Push Back

Well, so...
I have been experiencing push back. Hard core. I have found myself rebelling against my homesteaderish life in every way. First I abandoned buying things in bulk. It was too hard to change my patterns and go to the bulk stores and it was so easy to head to my local Ralphs. Next I abandoned my glass containers. I had been saving all of our glass jars and some friends saved and gave me their glass jars (thank you Viki and Brook) but I never remembered to take them with me so the things I would buy in bulk would come home in plastic bags then get transferred to the glass jars. Now that I was not buying bulk the glass jars sat there empty, filling up shelf space to capacity and reproducing while I wasn't looking. So I threw them all in the recycling. Then I rejected cooking. "I don't want to cook anymore. I'm done". Realistically, I have been preparing breakfast lunch and dinner for my family for over 20 years and it makes some sense that I might be tired of all of the meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning that goes into that. But I still have about 8 years to go before my youngest is an "adult" so I can't be done yet. And I like cooking. After pondering things like, meal delivery service and a personal chef, I found myself in Trader Joe's purchasing over $200.00 worth of prepackaged meals and filling the freezer. Every day, I look in the freezer grab something and heat and serve. My daughter is a little stunned by this change and looks at me with questions like, 'is this processed food?' and I look back at her and say 'well it's trader Joe's, so it's okay".

What am I doing?

I also found myself thinking "I don't even like to take care of my dogs, what the hell would I do with goats and chickens?"

or "maybe all I want is a small studio apartment for just myself on the beach with a fridge full of single serving sized beautiful looking food and drinks".

 Basically feeling like - I don't want it to be so hard. So there we have it. The essentially lazy person is creeping out. The person who is used to all of the conveniences that we enjoy in this country. Who doesn't want to give up all of the things that I can have with almost no effort. I don't want to work that hard for something that feels so intangible.
But I am finally waking back up. I am finally realizing what this is. This is my push back. It's no different from when I try to diet and decide that I can not have any cookies and then within two hours of the decision eat an entire box of cookies; something I would never do before I had made the no cookie decision.

Changing your life and lifestyle is very hard. It is hard work. It takes a lot of determination. and I still want to do it.
Somethings have remained. I still make cleaners and detergents - because once you have the borax and washing powder and salt and citric acid and vinegar it is considerably easier than going to the store to buy it. I still....hmmm..maybe the cleaners and detergents are all that have truly remained. sigh.

But I am recommitting myself. I will keep going. I'm not even going to call it starting over because maybe push back, fall back, fall off the cart entirely is a natural part of this process. Maybe what feels like being back to square one is actually achieving square ten because you had to miss a beat in order to move down this path.

We are almost finished with my Trader Joe hoard. I will not go back and replenish. I will pull together the remaining glass containers in the house and march to a store and come home with something that is not wrapped in plastic.
And so we continue...

Teen Mom

My son is my joy. He is my world. His well being is my well being. His accomplishments are my recognition of greatness in the world. His challenges are my worst nightmares or on a good day, my lessons.
I was a young mom with my son. I like to say that he was born when I was twenty because that sounds more appropriate but actually he was born two weeks before my 20th birthday. He was born when I was still 19. A shocking number, I admit. I was a teen mom. I hate to admit that for some reason. I hate the stigma that comes along with being a "teen mom". But there you have it. I was a teen mom. and all through my youth - early twenties that is - I fought the internal battle against recognizing that I was in fact a "teen mom". I thought - oh but I'm so different from the common understanding of teen moms. I wanted my son. I married a great man. We cared about our baby. We love him. We are not those strange breed of humans you see now on TV who don't know how to change diapers or know that breast feeding is better than formula. We hung dry our laundry instead of using our dryer, we sterilized everything. I mean for Christ sake, we lived in Vermont. surely we are not typical teen parents. It has taken me a very long time to understand that all of the other young parents, all of the other people who come from families without a lot of money, every one in my demographic thought the same thing. We all think we are unique or different or at least, don't fit the stereotype.
But once again you learn, that we are more the same than we are different.
For better or for worse.
I truly have seen a chasm between me and other people that have the same numbers as I do - sure we have the same ingredients but what comes out of the mold is different. And, of course, what came out in me is better than the rest of my group, even if we could appear on paper as the same.
 I AM BETTER THEN THEM. I"M MORE.

