Camping at Waitawa

During our Sabbatical, Martin and I are hoping to go camping every four weeks' or so.  Around 6 weeks ago we were at Ambury Park, and a few weeks after that it was our church camp.  Last week we were off again, this time to a new-to-us regional park called Waitawa.  All the extra exercise I've been doing during the Sabbatical has really improved my fitness, and it felt realistic to try for a campsite 35km away from the nearest train station :-)

 

Three encouraging things

This past year has been uncommonly difficult, due to the concussion I acquired almost exactly a year ago.  And this past month has been a challenge with a double dose of Covid followed by a bee sting that's led to a significant infection, both of which have set my energies back a lot.  However, Monday a week ago I was doing my New Year's Examen and was encouraged to realise quite how amazing one thing that had happened this year was.

1 - Church Women's Conference

In July our church held a one day 'women's conference'.  It was the first one, and I had no idea what to expect from it - and wasn't sure if I could make it, as I was still very much limited by my concussion.  But I got hold of the programme and decided to go to the main morning session, with a plan to go home over lunch and some workshops and return for the main afternoon one.

The morning session turned out to be a brief session of teaching (I can't remember what on, but by a woman from the church a close friend of mine goes to), followed by a time when you could reflect or come to the front for someone to pray for you.  Three other women from my friend's church were also there, and they were all part of a prayer team I'd heard a lot about and felt confident in.

They were asking people to come forward specifically if there were lies in their lives that were holding them back.  At one point the woman doing the asking said "maybe there's a voice in your head that says you're useless".  Without really even considering it, I stood up and went forward (most unusual for me!).  Ever since I first developed CFS, when I get tired and sore, I feel like a bad person and want to hurt myself - and one of the persistent thoughts that comes at those times is that I'm useless.

There were two rows of women at the front by the time I got there, and the three prayer ladies were going from person to person, praying briefly by some and at great length by others, as they felt God instructing them to.  The speaker was also saying little bits from time to time about what we could be praying about ourselves.  I think she said to specifically name the words in your head as lies and ask God to take them away, but what I really remember was when she said to ask God what words He wanted to put in their place.  As soon as I did that, a phrawe popped into my head: "You are My Light in the World".  It was so unexpected!  But also a very Biblically-correct idea (e.g. in Matthew 5), not just some random thing, and I figured it was likely from God.

So I prayed about that for a bit there.  And, over the following weeks, whenever I found myself starting to tell myself I was useless and bad, I resisted articulating that and worked on saying "I am God's Light in the World" instead.

In maybe a few weeks that lie was gone.  Doing the New Year's reflection I realised that, with very little input from me, God has taken away something that's made me miserable for years.  Thank you, Jesus!  It has come back occasionally since, but reminding myself that I am God's light in the world seems to generally deal with it fairly quickly :-)

2 - Strategy to deal with concussion cognitive issues

That wasn't the only significant encouragement from recent months.

I loved this house near my niece's place in Wellington.  The monarch butterfly to the right of the door was made by the son of one of our neighbours here in Auckland.  He lives in Newtown and heaps of the houses in the area were decorated with them :-)

Over October/November we were in Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui visiting various friends and relatives.  We'd hoped to do this trip back in April, but that wasn't realistic due to the concussion.  By October, however, I was mostly back to normal with physical stuff (walking, biking swimming etc.), although still more fatigued than previously and still really struggling with doing most cognitive stuff.  My concussion physio (through ACC) had given me strategies that had led to steady improvement with my physical symptoms, but I'd found the cognitive strategies recommended by the OT from the same service much less helpful and was feeling pretty stuck.

One person we were visiting on our trip was my friend Louise, who's also a concussion OT.  One day she was kind enough to sit down with me and talk through the problems I was having and what she'd recommend if I was her client.  It was a completely different approach from what my OT had suggested.  Rather than doing exercises (the various worksheets I'd been given previously), she suggested I pay really close attention to how I was doing.  She didn't quite put it like this, but what I've taken from it is this:

1. pay attention to how I'm feeling before I start something that takes a lot of figuring out or concentration (like this blog!)
   
2. fairly often while doing it (maybe every 10-15 minutes) pause and think - how am I feeling?
3. once it's starting to feel a bit hard (i.e. I've deteriorated a bit) stop - don't keep going till I really can't carry on.
4. do a "complete rest" (which has mostly meant lying on my tummy with my eyes shut) until I feel as good as I felt before I started.

