Category Archives: common sense

Limits

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, home, work

I quit one of my jobs on Sunday.  I was apologetic for the short (as in NO) notice, but explained that I simply can’t work in the hospital environment any more.  I get too stressed out, and my anxiety makes me vulnerable to making mistakes.  I can’t afford mistakes when I’m going to be in a master’s program in five months.

It was a strange feeling to realize that middle age really does begin imposing limits.  I was thinking that the limits were mostly physical, and that I could stave them off for quite a while by just keeping flexible, active, agile.  Nope.  Just like broken bones don’t heal as well in our forties as they did in our twenties, the beating the emotions and psyche take don’t heal as well in our forties either.

Interestingly, both of the house supervisors that I spoke with agreed that the hospital environment there is…extreme.  In fact that is a quote from one of them.  Both wished me luck and said it was the hospital’s loss.  There would have been a time when I would have agreed, but not today.  I think it is best for both me and for the hospital I do not work there.

The garden is winding down; the temperature in the day is in the 80′s but our first frost date is estimated for the 29th.  That’s not nearly enough time for anything that’s not already ripening to finish; I’ll probably get out there and begin pulling plants for the composter later this week.  NOT a great year for the garden.  Since this was the first year I actually got a Thai hot plant to grow, let alone fruit, I may put that into a pot and bring it in for the winter.

I have a feeling it will be a more powerful than usual Samhain.

Karl Denninger’s “Bonus Army” post. Worth reading. Worth passing along!!!

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, the dreaded politics

Karl Denninger\’s latest Market Ticker is fantastic.  Please read, watch, pass along.  I’ve copied from his post the narrative, if you want to watch the videos click the link.  Karl and I don’t always agree on conclusions, but his assessments are dead on.

There are many who argued that The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I retort that this is not by any stretch of the imagination always true.  Sometimes, the enemy of your enemy just means you have two enemies.  My reluctance to get involved in championing the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has to do with what I consider to be an essential first determination of which of these two principles is more-likely to be correct.

After all, supporting one is good.  Supporting the other is suicidal.

That there is no “cohesive set of demands” may be a good thing, if it’s real.  The problem is that I’m not sure this is the case.  Among some of the “looney tunes” demands I’ve heard include:

  • A $20/hour minimum wage.
  • The right to receive it irrespective of whether you work.
  • Cancellation of student loan debt (Note: Not bankruptcy discharge, which I support – just flat cancellation without consequence to the borrower.)
  • Tariffs to stop wage and environmental arbitrage (good) and wide-open borders (horrifyingly bad and flatly impossible given the first two demands.)
  • A right to a college education (not an aspiration, a right – which means irrespective of ability.  How has this worked out for our High Schools when we forced everyone, including those who are on the lower end of the bell curve in intelligence, into “mainstream” classrooms? It’s been an unqualified statistical disaster.)

Add up all the above and you have a thinly-disguised attempt to demand Communism.

Not socialism – communism.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

That not only won’t work, it will destroy what’s left of America and give rise of a dictatorship from the smoldering ruins of the collapse.

On the other hand we have demands that make perfect sense, such as:

  • Prosecute the banksters.
  • Your kids (and those not yet born!) are being told they’ll have to bail out the crooks.
  • The “99%” are against those robbing the nation.

So here’s the deal, as I see it.

If the so-called “Tea Party” is going to mean anything at all then it has to get in the middle of this debate and protest movement right now and amplify the voice that represents common ground.

