Month: May 2017

08:43 – It was 62.8F (17C) when I took Colin out around 0645 this morning, blindingly sunny. As usual, Colin immediately headed for the back fence to check on his cattle.

Ordinarily, if the cows are at least 10 or 15 meters away from the fence, Colin ignores them and they ignore him. This morning, they were right up at the fence, so he stalked down towards them until he was close enough to do his pounce-bark routine to drive them further away from his fence. But this morning, for the first time, there was a courageous cow, a young one about 3/4 normal adult size, and about 20 meters back from the fence. As Colin stood silently watching it, it noticed him and ambled over towards him. Colin was standing with his snout right at the fence wire, and the cow walked over until it was snout-to-snout with Colin. He finally couldn’t take it anymore and did a ferocious pounce-bark, at which point the cow just stood looking at him for several seconds before it turned and ambled away.

As I was scanning the recently added list on Amazon Prime video last night, I noticed a three-episode homesteading series on soap making. The episodes were only a few minutes, so I watched the first one. Nothing new there; saponification has been around for thousands of years, and the only new thing in the video was that the lady used a silicone bread pan as a mold. She didn’t go into the chemistry of it. She said lye was an acid. Okay.

But I decided to see what else was out there so I did a Roku search for “homesteading”. It came up with a lot of hits, one of which was the Homesteading Channel. They really do have a channel for everything nowadays. So I checked that out.

One of the series was called Life on the Big M Ranch, so I fired up the first episode. It started off well enough, with a bearded young man wearing a t-shirt with a stylized Spartan hoplite silhouette and “Molon Labe” beneath it in Greek letters. That by itself would have told me the family were probably preppers, even if the intro hadn’t mentioned preparing for the “fertilizer to hit the fan”.

The family involved is the Mize family from Easley, SC, about four hours southwest of us. Parents Brian and Tammy, in the 40’s, older son Houston, in his early 20’s, daughter-in-law Dana, also early 20’s, and daughter Kindall, in her early teens. They’re all nice people, the kind of people who could just as easily be our next-door neighbors.

They decide to abandon the rat race and consumer/debt society and relocate to 50 acres in upstate SC, near the NC border. So they buy two 200 square foot (20 square meter) trailer homes, plop them down on their newly-purchased acreage, and go to work building a new life. They keep their current jobs in town for now, because they need the income, but they focus on getting completely out of debt and getting all their important stuff moved to the farm so they can get their house on the market. None of them has any experience whatsoever in farming, handling livestock, and so on, so they have to learn as they go.

I found the early episodes very interesting. Unfortunately, the later episodes started to lose focus. Dana became the face of the Big M Ranch, with the rest of the family appearing very infrequently. So I bagged that and started watching the other multi-episode series on that channel, which was about two families building a homestead in the Ozarks. I bagged that one after Season 1 Episode 1, which was an extended sales pitch for overpriced “survival food”.

Barbara called last night to check in. She’s having a great time. Only three more days until she gets back. The people are supposed to show up today to install the drop ceiling downstairs.

It’s Memorial Day here in the U.S., the day set aside to remember those who sacrificed themselves to protect our freedom. Although the official purpose of Memorial Day is to remember those who gave their lives in the service of our country, let’s also remember all of those brave men and women, living and dead, who through the years have put their lives on the line to protect all of us. As we have our cookouts and family get-togethers today, let’s all take a moment to think about our troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, who can’t be with their families. And let’s have a thought, not just today but every day of the year, for them and the sacrifices they are making and have made.

08:59 – It was 64.5F (18C) when I took Colin out around 0645 this morning, bright and breezy. With Barbara gone, Colin’s a bit at odds. He was a good dog yesterday. He pestered me pretty constantly, but he does that when Barbara’s at home. He actually deals better with her absence than any of other other dogs have, probably because Colin actually likes me while the others were all about Barbara. Oh, well. Only five more days until Barbara returns.

This morning I read Fred Reed’s latest column, followed by Kurt Schlichter’s. The two in juxtaposition are interesting. Fred writes about the Eloi class of so-called journalists, who don’t mix at all with us Morlocks. Kurt writes that the Eloi are shocked that we Morlocks are starting to hate them right back.

I’ve always read a lot of history. My dad really got me started when I was in sixth grade. One day he brought a bunch of large books into my room and stuck them on the bookshelf. One group was a complete set of Gibbons’ The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The other was a then-complete set of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization. He suggested I read the Durant volumes first and then if I wanted to know more about Rome to read the Gibbons. As it turned out, I read Durant through Caesar and Christ and then temporarily abandoned Durant to read the Gibbons set. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by Roman history but also interested in the rest of what the Durants covered.

And reading history is probably one of the major reasons I’ve always been a prepper. Over and over, one reads about people whose lives were going along swimmingly well. All of them thought nothing bad could happen because nothing bad had happened before. Until something bad happened. Often something disastrously bad. History is basically a long string of disastrously bad situations interspersed with infrequent and short periods of things going well. But people rapidly get used to the latter and come to regard it as normal when in fact it’s anything but normal.

We’ve had Eloi and Morlocks since the dawn of civilizations, and the progression is always the same, anywhere and anywhen. The Eloi rule with an iron fist inside an iron glove, until at some point the Morlocks just stop putting up with it. And I think we’re on the cusp of such an event. And, just as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette or Nicholas and Alexandra, if they thought about it all, thought their privileged lives would continue just as they were, today’s Eloi have no clue that the rumbling among their Morlocks presages something very unpleasant on the near horizon.

