Catalogue addiction

Got my Terra Edibles catalogue this morning - I can see this developing into another catalogue addiction already - as if twenty-odd homeschool catalogues aren't enough, now I have to start a shelf for gardening/seed catalogues.

I know virtually nothing about gardening. Oh, I've always *had* a garden, but in the past I would just go to the temporary garden centre located in the grocery store parking lot and buy a bunch of little green plants and stick them in the ground. I didn't always know what it was I was buying ~ it was just an experiment in being delighted that something grew. The cherry tomato plant that yielded about 2 cups of marble-sized tomatoes wasn't what I was expecting; and who knew that you could grow 'baby' carrots from 'regular' carrot seeds if you didn't know any better and pulled them all up too early? I never knew til a few years ago that 99.99999% of all the grocery store plants are hybrids ~ had never thought about it - seeds are seeds, right? Never made the connection between food supply and corporate profit til then. I mean, by definition a seed is supposed to be life-giving, Webster says: seed (n)1. The substance, animal or vegetable, which nature prepares for the reproduction and conservation of the species. What I've done up til now was merely playing at gardening - it was satisfying if something grew and tasted yummy but it wasn't essential. But all my produce combined for the past 12 years wouldn't feed our family of 3 for more than a few weeks (and poorly, at that). Well, I was about to write 'it's time to get serious about gardening' but really, it's *way* past time to get serious. As with a number of other things I have a whole lot of catching up to do.

On the other hand, I don't want to go too far. If we do ever find a place to move to, I can't have my entire lawn covered in vegetables - the average house-buyer's paradigm includes green grass, no weeds and low maintenance, not unkempt pumpkins and pole beans.

So, I figure if I can somehow hack down the two globe cedars that are overgrowing the side of the garage maybe I can plant some things in that 3 x 12 space. This might be one of those "my eyes are bigger than my stomach" deals, or in this case, bigger than my biceps - those cedars are well-rooted and it'll be an awful chore to get them out. But it would be a pretty good spot for growing a bunch of vertical plants up the wall (with the help of some sort of trellis) and bushier plants underneath. I don't think I can do root vegetables there, I know there's gravel under the raised bed.

This site looks interesting: No-Dig Gardening. I like the concept! Spreading wet newspaper all over the ground sounds a lot easier than double digging a 4 X 20 ft patch along the fence. Should've put the newspaper down in the fall but I hadn't got that far yet. There's an awful lot of beginner-gardener info on that site that I know will be useful (am printing stuff out as I type).

All well and good to sit here "talking" about gardening - there's still 2 ft of snow all over the yard. The only things growing here right now are the garlic bulbs in the bottom of my fridge drawer.

~J~

Missing blogger found

under piles of (clean) laundry, dog toys and homeschooling books.

2008 has been an *interesting* year so far, to put it mildly. No need to expound on all our difficulties - let's just say it's been hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hubby has been off work for about 3 weeks now with a back strain but is currently in the hospital overnight suffering from angina. I really hope this is the wake-up call he heeds - he's had a couple of other wake-up calls in the last few years (cancer, for one) but apparently he keeps hitting the snooze alarm.

I have my own on-going health issues and it's really putting a damper on any kind of prepping. We're neither of us in any shape to get this house ready to put on the market...so I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept of Plan B: that we actually have to stay here; with this inadequate yard and a house that is literally crumbling around us. Not at all a good thought.

Like everyone we're feeling the pinch of rising prices. I'm not sure what the tipping point will be. In the past 6 years gasoline in Ontario has increased from 60 cents a litre to about $1.05/L.




When you look back at such a huge increase you wonder how you could go through another jump like that, but, like the frog in the pot, if the heat is turned up slowly it doesn't seem to cause as much pain. It certainly hasn't changed our lives much - we never went anywhere anyway, LOL.

