The Digital Homesteader (Beta)

While meandering through the endless aisles of our local mega grocery store I happened upon a couple of carts of closeout items. These carts are worth noticing, we picked up a new coffee maker really cheap a couple weeks ago. This week they were selling a lot of emergency supply stuff. I picked up this really neat LED crank flashlight for $10. These retail for $40, so I thought it was worth a shot just from the savings factor alone. It has AM/FM, a fairly bright light (single LED or 9 LED), a flashing strobe with red LEDs added in and siren, a night light mode (which is being tested in a dark bedroom now) and compass. But one of the things that I really liked was that they thought to have a jack and cable so that I can plug in my iPod. During times of crisis it might be rather soothing to have a little Charlie Parker playing softly in the background.  It also has some kind of ability to charge your cellular, but the adapters won’t work with ours.  But hey, for $10 you can hardly go wrong. The best thing about it is that I won’t have to scramble around looking for batteries. The crank is supposed to charge the unit for 45 minutes of operation with just one minute of cranking. Early tests didn’t seem to work out that way at all, but its better than not having lights because I can’t find the batteries that I need when the lights go out!

I love looking at differenct cultures and learning. One of the things that strikes me every time is that the American culture is so used to our luxuries that we can’t possibly conceive of the idea of “going without”. But cultures that have never experienced these luxuries, or have eschewed them, don’t seem to be missing out at all. Now please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying that we need to sell everything that we have and join some primative community. I am saying that we can learn from them and possibly adapt some of our ways. Personally, I like have a toilet inside the house and plan to keep it.

All around us are people that have made conscious decisions not to have one convenience or another for a variety of reasons.  During the Great Depression people found that they had to cut back on a lot of things and make due. Wouldn’t it be a great practice to do so now? We have found that we don’t need the TV (shock!), we can get by without the phone.  I asked the family recently what they would have the hardest time giving up and the consensus is that we wouldn’t do well without air conditioning. That’s a tough one, but so many people for so many centuries have done fine without it. We have become spoiled.

I want to recommend a great fiction peice that I had never read until this past week although it is famous and has been out for 50 years. “Alas, Babylon” by Pat Frank. The premise is that there are a lot of nuclear bombs that fall on America and how the city of Fort Repose, FL adjusts to life after the bombs. It is very similar to the TV series Jericho in a lot of aspects, just in a different era.  It really got me thinking a lot about the value of what we have and some of the things that I would like to trade if we ever had need.  I don’t particularly think that a nuclear war is a significant threat today, but the priciples of what these people had to do to survive was compelling. Shelter, water, and food; everything else is secondary.