After all the hoopla, I didn't watch the apology. When it was being said, I was driving to the Centre, when it was streamed from the internet during the morning tea, I was on the phone and dealing with clients. : - (

The morning tea was a great success. About 30 people attended and everyone was moved by the speech and the coverage of the event. The Flexi students and teachers joined us and the kids helped with chairs and moving things around to accommodate everyone. I was really pleased with the kids. When I invited them I asked that they respect the importance of the day and the other people, and they did just that. When everyone was gone there were a few scones and biscuits left over so I told them to help themselves to the food and the last of the coffee. There is never leftover food or drink when there are teens around.

I had a few periods during the day when I could have watched the speech but I decided to save it for later. When I got home I saw some of it on the news and watched the rest on the internet and I was really pleased I waited to have the time to really take in what was said.

It was a very emotional day. The TV coverage of the event showed black and white Australians celebrating, embracing and quietly wiping away tears while they listened to the apology. It has made some truly wonderful promises - that the health, literacy and numeracy of indigenous Australians will improve, that indigenous life expectanacy will move closer to that of white Australians and that we, as a nation, will move towards reconciliation.

My family has lived in Australia since 1797 but I doubt any of my ancestors ever felt as proud of being Australian as I did yesterday when I heard that apology. And when I saw our Prime Minister welcome individual black Australians as they came to Parliament House with the words: hello, I'm Kevin, and a handshake or an embrace, I knew that I was watching something really significant happen.

There are times that we look back on, and with the benefit of hindsight, know that time was important. We don't need time to know that what happened in Australia yesterday was significant, decent, honest and long overdue. Along with all the tears, a lot of joy came from that apology and I believe we've been changed by it. I hope we remain as united as we are right now. As the first item of business in our new parliament, this set the tone for what will come, and I for one am very optimistic about what will follow.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Government of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

I offer you this apology without qualification.

We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.

We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied.

We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.

In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation - from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the Government and the Parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally.

Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that.

Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.

I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.

My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia.

And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us. Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot.
For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong.
It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history. Today's apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs. It is also aimed at building a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians - a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt.
Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians - to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives.
But the core of this partnership for the future is to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities.
This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between indigenous and non-indigenous children and, within a generation,to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between indigenous and non-indigenous in overall life expectancy.
The truth is: a business as usual approach towards indigenous Australians is not working.
Most old approaches are not working.
We need a new beginning, a new beginning which contains real measures of policy success or policy failure; a new beginning, a new partnership, on closing the gap with sufficient flexibility not to insist on a one-size-fits-all approach for each of the hundreds of remote and regional indigenous communities across the country but instead allowing flexible,tailored, local approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national objectives that lie at the core of our proposed new partnership; a new beginning that draws intelligently on the experiences of new policy settings across the nation.
However, unless we as a Parliament set a destination for the nation, we have no clear point to guide our policy, our programs or our purpose; we have no centralised organising principle.

Let us resolve today to begin with the little children, a fitting place to start on this day of apology for the stolen generations.
Let us resolve over the next five years to have every indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled in and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper pre-literacy and pre-numeracy programs.
Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial pre-school year.
Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to build future educational opportunities for indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventive health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote indigenous communities up to four times higher than in othercommunities.
None of this will be easy. Most of it will be hard, very hard. But none of it is impossible, and all of it is achievable with clear goals, clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap.
The mood of the nation is for reconciliation now, between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The mood of the nation on indigenous policy and politics is now very simple.
The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide.
Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967 referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.
Let me take this one step further and take what some may see as a piece of political posturing and make a practical proposal to the opposition on this day, the first full sitting day of the new Parliament.
I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past.
I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement, to begin with, an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years.

