Sleepless Nights

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  • International Women’s Day

    It’s a universal truth that women have had to fight twice as hard to get half the recognition of men. This year marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day and it shows us how far we’ve come from the suffragette movement of the early 1900’s. It also highlights how far we’ve still got to go, to reach true equality, in all things.

    I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m white and I’m living in a developed nation. I have access to health care, I have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be sexually assaulted or abused and I have access to legal channels if these things happen. I’ve got next to no risk of contracting HIV and safe sex practises in my youth meant that whatever risk I had then was negligible.

    Unfortunately, a good portion of women in the world are not as lucky, nor as protected as I am.

    UNHCR is working to raise awareness of women across the globe, who still don’t have access to clean birthing conditions, who are living in refugee tents with their families, who run a real risk of being raped, just living their life.

    90% of war victims at this point in time are civilian women and children, and HIV is running rampant.

    In Bosnia, rape was used as a specific act of war. The age old ‘if you can’t wipe them out, then breed them out’ was taken seriously and thousands of Bosnian women were raped.

    “Lustmord” at MONA highlights this, the work of ink on skin is a reminder of what the women lived through – the words taken from three different viewpoints, the rapist, the victim and a witness.

    Lustmord 1994. Jenny Holzer.

    I think the job that UNHCR is doing is fantastic, in all honesty. Providing clean birth kits to Somalian women to help decrease maternal and infant mortality is a wonderful thing.

    However.

    [And there is always a however with me.]

    I am a big believer in ‘Think Global, Act Local’. I support everything UNCHR is doing, wholeheartedly, but I would like to know what the mortality rate for Aboriginal women giving birth in the Outback is.

    The indigenous infant mortality rate in the Northern Territory in 2002 was 18.1/1000 births – higher than the combined non-indigenous infant mortality rate of ALL states and territories.

    The lowest indigenous infant mortality rate was 9.5/1000 in NSW.

    I’m sorry, but those numbers are horrific. We are a developed nation and yet, nearly 4 times the amount of aboriginal babies died in the Northern Territory in 2002? REALLY?

    The average life expectancy also throws up large issues. The average life expectancy for an non-indigenous Australian woman is 82.6 years, yet for an indigenous women in the NT, it is a mere 50 years.

    We have made huge strides in the last 100 years – International Women’s Day shows that, however, that entire hundred years was not forward progress for all women. The Stolen Generation (if you can’t wipe ’em out, them breed ’em out) is a sad history in Australia and the figures I have stated above shows just how far we’ve yet to come.

    All we can hope for is continued forward movement, because looking at those numbers makes me realise just how very privileged my life truly is.

    There is a push this year, to get people on social networks thinking about women who may not have a voice to speak out with.

    **

    Figures taken from here.

    Disclaimer: UNHCR contacted me and asked if I’d like to write about the work they are doing. I used this as my soapbox to get to talk about Aboriginal women; something that they didn’t bring up. I was not compensated for any of this post, nor would I ask to be. I like my soapbox, but you don’t have to.

  • The death of a garden

    I mentioned in yesterday’s post about stolen ducks that my entire “big” garden was destroyed by frost.

    Corn.

    Wide angle lens – the tomato patch was 2x3m (plus tomatoes in the small garden that I lost too – not pictured).

    We also lost the 15 pumpkin vines, 8 zucchini plants, all the basil, all the cucumbers, the rockmelon and watermelon (that were doing badly anyway).

    The entire summer crop, gone. Sigh.

    I’m going to go out this afternoon and see how many of the green tomatoes I can save, either to ripen inside, or to make green tomato sauce/chutney out of.

    There are farmers in Victoria whose entire farms are under water still – while mine is only a tiny loss in the scheme of things, these were still plants I was hoping to use to see my family through winter. I can understand the gut wrenching feeling of realising that everything you planted has died.

    A lot of empathy for the farmers this week. I only lost a small amount of money invested and everything else was time and energy, and I’m still devastated.

