Flea Be Gone

The weather is getting warmer, so that means nasty buggies are coming out.  Plenty of ways are available to poison them, but you have to be careful they don't poison you or your pets -- even if they are natural.

Look, Out In The Field...

It's A Flower!

It's A Food!

It's A Fiber!

It's Flax!

Learn All About Flax.

'Dem Dry Bones

You may take supplements for healthy joints, but what would you do if they were no longer available?  The Prepper Pages has instructions for Making Dehydrated Bone Broth.  Not only is this something that can be done with relatively simple equipment, it is shelf stable, so you can start making it up now for use later.

Up All Night?

Having trouble sleeping?  Jeremiah Johnson at ReadyNutrition.com has 12 Natural Ways to Remedy Sleep Disorders: 8 suggestions for changes in behavior and 4 natural remedies to try.

Swimming Au Naturel

The latest fashion is not swimming without bathing suits, it's swimming without chemicals.  It's called wild swimming, but it is frequently man-made. You can find plenty of directions for making your own natural swimming pool. And they aren't just swimming holes; plenty of options are available.

Related articles

• 10 Natural Swimming Pool & Ponds
• The swimming pools of the future will become friendlier to the environment

I Hate To Brag, But...

NoiseBot

B.O.M.B. Making 101

No, this isn't a recipe from The Anarchist's Cookbook, it's a variation on the Bug Out Bag: the Bug Out Medical Bag.  A souped-up version of a first-aid kit, these are more commonly known as gunshot wound or gunshot trauma kits.  Survivopedia has instructions on how to assemble your own for less than $100. The main components:

1. Tourniquet
2. Compression Bandages
3. Suture Kit
4. Splint/Sprain Wrap
5. Blood Clotting Agents
6. Miscellaneous

10 Healing Herbs

The admin at Homesteading Guide calls these the Top 10 Medicinal Herbs for Your Garden.  While I'm not sure I'd agree with their ranking, it definitely is an interesting list:

1. Chamomile
2. Calendula
3. Peppermint
4. Comfrey
5. Lavender
6. Hyssop
7. Rosemary
8. St. John's Wort
9. Arnica
10. Marsh Mallow

Related articles

• Keep pets in mind when gardening
• 5 Plants For A Breast Cancer Medicinal Flower Garden
• You'll Never Have To Replant Again With These Self-Seeding Crops

The Cure: Morning Coffee

A suburb in the Eastern United States
Several months before the Announcement


Jane walked to her big oak dining table, coffee with cream and two sugars in her right hand, the rolled-up newspaper from her front doorstep under her left arm.  She sat down and laid the paper on the table, grateful that her local newspaper was still in business and delivering papers to her doorstep.  Like most everyone, Jane had a tablet and a smartphone, but she spent enough of her day staring at screens.  When she sat down for her morning coffee, she enjoyed having the whole paper spread in front of her, turning it page by page.

In between, as she sipped her coffee, she liked to look out her big french doors just past the end of the table.  It had been a hard winter.  Even though the average temperature was a bit higher than normal, that just meant they had had more ice storms and less snow.  She couldn't ever remember the power going out as many times as it had that winter.  Now finally Spring was returning; the snow had melted, the animals were out and about, and the birds had returned.

She had an excellent view of her bird feeder, which she had just refilled the day before.  She was looking forward to watching their antics while she sipped her coffee and browsed the headlines.  Much to her chagrin, a squirrel was sitting on the bird feeder.  Just sitting there.  She would have to check the metal guard and figure out how it got past that.  Still, it was odd that it was just sitting there, quite still.  She expected it would have been trying to get at the bird food.  She wondered for a second if maybe someone was playing a practical joke and put a squirrel statue on her bird feeder.


Apparently that's what several starlings thought -- or maybe they just didn't see the squirrel. Two landed on the same side as the squirrel, three on the opposite side.  That appeared to break the squirrel out of its trance.  It lunged for the nearest starling, who didn't have a chance to react, and sunk its teeth into the hapless bird's neck.  The others started to fly off, but the squirrel leapt onto the other bird on the same side of the feeder and bit its wing.

