What we did, what we do now

Sweetie made this blog some time back, and it has been sitting idle as long. We intended to partner blog and were using this particular blog as a vehicle to chronicle some elements of living our life in this wonderful treasure of a hamlet called Bay Center (named so because it is a peninsula that juts out into the center of Willapa Bay). We didn't do what we intended with this blog. Some years have passed and elements of our life and activities together are reflected in bits and pieces spread out amongst our other blogs.

It would be a bit time consuming to capture the last five years of our life living here in this village on the bay into one blog entry, so I won't try. As we move on with posting to this blog about our lives now, likely some of our past activities will show themselves in our future posts together.

He is five years to retirement, and I 'retired' a little earlier - May 2003 - but since I only put in sixteen of the required twenty years, I'm not going to be receiving any kind of a retirement pension. Thus, I am not officially 'retired'. We are trying to figure out how (if)our income in retirement will meet our daily needs. We used the rules we grew up with as the basis for our retirement, but we can see those rules have become antiquated and outdated for these tumultuous economic times.

So in between our intense efforts and activities to speak out as military family with loved ones deployed in Iraq (see more on our activism at one of my blgs, Dying to Preserve the Lies), there have been some other things we do in our daily lives besides activism. Although it has taken me about the last year to clear my head a bit from the intensity of the previous five years of activism, enough to see that it became so all consuming for me, therefore for us, maybe we are finding some balance in our lives now. Looking out at the horizon, there are new challenges for all of us ahead in these difficult times with the looming oil/food/economic crisis. As we post to this blog, we will be addressing our efforts at how we are trying to be somewhat prepared for an uncertain future.

Recognizing that we don't have the survival skills of our ancestors, we are trying to learn a thing or two about a thing or two. Learning about food management is one of several of our current shared focus - growing our own food, harvesting, preserving what we grow - and that is a large enough chunk to bite off as the peripheral topics that accompany it become their own kind of challenges, ie, making a root cellar.

I think because it is something we CAN do, it helps us to feel like we are attempting to do something concrete in the face of knowing that the wolf is at the door. We have spent a goodly amount of the last five years being messengers, and it feels good and right to turn attention now to spending less time messengering, and more time doing. Amen.