Last day of freedom

Back to work tomorrow and so how do I spend my last hours of freedom? Dishes, laundry and contemplating the basketful of ironing. Could life get any better? Yeah, right.

I did spend a good part of the morning on the phone with Julie and for her, here is another shot of the courtyard out from the kitchen. (Just so that while you're clearing out your stuff darl, you can see if there is anything that would fit in. Some cuttings from your plants would be good especially those ones in the big front garden.....)

The other shot is especially for Blaire although it doesn't really do justice to the ENORMITY of my tomato plants. They are getting so big now that any day I expect to get a letter from the council telling me they have to be topped before they interfere with the power lines.

Actually writing the comment about cuttings from Jule's garden reminded me of an article in the Herald yesterday about the "Compact". From what I have read so far the gist of it is that a group of friends "worried about the impact of mass consumerism & today's disposable society" elected to see if they could give up shopping for a year. Well that's the short version according to the Madcow anyway. The real version is here. Also there's a Yahoo group over there.

It's been a bit of a hot topic around here lately with the onset of that strange holiday phenomenon ... cleaning out the pantry. Where other people choose to go to the beach or sit quietly reading books, apparently in this particular corner of Auckland a journey to the back of the pantry is "the" thing to do this summer. Robyn, Leonie, Lynnie & Jules have all made their own intrepid journeys to the dark place and the resulting obsession with "Use By" dates is comforting. I of course had been on my own adventure some months earlier when we shifted and had cleaned out the pantry here & at the old place, resulting in a supply of tinned fruit salad, that if it were ever released onto the open market, could tip the balance of the world economy. As for the supplies of tinned tuna ....

Still it is comforting to know that I'm not the only one with more food in the cupboard than one person could possibly eat but it's also disturbing. Why the apparent need to hoard? Why do we insist on almost daily trips to the supermarket when the cupboards are nowhere near bare? Is it just marketing and advertising? I can't believe we are all the gullible and yet it seems we are.

Then there's all the other "essentials" - the magazines, the books, the scrapbooking supplies, the computers, the cameras .... all rapidly cluttering my house. When I first left home many Cow Years ago, I packed all my worldly possession in two small suitcases and caught the train to Wellington. Now I need a large truck and several burly gentlemen to move it all.

This needs a bit more thought but it may well be a "Compact Cow Year". Of course easy to say at this end of the holidays where a great deal of time and a significant amount of cash has been spent shopping for "essentials" but still the politics of it all interests me. I'll let you know how this pans out.

PS. Wine IS an essential.