Murphy’s law of the apocalypse

Murphy’s Law of the apoclaypse   An animal that is too easy to catch ain’t worth eating. You will get sick of beans. Mice will get to your beans. The mice in your beans will be easy to catch. The mice in your beans will have Hantavirus. People will betray you because of the temptation for [...]

Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbit

Reader’s Beware:  Some of you vegetarians and snuggly animal lovers will not like the following post.  It involves dead bunnies. We made sticks.  Heavier on one end and lighter on the other end.  You carried two.  The idea was to throw it at a rabbit, preferrably a cotton tail and not a jack rabbit, hit [...]

Surviving Survivor School

This last weekend I took the Complete Survivor Class from Ancient Pathways.  I picked up a whole series of skills to practice. Notice I said “practice” because, good lord, just cause I did these things once doesn’t mean I am actually competent at any of them.   We set traps, snares, tracked, snacked on plants, [...]

Playing Chess with Gophers

A while back I declared a truce with the gophers.  They, however, did not see my white flag.  Last week, they went at one of the two agave plants I have in the backyard.  Upon my return (I was gone for a week) I found one of the agaves dug out from underneath.  The agave [...]

The gophers won and hate mail

I have decided to surrender in my war against the gophers for four reasons. I am a highly ineffective opponent.  They are clearly winning.  Assuming regular new holes means they are doing just fine. I am not confident that they are doing any harm to the garden or the trees, I think they eat the [...]

How to survive a bear encounter

As Alan Weisman demonstrates in The World Without Us, no one really knows what animals will thrive after we pesky humans are gone. I figure if one knows how to deal with a bear then you would hopefully be OK with any other wild animals. The presentation is the result of watching multiple videos on [...]

Gopher update

I have yet to kill much less catch a gopher. I will spare you the details because otherwise you would think I am cruel.

First attempt to build a solar oven

Last weekend, I built a solar over and tried to make sun-dried tomatoes in them. Needed: Two cardboard boxes, one slightly smaller than the other. Aluminium foil. A piece of glass or clear plastic. I used clear plastic because I figured for first attempt best to learn on something that does not break easy. Glue. [...]

Now we are cooking without gas! – weekend plans

Despite the fact I have yet to even coming close to catching a gopher, much less killing, skinning, cooking and eating one, at some point I am going to have to think about cooking. If I lived in the Appalachian’ foothills of my youth then wood would not be a problem.  But here in Phoenix [...]

Gopher Trap!

The gopher traps have been out for 48 hours.  I can’t tell if I have had any close encounters.  None of the traps have sprung on their own accord.