Taking Care Of Yourself First Helps Everyone

I have a story that I often tell people. I do it so much that they get tired of hearing it. Now you get it.

If you have ever flown on a plane, you have experienced the obligatory safety lecture. The part that we need here is where they tell you about the oxygen masks.

During an emergency oxygen masks will drop down from the ceiling above each seat. The steward or stewardess giving the safety lecture will tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first, even if your child is sitting next to you gasping.

The reason they give for this is that if you are not breathing well, you can't help anyone else. 

You put your own oxygen mask on first, so that you will be healthy enough to help put someone else's oxygen mask on them. Even if they lose consciousness, you will still be able to get their oxygen mask on them. 

If you lose consciousness because you put their oxygen mask on first, they may not be able to help you. You may not even finish putting their oxygen mask on before you pass out, if you try to put their oxygen mask on first.

This lesson is very applicable to many emergency situations. You can not help anyone else unless you are okay. 

It applies even to daily life. Taking care of your personal health is very important at any time, but even more so when medical help is scarce during an emergency. 

The above is what I have been doing lately. I have been working on taking care of myself. I have had some serious health problems that have required a lot of my attention and energy. That didn't leave me much to keep writing on this blog. 

I think I can rest on my laurels a bit here since I have over 500 posts on this blog now. I think there is enough to help anyone who is interested in basic information on emergency preparedness to get a good start on finding out what they need to know.

I apologize for not having this blog better organized, but you can use Google searches to find subjects that interest you on this blog. I use tags for each post and that makes searches more efficient on many subjects. I expect I will write a post that goes into more detail on how to do this.

With climate change happening so fast, we all face many more and much more serious emergencies than have occurred in human history. It only makes good sense to be prepared for emergencies.

What Is A Diagram?

This question comes up in search queries for my blog often. Most readers will already know the answer to this, but since so many do not, I am going to answer it in an extra post. I am also going to refer you to other posts connected to it.

In case you wound up on this post without reading the title, the question is: "What is a diagram?" A diagram is a simple picture that helps to understand ideas more easily. That is my own definition of a diagram. I am going to give you a link to a dictionary definition of it also. I hope that you will be able to look up any words you don't understand after you read this. I have posts on how to use the internet to look things up. You might want to read those also.

Here is a dictionary definition in red:


di·a·gram
[dahy-uh-gram] Show IPA noun, verb, di·a·gramed or di·a·grammed, di·a·gram·ing or di·a·gram·ming.
noun
1.
a figure, usually consisting of a line drawing, made to accompany and illustrate a geometrical theorem, mathematical demonstration, etc.
2.
a drawing or plan that outlines and explains the parts, operation, etc., of something: a diagram of an engine.
3.
a chart, plan, or scheme.
verb (used with object)
4.
to represent by a diagram; make a diagram of.
Origin:

1610–20;  < Latin diagramma  < Greek:  that which is marked out by lines. See dia-, -gram1

The definition above comes from this link: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/diagram

You can use the dictionary or others online to look up other words you don't know. You can type the word you want to find out about into your search engine or browser with "def" after it (short for definition) and you will usually get a lot of different dictionaries with their version of the definition. I think it is good to try different dictionaries to see which ones you like the best.

I believe that the most important diagram among my posts on this blog is about what happens when a nuclear bomb explodes. My diagram is not that great, but it gives you some idea of what happens when a nuclear weapon explodes and makes it easier for readers to think about it. This makes it possible to make a plan to live through a nuclear war. I do not care what side anyone is on who reads this information. I think it will be hard to keep enough people alive to save the human race after a nuclear war starts, so the more people who live, the better.

Any survivors will be so busy trying to stay alive, that continuing a nuclear war will not be a priority. I think we will need all of the genetic diversity we can get. We certainly won't have enough people left to kill off more after a nuclear war. I hope that a few more people will do emergency preparedness, including for nuclear war because of my blog.

I have other diagrams on my blog for things like a cheap, easy-to-make solar oven and for a rocket stove that is basically a fancy hole in the ground, but takes very little fuel. If you look at these diagrams and study them a little, you will be able to take the ideas and make your own versions of a solar oven or a rocket stove with the materials you have available. I put lots of links into my posts to help you understand and use the information in my posts.

I started this blog as a public service to as much of the world as possible, to help more people live and thrive in spite of the damage that humans have done to the Earth. 

I believe that people are capable of behaving much better than we have so far and hope that this blog and all of its posts will help us to become better humans. First, we have to stay alive.

What Will Climate Change Do To You And Other People?

I am going to try to put this information into words that are easy to understand for normal people who are not rocket scientists. I think it is a bad idea to leave out most of the people on Earth from understanding this important stuff that affects all of us. 

I am not telling you this to discourage you. It is the opposite. I think that there are things we can all do about this problem. I am not saying it will be easy, or that we will like doing them. We need to do them anyway, in order to survive.

I got this information from my class on the Health Effects of Climate Change. It is taught by a Medical Doctor who takes care of children and a scientist who has been studying what is happening to our air for about 35 years. Both of them want more people to understand this stuff also. 

There is a problem with them doing this. They are very very smart and have a hard time putting things into language normal people can understand. I am having trouble myself, but I already knew a lot about it before, so that helps me out some.

This particular bit of information that sorts out what will happen to us because of climate change was written by another Doctor, Anthony J. McMichael. Here is a link to it in case you want to see it yourself: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1109341

The part that I am basing this on is in a little part that you have to click to see in the article. It is in a table, that you can make full screen on your computer so that you can see it better. It is called, "Table 1. Categories of Climate-Change Risks to Health, According to Causal Pathway.

The table sorts the health problems that we will get from climate change into three areas. 

The first one is called, "Primary" health problems. This is things that climate change does that will get us and our health directly. His categories for this are: heat waves, extreme weather events, and temperature-enhanced levels of urban air pollutants.

