The House

Jones Family Jam

We just had a great visit with my brother Allan and his family.  His wife is really "into" music (and possesses fierce discipline).  I loved our experience - we were blown away.  We marvelled at the music which suddenly came forth and was present.  It made me want to play music!

Lucan has always shown a love of music - and used to pluck at our guitar (which we didn't know how to use) and sing, as a baby. I brought a ukelele, and one of the musical daughters, Elizabeth, is going to get us past the intimidating part to use it!  This is one of the great things about travelling.  You learn so much from people. 

Don't laugh about the uke. Anything new is daunting.  I played the piano for years, had piano lessons.  But we never touched a stringed instrument!

When I saw the musical expression pouring out of those kids, especially the oldest boy, and oldest girl, who seemed to really love it - it made me wonder at how humans have fashioned musical instruments to better voice the music inside us.

A wise way to live

When I visit my parents (see photo of super sharp knives - all with holes drilled into them to hang on the wall - with some small chopping boards) I get the sense of, this is how to live. It's a wise, way to live.

They have good tools, very good quality, even expensive good tools. With which they save heaps of money by doing everything themselves.

Supermarkets are selling fruit and vegetables that are often mass produced, with less and less nutrients - but they use a loophole and were growing their own veggies.

They made their own bread (with the help of a food processor with a dough hook), they did store away bulk foods that were dehydrated or processed so that they could be, to use as a backup (like "doomsday preppers" do). They were just being clever with the resources they had all the time. Very clever!

Now their money is put into things they really care about - like their beautiful restored heritage home, and travelling to do what they want to do. Probably also helping everybody.  Being out of debt.  Being as free and as happy as possible.

My Dad's garage

Entering my Dad's garage is like stepping back in time.

Despite all the change around his home, new monster houses and duplexes rising up here and there, even more so time stays still just inside these walls.

Every tool, even from decades ago, some even older, are cared for so well. In this house, even more care can be seen - with wooden tools and objects made for every purpose and ease. Everything is fixed, painted, well kept up. The energy put into it is beautiful.

This place has so much spirit I can even feel it in the photo.

Old world, New world

I have visited home before - but not during winter.  I think any person who has permanently left their homeland and relocated can understand the depth of feelings it is to leave one world and have it absent completely for a long time - then suddenly return to it.  Just the chill in the air - that's something I haven't felt in ten years - when you come out of a warm space like a car or a house and come out to a colder chilliness - brings back my entire life of memories and experiences until 27 years of age when I left here.

Here is Calgary (said CAL-gry).

Snow crunching, air chilly - memories of air frigid and the cold despite dressing really really warm.  All sorts of memories have been flooding that sometimes play through my mind at random times in semi-tropical home.  The satisfying crunch thin ice over a puddle of water in the park - just the freshness of home.  To be honest, not usually freezing but fresh and sunny.  Snow melting, bright, fresh days.

My family's home was overwhelming - as I thought it would be.  But having grown up in a heritage home and having thought it was normal at the time - since then I have lived in newer houses, and I can feel the history of the wooden steps, everything far more handbuilt than now. Switches that push in with a loud click, they don't flip, beautiful wood and wallpaper.  Like a farm cottage, really beautiful.  The shape of closets and spaces all over the home - original 1913 bathroom with old taps and a bathtub with claw feet.  But as different as it was at the time - my family bought a run-down "haunted house" at the time and completely restored it - but it took 20 years and alot of effort.  The kids grew up helping our parents.  Now it's a gorgeous historical home - even more bizarrely in the middle of sweeping change of this neighbourhood around it, like a beautiful stone in a river.  I hope they never change it.  Many little box homes remain on the streets around it, but about one in 10 has been transformed into a monster multiple living plex - rising up like the future around it.  But enough remains of what I knew, the old, which is also new again to me.

