[Insert SuperAwesome Title for Last-Ever Blog Post Here]

I did not mail out the Christmas cards in time for the Apocalypse. Dag! Nabbit! EPIC. FAIL.
In other news...

If he really looked deep into his own heart, perhaps even James Wesley Rawles would agree that you can prepare and prepare, for whatever tragedy, and you can still not be quite ready when it happens. You have kind of a vague understanding in your mind that things are going downhill, and then they do. When they do, no matter how slowly they've been sliding, the real end always feels like a crash.

I am sad that this will be the last-ever post on "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse," although now that I've racked up 8 loyal readers (as opposed to the only-four loyal readers I had on "Another Celebrator of Seven-Day Weekend), I think I'll leave the URL intact for ease of access. I planned and planned my last post, but then as I reviewed the concept in my head today, it just didn't seem appropriate. It wasn't inappropriate, but it wasn't as exactly right as I thought it would be. So! In addition to "there goes the world," there goes my brilliant last-ever post, as well.

As has so often happened since last January when I cannibalized my personal blog to make way for this one, something else came to take the place of my brilliant last post, and that thing was the school shooting in Connecticut.

That shooting jacked EVERYTHING up. It jacked up collaboration by forcing an all-staff meeting to discuss rumors in the district that people with guns will be storming campuses all over Las Vegas tomorrow. It jacked up 2nd hour when some kid leaped out of his seat screaming, "OHMYGOD I SEE A SHOOTER!" and I replied, "Tell the dean all about it, kid," and wrote him up. It jacked up my plan to say to my students tomorrow, "In the unlikely event that the world ends tonight, I have enjoyed teaching you," because several of my students intentionally got suspended so as not to come to school tomorrow, and others' parents are keeping them home. It jacked everything up so much that one of my students actually asked this afternoon, "What is it again that we're not supposed to talk about? Is it the end of the world, or is it shooting?"

That's how jacked up everything is.

At least two students in each of my five classes asked me if I am coming to school tomorrow. I replied, "Of course I am! It's my job. I also predict that I will have the possibility of receiving gifts!" I was able to take the opportunity of the confusion to say something along these lines to each of my classes: "We have structures and procedures in place for emergencies, and we promise to keep each of you as safe as we possibly can. HOWEVER! You know that anything can happen at any time. [Insert funny disaster scenario, such as getting conked on the head by a falling projector, here.] But we don't live in fear because fear does us no good. What does us good is coming together here and learning and talking together." Fourth hour listened and smiled and nodded. Fifth hour hooted and hollered and generally fell off the geography train. I didn't mention any of any of this to 6th hour, because I was too jazzed about driving across town on a last-minute Christmas errand.

Know what else is jacked up? On 1/2/12, I took YES! Magazine's "How Resilient Are You?" quiz. Since earning my initial "off to a good start..." I have made arrowheads from pointy rocks. Even though they were only four feet high, I have scaled cliffs. I have maimed paper zombies with actual, real-live guns. I've rubbed elbows with the scary-looking lady at the honey stand. I have stockpiled food storage, harvested lint, learned how to use magnesium to its best advantage and come on people! I've knitted scarves! Tonight, when I took the "How Resilient Are You?" quiz, I got...

(drum roll please)...

off to a good start.

Readers, thank you for taking this journey with me, especially if you literally took it with me like Miss Gokey or Jodi or Krista or Dana or Amanda did. (Because I would run out of room if I mentioned everyone, I'm only listing my top-five most frequent mentions. Don't be offended.) As we get "off to a good start" on the next one, best wishes, and I leave you with Jack Kerouac:

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

******* Tuesday

In certain circles, there is a phenomenon known as "Suicide Tuesday." Suicide Tuesday has to do with Saturday night. You see, the joy of Saturday night can keep you going through Sunday and Monday...but when Tuesday hits, you realize that you are no longer "walking on slippery bowling balls" in one of the planet's most spectacular natural cathedrals. So you conveniently "forget" to write a blog post, hoping instead that your loyal readers will understand your irrational attachment to rocks and green things.

I still have things to say that I'm not saying, as our time potentially runs out, but the weather on this particular Suicide Tuesday helps me come closer than I have been able to in the recent past.

The time comes when the fodder is delivered from the Universe, and Selene and Yishay and Mr. Boldt post these photos on their facebook walls. (They ripped these photos off from local news sites.)

For sure the second photo is UNLV (pronounced "un-love").
I am grateful that I didn't have it anywhere near that bad. I don't understand this. I distinctly remember two resplendent days of constant rain that didn't leave the roads in this kind of shape. My theory is that the previous rain was inadequately absorbed into the desert pavement and the drainage systems suffered an unfortunate overload.

