Peace Of My Mind

I sit here and read article after article about the “perfect super mega evil scary FRANKENSTORM” (Mwahahahaha! 😈 ) about to destroy the world as we know it and I have no fear, no anxiety, no unease, no distress, no foreboding, no worries…just several times yawning from the boredom of it all…like watching the slow motion scene of an action movie and laughing out loud because the effects are poorly done and absurdly cheesy.

Try as I may, I just can’t feel uneasy about this FRANKENSTORM (Mwahahahaha! 😈 ) 😆

Some of you may remember that we had a practice run for this sort of thing back on June 29th (exactly 4 MONTHS ago) when the Derecho came through here unexpected and unannounced with winds clocking in at 90MPH wiping out our electricity for 11 DAYS during a heat wave (if you didn’t catch that blog post you can find it here and a picture post here.)  That storm came through with NO WARNING, absolutely NONE, we were led to believe by the local new stations that it was just a line of strong thunderstorms coming through, no biggie, just summertime thunderstorm business as usual and then WHAM!  out of absolutely nowhere! thrown into the most severe survival situation of my life! It was quite the adventure…bahahahahahaha!!

Being realists, we long ago realized the fragility of our consumer based debt driven society of just in time production, like a house of cards at any time destroyed by the smallest breath.  When you live in a world where everybody consumes and very few actually know how to produce something actually real…you know like with their HANDS real, through real actual physical labor, like how the majority of mankind has provided for itself throughout most of the history of the world FOR REAL…not punching buttons or click click clickety clicking a mouse at a computer screen or working physically to produce some widgety whatchamathingy for some boss of some corporation somewheres far away, never truly enjoying the fruits of your own labor…given paper IOU vouchers in return to trade in for food and other goods at the local “Big Box” retailer…

Realizing and understanding this long ago (from the moment we got married back in 2002) and constantly working towards becoming ever more self-sufficient and less reliant upon a system whose foundation is nothing more than hot air and empty promises, we were fortunate that, even though we had been slacking off a bit (it happens *shrugs shoulders* I am human after all…), when the Derecho came through we had most of what we needed to fulfill our basic needs and even most of our comforts during that 11 DAY electrical outage.  I was utterly amazed at the fluidity with which we so easily switched over into “survival mode”, excited even!  I was born for tumultuous times such as these 😀

And so, here I sit, with several days in advance warning of a huge storm that could possibly dump up to 2 FEET of snow on us and produce wind gusts up to 40 MPH and probably knock out the electricity for several days…again. . .and at the same time threatening the whole “mega-population corridor” of the east coast and flooding one of the most popular cities in the world, and I just sit and shrug my shoulders and do my best to suppress a yawn…been there, done that…ho-hum *sigh* 😆

But just in case there is someone reading this with NO IDEA of what to do or how to prepare, if I was in a city situation (and I used to be a city dweller) with no prior preparations made, this is what I would do:

– Fill the car’s gas tank with gas and keep it filled!

-Buy Water (not the type with the added fluoride!), at least 1 gallon per person per day, this will cover basic drinking/cooking needs but not washing.  If you have children, then 3 gallons per person per day would be more ideal.  You can also get some large containers, like brand new clean trash cans, and fill up with water from the tap to store, fill up the bathtub to and water can even be drained from the hot water heater and used.  You may also want to buy powdered milk and maybe some of those instant breakfast protein shakes that you can mix with milk or water.