My favourite was when the garage door raised up, returning home for the first time - and even more from the old world was exposed.  A completely wooden garage inside, hung completely with tools - many old but kept in perfect condition.  The floor, wooden - the window - the same from when this garage was built to keep the cold out.  The garage is not that old I don't think, as the house, which is from 1913, but it's still such an old way of living inside it.  There is even a cellar under floorboards of the garage - the "greasepit" for working under the car.  But my family stored potatoes in it for a family of 10 to live off of all winter long.  Which we grew here on this city property.  So not a normal City of Calgary residence at all.  A special, special place.

I will take photos tomorrow in the light - it got dark here at 5pm!  But I will disturb people now.  I did photograph one very small thing.  My dad has built many things around this place - every wooden chair shines, every bookshelf made into a better one - and now he has a masters woodworking shop in his garage.  In fact I am besmoggled by their management and care and just the strength of their "good husbandry" - I think it's a term that means they look after things well.   Everything is clean, fresh, painted, simplified, organized.  I feel extremely intimidated, or besmallered - my way is very small in contrast to the strength of their organization.  People who used to run a ship of 2 adults and 8 kids - who now just manage themselves.  Anyways of the many other well-maintained tools about this place, shelves, quilts, etc, this is the little wooden structure my Dad has made just for drying small plastic bags he has washed.  I will take lots of more photos.  Just for us all to learn from, including myself!  I want to remember.

I really really want to paint our home, and not be lazy - there are so many tiny unfinished projects I have not even bothered to finish.  A kids dresser half painted, a fairy dress unsewn with pattern and material ready, a unicorn stuffed animal cut but not sewn.  Kids room unpainted.  Whole house unpainted.  Hideous curtains.
 

See why it's overwhelming to visit home?  For now - besides documenting it all - I will enjoy that long missed experience of the crunch of snow.  And helping my NZ family to not slip and break any legs on that slippery ice!

Rescuing Hoihoi (a baby blackbird)

This is Hoihoi - a rescued baby blackbird, fallen out of the nest and missing some feathers.  Always pays to keep your eyes peeled - which is something I am not particularly good at. Good thing my husband Shane and daughter Troy are.

Hoihoi suits his name (Maori for noisy), he likes to chirp away and make vocal communication.  He (or she) gobbles up a cereal mixture from a homemade eye dropper, just like you see baby birds in the nest doing when their mothers bring back worms. He sits on your finger when you bump a horizontal finger against his chest, and runs around on long road runner legs.

We didn't have an eyedropper to feed this baby song thrush so I fashioned one by cutting a length of plastic tubing, and trimming down a wine cork.  The eyedropper places food in the bird's "crop" just like the mother would with her beak.  I researched what to mix up - cereal (weetbix in milk), with a teaspoon of jelly meat (cat food), and an egg yolk.  They said to add calcium, but as our funds were low we bought high calcium milk and only used milk to dilute, no water.  When it was runny enough, it either ran out of tube - or we pinched it to help it go.

He is getting very fat and healthy now, we also built a bird enclosure with materials we had - mostly to contain the mess!  We also make a perch set into a stump, with a few different sticks he can perch on.  The cage is bottomless - just sits upon a board - so that later we can just set it on garden dirt outside so he can practice digging for worms.  We have already started to bring in trays of dirt with a few worms in it which he pecks at, and finds to eat.  The lid with bamboo poles (he is sitting on here) just lifts off, we also use it as a place for him to perch while we feed him, or he can hang out on it.

Now that he is stronger he shows a more mischievous, cheeky personality - he likes to run away from you behind his cage, or runs up to us / flies up to us asking to be fed.

Some people might wonder why we would bother with a small creature.  How could you not?  He's a little person, even the little snails I pull from my garden are small, inquisitive, seeking little guys.  Our eyes are just not closed to it.

He's a cool little guy.  We were having a very challenging period.  Hoihoi was a blessing as he was a humorous distraction.  He can fly around the room too.  Our kids and their friends have all had fun feeding the baby bird.

Video of us feeding Hoihoi:




Update 10 November.   Hoihoi's return.