It will be consistent with the Government's policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. If this commission operates well, I then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians, consistent with the longstanding platform commitments of my party and the pre-election position of the opposition.
This would probably be desirable in any event because, unless such a proposition were absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum. As I have said before, the time has come for new approaches to enduring problems.
Working constructively together on such defined projects would, I believe, meet with the support of the nation. It is time for fresh ideas to fashion the nation's future.
Mr Speaker, today the Parliament has come together to right a great wrong. We have come together to deal with the past so that we might fully embrace the future. We have had sufficient audacity of faith to advance a pathway to that future, with arms extended rather than with fists still clenched.
So let us seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection.
Let us take it with both hands and allow this day, this day of national reconciliation, to become one of those rare moments in which we might just be able to transform the way in which the nation thinks about itself, whereby the injustice administered to the stolen generations in the name of these, our parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, at the deepest level of our beliefs, the real possibility of reconciliation writ large: reconciliation across all indigenous Australia; reconciliation across the entire history of the often bloody encounter between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and those who, like me, came across the seas only yesterday; reconciliation which opens up whole new possibilities for the future.
It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries of our settled history to a close, as we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration and awe these great and ancient cultures we are truly blessed to have among us cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread linking our Australian continent to the most ancient prehistory of our planet.
Growing from this new respect, we see our indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together, the great practical challenges that indigenous Australia faces in the future.
Let us turn this page together: indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, government and opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter in our nation's story together.
First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let's grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia. I commend the motion to the House.

It's been a long time coming but this morning, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will apologise to the aboriginal people and the stolen generations, for the injustices and hurt caused by government policies of the past.

There is a full story about it here, but for those of you who know little of our history it used to be government policy to take some aboriginal children from their parents and have them raised by church institutions or white families. About 100,000 families were affected between 1910 and 1970.

Australia is divided on this issue. Many people think we should not apologise for something we didn't do but I agree with Kevin Rudd. I think it is the right thing for him, as the current Prime Minister, to apologise for the actions of former governments that we now know to be wrong and which caused a lot of pain and sorrow.

Today, the Neighbourhood Centre I work at is hosting a morning tea for our town's residents so we can watch the apology together. I have an Aboriginal flag to hang as a sign of respect for our fellow Australians.

This is an historic day in Australia. I hope the apology will help heal the stolen generations and their families. We have a long way to go but hopefully this will be the first step towards reconciliation.

I'm bad. Here I am telling every one who will listen to stop spending on all those little bits and pieces that make your dollars disappear, and I go and buy lunch for myself when I was at work yesterday. I bought a cheese and salad multigrain roll and a piece of fruit cake from the lovely Swiss bakery in Maleny.

It cost me $6.50! If I did that every day I worked it would cost almost $20 a week for lunch. Doing it all year, would cost almost $1000.

I was running late again yesterday and I was supposed to be going to a lunch meeting where I thought sandwiches would be served, so I didn't bother taking lunch. The meeting was cancelled. No problems, I'll just have some of the crackers and cheese I put in the fridge last week. The cheese was gone! I went to the bakery.

There always seems to be a good excuse for spending. When I am in the shop it feels like the most natural thing in the world to buy what I have my sights set on, but I always regret it later. I have been very slack with my money lately. Last month we decided to live off the stockpile to make sure we rotated the stock properly. I only took a small amount of grocery money for milk and vegies and we left the bulk of the grocery money in the bank. However, instead of dividing up the rest of the money into my plastic bags as I always do, I just put it in my purse. We ran out of money for the first time in a couple of years.

If I am to save money and cut down on everything, I need to organise myself so it is easy to do. Having all the money in my purse is the worst way for me to organise my money. It's too difficult to budget that way. Having money ready to spend when you go out is too much of a temptation, and when these things are just a few dollars I talk myself into the spending by telling myself it's just a few dollars, it won't matter.

It matters.

Today I'm taking a backup lunch to work with me and if I don't take my lunch again, then I will have to go without. It will do me good. I've also reminded myself how easy it is to let money just slowly leak away. I need to be mindful of that all the time. I don't need another reminder for a while. I'll stay on track now.

How are you going with your budgeting? Do you fall off the edge of your budget sometimes? And if you do, how do you recover from it. How are you organising your cash so that you don't spend it when you go out? I'd be interested to know how others organise their money and how they stay on track.

