Mid-Week Miscellany

Every time I try to blog I fall asleep, so it's been a few days.

The last few weeks have been all about repairing my house.  First I was painting the porch, then the tenants' shower started leaking again and I decided I was sick of replacing washers and/or valve stems every six months; I thought maybe the seats were worn out and indeed the shower was a discontinued brand except for some parts - so I tore a hole in the wall and replaced the whole works with a more common brand; and then one of the motors in their furnace went out so I called the furnace man. My wallet is much lighter, waah. But one of my survival buddies wants the old shower handles etc; she has the same brand shower and her handles are some trashy, worn-out universal handles.  Universal shower handles never fit right, there's these adapter things but they slip and fall off all the time.  I'll be glad to give her mine.

I am trying to make Vinegar of the Thieves so that I can write about it again, I was making it from memory a couple days ago and I forgot the cloves so tonight I will add some.  So far it is a reddish brown and it smells like - well, salad dressing.  As you might imagine.

The highway weirdness has returned: I am seeing everywhere cars with either a donut wheel or with one hubcap missing.  I counted seven on a trip to a place 2.5 miles from my home on that day.  Another day, on a trip1 mile from my home, I counted five.  One has started parking on my street in the last week.  I have really never noticed missing hubcaps in this quantity before, but perhaps it's a sign of the times: people can't afford to replace them, or maybe people are stealing them more, or both.  Either that or I was blissfully unaware of the horrible dearth of hubcaps in this town until suddenly I started noticing them, sort of like when you start seeing all the cars like the one you just bought.

I would be doing the superstitious synchronicity thing of equating the sighting of a missing hubcap with whatever I was thinking at the time as a sign, except I'm seeing so many missing hubcaps and also I'm mostly thinking about 2012 this week, because I'm doing research on 2012.  So every time I see a hubcap missing I'm thinking the same thing anyway.

I have been contemplating setting up a survival retreat of my own. I have offers from friends to stay in their retreats, but I want my own. I don't want it to be a waste of money if nothing happens, so it would have to be either close to free or something I could use as a weekend getaway in the meantime, and something I could sell off if I change my mind.  I'm thinking the first part is to decide where exactly would be a good place, based on location, geology, proximity (or not) to civilization, and average price.  The second part is to find a decent piece of junk land for my purposes, for wicked cheap.  The third part is to build or drag something there that is more comfortable than a glorified foxhole, and relatively unobtrusive. So, we'll see if I can pull this off.  I do have the budget; that is, if my furnaces and plumbing behave for the rest of the season, to get the land in the spring.

If the SHTF and the dollar collapsed before the spring, there's always either bartering for land or use of land; or trespassing and building a stealth retreat, but that runs more risk of a lead powered eviction.  I would rather actually own the land, or if not, be using it by permission, than trespass any day of the week.