Life on the Z list.

My sister left a copy of Haper’s Bazaar at my house recently and I began reading it, finding that reading it produced a strange sensation in me. Namely, I wanted to rip out my own eyes and possibly cause grievous bodily harm to the people on the magazine pages. From reading a blow by blow description of Jodhi Meares day (on the A list 24 hours page) to seeing pictures of Michael and Kyly Clarke at home (okay perhaps there is something to be said for this current debate about literacy teaching – does no-one understand the proper use of vowels and consonants in names?), I was filled with an indescribable rage. Well, actually I can describe it, it’s the rage that comes from superficial crap being lauded as ways to live life. ‘I’m like Forrest Gump – I walk as much as I can’ proclaims Meares (suggesting that perhaps she hasn’t seen the movie at all), while she goes on to tell us how she begins her day with yoga, with warm water and lemon to ‘alkanise the body’. It goes on from there and if you’re into that shit you can read it yourself. Meanwhile Harper’s Bazaar takes a stop at the Clarke household on a ‘rare Saturday off’ where the two of them call each other ‘babe’. How astonishing that a married couple might use a term of endearment. Cue vomiting now.

Still I figured there was something in all that about recording the way we live our days in a breakdown of times and activities. I mean, surely you all find me so infinitely fascinating that you want to know what I’m doing at every catalogued minute of the day and what I’m wearing? So here it is. Sharon’s bizarre z list description of my 24 hours.

5.30 am: I awake to what sounds like next door’s bull rogering one of the cows. There’s nothing like the sound of nature to pull you from your lazy slumber to the day ahead.  ‘Ah’, I think to myself, I’m so lucky to live here connected with nature’ as I snuggle back into my Target doona. Soon though, the dog is leaping on me and I laugh as I scratch her fur and clamber out of bed. (Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. In reality I probably swear, push the dog off me and drag the doona over my head before the grim fact that I need to get out of bed sends a shiver of doom in my heart and I crawl out of bed, tumbling to the floor and dragging my sorry arse towards the bathroom).

Unlike Meares, I don’t begin with warm water and lemon, I like to begin the day by evacuating my bowels. I find that I’m just so much lighter after that, I can feel the life force ebbing through me. I head into the kitchen wearing some hand me down flannel pj pants I stole from my husband and an old Qantas pj top that a flight attendant once gave me.  I make a pot of Irish breakfast tea. I live on a property in an area that was once known as little Ireland and I find that drinking Irish breakfast tea enables me to connect with the ancestry of the place and with my own Irish heritage.  It also makes me less likely to drop expletives before 7 am.

I make a monkey salad for breakfast. Someone shared a link to the latest paleo craze and some 30 day challenge where monkey salad was recommended for breakfast. I still can’t find the monkeys at my local deli so in the meantime I make the vegan version which has banana, coconut flakes, cashews and blueberries. Well, it’s probably not technically vegan as I can’t swear that the blueberries haven’t come from a farm that uses that bacteria that kills other bugs– take that vegans who think that your lettuce leaf hasn’t resulted in the death of an animal. If it’s a weekend or a holiday I’ll start the day with coffee made by my lovely husband. He’ll normally do this if I throw myself on the floor and cling onto his legs like a toddler, begging for coffee to take the pain of daylight away.

6.30 am: By now, it’s time for exercise. I know this because the dog is throwing a lead at my feet and barking at me and I’ll do almost anything to make her shut up. We head out into the picturesque olive grove where the sun is creeping through the cloud and the mountain casts a shadow over the landscape. There’s an oracle on the mountain and last year after moving in, I climbed the mountain, reaching the top breathless and sweaty to find out my life’s true path. The oracle must have been having a bad day as he told me this wasn’t a public access area and to stay away from the telecommunications infrastructure. I figure that was a metaphor suggesting that I need to try and connect more with the authentic me and to not use so many devices so I’ve been trying to cut back on my facebook  and mobile phone usage. Meanwhile, the dog is dragging me through the olives, eating the excrement of animals and I figure it’s only a while before I’ll be doing that too as part of the latest ‘get back to nature’ diet craze.

8.00 am: After a walk with the dog, I head into the bathroom for my morning ablutions. Unlike Meares who is obsessed with washing her hair ‘I sometimes wash it twice a day’, I’m obsessed with ensuring that our farm water supply is continuous and so I shower quickly, thankful that as yet the bore hasn’t dried up. I read in Bazaar that ‘raw beauty’ is on the hit list and some designer recently sent models down the catwalk wearing nothing but moisturizer (surely if it was a fashion show they would have had clothes too?), but anyway, it seems I’m ahead of the trend as I’ve been embracing raw beauty for 41 years. It comes from my theory that you can’t stick a candle in a turd and call it a birthday cake. For work I dress in whatever doesn’t require ironing and which sends a message that says ‘I’m an academic and if you want to give me a promotion because of my clothes then I’ll happily stay on this rung of the academic ladder for life’.

