Adventures in Self Reliance has a post about using super glue to close cuts. I’ve heard of it being done, and I’m sure it would work, but I would personally appreciate a little advice on the proper way to apply it before I try it. With my luck I’d do it the worst possible way and scar them for life or something!
Author Archives: Thom
The cost of "free"
My sister, over at Knot in the Rope, has a post on how misleading many “free” can be. Very few things are really free.
What is the mentality of “free”? It’s the belief that “free” means there is NO cost! Take the lunches I mentioned: sure, they’re not asking the kids who come to hand over some cash to get lunch, but that food doesn’t just materialize out of nowhere and the people there cooking and serving aren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. SOMEONE is paying for this program — in this case the federal government, which translates to the taxpayers!
Read the whole thing.
More self reliance fun
On marketing, consumerism, and self-reliance
Rhonda Hetzel at Down To Earth Forum has an interesting essay examining the idea that unwarranted concern over food safety has made us all dependent on pre-packaged foods. I think there is something to that.
For one thing, marketing has long focused on showing how a product fills your needs, and they’re not above creating a need where there is none, even if it means scaring you to death. I remember a friend of mine years ago trying to sell me on a vitamin program based on this apocalyptic presentation that did its best to convince us that we would all die terrible, awful deaths without their vitamins. I didn’t buy it, or the vitamins.
For another, though it may have gotten its start in marketing, the anti-germ crusade has taken on a life of its own. We are so concerned about germs that we are using stronger and stronger products whose only real effect is to force-evolve more potent germs while simultaneously weakening our own natural defenses.
Now, I’m not an un-hygenic person, but I often observed at work how many people would take their paper towel they had just dried their hands on and use it to open the door out of the restroom so they wouldn’t have to expose themselves to the germs on the door handle. I don’t know if this helped them any, but I suspect all it did was make the door handle moist, thus extending the life expectancy of any germs that were there. In any case, I didn’t do that, and I was, if not sick less often, not sick any more frequently than they were.
At the same company we had executives who would spend months at a time at our India office, living amid conditions that would make most of us shudder. Invariably they would all get terribly sick within a few weeks of arriving there. Yet they all observed that the Indians themselves were very seldom sick–and they (the executives) seldom got sick again.
Now I’m not recommending we all start living in squalor or abandon basic hygiene in order to start building up immunity to common germs, but I do think we could relax a bit and not insist on surgical-theater cleanliness for every room in our house.
What are your thoughts?
Gardening ideas
Smithville Post has a good entry up for getting ideas on how to set up a garden. He doesn’t say much about it (I’ve invited him to do so in the comments–feel free to add some pressure of your own 😉 ), but the pictures alone are worth consideration. Take a look!
Self reliance vs. fostering self reliance in others
Tonight I was reminded again that self reliance, while a worthy goal, is sometimes at cross purposes with other values I hold to. As a Christian, I also believe in looking out for my fellow man. While I do not believe in just giving a man a fish, I sometimes may need to allow a man to fish in my pond. Allow me to explain.
There is a person in our church who supports his family by cleaning buildings, mowing lawns, painting houses, and any other odd jobs he can find. He works hard–a lot harder than I do, most likely. He knows how to fish, so to speak, but then so do I. Very little of what he does is something that I can’t do for myself.
Self reliance says I should hold on to my money by doing those tasks myself. My Christian values say I should reward this man’s industriousness by paying him to do some work for me, at least now and then. Which one wins when my values clash in such a manner? Which one should win?
Right now it’s not an issue. I don’t have the money to pay him, because I am still struggling to support my family. My business, while showing some signs of progress, is not yet putting our bank balance on a positive trajectory. But someday I will have enough money to meet my family’s needs and perhaps some to spare. At what point do I decide that while I can take care of my lawn myself, it is my Christian duty to give this man the opportunity to do it for me and thus allow him to take care of his family?
Technically, self reliance doesn’t mean you have to do everything for yourself, you just need to know how to do as much yourself as makes sense. Should I ever fall on hard times again I’m pretty sure I won’t have forgotten how to mow my own lawn. I doubt I’ll have thrown away my mower. But since my my desire to please my God is more important to me than my self reliance, I suspect I need to be taking a careful look at my finances as my business becomes more and more successful. At some point I will need to switch over from securing my own self reliance to helping others achieve it for themselves.
Deck project update
The deck removal/garden bed project is pretty much complete. After clearing away the decking we dug up the area. I quickly found that someone had devoted a great deal of concrete to making…I don’t know what. Every few feet I’d dig up another inverted gumdrop of concrete that served no purpose I could ascertain other than to annoy me. I now have the world’s largest concrete gumdrop collection!
