[lper100km]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quagmire', '.')

Someone stole my garden cart, but yesterday I found an old baby stroller for twins

[Quagmire]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lper100km', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quagmire', '.')

Someone stole my garden cart, but yesterday I found an old baby stroller for twins

[patience]

I'll be 67, and having been on Social Security for 5 years, not getting near enough to get by, so I'll still be trying to eke out a living working the home business. Assuming my health holds up, I would nonetheless be somewhat less productive at machine work.

Early mornings in warm weather I'll be in the garden, orchard, and tending chickens, unless it is the monthly shopping day, when we will take our much modified VW (50 mpg, on gas) to town, 5 miles distant, followed by a one-wheel trailer so we can shop for at least a couple neighbors, who may ride along.

Mail and package deliveries will be a big deal, having much less communication, and that powered by our solar system. We'll be sweating how to pay for replacement batteries, and wondering if the rejuvenating (desulphating) will work one more time. I'll be online on a solar powered computer searching for the latest energy saving/producing tricks, and listening to FM and shortwave radio for news. My wife will cut into my web surfing time to use our one low-draw laptop for business records and accounting. Every effort will be made to keep our power draw low, to extend the battery life by limiting the depth of discharge. One CFL at a time, and a few LED's to keep from stumbling into things at night.

The daily repair shop work will be mostly manual labor, and forge work, with limited grid electricity for shop power, at a premium cost. During blackouts, if a customer wants welding done, he'll have to bring his own gasoline for the welder, with a bit extra for me. Acetylene torch work will be quite expensive. Steel orders will be limited to once a month, instead of weekly, with a minimum order amount and a big fuel surcharge. Thus, scrap steel will be getting precious, and hoarded like other metals.

Once a week, on a weekday to avoid the Saturday crowd, I'll take the bike and trailer to the water-powered grist mill we helped restore back in 2008. I'll get 15-20 pounds of wheat ground into flour, for our bread and kitchen use, along with 20 pounds of cornmeal, some for us, and some for the chickens, who mostly free-range in the garden and orchard, yet provide an excess of eggs in warm weather.

Eggs provide much needed protein for us old folks, and our younger daughter and her husband (childless) who lost everything in the San Diego collapse of real estate and banks. They moved back to Indiana with little more than their clothes, and now help raise food and do some part time work. The son in law is a chiropractor and nutritionist, now studying herbal medicine, and busily processing herbs from our garden into remedies he trades for meat, milk, butter, and grain from the neighbor farmers.

Our older daughter and her husband are pretty self-sufficient in their off-grid, super-insulated home, but they are over 10 miles away,so we don't see them much. He does welding and repairs, too, in their area, along with building windmills for sale. She is the family herbalist, and advises her brother in law as he learns. She also makes jewelry of copper, brass, stainless, and aluminum as she can find it, the sale of those bieng limited. She has a foot-powered lapidary setup to cut and polish local stones, mostly for wire-wrap mountings. Her stuff brings a premium at the saturday farmers market and swap meet in the county seat, where they trade it for needed items.

We have a supply of clothing we accumulated back before the crash, but my wife stays busy doing mending on her old treadle sewing machine. She also does canning, cooking, baking, writes an online meditation blog.

Our younger daughter (at home) does a lot of cooking and cares for chickens daily, but her back injury limits her work. So, she takes care of inventory for us, helping plan meals and food storage, checking on the condition of root cellar items and food ready for eating or preservation. She has a degree in Communications, and is the resident electrical geek, monitoring our solar system for optimum performance and longevity, and solving computer problems. She has a part time job for the local internet provider, answering his phone via internet to do customer service.

Once every couple months, our clan gathers in the county seat and hops the bus for the big city, always going in a group to avoid trouble with the riff-raff. This is the outing to get items not locally available, since most local retailers are gone.

Altogether not a bad life, more interdependent, and rewarding for that, but with the frictions one could expect. We like it.

[darwinsdog]

Some kid with a 5th grade education will come in, slap you around & assess whether you have any shit worth ripping off. When you object he'll knock you down & hurt you. He may kill you but probably won't bother to off some old fossil. You could pull a concealed weapon & kill him, but would you really want to? You're the has-been, whereas the kid is up & coming. Welcome to the post-PO future.

[patience]

darwinsdog,

Been tried before, unsuccessfully. Youth and exuberance will never overcome old age and treachery..... Take it to the bank, uh wait, no, just keep it in mind.