There’s a lot of that common ground.  The messages we the people must send are:

  • Stop the looting and start prosecuting.  Not protesters, banksters.  Right now.  Fraudclosure, fraudulent lending practices, fraudulent securitization, fraudulent accounting here and abroad.  It all must end right now with prosecution both for past and forwardly-committed financial scam sins.
  • We will not pay for the bailouts and handouts.  Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.  Nor will our children and those not yet born.  We will withdraw consent through our cessation of taxable work product if the government refuses to meet this demand and claw back every nickel of the transfers it already made.  That response is lawful and is, in fact, exactly what happened in Egypt.  We will bring it here.
  • We are the 99%.  Yes, some of us are liberal and some of us are conservative on social issues.  On this issue – the rule of law – we are united and we stand as one.  This crap stops right now; we’ll fight about the other issues later.
  • There is a process for unpayable debts and it’s constitutional.  It’s called bankruptcy and it must be available to all with unpayable debts.  Period.  This means medical debt, it means student loans and it means mortgages.  All debts.  If you want a demand that will collapse the bankster BS game, that’s the one.  You shouldn’t get off if you borrowed foolishly but neither should the lender who lent you money they either knew or should have known you couldn’t repay.  No bailouts and no handouts on either side of the ledger.
  • We know that pulling the deficit spending and “supports” from under the banksters and housing will cause an economic contraction worse than the 1930s.  We know the pension funds are levered up with bank debt that must be haircut severely and that stock prices will fall precipitously if financial institutions are forced to tell the truth and “easy credit” is removed.  WE NOT ONLY KNOW THIS, WE ACCEPT IT AND DEMAND THAT IT HAPPEN RIGHT NOW ANYWAY.  Why?  Because we are Americans.  We make mistakes.  We accept the possibility of bankruptcy for ourselves when we make mistakes but we demand that the jackass on the other side of the desk gets the same punishment for making a bad loan we get for taking one out.  We want to buy houses when they’re cheap just like we want to buy DVD players when they’re cheap.  We want American industry to provide jobs, not jobs for Chinese who were tending rice-paddies with the “profits” flowing to executives while Americans go jobless on the dole.  We accept that realignment and re-industrialization of America will be painful but the fact remains that wealth disparity that comes from ripping people off is bad while wealth disparity that comes from being inventive and industrious is good — the latter is how we make progress and the latter are the people who we want to have the money to hire us, not the former!
  • We demand that the “cheap money” policies, which in fact are really nothing more than bailouts and handouts across the board along with protectionism for the bankster class and those who offshore jobs, end right now.  This means no more negative real interest rates anywhere on the curve and a true zero inflation target with criminal penalty teeth in the law. We’re prepared to back this up with the sort of durable protest that we see in NYC and elsewhere and we will expand it as we’re able and as is required until the above demands are met.
  • We demand tax reform that results in nobody getting a free ride and nobody having loopholes they can exploit. Whatever we do for a tax system the instructions must fit on one 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and be presumptively correct under law when followed.  Your “return”, if you have to file one, must fit on a postcard.  Corporate taxation must be similarly simple and presumptive.  We demand that the government bring in via taxes every dollar it wishes to spend in programs in the present tense, not borrowing from the future.  We can and will have the debate over exactly what those services are in the public square, as we should, and render our opinions in the voting booth.  We will not tolerate one more day of deficit spending.  Period.

I don’t see anything here that the “Occupy Wall Street” folks could disagree with.  Maybe I’m wrong – but if I’m right, these seven points should be what we preach – and what we stand for.

WHERE IS THE TEA PARTY WITH THESE SEVEN POINTS –  SEVEN POINTS THAT, PART OF THE EXISTING PROTEST AND AMPLIFIED, BACKED BY MILLIONS IN THE STREETS WHO PEACEFULLY PROTEST AND REFUSE TO STAND DOWN, WE CAN BRING TO THE FORE AND MAKE HAPPEN IN THE PRESENT TENSE?

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=195248  Thanks to Karl for a call to action.

Thinking two seasons ahead

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, Economy, Independence Days, preparedness, Uncategorized

IMAG0206

Originally uploaded by susancoyotesfan

Like our ancestors, it is time to start thinking about being warm this winter. Since hand made items take time, it means that if I want to have gifts for holiday giving and warm things for myself, now is the time to start making them.

I spun this yarn earlier this summer; I dyed 775 feet of it with cake dye; it turned out a heathered color that ranges from a deep sky blue to a royal purple. The rest I left the natural color.

