Tying the Knot

First of all, it's good to see Pastor Dana of Kaleidoscope Faith back in business! She's been gone so long I almost forgot how to spell "kaleidoscope."

In other news, I started thinking about tying knots when I put a knot-tying toy on my amazon.com wishlist sometime last summer. I received this for Christmas from my parents:

First of all, let me just say that in the current political climate, when women are not being allowed to testify on the House floor about women's health issues, and Rick Santorum calls unwanted pregnancies, "a gift from God," far be it from me to advocate a sexist toy.

Therefore, please forgive me for a moment while I let my sarcastic show: BECAUSE GIRLS DON'T NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TIE KNOTS!!! *huff*

As my foray into knitting proves, apparently in order to learn a skill, my particular style requires that I:
1) read about it      2) see someone else do it in real life and      3) watch a ton of youtube videos about it.

Therefore, I followed the instructions in the All-American Sexist Knot-Tying Toy and then went to a knot-tying class at REI, where I experienced loads of social anxiety due to the absence of Miss Gokey. Soon, however, I was enjoying practicing the knots the instructor showed us, and then forgetting how to tie them IMMEDIATELY after we finished and moved on.

I supposedly "learned" a square knot (which I think I can do like a champ, but Amanda says this guy is doing it the right way, and this way is nothing like the way the REI instructor did it), a fisherman's knot (I can do this, but only with the help of the youtube video), a bowline knot (whaaaaat?), a clove hitch (this will require more practice), a taut line knot (I did this successfully in class, but I can't seem to make heads or tails out of the video), a figure 8 knot (huzzah! and [in the case of the video] British!) and finally a water knot which I'm not even going to hyperlink because it seemed so confusing and useless to me.

So...that's how you can get for free what I also got for free. Thanks to the sexist knot toy, for a little bit of someone else's money I also have a practice set of ropes and a tiny hitch.

Since I know that by this point you're saying, "surely these knots aren't the only reason I'm reading this post," when really they are, I'll go ahead and tell you what disasters are trending today on the Doomsday Dashboard. It seems nuclear war has overtaken pandemic as most popular, ringing in at 27%.

A Little Help From My Friends

A few weeks back, Ms. Tye sent Miss Gokey a text message informing me about a series called Doomsday Preppers that she thought I would be interested in watching. Here's something you either know, because you live with and/or in close proximity (within 30 miles) of me, or you never would have guessed because my posts are of the couch-potato variety:

***I don't have TV.***

I have Netflix and the internet, and that is all that I will ever need for the remainder of my life. Gosh, I hope both of these things survive the destruction of the Grid. (Hahaha.) The Doomsday Preppers website is a goldmine of fascinating stories about people who are succeeding far more handily than I am at preparing for  various disaster scenarios. You can find out which disasters are trending on the website, as well.  At the time of writing, pandemic is the favorite, although personally I hold with the 15%. You can watch video clips from various episodes, etc. What a wonderful feast for our eyeballs! Many thanks to Tye and Gokey.

In other (but similar) news, I was happy yesterday when Jodi announced that Anderson Cooper was doing a show on how to survive the end of the world.

Seeing as ***I don't have TV,*** I had to do some digging in the webospheres to find any information about the show, but my mad googling skills eventually landed me here. Oddly enough, he interviews cast members for...Doomsday Preppers! It's a small world after all.

As you can see, Anderson starts out in a mobile earthquake shack. Sadly, you can only buy a mobile earthquake shack if you are a government agency or part of some other special organization. However, it seems to me like you can hire people to fasten all your stuff down so that it can survive intact in an 8.0.

To sum up the remainder of what I was able to gather from the website, you should just go here, to the American Red Cross website, which will give you information that you already know from your real (if you're Miss Gokey) or vicarious REI classes: Prepare an emergency kit. Have food and medications on hand so that you can get by for a while (Red Cross suggests two weeks, others including James Wesley Rawles prefer much longer) without outside help. Know what disasters are likely to occur where you live.
Make and practice a disaster plan, and my personal favorite: take a class!

