We're driving 10 hours to our kids Uni today. It occurred to me that it's a good thing that we're going from a big country to another big country. It must be so difficult to go from a small, closed in place to a big open one. We had people come out to Finnegan's Wake, who found the darkness and silence at night intimidating -who slept with the lights on. I love the silences and the absence of artificil light makes for woderful star viewing. Ok so there are no (well make that 'few' ) stage shows and the choice of restaurants is a little limited in number... but ah, we have night.

I can't wait to see my boys. I hope they love Australia as much as we did.
Australia, put out your best :-)

The glut

Back in the dark ages, just after smoking too much killed the dinosaurs and people still had fax machines, B and I moved onto Finnegan's Wake and for the first time a serious go at self-sufficiency. We were bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but our delusions of handsome appearance and sartorial elegance aside, we were also in for a bumper year. Partly this was as a direct result of my ignorance and over-enthusiasm. To put it slightly cryptically - there are about 30 seeds in a pack of courgette seeds. I had the space and compost to plant them all... every plant bore at least 50 baby marrows... And herein lies the devilish detail - I was raised 'waste not, want not'. Did you know that sliced paper thin courgettes (lightly salted, left to stand for 3 minutes, then washed and dried)dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and black pepper can be served as a great salad? No? Well neither did I, before. I didn't know they were good in bread either. Or parboiled, slit from gizzard to zatch and then with a slice of cheese and a piece of rehydrated sundried tomato in the slit, and a slice of bacon on the outside as a wrap, skewered in place with a couple of toothpicks and then grilled is delicious. Yes -I believe I came up with 33 disguises for the humble courgette - none quite as effective as shoving a carrier bag of the things into a visitor's car. Yes the courgettes nearly killed us, and years later even the sight of virulent yellow courgette piccalli makes me blench. But it was the bramble patch that finally hammmered the stake into that old waste-not maxim. It was several acres of thorns and black woody bramble-berries. Free food! We picked with glee. Then with enthusiasm. then with grim determination, then with scratched and battered resignation and, um, whining. And even when we gave up, that was only the start. Jam making continued to the small hours, until every jar and every pound of sugar (we had to go and buy extra -at a 50km round trip, and the cost of sugar and jars it probably would have been cheaper to buy 12 jars of jam.) But we had jam. 6 years later we STILL had jam... and juice... and getting the eager family interested in another picking session the next day (or the next year)... was fortunately not well received.

Self-sufficiency requires a lot of things - one is getting fellow self-sufficiency people to trade with. And realising that processing what can be an endless excess is actually expensive too. There is a balance in all things. :-) It's a shame that i am not that well balanced anyway.
And when it comes to courgette piccalilli, waste not becomes want not very quickly.

security

Having failed to drown us, the South African weather says fricassee will have to do. It's hot, sticky and unpleasant today – more like the Durban I remember and so wanted to leave. We spent last night with the clann Beck up in Pietermaritzburg, where we had lovely supper (green thai prawn curry, very mild, but tasty and the usual appalling puns. They're dear friends, it was their older son's 21st, and the farewells are sad, but the security aspect of their lives is just exactly what I want to leave behind. Outside spotlights, Area alarms (so for eg, me a 5 AM riser hd to stay carefully out of rooms xyz), burglar bars... and of course sleepy hollow's lovely climate - In winter it's quite pleasant but in summer they end up jumping into the pool just before bed, emerging dripping and putting towels on their beds. Um. No thanks.

I see Tassie is cool today. :-).

21 years

We spent last night with good friends from University days, whose son, Geoffrey, turned 21 yesterday. It was wonderful to celebrate with the whole extended family, and sad to think that when his younger brother reaches his 'great milestone' we will be far away. (though probably Steve is heaving a huge sigh of relief.)
We have started on a round of 'goodbyes' to friends and family, and I think it was a mistake to draw it all out over 5 weeks, but seemed like a good idea at the time! Still we will get to see a lot of people this way.

city life

ok, this suburbia inside a small secure complex, but it does show how used to wild space I have become... we were so exhausted the first night that I barely heard anything beyond waking briefly to yet more rain. (It appears that the weather on our final move day killed 7 people :-(.) Last night, however, I did a lot of waking for trucks, cars, voices, dogs... oh well, the jackal yowling on the hill used to wake me. And the 'piet-my-vrou' dawn chorus (skiet-my-nou! as my mum used to call them.) and the mournful mist foghorn of the rare fluff-tailed buffs on the stream (you'll know why they're rare when you hear them!) and the hadeda ibises - some just flew past - this is suburbia, but Africa. Still, I got used to the jackal, I'll possibly get used to this again before we head out, and there'll be wild sounds of Australia (the roaring puking of the Bennet's wallaby that ate all my veggies and that sort of romantic bush-noise).

