Stubbornness Averted

Well, I was trying to delay posting until I managed to find the aforementioned Capitol Collection in a store near me. Luckily for my readers, something happened in the meantime, and I received a new survival kit in the mail, which I'll tell you about in this post.

Many months ago, my parents went to test drive a car to get a gift card. They actually wanted to test drive the car, but the dealership was busy, so they got the gift card and were sent along their merry way. The gift card was for an outfitter that happens to sell a Deluxe Survival Kit unlike any I have ever seen before. Now it is in my collection of survival kits, and all it cost was like an hour of my parents' time, and $3.50 in RT fuel cost according to mapquest.com.

I will tell you what it includes. It includes a signaling mirror. A map compass (I have other compasses, but this one has a base that you can set down on your map for more accurate orienteering), and a magnesium firestarter because a girl can't have too many of those. But that's not all! It also includes 12 fire sticks. Well, I already have the best fire-starters ever, which I made myself with Miss Gokey, but I'm very glad I looked up the contents of the kit, because I very seriously believed the fire sticks were some kind of high-energy protein bar-type snack. I was mistaken. I'm glad I didn't bite into one.

Further, the kit includes one poncho, two towels that are shrunk to the size of quarters (once unleashed, those towels are NEVER going back into the bag), and one tiny roll of duct tape, presumably enough to tape you up if a branch rips a 1/2" gash all the way up your forearm.

The best parts of the kit are two things that I don't have in my previous kits: glow sticks (! YAY! I let glow bracelets from the dot spot suffice for my homemade kits) and...

drum roll please...

a bug net. Which my dad immediately put on his head. I didn't get a photo of him, but here's a photo of ME wearing it.

It's cammo! Perhaps you'll see me wearing it in the woods of Michigan some summer soon. Just for the bug net, the packet was totally worth the absolutely $0 and 0 effort that I personally put into it. Thanks, mom and dad! 

In other news, I have FINALLY finished reading 1491. You can find my rather abrupt review on goodreads here. I think. Now, since it's October (my favorite month), I'm reading Libba Bray's The Diviners. 

Rants and Reviews

I spent my morning joyriding around to every store in a ten-mile radius looking for some Cover Girl promotional nail polish for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The movie will come out on November 22nd, and I'm very excited about it. After hitting 3 Walgreens stores in 2 different states and coming up empty-handed and bare fingernailed, I came home and googled the collection and saw this ad. Now I'm convinced that the collection has been released, that I saw it in the store and didn't know what I was looking for. It's called the Capitol Collection, and I don't care that Cover Girl is part of a big international corporate conglomerate. Now I know from the ad what to look for, so I'll hit the makeup trail again soon.

How do I know about Cover Girl's evil corporate status? My new previously-mentioned buycott app. I took advantage of my time in the stores to shop for some cruelty-free facial scrub for after my Neutrogena runs out. I absolutely love Neutrogena products, but according to buycott, Neutrogena contributes large amounts of money to Scott Walker. (Pay attention to the "transform education" priority.) I know this because I joined the "Boycott Scott Walker Contributors" campaign. I also joined one of the cruelty-free campaigns, one of the anti-GMO campaigns, and the "We Own You" campaign. In conclusion: I can't ever buy anything at any store ever again.

That's an impractical plan.

I will try to choose the lesser of the evils. I literally scanned EVERY brand of facial soap on the shelves. (Yes, I know Walgreens contributes to Scott Walker, too. Baby steps!)

Pictured below is the only cosmetic product that was cruelty-free and didn't give Scott Walker money.

Look at those prices! I have contacted my friend Chris to see if his wife Angie's company, YB Urban?, features facial cleanser. In the meantime, I found a web page that lists 6 recipes for how to wash your face with food. 

When you can't trust Walgreens, who can you trust? Pinterest. That's right. Inspired by Kristy Phipps's Pinterest Sunday photo, this was breakfast today:

Pumpkin french toast FTW! Frying apple slices covered in pancake batter wasn't half bad, either.
Ms. Whitaker will note that the taffy apples have appeared at the grocery store, as well.

Coming soon: the actual artastic challenge entry for September, and me expounding on my local hometown libraries.

A Few Media Footnotes

1. I am currently watching Supernatural, and the apocalypse has finally come into the show. I'm waiting with bated breath to find out what happens!

2. I am satisfied that my fellow graduate of Indiana University, Suzanne Collins, did NOT plagiarize The Hunger Games from the "original survival game" Japanese novel called Battle Royale. Granted, I am only about halfway through Battle Royale. The concept is similar, but there are points that make it different enough to not be plagiarized. I will update my loyal readers on this book as I make my way through it.

3. DETENTION OF THE DEAD, starring one of my favorite young actors, Jacob Zachar, is premiering this weekend at the Newport Beach film festival. Sadly I will be unable to attend. But I look forward to the film coming to Las Vegas where I can thoroughly enjoy it.

4. Finally, it's been a long time since we've checked in with the Doomsday Dashboard. Trending tonight:  nuclear war is winning at 27%, followed closely by pandemic at 26% and economic collapse at 21.

I Can't Even Say It!

It's the most perfect line ever. I used it on my Nevada Reading Week door. I used it in my March 23 Friday letter. It's on my souvenir plastic cup. Therefore I feel it would be weirdly redundant to put it in here, so I'll type it really small.

May the odds be ever in your favor. 


By the time this post goes live, I hope that most people who read this page who are going to see The Hunger Games have already gone and seen it. (Don't worry, I won't be a plot-ruiner.) I also hope that all who are going to see the movie have already read the book.

I read the book a while ago and did not re-read it before going to the movie. I'm glad I didn't re-read it. I must say the movie is fabulously beautiful and as faithful to the book as it can be without merging into the second book.

My reading of The Hunger Games trilogy was definitely the first event on my personal post-apocalypse preparation timeline. The Hunger Games was written by a graduate of my own alma mater, Indiana University, and according to some, she plagiarized the idea from a Japanese novel written in the '90s called Battle Royale.

That novel is on its way now.

Perhaps my being so enthusiastic about the film means that instead of being a person who prepares for the apocalypse, I am a person who falls for the first clever marketing ploy. Be that as it may, I would not trade my $10 ticket or my $3 souvenir cup.

There's something about arriving at the movie theater at 11 p.m., loading up on nachos and coke, and then bursting into tears within the first 15 minutes (yeah, it's that good) that just makes me feel really American, in a good way.

I'm guessing that thanks to this movie premiere, nuclear war will be trending on the Doomsday Dashboard.
Let's check it...
Nope. Weirdly, "megaquake" has hit an unbelievable 49% as today's scenario of choice. Personally, I'm not finding anything in the news feeds or my twitter feed regarding recent earthquakes, so...
an anomaly. Please, if you know about an earthquake, tip me off. Thanks.

And now there is nothing I can say about it that hasn't already been said, so I will leave you with some advice from Haymitch:

Here's some advice: stay alive.

Enjoy the movie.

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.