Hubby tries to carpool to work but has a hard time finding anyone that is committed to the carpool idea - everybody seems to have this idea that driving to work is personal time; nobody wants to have to make conversation at 6 am or accommodate someone who needs to stay an extra 30 min at the end of the day. Even appealing to their environmental consciousness doesn't seal the deal - nobody wants to think about greenhouse gases before coffee.

Heating oil is another matter altogether - the pinch of a 20% increase is really putting a damper on our disposable income. $600 a month to heat our house! Good thing it's only cold from Nov to April. Probably that 20% change will be a fond memory by next fall. Makes it really hard to find money for extras like clothes and birthday gifts. Ds turns 16 next month and I regret that we really don't have anything special planned for his birthday, nor any special gifts. We're having his mountain bike repaired (he wrecked one of his rims last fall) and he'll get a DVD or a book and that'll be it.

Electric bills are going through the roof - I'm starting to consider whether it's more cost effective to do laundry at the laundromat rather than running our washer here ~ larger loads; their hydro, not mine. I'm already wearing clothes twice as long as I would've two years ago - a little chili sauce on that shirt? Just sponge it clean and wear it again. Somebody on LATOC mentioned these gadgets: a vacuum cooking pot (links here and here) Sort of a slow cooker without the electricity... might save up some grocery money and order one.

On a brighter note - the financial wound of making double mortgage payments is starting to scab over. We're at a point where every double payment we make is putting a visible dent in the remaining principle. It's kind of exciting to see that extra month disappear from the amortization chart every three weeks!

So, what have I missed?

~J~

Peak Oil and Banana Bread

Funny how the concept of Peak Oil changes your perceptions about *everything*.

Beyond the obvious conclusion that the day is rapidly approaching when bananas will not be a common product in the local grocery stores, in a sort of convoluted way I've learned a few things from the bunch of bananas that were sitting on my counter.

There they sat - mottled-brown-and-yellow-coloured; nobody wanted to eat them, in case they'd already turned to mush inside. So they were overlooked for a few more days, turning as brown as the wet dirt (under the snow) in the garden and I knew I had to use them up. Throwing them out isn't an option (although I won't claim I haven't done that in the past).

What do you do when you have a bunch of over-ripe bananas?
You make banana bread.

So far, all this has been obvious, right?

But as I reached for the bunch of them, hoping they'd stay intact long enough to get the fruit dumped cleanly into a bowl, I realized the personal implications of over- ripe bananas:

Even now, I'm still taking a *whole* lotta things for granted.

Aside from any possible nutritional considerations (maybe over-ripe bananas are nutritionally worse than properly-ripened bananas?), am I taking those bananas for granted, "using them up" as though they were some sort of inconvenience? Dare I purchase food and nonchalantly leave it to go to waste? Am I assuming there will be plenty of bananas at the store tomorrow with which to replace those less-desirable ones?

It made me pause and take a good look at them. Outside yes, they were brown, but the insides were still white and firm. Really nothing wrong with them. I ate half of one just to convince myself.

Of course this part of the whole exercise could be extended into a treatise on "don't judge a book by its cover", etc, etc, but that wouldn't be the point.

So, the bananas had been peeled and mushed into something that does not look very appetizing and I went to the shelf to dig for a recipe (me being the sort of person who starts something and then looks for directions...but I do eventually read the directions; and sometimes edit them for spelling, context and grammar...and groan over the fact that they were printed in China). I pulled out one of my favourites: the Five Roses Flour "Guide to Good Cooking" (circa 1950?). My tattered, splattered and torn cookbook's vintage quaintness appeals to me. This edition does defer to standard quantities such as 8-oz cups but recipe temperatures are still given as Very Hot, Hot or Medium - cooks didn't rely on the digital displays on the top of their ovens - they tested the heat of the oven (electric, gas or wood-burning) with the backs of their hands. It's a comfort to cook from a book like this; one that has been well-used for half a century. Somehow you know your recipes are guaranteed to turn out when so many millions have followed the same recipes before you.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my old, reliable cookbook had no recipes for banana bread. Nor a single pudding, pie or sauce recipe for banana-anything.
As recently as fifty-odd years ago bananas were not common.

