I’m back home from my work in Korea. I managed to drop a firebrick on my foot on the 3rd day. I couldn’t wear a shoe after that, as the big toe had swollen up so much, such that I had to wear a plastic ‘flip-flop’ thong to keep working. I went to the local convenience store in the village and bought alcohol disinfectant spray for cleaning the toe, over-sized bandaids, gauze bandage and medical tape. I was amazed that such a tiny village shop had everything that I needed.  
The next day, the local government health clinic was open and my friends took me to the clinic to see the doctor. I needed them to translate for me. The doctor told me that I had kept it very clean and to try and keep it elevated, not to walk on it too much and that if it started to throb or get red. I should come back ASAP. As a precaution, he prescribed and also issued me with 2 different antibiotics, for 3 times a day, enough for 10 days. I don’t like to take any antibiotics if I don’t absolutely need to, but I certainly didn’t want to end up with medical complications while in a foreign country, so I took them.  I didn’t want to risk getting toe-main poisoning and it spreading up my leg to Knee-monia and possibly even dick-theria.The doctor offered me an X-ray, but I assured him that I could still bend the toe. I had to demonstrate that for him, so that he was satisfied. 

My friend got out his credit card to pay, but there was no charge!!!! I’m a foreigner here. I don’t pay taxes here. I should pay for such a terrific service. Korea is an amazing place!

My foot was still swollen, and I was still wearing a plastic flip-flop thong on my foot right up until I left Korea. I even had to attend the official opening of the exhibition in my formal black thong. The nail has since died and come off. I’m so lucky that I have such good friends and that it wasn’t worse.
The garden has grown such a lot while I was away, and badly needs a lot of weeding. Apparently there was a lot of rain and the temperature was quite mild. So plenty of late autumn growth. I got stuck into the weeding straight away, just an hour at a time each day. Weeding always involves such a lot of bending. I’m of an age where this is not so comfortable any more. So I space out my efforts, I didn’t want to over do it. 
The second day, I decided to wear knee pads so that I could get closer to the weeds, to minimise the bending. I also wore light gloves to save my fingers. So I am learning to change my old habits to make living here the way that I have so far, and want to continue to do into the future, a more achievable prospect. This is a really hands-on life style, doing almost everything the old fashioned way, by hand, honouring local gardening lore and organic traditions with green environmental knowhow/theories.  A permanent garden/orchard/vegetable patch, including chickens, all inter-woven and based on sustainable living principals, but with a nod to modern conveniences where necessary, like a cultivator and a mower. 
We can still pick all of our salad lunches and our nightly dinner from the garden each evening, it’s just that the flavours have changed to winter forage now. We have all the usual winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and kohlrabi. We cook a lot of vegetable stir fry, tofu, okonomiyaki, Japanese style cabbage pan cake, baked mixed vegetables, and cauliflower au gratin etc. We have also just celebrated the start of the cold winter season with an old fashioned baked dinner. Our first red meat meal since last winter.

  Other than weeding the garden, there is also a lot of mowing, so an hour or so of that each day too. The garden work fills half the day. I’m using the electric ride-on mower for the bigger areas that have become deep in luscious growth. But I also use the electric strimmer for all the edges where the ride on can’t get to. It’s a good feeling to know that all the work is being achieved powered by sunshine these days instead of fossil fuels. Janine fills in the gaps with the electric push mower, to get in under the branches of the fruit trees and other similarly appropriate places for that mower.

We have worked hard at planning and finally becoming a fully solar electric household. We started back in 2007, when the cost of solar panels finally became affordable for us. When I was a teenager, the only solar panels were to be found on space craft and satellites. We’ve come a long way and Australia can be proud of the world famous, ground breaking research into refining solar panel technology done by Professor Green at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We have slowly increased our solar PV over the years, until now we have 17kW of PV panels and two 15 kWh batteries. Sufficient to charge 2 electric cars, run the house and pottery workshop, Fire our electric kilns and if carefully managed, also selling the excess back to the grid. Although we try to minimise our exports, as we only get paid 5 cents per kWh. It’s better to use it all ourselves. We haven’t paid a power bill since 2007, and spend more money on petrol for things like the chain saw and fire fighting pumps than we do on our Plug-In Hybrid car.
Now that the garden and grounds are back under control, I’m also back in the pottery, making pots again, for the other half of each day, making again is fun and half of my existence. My start back on the potters wheel was delayed by a day, as the pug mill had seized up from being left for too long without use. I had to hand scrape the clay from the barrel nozzle and take out the vacuum screens to remove hardened clay from the mesh.  Quicker and easier than a complete strip down, but still time consuming. It somehow feels like a bit of a waste of time, but any other option is far worse, I’m so grateful to my friends who passed on their old pug mills to me after the fire. You know who you are. Thank You! I’m very grateful to be so lucky to own my very old, re-furbished, Venco pug mills. 

The next day I’m back on the wheel throwing perfectly de-aired and beautifully mixed plastic clay. My old wrists are too worn out to hand wedge all my clay any more. I did manage a lot of hand wedging for the first year back at work here, during lock down. I couldn’t buy a new Venco as they were out of production, and the large 100mm. model is still un-available! I don’t know where I get the energy and enthusiasm to keep on working like this into my older years, other friends and colleagues have retired, but I was determined not to let the 3rd bush fire in 50 years and loss of another pottery workshop stop me. I’m still here and still creating the things that I love. So out of desperation and necessity, I hand wedged my clay to my lasting detriment. My ageing wrists have never really recovered. Even throwing slowly on the kick wheel, causes just a little bit of a twinge, so I have to modify my hand position slightly to cope. We have a few Shimpo electric potters wheels, mostly used for our weekend workshops, that run on our solar power, but I really prefer the old ‘Leach’ treadle style kick wheel for all the smaller domestic pots.

Winter brings on the citrus crop, so we start the season by making 2 batches of marmalade, lemon, lemonade and lime marmalade and then tangelo and navel orange marmalade. The Seville oranges aren’t ready yet. They come on later in the season. They make the very best marmalade.

It’s hard to believe, but today, in winter, at the end of the first week of June, I picked a ripe red tomato. We still have self sown tomato plants flowering. We have had ripe tomatoes in June before. It all depends on the severity of the frosts. At this stage we have had a frost during the week, but because the vegetable garden is fully netted to keep out the birds, that netting seems to just take the edge off the frosts, allowing us to still harvest tomatoes so late in the season.

It’s so good to be home again! We have a quotidian flock of wild wood ducks, that have decided to take up residence on the front lawn, sometimes up to 30 or so of them. They seem to like it here. Plenty of grass to eat and 4 dams to explore. Why wouldn’t they? They were probably all born and raised here over the years. They do pooh all over the lawn, so we have to watch where we step and wipe our feet at lot. We have a shoes-off household, so no problem about the house, but a lot of pooh gets tramped into the pottery workshop when we have weekend workshops and open days.

If this is my biggest problem in life. I’m so, so lucky!

Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished, and nothing lasts.