I resolve to count my blessings. I thought, "How splendid would it be to get my 8th grade Explorations class trained at CPR?" My own CPR certification was *FREE* from the School of Which We Shall Not Speak. The school nurse just threw a dummy down onto the floor and the next thing you know, I had a little card. (I want to challenge my current school nurse to do the same.) Once a quarter, I was able to leave my co-taught class to practice my CPR skills on a dummy in a drill! Yeah, the class costs $90 IRL. Boo!
But there are plenty of PDFs to laminate and other free resources through the Red Cross website.

As I leave you to enjoy the best night of the week as I watch Ken Burns and knit, I recommend that you take a minute to watch Anderson don his chemical and biological weapon suit, a less potato-chip-baggy version of which was featured in Phase 7, which I mentioned earlier this week.

Here's the link: http://backstage.andersoncooper.com/post/18094282206/chemical-biological-warfare-training-suit

Oooh! I almost forgot! There's also a GIVEAWAY! Good luck!

And many thanks to my friends (including Na'he for the flintknapping...coming soooon!) for the tips and recommendations! Keep 'em coming. >:+D

All and Sundry

More for my fellow couch potatoes/global thinkers, with a shout-out for my cancer activists and campers, and the moment everyone's been waiting for: to see if I've thrown my knitting needles out the window. Haha.

First of all, in case you have not already clicked the link on facebook, National Geographic Education has an interesting post on their My Wonderful World blog about mental maps. Knowing that maps can deliver political messages can help us navigate (#1 on our Ten Essentials, remember) and can inform us about how the rest of the world thinks.

As you know, Americans are the ones freaking out about the end of the calendar this year. Maya themselves are not all that concerned about it. Other cultures have cast their lots, however, and gleaned their profits from the post-apocalypse marketplace. 

Netflix recommended the BBC series Survivors to me, and I enjoyed watching it. As fond as we Yankees are of our beloved conspiracies, this show goes above and beyond with the "it-was-an-inside-job" hypothesis. That's part of its charm. With endearing characters and a short first two seasons, I would definitely recommend it if you have to spend time laid up on your couch with a flu bug of your own. 

In fact, the flu bug seems to be the foreign market's favorite scenario for triggering the end of the world. Amanda was out of town for the weekend, and you know what that means: it's horror movie time! My horror movie choices this year, however, are affected by my desire to soak up as much hysteria as I possibly can. It is in that spirit that I chose an Argentine film called Phase 7 to keep me occupied on Friday evening. Coco and Pipi (who is pregnant) have been locked into their quarantined apartment with their neighbors. 

I appreciate this film because it's funny. More funny than scary. But interesting. One of the neighbors is himself a conspiracy theorist. There are bullets and cuss words and there is blood. There are also badly-translated subtitles and surprising plot twists. Not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. Due to the subtitles, however, it is not a good idea to continue to try to knit while watching Phase 7.

Knitting is more of a Happy Thank You More Please activity.

On Saturday, I suffered an unfortunate total meltdown which ended with my tent being thrown in the trash. Last May, my tent was part of the shelter plan for my (turned around) high school Key Club's Relay for Life event. In the chaos of taking down the shelters, two rain flies got switched so that this weekend, when Miss Gokey and I made a (somewhat) valiant attempt to set it up at Lake Mead NRA, the rain fly in my tent bag was 1/3 the size of the tent. In my haste to disassemble everything and abort the camping mission, I ripped the (admittedly probably partially dry-rotted) tent in at least three places. I proceeded to act like an infant for at least 15 miles after that.

I swore off watching horror movies for the remainder of the weekend. If you don't like indie-film-style EXTREME close-ups during pretentious dialogue, the painfully heartwarming Happy Thank You More Please will not be for you. I award it a Netflix three-star for "I liked it."

Here is my Happy Thank You More Please progress on my practice somethingorother:

It's not pretty, but whatever it ends up being is going to keep me warm, whilst people who have no experience with knitting needles are going to have to either freeze, or find a store that carries cozy things to loot. Just sayin'. On that optimistic note, I bid you adieu until Thursday, when hopefully a more focused post will appear. 

The Skills to Pay the Bills

Here's my theory about buying things: if you want it for a really, really long time and the day comes when you walk past it in the store and pick it up, you will not suffer buyer's remorse. Buyer's remorse is for impulse purchases, like an extra four boxes of Girl Scout cookies. It is in this spirit that I do not regret last Sunday's purchase.