-Buy Canned Food that does not require cooking.  Everybody goes for the tuna, but it’s a poor choice, containing few calories or fat it can fill your stomach but will not provide much in the way of energy and in a survival situation you NEED energy!  And FAT, fat is essential in helping your body to properly deal with stress and can even prevent you from going into shock should your situation become especially perilous.  Go for the sardines or canned salmon or even canned mackeral, with plenty of hot sauce or mustard and some saltine crackers…it will provide you with REAL (mostly nutritious) energy.  Any of the canned chillis taste fine cold, and other canned meats like SPAM or canned ham (NOT the chicken, you need the fat and it doesn’t have enough!) or potted meat even…any of these paired up with saltine crackers (preferably whole wheat saltines if you can get ’em) or other cracker like Triscuits will provide good basic energy for little money and it will not go bad nor does it require cooking.  Other good ideas are shelled roasted and salted sunflower seed kernels, banana chips fried in coconut oil or palm oil (both the sunflower seeds and banana chips I get from The Dollar Tree for $1..I mix these with raisins and mini M&M baking chips, or mini chocolate chips if melting isn’t going to be an issue, to make my own trail mix).  Peanut butter is excellent as well and BUTTER is a good idea too, the salted kind can remain at room temperature for weeks without going bad.  All of these things have A LOT of calories for little money and they don’t require refrigeration or cooking.  Also, make sure you have a couple of manual can openers on hand!

-If you live in a place that is going to be cold and snowy from this storm then a kerosene heater with at least 10 gallons (2 of those blue kerosene containers filled to the brim) of kerosene on hand would be a good way of providing heat without electricity, used judiciously (that means wearing a couple layers of clothing and a hat and coat INDOORS and not using heat at night while sleeping) that amount of kerosene could last as long as a month depending on how well insulated your house is.

-If a kerosene heater is out of the question then blankets blankets and more blankets! Especially woolen ones and nice thick quilts. If you go to the camping section of your local “Big Box” retailer they often sell hand-warmers, little pouches of chemicals that mix together to provide a heating reaction, you hold the pouch in your coat pocket with your hands in it or put them anywhere you may need them on your body. Long underwear is a good idea too..

-For light, flashlights are the obvious choice and if you’ve got the dough go for a Mag Light and it’s corresponding battery size…AA or D-Cell.  Oil lamps and kerosene to fuel them is a good idea too!  If your basic department store runs out of oil lamps then check flea market/antique stores…my most favorite oil lamp ever was one that I bought from an antique store.  And make sure to pick up a few boxes of matches and a couple packages of lighters.

There is a lot more that can be said on this topic but this is intended to be pretty basic and straightforward, geared to the city dweller with no previous experience in preparedness or survival situations.  Good luck and stay safe!

Fresh Dandelion Root Tincture

First, dig up your roots!  Below is a picture of what a typical dandelion plant looks like in the grass when it’s not in bloom.

I have been making my own fresh dandelion root tincture for years, even running around and digging up roots from the grounds of our apartment complex when we used to live in an apartment in Maryland many ages ago!  In order to dig up the roots it’s best to choose a time when the ground is pretty soft, like after a good rain, position your shovel about 6-8 inches out from the center of the plant and dig around it until you can pry up the plant with a “block” of dirt surrounding the roots.  Using your hands, carefully remove the dirt until the roots are exposed, being careful not to break off any pieces.  You will need several plants.

roots in the sink

Once you have collected all of your roots, take them inside and wash off as much of the dirt as you can, also cut off the greens (I usually save these and feed them to the goats or rabbits, when we used to have rabbits…).

roots of about 15 plants, more or less

Next, chop up all your roots into bite-sized pieces and loosely fill a pint or quart sized jar with them, depending on how much you have.  For this post I decided to make a pint of fresh dandelion root tincture.

jar full of chopped up roots and VODKA

Fill the jar to the top with the vodka, any ol’ cheap vodka will do, it doesn’t have to be something special..unless you prefer a nicer brand..there is no rule that says that you can’t use good vodka…I, however, prefer to save that for my martinis, shaken not stirred please 😉

fill ‘er to the top!