Budunet my radio link to civilization and the net out at Finnegan's Wake appears to have been a casualty of the rains. As that is still my principal e-mail addy, I am not gettting much mail.

'Wild Weather batters KZN'

Or so the headlines told us, just in case we failed to notice downed trees and mud-slick roads we slithered and bumped down with everything and not quite the kitchen sink that should have been packed and wasn't... Freer chaos reigns. Oh and the wet stuff. I see they're now forecasting the possibility of snow (yes, I'll post some to Adelaide if you like - it's like dandruff but colder). Anyway, that terrible phase of the move is over. So far saying goodbye to our beasties was the worst part, but teary farewells from 'nThombifuthi (we have found her a new job, with someone she likes, but still...) and Mfanjane (who has a disability pension, but used to come and earn a bit extra once a week), and the forlorn faces of our now ex-neighbour's workers (whose kids we took to school, gave lifts into town, brought 80kg sacks of maize-meal for and and occasionally provided first aid to, and greeted and chatted to), and "you did so much for us" - as one of the dairy guys told B yesterday. True enough I think. We tried to fit in, and make ourselves part of the community, not just a separate caste. It seemed to work (ex-neighbour on the other hand is I gather is having 'labour' troubles. What a surprise - there is little love lost there. Perhaps he should wise up to living in 2009, and not 1809 - his latest petty act of improving staff morale was to lock a gate leading to their cottages - meaning everything (eg, their 80kg of maize-meal, and a fair amount of furniture we didn't pack) has to be carried half a kilometer. It won't stop the people carrying the same things in. Or improve his security an iota. But it'll show them he's the boss. Yes, that'll help. Not.) Ah well, I am glad to leave that kind of idiocy behind, because I only see one long term end for it and it will do no one any good.

The packing up was something of a disaster -partly because we were less organised than we needed to be, and partly because the rain and the packers and estimators and mis-information added a whole new layer of chaos... like we arrived here with 4 loads of wet washing - all of which should have been packed. And wine racks (the plastic -no wood-bugs kind we had in among the others we had to leave) and other things which didn't need to go that did... before we turned around. Oh well, 'tis done. Unpacking may be a bit like archeology ;-) (besides the rock part)

Anyway, we've arrived in Durban, with my sister for a few days, I'll get some writing done, and we'll finalise a few more things. Her little sausage dogs are somewhere between cats and dogs, and remind me how much I miss my dogs and cats. I hope the big black nose can keep the faith.
I miss them.

neither rain nor sleet....

The container - and the family rock finally loaded, and the pair of jumper leads mysteriously like ours (but we were told, not ours, even if appearances were deceptive, were loaded by 5. All Moving estimators -Stuttafords, Elliots, and Magna all WAY overestimated our volume, and we could have taken a bunch of stuff we left/sold/gave away, drat them. Anyway loading the rock was... entertaining. And so was the rain. And the rain. And did I mention... rain. The container truck left and we loaded up a ute-load of garbage, and set out for the dump (as this was not thanksgivin'). We got as far as Reggie- the Retired Lt Colonel about km away, and found the rock was resisting leaving Africa... well, the mud was. The container truck had failed singly at the art of mud-driving and was now jack-knifed at the bottom of the hill blocking our exit. So we too abandoned our quest and went to visit Reggie Purbrick, who is a good friend in need. He has that military organising streak about him (he takes schoolkids on adventure trails to the mountains, or game reserves or the battlefields . I suppose they're not much worse than a regiment to organise... we were wined, fed and provided with baths and beds and sympathy and laughter and advice. I'm really going to miss him, which is more than I say about my other ex-neighbour, who was trying to prove he was a git to my ex-employee. Stupid. And childish and futile too. Ok so I am tired and grumpy... anyway, we finally left the farm in howling wind and rain and mud.... did i mention muddd. The little car (my sons from granny) made it barely. We've left all sorts behind... but we have gone. And in a way being exhausted and coping with a nightmare-ish rain and wind, and the rocky slithery, muddy road stopped us saying sad farewells.
On the plus side the new owners kids were having a ball and so was their calf.