This and That

Somehow these weeks just keep flying past. I can't believe it's October already. And apparently daylight savings starts this weekend too, I discovered today. We are hurtling along into summer and I am in no way ready for it. I didn't get enough winter, truthfully. June, July, they were good winter months. August, well from August it was just spring and that was it, it's been getting steadily warmer ever since. And not much rain, really. Things are drying off, dust is flying and I'm really not looking forward to the scorching days that will hit come January and February. Perhaps we'll get some reprieve this year. Perhaps there will be lots of rain and perhaps the temperatures won't climb so high, or for so long. Who am I kidding. This is Central Victoria. Hot and dry is what you get.

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We've had many late nights in this house lately, mainly because we've had our heads in macbook researching and learning, questioning and to be honest, getting ourselves quite worked up. Many things in this world aren't right, and a big fat one of those is the medical industry and phama companies. We've been lurking around the World Health Organisation website, and I checked out who the 'partners' are, and then I checked out the Australian 'partner' - an organisation called Medicines Australia. From their About section (here), they represent the innovative medicines industry by:

"engaging with government and government departments, the Australian Medicines Industry, consumer groups and health professionals to develop health and industry policy"

amongst other things. Which might sound laudable until you scroll through who the member companies are, and low and behold - big pharma companies (here). I do not think that it is in any way appropriate for profit driven companies to be influencing health policy. It smacks of conflict of interest to me. Maybe it's just me. Well it's not just me, my husband also thinks this too. 

Who's calling the shots? Or should that be, WHO's calling the shots.

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To much more pleasant topics, I'm so excited about heading to a permaculture garden tour and talk with  none other than one of the founders of permaculture, David Holmgren this weekend. So excited, I've been counting down the days. We've got a little space to work with here and we want to get it right from the start, if we can. We want sustainable, we want productive, we want a living, working system where everything plays it's part and all ties in together. And I want it to be beautiful too. So we're off to fill our heads with ideas and start the process. It's all very exciting.

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We're settling back into our rhythms and routines in our daily life here. A house move, my focus on end-of-semester study and a job change for my husband, have seen things a little out of sorts. Plus the arrival of the horse and the pony have changed up our routines a little too, with extra mouths to feed and extra animal drama's to resolve. The irony, we have a paddock full of grass that we would really love to see being eaten, we have a pony that is restricted from eating spring grass and is finally (after a few unsuccessful attempts) contained within a 'jenny craig' section of the property and we have a horse that could really do with a lot of grass eating, who is more interested in running up and down the fence to talk to the horse next door. But anyway, things are settling back into the rhythm and I'm so glad we have that rhythm, always there, and able to sustain us through changes and challenges. If you're interested in establishing rhythm with children in the home, Lisa of Celebrate the Rhythm of Life is running her 31 Days to Rhythm course again during October. I did a similar course in January and honestly, it's one of the best things I've done as a parent. Twenty five bucks well spent, in my book.

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And that's about enough. Because it's Friday, it's late and apparently the hours of sleep before midnight are worth twice as many as the hours after midnight. I've missed too many of those before hours lately.