Free Learner

On being prepared... mentally

The one thing that seems to get left out of "survivalist" or preparedness plans, on the blogs and sites I come across, is the mental health component.  I think, perhaps, that even the worst doom and gloomer suffers from a bit of romanticism.

"Suppose the power goes out," says the Doom and Gloomer.  "Wouldn't that be fantastic?  We could haul in some wood and snuggle in front of the fireplace.  No TV, no video games, no Internet-- it'd be just like camping!  We could cook all that wholesome oatmeal in the dutch oven and read to one another all evening.  Even use our fireplace popcorn popper!  Good times!!"

Yeah, I suffer from that too.  You try to be balanced, you know?  You say "Well, okay, jobs are disappearing like beers at a frat party, but we'll all be closer to our families."  Or: "Well, I may never eat clementines again, but I'll be developing a relationship with my local farmers."  Or: "If there's no TV for a week it will bring my family together."

It's mostly true, too.  But then again, last night my family was brought together -- all of us having a grand old time and laughing our butts off for 2 hours -- by The Simpsons Hit and Run video game, in which you not infrequently mow down cartoon pedestrians as you mishandle your vehicle.  (In my defense, that's not the point of the game and we try hard to stay on the road!  And if you hit someone, they just yell at you as they roll out of your way.)  To be honest, I just can't see Candyland or Chutes & Ladders (other games which all 4 of us can play) as being anywhere near that much fun.  When it comes to old-fashioned values, The Simpsons Hit and Run game fails miserably on all counts, but that much laughing together has to be good for us.  So I suppose I try to look on the bright side, but I also try not to romanticize things like a Depression, peak oil, power outages, or having to stay inside the house for 3 solid weeks because of H5N1.  The fact is, I kind of like the 21st century.  I can't help it -- that's what I'm used to.

My own (minor!) "crisis" experience, when I went without power for 4 days in August of 2003, was far from romantic or refreshing.  I huddled near the radio, clinging to our local radio station like a lifeline, praying the batteries wouldn't quit, because by the time I'd gotten to the grocery store (45 minutes into the blackout) they were totally sold out of batteries.  And ice.  And bottled water.  And any kind of meat you'd typically grill.

Let me tell you, if you're an Internet junkie -- and we know who we are -- you need radios.  I mean, you need a hand-crank back-up radio, a regular radio or two, alkaline batteries, and possibly rechargeable batteries and a solar battery charger, plus headphones or ear buds to save those batteries.  Maybe even a shortwave radio.  My MP3 player has FM radio and I can charge it in a few minutes off the car battery, without starting the car; if you have one, consider getting the car charger.  You might even consider one of those radios that picks up TV, even though supposedly they are always about to halt old-fashioned TV network broadcasting.  If you are the kind of person who checks the internet more than a couple of times a day, you need INFO and you need it YESTERDAY, and thank god the local station put on BBC at 10pm so I could go to sleep feeling connected to the rest of the world.

Secondly, you need light.  Flashlights don't cut it, not even close.  A single night of reading by flashlight is enough to depress you and make your children crazed and creeped out.  I would aim for at least one small room that you can keep pretty well illuminated.  There are bright LED lanterns that are totally kid-safe, including some that are solar.  There's the old-fashioned kerosene lantern, the antique oil lamp (which we used in 2003-- thank you Grandma for giving it to me!), and there are 100-hour candles if you can manage those safely with the kids in your family.  (The 100-hour candles are round, squat, and hard to tip over.)  Hand-crank flashlights are a good back-up and kids think they're fun, and I'm glad that we own a couple.  But they do get tiresome, so I think recharge batteries with an AC and/or solar recharger are a good bet.  By the way, Costco sells a recharge battery set that has the "spacers" that convert an AA battery to fit a C or D slot.  This means that with one set of AA batteries and one AA recharger, you can put batteries into almost any flashlight.  Lastly, head-lamp style flashlights which strap onto your head may look ridiculous, but hey-- it's a no-hands flashlight.  Could be very useful.  Kids find them amusing.

So again, from my experience, a couple of flashlights somewhere in the house doesn't cut it.  It's not a matter of "Can I get to the bathroom without breaking an ankle?"  It's a matter of "Can I get through 4 days without power while not becoming depressed /creeped out by darkness every evening?"  Some kind of little battery / solar nightlight, or light sticks, are a good idea if you have kids in the house, as they can panic when waking up in pitch darkness.

