Posted on 07/24/2009 3:37:21 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny
Weekly Roundup - Living On Nothing Edition Category: Roundups | Comments(15)
Did you hear about the guy that lives on nothing? No seriously, he lives on zero dollars a day. Meet Daniel Suelo, who lives in a cave outside Moab, Utah. Suelo has no mortgage, no car payment, no debt of any kind. He also has no home, no car, no television, and absolutely no “creature comforts.” But he does have a lot of creatures, as in the mice and bugs that scurry about the cave floor he’s called home for the last three years.
To us, Suelo probably sounds a little extreme. Actually, he probably sounds very extreme. After all, I suspect most of you reading this are doing so under the protection of some sort of man-made shelter, and with some amount of money on your person, and probably a few needs for money, too. And who doesn’t need money unless they have completely unplugged from the grid? Still, it’s an amusing story about a guy who rejects all forms of consumerism as we know it.
The Frugal Roundup
How to Brew Your Own Beer and Maybe Save Some Money. A fantastic introduction to home brewing, something I’ve never done myself, but always been interested in trying. (@Generation X Finance)
Contentment: A Great Financial Principle. If I had to name one required emotion for living a frugal lifestyle it would be contentment. Once you are content with your belongings and your lot in life you can ignore forces attempting to separate you from your money. (@Personal Finance by the Book)
Use Energy Star Appliances to Save On Utility Costs. I enjoyed this post because it included actual numbers, and actual total savings, from someone who upgraded to new, energy star appliances. (@The Digerati Life)
Over-Saving for Retirement? Is it possible to “over-save” for retirement? Yes, I think so. At some point I like the idea of putting some money aside in taxable investments outside of retirement funds, to be accessed prior to traditional retirement age. (@The Simple Dollar)
40 Things to Teach My Kids Before They Leave Home. A great list of both practical and philosophical lessons to teach your kids before they reach the age where they know everything. I think that now happens around 13 years-old. (@My Supercharged Life)
Index Fund Investing Overview. If you are looking for a place to invest with high diversification and relatively low fees (for broader index funds with low turnover), index funds are a great place to start. (@Money Smart Life)
5 Reasons To Line Dry Your Laundry. My wife and I may soon be installing a clothesline in our backyard. In many neighborhoods they are frowned upon - one of the reasons I don’t like living in a neighborhood. I digress. One of our neighbors recently put up a clothesline, and we might just follow his lead. (@Simple Mom)
A Few Others I Enjoyed
* 4 Quick Tips for Getting Out of a Rut * Young and Cash Rich * Embracing Simple Style * First Trading Experience With OptionsHouse * The Exponential Power of Delayed Consumption * How Much Emergency Fund is Enough? * 50 Questions that Will Free Your Mind * Save Money On Car Insurance
ping for later reading
Okey dokey! It’ll make your hair stand up!
Thanks for the eggplant tips and recipes. We were having veal parmegian for dinner, so I thinly sliced and sauted the eggplant, and will try it with the sauce and cheese with tonights dinner. I have another one or two on the vine I can pick and try something different with.
I won’t go to any WH website and I sure as hell wouldn’t ever post on any of their sites. I want nothing to do with the Commie bastards in the WH or anyone associated with them.
http://thelibrary.org/lochist/periodicals/ozarkswatch/ow703k.htm
The Closing of the Fairburg Bank
by Donald R. Holliday
This is a true story. Only the names are changed.
As the first facts of it are remembered, the story of the Fairburg Bank’s closing is simple enough. Archer McMillan was the banker. Descended from one of the old farm families, a good family, he was a neighbor and kin of neighbors. Archer McMillan was an honest man, honest and trusted enough most people doubted the first rumors, in 1931, that the bank was failing. In 1932, the bank was ordered locked up by two men from the county seat. They were hired by the federal government, but no one remembers what branch of government. When the bank was locked up, John Frazier, a descendant of one of the old farm families, a good family, a neighbor and kin of neighbors, went to the bank with his rifle and forced a bank employee to unlock the doors. At the point of his rifle, he withdrew exactly the amount he had deposited. Lena Oberlander, too, asked for her money and was refused. “She carried a great old big heavy purse, and she nearly beat the cashier to death with it, and I believe he gave her her money,” Otis Patton recalled. Other depositors were less lucky, or forceful. Few received more than a small percentage of their money. Broke, the bank closed forever.