You see, I've been spending a lot of time reading books and magazines and watching tv, when the actual purpose of this blog was to document my building a skill set for the apocalypse. I'm looking for a way to produce trade items and/or things to keep myself alive when the grid goes down for good. 

When I was a tweenager, I taught myself to juggle three tennis balls by reading a book. I was thinking of that, and my longtime desire to have one, when I picked up the Learn to Knit Kit at JoAnn whilst I was waiting for David's Bridal to open so that I could get some swatches as I plan my bridesmaid outfit for Ace and Jodi's wedding. True, if David's Bridal had been open when I arrived at 10:30 instead of keeping its doors locked till noon, I would not own the Learn to Knit Kit. But things being as they are, I was unwilling to spend the $4.16 + punitive damages of driving home and coming back later. 

ANYWAY...The question my loyal readers should be asking themselves now is, "SingleGirl, are you training for the apocalypse or training for retirement, with your aspiring-to-knit ways???" Now anyone who has seen the results of my Super Saturday attempts knows that I am the opposite of crafty. But anyone who knew me back on my 30th birthday, when I kayaked in the Colorado River, knows that I am also self-aware. So I also purchased a book called Learn to Knit in Just One Day. I chose Monday. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the title of the book be changed to "Learn to Knit in Just One Year," unless it's a very, very long day!

Good thing I bought that book. The Learn to Knit Kit speaks in knitting language and does not provide translation. It's a very entertaining kit. You know how little kids color with GIANT crayons and write with GIANT pencils to develop their motor skills? Well, the kit includes GIANT knitting needles and GIANT yarn. They are pictured here with Amanda's regular-sized needles because that's right, folks...knitting is NOT just a retirement hobby! In fact, it's all the rage with the my-age DIY/etsy set. I am in fact behind the hipster curve in my demographic.

While watching the Medici miniseries on Netflix, I was able to successfully "cast on" 24 stitches, destroy them, and do it again. Twice. As for knitting and purling, well...

...it's three days later, and I haven't gotten there yet. But I'll try again now. And I will post photos of my sure-to-be hilarious results in an upcoming post on some other day. I anticipate that any income I might earn from knitting in the futuristic dystopia will not be enough to pay for the yarn for more knitting. So, for now I will plan on supplementing my knitting earnings by making deals with people who have fruit: if I can keep three pieces of your fruit in the air juggling them for ten minutes, I get to keep and eat them.

Where there's a will, there's a way!
Wish me luck.

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?

This title, made famous by several characters on the Simpsons through the years, indicates that this post is dedicated to those readers of mine who are parents.

I'm not a parent myself, but as a teacher I have long been a reader and fan of juvenile fiction, as you know because I frequently link to HydroJen's Book Envy blog. The books that Jen reviews are for teenagers, as is the one that I'll talk about later. But first, in honor of my friend Beth's facebook posting asking for reading ideas that are appropriate for a younger audience...I would like to introduce you to Lauren Tarshis. This author writes a book series called, "I Survived..." [insert famous historical event like the Shark Attacks of 1916, the Sinking of the Titanic 1912, and the San Francisco Earthquake 1906, where I inserted the elipses.]

Conveniently, I have bracketed the three books that I personally read. My grown-up self is able to get through an entire Lauren Tarshis historical adventure novel in about half an hour. So far, in these three books, the hero characters have all been boys. (Hmm. That may decrease the interest factor for my friend Beth.) In fact, it rather struck me that in the Earthquake book, there were no women at all in the story.

In each of the books, the hero finds himself in the middle of a major historical event that ended some lives, but the hero comes out okay. What I enjoy about the books is the detail they include, and the fact that the hero holds on when he is close to losing hope, thanks to memories of loved ones and the encouragement offered by family.

The lexile score for the Lauren Tarshis books is about 610, marketed to ages 7-11. The lexile score for Empty by Suzanne Weyn is 790. The website suggests it for readers ages 12 to 100!

The concept behind Empty, which I mentioned in my The Walls Came Tumbling Down post, is that the world oil supply has been depleted. Teenage protagonists, both male and female, deal with a world at the outset of disaster. I would summarize the main point of this book as, "We've known forever that we would run out of this non-renewable resource. So why didn't anybody do anything about it?" I think that's a valid question posed at an appropriate time (the book was published just this month). I also LOVE the ending, but I refuse to be a plot-ruiner. Please consider my hyperlink to the book's amazon.com page a strong endorsement of the idea that this book should find its way to your shelf.

