I recentyly got an Email from the Adm. that I hadn't been heard from for a while, and could I make a post to update what had been happening with me. That's easy.
My last time in here was about April, so I decided that they had a good point, and I needed to drop in and do a post in the general chat board. Unfortunatly I don't have sufficient privilages to do so, so I got back on with life, and tried to figure where best to post. Figure this forum is about the most appropriate, because of what I've been up to.
I do quite a bit of lawn cutting, and I scrap metal for recycling. I've picked up a couple of new customers for my lawn cutting, and I do a lot of it during the week after my regular, steady job. If I could find a couple more, I'd gladly do them, even though my time is stretched close to the limit I could effectively do it all. Given my present circumstances, I'd gladly accept a few more for each cutting season(April thru October) just to have the extra Federal Reserve Notes (FRN's).
Of course I also do the scrap metal thing for extra FRN's to trade for goods and services that I sometimes need for living my life. I have recently been doing quite well with the scrap, and it is mostly due to the fact that this is the time of year that most folks do their spring and summer cleaning around their homes and properties. It's amazing what people will get rid of. I've not only got a lot of good loads of scrap metal, but have also gotten some great items that work, and would have otherwise gone to waste in some scrap yard or landfill somewhere. I'll take these items and sell them, and the ones that need a little bit of TLC, soon find their way to being sold as well. A good case in point is a few major appliainces that I have had given to me, as well as a few extra lawn mowers. As a matter of fact, I've made a flyer that lets people know that I haul off old appliances from microwave ovens to 7' chest freezers. And I do it for free. I've got lots of calls from people that saw my flyer, or knew someone that had it. I'm hoping that a local store chain that is re-doing some of their commercial meat cases, will give me a call back with orders to come pick up what isn't worth fixing ( got the ball rolling on this one thanks to a friend who's wife works for the owner). Ive got dozens and dozens of these flyers out there, and I'm adding dozens more each week when I stop and talk to someone who happens to be setting out some trash and junk with some visible scrap metal mixed in the pile when I roll through their neighborhood the day before their trash pick-up.
I've also put out a garden at the in-law's just before my father in-law passed away towards the end of April. I will miss his advice and knowledge, but I still have my mother-in law and my own father to draw from. The garden is doing fair, and with what I'm composting, and what I hope to add with some manure and other additives next year, it should start doing a lot better. He had two plots that he'd worked in previous years, but they had gone fallow for the last two years because of his declining health, and bringing them back from the return to regular yard turf was a bit of a challange this past spring. As I ammend the soil, things should get better and easier to work. With all the extra rain we have had, I'm thankful to God that we didn't have to do any watering with the hoses.
With all the extra FRN's that I've been taking in, I've been replacing the food we used up from our Armageddon Pantry (term started by a friend of the wife [always gets a big smile from me when I hear the term] ) from using it to get through our personal SHTF event two years back. For those that don't know (and I'm guessing it's quite a few of you), a little over two years ago now (7-8-11), I was terminated from my job of almost nine years. Due to some bad luck, I was not able to take advantage of my unemployment benifits, so I scrambled and hustled to make some extra FRN's doing odd jobs and lawn cutting during the summer. It wasn't nearly enough, but the wife still had her job, and we did own our house, so a mortgage was not part of the equation. What made the biggest difference for us, was the fact that I saw the need to prep years ago before it became fashonable to do so. I was out of work for almost ten months before I found the job I have presently, and our pantry, along with the few FRN's I was able to get doing some simple odd jobs, was enough to keep us fed. By my best estimate, we had a year's worth of canned, dry, and boxed food stuffs when our personal SHTF event started. So working with the remaining two months worth that was left when I got this new job, I've steadily added back to the reserves in our Armageddon Pantry ( I really do love that term
). As of last week, I figure that we are right about where we were when the SHTF back in 2011 (give or take a few days worth).
Given all that has happened in just the past ten years alone, I am so glad I have found the survival and preparedness lifestyle. I really started back in the 80's, but didn't really start hitting meaningful and purposful strides to become prepared for bad things till around the mid 90's. Things progressed slow at first, but as soon as I started a family in the late 90's, things changed dramaticly, and took on an urgency when my son was born in 2000.
09-11-01 was a wake-up call for a lot of folks, and I started feeling justification for all my work after that point, even though I still get strange looks and snide comments about my preps from people that know I prep. All it takes is a few facts pointed out about what happened to us when I lost my job back in 2011, or when I talk about how some of the preps, skills, and my knowledge of how some things work, made it a bit easier for us to endure having power out for about a week back in 2008 when the remnents of Hurricane Ike blew through the upper mid-west, Great Lakes Region, and Appalachian Mountainn range, causing wide spread destruction and loss of electrical power, apart from the normal destruction of the Southern States it passed through. Once people hear these things from someone like me, they start to think a bit more about themselves and their own family's needs if something happened.
YEP... I've been oh so busy these last few months adding stuff here and there, doing work towards our future welfare, taking care of the here and now. It gets hard to find time to get in here and post during the warm weather months with so much going on right now, but I promise to make some time to post till the first snow flies around here, and can then take a bit more time to get in here and do some reading and posting on a regular basis.
So you all keep doing, and I'll have some more to tell and share real soon.