After bringing worms in to Hoihoi, Shane started taking him outside on walks in the backyard regularly to dig for worms and explore.  He was no longer scruffy and weak, now he was vibrant and had grown larger.  But sometimes he didn't want to look for his own worms, and preferred to be fed - and we knew we had to release him soon or he would become dependent on us forever.  Then he started to enjoy the freedom of being outside, pecking for food, and flying where he wished.  He flew onto the roof, and listened to the birds in the neighbourhood.  Shane collected him down, but knew he was nearly ready to go.

One wet morning, when many worms had been washed out of their holes, and although the air was damp and the skies overcast the neighbourhood was full of birds singing and chattering.  Shane took Hoihoi back to the park where he had first found him.  He set him down, where he started to run about and forage in the ground, pecking for insects and worms like a little bird should.  Then a blackbird made a sudden landing nearby.  He (male as he had dark colouring) hid right away from us behind the nearest shrub, but kept following Hoihoi protectively.  Up to this point we didn't know he was a blackbird as they look lighter, and don't yet have such an orange beak when they are babies.  Both male and female parents care for fledglings (we looked this all up in our official bird book).

Since then when we visit the park, we know it's Hoihoi as he doesn't take off when we come by - as all the other wild birds do.  He doesn't vocalize back any longer, but stops his busy job of pecking the ground for food, and looks at us.  Then his parent blackbird flies down to protect this grown-up baby who still needs to learn many skills.  He is so quick and fleet now, you wouldn't know he had ever been looked after by humans - except for his lesser fear of them.

Hoihoi is free now, living just as a wild bird should.

Putting the spotlight on: honey by Annabel McAleer, Good magazine

Full text of this article all about how healthy honey is for you - originally published in Good magazine issue 24, May/June 2012.  

Putting the spotlight on: honey

By Annabel McAleer

Drizzled over Greek yoghurt; dribbled into a steaming hot toddy; oozing from a hot crumpet ... sticky, golden honey is one of nature's sweet spots


A single teaspoonful of honey is the life’s work of twelve bees, each venturing as far as ten kilometres from her home hive on a single flight, collecting half her own body weight in nectar and visiting as many as 10,000 flowers a day. Back at the hive, the bee deposits her nectar into honeycomb cells and dances for her fellow workers, her fuzzy little body waggling incredibly precise compass directions to her latest floral goldmine.

Borne out of painful childhood experience, many of us are wary of these armed insects with suicidal tendencies, but bees and humans have maintained an uneasy, yet mutually beneficial relationship since we began hunting for honey at least 10,000 years ago. Ancient Egyptians identified abundant uses for honey, using it to both sweeten their baking and embalm their dead, while the art of beekeeping has been practised in China for untold thousands of years.

For most of human history, honey was a sacred and rare resource – until one fateful event: the invention of refined sugar. The sweetness of honey was suddenly replicable, accessible, widely available and cheap to produce. Today, sugar cane is the world’s largest crop.

Although sugar and honey pack a similar calorific punch – both are simple carbohydrates made up largely of fructose and glucose – the outcome of substituting honey with sugar in our diets hasn’t been so simple.

Dr Peter Molan, director of the Honey Research Unit at the University of Waikato, has been researching honey for more than 30 years. In one recent experiment, rats were fed the equivalent of a typical New Zealand diet, except half the rats were fed sugar in the form of honey, while the others ate ordinary table sugar. Over the rats’ lifetime, says Dr Molan, “the ones on the refined sugar got obese and the other ones didn’t.” The sugar-fed rats also suffered greater mental deterioration as they aged, until eventually they all became too fat to fit into the maze that measured their mental performance.

The implication for us humans is clear: replacing the sugar in your diet with honey will likely be good news for your body and brain. But why?

Molan says the results of his experiment probably reflect honey’s antioxidant action, but could also be explained by honey’s low glycaemic index (GI) compared to table sugar. Eating foods with a high GI raises your blood sugar level, Molan explains. “If you’re not a diabetic you have a strong response to produce lots of insulin to lower that level, and when it overshoots and your blood sugar level goes too low, you feel hungry.” If you find that one biscuit inevitably leads to another, sugar could well be the culprit.

