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.