And what of the world traveller, the woman who’s now lived in 5 different countries?

I am so very glad to regularly lay myself down in this, our most beautiful bed. It’s comfortably soft and firm at the same time and layered with a bedspread I bought from a tiny old lady in Sapa, Vietnam several years ago.

The map reminds me of the places I’ll be and the places I’ll go – but most days I’m very happy to be at home. I really like the small city feel of Linz and I’m beginning to reach out tendrils of personal growth into the opportunity of this place.

I’m slowly documenting my making and doing a little more, primarily to make myself feel more productive but also to prepare a portfolio. It’s strange, but in these days of craft and cooking blogs it can often feel like you’ve done nothing until it’s been documented publicly.

For example:

Cloning a Kombucha Scoby

I’m not much of a soft drink consumer, though I do love carbonated spring water and “gespritzte” juices. I have enjoyed Kombucha, but spending 3€ per bottle on fermented tea seems like a waste when I can follow a tutorial and make it myself.

I’m hoping that the Scoby mother will grow – so far there’s a pleasant cider vinegarish smell which is meant to be a good sign.  Apparently it’s also good to anthropomorphise your scoby “mother” and give it a name. Since I used Yorkshire Tea and raw Demerara sugar in the mix it seems that Mrs Rochester will be appropriate.

There’s something about cloning a mass of microbes (yeast and bacteria) which is strangely compelling.  I’m hoping that we’ll have a batch of Kombucha ready for the public mushroom growing workshop of Time’s Up‘s Non-Green Gardening residency.

Picking Wild Foods

Living in Berlin put a bit of a dampener on picking wild foods, something which I’d done in Finland, Adelaide and during my short time in Sheffield. Despite collecting some blackberries in Gorlitzer Park, the ubiquity of dogs and their waste meant I was reluctant to pick nettles.

So the presence of wild and urban food sources around Linz is quite lovely. There are more backyards for fruit trees to escape from and there’s a healthy continuing tradition of collecting wild foods. Many of my urban finds are being tracked in Boskoi and I’ve got a lovely book that I’m slowly learning to understand.

Bärlauch / wild garlic (Allium ursinum) is in season now and Vicy, Theresa, Lisa and I went picking a couple of weeks ago after a quick tutorial on how to recognised the leaves.  If nothing else the smell of garlic helps you identify the bärlauch from its poisonous and perfumed doppelgänger Maiglöckchen / lily of the valley.

I’ve frozen some chopped leaves and have several jars of pesto (with almonds and sunflower seeds) that are awaiting consumption.  Unfortunately the stored pesto coincides with me trying to manage my carbohydrate intake, so I’ve not been eating nearly as much pasta as I’d like. Nor are bärlauchsemmelknödel (wild garlic bread dumplings) especially low on the GI scale… Oh but they’re delicious!

Travelling on Handbuilt Boats

Recognising bärlauch came in handy just before Easter when we started the second journey* of the Control of the Commons (CoC) project and began travelling down the Danube on a Frankenboat. In short we only managed to camp for one night before our trip was halted due to being an unidentifiable watercraft.

We made our camp near Wallsee on an old section of the Danube that was bypassed when a hydroelectric weir was installed.   The highlight was being camped next to a forest of bärlauch and young nettles, both of which made it into that evening’s risotto.

As much as I love the CoC project, camping in Austria in early April is not such a good idea for the ill-prepared. We almost reached hypothermia as a result of being too tired to layer up properly in our sleeping bags on a -2°C night, so our camping experience was not amazing.

Yet another reason to be grateful to return to our lovely bed.

*See, I really should be blogging more – not only have I not mentioned our wedding at all I also neglected to talk about travelling down the Murray River for 3 weeks on another weird boat.  Another time… I promise.

It’s not that I’m like this all the time, and luckily it’s not scary depression. However it is the kind of depression that stops me from easily doing [new] things or finding much joy in anything. When you’re relatively freshly moved to a place and in the search for work, most things are new. Glory, it does seem easier to sleep and hide at home and knit rather than push through this layer of bleurgh to be more me than I’m letting myself be.

Rationally I can tell that there’s a layer of depression weighing down on me and it’s clouding my interpretation of the world and my relationship with the world. The world, I know, is weird, but generally fantastic and there are many good things in my life.

