I have been thinking about this a lot.  Not just related to food, but related to any product.

Consider this.  Recently I bought and read a book called ‘Love And Terror On The Howling Plains Of Nowhere’ by author Poe Ballantine.  A publisher’s review can be found here for those interested in finding out more about it – http://hawthornebooks.com/catalogue/love-and-terror-on-the-howling-plains-of-nowhere

The book was written by an American and published by an American publishing house.  It was printed in China on paper that may have come from anywhere, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia . . .

It was sent back to the US for distribution and I bought it online from The Book Depository who sent it to me from the UK.  It cost a little over twenty bucks with free postage.

The point is that this single book has travelled around the world racking up mileage along the way, all of which costs money and all with a cost to the environment.

Now food is like that as we buy oranges from California, pineapples from Asia, and apples from New Zealand and millions of tons of processed foods from China.  It has become so absurd that as the makers of the video ‘The Economics Of Happiness’ point out, we are seeing “apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US”.

In fact any product is like that as we trundle down the path to globalisation and I reckon it’s time to put a stop to it.  In Queensland, according to the Qld Government, there are 403,000 small businesses employing about half of all Queenslanders.  The money we spend locally goes back into the community.  And I put my money where my mouth is by having my website built by a local, my computer repaired by a local and I shop locally as much as possible.  I’m also involved in a local initiative to start a ‘community farm’ to work towards a food independence, at least as far as fresh veges and fruits are concerned.

Let’s all buy locally where we can.

I have just ordered a book and I have stolen the title for the name of this post.

The book, named ‘Death Sentence’, is by Don Watson and is about, as the title suggests, the death of the sentence – http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/don-watson/death-sentence-the-decay-of-public-language-9781740512787.aspx – or, as the sub-title puts it, ‘the decay of public language’.

Maybe later I will write about the book (I haven’t got it yet) but I wanted to comment on the appalling state of our language, in particular the appalling spelling of it and more to the point the spelling used on the internet, where many of us do much of our reading.

I understand that there are those who have learning difficulties and so this is not targetted at those who have genuine problems with learning our complex language, rather it is aimed at those who are too lazy; who can’t be bothered getting it right.  And with the availability of spell checking technology there isn’t much of an excuse to get it so terribly wrong.  Poor language/spelling is, to me, a breach of contract with your reader, assuming you want one.  It makes your reader do all the work that you ought to have done when you wrote your message.

Looking to buy a car has revealed such blunders as “tidey” for tidy, “ruber” for rubber, “duel” for dual, “veihcle” for vehicle, “moter” for motor and “coluor” for colour.  And that was in just a few minutes of looking.  All of these mistakes have a red line under them as I type which ought to give the writer a clue.  Unless they are clueless of course.

I went to school a while back, it’s true.  And we had spelling hammered into us (for which I am thankful), but in just a couple of generations, with the support of real-time spell checking, we lost the plot.  How come?

Yesterday Brisbane copped one of the worst storms in living memory, comparable, it has been said, to the 1985 hail storm in its destructive ferocity.  I recall the 1985 storm with great clarity.

I was working at ABC Television, in the old ABC studios at Toowong.  Ironically I was broadcasting the warning messages on air while the great storm front rolled in from the east.  It was a wall of green air that looked terrible.  And when it arrived, it was like being inside a drum as the hail hammered on the roof.

The car park was behind the building, right on the water, and my car resembled a golf ball it was so pitted with the apple sized hail stones raining down on it.  The hail looked like snow, so much of it fell.  And my home, which back then was in Bardon, was saturated throughout as I had left the windows open to keep the place cool while I was at work.

Yesterday in Brisbane was a repeat of that destruction.

I am in awe of the effort we see by emergency services personnel who risk their lives to help people.

I installed the blog two years ago (well just over two years really – I just paid the bill for another two years) and as you can see, there isn’t anything here!

That’s about to change as I pick up from where I left off and with the help of Kate Lawrence (www.indigocat.net) the website is finally being built.  I’ve been using Facebook a bit – https://www.facebook.com/kurrajongfarmcollection – but it’s time to get back to blogging.  I wanted to talk about building furniture.

You know, pieces often suggest themselves to me when I look at the timber.  Building furniture out of recycled timber is not always easy.  Unlike timber bought from the timber yard, recycled timber isn’t always the same width, or length, or thickness, or even the same type of wood.  If you make a mistake you can be in big trouble . . .

And often the pieces of wood aren’t even straight.  Recycled wood can be cupped, warped, bowed, twisted . . .  I have five thick boards clamped together sitting on the water tank in the weather with weight on them to try to take the twist out of them.  So instead of starting with a table, I often start with a piece of wood.

But sometimes ideas just arrive and then I find the timber that will work.  One such is the idea for a stool.  Who said stools have to have four legs?  Or even three?  Couldn’t we get by with two if it was stable?  Of course and this was inspired by the good old fashioned step ladder.

This one was taken from Etsy but we have one here on the farm, an old timber one like this.  Anyway, these have only two legs, the second fold out set are just the brace to stop it falling over and you can sit on them in perfect safety.  So how about a permanent brace?  Like this?

More to come . . .

It’s been almost exactly three years since we decided to buy Kurrajong Farm, though it wasn’t called Kurrajong Farm when we made that decision.

We were living in Lutwyche, in Brisbane, in a three bedroom apartment, and we had in mind that one day we would buy some acreage.  But in the meantime we were looking around to buy a house, in suburbia.  Both of us were working in the city.  We still are.  As I write my blog I will keep coming back to these beginnings.

Today, Sunday 18 November, we are stuck indoors as the rains fall.  The rain is not unwelcome as it fills the tank, waters the gardens and greens up the grass, brown after a fairly prolonged dry spell.

Even though it rains, there is much to do around the farm.