According to a neurobiologist on Molan’s honey research team, sugar shows all the effects on the brain that you would see with an addictive drug. “You never see people pigging out on honey like they do on sugary things,” he points out.

The precise reasons why honey seems to be so much better for us than sugar are hard to pinpoint. That’s because while sugar and its modern-day mimics, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are basic organic compounds, honey is an incredibly complex liquid. It contains a multitude of micronutrients that vary according to the type of flower visited by the bee, the season and even the health of the plant.

No two honeys are the same; even those produced by the same hives vary from month to month and year to year. Each batch of honey contains a unique mix of sugars, enzymes, amino acids, proteins, polyphenols and small amounts of vitamins, minerals and antioxidant compounds. While there are only trace amounts of these nutrients in honey, there are a large number of them, working together in ways we do not yet fully understand.

Depending on the honey, it can have antimicrobial, antiviral, antiparasitic, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antitumor effects. Unfortunately, most of these benefits aren’t gained by scraping a little honey over a slice of buttery toast come Saturday morning: most studies in humans are based on consuming around three tablespoons a day, which would account for about 10 percent of your day’s recommended calorie intake.

“You’re not going to be able to use honey like a dietary supplement – just take a teaspoonful and get your daily dose of antioxidants,” says Molan, “but if you start replacing the large quantities of sugar that are used for sweetening foods and drinks with honey, you will start getting reasonable levels of antioxidants.”

One rule of thumb is that the darker the colour of the honey, the higher it is in antioxidants, although Molan points out that all honeys darken with age.

Honey never really goes off – King Tutankhamun’s tomb contained 3000-year-old jars of honey thought to be still edible – but its key enzymes do have a half-life that is affected by both heat and time. Some of these changes happen at ambient temperatures, explains Peter Bray, owner of Airborne Honey, but heating honey in processing can speed the process up.

Raw honey contains a multitude of enzymes, but the one that’s interesting from a therapeutic point of view is glucose oxidase, says Bray. “That takes the glucose in the honey and it makes hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid. That’s certainly worth protecting.”

Hydrogen peroxide is what gives antibacterial activity to honeys other than manuka honey, Molan explains. When honey is applied to a wound – your little girl’s grazed knee, for example – hydrogen peroxide will be slowly released, acting as a mild antiseptic.

Any honey is good for first aid, says Molan, but if your injury is inflamed (particularly if it’s a burn) or infected then it’s better to apply manuka honey, “if you can afford to and if it’s genuine”. Manuka honey has an exceptional ability to clear wounds of infection – even the deadly MRSA superbug is killed by manuka honey – and it has much better anti-inflammatory activity than other honeys.

Manuka honey’s anti-inflammatory, infection-clearing and antiseptic qualities are increasingly being harnessed to work wonders under wound dressings in hospitals – but they can be put to a more prosaic use closer to home, such as being used as a zit zapper.

The bacterium that causes acne is very sensitive to manuka honey, says Molan. “If you can see you’ve got a spot coming up – it’s red and you know it’s going to end up a zit the next day – put a Band Aid with a bit of manuka honey on it overnight and it won’t be there the next day.”

In skincare and beauty products, honey’s wholesome, all-natural image appeals to health-conscious consumers. But behind the appealing yellow labels, is honey actually useful in cosmetics? Skincare formulations expert Kate Robertson believes it is. “Honey is a really soothing ingredient,” she says. “It’s really good for skincare in the sense that it’s quite a good humectant, so it can be quite moisturising.” While she hasn’t had consistent results treating clients’ acne with honey, it seems to be those with the most aggravated skin that it hasn’t suited, while those with mild breakouts find it healing.

