Surviving the Hard Times

I hope none of us end up in the poor house. Do poor houses even exist anymore? I don’t think so. I think we replaced those with our welfare system. No more working on the poor farm. No more working on the prison farm. Just the free handouts. It’s a system that I don’t believe can be sustained. We need to learn how to do things in a sustainable way. Whether it’s building from sustainable, renewable products, growing our own food or governing our country, we need to focus on whether we can sustain the ideas that we propose. We need to approach the world as though it were a marathon. Can we sustain this pace? Do we need to make adjustments now so we can make it to the end of the race, or will we drop out before the end?

Shelter, water, and food are essential to life. Shelter is generally provided and often an afterthought in today’s society. People are beginning to think more about it in these last few months. People are beginning to feel threatened. The thought is finally beginning to intrude, “Where will I go if I lose my house?” The old ideas of thrift are beginning to return. So where can we be more thrifty? Where can we cut back and save money?

So back to the poor house food or how we can pinch pennies to stay in our house and out of the poor house. This isn’t going to be about clipping coupons and buying in bulk. There are other people who write about those areas. This is more about a trip down memory lane to the rocky hills of a farm. I’ve written about the brown beans, the lamb’s quarter and poke salad. There are other areas that seem like a luxury now. There were steaks, hamburger, heart and liver. Now days I don’t cook steak often, nor use much red meat. Not because I’m a vegetarian or opposed to red meat, it’s the price of meat plain and simple. It would almost be sacrilege in my family to be a vegetarian, I come from a family that raises beef cattle. It’s not a big operation. There are no feedlots. There are no veal shacks. The pastures aren’t overgrazed (unless it’s a dry year and things get really tight then the grass gets skimpy). There was a steer that was fed up every year for eating. He was sent to the local slaughterhouse (There’s another small town business that’s disappearing) to be packaged and then stored in the huge freezer. Since we weren’t buying the meat in the grocery store it was cheap for us. I doubt I’ll be able to feed my children the way my mother fed me. There will be less meat loaf, little or no steak, and fewer hamburgers.

I read on various blogs and forums about people buying bags of rice. White rice is good. I like white rice but I think it could get old really quick by itself. One of my memories of childhood is tuna gravy over rice. People don't seem to make gravy anymore. With all the weight loss concerns, we've been taught to leave off the gravy. It's fattening and unnecessary. Tuna gravy is just a white sauce/gravy with a can of tuna dumped in for flavor, texture and nutrition. Place a bed of rice on the plate and ladle on the gravy. Right now it's probably not the best thing for your waist. If times get harder, we may all be eating a lot less and have lost a bit of weight, in which case, we'll be looking for a few extra calories.

So let's look at gravy a bit more. There are infinite varieties of gravy. I could do the whole Forest Gump name all the forms of gravy but I'll refrain. I'm fond of white gravy myself. Just look around the pantry and you'll find all sorts of things to either toss in the gravy or to toss the gravy over. If you have a large freezer for food storage, look around for a restaurant supply store. Here on the West Coast of America we have a chain called Cash and Carry. They are open to the public. You'll find there are big bags of crumbled sausage, Canadian bacon, link sausage, all in large packages that cost less per ounce than the small individual packaging you find at the local grocery store. Just look around and imagine things swimming in a creamy white sauce. As long as the electricity holds out to power the freezer, you can have a ready supply of tasty protein to toss into your gravies.

So you've got a tasty gravy, now what? Put something under it and chow down. Got bread? Got bread that doesn't taste quite as fresh as you'd like? Toast it and top it with your gravy. Getting sick of that white rice? Add the tuna or sausage gravy with some salt and pepper. If you're lucky enough to have some hamburger, steak or chicken, bread it and fry it in chicken fried steak fashion and top with plain white gravy. A bit of corn or green beans on the side and you've got a meal.

For those of you who have only made gravy by opening a jar, or mixing water with the ingredients of a package, here are a few tips. I have to admit. I most often end up with lumpy gravy or scorched gravy and various other incarnations of gravy. It comes from doing too many things at once. It doesn't bother me. I like my gravy, lumpy, scorched or otherwise.