And then you live life for a while and you come to learn that "they" feel the same way.
They don't want to be part of your group either.
Everyone feels different. Everyone feels like some new product of their environment. Everyone grows up with that feeling that they are different and don't fit in entirely because of their special uniqueness. If you are poor, you are the first really smart, articulate poor person. If you are rich, you are the first rich person lacking a sense of entitlement. If you are in the middle, you are the first person in the middle to recognize your own privilege and decide to go into human services - most likely with an MSW. (Masters of Social Work)

We all need to think that there is something that sets us apart, makes us uniquely special, makes us not accounted for in the annual tabulations of societal norms.

And we are right. You are unique. I was unique. You are the first one to see things the way you see things. No one is just like you.
And we are wrong. We are not at all unique. Someone has thought it, someone has done it, someone is just like you.

As I age, I find myself more and more coming to the understanding, the belief, that I am so much more like my peers than I ever thought possible or ever wanted to believe. I see the younger generation asking the same questions I asked with the same arrogance, that they were the first ones to ask it. And now as I enter -what I've decided to call "the beginning of the end of my youth" - I find myself looking at things that I never thought about before unless it was a current topic in my social circle. I'm looking at our economy, I'm looking at our resources, I'm looking at our planet. And what I see feels as obvious to me now as teen moms seems to most everyone.
Something is amiss.
But does it seem in catastrophic proportion because I am only now looking at it and  would have the same appearance twenty years ago? Or is it more like the intended weddings that come from all of the bachelor shows - It is actually not going to work _ in the foreseeable future.

I feel a bit scared about what I see for Americans in the not to distant future. And I feel sad that something in our present leads us to want to separate ourselves from a herd that we can plainly see has gone awry.

And I worry about my now 20 year old son. I fear that he does not have the good fortune to devote twenty years to recognizing his own vulnerabilities and humanity. I fear that he must work much harder and faster just to figure out how to survive.
As for me, I will continue to wallow away in fantasies of small goat pastures and the day that all my more more accomplished friends show up to say "I'm so Thirsty, may we drink of your goats milk?"

I Made Mayo!

A big part of my homesteader fantasy involves making my own stuff. So I made some mayonnaise! By myself. I'm certain that most people have done this before, but not me. I'm very picky about mayonnaise, I only eat Hellman's (It's called best foods out here). I won't eat the generic stuff and I can barely look at miracle whip or Cains without thinking of cow udder mastitis - don't know why. But I love Hellman's, it makes everything better. So I had no idea if I would like my own mayo, but I do. It is simply delicious. I'm not kidding. It's got a very, very slightly more vinegar-y flavor then Hellman's but just barely and there is no difference once it's on the food. I made the best potato salad of my life with it. It's hard to make though. In another post I'll put recipes for all the stuff I make for those that are interested.

Once I got the make it yourself bug - I couldn't stop. I made homemade veggie burgers, my own granola, facial scrub, facial moisturizer, lip balm, eye cream!! I made my own household cleanser and bought what I need to make dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, carpet freshener.

This house will have no poisons in it anymore!!

I do believe that when you start really looking at and thinking about the number of harmful chemicals that are in all the hundreds of products we use everyday, you'll start rethinking what you buy as well.

I just keep thinking - if I can't ingest it, why is it safe to use? Breathing in little bits of it, day in and day out, absorbing through your skin while cleaning with it or from residue on surfaces?

And all those little chemicals enter into your body and live there. Building up over time, causing damage, confusing your cells, turning into cancer.

We can not fully insulate ourselves from harmful things in an industrialized society, but we can sure try. I encourage all of you (my two readers) to simply take a peek at what you use to clean any one room in your house, count the number of chemicals, google one of the chemicals and see what the harmful effects could be to a human who accidentally came into contact with it.

You might find that you can imagine using less poison if you were offered an effective replacement. Well effective replacements exist.

I will post a series of recipes and how they are working out for me in an upcoming post! And good news, I have pictures of all the things I've made!

Popular mom

Snacks are rapidly changing in my house. And I was wondering what effect this would have on my "cool mom" status.

