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So did everyone have a happy Turkey Day? We had a fun chaotic event. Not quite fifty folks showed up for croquette and turkey dinner at the local beach park. Four turkeys, one ham, five pumpkin pies and we ran out of mashed potatoes real early on. Oh well, we had enough turkey and pumpkin...

There is a book called "Basic Home Building" by Ortho Press and it pretty much shows you how to build a basic house. There is a book by Sarah Susanka called "The Not So Big House" which can give you some great design ideas. I don't own the second book, but I've used the first one to build...

How about clock repair? It is a fun hobby that can make a bit of side cash now and then. The antique key wound or weight driven clocks are the kind which folks will pay to have repaired and there aren't that many new clock repair folks out there these days. For your visible-to-the-neighbors...

Many farmers feed grain to cows, pigs, chickens, etc. If you want grass fed, just move here. Nobody can afford to import grain so if it is local beef or milk, it's grass fed. The dairy has several large fields of corn now, so I guess that will be feed, but they are at least growing it...

Too bad airfares are too expensive, goats along with a goat herder would be real good to keep the guinea, rezner and elephant grass down in the back. You could look into WWOOFing, (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) but I dunno if many of the farms would allow that many incoming critters.

:bun :bun :bun Bunny harvest today! A gallon sized glass jar packed full of white angora wool! Yay! :bun :bun :bun

There were cans for quite a few years, I'm remembering something like thirty something years but that doesn't seem right, before can openers were invented. That's probably why they have those iconic images of hobos with cans around a campfire and they have those raggedy edges with a curled up...

I try to not even go into town between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I usually end up sneaking in and out quickly once or twice anyway. Not on Black Friday, though. We don't buy much retail, just about everything - including presents - comes from yard sales. Our friends not only know this...

A lot of these preppers seem to think that a large storage closet of food and supplies is going to save them. Personally, I think they need to learn how to provide all those things for themselves off their own land if they truly want to be prepared. If there is someone with a crop of potatoes...

We used to have some sort of floating wick and there would be a layer of oil on top of water that the wick would burn. There would usually be flowers down in the water and these would be centerpieces for dinners and such. Sometimes there would be some color added to either the water or the...

See if she can find a place with owner financing and give them her story, maybe they will let her make payments. It is going to take years for her to get a decent credit score since she is basically starting at ground zero. At the moment, the banks aren't real keen to loan money and she...

When the local bakery owner died, they gave away all the stuff in the bakery and I ended up with about two hundred pounds of what I thought was flour, but it was called "Breadmate II" which turned out to be some sort of all natural preservative. Some sort of extract from flowers, I think it...

You can also look into "intentional communities" and see if you find any you like. Frequently, many of these groups were religious in nature since that was a common bond for all the members. If folks all share a common faith or world view, it probably makes it easier for them to get along...

We have a Bosch Aquastar and it does well for us. Better than the Paloma 16 which we had before since the Aquastar will start and run on a lower volume of hot water. I think the Paloma was too big for what we were using it for. They are sometimes called "on demand" water heaters since they...

Well, find out how much power the two chest freezers use, figure out what size of system would run them and then do the math. Depending on how much you pay for electricity, it may or may not be cost effective. Freezers only run for a portion of the time, so if you had a Kill-a-watt meter or...

For the first six or seven years we lived here we only had four 150 watt panels on the roof, I forget the brand. There is a charge controller, I forget the brand. It feeds into a battery bank of twelve deep cycle 6 volt batteries wired series to get the voltage up to 24volts and then in...

When I lived on a boat and didn't have an oven, there was a pan which could be used as an oven. It sorta looked like an angel food cake pan which sat on a ring and had a lid. The bread, cakes, potatoes, or whatever was being baked would go inside the ring so if it was a cake or bread it was...

You could always trim one side of the wick and leave the other side square and then see how the flame shape looks afterward. Sometimes I'll just nip the corners off, other times leave them square, sometimes make them round. It's interesting to see the way the different flame shapes make light...

We torture cast iron and it seems to not mind much. If we get a really rusty or cruddy one at a yard sale, I'll take it into DH's shop and hit it with some of his air tools. If it is a new pan with the not so smooth bottom, I'll grind it flat with one of his air grinders. Makes a lot of...

It's building a spinning wheel without a lathe and without any instructions so at the moment, it's a lot of design work and then finally into the workshop to get some parts made until the next change in design sends it back to the drawing board. If it turns out well, then I may make and sell...