More Signs of Spring

We're getting a snowstorm today. Owain has a snowday and Gwynneth just got a call that her evening class is cancelled. Spring in Vermont is very much a two-steps-forward-one-step-back proposition.

But never mind what the weather is doing outside, inside it is spring.

I have started tomatoes, broccoli, onion, some herbs, and some flowers. I'm going to plant some cabbage and kale when I get the chance.

My makeshift greenhouse is my south facing bedroom window. I have some very bright lights to add supplemental lighting and seed flats. It's a very warm window, so I haven't needed hot mats. The biggest dangers are the marauding kitties who like to snack on green shoots (Uh, you know you guys are carnivores, right?).

Starting seeds this way has been a hit or miss proposition for me for many years. It's much more cost effective than buying plants in the spring and for many plants it is impractical to direct seed them in a climate with this short a growing season.

I have always wanted a nice garden. We're getting there, but the problem has always been that so many other things demand attention. I've got a million projects around here in various stages of being finished. Largely because I learn as I go.

I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: I learned none of this growing up. Every skill I have that requires working with my hands, I learned as an adult. Plumbing, woodworking, gardening, animals--all of it. I learned using books, websites, neighbors and trial and error. Sometimes when we hire a professional, I sort of hang around watching what they do and asking questions.

I have this thing about liking to work by myself. The complete opposite to Bryan. I think I always fear that people will judge my work. Like spring in Vermont, my skills are sometimes a back and forth proposition. A lot of it I end up ripping out and doing over, but my mantra is always "It goes easier the second time."

For all of my homesteading stuff, I have to be willing to do it over. I can't get too invested in how much effort I put into something, because then it's just too heartbreaking when I inevitably need to redo things. I suppose there's a certain Zen to it. 

I am convinced that anyone can learn anything, given the time and the right books. I'm certainly a good example--the first thing I ever built was when I was in my thirties.

The snow will stop coming down soon and tomorrow is supposed to be warmer. This is what they call a "sugar snow" because it makes the trees produce more sap. Tomorrow is the first day of Spring by the calender and astronomically, but it'll be another few weeks until the ground is thawed enough to plant anything outside.

In the meantime I'm tending my little seedlings.

Sugaring

No matter what the calender say, spring starts in Vermont with two things: seeds and sugaring. The seeds are planted in flats, protected from drafts, put under lights and carefully nurtured. The sugaring requires a drill, some buckets and lots of time.

I love sugaring. There's something really pleasant and contemplative about watching water boil and turn into liquid heaven. The only reason to make pancakes to me, is that they are a maple syrup delivery device.

The sap buckets sprout on the trees long before the snowdrops, but the weather has turned. Even if we get a cold snap now, we are aware that it will only last a day or two. The snow has taken on the specific texture that skiers say they enjoy and I warn the kids not to make snowballs of to hit their father.

Winter is shrouded in silence or it roars with wind. Spring announces itself with song, even before the birds return. In the sugar bush the sap drips into the galvanized steel buckets creating a high pitched musical plink.  A dozen of these on a sunny day sounds like a couple of people riffing on high pitched steel drums. The base line is provided by the stream that is a chuckling  then a roaring as the ice breaks up.

We have snow on the ground up here in the mountains, but it's mostly gone on the valley floor.

My neighbors for whom sugaring is a commercial exercise are up and down the street with their tractor and our grey muzzled dogs play together, running up and down the trails.

Maple sugar is a wonderful thing. It is the only form of sugar that does not lend itself to the Plantation System. A sugar  bush can only be tapped for about 6 weeks out of the year. The rest of the year the maples just grow happily in their forest with only minimal help and protection from humans.

Sugar Maples are only found in North America. From Cornell University:

Distribution and Habitat: Sugar maple is one of 148 maple species found in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes about 90 native and introduced species in the United States. The range of sugar maple in North America extends from Nova Scotia and Quebec at its northern edge, west to Ontario, southeastern Manitoba, and western Minnesota, south to southern Missouri, and east to Tennessee and northern Georgia (Figure 2). Sugar maple is most common in New England and the Great Lakes states as well as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Yes, it is expensive, and likely to get more so. Due to the recent warm winters, the season has been growing shorter, especially for the valleys.