I had a lovely day yesterday working away quietly in my home. Hanno was up on the roof cleaning 10 years worth of dirt off with Jens' pressure cleaner hose and as he stayed up there most of the day, I think he enjoyed every minute of it. I started off my day watching the end of a DVD one of the ladies here sent me. It was the BBC program It's Not Easy Being Green - 2 DVDs, eight programs. It's the true story of an English family who moved from a city to a small village in Cornwall on the road to a greener life. We started watching it the night before and I very really keen to see their progression from normal suburban family life to being self sufficient in water, electricity, biodiesel and much of their food. What a wonderful program! They installed a water wheel, solar and wind power, used water from their own spring, grew organic vegetables and kept pigs and chickens. None of which they'd done before. Their website is here with recipes, a great forum and lots of info.

I did the ironing when I finished watching and thought about that family while I worked. They were quite inspiring and when the DVD ended they were starting to conduct school groups through their farm to teach children the importance of a green lifestyle. That part is significant, I think. It's not just the doing of it, we have to be showing others what is possible and how we can all play a part, even if that part is small.

Our garden is looking pretty grim at the moment. Most of the garden beds are empty or just hold the last sad remnants of our summer garden. I cut into our last pumpkin yesterday, we are eating store bought tomatoes again and bitter, tasteless lettuces from the market. I even bought canned tomatoes to make some tomato and chilli relish! I usually have enough tomatoes to make sauce, whole tomatoes in jars and lots of relish but this summer's rain knocked the tomatoes on the head early in the season and we scraped by with fresh tomatoes for a short time and then started buying them from the store. I really dislike buying tomatoes because they are invariably perfect looking but lack taste. Nothing beats the fresh organic vegetables we grow in our backyard.

I started planting seeds yesterday afternoon. So far I have a tray of Siberian kale, a short bush variety of cucumber, zucchinis, pink farmstyle pumpkin - the seeds from a local friend, and sugarloaf cabbage. I'll go to Green Harvest during the week and see what goodies they have for the new season, and to the green grocer for organic potatoes to plant. I hope they have Dutch Creams as I fancy a garden bed full of them.

This is the recipe for the tomato and chilli relish:

I felt the seasons change slightly yesterday. There was a nip in the air when I took the dogs outside early in the morning, and although it didn't stay cool for long, I know Autumn is not far away. Autumn is my favourite time of year. It's still warm in the daytime, cool at night and there is that wonderful change happening in the garden. Trees shift from green to gold and red, leaves fall, flowers bloom and we plant our main vegetable garden for the year.

There is not much growing now, just a few late eggplant and cucumbers, my experimental pineapple, herbs and fruit. It's the fruit that keeps us going at the moment, although we aren't eating much of it yet but there are lemons and bananas growing, plenty of passionfruit almost ready to pick and the blueberries arejust starting.

I wandered around the garden yesterday taking these photos for you. The first is the loquat tree. We cut this back heavily last year because it was too tall for us to pick any fruit. The bats ate the entire crop. This year I hope we get to share with them as I would love to make loquat jam. There are no loquats on the tree yet, and that may be the result of the pruning but I'll keep my eye on it for further developments.

Right next to the loquat tree is a group of about six bananas. There is only one bunch of bananas this year but if we can keep the birds and bats away, they'll be ready to eat late April. The birds love to eat the nectar from that red flower at the end of the spike. When that falls off and the bananas are a bit bigger, we can cut them off and hang the bunch in the shed to ripen.

Behind the bananas the creek is flowing slowly by. It's been much higher than it is right now but it's still holding a fair amount of water that will spill into the Pacific Ocean about 10 kms from here. Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

Walking next to the fence that runs along the creek bed we find these golden passionfruit growing. There are about 40 fruit on the vines now. When we harvest them in the next couple of weeks, we'll cut the vines back so we have healthy growth later in the year.

And here is the aquaponics garden I planted out yesterday. In the foreground are yellow button squash, and behind are Roma tomatoes and dwarf green beans. We've had the aquaponics garden for almost a year now, so we're still novices, but we're happy with it most of the time. Hanno cleaned this grow tank out a couple of weeks ago and removed all the old roots and leaves left by past crops.

I'll be able to do that research tomorrow as that is when we get our broadband speed back again after almost three weeks of a speed limited service. I haven't been able to visit many of my favourite blogs during that time because sometimes the pages didn't load at all, or they took so long I gave up. I will have a good time tomorrow catching up with what everyone has been doing.

