Village Blog

It's time for a change. 

Click here to check out the spanking new Villageblog site and please update your bookmarks and hyperlinks.

Thank you for flying with us. 

This is more Ran’s territory than mine but here, via Free Range Organic Human is a fascinating article about how the universe is a hologram.

***************************************************

The article has a myriad of links and upon following one of them  I discovered that it had a New Zealand based domain. Out of curiosity I went to the homepage and discovered this Indigenous Weather Modification site. Until the advent of the internet there really was nothing else that could deliver this degree of ‘unusualness’ to my life.

The operator of the site claims to be able to modify the weather using unspecified techniques that seem to be based on traditional Maori knowledge. It would also seem that the universe-as-hologram theory could be used to understand how it might work.

Delving further into the site I discovered something that had a fantastic only-in-New Zealand quality to it:

A Maori Sovereignty group had wanted to fly the Maori Independence flag on the Auckland Harbour Bridge on Waitangi day, New Zealand’s National day. The body that overseas the bridge, Transit New Zealand, had refused permission and upset a great number of Maori including the person running this website.

Shortly after this hit the headlines Transit New Zealand received an email from John Porter, weather modification consultant, telling them that he was going to teach them a lesson to the tune of $100 million dollars of weather related damage to New Zealand roads.

I can only guess at the reaction of the staff of Transit New Zealand at the arrival of this email – or at their reaction at the arrival of subsequent emails toting up the costs after every piece of bad weather we’ve had this winter.

I know this isn’t usual Village Blog fare and I can’t verify any of it except that the storms did in fact happen but I just love a good story. 

It's always interesting to check the stats for this site to see where people are coming from and in the last day or so someone came to Villageblog via a search engine and the following keywords; inuit dog sled how built.

Amusingly they would have been directed to this page with a story about how someone once made an inuit dog sled. It's such a good story I'll post it again.

[I was listening to a talk] by a guy called Wade Davis who was hunting around the tip of Baffin Island and met an individual (whose name wasn't clear in the recording) who told a story about his grandfather who refused to go into one of the Inuit settlements;

 "His family took away his tools and implements, hoping that it would oblige him to go into the settlement. Did it work? No. He simply stepped out into the arctic night and in the darkness, pulled down his trousers and defecated into his hand. As the faeces froze he shaped it into a blade. He put a spray of saliva along the edge and as the shit-knife took form he butchered a dog. He skinned the dog with it and made a harness, he took the rib cage of the dog and made a sled and harnessing the sled to an adjacent dog he took off over the iceflows"

 

I wonder if they decided to use this technique or not? 

Quite by coincidence, when Ran’s new posting about his teeth appeared I was sitting here with a numb face having just got back from getting 5 new fillings in my teeth. There’s no holistic dentist near here so I went to the local one and asked for the white fillings thanks.

To be honest I despair about my teeth, when I left school I had no fillings but ever since then I can’t go to the dentist without getting more put in. This time I set a new record. Five in one go, in a marathon 2 hour session. The dentist shook my hand at the end.

For some reason I had this powerful sense of dread before going, which is why I had put it off for so long, the feeling gradually subsided while I was there but it didn’t help matters at the start. To make matters worse my jaw seized up at one point and I could barely open it. I was trying hard to focus on something else (I was estimating the length of my finger nails by sense of touch at the time) and had my eyes closed, when I realised that the dentist and his assistant were laughing, I became aware that my mouth had closed up and the assistant couldn’t get the sucker thing out. I hadn’t noticed previously because my entire mouth was numb and I couldn’t feel what she was doing. I could only hear the tool clattering against my teeth.

I’ve decided to fast today in an attempt to mitigate against the mercury that has no doubt flooded through my body since they removed an old amalgam filling in the process. I’m not sure how effective it will be but the whole family is away today so it’s an ideal time anyway.

As for what’s going to happen when lights turn out and the dentist can’t get painkillers any more I hate to think. To be honest this is probably my biggest fear of post-crash life. I know there is a native plant called Kawakawa which Maori used as a painkiller plus there is the option of getting bombed out of my tree before going for post apocalypse dental care but really I would prefer to just have good teeth.

And yes, I know about the Palaeolithic diet. Weston Price came to New Zealand, collected up a bunch of Maori skulls (don’t ask me how) and worked out that pre-European Maori had dental cavities at a rate of one in one thousand. I'm pretty sure I could live with that.

I congratulate people who have made this change to their life and I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully put an end to dental problems this way, but I have a young family and other priorities. Making any kind of change is difficult but one like this is near impossible, especially as I doubt that I could convince the others to give up grain-based foods and I know we couldn’t afford it.

Additionally, food is a comfort device – some would say a necessary comfort for civilisation - and I imagine that until the temptation is removed there will be minimal chance of this happening for us.

Damn, I can still feel them aching…

As part of our bedtime routine for our children we usually get them to clean up their toys, which by days end seem to cover all available floor space in our living room. To start with, getting our eldest to do this was easy but it soon turned into an ugly daily event where we were using the full gamut of coercion and punishment to get her to 'clean up her mess'.

