Living Providently

List from one who has lived through Sandy's lessons Nothing we don't know, but are we ready?

I received this email from my Mom. She got it from a friend. I have no idea if it's really from Sandy or if it's apocryphal, but it has some good information.

I'm sending this on to EVERYONE. I'm thankful that I was sent this list so I'll be better prepared. Please read it, and take it to heart. They weren't expecting this to happen to them anymore than we expect it to happen to us.

Living through Sandy - (hurricane)
46 things you'll want to know
by Frantz Ostmann on Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 7:13 am

1. The excitement and coolness wears off around day 3
2. You are never really prepared to go weeks without power, heat, water etc. Never!
3. Yes it can happen to you.
4. Just because your generator runs like a top, does not mean its producing electricity.
5. If you do not have water stored up you are in trouble.
a. A couple of cases of bottled water is “NOT” water storage
6. Should have as much fuel as water
a. Propane
b. Gas
c. Kerosene
d. Firewood
e. Fire starter, (kindling, paper, etc)
7. Even the smallest little thing that you get from the store should be stocked up.. (spark plug for the generator, BBQ lighter, etc)
8. If you are not working, chances are nobody else is either.
9. I was surprised how quickly normal social behavior goes out the window. I am not talking about someone cutting in line at the grocery store.
a. 3 people were killed at gas stations within 50 miles of my home.
b. I did not say 3 fights broke out, 3 people were killed.
10. Cash is king (all the money in your savings means nothing)
11. Stored water can taste nasty.
12. You eat a lot more food when you are cold
13. You need more food than you think if your kids are out of school for 2 weeks
14. Kids do not like washing their face in cold water.
15. Your 1972 Honda civic gets to the grocery store as well as your 2012 Escalade… but the Honda allows money left over for heat, food, water, a generator, fire wood, a backup water pump, you get the idea..
16. The electrical grid is way more fragile than I thought.
17. Think of the things that are your comfort, your escape, a cup of hot chocolate, a glass of milk and a ding dong before bed, etc. Stock up on those too. You will need that comfort after day 3.
18. You quickly become the guy in the neighborhood who knows how to wire a generator to the electrical panel, directly wire the furnace to a small generator, or get the well pump up and running on inverter power or you are the guy whose Master’s degree in Accounting suddenly means nothing. (Love you Steve!)
19. A woman who can cook a fine meal by candle light over the BBQ or open fire is worth her weight in gold. And women, whose weight in gold, would not add up to much, usually die off first. Sorry skinny women.
20. It takes a lot of firewood to keep a fire going all day and into the evening for heat.
21. All the food storage in the world means nothing if your kids won’t eat it.
22. You might be prepared to take care of your children and their needs, but what about when the neighborhood children start to show up at your door?
23. Some people shut down in an emergency. There is nothing that you can do about that.
24. Your town, no matter how small is entirely dependent on outside sources of everything.
a. If supply trucks stop rolling in due to road damage, gas shortages or anything else you could be without for a long time.
25. In an emergency Men stock up on food, Women stock up on toilet paper.
26. I was surprised how many things run on electricity!
27. You can never have enough matches.
28. Although neighbors can be a great resource, they can also be a huge drain on your emergency storage. You need to know how you are going to handle that. It is really easy to be Bob the guy who shares on Day 3, not so easy on Day 11. This is just reality speaking.
29. Give a man a fish he eats for that day, teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again.. Now I get it.
30. All of the expensive clothes in the closet mean nothing if they don’t keep you warm.
31. Same goes for shoes… Love you Honey!!!!
32. You cannot believe the utility companies. They are run by politicians!! Or so it seems,
33. Anything that you depend on someone else for is not avail anymore.
34. Quote “A man with a chainsaw that knows how to use it is a thing of beauty” lol
35. Most folks don’t have any emergency storage. They run to Wal-Mart and get water and batteries and then fill their tubs with water. That is it. A lucky few will get a case of ramen and a box of pop tarts. That will be your neighbors supply. (Especially if you live outside of Utah)
36. Fathers, all the money you have ever made means nothing if you can’t keep your kids warm.
37. Mothers, everything you have ever done for your kids is forgotten if your kids are hungry.
38. You really do not want to be the “Unprepared Parents” The kids turn on you pretty quick.
39. Small solar charging gadgets will keep you in touch. Most work pretty well it seems.
40. Most things don’t take much power to operate.
a. Computers,
b. Phones
c. Radios
d. TV
e. lights
41. Some things take a ton of power to operate.
a. Fridge
b. Toaster
c. Freezer
d. Hot plate
e. Microwave
42. When it gets dark at 4:30 pm the nights are really long without power.
43. Getting out of the house is very important, even if it is cold outside. Make your home the semi warm place to come home to, and not the cold prison that you are stuck in.
44. Someone in your family must play or learn to play guitar.
45. Things that disappeared never to be seen again for a very long time.
a. Fuel, of all kinds
b. Matches, lighters of any kind etc.
c. Toilet paper
d. Paper plates, plastic forks and knives
e. Batteries, didn’t really see a need for them. (How about flashlights??? I guess)
f. Milk
g. Charcoal
h. Spark plugs (generator)
i. 2 stroke motor oil, (chainsaws)
j. Anything that could be used to wire a generator to the house.
k. Extension cords
l. Medicines (Tylenol, Advil, cold medicine etc)
46. There was a strange peace to knowing all I had to do each day was keep my family safe, warm, and fed, but my peace was someone else’s panic.