For the record, I and Mrs. Lovejoy are not the only ones asking our famous question. The social media informs me that National Geographic Education has been pondering it, as well. So, put the "When was the last time you got lost?" article in your #1 Essential: Navigation file.

Duct Tape Holds the World Together

Following is a list of all the full moons in 2012:
January: 8
February: 7
March: 8
April: 6
May: 5
June: 4
July: 3
August: 1, 31
September: 29
October: 29
November: 28
December: 28

It's a shame we only have eleven more full moons to enjoy this year, or ten if you believe the Maya mystics. I got this handy list last night while attending a workshop on Night Hiking with the intrepid Miss Gokey. We learned again about the "Ten Essentials," outlined in my Battling the Elements post from a while ago. I'm sure you noticed duct tape in that post, listed under "repair supplies" along with trash bags.

The official word, of course, is that you need a patch kit. The instructor for the workshop stated that duct tape will suffice to tide you over until you get home safely and can properly repair your gear or... if we follow the advice of James Wesley Rawles, get this: duct tape can actually be used to hold major wounds closed until you can get to qualified medical help IF it is clean. Maybe you already knew that. But I didn't.

On another blog, I posted 1.5 summers ago about a little girl in Highland, IN who taught me how to make duct tape flowers. For this post, I wanted to link to her etsy shop, but I can't find it with a zip code search. If I ever see the little girl again, I will correct my error.

In the meantime, here's a link to duct tape activities that you can use to waste your duct tape stash until such time as you absolutely need it for other things. I'll warn you, though, that if you're thinking about selling your crafts online: etsy is rather saturated.

For my part, unless I get super motivated, I will save my own duct tape for trade and barter.

Popular Mechanics

Although the cover of the February 2012 issue says Game Over: 12 Ways the World Could End in 2012, the title of the actual article is, "That's All, Folks." The article begins with discounting Maya prophecies as mysticism and encouraging readers to examine the "hard science" of things that might severely alter, if not end, civilization. The twelve things include but are (obviously) not limited to:

• Pandemic flu: This is possible because it happened before, in 1918, and killed about 65 million people. The global war that immediately preceded it only killed 38 million, according to PBS. This is also what's currently happening in the Netflix dystopia I'm currently watching: Survivors. 
• A massive supervolcano (hey! There's one of those in creepy Yellowstone, about 800 miles from here!) It could explode and turn the Earth into a -50F ice ball. Permanently.
• Oceans become acidic, killing the reefs and leaving the coasts vulnerable to superhurricanes. 

Then there's the big finale (I'll use the words of Matthew Broderick): global thermonuclear warfare. 

So, now that we're all informed consumers of "hard science," here's a list of things in the issue that are arguably more useful than the cover story, and it is my opinion that Popular Mechanics did that on purpose.

1) Once again, NASA is sending a rover to Mars, and this issue contains technical information about it. 

2) The "World's Smartest Lamppost" is manufactured by Michigan-based Illuminating Concepts and can do amazing things in addition to lighting the streets. 

***3) "Home Sweet Fortress" tells us how to protect our homes from invaders, especially by planting thorny bushes under windows, hanging bells on the doors, being sure roommates know where the safe room with the gun and flashlight is.

4) Miss Gokey affirms that knowing how to build a $100 robot is NOT useful for us, but some people may be into that, so...

5) There are tips about how much money homeowners can save by doing things like driveway sealing and stump-grinding themselves. 

6) A nice little article includes information about craft distilling for gin and whiskey. 

***7) How to Build an Igloo. DID YOU KNOW that the snow blocks only touch at the corners? Amazing.

And finally, for the historical record: the national average price for electricity is currently $0.12/kilowatt hour. 

I am glad I picked this issue up, and I will keep one eye peeled for future issues with interesting covers, as well. 

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Based on my having watched The Colony, Netflix recommended that I might like Jericho. In the interest of, "I saw it on TV, so it must be true (a line from Garfield the cat)," I went ahead and watched the series. (I suppose that I should update Garfield's line to, "My TV told me to watch this, so I did.") I have just now finished it and thought I would review it here. The basic premise is that a bunch of major cities have been bombed off the planet. The residents of one small town try to deal with the chaos.

