Paintings by Wilfred, a local (Hoedspruit) artist, I love the colors
How do you know the food
you buy is really food? By that I mean how you know it is not genetically
modified, just for starters. There is quite an easy test for your veggies. Let’s
say you have a butternut and you want to know, you simply plant some of the
seeds and see if they grow and if they do grow, they are not gm and you are now
growing your own butternuts.
I am sharing my kitchen
with at least two nests of small black ants, they are complete sugar addicts.
Besides from the ants there is a squirrel that comes for the bread and a mouse
or maybe two and the monkeys are starting to take a closer look. It is time for
lockdown!
Let us get one thing very
straight, I like little crawly things, I find them fascinating and sometimes
infuriating, when they take over. I have learned that if you keep you space
clean there is no problem; it is when you leave stuff to eat lying around when
the problems start. I refuse to use poisons because I simply do not like the
stuff near me. I will rather live with the ants and things.
I also find where they
enter the kitchen, and then I leave some food for them, just outside or
sometimes just inside, but out of the way. They then eat this and don’t come
running all over the kitchen looking for stuff, but again if there are thing
lying around, they will come for it, they will go invite their cousins on the
neighbors property to come help if there is enough.
It is really interesting to watch and see what
they consider food. They obviously cannot resist honey, or sugar, if you leave
tea bags (from a cup with sugar in) they will suck the teabags dry!, maybe they
just like the tea, either way here is a quick way to dry teabags, which you can
soak in paraffin or something and use as firelighters, leave it for the ants.
They do not recognize
concentrated Oros type cool drinks as “food”, although it is very sweet. They
completely ignore it. I always considered margarine to be more plastic than food;
I do not think that anymore, the ants love the margarine, so it must have
something they recognize as food, like seed oils?
Hostile take-over! Forgot to put the margarine
away…
Then there are the raisons,
now this has me wondering! I have this bag full of “commercial” raisins. They
taste good and I left a few out for the ants, they won’t eat it, they do not
recognize it as food! By all rhyme and reason they should love it! Now I am scrutinizing
this packet, reading the labels. There is nothing strange there accept for a
preservative called sulphur dioxide. So I Google this and sulpher dioxide (SO2)
is another by product from the petro chemical industry, to be precise, it is a colorless
gas, released from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil. This gas is sprayed
onto the fruit as a preservative. That gas that smells like rotten eggs, that
is sculpture dioxide.
If you Google some more you get, as usual, too
much information and facts and fiction of all kinds. There are the normal
rumors about it causing cancer and then there was some studies done and it was
found that contact with SO2 effects the respiratory system and can cause
bronchitis and induce asthma and things
like that, but I am no scientist, so I will just listen to the ants.
I am well aware that I
might sound like a crazy old coon carrying on about the ants and all, but
doesn’t the bible say something about watching the ants and becoming wise (not
exactly those words but something like that)?
The packed (with the
raisons) also does not say anything about genetically modified or not, I was
under the impression it is now law in South Africa for this information (gm or
not) to be in the packaging, so much for law, or rather the implementation
thereof.
I do not think I will eat
these raison either, maybe feed it to the monkeys, definitely not, but then
again, it will be interesting to see if they will eat it….. I suppose once
won’t kill them.
Not Fya, another Orb Web Spider
Then the sad story, my
spider is dead. Joyce killed her! There was this awesome Fennel Orb living on
my veranda, she spun her web under the roof. We had a few run ins in the
beginning, but she wizened up very quickly and just moved her web a bit higher.
I was great watching her grow and eat and grow and surprise! She was not
getting fat, she was pregnant. I saw her cocoon the eggs and she was her slim
and slender self again.
Then doom stuck. Joyce, the
lady that works for Dieter and Monica as Domestic decides to sweep and clean my
veranda, why I do not know! Okay so she obviously meant well, but in the
process she killed Fya with a broom! at least it was not Doom! (The poison
people stray on insects). Death was instant.
Now I feel like a surrogate
mother, I have (I have no idea how many) baby spiders/eggs to look after. I
will protect Fya’s offspring with my life!
My cottage and me, halfway
up this tree. Monkeys and more, never a bore….
I have been wondering about
something. When I write by hand, I use my left hand, but when I use a computer
I do it with the mouse in the right hand. I can do both, but somehow the right
hand takes over. Now I have been wondering if this can affect your creative
process and how you think and perceive things. Different parts of the brain are
at work here, so I might be onto something. I am going to write things by hand
first, let the ideas flow by hand and then copy to computer and see if there is
any notable difference in style etc.
To be continued