Basic Gravy Recipe

4 tablespoons margarine or butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups water, white wine, chicken stock or milk

Melt the butter over low heat, then add the liquid and the flour, stir for 3-4 minutes with a fork or wire whisk. Now that you have a basic sauce or gravy, you can start flavoring it. A pinch of salt, a can of tuna, a handful of sausage or a heavy grinding of black pepper are good starting points. Keep stirring until the gravy reaches the desired thickness.

Next up on the menu....cornbread!

It’s been an interesting few weeks. We’ve seen unpresidented swings in the stock market. We’ve seen a bailout/rescue bill fail in the House of Representatives. We’ve seen the Senate take up the same bill and add favorite tax cuts and incentives to the bill. The Senate passed the bill…so did the House. So we’ve been bailed out. The stock market didn’t come bounding back after the bill was passed.

How does this affect me? How does this affect you? Does it affect us at all? I believe that it will impact our world. Whether your world is in rural America, suburbia or the inner city. There will be a ripple happen. Whether that ripple is a result of the original cause (the need for a bail out) or whether it is the result of the bail out itself, we may never know. I believe that we are in for a rough ride ahead. This bail out plan may not have the desired results. I’ve been reading about the Great Depression in America. It is believed that the bailout plans instituted then may have actually prolonged the depression. By trying to do good, the natural recovery of the economy was prolonged. I am not an economist. I have not studied these things in depth. I openly admit when I do not have all the answers.

What I do know, however, is that we must begin to change the way that we are living. We cannot continue to live in the credit bubble that has been providing the livestyle for many of us. I am not happy with my current credit state. I would like to have less credit and more money in the bank. My plan for the future is to pay off as many bills as possible and get back to saving. I plan to change the way I eat, the way I shop, and the way I cook.

Lately, I’ve been reading lots of food books. They are interesting and tend to involve travel and eating the local foods. Then I realized that many of these books were written by wealthy people; people who every year spend a month in Maine. I began to wonder why poor people didn’t write food books. Is it that we are boring? Surely the food of poor folks is just as interesting as that of the more affluent. I began to think back on the food of my youth. I grew up poor; one of six kids on a rocky flint and limestone farm in hillbilly country. What did we eat? So I sat one afternoon and started listed the foods that I grew up eating. There were always the brown beans. There were pots of brown beans with an oxtail. Not a ham hock, as mother attended a church with psuedo-Jewish traditions, so there was no pork eaten. The beans were always served with a vinegary relish called chow chow. We made chow chow every fall. It consisted of all the garden leftovers that would die with the first frost. Cabbage, green peppers, green tomatoes, sweet red peppers, cucumbers and onions all ground in the hand grinder then cooked with vinegar, sugar, and spices. It smelled heavenly when cooking and going into the jars. It tasted heavenly during the winter over plates of brown beans with thick homemade bread spread with butter. If the milk cow was giving milk, there would be homemade butter. Hard and tough to spread but which melted into the hot slices of freshly baked bread.

The beans might have been my first thought but as I wrote I realized that our diet was quite varied. There were the greens picked wild from the field and cooked down. These were lamb’s quarter or poke salad. From the garden there was swiss chard and mustard greens. Tossed into the big pot with water and salt and cooked down. They were often served beside the brown beans. There was a glass cruet filled with vinegar to pour over the greens once they were on your plate.

I find the regional differences in eating styles amusing. My husband seems to have little reference to vinegary foods. I’m not even sure that he eats relish on his hot dogs. Perhaps it’s my Southern upbringing or my German genes. I have a love of sauerkraut, pickled herring, beans with chow chow, a freezer coleslaw that has a vinegar base and greens with vinegar. In my more adult years, I gravitated to vinegar and salt potato chips. Vinegar seems to be a staple of life for me. I feel that it is a good thing. Vinegar is a good preservative.