Not everyone will understand about what heat waves do to your health. I have been in more than a couple of record-breaking heat events. If you have not, I can guarantee you won't like them. The first one I was in was in a town where we got a 30 day long triple digit or higher spell of hot weather. That means it was 100 degrees Farenheit for 30 days in a row with no cooling off.  (100 degree Fahrenheit = 37.7777778 degree Celsius).  As if that wasn't bad enough, the same place set another record for 40 days of triple digit heat while I was still there. I could not get out of there fast enough.

You may think you don't have to worry about this in your area. Wrong. Climate change is going to cause record heat all over the world. You are not likely to escape it, especially if we don't get busy and stop making climate change worse.

"Extreme weather events", means we will get more, and worse, of the kind of weather we already hate. These are weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, floods, etc. An example of the kind of "extremes" we will be dealing with are hurricanes like Sandy. 

Sandy set all kinds of unpleasant records for size. In case you don't already know, Sandy reached all the way from the East Coast of the USA to our far inland state of Ohio. This is an area bigger than many of the countries in the world.

I believe it was last year, 2012, where the USA set a world record for tornadoes. We had over 800 of them. We not only got more tornadoes, but they did more damage and covered a much bigger area than is usually affected by tornadoes. People got hit by tornadoes, who thought they would never see one.

Whatever weather we are used to is getting hotter, colder, wetter, bigger and worse in every way we can imagine and climate change will keep making this worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

"Temperature-enhanced levels of urban air pollutants means that if it is hotter, breathing polluted air in cities will make you sicker and kill more people than it already does. There was a woman who lived in that city with the triple digit heat records who was killed this way. 

She already had asthma and other health problems. She was the single parent of three little children, the oldest a toddler. She was found dead in her home with her children crying over her body. This one incident is almost enough to make me cry while I write about it. She is only one person and her children are only three more people. There are more like them and there will be a lot more. 

We need to stop climate change from getting worse so we don't get endless numbers of children crying over dead mother's and father's bodies or parents crying over dead children. We can work to stop this sadness from continuing and spreading.

The next "Causal Pathway", is the secondary risks that get us indirectly. The ones mentioned are, "food yields, water flows, infectious-disease vectors, and intermediate-host ecology". This means things like the drought that hit over 90% of all of the agricultural land in the USA last year. The USA normally exports food and feeds people in other parts of the world. The USA is not even doing a good job at feeding its own people because of that drought. That means people in other countries are going hungry because of our drought.

The drought in the USA also caused food prices to go up all over the world, because there was less food to go around.

Water flows does not mean only drinking water. It includes things like water for growing food, or cleaning,
or manufacture. 

"Disease vectors", means things that carry a disease to you. An example of this is the bubonic plague a long time ago in Europe. Rats were supposed to have carried fleas that carried the bubonic plague germs inside them. The rats took the fleas wherever they went. The fleas jumped off of the rats and bit the humans. When the fleas bit the humans, they gave bubonic plague to the humans. Vectors are the "middlemen" of disease. 

When climate change warms up places that used to be colder, it makes it possible for animals that could not live there before, to start living there. That can include disease-carrying vectors, like rats.

"Intermediate host ecology", Whoops. Sorry. The fleas are the prime vector and the rats that carried them were intermediate hosts. The fleas only stayed on the rats for a short while. The normal home of those fleas was another kind of rat. That short stay of the fleas on the European Roof Rats made them intermediate hosts.

The last category of bad things that climate change can do to your health and the health of everyone else, is called Tertiary. That means, "thirdly". The third group of bad climate change health effects can be things that are harder to pin on climate change, but still would not happen without it.

This third group of climate change bad health effects are things like, "mental health problems in failing farm communities, displaced groups, disadvantaged indigenous and minority ethnic groups". There is a subset of this third group, that I will cover next.

I get to see a lot of the mental health problems similar to the ones mentioned. Alaska still has a lot of people who live in small remote communities, who have never been to a big town and who live lives that are not a lot different than before Alaska was invaded by white people.

Over 180 communities in Alaska are being flooded out by rising ocean waters. Two island communities have already been scheduled to be evacuated. Their houses have been falling into the ocean every year when the winters storms hit them. 

Big chunks of their land disappear with the storms and even without the storms. These two islands will probably be completely underwater soon. These two island villages are called, "Kivalina", and "Shishmaref". I have already posted about them. Both are trying desperately to raise money to save their communities.

The government of Alaska just wants to move these people into the big cities. The people who live in these flooding villages mostly do not like this idea. Some of them speak their native languages as the main language in their villages. They are afraid that their languages, customs, and ways of life will be swallowed up by the big cites just like the ocean is swallowing their villages back home.

Some of the villagers who are being flooded, have already ended up in the city where I live. I see them on the bus, and at the bus stops and in the stores. 

They often have a dazed, lost look their faces. Some of them hide it better. Some have never seen a bus, let alone ridden one, or figured out how to do it. They can have the same sort of trouble shopping in a huge department store for the first time, or times, or even forever.

I believe this is culture shock. I have probably experienced a little of this sort of thing myself. It was not as bad for me as it is for the villagers. I had already moved around a lot when I was a child and seen lots of different things. It was easier for me than it is for them. It was enough so that I have some idea of how they feel. It is only a small reflection, though.

This same sort of thing is happening all over the world. Some Pacific islands have already gone under the ocean, and only have bits sticking up for a few months out of the year. The people were evacuated to New Zealand and other places. One of these islands was Tuvalu. I already posted about it, and the people I met in New Zealand.

The last part of the third group of health effects from climate change are called, "consequences of tension and conflict owing to climate change-related declines in basic resources (water, food, timber, living space). This is a fancy way of talking about war and the kinds of things that go along with it. 

Not many people are going to simply give up when they see their homes being gobbled up by the ocean, or they see their children going hungry and starving to death in front of their eyes. They will fight to get what they need. They will kill other people, or die trying to get what they need to stay alive.

It is something we have to expect from climate change. Lots of people will die fighting over what they need to survive. This will get worse and worse as climate change gets worse and takes away more of what more people need to survive.

You can try to hide from all of the bad health effects of climate change, but it will not work. If you want to have a decent life much longer, you will have to change what you do. 

