when instagram disabled my account

Last Saturday morning I was lying in bed, loving the fact that I didn't have to be anywhere anytime soon, sipping my coffee and reading the last couple of pages of my book. If I listened carefully I could hear the sounds of the girls slowly waking up, Bren and a friend using power tools in the shed and the birds calling to each other through the forest. I was warm and content in my little bubble as I reached for my phone to have a look at what the rest of the world was up to.

I started with the comments that had come through in response to my blog posted the day before. Thoughts on sock knitting, bowl carving, dealing with difficult shop keepers... I love the way your comments keep the conversation going. Like my blog is not a static piece of writing but an ongoing collaboration, a conversation.

And then I read a few asking me about my Instagram account. Where was it? Had I decided to have a break from social media? Had I deleted it?

Of course I clicked over straight away sure that my photos would be right where I had left them the day before when I'd posted a picture of a little tea party we'd shared in Bren's shed amongst the wood shavings and tools.

But, instead of finding my photo stream or my profile, there was a log-in page asking for my details. Ahhhh that's easy enough, I thought to myself while filling in my user name and email address, I've been logged out, easily fixed. But instead of resuming normal activity, a little square came up advising me that 'Your account has been disabled for violating our terms. Learn how you may be able to restore your account.' Then a blue Learn More box underneath which I clicked on quickly. The next page it took me to asked me all sorts of questions about what sort of account mine was, where I was posting from and my personal details.

I think at this stage I was still thinking that I had been logged out accidentally and that once I'd filled in my details I'd have my account back in no time. Obviously I couldn't have violated any of their terms or conditions so nothing bad could happen, could it?

Initially I was texted a six-number code and asked to use it to verify my account, but I couldn't find anywhere I could enter it.

Then I received an email asking me to confirm that I am the owner of my account by taking a photo of myself holding a hand written sign that includes my full name, user name and a code supplied in the email. The photo had to be well lit, include both my hands holding the sign and my whole face. Unless I fulfilled their requirements they would not be able to help me.

Although by this stage I was starting to realise that my account wasn't just going to reappear, I didn't trust the 'Hi, Thanks for contacting us. Before we can help we need you to...' email either. It felt like some sort of scam.

Maybe I'd been hacked!

I fully remember the first time I ever heard about Instagram. It was 2011 and we were about a week away from heading off on our caravan adventure, having coffee with my sister Emily in Fitzroy. She, who had originally introduced me to the period tracker app that changed my life, showed me through an app that allowed you to put filters and frames on the photos you took on your phone. She said it was possible to then go on and share your edited photos with the world, but she chose not to. Before this we'd played with the Hipstermatic app that made our photos look old school, but Instagram felt a bit more user friendly and natural.

I also remember the first time I shared an Instagram photo for the world to see and I promptly tweeted that I hadn't realised that Instagram was actually a social media, complete with comments and likes and follows.

And there began the slippery slope:Travel around Australia in a vintage caravan, take pictures, geotag the pictures, explain in the caption what we were doing, post, follow friends and family back home as they caught on, look at their pictures, like their pictures. Repeat. And it was simple and a bit messy back then. We used lots of filters, posted everything unselfconsciously and often, popped our photos in frames and liked everything we saw.

When we got home and I wrote a book about our travels I used Instagram to publicise it, I started seeing our farm differently as I posted it in squares and people liked them. And then one day I posted a picture of a cute, yellow vintage caravan I saw and got a notification that it had hit the popular page. I still have no idea how that happened or what it meant, but it sent a truckload of followers my way and that felt good.

In 2014 I got an email telling me that I was one of Instagram's suggested users which again sent 1,000's of new followers my way. But as I clicked on many of their profiles and saw that they were sexy models wanting followers, scary guys posing with weapons or cash, and buy-lots-of-follower accounts, I started blocking them and feeling icky about my life being so public and accessible.

