the Hollow Log isn't just for the elves

Yesterday The Prude expressed concern that the world was heading due south in a hand basket faster than she can develop survivalist skills.

But then she remembered her survival resources and she is feeling better.

Below are her lifesavers:

The Little House series

The Boy Mechanic Books 3&4 (copyrighted circa 1920)

Pa Ingalls smoked his deer meat in a hollow log and dug his own wells, knew how to tell if the well had poison gas AND how to get rid of it.

Pa shows how to have meat without refrigeration and fresh water.

The Boy Mechanics help with everything else.

They demonstrate how to make our own candles and homemade hammocks and pillows of cattail down.

We learn to grow large grapes and construct a fruit dryer for large raisins.

If the water from Pa’s well is alkaline we can make it drinkable.

Once we build a chicken feed box we can keep varmints out with a self-setting rat trap.

We’ll make a scaler for our fish before we smoke them in the hollow log.

Bessie will be easier to milk with our own convenient milking stool.

Who needs electricity and gasoline? We can build a wind wagon, a hydraulic turbine and a windmill.

We can still be fashion conscious with our birch bark leggings.

We can while away our leisure hours on a porch swing made from an automobile seat

while making music from pumpkin stalks, blowing bubbles with paper figures attached

and popping them with a handmade pistol  that shoots cardboard disks.

We could make cement dumbbells from our own miniature cement plant but it needs an the asbestos roof so we’ll pass, as we will on the crafty projects listed for leftover WWI steel trench helmets. And she still hasn’t run across directions for that sanitary outhouse.

If you need big raisins just call The Prude.

She’ll deliver them in this: