LHitBW - Chapter 1 - Part 1

I like that this book -- no, this entire series -- starts off with preparation. Smoking venison, salting fish, making sausage, storing vegetables in the attic. It starts off with work, with abundance, and with a feeling of preparedness.

More lives ought to start that way, I think, and continue along just the same lines.

I'm one of those people who lived the paycheque-to-paycheque life, buying too much and yet always seeming to have too little. Food would go to waste because I didn't feel like making anything, I'd buy take-out food, I'd buy things I didn't need, and then wonder why I was broke and didn't seem to be satisfied with life.

I've taken a turnaround. I do more with my life, I waste less, and I don't buy so much of what I don't need. I have my vices, as everyone does, the chief ones being books, certain video games, and craft supplies, but at least I can find use and enjoyment from those. Not like times I'd go out and buy $20 worth of junk food that would be gone in a day and would leave me feeling empty.

I've been giving a lot more thought to long-term food storange lately. I've been unemployed for the better part of six months now, and am learning ways to make the grocery budget stretch a little further, but I've been thinking long and hard about how nice it would be to have enough food stored away so that if this ever happens again, we won't need to worry about groceries at all. Aside from things like milk and wet cat food and toilet paper, the grocery budget could be put towards rent or bills, because we'll be all stocked up and prepared.

So maybe at this time next year, I'll have bags of dehydrated fruit, plenty of flour and beans and sugar and rice and oats in canisters in the cupboard. My roommate would say that things like pasta would be necessities for long-term food storage, but with water and flour, I can make fresh pasta anyway. I already have about a year worth of various kinds of tea stored away. We're looking into getting a chest freezer at some point, to make meat easier to store. Root vegetables, if they can't be dehydrated for some reason, will do well in the coold darkness of the cupboards below the countertop.

There's something to be said for an abundance of the right things.

(Thus ends part 1 of my thoughts on the first chapters. It's impressive when the very first chapter of a children's book has so many things for an adult to think about.)