"I see nothink!"

I don't follow the daily ups and downs on the stock market -- after all, we don't own stocks -- but of course there are people who watch constantly. They chart, they predict, they explain, they apologize, and they analyze every wobble, every peak and valley, every move.

One such website is ZeroHedge. I dip into this website a couple times a week because it's interesting to read explanations about what the financial world is doing. And ZeroHedge, unlike other financial sites I've seen, tends to look at the overall picture. In other words, they tend to see the forest and the trees.

A couple weeks ago they put up an article entitled For The "Nothing Is Happening... Everything Is Awesome" Crowd in which they gave their views on why "nothing" happened to the financial world in September.

September, it seems, was considered a significant month. Many financial signs appeared to be coinciding in a way that made preppers and investors alike nervous. The stock market made wild swings, then straightened out. Stocks tanked and recovered.

But nothing earth-shattering happened. The month came and went, and we're all still here. This, of course, allowed the "See I told you so" types to say, well, "See I told you so."

But ZeroHedge saw it differently. To quote some portions (and leaving out some of the financially technical parts, which are well worth reading):

A lot of people out there expected something to happen in September that did not ultimately happen. There were all kinds of wild theories floating around, and many of them had no basis in reality whatsoever. But without a doubt, some very important things did happen in September.

As I warned about ahead of time, we are witnessing the most significant global financial meltdown since the end of 2008. All of the largest stock markets in the world are crashing simultaneously, and so far the amount of wealth that has been wiped out worldwide is in excess of 5 trillion dollars.

In addition to stocks, junk bonds are also crashing, and Bank of America says that it is a 'slow moving trainwreck that seems to be accelerating.' Thanks to the commodity price crash, many of the largest commodity traders on the planet are now imploding.

So I honestly do not understand the "nothing is happening" crowd. It takes ignorance on an almost unbelievable level to try to claim that "nothing is happening" in the financial world right now.

What we witnessed in September was not "the end" of anything. Instead, it is just the beginning.



Make of this what you will.

Me, I'm glad we haven't invested in the stock market. I'd rather invest in the "livestock" market.

Guest post on SurvivalBlog

Today I have a guest post on SurvivalBlog:

The post is entitled The Harsh Truth About Bugging Out of Cities, and long-time readers may recognize it as a synopsis of a three-part series written by Don back in June.

Oatmeal-raisin cookies

I decided to make cookies a couple weeks ago, and Younger Daughter plugged for oatmeal-raisin. I hadn't made those in while, so I agreed.

I use a favorite recipe found in this book:

These cookies are nice and moist and I've been very pleased with the recipe.

I double the recipe, and the resulting dough is too much for my largest mixing bowl; so I use two mixing bowls and just put a single recipe in each bowl. Here are the dry ingredients (except flour):

Wet ingredients:

Salt, baking soda, vanilla, cinnamon.

One bowl mixed, one not (yet).

Now the flour. It's too hard to mix if I add the flour earlier.

Last of all, raisins.

These cookies take vigilance while in the oven. A minute too long, and they're too crisp for my taste. A minute too little, and they're not quite cooked. The recipe says 8 to 10 minutes baking; I set my kitchen timer at 8 minutes at first, but usually I'm satisfied at 9 minutes. Everyone's oven will be different.

A delicious treat anytime.

Molly Green subscriptions on sale

Molly Green, the excellent homesteading/homemaking magazine I write for, is having a BOGO sale. (For the internet illiterate among us -- yes, I had to look it up -- BOGO means "Buy One Get One").

What this means is you can get Molly Green for two years for the price of one -- regularly $89.90 down to $39, but the sale ends October 23. Details are here.

Included with the subscription is:

• 8 PRINT Molly Green Magazines (four each year)
• 60+ back issues of vintage Molly Green Magazine
• 30 Bite-Sized Guides (one each month)
• 104 Dine-on-a-Dime meal plans (one each week)
• 5 Planners
• Seasonal desktop images
• PLUS access to over 10,000 streaming-videos media library through RightNow Media!