When I was a kid, snacks were very clearly, highly processed and wrapped in colorful packaging. I knew kids whose families did not buy snacks or candy but we (thank goodness) were not one of them. It's true enough that my mom did not stock the house with chips and cookies and the like, but she made no restrictions on whether we were allowed to eat that stuff. She would buy sugar cereals if we asked for it, though she didn't buy much as it only lasted about an hour in the house because we would gobble it down like true scavengers. But if we had any money we were allowed to go to the spa and buy whatever candy or chips we wanted. Occasionally you'd find yourself at someones house and head to the kitchen for snacks only to find things like roasted almonds, sheets of seaweed or matzo bread. Let's just say - you would not be heading to that house on a day you knew you wanted to eat. Even in my adulthood, when I want snacks, I'm usually after french fries or pizza or extra cheese on anything. If someone offers me say an apple, I feel slightly insulted and thoroughly outraged. I had a friend who thought of Sushi as comfort food - Sushi? Which part is comforting? The seaweed or the raw fish? I love sushi, it's delicious but comfort food? One day I was heading to a friends to make some food and watch movies on the couch - she excitedly offered to roast the organic carrots and purple potatoes she had. I wanted to slap her through the phone. Carrots are NOT good on the couch, movie food! It must be fried, stewed or slathered in gravy or cheese to be comfort food.

Lola is different. She has certainly had bags of Doritos and candy but really the only time she finds those in our house is when we have a party - and even then, not always. She could count the number of times she has had her own bag of chips, it would be double digits but not very high up there. She has never had, like, her own cup or bottle of coke - though she has had her own sprite or root beer (those wouldn't be double digits). When she thinks of snacks, she is likely to think of any kind of fruit, cheese, salami, crackers, peanut butter, etc. She has a reasonably healthy diet. But I've begun to see that we can do better - so much better.

So the other day she had friends over and I laid out snacks for them. I put out the normal fruits and carrots and cherry tomatoes, but replaced the cheese with pumpkin seeds and homemade granola, I replaced salami and crackers with whole wheat toast with peanut butter or garlic and oil. Instead of apple juice I made homemade ice tea and fruit smoothies with silken tofu instead of yogurt.

 Had I been offered that as a kid, I would have refused to eat any of it and felt really sorry for the kid who lived there, maybe would even have regaled that kid with tales of how "Boo Berry" cereal turns your milk the prettiest shade of blue. But Lola and her friends - not only ate it all, they thanked me for it. They drank all the tea and all the smoothies, ate every bit of fruit, veggie and toast and most of the seeds and granola. No one even blinked, they didn't ask if we had soda or cookies. Snack Success!

It got me thinking that often times, when you offer kids that fun party food, or that yummy comfort food you are really passing on to them your ideas about what that is. If you make a big pot of homemade soup and crusty bread and curl up with that to watch a movie, that is what they will think of and crave when they are in the position of choosing what to eat on their own. Much like my friend who thought fish roe was comfort food.

As for myself, I loved the roasted carrots that my friend made and apologized for my shocking behavior. I've begun nibbling on the apple slices I make for the kids and I always drink the smoothies. I'm trying to change the way I eat - and perhaps for me most importantly - trying to find ways of feeling comforted that don't come from a box with a friendly elf.

Rickets

I was thinking about Rickets the other day. It's that vitamin D deficiency disease that causes peoples bones to not form properly and they get bowlegged or whatever.

It started because my friend was talking about being lactose intolerant. Which led me, in my mind to immediately begin to argue both sides of the issues created when someone can't drink milk.
"where are you going to calcium, vitamin D, you're getting older, you need strong bones...

"Calcium is available in a plethora of veggies - like broccoli and all you need for the vitamin D is sunshine...."

This is truly how my brain functions (or malfunctions) I will argue both sides of any topic in my head for however long I have before the next distraction. Sometimes I branch off:

"My sister drinks lactaid, is there vitamin D in lactaid?...What are the other vegetables that have a lot of calcium?..."

More commonly I will go into a long lecture

"Vitamin can not be synthesized in the body without sunlight so it must be added, it plays a part in your bodies ability to utilize the calcium..."

I will take whatever weird little bits of info I have stored up there in my head, maybe start making things up, that whole sentence above might be made up. Not sure. Anyway

So this day my brain remembered a story I had heard. So there was a time that people got rickets with regularity and that is no longer the case, But I guess in the last ten years or so there has been a small resurgence of rickets. Scientists were a little baffled as to why. One guy suggested that it was because of sunblock. That parents were so well trained on the dangers of sun exposure that between sunblock, sunhats and keeping their kids out of the sun, we were inadvertently giving some kids rickets. His solution was to take your kids in the sun for 15 minutes a day without sunblock. (He was subsequently discredited and his career ruined because we are very scared of sunlight in this country.)