Sugar maples can be grown in other places, but they will not yield sap without the specific weather available in these specific parts of North America. Thomas Jefferson apparently tried to sugar in Virginia, to no avail. In order for tapping to happen, there must be warm sunny days and freezing nights.

Maple syrup can be boiled down into dry sugar and stored almost indefinitely  The chief component is sucrose (like table sugar), with very little fructose, which is being implicated as a culprit in obesity.

There are no GMO maple trees (yet) and since the trees are North American, there's no need to look for the free trade label.

Soon, the snow will be gone and we'll be into the planting part of the spring, until then, I'll be busy watching water boil.

Women and Collapse; Or, One Bad Day

It's always interesting to me that people talk about collapse as though it's in the far off future, and as if it will hit everyone, everywhere, at the same moment. That there will be a universal SHTF moment. 


If one defines "Societal Collapse" as:  The coupled breakdown of economic, cultural and social institutions. 


Detroit has been collapsing my whole life. New Orleans had a fast collapse after Katrina. California is well on its way to collapse


I think that "Personal Collapse" can be defined as: The coupled breakdown of economic, cultural and social institutions within people's lives. 


Many, many people are already living in a state of collapse. It doesn't matter if the rest of the world is going merrily on when you've been evicted, your kids are hungry, you have an infected tooth you can't take care of, and you're trying not to let anyone know the family's been sleeping in the minivan.


Years ago, I worked in a family homeless shelter in Southeastern Michigan. Most of the families there were headed by single women. Most of these single women had been married when their children were born. Most of these women had had what seemed like adequate resources to raise their children. Due to divorce, widowhood or job loss, those resources were slowly whittled away. By the time these women reached the homeless shelter, all of them were at the end of their resources.


Women and children live much closer to collapse than either men or childless women. Children limit the work you can do, the places you can live, the people you associate with.


The myth of the welfare mama who's sitting fat and happy is just that...A myth. Yes, you might get food stamps, Federal lunches and Medicaid, but you can't put gas in the car to get to work, even if you can find a job that works around your kid's school schedule. None of the doctors around you take Medicaid, the nearest grocery store is twenty miles away, and the lunches at school are the only thing you kids eat, some days


I had once had a woman, who was bringing donations to the shelter, ask me, "How do women end up here?"


My reply, "One bad day."


My mom and I had a bad day, once.  Oh, there was years of difficult days before that, but she had always worked through them as best she could. 


My parents were solid, upper middle class people, with a home in Suburbia. My brothers and I attended private school. We took trips to Florida every winter and trips to the UK almost every year.


The bad day was the day I told my mom that my dad had a girlfriend. My mom's carefully wrought denial came crashing down around her ears. She then found out that my dad had drained the various savings accounts. She filed for divorce the next day. In the space of a very few days, we went from upper middle class to poor. Just like that.


There were other days, probably, but that's the one I remember, the day my world collapsed.


In short order, we went from the sort of people who gave to charity, to being the sort of people who had to choose between eating and paying the light bill.  


We got through it, obviously, but my mother never enjoyed upper-middle-classdom again. I am left with a fear of empty cupboards and a clear understanding that, at any moment, the bottom could drop out of my world.


Recently, I have been bearing witness to the collapse of other people's lives. Mostly women, some with kids, some without. 


One friend has been left disabled and is now navigating the Byzantine world of Medicaid and State Assistance. That's a full time job, even without a traumatic brain injury. This is an incredibly talented writer and professional woman who, right on the heels of escaping an abusive marriage, sustained brain damage from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Where did she get CO poisoning? From the furnace of her home which was never inspected properly by the landlords. Her world has ended and she's trying to figure out the new normal. Of course, she hasn't been able to find a doctor who's competent to deal with her complicated medical history who also takes Medicaid.


Another friend just escaped from crazy ex with her kids. He left her high and dry ten years ago, is in arrears for an ungodly amount of child support, and now is making demands. Mostly he wanted the kids to live with him through 2012, because the world's ending. She's afraid of what he might do if the world doesn't end on schedule, in bright, fiery 'splosions. 


