Cookies, Newsletters, and Seeds

Today is a busy day. I have a podcast interview this morning and I’ll be teaching a serger mastery class this afternoon. I think we’ve resolved the class registration issue at the store. I am not being a diva by expecting students to register for my classes. I’m not psychic. The only way I know if I have students to prepare for is if they register for a class, and that’s nothing that any other teacher wouldn’t also expect.

I baked cookies yesterday. I told Susan I would fold the homestead foundation newsletters on my folding machine, and the easiest way to do that is to set up the machine in the kitchen and feed them through while I work on something else at the same time. She copied the newsletters on Monday and her SIL dropped them off here yesterday morning. I had promised the boys—our employees—that I would make them each a batch of cookies because they came over and checked on things here while we were in Tacoma in December picking up the new work truck. (We paid them for their time; the cookies are a bonus.) Both liked the ones I made before Christmas that were chocolate with peanut butter chips, so that’s what they got.

While I worked, I also listened to Jack Spirko’s podcast on YouTube. Yesterday’s episode was entitled This is Dystopia, Wake Up. The husband has been listening to Jack’s podcast for years. I listen less frequently, but it was through Jack’s podcast that I found Nicole Sauce and the Living Free in Tennessee podcast. All of these people—including the person I’m interviewing today for the podcast—are part of the same network. Jack was one of the speakers at Self-Reliance Festival, where I taught last October.

The husband came in to tell me he was leaving and heard me listening to Jack’s podcast. “You needed a hopeful and uplifting message, huh?” he asked me. We joke about doomer porn. I said, “Jack’s talking about the fact the we’re in the middle of a collapse, but most people don’t see it,” and the husband said, “I am reminded of it every day, trust me.”

[I had just spent an hour attempting to track down the title for the new truck. We had this problem two years ago when we bought the other truck. The county will no longer process title paperwork for LLCs, so when our business buys a vehicle, the title paperwork goes to a company in Billings for processing. Last time, it got lost for three months. The husband does not want to get pulled over for driving around on expired temporary tags.]

The message that Jack and Nicole and others are trying to get across is not based on fear mongering. Rather, it’s an exhortation to do what you can, when you can, to make your life the best it can be no matter what happens. And it’s not proscriptive. It’s not the “beans, bullets, and band-aids” kind of prepping. It’s a recognition that making one’s life the best it can be looks different for everyone depending on their circumstances and goals.

The temptation to succumb to the darkness and fear is overwhelming—that’s why the husband and I joke about doomer porn. (After everything I’ve been through in my life, I do gallows humor very well.) Much of what used to work reasonably well no longer works, and I think that will continue to get worse. We have a choice in how we respond, though, so I bake cookies and fold newsletters, because life goes on.

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My seeds arrived yesterday:

Talk about hope and optimism—there it is. Victory was already sold out of a couple of things I wanted—Fisher’s Early Sweet Corn and Carolina Amethyst peppers—but I substituted with other varieties. I don’t experiment much with my plantings. I find what works and stick with it, and I’ve been ordering from Victory for over 10 years because I’ve always had such good success with their seeds.

The husband and I will have to decide soon about raising pigs again this summer. We might take a year off. We’ll see.