Hanging laundry on the line! Beats energy-gulping dryers, chemical anti-cling sheets, and sorting socks on the bed (boring!). For the laundry: 1) Sunshine helps keep to disinfect clothes and fresh air helps blow lingering odors away. 2) the weight of hanging reduces wrinkles significantly 3) clothes and sheets feel crisper and cleaner on our skin 4) shirts stay fresher longer and 5) that smell! For me: 1) I can watch the clouds  2) listen to the birds  3) throw the ball for my dog 4) breathe fresh air 5) move and stretch my arms and shoulders 6) sort socks and plan the garden 7) listen to kids laughing and playing and 8) bury my nose in that fresh-smelling cloth! What’s not to like? Well, towels are scratchy when coming off the line – unless a stiff breeze has been flapping them around! Think I’ll turn off the screen and go do a load now.

My favorite chore is hanging out laundry on the line. Inside, laundry chores are mind-numbing. Outside, the time is filled with sunshine, breezes, birds, bees, butterflies, and throwing the ball for the dog between garments.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. Hatchet by Gary Paulson.

Yup! I’m planting natives of the Great Basin precisely because the weather there gets so savagely cold, and so blistering hot, and so dry most all the time. You’ve got to be tough to make it in the future. Great Basin plants have a good track record. These plants are setting their roots now, and so hopefully will be well established as the weather gets more unstable and as Denver’s water gets scarcer.  I’m also planting species that are edible, useful, or both. Yucca, sage brush, Indian rice grass, sand cherries and the like. 

Two spots in Canada are making headlines this week. The Kelowna, British Columbia metropolitan area is home to over 200,000 people and wildfire burns on its outskirts. Over 50 structures have already burned. In Yellowknife, North West Territories, the entire city of 20,000 people is still under a wildfire evacuation order. From my vantage point, south of Denver, I watched the Marshall Fire develop in Boulder County, Colorado a couple of years ago. I’m about 20 miles away, as the crow flies, and at first I thought it must be an industrial fire, with all the black smoke. Over the course of an hour or so, the smoke billowed bigger, higher, and very black. A residential fire was burning, but it looked like petroleum smoke. And of course it was. Our houses are made of plastic. Roofs, paint, siding, window frames, floor coverings, furniture, clothes in the closets, and PVC pipes in the walls – all made of plastic. Plastic that burns hot and fast. There is nothing to say that on a windy day, wildfire won’t spread through urban areas. Wildfires aren’t just in the forest. No matter where you live, it makes sense to get ready. It sucks to run out of the house with nothing but the baby and the diaper bag. Scan important documents onto a flash drive and stash them with friends and family a decent distance from your home. Have water, a go bag , phone numbers, cash, and gas in the car. When it’s windy, pay attention, listen to the radio, watch the sky. It’s not just wildfire, these are good precautions for all kinds of situations. References: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wildfires-shuswap-kelowna-august-21-1.6942356 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nwt-yellowknife-fire-update-august-20-2023-1.6941967 https://www.nifc.gov/nicc-files/sitreprt.pdf https://apnews.com/article/canada-wildfires-british-columbia-northwest-territories-2450568b1db8152ad8f39b8197df321b

Can I complain, too? I had two, and possibly three Covid infections in 2021. One was pretty nasty. New symptoms after the last infection: Loss of appetite (I lost 55 pounds.) I was too weak to walk across the street for months; I have an autoimmune disorder that is causing my hair to fall out; I had several severe bouts of vertigo, and I still have lingering dizziness; I had acute kidney failure; and probably the most debilitating of all, my cognitive functioning cratered. I still have memory loss, aphasia, trouble sequencing things, and slow processing speed. ( I used to be a quick thinker. Now I can work 6 or 8 hours a week.) Still, all these maladies have other, more common, causes. My doctor listens well, believes me, and is thorough and thoughtful. I feel like she is an alien that sucked me out of my car to do all kinds of high-tech testing. We have eliminated lots of scary possibilities. And the search goes on. My hope is that as we build immunity as a population, the incidence of long covid will actually decrease.

It’s an uncomfortable time to be in the insurance business.

I had an electric toothbrush for over 10 years. When it finally died, I got a regular toothbrush and my gums are better now! For me, the trick is to get an extra-soft toothbrush. Because the bristles are so soft, it is more like polishing my teeth than brushing them, and polishing is all that is needed to remove the bacteria. Also, because the bristles are so soft, they don’t hurt my gums when I brush right up along the gum line. So I’m more likely to spend time there. I think that may be why my teeth are doing better with a regular toothbrush.