Hello swappers! We just wanted to remind all of you that today is the deadline for mailing your parcel to your swap buddy. Don't forget to let your buddy know that you have mailed it and also drop a quick e-mail to either Lorraine or myself (Sharon) so that we can keep track of everyone's parcel. When you receive your parcel please let one of us know and send a photo to me (Sharon) so we can post a "parade of tea cosies" after all are received. Have a wonderful week-end! Sharon and Lorraine

I was very busy at work this week. We're moving to a another building soon and I've been getting removalist quotes and finding out what we need to do to change our phone, internet and electricity, as well as going to the new building to work out where desks will be placed so our electrician can install new outlets. I've also been trying to get our financial records in order because our previous bookkeeper left, I'm the new bookkeeper and our treasurer is away. Add to that a report for tonight's committee meeting, dealing with our clients and interviewing new volunteers, and the three days went by in a flash. I'm going to take it slow today, go to the meeting tonight and get back to my work here tomorrow. It's good to take a day off from everything occasionally.

Some of the comments left are very special to me. I really love knowing when readers see a way to change and when they suddenly "get it". There was one such comment a couple of days ago: Jenn said...
I've been lurking about for a while now. Enjoying your posts on the simple things in life and thinking about life on the other side of the world. I have thought about this post all day! I often feel guilty for wanting to just be at home. But now I realize that is how it's supposed to be. My home is my HOME. It's where I am nourished, where I rest, where I pray and where I love.
That's right Jenn, you got it! Home is where you're nourished, it's not just a building.

When I had my eureka! moment, I suddenly knew that if I wanted to feel comfortable in my own home, if I wanted a safe and pleasant place to live where I could nurture my family and myself, I had to make that space myself. I had to make my home what I wanted it to be. This is one of the many significant and life changing things that you can't buy in any store, anywhere in the world. A home is not made with appliances, new dinner plates or big flat screen TVs. A home has a much more complex character than that. A home is the sum total of the work you put into it and the joy you get out of it.

For me, making a home meant developing a routine that met all my needs and then following that routine as well as I could. It is important to me to have a clean and comfortable bed to sleep in every night, so I make sure I make the bed every morning, the sheets are clean, there are enough pillows, we have books to read, a light to read under, cool sheets in summer and flannel sheets in winter. We also like having warm fresh bread for lunch, so I make that happen every day. Just after I make the bed, I start the bread so it's ready for lunch. Neither of us likes a dirty floor, so I sweep every day. We love having morning tea together on the front verandah, so I make sure we have a nice hot pot of tea and something home baked like pikelets, orange cake or muffins, or a million other things. I love organic fresh vegetables, so Hanno does a lot of gardening to ensure a reasonable supply. We like using good soap, so instead of buying "natural" soap for $3 a piece, I make it at home. Washing is hung out in the sun because it's lovely to look at, it smells of sunshine when it's brought in and it saves a mountain of money running the clothes dryer. I hope you get what I mean - we have identified what makes us feel comfortable and cared for and we make it happen in our own home.

But it is not only the work that defines a home. It is also the joy you find in being there. It is taking the time to relax and recover, as well as having a secure place to watch your family grow into strong and capable people.

Our home is where we are really ourselves. Sometimes we are weak here. It is where we are naked and vulnerable but it's also where we find our strength. We wear what we want, we sleep without fear, we wash, cook, eat, read, create and regenerate. We enrich our lives with our work because we know we are doing what it takes to make living here exactly what we want it to be. We see a reason for the work we do - it's not something we put off until it must be done, we do our work because it gives us our lives and our home. Whatever we put into our home in terms of housekeeping and gardening, we get back again ten fold.

So you see, your home isn't just the address you spend time at between work days and trips to the shop. Home is the place that will enrich your spirit and make it possible for you to gain the strength to live. And as Jenn so eloquently put it: "It's where I am nourished, where I rest, where I pray and where I love."

Only you know what it is that makes you and your family happy; only you can make your home the place that produces that particular kind of happiness. You don't create a home by creating a showpiece - that's just a house. A home is created first in the heart and then it is pieced together, bit by bit, with all members of the family playing their own part, to make it a home you all thrive in.