One of my recent joys is fermentation. It’s not exactly recent to me. It’s more like a rediscovery of something that I haven’t done in many years. I used to help my mother prepare cabbage for sauerkraut. Many delicious things come from things that most people throw out. We’ve become so out of touch with how food is manufactured that we’re afraid of anything that doesn’t look surgically sterile. It never ceases to amuse me when people want to discard sour cream that has been sitting out for a few hours. I am certain that they are unaware of how to sour cream, cheese, and yogurt are made. It is that very process of letting the milk sit and sour that creates these wonderful concoctions. I often laugh about my kids making ricotta cheese in their lost sippy cups. But the truth is that it’s a pretty good start on a pretty good cheese.

I think we need to start getting back in touch with our food. It can save us in the future. Save us from wasting perfectly good food. Save our life from starvation because we fear eating perfectly good food. We need to get over these food phobias.

Normally I do my real estate searching via the Internet. I know I'm missing lots of properties but it's a way for me to get a general idea of what an area looks like. It's also fun to start looking at the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) for an area. They love to post pictures of them operating during the last disaster. One small town in Kansas looked very good...and then I saw the pictures from the DEM. Apparently large areas may be prone to flooding. I have an aversion to seeing all or portions of my house underwater. So I quietly crossed that area off my list of possible areas for a new homestead.

This past week I got the opportunity to do a little traveling. Down through Oregon and into Northern California. It's a beautiful drive. A little less lovely when it's 105°F in Grants Pass but still nice to see that part of the country. I've made a permanent note to self to never drive Hwy 199 between Grants Pass and Crescent City, California again. It's beautiful, wild remote country. But the twisty, little highway hanging above the river in the canyon really eats up the time and gas and tends to make passengers carsick. Ok, the driver felt sick on occasion too!

Driving along the California coast was nice and much cooler than the inland Oregon temperatures. It's nice to think about the bounty of the sea. There's salt to be produced from the salt water, fish, mussels, crabs, and seaweed to be harvested. I also wonder if it would be safe to eat those items or whether we've managed to pollute the water so much that we've created toxic food sources. If we lose power and can't process waste water, will we further pollute the coastal waters? My feeling is that we would see more pollution being dumped there.

There were Tsunami warning signs. Some of them were in areas where you couldn't even see the ocean but it was flat and marshy towards the west; an easy path for water from the ocean to your front door if you lived there. My husband and I began asking ourselves just what is the size of tsunami wave that is used when they determine which areas are in or out of tsunami danger. All the upwards grades were marked 'Leaving Tsunami Danger Area' but all of them didn't seem that safe to me. I'll have to do a bit of research and see how high the tsunami wave was in the computer simulations used to post the signs. I'm thinking it wasn't as high as I'd like. I wonder if it takes into account rising sea levels as various glaciers and ice caps melt. Will they need to move and repost the signs every year to stay ahead of the rising water? As we're driving along, we notice a large power plant located between Hwy 101 and the ocean, on flat lowland. If a tsunami hits, the area will lose power, for quite some time it would appear.

We drove inland and upwards out of tsunami danger. It was dryer. Not arid, just not the lush, squishy wetness of my current location. A nice flat plot of land. An old plum tree grew near the old house. There was a bee hive in an old apple tree. Other apple trees grew on a steep slope. There was a drainage ditch that came into the property and runs in the winter. There's a nice three feet of drop which would make a nice spot for a little hydroelectric generator. In the early morning, I watched four deer grazing on the upper edge of the property. Over the years of suburban living, I've lost my ability to gauge acreage. Six acres sounds big on paper. It looked tiny to me. There are supposed to be lots of survival/sustainability types in the area. It's all about organic in this area. There is apparently a fair amount of bartering going on in the area.

