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I was online yesterday when I got a message to turn on my TV because Sarah Palin was going to commit political suicide in her backyard. I watched her almost psychotic speech and tried to figure out why now. She has been surrounded by investigation on ethics issues and had survived that. There were major puzzle pieces missing. Sarah referenced the many ethics scandals she bypassed recently and she did not quit her job over any of those. It had to be bigger. Then someone sent me a link to the latest scandal. It is an embezzlement scandal. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/03/palin-hockey-arena-scandal/

For a woman with an all encompassing ego, it would take something really big to convince her to rush into her backyard and talk in broken sentences that are discombobulated. Where were her people to talk her down? Anyhow that was the news item of the day yesterday and I was already writing about the economy for my next blog so it fit right in.

OK my original blog….

Since we have a shopping based economy (2/3 of the economy depends on us shopping) our economic outlook looks pretty dismal. While we are being told that everything is really in recovery most of us are not believing it and tucking money away when we can do so. In order to catch up to what we lost it is estimated it will take a full generation of saving. They are trying to hide how bad it all is. We have a Ponzi scheme economy based on unsustainable consumerism. It is terminally ill. Our war machine and government is bloated. 9.5% of the people are collecting unemployment 16.5% have accepted part time employment or are what is considered to be under-employed compared to their previous pay and hours of work. That totals to 27% and it does not include those people that no longer get unemployment benefits and have no employment at all. There are approximately 140 million jobs in this country and that number is shrinking. In fact the average full time employee is now working only 33 hours a week. Remember when the average was 40 hours…We are talking 2007. 16% fewer hours equates to less money getting into people’s homes. The average hourly earnings is $18.53 or $611 a week. One in 7 homes are in foreclosure or behind on payments.

I do after it is all said and done believe we will have a kind of recovery. A lot of the figures are already kinda looking good. The problem is that it cannot last. We are in a deflationary period they say. That is probably true. Prices have not gone up that much lately. Supply has been the problem rather than price. Within two years we will be hitting inflation. As availability decreases and demand increases the price will go way up. I asked the manager at Walmart about many of the products they used to have being gone. He said they now carry less than half the stock they used to have on hand and so to check back often if my product is not available. I was looking for cream cheese. The number of brands have shrunk and they carry fewer brands than they used to carry. I think we are being prepped for rationing and we will be lucky to get that.

I got a list of what a normal person needs to store for a year in order to be healthy and not starve to death. The list does not include fresh fruits and veggies and meat. They assume that we all have that available to us. We all pretty much grow gardens and have a few chickens and maybe a cow or rabbits around. M y garden baked and so I do not hold out much hope for any farm animals at my house. I suppose I could go steal a cow but the Texas Rangers are really good at finding cattle rustlers. We have a crisis of cattle being stolen as the economy tanks and those desperate cowboys will end up in a hot Texas prison. We are the biggest cattle producing state with a herd of 14 million cows and 24 million humans.

No matter what we all decide to do when and if TSHTF we will have 303,824,640 hungry people looking for something to eat.

Enough for now….I am going to an outside party to celebrate the 4^th….

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June 29

Reading Material

It was 104 degrees outside when I made and put up a 32 foot canopy to keep the sun off the front of my house. It took me 7 hours to sew it, put in the grommets, get the braces up near to roof and install it. The whole time I was wondering what kind of a difference it would actually make. I have tracked it to determine that for 2 days now. It made a 5 degree difference. In a normal house around Houston they calculate $100 a month in electric bills per elevated degree above 90. My house being small I calculate a $30 to $50 a month difference in electric bills. The cost of the materials for the canopy was $22. Not a bad investment.

I had a few flies in my house and put up a fly ribbon from my ceiling fan light chain. I have cathedral ceilings so it is still 7 feet above the floor. 12 came over and asked what it was and saw 2 flies snagged on it. She was impressed with such an invention and then did the numbers on the cost of spray they use and the 20 cents a fly ribbon costs. The ribbon won.

