Next year I promise that I shall go to an accountant prior to the final submission date for tax returns. Because really, filling out the last two years of tax returns wasn’t really quite that difficult – so why did I leave it until today*? Over the next year I also have to do business activity statements and there’ll be rent income and possibly minute amounts of advertising income from radelai.de (i guess i should set that up as a separate business) and I’ll be fleeing the country once again, so of course using the services of an accountant will make a lot of sense. The first boy who I ever kissed, Chris, ended up as an accountant, I wonder whether he’s still cute? In the moments before leaning over and kissing me he did say with all the romance that a 14 year old boy can muster “wow, your face looks just like a skull!”.

Yours,

Pippa Buchanan

* er, I was living on the other side of the world and etax won’t run on my mac and why on earth would i install vmware and windows just so i could submit my tax return?

I’ve got an admission to make, one which doesn’t sit very well with my treehugging, car-free, bike and public transport loving persona:

I really like fast shiny new cars and cool old gas guzzling cars from the 50s, super polluting aeroplanes and even though the thought of ever riding one scares me half to death, big noisy motorbikes.

Apart from the obvious financial considerations to do with owning a car (registration, insurance, maintenance, parking, fuel etc) and the ethical and environmental issues involved with their domination of our society, the big reason why i don’t own a car is because I would drive far too much.

And I love flying, whether it be in light aircraft or a jumbo – there’s this fantastic unbelievable moment as you take off which makes my heart leap too – this big lump of metal is flying. Even just thinking about planes, such as the F-111s and F-18s that were being discussed on 4 Corners tonight, is pretty cool. My dad still owns his old Piper Comanche, so theoretically I could learn how to fly the plane we used to squeeze into for family holidays.

I am in awe of the engineering and power and design of vehicles, and that is why I try to avoid using them, as it prevents me from ever taking them for granted. When I do borrow a car for a day or two, or take an international flight and stay away from Australia for half a year at a time, I make sure that I am use those resources with as much respect as possible. But that isn’t to say that I won’t be enjoying my experience!

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For over a year I’ve been planning on taking this design from my notebook and turning it into vectors. In May, 2006 I sketched it from the a17th century Indian Mughul silver vase seen at The Hermitage in St Petersburg, Russia.

Tonight it’s taken a good two hours playing around in Flash trying to get everything lining up – “Why isn’t this instantaneous?” I kept on thinking. I had to remind myself that the original was etched by hand and that the silversmith also graduated the curves of the pattern so that it remained stable around the curves of the vase.

Back in the sunless days when I lived in Finland, I started thinking an awful lot about how great Adelaide is. Then I realised that I only know a tiny bit about my hometown. I have my favourite parks, streets, beaches and cafes, but unless someone else tells me about something new, I rarely explore outside my comfort zone.

Being a geek I had an idea for a website about why Adelaide is so rad, so I bought a rather fun and cheap german domain about 6 months ago*. But I needed more content for this website than I could just write myself. So ultimately the plan kind of stalled…

Until this morning when I decided to finally design a very simple logo, and to actually get the radelai.de domain to work properly… [still waiting on this - my apologies, but i'd appreciate positive problem solving vibes to be sent this way...] … And now I’m all inspired again and hungry for content to put onto the web.

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Which is why I’m emailing you. I want you to help me with content for radelai.de.

What are your favourite things about Adelaide? Why do you choose to stay here or come back even though you’ve moved? When you’re entertaining visitors to Adelaide, what do you show them? Which deli makes the best bacon sandwich? Is there really a secret vat which makes the best tasting Farmers Union Iced Coffee? What are your favourite places in the hills and further afield?

So, are you interested? Have you and your friends got [metaphorical] balls?^

!

Articles should be between 100-500 words in length. If you can supply images to accompany written content that would be lovely. Over the longer term, video / podcasting content would also be sweet…

At this point of the project, payment is unlikely but notoriety and my everlasting gratitude is assured.

Yours,

Pippa xo

“Gunns will pay a base price of nearly $16 a tonne for native timber and $32 for plantation timber with additional costs for road access, transport and harvesting.”
via abc.net.au

Over the last month or so I’ve started doing some freelance web development for a couple of Queen St based clients as well as working at One Small Room. It will be a couple of weeks until both sites are live, but one site requires me to incorporate PayPal payments into a Wordpress installation. And what better test ground than as part of battlecat?

