Good Things Friday (223) and Link Love
June 2, 2023
1. Week one of camp for JB: so far so good! This is a new one for all of us so we (JB and I, separately) were slightly apprehensive. Them: what if no one likes me?
Me: what if it’s run by untrustworthy bastards?
They found two familiar faces and two more kids from their school, so that was their concern allayed. I spent the whole first day camped out in the waiting area to keep an eye on things. My butt wasn’t pleased by the hours on a hard chair but my worrywart soul was appeased.
2. WE MADE IT TO FRIDAY. OMG.
I feel like the Frugalwoods must have been following the wrong people before dreaming of growing all their food. I started following one farmer friend years ago (Neolithic Sheep) and learned immediately that, physical limitations aside, I didn’t ever want to HAVE to grow all my own food. It’s an unfathomable amount of work. The chores never stop, the harvest comes when the harvest comes, and you’re never guaranteed a harvest which is especially stark if you’re depending on it. I like the idea of growing some of my own food on a very small scale, like we do with the potatoes. A few harvests are a treat, and fun, with long periods of growth in between.
I know about the looming crisis with the debt ceiling fight though I can’t wrap my head around the details at the moment. What I do find easy to understand is that a default would hurt a hell of a lot of real people, none of whom the politicians care about: Financial Concerns – How a U.S. government debt default would affect my military family
Jane Fonda Shades Redford, Disses Godard, Dishes On Hepburn In No-Holds-Barred Appearance In Cannes: “We would shoot sometimes 14 hours a day,” she noted. “And Lee Marvin took me aside and he said, ‘Fonda, we’re the stars of this movie. If we allow them to work us so many hours, we’re not the ones that get hurt. It’s the crew. We have to stand up for the workers, for the crew, and we have to refuse to work these long hours. We have to stand up for the crew.’ And that had never occurred to me. That was a huge lesson from Lee Marvin….
…
on the issue of climate change:
“We still have reason to be hopeful if we do everything right. But I’m saying this is serious. We’ve got about seven, eight years to cut ourselves in half of what we use of fossil fuels,” she said. “And unfortunately, the people that have the least responsibility for it are hit the hardest — Global South, people on islands, poor people of color. It is a tragedy that we have to absolutely stop. We have to arrest and jail those men — they’re all men – [responsible for the crisis].”
I saw that FW’s post and was like, how could you not know this going into it? Homesteading sucks! It is more than a full-time job and most farmers have done some form of specialization since the agricultural revolution back in like the 18th century and likely earlier (there definitely was specialization, but I’m not sure about the more than 50% of “most” prior to the agricultural revolution). My thought was like, have you never lived somewhere where a neighbor has grown too much zucchini? I can’t imagine uprooting without doing more research into it. I hadn’t actually realized until that post that they had thought they would grow most of their food. It’s a good post and I don’t want to shame learning, but also… I have to wonder about the surprise aspect.
A big problem with debt ceiling talks is that the democrats actually do care, so the American people continue to be held hostage by republican politicians. If they didn’t care, then they could choose to not negotiate and republicans would lose the game of chicken.
Yes it’s well written and of course it’s always good to learn! It’s just their surprise very much surprised me.
I’m so tired of the country being held hostage to Republican politicians.
All their food = wheat? Dairy? I was a little shocked that anyone doesn’t know how much time and acreage is required to not be malnourished in the winter. Since well before the Romans put up cities people have been outsourcing food production. But yeah, kind of almost charmingly naive except farming is brutally hard work. My dad grew up in a farming family and they lived very near poverty and it was literally sunrise to sunset all summer long.
I would absolutely immediately fall over on the lack of rice paddies and wheat fields. I need my rice! And other carbs!
My grandparents were farmers and they had to work well over a hundred acres in order to make enough to support their family.
I told a gardener that I was disappointed to have gotten so few potatoes when I planted half of my garden box with potatoes. He said yeah you need an acre for that. An acre!
AN ACRE! Thank goodness I have really low expectations. XD I’ll be happy to get 2-4 harvests of a half colander at a time each year.