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.

How its going

so I was feeling a little bit defeated by my zero waste efforts so far. When I made the decision to do it, I imagined that within a week I'd have sewn bags for the kitchen and not had have any trash to take out. Unrealistic! So I decided to take stock of the changes I've made so far.

I've stopped using anything other than a thermos for Lola's drinks for school.

I've stopped using plastic bags in her lunch box, I use a small kitchen towel to wrap anything that would have been in a plastic bag.

I don't use paper towels, we use washcloths instead. 

I buy all my dry goods from bulk with my glass containers

 

I've adjusted to using glass containers for freezer storage and left over storage.
 

I buy soap that comes with no packaging

I stopped buying k cups for my Kuerig coffe maker and instead use the refillable insert. I also got a French press for Christmas (thank you Aaron!) so I use that too.

I keep the heat very low and just have little blankets in every room - different kind of waste.

I make my own ice tea instead of buying it

I don't buy sparkling water and instead use my machine thing that makes it - though there is still waste because of the gas cartridges but you are supposed to bring them back and they are reused.

That might be it so far....but I was encouraged as I thought about it. Those are big changes. We are truly on our way. Change takes time, I vow to be patient with myself! 

On the agenda for next week:

Lola and I are sewing some bags out of kitchen towels and old tshirts that we can use in place of the plastic bags instead of wrapping dish towels. We will do this on my new sewing machine ( thanks again Aaron!) 

I finally ran out of my method all purpose cleaner so we are making cleaner using lemons, vinegar and water. Will post the recipe after we make it.

And we will begin plans for our raised garden beds.

So that's the update! We are on our way!

No Waste Christmas

No waste Christmas didn't really happen for me this year. I was so busy leading up to the holiday that I just couldn't do the mental work required to figure it out. But it did force me to stop and think about what I was doing, what I would like to do differently and how I could manage that.

For my family, Christmas is about three things: spending time with family, giving cool presents and eating tons of food. Two out of the three are in line with my heart but the third - giving lots of presents - is a little murkier. I love to give gifts, I love to recieve gifts. The anticipation everyone feels wondering what they will get or waiting for the expression of the person you got the perfect gift for - those things are wonderful.

But it's the focus now. It isn't Christmas without the gifts. And that feels a little bit off.
So the first thing I feel I need to do is to come up with a true idea of what Christmas means to me. What is the actual meaning of the holiday, where and when did it start, what does it represent in different cultures? What are the pieces of all of that that mean something to me and feel important to share with my kids. I think it is so easy to get caught up in something that you don't even remember exactly why you are doing them any more.

I'm curious to know how/why/what you celebrate? Leave me a comment with your thoughts.