Semi-Sufficent? Is that Enough?

I've written here about the folly of trying to be self-sufficient, instead turning to the notion of self-reliance, an Emersonian virtue I embrace.

Recently I read a fine post from Kirsten Lie-Nielsen, a homesteader, that she and her spouse have left farming largely behind, at least as a full-time, rural venture. This experience, one where she attempted to become an influencer but met hostility for her left-wing political views, gave me pause about how I approach rural life. 

These words in particular strike me as wisdom: 

We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress.

When this blog began, I thought that I might use my writing skills to follow the path of a farmer like Joel Salatin. Now I've my doubts, and not because Salatin and I are very different animals when it comes to politics and religion. I deeply respect the way he manages the property at Polyface Farms, and I've had two nice chats with him about how one can run a farm sustainably. I no longer follow his blog, however, because of right-wing extremism and Doomerism, mostly by his readers, a similar pattern that led me away from another writer who once used to visit my classes to discuss his work. 

In case of a national disaster, no one is an island, no matter how many generators, solar panels, firearms, or cans of food on hand. Only community and self-reliance might ease the troubles, though I'd prefer we search for ways to avoid them altogether.  

I'll employ a simple example of semi-sufficiency here: the other day, my brother-in-law and I skidded two 12' long poplar logs out of the woods. A huge twin-trunked tree had split in a storm; we wanted to save part of it for his sawmill. Poplar is a delightful wood to work. I've made a good bit of weatherboard for our farmhouse from trees we cut, milled, and planed in years past.

I could never handled that sort of job alone. We used two saws to cut the logs (for when one saw gets pinched and stuck; it happened once to me). We then used a long cable and electric winch to skid the logs across a wet-weather stream at the back of our property, with me walking beside the skidway with a Peavey Tool to roll the logs around when they got caught on something. Finally, I got on my tractor and hauled the logs the final distance to a trailer.

No one person I know could do this. With my spouse still recovering from a broken leg, she couldn't help. So in hard times, who can you count on to help with rural work? My other best helper, who lives nearby, voted for the other side, but we get on well.

Community, despite adversity and personal differences, keeps the Amish on the land, but influencers have followers, not co-workers.

That's the mistake too many misty-eyed homesteaders make who want to be famous. 

Not a Drop to Drink: So Plan, Already!

Our well water is cloudy again, after rains that have turned the ground to pudding, at least at the top. Further down, it's frozen, a pleasant and, historically, seasonal surprise after so many disappointing, warm winters. If we get lucky (well, I love snow) we'll see a major snowstorm midweek here.

The issue with filtering our water is trivial; trees falling in wind are more serious, but so far things are happening away from the well-tending giants around our home. What falls back in the woods will be firewood for 2026.

I compare our lot to folks in the Richmond metro area who lost potable water for a week due to mismanagement and delayed maintenance at the treatment plant. This event made national news. Some people I talked to had pressure; others did not. None of the water was safe to drink. 

 There's not much to do if no water comes from the taps. You buy bottled water or, as one friend did, visit friends elsewhere. Others took short and unplanned winter holidays.

But were the water on, yet not potable, why not own an emergency filter? That's our plan and it's come in handy at least four times in almost as many years. I detest those awful iodine tablets, considering them some test of macho-hood for old-school campers. Technology has given us a better alternative.

We use a system very similar to Sawyer's product shown here. 

Before we have more emergencies that I'm sure are on the way in these troubled times, get one for your home. We are pricing solar and a whole-house generator for our farm, too. I can't run our generator until the snow or rain stops.

Urbanites and suburbanites may not need the big-dog chainsaw or even "the pee-wee" saw I use, but consider a basic hurricane emergency kit as well as two weeks of non-perishable food. You may not be able to leave home the next time trouble comes knocking. 

Creative Commons image from Pexels.

All The Rain At One Time: Hurricane Season Again

I've written here before about the feeling of living in a shooting gallery as tropical storms and hurricanes roar over ever more frequently.

Hurricane Ian follows a track so close to the one from my 2020 post's image that I'll just be lazy and use the image again.