Instead, there are recipes using summer garden fruits like strawberries and currents. Orchard fruits like apples and backyard tree fruits such as peach, plum and cherry; turned into crumbles, sauces, jams and jellies. One recipe for marmalade calls for two oranges, two lemons and two grapefruit. Only two! I don't believe I've ever purchased as few as two oranges.


I've obviously not gotten my head completely around the idea that commodities will become scarce. I *am* starting to think, though, that someday mottled-black bananas will be a prize to be treasured, not a piece of waste to be rid of.

Now, what else am I taking for granted?

~J~

Peak Oil Picnic

Since I don't always have much to talk about as far as our own prepping, I thought I'd start my own "Carnival of Peak Oil". What's a carnival? The Carnival of Homeschooling is the one with which I'm most familiar and they have a description here.

And since I'm a rebel at heart and always want to do things differently than everybody else, I'm calling it a Picnic, rather than a Carnival (and I like the similarity to the word "peaknik").

So, watch this space - nothing there yet but I plan to get it updated each week.

If you'd like to host the Picnic once it gets started, drop me a line.
PODoomer @ gmail.com

~J~

Last Light

I've never seen a trailer for a book before - I wonder if the book is as intriguing as the trailer (will know soon - ordering it today)


Go here to watch it yourself

Merry Christmas! **

It's Christmas morning and what am I doing? Reading through preparedness websites and making lists of my goals for the next few months as far as purchasing supplies and learning skills.

Hubby and son are off to the in-laws, a trip I don't make as I can't sit in the car that long and be able to walk afterwards. So I'm home cooking turkey (which the dog silently points out, standing beneath the oven door as if to say, 'it's over here, Mum, in the oven, right here, I'm sure it's done now....' and making a couple of pies and a salad or two for our Christmas dinner on Thursday.

It's a bit of a drag spending Christmas Day alone. There was absolutely no one out and about this morning when I took the dog for a walk. Not a single car; although it was a bit early, there are usually at least a couple of other early morning pedestrians at that time of day.

At the same time, I kind of enjoy the peace and quiet - when you homeschool you don't get a lot of alone time, ever. So a couple of days to just take it easy are nice once in a while. Just wish it didn't have to be Christmas week.

We struggled this year over whether to do the whole "Christmas thing" - I say that in quotes because we really don't believe this is when Christ was born. Some scholars say He was born in the spring, others say autumn. Probably wasn't Dec. 25th, and where does it say we have to have a feast about it anyway? But hubby and I both grew up "doing" Christmas and have just continued doing what we've always known.
(Sometimes it's easier to stay in the rut you know rather than trying to find a new rut, especially when it comes to facing the inlaws with something as "heretical" as "we're not doing Christmas this year").

Overall I think Christmas is a lovely family tradition but I'm not convinced it's really "Christian". And, no, I'm not going to go all "religious" on you. My beliefs don't really fit any particular brand of Christianity. If I had to put a label on myself I'd say I was a Baptist but there are a number of areas where I don't subscribe to the "traditional" Baptist lines of thinking (and would summarily be booted out of most Baptist churches if I mentioned them).

Personally, New Year's is more of a significant 'holiday' in terms of its value to my life. We don't "celebrate" New Year's; don't really see the point in that one either, LOL. (No, we're not curmudgeons holed up in some dark cave; we're actually quite fun if you know us... we're just rebels to tradition, among other things). New Year's, to me, forces me to focus on the things that I would do differently, reflect on the things I did or didn't achieve, re-orient my goals to accomodate any changes that have come up in the past 12 months. I like New Years resolutions (except the diet ones...those I don't make any more...).