Hey, Bart! Welcome aboard! I’m always curious how a person’s background and experience informs the way they get ready for tough situations. Care to share the kinds of things you see as important to do now?

You have done an important piece of prepping by understanding your executive-functioning deficits. No judgement here, just admiration.  We all need to be both aware of our weaknesses and to focus on our strengths. For example, a paramedic might have a storage room full of emergency medical supplies where a cook has canned food. Perhaps it’s best to prepare in areas that are familiar or easy for you. Play to your strengths and then ask for help with your shortcomings. Self awareness is a huge part of being prepared.

That’s a good idea!

When that happened to us, and it was time to pay the bill, my husband said, “It’s the most expensive thing we’ve done to our house, and they wouldn’t even let us pick a color!”

Being the granola couple that we were, my husband and I refused to use baby wipes when we were at home. We kept a stack of small washcloths at our changing table and a small, stainless steel tub handy. When it was time to change the babies, we put water – only water – in the tub, got a couple of washcloths wet, and THEN took off the diaper. The washcloths were very effective at cleaning baby bottoms, even when things got, er… stinky. (Of course, if there were a big mess, we’d take the babies straight to the tub and undress them there.) We had a container for dirty cloth diapers where we put used washcloths. When it was full, we poured it all out into the washing machine. A hot wash, extra rinse, and bleach rinse cleaned all the yuck off. Hanging them on the line to soak up our high plains ultraviolet-rich sunlight helped bleach them and disinfected them further. My husband was a health inspector and, as long as we were careful not to cross-contaminate anything, the system had his approval. As for the babies, I think each one may have had diaper rash once. When I was a baby (OK, I’m that old) cloth diapers were the only option. Plastic diapers and baby wipes weren’t a thing. I remember my grandmother rinsing my diapers out in the toilet bowl before sending them to the laundry. Sometimes you just have to put on your no-nonsense farm-wife face and do what needs to be done.

In my neck of the woods, snow is predicted for tomorrow and for later in the week as well. The ground is still cold, and my garden is tan and gray and brown. (But in my mind, it’s green and full of edibles.) Thing is, I haven’t planted a seed yet this spring, but already plenty of green shoots are elbowing their way through the remnants and braving the cold. Hooray for perennials! So far: oregano, parsley, sage, and green onions are off to a good start!

This looks great! I can’t wait to see it live. And, phew! That’s a lot of brain damage figuring it all out! But I bet it will be worth it!

The best skills are developed by actually spending time in the wilderness. That said, baby steps are just fine. Let’s say you live in a high rise in downtown Big City. First, just go outside and observe. How does the air feel? What do the clouds look like? Where does water flow and settle when it rains? How do people deal with changing weather conditions? After that, go for picnics in the park in all kinds of weather. What tips from Thrive and other survival books are on target for your area, and what are completely useless? Next step is a camping trip to a national forest or park. The conditions are a bit more primitive, and spending 24 or 48 hours outside can teach you a lot. Again, notice the sounds, smells, looks, and feel of the outdoors. Be aware of the air, the clouds, the ground, the plants, and the shape of the land. It’s all about getting a visceral sense for how things normally are, so your intuition can kick in when something is off. You’ll also learn basic skills for living outside. Were you awake all night because you were cold? How are you going to fix that tonight? Books are incredibly helpful, and I use them all the time. But you’ve got to get out and actually do what they say to know what to do if you need to make it in the wilderness.

Well, that’s a heck of a conundrum! How does a person prepare for that? Seems like folks might think about moving. Easy to say, hard to do, I know, but yikes!

It’s a matter of priorities, perspective, and reading the tea leaves. I lived in a neighborhood with an HOA focused on aesthetics and keeping up home values. It was beautiful. But as I thought about events that would most likely visit my part of the world, that lovely neighborhood seemed artificial, unsustainable, and vulnerable. The homeowner rules were written in the before times. Where I live, not just drought but a permanently dry climate looms. There just won’t be water to keep up appearances like we used to. In addition, I’m not so optimistic about the stability of our economy. I’d like to have backup when the price of food increases. So I moved. My new neighborhood is messy. Weeds mostly. Some front yards completely covered with them. Lots of trees and shrubs desperately need haircuts. Of course my project is taking a lot longer than I anticipated. It’s an organic process. The land tells me, step by step, what I need to do next. In the meantime, it isn’t pretty, but I won’t get hassled while I build my sustainable little suburban farm.