Checking out other sites...

Photo by Wasabi Noise

Hey everyone,

Its raining here at ONC today! How wonderful! While I love love beautiful clear days, the drought (is it really a drought? maybe its permanent climate change?) has made me fully appreciate rainy days and nights. The ONC have been on water restrictions now for over 7 years! That's longer than my daughter's entire life.

I think this climate change did not really sink in for me until about 5 years ago (this is despite experiencing the Canberra bushfires a couple of years before). It was on a rainy day. My daughter, then almost 3 years old came out of her room for the morning and sat down on the couch staring outside. After about 5 mins, she said to me:

"Mum, what's that?"

I looked and she was pointing at the rain.

I said "That's rain, honey."

Her response: "Its okay for the sky to waste water?"

And it struck me then that at almost 3 years old, she had never seen rain and saw it as a "waste of water".

Until that time, I had not realised how much I had changed my habits so that we wouldn't waste water and had subconsciously drummed it into my daughter the importance of not wasting it.

Anyway, I've digressed from the original purpose of this post! I have been reading with interest some things happening on the net.

Dixiebelle has set up a food challenge that is near and dear to my heart. She is doing a guilt-free chocolate month! Regular readers here will know that I have often blogged about the existence of child-slavery and exploitation in the cocoa industry. Check out how she's going, along with Mountain Wildlife.

For new readers, I thought I'd post this video again as an intro to the topic. It was made by Cody Maasen as part of his highschool project. At the end of his video he lists more websites that you can check out to read as well:



I am pleased to announce that I have been buying only slave-free chocolate and coffee now for 2 years now. I slipped up in Aug 2007, when I accidentally bought chocolate covered pretzels (thought they were plain pretzels) but prior to that, I had not bought blood chocolate and coffee for just over a year. So except for that one slip-up, I've been experiencing the joys of chocolate and coffee without the expense of the suffering and exploitation of children.

Anyway, I'm off now to read to my children and spend the last few hours of the night sipping Chai tea (fairtrade, of course :P) and listening to the wonderful sounds of rain pattering gently on my roof.

Hope you all had a wonderful day.