Self Reliance Exchange has a great article on what items to keep in your car in case of emergencies when you may be driving in extreme conditions:
Many things should be in all vehicles, but there more things that can be needed or required for extreme conditions. Recently, I have been researching 4×4 off-roading and beach buggying and discovered there are tools and equipment that are either required or needed that could benefit people even in everyday conditions.
Read the whole thing. Many of those items don’t seem all that extreme to me. But then I live in the northwest where during winter just getting across town can be extreme conditions.
When we bought this house nearly five years ago one of the things that impressed us was the back deck. It was large! We could have a whole party out there. We forgot two small facts. For one, we are not “party” people. For another, there are only three real seasons in Idaho: too cold to go outside, too wet and windy to go outside, and too hot to go outside.
Needless to say, our deck has not had a lot of use in five years. Since I lost my job last year we started joking about all that wasted space, and that perhaps we should cut holes in the deck and turn some of it into planter boxes or something. The joking began to turn serious. A few weeks ago we decided it was time to get rid of the deck. We need the space for more garden, and can make do with a much smaller outside sitting space. It was time to dismantle the deck.
Let me just start by saying that the deck was added well after the house was initially built. Whomever built it did a much better job than the company that built our house. This deck was designed to last! I’m fully confident we could put our upright grand piano on it with no worry about it breaking the deck at all.
Of course this means that tearing down the deck has been a slow process. Not that I’ve had much time to devote to it, but even with the time I’ve had it seems as if I’m making no progress. I had to start by cutting through the decking boards to expose the structure underneath to get an understanding of how it’s built. Then I had to figure out how to remove the railing without destroying the flower beds and sprinkler riser around the outside of it. It sometimes feels like dismantling a ship in a bottle. But I am making some headway.
We’re still holding on to hope that I’ll have the deck taken down and the new garden beds put in while there is still time to plant something. But then it’s already mid-May, and I’ve only got the rails and a tenth of the deck down. Tomorrow I will devote most of the day to it. That will probably be my “make-or-break” day. Our future gardening efforts hang in the balance!
StarBird Farm has an interesting post about deciding what to grow in your garden. This has long been a question for us as well. For example, our first year we grew potatoes. They grew quite well. This is Idaho, after all. But then it probably cost us more to grow those potatoes than we can pick them up locally. This is Idaho, after all. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to grow a lot of foods that you can obtain locally quite inexpensively.
On the other hand, we do well with strawberries, and they are not cheap to buy. Ours also taste a lot better than the ones you buy in the store. We often joke about forgetting about everything else and just growing strawberries.
Of course another option is to still plant things you can grow easily even if you can buy them cheaply. Even though most vegetables are cheap when they are in season, they go up in price quite a bit at other times of the year. When they are cheap, go ahead and stock up and store them for the off season. Then you are able to enjoy that food cheaply year round.
This year we’re going to take that approach. We’re planting a lot of tomatoes–something we eat a lot of in various forms–so that we actually get enough to do something with. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Mother’s Day means two main traditions around our house: 1) Dad makes biscuits for breakfast, and 2) Dad tries a brand new recipe for dinner. Which usually leads to a third: Dad makes a huge mess in the kitchen.
I enjoy cooking. But I don’t do it often enough to where I really know the arrangement of things in the kitchen. I’m always looking for things, which usually leads to a fair amount of stress, as I’m often supposed to be adding the ingredient I’m looking for right now!
So when we ran out of baking powder mid-way into making biscuit dough it should have been a stressful moment. But not this time. While I may not know the layout of my wife’s kitchen cupboards, I DO know where our food storage is. I immediately knew to check the box on top of the partial wall along one side of the kitchen. The one labeled “Baking Powder”, where we keep extra cans of baking powder (amazing how that works). But we were out there, too.
Not to worry. I know my wife would not leave us short on baking powder. She’s too good a shopper for that. She’d have stocked up as soon as she knew we were running low. She just hadn’t gotten as far as putting them in the box atop the wall yet. So where else would she put them? Downstairs storage closet, of course. Easily found. Probably avoided.
And that’s how food storage saved Mother’s Day (or at least Daddy’s hide).
Lauren over at Path Across has posted her experience in having her herb garden die so that we can learn from it.
It’s not easy to admit defeat, especially when I like to go around telling people that they ought to use their backyards and front yards and porches to grow gardens. Especially when I look forward to the day that I have the space to grow my own “edible jungle.” How can I do either of these things when I can’t even nurture a windowsill herb garden?
There is a class of people who claim that they have a “black thumb,” i.e., they end up killing any plant in their immediate vicinity. I’m afraid I might be one of those people.
Self Reliance Exchange has an article up on the importance of water and how to get some in a pinch. In this case the problem was localized to their own home, but it’s a good reminder. We need water, and it’s good to have some on hand. It doesn’t all have to be drinkable to be useful. Even the slimiest rain barrel water can be used to flush your toilet at least.
Still, having a supply of water on hand to last for a while can be important–if not critical. Especially for people like me who live in a desert.
Today I at last finished “Walden”, which was both better and worse than I expected. As an observation of nature in New England it was quite compelling. As a seminal philosophical work I was somewhat disappointed. But then I believe that much of what Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists proposed has become such a part of American thought that we probably become familiar with Thoreau’s works without ever having read them.
