EMCOMM Exercise

Those of you who became licensed ham radio operators, I felt the need to commend you for your efforts and let you know that your obedience has been noticed well beyond Powder Springs stake--- word has spread to surrounding stakes as well. You have set an example that is impressive. So feel good about yourself! You've done a good thing.

Now moving forward, Saturday (1/15/2011) we will have the first multi-stake net in North Georgia. We will practice (probably relay style) communicating with each to see how we will have to do it to get the most communication accomplished. If you are a Ham and are unable to attend, then look into downloading Echolink and go to Walmart or Staples and purchase a headset (headphones and mic combination). Crank it on and start your highspeed listening....working up your confidence to interact there yourself.

As I said, this is the FIRST multi-stake net, implying there will be others-- and there will be. There will also soon be a local WARD net too. It will operate a little less often, but will operate soon nonetheless. Hopefully it will provide an opportunity for some of us to gain more courage and confidence AND EXPERIENCE so that larger nets and communication activities will scare us less.

So this is your heads up! If you are interested in participating, be at the church Saturday morning by 8am, or post/email your questions.

Prepare for Power Outage

Sunday morning, I woke up not feeling quite right. I stayed home from church and as the day went on, I got sicker and sicker. By the night, I was asking for a blessing because of intense body pains and misery. It wasn't hard to make myself go to bed that night either! I woke up off and on all night, but when morning came, I woke up and noticed it was pretty cold in the air. I live in a house... in GEORGIA... and its barely December... and we went to bed with the heat on... Where did this frigid air come from? Tommy tells me --- the power is out.

What timing!!

Thank goodness I had done lots of laundry just 2 days before and had pulled out quilts to wash so they wouldn't smell musty. The kids had ample to wear and extra covers to wrap up in. The power outage only lasted a few hours and then it was back on again, but what if it wasn't? I had no electricity to run my tv to tell me if something was wrong. My storm radio is ready, but the weather was fine so I wasn't going to get answers that way. The internet was down because it requires power to operate even off a satellite. I had taken a hot bath before bed, but had not washed my hair,...so my head felt especially yucky knowing I couldn't go jump in a hot shower right now....because my hot water heater needs power to work.

It could have been a bad situation. Luckily it was just a warning call. If I had needed hot water, I do have a camp stove and a bottle or two of propane left from camping season. I had all those warm blankets and quilts and plenty of clean clothing for everybody (including socks!) and even have a kerosene heater I could use (if I go buy some kerosene to put in it--oops, something I haven't thought to do yet!) I was fine -- THIS time.

But what about next time?

And what about if it were you?

Time for Batteries!

Normally you see signs up this time of year saying "Change your batteries when you set your clocks back!" Well, the powers that be are changing the timechange date on us again, so that puts us resetting clocks on November 7th.

Well that gives you time to get new batteries! Scour your house and your storage items. Get an idea of the sizes and styles of batteries you need and start shopping now to get them! You can find coupons in store circulars to make this easier on your wallet too. (Try sites like http://www.qponqutie.com/ for a wide variety of printable coupons.)

You need batteries for things such as:

• smoke alarms
• carbon monoxide detectors
• portable radios
• weather alert radios
• ham radios
• flashlights
• hearing aids
  

And a little "survival trick" that uses a battery....
Use some steel wool with a battery (we keep a 9volt on hand for this). Put the battery to the wool and have some wood on hand because you'll have a fire in literally a second or two. Firebuilding is one of those survival skills that is critical, and preparing in this way can be a huge blessing.

It never hurts to have an extra battery or two on hand either ;)

Where Are You?

There is much to consider in the efforts of Emergency Preparedness for a family. I've found that you can't judge a family's preparedness by how they look, what their income level is, or how actively they collect food storage items. I've discovered that some of the lowest income families have a larger storage than some higher income families! I guess that comes about due to prioritizing funds. Of course, the opposite is just as true- some higher income families are quite well prepared too.

So where are you?

Food storage seems to be the larger number of items to collect, and is generally where most people start. So take a moment to look at YOUR collection. Do you have a week's worth of food to sustain YOUR household without having to go shopping? If not, I challenge you to accumulate that much and store it with appropriate dates, and have at least that much completed BY December 31st of this year. This can be as overwhelming or as simple as you make it. Achieve this goal and set a new goal, a 3-month supply for your household.

Times are more difficult than they once were. Money is less available than it was not very long ago. The weather is a bit more unpredictable than in times past, making growing seasons fluctuate a bit and conditions less productive. You may need your storage sooner than you realize! It may be due to a job loss, or a loss of a family member who normally provides an income. It might even be due to the "end of days" predictions coming to pass. No matter what causes you to need that storage, it is better to have it and not fear.

