Not to be confused...

Here's a valuable lesson I learned just now:DO NOT confuse James Wesley Rawles' official SurvivalBlog with the less scrupulous commercial site with the suspiciously similar URL. The latter will try to sell you a very handy magnesium firestarter for $12.95. We already know you can get the same thing on amazon.com for $5.

I went looking for James Wesley Rawles' site again today because this past weekend, I was able to help my friend Dana while she moved into her new house. WELL...now that I said that, I don't know how much I helped...I'll say I visited her while she was moving in and ate a lot of her cookies.

The sun doesn't set in MiddleO'Nowhere, Michigan until about 9 p.m., so it must have been around 10 or 10:30, when the noise of the crickets surrounded us as we sat around the fire, that I made the comment, "Yeah, I'm going to die in the first phase. There's no way I could live out here in MiddleO'Nowhere." I was pretty scared just thanks to the darkness and the crickets.

Fear aside, I also thought that Dana's new crib would be a pretty sweet place to be in the apocalypse, so I thought I would compare her property to James Wesley Rawles' "Criteria for Choosing a Retreat Locale in the Continental United States." I will concentrate on the positive. If you'd like to see both sides, the negative and positive, I have hyperlinked it for you.

• There is a source of water in the back yard.
• Plenty of sunlight for gardening (and grapevines for making wine!)
• Low to low-moderate ranking on the natural hazards scale
• Not in the path of real estate developers
• Not near any nuclear power plants

Combine with these basics the fact that the surrounding area is relatively away from major highways and also fairly pro-gun, I do declare that Dana has made a very good choice of home vis-a-vis the potential end of the world. I don't think she will have any problems, but I do suggest that food storage be her next apocalypse priority. :)

I would post a photo, but I'll have to add it in the next two weeks, because my T-Mobile Sidekick (aka "Beezlebub") has decided to force me to practice living without my handheld electronic device.

I can still play Fruit Ninja, and at the end of the day, that's what really matters. But it won't read my SD card, and neither will this AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor that I'm working with, either. (I used big words for the sake of using big words, but really I have no idea whether the processor has anything to do with the card readers, and I'm guessing it probably doesn't).