And then, of course, you need entertainment.  If you can work out some way of listening to an audiobook, that's fairly entertaining and can be done on batteries.  Obviously someone can read aloud.  You can also put aside some "beach reads" for the adults & some previously unseen books for the kids -- I'll bet your local library has cheap paperback novels -- for emergency escapism.  I've also put aside sudoku, crosswords, cards, games, puzzles, etc.  Keep in mind that during crude oil disruptions schools will be closed, so whether you homeschool or not, in such a scenario you'd be (or someone would be) with your kids all day, and possibly without power.  (We take coal to our power plants largely by diesel truck-- brilliant, eh?)

And, for those who are stockpiling beans, barley, wheat, rice, and other wholesome Amish fare -- may I suggest Doritos and candy?  (Okay... organic non-GMO tortilla chips and fair trade cocoa powder?)  Don't forget junk foods as a treat.  Even if you very rarely eat junk food, your family may need something to cheer them up, make things a little easier.  Canned soups (Costco has good deals on Progresso), chewing gum, chocolate, potato chips, and so forth may compensate for other inconveniences and keep everyone in a cheerier state of mind.  (Whiskey or half a case of Charles Shaw doesn't hurt either, for extended disasters... for adults, I mean!)

So that's my two cents on crisis preparation, on the sanity front:

Connection, light, entertainment, and treats.

10 Reasons to store food

Yesterday there were some bits of news that were positive.  There were some indications that more money was being passed around in the financial sector, and the Dow was only down 189 points, a relatively good day.  Six central banks around the world had made a coordinated interest rate cute of 0.5%.  Translation: they all pitched in and took emergency measures to make it cheaper for banks to borrow money from one another.  For about three seconds it looked like it might be helpful in getting money moving again.

Eh, well.  That all came to nothing.  Today was positively hideous, with GM stock closing at $4.76 and Ford headed for penny-stock status if this continues much longer.  The Dow was down 679 points to 8,579.  (One year ago today, the Dow hit its all-time high of 14,165.)  Credit markets were frozen again, with the LIBOR rising.  The LIBOR interest rate is what determines the new interest rate for many American adjustable rate mortgages, so this has a direct effect on US families.

Tomorrow, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of bets taken out on Lehman Brothers will undergo "price discovery."  The people holding these legalized gambling contracts might get 12 cents on the dollar, or 50 cents, or who knows.  And we don't know how many of these bets are in existence.  And we don't know who the bookies are-- as in, just who is it that has to cough up the dough?  It's a big unknown.  Depending on how the Lehman thing works out, markets could rally, or the Dow could drop a thousand points.  Some folks on the blogs have already dubbed it "Black Friday," but if the news were good, we could see some stabilization in stock prices.

Things are not improving in Iceland.  The IMF says it's going to "help" them.  This is like Dracula saying he's going to cure you of a disease by draining half your blood.  It's true that Iceland allowed its banks to grow to 11 times the size of their entire GDP, but their entire GDP is piddling.  Google is bigger than Iceland.  Hell, if the amount of money the Fed gives to banks on an average day could just be funneled to Iceland instead, the country's problems would largely be solved!  But no.  Iceland is to be thrown to the wolves.  This is how the West treats the least among us: we cut them off, and worse, sic the IMF on their asses.  Meanwhile, the head of the European Central Bank says the banks can have as much money as they want.  No-- seriously!!  Unlimited cash.  Unlimited cash for banks, and Iceland can go starve.

On to the title of this post: 10 Reasons to Buy and Store Food.

1. It's only going to get more expensive, so buy it now and eat it later.
2. Banks could be closed for days by government order; stores would close.
3. A diesel shortage could disrupt food distribution; stores would run out of food.
4. Extra food provides a cushion when you have an unexpected expense.
5. #4 goes double when the banks begin canceling all our credit cards.
6. Buying in bulk and at bulk discount stores is cheaper anyway.
7. The government says you should have 2 weeks worth of food.
8. They're serious about #7.  They're hopelessly incompetent during disasters.
9. You'll learn about shelf life, food preservation, and nutrition.
10. You will feel less scared and more empowered during this economic unraveling.

At least get a sack of rice, a big box of spaghetti, and a giant #10 can of marinara.  How hard is that?

The carnage continues

A lot has been happening in the financial world, but the news comes so fast I hardly know what to blog about.

