Once a Prepper ...

I often think fondly of those days, almost two decades ago, when there were so many of us here, on blogger or wordpress, in those pre-Facebook and Instagram days, when we spent time drafting out our thoughts and ideas and actions.  We were "influencers" before that was a word.

The Crunchy Chicken.  Sharon Astyk.  John Michael Greer.  James Howard Kunstler.  Dmitry Orlov.  The Dervaes.  Miranda.  Daisy (who is still writing and sharing and prepping at The Organic Prepper).

I JUST learned that Jules Dervaes, Jr. passed away in 2016.  I mean, just now. Just this minute.  He's been gone almost 10 years.  It feels like the end of something ... and I missed it.  RIP, Jules.

Those people - all of those above and many more - had such a profound impact on what I was doing, what I was building as a future for myself and my family here in the suburbs of southern, coastal Maine.

In a lot of ways, those were pretty amazing and intense days, and I am so incredibly grateful for all I learned during that time.  My children had such a different experience than I had as a kid.  It's not a good thing or a bad thing.  It's just a thing.  Sometimes they tell me stories of experiences they have with other people where they will share some knowledge they gleaned from living the way we lived, and that person with whom they are interacting will ask, incredulously, "Why ...?  How do you know that?"  In a snarkier moment, they'll respond with, "Why DON'T you know that?"  

There's a saying about apples and trees.  We all know where they get that snark.

My life is very different now that my kids are grown.  Precious is the only one of my large brood who is still living at home, but she's a grown-ass adult with a full-time job and an active social life.  It's very, very different from days of yore when my children were the center of my attention and everything I did evolved around what they needed in that moment and the prepping I was doing in the hopes of having a more comfortable future.

There was a lot of living in the future.  As a prepper, that's what we're doing, but not.  Not "living" in the future, but every day is spent preparing for tomorrow.  

There were so many things that needed to be done NOW: splitting and stacking wood; planting, tending, and harvesting the garden; tending the animals; butchering; canning; preserving; cooking; eating; sewing; crafting ....  It was very much about doing what had to be done today, because today is the only day that it can be done.  Tomorrow it will be too late.  Everything had a time, and it had to be done in its time.  Chicks arrive in the spring.  Strawberring ripen in the summer.  Apples are picked in the fall. 

I spent most days just doing what had to be done to get ready for the next thing.  There isn't a lot time to be worrying about what's gonna happen next week, when you're dealing with what's for breakfast today.  And having so much to focus on every day doesn't leave a lot of time to worry about what happened three weeks or three years or three decades ago. 

In those days, my dream was to be a full-time surbuban homesteader - to be off-grid on my quarter acre, producing our own electricity, growing or raising most of our own food, being debt-free, and working at something to earn a little cash to be able to pay the property tax, and maybe go see a movie, occasionally.  My goal was to get everything ready and in place so that someday both Deus Ex Machina and I could be home full-time and just be doing things we loved to do, or just needed to do for survival purposes (like stacking wood.  Nobody loves to stack wood, and if they say differently, they're lying).

I still fantacize about being a full-time homesteader, and I think, when I retire, I'll go back to it.  Maybe even start a home goods or craft-centric side-job as a way to generate a little bit of an income stream.  

The other day, Deus Ex Machina and I were working wood (yes, we still heat, primarily with our woodstove), and I found three little birch logs.  I held them up to show Deus Ex Machina, and quipped, "I could wrap some twine around these and sell them for $15 at the Farmer's Market." 

I'm not going to make a living just selling birch log decor, but I have a few other skills I could use.  I still have my trusty sewing machine.  There's probably some fun, little thing that I could stitch together - like an apron.  People still use those, right?

Maybe I could start a gluten-free micro-bakery in my home kitchen and sell muffins and cookies at the Farmer's Market.  There's probably a niche for that sort of thing.  

For now, though, I'm working full-time, and I like my job.  It's a desk job, but if one has to do a desk job, it doesn't get much better than working in a theater.  

