Welcome

     Hi! Welcome to my survival blog. Just a little bit about me. I have been fascinated by survival since I was in High School (many centuries ago ;)) I would check books out of the library (we had to do that in those days, no Google :p) about making snares to catch animals for food, making a fish trap in a stream, identify edible plants, etc. It continued after I married and became a mother, with a subscription to Mother Earth News learning more about living with the land, and becoming more self-sufficient. I tried my hand at living in the middle of nowhere for 13 years, with no running water, an outhouse and only homemade power. I raised rabbits for food and learned to butcher them myself (although I found out I didn't really like the way rabbit tasted unless it was made into Chinese dishes. lol  My sweet "n" sour rabbit was to die for!). We raised horses, goats, chickens, a calf and a pig. We also had fruit trees and a vegetable garden. With no running water! lol  Although I have to say most of that was thanks to my ex-husband and the four 55 gallon blue plastic barrels of water he hauled 5+ days a week.

      And speaking of the pig. We went down to the local auction to see what was for sale. An adorable bunch of baby pigs were run into the arena and the bidding was furious. At the end we were the proud owners of a baby pig. Now we live in a farming community and sorry to all the pig lovers out there, but our aim was to fatten him up and then make bacon (so to speak. hehe) out of him. I love animals and baby animals of any kind are adorable, but I am a country girl and if it's been bought to be food, food it's going to be. With that in mind we named him Pork Chops (rabid animal rights activists need not respond, lets just agree to disagree. I don't preach to you, please don't preach to me. :))

      So Pork Chops came to live on our little ranch (we called it the Half Ass Ranch). At first he was a dutiful little pig and stayed in his sty, but that soon changed. He was the hoodini of pigs. No matter how many times I fixed his sty, no matter how many different ways I fixed it, he would escape. Pigs are notoriously extremely smart animals. I would have just given up and let him run loose, but we have a bad coyote problem here and I didn't want to feed them a nice pork dinner.

     Finally in desperation, I threw him in the dog run with our dogs. This run was about 48 feet long, 8 feet wide with a shed made out of sheets of plywood (4 feet wide, 4 feet tall and 8 feet long). The fencing was welded wire, semi-rigid panels. Finally something he couldn't get out of! Soon the dogs and pig adjusted, he was just one of the guys. He grew bigger and then one day we realized that the pig thought he was a dog. How do we know that? The run was parallel to the road and whenever a car would go by, the dogs would bark their heads off as they ran up and down the run. 


     One day I was outside by the run when a car passed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing. The dogs were doing their usual bark and run routine, with a slight addition. You guessed it, the pig was running up the down the run with the dogs barking (Yes barking....he sounded just like a dog). It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. We had a barking pig. I thought about how funny it would be to turn him loose the next time a car went by to see what he would do. But I was afraid he would either get run over or someone would wreck at the sight of a pig chasing their car.

     Well as you can imagine, we didn't end up eating the pig. Instead we sold him (in the country it's not as easy to justify keeping an animal like that just as a pet, especially for the ex-husband). He would have grown up to be a huge pig and potentially dangerous animal. But I will never forget our barking, car-chasing pig. :)

     Back to the real subject. We learned to take showers using five 1-gallon jugs of water, heated up on either the propane or wood stove, depending on whether it was winter or not. Conservation is the key, we had to learn to not waste our resources. Everyone should spend a few months at least living in this manner, it is a real eye opener about what you actually need to survive, as opposed to what we "think" we need.

     And I learned that even in the High Desert the temperatures can drop to extremes. One winter (and only one thankfully) we woke up to about 18 inches of snow on the ground and temperatures during the day started to drop. By that night they were below zero and a freezing fog (known to the local natives here as Pogonip, which means something like white death in Paiute) had rolled in. The fog stayed for about two weeks with the temperature dropping lower and lower, the snow sticking around. Now in the Nevada desert it snows, but it's gone almost as soon as it stops snowing. Not this time. A neighbor came by a week or so after it started to check and see if we were all right. He said his thermometer had recorded a low of minus 27. It's like we were living in Alaska not Nevada.

     At that point in my life, I didn't work. I was a ranch wife, or as I like to say it. I played with animals all day long. Such a tough job! Well my days with the snow quickly developed into a routine. I had a teapot and an old style camp coffee pot. I filled them both up with water and set them on the wood stove which had two burners on it (I miss that old stove! Soup cooking on the front burner all day smelled so heavenly and tasted divine!), then when one was boiling hot I took it out and poured it on someones water dish so they could have a drink. No water tank heaters for us with no electricity. On the way back into the house, I would grab an armload of firewood which was stacked in the front yard. Rinse and repeat for the about two dozen chickens, assorted goats, rabbits and 5 horses. The horses I would have to make multiple trips to make sure they got enough to drink otherwise they can colic, which can kill them. 


     This was my life for at least 2 weeks (I don't remember exactly how long it lasted, but it seemed like an eternity at the time). We lived in a single wide trailer that had two bedrooms, one at each end. We had to take blankets and hang them at the beginning of the hallways to block them off and we moved into the front room and kitchen to live. Our only sources of heat were the aforementioned wood stove and a portable kerosene heater that is not really supposed to be run in the house or unattended. We would run the kerosene heater at night while we slept to supplement the coal we threw in the wood stove to keep it burning all night. Thankfully we didn't asphyxiate from carbon monoxide. We ended up sending my daughter into town to stay with grandma to make sure she stayed warm. Btw there is nothing quit like an outhouse in below zero weather. *shudder* But the temperature finally broke, we and all our animals survived and all was well.

     So those are a basic outline of my credentials such as they are. No I haven't survived a disaster, but I survived 13 years living in conditions that a lot of people cannot even imagine. So I want to share what I  have learned and I want to learn even more that I hope you all will share with me. :) I have a couple of friends who will be joining me on this blog, but I will let them speak for themselves.

     Thank you for reading and if you managed to reach the end here, great! Jewels