Another brilliant woman who had to learn to be resourceful to keep herself and her kids fed.   


Another woman recently confided to me that her world ended in the form of her husband leaving. She's been a stay at home mom their whole marriage because he had vowed to take care of her.


A woman I met lost her husband of ten years. Sudden cardiac arrest. He had no insurance and she'd just lost her job. They were scrambling for the money to have him cremated.


The list just goes on. Most of these women are hanging on to their housing, but by a thread in some cases. 


The best preparations are in your own head. Someone's world collapses every day.


I've been laughed at, often, over the years. I've been called a paranoid many times. However, I am not worried about the end of THE world, just my world.


I'm preparing for that One Bad Day.

Life with part-time electricity

What would it be like to live with eight hours of electrical power per day, in a first world country?
John Robb is thinking about it, especially in terms of national decline and collapse scenarios.

What would it mean for us, up on our little mountain?

So much of our life, even the way we homestead, is based on steady access to electricity.  Our water supply is a well, and its pump draws on household current.  Electrical light is crucial to doing work and being relatively sane during our long, dark winters.  And so many appliances require Edison's trickle: the clotheswasher, the refrigerator, and of course the modern world of digital communications: laptops, modems, X-box, etc.

One hopes that the eight hours of electricity are predictable and they coincide with the evening need for electricity. Say 3:00 PM until 11:00PM or 4:00 until Midnight. This way, the dark days of autumn and winter wouldn't become completely intolerable.

A brief peek into an unspecified future, as imagined by Ceredwyn:

So, winter: Electricity turns on in the afternoon, after the kids come back from school. Which is good, because it gets dark at 4:00. Husband has been running his computer (and the all important Internet connection) from battery power. The batteries were the best we could afford, deep cycle marine batteries that charge on a small solar panel. Failing that, we charge the Lithium batteries on our devices from the wall sockets at 4:00.

The gas stove usually works without electricity, but the oven does not, because it has an electric ignition. If we want to bake, now's the time.

It's also the time for showers and filling up our water containers. Fortunately for us, our septic is downslope from the house, thus we only have to pour greywater into the toilet to flush it. If the septic required an electric pump, we'd have quite a predicament.

We heat with wood, so we're pretty cozy. It's tough for the neighbors who have electric or gas heat. They both require electricity to run.  The fire dept has more alarms these days for people using makeshift heat sources.

The refrigerator gets plugged in, the melted snow that's been keeping it cold gets replaced. Of course, the food that needs to be frozen is in a locked freezer out back, packed with snow.

With the power being off 16 hours out of 24, I'm more inclined to can things than freeze them, and, of course, there's the stuff in the root cellar. Not telling you where we built that, it's well covered to discourage the casual thief.

In the evening, we indulge ourselves in those 20th Century pleasures, movies, music that we don't make ourselves or video games. The lights also make reading much easier. We power up whatever devices have rechargeable batteries.

Clothes are washed in the washer and hung to dry. Dishes for the day are done, no leaving anything for the next morning.

11:00 comes all too soon, and there's no real point to staying up once the power's off.

Summer's a little different because we don't rely so much on the electric lightbulb. There's also the fridge and freezers to consider. Basically, we use the freezer and fridge like one might use an ice box. When the electric comes on, we put the cold packs (We have quite a few large ones, we used to use for camping) in the freezer to freeze. Before bed, we put them back in the fridge.

Bedtime is when the electric shuts off. The electricity turns on at 3, the hottest part of the day, and shuts down at 10:00.

This is when living up north in a rural area pays off, our house doesn't need much in the way of air conditioning. We also moved our bedroom to the basement from the top floor. I'd like to install a sleeping porch if we ever get the money.

If one is lucky, one has some sort of solar panel or wind power set up. This can often supply electricity for the 16 hours of the day when the grid is off, but solar and wind are both prohibitively expensive to get started. One can also use gasoline generators, but again, very expensive, especially if the gas is expensive.

Expense is a problem in another way; the electricity we do get isn't  $0.11/KWh anymore. And it just keeps going up.