I guess we are, sort of, still doing some mindful prepping, but we're prepping differently.  We're prepping for a future in which we are still active.  So, we're going to the gym and doing a weekly full-body workout with weights.  I practice Yoga, taking classes three days a week.  We're watching our diet more closely, both for health reasons, and because I'm trying to lose a few extra pounds I seem to have decided to store.  When I became a "woman of an age", I found that I needed to relearn how to live in this body.  Eating chocolate after dinner when dinner is after 7:00pm means my body wants to hold onto all that chocolate goodness.  Did you know that chocolate is really heavy?  Ask my scale.

I'm learning to adjust to the new me.

I got a tattoo on my forearm a few years ago.  It says, "Kein tag aber heute."  

Recently, I was told that spending too much time dwelling on the past creates depression and thinking too much about the future creates anxiety.  I laughed in recognition of those roller-coaster emotions.  I know, I know, I keep saying "Do what you can with where you are," and then, I spend all my time analyzing what I did and worrying about how it will impact me later.

So, I'm working on remembering - Kein tag aber heute -  No Day But Today.  And for those who aren't theater folk, it's a line from the musical, Rent with the message being that we can't change the past and tomorrow isn't a given, and the only time we have to really enjoy life is right this minute. 

Deus Ex Machina and I celebrated 30 years this year with a renewal of our vows in the place where we first said them.  

We aren't who we were 30 years ago.  Every couple who has been together as long as Deus Ex Machina and I have been will say the same thing - it's been a long, hard road, blah,blah, blah.  The fact is that we're still on that road, after 30 years, and that's pretty incredible.  Most days, we even still like each other enough to hold hands and laugh at each other's silly jokes.  

We raised meat birds this year, and bought a cow share and a pig share.  We still have our laying hens and share a lot of eggs with friends during the summer.  The rabbits have been gone for a while now.  

I planted a garden, as I have for the past twenty-five years.  We harvested a bunch of tomatoes, lettuce, and broccoli.  The cucumbers were a failure, as was my cardboard box potato experiment.  The Brussels sprouts may get big enough to leave for harvest later, if it doesn't snow anytime soon (I think we might have JUST had our first frost this past week).  The chipmunks ate the blueberries.  The birds ate the  grapes.  The squirrels ate the apples.  I don't know what ate all the raspberries, but it certainly wasn't me. 

In short, I'm not doing a lot of prepping - like I used to do, but we did get a membership at a regional warehouse store (by the way, we have a Costco - not a fan!) that carries a surprising number of local-to-me products, and I'm doing some stocking up on fresh and frozen things I can buy there.  

Life is still pretty good.  I'm not living the dream, but there's probably still time.

For now, Kein Tag aber Heute.  No day but today, and that's okay.  

Helping Hands

For those of you who know me and have known me for a while, you know that some years ago, I dragged my teenaged daughters into the local food pantry one afternoon where we inquired about volunteering. 

After a few months of showing up weekly to help with food distribution, I was asked to serve on the Board of Directors, and over the following two years, we would continue to be very active at the Pantry, including organizing fundraisers in collaboration with a local restaurant; picking up food donations from local grocery stores and the day-old bread store; and assisting with setting up a satellite pantry at our local library.

The food pantry was a very important part of my life in those days, and it was with a great deal of reluctance and regret that I ultimately had to resign my position when life got too busy and something had to go. 

Food insecurity is still one of those topics that's at the top of my list of egregious characteristics of the modern world.  We have infinite knowledge at our fingertips and an abundance that is unprecedented in human experience.  The world produces enough food to feed the entire world population, and that starvation still exists and there are people in this world who don't know where they will get their next meal has more to do with greed and waste than it has to do with actual scarcity. 

And here in the US, if things don't move forward, like, today, there will be people here in my community who may find themselves hungrier.

But there's this video, and it gives me hope - at least in my local community.

What he says stuck with me:  None of us can help everyone, but all of us can help someone. 

It's the story of the little girl and the 10000 starfish.  She can't save them all, but she can save some of them, and that's worth doing.

