Storing Your Buckets

After cleaning out both my storage units I realized that one critical item was missing from my house here in the valley. I have no closets! Not only do I not have any closets I have no storage space other than the kitchen cabinets. Right now the 30 plus buckets of food and miscellaneous storage totes are divided between the bathroom and sunroom. Here is what I am doing to permanently stow these items.

Your average 5 gallon bucket is about 15 inches tall and 12 inches across.

I built a 16 inch platform for my bed. With my mattress I sleep roughly 28 inches off the floor. I am fine with this but had to build some steps for the dogs. This created a 5 by 6 foot space capable of holding 30 buckets. The under bed storage contains mostly totes right now.

The dogs love lying on footstools pushed against the windows. They sit there all day guarding the house. I am planning a 3 by 5 foot window seat covered with an old piece of foam rubber I picked up by a dumpster. I used to have a couple of old futon mattresses in front of the windows but they were huge and afforded no storage. The new window seat should be able to store 15 buckets and offers additional seating when necessary.

I keep 4 buckets under the coffee table. This could have been sized to hold many more but the rugs are shaken outside for cleaning so you don’t really want to move 15 buckets each week. Four buckets are also used as end tables.

Eventually most of the buckets will be placed in a root cellar but I won’t be building that until this summer.

If you are planning a very small house do not overlook the storage. If you are stockpiling several years worth of food the storage space is essential.

Shared Resources

While planning my spring garden several problems with logistics and layout were brought to light. Remember my house sits on the north side of a ridge and only about one of the five acres are available for planting. A large area would need clearing and raised beds built. Additionally there is no well and deer in the area tend to decimate gardens.

I spoke with my neighbor about these issues and she enthusiastically suggested I plant the garden in the area surrounding her small wind break trees. This “L” shaped area is enclosed with an eight foot deer fence and covers roughly 4000 square foot. It has adequate water, unobstructed sun and is easily accessed. Raised beds will be built and placed around the perimeter. Plus I can see the garden area from my recliner for easy monitoring.

My neighbor works so tending a large garden is difficult. On the other hand my job is basically tending a large garden. She provides the land, water and security. I provide the seeds, labor and canning. We share the produce.

As we move forward in the Great Decline people need to seek out these types of resource sharing arrangements. City dwellers living in apartments might have relatives or friends who have space for gardens but lack the time to maintain the plants. Many people have large backyards but no time for gardening, try running a CraigsList ad offering your land. Everyone benefits.

Tractor

I picked up an older model 20 house power garden tractor on ebay a couple of weeks back. It’s a four speed that has the throttle on the dash, I prefer this over automatics. The tractor pulls great and the first gear is a “granny” gear which allows me to pull some decent loads up the ridge. Here are some of the uses I have planned.

Living on the north slope of the ridge creates a problem with snow pack. Even though we have been getting relatively warm temperatures the snow remains somewhat shaded and refuses to melt. With a small blade attached to the front of the tractor and some chains on the rear tires the driveway should be kept clear with little trouble.

The hot dry summers leaves the house surrounded with dry, oily sage brush that burns like paper. Part of my fire mitigation plan is to remove as much of the dead brush as possible. Clearing brush by hand is a hard and unpleasant job. With the tractor and blade it should take a fraction of the time to remove the dead brush and deposit it in the runoff ditch for erosion control.

The new garden will need some rich top soil mixed in with it. A truck delivers the soil to the roadside and I carry it in a wheel barrow up to the garden beds. With a small trailer attached to the tractor I save time and the sore back muscles.

That same trailer can be used to haul firewood from the wood pile to the house. One trip on the tractor equals ten trips for me up the icy path. I hate falling down when my arms are full of wood.

Plus you never know when you might need to pull a float in a parade.

Globalization Is The Enemy

Globalization is the enemy. Make no mistake it does not matter if Obama or McCain is the president. It does not matter which party is in control. The economic demise America is experiencing is an engineered transfer of wealth whose end is the destruction of the middle classes in every country on the planet and the installation of one all powerful world government.