I was sleeping on the floor while I was there. I felt a familiar rippling feeling the first night. Either an earthquake occurred nearby or my inner ear is messing with me again. It's happened before and I've been convinced that the foundation of our house had become unstable. When that trembling unstableness followed me to get my haircut at a strip mall, I admitted that it was me and not our house. This didn't feel the same. Just about three ripples of the earth and it stopped. No one else felt it but me. I love the Internet for earthquake research. A 4.6 earthquake that was nine miles deep near Trinidad, CA doesn't make the news. It's nice to go online and confirm that there had been an earthquake nearby.

At first glance, this little corner of California seemed like a perfectly idyllic sactuary for a retreat. The more I thought though, the more I decided that it wasn't perfect for me. I like warmth. I don't mind hot days. Sure hauling hay or building fence on a 100°F day isn't that terrific but with fluids one can survive and get the job done. I also like snow. I've slogged through mid-thigh deep snow to feed cattle and haul wood. It's not fun but where I lived at the time, it didn't last more than a week or two at the most. This particular area of California doesn't provide me with those weather patterns. While this region may be perfect for other people, I'm not sure it's my first choice for a hideaway. It's a just a reminder that everyone is different and we all have to consider all aspects of our lives when we're making decisions about the best location for us and our families. What is perfect for one may not be perfect for another. Of course, there are things that all good homestead sites have in common: water, good soil, a good building site, etc. I won't enumerate all of those qualities. There are many articles on the subject so I won't reinvent the wheel.

So I'll continue searching for that perfect utopian homestead and perhaps one day in the near future, I'll find it.

It's been a while since I've done any writing. I've been busily growing the veggies out front...picked the first cucumber this week! But mostly I've been collecting. I'm a packrat by nature but lately what I've been collecting is information. My library selections are very eclectic or maybe not to Jericho fans. Some of the topics are homesteading, gardening, solar power, wind power, self-sufficiency, underground houses, nutrition, hydroponics, cookbooks, especially those about camp cooking, vegetarian recipes, cultural cookbooks. I've been collecting little bits of information from all of these books and writing them in my notebooks. Writing helps me remember things and I'm not counting on having a working computer at all times in the future.

The future is uncertain. We're seeing rising gas prices (Ok, they dropped some this week but I'm not going to count on them staying down), rising food prices, a crisis in the mortgage and banking industry due to bad loans, the possibility that we've reached peak oil and the list goes on. So what do we do in uncertain times? We can worry. We can imagine. We can prepare. There are well respected segments of the religious community that teach members of their faith to be prepared. They recommend having a years supply of food stored. That has been taught for many years...before the oil embargo of the 70s, before the S&L debacle of the 80s, before our current uncertainty. I think it's a good idea. After all, I really don't expect food prices to drop anytime soon. So buying and properly storing some extra food can't hurt.

My summer gardening experiments in hydroponics have been interesting. I've determined that during the summer, there is no real advantage to growing my tomatoes and cucumbers in a hydroponics tub. The tomato might have slightly larger fruit that it's counterpart growing in soil. However, they are different varieties so it's a bit hard to determine the size difference. The New Zealand spinach in the dirt is certainly larger than that in the tub but again the spinach in the tub tends to get pinched off and eaten more since it's clean all the time with no grit. Cucumbers I can evaluate side by side. I have one in water and one in soil very near each other so they get almost the same sunlight. The one in soil is much larger and produced cucumbers faster.

I will admit to not being as precise as I should be with the hydroponics. I haven't been dumping my solution as often as recommended, etc. I'm trying to imagine using this setup in hard times. In hard times, I won't be able to afford the nutrients. Talk about sticker shock! I put a gallon of nutrients on the counter and was told it was $118. Excuse me? The sign said $24.95...turns out that was the price for a pint. The tags were in the wrong spots. Needless to say, I went looking for something less expensive. This calls for more reading to find a way to make a natural solution for growing plants. Something that I could make and feed the plants if commercial solutions weren't available. There's that self-sufficiency theme popping up again. Comfrey popped up in several places as a tea for feeding soil based plants. So it's on my research list.