This year we decided to be a little more proactive as Ian approached. It looks like gale-force gusts tomorrow, but no sustained winds of more than 40 miles her hour. The ground was dry, too dry even, this morning, so we hope the rains do not uproot any trees. I did rush out in the final dry hours to plant some lettuce seeds and a row of peas, hoping to cheat Jack Frost.

I also hope we don't lose power, but I filled up two five-gallon containers with potable water, just in case. Our generator cannot run in the rain, so we'd have to rough it a day or so or until power returns. A whole-house generator is now under consideration.

As Ian looked likely we had ordered a few supplies, including a USB-rechargeable Streamlight flashlight; it's our third by that company. It arrived in a soggy box as the first rain-bands hit. Law-enforcement, the military, and first-responders praise the brand. I find them rugged and waterproof. Cheaper lights exist, but you get what  you pay for in a flashlight.

I had to use the new light right out of the box to help Nan find a chick that had gotten itself under a coop. The little critter would have perished in the mid-50s weather we are having, as the storm passes us.

It seems that I forgot flashlights in my earlier list! You can recharge these sorts of lights from your car's power outlet or USB ports. So let's add USB-Rechargeable light with at least 250 lumens to our storm-prep.

In 2020 we did not have our Walkie-Talkies, one of the best investments we have made. Their battery life would be a few days if we lost power. Add them to the list.

I'll message my nephew Chris Essid with Homeland Security to see what I've forgotten in this and my earlier post. Check in with your neighbors and family in the path of these storms. Good luck until hurricane season ends.

A Mechanic's Lesson From the Yoga Mat

Before you know it, seven years pass. It has been nearly that long since I purchased a deceptively decent-looking 1974 Buick Apollo advertised at Hemmings.

My next column for Hemmings (the 12th installment of "Project Apollo") will focus more on some lessons leaned from failure, but here I want to wax a little more philosophical for my general Tractorpunk reader.

After more than $5000 invested over 6 and a half years, the car does run well enough to take regional road trips, but despite the money spent and many skinned knuckles since 2015, it's been on the lift since February 2022. Why would I do such a thing? Old cars are meant to be driven, right?

The answer is "it depends." My goal for the car has also as rolling classroom, so I'd get over my fears of being a first-time restorer and novice mechanic. To a large degree, I've met that goal. I have a 99 Miata to flog on backroads when I want some cheap thrills.

What I did not anticipate, however, was how failure with a relatively minor-seeming repair would lead me to realize an important lesson that applies far from the garage.

Gearhead Yoga, Parking Pawls, and Flight Attendants

During the pandemic, my Thursday evening Yoga practice moved to a Zoom conference. One benefit of Yoga, physically, has been my ability to contort myself in a car, while seated upside down on the front floor, legs over the driver's seat as I cram my head under the dash to fix wiring.

Little did I know a more subtle and probably more important benefit would happen. Our teacher, Kerry,   shares a short mindfulness lesson with us early in class, as we begin to warm up for the stretching and strength-building ahead. One week she noted how a woman on a crowded, tense, and very uncomfortable flight summoned an attendant for some small need. It took a while for the flight attendant to arrive. Just before barking at the airline employee about how awful things had gotten, an epiphany struck the passenger. Instead of barking, she apologized for interrupting the harried woman and thanked her, personally, for what she'd done on the flight thus far to make it as pleasant as possible.

Instantly, the attendant's face went from wary to grateful, and she and the passenger talked for several happy minutes. A weight was lifted  and of course the passenger's need got addressed speedily. The lesson? Try to turn frustration into gratitude. 

I began to try this with humans, and the effect resembles a magician's spell. It fails sometimes: the UPS clerk who replied to my "How are you?" with "I'm here" answered my "better than the alternative" with "not really." But I tried, and by being pleasant, I got a real smile by the time I left the UPS store. 

Outside, the sky was tumbling with storm-clouds that said something to me about the need to look at the sky. Life is short. You can fix a car easier than a life. Two days later, a tornado ripped through a spot about five miles from that UPS store.

Trying the Technique on the Toughest Person of All

Then I tried Kerry’s idea on myself. My car's parking pawl, a small metal piece in the guts of the Apollo's transmission, looks undamaged, but it does not hold the car in park, no matter what I try. I've replaced the spring, checked the fit of the rod that engages the pawl, and kept the bottom of the transmission off while doing all this work. While I was at it, I realized that the car needed new universal joints. Getting the correct size for the front of the drive shaft proved tedious, involving calipers, some guesswork, and lots of searching around local parts stores. When I got a fit, I saved the empty box for next time!