I have a membership at a regional wholesale club, and for the next little while, I will be purchasing an extra case of something each time I go to share at my food pantry. 

If you were food insecure, what would you want that something to be? Asking for a friend ... :)

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

― Benjamin Franklin

More than ever, this quote is relevant.  

Over the last year few years, my life has changed - a lot.  

• My children grew up.  
• I took a job outside of the home. 
• I left said job.  
• I survived a Pandemic.  
• I wrote a novel.  
• I took another job outside the home.
• I realized I'm getting old ... fast.
• I left my part-time job to take a full-time position at the job I left during the Pandemic.
• I just bought a washer/dryer combo.  I haven't had a clothes dryer in so many years ... I don't remember when it left my house. 

I am working full-time outside of my home for the first time in over two and a half decades.  

It's been really hard, and we've sacrificed a lot.

• We didn't go strawberry picking last summer.
• We didn't go apple picking last fall.
• I didn't can anything last year.
• We didn't tap trees this year.

Instead, we're relying on stocking up what we can buy.

But I guess we still have the knowledge of those things we learned to do while I was at home, working from home, and being a full-time Mom/housewife/caregiver. 

I miss those days, for sure.

But in the end, needing money for when I retire won and so I have a job.    

Life is sad.  

English Muffins

I've been thinking a lot about life back when ... 

... when I was actively trying to homestead, just a decade ago.  FB regularly reminds of things I was doing to make our lives more self-sufficient.  One of my recent memories reminded me of the year that my goal was to can 200 jars of *something*.  I wasn't too terribly picky about what went into the jars.  What I mean is that my goal wasn't:

x jars of pickles
x jars of applesauce
x jars of soup stock

The goal was to have 200 jars of home-canned food with the logic being that 200 jars would give us one jar of something preserved per day for the winter.  During the summer, we have the garden and stuff we can forage, but without some preserved food, if we lose access to our on-demand supply of groceries, we'd be very hungry.  One jar a day would keep us fed, if not full.  

That said, not all jars of food are created equal.  That day when the jar was pickles, divided five ways, would be a much hungrier day than the day when it was canned chicken.

Of course, THAT said, the ultimate goal was also to have 200 jars of home-canned goodness AND a pantry stocked with dried goods, like rice, pasta, and baking supplies.

I thought a lot about that time recently, when I had occasion to visit my ancestral home deep in a hollow in the hills of southeastern Kentucky mining country.  I spent some time with my uncle, who is still homesteading the old homestead, and I brought home six quart jars of his home-canned tomato sauce, a bowlful of Chinese chestnuts we collected from the path under his chestnut tree, and a huge clump of Hen of the Woods (maitake) my uncle and I foraged from his woods.

I didn't can any tomatoes this year.  In fact, I didn't even process any tomatoes for the winter.  I only grew grape tomatoes this year, and we ate them almost as quickly as I could get them off the vines, which were incredibly generous, but rather than preserve my harvest, like I should have done, I gifted a good portion of my harvest to a local friend.

Looking at those jars of tomato sauce from my uncle and thinking about my very poor preparations this year had me kind of nostalgic for the way my life used to be ... before I started working a job outside the home ... when my JOB was the home.  

In those days, most of what I fed my family was homemade in my kitchen, including the bread stuff.

I haven't made a lot of bread recently.

I missed it.

So, today, I did. 

There's a loaf of applesauce bread cooling on the back of the stove, and these English Muffins will go into a lightly greased pan to fry until golden brown, as soon as they've had a second rise.  

Then, instead of running to the store for breads, I can make Deus Ex Machina his daily breakfast sandwich for the rest of the week, with a couple of muffins leftover for both of us to have sandwich before music class on Saturday.

Making homemade bread is time-consuming.

It's, kind of, funny that my kids grew up and moved on, no longer needing me to facilitate their education or chauffeur them hither and yon, and some how I wound up with less time to do all of those things that I used to just do, because that's what we did.  