Bless James Wesley Rawles for putting an index in the back of his nonfiction book. Curse James Wesley Rawles for not including an entry on "floods" or "flooding" in said index. Curse the author of The Zombie Combat Manual for not including an index OR any info on flooding. Curse the Doomsday Dashboard (and the twitter feed that inspires it) for not even reflecting the remote possibility of flood.

So, tonight's glimpse into the earthly afterworld comes to us from author Erik Larson. He is describing the last days of Isaac Monroe Cline.

"He retired in 1935," Larson reports, "at the bureau's request, and opened a small art shop on Peter Street in New Orleans. He never remarried. He mourned the passing of slower days before cars and aircraft, but he filled his time to the maximum. He filled it with burnt umber and cerulean blue, linseed oil and turpentine, and the cold caress of ancient bronze."

Before I leave you with Isaac's own words, allow me to post a third image that came out of UNLV today.
Sure, it *may* be photoshopped. But still.

Now, reported speech from Isaac Cline:

"'Time lost can never be recovered,' he said, 'and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.'"

The Best Reference Book Ever!

I am back in Las Vegas and I have just finished my 94th ounce of water for the day. It's a sunny 105 (but it's a dry heat!), or it WAS. It seems to be trying to rain now, but it's still like an oven outside. I'm inside under the ceiling fan with all the curtains shut tight, practicing. James Wesley Rawles says that in the event of an epic disaster, it's best not to let people know that you are alive, lest they try to take whatever you're using to keep yourself alive for their own selves.

Once again, he's right.

I managed to make it to page 95 of David Werner's Where There is No Doctor on the airplane yesterday, before conking out just like 6-year-old Jeremiah, who was sitting next to me and also conked out.

Werner's book is very entertaining thanks to advice like the following:

"Do not waste your money at 'magic centers' that claim to cure witchcraft. And do not seek revenge against a witch, because it will not solve anything. If you are seriously ill, go for medical help. (5)"

But I also recommend it because of what I have seen so far, which includes: fever charts. An attractive two-page spread describes the different fever patterns of various sicknesses.

Page 31 has an illustrated tutorial on how to read a thermometer. This reminded me that I do not even own a thermometer for my apocalypse kit. It's a good thing that I'm going to venture out into the anemic rain for provisions here in a bit.

There is a very useful page on the signs of dangerous illnesses, and page 43 has some good advice about sending for medical help: Never send a small child or a fool.

The book was originally written for villagers in the mountains of Mexico, and it is intended for use by community health educators in places like those. Sad, really, a lot of the information that is emphasized. To those of us in the developed world, it seems like common sense, or addresses problems that we just don't seem to have.

We do have our problems here in the developed world, though, and in just the beginning of the book, I have already read several times about how health problems are caused by greed and uneven resource distribution, and some health problems that people seek medicine for are actually better treated at home. That's information we can all use.

I'll have to finish it before I can say for certain, but for the moment I say that if you have $15 laying around, this one might just be worth having.

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).

From the Food Network to the Quick Care

Are you familiar with Alton Brown?

I bring him up because several years ago while watching the Food Network, I became agitated and asked my friend Krista why he had to stop so often and bore us with technical details about food. She informed me that he is actually a food scientist. I'm not sure what that means, but Alton Brown does have a very good blog that has a current entry about foodscaping that is worth the read while we prepare for a possible apocalypse.  

I bring him up because he (and Sara Oberle) would be appalled at what I am about to say: I invented a raw s'more. You take a piece of graham cracker, a raw marshmallow and a square of chocolate, and you stuff them in your mouth at once, not bothering to heat them in any way whatsoever. 

I bring up my raw s'more to introduce you, in case you did not already know, to my most treasured personality trait, impatience. 

Of course, the very minute the school year ended (a few minutes or hours beforehand, in fact), I fell ill, the victim of a phlegmtastic event. Following the advice of my friend Jodi, I started a Mucinex regimen. Following the advice of my friend Miss Gokey, I quadrupled my water intake. These actions made me feel slightly better. 

Being sick reminded me that I meant to order, but never did, a book recommended by James Wesley Rawles, Where There is no Doctor by David Werner. Lacking this proper manual, I went to the next-best resource, pinterest, where I believe it was Shannon Koistinen who had pinned a link to Mountain Rose Herbs. Clearly, according to the website, you have to sleep at night on top of a large pile of money in order to be healthy and natural. 

Which brings us back to impatience (in this case, also frugality) and raw s'mores. The fourth recipe down the page on the Mountain Rose Herbs website talks about a throat spray made from essential oils. Yeah, I went ahead and threw a sliced lemon and a handful of mint leaves into a pitcher of water and have been drinking lemon-mint water all day. And I feel slightly better.