  • Sometimes, people are utter bastards. So is the weather.

    On top of the stress, some bastard stole 17 of my ducklings.

    I am, as you can expect, rather angry about this.

    The ducklings were here and accounted for at 4.30pm when we got home from Isaac’s psych assessment and I couldn’t see them at 7pm last night when I was on the phone to Mum. At the time, of course, I just assumed that the mother had put them and herself to bed already, and I filled up the water containers, didn’t bother doing a full head count and went back inside.

    This morning when I woke up to a frost, I figured I’d best check to make sure everything had survived the night.

    Outside, I found 3 ducklings with one mother and one mother with no babies at all.

    A quick walk around the paddock found one duckling in a nest that they’d slept in, obviously suffocated – this duckling belonged with the 3 other live babies. (How can I tell you ask? They were slightly different colours, because of a 2 day age difference). Obviously that mother had slept indoors with her 4 babies.

    A long slow walk around the paddock turned up nothing.

    A detailed examination of all the water containers, the blackberries, the septic tank, the marshy back corner and ALL the surrounding paddocks (risking electrocution and plover attacks), plus the sides of the road and the paddock across the road, showed nothing.

    17 ducklings, vanished.

    Last night, as I cooked dinner, Maisy barked at the window. We ignored it, being busy, figuring she was barking at the cat. Now, we assume she was barking at whoever was in the yard, stealing ducklings. Cars and people stop at the front of our house all of the time, so it’s not something we pay attention to anymore.

    Moral of the story? Always check when the dog is barking. Always.

    I’ve been on the phone to the police this morning who agree with me, that losing 17 is definitely theft, as a hawk or snake would only take 1-2, and not 17 in a 3 hour time frame. And if they’d died of anything else, I would have found remains.

    I am so upset. They’re only 4-5 days old and so so fragile still. They won’t survive if they’re separated from each other and they’re probably already doing badly without their mother. I’m worried about them, hand rearing ducklings is hard work. The RSPCA has also been notified, so that they know to ring me if ducklings start arriving there.

    On top of the duckling theft, we had a major frost that wasn’t forecast on my weather forecast and I lost nearly the entire contents of my garden.

    All of my tomatoes are dead, or dying. I didn’t even get any to ripen on the bush this year. I’ll save what I can for green tomato chutney and for ripening inside, but still. That’s over 100 tomato plants dead.

    All my pumpkins died. I was able to rescue 3 half grown pumpkins off the vines, but all the vines are dead.

    All of the zucchini. All of the corn, the basil, the cucumbers.

    Everything.

    You know how sometimes it just feels like too much? Yeah, this is too much. The stuff in my garden was for preserving and bottling, to get us through winter, on a tight budget. The ducklings would have been sold at the growers market in a few months.

    I am Not Impressed.

  • Ethics and integrity

    A while ago, the Blog With Integrity movement swept through the US mummybloggers. Like most things, I ignored it, because having a button on my sidebar isn’t going to change who I am deep down, and you’ve either got integrity, or you don’t.

    I spoke on a panel at the University of Tas almost 12 months ago and walked away knowing that because bloggers don’t have unions and a legal team to protect them, this means that we need to try twice as hard to adhere to good ethics.

    Ethics are something we seem to avoid discussing here, because we don’t want to accuse anyone of not being ethical, but I think it’s a discussion that might be a bit overdue, so I’m going to jump up on my soapbox with a drum for a while.

    Ethics are what make us good people. They’re the difference between us creating good original content, or being link farms. They’re what make us tread the line between being inspired by someone, or stealing content and making up a story to go with it. You don’t believe that happens? It does. Bloggers have had their lives stolen before and it will likely happen again.

    You can have the best content in the internet, but if you’re not seen as honest, or ethical, people won’t touch you, and people are sponsors, they’re your traffic. People are everything.

    It can take years to build a reputation, but treating people badly will destroy it, very quickly.

    I have a few rules I stick to, that work for me.