Almost everyone on Earth is now making climate change worse. We are doing it very fast. Even the most pessimistic, depressing predictions of what climate change would do in the future have turned out to be too optimistic. We are wrecking our home, the Earth, very fast. It is happening much faster than even expected.

Because of the speed with which we are making climate change worse, we do not have much time to make our changes before it will be too late to fix it. We will all have to work together to do fix climate change. First we have to stop making it worse. 

The changes that we need to make in what we do are not Rocket Science. They will not all be changes that we will like, but we can't live without the changes. It is time for us to get busy making them.

Save Yourself fFom Starvation As You Age

As you grow older you will probably become less able to work and earn money. This is normal. This does not make it good or something for you to look forward to. There have been scandals in the USA where it was (re)discovered that elderly people were forced to buy dog food to eat themselves because of not being able to afford meat for humans.

Social safety nets, that give food to people who would have starved to death in the past, have increased worldwide. You may be depending on one of these safety nets to keep eating as you age.

This is not a good idea. Climate change is already making food prices go up all over the world. This will get much worse. As prices continue to rise, there will be more need for the food from social safety nets because of more poor people needing food, and less food and money to spare for social safety net programs.


When you do things to stop climate change you are protecting your own food supply, now and in the future. 



We need more people who understand, care about, and are willing to act to stop climate change. It is in your own best interests to be one of these people. Your own future depends on it.

Climate change is raising the average temperature of the whole Earth. One of the easily predictable results of a rise in the Earth's average temperature is drought. Your food supply will be harder to keep coming to you when there are more droughts.

Plants need water. If you want to eat plants or animals that eat plants, you need water for those plants. This is true even if your food does not come from your own area or country.

In 2012 the United States had a very bad drought. Ninety percent (90%) of the cropland in the USA had a drought last year. This used up all of the food stored up by the government to give to poor people. It was not replaced. Food banks all over the country are already running out of food to give poor people from only one year of drought.

Since the United States is a food exporting country, this has driven up food prices all over the world. This situation will last at least the rest of this year without another drought, because of limited supplies to food manufacturers in the United States. We can expect a continued rise in overall food prices for the rest of this year.

This is just a sample of what we face with our food supply as droughts occur
more often and in more places in the world. If you want to keep eating, you need to learn more and take action to stop making climate change worse.

Learn How To Stop Climate Change

There are realistic things that you can do about climate change. You do not need to try to hide from it. 

Climate change can be overwhelming because it is such a big problem. It is a vast relief to find things that give one hope about fixing the problem of climate change. We do not need to give in to despair over the size of the problem compared to our abilities.

I treasure any glimmer of light in our polluted darkness. One of these is a free online class. The awesome respectability of the class and its teachers is in itself a little overwhelming to me. 

The class is given at Harvard University, one of the finest colleges in the world. They have other classes available on many other subjects, of course. Some of the other classes are interesting, but none has the importance of this one. It is, "Human Health and Global Environmental Change". It starts today. It is not too late to be included in this ray of light.

If you want to consider taking this class, you can look it over here: https://www.edx.org/courses/HarvardX/PH278x/2013_Spring/about

One of the professors of the class is an MD, a pediatrician at a famous hospital. The other professor has been studying the "quality" of our air for many years. 

A book by one of the professors of the course, "Sustaining Life, How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity", is optional reading for students taking the course. The book is offered on Amazon, in both a hard copy and a digital, Kindle version. You can read these without even taking the course.

There are plenty of links to strong, useful information. There are lots of graphs and charts to make this information easier to understand and be able to explain to others.

The lectures are broken down into short video segments. You can use the materials at your own speed with a few exceptions. The course is broken down into sections and access is restricted to the current and past sections covered, to keep the eager beavers with the rest of the class. 

There is a lot of information to be covered in the course. I am definitely glad that I refrained from taking other courses simultaneously. This is all information that I want to understand very well, and it is clear that this will require a lot of time.

I hope that some of my readers will join this class, now or later on, as it is repeated. The Earth and the people and the rest of the life on the Earth, need your attention, interest and actions. 

We can not continue to exist in the face of indifference to climate change, and we need everyone who is willing, to get busy learning and acting to stop climate change.

Climate Change And Health

Many of you readers are interested in your health. This is a good thing to be interested in. It is hard to enjoy good health if you don't learn what is required to get good health and keep it.

Sometimes people do not make good sense in their choices for their health. An example of this is people who decide to lose weight by drinking diet soft drinks. I am not going into the hazards of this idea on this post. This is just an example that many people already know is not that great a choice for good health.

Another bad health choice that many people make is not paying attention to what is happening to the planet we live on. We need the earth for our health. If we destroy the earth, we get things happening like the effects of climate change. 

We agree that breathing bad air is unhealthy. Some of us take care of the bad air problem by buying an expensive air purifier. We may be doing this when we drive many miles every day in a gas guzzling vehicle that does a lot to make the air worse. 

We may make sure that our food is healthy and organic and buy a house on a piece of land that used to grow organic food. We might put in a tennis court or swimming pool on that land and our neighbors may do the same.

We may be concerned about climate change when we see enormous hurricanes killing people and doing record setting damages. We may take yoga and meditate to help stay calm and not worry that the next hurricane might hit our area. We may be doing this when we are part of the cause of the climate change that brought us these super storms.

Yes, it is not that fun to think about climate change. It is even less fun to think about what we, as individuals are doing to make climate change speed up and get worse. 

Sometimes we have to think about unpleasant things to avoid them. It can be scary to think about the consequences of poor nutrition choices, but it is necessary to learn what bad nutrition can do to us so that we can make better choices. The same is true for bad climate choices. 

We do not have very long before climate change is irreversible, and goes into an ever-worsening spiral. It is time to learn what bad climate choices we are making so that we can make better choices and protect our health. 

You can be the healthiest, fittest person on earth and not outrun a natural disaster. 

Earth Day Preparedness

In honor of Earth Day, I would like to remind you that if we don't take care of the Earth, it can't take care of us.

