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Month: March 2017

Reverberations

Reverberation 1 My friend has been going through hard times. My friend has also stepped foot on an intriguing spiritual path. My friend’s planned event fell through and his deposit was returned. He discovered a different event. Not for him. He turned around and sent the deposit money for the new event, an icon-painting workshop, to me. In a million years I’d have never come up with the thought of attending an icon-painting workshop. But I knew before I even finished reading his letter that I would. When Old Blue and Amazon fell apart in short order and I knew…

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Simplicity

“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau “Simplify.” — Wendy McElroy It’s funny about simplicity. It’s easiest for the very rich and the very poor, but I don’t think either go for it as often as they might. The rich (and these are very broad generalizations here) are too busy hustling to get richer or consuming and partying with the wealth they’ve got. The poor are too busy struggling not to be so poor. Or they’re filled with resentment, unable to be creative with what they’ve got (or haven’t got). Simplicity is harder for people in the Great Middle. Yet…

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Candles in the Wind

I haven’t done any art in a while. Painted these candles this afternoon from a photo I found online. This is a small study that took about two hours. I was going to add caveats about not being a very good artist and being rusty and there being an irritating pentimento in the image, etc., etc., etc. (And I confess I always wanted to use the word pentimento in a real-live sentence. I don’t think I’ve heard it spoken aloud since my one-and-only Art History class many moons ago.) But screw it. You know and will undoubtedly forgive all that.…

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Friday links

  • There’s a new player in the freedomista news and comment field: LibertyNation.com and some of our blogfriends are associated with it. It’s lib-conserv, not anarchist (so anarcho-snowflakes might want to stay away). Very nice site, though. Clean layout, good content. Much to read.
  • The number of TV sets in the U.S. is declining. No surprise in the netly age. But what crossed my eyes was the stat that “declining” still means 2.3 televisions per home. Which is nutz. 17 Comments
  • A month of frugality (and more)

    While Amazon’s recent moves helped spur this, I was planning to do it in any case. Over at the public section of the Cabal, I’ve begun a journal of My month of frugality. Reasons are explained in the thread, but even if most of them don’t resonate with you, it might be a good thing to try this exercise once in a while as part of your preps. We try out our storage foods, change the batteries in our flashlights, even conduct experiments in doing without our household power for a few days. But how many of us test to…

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    So. Now what?

    Thank you, Commentariat, for your kind support and wisdom yesterday. I didn’t get a chance to reply in comments because the Wandering Monk was here all day enlarging the attic hatch. After writing yesterday’s post I was on minion duty. Even when not hauling construction rubble to the backyard or perching above the hatch waiting to receive and nail down the new folding ladder I was distracted, covered with ceiling crud, grubby, and not sitting quietly at the computer. With hatch completed, I have the lovely task of schlepping stored stuff from the bedroom-to-be into the attic. Which will enable…

    14 Comments

    Midweek links

  • That’s the (entrepreneurial) spirit. You may have heard that Seattle had a major freeway mess the other day, with all lanes of I-5 closed for eight hours. But that didn’t stop the operators of one taco truck who were stuck in traffic along with everybody else.
  • Only four federal agencies to abolish? Surely we can do better than that!
  • Anyone who has stood in a grocery check-out line behind people paying with SNAP/EBT cards Continue readingMidweek links
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