I wrote yesterday about focusing on your home and the importance of seeing your work there with respect. One of the things that helped me refocus on my life at home was to do things that I really enjoyed and that helped me live up to my new values. I taught myself to knit and sew again. I had done these things earlier in life but put them aside thinking they were irrelevant when I could buy, ready-made, whatever I needed. I've already told you, to my shame, that I used to throw away shirts and skirts rather than sew on a button or mend a small rip. I regret doing those things but it did teach me the true waste of doing it and that knitting, sewing, mending, patchwork and dressmaking are fine skills to have and necessary when I want to use everything to its full extent.

I bought my first ever sewing machine when my children were small and I wanted to repair their clothes. That didn't last long though and that sewing machine sat in the cupboard, unused, for many years. I started using it again about five years ago and when I took it to be serviced and the mechanic told me that it would stand only one more service, I decided to give it away on freecycle on buy another sewing machine. I use it frequently.

Although I knit, sew and make simple patchwork I don't regard myself as having a craft hobby, or even having the skill of a crafter. I see this work as housework. I don't sew and knit for pleasure, although there is much pleasure in it, I do it for the practical reasons of economy and maintenance, and to make unique practical items for my home.

I know some of you will be new to sewing and knitting, and some will not have taken up the needles for many years, so I want to encourage you to give it a try. I think there is a lot to be gained in learning these skills. You'll save money when you mend clothes rather than waste them, you'll be able to make unique gifts instead of buying one of a million, you'll be able to sew curtains, cushion covers, aprons, shopping bags, dishcloths, jug covers, napkins, tablecloths and tea towels. The list is long.

I've collected a number of sites that have helped me in recent years, maybe you will find help there too. I'll also include my stitchery how to and the link to my free stitchery patterns. I hope you gain a lot of enjoyment with your knitting and sewing, I have, although I'm not nearly good enough for my own liking yet. But I do get by and produce many things for my home that I'm proud of and use frequently. My hope is that you find that pleasure too.

Fingerless gloves. I am knitting these this winter.

Knitty.com this is a nice knitting site with lots of wonderful ideas

How to sew - basic instructions to get your started.

Homespun Living - Deb's blog is a lovely mix of sewing, knitting and cooking.

Turkey feathers - this is a lovely blog for sewing and various craft ideas.
Sew Mama Sew

The wonderful rosehip blog.

These are just a few sites where you can teach yourself how to sew, mend and knit. If you know any other links that freely givegood advice, with pictures, please add them to your comment so we can all share this important homemakers' list.

PS: I have to apologise to many of you who are waiting for a reply to your email. I hope to have the time to get to them tomorrow. I do appreciate your notes and always enjoy catching up with what everyone is doing.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it took to kick start my simple life. I used to think it was to stop spending, but I realise now that was the consequence of something else I did. The big change was to focus on what I did at home and to make my home the most important place for me.

We grow up with advertising, it's ubiquitous, Wherever you look, there will be an advertisement telling you what to buy, where to get it and how wonderful you'll feel when you buy that product. When we wake in the morning and turn on the TV news, advertising is there to greet you. Read the paper - more ads. Go to work or to the park and you'll probably pass billboards and advertising signs along the way. You come home to relax and if you turn on the TV, every few minutes, ads will be telling you what you can't do without and how to get it. You've just spent another day in the modern world - bombarded by advertising.

Advertising make us look outside our homes to find what satisfies us. It teaches us that when we see what we like, we should have it. It never teaches prudence or patience; quite the contrary, it encourages us to go into debt to buy whatever our hearts desire.

My heart's desire is to live well, to be happy and safe and to feel satisfied by what I do each day. Since I started living as I do, I have achieved all those desires. I have never seen any of them advertised on TV or even in the slickest magazine. It's obvious you can't buy the experience of living well, the sense of being happy and safe or the inclination towards satisfaction. These, my friends are all handmade treasures, you have to make them all yourself. And you do it at home.

I believe that focusing on what you're doing at home and knowing that everything you do is a gift to yourself or your family helps build a better life. Go back to the old ways - it's healthier, cheaper and it will give you back your independence. Learning how to look after your family, yourself and your home without buying convenience foods, chemical cleaners and new appliances will liberate you. The money you earn each week will stay in your own bank account, or will allow you to pay off your debts, instead of adding to the billions we all give over to supermarkets and multi-national companies.