There were also many things that were not learned from hurricane Sandy, but reinforced. Those things were the importance of my family and their love and support, especially my lovely wife, that my Heavenly Father is really in charge, period, and finally that I am very thankful for the upbringing and experiences that have taught me and brought me to where I am .. Wherever that is…lol God Bless!!!

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Little Things

Today I wanted to take a few minutes and write about the little things that make me happy in living this provident lifestyle. This is what it looks like at my house today.

Now I will be honest, the snow is not what makes me happy. In fact, I am not a fan of cold and snow. Why I ended up here is beyond me. Oh yeah, I love the man that chooses to live here. Anyway, I was outside this morning doing chores in all this white stuff. While I was feeding the various birds, I realized that I was out of chicken feed in the grain shed. That meant I needed to get the feed out of the Jeep and to the grain shed. This is not a big deal on a normal day. I throw a 50 lb bag over my shoulder, and it isn't a problem to get it moved and in the bin. Living this lifestyle has made me a much stronger (physically) person. However, with all the snow and no really good paths through that snow, it is hard for me to carry those big bags of feed. We have a couple of wagons, so I thought about putting it in one of those to move it, but then I realized that pulling the wagon through the snow wouldn't be very easy either. Then I remembered the little tin sled that was leaning up against the tool shed. A few years ago my husband's dad lived in the little sea can house (I'll save that explanation for another day) on our property. He was in his early 90's, but he was still very independent and capable of doing so many things. His entire life has been lived as we are trying to live now. He is an amazing man (still going at almost 95), and he has taught me so many things. I miss him since he moved away. Anyway, because he was so independent, he had all kinds of things around to make his life easier. He had some chickens that he insisted on taking care of even in the winter. We had them living in our greenhouse, so it was a bit of a trek for him to get to them. He made this little sled so that he could transport water and feed to them every day.

I figured it was the perfect size to drop a grain bag onto. I dug it out of the snow, pulled it over to the Jeep and proceeded to load the first bag onto it. It truly was the right size. The weight of both bags was too much for it, but it pulled the individual bags really well, and it wasn't like I had to go miles. It was just a short trip across the yard. The second wonderful thing about my little adventure was that the sled with the weight of the grain on it, packed the snow down and turned my little trail through the snow into an actual path through the snow. How great was that? Within a couple of minutes, I had the grain bags moved, dumped into the bin and was getting ready to put the sled away when another great idea came to me. The sled would be a great way to transport wood from the wood shed to the deck so that I could then carry it into the house. We totally heat our house with a wood burning stove, so we go through a lot of wood. I normally carry about three or four armloads of wood from the shed to the deck, then from the deck to the wood box in the living room. Not a big deal, but I figured I could save a few minutes if I stacked wood onto the sled and moved those arm loads in one trip. I still had to unload it at the deck and then transported it an armload at a time to the house, but it saved me various trips from the wood shed to the deck. Now this amount of wood was moved in one trip.

When living this lifestyle, the smallest thing can be considered a blessing. I'm thankful for the wonderful father-in-law that I have, for the great things he taught me and for the awesome things he left behind for me to enjoy. Thank you T.D. Hatch for all the knowledge, kindness and love that you have shared with me. Who knows when I will run across another one of your wonderful inventions to help me through another overwhelming moment in my life.

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Intro to My Craziness!

Well, I guess it is about time I add my two cents worth to this fun blog! I keep thinking about lots of things I could write about, but then when I sit down to do it, I can't remember what I was going to write about. Such are the joys of getting older. Anyway, I thought a good starting point for me would be to talk a bit about what brought me to live this lifestyle that I do. When I was younger, I always said that some day I wanted to live on a farm, have lots of fun animals and do my best to raise food for my family and be somewhat self sufficient. It was one of those dreams that I never thought would come about. My life wasn't headed in that direction. I'm thankful that through several unexpected things, my life took a major change!