The delays taking off parts and re-installing them multiple times were infuriating for a while, until I recalled Kerri's story of the passenger. A few worn parts, some hard to source, are not my fault. Would I rather be stuck by the road with the drive shaft on the ground, something that happened once to a friend's 1974 Dodge Dart? So I would tell myself "every time you do a chore again and again, you are turning it into muscle memory. Soon you will be able to remove a drive shaft or install a universal joint blindfolded. Be grateful for the lessons."

When I got both u-joints home, the attitude learned in Yoga Class made all the difference. I learned to install the joints with my shop vise, lubed them properly, reinstalled the drive shaft, and went back after the errant pawl, teaching myself to adjust the car's shift linkage in the process (I did that at least five times. It is getting there). When the flimsy plastic tab that holds the shift-indicator needle in the dash broke, instead of screaming I took the dash out for the seventh or eighth time, and using a pin vise from my scale-modeling supplies, I drilled a tiny hole for hooking the little spring in place. It's better than stock now.

Even when I learned that the parking pawl could not be mended without pulling the transmission, I decided to be grateful. Now at least I'd isolated an issue to its probable cause. I will pay a shop a thousand bucks or more (if the gear the pawl engages is worn) to fix it later. Maybe I'll eventually pony up $2000 and have the entire transmission rebuilt, as I know a good shop for that work. Meanwhile, parking the car in gear is not an option as it is on my manual-transmission Mazda. I'll keep a chunk of 4x4 wood in the Buick's trunk as a backup to the emergency brake, so the car does not roll off, park it on level ground or touching a wall (Yay, 1970s 5 mph bumpers with thick rubber pads).

One Over-Torqued Bolt

As I finish work under the hood (at least until I add a heater) I'm focusing on upgrades, such as new finned valve covers, plugs and wires, and a dipstick from the parts car I found in South Carolina. Yes, the cheap aftermarket one that a prior owner had installed broke, with the end of the dipstick falling off.

Remember how Tom and Ray Magliozzi warned us about that, on their wonderful, and sadly gone, Car Talk radio show?

So be careful when you check that oil!

One justifiable, rather than cosmetic, upgrade to the car is a new transmission pan with a drain plug. Transmissions notoriously spill fluid everywhere when a pan gets removed for service or a fluid change, so lots of gearheads add a drain to the existing pan or switch to a pan that has a drain, as I wanted to do. Summit Racing has some good aluminum pans for my car's TH 400 transmission, so I ordered one to the tune of $130.

I installed it with an upgraded gasket and new filter in the transmission. Yes, I was proud of myself. Too proud.

On the final bolt, tightened to spec of 10 foot-pounds by the manufacturer's instructions, the pan cracked. I felt it rather than saw it.  Looking up, I saw the pan was ruined, a solid crack running from the bolt hole down the side of the pan.

It would have really been  easy, even on a Sunday when Summit's phone lines are closed, to "scream" at them through their text-messaging service. Instead, heeding that lesson from the Yoga mat, I texted what had happened and said how sad it made me, because I like the product and so appreciated all the other products I'd purchased from them over the years for the car and others. What might we do next?

In five minutes, I had their customer-service person thanking ME and sending me a return authorization, under warranty.  Everyone was smiling. I got a full refund and for now, my stock steel transmission pan goes back on the car, which then goes back on the road. Maybe later I'll tap it for a drain plug. Steel lasts.

 Out of the Shop and Into the Mean Check-Out Lines

Side benefits of this new approach to frustration continue to multiply. I am the least-likely peacemaker imaginable but recently I stopped a fight in the making in line at Food Lion. 

Letting a man with two items in his hands go ahead of me, I thought to an unattended shopping cart. I figured he'd forgotten two things and stepped back to fetch them. No. Another man came rushing up and began berating the shopper for pushing into line past HIS cart. The man I'd let in line retorted with an unfortunate and unearned "I think you should show some respect." That the speaker was white and the man with the cart was black turned those words into a dangerous spark.