Tim for example is more than good and supports me in so many ways. I’m seeing a therapist who is interesting and helpful. I’m really glad to be finally living in Linz, and I enjoy the size of a smaller city (200,000) after the last years in Berlin. I’m meeting lovely new people here and take my knitting out to the local Stitch and Bitch.  And luckily on those hide at home days, there is knitting while watching Six Feet Under. And at least if I’m knitting I’m still doing something while I hide at home and Six Feet Under is a fitting accompaniment to both knitting and the blues.

In a couple of months Tim and I will be in Australia getting married and enjoying the summer and building boats. There is so much to be happy and joyful about, but it’s so incredibly frustrating that a forcefield of inertia is preventing me from actively engaging with my life to the full extent possible.

Anyway. More than writing about depression I wanted to share a detail photo of my grandmother’s wedding dress.

I think that modifying this dress will be the most intimidating thing about getting married to Tim – he’s great just the way he is and I’m so happy to have him in my life.

The dress is almost 80 years old and feels very vulnerable – I’m a little afraid to take it from being my grandmother’s wedding dress to mine and am thinking about having a second dress available to change into after the more formal bits of the ceremony.  I’m slowly working up the courage to tidy up the hem and shorten the sleeves in preparation for an Australian January wedding. Wish me luck!

Those three weeks earlier this year were exhausting and in many ways I didn’t feel very settled during my time back here. Perhaps it was the excitement of introducing T to my favourite people and things of A-Town or the energy that pervades the city in the lead-up to Fringe and the festival. And the previous visit home was for a frantic month as I packed up, sold my things and rather rudely told Adelaide that things were over between us.   Luckily, despite the fact that my Dad is getting older and frailer due to his lung disease, I feel suprisingly relaxed and happy on this return trip.

A lot of my current feelings towards Adelaide have a lot to do with maturity and finally beginning to feel at home in Linz with T.  So despite missing T like the blazes and really wanting to have him around to support me as I help my family, it feels good to be back here and to begin to assess my old home with the eyes of someone older (remember, this is the town you settle down and have kids with).

Another big reasons for loving my hometown this time around is that it’s winter. I’m missing the summer in Linz, but in some ways the chill of a hibernating Adelaide is so satisfying. It’s tea and toast time, eating soup and good bread with friends weather rather than all-out party season.

It’s actually been raining here, so for the first time in almost four years I’m seeing Adelaide (and my old garden) with green growth, both good and unwanted. There’s something wonderful about a cool weather garden and the smell of soil and decaying leaves as you pull up weeds. As much as I love being able to container garden and finally have a balcony to fill with plants I have missed the mindfulness that comes from weeding an actual garden bed.

The other day I battled, pulled and dug against one of my favoured old enemies for a half hour while my father rested in the living room.  Looking after Dad is a very slow, sometimes sad and frustrating business and I needed some active destruction to balance me out. Besides the stress relief of weeding and the satisfaction of dirt under your nails and a visible change to the space, I love weeding as it lets me observe the techniques that plants use to spread themselves around.

My weeding enemies - the unidentified climbing succulent plant, plus ivy and soursobs (oxalis)

On Friday the plants I attacked were ivy and some weird succulent climbing thing that I don’t know the name of, but would love to identify so I can accurately curse it.  The plant is growing up and around an overgrown shrub and despite intermittent and zealous attacks over previous years it persists and spreads around.

This plant just makes me get all awe-full and think about evolution. It is incredibly cleverly constructed and seems to propagate itself as you weed it. The leaves and sections of this plant fall off far too easily and forgetting pieces on the ground gives them a chance to take root and spread themeselves around.

This kind of promiscuous growth demands action and despite only being back in Adelaide temporarily I started down the dangerous path of Significant Garden Plans for the family home. Obviously the leggy shrub would go, but the winter weather calls for replanting the front beds with fruit trees, which leads to reading plant catalogues and considering just where a pizza oven could go.

At some point I looked up and realised that it felt like I’d never gone away from here. Tim, Linz, Berlin, working on School of Webcraft and all of those things seemed light years and lifetimes away.

Oh, it is a weird feeling to be here and to feel so very comfortable and to feel the pull of this place pulling me back. At the same time Tim and the actual everyday life I’ve chosen is in Linz and as I fall asleep I’ll be wanting to wake up back in our bed and go for a run along the Danube.