The media library includes Veggie Tales, Adventures in Odyssey, Dave Ramsey, Francis Chan, holiday movies, apologetics, resources for all ages, etc. via your computer, smart phone, or Roku.

I have to admit, Molly Green is just one of the prettiest, spiffiest publications out there. It focuses on HOME -- homesteading, homeschooling, home businesses, homemaking, etc. The photography is beautiful, the articles are varied and interesting, and altogether this is a heckuva deal.

Welcome FarmWife Products

When we decided to begin accepting select advertising last month, we specifically wanted to showcase home businesses with products that might appeal to our rural- or preparedness-oriented readers. No more big mega-companies (with the exception of Tattler reusable canning lids). We wanted to profile folks whose creativity and ingenuity are allowing them to make a living using their hands and their brains.

Here’s a perfect example: we’re pleased to welcome our newest advertisers, Judith and Mike Ozmer of FarmWife Products, purveyors of wondrously hand-crafted soaps. And when I say hand-crafted, I don’t mean they just mix the ingredients – I mean they obtain local organic grass-fed beef tallow, render it themselves, and go from there. Wow.

FarmWife Soaps was born after the Ozmer’s favorite source of homemade soap dried up. Wanting to continue using a natural product, Judith decided to learn how to make creamy high-lather soaps herself, and the rest is history.

FarmWife Soaps come in a variety of fragrances, including Forest Camo (inspired by our dear friends Paratus Familia), lemon, orange cream, and other delectable scents. They deliberately package their soap in “cheap little paper” to keep costs low (after all, they remind us, they’re selling soap, not fancy packaging).

Right now, as an introductory offer, FarmWife Products is having a special: buy six bars and get free shipping.

FarmWife Products also sells ethereal hand-spun wool items – once again, crafted from beginning to end, from sheep to final product. They’re also offering free shipping with the purchase of any wool item.

If you read the About page on the Ozmers, you’ll quickly see these folks are hard-working, resourceful, flexible, and talented – in short, they epitomize the can-do entrepreneurial spirit of Rural Revolution readers, which is why I’m so pleased to showcase their products.

Welcome!

Reality hits

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called How Hard Can It Be? in which I scolded people who are armchair preppers or keyboard gardeners for thinking homesteading or self-sufficiency is a piece o' cake. Quoting from the post:

"Too many people think homesteading is a snap. Eh, how hard can it be? You plant seeds, they grow. In a few months you harvest a bountiful crop and can/freeze/dehydrate it. You get a cow, you milk it. Criminey, what’s the big deal? How hard can it be? ... What concerns me are those who people think they’ll wait until AFTER the bleep hits the fan to move rural and learn self-sufficiency ... because, after all, how hard can it be?"

So it was with great sympathy that a comment came in from reader Heather as follows:

"Because I don't know where else to put this, I thought I'd add that we've found out that you're right -- it's hard to be self sufficient. We've lived in our new place for 9 months and wanted to do chickens and a garden first. I was SO proud of our garden -- it's neat rows of baby green things shooting up. Then, a storm to end all storms, torrents of rain washed all my seedlings away and the garden never recovered. As for chickens, we had 21 last spring and since then we've lost 2 to owls, 16 to raccoons, and the remaining 3 have mites. Listen to Patrice, y'all!"

I sincerely hope Heather sticks it out. The learning curve is steep on a homestead, but well worth it in the end!

UPDATE: Reader "Montana Guy" had an excellent point: "The only ones who never fail are the ones who never try to create anything." Amen and well said.

Canning leftovers

Last week I prepared one of our family's favorite dishes, orange-roasted chicken, from a Cornish Cross we raised last year.

After the meal, I deboned the rest of the chicken...

...and gathered up all the scraps. A chicken carcass is far too useful to waste.

So into a stockpot it went. I brought it to a boil, then lowered it to a simmer.

I added about 1/4 cup of vinegar, which helps draw the nutrients from the bones.