There I was, with two badly over-torqued bolts. 

It hit me to take the blame. So I said "Gentleman, Let's show some mutual respect. It's all my fault." I quickly told them what I'd done. They both looked at me, none too happy, so I rushed on. "Everyone is so angry nowadays. I'm to blame. I'm sorry. Life is short. "

It ended there. They both gave me a nod and though neither apologized to the other, we all checked out and went home. I needed a stiff drink after that. It could have blown up into a fist fight. And these days, maybe one or both of them would have a gun.

Still, my words worked. Maybe breaking aluminum pans and fixing a balky transmission "well enough for now" provides a life-lesson to take outside the shop into our imperfect, angry world.

 Coda: Let The Good Times Roll, Even When The Car Won't

The Buick is about to go back on the road with the old steel pan back on. I fired it up--no leaks!--but it won't move in any gear. Time to adjust the shifter linkage--for the nth time. It will roll. I have an assembly manual for the car now.

I even changed the oil. When it rolls, I can get back to upgrades for the engine bay and a center console I'm building for the interior.

So what frustrations repairing things have you dealt with, creatively? And have you turned frustration into gratitude, like the lady on the airplane?

A Recipe for Middle Eastern Tomato Sauce

 

You have a garden or farmer's market. Use them, and learn to put up food. It's a great benefit of the extra time we have now during this pandemic.

 I was asked for this, and every year I have enough tomatoes to put up about 8 pints, if not more. This will make four quart jars for canning...maybe.

• Gallon pot of tomatoes, any kind, cut up (Romas and similar will make a thicker sauce). You can peel them if you wish. I don't
  
• One onion, chopped
• Six cloves garlic, or more, minced
• Green pepper chopped small
  
• Tablespoon of dry oregano (use less if chopped, fresh)
  
• Other dry herbs such a basil (tablespoon, crushed) or thyme (up to a tablespoon, crushed). Use less if chopped, fresh
• Teaspoon cinnamon
• Teaspoon allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper or more to taste
• Teaspoon salt or more to taste
• (Optional) 1/2 teaspoon hot pepper flakes.
  

 

That's really it. I often cook the tomatoes down a bit first, bringing them to a boil in a heavy dutch oven, then pressing them down with a potato masher to release the juice. The trick is very slow cooking, and I let the sauce simmer on a simmer-setting burner, with the top tight or just loose enough for steam to escape.
 

Watch the pot and stir occasionally to avoid thing burning. Cook until thick, at least 8 hours!

This makes a great base for lots of Lebanese dishes and it can also become chili con carne, pasta sauces, and more. 

I brown ground lamb and add it, then serve it over basmati rice. Or chop and fry up some okra and add it. You can't go wrong.

It cans well, with the water-bath method.  One thing: be SURE to follow recipes well, including adding citric acid or lemon juice in particular! Granny had more acidic tomatoes than we do today.

Update 2022: I now use a pressure cooker method recommended by The National Center for Home Food Preservation. Their spaghetti sauce recipe is closet to this one in terms of processing safety to avoid botulism.

That Hurricane Thing, Again

Every year what I call the Atlantic Shooting Gallery lines up with tropical disturbances bound for the Caribbean and US East Coast. Though we live far enough inland to avoid the worst effects, my experience in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel and Tropical Storm Gaston taught me to prepare. My nephew Chris, with Homeland Security, has tried for years to get the family to do the same.

If Chris is reading this, I'll add that it's like shouting into a hurricane. It seems that only the bad experience of living through one does the trick. So what DO you need, beyond the expected candles, first-aid kit, oil lamp, flash light, battery powered radio?

A water filter: I was recently asked about backpacking filters, and I'm fond of the household and personal ones from Sawyer. But MSR and other firms make fine ones. Be sure you get more than a filter; get a purifier.  We used one of Sawyer's household units for over a month until we got a UV filter put into our well. It was clunky but we had lots of drinking water.

A full tank of gas: When the power goes out, so do the gas pumps. It's so easy to forget this one. I topped off our daily driver today, just before tucking it into the garage.