[darwinsdog]

Gotcha. I'm rather old & treacherous myself, but not sure my aging phenotype is worth much. A ballsy foraging kid, in the post-peak world, may be the future. Not if he threatened my granddaughter tho. Then I'd kill him immediately.

[Mominator]

My gardening skills will be maturing and I will be getting more reliable results out of my cultivations and I will be getting frustrated with it less and less. My fruit and nut trees will be maturing too.

I will probably have a large bruise on my thumbnail from the hand-pump well.

My children will be 8 and 6 and they will be somewhat helpful with the animal chores. They will be happy and sleeping well at night. They will be homeschooled and they will take ANY opportunity to interact with other children. I may be debating having another baby.

My apprenticeship with a midwife and my education from a distance learning school will be more than half way complete. I will be riding a motorcycle with a side-car or driving an old vw to go to births. My kids will probably want to tag along if it's a family with older children.
I will be cementing the friendships I will need to organize the cooperative with my neighbors and other locals.

My husband will be working as a solar power electrician and he will feel more secure than average and will be proud of himself. I will still get mad at him daily as he doesn't take good care of our tools and they are getting much more expensive to replace.
He will have learned more songs on the guitar.
He will laugh about the days when he installed $1,000,000 home-theaters in monstrous homes.


My mother will be enjoying the added privacy from the cordwood house we just finished on the property. She will be doing whatever manual labor she can and will excitedly volunteer to bike into town whenever we need the smallest thing. She will be our personal firearms instructor & will relish the chance to teach my husband anything. She will have excellent ideas for building the cooperative and she will be instrumental to its excecution. Her blog will be well visited.

My blog will only be visited by her.

[Hawkcreek]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'G')otcha. I'm rather old & treacherous myself, but not sure my aging phenotype is worth much. A ballsy foraging kid, in the post-peak world, may be the future. Not if he threatened my granddaughter tho. Then I'd kill him immediately.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Hawkcreek', 'I') would try to do it out of sight of the kids, though, just in case I needed to turn him into jerky.
That is what old guys are for - do the dirty jobs so the kids can grow up with less guilt.

[darwinsdog]

Homo is a cannibal ape. Homo erectus (ergaster), H. neandertalensis, H. sapiens: all cannibals. Pan troglodytes, our closest extant relative, is a cannibal. Cannibal cults were rife among the Anasazi of the American Southwest. There are to this day tribal peoples who practice culturally legitimate cannibalism in Irian Jaya & elsewhere. Many religious traditions worldwide encorporate literal or symbolic (the eucharist) cannibalism. Oral sex & the hippie practice of eating the placenta are quasi-cannibalistic. Cannibalism routinely crops up during survival situations & in mental illness. There's no getting around the fact: humans are cannibals.

[Novus]

I am glad we are getting back to our senses now. The year 2013 will definitely be a world of cannibalism.

Planet of the Cannibal Apes.

[Mominator]

Hey, I'm not a hippy and I ate my placenta.

w00t! I'm a quasi-cannabal. I beat you all to it!

[PrairieMule]

Well maybe I'll be pickin' or maybe I'll be a grinin'. Haven't decided yet...

(For those not in the know, that's a Hee-Haw reference)

If things go south I'll be relocating to the Big Kiamichi Ranch

[emeraldg40]

I have no idea. I may be in Texas, Oklahoma or Canada so its hard to say. But I will nap.

[Nicholai]

I'll be in Alberta, Quebec, Norway, Denmark or Finland.
Either way, the chances are I'll be either in an ecovillage or a small Norwegian town. If I find a perfect ecovillage, I'll be building with Cob (I just received The Hand Sculpted House in the mail and have already read 70 pages...it's wonderful!) and will push the community to grow a garden as large as possible.

Trying to imitate the post-oil man I suppose...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QovBLFZhQME

[cynthia]

July 19, 2013, Central Coast Range, Oregon

Ocean fog hangs low in our little valley as I wake to the sound of the burbling spring-fed creek that runs below our south facing hill. When the sun rises higher in the sky, the mist will burn-off leaving another beautiful sunny day.

A pot of Douglas Fir tea sits on the little wood stove we use to heat our 10 x 12 cabin. Even in summer, we often use the stove to banish the damp cool mornings.

My husband is already at the creek. I know his routine well. He checks the fruiting blueberries and then nods to our dog's grave site on his way down the hill. Creekside, he splashes icy-cold water onto his grizzled face. Shaving stopped for him a few days ago when his last razor was too dull to use.