After filling, screw on the lid and keep in a dark cool place for at least 6 weeks or longer, the longer it sits the more potent it becomes.  The back corner of a seldom used kitchen cabinet that isn’t near the stove is a good place.  After about 2 days, check on it and top it off if necessary as some of the vodka gets absorbed by the roots.  After 6 weeks strain out the roots squeezing as much vodka as you can out of the roots, you can store the resulting tincture in the same jar just make sure you don’t expose it to light as light causes the active components of the tincture to rapidly decay.  So, inside a cabinet is a good idea 🙂

Dandelion root is great for all kinds of digestive and intestinal issues, especially for stimulating digestive enzymes in the liver and pancreas, increasing the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, and reducing sugar cravings!  Anything bitter tasting will help with these issues as it is the bitter taste itself that acts as the catalyst to increase the production of these enzymes. You have to taste the bitter flavor for it to work, you cannot try to mask it with other flavors.  Most people in our society have a strong aversion to bitter flavors, preferring sweet and salty instead,  and that is why most suffer from diseases that are the by-product of malnutrition because their bodies are not able to assimilate all the nutrition from their food due to poor digestion.   The bitter flavor has grown on me and I miss it if I don’t have it regularly.  This fresh tincture will also help preserve and detoxify your liver which is your body’s “janitor”, this is especially important during pregnancy which can be hard on the liver, responsible for keeping the blood clean and clean blood = LONG LIFE!  Dandelion is one of my top five favorite herbs, something you can take throughout your life as a ‘health promoting tonic’. You can take it as a tea or a tincture..I usually take about 1/2  tsp. of tincture a few times a week when I have it on hand. You can also cook with it in soups and stir fries, although I would use only a tablespoon of chopped up root for your average sized wok full of veggies.  Enjoy! 😀

A Primitive Cheese

NOTE:  This recipe only works for RAW milk.

This is the simplest way to make cheese…

You take 1 gallon of RAW milk, put it in a large bowl or pot big enough to hold it all.

Then put it in a very warm place, between 90F and 100F (but don’t go above 110F or below 85F) for at least 24 hours and sometimes for as long as 36 hours.  I like to put mine in my turned off oven with only the oven light on, every once in a while turning it on for a moment to add a bit of heat and then turning it back off.  After about 3 hours I check the temperature to make sure it is in the desired range and then I check again periodically throughout the day.  In the summer, I just leave the milk on the counter near the stove top, it gets plenty hot there!

the curds separate from the whey through the natural process of fermentation

The probiotics (good bacteria) that are naturally occurring in RAW milk will proliferate and as they increase in number they give off lactic acid as a by-product which causes the milk solids to separate from the whey…in my simple cheese recipe the vinegar does this for you, in this recipe the acid comes about through the natural process of fermentation.

After the curd separates from the whey, drain off the whey using a cheesecloth lined (4 layers of cheesecloth) colander set over a bowl big enough to catch all the whey.  This leftover whey is rich in probiotics, enzymes and protein and can be drunk “as-is” to increase health and vitality.  It is also really really good for making bread, or you can feed it to your animals, I know that my chickens LOVE whey and I have read that pigs really like it too!

the curd after draining the whey, can be salted and eaten “as-is” or pressed in a cheese press to make a semi-hard cheese which can be further aged

The “type” of cheese that you get is determined by the temperature.  If kept at the lower end of the temperature range the cheese will be a more creamy spreadable consistency, suitable for spreading on crackers or bread or for replacing ricotta cheese in a recipe.  If kept at the higher end of the temperature range (but NOT over 110F, that’s when the bacteria will start to die!) you will end up with a curd that is more like the curd found in cottage cheese, just like little Miss Muffet’s “curds and whey”…I personally LOVE this type of fresh cheese curd!

To press the curds in a cheese press first salt the curds with about 2 tsp. all natural sea salt, then put the curds in your press…after a day or two, you will end up with your own unique semi-hard cheese made from the bacteria native to your region (to make a hard cheese you would have to add rennet and let it set for a few hours before draining off whey…follow the instructions that came with your rennet).  Take the cheese out of the press, salt the outside of it and wrap it in more cheesecloth and put in a 40F-50F degree area with “moist coolness”…NOT the fridge, it’s too dry!  Traditionally cheese was usually aged in a cave or cool root cellar.