The End of The World, Again.

I keep saying that I'm not prepping for the end of the world, just the end of my world

Here in Vermont, many people's safe ordered worlds have ended.  Property damage is bad in many areas.  A friend in  Upstate New York tells the story of a co worker who now has nothing left but the scrubs in her car and the pajama's she was wearing when the Sheriff banged on her door, yelling "You have to evacuate now!  Not ten minutes from now!  NOW!"

I read a statistic that said that, after a major disaster, 40% of small businesses fail.  I see farms that just won't be able to make it past the crop failure this year,  business that will just have to shut their doors and be done with it.

I also see homeowners who, without flood insurance, will just say "screw it" and  never return to their home, maybe moving in with family or friends.  The saddest part is that some of these people TRIED to buy flood insurance but were told, "No.  Your house came through the 1927 flood.  No way it's going to flood now."

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but all I have to do is talk to my friends in Louisiana to feel that I am not.  An area with no road access is called a "wilderness".  Going by this, we've got more a bit more wilderness today than two weeks ago.

The political bullshitting has already started, with Congress creatures from both sides wondering where the money is coming from.  I got an idea...How about we start means testing Congress creatures?  Like we do with other government program?  If you are worth more than $1 million, how about you donate your Congressional salary to a fund for recovery, rather than taking it out of Medicaid funds? And if you're a pauper, living just on your Congressional salary? How about you donate 100K out of it.  I'm sure you can get by on 50% (roughly) more than what the median US income is (median income is 42K.  Congress creatures make about 175K).  That'll give us 5 to 7 million to get started with.

Better yet, let's go back to taxing the rich at 90%.  That's how we built all those freeways in the first place.

I'm just ranting because I'm frustrated.  In the end, it isn't even about how much money there is or is not.  This is the new normal. I keep hearing that phrase.  Usually with a shrug and a "What are you gonna do?" sort of gesture. Disasters will happen, because they always happen.  People will get on with their lives, doing what they have to do.   In three days time, we're on to the next news item.  If CNN's really lucky, some celebrity will do something egregiously embarrassing, and they can stop talking about disasters for a while.

When that palls, they'll move on to the end of someone else's world.

Feeding the soul

I, Ceredwyn, have spent a considerable amount of time and money this spring working on our flower garden.  I have doubled the size of our rock garden, planted a bunch of flowering plants and herbs.

I haven't done flower gardening in a major way before.  It's always seemed impractical and I am nothing if not practical.

One big practical reason for cultivating flowers is to give our friends the bees a hand and to attract other pollinators (I've seen a few hummingbirds).  Bees are dying and no one is entirely sure why, so they need all the help they can get.

More than that though, I am coming around to the notion that art, be it stories, drawings, music or flower gardens, becomes more important in austere times rather than less.

I had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, to go to a show where two gentlemen were doing an act straight out of the 1900's.  Their instruments were banjo, harmonica, jaw harp and their own hands and feet.  As well as being fine musicians they were historians and reenactors, giving us a wonderful lesson in musical history.  I learned how the banjo originated in West Africa and it was once made of cat gut and gourd.  They showed us a musical form they called "hambone" that uses nothing but the rhythms one can produce with slapping hands and stamping feet to accompany the sound of singing voices.

The songs they sang were traditional and their act vaudvillian, but you could see that they were performing the direct artistic ancestor of punk, rap, and hip hop.  Not the polished stuff the corporations keep trying to sell us, but the stuff that catches on in spite of the bosses and the banksters, the robber barons and the overseers.  The "What the hell is that noise?" songs that get the church lady's knickers in a twist.  The songs that slaves sang to remind themselves they were still human.  The songs that the strikers sang on the picket line, 'cause it was cold as hell and singing might possibly keep you warm.  The songs protesters sing because it gives them the courage to march into lines of riot police.

Song and dance require no equipment.  Instruments are nice, but can be improvised.  The visual arts are a bit more difficult, but people manage.  In any urban landscape, one can find graffiti artists.  Their chosen medium walls and cheap paints or inks.  Even a bit of charcoal on a concrete floor is can be lovely.

