no longer in the hyperactive state CFS likely put it in) maybe that will be how it is again.
Monday 29 April 2019
Holiday in Whangarei
Thursday 18 April 2019
Happenings
Wednesday 17 April 2019
Vegan marshmallow Easter eggs
This is part of an ongoing quest to love our neighbours as ourselves. Working conditions in the cocoa industry are terrible and child labour is common. We want to love our neighbours in far-off cocoa-growing regions by ensuring they have what they need to flourish: a living wage, safe working conditions and, if they're kids, the opportunity to go to school. But we also want to love our nearby neighbours by showing them hospitality. For our vegan neighbours at Easter, that means hand-making vegan Easter eggs using fairly traded chocolate, as vegan fairly traded Easter eggs are otherwise very hard to come by.
Friday 5 April 2019
Fairly traded Easter eggs 2019
Fortunately, you don't have to! Below are some ways you can get your Easter treats whilst helping your neighbours to flourish :-) - the list can also be downloaded as a pdf here.
Sunday 31 March 2019
Mokoroa Falls
David and Martin cleaning their shoes as we entered the track |
Wednesday 27 March 2019
Fairfield Conference 2019
Sunday 24 March 2019
A long way to go
It's a funny time at the moment. I started seeing a physio about 6 weeks ago, since then exercise has been my main occupation every weekday morning. He has me doing various strength-type exercises each morning (some 5 days a week, others two or three), plus twice a week I go for a walk for an hour or so and twice a week I go for a bike ride. The bike riding's been a bit of a shock to the system! At the beginning I could only go the length of our driveway a couple of times but I'm now doing just under 4km (which takes me 15 minutes) and I'm hoping to be cycling for transport a bit before too long.
In one sense, I've definitely made enormous progress in the past 4 1/2 months. My physical abilities have gone through the roof. This is my graph of how many steps I'm averaging per day (the numbers are the average of the two weeks leading up to that day - my steps are very variable per day, so averages make it easier to tell what's going on!)
The numbers are still small, but the graph is just going up and up!
Saturday 16 March 2019
Thoughts after yesterday's shooting
Image credit https://www.facebook.com/YeoCartoons/ |
I'm white and I grew up here. New Zealand doesn't feel racist to me. But I have two friends, people of colour who have moved here after living in quite a few other countries, and they say they've never experienced racism anywhere like they experience here. And one of them has lived in France, which I tend to think of as pretty racist, and they've both lived in England.
I also (occasionally) hear Kiwi Christian leaders making statements near-identical to those quoted in the middle of this video.
I don't know exactly how, but I do feel like people like me are part of the problem.
Whilst I don't think we've had violence on this scale here since the early days of European colonisation (or maybe since WW2 - I think there was a massacre of POWs here then?), it feels like what happened in Christchurch yesterday is just the extreme end of something that's pretty everyday in New Zealand.
If we don't acknowledge that, actually, this *is* us - how will it change?
Thursday 28 February 2019
Preparing for Easter
Easter may seem far distant today, but in my experience it often turns up before I've really noticed. Palm Sunday gives me some warning, but life is busy and before I realise it's Good Friday.Many Christian traditions practise a season of preparation for Easter, known as Lent. The word Lent means many things to many people, but as a Baptist with no Lenten tradition I have quietly picked up two ideas that give my heart time to feel the vibe.My first goal is a daily reading plan following Jesus as he walks towards the cross. The internet (or your Bible app) offers many plans for the Western Lenten timeframe - 40 days, skipping Sundays. Those will start this Wednesday, if you wanted to choose one yourself. Palm Sunday is another good time to start, reading day by day.I also try to go without some small nice thing that I would have every day or so. This jars my memory and points my mind to Jesus stepping away from the glory of heaven. It also makes me a little sad, and I try to remember that "God is Enough" for me. On Sundays I enjoy the small treat and remember with joy that on Easter morning Jesus conquered death.(Pro tip - Don't pick something morally bad to give up. You can hardly celebrate Sunday by being rude to the neighbours, can you? The best day to give up sinning is Today, certainly, but don't mix up your purposes.)My success rate has been variable, and last year the calendar again surprised me. I will be trying again, and maybe you'd like to join me.
Tuesday 19 February 2019
So many flowers!
Wednesday 13 February 2019
Neighbours Day is coming!
Tuesday 29 January 2019
Oakley Creek with Michaela
Vegan ice cream and frozen desserts
The internet is full of vegan ice cream recipes - however, I wasn't that satisfied with them. Most are based on either bananas, coconut milk or cashew nuts. Both bananas and coconut milk have quite strong flavours - that's fine if those are the flavours you're after, but they do limit your options. And cashew nuts, as well as being quite expensive, are hard to work with. If you want a smooth product, you have to soak the nuts, blend them to a paste, then force that paste through a cloth. I've never actually tried it so I could be wrong, but that sounds like very hard work!
So I wondered, could you make ice cream using relatively-flavour-neutral soy milk? It turns out you can, although I haven't found anyone on the internet publishing such recipes. The trick is to add neutrally flavoured oils to bump up the fat content, then add soy lecithin (a natural emulsifier) to get the milk and oil to mix. Turns out it works a charm!
rose geranium ice cream, chocolate ice cream and vanilla soy gelato - neapolitan ;-) |
Sunday 27 January 2019
On not being 'there' yet
He is now retired and I have finished his back catalogue on YouTube, but I found that his church, First Baptist in Vancouver, Canada, publishes all their sermons online. Last year I appreciated their series on Colossians. Today I had intended to go to my own church, but was too tired and ended up staying home. I've listened to all the recent sermons on my own church's website so I turned back to First Baptist and listened to the first sermon in their series Why Jesus says He came. It was called The Preteen Jesus.
Friday 25 January 2019
Accessibility
I was pretty shocked by what I saw.
Over these past years I've thought a lot about accessibility as I've more and more come to see myself as a person with a disability. I think the blood test place was very 'accessible' if you limit that word to meaning 'wheelchair accessible'. However, I live in an area with a high migrant population, and I was shocked by how inaccessible it was for someone not that fluent in written English.
Monday 14 January 2019
A bit of an update
Hanging out with friends from high school near Oakley Creek |
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For Christmas, I wanted to make Martin a chair that he could use when he goes to the cricket or goes camping. He's already got a self-i...
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Ages ago, a foraging blog I used to read taught me that kawakawa plants, not only produce leaves that make yummy tea: the plants come in mal...
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Don't you think that feijoa skins smell delicious? After you've scooped out the flesh, you're left with a skin that is tart and...