Then I started thinking about how the way of life we have created keeps us all out of the sun. We are totally disconnected from nature - to the extreme. So I formulated a theory that Rickets was something that would have become a common problem during the industrial revolution when everyone moved inside to work and for school. So I googled it. And I was right! According to what I read, they say Rickets is the only known childhood epidemic that was directly caused by the industrial revolution.

Ha.
Im just sayin.

One last doom and gloom post

So now we've talked about peak oil and global warming and our declining mental, physical and emotional well being. So lets add it all up.

Sometime within the next ten years, things will change a lot. We won't be able to afford things in the ways we do now. Costs will rise. You won't be able to rely on things that we rely on now. We will need to find ways to heat/cool our homes. We will need to find new ways to refrigerate and heat our foods. We will need to find new ways to get our food. We will need to think about our access to affordable/available health care. Basically, all of the easy convenient things we can access so freely now will become much harder for us to access. I'm not talking about 100 years from now, I'm talking about in the pretty immediate future. I think I read that gas is already like $10 a gallon in England. There is NO question that these changes will start to happen - some people just think it's further off than others - but it will happen.

Fair warning - you're about to meet my inner prepper. You might need to look away from this post in order to not think I'm crazy.  

So trying to figure out how you will get by, now while we still have all the stuff we need and love, would be much easier than realizing a week after the oil runs dry that you are screwed.

 If you install solar panels and wind turbines or water turbines or whatever, then theoretically you can heat/cool your home without grid power. The problems are that not every part of the country can really use these resources year round to generate enough power. Installing any of these systems is beyond the financial reach of most people. And even if you can install them and they will generate all the power you need, they are reliant on a battery pack that stores the energy that will be converted into AC/DC power that your appliances can use. The batteries apparently need to be replaced after 5-8 years. That could be a problem at some point. Some country - India? - can't remember which right now, has a lot of the ummm, titanium? whatever resource we need to use in batteries. However, imagine the prices you would need to pay if suddenly parts of our world were totally dependant on battery power. And if the oil crisis is true, how would we even import them? So it's not a perfect solution either. I guess that knowing how to chop wood and having a fireplace or wood stove would be an important thing as back up. But in that case, you would need to figure out how to refrigerate with no power or how to eat without one. A root cellar? That weird clay pot with sand and water thing?  I've read lots of blogs about people living without refrigeration and obviously many parts of the world do this already. But I am a pampered American and I like my dairy cold and wouldn't know what to do without a fridge if it was suddenly gone. So that is something to learn. You can cook on a wood stove or in a fireplace and there are solar ovens, cob ovens, etc that you could use. So having some of those things or at least knowing how to use them would be good.


The global warming is going to change the ways we do things to. I don't understand enough about this yet, but suffice it to say that experts seem to think that the climate will change enough in the next 20 years that the way that we farm right now will not produce the same results - even if we could still use the same amounts of oil. So in thinking about how to have the skills to deal with those climate changes, I think it's important that we investigate various ways of growing food.
Obviously keeping livestock like chickens will provide some food. Learning to hunt and clean and store animals would likely be a good skill. (eek)
But if the oil stuff is true, how will you get enough food to feed that livestock? Chickens are pretty easy because they will eat all of your food scraps and bugs and indigenous vegetation. But goats? Cows? Horses? How will you feed them?
Growing food would be a vital skill in this imagined different world. But if the soil is ruined, you don't have access to fertilizers and the sun is too strong, how will you grow? You can compost your food scraps and the chicken poop and all that to create fertilizer for your plants but its not always the fastest process. Would you produce enough compost to feed a big enough garden? Would a green house with sunshades work to keep plants the right temperature if the sun were hotter? I've recently been looking in aquaponic gardening. Which is a sort of circular system. Basically you put some fish in a big tank - edible fish if you want - and rig it up so that their dirty poop water goes from their tank through your edible plant garden. Their waste water fertilizes the plants. In return, the plants clean their waste water and add oxygen to it and send it back into the fish tank all clean and healthy for the fish. It's one of those perfect cycles that I just love. It's great for you too because you don't need to use much water on your garden, in fact you'll just have to add a bit to the fish tank every once in a while. You can eat the fish and you can eat the fruits and veggies. These systems can be installed anywhere, even your basement or garage so even the north and northeast can use this year round. But, if it were inside you would need artificial sunlight for it which would be power dependant so that would need to be figured out. However, it seems like a great system should we need to do things differently. Another thing to think about is that it takes a long time to build up a garden that can feed your family year round, so starting one sooner rather than later would be smart.