On July 6th 2015, Instagram published a short story about us on their blog called 'Growing food with love and integrity'. That felt very exciting and brought with it a lot of interest from all over the world, including a follow and a post from Jamie Oliver!! (I still get a kick when he likes my photos and watches my stories.)

Instagram sent me Christmas presents for a few years in a row and last September we attended a party they threw with a table laden with food that looked like a garden, boxes of fancy doughnuts, stickers, badges, speeches and a photo booth.

Basically, apart from a couple of spikes, my Instagram life has been pretty low key and full to the brim with photos of farming, knitting, mothering, travelling and other family adventures, sometimes slightly filtered, often rambly-captioned, occasionally hash-tagged, mostly taken on my phone, never sponsored, never stolen, and never sexy.

And although over the years I have questioned the algorithms, the designerness, the use of proper cameras, the fact that people have several accounts, the dodgy ways people go about accumulating followers, and the fact that it feels much less friendly and much more businessy than it used to, I feel like I have stuck to what works for me and been true to that.

Which brings us back to last Saturday and all the awful thoughts that were starting to run through my mind. Had my account been hacked? Had someone reported me? Would I ever get it back? Could someone else use my profile? Did I have all the photos saved? How would I let people know? How would I ever find some of the profiles again? Was this the end of @foxslane?

Eventually Bren came in, I filled him in and he started googling. There were stories about some celebrities being hacked but nothing yet about the little people.

I posted to twitter, I took the photo with the information Instagram had asked for and sent it to them, I posted on Facebook and then I waited.

I felt like I'd been punched in the guts but I didn't cry or make a fuss. In fact I think I was quite calm. When the girls came in and we told them they weren't all that empathetic which annoyed me, considering how hysterical they have been known to be when they close all the tabs on their computers by accident or think they might have deleted an essay. But they eventually came around.

Later that Saturday afternoon reports started dribbling in that other people had lost their accounts too, including this blog post, and that this was quite a wide spread thing. Somehow, once I was aware that it wasn't only me, I felt more secure in my faith that order would eventually be restored and that I'd get my account back in due course. It might have been naive faith but it helped me move on and enjoy the rest of the weekend in any case. Including a switched off, unphotographed fathers' day which I can't help but think might have been farmer Bren's best present of all.

On the three days that I was locked out I noticed that I posted to and read Twitter for the first time in years, I posted thoughts, videos and photos to Facebook that weren't related to my blog and I enjoyed the interaction, I left my phone in the charger for long stretches of time, I checked every few hours to see if my account was back, I worried about how I would ever contact some of the people I chat to in instagram daily but have no other way of finding, when people wrote to tell me they missed my feed, checked to see if it was back, or had written to Instagram about me it meant the world to me. People wrote me the kindest messages. I was in the dark but I didn't feel like I had been forgotten.

I seriously wanted to be the type of person who didn't care so much about being locked out of an app. My life is dirt under my finger nails, knitting cabled beanies, cooking food my kids won't eat and cutting myself a crooked fringe, I live in the real world. But I did care. I do care.

I thought a lot about how much power we give over to our personal lives in social media. How we can spend years building up these beautiful profiles and relationships only to have them deleted with no warning or reason. How much care we put into our photos and responses only to have the apps dictate algorithms that feel random and sometimes cruel. And how much I take for granted that what is there will always be there.

More than once over those three days I wanted to refer to a photo to remind me of the date or of how something looked, only to remember that I couldn't access the information. I have the photos saved in my library, but I need to find a way to back up the captions and comments and to be able to contact some people who I feel like I know so much about but don't even know how to contact in real life.

On Saturday Miss Jazzy informed me that she was upset that I'd had my account disabled because it meant she'd lost a follower!!

