Here are the current top-most items on my perpetual bedside pile:
- I just finished reading the novel Life As We Knew It
, a 2006 “young adult” novel by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It is a survivalist story. An asteroid strikes the Moon, knocking it out of orbit and closer to the earth. As a result, the earth’s gravitational forces are changed, causing high tides, tsunamis, earthquakes and major volcanic eruptions. The coastal cities world-wide are wiped out, weather patterns are completely disrupted, causing floods and droughts, terrible thunderstorms and blizzards and earlier, colder winters. Food is scarce. The story is a series of journal entries (along the lines of The Diary of Anne Frank) written by a 16 year old girl (Miranda) chronicling how she and her family and neighbors experience the first nine months following the asteroid strike. Miranda explores her many thoughts and feelings of coping with the disaster: lack of abundant food, death of friends, illness, work, personal religious views, her relationships with a very religious and a very secular friend, her brothers and mother. From the first page, this book was a gripping read, and very informative in the areas of stocking up, preparing for winter, and self-rationing of food. They nearly starved to death. The story was rather depressing to me. It makes one examine how prepared they would be physically, emotionally, and spiritually in event of a long term disaster. Would I survive? I found myself pausing often and wondering how my beliefs lined up with Miranda’s actions and if I would do the same or differently. I hope we never have to go through any times such as these of which I’ve read about recently: major natural disasters, economic crash or war. I just hope and pray that God will continue to have mercy on us all. Our nation is overdue for some serious discipline from the Almighty Father. I’m done with reading survivalist fiction for a while. I am now more than fully aware of the possible grid-down causing scenarios and their aftermaths. Its getting a bit heavy for me. So for the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on becoming more knowledgeable and skilled in practical living. Therefore, I will be concentrating on non-fiction preparedness and homesteading books, some history, and homeschool topics.
- Echoing my preceding statement, some of the young’uns and I have started watching Homesteading for Beginners DVD series. These are three excellent educational videos produced by Mark and Erin Harrison, in Wisconsin. This is a young Christian homeschooling family with five children. Their DVD series deals with the basics of Homesteading. Nearly all of the teaching segments includes participation of their children. It is wonderful to see them all working together and sharing in the bounty of their efforts. They cover topics like milking a cow, making home dairy products, raised bed gardening, canning, butchering livestock, meat canning, making homemade noodles, baking bread, sprouting, root cellaring, making homemade vitamins, maple syrup production, and much more. Most segments are accompanied with instrumental Christian music: guitar, banjo and violin. Much of what they know they learned from their Amish neighbors. A trailer of their first DVD is available on YouTube. Their web site is: HomesteadCommunityPost.com. I will have a few more comments after I’ve finished watching all three of their DVDs. So far, I find them to be wonderful and very informative. Our Young’uns are enjoying watching the Harrison’s children doing all of these activities.
- I just read How to Stay Alive in the Woods by Bradford Angier
. This is considered a classic book on outdoor survival skills. I highly recommend it. Oh by the way, the edition of this book that Jim bought several years ago has a unique green rubber cover that feels very strange in your hands. (A bit of a novelty, but I suppose it does make the book more durable.) Jim was disappointed that it was printed in China.
- Jim and I are still watching Northern Exposure
episodes on DVD once every few nights. Don’t look for any great outdoor survival lessons in the show, but it can be depended upon for plenty of humor and witty dialogue.