There are several books that were quite informative. Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon was very good and set for some interesting points. This book provides good information on saving seed, growing food in dry conditions, organic fertilizer and irrigation. I hadn't really thought about it until I read this book but think about the lot size of older homes. Homes from the 40s and 50s and even through most of the 70s are on what are now considered HUGE lots. Those lots were the perfect size for a house and a garden spot. Victory gardens were grown during the war to provide food for families. Rationing was in effect. Men were away at war. Times were hard. People grew as much food as possible. Growing a garden then was not the 'hobby' that it's become now. It was something that almost anyone with land did. I'm beginning to itch for more land. Growing a few plants this summer makes me want to plant a big garden again. There are community gardens but the plots are tiny, if you can get one, and just the gas to drive there to water the plants would make it inefficient. Water is a very important factor. If you live in the city or a suburb, your water most likely comes from the faucet, from the water treatment plant. What if these services are unavailable in the future? It will be hard to get drinking water for yourself, let alone water for plants. From this book, I learned about spacing plants for growing in the dry season.

Another book surprised me. I expected a foodie book and instead found some wonderful tidbits of information inside. Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon. What would happen if you suddenly decided to eat only foods that were grown within 100 miles of your home? Easy? Maybe until you begin to think about things like salt, flour (wheat), apples, oranges. Imagine spending several weeks at a cabin with no running water, electricity, or nearby store. How would you feed yourself? If it's summer, you may be able to find food in the woods and fields nearby. You may be able to catch fish from a nearby stream. It occurred to me that there's lots of food around most of us. We walk on it. We throw frisbees and footballs across it. We may sniff it and admire it's color. The parks around our towns may hold food that we've never considered before. I shall soon be buying a native plants handbook for my area. I need to discover the food plants that may be growing nearby. Reading the detailed history (as opposed to the high school history book version) of expeditions such as Lewis and Clark may tell us what people in our region were eating at that time.

Our agriculture has changed over the years. Most of the small family farms are gone. The methods of the small farm have been replaced with growing on a mass scale with tractors and irrigation systems. We've come to think of certain regions of the US as areas where corn is grown, or wheat, soybeans, rice. We've been told that wheat only grows in a specific region. What I learned from Plenty is that this is not entirely true. Perhaps wheat grows best in Eastern Oregon or Montana but it can also grow in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. Start visiting farmer's markets. Get to know the farmers. Ask where the food is grown. This information may become important in the future. Knowing someone locally who has grown wheat may give you a chance at loaf of bread in the future. It can also lead you to some food that tastes very different than that in the local supermarket.

Maybe it's being the child of a mechanic that makes me want to know how things work. I've been reading more science books and watching some interesting things on The History Channel. People don't often tinker as they once did. We've become a throw away society. If it stops working, buy a new one. I think that those who are mechanically inclined and able to fix things, will be valued if our country falls into hard times.

That is enough rambling for tonight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write again before another month passes.

Watching Jericho and imagining living for three months without power, is a strong reminder that energy is precious. We should not waste it. We should do everything in our power to conserve it and find new ways to create it. So this morning while watching the news, I hear that President Bush plans to veto legislation to upgrade older schools to make them more energy efficient. Why? Apparently he feels that it would not be 'fiscally responsible'.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has information and further links to this legislation on her website. Read it. Does this sound 'fiscally irresponsible' to you? Those words from our President make me angry. Why wouldn't we want to make our public school buildings more energy efficient? Is it too expensive? It's expected to cost $20 billion. Yes, billions. That does sound expensive to me. But wait a second.... How much have we spent on the war in Iraq? Not billions but trillions. This continues to mystify me. We are able to find (or borrow) trillions of dollars to wage war in another country and to rebuild that country but twenty billion dollars for our own country is too expensive.

What's wrong with this picture? What is wrong with my government? What's wrong with me and my fellow citizens? Why are we letting this happen? The phones should be ringing in Washington, D.C. Mail should be delivered by the bag full. Email boxes should be filled to capacity. We should not sit idly by while our President vetoes this legislation. Write or call the members of Cress who represent you and let them know that any veto must be overridden. Too often we blame our Senators and Representatives for voting for or against pieces of legislation but how often have we written and told them how we want them to vote? The Internet has made it much easier for us to communicate with out government. Let's use the power at our fingertips to make a difference. Start here to find the members representing your state and district.