The good: This show oozes upright morals. We accept our neighbors even though it gets us into trouble sometimes, we come together even though it hurts, we get in fights but still love one another in the end. We also always, always defend each other against outsiders like government people, no matter what. Another thing I liked about it is that apparently, after a major national catastrophe, there will be plenty of gunfire. It's definitely an action show with an engaging story line. There is no lack of weapons, ammo or explosive stuff in the world after the world ends.

What useful tips can we learn? Nothing that we haven't already read about in James Wesley Rawles or Time Magazine. Have a farm, guns, and medical supplies. So...I hope we all have all that stuff.

The bad: Jericho is way melodramatic. WAY melodramatic. And I'm pretty melodramatic myself. About halfway through season one, they almost lost me to the melodrama. But I'm glad they didn't.

The ugly: Some of the main characters occasionally have facial tics that increase the melodrama factor, so if weird twitches freak you out, this show is not for you.

Watch it if: you are in the mood to be preached at about right vs. wrong, or you have a hankering for feeling superior to people you believe to be morally wrong.

Do not watch if: you hate syrup and squirm when others twitch.

I gave it 3 stars for a mild, "I liked it," on Netflix. Netflix now recommends the British version of the same show. It's only 12 episodes, so sadly, I will soon dedicate another post to TV. Ugh.

On the book front, I am mostly finished with a kids' book called Empty which I started earlier today.
The premise is that the world has mostly run out of oil. An intertwined group of teenagers try to deal with the chaos.

I'm off to curl up in my flannel pajamas and finish that one right now.

Good night, loyal readers. Get some rest: it's hard trying to deal with all the chaos. :)

The Disappointing Radius of Honey

I've kept the world waiting for this blog post, but it's worth it for the very useful devastating news that will come later.

Although it's been my goal to stock up on food just in case the grid goes down tonight, I'll do a good job of making a bulk purchase and then...eating it. I've been wasting less food, and I'll cite my carrot-raisin salad and tonight's dinner of a nearly-rotten squashed banana with cashew butter and mesquite honey as evidence. I'm still trying to create a balanced pantry. 

My quest has taken me on a $3.29 (according to RoadTripAmerica) trip to the Las Vegas Farmer's Market at Garden Park.  The market takes place at a park so bougie that you're sorely tempted to steal the TP they so boldly leave lying around. The market consisted of a small number of vendors, maybe seven or eight, hocking anemic-looking produce that I didn't buy. Instead, I came home from the farmer's market with a 1/2 pound of raw natural pistachios and some sun-dried tomato and asiago artisan bread that lasted me for a week and inspired me to rotate my soups. There are a couple of other options in town that I'll look into in the near future and report on. 

This past weekend, I took a trip to Joshua Tree National Park with you-know-who (Miss Gokey). If memory serves, and I'll trust Gokey to correct me if I'm wrong, we got caught by the (merciful) end of the longest Burlington-Northern-Santa-Fe train I have ever seen in my natural life, and I come from the Crossroads of America! And then, we sped past a honey stand and got to talking about how it was a shame that it looked closed and how we would stop there if we were taking the same route home, which at that point we were not. But then, as it turned out...we did!

So, on Sunday, I screeched my car into the honey stand. The woman hocking her honey looked positively scraggly, but I thought to myself, "Well, I've already stopped, so..." We got out and tasted the mesquite honey, the wild honey, and some bee pollen. Miss Gokey had been talking about how local honey is supposed to help with allergies. We asked the honey lady, and she was enthusiastic in her support of the idea, which the New York Times unfortunately says is false. Discovery Health, however, supports the idea that local honey can help ease allergy symptoms. Miss Gokey and I then broached the topic of what constitutes "local." 

This post is dedicated to the answer to that very question, and the answer is (according to the same article from Discovery Health)...

...within a few miles of where the allergy sufferer lives. 

For a glorious minute there, I was considering buying local honey wherever I went, and then using it as a bartering tool to allergy sufferers after the apocalypse. Helas, the best laid plans...

At any rate, here are two photos of the honey stand. 

Needless to say, I carried some honey and some natural raw pistachios (gotta love California) over the state line and into the Vega.