14 was over and she is very pessimistic about her future. I asked her what age she expected she would die at. She figured she would be very lucky to see 25. Then 12 told me yesterday that Michael Jackson would be spending eternity in hell. Her father’s live in girlfriend has been taking her and 14 to one of those right wingnut churches. They are on every street corner in Houston. 12 freaks out about sleeping alone and possibly dying and going to hell. Unfortunately, this was my grandkids first exposure to Christianity. With any luck they will be able to sort it out and run away from this stuff when they are older. If not it will become paranoid fodder for their hallucinations. I talked to the kids father and we discussed if this was actually a good thing for the kids. He said his girlfriend is a religious crazy and he was thinking of ending the relationship. I told him I was not trying to influence him in regard to that but I was trying to intervene on behalf of his children and felt he could make some decisions about what they are being exposed to. I let it go at that….

Today’s menu- pancakes, and OJ. Lunch-milk, pork roast with potatoes, carrots and gravy. Dinner- milk, homemade chicken nuggets, wild rice, corn on the cob, biscuits, watermelon. Snacks---none.. If they want that they have to go to their house to fine junk to eat.

I found this nugget on the internet: http://survivalblog.com/ Of course they were talking about survival in a society collapse and most of these people are really fear mongers. I do certainly agree with the water one…..

1. If your water comes out of a faucet or a bottle, and you can not safely walk to a permanent backup source in less than 10 minutes every day, then you will die.
2. If you do not raise your own food, or personally know the family that you bought it from, you will either die, or be forever controlled by someone with a clipboard and a list, and you will wish you were dead.
3. A centuries old rule of farming: It takes a minimum of 10 years of farming a piece of ground to know it. So, you're going to compress a decade of intimate knowledge into a weekend, because you read a book? We'll send the guy mentioned in Rule #3 out to your shack next spring.
4. Unless you have a fully stocked and equip 19th century-style working farm to escape to, with food for two years stored in place for humans and livestock, you are simply a well-intentioned refugee, or an unwelcome house guest.
5. [Forget "foraging".] In the 1850s, (for the purpose of sizing reservations), it was determined that a skillful Native American needed 100 square miles (10 miles x 10 miles) minimum, to live off the land, per person. There was a lot more game back then, and less afraid of humans. You're going to be competing with around 300 million hungry human bellies, every morning.
6. Ten cases of canned food fits in a 2'x2'x2' area. Around 30 cases will give you one meal a day for a year, and fits under a [tall] bed. The gear, tools, food, and clothing needed for a family of four for a year in the wild would fill one or more semi-trailers.

Then I read an article http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14121 about Canada immunizing their entire population against Swine Flu.

If you want some reading material here it is for free. Some of these books cost more than $35 each at Amazon. You can join this site and read all day long for free. Of course most of you won’t be interested in most of it so I put in a lot of variety. The Foxfire books are all pretty good. I don’t know if any of you remember those books.

Foxfire One
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8961411/Foxfire-One
Foxfire Two
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8961376/Foxfire-Two
Foxfire Three
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8961322/Foxfire-Three
Foxfire Four
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8961243/Foxfire-Four

The Foxfire Five
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6476078/The-Foxfire-Book-Volume-05

PICTURES: None are mine. The first two are from Lake Superior and the last one is a guy at Gitmo being transported for torture.

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June 26

I’m Back

I have been home since Wednesday and will be headed back to Georgia in a week or two. I will spend July in Georgia. When I arrived home it was 104 degrees and when I was in Atlanta it was also blazing hot. I did get some good pictures on the flight back home.

It was very relaxing to be in Georgia. Now I am back to making 3 meals a day and have grandkids and their visiting friends to feed. Just got done making bacon, eggs, hash browns, OJ, and bagels. I did the dishes and now kids have scattered. I am sure they are in their house listening to Michael Jackson music. I notice I have 3 other computers online so they are online talking to friends.