As I've been studying solar and wind power, I've learned that the first thing to do is cut your energy usage by making the building more energy efficient. In homes this is usually done by replacing windows, sealing ductwork, and adding insulation. So why doesn't President Bush want to make our public school buildings as energy efficient as possible? Is there some hidden agenda here? Are the right companies not in line to make money from this deal? Is greed getting in the way of common sense? Should we start looking for the money trail? Maybe it's just ignorance about the physics, renewable energy (and the fact that oil isn't considered renewable) that makes President Bush think that we can continue to do the same things and have different results in the future. The oil supplies aren't going to last forever. We have to start to make changes NOW! We cannot wait until the world is fighting for the last dregs of oil to begin converting to renewable energy. We've got to start now.

We have to begin educating people so they understand the benefits of these renewable energy sources. What better place to do that than in a school? When children attend a green school powered by alternative energy, they see these principles at work everyday. It's the way life works for them. They can see the solar panels that generate power for the lights. They are taught the principles of recycling and reusing on a daily basis. It becomes habit. A good habit.

While the Green Schools Bill would cost billions to implement, it's billions invested in this country. The citizens of this country were the ones who were taxed to obtain those billions and who will be taxed in the future to pay back any loans and interest. Isn't it about time that we started investing in America again? The housing industry is in a slump. Housing construction has slowed and stopped in some areas. Why would our President veto the opportunity to put people to work? When people have good steady jobs, they spend money and the economy benefits.

I, for one, am tired of feeling second rate. I pay taxes. I'm a citizen of the United States of America. I want my government to invest in America. I want our children to attend schools that aren't crumbling, leaking and growing mold. It's time for the citizens of this country to start telling our politicians how to run this government. We've spent too many years sitting around letting the politicians run our government. We complain about the government and the politicians but how many of us have taken the time to write, call, or email our politicians to express our views? WE need to take action and take control.

This is a great opportunity to start moving our nation away from it's dependence on foreign oil and oil in general. If we make buildings more energy efficient, we use less fossil fuels to heat and cool them. If we add solar panels, we take an even bigger step away from our addiction to oil. Yes, I said addiction. We are so dependent on the way things are now that we're unwilling to give it up for something new. Oil is our drug of choice whether for our cars, power plants or homes. We need to get into rehab. How about we start with the rehabilitation of our schools?

Last week the husband and I went to a disaster preparedness class. I found out that we weren't really as prepared as I thought. I have lots of things that are useful in a disaster. I just don't have them organized where you could grab them and go out the door or hunker down in a room to 'shelter in place'.

The class was interesting in more ways than you'd think. My husband and I were perhaps the youngest people attending...we're in our 40s. I'm not sure what that means. Does it mean that the younger crowd doesn't think anything will ever happen? Do they think that the government will take care of them in a disaster? or maybe it's because they've looked all this up on the Internet and have prepared disaster kits. I hope the latter is the case.

Another interesting thing that I learned was don't go to the fire station or hospital if there's a disaster. Well, let me qualify that. If you are having a medical emergency, then you belong at the hospital. If you can walk yourself to the hospital, then you don't belong there and they are likely going to tell you to go home or at the very least to the end of the line. They are going to be very busy taking care of people who are seriously injured and in danger of dying. There was a scene in Jericho where Dale and Skylar are at the hospital after the riot/fight at the mine. Skylar has sprained her ankle and Dale is trying to get some attention for her. When I first viewed that episode I thought she was being ignored because people didn't like how she handled her ownership of the mine. I thought it was about feelings and relationship. In reality, she would probably receive the same treatment even if the doctors and nursing staff didn't know her. A sprained ankle would be very minor when patients are being triaged. So in a disaster think about that scene and whether you really belong at the hospital. You may be wasting your time getting to a hospital. You may end up being more comfortable at home, in the park, or wherever safe shelter can be found. It's not going to be fun sitting around a hospital watching other people get treated in front of you. If you're not suffering from a life threatening ailment, then stay at home. Be prepared to treat your own scrapes and bruises.

