Don’t sue me kids!!!!

I just read a news piece about a kid who successfully sued her father because he grounded her from a school field trip for going on-line when she was told not to. I feel like an old fogey say, “when I was a kid….” but really.

Don’t misunderstand me. I have spent most of my adult like caring for kids who have been abused or neglected by the adults who should have been caring for them. My four youngest are all adopted from the child welfare system. Nobody cares more about protecting children from mistreatment than I do but this wasn’t mistreatment. It was a consequence of bad behavior.

In a crisis, having your kids know that they have to obey first and ask questions later could save their lives. If the smoke detector goes off while your daughter is on the phone or your son in the middle of a video game, they have to get out of the house without arguing.

I don’t think we are doing our kids any favors when we teach them that the answer to every demand is yes and that they are equal partners in the decision making. They aren’t. At least at my house they aren’t. Bruce and I run a benevolent dictatorship. What we say goes. As kids display good judgement and maturity, they can take more responsibility for making decisions for themselves but ultimately, we are in charge for a simple reason. Kids don’t always know what is good for them.

Maybe there is a life lesson in here. This country is in big trouble because we haven’t learned to take no for an answer. Everybody gets a car for their 16th birthday translates in later years to everybody gets a $40,000 SUV. Everybody has a television in their bedroom turns into everybody has a 5000 square foot McMansions with 4 flat screen televisions and a pool. If you want it and don’t have the money, don’t worry. That’s what credit cards are for. Delayed gratification? I don’t think so.

And maybe this is lesson for all of us. You can want and desire and ask for but sometimes the answer is no.

 

Sunday thoughts

We have a lovely day planned. We are going out to breakfast with some of Bruce’s family. Karen is waiting tables for the first time and we want to give her some moral support. Then we are heading off to church. My son is singing a solo and we can’t wait to hear him. He sings a lot locally but we don’t often get to go. Then Nate, his wife and little boy, another son and his two kids are all coming by for lunch. I want to talk to them about a couple of preparedness things.

One thing we will discuss is who gets what kid from where in a crisis. We babysit for my grandson 2 days a week while my daughter goes to school next door to the place my son works. In a disaster, I want to make sure that my daughter gets picked up and that the kids come here first and worry about feeling silly later.

Families need to have plans for this kind of thing. Most of us don’t want to spoil a beautiful day with talk about emergencies but if not now, when?

 

food security

One of the more enduring pictures of the depression is that of bread lines. I fear that we are beginning to see a different incantation of modern day bread lines. Food stamps applications have soared and what are food stamps but invisible soup kitchens and bread lines. Private donors are handing out food in places like Elkhart where unemployment has reached 20%. My husband volunteers at our food pantry where donations are down but usage is up. The demand for subsidized lunches and breakfast at my daughter’s high school has surged to the point that they can no longer afford to offer a hot breakfast and have switched to a selection of cold, presweetened cereals and milk.

We all need to think about food security, not in the abstract, isn’t it awful what is happening in other places and to other people, but in the sense of personal security. What will you do if food becomes too expensive for your budget?

I looked over several years of checkbook ledgers last night, pulling out what I spent for food. The numbers are difficult to figure as, at times, I have had a houseful of teenage boys to feed and other times when it has been just me, Bruce and the three girls. Still. I think I have a pretty good idea of where my food money has gone and why we seem to be eating a lot better for a lot less money today.

I rarely go grocery shopping any more and I almost never shop for the ingredients for a meal.  Rather, I shop to restock my pantry. One week, I will put in a co-op order for dried fruit and nuts and maybe a fifty pound sack of grain. Another week, I might buy a bulk order of chicken. I take a trip to a big box store 6 times a year and get things like sugar and case lots of the fruits that I can’t get locally. I hit a buy one get two free sale to restock my juice supply. If I didn’t get to the market for a month, I might have to pick up local milk or cheese and maybe a bit of fresh produce at the the general store here in town but I could manage quite well  even if I couldn’t get there as I have a large supply of dried milk and all the supplies for making cheese. My goal is to use at least 2 jars of something I preserved last summer every day. Last night, we ate a ham and scalloped potato casserole. The potatoes and onions were from our garden and the ham was local. The milk was local and the salt from storage. We also had canned applesauce (ours) and bread and butter pickles (ours). I made canned green beans which no one likes but they ate them because they could smell the rhubarb/blueberry crisp in the oven.