Eleven years ago I moved to the wilds of Canada. I am from Utah, lived there almost all of my life (spent a year or so in Arizona) and then met my second husband (I almost put current husband, but decided that sounded like I might replace him at some point) online. I was just recently divorced and felt like it was "safe" to get to know a man online that lived so far away because "I would NEVER move to Canada." That quote about never say never is so right. In less than a year, I had packed up my three kids, two cats and a dog and truly did move to the wilds of Canada. My husband had recently purchased some undeveloped land (166 acres with lots of trees), and that was to be where we lived. The first time I saw the land was when I came up to visit a few months before we got married. There wasn't even a road into the place. When he took me to see it, I didn't know whether to sit down and cry, throw a temper tantrum or run for the closest airport. I wasn't absolutely sure I was up for the adventure that it was going to be.

The next time I saw the place, it had a driveway into where the house would eventually go, some of the trees were gone from the yard part and there was a very small one-room cabin that my husband had built as temporary living quarters. The cabin had a wood stove for heat, a small propane stove for cooking, a partial wall and a bed on the other side of that wall. My husband and I got the bed, my three kids slept in the small camper parked next to the cabin and my stepdaughter slept in our jeep that first summer (she was headed off to college in the fall). We arrived in early June, and we had a summer full of interesting adventures. With no running water, or electricity, we learned to do things in a whole new way. We had an outhouse, heated water on the stove to wash dishes and went to town to take showers at the local laundromat! The kids made a game of it to see if they could get wet, soaped up and washed off on only one quarter. However, I looked forward to those showers and used as many quarters as I could.

We lived in our cabin for the remainder of the summer, a summer that had almost nonstop rain. With no grass growing, we got to really experience the mud in this part of the country. They call it Peace River gumbo, and I'm not sure that even truly describes it. My kids would walk over from the camper to the cabin and grow several inches in the process. The mud sticks like crazy, and they would literally have several inches of the gooey stuff stuck to their boots in just that short walk from one building to the other.

Even in the beginning of this adventure, animals were an important part. We immediately started preparing the land for our cows. Fencing 166 acres is a lot of work, and I am sad (but kind of relieved) to say that I didn't do much of the fencing back then. We also had chickens right off the bat. I hadn't raised chickens before, but they were animals, so I was up for the adventure. We built a chicken coop and started with a few hens. We also had two large guardian dogs, okay one was just a cute little puppy when we first came, but he grew to be a huge dog. Mufassa was a wonderful dog for my kids. He went everywhere with them. My boys were 10 and 12 and my daughter was 16 when we moved here, and having all this space was wonderful for them, though a bit nerve racking for their mom. I felt better once Mufassa was big enough to protect them when they were out and about! Duke was Mufassa's father, and he became my constant companion. They were such amazing dogs.

In the fall, we had a modular home brought in, and we sort of went back to life like we knew it before the move to Canada. We now had running water and electricity, so no more trips to Dawson Creek to take showers, no more need for the outhouse and TV and other electronic gadgets came back into our lives. Some of those things were nice to have back, but I missed all the family time we had spent together when we didn't have other things to distract us. We had read together, played games together and gotten to know each other better when we went without all those modern conveniences.

I'm grateful for what I learned that summer, and I am even more grateful for the things I have continued to learn over the last eleven years. We try very hard to become more and more self sufficient as the years go by. We provide all our own meat, have a large garden every summer (though our growing season isn't very long) and look for ways to lessen the foot print we leave behind on this earth. I try a lot of things, not always successfully, but isn't that part of the journey? We need failure to learn and grow, and each unsuccessful attempt at something leads me to improve on it or try something else. I'm excited to write about some of those things, to share experiences, stories and trials from living this wonderful lifestyle.

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Septic Systems: A Learning Curve

Labels: landscaping, septic

The home that John and I are looking to purchase has a septic system. I know very little about these systems so I thought I'd look up some more information. I found this diagram that shows a little about how it works. I looked this up for a couple of different reasons.

The first reason is I want to know the "don'ts" of a septic system. Looks like I am not supposed to use bleach or drain cleaners. Ugh. No bleach? Guess I'll be looking for some alternatives. Not only do I use it for laundry purposes, I also am a big fan of cleaning with bleach.

Also, I shouldn't use a garbage disposal to dispose of waste food. (Good thing we'll have chickens!)

And, I shouldn't dump cooking oils & grease down the drain.

Okay... good information. Now I know what not to do.

Looks like I should have my tank checked every year by a pro. We will have to schedule that when we move in. We will have to have it pumped out every few years and that will be approx. $200-$300.

The other reason I wanted to look up information this morning was to see whether or not we can plant a tree on or near the leach field. I found this site that has some good information. It kind of scares me to plan on/near it but I really, really want a big tree to look at out my front window.

This is the big window in my front room. It just cries out for a tree out there... What do you think? Maybe I'll just plant a wildflower field... It is really too bad, because we really wanted to plant a hackberry tree. I guess that will have to happen somewhere else on the property.

Looks like the best time to plant flowers on a leach field is fall so I should plan on getting that done as soon as we move in.

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Living Providently

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List from one who has lived through Sandy's lessons Nothing we don't know, but are we ready?

Little Things

Intro to My Craziness!

Septic Systems: A Learning Curve