Ireland, Greece, and Germany are guaranteeing all bank deposits, with no upper limits, while in the UK and the US the upper limits are being raised.  This may sound good for the citizenry, but it indicates that bank runs are feared in these nations. 

In the US, there is a lack of physical cash.  If too many people start hoarding cash under the mattress, we could have a bottleneck during which physical cash can't be printed up fast enough.  Sure, everyone has credit cards, but those are about to go the way of the home equity line: banks will soon begin canceling them.  People will need real hard cash again, and there won't be enough.  Moreover, banks have about 70 cents of cash on hand (mostly 0's and 1's, not paper) for every $100 their customers have deposited.  I don't pretend to know what will happen when credit cards dry up... I don't.  I can't imagine it.  I guess the Fed will print new money as fast as it can and people will all be assigned debit cards in lieu of paper cash, but there are a lot of people who depend on credit to help them squeak by.

Iceland, which got heavily involved in international finance, is in a bad way.  I mean a really bad way-- the UN better start drawing up plans for a food relief program.

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country's three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out. [source]

They have had panic buying at grocery stores because there aren't going to be any more food imports, since no one will take Iceland's currency.  People should watch what happens in Iceland, because this nightmare will happen one day in the United States.  Thankfully, it is much easier to grow food in the US than in Iceland, but on the other hand we are heavily dependent on imported crude oil and we don't make any shoes or clothing.  Economist John Williams, who runs the well-known and much-cited Shadow Stats website, has predicted that hyperinflation might hit the US as early as 2010.  Mr. Williams defines "hyperinflation" as a time when what used to be the largest bill in circulation (the $100 bill, in our case) becomes "more useful as toilet paper" than as currency.

The EU banks turn out to be in even worse shape than US banks, unbelievably.  They have massively more liabilities (loans to be repaid, depositors who need their funds back, etc) than they have capital.  Germany's second largest real estate lender is going down, and the government is in emergency talks with other banks to try to salvage the situation.  If they cannot save this major lender, it will cause large financial ripple effects in Germany.

That said, Germany is one of the healthiest of EU countries, fiscally speaking.  France wants an EU bailout of many EU banks, and Germany (the main country with a lot of savings) is saying No.  The southern nations (Spain, Italy, Greece) are not doing as well as northern ones, and Germany is refusing to funnel their own wealth into these poorer economies.  I do not think the Eurozone will be able to stay intact as this financial disaster continues.  Already, German citizens are hoarding Euros printed in Germany (there is some sort of number or symbol that indicates which country they were printed in).  They do not trust any currency printed in Italy or Spain, even if they are, ostensibly, all Euros.

In other news, I went to a coin shop and asked about silver.  The guy had two 5-ounce bars ($95 each) and two 10-ounce bars ($180 each).  That was it!  He was getting 20 or more calls per day asking about his available silver, including from Ohio.  He had received several hundred silver bullion coins one day last week, and they sold out in just 90 minutes.  All this silver was going for about $18/ounce, on days when the ostensible price of silver (the spot price) was around $11.  You always pay a little bit more for minted silver (coins or bars), but not 64% more!  The paper "spot" price just doesn't mean anything nowadays.  It has disconnected from the real world and is an imaginary value.  The same goes for gold.  There are extreme shortages of both metals and it is very hard to obtain coins in either metal.

Never mind, though-- most people should, at this point, be buying long-term storable food, shoes and boots, clothes for their kids in the coming years... in other words, tangible goods.  Other ideas, off the top of my head, include: camp stoves, rechargeable batteries, flashlights & LED lanterns, firewood (if applicable), very heavy blankets & sleeping bags, home insulation, Polartec hats, canning jars, a pressure cooker/canner, cases of cheap wine or whiskey, vegetable seeds, gardening implements, escapist fiction (try your library for cheap used novels), basic medicines, knitting / crocheting / sewing materials, a solar cell phone charger, a solar battery charger, and a wind-up radio.

Garden warning

If you grow any kind of hot pepper in your garden and you have kids, make sure to frequently remind them which peppers NOT TO EAT.  Tristan bit off the end of a fire-engine red cayenne this evening.  He is okay, but I feel like I've been through one of those Poison Control Center directions: Flush with cool water for 15 minutes.

On the positive side, he didn't throw up, and I didn't panic even though he was panicking.  Poor little guy.