Not everyone has the space to grow as much as we do but I think we shortchange our ability to grow something. There is a terrific web site called path to freedom you should check out if you think you can’t grow food in you back yard.

Put out the word that you are interested in growing and foraging more food. I got 50 pounds of peaches last year from a woman who was swamped with them just through word of mouth. We are still eating those peaches and will have them until the new crop comes in. If the crop fails, I have cases of canned peaches in storage to hold me over until the next harvest.

Food has been rationed by price for many years. If you had money, you could afford fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and good bread. Poor people ate peanut butter, white pasta, and kool-aid. I see food rationing by price as something that will get a lot worse. Prepare for that time by figuring how and where to grow food. Learn how to preserve it and cook it. Plan to enjoy it during the lean times that are already here.

 

cooking when the power is out

This past winter, the power was out in my town for 10 days. That is very long time if you aren’t ready for it. If you have a gas stove that work without electricity, you can cook very acceptable meals on your range top, as long as the propane holds out. I have several alternative cooking methods at my fingertips. The are pros and cons to each.

Solar oven

I have a very good solar oven. In the summer, I use it a lot. The temperature gets up to 350 degrees on a sunny day. Keeping the oven oriented to the sun and out of the wind helps a lot in keeping the temp up. Mine has an electric back up in case the sun goes in. I can’t cook anything too tall this way as the oven body is not high. It is best for things like stews and casseroles that need long cooking. Plan on 50% more time than in a conventional oven.

sterno stoves

I have 3 of these little one burner, fold flat stoves.  I keep one in each vehicle. They are cheap, and actually put out quite abit of heat. It works quite well for boiling water and heating soup. I wouldn’t try use it for anything else. The biggest benefit is for the apartment dweller with very little space or someone with very little money.

propane camp stove

These are the 2  burner stoves that a lot of keep with our camping supplies. We cooked on this while our power was out. I was surprised at how efficient it was. Again, one can be had for very little money and the propane canisters are also inexpensive. I store about 25 fuel cylinders.

gas grill

I guess if you have no other option you can cook on your grill but you have to heat the whole thing, even if you only want a kettle of hot water for tea. Not very effiicient. You also have to cook outside which isn’t much fun in a blizzard.

hibachi

Same as above but uses charcoal instead of propane. I have one, just in case, and I store a couple of bags of charcoal, along with lighter fluid and matches.

Obviously, if you have a wood stove, you will cook on that. Bruce got me a stove top oven for Christmas. You set it on a range top or on top of the wood stave and You have and instant oven. It is not large but you can cook up muffins or meat loaf. i tried out a couple of home made stoves from cans. They use paraffin for fuel. They were smelly and smokey and not at all efficient but you might want to make one with your kids. I like to know how to do things which explains why we spent a couple of hours making a pizza box solar oven with the kids, then another larger solar oven out of some big boxes. I worked pretty well considering it was made from junk we had lying around the house.

The point here is that you never know when you might be without power. Sharon Astyk did a very good post today about all of the scenarios that might leave us in the dark. All are possible and some, quite likely.

 

mathoms

If I remember correctly, Hobbits used to give Mathoms instead of gifts. A mathom is an item that is passed from one Hobbit to another in place of a purchased gift. I hope I have that right. It has been many years since I followed the escapades of Bilbo Baggins. Anyway, as I clean out my kitchen cabinets, I am finding quite a stash of mathoms. Bruce just came home from a bee meeting with one-a set of swan shaped, silver plated candle sticks in the original box. They were some sort of a door prize. Thank you. I will pass them on ASAP.

This got me to thinking about gift giving and how it relates to sustainability and preparedness. When we got married, 36 years ago, a shower gift was a nice set of pot holders or some glasses or a cookbook. Often, the item was handmade. I still use the aprons a favorite aunt made for me. An acceptable wedding gift was a small appliance like a toaster or blender. I actually got married in the era of the fondue pot. I got 4 of them. How things have changed. Most wedding gifts now seem to fall in the $100.00 dollar range for friends and $200.00 range for family. I have gone to a couple of kid’s birthday parties where gifts cost an easy $25.00. Call me cheap (Please! I consider it a compliment) but I think this is plain silly. Most gifts, especially gifts for kids, become landfill clutter about 2 hours after opening.