The lie the globalists used was that by increasing the number of middle class workers in developing nations America would find new markets for their products. Honestly this might have worked unfortunately the corporations maintained their third world laborers in slave labor conditions and pocketed the profits. So rather than equalizing wages around the globe money flowed from the American citizens to the globalists bank accounts.

When corporations, with our governments blessing, started sending our manufacturing jobs to countries that utilize slave labor it was over for America. Logically we were never meant to compete, it was not possible. Our manufacturing jobs were sent to China. A technology bubble was created to placate the upset masses. These replacement jobs were then shipped to India after we developed the systems.

To dampen the American workers loss we were given cheap credit and a booming housing market. All middle class jobs were being shipped overseas at the same time home prices were skyrocketing…did this really make any sense to anyone. All those displaced workers took up employment in the housing industries. Everyone made huge money and no one noticed the strip-mining of our most valuable resource…our jobs.

The wonderful housing bubble also allowed for the entrapment of the remaining American middle class workers in “debt slavery”. Through declining wages, cleaver legislation and the “American Dream” the globalists thought that Americans would simply work themselves to death in an ever decreasing jobs market trapped in their overpriced homes.

This did not happen. As the American workers started sensibly abandoning their upside down mortgages en mass the global elite demanded payout from our government. The banks were given literally trillions in tax payer dollars under the guise of stimulating lending and restarting the massive consumption engine that is America. Instead the loan industry hoarded the money investing in things like toll roads, private prisons and security agencies. All of this legislatively hidden from the American public!

While all this was going on the worlds governments were instituting policies and procedures to combat “terrorism”. The big, bad war on terror is nothing more than a smoke screen that allows the corporate/government complex to install public control mechanisms in an unmolested and patriotic manner. So when it does fall apart in the “developed” nations and the people figure out they have been screwed over it will be easy to maintain control. This is where we are at today.

Tomorrow or Monday Congress will pass a trillion dollar stimulus bill to create jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. It will not work…the stimulus bill will not restart our consumption economy…but that not its real purpose. Our globalist masters will need good roads to fully strip our land and enslave the indebted American public. We still have the largest most productive farmlands in the world and they will need good workers to till and plant.

Don’t worry about the trillion dollars added to our national debt…the republic is dead.

Now I am gonna have a beer and watch another episode of buffy. Tomorrow I will tell you about my tractor.

Today

The sun is going down. Usually by this time of day I am packing up to leave for home. Most weekends were spent rushing around trying to get done the absolute necessary projects before I head back to the springs. It’s an odd feeling to know this is no longer necessary. I still get up and make my list of daily chores but there is no sense of urgency in the activities. I like it.

God knows there are still tons to do here but the place is livable and frankly quite comfortable. I have spent the past couple of days putting away and organizing my new life. Not nearly enough storage…I will work on that. Today it was in the 60’s and I enjoyed it cleaning the backyard and soaking up the sun. Several old piles of sheetrock had melted and needed disposal. Brought in the wood and watered the plants.

The house is staying between 70 and 90 degrees, almost to hot but it feels good. The fire is dead by nine in the morning when the sun takes over the heating duties. Today I had to open a window. Between five and six in the evening I start up the woodstove and it runs through the night. Right now I have a pot of chicken noodle soup with some spam cooking on the woodstove. Had some unburnt pancakes for breakfast…that was a treat and beef ramen for lunch. All Good.

Bill O’Reily just said I have to worry about getting machine gunned by the Mexican drug lords. It’s not just scare mongering, he knows, we should have elected him president he has pretty hair. Tricky Dick Cheney said we are now at risk of a terrorist attack because of the Obama Presidency. We should listen seeing that he planned the last one. It might make me a pinhead (ala o’reily) but I don’t really care about that stuff now.

All that worry just shut down when I moved here.

I am gonna eat my soup, take a walk, watch some Buffy then go to bed.

Just kidding about O’Reily he’s a dirty tool. I am starting to enjoy having a President who can actually speak and think.