This is why I am loathe to grow medicinal herbs that can be poisonous or simply make you ill, like pennyroyal or lobelia.  I've watched Tristan eat purslane from the edge of the driveway, and seen Anya rub lemon balm between her fingers to inhale the scent, and seen both of them collect catnip for the kitties.  And I had resolved only to grow safe plants, because of the kids.  But the problem with this rule was made apparent to me tonight: I like spicy food, but cayenne peppers cannot be considered "safe" in a household containing small children.  Usually Tristan only picks veggies when I'm out there, with some guidance... but not so this evening.  A ripe cayenne, after all, is a gorgeous thing.

Perhaps next year I'll tie tinsel on the "dangerous" plants.

Quality used goods

Today I bought things from two different Craigslist folks, which put me in a good mood.  I've always had very pleasant exchanges with Craigslist people.  I am still waiting to hear back about a solid wood, 5-drawer dresser someone was insanely selling for $20, which I highly suspect has already sold.

First, I went and picked up 3 dozen pint jars and 4 dozen quart jars from a woman about 15 minutes away, for $3/dozen.  These were stored in very old cardboard boxes that the original jars had come in.  Check it out:

Whoa!  Holy 1950's, Batman!  I love how "Mom" appears to be in her dotage already.  And catch that bit of sparkle on the glass....

The woman I purchased these from had had gardens and had canned for many years, even while raising 6 children.  We chatted about gardening for a while, she said she was glad to give the jars to someone who would be growing their own food, and it was nice to see younger people gardening.  We agreed that our college town farmer's market has extremely high prices.  (There's a granola snob factor, around these parts.)  She said I should put newspapers covered with straw under my cucumbers, while for my part, I recommended Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (for about the 100th time).  She also threw in two dozen "spaghetti jars" for free.  I thought maybe Ball made some sort of specially decorated jar for tomato products or something, but no--  These turned out to be commercial spaghetti sauce jars which are actually, when you take the label off, 26-oz regular mouth Mason jars.  I have to remove a few more labels, but the 26-oz size should be good for applesauce.  I am not sure how to adjust canning times, but I can treat them as quart jars if need be.

Second, I bought 18 hardcover Time Life Nature books from the 1970's, most of them never opened, for $40.  You might think these would be rather dated, and it's true they say "man" and "mankind" everywhere.  This is something I will soon have to discuss with Anya.  When reading non-fiction books to her, I routinely swap out many of the male pronouns for female ones on the fly, and when reading to herself she usually reads only small bits at a time.  She therefore has not yet realized that older books pretend all people are male.  But hey, I have to explain this at some point, right?  In other respects I like these books much more than recently published ones.  The newest science books for kids have so many photos and graphics that they are often visually confusing, and you have to hunt for the text.  It's all sidebars and footnotes and captions, and the little bit of real information is largely given in "random factoid" form.  The old Time Life books do have many gorgeous photos, as well as diagrams and maps, but there is a lot of text, sometimes several pages of small type in a row.  This seems like a better balance, to me.  And the photos seem well chosen, from a time when every illustration was costly, rather than now where the goal seems to be a cornucopia of color and the maximum number of different fonts per page.

Yes, when it comes to newly made things I have become a curmudgeon.  I used to buy T-shirts at Target, but now the material is so thin and shoddy I will have to go elsewhere.  I looked at some waffle-weave thermal blankets at a store recently, and they were so thin and badly woven that in places they looked like gauze (so much for "thermal").  And then there are the stories about food items that still have the same price, but the sizes are just a bit smaller, which they hope you won't notice.  Instead of 12 ounces of cereal it's 9.8 ounces; instead of 32 ounces of mayonnaise it's 28.  We have rampant, galloping price inflation in the US, which has now hit roughly 13.5% per annum.  If you bought jeans or lettuce or printer paper or gasoline today, then by this time next year the cost would be (as a rough average) 13.5% higher.  I say "would be" because companies are finding ways to avoid sticker shock, mostly by giving us junkier and junkier crap.  Corporations are trying to hide price inflation by cutting the quality and the quantity, and trusting to the indiscriminate nature of the impulsive American consumer.

As Dmitry Orlov says [pp. 81-82 of Reinventing Collapse]:

For decades now, the main thrust of marketing has been to convince everyone that new is better than old, all the while witnessing a steady degradation in the quality of many items.  Taking the case of furniture as an example, it has evolved from solid hardwood to softwood with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a faux-woodgrain plastic veneer.  While solid hardwood furniture can be sanded down and refinished, making it as good as new, the cult of the new forces people to throw it out and then pay for a new, shoddy, disposable, but new-looking replacement.  Over the years, I have consistently been able to trash-pick better furniture than I could find in stores, while the overall quality of the trash has gone down continually.  At present, most of the trash I see, even in the prosperous neighborhoods, is simply appallingly bad and not worth picking.