While I’ve taken projects from dirty fleece to finished object, this is the first of many projects that I plan to take from dirty fleece to woven object. Like most of my ‘firsts’ this scarf has issues – but it is my first attempt at weaving with my hand spun and I’m happy to report that my yarn is more than strong enough for the stresses of weaving.

In keeping with thinking two seasons ahead, the fall garden will be planted later this week. We’ll grow broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, as well as chard. I’ll try cabbage again, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for it.

I’ll be placing an order with Johnny’s Seeds for some greenhouse plastic and the clips to hold it to PVC pipe; I think I can manage a cold frame that won’t blow away this winter. I’ll also be hedging my bets with my free sliding glass doors, using those over a couple of our beds and getting hay bales as necessary to keep the glass high enough to allow the plants growing room.

I have to go back to work soon; I am not sure how I feel about that. In the mean time, I’ve been busy preserving the bounty of summer. If it were from our own garden I’d be happier, but from the farmer’s coop is good too. So far I’ve made 100 pounds of tomatoes into sauce with 25 pounds blanched and waiting in the freezer to be made into paste. Today I roasted 30 pounds of green chiles and put them into our freezer. Mr. TF was aghast at the sheer poundage until I reminded him that last year we got 15 lbs from the store and it wasn’t enough.

I’ve been drying herbs like rosemary, oregano, thyme, and marjoram; I need to get out into the garden and pick basil to make into pesto for the winter.  I wish I could live a little more like our ancestors; I would love to exhaust myself all summer long with projects and preserving, knowing that this winter I will have a well deserved rest time.  Modern life makes that impossible though.

Re-evaluating things

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, sustainability, work

As some of you may know from previous posts, I’ve been home for a while due to work related stress.  When this started, ever so long ago, I attributed it to ‘just part of the job’ and assumed that there was something wrong with me because I seemed to get little satisfaction that I had accomplished anything of value at the end of the day.  I can even remember having a conversation with a coworker who was also struggling a little, and she asked “why do we do this?”  My reply was “for the money” which even then I was trying to convince myself was the case.  Now, monetary matters always play a part in what one ultimately chooses to do for a living, but it shouldn’t be the primary reason – ever.

As it turns out, while my reason for staying where I was might have been a monetary reason, my actual reason for choosing my profession is something quite different.  I’ve been seeing a counselor and a psychiatrist as a part of my recovery, and they both tell me that the reason I ended up ‘breaking’ is because I care, not because I don’t.  Apparently the disconnect between the compassion in me – and others who care – and the financial drivers of today’s health care is so great that, for some of us, it becomes too much to live with.  Lying to oneself only works for so long, and trying to disconnect from caring means creating an emotional and psychological dissonance so great that it is only a matter of time before one ‘breaks’.  I spoke with someone else I used to work with today, and we have much more in common than it appears on the surface; our greatest differences are that she refused to lie to herself, and that she had the good sense to realize that the problem wasn’t within her.  It gave me great hope to speak with her and catch up; we will be meeting for coffee next week and I have to say I am overjoyed at the prospect.  I have avoided cultivating friendships within my sphere of colleagues, feeling that whatever was wrong with me was something I didn’t want to share, and truly failing to understand much of their lifestyle.  Some of that is because I’m peak oil aware and I follow they financial world and they don’t, of course, but much of it is because they just seem to be able to ‘cope’ better than me.  Finally, frankly, several of them are not people I would want to spend my valuable free time with any way.

It has been a great relief to realize that I’m not a horrible person (although some may disagree), I still care about individuals I come in contact with, though I could care less about our species as a whole,  and that I actually DO want to continue to do what I spent so much effort attaining.  To realize this is possibly the greatest burden lifted off my shoulders I could have had.  So if there’s a bright spot in this, it’s that this time off has given me perspective on myself.  Sometimes sucking it up and dealing with it, though many times IS  the solution, isn’t always the best choice, particularly if it means ignoring those little soft voices whispering in the back of your ear that this is wrong, it’s not supposed to be this way, you’re in a helping profession, …

So that’s it, my little bit of nothing.

