Burning brush, support jobs for food production and walk-abouts

Burning brush

You know you are doing it right when your neighbor's smoke alarm goes off.

Over the transom (email)

(Paraphrasing) "What if I am not a gardener, just moved into a new place or don't have property and/or have disabilities. Am I screwed if food-insecurity increases?"

You are not screwed if you network and can find somebody who does raise food and needs services you can provide.

Suppose you have neighbors who raise cattle. Rustling cattle is a "thing" when people are hungry. Most 20-somethings have to work really, really hard to be motionless for 10 minutes. Most 60 and 70-something year olds can sit motionless for hours.

If you zoom in you can see many "stock ponds". The creek has catfish as does the river it runs into.

An person who is relatively sedentary can also be an awesome fisherman. He can run a set-line or watch "jugs" which would under-utilize a man with the potential to burn 4000 Calories a day in physical labor but is just right for a fellow who values his time in a lawn-chair and iced-tea.

Another niche is in food preservation. Sometimes it is just a matter of keeping fires burning or moving trays around a food dehydrator. That seems like a small thing but producing food is of little value if you cannot convert it into a nonperishable form. It is like driving the football down to the 1/2 yard line but not being able to punch it into the end-zone.

An iconic example from literature is found in Thomas Hardy's Far From the Maddening Crowd where Farmer Oak interacts with the old man in the malthouse. The old man was notable for doing very different things over the course of the year but also notable for shifting over to less physically-demanding jobs as he aged.

Several years ago when I was looking into air-guns, I read about a handicapped man (very little use of his legs) in Great Britain who performed "pest control" on rabbits. He used an air-gun and maybe snares to reduce rabbit populations. Not only was he paid money for the service but he kept the dead rabbits.

In fact, I would have considered it a blessing to have an old man or an old woman available to sit and watch the burning brush reference in the first section of this post. I could have been doing other things rather than being "pinned down" watching the fire.

Walk-about

I am nearing my 63rd birthday. I am out-of-shape due to winter and estimate that I am forty pounds over my optimum weight.

I am tempted to take a one-day walk-about to see how far I can walk. From a statistical standpoint, the only thing less valuable than a single datapoint is zero-datapoints.

In light of what is happening in Ukraine, what weight "load-out" would be most interesting from an educational standpoint? My personal leaning is toward thirty-to-forty-five pounds. Yes, the guys in the sand-box carried 90 pounds. I could manage that to the end of my driveway.

An AR and ten, thirty-round magazines would run about 17 pounds. Food for a week about 7 pounds. Water for a day's march 8 pounds. Poncho and a change of clothes another five pounds. Add three pounds for the weight of the pack and frame and you are looking at 40 pounds. Comments?

The plan is to do the walk-about toward the end of May or in June for maximum daylight.