Another way of making consumers dependent on a continuous flow of new products is through the use of fashion.  Here the goal is to make products that are ugly, while simultaneously convincing consumers that a certain kind of ugly is "in" this year.  Next year, a subtly different kind of ugliness reigns supreme, while the previous year's ugliness is simply that -- ugly, and therefore no longer desirable.  The combination of teenage rebellion, adolescent conformism and plain immature silliness offers particularly fertile ground for this type of mass uglification.  The result is, again, obvious: when the flow of fashionably ugly new products stops, the products that remain are just plain ugly, and the self-esteem of those who are forced to use them rather low.

. . .

The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash.  At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer.

As one last example, if you buy non-stick pans you are going to have to buy them all over again in a few years, because inevitably the teflon flakes off.  Lately, I care less about the price, and think more about when I will have to buy this item again.  Stainless-steel and cast-iron pots and pans will NEVER have to be purchased again, so that's what I use.

And if the durable stuff is more expensive, well... keep your eye on Craigslist.

Beetlemania

Well, I've discovered why my blueberry bushes are mostly-dead twigs sticking out of the ground.  I had my first clue when I was out drowning Japanese beetles in a plastic cup and saw them buzzing and swarming all around the apple trees.  "Huh," I thought to myself, "that's not good."  I knew the blueberries and the hazelnuts and the almond tree were getting eaten, but I thought my little soapy water cup would be sufficient to put a stop to it.

Ha!

I finally bought a Japanese beetle trap and hung it up in the apple tree yesterday.  All I can say is, if you see a Japanese beetle KILL IT.  Do not be dissuaded by that pretty green-gold iridescence.  If there is one there today, there will be a hundred next year.

Notice how that green bag seems to be sagging with weight?  You know what's in there?  An absolutely ungodly number of Japanese beetle carcasses, that's what.  I hung that thing up approximately 24 hours ago.  A stiff drink will be required to wrestle that sack of dead beetles off the frame for disposal.

Let's zoom in a bit, just above the trap:

This image gives me the willies, especially because when you try to sweep them into the cup to meet their soapy deaths, half of them play dead and fall right off and you get pelted with the damn things.  I come inside and spend ten minutes in the bathroom inspecting my hair for beetles.

So, in summary, all I can say is: Do not let 7-year-olds, even of the sort who carefully escort earwigs out of the house, convince you not to kill Japanese beetles because they're pretty.  We did that last year, and there's been hell to pay.  This year I just put on SpongeBob before I venture out of doors to commit insect murder, and my kids are none the wiser.

I may actually have to put that revolting green sack in the car and take a short drive, however, to convince Anya that I'm taking the beautiful beetles away to set them free.  *shudder*

This can't be good

If you've ever been to an online survivalist shop, the sort that sells hand-crank flashlights and solar battery chargers and 100-hour candles, you've probably seen ads for Mountain House Foods.  This is a major company selling huge amounts of freeze-dried foods in #10 cans.  They'll even sell you a whole year's worth of food for an entire family, and ship it to your house.  I know most people haven't heard of them, but in the preparedness culture, they're the biggest brand out there.

Well, turns out they will not be taking any more orders until 2010.  They have no more inventory, and all production through the end of 2009 is already spoken for.  In addition to the source I linked to, I've also heard this on a radio show, from the owner of a preparedness store.

Mountain House is such a large company that people suspect it was the US government who bought up all their food.  Individual purchasing could deplete their inventory, but it's hard to see how individual people could backlog the company for 18 solid months.  The US government is also buying up canned butter (see above link), which I have also heard from a second radio source.

It's certainly possible that we're running low on MRE's, and that's why the government is buying storable food.  After all, the Pentagon ran out of bullets and had to buy them from the Chinese, so it's certainly credible that we might have screwed up and run out of food for our soldiers.  But I think these food items are being placed in strategic locations where government intends to barricade itself during a time of crisis.  Other folks think this means we're going to Iran, but I think this sounds more like a FEMA, refugee camp sort of stockpile.  By "refugee" I mean "starving, homeless person," not necessarily the victim of a natural disaster.

Whatever is going on, it ain't good.