On Sunday I posted to Facebook -

things i didn't get 2 post on instagram this weekend - sock knitting, wooden bowl carving, bundt cake baking, daffodil picking, organic farming - pretty controversial, no wonder instagram blocked me

On Monday I heard that people were slowly getting their accounts back and so I had confidence that it was only a matter of time until I had mine. On Monday it also snowed which was a bit mean considering I couldn't post videos and photos of the beauty. And seriously, if it snows and you don't post it on social media - did it even snow?

And then on Tuesday morning it was there! Everything exactly as I'd left it. Phew.

I had an email from Instagram informing me that it was back and 'we apologise for any inconvenience caused' but no reason for the inconvenience.

And aside from lots of lovely comments on my photos, that's about it. I'm happy to be back but I'm slightly more wary too.

So there you have it. That's my locked out of Insta story. If you're reading this because it's happened to you and you've found me through googling it, I hope it brings you some comfort - you are not alone.

So how about you?
Are you a social media addict?
Do you feel like you control your social media or does it control you?
Have you had a scary app moment?
Is all your online stuff backed up?
Do you ever wonder about all that data out there and what happens if it all disappears?

Have fun out there!

Love Kate

xx

The Swiss Italian festa!

Over the past few months I've written many articles and answered many interview questions about how and why we moved to Daylesford 12 and a half years ago.

I've spoken often of our desire to grow our own fruit and veggies, of our need for space and a slower lifestyle, and of our yearning for a more meaningful existence.

And I've shared our lists of must haves and must not haves in a property. But I have to admit that beside the local schools and hospital, I don't remember being so interested in the town we were moving to. I don't know why I didn't have a town/community list of must haves, but I didn't.

So it was almost by accident that we came to live close to one of the most culturally diverse and interesting towns in regional Victoria. A town that boasts some of the best eateries and shops and galleries in the State. And a town with a calender of events so rich and varied that there is bound to be something there for everyone from Words In winter, to Chill-Out, to music festivals and art festivals and food festivals.

This weekend Daylesford and Hepburn Springs are celebrating the Swiss Italian festa and in the opening parade, our family marched and hoola-hooped with the circus crew.

And we admired the costumes and the bands and yodellers and goats who had come from near and far to celebrate the rich history of our town.

Before we moved here I was worried that we wouldn't feel accepted by a town until we had lived there for generations and generations back, but I needn't have. In our town if you want to hold a banner or a bell you are welcome to march. In fact in our town there are almost always more marchers than onlookers. In our town, the hardest thing to do is to decide which crew you want to march with.

I feel pretty lucky that we accidentally set up camp next to such a cool community.

Oh, I just found this clip on Facebook. Check it out.

I'd better go now and make sure everyone here has a rest before the closing ceremony lantern parade tonight.

Does your town throw a good festa?

Do you love a good march down the main street?

Did you spot me and my girlies in the film?

Ciao x

Treasuring

So, as I was saying the other day when we were so rudely interrupted by school uniforms and lunch boxes and readers, while we didn't find any mushrooms on our forest adventure, we did find another sort of treasure. Real treasure. Old treasure.

As we were walking up to the house following the path the gorse muncher had uncovered a few days before, we came across an old gold miners' camp complete with lots of bits of old crockery and glass.

During the mid 1800s to mid 1900s Daylesford was full of thousands of workers looking for gold. Our farm has a few mines dotted about and an old race running through it.

I'm not sure I have the words to convey the feeling of coming across this little camp. Part curiosity, part excitement, part feeling like we were trespassing, part awe, part respect and part fascination.

First we examined the pile already collected. The patterns on the the shards of ceramic, the letters on the glass bottles, the handles broken off and the different shapes and sizes. And then we wandered around and started searching for more in the nearby area - slowly uncovering and digging up pieces to add to our puzzle.

As we came across each piece we'd slowly dig around it and pull it out. Miss Pepper liked to spit on and wipe them to uncover their design but we were happy to wipe them on our pants.

Treasure hunting is so addictive. Long after farmer Bren left us we were still saying 'just one more piece' and 'what if the next one is a complete jug'...

