Professor Sir David MacKay

I was saddened to learn of the death 10 days ago of David MacKay.  He's the creator of two quite different resources that have been hugely helpful to me:

• Dasher - the computer program that is enabling me to 'type' this blog post using tiny movements of my mouse (I wrote about it some years ago here);
• Without Hot Air - the book (and associated blog) that taught me to always ask if the numbers stack up when it comes to climate and energy policy.

Both the resources I mention are available for free download at the above links.

When I realised the same David MacKay was behind them both, I emailed him my thanks and received a very kind reply :-)  I was sorry to hear of his death (particularly at the young age of 48) and to learn that he leaves behind him two very young children.  He seems to have been a kind and humble man, and he certainly made my world a better place.  I'm sorry that he doesn't seem to have known Jesus.

His Telegraph obituary is here, and you can follow his experiences with the cancer that killed him on his personal blog starting here.

A momentous day

This afternoon a friend who was visiting noticed a pretty special visitor feasting on our guavas!

A pair of gorgeous Kereru had come to visit!  It's been a couple of years since that's happened, but we do have a bumper crop this year.

And then, it was time to say goodbye to Sarah.  She's headed overseas for five months - to Thailand, then Canada and lastly the US.  You can follow her travels on her blog.

It'll take a while to get used to the bare shelves in the pantry and freezer...

Her freezer shelf is packed with empty milk bottles - cold air sinks, so hopefully this will save on power as the freezer won't have to cool down a new batch of warm air every time we open it.

How should we, as a church, spend "our" money?

Our church is currently considering a couple of big financial decisions.  This has got me thinking about the philosophy Martin and I apply to our personal finances, and whether or not the church's finances should be run along similar lines. I'd like to share here some of the considerations Martin and I make when setting our household budget, and the questions those are raising for me about the church's budget.  I'd be interested in your thoughts!

We try to take as our starting point that the money we have isn't really ours - it's God's.  He, after all, owns everything!  So we want to distribute the money He's entrusted us with in a way that honours Him: in a way that reflects both that we serve a God of abundance who desires good things for us and that our primary calling is to love both God and our neighbours with all that we have.

In terms of loving our neighbours as ourselves, it might be logical to try to keep no more money for ourselves to live on than what some 'global average person' has to live on.  After all, God loves us equally, and it's largely the global financial system - a construct of sinful humanity - that puts Martin in the top 1% of income-earners globally and leaves so many others so badly off.  However, doing that would also be the end of me: after all, in most of the world, someone as sick as I am would have died long ago.

A short visit to Serbia!

Ages ago, I noticed that the Pt. Chevalier Serbian Orthodox Church has a monthly bake sale.  Today, for the first time, we were able to go along.

 

The food all looked yummy, but I was really taken by the main sanctuary of the church.  I asked if I could take some photos.  They not only said 'yes', but two women generously took turns explaining it all to me.

Home-made creme eggs

On Wednesday, my friend Anna came over for our annual Easter egg day, where we make Easter eggs together.  You can't buy fair trade Easter eggs in New Zealand (except for expensive artisanal ones - even the boring hollow Cadbury eggs don't seem to be on sale this year).  We want Easter eggs to eat and give away, but not at the expense of people being enslaved and abused to make the chocolate, so, for some years now, we've made our own :-)
We've been doing great marshmallow Easter eggs for some years now, but this year I think we've finally nailed how to make creme eggs!

classic vanilla creme eggs

peppermint creme eggs - for variety and to share with vegan friends

and even creme 'egg' bunnies!

If you'd like to make some yourself, here is our recipe.  There are photos of various parts of the process after the written recipe.  It's a bit time-consuming, but none of it is hard.  You'll need chocolate egg molds, a candy/meat thermometer and a good beater for best results, but none of those are strictly necessary.

Dinosaur cake

A friend of mine has a wee boy who turns three today.  It's the first birthday he's had where he's really been aware of what it's all about, so his mum wanted to have a proper party for him.  I volunteered to make the cake :-)

I had a blast doing it!  He's really into dinosaurs, and I was delighted to find these very straightforward instructions for making a dinosaur cake.  You make two round cakes, then cut one into an 'n' shape for the legs and body and the other into two hooks to make the head and tail [pdf].

I'm really pleased with it!

UTZ certification

I've long been a supporter of fair trade*: I want the people who produce the goods I use to:

• have been paid a decent wage;
• be working without coercion;
• not be children**;
• not be being exposed to poisons without suitable protection.

* I refer in this post to both fair trade and FairTrade™ - the first is the concept, the second is a certification system.  Confusing, but there you are.
**the International Labour Organisation makes a distinction between 'child labour' and 'child work'.  'Child work' is work that doesn't interfere with their education or affect their health - like the paper run I did as a kid.  'Child labour' is work that goes beyond that.  I'm OK with 'child work', but not 'child labour'.

I know that if I buy goods with the FairTrade™ logo or buy my goods from TradeAid, then they will meet those conditions.

(Update from 2018 - the FairTrade Sourced Programs are fairly new - they now have cocoa, sugar and cotton programmes, all with the slightly washed-out logo you see at the right.  This means that the named ingredient is FairTrade certified, but not the other ingredients in the product.)

However, a new fair trade certification has now come to my notice: "UTZ certified".  It's used mostly for cocoa, coffee and tea at this stage, but is gradually widening its scope.

UTZ removes two issues that I think are barriers to the greater uptake of FairTrade™:

1. the producers of the goods don't have to be a co-op: they can be a normal company;
2. you can advertise that one of the ingredients in the product is 'UTZ certified' even if the others aren't.  (Update from 2018: FairTrade now also has this possibility, through the FairTrade Sourced cocoa, cotton and sugar programmes)

In a market-based economy such as our own, co-ops are a rarity but we still manage to have rules that ensure labour conditions aren't too bad.  Why should we insist on co-ops for cocoa producers rather than simply requiring decent labour conditions?