I want to put up a canopy between my house and the storage shed but it is so blazing hot outside. I won’t do it until tonight. I did it a few years ago and it really helped. My poor garden cannot tolerate the heat. It gets to over 125 degrees in the sun so my vegetable plants have fried. Now I know why nobody has vegetable gardens around Houston. My flower garden loves this weather and the plants being tropical are now taller than me.

My son in law took the kids to 6-Flags and every other tourist attractions within a few hundred miles. That daughter and her hubby are great at entertaining. I caught up on some reading when I was in Georgia. I had forgotten a book there last year that was published in 1928. It was a book about the history of Lake Superior and more specifically the Chippewa Indians and what was known about them. The book was reprinted in 1975 and that is when I bought it. I remember buying it in Ashland, Wisconsin because I complained to the shop owner about the price. It cost $6.75. It was reprinted again in 1996 and there are only used copies for sale….of course the price has increased.

T he Lake Superior Country in History and in Story

Product Description
Originally published in 1929, this massive volume is a complete living history of the Lake Superior region from the days of the first white settlers through the summer of 1928 when President Calvin Coolidge visited the area to hunt and fish. Includes rare poetry and photos.
About the Author
Guy Burnham was a newspaper columnist whose compilations of historical facts, personal remembrances and on-site accounts are the heart and soul of this fascinating book.

Yesterday I used my outside washing machine and the wringer I bought from Lehman’s. It was so hot outside I thought I was going to pass out but I made it. The clothes dried on the clothesline in 45 minutes because the heat cooked them. Today I will do nothing. I am not even riding my bike anymore. It cools down to the 80’s at night but I won’t ride in the dark. I don’t really want to be road kill.

At my daughters house I did go to Berry College and got some deer pictures and of course a zillion pictures of the kids. We toured the Berry Museum and the home of Martha Berry who founded the college.

Martha Berry never married and devoted her life to developing the schools that would eventually become Berry College. In the late 1890s, she constructed a small whitewashed school on eighty-three acres of land given to her by her father and began to teach Sunday school classes to local children. She also taught in an abandoned church at Possum Trot, which still stands on the Berry College campus. The Sunday school classes eventually turned into day school activities and Berry opened a boarding facility for boys called Boys’ Industrial School on January 13, 1902. At the time, she had only five boarders but the need was apparent and in 1909 she opened the Martha Berry School for Girls. Both schools offered high school level education and were open to those willing to study hard and work for the school. Her teachings focused on the hands, head and hearts of her students: The ability to learn, work and the will to do both well. Her motto was and still is the motto of the college, “Not to be ministered unto but to minister.” In 1926, she established Berry Junior College, which in 1930 expanded into a four-year school. Martha Berry died in 1942 and the schools were faced with several years of transition. The Martha Berry School for Girls closed at the end of the 1955-1956 academic year. The boys’ high school was renamed Mount Berry School for Boys and in 1962 it became Berry Academy, which closed in 1983. The college continues to provide a highly-ranked educational experience coupled with worthwhile campus work opportunities.

On Monday evening we went to the anniversary event of John Ridges death at the home of John Ridge. The most recent 3 generations of the Ridges were there. They now live in Texas or New York. There was a speaker who talked about the Trail of Tears and the horrors that happened to the Cherokee Indians. This weekend they are having Cherokee ceremonies at the Ridge property but I will not be there.

There was a Cherokee village named Hightower on the site of Rome, but its people later moved to Cartersville, Georgia, taking the name with them. The Cherokee also referred to the area that would become Rome as "Head of Coosa", and it eventually became home to several Cherokee leaders, including Chiefs Major Ridge and John Ross.^[11] Ridge's home here was known for years as Chieftains House, and is now Chieftains Museum.

I hope all of you have been well and when I go back to Georgia I will bring my laptop so I can keep in touch more…..

