To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
I was very busy with livestock chores this week (plenty of manure hauling) and filling in on bummer lamb feedings, separating ewes from their lambs before scheduled sheep-milkings, collecting eggs, et cetera. I packed several mail orders this week, and I did some cataloging for our Elk Creek Company side business.
Our progress hit a speed bump this week, when Lily injured her right hand. Our still-at-home daughter (“Miss Violet”) and I have had to take up the slack with cooking and barnyard chores while her hand heals. It is at times like this that we fully appreciate just how much work Lily does on a daily basis! She is such a blessing and a helpmeet.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather this week was a mix of sun, clouds and rain showers, one small thunderstorm with high temperatures as high as seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. It was a beautiful week. One that is as is said, “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.”
This week I saw a Western Tanager fly down from a pine tree into my garden to get a drink from a puddle of water on the black plastic that was overlaying a bed to keep the weeds down. What a beautiful bird. Additionally, an Osprey came over into our valley to scope out The Unnamed River for fish. I saw it on several occasions during the morning. In the afternoon, I went out to sit in a chair to sunbathe. I heard it’s
“Kik, kik, kik”, call and saw it soaring about fifty feet above our meadow. I just sat down in our plastic Adirondack chair and watched it soaring the thermals higher and higher up into the sky. It kept going higher until it was above our Unnamed Mountain. I thought it would come back down but it kept going up. Soon, it was so high I could barely see it. Then some cumulus clouds came by and I’m pretty sure it went above them and then just disappeared. I kept watching for another few minutes just in case I could see it again, but it was gone. How amazing. Can you just picture the beauty of the earth that, that bird can see so high up there. There are no barriers for the birds that fly so high. They can easily scope out the mountain valleys and streams, lakes and rivers and decide which ones to drop down to, to do some fishing. God’s Creation is just marvelous. All Praise and Glory to Him who created it all.
Yes, this week, I accidentally got a serious hand injury. Let me tell you it knocked me down a whole lot of notches on my stick of being. I had just had a very productive day the day before, and woke up with the desire to repeat that day again to “get ‘er all done”. I milked my animals much quicker than I had been. I went into the house, strained the milk and attacked the dishes to get them out of the way. I wash them very vigorously. I use the pint and a half straight-walled mason jars to milk into and to store the sheep milk after milking and straining it. I had about six of them to wash. I have smallish hands. I am able put my hand right into them and am able to reach right to the bottom to scrub. Well, after washing five of them, I grabbed another one and plunged my green scrubby and hand into it and started to scrub vigorously and the thing instantly, and unexpectedly, shattered in the shape of a “W”, in my hand, slicing the top of my thumb on the second knuckle from the tip and between to the bone taking off a one-half a square inch of the flesh of the thumb of the hand in the glass. Thankfully it didn’t cut a tendon or a vein. The blood poured out. I took a quick look at it and thought that “I’m in trouble now. I really did it this time.” I cried out to Jesus,”Please, please, please,” thinking “I’m done milking now for the next few weeks, the latest bummer is only two weeks old, the vegetable garden isn’t in yet, and I might need stitches. Oh God, I don’t want to be incapacitated.”
I rinsed the wound off quick and grabbed a paper towel and tripled it up and applied pressure. Blood came right through that. I grabbed another towel and put it on top and applied pressure and put my hand up over my head and went outside of the house to find Jim. It took a few minutes to find him. (He had been out chainsawing.) I showed him the injury. He said to go quiet;y sit down, hold pressure on it and pray until it stops bleeding. I decided to stay outside in the sun. So I sat down in one of our Adirondack chairs while Jim went to prepare the compress bandages. When the bleeding had slowed down, we went into the house and put the Silver Sulfadiazine cream on it and put a compress bandage on and a Keflex tape wrap over it. Then I went back outside into the sun and quieted down for a bit thinking and praying.
We had decided that too much of the flesh had been cut for stitches. Jim had worked as a security guard in an emergency room in California during his college years, so he saw how the doctors dealt with these types of injuries which is stop the bleeding and let it heal on it’s own, keeping it from being infected. They didn’t stitch those, and left them open for drainage. So that is what we are doing.
My injury occurred on Monday, so we are now five days into this. The first three days we changed the oversize Band Aid and put more of that cream on it. Now we are giving it a couple of days to be undisturbed covering it lightly with nonstick bandage and over that a large Band Aid. I wear latex gloves when I have to do anything outside. The first two days I drank frozen cherry, Juneberry, elderberry syrup smoothies for their nutrients and painkilling properties. Cherry juice really does work as a painkiller.
It was throbbing badly the second day and after drinking the Cherry smoothie the pain went away. I’m so impressed with cherry/s painkilling properties. I also spent time eating a lot of very healthy foods and drinking herbal teas with Oregano, garlic, thyme, sage, dandelion root, rose hips for their antiseptic, anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and vitamin C properties. I also ate a lot of oranges and salads with kale, miner’s lettuce, sorrel, broccoli, dandelion greens, winter lettuce, Pac Choi, etc for their high “C” and other vitamin content. I felt quite tired this week after the injury so have taken that as a cue that my body wants me to rest to heal this. I also feel emotionally drained. So I took daytime naps.
Also the next day after closer inspection of my hand and blood cleanup, I counted a total of seven smaller cuts that were overlooked, because we thought all the blood had been from the big cut.