We depend on the Earth to provide us with air, water, food and all the other necessities of life. Playing Jackstraws, Pick-Up-Sticks, or Jenga with what we need to stay alive is not a good plan. Sure we can keep removing parts of the systems on Earth and see how long we can survive, but it is a pretty dangerous game. If things start collapsing in this game, they can land on our heads.

I don't feel like nagging. We already know we have a very bad problem with climate change. If you don't know this yet, you must be on another planet already and there is no use trying to talk to you about it.

In this post I want to encourage people who are discouraged about the immensity of the problems we face. 

We human beings may be obnoxious critters, but we can really move the Earth when we make up our minds to do so. This is fortunate since this is about what is required now. :-p

There is a fairly new organization that got their name from the center of the problem with our air and with climate change.Their name is 350. They are named after the 350 parts per million that scientists have agreed for some time to be about the upper limit of how much carbon is safe for us to have in our air.

350 was formed for the purpose of stopping and reversing climate change before it is too late to do anything about it. We already passed 350 parts per million a while back. If we do nothing, it is already too late to fix climate change and we are doomed. 350, however, tells us that not only can we stop adding more carbon to our air, but we can reverse the almost 400 parts per million we have in the air. 

We can get our air back down to 350 parts per million of carbon in our air. We can then keep going and make it even better than 350 parts per million and make our air better and reverse the trend of climate change.

This does not mean that this will be easy. It will mean we have to make big changes in how we live. It is something that gives us a chance to save our civilization and a lot of lives, human and other kinds of lives. These are changes we can live with. 

Please think about becoming part of a solution instead of part of the problem. One easy way to do this is to go to the site for 350.org and sign their petition to stop the XL pipeline. They will explain why we need to do this. It is very urgent, if we want to stop and reverse climate change. A few little clicks of your mouse can begin to make a difference. Go to 350.org and make yourself count.

Spiritual Self Defense For Christians

If you are Christian, it does not make much sense to stock up on food and water and forget your Bible. How can you think you will be safe from a mere hurricane when your spirit is at risk?

I am not speaking to people of no religion, or other religions here, so feel free to skip this post if you belong to those groups.

Someone in my life has latched on to something out on the internet that says that the "three days of darkness" mentioned in the Bible are coming upon us shortly. It is supposed to happen this Thursday, in case you like to be up on these things. I am not going for this alarm. This is because I read the Bible and study it even. 

I have read estimates as high as over 60% of Christians who have never read the entire Bible. This is very strange and does not make any sense. 

How can you call yourself a Christian when you have never read the book you are supposed to base your life on? 

The person who gave me the tip about the three days of darkness mentioned that she has a list of over 100 prayers she thinks she needs to say every day. She said that she isn't sure she can manage the time to study the Bible because of having to say her prayers every day takes up so much of her time, she doesn't see how she can fit in the Bible too.

That does not make any sense to me. Prayers are mostly for the purpose of asking Gd to take care of something. It is a one-sided conversation, with the person saying the prayer(s) doing all of the talking.

It seems to me that our relationship with Gd ought to be one with two-way conversations. We get our two cents in with prayers and then we get Gd's side of the conversation mostly through reading Gd's Word, the Bible.

When I want to know what Gd wants me to do or know about a particular subject, I get out my Concordance of the Bible and start studying, until I understand what Gd's idea is on the subject.

I do think prayer is necessary for a Christian, but not as much so as spending time "listening" to what Gd has to tell me. I do this by reading and studying the Bible. Since Gd has a better idea of how to handle everything than I do, I like to spend more of my time studying what Gd has to say about everything, in the Bible. In my two-way conversation with Gd, I'd rather do more listening, than talking.

There is an old Native American saying that sums it up pretty well: "We have two ears and one mouth. This tells us that we need to do twice as much listening as talking." It is even more important to do this with Gd. 

Knowledge of Gd's Word is the very basis of Spiritual Self Defense for Christians.

To Be Or Not To Be? Nuclear Bomb Shelters

I was talking with someone about nuclear preparedness. He was fine with the general subject of preparedness, but balked on nuclear disaster preparedness. His reasons were something like," he would rather just die right away by not making any nuclear disaster preparations". That was instead of dying a slow death by radiation.

There are other options besides a lingering death by radiation or getting a bigger dose and dying faster. 

This is not a new reaction to me, even if it is not as common among preppers. (Preppers are people who are ready for disasters.)

I live too close to a military base that is very likely to become ground zero in a nuclear shooting match. I am so close that it makes me essentially ground zero as well. A slow lingering death from radiation is not an option for me at this time. I would be pretty much instantly incinerated. 

That does not mean that I want to ignore the realities of nuclear disasters. 

The whole world was treated to a front row seat, courtesy of international media, when Japan had their run-in with atomic energy. No war has to cause exposure to a nuclear disaster.

Even when it comes to dealing with a war-based nuclear disaster, I do not choose to opt out of the discussion. 

Human beings have been faced with "ultimate weapons", throughout our history. The long bow was regarded as such a terrible weapon that it surely would end wars. We can easily laugh at that idea now, but it was very serious at the time.

It is likely that some day people could have the same reaction to the idea of nuclear weapons being an ultimate weapon. The people at the time of the advent of the long bow, had no clue that some day nuclear weapons would, by comparison, make their fears humorous. The same could be true for ourselves and our own fears. This is no reason to dismiss nuclear war as a threat now. It is not a reason to think that nobody would ever dare to use such a horrible weapon. 

No matter how horrible the weapon, humans have always used the ultimate weapon. 

Nuclear weaponry is not likely to be an exception.

Russia and China take the idea of a nuclear war as inevitable. Both countries are matter-of-fact in building shelters to house citizens in the event of a nuclear war.

The USA has no comparable program for the general populace. There is, however, an extensive program to build shelters for "important" people, at taxpayer expense. 

It beats me why the citizens of the USA tolerate this situation and how most US citizens blithely ignore the reality of war- based nuclear disasters.