Fermented pickles

I was out at my parents' place over the weekend, and picked three grocery bags full of pickling cucumbers in one day.  It's amazing how much produce can be gotten out of a patch of land.  I said that I would take some home, and my mom said "You're darn right you will!"

And here are two half gallons of pickles beginning to ferment, in a salt brine with mustard, white pepper, and dill:

The plastic caps are perfect for this, because you just loosen them a bit to allow fermenting gases to escape, but once or twice a day you can tighten them to shake up the mixture.

I used my own heads of dill, snipping off the smaller bunches of seeds and shoving them in amongst the cukes.  Here's one head, mid-way through the snipping process:

One online recipe called for 30 heads of dill for a gallon of pickles, which seems crazy to me.  Some of my heads of dill are 8 inches across!  I only used 2 heads of dill per half gallon.

When the pickles are done they'll have a different taste than commercial pickles because they won't be in vinegar, they'll be in lactic acid.  Lactic acid, it turns out, is a fuel for our mitochondria.  It is not, contrary to widespread belief, a "waste product" that builds up in muscles, nor is it responsible for making muscles sore.  From a New York Times article:

As for the idea that lactic acid causes muscle soreness, Dr. Gladden said, that never made sense.

"Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise," he said. "You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent."

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found.

I wonder, then, if people would have more energy when they eat large amounts of lacto-fermented foods, chock full of lactic acid?  Or, more to the point, chock full of lacto-bacteria, which inhabit your gut and sit around making lactic acid all day?  All this from cucumbers, water, salt, and a few days' time.

Gardening gone awry

This year isn't going too well in the garden, although I'm trying to keep a stiff upper lip, ignore the fact that I killed my entire crop of seedlings, and take heart in Sharon Astyk's reassurance that this does not necessarily mean my family will starve in the coming Depression.

I really do not know how I offended my broccoli to the point where it looks like this:

I have never read complaints about one's broccoli bolting in the heat, but apparently I managed it.

In the radish patch, I did get some radishes, but I didn't thin them enough and they were mostly pretty skinny.  Here's one that I let sit there until it flowered, and the dang thing was still no bigger than my thumb:

So far, I have only eaten herbs, radishes, and lettuce greens... I could've fried up those little green tomatoes my son plucked off, but I didn't.  I do have enormous cucumber plants full of blossoms, and green tomatoes, and two little green cayenne peppers.  The onions and carrots seem to be thriving, but I'm supposed to be thinning them more, I'm sure, and half a row of onions got over-run by the radishes.

As for my pole beans, what can I say, I am a terrible human being.  The poor things are twining madly around one another like men on a sinking ship, desperate for something to climb, only the "something to climb" has been sitting in a corner of the garage for three weeks:

I'm great at buying and reading books about gardening and raising chickens and making medicines from herbs, but I'm bad at actually doing it.  My hope is that when things really go to hell, I will suddenly find myself more motivated to go out in the 90-degree, soupy, hazy humidity and water those new fruit trees one more time, and the tomatoes again just to encourage them.  Possibly I might even say to hell with my lawn nazi neighbors and plant a big ol' asparagus border and run some hops up the basketball pole.  This year I'm more inclined to sit in the AC and read Sharon Astyk and ponder which solar oven and which pressure canner I want to buy in the next couple of months.  I'm largely an "armchair survivalist"... though with a few veggies I've managed not to kill.

Anyway, it's progress.

Accidental butter

If you've read the Little House books, you might remember what a tedious job it was to churn butter.  The Ingalls family had a tall, narrow churn with a wooden post that had to be moved up and down for perhaps a quarter of an hour.  The Wilders, who were wealthy and had several cows, had a small barrel on rockers which had to be rocked for an even longer time.  By the 1920's some households used smaller crank churns which fastened onto jars, like so:

.

And I've read that one can put cream in a mason jar with a plastic cap and shake it up for 10 minutes or thereabouts until lumps of butter form and rattle around in the buttermilk.

But in the electric age you can get results extremely quickly.  For instance, here's a method I used the other night:

.

1. Announce to kids that you're making whipped cream.
2. Place heavy whipping cream in electric stand mixer.
3. Turn on medium speed.
4. Suddenly decide to check weather radar.
5. Stand around cursing Internet connection while radar loads.
6. Return to mixer to discover yellow lumps being whacked around in thin white liquid.

.

Ta-da!  Butter:

 

If only I had done it on purpose, I could've bragged about another small "back to the land" / slow food experiment.