That last bit (feeling as good as I felt before I started) felt impossible.  I always deteriorate significantly during the day - even before the concussion.  But I tried to give it a go and it mostly works.  Sometimes I've needed to rest only 20 min or so; 30-ish minutes seems typical, sometimes it's been well over an hour.  But I do get back to a point where doing the same work feels pretty easy again :-)

This meant I was able to get stuck into the Just Kai Christmas recommendations when I got back.  And I literally did as many Just Kai hours in those two weeks as I'd done in the whole year previously - and that without feeling absolutely disgusting at any point!  It was a bit of a miracle.

The idea is that this approach will encourage my brain to slowly heal.  The time since Wellington has been pretty disrupted (especially this past month), so I can't say I've seen steady improvement in my capacity - but I can say I now have an approach to get way more stuff done than before, and to do it without wiping myself out and feeling absolutely awful afterwards.  Hopefully I'll also see actual improvement in time, but it's still an immense and hugely encouraging change.

3 - Small planes have low emissions

For our October/November holiday we flew to Wellington, caught a bus to Whanganui then flew home from there.  When I was calculating the carbon emissions for our trip, I noticed something very surprising.  The flight to Wellington generated 195kg CO2e across the two of us, whilst the flight back from Whanganui generated only 69kg CO2e (again, for two people).

Why?

Have a look at the screenshots of the detailed info for the two flights.

to Wellington

home from Whanganui

I use the atmosfair calculator in part because it allows you to specify the make of plane used.  Looking at the screenshots you can see that, whilst the distance for the second flight was noticeably shorter, by far the biggest difference comes in the emissions related to contrails and ozone.  These are significant drivers of climate change, but only occur when fuels are burned at high altitude.  For the Wellington flight we were in an Airbus A320 - a biggish plane seating around 170 people.  For the flight home we were in in SAAB340 - a much smaller 34-seater plane.  Small planes don't fly as high (you can see the altitude difference in the screenshots above), but I hadn't previously realised that such planes weren't flying high enough to form contrails etc.  That was super-exciting information!

We're not 100% sure what we'll do with this new knowledge.  One thing we'll definitely be looking into is flying to Kāpiti Coast airport rather than Wellington airport next time we're heading that way.  Air Chathams flies there daily (in the same SAAB340 planes), and from there it's about 90 min by bus and train to the Wellington CBD.  Total carbon emissions under 80*kg CO2e for two people - compared to 195 kg on the regular plane!

*the AirNZ little planes are even more carbon efficient than the Air Chathams once - presumably as they still fly low but carry twice as many people.

We decided many years ago to do only one domestic flight every three years, as part of limiting our carbon emissions - and those flights have basically all been to Wellington or Whanganui.  I've now realised we can do those flights for half the carbon emissions we previously expected/generated.  Could we fly more often?  We're not sure, as that original target was pretty arbitrary and our emissions are still well above sustainable, but we're certainly wondering about it.

I've also realised that Air New Zealand also uses small planes (in their case ATR72s, which even have a slightly smaller per-passenger carbon footprint than the SAAB340s) to service a bunch of regional airports such as Napier.  I have a good friend in Napier, and found the drive there two years ago pretty grueling.  We're hoping to go back this year and had been thinking to travel via Intercity Gold bus seats.  I'm still interested in giving that a go, but am also wondering about flying at least one way: it turns out the emissions from flying are only double that of the bus!!!

Photos from Wellington/Whanganui

I didn't do a proper blog post when I got back from Wellington/Upper Hutt/Whanganui as I got stuck straight into Just Kai stuff as soon as I was able, but here's a few photos of what we got up to.

A statue of Katherine Mansfield, made up of fragments of her writing.  I was captivated by this when I first spotted it as a teenager, and was delighted to see it's still there.

Printing a T-shirt (for me) with my niece :-)

 

with my Aunty Elspeth and cousin Karlene in Whanganui

Martin and the Whanganui river

my Whanganui relatives (except for my cousin Garth's daughter)

Aunty Elspeth also showed me some old family photos I'd never seen before.  Apparently my grandad (who died long before I was born) was a gymnast!

my grandad's the man kneeling on the right, half-way up the picture.