I think we should become Hobbit gift givers and turn to mathoms. As the economy deteriorates, we need to think about what gifts are saying. Are they conveying a message of I love and care about you or are they saying I don’t have a lot of money but I am willing to run up my Visa card to keep you from knowing it?

Last year, a friend who really was not obligated to give me a gift, never-the-less got me a seed sprouting set up for my birthday. It wasn’t expensive but it was perfect for me as I hate cleaning the cheese cloth after a sprouting session. I gave him an extra set of canning jars I had in the basement. Again, not an expensive gift but one I knew he would use. For kids, I tend to pick up  drawing paper, crayons and markers when I find them marked down and keep them on hand for the forgotten birthday party (There is a preparedness connection. I knew there had to be.) The markers may have Easter Bunnies on them in October but do kids really care? I would like to go a step further and say that used books make a good gift as do the ingredients for cookies in a jar with the recipe attached.

We have given up giving gifts outside of the immediate family for everything but weddings and new babies. Bruce has 8 brothers and sisters and I have three and we have a pile of nieces and nephews and now a new generation. We would go broke trying to buy for everybody. If you can’t give up gift giving entirely, can you convince your family to turn to mathoms? The only rule is that the item has to be entirely useless and cost less than $2.00. Free is better.

This may seem like a silly thing to waste time writing about but there is a serious side to it. This country has to rethink how and why we do things. Trying to impress people with what we have rather than who we are has driven people to bankruptcy. The hot tub culture has to be replaced with one that honors honesty and responsibility. Taking back our country starts with taking back our own lives.

 

slush bound

Sometimes a slush bound day is good thing. I was supposed to go out this morning but the weather will keep me in. This works because I am finishing Mike Folkerth’s book, The Biggest Lie Ever Told. I keep up with economic news but there are often pieces that don’t make sense to me. Mike’s book is not your typical doomer read. It is funny, informative and makes sense to someone without an MBA. I don’t recommend a lot of books but this one will find it’s way to my kids, just as Sharon Astyk’s book, Depletion and Abundance did. Add my book and you have a good starter library to life in this new world.

After that shameless plug, I want to talk about grains and legumes. I store a lot of both as they are cheap, readily available, will store nearly forever and provide a huge nutritional bang for the buck. The trouble for me was making them tasty enough to appeal to my family. Last night I made an investment in a cooking class that walked me through the finer points of preparing meals from what seem like pretty pedestrian ingredients. Even my husband, the meat man, liked the bean burgers I brought home and the kids fought over the dal (a kind of stewed lentil dish served with rice).

I know too many people who store food they won’t eat, thinking that in a crisis, they will figure it out. Guess again. Kids will go hungry before they eat something they hate. It pays to spend the money on some good cookbooks and spend time preparing meals from stored foods. We eat from storage several days each week. My new goal is a rice and beans in some incatation twice a week. I also want to cook with some grains I have never eaten before. Last night I ate rye and quinoa, new foods for me. With the right seasonings, they were terrific.

We are a spoiled bunch when it comes to food. Walk into a supermarket and the sheer volume overwhelms the senses. We can have strawberries in January and winter squash in July. Meat is affordable to most Americans at least some of the time. It is easy to forget that most people in the world eat less than we do and have a far more limited variety available to them. I can see a future where the lowly bean plays a much bigger role in the family meal plan. It behooves us to figure this out sooner rather than later. We will be healthier, save money and tread more lightly on the planet.

Back to the book and the cleaning. I do love getting things accomplished after laying around for nearly three weeks.

 

a penny saved

“I can’t dedicate money for paying down my debt or preparing. There is nothing left at the end of the month”. I hear it all the time and I sympathize. It is hard to look at your finances and find places to cut when it doesn’t feel like you are extravagant. But for most of us, it is possible to find ways to economize and use the savings, even if only $10.00 a week, to buy in bulk, get the things you need to see you through a crisis or put extra money toward ridding yourself of credit card debt. Often, it is a question of analyzing each expense, deciding what need it meets and then figuring out how to meet the need for less money.

For instance, you have to eat. If you spend $150 every week on food, you need to look at that amount and see how you can eat for less. You can go vegetarian 2 days a week, plan meals around sales, cook from scratch and eliminate all junk food. There are dozens of books and web sites dedicated to thrifty food ideas.  Do people eat a healthy, varied diet for less than what spend? Probably. You can do it to.