I do think the average citizen anywhere in the world should accept the reality of nuclear war happening in the near future and prepare themselves for it. The people of the USA, being citizens of a prominently nuclear-weaponized-country, have more reason for this than the average citizen of most other countries.

If you live in the USA, it behooves you to prepare for nuclear war, if you are preparing for any kind of disaster. I have the links here on this blog, including an entire book on how to build a nuclear shelter. Please use it, or get the information elsewhere. I don't think  "important" people who push buttons to start nuclear wars should be the only ones to survive the nuclear wars.

Are You A Builder Or A Wrecker?

Something both religious and non-religious types can find to agree about is what general effect your actions have on the rest of the universe. It comes down to this: Are you a builder or a wrecker?

I am tired of endless useless arguments about good and evil. Builders and wreckers are easier to decide about and don't require so much argument.

It doesn't matter whether you think you will face Divine Judgement at the end of your life, or worms and decay into dirt. You can look at someone's life, so far, or all the way to the end if they are gone from this life. 

Perhaps you don't know enough about that person, to know whether their actions make the world better by building it up, or worse by tearing it down. It does not matter to you whether that other person is a builder or a wrecker. What matters to you is which you are.

Are you building up the world and making it better as you go through your life? 

This question is not fancy. It doesn't require that you set any records or built anything visible from space. It is only whether your actions generally tend toward making things better.

None of this means you have to spend every waking minute doing good deeds. None of us are able to be a builder every waking minute. All of us have bad days. Some of us have lots of bad days, but still manage to do small things that add up to making the world a better place.

You can still make the world a better place by doing one small, quiet thing at a time. Something as small and quiet as a smile or a kind word at the right time, can be your way of building up the world and making it a better place.

Prevention is part of emergency preparedness. Part of prevention is being a builder and doing our best to make the world a better place.

Every one of us has some special areas that we are good at. We need to find those, build them up and use them. We can all be builders instead of wreckers.

Taking Preventive Care Of Pets - Temperature

Something that a lot of people forget when they take care of pets is that their normal body temperature is higher than that of humans. It might be a good idea to take your pet's temperature when it is healthy so you can get used to what is normal.

Taking a temperature when the pet is not sick will also allow the pet to get a little used to it when you are not under stress and can handle the pet better. You can both get used to temperature taking ahead of a need for it.

They have made nifty new temperature devices for people lately. There is an instant read thermometer and one that works across your forehead. There is another that works with a probe in the ear. I have not seen many of these sorts of improvements for pets yet, but if we ask the manufacturers, I am sure they will oblige. There are a lot of pet owners. 

It bothers me a lot sticking a piece of glass in my cat's rear end to take his temperature. 

I stopped to see what they have out there in the way of pet thermometers. Whooie! They have improved it a lot. There is a dog thermometer on eBay that uses infrared to take the temp in one second without contact. That is pretty good. The price is a bit breathtaking, but I think it would be worth it. Here is the link to it:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Infrared-Non-Contact-Pet-Dog-Thermometer-1-sec-reading-/260789002007?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cb83c5f17

There is another one that takes longer, but it is much cheaper:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/9-Second-Digital-Thermometer-JEFFERS-PET-Equine-Livestock-M7A1-/300726238312?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4604ae3c68

It is possible for people to learn to tell accurately, an above normal temperature by touch. This takes some time to do and you will really have to work at it. You may not be able to learn how much above normal your pet's temperature is, so you would need to resort to a thermometer anyway at times. I don't think it is worth the effort for me.

I found another nifty thermometer for pets. It is an ear thermometer and reads in one second. It costs $87.00 USA. If you can stand that kind of sticker shock, here is the link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pet-Temp-Ear-Thermometer-for-Pets-pet-body-temperature-accurate-easy-read-/200881927432?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ec57ef508

Besides the first one, a non-contact infrared one, I like the following the best. It is the fastest readout and does it in 20 seconds. I think I might get out of that one without bloodshed.

How you do the temp matters a lot. I always have treats ready when I give any medical treatment to my pet. I usually show the treats to the pet before I start, to get them thinking about the treat. The one that bites when you use a thermometer on him, gets so busy thinking about getting a treat, that he will even sit on the rug I use to do his treatments and wait for me. I think I can get the 20 second one in and out before he is distracted from the treats.

I have to decide whether the extra money is worth no fight at all for the non-contact one or not. The other favorite is the 20 second one, of course. 

We and our pets are all different, so you have to make up your own mind which one will be best for you. There are sure to be others out there as well. You may find something even better than the ones in the links. 

Once I get a new non-glass thermometer, I will share what kind of results I get.

The Future Can Be Great If We Live

There are all kinds of scientific advances that we are on the verge of. If we get all of them we can feed everyone good food without wrecking the Earth and have as much power as we all need and get it without harm to us or our environment. 

The tricky part of getting all of that good stuff is whether we will kill ourselves off before they arrive.

Right now most people are spending our natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. That, of course, can mean there will literally be no tomorrow for the human race. This doesn't mean that we will literally die tomorrow or even next year. We may even get a decade or so before things get really bad.

That delay in consequences for what we are doing now may be our undoing. People are not generally thinking very far ahead. Most grocery stores only keep about three days of food on hand. Other kinds of stores may plan a little farther ahead, but a year ahead is long-term planning.

The worst problem with this short-term thinking is that we are doing damage that is about to reach a tipping point where it can't be fixed and the end after that, will be certain.

It is easy to think about what we want right now. It is harder to think about what we will have to have for tomorrow, next week, month, year, or a decade from now.

We need to think fast. We don't have much time to learn to do that. The sands in our hourglass are running out and most of us aren't even paying attention. Not paying attention can mean paying with your life later.

Now is our chance to reduce our carbon footprints to save our Earth and ourselves. We are starting to see how many lives climate change can take, and this is only the warm-up for it.

Christian Earth 101

Being a Christian, you know what Genesis says. It goes into a lot of detail about how Gd made various parts of the Earth and the life upon it. Every time Gd made something, he said it was, "Good".

Does that sound like somebody who wants His property wrecked?

We are not being very good property managers. If we really love Gd, why do we want to treat Him this way?

