Thursday 25 August 2011

We're back. Sort of.

Hello lovely people!

As Lotte so brilliantly told you in their prior post, we have been away in fields in various places across the country. This has included adventures to Earth First camp, Dance Camp Wales, Women In Tune and the Radical Routes Summer gathering, to plug but a few. We're all glad to be back in our own beds.

And they're still the same beds, because we still don't have a new house yet. Sad times indeed. The search continues, and so do various other machinations of the co-op process. We have another secondary rules workshop (click here to see the secondary rules of an established housing co-op) planned for next week. We also have a repeat viewing of The Tardis and a viewing of another interesting property on the cards next week, so we're not just sitting here twiddling our thumbs. Well, we're managing to squeeze that in too.

We had our first meeting in quite a while this evening, and although it was slightly fraught (tense issues were discussed), we slipped back into consensus decision-making and honest discussion in a way which felt affirming and brilliantly familiar. For those of you with a dread of meetings, I cannot recommend consensus techniques enough. I miss them when I'm in meetings where they're not used. Go and have a read about them, and see if they could make your meetings less arduous.

Right, I'm off to be a Viking for the weekend with this shady lot. Although I'd like to think that swapping modern society for a societal structure from a thousand years ago counts as radical social change, I have to admit that really, I just like dressing up.

We'll post soon about our house viewings and progress on the secondary rules. Fun times, even if we don't have new beds yet.

- Hannah 

Saturday 13 August 2011

*honkshu* (by Lotte)

Our co-op is slightly on hold a little bit. Due to festival season (commonly known as Summer in colloquial language), and therefore many of our members being in fields in far distant lands, sometimes as far as England, it is difficult to be looking around houses. Especially Tardis houses that are technically not at all for sale.

I can assure you that we are not completely asleep, though. I don't feel able to speak for the others, but for me, I am mostly banging on with the gender activism. My latest exciting thing is convincing the UK Deed Poll Service to offer a gender-neutral title on their documents, thus convincing hopefully many more organisations and companies that genderqueer people do exist and won't accept Miss or Mr or whatever.

I also somehow ended up in Lesbilicious.

Leave a comment if you want a signed photo, people.