In any case, Thoreau and I have made our peace. As you likely detected in my earlier posts, I find Thoreau a bit vain and pedantic. His continual criticism of his fellow man grates on my nerves, mainly because he always seems to add an unspoken “unlike myself” to every fault he finds. I can only tolerate so much self-aggrandizement before I stop listening to what one has to say. Fortunately for Thoreau, he intersperses his sermons with nature study, which pulls me back in enough to allow me to listen to him a bit more next time he meanders off to vex his neighbors.
But in the end I do not necessarily disagree with him. We all do live unexamined lives to a large degree; accepting with little question the path society lays before us rather than thinking carefully what it is we want and how to get it–or become it. We live lives “out there”, constantly focused on the world and society around us while paying very little attention to what lies within us. No wonder our society teeters on the brink when so many of us build upon unsteady foundations.
How Thoreau’s Walden experience will impact my own thoughts on self reliance remains to be seen. I have a great deal more thinking ahead of me. I’ve read what Thoreau thinks on the matter. Now it’s my turn. Fairly soon I shall put to pixel my own theory of self reliance–and then proceed to poke holes in it for the next year or so. Even better, I invite you to join me in hole-poking. I highly doubt any thoughts from my head will be solid enough to stand on their own without reinforcement and reconstruction, and I doubt even more in my objective ability to locate all the weak points on my own. I look forward to learning from you–and I hope before I’m through you’ll be able to learn something from me.
But for now the lofty siren song of intellectual exercise must give way to the rustic realities–it’s bath night, and I have my role to play in the cleansing of the children. What e’er thou art, act well thy part.
Did you know that Nashville, Tennessee has experienced the worst flood in 200 years, twenty people have died, and many national landmarks have been completely ruined? Probably not, unless you caught it in passing as the media moved on to more “important” news. A few websites have speculated as to why we don’t see more about it in the news:
Unlike what transpired in another southern city hit by a crippling storm a few years back — a city deemed by the media as worthy of ad nauseam coverage — there was no crime spree. In the aftermath of heart-wrenching destruction and chaos, there were zero reports of looting, assault or rape. Oh, and neither the mayor, nor any elected official in either Nashville or Davidson Counties got on national television and shrieked about how it was all Barack Obama’s fault (although the least the President of the United States could’ve done was issue a statement of support). They were too busy actually doing their jobs and fulfilling their responsibilities to the locals who elected them.
Funny, but the residents of middle Tennessee bear a striking resemblance to Louisiana’s neighbors, Mississippi and Alabama. Parts of those states were hit just as hard as New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, yet they barely merited any mention on the nightly news either. And instead of looking for a scapegoat, these American citizens also went to work. Side-by-side, neighbors of all colors, races and creeds rebuilt their homes and their lives. They also had competent governors who executed well-planned disaster recovery procedures, in fulfillment of their obligations and responsibilities as CEOs of a state. And in stark contrast to the myth perpetrated in the media and in pop culture, southerners proved that they are for the most part, decent, caring, generous folks — not wild-eyed, Bible-thumping, card-carrying KKK racists.
Though the commentary comes from a conservative site, there is a fair amount of truth there. Had the Nashville flood paralleled New Orleans in any of its worse aspects you can bet there would be coverage. Conflict and outrage sells papers and grabs viewer eyeballs. There was a time when the media would also have loved to cover stories of people coming together to minimize the impact of such disasters, but that’s falling out of vogue.
The message here is obvious. Regardless of how important and how beneficial self reliance can be, don’t expect any praise or adulation for it. Those who are prepared will never get any reward for it beyond the benefits of being prepared. But then again, what good is praise if your family is hungry? What good is media coverage if you’re stuck without shelter? What good is a television crew when you’ve lost everything?
No, I suspect that while the Nashville flood is not getting much outside attention, the people of Nashville wouldn’t have it any other way. They’ve got each other, and that’s worth more than millions of viewers on the nightly news. That is what self reliance is all about, really: minimizing the impact of such events to yourself and your family so that you can instead turn out attention outward to helping others.
So here’s to the people of Nashville. You’re a class act all the way. Thank you for showing the rest of us how it’s done.
Anthony Siino, writing for Chico State’s independent student newspaper, produced a column about the value of hard work and producing something with one’s hands. He encouraged his fellow college students to not get too caught up in the “life of the mind” and try hard work now and then to boost one’s self-reliance:
Students should remember to stay in contact with the physical world. Hard work brings even the most philosophical people back to the ground and grants us appreciation of the simpler things in life.
The beauty of hard work comes twofold. Not only can you appreciate the relaxation that comes after grueling labor, but you can immediately see the results.
He of course catches heck in the comments, proving once again that college students seldom read anything all the way through, let alone think about what they’ve read. But if Mr. Siino ever comes to me for a job some day he’ll have a much better chance than most of his readers–I mean, skim-and-detractors.
Angela over at Adventures in Self Reliance shows an emergency kit she put together for their new vehicle, which includes some basic items that would be helpful in event of a breakdown, unexpected stops, etc.
They’re also sponsoring a contest, ending this weekend. Photograph your car emergency kit and you could win a prepackaged survival kit! I’d consider it, but with in-laws coming next weekend, we’ve got a few emergencies of our own to deal with before they come. I’ll be busy with lots of other projects this weekend.