If you have collected a 1-week supply of food storage, then set your goal to a 4-week supply instead...and still aim for December 31st. Be as complete as you can, including fruits, vegetables, grains, powdered dairy products, snacks and seasonings. Dehydrated, frozen (but don't rely on a freezer for the majority of your storage!), freeze-dried, canned,...whatever form your food is in, collect it now! Hurry before Christmas shopping takes your last available dollar for something a little less valuable!

Honey Storage

This post is more of a personal nature, but in sharing it with you, I hope you get ideas of things you can do to increase your own storage by relying on Mother Nature a bit.

As some of you know, our family raises bees. Now don't misunderstand what I'm saying,..."I" do not raise bees...nooooooo way! My daddy did that while I was growing up and I didn't enjoy a single minute of it. I told my husband when we married that if he wanted to get involved in yucky hobbies like beekeeping, he had to deal with it by himself. A few years ago, we moved in with my parents for a few months, and of course it was during the honey season. Daddy got Tommy hooked...and now I live with bees again. For some reason, its not as terrible now that I'm grown as it was when I was a kid. Perhaps that's because we tend to worry about the bees together instead of it being just one person in the house doing that. Perhaps its because I'm a Family Herbalist now and I recognize benefits I never even heard of when I was kid. Or maybe after all these years, I've gone crazy. Who knows!

Anyway, here in Georgia, the "honey flow" as it's called happens just as summer is beginning. Sometimes you can even rob the bees a second time at the end of summer. And because bees are especially dedicated workers, they do their best to keep that honey coming in. [Inserting a sidenote here: I've written an ebook about bees and beekeeping. It doesn't teach how, but instead it correlates bees with life and looks at them in a spiritual way. Interested? Visit www.4m-designs.com and click on The Honeybee Religion.]

Last Saturday, our family went into "busy bee mode" and robbed three beehives. Tommy and Manti suited up in whites, hats, veils and gloves and approached with smoke. The smoke is used just to help calm them down a bit...the bees, not the men. It makes me think a little of those old ways of Native American people where they sat amongst their enemies and smoked a pipe. It was a calming experience then too so that matters of importance could be spoken of in appropriate ways. Interesting thought, don't ya think?

Anyway, back to the bees... When the bees move out of the way enough you can put your hands inside their house, boxes of frames filled with wax are taken off and carried inside. Some beekeepers believe that they can form a relationship with the bees, where the bees recognize the beekeepers scent and mannerisms and respond differently towards them than to other people. Tommy is this type of beekeeper.

Once you have boxes/frames of honey-filled wax inside, you quickly find you have a dripping mess and sometimes even bees who just can't walk away from their hard work.

I was particularly intrigued to watch these bees cleaning each other up. Some of them get squished as their hive is disturbed, and some of them get honey dripped on them. They actually tended to each other and worried over the other bee instead of themselves. Impressive characters!

Notice the covering you see on the frame of wax? The bees make that, and it is formed over those little slots to act as a cap. It protects the honey once it is "ripe"...I guess you could call it that. It means the water content has been sufficiently evaporated and the honey is ready to be used. You can't get honey out of it that way though, which means you have to slice off those cappings and quickly put the frame into your big gadget called an extractor. It's an ugly gadget, but it does the job!

Our extractor has 3 slots for frames. You can see a frame in each one. A lid goes on top of it, and then you turn the handle on top. This causes the basket inside (which holds your frames) to spin, thus slinging out the honey from the open wax compartments. It slings little droplets of honey all inside this big barrel (which is the size of a 33 gallon trashcan) and collects at the bottom. After you spin it one direction, you turn the handle in the opposite direction to more fully empty the wax frames. THEN,....you open the lid, remove each frame and turn them around so you can spin the honey out from the other side of each frame. If you don't put the lid back on,...you will be glittering from honey splatters! Ask me how I know!

(overlook my unorganized pantry showing please)

When you complete all the frames, you've got gallons of honey in the bottom of your extractor. There is a "gate" on a spout at the bottom of the extractor, and you open the gate to let the honey flow out. It is always possible for debris to get into it at this stage, but not a lot. From here, it pours into a 5 gallon bucket that has 3 baskets on top of it. The first basket has a mesh bottom that filters out the large particles of broken wax and whatever else. It's very much like bridal veil fabric. The next basket has a smaller weave that filters even smaller particles, and the third basket has such a tiny weave that it can catch the ittiest bittiest things you can imagine. What you collect in the bottom of the 5 gallon bucket is clean honey. This bucket also has a spout and a gate, and from here, you fill your clean jars and cap them. Here is our first jar of honey this year:

There is something about bees that is really remarkable... take a look at last Saturday's honey collection in jars....

