There Are Quietly Good Days

It seems like I have spent the last few months obsessing about my miseries - diabetes, depression, and other emotional issues, and although I enjoyed our holiday in Nelson and Golden Bay, these things have been my focus. To remind myself of how those things are not the totality of my existence, I decided to write a 'what I did today' blog. So often the ordinary good gets forgotten in the midst of the misery.

After a broken night's sleep, I got up late and breakfasted on blueberries (picked by me at Blueberry Country in summer), homemade sprouted and dried buckwheat, sunflower seed, almond, coconut cereal, homemade probiotic yogurt, raw cacao powder and cinnamon: satisfying to eat homemade food. Plus a glass of doctor-prescribed protein powder mixed with probiotic yogurt.

Food has become part of my ill-health / health obsession, but it feels good to make the food that is helping me heal. Lunch was a large salad of mixed greens, seeds, dried tomatoes, olives, gifted beetroot, homegrown bean and seed sprouts, homemade sauerkraut, and cheese. Dinner has become a small meal here, so tonight it is homeproduced eggs on Venerdi SuperSeeded Paleo bread.

The usual morning round of feeding and watering the cat, dog, ducks and chooks resulted in 7 eggs. The chooks are coming back on lay and soon I'll be looking for new customers to buy them, now that Mac isn't working at the council regularly any more.

I was going to help Mac with firewood, but while feeding the ducks, I noticed that my garlic and shallots were lying all over the mulch, pulled out by marauding pukeko! The fierce winds had ripped down some of the windbreak, allowing the wretched birds in. Just as a toddler will try every identical biscuit on the plate, discarding each after one bite because they don't like that kind, so the pukeko had pulled each bulb out, pecked a bit, and thrown the disliked plant away. So once again I planted and mulched them, hoping they will survive, and mended the windbreak fence.

Next it was time to get back to helping Mac by 'stacking' the wood he had chainsawed up. (Stacking = chucking in a heap in the old water tank he converted into a woodshed.) After lunch we headed down to the pinenut tree which broke in half and landed on the boundary fence in the big storm. It's the first year the tree had produced cones but the tree was dropped before the cones developed, which is very disappointing. However, there is quite a lot of wood to fuel our fire next year - and quite a lot of work to do still! We have cleared the fence though, and it only needs 4 new batons to fix it.

At the end of this day, I am tired and have a sore back (a soak in a bath with epsom salt helped), a basketful of forgotten wet washing, and a pleasant sense of satisfaction and of being in my right place in this world.