How this cheese tastes and ages is depended upon the type of milk used, the quality of milk used and the type of probiotics present in your region.  This is how all the “famous” cheeses came about, from France and Italy etc. they are most often cheeses made from RAW milk utilizing the probiotics that are naturally occurring in their area.

A truly local handmade product 😀

Homestead Economics

Throughout my 10 years as a housewife and stay at home mom, my goal has always been to do things well and as cheaply as possible….even if doing things cheaply requires extra work on my part.  From living in a 350 sq.ft. studio apartment (our first apartment) in Maryland and growing tomatoes, hot peppers and cilantro in order to make my own fresh salsa to now where I live far out in the backwoods mountains of West Virginia and milk goats twice a day, everything that I have ever taken on has always had two goals in mind: 1) Provide myself and my family with as nutritious as possible food sources, and 2) do so while spending as little money as possible.

Spring 2004, our second garden, outside of our first apartment.  There were 2 small gardens about this size, the other is not pictured but on the other side of the sidewalk.  Please excuse the graininess, I had no pictures of those first early gardens so I  took a picture of a paused home video.

The most common objection that I hear to my way of life goes something like this “well I just don’t have the experience, knowledge, know-how to do what you do, I didn’t grow up in the country…I can’t do that.”  I don’t know why most people always assume that just because I live this way, it means that I must have always lived this way all of my life.  NOT SO!  I grew up in central Maryland in the far outlying suburbs of Baltimore, a member of a southern baptist church from age 4-14 when I quit, and I also attended a technical/trade school as a teen where I became certified as a nursing assistant before I graduated in 2001.  When I was a child, my parents would have a small garden in the summer, but that stopped once I was a young teen…I didn’t grow up with chickens or goats or ducks on a farm…although I always envisioned myself eventually having one.  My family did own a couple acres of land and my siblings and I did play in the woods A LOT, but that was before a big land developer bought up all the land surrounding my parent’s home and turned it into one of those poorly built matchstick box home developments where everyone is smashed in like sardines living practically on top of each other.  It was a sad sad day in my universe when they knocked down ALL of my childhood woods….but I digress, the reason I say all of this is just to point out one small simple fact:

ANYONE can do what I do, all it takes is the willpower to WANT to do it and a bit of common sense…God gave you a brain, use it! 😉

Our main rooster, a Buff Orpington named “Roostaur” (like Dinosaur). We’ve had him for 3 years, the best rooster we’ve ever owned. I’ve seen him fight off possums in the dark and stand up to the cats, protecting chicks from them.  But he’s also very tame, letting me pick him up and pet him and even eats from my hand like a small dog.

I’ve been raising chickens since 2006 and they are still the “Cornerstone” of my homestead.  Our chickens are 100% free range, they have complete access to every part of our little 9 acre homestead and BEYOND that, often going into the field next door that belongs to the Black Angus Cattle Farmer who lives behind us and even deep into the woods to scratch up leaves and eat big fat wriggling worms.  Our flock usually ranges in size from 20-30 birds with 2 Roosters, a main one and a back-up, just in case.  We raised and ate a couple of geese one year and two years ago we even raised our own Thanksgiving Turkey, just to discovered that turkeys are annoying and not really worth the extra trouble.  We supplement their foraging with feed, but never beyond using one 50 pound bag of chicken feed every 2 weeks, 2 bags (100 pounds) a month of chicken feed. . . .which isn’t much, so technically they are providing most of their own food most of the time.  But they are most excellent foragers.  Since chickens are omnivores, we also feed them all of our food scraps, you can read more about that here “Waste Not, Want Not“.

