Sis sings the National Anthem SOLO at her new High School

For those of you who have been following since Oklahoma or before, you'll recall what a hard time Sis had moving away from her old high school. She really didn't want to move to Oklahoma so when she found out we were moving to northern Arizona, she was pretty happy. To her, three hours away was much better than moving 18 hours away (driving time.)

Well, I'm happy to announce that after a bumpy first week in a new high school, we are now one full month in. While we (again) are not happy with the level of education,  and we are still thinking about home schooling, I am super proud of Sis for having the courage to stand up in front of the whole school and sing the National Anthem before a volleyball game.

She wasn't nervous a bit, did a terrific job and was cheered by the whole gymnasium.

Life is good.

~OJD

Mmm...Beaver Butt!

Frosty morning, smoke billowing out of our pipe.

Figured out a little bug today. Since I have a computer with Internet Explorer 8, which is outdated, that is why I have not been able to use the "compose" part of Blogger. I have had to write the last few posts in HTML mode. Luckily, I know that language.

Thinking outside the box, I decided to give Blogger a try in my trusty Firefox browser. Low and behold, it works perfectly. Go figure, almighty Google (owner of Blogger) has screwed itself with it's own browser.

But anyway...


So, something new on the blog here. Might not interest many of the usual crowd (are you three still reading?) but it is teaching me a thing or two so I thought I would include it here. It's called Eating Healthy.

I know, I know. B.O.R.I.N.G...right? But, if most of  you are preppers, survivalists, homesteaders, farmers and the like, this is important stuff. As you MAY have noticed in some of my YouTube videos, I'm a rather LARGE guy. At 6'3" I have been weighing in at 290lbs for a few years now.

Do I like being this big? Of course not. But like many others out there, I've just kind of...given up. With the constant stress of full time school, full time family and full time work (and I should add full time debt because it is a huge source of stress) I just finally felt like the excuse of not having enough time to devote to health was valid. Sprinkle in a little guilt if I spent time away from family at the gym and I just didn't want to do it at all.

Until now.

I care about my family and my future. I want to live a long, healthy life and enjoy grandchildren and great-grandchildren so I've decided to make a change. Some of this is brought on by the discomforting inability to breathe after a simple short walk. Some of it due to comments or actions by people close to me (like a guy that keeps poking me in the belly as if to say "Dude, that thing is huge!) But for the most part, the change I am making is due to two things:

1) a really great friend who is helping me learn how to eat properly

and

2) I am finally in an environment where I can eat healthy.

Let me explain just a little. You're all intelligent people so I won't babble too much on this but...

We all know greasy, fried food is bad. We all know high fructose corn syrup and sweets can cause diabetes. Yet, we eat it. Mostly for convenience. Working the night shift for the past 8+ years has been my excuse for eating fast food every night. Well, there's nothing open at 3am besides greasy fast food joints, right? Or Circle K. So for years, I indulged in burgers and fries, tacos and burritos, you get the picture. Oh, and Dr Pepper by the gallons.

So now, with the help of a good friend of mine 1000 miles away and my new job which has a terrific cafeteria and a plethora of options, I'm taking it one meal at a time and getting healthy. I take a picture of every breakfast and lunch and send it to my friend via text message (with a picture). I describe what I am eating and he drills down about how bad it all is. Seriously. What I thought wasn't so bad, man. He's opening my eyes to stuff I didn't even think about.

As I've begun to learn things about food, glycemic index, GMO and raw foods, I thought maybe some of you could benefit. But since it's not the usual homesteading topic, I'll simply drop a blurb on here that I posted something new and link to it on a side page of this blog. Like I did my Farm Critters topic. The first one is live, read it on the Eating Healthy page. It's good information albeit NOT from professionals and is sprinkled with humor between to buddies.

Because, after all, if we're serious about getting prepared for the trouble that certainly seems to be heading our way thanks to our government leaders, we not only need to be prepared with food, water, medicine, weapons, and the like...but we also need to be in good enough shape to handle day to day activities like chopping wood, hunting game, household chores, outdoor chores and just plain playing around with our children.

Hope it helps.

~OJD

Our First Country Problem: Rodents Attacked Our Food Storage

Rodent damage to our Hard White Wheat bags.

Having lived in the city for the last 21 years, we have had to deal with ants, roaches, spiders, and noisy crickets. Never once did we have to deal with a rodent problem and likewise never had to defend our plentiful food storage.

In 2010, we constantly bought as much food storage as we could afford. I was working the equivalent of two jobs and we were lucky enough to pack away a year's worth of food for our family of eight. That was no small accomplishment.

We proudly displayed it on our kitchen loft for many months until a SurvivalBlog article got me to thinking "Maybe I shouldn't make this public knowledge." Some strategically placed cutouts turned our kitchen loft into a nice hidden cache. I found work lockers to be another great place to store additional food and put up a good 30-40 cans of soup there.

Another food storage casualty.

So our food storage had been safe...until now. When we packed up our food storage to relocate to northern Arizona, I made a great score in finding a DAILY discarding of big, wide meat boxes from our local Walmart butcher. These boxes held a ton, had nice notches for handles on the sides and were very sturdy. Before I returned from my Oklahoma journey, Wifey had packed 117 boxes with the help of the girls.

The food storage we bought in #10 cans was still in it's original boxing. The rest of our food storage was packed in mylar bags with oxygen eaters courtesy of our local LDS Cannery.  We packed hundreds of these mylar bags in boxes from Walmart and lugged them north. Little did I know, field mice were on standby, waiting for our arrival...and the handy little handle holes on the side of each box meant INSTANT ACCESS for our new friends.

They got several rice bags.

I also didn't know that mice would chew right through our cardboard boxes to get to our powdered milk.  Even the mylar bags proved no barrier for their little nibblers. We discovered tragedy today when we were looking through boxes for handles to add to the little girls' clubhouse wall. There they were, plain as day...mouse turds, all over the inside of the box.

As we began moving boxes away from the wall, the horror became more clear. They had chewed through the cardboard on several boxes and contents were spilled out onto the floor. We've been here three weeks and today we pulled 21 mylar bags aside that had holes in the bags.

So we spent half of our Sunday, which was very enjoyable up to this point, taking food storage out of cardboard boxes and putting them into home depot buckets and plastic boxes with secure lids.

Our question now is: "What do we do with the damaged items?" Do we have to throw it away? Some bags have such small holes in them that it seems hardly large enough to squeeze a rice grain through it. Having worked so hard to save up the money AND bag it all ourselves, I'm hoping somebody can tell me how to save this stuff. I guess the worst case scenario would be to feed it to chickens, once we get some more.

Besides the rice, we also lost:

All these bags have tiny little holes in them ranging from the large ones I imaged at the top of this post to little bitty holes only big enough for one grain of rice to slip through. So, are any of these salvageable? Should we dump them out and sift it for rodent feces to see if the bag got contaminated? Can we make the powdered milk and boil it or something to make it safe to drink?

I hope it's not all wasted.

~OJD