A fistful of dollars: I love cash. I don't like the government or big corporations knowing my spending habits. Yes, I'm Libertarian that way. Cash may wane in decades to come, especially after the pandemic ends (Amazon has been a good friend this year) but when the lights go out, cash is still King.

A chainsaw: Don't wait until the next storm hit to teach yourself. Also, don't get me wrong; if you don't know how to use one, don't get one unless you are willing to put in the time learning proper use and care. They are as finicky as they are dangerous. An electric won't do you much good after a storm, but it might be your gateway to a gas-powered one. I cannot comment on cheap brands, but I will say "buy a Husqvarna or Stihl." I own both, but currently I'm leaning "Husky" because it's lighter, starts easily, and I actually enjoy using it. The Stihls seem to have a life of a decade, and they are heavy as logs.

I am so enamored of sawing wood that I bought my own chain sharpener, an electric bench-mounted device. You might opt for a spare chain, and get the shop to sharpen yours as needed (it's not an expensive service). My one tip for new saw owners is "do not store E-10 gasoline in the saw. Ever." I have a source of ethanol-free 93 octane, and I mix a gallon at a time. I burn about 3 a year. If you don't have a source for such gas, either buy Stihl's expensive Moto-mix fuel if you don't use a lot, or buy high-test and never mix more than a gallon. Empty the saw after you run it.

A camp stove: We used our Coleman for the 12 days in 2003 when we were without power, since we had an electric range in the kitchen. It was simply nicer to cook outdoors, anyhow.

Block Ice: You may lose your power and food in the freezer, but even with a generator, you can only keep so much fuel (in our case, Propane) handy. I like to make block ice to extend a dead freezer's useful life. It can go in coolers, too, or be put in pet water when the AC is out.

A big tarp: Let's say the worst happens: a tree or part of it punches through your roof. If you have a tarp and some nails, you can make a temporary repair so you don't have flooding, too. If your roof is too steep to reach, don't even think of trying this. I did, however, once put down a tarp over a roof that a roofer had left partly uncovered, when a terrible rain storm arrived. So now I keep a few handy, and they have lots of other uses. If not exposed to UV light, they can last many years.

Now what did I not think of? Booze. But the sorts of folks I like all enjoy drinking. They have that one covered. And if you get through this storm unscathed, remember: this is early in the season. Get ready.

Summer Tractorpunk Reading: Alas, Babylon

June managed to slip by in a flurry of Fall-semester planning and summer-garden planting, so not a post from me. But now that some of the frenzy is behind, and the tomatoes beginning to ripen, I've had time to read a few books. My summer custom is a nautical book (Williwaw,  by Gore Vidal) and a travel one (Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor). I even read Rowling's second Harry Potter novel; I'm not a fan but it's a fun diversion from racial-tensions, atop American incompetence and selfishness in the face of a pandemic. Then I tackled a book for the very times we are in, one I'd tried to read 40 years or more ago.

When I was a teen, I began Pat Frank's then famous 1959 novel Alas, Babylon. Back then, the world seemed dangerously close to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and to an OCD kid who loved dark science fiction, I wanted to see the glowing mutants stumbling through the radioactive dust of scorched cites. It was a sort of whistling in the dark. I never finished the book, because the cover was the scariest part. The image above is the edition I owned, but the back had no bar-code. Those didn't exist on books in the 70s.

Inside the book, to dorky me, the human drama of survival was boring.  I wanted big explosions and flesh-eating monsters under a Strontium sky.

Now I prefer well developed characters. It seems that only character will get us out of the perils of 2020, when everything seems a powderkeg of a different sort than the global one in 1959. One detail that did stay with me from my teen-aged abortive reading was the blurb on the paperback's back cover, something about the "thin veneer" of civilization vanishing. Well, I learned a new word at least. And that's a good take on Frank's novel, one that compares favorably to more recent work such as Jim Kunstler's World Made by Hand novels or the older Earth Abides by George Stewart. That final one might have been best for this summer, as it concerns a pandemic. Or Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, with its depiction of a racist American dystopia in the midst of environmental crises.

As for nuclear-war fiction? My gold standard has come to be Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, but that too is another story.