But this story has a past. That’s one of the complications of the first simple facts.
In Fairburg, a warm and prosperous little farm town where the land was good, if rocky, by hard work and hard thrift the people had lived well. With their hands they had cleared the land of trees and carried the rocks from the fields every time the plow turned up a new layer. Their corn thrived, and they traded part of the grain and milled part of it for their meal and distilled part of it for their spirit. They fed some of the grain and the fodder to their milk cows. Then they shoveled out their barns and returned the manure to the fields so new crops would thrive.
Trails to market towns developed into roads and railroads, which made it possible for Fairburgians to sell produce they did not need for their own use. With the money they got for the corn and cream and other things they sold, they bought shoes for themselves and their horses, new overalls, cloth for dresses and shirts. Sometimes they had to buy a coffin for an old one whose hands had picked too many rocks, or for a strong man who had been kicked in the head by a mule, or for a baby. But each year they saved a little, against hard times. Then Archer McMillan opened a bank, and the people took their hard-won money out of the jar in the cistern or the hole in the field or from under their feather bed and deposited it in the bank.
In the autumn of 1929 the American stock market crashed in New York and sent shock waves across the land that, in a year or two, reached Fairburg. Around the land, banks failed and federal men come and locked bank doors. Then the people couldn’t get their money. In some towns, people heard and passed on rumors about their banks. Sometimes, because of the rumors, the federal men locked the doors of banks that were solvent, but the people didn’t know that. They grew suspicious, then frightened. They knew only that the years of hard work of their grandparents and fathers and mothers they would have to do all over again on top of their own.
This happened in Fairburg.
When the rumors began in Fairburg and waxed strong and the bank was locked up in 1932, most people trusted in Archer McMillan and the Fairburg Bank. No McMillan had ever taken anything not his. Others believed Archer McMillan had become too greedy and had taken their money. A very few, wise in the ways of money that was only paper, believed McMillan and his bank were the victims of the national economic collapse. Almost all believed that John Frazier, in taking his own, had taken more than his share. In time, the fact that Archer McMillan’s fortunes seemed not to have been broken by the closing of his bank fed the bitterness of those who first believed he had taken their money. The fact also caused many of those who first trusted Archer McMillan to join the disbelievers. Their bitterness was doubled by their recriminations against themselves for having, at first, trusted their friend and neighbor.
So the simple first facts of the bank’s closing were complicated by the times—both the past and the national economic present of Archer McMillan’s bank. The times would not let the facts remain simple. Had the national economy recovered before the farmers of Fairburg wore out their horses’ shoes and harness collars, before they needed their trace chains replaced and rivets for hoes and single trees and double trees, before they wore out their own shoes and overalls and dresses, and before they exhausted local credit, the first budding spring and good harvest might have written an early end to the story. They could have survived easily, even thrived, for a year—for two years, less easily. They would have butchered their hogs and cured their hams and bacons and made their sausages and canned and dried their beans and greens and hilled out their Irish and sweet potatoes and carrots and turnips and milled and marketed their corn and wheat and sorghum and looked in full hope toward a new spring. But the national economy did not recover for many years, at least partly because the future of the farmers of Fairburg and much of the nation was to be blasted by successive years of devastating drought.
[37]
1932 went its way and turned into 1933. The Bateses and Fraziers and Pattons and Sullingers and Stubblefields and Williamses and all the others tilled their fields and planted seed bought on credit and dressed their fields and gardens. The rains came sparingly. The seeds germinated and sprouted and the farmers laid by their corn and waited for rain. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky through June. By the end of June, the corn and wheat had struggled to half growth when the grasshoppers attacked. By the end of July, the crops had withered and dried and, rustled by the dry wind, whispered arid dreams and mean thoughts to the farmers of Fairburg. They gathered the few nubbins of corn and wheat for meal and animal feed. “We had that fifteen acres there east of the big timber in corn,” Otis Patton remembered, “and it was just about shoulder high when the grasshoppers hit it so hard they were about to eat it up. We got bags of sawdust oozing with arsenic from the government office in Ridgeway and I scattered it on the field with a big spoon. The next day, the ground was thick with a layer of dead grasshoppers. We hired Estol Nevins to cut it with a corn knife and shock it in the field, and it was so hot and dry he had to cut it at night, by moonlight. It didn’t make much, but we put it up for winter feed.”