 

The Economy of Food

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Economy, home, work

ETA:  I raised three boys on about $9000 per year, without the help of food stamps.  And they did not eat very much frozen or fast food.  We ate a lot of Chinese type foods, and a lot of vegetarian meals, and cooked from scratch was pretty much normal.  So I know whereof I speak.

H/T Sharon Astyk for the link and her commentary on her blog; what she has to say as well as the comments on her blog are well worth considering.  I just have a few insights of my own to add.

A new article in Harvard Magazine discusses the rise of restaurant culture in America, and makes some statements regarding eating out and food in general that I just don’t agree with.  They state, for one, that eating at McDonald’s is cheaper than eating at home.  Really?  What about the gas it takes to drive there?  At four dollars a gallon?  And McDonald’s cannot accept food stamps because food stamps can only be used for UNcooked food.  For instance, you can buy a burrito at the local gas/mart, pay for it with food stamps – THEN put it into their microwave and cook it, but you cannot cook it first and then pay for it with food stamps.  Now, that may be possible, but again, it’s still fast food, and not a very good use of a finite resource – your food stamps.  At last reading, 1 in 8 adults and 1 in 4 children eat thanks to food stamps.  That is a LOT of the population relying on them.  All of these people are faced with being money poor, and I would suspect that buying a burger at McDonald’s, is putting a further strain on an already strained budget that must also pay rent, utilities, gas, etc.

So, McDonald’s may have cheap food, but you have to factor in the cost of gas to get there, the fact that there is next to zero nutritional content in the food, the time spent driving to and from versus staying at home and cooking, and the loss of that money to purchase other necessary goods/services.  Not to mention the nutritional content versus McDonald’s, or even a frozen burrito compared to home cooked food.

I am astounded that people really think they do not have time to cook.  Now, I can believe that they may be too tired to cook.  When I come home from a shift where I work, I am lucky if I have not had to fight nodding off in the car, and I get home with exactly enough time to get my clothes and food around, and go to bed and get ready to do it all over again in the morning.  But my situation is not really normal, except for others who also work 12 or more hours in a day.  But.  Notice one particular thing in my previous statement.  Get my food around.

Yes, I take my own lunch.  On my days off, or on days my husband is home and he cooks, we deliberately make enough for leftovers.  Last night’s dinner becomes today’s lunch.  A meal at the cafeteria, or at McDonald’s costs at least $6.  Taking my lunch costs perhaps $2, if it was an expensive dish.  Often my meal costs 50 cents or less.  A meal of curried lentils and rice with slivered almonds, and some pickles, costs perhaps that 50 cents.  It takes time to make the pickles, of course, but that time is amortized across an entire year until I do it again – one or two marathon days of canning dill, bread and butter pickles, dilly beans, and relish mean we have those things for the rest of the year. The lentils are maybe 99 cents for a pound, and I use a cup which I am guessing is about a quarter pound for the meal; the rice is also about a dollar a pound and I use 2 cups of that.  The almonds are the expensive part; they are garnish though and a quarter cup is more than enough for the meal.  The spices of course are expensive but like the pickles the price is amortized across every meal I prepare with them.  Then of course, there is the cost of utilities both to prepare and to clean up.  Even so, I think that my meal made at home, which takes about 10 minutes to prep and 30 minutes to cook, still takes both less time and money than that meal from McDonald’s.  Plus, my meal gives us leftovers and feeds us for at least one other meal.

Or say we had poached salmon in a cream sauce with peas over pasta.  The salmon obviously is the expensive portion of the meal; I believe it was $8 or $9 per pound the last time I shopped.  Well, we use perhaps 10 ounces for both of us in this meal, probably more like 7 or 8 ounces.  So that’s much more expensive than the lentils, but we are still less than the McDonald’s meal so far, say $4.  I only purchase pasta when it’s on sale, so it’s usually about $1 for a package at most.  We use perhaps a third to a half package for this recipe.  The peas I buy early in the season, in bulk, and keep frozen, so they’re maybe $1 per pound.  We use a cup of peas in this recipe.  It uses 1/4 cup butter as well as 1 cup cream which we substitute with milk and a little cornstarch for thickening.  A little garlic which we grow ourselves, some salt and pepper, and 1/4 cup onion which we may or may not have grown in the garden.  This meal will feed us for at least two full meals.  So the cost, $9 say, actually is still cheaper than the McDonald’s meal because that cost gets divided in half – $4.50 to feed us both.  Twice.  The time it takes to make this meal is approximately 40 minutes. Possibly more time than McDonald’s, but certainly still cheaper.  I would guess that my meal, eaten in the quiet of my home, or on my deck, is less stressful as well.