On the first day after the injury and after calming down somewhat and resting and thinking, I became very furious with those particular glass Mason jars. It is not the first time that they have shattered on me. The same with the Correlle plates and bowls that we use for everyday tableware. Those too have shattered on me while washing them and have caused smaller injuries to me in the past. Plus we are always sending them by accident of course to our stone tile floors and they are shattering at least once a month. I was so mad, that later that day, one handed, I went through the whole house and removed every single one of those particular types of mason jars and transferred all of their contents into quart-sized large mouth Mason jars. We boxed up all of the 1.5 quart tall jars (all twenty-five that were left) and got them out of the house, as well as all of our Corelle dishes. They are now tucked way in JASBORR.
We have some regular beautiful stoneware pottery dishes for entertaining company and another type of heavy glass dishes that I like to use for dinners from time to time. We, then took out Miss Violet’s green enamelware camp dishes to use at the table for everyday use. I have a blue set, but she wants us to use the green. I love both of those colors. We also decided to order stainless steel tumblers for the house and some stainless steel water containers to milk in and to store the milk in from now on. They are safer than plastic, for the leaching poisonous chemcials and microplastics. And we are now using the glass on;ly fro canning — not for drinking or for dairy milk tasks — for fear of potential breakage and physical injuries. So that is that. I hate glass. I like it for the cleanliness, purity, and lack of chemical leakage, but not the potential shattering. Finally, we went to the store to buy new bottle brushes for our other Mason jars and will try to remember to use them more often rather than sticking my hand into the jars.
So, now there were some big changes for me here on the ranch for the time being. I decided to stop milking my cow for now, she has her one-month-old calf on her. And I decided to stop milking the Meat and Fiber flock sheep. Their youngest lambs are almost two months old. I’m not sure if I will get back to milking them this year before they wean their babies. They wean about three or four months of age. We shall see. I am continuing to milk with my left hand the two ewes in My Dairy flock, for the youngest Bummer’s benefit.
We looked into sheep milk replacer, but found that it is mostly just whey protein cow milk, and some odd chemicals.. It is not good for them. So Jim Is helping me milk the sheep by hooking them up helping me get the grain, helping me hold down the one mother whom has rejected her almost three-month-old ewe lamb. She needs to nurse from her mother at least twice a day. She will wean soon. I have a third ewe that I could milk, and was starting to milk two days before my injury, but she was giving me a lot of grief being her first time being milked, so I let her off the hook, yet again. She is the youngest bummer’s mother. Grrrrr!
Milking two with just my left hand is enough work for my left hand. And now I’m not getting any sheep milk for myself, because it all goes to that bummer. He is a cutie! He likes to be hugged and he gets a lot of them from me and Miss Violet. So we are back to buying Bellwether yogurt for me, for now, and store–bought Organic milk for Jim and Miss Violet.
In some ways this is all a relief to me. I was becoming quite stressed milking the three different sets of animals. Now we just turn them out for the day — the ones I’m not milking, that is. This leaves me just the Dairy sheep, one bummer, and chickens to take care of for the two or so weeks. Jim is finishing up cleaning out that manure island in the Dairy sheep pen. The rest of the animals we’ll try to keep their domiciles clean but it won’t be as frequent as when I was doing it.
I had gotten away from doing much Bible reading and I was becoming quite unhappy the past few weeks and my joy was slipping away from all of the work that i was doing and felt was hanging over me. So now we are taking a step back for a few weeks — both for my hand to heal and to get back into the Word and praying. Also this has been good for our unity as a family. We are now being forced to work more together and more closely, because I cannot do it. Miss Violet is helping me more with the cooking and house cleaning and Jim is helping me more with the animals and doing little things for me like peeling oranges for me, doctoring my hand for me, opening jars, taking pots out of the oven, helping prepare dinner, and buttoning my jeans for me. He loves that! 😉 So this is good for us as a family. We are all very independent of each other with our jobs, etc, generally. So this is a good bonding time. And I’m now not so stressed as I had been. I had to let go some of my ideal projects with this injury, milking so many animals and making our own cheese. Being a bit proud though stressed that I can do “it all” worrying out providing for us. God will provide regardless of all circumstances that are coming. This setback is actually knitting us closer together as a family.
This week, as of Thursday, Friday and today, the latest batch of incubating chicken eggs are hatching. I have another hen who has gone broody. I will wait a couple of days for these chicks to get strong and independent with their eating and introduce some of them to this hen. I hope she adopts them as well as the other hen did last month. It is so sweet to see a mama hen strutting around the barn yard with her chicks following after her thriving under her care… Plus, I’d rather a hen care for them, than me. All I have to do is throw out some seed and chick grower and make sure there is a water source nearby and close them in the Hen house at night, so no predator takes them out.
I read Psalms 91, 95-98 and meditated on them. I’ve done a lot of praying for myself and the folks around us. So I have to say that being off the Internet most of the day has really opened my mind up these past weeks. I am remembering so many good things in my past and thinking of many things that I would never have thought of if I had been watching videos of other homesteading/prepper people doing what they do. I keep thinking of things and comparing things in my mind and analyzing events that happened in the past with more mature thinking, etc. It is good.
I feel lighter spiritually, too. I still watch a couple of shows, namely “Holdfast Alaska” and “Sailing Zatara” for fun, and for Knowledge: Ben Davidson at Space Weather.com and Adapt 2030, and Yanasa TV. I skip through his videos, Redacted News (mostly reading their headlines), and I check Drudge Report, What Finger, and Steve Quayle for headline news, again mostly just reading headlines, not opening up the articles. From time to time, I also check NOAA weather reports, the USGS earthquake map, and Space Weather to see what the sun and KP Index are for the day. That is all I have time for, because Jim has to work on this computer. I get on when he is working outside on a project or gone to town on an errand and I stay home.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We want to hear from you.