Here in Las Vegas, there is a doctor, and there is also really good health insurance that I'm fortunate enough to have for the time being and should definitely be taking advantage of. There is something to be said, however, for finding the online recipes, and for beginning to build up an Apocalypse medicine cabinet. Maybe it will contain essential oils.  

Be well, my loyal readers! Hasta la proxima. 

Na'he's Annotated List

For this one, you'll need some time to dedicate to the contemplation of things that people need in order to survive. On April 26, I put out a Call for Submissions for things that we will need whether OR NOT everything goes awry in December. The most apocalypse-prepared individual I know (and I mean that in the good "prepared" way, and not the "James Wesley Rawles kinda crazy" way), Na'he Martin, sent me The Tiffany List. I have included it below, with editorial comments, and little check marks next to the things that I personally have.

ü      Many extra pairs of shoes

(maybe not enough to last until the end of time, but enough to get me to a shoe store I can loot)

ü      Lots of thread with needles

ü      Spare jacket and sweaters

(I believe I have hoodies enough for the whole neighborhood to wear for at least a decade)

Waterproofing oil materials

ü      Duct tape

Rope

Wire (including copper wire)

Synthetic twine for making nets

A saw or two

ü      A hiking backpack

ü      An axe

Tarps

Extra gasoline

(I will have to barter for this. It's too volatile for me to have lying around in the desert.)

Or maybe an old Mercedes converted for biofuel

(Why Mercedes?)

Ideally a pop-up Vanogan converted to bio

(Much cuter)

A bicycle plus oil and fix-it book

Panniers

ü      Pocket Knives (multi-tools?)

Flint rock

Magnesium

Magnifying glass

(I have little fire starters - do these count?)

ü      Water purifier

(I have a limited supply)

Canteen

(Nalgene bottles OK?)

ü      Protein powder

for a few years until the garden is established (I have 47 servings, or enough for 1.5 months)

Soap or materials to make soap 

Wash cloths

Towels

(it's not that I don't keep clean with soap/towels/etc., but I don't have an Apocalypse supply to speak of)

A weapon and knowledge about how to use it

(I have a few things that COULD be used as weapons, that I know how to use...)

Encyclopedia

40 Volume set of the OED volumes of “How Things Work” ???

ü      A book on chemistry (I got this weirdly, but I do have it.)

Book on house building

“The Art of the Stonemason” by Cramb (I want this!)

ü      Trowel

ü      Seeds (definitely not enough seeds to last me from now on or anything)

Hoe, shovel, weed puller, hand clippers, book on N. American plants, season planting guide

Spices

Grain seeds including wheat, flax, hemp, hops, barley, malt, marijuana (good for bartering)

Book on making beer (trading)

Book of building stone ovens

Yeast, baking powder/soda

Lots of black pepper seeds

ü      Salt

ü      Sugar

ü      Vitamin C – no scurvy! (Once again, not ENOUGH of any of these things.)

ü      Deck of cards

Checker/chess board

Flat sheets

ü      Tool box (hammer, screwdriver, ratchet set, wrench, nails, screws, glue, etc)

Stone mastic

Cement

Sand

Lime

Sharpening stone (I have one for my flintknapping tools, but it's too tiny, doesn't count.)

Tape measure

ü      Scissors (In fact, I have 30 pairs of scissors, not that they would cut metal or anything...)

A plane

Chisels

Gouges

Hand drill w/bits

ü      Metal files

Machine oil

Lubricant

Powdered milk paints

Vise

Clamps

Kite

ü      Advil

ü      Medical kit

Gray’s anatomy

Grave’s alcohol, and a book on distilling

Enough tampons to last until menopause

A dog (but then you have to feed it)

Or trained falcon

Portable wind-up phonograph, with records

Figure out how to make electricity by bicycle like the NYC 99% people

Fishing pole/line/hooks/lures

ü      Compass

ü      Paper/pens/ink/pencils

ü      A mass amount of large Ziplock bags

ü      Tin foil

Eye glasses

Collapsible water barrels

Oil lanterns/candles

Book on candlemaking

Chickens, with wire to fence them

Guinea pigs (are these for eating?)

Goats (I would love a goat!) 

Shoe laces

Figure out a new calendar system b/c notches on wall will get boring

Celestial map for whole year (does star chart count? If so: check!)

Favorite books

(maybe a copy of Robinson Crusoe for irony but not Lord of the Flies) (heheh)

ü      Raincoat

Gortex

Topo maps

“The Artist’s Handbook” by Ralph Mayor, a must for understanding how raw materials combine (want!)