Eventually, as you might expect, we figured out that approach was waaaaay too destructive for all parties involved. Aside from the nasty atmosphere it created and aside from the people this was turning us in to and aside from the lifelong dislike of tidying-up this would produce in our daughter we also realised that for the most part the issue of tidyness was a matter of taste and that it wasn't our daughter's fault that she didn't share either our taste or our ability to focus on tidying for long periods either.

So we decided to stop the whole thing and to try modelling the tidying process instead. This was quite some time ago and it often looked like our hope that she would eventually follow our lead was not going to be fulfilled. I tryed to remind myself that it didn't matter and that the most important thing was that we'd removed this ugly thing from our lives.

In actual fact that was the most important thing and to be perfectly honest we were still trying to make her do what we wanted - just through a much more subtle means.

We certainly didn't deserve to have our wish granted but nonethless (and many, many months later) for the last two nights our eldest has enthusiastically volunteered her services for cleaning up at the end of the day.

It came as a great surprise and despite my wariness of our motives I'm really happy to see evidence, in my own life, of the idea that children can do the right thing without the 'encouragement' of threats and coercion. I also see it as evidence that they will 'naturally' act to enhance family life as opposed to being hell bent on it's destruction.

How's this; this blog has Village in it's title because it's supposed to be about starting up a village but instead of any postings about how that might be happening it's mostly been about coping with not being in a village. And most of that  stuff has been about coping with not living in a village while we raise our children.

I've recently come to the conclusion that at this stage of our lives we just don't have the energy to do something like starting an ecovillage - even if it would be a better place for us in the long run. Taking on non-coecive parenting in a world that has no time for it and no models of how you might do it seems to be even harder than the usual nuclear family situation that most people are struggling with (probably because we don't really know what we're doing!)

At the moment (as previously mentioned) we'd just like to be able to find families doing homeschooling so that our five year old has someone to play with, and my most ambitious dream is to do something farmlet style with one other homeschooling family either on the same piece of land or right next door.

Even that is looking quite difficult to acheive though, there's only a couple of families that we know who would be candidates, only one of them is up here in Northland where we're looking at property and they aren't in a position to do anything about it right now for financial reasons.

So we're contemplating starting something by ourselves and getting people on later but we may not have enough money to do that and stay debt free. Plus I am discovering that I can't stand being isolated.

While Karen could live in the middle of the wops with no one else visible I find that I prefer to be in a busier setting. I don't mean a city though, just a small place like Raglan (pop 3000) where we have been for the last couple of years. Failing that though I could probably handle living in a rural area if there were plenty of people going by and I could see a number of farms down a valley. I really am very civilised:-)

I also have a real hankering to be able to see the sea but even in the far north of New Zealand we may not be able to afford that. In fact the problem is that most people in New Zealand live near the coast and it is that land that has really skyrocketed in price in the last few years.

There is also the issue of post crash security to think about.  I heard a story last night of a cow being butchered on a farm in the dead of the night nera here, with only the intestines left in the field for the farmer to find the next day. If that's already happening then there will be good cause to be hidden away in the coming years. How people will cope around here will be partially dependant on the speed of the crash but really it's crystal ball gazing and I don't want to have to bet the house on what will happen.

So, since I have no one to bounce ideas of in my physical world I thought I'd ask you guys in my virutal community (what an apalling phrase) what your thoughts are and what you are doing or trying to do about this issue? And if there are any Kiwis reading at the moment I'd especially be interested to hear from you.

Yes we're back from our summer road trip, we ended up taking 3 months longer than we originally planned because it seemed a bit crazy to screw up the whole experience by rushing everywhere. By the end though the strength of the cold and the rain meant we were looking forward to settling down again.

Actually we've been back a week and a half but the whole adjustment process has been far too weird for me to think about posting anything here right away. For the first 48 hours, every time (and I do mean every time) I thought of the bus I got a big emotional hit with a feeling in my chest that I can't describe. It wasn't nostalgia or anything else I recognise. Of course I'm not that great at feelings but really that just makes it all the more significant. I'm guessing the change in lifestyle must be pretty significant.

One thing we've really noticed is how much time can be wasted living in a big house (bigger than a bus anyway) simply keeping the whole thing operating and just shuffling our material assets around.

I was going to call this post Last of the Summer Wine because I realised during the trip that this was probably one of our last chances to enjoy the travel aspect of living in civilisation. Never again will we be able to pack the facilities of a house into a self propelled carriage and move it up and down the countryside at will like this and I'm glad I had the chance to explore New Zealand before the opportunity dissapears.

For those who aren't aware New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country and many's the night we would park up next to a beach (or on it) with a stunning piece of scenery waiting outside our window for the morning sun to bring it to life. I'm glad I did it.

The weirdness is set to continue though, I have no strong idea about how I am going to make a living and even where we we are going to live right now so - I'm feeling anything but settled but I'll save that for another post.

In the meantime can anyone tell me what happened to Casemeau? I'm going to miss not having his blog around.