Yet Frank's novel kept calling me. And this time, the human drama kept me reading it. I finished in a couple of sessions, so it's most definitely a page turner.  The book might be called one of the gentlest treatments of nuclear war imaginable; Brian Aldiss called such fictions "cozy catastrophes." Frank lets the horrors happen offstage, making the book readable for those who are ordinarily terrified by such fiction. The little town of Fort Repose, Florida, gets lucky, when an east wind and perhaps a Russian dud aimed at Cape Canaveral save them from the fallout. Yet necessities soon become scarce, the lights go out, and the town's one doctor must cope as best he can.

He'd make a fine protagonist, but Frank chooses Randy Bragg, who begins the novel as a somewhat dissolute Korean-War veteran whose family fortune is quickly vanishing. He's not a static character, as one recent reviewer claims, nor a shallow one. The same review critiques, rather unfairly, a perceived masculist tone of the book, largely based on one moment of internal dialog in Bragg's head.  If anything, Bragg exemplifies the sort of Southern small-town Progressive whose was very rare then and, too often, now: he helps and befriends his African-American neighbors The Henrys, and he demonstrates sympathy for the women in his life. Minor characters, while not as richly drawn as some of Kunstler's, offer a glimpse into the world of ours, circa 1959, on the brink of ending. I particularly enjoyed the Western Union operator, whose contacts with the outside world on The Day show that before the Internet, there was still a global network. The arrogant town banker remains sadder; soon his bank is worthless, because it has only paper money no good for trade.

That points to what remains my biggest problem with World Made By Hand; I wanted Kunstler's story to begin in our own period of technological plenty. In Frank's book, we get that for a good part of the novel. It's nostalgic, too. I well recall pre-Interstate Florida before over-development began the ruination that a rising sea will finish in a century or two.

Yet Alas, Babylon is far from perfect. Dialogue can get wooden between the sexes, in particular. Randy is a bit of a stretch. He has three (at least) old or potential flames and this takes the book into the male-fantasy camp. Yet despite that misstep, the novel really looked ahead in terms of racial politics and a sense of social justice, even if that includes rough justice for highwaymen. Their menace is well portrayed, as they begin to prey upon all races in Fort Repose when the pickings grow slim elsewhere in Florida's "Contaminated Zone."

Why read the book now? And what is it doing in a blog about rural life? I would claim it's a study in building a self-reliant community. I don't believe in the American myth of self-sufficiency, as I've noted before. But self-reliance as a key to resilience? That I celebrate, and Bragg's story takes off when he decides that he and his family need to join others in town to keep that veneer of civilization from vanishing, altogether. They share resources to get well water, post notices about dangers, keep a short-wave radio working, organize a constabulary, make their own alcohol, maintain the town library, fish in the uncontaminated waters around Fort Repose. 

In that regard and others, Alas, Babylon proves a hopeful book for this pandemic. Theirs is a world where folks do what is best for each other, even if they choose a wrong path initially. I compare that to our failure to stay out of restaurants and off beaches. Those show our lack of self-reliance, our inability to sacrifice. Yet there's hope. In the store yesterday, I saw only one white, angry-looking guy without a mask. A few weeks ago, most of the customers went about unmasked.

It's good to see some progress. That's one reason to dig out this old book and see how a classic story of disaster handles the human capacity for cooperation. May we do half so well this year and beyond. Seeing that angry man in the grocery store actually encouraged me. He and his selfish notion of "freedom" looked puny, and I think at some level, he knew it. 

We'll outlast such attitudes.

Pandemic? Huh? Oh, Yeah, Like a Hurricane. With Lights and Water

In all seriousness today, a colleague asked others at our lunch table "you guys prepping yet?"

He is stocking up on food. With two young children, it's not a bad idea. COVID-19 shows every sign of a national outbreak. I figure in a week, the first widespread cases will emerge, and then the masks will go on and panic will set in. I'm certain we'll see a few supply-chain disruption and some empty grocery shelves. Americans do not handle emergencies well, in my experience during hurricanes.

For our part, we have enough non-perishable food to feeds two humans for at least a month. Since I spend a good amount of time in harvest season canning and dehydrating, we are set on that count. Unlike surviving a hurricane, even in a widespread outbreak we'll have power for the house, for tools, and to pump water from the well.