When this dam finally breaks, the consequences are going to be disastrous for everyone. The Morlocks, certainly, but even more so for the Eloi.

09:29 – It was 55.5F (13C) when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, bright and breezy.

Barbara is off to the gym. Today and tomorrow she’ll be getting packed for her week-long trip down to the Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC for a crafts class. She leaves Sunday morning and returns the following Saturday afternoon.

We finished binge-watching Shetland on Netflix streaming last night. Barbara commented that it was the best recent series we’ve seen, and I agree. Excellent cast, writing, production values, and everything else. We did watch it with closed-captioning turned on because otherwise we’d have been unable to understand a lot of the dialog. In series three, they added the delightful Archie Panjabi as a main character. She’s a beautiful woman and a superb actress. We liked her in The Good Wife, and watching her in Shetland just confirmed our opinion. Barbara and I are both surprised that someone hasn’t given her her own series.

Sam from Shaw Brothers finished the Sheetrock work yesterday afternoon. The next step is to get the drop ceiling installed. The guys are showing up to do that next Wednesday morning. When they finish that, the next step is get everything painted, followed by installing the new floor. As Churchill said, “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

As long as everything is being ripped out and replaced, Barbara decided to rearrange the furniture downstairs. Our guest bedroom, which we call Frances’s and Al’s room, is at the far end of the downstairs den. We did have the sofa, love seat, end tables, and so on arranged at the near end, right at the bottom of the stairs. But Barbara intends to move that group of furniture down to the far end of the den, which’ll give Frances and Al a sitting/TV area right outside their bedroom door.

08:39 – It was 51.8F (11C) when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, sunny and breezy. We’ve had about 3 inches (7.5 cm) of rain over the last couple of days.

Barbara arrived home about 1645 yesterday, driving through torrential rains at some points. When she got home, she checked the forecast and found we were under a tornado watch. Tornadoes are uncommon in North Carolina, and almost always small ones, but the morning paper reported a cluster of them yesterday afternoon, mostly between here and Winston. As Barbara said, she was unknowingly driving home through tornadoes.

She’s spending the morning doing outside work. She has plants to get in the ground, work to do in the garden, and assorted other stuff. This afternoon, I’ll have her labeling bottles while she watches TV.

My bout of vertigo appears to be clearing up. I was pretty unsteady yesterday, but I’m doing much better this morning. Still not 100%, but at least I don’t feel like I’m going to topple over any second.

I’m not sure if the meclizine helped, or if it just cleared up naturally. I was taking 25 mg every four hours all day yesterday, from 0700 to 1900. I’ll probably order more on Amazon just to make sure I have it in stock. I dislike taking any medication and, as a first-generation antihistamine, meclizine is particularly obnoxious. I took a few unintended naps yesterday because of it.

If you follow Franklin Horton’s books, you’ll want to grab his most recent one when it hits Amazon on June 28th.

07:56 – I didn’t take Colin out this morning because I was having problems with my vertigo. That’s the first time I’ve had that problem in a couple of years, and only the second or third time since I first had the problem back in 2009. So Barbara took Colin out this morning.

I had her dig a bottle of meclizine out of the freezer. It was originally filled in 2009, forty 25-mg tablets, of which about 20 were still in the bottle. I’ll take one every four to six hours until this clears up, which based on prior experience should be at most a day or two.

Barbara was going to cancel both her trip down to Winston today and her week-long craft class that she’s to start Sunday. I told her not to do that. The only change we made is that she’s going to get all her errands run in Winston today and come back around dinner time instead of staying in Winston overnight. I should be fine by tomorrow or Friday, so there’s no reason to cancel her trip Sunday.

08:54 – It was 57.3F (13C) when I took Colin out at about 0700 this morning, bright and sunny. Barbara is off to the gym, and then it’ll be more science kit stuff today. She has a busy week on tap, with the Friends bookstore tomorrow afternoon, a trip down to Winston Wednesday afternoon, returning Thursday, and then preparing to depart for a week-long craft class on Sunday, returning the following Saturday. Colin and I need to get prepared for WW&P while she’s gone.

Yesterday, I read a summary of a report from the Fed that said 23% of American families couldn’t pay all of their monthly bills and that 44% of them did not have the cash or equivalent on hand to deal with an unexpected $400 expense. I remember seeing similar figures in the past that something like 75% of US families couldn’t deal with an unexpected $1,000 expense and more than 90% with a $2,500 expense. In other words, the vast majority of US families are living on the edge economically.

And that’s not limited to young people, poorer people, or uneducated people. Obviously, all of those make the problem worse, but there are plenty of middle-class and upper middle-class families whose breadwinner(s) are well-educated, in their 40’s, 50’s, or 60’s, and have few if any financial reserves. This does not bode well for any of us.

The fundamental problem is that most people, whatever their incomes, are living at or above their means. I’ve known many people over the years whose incomes put them in the top 10%, 5%, or even 1%, but they spent their money as fast as or faster than it came in. They put nothing aside for a rainy day. In other words, they’re irresponsible. And I’m afraid that they may soon reap what they’ve sown.