I’ve lived overseas (on and off) for about 5 years now and it has always been with the knowledge that distance makes it much harder to maintain contact with family and friends. Either you’re here or you’re there, and despite the best intentions and the latest in technology it’s almost impossible to maintain or grow a relationship in the same way that realtime and realspace allows. There’s something about biorhythms, a shared physical environment, eating and drinking together that will always be more valuable than endless Skype conversations and email lists.

It’s one of the reasons why, even today, organisations still spend huge amounts of money and burn fossil fuels to organise face-to-face meetings and why for the last two years Tim and I spent weeks of time on train trips between Berlin and Linz. Luckily of course, I’m finally living in Linz and the tension that resulted from never being quite at home has begun to ease.

Being in a long-distance [romantic] relationship within the confines of Europe has also obscured the many other long-distance relationships that have evolved: all the many across Australia, to those scattered in Finland and Brussels, Newcastle Upon Tyne, the Norwegian bits of the Arctic Circle, Biggleswade, Sheffield, Brighton, Dunedin, London and beyond. Of course, now with the move to Linz, those who made up my community in Berlin are now more people far afield. Within my head when I think of these friends I also think of the people I’ve met briefly, desired as friends but have never had a full chance to become friends with.

So lately, as annoyed emails have begun to arrive from those I’ve neglected I’m trying to work out how to maintain these relationships, how to provide intermittent meaningful connections that transcend Facebook messages and work for those who are far less digitally embedded than I am.

Letters and packages I guess. I managed to send one off to Berlin yesterday.

That’s what’s been bugging me for the last week or so. Today though my tyrannies of distance are familial. My father has finally asked for me to come back home and visit him, sooner rather than later. He turned 76 last week and he’s been ill for ages, so this isn’t such a surprise.

I can remember when he rang up to tell me he’d been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and that slowly, his lungs were scarring and being eaten away by a autoimmune response. I was in Helsinki at the time and even though my memory places me in the flat on Mechelininkatu I lived there in 2006. Somehow that timing feels wrong, maybe it was when I was back in 2008?

So for at least 3 years while I’ve been away there’s always been the knowledge that one day I’d have to go back home to hang out with Dad and not really know how long I’d be back in Adelaide for.

What’s amazing though is that for far longer than was expected, Dad’s lung capacity stayed strong. Based on advice from a doctor friend and responding to data from drug trials on rats, he started to take high levels of anti-oxidants and until recently his lungs were good. But at the end of last year he was hospitalised following a stomach flu and as seems to be the way, suddenly felt, I don’t know what. His age? Breathless?

Putting aside the fact that Dad is ill, I am looking forward to hanging out with him some more. As a child he preferred to teach me maths than play sports, but as I’ve grown older I realise how much he’s influenced me – to love science and to be more of an independent worker than an employee. Without a doubt, one of the reasons why I’m with Tim is that in many good ways he reminds me of my father.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to finish this post. I still need to work out the best tickets and how to fit this around work and how to manage being away from Linz  so soon after I arrived here.

Maybe it will give me more motivation to write postcards.

Even though I fell head first, properly and oh so significantly into love with the aforementioned BMC, I didn’t suddenly drop everything and move to Linz. Considering the catalysts for the last two moves to Sheffield and Berlin, this is incredibly surprising.  But maybe, despite having no regrets and being rather grateful for those experiences in their own odd ways, it appears that I’ve learnt something.

Or perhaps I feel at home.

And when considering learning from my experiences or finding a home, I should add in finally. I mean, to move countries on the spur of the moment for a man is romantic, but to do it twice (in one year, and for different men) is not just careless, but also incredibly foolish. I don’t know what Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell would say about a third time, but considering how she felt about the loss of a parent, I can’t imagine she’d be very kind. So maybe I should focus more on the fact that I feel at home in Berlin, and one of the things that has helped that has been that I’ve been very happy in my apartment.

I’m in a great position in Kreuzberg, my room is south-facing and full of light AND has nice floors, and the bathroom and kitchen, while not perfect – do satisfy my requirements by having a good, hot shower and a stove and oven that don’t suck.  I’m friends with several of my neighbours and know almost everyone in the building by name and have babysit half the kids and shared cake with their parents. And until recently, I had managed to maintain a relatively good relationship with my flatmate, only to have it sour from some hideously poor communication on their behalf in the last couple of weeks.  Myeh. I could go on for hours. But I won’t.

