As I sit here I am pretty pleased.
The yards front and back are completely Gran Torino'd...we have excellent blooming flowers in the front beds...both cars are washed and clean..I'm still averaging over 50mpg with the Prius..and work was not too bad this week. I got some reading in and organizing. Tomorrow I may actually get a chance to tune up the Segway and go for a ride. The kitchen counters are covered with vegetables we grew ourselves...Life seems pretty good today...and I am going to appreciate it.
We are done with the farmers market for the year. We have sold and given away our excess production, which was the plan. Now the produce we have left and what will be created from this point on will be stored. Home canning is the next project.
This is the first time we are going to try to can food we produced ourselves...It should be somewhat interesting. I am undecided about this. The stuff I remember as home canned was brown and you were really unable to determine what was in the jar....Now my mother was a lousy cook and it's probably pretty hard to can stuff with Vodka as her "little helper" so that may explain why anything home canned appeared to be some type of medical school teaching prop to me as a child ....I'm going to give home canned food a non-judgemental shot as best I can. If what we can appears close to the photo's of normal people's canned foods on the net then I'll go along with it. If this process turns out to be just like mama used to make, then it's outa here.
We are pulling out the used up portions of the gardens and it's tough seeing our plants go. I do not believe we will plant a fall garden-----rather we will use the time to work on building up the garden beds again. All our soil we created...so the more we work on composting and resting our created soil all the better for our produce next year.
I remembered reading about these houses as a child in the 1960's--the Futuro House. Portable by truck or by helicopter and designed by Finnish Architect Matti Suuronen this structure was usually featured right after the articles on how personal jet packs were the coming mode of transportation. I've never seen one although constructed complete by prefabrication there were 100 sold. The Futuro House is not just an artifact of an Architect's fantasy it is an artifact of a future we believed in---a future that never occurred.
I understand that the Futuro House was actually very well insulated and easy to heat ( da-Finnish architect eh?) and actually was useful in areas as a vacation home or a small family house. Capable of being hooked to services much like an RV site set up was remarkably easy. The Futuro House stands as the future we all at one time, thought was coming, but never showed up--the free energy car---unlimited nuclear power---personal submarines---the future believed in completely, it was coming, we were told by those my generation's parents believed in. It would happen any moment. Like the Jetsons we would step out of our Futuro Home, strap on our Jet pack, zoom to work, where we would supervise automated machinery and then zoom home again to a happy family. It was just a little bit away---any time now.
This belief structure of the wondrous future just suddenly stopped. It did not slowly die, it passed away overnight. It became obvious that we, as a society, had either, wasted our future's opportunity or missed the correct path to this future. Magazines stopped showing us the future. It was as if our culture woke up one morning realizing that this dream of the technological good life for all would never, never happen. Sad eh?
The atomic clock (pictured above) that your wristwatch connects to for time set (if you have that feature) had always been one of those mystery's to me. Not any longer thanks to the link below. I had imagined a complex piece of equipment deep below the surface of a mountain, serviced by a squad of geeks. I was almost on target----
If you haven't you need to:
I've been reading several articles on the web and I believe there is also a book on the subject of why, cheap is bad for our society. I thought on this subject quite awhile after reading this material and decided this was a true concept..Cheap is bad...I began to realize that there is no middle ground in the products we use, need or want any longer. Everything is cheap or tremendously expensive. There is no middle in terms of cost or quality. We face the fact that when we buy a $5.00 belt at walmart we understand that it is a cheap piece of Chinese shit and will without a doubt, if we are lucky, last 6 months---but we accept this situation due to what fact? It is cheap.
We also silently accept the fact that there is now nowhere else to go...unless you wish to order a $30 or $60 dollar belt off the Internet that is of course a better quality, with a subsequent longer use life---but with the drop in our true, real individual income over the past 8 years--- $60.00 or $30.00 for a good quality belt may be out of the question for immediate purchase. The middle ground for the American consumer of the $15.00, good quality belt is, like the typewriter, simply gone.
The truth is we are paying so much more than we realize for cheap---we have been forced into this situation by the redistribution of wealth in this country from the middle class to the rich during the Bush Administration...we as a society accepted this via our elections and actually encouraged this transfer of wealth to occur. The next time you vote look at your belt.
Sometimes you must chew off your foot, to get out of life's little traps.........
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