I'll repeat that again because it's important to understand. Be prepared to take care of yourself. That really begins with the prepared part of the equation. If you or a member of your family depends on oxygen, do you have extra canisters? Do you want to stake your life or the life of a loved one on the fire department or some other organization being able to reach you with another oxygen canister? I wouldn't.

Medications: Are there medicines that you require to stay alive? Do you have a seven day supply on hand? Yes, seven days at least. Just think back to those news images of the Super dome in New Orleans or the recent earthquake in China. Consider that it may take at least a week before you are in an area with a functioning pharmacy. Don't count on the Red Cross or any other relief efforts to provide you with medication. Even if you do get to an area with a pharmacy, they aren't going to just hand you medications because you say so. Make things easier for everyone by having your bottle with the prescription information on it or a copy of the prescription written by your doctor.

Are we beginning to see the theme here? Being prepared helps the whole system work better.

So husband and I have begun to work on getting all those disaster items that we have in various areas of the house organized. I started by organizing the food stores. I actually started that before attending the preparedness class. With food prices, I don't want to buy food that I may already have on hand. I found that I have seven jars of marshmallow creme fluff...or did the total rise to nine? Anyway, more than enough fluff. The movement of food from the four foot deep pantry shelves to walk-around shelving in the garage netted about twenty boxes of Hamburger helper. Oh well if we get tired of it we can just cook the noodles and use the flavor packets for broth or something.

Turns out that the pantry design creates shelving that is too deep. Things get pushed to the back of the shelves and stays for years. The plan is to put plastic shelves in the garage. They are free standing so we're able to walk around them and shop from our own little store. Since they can be disassembled, they'll move along with us if we decide to go somewhere else. So what about all that pantry space in the house? I've decided to move the deep fryer, steamer, rice cooker, etc into those deep shelves in the pantry. After all it's a lot easier to see that big rice cooker behind the fryer than it is to find the can of beats behind the cans of pineapple and corn. Hopefully, we'll have no more lost food. We'll know how many cans of pasta sauce we have on hand and will buy more only when the supply reaches the restock level.

The other messy place where food gets lost is the bulk foods tub. It didn't start out that way. It started out in plastic bags from the grocery store that collected on the counter top. Then it got cleaned off for a party and parked in a tote (still in their plastic bags from the store). Pretty soon we didn't know whether we had dried cherries, corn meal or farina. So I've gone on a buying spree to acquire square or rectangle storage containers. Round containers seem to leave too much wasted space. The containers must stack. They must be labeled. Now I'm focusing my obessive organization skills on our food supply. Now we can quickly tell how much bottled water we have on hand.

I'm still reminded of the Jericho episode where Jake is talking to Hawkins. "You have a generator and a food supply..." Jake seems to think that makes Hawkins a terrorist. Why? Maybe he's just prepared for the nexted disaster. Sad to think that someone might be labeled a terrorist just for being prepared. Although I'm not as prepared as Hawkins, I don't have a generator. I don't have a concrete room in my basement. Mainly because a basement doesn't really working in my semi-wet geographic location next to the old swimming hole. However, if I ever move to Kansas, I will have a basement. I grew up on the edge of tornado alley. I've seen a few of them on the ground. I've heard them in the air when they didn't touch down and I've driven through the aftermath of tornadoes. For Kansas, I'll have a safe room in the basement or an underground house.

Which brings me to my dream house....good for tornadoes, nuclear attacks, and keeping burglars out. Call me crazy, a recluse, or maybe the woman of your dreams but I want my very own missile silo. I want to win the lottery and convert my missile silo into a luxury home. This website shows one man's dream plan for converting a missile silo into living space and more. It's called "World's End". Just imagine fourteen levels of living space. Swimming pool, theater, and all the storage you could ever want. No danger from tornadoes. Just build a nice earth sheltered garage above and you can laugh at the weather. I'm sure lots of neighbors would start stopping by whenever the weather started getting rough. Well, at least there'd be plenty of room for everyone.