There was no cash crop. Early garden stuff—potatoes, cabbage, onions, peas—planted in the chill of late February and early March produced tolerably, but garden stuff planted late, after frost, withered with the field crops and produced the sorriest of sustenance. Farmers, townspeople too, hunted and gathered more wild game and greens and fruit. In July turnips and sorghum cane failed to sprout for lack of moisture. To the people of Fairburg, the Fairburg Bank’s failure seemed more critical now, Archer McMillan still less neighbor, his apparent comparative prosperity more suspicious. John Frazier, on the other hand, had become wiser.
Meanwhile, the national economy did not improve.
With no rain until November, 1933 provided poor prospects for 1934, but it came anyway. The local feed and seed and hardware stores, stretching to the limit, extended credit again for most farmers, the best ones. Some of those whose credit was cut off settled into pure subsistence—bare survival. Others packed up and left, for some job somewhere someone had talked about. The season was worse than 1933. Bitterly, the people remembered those dollars they had lost to Archer McMillan’s bank. 1935 came and went, worse than 1934. Fewer farmers got credit. More turned back their calendars to their grandfathers’ hard subsistence. More left. The harder times got, and they kept getting harder until 1938, the more Archer McMillan’s reputation shrunk. John Frazier’s only grew in stature.
By 1938 the drought eased. In one season good rains brought the earth back to original vigor. Only grudgingly, almost imperceptibly, a cell at a time, did the drought relax its grip on the seared minds of the people. Only years of good seasons could refresh that. By then, Archer McMillan and his family were regarded with general disdain around Fairburg. The name evoked deep suspicion or bitter resentment in the minds of the people of Fairburg, who themselves were changed forever. Otis Patton, a boy of eleven when the Fairburg Bank was locked up, said, “The McMillans are just plain old greedy.” His wife, Esther, a girl of six when the bank was closed, described years of eating corn and wheat, wheat and corn—boiled wheat, boiled wheat pudding, wheat mush, cornmeal mush, corn cakes, corn bread, hominy, hominy grits. She declared that she had determined one thing during the depression and drought, that she would do everything earthly possible never to be hungry again.
The decades following the depression and drought of the 1930s have brought economic good to Fairburgians. There have been other droughts, one severe, three years long, and there have been recessions, but never since has it been impossible, or even difficult, for Esther Patton to load her table to groaning with meats and vegetables and desserts.
Sixty-two years have come and gone since the lock-up of the Fairburg Bank. Feelings are still strong. Archer McMillan’s grandson, a man of seventy or so years, rises in instant anger to defend his grandfather at my first mention of the story. He is adamant in his belief that his grandfather never did anything wrong. Few Fairburgians now agree with him. One of my brokers to the past, born five years after the closing of the bank, looks to see whose relative might be listening, before telling me that John Frazier’s son “lives right over here by Stoneton.” His tone and manner suggest pride in living so close to the son of such a hero as John Frazier. Otis Patton has lived his sev-enty-four years with his face almost perpetually adorned with a boyish grin. He grows agitated, his hands clench and reclench, his grin twists into a grimace as he wrests from his mind the strongest language he can use and condemns the McMillans as “just plain greedy.”
For Fairburgians, this is a story of pain. Not a sudden, stabbing pain. This is the pain that claims a man, a family, a whole town, and won’t let go until time has erased from living memory the memories of many generations—the pain of suspicion, distrust, and greed.
Only little children know how to cure it.