At one stage, digging out what farmer Bren thought might have once been a rubbish bin, Miss Pepper wondered if there might be ghosts around. The ghosts of the people who ate off and drank from these implements way back then. So together we made a list of some of the questions we'd like to ask these ghosts if they came.

What is your name? Where are you from and what language do you speak? How long have you been here? What is your job here? Have you found anything interesting or valuable? Do you live in a tent or a hut? Do you have a family/children? How many people are working in this area with you? What will you eat today on those plates? Did you break the plates and bottles when you left them or did they decay over time?

It's funny to think that a couple of months ago we were on an archaeological dig in Israel unearthing pieces of ceramic from 2,500 years ago, and here we were digging up 150 year old ceramic and being as excited. 

This treasure is part of our farm's history and therefore part of ours.

We're not sure what we'll do with our discoveries. Maybe we'll leave them in the pile we found them in, maybe we'll make a mosaic or maybe something else will come to us. In the mean time this basket full is doing the rounds of classroom show and share.

I just feel happy about the added layer of history it adds to our farm's story and the questions it's making us ask and think about.


Have a wonderful Tuesday my friends.
May your travels be filled with treasures.

xx

Springy!

Oh springtime, I have fallen head over heels in love with you all over again.

The smell of your sweet pollen filled air, the way you make the farm chores fun, the smiley, playful Maremmas, the fields of daisies, the busy buzzy bees, the shoes instead of gumboots and the tights instead of leggings.

Oh springtime, I love the warmth of your sun on our backs as we fill the wheel-barrow with weeds and cut back the green manure crops and fertilise and plant out the spring vegies in the kitchen garden. There is nothing quite like the planning for the abundant seasons to come after the hungry winter.

I love the way the quantity of eggs we collect seem to multiply by the day in spring and I adore watching our feathered friends find little pockets of sunlight to dust bathe and gossip with their hen friends.

I love watching Jo-Jo run and climb and play without the constant worry about his muddy locks. And that blue, blue sky...swoon.

And I love only keeping one fire going. I am a bit over the constant shlepping and splitting of the wood, I am.

I feel excited beyond words at the discovery of spring's first asparagus spear and I am still loving finding new and exciting ways to eat the very last of the broccoli.

And eating outside, and having the windows open, and the brightness and lightness, and sharing a cold beer between dirty farmer's hands at the end of the day. Love!

But I think my very favourite part of spring is that feeling of the world opening up again. There are endless possibilities and choices and ways. Like a spontaneous icy-pole and walk around the lake after school. Holding hands and telling stories and joking and laughing. And smelling the sweetest, yellowest wattle and bumping into friends and being in love.

I'm happy.

I hope you are too and that you've had the most bright sunshiney start to your week.
Do you love springtime?
Or is autumn where you're at?
Have you got anything exciting planned for the next few days?
Do tell.

Bye!

Where I'm at...

My I ❤ Tikki Knits giveaway is going super well. And not just because people are coming out of the woodwork to enter, but also because people are telling their knitting stories in their comments and I am just loving reading them. I have been finding them so interesting and emotional. I have laughed and even cried a few times.

Knitting and craft in general is so wonderfully important to us womenfolk. Busying our hands making clothes to warm our loved ones warms our hearts. And the connections and memories we feel to those who taught us are priceless.

And I feel so heartened by those of you that are going to give knitting a go, or another go. You'll get there. Just this weekend I cast on and knit 37 rows of the cardigan above only to pull it all out on Monday. The learning process seems to be part of the knitting journey. Two stitches forward - one stitch ripped back. But a completed and worn project makes it all worth while and then some.

My gorgeous friend Manda sent me some of her newly printed fabric late last week. It's sitting here next to my computer so I can gaze at it adoringly and often. I think it's destined to become a dress one day when I have a minute.

Manda has more of this fabric as well as colouring-in books and lots of other fun babushka things in her shop. Check them out, they are the cutest.