LED lights in case you have electricity

ü      Hand-crank flashlight (Yosemite flashlight, plus one on the way, solar-powered!)

ü      Radio (in case someone is running the waves)

Book of Latin (for future and past identification)

Medical books and first aid

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

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.

Lite Reading

As you know, I am busy reading Independence Days and How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It. The first is about food storage and preservation, and the second is about which guns to buy to stock your arsenal and how we should all invest in Pakistani medical kits, plenty of extra birth control, heirloom seeds and gold. SO I'll keep reading these things and reporting on them if there's anything of interest to a general readership.

In the meantime, in response to numerous recent requests on facebook about what to read, I will offer a list for myself and others. Surprisingly, I am a slow reader in my old age. It should not be surprising that most of the information I find useful in preparing for a possible catastrophe comes from history. I was thrilled with Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm. From this read, we can learn not to squabble pretending we know more than someone who could actually help us. We can also learn not to put off projects that we know need to be done "someday," and not to ignore warnings of imminent doom. I recommend it. Like the other of Larson's books that I have read, Devil in the White City, it starts out slow but pays off if you stick with it. The last line makes the whole read worth it.

Lately, I haven't finished anything else of note since the nice post-apocalypse utopia in After the Fall, which I read during Nevada Day weekend. Really, the only post-apocalypse aspect of After the Fall is its story of wanting to get back to your family, and how people who know how to do things can work together to accomplish good. Not for consumption by people who don't want to read about a lesbian main character.

Before that, it was summertime and I was reading Divergent (shout out to HydroJen's Book Envy blog!), The Urban Homestead and a couple of books about the Salem witch trials. I suppose it was those books that got me interested in thinking about building a skill set for a different economy. Which you may have noticed I'm not building. I'm just thinking about it.

Of course you're already familiar with the now-classic The Hunger Games, which teaches us how to prioritize in a pinch.

Other than that, books upcoming on my reading list are more by James Wesley Rawles: Patriots, and of course Alas, Babylon (recommended by Miss Gokey, whose name nearly escaped this post...). If I think of anything else useful, I will update. Until then, may as well practice reading like in the old days, from pages and not from a screen. But don't do that for too long, or I'll lose my loyal readers! Hahaha.

Barn's Burnt Down...

This title/first line of a famous haiku by Masahide, a late 17th-century samurai, was introduced to me by my traveling companion and perpetual star of my Single Girl's Guide to the Impending Apocalypse Blog, Miss Gokey. The full text of the haiku is:

"Barn's burnt down
now
I can see the moon."

It is particularly fitting that I use the poem in this post because my friend Oren (buy it!) participated in Indianaplolis' Encyclopedia reading last night after publishing a haiku on facebook in the early afternoon.

In my perpetually optimistic and lighthearted childlike naivete, I began this blog about the potential impending apocalypse. Well, kids, it's all fun and games until you start reading James Wesley Rawles, creator of SurvivalBlog. The first 25 pages of the first of his books that I'm planning to read convince me that the barn is indeed going to burn down. We are going to see the moon. We may as well know what we're looking at.

In that spirit, Miss Gokey and I made a triumphant return to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area to attend a little stargazing seminar and participate in the Globe at Night Campaign. Globe at Night is collecting data once a month in January, February, March and April to raise awareness of light pollution. You look at Orion, then submit your data via the web app. The website has family activity packs and detailed instructions. I encourage people to do this. Personally, I'm totally following Globe at Night on Twitter and I plan to do my own personal entry tomorrow night.

In fact, I found this video on Twitter, entitled, "Does Las Vegas Care About Their Light Pollution?" I would argue that we do. But this blog is not a forum for my ranting about how I'm tired of people not realizing that there are actual people with actual social consciences living here. So, back on task. The evening was fabulous. We:

- ate sour gummies
- took an alternate route to Lake Mead
- got (only slightly) lost twice even though we know that we're supposed to do research and recon before we head into the wilderness
- saw two jackrabbits
- saw a coyote (my first!)
- learned how to read the star chart (kinda)
- got free January star maps
- learned about open-source stargazing software at Stellarium
- learned how to use our fingers to figure out our latitude (at least in the Northern Hemisphere)
and finally...

...the piece de resistance (drum roll):

we viewed the Orion Nebula through a telescope.
Yeah, it's under his skirt. It's okay. These things happen.

So, when James Wesley Rawles convinces me that no matter how much I scramble, I can never, ever be prepared for "the end of the world as we know it," I can revert back to the words of the heroic samurai. When the barn burns down around us, we will be able to pay more attention to the stars.

Have fun submitting your data to the project! Let me know how it goes.