Self Reliance Exchange continues their long term food storage series with Step 7: Fruits & Veggies. This is a big one. Grains, legumes, and so on are all good, but fruits and vegetables make those others more versatile and offer important nutrition. They recommend growing your own, but also point out that buying in bulk or buying pre-preserved are also viable options.
If you’re interested in home canning, check out my friend Tonya’s site, Country Home Canning. She’s got recipes and techniques, and can help set you up with everything you need.
Self Reliance Exchange has a short article about taking care of our health. As I said, it’s short, so I’ll reprint much of it here:
…are you:
Getting enough sleep?
Exercising regularly?
Eating right?
Protecting yourself?
Taking your medications?
Seeing your doctor and dentist?
While I don’t live up to my own standards, I do believe in this. Life is stressful enough without making it more difficult by not taking care of yourself. Inversely, I deal with stress much better when I’m getting enough sleep and getting some good, solid exercise.
It’s tempting when things get tough or tight to skimp on yourself. Don’t! You can only overload yourself for so long before you give out and are no good to anyone. Take care of yourself!
I finally got back to continuing my series on my sister’s blog about home document management. This edition helps you take the first step to getting all your documents under control by starting with the most critical ones. There’s also a little off-shoot discussion on safes and safe deposit boxes. Please go and read it, and then stay around and see what other useful stuff my family has put together.
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.
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.
Iain Hollingshead, writing for the Telegraph, decides to test out the theories in a book by Matthew Crawford on the benefits of working with one’s hands. He decides to help his favorite mechanic services his Alpha Romeo:
I have a minor triumph of my own when, after an hour of gentle, blokey ribbing for knowing nothing about cars, I mend a fiddly rear numberplate light. As we celebrate with a mug of builder’s tea, I’m surprised by how pathetically, disproportionately happy I feel. Then I remember Crawford’s words: “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.”
Mondegreen II has a great idea I should try to implement in my homeowners association (I’m the president):
Think of the specialty tools we buy that we don’t need more than once a year (if that). Not only do we incur the cost of buying them, we also incur the cost of storing them. I am more than happy to share my small collection of such tools with neighbors–thinks like the DeWalt compound miter saw that I bought for a deck project, or the sturdy hand truck hanging in a corner of the garage. There is absolutely no need for every suburban family to own their own copy of such things.
I agree. I own four different types of shovel, three of which I use at most a few times a year. I’m glad to have them when I need them, but really…
Melanie Williams at Where Simplicity Leads has some excellent thoughts on the difference between tools and skills in self reliance:
When I was just getting serious about simple living a few years ago I read an article about self-reliance which really stuck with me. The author said that the biggest mistake people make when starting out is thinking that in order to become self-reliant they have to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. I remember thinking that was kind of funny–what kind of self-reliance is that? Self-reliance is really more about skill-building than it is about tool-getting, but in the early stages it’s easy to believe all you need are the right tools (or at least to believe that the right tools will get you a very long way).
Tools of course are important, and when we’re first adopting a simpler and more resilient lifestyle it might become very obvious, very quickly that all the tools and gadgets and gizmos we’ve acquired over the years are precisely all the wrong tools and gadgets and gizmos needed for self-reliance. Riding lawn mowers, microwave ovens, GPS navigation, bread machines, rototillers, dishwashers…not so important. Root cellars, chicken coops, grain mills, spades, shovels, buckets, jars…very important tools.
Read the whole thing. And not just because she uses the same blog template I used to! 😉
My yearly checkup with my cardiologist went fine. Taking echo-cardiograms is becoming second-nature to me now, though I’m regularly impressed how the technician can look at the odd stuff on the screen and know what they are looking at. And as the assistant was hooking me up for an EKG I suddenly pictured myself as a cow being hooked up to a milking machine.
Anyway, the bottom line is that nothing has changed significantly since last year. And that’s good. The longer my situation remains unchanged the better. It means major surgery is not in my immediate future, and if I can hold it off long enough technology may advance sufficiently to where it will no longer require major surgery. I’m all for that. Better a nanobot injection in twenty years than valve replacement today.
So what does this have to do with self-reliance? Well, you can’t be entirely self-reliant without your health. The more you know about your health the more you can do about it. The earlier you detect problems the sooner you can deal with them–preferably by yourself and not with significant medical intervention. I’ve nothing against medical intervention, but if you can do something to keep from needing it, why not do it? Being proactive in your health allows you the most control over your medical future.
In my case it’s a reassurance to know that I’m still okay. It’s also reassurance that my current level of preventive action is sufficient. I don’t have to guess what I need to be doing. I’m doing it, and it’s working. That in itself is peace of mind.
I like to speak badly of the doctor who had the gall to keep finding things wrong with me, but when it comes right down to it, I’m grateful. No one likes to hear bad medical news, but once you know, you can do something about it.
I should probably back up a bit. Not long after I got married I decided (okay, was practically forced at gunpoint by my wife) to go see a doctor about my allergies. My doctor didn’t just check on my allergies. He gave me a full physical, including blood work. What he found was that I had a high level of VLDL, Very Low Density Lipids, or triglycerides. Or, as the doctor explained it, you have your good cholesterol (HDL), your bad cholesterol (LDL), and your not-good cholesterol (VLDL).
He immediately put me on a diet which, if it didn’t work, would be followed up by medication. Fortunately the diet worked. I’d been eating too much sweets after getting married, and once I cut that back and started exercising more I was fine. I also lost 30 pounds I’d gained since leaving college. No biggie. Thanks, Doc!
Except he wasn’t through. The next checkup the weight loss allowed him to hear my heart more clearly, and what he heard wasn’t good. He sent me to a cardiologist, who determined I have two leaky valves. At that point I started half-jokingly threatening to stop going to the doctor so he wouldn’t keep finding things wrong with me.
The thing is, awareness is half the battle, at least for me. Now that I know, I can maintain my weight and not worry too much about cholesterol. I take medication for my heart condition which seems to have arrested the problem. It’s been nearly ten years now, and the cardiologist still thinks we may have to do something about the problem maybe twenty years from now. Every year I can put that off increases the chance that much more that they’ll have better, less-invasive procedures to fix my valves by the time I need them, or that I won’t need any surgery at all (something else will kill me first, to put it bluntly).
Knowledge really is power. I may not have liked getting bad news from my doctor, but knowing what I know, I can take control of the situation and do what it takes to make sure I’m still around for awhile.
Tomorrow I’ve got my yearly appointment with the cardiologist. Of course I’m hoping for good news. But if it’s not, I hope I’ll have learned my lesson enough to not hold it against him.