Don't get me wrong.  I still cook, from scratch, more nights than not.  Eating out is very expensive, and we're saving up for retirement :), but also, as a loved one recently observed - when one learns to cook, especially if using fresh, local, in-season ingredients, the food just tastes better.  No offense to all of those restauranteurs out there, but the food I prepare at home is better.  It's always exactly what I want, exactly the way I want it, and I know what's in it, which means there's no chance of getting contaminated with ingredients that can make Deus Ex Machina's body hurt.  

I still have my garden, and my chickens, I still make my own soap ... but I just don't spend as much time or energy doing the homesteading things I used to do - like canning. 

The first thing I learned to can, back when I first started down this path, was applesauce.  There's a bushel of apples in my kitchen, picked when my son and daughter-in-law visited at the end of September, which will end up sauced and dehydrated.  I figure, perhaps, going back to my beginning might get me back to where I was before I veered off the trail, when I started working outside the home five years ago.

With the way things are going in the world, kick-starting my prepper life is probably not a bad idea.

And home canned applesauce with pork chops from our pig share and oven roasted potatoes, just tastes better than anything mass produced and sold at the grocery store.

What about you?  As life ebbs and flows, do you find yourself falling off of and climbing back onto your self-sufficiency path?  Do current events have you revisiting all of your homesteading efforts?

Finding Solutions to a Unsolvable Problem

This morning, I woke up, as usual, at 4:30 am.  I got out of bed, did my morning hygiene routine, let the old tom out (he's the only of the three kitties who own me that likes to go outside), started the coffee water to boiling, prepped the French press for a new pot, and plugged in the iron.  Then, I fed the cats and dogs (after tom came back inside), added the now boiled water to the French press, and ironed Deus Ex Machina's work clothes.

At some point during that routine, I started thinking about Medieval life (my brain works in mysterious ways - I don't question), and I thought how I would love if some English peasant were able to time travel to now, and I could host him/her in my home. I wonder what he/she would say about my house.

It's modest by modern standards.  The average house size nationwide is just over 2000 sq ft and in my state is 1680 sq ft.  Mine is smaller by almost 200 sq ft than the state average, but it's adequate for my needs (and some days more than I can manage to keep clean (!)).  

The average dwelling in the Middle Ages was between 600 and 1500 sq ft.  So, I guess my house isn't so big and luxurious by Medieval standards.

But I do have an actual roof (as opposed to a thatched roof), indoor plumbing (including hot and cold water on tap), glass windows (that let in the light but keep out the critters and the weather, and help to keep the temperature more comfortable), and plush, comfortable furniture throughout.  Not to mention electricity for cooking, refrigeration, and lighting.  

I wonder what someone from the Middle Ages would make of my house.  I think the biggest surprise, for them, would be to note that my house is "mine!"  It's not "owned" by a Lord (unless we count the mortgage that is owned by the bank ... hmm??!).

Of course, then, I sat down to have coffee with Deus Ex Machina (which would probably be a luxury for a Medieval peasant, especially with the teaspoon of sugar per cup I add) and read the news, and there were two back-to-back articles.

The first was dealing with the growing issue of homelessness - worldwide - but especially here in the US.  As of 2022, there were over half a million people who are defined as being homeless in the US, and per the article I read, the number is growing.  The article cited the main reason for homelessness was a lack of "affordable" housing.  That is, in most places, the cost of renting a place to live exceeds the ability for a too large portion of our population to pay for housing.  

In his book, Tell Them Who I Am, anthropologist, Elliot Liebow attempted to shed some light on the homeless issue among a group of women who lived in a homeless shelter.  His book was published in 1993.  Thirty years ago.  

What have we done as a society, to understand and fix the issue in the last thirty years?  Of course, according to this source, homelessness was an issue for the English pauper, too, with 20% of their population being homeless.  So, what have we done, EVER, as a culture, to stem the tide of those living without a proverbial pot-to-piss-in?

If the growing homelessness trend is any indication, the answer is not much.

