The most important piece of survival equipment you can own is your house. If you’re serious about prepping, you will need to think of your house as a survival machine. That is, you should choose and equip a residence that is set up to maximize your family’s chances of survival. This doesn’t mean you need a fortress or a place with a bomb shelter in the basement. Instead, it means that you need a residence where you and your family can live for a long time without any outside help—or at least minimal outside help.
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If you listen to the financial industry’s propaganda, you might believe that having a poor credit score means you will end up sleeping under a bridge and foraging for food in garbage cans. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s fairly easy to live with a poor or even a bad credit score; in fact, tens of millions of Americans are doing it. And guess what? The vast majority of those people have homes, cars, jobs, and washing machines, just like the rest of us. This doesn’t mean that a credit score isn’t important.
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“To boldly go where no one has gone before” – through its various incarnations, this was the continuing mission of the starship Enterprise, as its intrepid crew traveled the lengths and breadths of the universe in the star vessel that doubled as a cozy permanent home for all. As cosmic citizens, Captains Kirk and Picard
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In Washington, scientists developed a model home that not only avoids energy bills, but it actually produces net additional energy that the homeowners would be able to sell for profit. The National Institute of Standards and Technology created the “Net Zero Energy Residential Test Facility,” a home that uses an exciting combination of solar panels,
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One of the biggest challenges for a new homeschooling family is learning to live and work with each other, day in and day out. Rather than trying to imitate a school’s structure, I think it’s important for families to find a schedule and organizational structure that works for them. Some parents like to-do lists and detailed schedules; others prefer a more laid-back approach. I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I like the Moore’s approach of breaking up the day into short periods of academic learning, followed by longer periods of manual work and
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Hello folks. This is Bob Whitten, coming to you from beautiful, sunny Thomson, Illinois. I cut another hole in my house the other day. It is a big hole, and I’m pretty sure it’s in the right place, but you never know until everything is all back together. To date, I have cut eleven holes in our house, all for various reasons. I might add that five of the eleven holes were cut in the proper place on the first try. Five out of eleven isn’t too bad if you’re a baseball player. Five out
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There are a lot of unique and interesting ways for inventive and imaginative folks to heat and cool their off-the-grid homes. One method that is beginning to make a bigger splash is the heat pump, which works by transporting heat from one location to another, most commonly from outside to inside. When in operation, these
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Let’s face it: life is busy and complicated. We live in a consumer-based, commercial world that readily awaits our next purchase. While we have all of the convenience of smart phones and quick meals, all of the entertainment of toys and television and more stuff than most of us know what to do with, many of us feel too busy, tired, and pulled in too many directions to enjoy much of any of it. While I think it’s perfectly okay to have things that you enjoy, often times in our society this concept is carried
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America is very much a gun culture, and more weapons remain in civilian hands here than just about anywhere on earth, which is a good thing. We also have a fascination with pistols in this country, with the vast majority of the states having some sort of carry provisions in their laws allowing anyone not
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It would never occur to most people to look for construction materials in a farmer’s field. But when wheat, oats, barley, rye, or rice are harvested, the fibrous plant husks left behind are not just a useless waste product. When these leftovers, known as straw, are tightly bundled up into bales, these plant remnants can
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