Suppose you have family tradition of pizza and a movie on Friday nights. You can justify that spend by saying that by Friday night you are too tired to cook and  time with your family is an important investment. What could happen that would save you a night of cooking and provide a way to spend family time together. You could make Friday night a soup and sandwich night and put the kids in charge of the cooking and cleaning up. You could put together a pizza dough in the morning and leave it in the fridge for the day. After work, it is a simple matter to put together couple of pizzas. You can rent a movie, borrow one from the library or begin a new tradition of board games on Friday nights.

Look at energy use. Set a goal for reducing usage and get your kids involved. Set on night a week as energy free. Use your lanterns, turn down the heat and cuddle on the sofa. Start a chapter book and read together rather than watch TV or surfing the net. Take shorter showers. Get an energy audit.

Make Sundays a no drive day. Other than essential driving (I consider your annual family reunion essential) stay home or walk.

Stop  buying books (except mine) and magazines, movies and CDs. Swap with friends and use your library.

Do you give your kids a budget for clothes. Let them know that the amount will be cut in half this year. Go over their wardrobe and repair what you can. Go to thrift stores, tag sales and second hand shops before you hit the mall. Kids don’t need new back packs every year. Tell them that if they want more money, they can earn it if they find a way to work that doesn’t interfere with school.

Look to vocational schools for some things like basic haircuts. Our favorite restaurant  is in the culinary department at our voc school. The food is terrific, the service very good and I couldn’t make the food for much less at home.

You need to look at every spend. Is it a want or a need$ Can you use less, do without, borrow, trade, repair or use a substitute. If you can save $100.00 a month, use it wisely. Put half  on your debt and half into bulk food. Get your kids on board. Younger kids can see this as a fun challenge and older kids can learn the facts of life about life in a changed economic world. They may not like it but remember who is the parent and what’s at stake.

 

The Prepared Library

Nothing is quite as important in a crisis as good information. Books are not a substitute for experience, I would not want to butcher my first chicken with nothing but a book for guidance, but a good library is invaluable for every prepared home.

You should set up a home library in as organized a fashion as possible. You need dedicated space and an easy system so you can lay your hands on what you need without hesitation. Most homes have space for a 4 shelf bookcase which should be plenty for preparedness resources. I keep my books organized by topic.

1. You need at least one good general preparedness book. Naturally, I want you to buy mine but I have to admit that there are other good ones out there with different focuses from short term preparedness as in a weather emergency to books to prepare you for TEOTWAWKI. When I got interested in preparedness, I bought every book I could find on the subject. In retrospect, I should have borrowed them from my library and not mad a purchase until I better knew my needs.

2. You need gardening books that are appropriate for your situation. There is no point in buying books to guide you through greenhouse gardening when you don’t have a greenhouse or one that assumes you have three acres of land in Tennessee when you actually live in a NYC apartment. I would suggest you borrow books like these for inspiration. Maybe you will decide to give up the NYC apartment and head for a smallholding in the country but until then, if your resources are limited,  put them into tangibles that work for you. Having said that, I spend money on books all the time.

3. You need a book or two on wild edibles. Again, a book is no substitute for a good mentor who knows foraging but you will want to own these.

4. Food preservation books are really important. At the very least, you want The Ball Blue Book but I would also suggest a book on dehydrating and one on fermentation.

6. General self-sufficient living books are a must-have. I love John Seymour’s books. They are so beautiful and give a lot of information on most subjects. My first book on self-sufficiency was Carla Emery’s Encyclopedia of Country Living. My ratty copy is held together with duct tape. When I read that she had died, I wept. In my mind she was still a young mother with a pile of kids, selling books at county fairs. I could not believe she was in her seventies.

7. Storey’s Country Bulletins are dandy little 36 page booklets dedicated to one subject like growing raspberries or home-made cold remedies. They are inexpensive and perfect for beginners. There are so many to chose from. I have dozens and use them all the time.

8. I have lots of cookbooks.  Make sure you have some that guide you through cooking with stored food and cooking from scratch. Cookin’ With Home Storage by Peggy Layton is a good book for this.

9. Everybody needs a couple of good references for first aid. Where There Is No Doctor and Where There Is No Dentist are inexpensive and could save your life.