And medical care - don't have that one figured out at all. The best I can come up with is learning some basic skills like cleaning, closing and dressing a deep wound. Learning about plants that have medicinal uses. Like cranberry for UTI's or all those plants that act like antibiotics or those cute little bacteriophage's - which are virus' that only eat bacteria. How you would locate the right bacteriophage is beyond me but they do exist. Best bet is to get a doctor to live with you I would imagine, easy as pie. My friend Mirja is preparing her family for this stuff by attempting to build up their immune systems with unpastureized dairy products and game meat. Check out her blog: http://brooklynbumpkin.blogspot.com/
Though I'm not ready for those things, between our dogs and my dislike of being wet, I'm certain we have encountered a tremendous number of bacteria and surely have pretty strong immune systems.

Okay - enough with my doomsday prepper impersonation. To end this on a positive note -
It does seem that the doomsday sayers believe that we will survive this period. Not fully intact, a lot of people will die, but a lot won't. They believe that we are in the "Age of Cheap Oil" right now and headed for the "Age of Expensive Oil" followed by the dark time of "No Oil". But that slowly, we will develope new means of meeting our needs that are sustainable. I guess this is our chance to try to be among those that make it to "The Age of Green Technology Post Oil".

ET phone home

A major reason why I would like to homestead has to do with our culture. I feel very strongly that at some point in recent history, we have taken a turn for the social worse. I love all of the advances and gadgets that we as a culture have created, but somewhere along the way we forgot about the human aspect of our day to day lives. We forgot that humans are pack animals and as such, need love and community and connection all the time. We were not meant to sit inside climate controlled rooms by ourselves staring at computers all day long. Connecting with people in ways that advance our joint works but do very little to advance our spirits. Coming home at the end of the day, exhausted, confused, distracted and grumpy. We were not meant to see our children for a couple hours a day before their bedtime and in spurts on the weekends between carpools to soccer and dance class. We were not meant to suffer alone the financial burdens of raising a family. Or even worse the emotional strain of raising only yourself, coming home to an empty house every night.

I find people in general to be stressed out, lonely, bored and overwhelmed. No one can understand what they are doing wrong. Why they feel so bad all the time. They worry that they have depression and might need to be medicated. They worry that it's more than that and that they are bipolar. They worry that they are unlovable and will never find a partner in this world. They worry that they never should have had children because they feel so overwhelmed by the task of raising them.

They feel like every career choice they've made was wrong, or that it was right but they could be doing it better. They worry that they will never achieve a happiness level that makes life feel like the joy-filled gift that it is supposed to be.

And I see two roots to these issues. Money and power.
It's not a new concept: Money is the root of all evil - trumped only by the desire for power.

Everyone I know is obsessed with money in some way. Either you have none of it and spend your days fantasizing about how to get more of it or the different ways you'd live if you had it. Or you have tons of it and have to spend your time figuring out how to get those around you to stop asking for some of it, where to invest it to protect it and make it grow and how to not raise spoiled trust fund babies with it. Or you are in the middle, you have enough to live comfortably but you must always be on the look out for the day that something will come up to change that, like the flu or a financially irresponsible partner or work drying up.

We spend the vast majority of our energy and time devoted solely to getting, keeping, using money. There is no time to spend with your kids when you need to work enough to feed them and clothe them and pay for those super expensive piano lessons. And what kind of parent would you be if you denied your child these important things in the name of staying home with them.
There's no time to see your friends in the evenings because you're too tired from work and need to be there again tomorrow.

There is no time and no energy for creating the lifestyle that a pack animal should ideally be living. There is no incentive to try to do it because our culture tells you that if you are not working you are a lazy slob and a drag on our whole society.