The lot, when cleared, looked much like this:
In digging up the area, too, I came to realize this was not going to be choice garden soil. Much of it hadn’t seen water in years, and was little better than packed clay. I spread what compost I could get from our composters over the area and dug it in. It still looked rather rough and clumpy, but I started putting in dividers and marking out pathways before the final attempt to condition the soil a bit better.
Today, while I had my father-in-law still here to help (thanks, Dad!) I went to the home improvement store and bought 21 bags of compost. Two-thirds of it actually went around various trees in our yard, but the rest got spread over the new garden area. The kids joined in, and were actually rather helpful. It’s amazing how quickly five rakes can smooth out a garden.
Of course all we’d really done to this point is just cover over the clumpy, clay-ish soil. Next we dug it all in. Amazingly enough, it worked! The dirt smoothed right out! It’s still not perfect, and I’ll be surprised if anything grows all that well in it this year, but it’s a start. We’ve got leftover seeds we can use, so it won’t be that costly to see what we can get to grow. If it does well, every bit will help.
I’m glad the project is finally done–well, except for getting rid of the rest of the scrap wood and the concrete gumdrop collection. There are plenty of other things I can focus on now, like thinning the peaches.
Can canning become mainstream again?
I was flipping through some ads from the Sunday paper today when one caught my eye. It was an ad for Ball, the canning supply maker. That’s a company you don’t see very often these days.
It turns out that Ball is trying to appeal to a new generation of Americans. The ad focuses on two things. The first is their Ball Canning Discovery Kit, complete with a plastic basket for immersing the finished product in hot water, three canning jars, and an instruction/recipe book. The other is a completed jar of what appears to be spaghetti sauce surrounded by fresh ingredients.
Out of focus in the background is a young couple, casually dressed, cooking something together. We assume it’s the sauce. The message is fairly clear: forget grandma and her pantry full of peach preserves. For the new, hip generation, canning is all about preserving your handmade culinary masterpieces. Canning is sexy. Canning is clean and simple (the couple are both wearing spotless white shirts, which means they can’t have come near any sauce, and in a clean, featureless, airy kitchen). It’s a shared experience.
In spite of my usual cynicism toward advertising and products trying to re-image themselves, I have to give them a thumbs up. Canning is in danger of becoming a lost art, and if someone doesn’t find a way to get the younger generations interested again it will disappear with the last of Aunt Eleanor’s peaches.
What I do find interesting about the ad, however, is that thrift is in no way addressed as a motivator. With only 44 words (only a little too long for a tweet), they don’t have much time for unnecessary words. They hit such keywords as easy, simple, fresh, new, variety, delicious, and discovery. Not a single word I would normally associate with the canning I was involved in as a child (okay, maybe delicious). Not a single reference to any old ways of doing things. It’s almost like canning hasn’t existed for over two centuries as a means of storing food.
No, it’s like canning has sprung unbidden from the farmer’s market as a trendy new concept in epicureanism. It’s not old, dusty bottles of peaches and jams anymore. It’s fresh primavera sauce in single-meal bottles–a recipe no doubt easy to make, yet impressive nonetheless, and not likely to change its nature in the heat-sealing process.
I hope they succeed, in any case. They’re working on it. Also included in the ad is a coupon for two dollars off their “Discovery Kit”, and $1.50 off a case of jars. Hopefully all the trendy young couples out there who try this kit don’t get discouraged when the sauce splatters on their clean white shirts. While canning is a great way to preserve food, and it can be fun, I’ve yet to have an experience that wasn’t at least a little messy.
In any case, if you would rather dive right in instead of sticking a toe in the water, I recommend my good friend Tonya’s site, Country Home Canning. She’s got the recipes, techniques, and equipment for those who want to get serious about canning.
What if the economy gets worse?
Path Across’ Jim Ingham is asking the question:
Have you given any thought as to what the economy looks like if we see a deepening of the recession due to the Gulf Oil Spill or any other event?
He then answers the question by pointing out four areas we can get ready now. Read the whole thing.
The need for role-models
While this is not entirely on-topic, this essay by Rick Johnson really caught my attention and pulled on my heart strings a bit. It is well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the bottom line:
I am convinced that the greatest, most effective way we help other people is through mentoring. Being mentored or guided by positive role models is also the best way that people, especially boys, learn. Males are extremely visual and so the need to actually see an example is imperative to our learning and development process. If we continue to produce angry young men that kill each other and prey upon others our culture is doomed to collapse.
If you are a man, someone needs you. You won’t have to look far to find a male younger than you are who desperately needs what you’ve already learned. Open yourself to the opportunities to be used. I promise you will not regret it. The satisfaction you will get from seeing how you are helping to change lives with such very little effort on your part will be a magnificent blessing in your life. It will make you feel like a man!