Or say we just make beans and rice.  Typical subsistence food, made in the crock pot.  Pennies to make, next to no time in active preparation, and feeds us until we’re so sick of it we give the last bit to the chickens.

There is no possible way that eating at McDonald’s is cheaper than eating at home, even if you factor in utilities!

The denseness of the nutrition of my home prepared foods, as well as the lack of preservatives and other assorted nasties, means that even with butter as one of the chief ingredients (organic naturally) that my meal is significantly healthier, and more filling with smaller portion sizes, than anything McDonald’s can offer.  Spiritually, McDonald’s can offer nothing to me or my family either.  My kitchen is the center of my house, both literally and figuratively.  How can McDonald’s compete with that?

No, making an idiotic statement like the one quoted in the article above is simply a lie, whether perpetrated deliberately or out of ignorance.  The sad part is that McDonald’s profits by this ignorance, and the general ignorance of our young people in how to cook.  THAT is perhaps the most troubling part of this article.  People spend hours watching food and cooking shows, but do not learn how to do it themselves.

Perhaps the best thing I could do for my community while I’m home for a while is to offer cooking classes.  They wouldn’t have to be anything so unusual as what we eat, just simple foods – pot roast, potatoes, veggies.  Meatloaf.  Mashed potatoes.  Fried chicken.  These are simple meals, but take skill to make well. And most importantly, since I would bet that 90% of the population is on, or qualifies for food stamps, these are nutritionally dense meals which can be made with things food stamps will purchase, unlike my burrito example from the frozen food section.

Food for thought.

What’s been going on at Tin Foil Acres?

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, Crafts, home, Independence Days

Lots of things.

The psychiatrist I saw, as well as the counselor, both said they are seeing a lot of nurses with the same stress related issues; one even said that ER and ICU nurses are getting the worst of it.  So I guess it’s not me, it’s just that I don’t have very good coping skills.  And that’s my homework for the next few months.  ‘Nuf said about that.

While I have read two novels – the first non-fiction I’ve read in more than two years – I haven’t been lying around eating bon bons.  Things have been busy here.  I’ve been weaving along on an 8 yard warp of cotton boucle towels; I cleaned, organized, and labelled all our spices; I cleaned the kitchen to my exacting standards and have been doing my best to keep it that way; together we have been working in the garden which has been very very nice; we have put up fencing in half the front yard and I’m working on lining the bottom with rocks to keep out the rabbits and skunks; I’ve been spinning and knitting and even dying a little; and I applied for a business license for my little fiber arts factory.  This last is because if I want to sell at craft fairs or events, I have to have one.  Plus it allows me to buy at cost without paying the taxes, which means that I can actually attempt to make a little money from my crafting; especially for weaving, if I have to buy at retail and pay taxes on my supplies, it means that I work and sell for free.  Not exactly what I had in mind.  I do plan to do a post on the relative costs of ready – made clothing from the turn of the 20th century to the 21st, but it might be a bit.

I have also been canning.  Yes, it’s that time of year again, and I’m grateful not to have to try to fit this in between grueling shifts right now.  I spent 9 hours one day making blueberry jam, strawberry jam, and peach butter.  I buy in bulk from Bountiful Baskets which is like a coop or a CSA but you don’t have to have a subscription and you’re not obligated to buy every week.  So when they have something in bulk I want, I buy the basket which allows me to buy the bulk items as well.  This time I got five pounds of strawberries and 25 pounds of peaches; the blueberries have been in the freezer for a while and I wanted to just do it all at once and get it done.  I can outside on my camp stove so I don’t heat up the house, which means that at times I come in to get out of the heat.  Unfortunately, I got distracted during my first batch of peach butter (6 hours into the marathon day) and it boiled – and burned badly – to the bottom of my pot.  Ugh.  I’m still alternating elbow grease and SOS pads with oven cleaner to try to get the mess off the bottom of the pot.   Good thing my time is cheap right now.