Which brings us to power. Obviously people want big power - we want to be the strongest richest country, we want to have the biggest house and the best clothes and our kids to go to the best schools. We want jobs where we tell people what to do instead of getting bossed around.

We want our friends and romantic interests to think that we are the sexiest and in the best shape and the best dresser. We want to be funny and smart and good cooks. What I'm saying is, in ways large and small, all through the day many of the decisions we make in our lives are based entirely around whether what we are doing will lead us further into professional or social power. If you get fat, or are poor or are just not very accomplished, people will still like you, they just won't respect you that much.
And there is no value placed on so many important things. If you are a good and loyal friend - that's great but it won't make up for not working more. All over the country there are stay at home parents who devote their lives to raising their children in the healthiest ways they can manage, they volunteer around their communities, in schools, or for disaster relief. They are your children's little league coaches, and scout troop leaders, they make sure that there is someone directing traffic at your daughters school in the morning to ensure that she gets safely across the street. They are handing out bottled water after your pipes were taken out, they organize a schedule of meals to be delivered to your house when you are dealing with an illness. They invite your kids to do safe, supervised activities. They work every bit as much or even more than the most powerful business person you can think of. They are on 24 hours a day taking care of the needs of a community and raising the future of our country.

But most people say or think - oh, you just stay at home. Hmmm. That must be nice. Me, I have to work for a living.

Or how about the lowly manual labor workers. Admit it, your mind flashed to immigrants and black people.
We have NO respect for people who do certain jobs. Take for instance a custodian at a school. They get no respect whatsoever and yet, they are an integral part of the team that nurtures your child everyday. They ensure the safety and well being of your child, they are the ones who will remove the poisonous spider or snake that roamed onto campus, they will get rid of the potentially fire causing material that falls off the trees, they will be the first to notice the creepy guy lurking near the bushes. And every fundraiser or event that happens at your school is facilitated by the custodian.

How about the dishwashers or construction workers or sanitation workers. They have no social or economic power in this country despite the fact that they perform services every single day that we would all be lost without.

I'm tired of this way of life, where the focus is on getting more and more and more and off of enjoying what we have and each other. It's not working anymore. How many people do you know that are not depressed or on some stress related medication like blood pressure medicine? How many people do you know don't cry or vent regularly about how hard everything is? I don't know many and I'm guessing neither do you.

There are many things that need to change. When I imagine a homesteading life, I see the focus shifting off of consumerism, off of fast paced power seeking, and onto our selves and our communities. I see long days in the sun teaching your children or friends to garden. I see big home cooked meals with lots of people around a table. I see teaching your kids to hang laundry instead of using a dryer and having the time to stand there and do it with them. I see a way of life that won't garner you much American respect, but will gift you a connected life. Connected to yourself, connected to your family and friends and connected to the earth.

..so hot in heeer

Another reason I want to homestead is global warming. I'm not going to attempt to explain global warming. For those of you that have read "We've Peaked" you'll note based on that highly intellectual discussion of peak oil that my brain does not like too many in depth details. I like just the basics, thank you very much. So to sum up global warming, I'll say this: I believe Al Gore. So watch his movie An Inconvienient Truth

If we have established that we believe in global warming, then we must do something about it. I can't really speak on what should be done on a macro level, but I know what I can do on a micro level. I can stop adding to it as much as possible.

 

I'm certain that one person changing alone won't be enough - but all of us together...hmmm a beautiful thing!

 

In any case, if you're not part of the solution; you're part of the problem. So homesteading it is.

If I use solar and wind power and no oil or gas, I am helping. If I reuse glass containers and cloth instead of plastic, I am helping. If I compost my food and waste instead of sending it to a dump, I am helping.

And considering what we know is going to happen to oil, if I grow my own food, I am helping myself financially.

We've talked global warming to death. But it is one of the reasons that I have decided to homestead.

We've Peaked!

So, I've been trying to understand the peak oil crisis a little bit. Here is my extremly limited understanding of what is going on.

At some point - think dinosaurs - there was a time of very warm temperatures on earth. Certain bacteria flourished and caused the earth surface to crack and seperate (into continents) and the spaces flooded with oceans. As the land fell to the bottom of the ocean it covered over this very hot bacteria which turned into oil.  (Please don't try to teach these words in science class, I'm sure much of it is wrong!)