Advertising forces you to look outwards all the time. It constantly tells you that your happiness is waiting for you at a store. I would like to encourage you to focus on your home. Start small. You could start by making your own laundry powder (there is a recipe here) or bread (recipe in the sidebar), maybe you could start stockpiling so you don't have to shop as frequently as you do now. Start cooking from scratch or cleaning with non-chemical cleaners. It could be anything. Your start might be to make your bed each morning so that when you go to bed each night you can look forward to a lovely warm and cosy bed. Maybe you could start by making up a roster of chores for the children so that everyone helps at home and you start teaching them how to look after themselves - that is the most wonderful gift. You might start walking to work or making sure you take 20 minutes out of an otherwise busy day to make a cup of tea and sit quietly to relax for a while. You might turn off the TV or the lights more often, or start monitoring your own usage of electricity or water. Maybe you mend a ripped shirt instead of throwing it away, or cut up old towels for rags. There are so many small ways to start and once started, it's easy to add another small thing, then another.

You will find that as you do this, your focus will be on your home. Do your tasks slowly and mindfully and that will help you slow your mind too. See the work you do at home with new respect. It's not an annoyance, it will make your home, and your experience of living there, better - you're building a new way of life. As you work towards what you want for yourself and slowly, piece by piece, add to the fabric of your life, you will see that each level makes you stronger and less reliant on what you'll find outside. And once you find the true joy of being independent and capable of providing your own needs, nothing else will be good enough for you.

Clicking on these photos will enlarge them.

I had another day at home alone yesterday ... pure bliss. Hanno and the boys went off to the one day cricket match, between Australia and India, in Brisbane. I watched the start of it, I think the end was washed out but I was too engrossed in my own day to take much notice. Just after they left, I took tea and a piece of orange cake out on the verandah and read Warm Earth magazine. In January the first of my regular articles appeared and part of the payment is three copies of the magazine. The magazine comes out every two months so I'll be giving away two magazines here to regular commenters each time I receive them.

After morning tea, during brief patches of sunshine, I started clipping back the shrubs in the front garden. Our front garden is like a jungle at the moment because the regular rain over the past couple of months has made it all grow like Topsy. I guess I spent an hour or two out there clipping away, listening to the whipbirds and kookaburras. I pulled out a few wild palms and pines that planted their own seeds and while it doesn't look too controlled - I like a wild garden - it does look cared for now.

It's a lovely place to spend some time. There were no neighbours around, no kids playing, it was just me with the dogs and the sound of the birds. Every so often I sat on our garden bench to take in the morning, the dogs came over for a cuddle, the air was warm and with the sun filtering through the pines, it gave me a feeling of genuine connection with the land we live on. I don't like to say the land we own because I think it owns us, and for all the time trees have grown here, and birds, snakes, insects and marsupials have lived here, our time, in comparison, is but a heartbeat and inconsequential in the bigger picture. But it is good to know that for the short time we spend here, we are surrounded and possessed by the beauty of it. We belong here and we will keep this land healthy and fertile for those who come after us.

After lunch I took a chair and my knitting into the back yard. I sat under the shade of a fig tree, and with the clicking of my needles and the gentle clucking of the chooks, I spent a lazy hour thinking, watching and appreciating. No amount of money can buy the feeling of contentment you feel when you're truly a home in your own space.

When the rain brought me back inside I watched a bit of the cricket then did some research for my next Warm Earth article. I started the document that will become the article, making several notes about important points I want to focus on. I'm writing about feeding chickens.

The rest of the afternoon went by too soon and before I knew it the dogs, cat and fish all needed to be fed. As darkness fell I warmed up a bowl of mushroom soup I made yesterday then sat down with my knitting to watch the cricket again. It had been washed out, so I got my dog eared copy of the Encyclopedia of Country Living and took it to bed with me to see what Carla had to say about feeding chooks. Hanno woke me up when he came home just before 11pm, but I quickly went back to sleep happy that he was back home safe and sound.

MUSHROOM SOUP

Add the onion, garlic and celery to the butter and olive oil in a pan and cook gently until transparent. Add the mushrooms and cook slowly for five minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover with vegetable stock, bring to the boil then simmer for 30 minutes. Just before serving add parsley and sour cream.

