Some beautiful things

It's the time of year for Jerusalem artichokes and I'm greatly enjoying the flowers and the bumble bees they attract :-)

aren't they glorious?

And my moth orchid is still going strong (although with many fewer flowers after some wormy thing ate through lots of the stems...)

I'm also pleased with some cards I recently made:

The yellow and blue are glass paints on acetate.

The image was a reward given to my mum at Sunday school many years ago.  She came across a stash when they were moving house recently and I've kept a few and will be using the remainder on cards :-)

Fair Trade 'Nutella'

Over the last year or two I've been working on a recipe for home-made Nutella.  I don't want to buy regular Nutella as it's made with cocoa bought on the open-market, some of which will have been grown by slaves.  I want my global neighbours to flourish, so try to always buy fairly traded cocoa.  However, I still want to have a chocolate hazelnut spread in the house as one of our regular visitors is very attached to it, and hospitality is important, too!  Having failed to find any fairly traded chocolate hazelnut spread in New Zealand*, it was time to figure out how to make my own :-)

*if you're in Australia and have this problem, try this: it's yummy, widely available and not even that expensive!

Assisted Dying in New Zealand

Update: the submission deadline has been extended.  Submissions now close at midnight on Tuesday, March 6th.

A bill proposing to introduce assisted dying (i.e. voluntary euthanasia) is currently being considered by the Justice select committee of the New Zealand parliament.  Were this legislation to be passed into law, assisted dying would become available to anyone with a terminal condition who is expected to have less than six months to live, as well as to anyone with a grevous and irremediable medical condition.

I am against this and am in the process of writing a submission to the committee to say so.  Could I encourage you to do the same?  You can read information about the bill (along with some concerns about it) here or, if you're super-keen, read the full text of the bill here.  You can make your submission here.  Submissions close February 20th.  Parliament has prepared a guide on making submissions which you can read here.  You don't need to say anything more than whether you oppose or support the bill in question, although they prefer for you to give your reasons in moderate detail :-)

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!

Finding a National Radio programme you heard

From time to time, people ask me to find a programme on the Radio New Zealand website - perhaps a programme that they caught part of live but would like to hear in its entirety, or something they heard advertised but didn't catch live.  I've just put together a guide to explain how I go about finding those programmes on the website, so people can do it themselves if they want.

If that sounds like something that may be of interest to you, you can download it here.  It's a pdf.  And if you have any feedback on it, I'd love to hear from you :-)

Christmas is coming

There's not much energy to spare at the moment, but I did find some time to put up a few decorations in our room over the last few days.

When I lie in bed, I'm now looking straight at this:

The 'hope' bears are from Martin's Aunty Elspeth and the holly tablecloth was a wedding present from friends from my church in Switzerland.  The broom flowers are in honour of our wedding anniversary - when we got married, Mummy made bouquets of them for our flower girls :-)

Settling in at my parents' place

On Saturday we moved to my parents' place, where we expect to spend the rest of the year.  We're here to help them sort their belongings and downsize prior to moving to a smaller place in the New Year.

We've stayed here for a long period of time once before, but this is the first time we've arrived expecting to stay many weeks.  To help make that work for us, my parents kindly agreed to let Martin and some friends largely clear the room we're staying in before we arrived.  This means it's easier for me to navigate the room than usual, which I'm really enjoying.  We also brought a few pictures for the walls and even pot plants and have set ourselves up very nicely :-)

I'm really happy with the setup and have posted a number of photos below.

Looking in through the main door - spot my moth orchid and bleeding heart vine in the corner and a picture by the window :-)