I'm chuckling right now as I write. I'm sitting in a Starbuck's in an upper class neighborhood while I write this. Not exactly the type of place where you hear conversations about disaster preparedness, growing food in tubs or living in missile silos. Of course, I'm drawing more than a few glances in my jeans, hiking boots and waterproof jacket. Of course, if they were designer jeans and the latest in high tech outdoor gear, I'd be acceptable. But here I sit writing away. They'll just have to deal with this decaf drinking hick chick. Oh yes, did I mention I ordered and am drinking black decaf coffee? Not an Americano, not a latte, just plain old decaf coffee. In the Pacific Northwest, that's almost as bad as walking into a Northwest brew pub and ordering a Budweiser. Sacrilege! But hey I got free coffee because they had to brew it. Didn't expect that...that is the free coffee. They always have to brew decaf for me.

This is quite the rambling post but maybe you'll stick with me and learn something or begin to think about things. It doesn't matter if you don't learn from me. If you just start to think about things and go elsewhere to learn more, then I feel like I've accomplished something.

Since watching Jericho, I've found myself reading more. I read about solar power and hydroponics. In searching out these books at my library, I've remembered how much I love libraries. They are magical places for me. With a book and some time, there isn't anything I can't do. My husband has rediscovered the library and now has his own library card. He loves movies and used to buy lots of DVDs. Then there was the day that he bagged up a grocery bag of DVDs that he no longer wanted. Of course, several hundred dollars of DVDs will get you less than fifty when you sell them. So back to the library. You can check out DVDs at the library. Wow! Free DVD rental! In this economy that can be a wonderful thing. So I urge everyone to find their local library, get your library card and spend a few hours discovering what's available.

The well of words has finally run dry for the day.

Yes, it is true. The lettuce in the raft has transformed from seeds into small plants. I haven't managed to kill them yet. It's a relatively simple setup. I went to the large box hardware store and over to the insulation area. That's where you'll find sheets of the 1-1/2 inch styrofoam. Cut that a size that will allow free floating inside a nice tote tub. Then it was off to the hydroponics store to find net cups. (I've since discovered that just taking a knife to a regular little pot will transform it into something that will hold rockwool and let the roots out to the nutrient fluid.) The pet store yielded an inexpensive pump, air stone (for making bubbles) and some air hose. Quick inexpensive little hydro or aeroponics set up. Right now I dont' care about the terms. I have plants growing on my front porch!

The lettuce is up and growing. It might be planted a little close together but I moved some over into the cantaloupe pot. The cantaloupe didn't seem to be sprouting so I figured at least give some of the lettuce a chance in that pot. The peas are looking very good. I haven't killed off the tomato either. In fact, I see that it has a bloom on it.

So I started another raft system. I managed to score a pot of burpless cucumbers that had three plants in the pot for $3. That's $1 per plant and gives me a head start which I really need here in the cooler climate. It's 54 here today, cloudy and rainy...the plants don't seem to be growing much. I did shock the plants a bit when I added them to the second tub. It was nice and warm when I filled the tub...of course the water was cold. So I removed the plants from their dirt and packed them into pots with rockwool and stuck them in their raft. A few hours later they were looking wilted. OOOPS! So I pulled the pots and sat them on the raft out of the water. Back in and wilt, back on the raft for recovery. After a few trips they seem to have figured out that they are going to have to adjust to the new temperature.

I started some New Zealand spinach in the dirt starter disks. They've been sitting outside with their little plastic cover held in place by rubberbands. They were used to the weather. They didn't go into shock when I placed them in the raft. So it looks like I'm going to have some success growing food in tubs of water and nutrients. I'm hoping to move everything inside for the winter.