Camping on Waiheke

Over ANZAC weekend, Martin and I headed off for our second ever bike camping adventure: four nights camping on Waiheke :-)

Here we are at the local train station, about to start our adventure.

What is good for 'the environment'?

Recently I've been pondering claims that various practises are good for 'the environment'.  I've come to the conclusion that such claims are often dicey - not because of 'greenwashing' (although that's real), but because there isn't, exactly, an 'environment'.  Instead, there's a whole bunch of systems, which often need quite different things to support them.  Sometimes the things different environmental systems would benefit from are even directly opposed to each other.

The place I see this most starkly is plastic packaging.

Vegan ice cream and frozen desserts

I spent a lot of last winter devising vegan ice cream recipes: mostly to put together a recipe book for our niece for Christmas, but also for our own use.  Why?  Although we're not vegan, we've cut back a fair bit on dairy consumption in recent years for the sake of our neighbours who are most at risk from climate change.  Dairy products are nothing like as bad for the climate as meat, but they're a lot worse than eggs or plant-based protein so we try to restrict them a bit.  Also, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable about all I'm hearing about the treatment of bobby calves in the dairy industry, and do wonder from time to time about giving up dairy entirely.

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 ;-)

Another adventure

Yesterday we caught the bus to go visit my good friend Anna in Sandringham.  We walked to our nearest bus stop, caught the bus just a few stops to a busy intersection, waited there about 15 minutes, caught another bus, got off at a busy road and walked a few minutes to Anna's house.

I found the walking fine, but the noise at the busy intersection was challenging.  I was very glad for my headphones while we waited there.

Cricket meatballs

A while back Martin and I bought a bag of cricket flour: farmed crickets that have been freeze-dried and ground to powder.  We were keen to try cooking with crickets as they have lower carbon emissions than most other meat.*  However, we rapidly ran into problems.  There are zillions of recipes for using cricket powder to boost the protein content of snack foods, but very very few for using it to make actual meals.

* I wasn't able to find data on their emissions as such; however crickets have negligible direct emissions and eat the same food as chickens (which also have negligible direct emissions).  Crickets have a feed conversion rate of 1.7 (for chickens it's around 3.3) and crickets are 16% protein (source).  Crunching those numbers with our existing carbon emissions number for chicken (3.9kg CO2e /kg), and noting that my cricket powder is 60% protein, I estimate carbon emissions of 7.5kg CO2e/kg cricket powder.  Which sounds worse than the chicken until you remember that chicken is 25-30% protein (with most of the rest being water) while the cricket powder is double that.  So the emissions per gram of protein are about the same as chicken, but much better than any red meat.

We did find one that we liked (shitaake mushroom and cricket meatballs), which we did with both an Italian-style and a sweet and sour sauce. That inspired us to try our own meatball recipe.  We've done it a few times now and really like it :-)

A Holiday in Te Aroha

Martin and I spent last week on holiday in Te Aroha with his aunty and uncle.

The two of us in Martin's aunty and uncle's front garden

A lovely Saturday

Yesterday was a fun day :-)

Martin and I had our first go at bottling mussels.

2kg mussels ready to go

20kg of CO2e

I've been playing with some numbers and have come up with a list of things that all give about the same amount of carbon emissions (approximately 20kg CO2e):

• 5 days of average Kiwi household power use (100kWh) - if hydropower
• taking the bus from Auckland to Palmerston North (500km)
• driving from Auckland to Huntly (100km)
• 10kg of dry fertiliser (20% nitrogen fertiliser)
• 80 standard loo rolls
• a 3L steel saucepan (1kg of saucepan)
• a pair of cotton undies
• 3 square metres of wool carpet
• 2 square metres of vinyl flooring
• 1.5 square metre of window glass (single glazing)
• 1/2 a square metre of driveway concrete (10cm deep)
• a square foot of house (just the shell, typical Kiwi construction)
• a square foot of solar panel (monocrystalline)
• 44kg fruit or vegetables grown organically or in New Zealand
• 33kg conventionally grown imported fruit or vegetables
• 20L milk
• 13kg lentils
• 5kg chicken
• 2kg cheese
• 1kg of beef

Certainly brings out how different things have different impacts - and not always in the ways you'd think!