It seems odd to me that so many devout Christians are not concerned about what is happening to the Earth. There are even holdouts among Christians who say they do not believe that climate change is real.

I have been trying to figure out how it is possible that Christians can manage not to believe that climate change is happening. My best idea is that they are people who never watch the news or read newspapers or listen to the radio. They would have to live somewhere that weird weather is not going on also. 

That last one is also hard to figure out. I don't think there can be anywhere left that is not having bouts of very strange weather. I read something by someone who wrote that they think climate change is not happening because getting snow in normally warm places means it can't be happening. No, I am not referring to the warm place in the afterlife, I mean southern areas of the USA, or possibly desert areas like Arizona or Nevada.

I think that when people were still calling the weird weather, "global warming", that might have caused some confusion. People have stopped talking about "global warming", and use, "climate change", instead. 

Climate change works much better to describe what is happening with our weird weather than "global warming". The reason for this is that even though the Earth really is getting hotter very fast, it is not even, and not steady, and the hotter spots don't stay put.

The way that scientists study climate change is confusing until you find out more about it. They collect temperature patterns from all over the Earth. Then they add all of the temperatures and average them to get the temperature of the Earth. 

This average temperature of the Earth is higher than ever before in recorded history. It is also getting higher faster than even pessimists expected. 

Very bad things can happen when temperatures change on the Earth. One of these, that is already happening, is with things we depend on to make the air that we breathe. Some of these things that make the air that we breathe are trees and other plants. 

We are used to thinking about trees and other plants cleaning our air. There are other living things that make even more oxygen than trees do. They live in the oceans.There are zillions of tiny microscopic sea life that make more oxygen for us to breathe than big trees do. 

Part of our problems that we are busy making for ourselves is those tiny oxygen makers in the ocean. They are not as strong and adaptable as humans are. When the ocean temperature changes even a few degrees they start dying. This is already starting.

I don't want to write any more about the bad things that are happening with climate change in this post. I have written about that already. You can read it later if you want to.

I want to say why Christians might want to take better care of the Earth. I have only said enough to give you an idea that we are not taking very good care of the Earth lately.

The whole Earth belongs to Gd. Most Christians will agree with that. We have been given stewardship over the Earth. We are sort of resident managers. That is our "dominion" over the Earth. We are supposed to be loving caretakers.

I like to think we have a lot closer relationship with Gd, than a resident manager and a property owner. I think love is and should be involved.

When you love someone you want to know everything you can about them and find ways to please them and help them to be happy. 

Gd is the Supreme Artist. The Earth is His Art. I love the Earth because it is a reflection of its Maker. I don't think everybody has to think and act the way I do, so I don't think all Christians have to love the Earth for the same reasons I do. 

I don't even think you need to love the
Earth at all to be a good Christian. I do think you at least need to respect it as Gd's handiwork that we are given to care for. 

It beats me how anyone can say they love Gd and not respect his work given to us for safekeeping, the Earth. We need to show our love for Gd with our actions as well as our words. 

What Is A Survival Bracelet?

Somebody searched about what a survival bracelet is. Thanks. That takes care of a nice post for tonight that I don't particularly need to do any more research on.

A survival bracelet is a USA fad for wearing a bracelet that can help with disaster preparedness. Each bracelet is made of extremely tough cording. The cording is so strong that a thin piece of it can support the weight of a human being. 

A survival bracelet is made so that each one contains several yards of the aforementioned tough cording. They are made so that they can be quickly and easily unraveled in an emergency. This will allow you to safely lower yourself or others from a high window to allow you to escape. This could be in a fire or home invasion for example.

The cording in a survival bracelet was begun by soldiers who made them from parachute cording. The originals were only standard military colors. Now they can be found in a whole rainbow of colors to suit your fancy.

People have come up with endless good uses for the cording in survival bracelets. Youtube is full of survival videos that show possible uses for it. They may not specifically mention survival bracelets or paracord, which is a name for the cording. You may have to think a little to notice when the video applies to survival bracelet paracord.

One of my favorite uses is to build a makeshift survival shelter in case you get stranded overnight and need to stay warmer. It is a lot easier to build a faster and better shelter if you can use some paracord from your survival bracelet to build it. You can tie branches together to make a framework to start the shelter.

Another good use for the survival bracelet stuff is to hang a cooking pot over a fire. It is easier to get just the right height to keep it cooking, without burning the food.

If you have a survival bracelet during an emergency, you will be inspired to find many more good uses for it. 

It seems to me that having a survival bracelet handy at all times is pretty easy. You just wear it on your wrist. Something that easy to do, that can be so valuable during an emergency, seems like a good investment in time.

I wrote another post on links to videos about making your own survival bracelet (s). Some of the videos have how to make a jig that simplifies and speeds up making survival bracelets. 

I hope you will consider adding a survival bracelet to your preparedness items. It is very cheap to make your own and not that hard to do.

Sinking Fluoride And Other Stuff

I keep getting search terms that mention something about sinking fluoride. I read that when water with fluoride is boiled, it sinks to the bottom of the water then. 

That is how I got the bright idea to take the water that I already have boiled in order to use the filter in my coffeemaker. I only pour the top part of the water in the coffeepot into my cooling bowls. I pour the bottom the water in the pot down the sink. 

I don't have any studies or proof that my idea works, but I feel a lot better when I do it. My cats will drink the water a lot better when I dump the bottom water down the sink drain. This is a very small unscientific study done on my cats and I.

I hesitated to share this wacky method of getting rid of fluoride, but it is the only one I had for my cats and I for right now, so we are happy with it. 

Since some of my more popular posts are about things that save money for preparedness health, that makes me believe that my readers are pinched in the purse the same as my cats and I are.
This thought about my readers maybe needing whatever they can get to reduce or eliminate fluoride from their water, made me share, my puny study results.

You are taking your chances that this stupid method for reducing fluoride will do any good. If you can't afford anything better, you might be willing to to try it like I do, anyway. It's biggest virtue is that it is cheap.