Then he will reach for the rope tied to a tree to check the craw fish trap we baited with a Grouse head from our dinner the night before.

I pour my tea and inhale the deep pine fragrance. I look up in time to see a Great Blue Heron fly overhead. A Kingfisher chuckles below.

Today we are going back to the homestead at the end of the logging road about one quarter mile from our hideaway. The occupants died and left behind a bounty of building materials. We plan to expand our dwelling that is difficult to reach even on foot. I dread the thought of hauling all those 2x4's one by one up the steep trail to our shack. Yet, this lifestyle has done more for our fitness than any gym membership ever did.

I dress and head for the garden where I pull young potatoes, baby carrots and beets for our breakfast. When things started looking bad in the city, we made visits to this logged and now overgrown acreage that we knew was long abandoned Here we stockpiled seeds, hand tools, and other basic necessities while we could still drive back and forth the eighty mile round trip.

Next I visit the hen house. We were lucky after a fox got in while we were gone that we lost only one hen. The rooster and six other chickens we brought with us were spared. There are two eggs this morning, one brown, one green. We are leaving the broody hen alone to hopefully hatch a half dozen eggs she's been sitting on for the past week. We want a good supply of meat and eggs since hunting wild game around here takes so much energy and risk.

We try to make our first meal of the day the biggest because of our active morning hours. We have another eight to ten weeks to prepare for fall and winter.

Optimistic the trapping will be a success, I put a pot of water on for the catch and heat a kettle to steam the vegetables.

I hear the familiar whistle of my husband coming up the hill. I look out the window and wave to him. He lifts the bounty and I see I must throw more wood on the fire...
cynthia
this is my u topic, back-to-the-land version

[Cog]

In 2013 I've been on my dad's 40 acre farm for two years. After the crash in 2010, I tried to hang on for a while in suburbia but after I lost my job, there wasn't any reason to stay. I heard some reports that the cities had all burned down. The house in suburbia is probably gone, don't know. There hasn't been any mail service now for two years.

Everyday is a struggle after the gasoline ran out. Pick and hoe planting isn't a lot of fun. Luckily my dad had always collected seed and most of it germinated this year. We have plenty of water but its tough hauling it to the fields. My daughter asks me all the time when are things going to get better. I just shrug my shoulders. My dad is 89 now and he doesn't get around real good anymore but he is a wealth of information as I try to learn how to do survival gardening. My mother died last year. Not really sure why. Maybe it was the heat.

We are all a lot thinner now. I weigh what I did in high school, 160lbs. At 6' 2" I don't have much body fat.
I try to hunt whenever I can but there isn't much game anymore. Groundhogs and the occasional bird that gets too close, is the meat we have. If it hadn't been for feral dogs and coyotes we would have starved last winter. I started out with plenty of ammo but I am down to .22 cal ammo after some fights with some folks who wanted to take what little we have.

I never counted on it being this hard and I'm exhausted every night when I go to sleep. I know that everyday will be just like this one for the rest of my life.

[jasonraymondson]

As a Captain in the United State Army, I will be leading a brigade of deadly soldiers through your home towns and taking your weak (from lack of food and hygiene) asses off to the gas chambers to be exterminated.

Then I am going to sit down with my men and after we have ransacked would we could from you all, we are going to play a nice game of holdem with what was once your property.

[Nicholai]

I'm frazzled by a rooster not far in the distance. The sun begins to shine through the cottage and, soon enough, I begin hearing the stammering footsteps of my loyal entourage of spotless French virgins as they prepare my daily cuisine. Today; scrambled eggs and carrots...it's funny how things can turn out so perfectly when you dictate them the night before.

Since the crash in 2010, some things have fallen to the way side. 2 billion people, feminism, industrial capitalism....it all sort of went to the dogs. After it went to the dogs, the dogs experienced a massive surge in population growth and were ironically eclipsed by a die-off similar to our own. I hope heaven is a big place, otherwise, I guess all dogs won't be going to heaven....

I sit at my table and wait for the meal. Goats milk and lettuce to begin, as per usual. I clap my hands and everyone takes their seats.

I can feel drips of water sliding down my cheek...my eyes still half glazed...I look at the ceiling to notice a small hole in my earthen roof. It was all just a dream. Damn.

I walk down several steps to the main level to prepare breakfast. Cucumbers, carrots, potatoes...I guess another stew will have to suffice.