One month trial of high protein, low carbohydrate diet for CFS

In recent years there has been some research* indicating that the cells of people with CFS may not get energy from glucose as well as regular people do, but may still be able to derive energy normally from protein.  They didn't look at processing of fat (the other main thing we get energy from), although at least one other study indicates there may be issues there, too.

* this research is explained in more lay terms here and here.

With this in mind, I decided to do a six-week trial of a very high protein, very low carbohydrate diet.  If my body was functioning like the cells in the trial, this should give me more access to energy at a cellular level, which ought to translate to more perceived energy :-)  The idea was to be as strict as I could manage with this diet then, if it proved helpful, to gradually figure out how strict was necessary.

Holiday in Wellington

Straight after Christmas, Martin and I headed down for two weeks holiday in Wellington :-)

We were really pleased to discover that the airline allows disabled people to bring two mobility aids with them (not one as we previously thought), so I was able to bring my walker as well as my wheelchair.  We also worked out we could just fit my 'travel' bed lever and my brand new 'travel' shower stool into the standard baggage allowance, so they came along in a custom-built cardboard box Anna and Martin put together.  It all added up to a stupendous amount of stuff, but it was very nice not to have the hassle and expense of hiring everything down there :-)

Me with my mum at the airport - everything you see (except the airport's trolley) traveled on the plane with us!

The Zero Carbon Act

I've recently been looking at the Zero Carbon Act prepared by Generation Zero, and I'm pretty excited by it.  They've drafted an Act of Parliament that, if adopted, would set in place plans to enable NZ to get to carbon neutrality by 2050.

I'm really pleased that someone is doing this work :-)  We see climate change as one of the biggest near-term threats to the flourishing of our global neighbours, so it's really exciting to see people doing solid work to try and prevent it.

They've basically taken an existing UK act of parliament (from 2008, no less!) and altered it a bit to take into consideration New Zealand's unusual carbon emissions profile.  Whilst for most countries the majority of greenhouse gas emissions are carbon dioxide itself, around half of ours come from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the agricultural sector.  The different kinds of gases last in the atmosphere for differing lengths of time, so they propose a 'two baskets' approach where the long-lived ones have to be down to zero by 2050 but there is a bit more leeway on the short-lived ones.

The act would require the government to not only set legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets but to set 5-year 'pathways' for how to get there, plus there'd be a Commission to oversee the process.  It also requires the government to identify the challenges a changing climate will bring to New Zealand and figure out ways to adapt to them, and requires them to help our Pacific neighbours to do the same.

If you think that all sounds like a good idea, please 'sign' Generation Zero's petition here.  Your signature will enable Generation Zero to demonstrate that these ideas have popular support.  The petition will be presented to the new parliament after September's general election.

Okara for a speedy, no-fuss sourdough starter

I very much like sourdough bread and keep a stash of sourdough starter in the freezer.  However, reviving it is a delicate process and I'd love to be able to make sourdough bread without that fuss.

Recently, I've stumbled upon a way to do just that!

In order to reduce our impact on climate change, I've started making soy milk at least once a week: I drink it 'as is' in the summer and make it into pudding in the winter.  Every batch of soy milk generates a cup or so of 'okara' - the depleted soy beans.  It turns out that these ferment really easily.  Other people have taken advantage of this to speed up the fermentation of idli or just to make the okara more palatable.  I've recently realised I can use it to make a speedy sourdough starter!  I haven't found any internet references elsewhere describing how to do it, so here's my method.

Ideas that guide how we live

Over the years we've come up with a bunch of key concepts that we refer to whenever we make decisions.  We've found it really helpful to have worked these through, as that means we can often easily see what the right thing to do is in a given situation.  I'd like to share them here :-)

In the Biblical book of Matthew, we read of this exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees (religious teachers):

one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

We often refer to these two commandments and our 'key ideas' flow from them.

We also refer frequently to another idea: the Kingdom of God.  This is something Jesus refers to frequently: the world in which he is King and where things are run on God's lines.  We believe that God calls us to join him in redeeming the world and creating 'islands' of that Kingdom in the here and now.  So, running through many of the ideas we reference day to day, is the idea of doing our bit in building that different world.  We believe you get the world that we all, collectively, build; and we want to make that a Kingdom of God world!