For a gentle, nourishing, calming and soothing mask, Robertson recommends applying honey straight onto your face. High concentrations of honey aren’t found in cosmetics, for obvious reasons. “It’s jolly sticky stuff. If you put it in a formulation at too high a level you’d end up with a goopy mess,” she says, but “even low concentrations of honey can add to a formulation. It can work synergistically with the other ingredients, rather than a single action from the honey.”

Whether we rub it on our skin or eat it on toast, the beneficial effects of honey often seem far greater than what we should expect from our current understanding of its constituent parts. And while scientists continue to explore the medicinal potential of this remarkable food, we can help ensure that our world continues to buzz and hum with the fuzzy honeybees that make it, by filling our jars – and our tums – with honey from good, local sources.



Behind the label

Bees don’t make honey to manufacturing standards, but various labels try to help consumers make good choices:



UMF
The Unique Manuka Factor is a measure of the antibacterial activity found only in manuka honey, which is additional to honey’s usual peroxide activity. The UMF number is correlated to the phenol standard, so UMF® 10 has the same antibacterial activity as a 10 percent phenol solution. “Phenol is an old-school antiseptic material which they used to use to sanitise hospitals and toilets,” explains Bray, who is also a member of the Bee Products Standards Council, a national honey industry group, including a new measurement for non-peroxide activity. The old measurement is controversial, says Bray. “There’s a lot of money in it so everyone’s pushing their own agenda.” 

MGO
Manuka honey can now be tested for its active ingredient, methylglyoxal (MGO), “but the correlation between the methylglyoxal and antibacterial activity has been subject to a lot of industry debate,” says Bray. Different manuka honeys have different levels of MGO, and those with high levels can be diluted with cheaper, non-manuka honey and still achieve a UMF rating.

HMF
Prolonged exposure to heat during processing reduces the enzyme activity in honey, indicated by an increase in the level of an organic compound called hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). HMF levels also increase naturally over time, says Molan. “Just storing honey for years at ordinary room temperature is enough to get quite high levels. It needs to be kept cool if you’re storing honey. But HMF has nothing to do with the honey’s antioxidant levels.” The EU regulates HMF levels to under 40 parts per million, but HMF is unregulated in New Zealand. There is also no compulsion to date honey with its harvest or packaging date.

Nectar origin
Just because a label claims its honey comes from a particular botanical source, doesn’t mean all the nectar came from that plant. To check the international standards visit: www.airborne.co.nz/monfloralhoneydef.shtml “We routinely measure other company’s products and we can tell you that there is product out there that has been labelled as manuka or clover that is just totally not manuka or clover”, says Bray.
Manuka honey should contain a minimum of 70 percent manuka pollen, says Bray, but he estimates that 70 percent of the manuka honey in the market falls below that, while some major brands fall below ten percent. Molan also sees problems with the way manuka honey is labelled. “There’s an awful lot on sale which isn’t [genuine] and its activity, even when it’s rated, is just hydrogen peroxide activity, like in cheaper honeys. It probably has little or no actual manuka in it.” To be sure your honey is from the source it claims to be, look for a brand that includes the pollen percentage on its packaging.

Organic
Honey can be certified organic if it meets certain strict criteria, such as avoiding synthetic chemicals and antibiotics within the hives, situating the hives several kilometres from non-organic agricultural areas, and not replacing the bees’ winter honey with sugar syrup (a common practice in beekeeping). The word ‘organic’ alone doesn’t mean anything unless it is accompanied by a third-party certification.

Raw
“There’s no definition for ‘raw’,” says Bray. It could mean that the honey has never been heated or filtered, or merely that is uncooked, or that it is simply a ‘raw material’.

Antioxidants
Molan is planning to develop a measurement of antioxidant activity in honey, so that each batch can be labelled. New Zealand Honey Specialties, which produces the NZ Honey Co brand, is so far the only company to do this, he says. Each 340 gram jar claims to contain the same antioxidants as 100 cups of green tea.

GI
The glycaemic index of honey is currently not labelled on honey, but Molan is seeking funding from the honey industry to develop a laboratory-based tool to be able to measure this a lot more easily than with dietary testing.