Anyway, I might be looking for a new place to live and that honestly petrifies me.  Of course there are the general considerations of whether there’s enough light to keep my happily provided with Vitamin D,  and building repair and cost which are tempered somewhat by the bright sides of maybe finally having a native German speaker for a flatmate. But then there are some more Berlin specific challenges to deal with, like whether I would end up with coal heating and what discount supermarkets are nearby.

I’m unlikely to move away from Kreuzberg, and from all reports coal heating is rarely in use in the former West German parts of Berlin, but I’m wary.  I spent a month in a coal heated sublet when I first moved to Berlin and despite the coziness of having an actual fire in your bedroom, the novelty of hauling fuel and old ash up and down stairs and waiting 3 hours for your room to defrost is over in about a week.

More realistically I’m worried about what stores might be nearby. I’m pretty sure that besides the weather and the state of the S-Bahn, discount supermarkets are one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst people living in Berlin. Unlike weather and public transport which are more universally recognised, the matter of Berlin grocery shopping is very localised and has its own language: Is Netto or LIDL better? Does your Penny Markt actually carry any stock? Is visiting ALDI a soul destroying experience for everyone? Which place has the best range of organic goods? Why did PLUS close? Why is Edeka easy to forget about? Do you find visiting the Karlstadt basement (a ‘proper’ supermarket) akin to a religious experience for you?

Of course, there are proper supermarkets which have everything you’d expect in a store – but due to both cost and convenience, most people end up shopping at their nearest discount store only to find that it doesn’t carry certain products. Then, because they have a favourite type of cheese or coffee they end up schlepping to the store that does stock it anyway.  In the end you develop favourites, and even though it’s a little further away than a couple of other supermarkets, Netto seems to have won me over, they’ve got a good  range of organic food that I can actually afford, stock Spreelinge pickled cucumbers and have a proper section devoted to baking goods.  So that’s another reason why I love my apartment and am hesitant to leave it, I might end up far from a Netto store.  And what would happen if there was only an Aldi nearby? I’d be liable to turn suicidal.

* Unlike 2008 in which I started in Adelaide, re-visited Helsinki for 4 months and would have stayed if I’d been able to find a job I loved, moved to Sheffield in the UK temporarily and then, after making a temporary stop for a couple of weeks in Hong Kong and Hanoi, went back to Adelaide to properly pack up before moving to Berlin. Eek.

Amazing Kunstdinge, originally uploaded by Fighting Tiger.

Back at the start of April I bought this for €1 from some kids running a stall outside the front of their building.

They had a box on a piece of string acting as a cargo elevator from the floors above, and a range of things made out of bits of old wood, computers and hot-glue-gun glue.

I think my favourite thing about this is that the “Bild” (picture) key points at a tiny painting on a stamp. That’s so clever.

Maybe it’s just because there was a bunch of smoke, but I actually enjoyed tonight’s interpretation of John Cage’s Variations VII.  Apart from the smell of some really hideous perfume on a woman standing nearby, the room smelt like melting plastic and burnt out motors.  It was a bit like guitar strings breaking, but still not quite rock and roll.

I’m probably still suffering the negative associations of a past relationship, but my back gets incredibly tense at the thought of much noise related art practice.  Then again, don’t even get me started on the terrible things that can be done with visualisations.

It would be easier to say that I just don’t get some types of media art , but something must fascinate me about it, because I keep on thinking about it and what I want to do as a practice within the greater new media field.   Nothing elaborate, but damn it, if I am to do anything I at least want to do it well.

Maybe one day I’ll actually work on one of my ideas.

“On the ground” in Austria from battlecat on Vimeo.

California by FBZ, originally uploaded by Fighting Tiger.

Fabienne (aka FBZ) of fabienne.us and HardHack (May 28, 29, @ C-Base) drew a map of California for the nottoscale project.  The first Berlin Geek Picnic was rained out as you can see by the water stains on the map FBZ drew.

FBZ draws California from battlecat on Vimeo.

the first battlecat vlog post… from battlecat on Vimeo.

Self-centered personal blogging ahoy!

I’m playing with my gifted video camera and the idea of different levels of honesty, intimacy and immediacy afforded by edited text and unedited video.

Also, I’m in the middle of trying to work out what happens next in my crazy life. Writing hasn’t worked so far. Maybe talking to an inanimate object will help?

So anyway the challenge is to know (with more certainty) by August, what I do next in my life. I’m not sure if I make much sense in the video.