So much has changed in the past year - we were just drifting along on the same old wave this time last year. Now we have specific goals in mind and plans to achieve them. Our focus has shifted from simply 'getting by' to making things happen; our priorities have moved to more tightly-defined objectives. Rather than 'we have to get out of debt' we're now making double mortgage payments, have some $ in the savings account for emergencies and have almost entirely stopped using the credit card for any type of purchase, even major car repairs. Our diet is changing to prepare us for the day when grocery stores no longer have fresh bananas from the Dominican Republic. Our time is used more purposefully, and not as much based on how we feel at that particular moment. We're pushing ourselves in many areas. We weren't doing that last year. Peak oil has forced us to evaluate *everything*.

We're not done - we have a lot of skills to learn; any number of conveniences to shed; a great volume of luxuries to learn to live without. And innumerable questions still to be answered. Hence, I'm still reading preparedness websites and searching the MLS site for houses with a couple of acres. Even on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas, and a very prepared New Year to you!

**I won't apologize for my politically incorrect greeting - we celebrate Christmas and I've never even tried to be politically correct (and I'm not about to start *grin*)

Just a rambling sort of update

For those who don't know, and those who are interested... we're having major health problems in our family. Hubby had kidney cancer 3 years ago and is now experiencing the same sort of extreme pain in his remaining kidney. And his doctor is on vacation...(insert tongue-sticking-out smilie face here). The office's answering machine won't even take messages and there's no "forwarding" address - if you need a doctor go to Emergency. Well, we've BTDT but the results of the tests are being forwarded to his doctor, who is out of the country... so we're getting nowhere as far as answers to the big question "is it a tumour?" (insert another tongue-sticking- out smilie face here). I'll limit my comments at this point because they're pretty much anything but lady-like...

But it's got me thinking about life post-crash. If the medical systems we rely on can be interrupted simply by a doctor taking a vacation, what will happen when the *whole system* can no longer sustain itself? When it's not a simple thing to drive to the hospital 15 miles away? When there may not be electricity to run the ultrasound or the CT machine?

We walked along a closed road a couple of months back and came upon a small family cemetery from the 1870'/80's. We could work out the family tree: Mom and Dad over here, Gramma and Grampa over there, and several small children (one was only a few months old; none was older than 6). A couple of 20-something sons - who dug these graves? - but no wives or children with them. A whole history of this family overgrown with weeds, markers tipped over by vandals, beer bottles perched on top of some for target practice. We cleaned up a little bit; it kind of hurt to see it being treated so poorly.

It sort of indicates the harshness of life before modern medicine. Who knows why those children died? Perhaps from a virus that we 'take for granted', chicken pox or measles or something we consider innocuous? Perhaps from a simple food allergy? A combination of things? So, what will gluten-intolerant people do in the future when the alternative foods become too expensive to purchase? Our modern life has so many answers, answers that will be withdrawn over time: no more refrigerated soy milk, no more instant medical tests and "instant" cures (drugs, extended surgeries etc), no more 'easy living'.

I see a return to small family cemeteries.

The other side of this thinking has hubby and me talking about skills. To this point we've pretty much been doing our own thing. Me thinking about cooking and clothing and such, him thinking about hunting and wood-cutting. We've become a lot more aware of the possibility that at some point there may just be one of us left. We each need to have some rudimentary skills in all areas - I couldn't shoot or dress a rabbit if my life depended on it, I need to learn that now. He couldn't make himself a basic shirt if his life depended on it - he needs to at least learn some basic stitching. I'm starting to see why "marriages of convenience" were so common, not just the stuff of Harlequin romances, but life or death reality.

~J~

Wintuk* and Sayelle*

: (

More things to boycott...pretty soon I'm going to have to give up breathing.