After breakfast, I make my way to the communal meeting grounds in the center of the ecovillage to say my hellos and find out the main business of the day. Gardening and picking weeds...how very exciting. Everyone is content but with the economic downturn everyones nerves are a bit on edge. As the Danish proverb goes...friends are like fish, if you're around them too long, they start to stink...lucky for me, I'm in Quebec and not around a bunch of smelly Danes.

I make my way back to the cob cottage to patch up the hole in my roof and grab some tools.

After several arduous hours of picking weeds and planting carrots, I make my way down to the local pond for a quick dip. After the frequent shortages of food within the ecovillage, I'm quickly confronted by the bitter-sweet decision of skinny dipping. But, much like in most situations, nudity is the obvious answer.

In the evenings everyone gathers around the campfire to sing uplifting songs that usually go to the tune of "Frere Jaques" or, on REALLY crazy nights, a version of "Frere Jaques" in 3:4 timing...what can I say, the French live on the edge...

At 24, my hair is long and shaggy. I've grown used to the beard but not the lifestyle. It will take more time but luckily for me I'm in a much better situation than some folks. Last I heard from people back home, Opies was still selling his body for ginger snaps and expired milk.....

All in all I'm happy with my decision to leave my family. Where family is lost, new family is made.....and by that I mean I got a girl pregnant in the ecovillage. We have a shortage of condoms.....but it wasn't my fault...Pierre kept pushing the wine and she kept looking at me funny...yeah I know...bad move....one night of fun for 18 years of horrendous misery....at least thats what my Dad used to say...

My back starts to ache...once again I'm reminded of the fact that I'm a 19 year old male sitting infront of the computer at 2 in the morning on a Saturday night in my boxers...it's time for bed...

I hope some of you enjoyed my story....

[gampy]

This is a neat thread.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wake up. Alarm clock is blaring Jimi Hendrix' "Fire". Pretty hot, and muggy in my apartment. Stumble to the shower. Cool stream from the shower head feels good. After brushing my teeth, I put on a pot of coffee and check my email. I browse over to the Huffington Post to see what the bloggers have to say about Obama's address to the US nation. They don't like it. Lol.
Pakistan is finally getting back to normal after the military coup that took power from the Islamic People's Party. The US (and their pakistani stooges) have control of their nukes again. Why that should make me feel safer, is anyone's guess. Especially after that "nuclear accident" on the aircraft carrier that blew up half of San Francisco. Same old, same old.

Next I visit the local weather website. High of 37 C. Humidex 44.
Glad I found that air conditioner at the yard sale. Hard on the electric bill, but worth it for these heat waves. Although the brown-outs seem to negate the effects of AC. I remember when they lasted only a week or two in July. It's been 6 weeks of +35 C temperatures. Brutal. Oh well, at least I don't live in the southern states, or Europe. People dropping like flies. Wind power, and solar just doesn't cut it during a heat wave.

Head out the door and hop on my bike. Asthma is really bad in this humidity, and smog. Debating whether to call in sick today.

Ummmm...nah...need the money.

Plus the restaurant pays under the table. Mind you, those Canadian dollars won't buy squat. But I get a free meal each shift, so that helps.

The cost of bread and vegetables is too high for 3 squares a day. Thank the gods, I work where I can get some decent food. No lining up at the only supermarket that is still in business.
Lol, suckers.
Government control of food distribution is pretty bad. Even in a world wide famine.

Oooops. There's the cops again setting up a checkpoint. Think I'll take the side streets today. Geez, hassling the great unwashed in the name of "terror security".

Saw a scary article on CBC last night. Malaria is now the biggest killer of newborns, and children in parts of the US. A few cases in Manitoba this summer, as well.

Strange. 2010 was the year the weather really changed. Nothing gradual. Just bam! Like crossing some threshold. They say that half of Greenland will be ice free in 5 years. Sea level is 2 metres above what it was in 2000. So much for Kyoto. Or the Washington Protocol.

Great Lakes levels are dropping though. Drought was very rare in this part of Canada, but the last two years, they lost 3/4 of the province's normal yield.

But I really feel sorry for those poor schmucks in South Asia. Man, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and India took it on the chin with those three typhoons in one season. Oh well...things are tough all over.

My parents lost their CPP and pensions 6 months ago. They are going to come stay with me when their house is foreclosed (should be next month.)

Damn, I can't believe North America is turning into Zimbabwe(or what's left of it. Half the population is HIV+, and the other half are starving.)

Glad there are still people with enough dollars to eat out though.
That will change in a year or so. Don't have a clue what's going to happen then.