A big 50 pound bag of chicken feed costs us $13.49…we get about a dozen eggs a day, sometimes as few as 8 and sometimes as many as 15, depending on the time of year (a few of those eggs are ducks eggs too!).  So, for eggs we spend anywhere from $1.34 – 71 cents for every dozen eggs we produce, and this is for EXTRA nutritious eggs from free range hens eating green grass and bugs and acorns that fall from the trees in autumn (my kids love cracking them open and feeding them to the chickens!), which if you bought these from a farmer’s market would cost anywheres from $3-$5/dozen depending on where you live!  This doesn’t even factor in that eventually every hen, after 2 years of egg-laying, will become dinner and provide practically free meat for us along with healthful delicious chicken broth made from the carcass..and every spring we use an incubator to hatch several batches of chicks and then raise up the roosters that hatch for meat, slaughtering them at 20 weeks of age, right at about the time they would reach sexual maturity …it’s impossible for me to figure out just how much that meat costs but I know that it isn’t much!

My 3 does, staked outside eatin’ weeds.

After the chickens and ducks comes the goats.  Now the goats are not quite as cost effective as the chickens are because we do not have enough pasture for them to live off of exclusively.  Someday we want to fence in a larger area for them, but the small exercise pen that we built will have to do for now.  We feed them mostly hay and in the summer when the weeds are really high we stake them outside for a few hours a day to eat the weeds down, no mowing needed and they get a free meal…a win-win situation if you ask me! 😀

We buy their hay from a farm 5 miles down the road, we pay $3.75/bale, they eat through about 5 bales a week which I will round up to 23 bales a month, more or less.  We also give them grain but ONLY to keep them occupied while they are being milked, this comes out to using one 50 pound bag of goat feed a week.  We currently pay $16 for one 50 pound bag of goat feed.  All of this comes out to roughly $160 a month.  We’re currently getting 1.5 – 2 gallons of milk a day….which comes out to a cost of  $3.55 – $2.66 for every gallon of RAW, high fat, delicious goat’s milk that we produce.  Since RAW milk sales are illegal in my state (but consumption of RAW milk from your own animal is perfectly legal) having such a source of milk, in reality, is actually PRICELESS.  Not to mention the super delicious goat cheese that I make which can cost an “arm and a leg” at one of those fancy dancy gourmet food stores…despite the fact that we have no real pasture to feed them, producing our own goat’s milk still costs WAY LESS than buying commercial milk from the store and it’s FAR HEALTHIER.

An typical daily late summer harvest.

Next, comes our most basic food crops.  Potatoes, onions, and garlic.  Potatoes would be our basic starch and wheat/bread replacement.  You can eat them baked, fried, boiled, steamed, mashed, roasted…and they taste far better than bread imho!  If you had to, you could live off just eggs and chicken meat, milk and it’s various products including meat from butchering the goats when necessary (I usually butcher the bucklings and raise up and sell the doelings at 4 months of age) , and potatoes and you would live pretty well and pretty healthily…especially if you add in extra veggies like beans (green and dry), squash, corn, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce and other dark leafy greens…which is most of what we grow in the summer, but we also garden year round.  Not to mention the deer that Nathan sometimes gets in fall and the maple syrup that I produce from tapping our maple trees in early springtime.   Yes, it’s good eatin’ when you grow your own! 😀

The Hobbit Subliminal Messages – An Unexpected Journey

Nathan’s latest video 😀 The Subliminals in this one are super super easy to see!
It’s funny, but apparently, it seems to be, from some of the comments that Nathan has gotten, that a lot of people who are LOTR Fans, myself included (but I was the one who suggested to him that he do this poster, because I like smashing cultural “icons”..), were saddened by their favorite movie being “tainted” by such practices… but it’s ubiquitous…you simply can’t get away from it, 24/7 these images are going into your mind from every form of media…controlling through fear through sex through death and demonic energies that leech into your subconscious unbeknownst to your conscious mind, subtlety but accurately deciding how you shall think. You cannot trust your “flesh” these days (not that you ever could really, but most especially not at this late late time in history) tampered with by people who wish to suck your life force dry and steal your soul, without The Holy Spirit and LIFE in and through The Spirit the common person stands NO CHANCE.
Strive to SEE what is there, NOT what your bias has filtered…

The Politics Of Guilt And Pity

The purpose of The Slave State is to make all men, women, and children proletarians.

((Proletariat: 1. the laboring class; especially the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live. 2. the lowest social or economic class of a community.))