My littlest sister is back from San Fran for a while. Yay!!!!!!!

Last night I calculated that every week I plait fifteen meters of hair. FIFTEEN METERS!!!!!!!!! That means that every month I plait 60 meters of hair and every year 720 meters. Holy hair!!!!!

Do you know about the Daylesford Craft Experience? Check out the details here. I think it's going to be load of fun and guess what??? I'll be coming along on the Saturday afternoon to give a little crochet lesson. I'm thinking I might teach a granny square cushion pattern. And Jodie will be there on both days too.

Farmer Bren has been experimenting with fast bread. Soda bread. This particular loaf took twenty minutes from measuring out the flour to hitting the table. That is a BIG difference to the 20 hour sour dough he's been making over the last few weeks. And it's delicious too.

The recipe is in The River Cottage Bread Book.

And lastly, but super excitingly, my gorgeous friend Abbe has opened a craft retreat in Woodend. It looks totally gorgeous, check it out here. And the best part of this exciting news is that you have the chance to win a weekend at the retreat for you and nine of your crafty friends. How great is that!!! Check out the deets on Abbe's blog here.

And I'm adoring the golden wattle, wondering what to do with some overripe mandarines, diligently keeping the home fires burning, stressed about a kiddie friendship issue, wondering how I can convince my family to move right up North and grow coffee or mangoes, thrilled to have found the Maremma rescue people, sadly pulling up the very last of the rainbow carrots, making stir fry and rice for dinner, relieved to have spotted jonquils this afternoon in town, adoring having Indi home from the snow, freezing my bum off, amazed at the practically life sized car being built from cardboard boxes in the other room, thrilled with our decision to put an Esse radiator next to the toilet, looking forward to plonking down on the couch this evening and knitting a few rows of the fan stitch cardi and hoping for a few dry, sunny days so we can plant out our roses.

So that's me this afternoon. In between the school pick-up, the ballet, the hip-hop, and the harvesting and cooking dinner. A sentence here, a photo loading there, you know how it is.

So how are you?
What's going on in your world?
What are you making/baking/growing/reading/thinking?
Do tell.
I hope you are having such a wonderful week so far.

Bye! xx

Hooray 4 home!!

Something funny happened to us this time after we got home from Melbourne. All five of us had at least one intense moment where we felt thrilled to be home. That we love it here. That we are so blessed to call this place ours.

Miss Indi told me yesterday that she also felt like she had changed. That she felt different since coming home. I wondered if she felt more her. Comfortable.

As much as we pride ourselves in being cool farmers that can straddle the country/city divide, we really are the happiest here in the forest. At home.

I've felt it big time since we've been back. That I am the happiest, the most me, when I am hanging out with my gang, with dirt under my finger-nails, wearing my farm clothes, doing the farmer-girl thing.

I feel happiest when I am making- knitting and sewing and crocheting;
The red To Melbourne & back beanie above (details here) and the start of my Graphite Mara.

I feel happiest cooking and baking gorgeous meals and snacks using our own and local produce on Mona the Esse.

Farmer Bren's spelt and rye bread with my plum jam and quince jelly.

Although the ground is icy cold, I love pottering in the kitchen garden. Planting and weeding and transplanting and harvesting.

And although it is dirty and a lot of work, I love that we heat our home and cook our food on wood that we have grown on our land. It is sustainable and it feels right.

And I love and feel proud of what we do here at Daylesford Organics. I love that we produce clean, delicious, ethical and sustainable food. I love doing the farm chores all together and I am so happy with the decisions we have made that allow our children to grow up here.

I feel happy. I feel that although the decisions we have made haven't always been the easiest, that they have been the best for us. And that after eleven years here, I can say that we are country peeps. We like to visit the big smoke but we feel our best out here on our farm.

I've had this song in my head for the past few days... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEOF_rcND8


I hope you are having a happy weekend.
I hope you feel great where ever you call home.

xx