    1) You don’t know who someone is? It doesn’t matter. Treat everyone with the same amount of respect, regardless of how “big” or “small” you consider them to be on the Internet.

    2) Be honest. If you say something, own it. You might still be wrong anyway, but at least you’ve owned it. You might also be in the right, and still spend hours defending what you said. Disclose your relationship with sponsors. I don’t care that it’s not law in Aus yet, transparency is never a bad thing. This is one area we can do better in than old media.

    3) Link. Link link link link. You love something and it inspired you to write? LINK. You quote someone? LINK. You want to discuss a point that someone made? Link them. If you link, then people can read as much as possible on the topic you’re talking about. News sites sometimes forget to link when we’re quoted and bloggers get grumpy. It doesn’t mean that we have to forget to link too.

    4) Be accessible. I want people to be able to comment here, honestly. I want feedback and I want conversation. Being accessible, for me, means following back on twitter and engaging in discussion. It means replying to tweets and following on from that…

    5) Reply to emails. I cannot tell you how frustrating I find people who don’t reply to emails. I hate sending an email and getting no reply, I think it’s the height of rudeness. I like email conversations and backwards and forwards and will sometimes email for days with people. If you email me about something, I will reply. Exceptions are made for viagra sellers. If you’ve emailed me and I haven’t responded at all, it’s because my kids have been into my emails clicking things and it’s shown up as already read, so I don’t double check it. Send it again.

    I strive to be nice to everyone. In real life, I am terribly awkward and I have issues with small talk and knowing what to say – that doesn’t mean I’m not nice, or that I don’t like you. It means that I have social anxiety and I don’t know what to say to make the conversation flow. You can find me at the conference either organising everyone like a drill sergeant (with much less screaming), or hyperventilating in the toilets.

    We don’t have much in this online space to make us stand out, for goodness sakes, at least let us be seen as ethical.

  • Ducklings and advice on weddings please?

    Oh my word has it been a big week over here. Not only did I get engaged and get quoted in the newspaper, but yesterday I sold another one of my ducks to Lauren (I hear he’s going to be very tasty), and had another six ducklings born. Now I’ve just got two ducks left sitting on eggs, so a minor duckling explosion is likely to happen again soon.

    I’m still very excited about getting engaged, although I started researching prices of things and had to walk away from the computer. I have a budget, it’s very tight and very tiny and I will get married and it will be fantastic, regardless of the fact that we won’t be having white linen napkins and a sit down dinner.

    Considering the Internet is very clever and appears to be populated with women and men who have married someone, I would love to ask for your wedding stories if that’s possible?

    What did you do that worked brilliantly and you loved?

    What did you think you would love, but it didn’t work out so well?

    And what did you do to cut costs?

    When I say I’ve got a very small budget, think tiny. Teensy. Like, I’m planning on getting married for under $1000 if I can do it. Also, if you’ve got suggestions for where to buy cheap things, I’m all ears. I priced wedding invitations and somehow, I think I might be making and printing my own. Ebay looks good so far too.

    I guess the big thing is a dress of some description and enough good food and company to have a fantastic party afterwards.

    And in unrelated news, my garden is going relatively well, for dirt that hasn’t had anything done to it for years and therefore, has no nutritional goodness in it (yet). (Watch me plant the entire thing in green manure crops this winter)

    Tiny female pumkin flower – the first one on this particular vine.

    Not sure what type of pumpkin this is, my seeds were a heirloom variety for cooler areas. It could be a butternut. It looks delicious though. It’s about 20cm long at the moment.I’ve got another two bigger ones on different vines, both different types.

    And my tomatoes are doing well enough, even if the plants are smaller than what I’d hoped for and the fruit is steadfastly refusing to ripen up yet. A frost a few days ago killed the tips of some of the plants, but they will survive. As a side note: Frost? In February? Come on Tasmania, I know we haven’t had a summer, but really?! REALLY?!

    Anyway. Wedding tips. Give me all you’ve got.