I live by the adage that my nephew Chris, an employee of Homeland Security, shared: every family needs clean water and food to last them two weeks, in the case of a natural disaster. In winter, if you live the country particularly, you need a backup source of heat (our woodpile more than suffices). If one approaches a scary situation that way, matters get much less scary. Spend a bit of time looking over likely emergencies at the CDC Web site's page on planning. You may feel a bit better after.

One thing we decided, however, was to stock up on food for the animals. Our two dogs go through about 80 pounds of kibble and 10 pounds of dehydrated treats in a month. Our cats might eat 10 pounds of dry food. So their needs are paramount. Humans do not consider it often enough, but these creatures who give us so much and ask for so little live at our mercy.

Our chickens have plenty of feed, and in an emergency we'd do what our grannies did every day: set them out further to free-range for bugs and greens. We might lose one or two to predators or a bad weed, but the flock would not starve.

What are you doing to get ready for what seems inevitable?  Are  your Plan B skills up to snuff?

Plan B Skills

All of us dream, right? Of that perfect job, that special place we want to live, that special someone. We know that even with those three ingredients, if we have difficulty, help is a phone-call away. And there's Internet everywhere, true?

Many times it all ends well. But not always. So what are some key skills that every person should have by, say, age 25? Here's a stab at it, without going down the Prepper rabbit hole. Some of these skills would be of NO use in an apocalypse.

I thought of this after hiring Quentin, a man in his 20s who had very good skills with a chainsaw. He impressed my taciturn, highly skilled brother-in-law, too: a real feat. We'll be hiring him again.

So here goes. No, no instructions or lessons. That's your quest. I think we should all know how to:

Build a fire, using matches: The trick is twofold, finding dry wood and building a "tipi" type fire.

Sharpen a cutting edge: Hatchet, knife, axe, shears...it doesn't matter. With a stone or a metal tool. Keeping blades sharp, paradoxically, keeps you from cutting yourself. Mom taught me that one.

Change a tire: This requires learning to use the jack in the car and understanding how to loosen, then tighten lug-nuts by hand. Not every car has run-flats. There's a thing called an "owner's manual" in nearly every car. Read yours.

Jump-start a car: How can it be so hard? Positive to positive, negative to negative. But oh, the results of crossing those wires!

Start and run a chainsaw safely: I use these a lot, as we heat with wood. No need to rehash the advice here, but a novice can learn the basics: Check for a sharp chain and tight chain. Add lubricant for the chain when you fill the other tank with gas (and knowing which tank is which). Learn to use a choke. As for how to cut up a downed tree or how to fell one, that's something I'm still learning in baby steps.

Drive a vehicle with a manual transmission: Guilty! Busted! I'm learning, however. It's been a lifelong goal to own a straight-shift vehicle other than a tractor. I'm going to have one soon.

Find directions by sun or the North Star:  If you know how to find the Big Dipper, you can find Polaris and north. And if you roughly know the time of day, you can find at least one direction by the sun, though it gets tougher at mid day.

Understand investing: Basics here, the difference between equities, bonds, cash, and precious metals. I follow Bloomberg's site regularly. Do you know the difference between the DOW and S&P? Long and short-term bonds? Trends for gold and silver? What it means when the Fed changes the money supply or interest rates?

Do simple math by hand and manage a monthly budget: Here I love it that I learned and can still do long division.  Knowing these basics lets you keep track of expenses and project where you need to be, financially, in a month or two.

Be on time & be neat: Quentin really impressed me here. When he ran a little late for an understandable reason one day, he contacted me. He smokes, and like a soldier on a five-minute break for his squad leader, he cleaned up his cigs after. Compare that to the "friend" of a house-sitter one summer, who ruined one of our watering cans with hundreds of butts. Better than putting them in our yard, but that sitter was not hired again and we docked her pay for the cost of replacing a nicotine-ruined watering can.

Load and fire a handgun, shotgun, and rifle: Controversial, but I'd claim that knowing how to operate a semi-automatic handgun or revolver is a life skill you never wish to have to use, but if so...I'd add bolt-action rifle to the mix. Semiautomatic rifles can be more complex, but the "manuals of arms" for most pistols and revolvers are similar enough. Hitting a paper target with any of them at 30 feet is also needed for basic competence.

What skills have I left out? This might become a series!