With a mad fluttering of wings, starling and squirrel spiraled to the ground until the squirrel finally hit the ground.  The jolt was just enough for the starling to break free and spiral away, obviously having trouble with its damaged wing.

Jane rushed out the french doors as she saw this happening, and the squirrel ran off when it saw her coming.  The other starling had plummeted to the ground from the bird feeder.  It had twitched a few times, but by the time Jane picked it up, it was motionless.

Jane was livid.  She had never been so mad at another living creature before.  She resolved to go buy a BB gun after work and make sure if that squirrel ever came around again, it would never hurt another bird.

How Obamacare Can Reduce Unemployment

Okay, follow closely.  Let's say you have some work that needs done that requires 120 person-hours a week.  Originally you might have hired 2 people to work 60 hours a week.  Then after overtime became an issue, you hired another person and cut everyone back to 40 hours a week.  Then came benefits for full time employees, so you went to 4 people working 30 hours a week.  Now with Obamacare, you would have to provide health insurance for people working 30 hours a week, so you go to 6 people working 20 hours a week.

Of course, this only works in jobs where there is a ready supply of new employees.  Those industries that can't hire readily just have to adjust to what they can afford, and those are the ones that publicly announce layoffs.  The hiring from Obamacare is more in low-skill service work, which goes relatively unnoticed.  Of course, there is no more money being paid to employees, so it's not really helping the economy, but it makes Obama look good.

So, the trend I expect to be reported over the coming months is a mild drop in the unemployment rate with a sharp increase in the underemployment rate, i.e., people who want to work full time but only have part time jobs.

A Treasure Trove of Survival Information

Okay, I know the whole theory is kind of hokey, and if it's not, it's a bit late now, but with over 14 GB of PDF files, this looks like a bountiful source of information:

Pole Shift Survival Information

I haven't had a chance to really go through it, I suspect there is a major overlap with some other source(s).  Glancing over the directory structure there seems to be a good variety of information, and looking at a couple of the PDFs they look detailed enough to be useful.

Tips for Chicken Eggs at Home

Colorado State University has a useful page on "Home-Produced Chicken Eggs," written by M. Bunning and J. Avens.  It covers the basics without going into too much detail.

The Dark Ages

Today at 1:25 P.M. I officially entered the Dark Ages.  No, it has nothing to do with lack of electricity.  I installed blackout cellular blinds in my bedroom to help ease my migraines.  The nice thing about them is they also are insulating too, so they will be useful at night when it is cold out as well as days when it is hot.

Diet Tip: Leftovers First

Here's a simple little trick that has helped me lose weight: if you make more servings than people who are going to eat them right away, put away the leftovers before serving. That way I'm not tempted to just finish it off so I don't have to put anything away.  If I am truly hungry, I can pull one out and eat it, but I rarely do.

Kitchen Tip: Nuke Your Sponge

This is actually two tips in one.  If you use a sponge to wash your dishes, when it stops looking, feeling, or smelling clean, stick it in the microwave for two minutes.  This will sterilize it and make it like new again.  (Sorry I can't remember where I picked up this tip.)  Also, when the sponge gets too ragged for dishes, I use it to clean up around the kitchen.  After I nuke that sponge, I go ahead and wipe out the microwave; nuking the sponge helps loosen everything that splattered or overflowed.  (That tip comes from my mother.)

Why Health Care Costs So Much

"Why Your Health Care Is so Darn Expensive"… by Alex Daley on CaseyResearch.com
The bottom line: because we are living so much longer.

Review: Healing Lyme Disease the Natural Way

William Hunter Duncan just posted an excellent review of the book Healing Lyme Disease the Natural Way by Wolf-Dieter Storl, along with his personal experiences with Lyme disease and thoughts on health care.