Time off from ‘official’ work, but no rest for the weary here!  Truly, home making is a full time job; most days I try to be up by 6 or 630 so we can get the watering and gardening maintenance done before the heat sets in; then breakfast and reading the news; then to work on the home tasks; then spinning or knitting or designing  or weaving, whichever has been neglected the most recently.  Then more outside stuff, then dinner, then a walk around the neighborhood.  By the time 9 pm rolls around I’m pretty well beat.  And that’s about it for around here.

truth.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, home, sustainability

I joined facebook because it’s the only way my children seem to communicate these days.  And thus it’s the only way to keep up with their lives.  I still am not a fan though.  And I still have my privacy settings set to max.  And I only have ‘friends’ who are family members, friends, or friendly acquaintances that I have vetted, in real life.

It’s no substitute for real people.  Facebook friends don’t give you kleenex when you’re crying.  Real friends do.

Learn CPR. And teach it to everyone you know, including your elementary aged children.

Posted by thetinfoilhatsociety in common sense, preparedness

I’m serious. I have a grand daughter. She’s 20 months old. Her father has known CPR since he was eight years old, because I have worked in the medical field for most of his life, and I have been a CPR instructor on and off for most of that time. You might think eight is a little young to learn CPR, but really, if they learn when they’re young it will stick with them much more so than if they learn it at an older age.

My son, the adorable terror’s father, is CPR certified because he needs it for one of his certifications; he is a certified caregiver although he doesn’t presently work at that job.

Fever seizures run in our family; I was hospitalized just before my first birthday due to an especially prolonged one, and two of my three children suffered from them. They mostly are scary to watch, but not very serious; it happens because little ones’ hypothalamus don’t regulate temperature as well as adults’ do; they can go from normal temperature to 104 in as little as 20 minutes — which causes the seizure. Usually after that the hypothalamus kicks in and the temperature comes down a little, and the child is no worse for wear (although the parents just got three more grey hairs).

That’s how it USUALLY goes. Except apparently, when said adorable terror is lying on the floor drinking her evening bottle.  Dad knew she was a little warm, but she was playing and being her normal self.  He warmed up her bottle (she was weaned at a year old so mom could go back to work) and gave it to her; both Dad and her other grandmother had their backs to her in the kitchen.  Dad apparently sensed something was wrong and turned around.  Adorable terror was blue, staring at nothing, and not breathing.  See, the seizure isn’t a big deal.  The fact that she was drinking the bottle and had a seizure is.  The milk activated the diver’s reflex apparently, and she stopped breathing.  Dad scooped her up and turned her face down over the sink.  She still didn’t start breathing.  He let the milk drain – apparently there was a significant amount – and then began CPR on her; at this point it doesn’t matter if she had a pulse or not; doing compressions on a young healthy heart doesn’t hurt it but she needed the oxygen from the mouth to mouth.  Grandmother called 911; by the time the crew got there she was breathing but unresponsive.  She was released from the emergency room several hours later, after many tests and observation.  Dad said she didn’t talk (this child takes after her father, she talks non stop) for two hours and was still not her normal self for a couple of days.

All the what if’s have gone through all our heads.  Dad is rather PTSD.  The only thing I can say, is thank the Gods above and below that what I taught him so long ago, what he has chosen to keep up on, was a part of his toolkit, and ingrained enough that he was able to act on it.

See, outside of healthcare professionals, the people who need to know CPR the most are family members.  Because believe it or not, that’s who you are most likely to use it on.  Do yourself and your family a favor, and take a CPR class today.  The life you save could very well be your own child’s.