This is accomplished by three steps.

First, The Slave State works to destroy Christianity and it’s rest, The Sabbath. This is its least confessed but most basic purpose.

Second, The Slave State works to destroy Work as a Holy Calling in order to proletarianize man. When work ceases to be a vocation and a calling, it becomes a burden. But because The State insists that this servile work is a duty and a matter of conscience, the unhappy and “rebellious” proletarian is made to feel guilty because he resents the enforced labor. As a result, Work is changed from a Holy Calling to a guilty burden. But this is not all.

Third, The Slave State also destroys property and inheritance in order to rivet men to guilty work, to slavery. No man can independently accumulate wealth or pass it on to his heirs. By forbidding private inheritance through severe taxation, The State makes itself the sole heir. By turning work into “national service” it reduces ALL men into proletarians and converts The State into the only capitalist.

The results of proletarianization are deadly.

First, there is a rise in sickness, because man is soul-sick and guilt ridden.

Second, The State seeks to resolve ALL problems by Technology. Whether it be problems of health, soil exhaustion, work, man’s inner conflicts, or anything else, a technological answer is forthcoming. The answer thus becomes MANIPULATION and not REGENERATION. Technology is always the last stage of a civilization. It is man saying that man’s control is the answer to ALL problems, the only result can be totalitarianism. Sin itself is reduced to a mental health problem, a question for technology to solve. Thus, one popular study of adultery concludes “Adultery is the symptom of a social disease. We must treat it as such.” If Adultery is a social disease, the answer then is social treatment and social control!

Third, by abolishing the concept of sin, the concept of responsibility is also eliminated. Environment then becomes the main cause of all social ills, and thus it becomes the duty of The State to provide man with a new environment to help manipulate him into “health”.

The Slave State, as it converts man into a proletarian; a man bound to work, tied to work; does seek also to give man leisure, but this “leisure” is geared to work. It is a reprieve from work in order to make man better able to work and more amenable to social control. The Slave State concerns itself greatly with “culture” as the oil in the social machine, to make it function with less friction. “Culture” in this statist sense is a kind of offering to the proletariat to demonstrate to them that now the worker has surpassed the nobility and capitalists in his social status.

The worker is now the patron of “culture”, and the ballet troupe exists to prove that he is the great heir and patron of “culture”. No more than a cannibal dressed in a top-hat, admiring himself in the newly acquired mirror, is the “proletarian culture” of The Slave State an expression of True Culture: it is a fraud on the cannibal and on the worker, to satisfy him with trimmings in order to make him agreeable to being robbed.

But, as leisure increases, man seeks to escape from the emptiness and pseudo-culture.  Man without God and without a True Sabbath Rest in Jesus Christ is man fearful of rest and self-confrontation.  Baudelaire wrote in his Journal in Time, “One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair.  For to reduce everything to a single truth, work is less boring than pleasure.”  The restless worker is unhappy with work and unhappy with pleasure.

In one store, where the workers fought for and gained shorter hours, the next problem was the presence of employees on the premises when not working.  Many workers returned to the store on their days off to visit with working employees, and it was finally necessary to bar non-working employees from the premises.

The worker wants rest, but cannot rest.  The worker wants True Work, a vocation, but is given slavery.

The proletarianization of man begins not with the formal socialization of society by state ownership of the means of production, but it begins with the secularization of society.  When the religious, the Christian, significance of work is destroyed or non-existent, man is reduced to a proletariat.  From a God-centered, transcendental frame of reference, his life and work are reduced to a man-centered and social frame of reference.  Socialization is then only a question of time.

In the biblical perspective, the Sabbath, although made for man, is the exclusive property of the Lord.  It is not man’s day, nor is its essential purpose man’s physical rest, but rather it is man’s rest in the Lord.  Man must trust entirely in God for his salvation and rejoice in God’s care and promises.  And the Sabbath involves thanksgiving for salvation, and the luxury of true rest in the assurance of victory.