In some of the most distressed parts of the world, women still adorn themselves in fashionable clothes, even if it's under a chador or niqab.  Astonishingly, in Haiti, one category of business that still thrives is the hair stylist.  The people are very meticulous about their clothing and presentation.  A trip to the clinic requires that one be dressed as well as one can afford.  It is a mark of respect, both to the doctor, but also to oneself, using the art of fashion to raise oneself up.

As a teenager in the eighties, I was part of punk culture.  We shopped at Value Village cause we were broke and our ripped jeans were mostly natural.  I was never extreme, but I knew people that were.  The kids who wrote for six hours a day and published little 'zines, or painted, or played some instrument instead of doing something "constructive".  We never went out to events that cost money, because we never had it, so sometimes we went to listen to unknown bands play.  Some were good, some weren't.

I have noticed for a long time, that the more one spends, the less one creates.  When you can buy cool and pretty art that's a million times better than what you can produce yourself, why bother?  Art becomes a thing "talented" people produce.  It becomes something that only an "artist" can create

But always when the money's tight and people are living on the edges, art appears.  Angry art, desperate art, sad art, peaceful art, even joyful art; anything but polished "high" art.

So maybe I'm flower gardening for the Revolution or against the Man.  Anyway, it's nice to look out of my window and see the flowers bloom.

What Are We Prepping For--Thoughts on Japan

I've been following the news from Japan pretty closely this morning.  I've also seen some blog posts from online acquaintances, who've had their electricity turned back on.

Grim stuff.  Although the doomers are moderately better prepared with food and fuel, etc, no one is prepared for this kind of thing.  Not really

It got me thinking about my own disaster preparations.

Up until the last couple of years, many of my friends (who were not doomers themselves), have often looked at my "preps" (doomer nomenclature for the preparations one makes against disaster) with a mixture of amusement and indulgence.  Most of them probably figured that, as long as I didn't go off the deep end and become a card carrying survivalist, it was just that I had weird hobbies and I was a little paranoid.

My husband became a real prepper about ten years ago after a nasty ice storm we had when we were living in Shreveport, Louisiana.  We lost electricity for ten days, but we had water, food and heat because I was a little paranoid.  Bryan got it.

I'm not prepping for a "Mad Max" end of the world scenario.  I'm prepping for the more common End Of The World As We Know It (referred to in doomer circles as TEOTWAWKI) scenario.  You know, the one where your world ends, not neccessarily the world.

Now, in Japan, it is the end of their lives, as they've known them.  Like Katrina survivors, like Haitians after the earthquake, like Americans after 9/11, there will always be a Before and an After

The news reports are horrific enough, but the blog posts I'm reading from the people on the ground are so much harder.  BBC talks about people queuing up for food and fuel, and some of the blog posts talk about people listening to the radio to discover what stores might be open.

Interestingly, there is a tone of surprise from the BBC for how darn orderly it is.  They go on to say they're sure it would be different if it happened in Britain--as if British culture had become especially hooliganish.

But the reality is, in a disaster people become more helpful to each other.  Chaos only sets in after the social order has broken down.  And, indeed, the Japanese are sturdily maintaining their social order.

My thoughts and prayers to the Japanese people.

Back to your lives citizens...nothin' to see here

Oil's at 92.something a barrel. We can all breathe easy. Peak oil's a flawed theory. At least that's what many are saying, but here's a fun article from New Republic.

"But it's worth trying to clarify what peak oil would actually entail. Here's Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute: "Sometime around 2010 (give or take two or three years), growing decline rates in oil production from existing oilfields will overwhelm new production streams coming online. The price of oil will rise dramatically. However, when it does it will cripple the trucking industry, the airline industry, tourism, agriculture—essentially, the whole economy. A serious recession will ensue,"

Umm...sorry, isn't that what's happening, right now? No one's travelling for pleasure, food prices are through the roof and aren't we actually seeing the worst week on Wall Street in anyone's memory?

Caught by surprise

I'm listening to a radio show on our local NPR affiliate right now: "What are you doing in response to high gas prices?". People are talking about doing stuff that DH and I have done for years.

