Up All Night

We are not procrastinators.

Not really.

Not much.

Well, if I’m being honest…we are a bit.

 As our moving date approached we took the carrot and stick approach of “let’s pack one box and then watch an episode of Doctor Who on DVD.”

 

Yeah…we somehow ended up watching more Doctor Who than packing boxes.

To be fair, we did pack a whole lotta boxes. But any odd shaped or sized thing was relegated to the back room to be dealt with “later.”

 

Suddenly it was the night before the big day and what did we have? A room chock full of stuff and six spiders who needed to be put in their travel boxes. How much time did we have?

 

Until 7am.

 Oh dear.

 So we got cracking. We packed boxes and snacked on any last thing that couldn’t carried with us and worked out little booties off. Unfortunately, because everything left to pack was odd size or shape it was tricky to get it all in a box.

 Did I mention that we were rapidly running out of boxes?

 

At 5am everything but the spiders had been done. We were running on adrenaline and time pressure and love. It was amazing that we had not snapped at each other or murdered the other one.

 

Now, we normally don’t have to put the girls in their travel boxes all at the same time. When we have to clean out their tanks, we do one a day and let them leisurely make their way into the dreaded box with no time pressure.

 But now there was two hours to go and six little girls needed to be cooperative.

 They weren’t.

 Perhaps they could feel our time pressure and we were trying to be as quick and firm as we could, but they needed to get outta the tank and into the box.

 There was  quite a bit of “I don’t want to go in the box!” and “Don’t make me go in the box!”

 How do you know when a spider doesn’t want to do something?

 They tell you.

 Not with words, but with gestures.

 There was much hair flicking (a defence mechanism where a spider uses a leg to flick irritating hairs at the predator) and some defensive postures (see below) to make themselves look big and scary. This usually means “I don’t want to bite you, but I will if I have to. Hopefully if I scare you, you’ll piss off and leave me alone.”



from flickrhivemind.net

 There was one narrow escape attempt by Pippi, but by 6:30am, all were safely in their travel boxes. Poor girls. They were probably quite stressed and frightened and that is the last thing we would want. No wonder they were flicking and posturing. Poor spiders. But they survived and are thriving in their new home, never fear.

 

Did I mention that as soon as Spiderman got a girl into a travel box, I would dash outside as the sun rose in the sky with the tank, empty the substrate, dash back inside and wipe out the tank and wrap it in bubble wrap and place it inside the previous tank (Spiderman had the good sense to pack up the girls from biggest to smallest so the tanks would nest inside themselves).

 

It was done.

 Spiderman took the fastest bath known to man and was out the door with all the spiders safely tucked in his travel bag and headed for the train (what First Capital Connect Train Services doesn’t know won’t hurt them!) so he could get to Wales early and get the keys from the Estate Agent and I was left to collapse in a heap and wait for the removal van to arrive at 9am.

 

Stay tuned for the exciting saga of the Tetris removal van!

Down in the Valleys

Here we are.

 In Wales.

 In the Valleys.

 In the green part of the world.

 We are here.

 It has been three weeks since we arrived and I have hardly had a moment to write for the blog. Have you missed me, oh best beloved? I have missed you. My life is so full of blessings and good things and happiness, but it has also been rather busy and hectic.

 We have just moved to another country after all.

 Let me just say, it has been a strange time of attachment and letting go. We found as we packed that there were lots of things we could let go of. Things we loved, but somehow it felt right to give them up. Our collection of 40+ hedgehog figurines were lovingly boxed up and sent to St Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital so they could sell them in their gift shop to raise money for animal welfare. Visit them here http://www.sttiggywinkles.org.uk/  to see all the good they do for animals. They even said some of our stuff might go in their hedgehog museum!!!  

We also gave up our rock and fossil collection. Really, if I am honest, it just collected dust. It was on top of a book shelf (one I had to stand on my tippy-toes to see) and so I rarely saw it (or dusted it) and we knew it could be better used elsewhere. We gave the rocks to my old school for their science cupboard and the fossils to one of my favourite students who used to drive me potty with his hyperactivity and his constant tapping and humming, but enchanted me with his deep thoughts and ability to take anything electrical apart and put it back together again. He also said funny things like “George the third is my favourite king of England because he went mad” but he couldn’t write the alphabet.

not actually our books, but it felt like that

 

We also weeded about a hundred books, which brought us down to about 573 books.

 

Yes that is brought it down to 573 books.

 

We still have a lot of books. 

 

We looked at things that we have loved, but were extremely fragile and decided they might not survive the move so we gave them away.

 

K-9 was adopted into to a very good home--the Doctor Who crazy daughter of a friend.

 We had a lovely wooden tree that we used to decorate with each season, changing the decorations with each solstice and equinox. It was so fragile that every move we had ever made within Hitchin we had asked a friend to drive it over so it wouldn’t get broken. That just wasn’t an option with this move. So we gave it away.

 

But don’t worry--I came up with a wonderful plan to have a similar but much more compact version that I will share with you soon! Plus some extra wonderful to ways to mark the seasonal changes. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

In the end we gave away dozens upon dozens of boxes to charity shops.

