The other day, reader “just waiting” emerged from two weeks of post-Sandy blackout. He conveyed some lessons learned and joked that he couldn’t see a downside to the storm from where he sat. However, there’s a definite downside in the aftermath. This morning he requests help from the Living Freedom Commentariat: I’ve never had to clean up after a major flood before (water was about 2 ft high over entire first floor). I’ve done some research and got the basics, but I bet there’s tips and pitfalls, what not to do’s, etc. that the sites I’ve seen don’t list. With…
Category: Rural and small-town living
Life far from freeways, Starbucks, malls, and other benefits/distractions
A handful of links and two (longish) videos for your Friday and weekend pleasure: Nano-material stops bullets? This I’d like to see. (H/T PT) Among all the other laughs of the Petraeus scandal is the scandalously flawed method the lovers used to hide their email correspondence. (And this guy was the nation’s top intelligence officer?) The Electronic Frontier Foundation has analysis and advice. So does the ACLU. (Tip o’ hat to JG) It’s pretty amazing what the FBI went through to trace emails that probably weren’t even illegal — and the kind of data they had fingertip access to (e.g.…
My two biggest clients pay irregularly. Don’t get me wrong; they’re good people who have gone out of their way for me in many ways. But they may pay me quickly or … not. I never know. Weirdly, they seem to conspire; in months when one is slow, the other usually is, too. I try to keep a cushion for bill paying, but this month the cushion got threadbare. My income in the last 30 days was $200.42 — all thanks to you guys stepping up your regular use of my Amazon links. (You see why I ask you to…
This is a guest post from Will Kone, aka BusyPoorDad, whose bio appears at the end of the column. Though he is busy indeed, he has huge expertise in the areas of first aid and emergency management. He has agreed to write a series of articles on those and related topics. These will appear irregularly, as he has time and gets the inspiration to write them. BTW, I will be returning to the topic of water storage; just not sure when. Will’s post on what to have in a first-aid kit will appear later this week. —– Where to learn…
Community cider pressing pot-luck last weekend! I wasn’t there, but furrydoc took along a box of apples from my tree and took these pictures: First the apples were washed, either in a dilute bleach bath or a vinegar bath (for those who didn’t like the idea of bleach on their apples). Then into the grinder and the press. The juice went into buckets. The pulp was caught in cheesecloth and taken to the host family’s animals. The juice … … is incredible. And I’m not just saying that because it has my very own backyard apples in it. My apples…
There was some cheering on the Intertubz when the TSA announced it was removing those infamous Rape-o-scanners from airports. Okay, muted cheering. Very. Muted. Cheering. Europe banned the Rape-o-Scans earlier this year and this was just the TSA’s belated acknowledgement of what everybody else already knew: that the x-ray scanners are potentially dangerous, ludicrously prone to false alerts, and offensive as all get out. Um, well, not exactly. They say it’s solely because the machines were slowing up their probing, poking, and stealing. So, did they send them back to Rapiscan and demand a refund? Is anybody investigating Michael Chertoff’s…
What I’m doing on my summer fall vacation First I fixed a broken gun. It’s an old .22 single-action plinker probably not worth a gunsmith’s fee. That morning I met someone who claimed to be a gunsmith and he was such an ass & irritated me so much I finally tore into the thing myself. It was either fix it or get one of these. Which I really don’t need. Maybe I didn’t really have to tear it down into such itty-bitty pieces; I don’t know. This hoogie-ma-jigger here turned out to be the whole problem. Instead of turning the…
This coming week looks like a nice, long pause between rounds of deadlines. So I’m taking time off. I hesitate to do it because I have this terrible fear that all you lovely readers will stampede to somebody else’s blog if I miss more than a few days and never return. Yeah, I know better. If you’ve put up with me so far, I have faith you’ll put up with me a week from now. Besides, even in my absence, there will probably be conversations going on in the comment sections. And there are always Amazon links in need of…
For those of you who care (and I suspect it’s a minority, although you’ve also been an extremely helpful minority), I think the apple tree in my backyard is a newtown pippin. Gads, there are zillions of apple varieties! And apparently very few people curious about them. (When I put the most relevant discriptive terms into startpage, my own August blog entry popped to the top of the results. Very helpful, that. 😉 ) But newtown pippin is what fits best, even though I can’t decide whether the aroma is piney. Or not piney. Piney? Who knew that apples had…
Walking the dogs to town today, I spotted this: That’s the Freeloader family’s house. Looks as if they’ve been evicted for the second time in a year. All their sad stuff — including the little kids’ bikes — tossed to the roadside. Exact repeat of what happened when the church kicked them out of the (free) place they lived in before. Just when I was wondering where they could go from here, I passed one of the local drug houses (at least I assume it’s a drug house; we do have several and this house is a profile-fitting tumbledown with…