9.00 am: I begin my work day at home as my office at the farm has breathtaking views of the mountain and the grove and I find these good for my inspiration. This, and it means I don’t have to go to the corridor of death at work, where walking down there is like taking on a computer game where you have to defeat your nemesis and other obstacles all preventing you from reaching your quest of getting to your office door and turning on your computer. Once I’ve slayed the email demon, I spend the day trawling through interview transcripts and wondering how we can defeat the quantitative, positivist voldemorts and the admin focused ministry of magic who are encroaching on all aspects of academic life.

12.00: This is hungry work and so I look on my desk for food. There is none. I go down to the staffroom and the remains of some overcatered event to which we academic footsoldiers weren’t invited have been thoughtfully placed on the table by leadership. I ponder on whether to allow myself to have an enforced detox by eating the smoked salmon sandwich that’s been festering there for a few hours, but decide against this and instead head to the café where I look for something that hasn’t been deep fried in a vat of oils, along with the last of the faculty to speak openly against the administration.

Okay, even I can’t keep this amount of self-introspection and bullshit up. You want to know about the rest of my day? It passes as most of the first half. I work, I eat, I talk to people, my husband comes home and we curse about the idiots we’ve had to deal with all day. We laugh about the good moments, we share stories about the people we love and the things we care about. We eat food, some that we grow and that we cook together and which we don’t overthink (is it wholefood? Is it paleo? Is it going to kill me?). Who knows, we might even call each other babe. We don’t label it all. Life doesn’t need to be labeled nor do you need my rantings of how I live my life presented as some sort of quasi-expert guide to how you should live. You wouldn’t pay money to read about how my day passes, so why would you bother reading about people you don’t know or don’t care about?

So I’m putting Harper’s Bazaar in the bin as it makes me hate humans. I figure there’s enough hate in the world as it is, so let’s call the superficial bullshit for what it is and just go about living.

Summer stress

Summer has arrived with hot days in the high 30s- the sort of weather that dries the last of the green grass to a brown husk and which leaves the cows slurping water from the trough. Here, our water tank to pool conversion has been one of our best farm hacks so far. We float in inflatable chairs staring at the mountain and Rohan becomes like an ADD kid splashing and spraying water at whichever poor sod happens to be in the pool with him (note this is frequently me). I had no choice but to attempt to use Annemaree as a human shield the other day, and even that didn't seem to work. Meanwhile the cows in next door's paddock stare over the fence at us, perhaps wondering why the hell humans are floating in brightly coloured chairs in a tank of water. 

Our neighbours kids seemed to be wondering the same thing as they came over to fish for trout with their dad in our trout tank. Claiming their dinner they headed home, only to return later looking for lemons to go with the fish. The next morning they returned bearing home made pickled onions, which taste so good, and have the lowest food miles of any going around- picked and pickled across the road. 

Yesterday morning I got a facebook message from a friend wishing us well for the day ahead, saying that the air was heavy as the CFA warned regional Victorians about the fire danger. When delivering our onions, our neighbour asked if we had our fire tank full and our pump ready to go and he and Rohan traded tales of their fire plans, of the way they'd pumped crops full of water the night before, and of the things we hope will keep us safe. With the hot, dry northerly swirling and whipping leaf litter into a frenzy, Rohan and I drove  to the service station to get more diesel, only to see 8 small mobile fire fighting utes and drivers parked there, just seemingly waiting to spring into action. Another friend down the road said she was like a meerkat - leaping from one window to the next and peering out. I'd read that olives are fire resistant and therefore recommended as trees to retain when thinking about managing trees for fire preparation. My sister said I seemed stressed and maybe I shouldn't have moved to the country, but it's not an either/ or proposition, but something much more complex. It's an unwritten requirement to be aware of, and to worry, about the risks unlike those who live on the land or the urban fringe of regional towns and cities and who don't have the worry cross their radar. I'm prone to thinking about Chris Wilson's lyric 'this is a wide, brown land', and so in summer it is likely that there will be days like yesterday when the air is hot, the wind howls and the CFA app lights up like Xmas lights blinking from across all areas of the state. You just hook up the fire pump to the tanks, hold your breath slightly and hope that your light won't be the next one to blink on the map. 

And then, came the rain. 

The storm warning map heralded it's arrival but so too did the birds. They'd been quiet most of the day or maybe I just hadn't been able to hear them over the howling of the wind. As the sky turned grey, the birds began to sing and to flutter in the trees, and then heavy, fat droplets of rain began to fall. Thunder and lightning inched across the sky, but with the advent of the rain. I was less worried about lightning strike causing a fire. With the smell of rain on the concrete paths around the house and steam rising from the road into town, my fire stress began to dissipate as the rain tumbled down. This morning, the fog has returned to Innisfree and we can't see the mountain as it is shrouded by cloud. In other parts of Victoria and South Australia, others are not so lucky, their lights still blink on the fire map, firefighters still work to save farms, livestock and lives. In moving to the country, you become so much more aware of this, it is more immediate than just a terrible story on the 6pm news bulletin that you can easily disconnect from. You become more aware of how our lives are all interconnected whether we live in town or on the land. If the land suffers, it spreads like a web to all of us, no matter where we lay our head at the end of the day. And so we all hope that days which are described as the perfect storm for fire conditions are few and far between in a long summer.