The second article was about a lawsuit filed by property owners in New York City to lift the "draconian" laws that often favor the tenants over the landlords.  There are almost as many homeless people living in NYC as there are people living in Portland, Maine.  If those landlords are successful, how many more tens of thousands of people will be forced out of their apartments and end up sleeping in a tent (if they're lucky enough to have a tent) in Central Park (until someone comes along and forces them out)?

In a neighboring city, those wishing to build housing units (including hotels) are required to include a certain number of "affordable" housing units or they can opt to pay a fee.  The city is flush with old buildings that were once working factories, and many entrepreneurial minded individuals have bought the old mill buildings with the intention of creating high-end apartments (condos) and luxury hotels.  Too many are opting to pay the fee rather than include affordable housing units in their plans. 

I am all for rehabbing old buildings, for sure.  I just wish there could be a happy medium between revitalizing a depressed, old mill town and pricing the long-term residents out of their homes.  I wish the pendulum could stop in the middle.  

I have always been keenly aware of the homeless issue.  There was a time in my life that, by definition, I was homeless, but I was exceedingly fortunate to have a place to stay that was safe and stable.  That is to say, I have never had to sleep "rough", I have never had to live in my car, and I have never needed to take refuge in a homeless shelter.

I have been blessed in my life, and I am grateful, every day, for the abundance I have been gifted.

Working in a place where the public is not just welcome, but encouraged, I have become more intuned to the homeless issue.  Everyone knows there are homeless people in big cities, like Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Portland, Maine, but who could even imagine that in my little resort town, there are people who sleep under awnings and on park benches, and spend their days in the cool, quiet of the public library for a lack of anywhere else to go?  

It's heartbreaking.  

I don't know how to fix the issue.  I don't even know who to call when I am asked for help, because in too many places, like my town, there are very limited resources and services for the homeless population.  

I guess all that to say, as a society, we need a better way of doing something than just throwing money at it, and I don't know what the answer is (I suspect there is no one-size-fits-all solution), but I'm open to suggestions.

What can we do, as individuals?

Vivacious Vittles - a Workshop

 When I started working part-time at the library, one of the things my boss wanted me to do was to organize some classes for our community with a focus on sustainability.  She knows all about my books, my blog and my lifestyle choices, and so she was super excited about the prospect of having me do *something*.

At the beginning of June, I started a four week series called "Vivacious Vittles" in which participants learned to grow food in containers.  Small containers, actually.

I live in a resort town.  The average-sized lot is less than a 10th of an acre with many folks having even less land than that.  There are a lot of condos, where there is no land, and if they're lucky, residents might have a balcony or a front porch, where they can have a few pots of flowers or the like.

We also have a larger than average elderly population.  For whatever reason, this town is a haven for retired folks, and there are a number of 55+ communities.  As a demographic, people who live in 55+ communities are often on a fixed income, which means that being able to grow a little food is a good thing, even if it's just some lettuce in a bowl and some beans in hanging planter.

And that's exactly what we did. 

The first class was planting lettuce in bowls. Yes, actual bowls.  I found some serving bowls in bright colors at the dollar store.  For the class, the participants poked drainage holes, then filled the bowls with soil. They were each given two bowls.  In one bowl, they planted lettuce starts and in the second bowl they planted seeds.

The second class was hanging planters with beans and peas.  We planted pea plants, because it was late in the season and added scarlet runner beans around the edges.  By the time the beans are flowering,  they will have harvested and eaten the peas.  

The third class was growing sprouts in a jar.  

The last class was planting herbs in a self-watering planter made from an old wine bottle.

Everyone had a lot of fun, and everyone took home both their plants and the knowledge that growing food doesn't have to require a piece of land or even a yard.  They can do a lot with just a few containers and a sunny spot. 

Summer Homestead Happenings - in pictures

I love my summer garden.  

I am a terrible photographer, and my phone camera isn't great.  The picture doesn't do it justice. 

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 Firewood was delivered.  Three cords.

With the help of our lovely assistants ... 

We got it all stacked.  It was a long day, but well worth all of the effort.  I love the way it looks, and this "fence" makes our yard feel so much more private.