But there was still so much stuff.

 

So very much stuff.

 We like to think of ourselves as minimalists but clearly we are not. We may have a more minimalist lifestyle that most of our peers, but damn we have lots of stuff.

 

Lots of good stuff.

 

Art and books that feed our souls, but take up way too many boxes.

 

But we wouldn’t want to live without them.

 

We wouldn’t be us without them.

 

So I don’t mind.

 

Okay, peeps, that was the getting ready stage--stay tuned for the actual moving day!

 

 

Wool Against Weapons

Last Saturday I had the privilege of participating in the most colourful protest. Trident submarines that contain nuclear warheads costs the UK £100 billion pounds a year. What would you rather see that money spent on?

 

The contract for the Trident submarines will be up for renewal in the next year, we wanted to send a message to the government that this is the time to make the change, to be the change, to be a leader in the change. A treaty banning nuclear weapons is on the international agenda—why is the UK boycotting? For more information read this leaflet from Action AWE

http://actionawe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ActionAWE_Trident_leaflet__Jan2014_2.pdf

 

Over a year ago two wonderful, mad ladies named Angie Zelter (co-founder of Action AWE) and Jaine Rose had a brilliant idea to “yarn bomb” the nuclear weapons factories in England in Aldermaston and Burghfield by knitting a seven mile long pink scarf that would stretch between these two armaments factories to send a message to the government about our desire for a peaceful future.

 

Would it work? Would people knit? Even if people did knit their hearts out, could they knit 7 miles worth of wool?

 

The answer was YES.

 

It was decided that the protest should be held on Nagasaki day to remember the 135,000 people who lost their lives to the atomic bomb. The word went out all over the world and people started knitting.

 

I heard about it from some other Quakers and I was so moved by their efforts that I asked our Meeting to help me. I wanted to take part in this peaceful pink protest. I wanted to contribute a knitted panel to the cause, but there was only one small problem.

 

I didn’t actually know how to knit.

 

Not to worry. I was taken in hand by some lovely Quaker Friends who patiently showed me and showed me again.

 

And again.

 

I was a bit of a slow learner.

 

But after eight months of work I managed to produce a panel that was 23.5 inches by 39.5 inches.

 

Well it was supposed to be.

 

I started adding stitches somewhere along the line and mine got wider and wider and wider by the end.

But I did it.

 

We met and joined up all our efforts and in the end we had 20 metres worth of wool to contribute. That’s about 22 yards for my American peeps. Here we are outside our Meeting House showing off our efforts.

 

On the demonstration day four of us decided to take the train together and we had a jolly time. We shared food and laughter and took turns carrying the wool through the Tube and Train stations (it was Hitchin to London Kings Cross to Paddington station via the Tube then overground train to Reading, change at Reading for Mortimer station—for all you train spotters out there)   The journey was a pleasant two and a half hours. When we arrived we caught a shuttle to the protest.

 

Despite accidentally getting off the shuttle at the wrong station (we wanted RED for Faith Groups) we managed to find our way there where we met up with some other friends (old and new)

 

We got the call that the seven miles of wool was complete (with some to spare) around 12:30 which was cause for huge celebrations. Our section had enough to cover both sides of the road.

 

It was grand.

 

There was singing--we sang old peaceful favourites like We Shall Overcome and Last Night I had the Strangest Dream and some new favourites sung to the tune of A Bicycle Built For Two with lyrics like Trident, Trident, your missiles will kill us all. 

 

There was more eating.

 

Then at 1:00 we all joined together holding the scarf and whooping and whistling and ringing bells and this was followed by a three minute silence.

You can watch a video about it here:

http://actionawe.org/videos-wool-against-weapons-7-mile-long-scarf-9th-august-2014/

 

Then we all unpicked our bits that were joined together while we did a bit more singing and eating.

 

Lastly, all the Quakers got together and sat in a circle and held a Meeting for Worship in the middle of all the chaos of singing voices, laughing voices, happiness, buzz and excitement. We centered down and felt the enormous warmth of the sun and God filling our hearts.

 

Did I mention the amazing, perfect blue sky, not-too-hot weather we had sandwiched between two days of solid rain? Thanks, God.

 

A friend agreed to cart our wool home by car and so we strolled  along back to the train station (the shuttle would have taken HOURS to get all the people back there) and made our way home.

 

It was a wonderful day with hundreds of people there, all wanting the same thing in our hearts: A peaceful world. There was wool from all over the world--as far away as Africa, Latin America and Canada. We saw wool from France and Austria in our section. Thousands of people knitted and sent wool, even if they couldn’t come themselves. Hundreds of people of all ages, races, gender and sexual orientation were there, all of us bursting with love.

 

So what happens to all the wool? Well, everyone was asked to take their panels home and turn them into blankets for disaster relief or the homeless.

 

Could you ask for anything better?

 

 We also got some coverage on the BBC which was grand.

 

I am so proud to have taken part, to have learned to knit (however badly) and attended this historical moment. I plan on stepping up my activism when we move to Wales on Wednesday.

 

Wednesday???

 

Yikes. Better get packing