So, here are our 'key ideas', as they currently stand!  It's kind of long, so I start with just the ideas themselves, then flesh them out in detail below.

Ecotricity: an electricity company building the world we want :-)

We've recently changed our electricity supplier to Ecotricity: New Zealand's first (and thus-far only) independently certified carbon neutral electricity company.

We were excited to find them.  New Zealand has other electricity companies that supply predominantly renewable energy (the whole grid is around 75% renewable, after all), but Ecotricity goes well beyond that.  They're also trying to reduce fossil fuel usage by:

• actively promoting electric vehicles (transport makes up 20% of New Zealand's domestic greenhouse gas emissions - electric vehicles powered by renewable electricity are one way to bring this down);
• they're encouraging people to switch away from gas in the home and office (something we still have in our kitchen, to be honest.  It accounts for well under 1% of our total greenhouse gas emissions: we think that's worth it for the rapid temperature control gas gives us);
• supporting customers to generate their own solar energy at home and work.

Reducing our climate impact by eating less dairy

Some years ago we became concerned about our dairy consumption level.  When we did our first carbon audit, food was the biggest contributor to our carbon footprint (responsible for about 30% of our carbon emissions or 1.4T CO2e per year each).  The planet can only cope with 1.2T CO2e per person per year, so obviously that number needed to come down a lot if we wanted to do right by our vulnerable neighbours in places like Bangladesh.

Dairy was the biggest contributor within that, coming in at around 0.45T CO2e.  The obvious question was, how could we reduce this?

On not lightly encouraging flying

I've been thinking a lot recently about big political changes that I'd like to see happen.  Different policies on immigration, on climate change, on the structure of our social welfare system and more.  I've come to believe that, for change to happen, the general public has to believe that they will still have good lives after the change is made.  No matter how much they are lobbied, the politicians are unlikely to change their stance without that.  The people who elect them simply wouldn't stand for it.

And so, every time I see someone who wants change encouraging others to enjoy the opportunities of the status quo, my heart sinks a little.

It happens so much with climate change.  So many people I know who are firm believers in climate change - people who lobby politicians, campaign for fossil fuel divestment, join marches and sign petitions - frequently and enthusiastically encourage others to fly.  People who live outside their home country encourage others to go see their beautiful homeland; people who live overseas encourage their friends and family to come visit them; people who hear of great deals on flights spread that news through their networks.

And every time I see it happening, my heart sinks :-(

A week of polo

Martin's had a blast at the world championships for bike polo in Timaru this past week!  For a glimpse of the action, check out the video below:

The cost of flying

Later this month, Martin's off to San Francisco for a work meeting.  This won't be featured in our calculations of our carbon footprints: if work incurs the financial cost of the trip, we figure they (and, ultimately, their customers) incur the carbon cost, too.

All the same, I was wondering what the carbon cost would be, so I plugged his flights into Atmosfair.  He'll be flying economy and one way he'll be on a 777-300ER and the other way on a 777-200ER.

I was genuinely shocked to find that the carbon emissions of these flights add up to a massive 8.8T of CO₂e!  That's the same as the carbon emissions from every aspect of both our lifestyles over an entire year!!!!

In the context of Martin's work, I don't think these emissions are unreasonable.  Hapara make software that's used by vast numbers of students.  Their business does seem to require a remarkable number of flights between their Auckland and San Francisco offices but, even if 100 such flights are made per year, that's less than 1kg CO₂e per student per year (assuming 1 million student users).  After all, over the course of a whole year that's the same as the emissions that same student would incur from a one-off 10km trip on the school bus.

However, this kind of trip is something plenty of people we know undertake for pleasure once every few years.  In that context, those emissions are astonishing: double everything else one of us incurs over the course of a whole year.

As an aside, Air New Zealand appears to use uncommonly greenhouse gas-intensive planes.  If Martin made the same trip using what an 'average' European airline would use for it (according to Atmosfair), the emissions would be only 5.4T CO₂e, not 8.8.  Similarly, for the trip to Timaru discussed earlier, he'd have been looking at emissions of around 500kg CO₂e, not the 680 it actually takes.

You could explain this for the long-haul flight by saying that maybe Atmosfair's data there isn't actually very good - after all, how many 12+ hour flights did they have in their European data set? - but after I saw it applied to the Timaru flights as well I've started to wonder if Air New Zealand is the problem.