Anyway - we come along and figure out how to get this oil and how to use this oil. Hooray for the industrial revolution!

But here's the catch: there is a limited supply of oil and the light easy to access and easy to refine oil lives at the top of the oil deposits and the stuff underneath it is heavier, sludgier, harder to extract and harder to refine.

So there is an equation for oil known as EROI which is energy return for energy invested. So it measures how much energy you must expend to get the oil, and how much energy that retrieved oil will generate. So at some point the EROI for oil was something like 1 - 100. It took one barrel of energy to get 100 barrels of energy out. Peak refers to the best EROI for getting the oil. After you hit that peak your EROI begins to decline, so maybe now it would take 1 barrel of energy to get 10 barrels of energy.

Okay - so now we get what the peak oil is. Here is the new question: When do we/did we peak and how long after peak can we continue to use oil in the ways we have been or at all?

This is where there is much debating. It seems that everyone in the know - scientists, politicians, economists, etc - agree's about there being a peak, they even seem to agree about what happens after you peak, they just don't seem to agree on timeline. Many believe the worlds oil has already peaked and we are on our way down, others believe the peak hasn't quite happened yet.

A huge aspect of these debates rests on economics. From what I understand, a capitalist economy is based on growth. I guess we are supposed to expect, or need about 3% growth per year, or something like that. Everything in our country is reliant upon oil - I mean really almost everything! Even our farming. So if we've peaked and we begin to have to dig deeper and deeper for oil and the oil we get is harder and harder to pull up and harder and harder to clean, then oil prices will start going up - obvi.

If oil prices go up - we suddenly can not afford to buy things - or afford to drive ourselves to the places to buy things. If a farmer has to pay more for the oil he uses in his machines and in his fertilizer to farm his land and grow our food, then he has to raise his prices. If the trucker who picks it up has to pay more to run his rig, then he also has to raise his prices. If we have to pay more to run our cars, by the time we drive to the store to purchase that piece of food that came from that farm on that truck - the price will be astronomical.

Okay, so no one can afford to buy anything so no one can afford to make or import anything, so our economy begins to collapse. I mean real collapse. People fighting in the streets for gas or food
collapse.

So you can imagine that there would be many people who would not want to accept that this is what is happening and even more people who do not want to let the public at large think that this is what is happening because they don't want panic and mayhem in the streets. But if you do any research at all - you will see that no one can fully deny that this is where things are going right now, they only differ on timelines.

So Peak oil is part of why I want to homestead. I'll let you absorb my long kindergarten ramble and talk more in my next blog.

I'm a prepper, she's a prepper......

I have a new obsession! It's basically a homesteading obsession with a slight prepper bend. I spend HOURS everyday thinking about, researching, talking about everything homesteaderish. I want to buy a piece of land which I have researched endlessly and have found that you can get land for CHEAP. How about an acre in Joshua Tree for $5000.00 I'm not kidding. 5 grand. Or maybe you prefer a lake to the desert, so how about a quarter acre in big bear for $7000.00? It's amazing how cheaply you can purchase a piece of land. There are parts of California that don't even charge you for the land if you will pay them to build your house.

It's pretty amazing and fodder for many fantasies. Here in Topanga where I live now, there are pieces of land for sale under 30,000. I have also researched building a small house, say 700 sq ft and it seems that this can be done for under $60,000. Significantly less than that even, but I would need to pay someone to build it so I'd be on that higher end. Now I'm not saying that I have 90,000 laying around, but imagine owning your own home and land for under 90,000? Or how about owning your own land and home for less than $30,000? If you bought land that was under $10,000 - possible in California - and you built say a cob house:

Which is made from earth, sand and straw - almost no money - but MANY man hours. You could total out at less than 30,000 likely including your solar and other systems.

Or how about a tiny house:

 

People are building these for as little as $3500. The trade off is very little space but even that has it's benefits.


In my fantasy, my house will be off grid, run by solar and wind, I will dig a well or install a rainwater system and grey water recycling. I will have a composting toilet. I will build my house with a greenhouse attached to the kitchen, I will have chickens and goats and become totally self sufficient!

My house will be small instead of tiny:

I can't tell you the number of hours I spend planning this.
The idea of that kind of lifestyle appeals to me so much for so many reasons. Which I will detail in the next blog.