The Sabbath also involves obedience to the word of God, and the most basic promise of obedience is healing.  According to Exodus 15:26 “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord they God, and wilt to do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee.”

In Deuteronomy 28, the curses on disobedience and the blessings on obedience are spelled out.  The Sabbath of The Old Testament and the “rest” given in The Promised Land, were only foreshadowings of the victory and rest to be given in Christ.  “Consequently there is a Sabbath Rest reserved for the people of God.” (Heb. 4:9)  This rest that Christ set forth in his resurrection is progressively manifesting in history…

Modern Man, however, cannot find Sabbath Rest because he is guilt ridden.  With more leisure than man has ever before enjoyed, he is increasingly restless and ulcerated in body and soul.  In the words of Isaiah, “the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.  There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.”  (Is. 57:19-20)

Man, having been reduced to a proletariat, is kept in the bondage of proletarianization by guilt.  The cornerstone of the slave state is guilt, and its hostility to biblical Christianity is intense.  The Slave State denies that man is guilty before God; sin is called an obsolete concept.  But man is steadily burdened with inescapable guilt in his relationship to The State.  Proletarianization is thus The State’s instrument of enslavement.

~The above is an excerpt from a book I am reading, “Politics of Guilt and Pity” – The Sabbath, Slavery, And The Proletariat Revolution – Chapter 7 – Pgs. 54, 55, 57 – by Rousas John Rushdoony

 

the new modern proletariat…enslaved by debt…debt to pay for his job, a job to pay for his debt…the cycle of slavery

Miscellany

• Building. . . an addition onto the chicken coop, for the past two days.  Just me and my 9 year old and 7 year old sons (Elijah and Solomon) using “re-purposed” wood salvaged from The Land.  Once completed, the chicken coop will be three times the size it is now.  We plan to greatly expand our flock come Spring.
• Birth. . . My “Herd Queen” Darlene gave birth on September 30th.  One little girl, we didn’t even know she was pregnant! 😆  Goats are very good at hiding their pregnancies, especially if it’s only one kid.  Being half Nubian, she’s also very long in the torso which makes it even easier for her to keep a pregnancy hidden.  The last time she kidded I didn’t even know for sure that she was pregnant till about 10 days beforehand.  So that makes 3 DOES in milk which equals out to about 1 1/2 – 2 gallons of milk a day!  I see lotsa homemade goat cheese in my future!
• Preparation. . . for winter.  We have a good system going.  Nathan chops down the tree and then chops the trunk into manageable sized logs, he did this last Fall and Spring, and the wood sat and seasoned on spot all year.  The kids and I then carry these logs to the house from the woods and put them into a pile by the chopping block.  Nathan then splits the logs into firewood and stacks it to further season it and for use in our woodstove throughout winter.  It’s a team effort, and our heating costs will be very LOW this winter! 😀
• Planted LOTS of Garlic a few days ago.
• Been back into the school swing of things as summer has ended here. Daily schooling Sunday-Friday, 6 days a week, that’s how we roll 😎 Just finished up a lesson on the planets and outer space, reading through The Hobbit together as we are so excited to see the new movie in December.  Charity, my 2 year old, is loving school the most and she’s not even being “officially” schooled at this point…but she knows more of her alphabet that her older brother Matthew (who is 4) but Matthew can count really high and she has no interest in numbers yet.  Taught the two oldest boys how to make a loaf of whole wheat bread, from grinding the flour themselves down through the kneading and even the shaping of the loaves.  Making and baking your own bread is a valuable life skill that every child should learn!
• And it’s always the same this time of year, I always end up hating my blog and desire to delete it, but I won’t.  I’ve had so many blogs before, and deleting them, that this time I have decided that I will not delete no matter what.  I could go a very long time without posting right now, but force myself to do this post, to do a post once a week at the least.  I just don’t care….and it gets to be this way every year at this time *shrugs shoulders*  So, if there is something you’d like to know about from me, now would be the best time to ask…at least it’ll give me an idea for a blog post! 😉