Cheryl

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June 16

I am in Georgia

I love it. It is so good to get away from th stresses of living next to my daughter and her boyfriend. The kids are having a great time and I am just relaxing. it is in the upper 90's here but it is so much easier to tolerate without the humidity. I am trying to get pictures of hummingbirds but have not been sucessful yet.

My daughters house is beautiful. Her husband and her dad really did a great job on it. It is so relaxed and comfortable here. What a change. Even 14 is acting like a kid again and not so snappy or short anymore. It is good seeing all the grandkids together. Later....

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June 15

Skimmer

Tomorrow morning I go to Georgia for a week. I am not really looking forward to it. I say I am but traveling and visiting is hard work. Especially when you have kids along. Being alone is much easier. They are good kids but you have to feed them, take them to the bathroom, get between squabbles about who sits where, etc, and it is just a lot of hassle. I am looking forward to seeing my second born daughters house. They did a lot of work on upgrading it since I was there last summer. They redid their floors, their entire kitchen, put a Jacuzzi in and made a second story wrap around deck for the entire 2^nd floor. Money to burn I guess. Nothing was wrong with the old floors or kitchen. They wanted a different color wood floors and new modern appliances. The ones they had came with the house and were 3 years old. So I have to go get a look.

Yesterday I made a chicken pot pie homemade and it weighed about 5 pounds. I figured there would be enough left over for today but it is all gone. My first born daughter does not make any meals anymore for the kids. She says she does but if they cook over there it is always exotic types of things that you would not really eat if you did not live in a 3^rd world country. The kids can eat it or go hungry. Of course she knows they will come over to get dinner here at my house. My daughter has stuff like soy milk, goats milk and some nutrition powder that they drink for muscles. That is costing them $100 for a container of that stuff. They are worried they may gain a pound so they do not buy stuff like what you or I would have in our cupboards. I looked in their cupboards to see if there was anything the kids could make for themselves for a lunch. All of it was spices and various types of expensive rice, beans wheat, etc. They have enough food to last maybe 5 days in an emergency. No bread, jelly, peanut butter, crackers, milk, butter, canned quick food for kids, nothing you would want to eat. Consequently I make almost all the food for the kids. I have enough food stockpiled to last at least 3 months off the grid.

About 6 weeks ago her boyfriend began redoing her countertops and still you cannot use the counter or eat over there. Then he started painting the dining and living room and there are still ladders, supplies in that room and the furniture is gone. Unusable space. When I start something I HAVE to finish or I am crazy until I have everything back where it belongs. So the kids can be in their bedrooms or in my house. If they leave anything downstairs then he throws it outside. They are not allowed to use the downstairs or if they do they better not leave any evidence that they were there. Every night before they go home to go to bed we check for stuff thrown outside. I don’t want to be negative in front of the kids so we just joke about him having no experience with kids and maybe he will get better. He has 4 or 5 kids around the country but he has never lived with them very long.

The kids never complain about him and are totally supportive of their mother but last week they both came over and talked to me about him. They said that he is constantly telling them what they do wrong and he just doesn’t tell them but he goes on and on about it and spends about an hour each time he finds something and if they say that he is repeating himself he goes onto a rage because they are disrespectful. So they said they are sick of listening everyday to his rants about how they should be. My daughter just sits back and allows this. I do not interfere and am supportive to the kids and encourage them to come over and eat or watuc TV or whatever so they are not alone. At their house they are alone in their rooms. They only sleep at their house. 14 does wathc TV over there but if she is alone evantually she makes her way over here.

These are good honor students who never have done ANYTHING bad in their lives. It breaks my heart. 14 is now helping her mother who is back in college. She helps her with math. That kid is a math and science kid.

Pictures..just stuff I got yesterday. The bird is a black skimmer. Not much black that you can see. In fact these birds look like Indian Skimmers but they are supposed to only live in the like Asia. The drunk driver marker is one of our previous mothers that lived a few blocks away.

Well I have complained enough. I need to get the kids packed for their trip tomorrow and make some lunch… Later….

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