Then I set the burner on the lowest possible gas, covered the pot, and let it simmer all night long.

In the morning it was a revolting-looking mess.

I strained out all the bones, etc.

This yielded about a gallon and a half of stock. Good rich stuff, full of nutrients!

I like to can stock in pints (rather than quarts). Because my stock is just rough-filtered, it has tiny bits of meat in it, so I used the pressure canner.

Meanwhile I also took out of the freezer some homemade teriyaki sauce.

This was left over from a neighborhood potluck meal a few months ago. Like the chicken stock, it also has bits of meat in it; so I froze it until such time as I was using the pressure canner for another meat product. This means 75 minutes at 10 lbs. pressure (adjusted for our elevation, about 12.5 lbs.).

When defrosted, it filled three jars.

When ready, everything went into the trusty canner.

By the end, I had 11 pints of stock and three pints of teriyaki sauce.

Waste not want not!

Projects galore

We just -- and I mean just -- finished the busy season for our woodcraft business. The last shipment went out Friday, by the skin of our teeth. Don's been putting in long, long hours, stressed and harried, as he rushed to get everything done.

For weeks, tankards shared space with garden produce...

...and monopolized the kitchen table. We all picked our way over and around drying tankards, crates, newspapers, glue, rubber bands, rubber hoses, and other accouterments of our trade.

Then, suddenly, it's over. The season is finished. At last my dear husband can take a deep breath and relax. (And today is his birthday too!)

Now he can tackle the endless farm chores that need to be done.

No really, this is relaxing for him. He's been salivating at the thought of getting projects completed before winter, and finishing neglected projects started awhile ago. The first thing he did was sit down and draw up a preliminary "wish" list of what he wants to accomplish:

There's no telling how much of this list we'll get done before the snow flies, but as we're fond of saying, wish lists are free and we can put whatever we want on them.

Yesterday he came inside and felt the need to immediately rush to the next task. Then he paused. "I keep telling myself to slow down," he said. "I have to stop with the hurry-hurry-hurry mentality. NO. It should be steady-steady-steady."

And so, little by little, slow and steady, he's working to his heart's content on projects galore.

Relationship advice du jour

From Grammarly:

When it comes to relationship advice, I've seen worse.

Missing a doodle

Remember the Jersey Giant chicks we got last June?

Here it is three and a half months later, and they're definitely showing their genes as giant birds. The roosters (we have three) are bigger than our adult older ladies (Americaunas, Buff Orpingtons, etc.), and the young Jersey giant hens are just about the same size as the older birds. At only three and a half months, they clearly have a lot of growing yet to do.

The hens are still too young to start laying -- we don't expect their first little pullet eggs for another two months or so -- but the boys are starting to get randy. Our farm has missed the lusty crow of a rooster since the sad loss of our beloved Snap last May, but now the boys are tuning up and finding their voices, so once more we're being serenaded.

Early crowing attempts for young roosters are pretty funny. It resembles nothing so much as the caw of a hoarse raven -- no melody, no syllables, just a croak.

But practice makes perfect. They're getting better, though none of them are Pavarotti yet. "He's missing a 'doodle' in there," noted Older Daughter this morning, listening to one fellow's attempt.

Meanwhile, when we ordered these chicks from the McMurray Hatchery, they threw in one free "surprise" chick into the batch. We had no idea what breed or gender it would be.

It turned out to be another rooster, a virile manly little guy ... with the emphasis on little. Especially compared to our Jersey Giants, this guy is so small we wonder if he's a bantam breed.

Because he's so small, this little guy is very skittish and something of a scaredy-cat. We named him Barney and think he's the cutest little thing. Even his crow is soprano, in keeping with his size.

Unfortunately we don't need another rooster; and since little Barney is just too sweet (and small) to put in the freezer, we're going to see if we can find a good home for him.

Does anyone have any idea what breed he is?

UPDATE: I think reader Sarah nailed it. Little Barney sure does look like a Silver Leghorn.