Today is the first of my three work days. We signed the lease on our new building last week so it's now full steam ahead with our relocation and all the preparation that goes with it. We move on February 29.

I hope you all had a lovely weekend. Thank you for taking the time to visit me and for all the helpful comments that remind me of our wonderful blog community.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not consistent with my washing up methods. I swing between using the dishwasher and washing up in the sink. I do this because I can't make up my mind which is the best way. I believe the dishwasher does a better job of cleaning, but I think I do a better job of looking after my kitchen ware if I'm actually touching it and cleaning it myself.

Of course there's also the issue of water, electricity and chemical usage. My dishwasher uses 68 litres of water per wash and I use it once a day. When I wash up in the sink, I do that after each meal, so to improve on the dishwasher I have to use less than 22.6 litres of water each time for washing and rinsing. Generally I can do that, but I don't save much. I think I'm coming in at around 18 litres, three times a day, in the sink, and a couple of litres to pre-rinse the plates. I'm probably saving about 8 litres a day by washing up in the sink. I'm going to see how I go washing up twice a day - breakfast and lunch combined and then dinner. I think I could store the breakfast dishes in the sink so they're not sitting on the sink waiting to be washed.

There haven't been very many studies done on dishwashers versus hand washing. There is a famous one that found washing in the sink used much more water, but the people they studied didn't put a plug in the sink and kept the water tap running over the dishes! How strange. I've never known anyone to wash up like that.

This is what I do. I pre-rinse the plates, removing as much food as I can. Sometimes I use a spatula to do this. I put the soap in the water as I'm filling the sink, then add enough hot water (usually around 14 litres) to suit the amount of dishes I have in the main sink. About four litres of coolish water goes in the rinse sink. I use my own homemade soap because it lathers and gives a better wash than the yellow laundry soap. I used to use one of the "green" detergents but think homemade soap is better. It makes the water look milky - that's okay.

My tools include a dish mop, handmade dishcloth, long handle brush, scrubbing brush and a steel scourer. I don't use rubber gloves. If the soap is left in the hot water while the sink fills, it becomes a bit soft. I rub the soap on the dishcloth and dish mop and use them for the glasses, cups, plates, bowls and cutlery. The soap is then put in the soap rack. The dish mop allows me to use hotter water than I could with just the dishcloth. The dish mop, and sometimes the long handled brush, are used for jars and anything that needs scrubbing inside. The steel scourer is used on pots and pans. BTW, a plastic handled scrubbing brush was almost ten dollars at the store. I bought this shoe brush instead for $2.45, it's just as good.

I wash up in this order: glasses and jars, cups, saucers, plates, bowls, cutlery, pots, pans. Everything is washed thoroughly and inspected for cracks and damage, everything is rinsed and left to dry. I only dry wine glasses because I want them to shine.

When I wash up in the dishwasher, I pre-rinse some plates, but usually just pack everything in after use. After dinner at night, I start the dishwasher up, it's unpacked the next morning. I use Finish powder every second wash and alternate it with washing soda. I don't use a rinse aid and I don't use dishwasher "fresheners". I use vinegar to clean the dishwasher every month.

On the days I work, we use the dishwasher because Hanno doesn't like washing up. I like washing in the sink so I do that on the days I spend at home. I would like to find an alternative to using my regular dishwashing powder so if you have any ideas, let me know. At the moment I use it one day and washing soda the next. I have also used half and half dishwashing powder and washing soda. It works well but using what I am now is easier and uses the same amount of both. I'm sure there would be a healthier alternative. I wonder what you're all using.

Just like everything else we look after, we also care for our cleaning tools. On the day I clean the dishwasher with vinegar, I make up a bowl of weak strength liquid bleach - about 2 litres water with ½ cup of bleach added - and I soak the brushes, scourer and dish mop in that solution for a couple of hours. They're all rinse and dried. After every wash, I shake out the dish mop so it dries out between uses. The dishcloths and tea towels are changed every day and washed with the general laundry. If the dishcloths are very dirty or greasy, I soak them in oxygen bleach (nappy soaker) before washing.

I'm sure there are many different way to clean dishes. If you've worked out a great way to save resources while cleaning effectively, please let us all know about it.