Spring!

Our neighbour's kowhai tree this morning from outside our bedroom window :-)

Big Fair Bake

Yesterday I submitted an entry in the Big Fair Bake: a baking competition that aims to promote Fair Trade.  All entries must use at least two Fair Trade ingredients.  Here's my entry photo and my answer to the competition question "why did you bake fair".

When I heard about the Big Fair Bake, it inspired me to research some new fair trade ingredients.  I first started buying only fair trade cocoa and chocolate a few years ago when I learned that much of the world's cocoa is grown by child slaves.  I didn't want anything to do with that!  Later we switched over to buying all our coffee and bananas fair trade, too, as we didn't want poor people being abused so we could get our treats.

For the Big Fair Bake I decided to try out a new recipe: Earl Grey tea biscuits.  The recipe uses icing sugar, butter, flour, salt, lemon zest and powdered Earl Grey tea leaves. I'd never bought Fair Trade tea or sugar before, but here was my opportunity to research it!  I learned that there is forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, just like for cocoa.  No one seems to sell Fair Trade icing sugar, so we bought some ordinary sugar from Trade Aid, ground it to a powder in a spice grinder and added some cornflour.  Voila!  Fair Trade icing sugar.  Unfortunately the supermarket was out of stock of Scarborough Fair Earl Grey tea so I used Trade Aid black tea instead.  The lemon zest still gave them an Earl Grey flavour. 

Researching fair trade sugar was interesting.  I went into this knowing very little about the sugar industry, but I decided that the time had come to find out whether people were being treated poorly to grow our sugar.

I learned that there is some forced labour and child labour in the sugar industry, but that in general the problem that Fair Trade is trying to solve is the precarious living sugarcane farmers make due to price fluctuations and the protectionist policies in and sugar dumping by some wealthy countries.  I decided that forced labour and child labour bothered me, but that the other problems would be better addressed by interventions other than price floors for certain farmers.  So it turned out that I did need to care about the provenance of our sugar!

I knew that, some years ago at least, Chelsea purchased all their sugar from Fiji.  As that wasn't on the list of countries where people were being enslaved to produce sugar, I decided to find out if that was still the case.  From their website, I found that they now actually purchase all their sugar from Queensland.  So, I now needed to know whether the sugar farmers of Queensland were beneficiaries of subsidies or other anti-competitive practises.  Turns out that they aren't.  So, while I bought TradeAid sugar for my competition entry, in the future we won't be doing so.

This process has still changed our sugar purchasing practises, though.  I'm no longer comfortable with buying 'home brand' or other sugars of unknown provenance: that sugar may have been farmed by slaves or children.  From now on, our sugar will all be from Chelsea (just as, for similar reasons, we buy all our tea from Dilmah).

Fun with Shadow :-)

Sarah recently got a kitten, a wee boy named Shadow.  Today he was outside when Martin and I were blowing bubbles....

What's that??

No, really, what's that??!!

They're everywhere...

That one's floating!  But if I investigated, I'd have to get wet :-(

It's safer back here.

But I really must go see!

What IS it?!

He jumped for them a few times, tried to pounce them, seemed confused when they kept on disappearing, and generally was a heap of fun to watch :-)

40 Maps That (Might) Help You Make Sense of the World

A friend recently drew this to my attention.  I found instructive the maps of:

• where Google streetview is available (map 1),
• how much maternity leave is available in different countries (map 6),
• global population density (map 12) and
• alcohol consumption (map 14 - look where NZ ranks!)

and the maps of where MacDonalds operates (map 5) and of the longest straight line you can sail in the world (map 38) were just plain interesting :-)

God is a person

Martin and I are currently reading the Old Testament book of Ezekiel.  Two recent chapters have really struck me.

Ezekiel 16 is an extended metaphor of God's relationship with Israel.  God describes how, when he found her, Israel was rejected and weak - like a newborn baby that no one was bothering to take care of.  He took care of her, then later married her and gave her riches.  In response, she rejected him: she gave the gifts he'd given her to other men (i.e. offered them to idols - idolatory seems to be a huge theme in Ezekiel) and was as promiscuous as a prostitute.

The chapter is full of pain and anger.  God is no dispassionate force here: he is a person.  Rejection hurts him.  His wife taking other lovers makes him jealous and angry.

Then a few days later we came across Ezekiel 20, which starts like this:

In the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month, certain elders of Israel came to consult the Lord, and sat down before me. And the word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, speak to the elders of Israel, and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: Why are you coming? To consult me? As I live, says the Lord God, I will not be consulted by you.

God goes on to explain that he is refusing to talk to the people because they have rejected him, have refused to come back to him and are even seeking help from other gods at the same time as coming to him.

I've been sobered by both these passages.  I think I'm too casual in my relationship to God.  I think of him as always being there for me - yet these passages suggest that that's not quite true.  God is a loving God but also a jealous God.  He's only available to those who are willing to give him his rightful place: who are willing to serve him exclusively and to trust him and not seek help from other sources.

These passages have made me see that I need to treat God like a lover not a service-provider!

Re-upholstered bathroom stool

Our bathroom stool was moving from 'looking tired' towards 'no longer functional'.  The time had come to re-cover the seat!

I found some instructions that looked workable but I didn't have enough vinyl to do it without buying more.  A check of TradeMe revealed that vinyl is surprisingly expensive.  What to do?

Just then, Martin had to go out.  He went outside then popped back in to pick up a piece of bicycle inner tube rubber, marvelling as he did so that they seemed to be an inexhaustible resource around here.  Ah ha!  I bet they'd make a nice wipeable cover for our stool :-)

A quick internet search revealed that others had had this idea before me.  At first I thought I'd follow these instructions, but Martin thought a woven top would be nicer and I could always seal the edge with more inner tube, rather than metal.  (Aren't the prices being charged for those commercially-available stools astonishing!!)

So, I set to and ripped off the old vinyl.

I pieced together some scraps of vinyl to protect the foam from any drips of water that might make it through the woven cover;

then wove strips of inner tube together in situ;

and finished it with a strip of inner tube around the sides.

 

All up it only took me two 'up times' (a bit under two hours) and was immensely satisfying!  Photos of the whole process are on flickr.

Brick by Brick

A little something we found amusing.

For the latest game you have to go to the Guardian's own page.