I may be a bit shaky for a little while on getting this blog out on time. I am having some serious survival problems and it cuts into my writing and researching time. I will do the best I can to get posts out anyway. The posts, may be more puny than usual also. Brevity is the soul of something or other. It is also quicker to write than longer posts.

Eat Cheap Save The Earth

A great thing that you can do for yourself and the Earth is to grow your own food. Even if you live in a small apartment, you can manage to grow sprouts to eat. 

If you are fortunate enough to have any space outdoors to grow things, you can grow a lot or all of the food you eat. There are some wonderful videos on youtube about this. A man in Arizona made one of them. It is very encouraging to watch his video about food growing for profit. 

He has invented his own hydroponics system and explains how you can make millions of dollars using only an acre of land. That is using his hydroponics system, of course. He shows diagrams of his system and explains how it is basically built. He grows an amazing amount of food in a few feet of space.

He suggests beginning with one hydroponics plant for less than a dollar if that is all of the money that you have available now. He suggests that you use the profits from the one plant to buy more equipment to grow more plants and repeat until you are a millionaire from selling your crops.

The process he suggests works much faster if you have enough money to buy more equipment to begin with. It makes me want to rush out and buy equipment. I actually prefer to learn more about how to grow stuff and operate hydroponics first, though.

Here is a link to his video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GghlbtGjfk&NR=1&feature=endscreen

Pina Colada Milkshake - Can Be Used For Diatomaceous Earth

One time when I was doing a lot of air travel I found myself with a horrible ten hour layover in Atlanta. That is not long enough to want to get a hotel room, but you can really get tired of that huge airport in that amount of time. Fortunately, I discovered a juice bar. They made milkshakes and smoothies there. One of their best was a sober pina colada milkshake. 

They made the best one I have ever tasted. They made their own coconut ice cream from fresh coconuts and put fresh pineapple in it.

I don't usually do all of that however. I do it the easy, fast, and cheap way. Mine is not as good, but it is still pretty good.
I also leave out the ice cream. You can put some in if you like, however. I use ice cubes, instead. That is lower calories and cholesterol.

I use coconut cream or coconut milk to make it. Coconut cream tastes better, but it is more oily and not as healthy.

I also use canned pineapple most of the time. I don't have precise proportions of the coconut or pineapple that I use. I normally go light on the coconut milk and more pineapple. I will usually have a much smaller can of coconut milk than of pineapple, and sometimes only use half a can of the coconut milk to make it and a whole can of pineapple. If I do that, I usually make another batch the next day and use another can of pineapple.

I go by taste on how much to put in. You have probably already figured that I put all of this into a blender. I also put in a banana. I mostly go by what will fit into the blender and how it tastes. A big banana will not fit in, so I cut it in half and put that in. 

Protein powder, flax seed powder, diatomaceous earth, and things like that are good additions to this recipe, and I usually put those in as well.

Now you can end up with a not very serious dilemma as far as leftovers for this recipe. If you are left with half a can of coconut milk and half a banana after you make this up and drink it, you will either be forced to find another use for them or make more pina colada shake.
I generally opt for another batch of pina colada shake.

Dietary Changes For Stroke Prevention

Yesterday I posted a bit about ways to protect your brain for health preparedness. I wrote mostly about online programs that give your brain a workout to keep it fit.

The majority of other things that I do to take care of my brain are dietary. I have extremely high cholesterol in spite of being a vegetarian. I believe that I would be dead now if I hadn't become a vegetarian many years ago. My body makes a lot of cholesterol, so I certainly don't need to eat things that have a lot of it in them as well.

Cholesterol is a major culprit for causing strokes. I do a lot of dietary things to help with this problem.

I have mentioned some of the virtues of oats in your diet before. Oats are very helpful to lower your cholesterol. I read that when you eat oats, they attach to cholesterol in you and escort it out. According to something else I read, extra virgin olive oil does the same sort of thing. Regular olive oil does not work this way, so you have to make sure it is extra virgin olive oil.

Olive oil can actually become bad for you once it is heated to high temperatures. This means it is not a good idea to fry things in olive oil. Oils that work better at high temperatures like sunflower oil or coconut oil are better for frying or saute cooking. I have also almost given up frying things. I lightly saute them in a small amount of high temperature safe oil, instead.

If you are going to eat any flesh, it should be fish. Salmon is one of the safest fish to eat as far as heavy metal contamination goes. Fish oil can actually help bring down your cholesterol and does lots of other good things for your body. Some vegetarians make and exception and take fish oil capsules.

I won't do that, but you can get some of the same effects if you eat nuts, walnuts are the best, apparently. Flax seed and flax seed oil are also good that way.

If you don't want to or can't grind your own flax seed and don't feel up to chewing them whole, you can get ground ones at health food stores. 

I put flax seeds into some of my blender recipes. I guess I will give you my sober pina colada recipe in a few days. That would work well with a dose of diatomaceous earth, also. Again, diatomaceous earth will righteously constipate you unless you take serious preventive measures. Since I am veggie, my diet is especially high in fiber, so I don't have much worry in that department.

I have added a grated apple to my breakfast cereal every morning lately. White flesh fruits like apples and pears do something that prevents strokes. They do not know exactly how it works yet, but it sounded good enough for me to try it. I am a great guinea pig in that department since I have been having a lot of TIAs. 

Once I started the apple-in-the-cereal addition to my diet, the TIAs dropped off. I highly recommend the apple/pear adjustment to your diet if you are a stroke risk. This is not medical, advice, however. Humor your MD. My doctor is patient and long suffering and puts up with me very well. You are fortunate indeed if you find one like her.

In case you are not up on stroke terminology, TIAs are little mini strokes. They only last a short time and are not supposed to cause lasting damage. They can do cumulative damage, however. 

Enough stroke stuff for now. I have found more stuff for strokes, that I do as well as what I have already mentioned. I will write about it later. I will probably post about the pina colada milkshake tomorrow. It is really good and easy to make. 

Stay Warm And Save The Earth!