Do you see how there are 3 different colors of honey here? Remember that we robbed 3 different hives. Each hive made its own unique honey blend. As tiny as they are, they are still so individual!

Vinegar Magic

Multi-purpose items are just fascinating to me. I love it when I discover ANOTHER reason why I want something, and now I've done it (yet again) with vinegar. I already knew vinegar makes pickles taste great, and it preserves my hot peppers and cleans my mirrors and windows. Recently I found that vinegar applied to a sunburn will relieve a lot of the fever and pain associated with it. That makes it cool! (ok, bad pun, sorry) Well here are MORE reasons to keep vinegar stored in your pantry:

• vinegar will take out smoke smells from clothes
• vinegar will remove sweat stains from clothes
• vinegar can deodorize the kitchen drain
• vinegar (combined with baking soda) will unclog a drain
• vinegar deters ants

That list is found on dollargeneral.com, so go read more!

My friend tells me that she uses vinegar on insect bites and it takes the itch away FAST and PERMANENT. You don't even see a whelp for very long after using it. See vinegartips.com to learn as many as 1001 uses of white distilled vinegar! That's a LOT of uses!

And after you make a couple pages of notes, head out to the store and stock up on vinegar! Don't forget to label the bottle with the date and USE it. Don't let stuff sit in the pantry and just wait for a disaster to happen. Use the things you store and when you open a bottle, buy a new one to replace it in your storage.

Sun Preparations

I recently dealt with quite an ugly sunburn. In trying to take care of it, I used several different products in hopes of getting pain relief as well as speed up the healing time. Fortunately, I had several options already at home in my first aid kit and in my herb collection. I say "fortunately" because my burn was so severe that certain articles of clothing caused me tremendous pain. If I had to have gone to the store to purchase something, I would have needed to wear very uncomfortable clothes and suffer from those clothes rubbing my burns. Thank goodness I was prepared!

If you are living in a southern state, your chances of getting a sunburn are increased due to the nature of the environment of your area. Don't think that you are "in the clear" if you live in Alaska! The sun DOES still shine there too! None of us want to live in a cave with no sun exposure, so the wise thing would be to store some items you can utilize should you have a little excess sun exposure.

Now remember I tried several things, and luckily I had good results with all that I tried, but I did have some favorites. I think my MOST favorite was aloe gel. My skin absorbed it rapidly which kept moisture in it and I think it has helped reduce the severity of the peeling and itching. I have a Natures Sunshine brand aloe gel that is thin and easy to apply. It doesn't leave a sticky residue behind like aloe gel straight out of the plant does, so it felt good and it brought instant relief. It has citric acid in it too, which is a plant matter that acts as a preservative, so it lasts a while even once its been opened. (I make my own deoderant and this is one of the ingredients of my recipe, giving me a second reason to have it on hand.) I have another aloe product that has menthol in it, which brings on a cooling sensation right away too. I liked that one as well. Aloe is inexpensive and readily available, so its definitely a top choice for me. I also have an aloe plant in my kitchen windowsill which is an added bonus because its pretty, its available if I get a kitchen burn, and it replenishes itself regularly. Renewable resources are GREAT!

Next is lavender oil and a calendula cream. Calendula takes care of the skin and is an ingredient for a lot of skin preparations, even for babies. Adding lavender essential oil to it gives added antiseptic properties and awesome analgesic abilities. So I took the lavender oil and doused my skin with it. Lavender is great for pain relief, but it can get expensive so that makes it more of a second choice option for me. The calendula cream is one I make, so that cuts cost down for me there. It has a wide range of uses, but by itself it doesn't take the pain away nearly as much as I'd like it to.

Third is cider vinegar. Now you can use any vinegar of course, but I prefer REAL cider vinegar (the kind that still has "the mother") because it has none of the chemical stuff in it that I prefer to avoid. Plus, cider vinegar has other abilities (too numerous to mention in this post) and its inexpensive too. I poured a good amount onto a tissue and dabbed it on my burned skin. It eased the pain significantly and immediately, and I think it sped up the healing time too because I started itching immediately as well! Tommy said he thought it was probably the histamine release that caused me to itch,...I don't know. I just know it was maddening for about 45 seconds. Mesa had gotten a bit of a burn too and we tried this on her back with identical results.

Those are my top 3 picks. All three are easy to store and have multiple uses.
Whatever YOUR choices are, plan ahead and store a little extra just in case of burns....whether by the stove, a campfire or the sun...they all hurt! Burned skin compromises your immune function too, so take care of it before it can become a bigger problem.