[38]
Copyright — OzarksWatch
Very interesting, hints and history....
http://thelibrary.org/lochist/periodicals/ozarkswatch/ow801toc.htm
Ozarks Watch
Volume VIII, Number 1, 1995
Health and Healing
TABLE OF CONTENTS
* In This Issue
* Health and Healing in the Ozarks (by Robert Flanders)
* The Healing Tradition (by Robert Gilmore)
* In Defense of Granny Women (by Janet Allured )
* Traditional Healing in Modern East Africa (by Christie Eastman)
* T. M. Macdonnell, M. D. COUNTRY DOCTOR (By Robert Gilmore)
* The Jim Johnson Story (by Melinda Muetzel Hartel)
* Grandma’s Coming (by R. B. Mullinix )
* To Tell the Age of a Horse ( From The Toronto Truth)
* Samuel Baker’s Animal Medicine and Other Wisdom
* Preserve Historical Documents and Papers
* Book Reviews
* Birthing by Granny Women (By Thelma Keithley Bilyeu)
* Knowledge
* Last Look
* Publisher’s Information
Previous Issue | Next Issue | Other Issues | Keyword Search | OzarksWatch Home
CNSNews.com) – Anyone who posts comments on the White House’s Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter pages will have their statements captured and permanently archived by the federal government, according to a plan that the White House is now seeking a contractor to carry out.
full link:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53363
<<<<<
Soon the word freedom will be outlawed, as jehadi is.
Don’t utter the word and the war on terror is over..
Don’t say freedom and we will not know we are captive.
I found out by accident that rain water makes a wonderful fabric softener.<<<
When I was growing up, everyone caught rainwater in a big barrel and we used it on our hair and for delicate clothing washing.
They said another worker had told them to apply vanilla as you would any repellent and that it worked. We had nothing to lose so bought a large bottle of real vanilla at Big Lots, cheaper than elsewhere, and are sold on its benefits.<<<
Camping, LOL, been there and done that, cars,pickups and even owned campers.
I prefer to be out doors, so don’t really get much use out of the fancy campers.
Vanilla, yes that is said to work and don’t sell it short, it is used for breathing, on bites and even in your bath.
I like it for perfume, when I worked as a waitress, have been known to put some on a cotton ball and in my bra, so that it is there and not over whelming.
I am glad it is working for you.
Welcome to our thread, glad you found us.
White House Seeks to Capture and Archive Citizens’ Comments on its Facebook, YouTube, MySpace Sites
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2329815/posts
by KAMorin<<<
Thanks for the link and welcome to the thread.
Yipes! Glad I didn’t say anything there about Dear Leader.
I am probably on the list already, though, for all the spam emails I forwarded to flag@whitehouse.gov before they shut it down.
Welcome to the thread, glad you are going to read it, join in when you are ready/want to.
Dinner sounds good, I am glad your plants are producing for you.
LOL, rut ro COMRADE! The brownshirts will be knocking at your door anytime now!
They are very versatile.
I try to plant the “finger” variety, they seem to have less of a problem with bitterness.
Enjoy your meals.
Glad you came to read the thread, you are welcome here.
I’ve used my rain water for the garden.. Guess I better broaden my thinking.
Thanks for reading the thread.
I think the use of rainwater today, might depend on where one lived, in the city, it would have more chemicals in the air and not be as pure, as a country setting would be.
Greenwashing 9/11
Header
By Matthew Vadum
From inside the Obama White House, green jobs czar Van Jones has been orchestrating a campaign to greenwash the meaning of 9/11 using federal resources and a political front group he founded, new research suggests.
It is unclear if this is illegal but at a minimum it raises questions about ethics, self-dealing, and the proper use of U.S. government resources.
The group, called Green for All, was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in California on Dec. 11, 2007 by Jones. Green for All is one of two groups involved in a campaign called Green the Block. Green the Block was created “to educate and mobilize communities of color to ensure a voice and stake in the clean-energy economy,” according to its website. Jones was also on the board of the Apollo Alliance, a hard-left environmentalist group that is now running large chunks of the Obama administration. The group has acknowledged that it dictated parts of the February stimulus bill to Congress.
Read more ...
[a snippet and the comments should be read too..........]
On a White House-sponsored teleconference call Aug. 11 leaders of these groups said that they view Sept. 11 as a “Republican” day because it focuses the public on supposedly “Republican” issues like patriotism, national security, and terrorism. According to liberals, 9/11 was long ago hijacked by Republicans and their enablers and unfairly used to bludgeon helpless Democrats at election time. Shifting the focus of 9/11 from remembrance to environmentalism and community service helps diminish the day as a Republican symbol, they believe.
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