Late summer, almost nightly showers keeping all green. An ocean warm and welcoming, if often wilder than my timid swimming skills would like.

Amid all the bluster about the reality of climate change (internationally and locally in these blogs) I have quietly finished Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything. I am waiting for my fellow humans to wake up to the freight train that is heading our way. Climate change is just half the picture.

The bad news remains the fact that we’re cooking the planet with fossil fuels. The good news is we’re running out of fossil fuels. But the really good news is that the giant oil companies are going to be squeezed, and with them, our economic substrata. For change is surely coming, as this recent excellent article by Gabrielle Kuiper in The Guardian reveals:

It might seem unethical but someone has to get rich fighting climate change

On a quick visit to New Zealand (farewell to my little cottage on a hydro lake, sacrified to personal rationalism) it was surprising to see the North Island more brown than the NSW south coast. NZ’s hydro supply and expansionary plans for their dairy industry could both be undermined if that situation becomes standard, as is happening in California. See No End In Sight For California’s Climate-Exacerbated Drought

I also discovered that a lovely red bulbous flower which I had captured and cultivated from the local bike path grows wild in NZ, although sadly labelled a weed here. (So I dutifully ripped them out, one step back for each two forward.) The Italian parsley, once coaxed as a lone plant in a pot, is now spreading its verdant vitamins in every arable patch. The tiny bush tomatoes are heading that way too, with my blessings.

Such revelations form the background to efforts here on our little coastal spread. Food and water occupy my plans, and how to process roo poo into compost for more edible items. A new tank has been delivered and installed:

The electrician was so good as to transplant my basil when he dug up the garden for the cable to the new garage, and the tiler has done a fine job of the patios front and back. A daily walk takes me up a set of stairs near a boat ramp. I call them the ‘Rosalie Gascogne stairs’ after an artist who did interesting things with bits of wood, sometimes with yellow paint:

Between equally furious bouts of ping pong and weeding, we are amused by the antics of our cat:

The antics of politicians are just as funny, and futile.

Efforts to grow food are stymied by my lack of devotion and too much time spent elsewhere. (Although the rucola in Canberra has been bountiful.) Slowly the innate potential for this block of land to become a resort is emerging. A pleasure palace palace where worries about the future take a back seat. More Caravaggio, less Calvinism. And wouldn’t that nook by the garage be the perfect place for a spa? And are we not still, for the most part, just the luckiest country ever? So I muse while looking out over my reluctant vassals, the grey kangaroos.