So, finally I’m able to offer Paypal transactions for the Paper, Scissors, ROCK! badge sets. I still need to get a screen made up but I promise I’ll be printing tshirts and offering them for sale before the end of November!

Paper, Scissors, ROCK! Badges (Shipping within Australia included)

Paper, Scissors, ROCK! Badges (International Shipping included)

Please ensure that your correct postal and email details are noted with the payment! Thanks!

It was Blog Action Day yesterday – and in between riding my bike to Pilates, joining the Clarence Park Food Co-op, buying fresh, local food at the Central Markets and cooking my own pizza to share with friends, I did think about what I was going to write.

In the end, and a day later, it seemed easier to just mention a little of all the things I considered:

Should I write about all those simple behavioural shifts (cycling, community, good food and friends) that can decrease your impact on the environment and make your life better?

Should I write about my recent decision to give up individually packaged drinks such as “spring” water, juices, flavoured milks and soda in lieu of carrying around a reusable polycarbonate bottle filled with tap or rain water?

Maybe I should write about the great books I’ve been reading , , and ? Or maybe the inspirational documentary I watched on Sunday night that left Jess and I so distraught that we were practically crying as the credits rolled?

Should I write about the ways in which we get to vote, every day and on November 24th, as both citizens and consumers?

It all seemed a little exhausting.

In the end I decided to write about my lawn, and how I like to lie in the sun and look at the grass.

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My lawn is a microscopic world – there’s buffalo grass, but there are tiny little flowers and clover growing too. In a couple of places freesias and purple crocus have escaped the flower beds and will spring up amongst the turf when their time to flower has come along. Wait long enough and ants, caterpillars, millipedes, beetles and spiders will continue to conduct their lives under your watch.

The sun hits my back and it makes me drunk and dopey in the most lovely way. I never used to sunbake quite so much, but most of a winter spent in Finland makes you worship the sun for all it’s beautiful power.

Eventually I’ll have enough solar panels (and maybe a domestic scale wind turbine) to power my house, but lately I’ve been thinking about rain water tanks and the slightly less achievable benefits of a green roof.

And that my friends, is how environmental action begins. You start by thinking and initially you might just try one or two simple actions such as giving up bottled water or carrying a reusable shopping bag around with you. Bigger decisions follow – you don’t replace your car and you spend your days thinking about what fruit trees to plant.

Then you realise that your entire world might slowly but surely be changing for the better.

I love catching public transport on those days when bike riding just seems like a bit of a chore. Sure there are the waits, the missed connections and the odd crazy person*, but then there’s also the opportunity to read, to eavesdrop (such a bad habit, i know) and to talk to people.

There’s the one off conversations with grandmothers visiting old friends – or teenage boys who fart loudly and offend almost everyone in the carriage – apart from yours truly laughing on the seat diagonally opposite.

I guess that it’s a bit of an Adelaide thing too – this is a small town, and the scheduled nature of public transport increases the chances of running into the same people again and again. Like Anita, the video games and role playing fan who really didn’t like her job selling showbags at the Adelaide Show . Tonight, when I saw Anita, she spoke about her short-lived job working at Shotz and her plans to study languages and move to Japan in 2012. Then there was Ben, the teenaged film geek who laughed to himself as i politely avoiding the over-familiar conversation of another passenger*. Of course, the next time I saw Ben I introduced myself and promised that the next time an annoying person tried to talk to me I’d make sure that Ben was also burdened with conversation.

There are the obvious environmental and financial arguments for increased trains and buses and trams, but its that occasional feeling of community and connection which happens every so often that makes me want everyone to leave their cars in the driveway, just so that feeling can happen even more frequently.

* the odd guy with developmental difficulties on the train the other day who kept on talking about the boots that i was wearing. “oh, they go up higher!” to which i replied “yep, and you’re not seeing how high!”.

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Today I realised that if I could choose to be reincarnated as an animal I would choose to be a rainbow lorikeet swooping and chattering through the park near my house. Aliese pointed out that you don’t really get to choose what you get reincarnated as, and that returning to an animal form would be a bit of a step backwards. So presuming that I don’t get to choose my next form, I now have an answer for when I’m faced with the inane “What animal would you be?” question in job interviews.

For a long time I also pondered the answer to “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?”. Then, finally, during a heroes inspired discussion at my last job I decided:

My superpower would be the ability to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and to form it into new shapes such as darts to attack supervillains, or even better carbon fibre bicycle frames. My superhero name would be Sequestra.