A round up of responses:

Fewer discretionary drives
Batching errands
Walking/biking longer distances
Moving closer to work
heating more with wood, less with oil
Public transit where available

Huh. Sounds like life around here. DH moved his office to our home last year, so we drive an average of 150-200 miles a week. And we live way the heck out in the country. We started making some desicions based on the possibility that Peak Oil was a real thing about six years ago. We figured at the very least, we'd save some money and have a nice retirement on that saving.

It seems like these many of these measures take time and forethought. It also seems like we just ran out of time.

Learning curve

We've been learning alot of new skills for the past couple years, my husband and I. I've learned how to build a shed, raise and slaughter chickens, raise goats, tap trees, milk a cow, make soap, can fruits and veggies, heat with wood.

We bring to the table willing hands and faith that if one can read one can learn anything.

We've had a lot of failures and I have always been glad that feeding ourselves did not rely on my weird hobbies.

I grew up in the suburbs. Gardening was something you did on the weekends for fun. Food was to be found in the grocery store. Any thing over 1/4 mile was too long of a walk and anything over two miles was too long even by bike.

Bryan and I were born at the beginning of the long, slow, downward spiral of the American economy over the last 40 years. Remember when someone with a high school diploma could earn a living wage for a family of four?

I don't.

I was born in 1969. American oil production peaked in 1971. Where once our economy depended on making things (electronics, clothing, shoes), our economy is now plagued by legalized pyramid schemes (dotcoms, Enron, flipping houses, the service industry). Plus, we've gone from the biggest creditor nation, to the biggest debtor nation in the world. I don't think there's any coincidence there.

Generation X: Cleaning up after a party we were too young to attend.

Bushistans

Remember the Hoovervilles from history class?

Check out their modern equivalent:



How about we call these Bushistans? Or perhaps Greenspanistans? Since he appears to have allowed the housing bubble to reach its manic pitch.

And please explain why this isn't all over the American media? Are they too busy trailing Brittany around, or is it Hillary? I forget.

While we're on the subject, here another grim prediction from the San Francisco Chronicle

Is Suburbia Turning Into Slumburbia?

...But mostly Leinberger is predicting the future rather than describing the present, arguing that the pendulum has swung too far toward isolated, car-dependent single-family-home neighborhoods to be sustainable. (In his description of the city, he's not including older inner suburbs like Berkeley or Palo Alto that have walkable urban neighborhoods and public transit; he's talking about the hillsides of homes detached from urbanized towns.) Now with high gas prices, long commutes, a bad job market and a new attraction to walkable urban living, it's just a matter of time before suburban fringes begin to absorb the people that can't make it in the city.

and she goes on to say...

In Europe, where the cities never died, the suburbs have long been the homes of last resort for the poor and the marginalized. Just last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced yet another plan to revive the suburban slums that erupted in riots in 2005 — the 16th such proposal in 31 years.

Florida and Leinberger say that retooling the suburbs is going to make urban renewal look like a walk in the park.

"Suburb development is really fragile," Leinberger explains. "It's going to be very complex to rebuild."

Post-oil life: a small Scots island

Reading this article about a small Scots island's electricity experiment, I wonder if this is one model for life in the Long Emergency? Not for big cities, but for underpopulated areas.

Listen to their new setup:

The island makes its electricity through a combination of solar panels, wind turbines, and a hydroelectric generator, all scattered strategically across the island and linked in a single grid. Storage batteries provide a backup. Two diesel generators stand ready to provide emergency power.

It's not quite American lifestyle standard, either in amount or in community enforcement:

Each household is allocated a ration of electricity not to exceed a draw of 5 kilowatts (kW) at any time (the equivalent of turning on 50 100-watt light bulbs all at once). Even at the full ration, that's only about one-half to two-thirds the amount used by a household in Britain, though islanders can supplement that with a diesel generator or heat from a wood stove. If the islanders use too much electricity and trip up the system, they will have to pay £20 ($40) to be switched on again. Businesses are allowed a draw of 10 kW. All these conditions were agreed to by the residents.

(thanks, LibraryBob)