I would also suggest some books that will work as teaching tools if your kids are out of school for a while.

I have a lot of books. I forage wild mushrooms so I have several good guides. I also save seeds and have books on that. I have dozens of gardening books and books dedicated to subjects like beekeeping and raising poultry. I do buy new books but I get a lot a library and church sales.  Tag sales are terrific places to find books. If you tell your librarian what you are interested in, he or she will get them through interlibrary loan. I am part of a sustainability group and we started a lending library that allows us to trade and share books.

 

a college for learning to do something useful

In the coming dark days, I fear we are going to have a glut of folks who can’t do anything useful. I am thinking about the abundance of graduates with MBAs, philosophy degrees, BA in liberal arts, woman’s studies, art history, and comparative literature. How many advertising executives, life coaches and motivational speakers are we going to need? I am not concerned that we have so many now (well I am actually but it isn’t relevant) but I wonder how many of them know how to do other things when following their bliss no longer keeps them fed. I think we need a new college system that teaches some useful things that will likely come in handy.

Do you know a cobbler? I am thinking that knowing how to make or repair shoes is a pretty rare talent and we will need at least one in every community. We will need barbers. We will not need hair stylists but actual barbers with the tools to provide shaves and haircuts when we might not be inclined to use disposable razors. Do you know  a winemaker, beer brewer, cheese maker, bread baker, or miller. Even if someone does some of these things as a hobby, would they have the tools and equipment to do it on a small commercial scale. I know we will need butchers. Weavers and seamstresses, basket makers and soap makers will all be in demand.

Random thoughts here. I know people who are looking at job loss and have had careers as furniture salesmen, social workers, and interior decorators. I sure hope they got some other skills along the way because those jobs might be gone for good.

If you have kids, start teaching now how to do things. Being the best on the block at some video game will not get them very far down the road.

 

Your rebate

If you are lucky enough to be getting a tax rebate this year, you may be thinking about what to do with it. I was speaking with two woman down at my daughter’s school today and both are planning trips to Florida over the April vacation even though money is clearly tight for both families. The rational is that they are already in so much trouble that it doesn’t really matter. They also feel that the value of their dollars is slipping so quickly that they might as well have some fun while they can.

I understand how they feel but I certainly hope you will make better choices. But what is a better choice? Alternative energy or a reliable car? A freezer or a new furnace? Pay down debt or stock up the pantry? I sure hope you aren’t expecting me to have some magic answer. I have just come into a small amount of money and Bruce and I are struggling with our many options for spending it. We are lucky in that we have no debt so we have more choices. If I owed money to anyone, I would in fact, pay that off, especially if the debt was a high-interest credit card debt. We know we will invest in our home infrastructure. We will probably put in a new double-flue chimney. This will make it possible to install a wood stove in the basement which will significantly decrease our heating bill. We have a wood lot and with proper management, we will be energy sustainable.  I just ordered a new dehydrator. Drying food  is much less energy intensive than canning and the food takes up a lot less speace in storage. We are going to build a small barn too. We need space for pigs, a couple of goats and a flock of chickens. If we build it ourselves and use a lot of salvage for materials, the cost won’t be too high. Our final spend will be  for a better cold cellar. We need a spot for the crops that like it just above freezing like the carrots, apples beets,  and cabbage. Bruce came up with a terrific plan. We have a hatchway with steps leading from the yard to the cellar. It stays really cold in that space. Bruce is going to rebuild the steps and hinge them. He will then drop insulated boxes under each step. The stuff we store there will not freeze but will be protected from the warmer temperatures of the the cellar. It was wasted space and the steps were falling apart anyway.

That’s pretty much going to eat up the money. I am writing this while I listen to the Obama press conference . I sure wish I felt better about this bailout. I am afraid that the government is doing the equivilant of taking a trip to Florida with our money. It will feel good for a bit but then the bill comes due and somebody is going to expect to get paid. With what? I know that in my house, if we got into money trouble, we would do without and suffer until we got out of trouble. I don’t know if the American people would be willing to suffer through bank and auto companies failing. He sitting there talking about credit so folks can buy RV’s. I just don’t see RV sales ramping up anytime in the near future. I’m pretty sure that the life we used to have is not coming back. I hope you spend your dwindling resources on things that will ensure your family’s ability to stay warm and fed. We have all been dancing and the fiddler is standing there with his hand out.