The weather was filthy today!! I had to drive over to Devonport and it was the kind of rain that you can’t see through even with the windscreen wipers on full tilt!
Yesterday was fairly blah (weather wise)… went out to a rally with my cousin, Fiona. Decent turn out despite the wind and rain!
(Thanks Fiona for the photos… I didn’t take my camera)
The rally was a meeting with a lot of interesting speakers in regards to the proposed offshore salmon farms they want to put in here.
Not content with the hideous environmental disaster they’ve caused in other parts of the state… sights are set on the north west coast. (Shudder)
I didn’t know they set off continual underwater explosions to frighten off the seals (and in lots of cases kill or maim the poor things)
(Talking about 80,000 explosions a year!!)
The 20 pens down near Bruny Island make millions $$ per year – and they lease the waters for less than what you can rent a 3 bedroom house for in Burnie for 12 months … AND the daily amount of effluent dumped into the ocean is staggering – equiv. to the population of both Burnie and Devonport sewage waste going into the ocean per day. Boggles my mind.
The Bass Strait is like a whacking big bathtub so what gets dumped in these waters doesn’t have a chance to disperse either.
People’s whose jobs and livelihoods that rely on the ocean are going to be under threat and the rubbish that comes off these farms is quite something.
The seal sculpture below is made up entirely of collected debri from the farms that are found in the water and washed up on the beaches.
Apparently there have been a number of boating accidents when powerboats hit the floating chunks of rope…
All in all there isn’t much good that can come of it but you know how it goes. Someone is making money somewhere. The current business who is slated to do this was bought by some pretty dodgy operators from Brazil.
Sigh… its astounding that you have to fight to stop something like this that should be a no brainer at all.
Political parties at the top are shouting ‘But jobs jobs’ – Not that many and they’re not counting the future jobs lost.
Our coast is stunning. The marine life is amazing. You’ve seen my photos.
You know how gorgeous and precious it is.
Lets hope we can keep it that way!! (There’s something like seven months before ‘D Day’)
I’ve fished out my facewasher and face scrubbies crochet projects and getting them together and sorted for next weekends market. (Uniting Church Fete… Usually a good day they put on!)(looking forward to those scones already!)
Another project I’ve been doing in the background the past few months is a baby blanket – My Japanese friends daughter (who I’ve known since she was a baby) has just had a baby!! (Eeep I feel old haha)
Its a new pattern I learned (thankyou youtube). Its a pretty pattern but it stretched the yarn weird so it doesn’t fold square – which is bugging me!! Its like it turned into a parallelogram or something. I’ve counted all the rows and stitches and they all seem correct!!
So I went and did a tutorial on how to do a bear for the corner of the blanket hoping it takes everyones mind off the skew-wiff nature of the not-square-blanket!
I just have to stitch him on and I’m done!
And this afternoon I put together a couple of batches of soap…
Oatmeal, milk and honey. The bubble wrap should give the top that honeycomb like texture.
And ‘crisp green apple’
This fragrance accelerates the mixture in a crazy way – gets thick very quickly.
So… I decided not to try any tricky colour swirls. And I mixed everything in well before I added the fragrance as a last thing.
It still got chunky quickly but was able to mostly get it in the mould before I had to get the spoon out!!
It looked a little plain so I did a last minute poppy seed sprinkle which looks rather nice!
Okies… back to my fire!
Hope everyone had a fabulous weekend!
Cheers