For some reason it never dawned on me that the yarns I use contain acrylic fibres. I mean, I knew they were acrylic yarns, just never thought about who made them. The most commonly-used acrylic yarn fibres are manufactured (in cheap overseas factories) by Monsatanco. Just about all of the acrylic yarn out there contains some form of Wintuk* or Sayelle*. I *should* have known that. I mean, I knew Sayelle was in just about everything but I never connected it to the M-word. So, you buy Lion Brand acrylic yarn (only one example, there are many others)- you're buying M's products.

Acrylic yarn, being a petroleum product, is going become very expensive soon, so I've been starting to stock up. But what to do now that I know who's profiting? I'm thinking a compromise would be to purchase "used" yarn - ie buy a few lots off eBay, at least that way my money is not contributing to their bottom line? (I should be boycotting eBay, too, after the ridiculous changes re: rules for selling homeschooling curricula they made last year, but it's too convenient when you live in the boonies...)


Not to mention all the so-called drought-resistant, genetically modified cotton Monsanto is "sharing" with the whole world (at the expense of the little 3rd world farmers who can no longer afford to maintain their cotton fields with ag chemicals and manufactured "fertilizers"). And are the soy yarns all made from round-up ready soy beans? I thought knowledge was supposed to be power...why do I feel so powerless?

Piffle...I suppose Monsatanco probably creates the dyes that are used on wool, too.



*trademarked, registered, patented and otherwise brand-named, marketed and foisted upon us relentlessly, without our knowledge, by aforementioned multinational chemical company.

Wind-up radio

We bought a cheap wind-up radio on the weekend, one something like this one, a Grundig model, probably their lowest-end version.
It was Made in China (insert rolly eyes smilie face here) and it's as cheaply made as you could imagine. I think a grade six science student could've come up with a sturdier design. But having had the power go out already (at the first whiff of winter snow the other night) we thought we'd just get one and start looking around for a better quality one later.

I'm surprised by the power this little unit has - it pulls in Illinois AM radio stations as clear as if we were just a few miles up the road. And almost as many shortwave stations as my better quality SW receiver. I don't have any sort of confidence in its flimsy battery connections but since it's a wind-up we won't likely ever put batteries in it anyway. 60 cranks constitutes a charge and it ran for over half an hour (it was still running, we just shut it off). Just not going to get too reliant on it if the rest of it is as poorly put together as the visible wiring is.

So, as long as there are radio waves we'll be somewhat connected to the outside world.

TV

I've been secretly weaning us off (satellite) TV the past month or so. Every few days I lock out another couple of channels.

Not that hubby watches a lot of TV (English Premier League footy or a really good action movie) but ds likes to catch *every* episode of Glenn Beck and all episodes, re-runs or otherwise, of Futureweapons, Top Gear and Mythbusters; as well as any and all hockey games. I figure if I slowly just lock out all the channels we can wean ourselves off TV altogether ~ although I'll miss BBCWorld for keeping up with the state of things on the other side of the planet...maybe we won't go that far. I just have it on for company half the time if I'm sitting doing crafts when hubby is home (dh and I are opposites in our tastes of music - he can't stand my Il Divo and Michael Bublé CDs; I can't stand his Bach Fugues...we agree on Chopin and Beethoven but that's where it ends).

"They" should let us just pick a few channels we want and pay some limited price for it, rather than having to have (and pay for) all the useless CBC/CTV/Global shows repeating hourly across 6 time zones. Since George Clooney left ER (8 years ago) I haven't watched any weekly prime-time shows; just can't "get into" the ones that are on now. Tried watching "24" but missed an episode somewhere part-way through Season Two and didn't have a clue what was going on after that. But I like watching the news occasionally; probably should have some sort of idea of what's happening in the world. And the odd movie. The only trouble is, without the satellite we don't get a single channel. Zilch. Nada. Not even TVO comes in. TVO was about the only thing that came in out in the country without an antenna. Now we're not even that lucky, LOL.

Overall, I think I really wouldn't miss the TV if it simply vanished overnight.
One less thing to dust.
J