Stay warm and save the earth! One of the  easiest ways to help save the earth is to use less fuel to heat you home. It just requires turning down your thermostat. That is one of those things that can be easier to do in theory than in life.

Once that thermostat is down and the temperature inside your home drops along with the thermometer, you may want to turn it back up because you feel cold. It can take a while to get used to lower home temperatures. There is no need to set yourself up for the failure of your good intentions.

There are lots of things you can do to feel more comfortable with a lower temperature in your home. You might as well set yourself up to make it easier for you and your family to be comfortable with the lower home temp.

Wearing a hat to keep your head warm is the most difference a single clothing item can make to help the rest of you feel warm as well. A fuzzy fleece hat or cozy knit one are good choices. If you feel very cold, you might want to opt for extra insulation in your warm hat.

I make my own hats and plan to offer free plans on this site to help you to make your own hats as well. Once you know how to make your own hats, it gives you more choice to get the colors and fabrics you like and save money as well. There will be both sewn and knitted and crocheted hats offered on this site for you to make.

My favorite item of clothing to wear to keep comfortable at lower home temps is a vest. I prefer fleece, but also make knitted or crocheted ones. I intend to either offer plans or patterns on this site to help you make your own vests or links to other sites that will offer free patterns.

Warm scarves do a lot to make you feel more comfortable at lower home temps. Scarves are nice for new knitters or crocheters because the straight lines make them easy to do for beginners. Your first scarf may be a little wavy along the edges and have a few other problems, but it will work to keep you warm anyway.

I also like to wear footgear to keep my feet warm for comfort in lower home temps. I do not knit socks yet, but I have crocheted slipper socks. 

I just bought ready made leather soles with fleece lining and pre-punched holes to knit or crochet into. It came with directions for the knit or crochet tops for the slippers. I like the nubby multi-colored yarn that I chose for the slippers. They are warm and comfortable to wear. I bought those from a Tandy store. 

If there is no Tandy store near you, they have an online catalog that you can use to order from them. Tandy is a company that specializes in leatherwork tools and supplies. 

When you feel very cold, you may need to do more to keep your body warm as you become accustomed to lower home temperatures. One of the items that helps with this problem is a heating pad. They require very little electricity to run for a long time and do a lot to help raise your core body temperature and make you feel warm. I sometimes use a heating pad while sitting at my computer for a long time. A hot water bottle will do the same job. They have heated items made for the microwave that you can wrap in a towel and use to keep warm. 

I have made my own and may offer instructions for these. It isn't rocket science and you probably don't really need any instructions. The most important part of using these safely is to put a cup with water in it in your microwave along with the heater. The material I put inside mine is rice. It can catch fire when re-heated several times, without the cup of water in the microwave with it.

These rice stuffed heaters for the microwave are nice for sore spots where you have arthritis or soreness from exercise or something else. I have made these for gifts that were appreciated a lot.

The items I have mentioned in this blog post can be purchased easily, but it is more satisfying and fun to do yourself. You can also save a lot of money by making them yourself and use recycled materials to help the Earth even more.

But What Can I Do About Climate Change?

No, you can not fix climate change all by yourself. If you change what you do that is making climate change worse it can help to stop climate change. A lot of people all doing as much as they can about climate change is what it takes to fix our climate change problems

Climate change is happening so fast that we need to do as much as we can as fast as we can. If we don't do that, we are toast.

Your personal part of this solution is to change how you live so that your part of the problem becomes a solution. You can learn how to live so that your carbon footprint is as small as possible. If enough of us do this we can reduce the carbon in our air to low enough levels to start reversing climate change.

The biggest thing you can do lower your carbon footprint is to stop using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gas, oil and coal. If your heating and cooking in your home depend on fossil fuels, you can find ways to reduce or stop using them.

One easy way to begin this process is to make sure your home uses as little energy as possible to keep you warm. Lower your thermostat. You can wear warmer clothes to stay comfortable. You can do things to make your home more energy efficient as well. All of these things will save you money as well as help save our planet.

Moving ourselves and our things around costs a lot of money and is even more costly for what it does to climate change.
We need to get off of our dependence on guzzling a lot of fuel to get around. We should be walking, biking, and using public transport.

You will have to get used to walking, biking, and using public transport as gas and oil prices rise due to their increasing scarcity, anyway. You might as well start a little early and save some money.

You can save up your gasoline money and use it to buy a good bike or a solar system for your home. They have dropped prices on solar energy equipment lately, so you can get your own more easily now.

You can reuse and recycle more than you have in the past. They have an amazing array of blogs devoted to making useful things out of things we are used to throwing away. 

You can start working on keeping your own usable discards out of the local landfill. Freecycle is the name of an international organization dedicated to helping you with that. You sign up to get on a freecycle email list for your area. They send you lists of items people are offering with a contact email to arrange a pickup for the item offered.

If you want an item that is offered, you email them and ask if it is still available. They let you know if it is still available for you. Then you arrange where and when to pick up the item(s).

If you want to offer an item, you write a post to the local freecycle group and the moderators either tell you to correct it, or they post it.

Many thrift stores and charities will come to your home to pick up items that you wish to donate to them. I have found one that I like a lot and am on their regular route. 

Some of the things that I recycle and reuse are my no longer used clothing and other fabric items like old sheets. My current project of this sort is curtains. I live up near the Arctic. That means that during the summer we have very long days. There are few hours of darkness. This can make it harder to sleep because of all the light in the bedroom.

I am layering some of my old fabric discards into curtains thick enough to block light from my windows. Light blocking curtains are ridiculously expensive and the fabric to block light is not a lot better. Putting several layers of fabric stacked in between the curtain fabric and the lining does not show and look ugly, but it can block out the light.

My windows need at least four layers of fabric to block the light well. If you want your curtains to look pretty and full they need to be three to four times the width of your window. 

Two extra layers of fabric between the lining and the curtain material is a lot more fabric. I am running through a lot of old sheets, pillowcases and clothing. This is a much more satisfactory use for them.

I plan to post in more detail on how to make hats and vests, etc. to stay warm when you lower your thermostat. 

Stay warm and save the earth!