If you aren't already afraid of an economic collapse, this video should enlighten you.

Amazingly, we get all the media talking heads blathering and shouting for hours and never get clarity.  This guy does it in a couple minutes.

The first rule in prepping is: You do not talk about prepping!

The second rule in prepping is: You do not talk about prepping!

Wednesday morning I made a trip to urgent care to have my thumb repaired.  I was canning pickles and sliced off a chunk of my thumb on the mandolin.

It's a problem any time I bleed because I take Warfarin daily to prevent blood clots, and I take 81mg aspirin to prevent heart attacks.  So, when I bleed it's harder than normal to stop it.  I have to have my blood tested every four weeks or so to make certain that my INR doesn't get below 2.0 or higher than 3.0.  Last week it was 3.7, which makes blood flow even faster. --- By the way, Warfarin is also used in rat poison.

Yesterday I went back to have it checked and it looks like everything will be okay eventually. I'll be staying off blood thinners for a few days.

It's difficult not having the use of the thumb on your right hand. You just don't realize how much you use your thumbs.

When I went down to let the chickens out of the coop we spotted a coyote about 100 yards away.  Libby was staring at something that I couldn't see because it was just getting light.  I finally saw something moving along the tree line in the shadows.  It jumped up on a picnic table and I lost it again in the shadows.  I assumed it moved into the trees.

I was curious to see what it was so I walked toward the spot where it disappeared.  Because the neighbors had spotted a raccoon that was acting strange during the day a couple of days ago, and because we had spotted skunks earlier I had Libby on a leash.  Also, I was carrying a 22 pistol in case we had a run in with a rabid animal or the chickens were being attacked.

As I got closer to the table, I saw the coyote lying on it, watching us.  Now, he wasn't crouched or sitting at alert. He was lying there relaxed and not afraid at all. I got to about 100 feet away (gun in hand, but not chambered) and he didn't move. 

I figured if he wasn't going to start something, neither was I. We made an oblique exit so I could keep an eye on him, but he never moved.  I watched him from cover for several minutes until he moved into the trees. The chicken fence is pretty much varmint-proof, but I watched the chickens until I felt certain they were going to be okay.

I've seen coyotes around the neighborhood before, but usually from a distance and when they're on the move.  He must have been curious about Libby. Libby is about the same size as a coyote, so maybe he wanted to make a friend.

One evening, in 1929, two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point above the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.

Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios (Lear had served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I) and it wasn't long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn't as easy as it sounds: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.

SIGNING ON
One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago . There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a "battery eliminator" a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.

GETTING STARTED
Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker's Packard. Good idea, but it didn't work -- Half an hour after the installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get the loan.) Galvin didn't give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.

WHAT'S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier. In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix "ola" for their names -- Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.

But even with the name change, the radio still had problems: When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.) In 1930 it took two men several days to put in a car radio -- The dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them. The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.

HIT THE ROAD JACK......
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn't have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression -- Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores.

By then the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to "Motorola" in 1947.) In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In 1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio -- The Handie-Talkie -- for the U. S. Army.

A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II. In 1947 they came out with the first television to sell under $200. In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 it supplied the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the world's first handheld cellular phone. Today Motorola is one of the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world -- And it all started with the car radio.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THEM?
The two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin's car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola.. In the 1950's he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and,eventually, air-conditioning.

Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that. But what he's really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)

Ineptocracy (in-ep-tock'-rah-see)

A system of government where the least capable of leading are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least able to succeed or sustain themselves are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Last year we planted a strawberry patch on the south side of the garage.  We didn't get a single berry because the plants were new and critters and birds ate what few there were.  This year we put up a fence and covered the patch with chicken wire and fabric.


Our first harvest yielded about a gallon of berries.  There's nothing like the smell (or the taste) of field ripened strawberries.


My first attempt at canning jam gave us five jars.  I overcooked them a bit, but the jam still tastes great.

We just bought eleven hens this week and five last week to make a total of seventeen.  We were virtually wiped out last month when some critter got into the old pen and slaughtered all but one chicken that managed to escape the pen.

We have fortified the coop and built a more secure fence that can be moved so the girls can have access to a different patch of grass occasionally.  We will be adding more sections of fence soon and probably will electrify it to make it difficult for varmints to get in.