Paths

I'm sure several here believe I am a strange monkey but I have never trod the beaten paths and It has worked well over the years for me and I admit my mind can be off a bit to some people.
How complacent are we anymore? As a child we woke up to a breakfast that mom cooked, got home at night from school, played with the dog, ate and washed up. Mom had ran your jammies through the dryer along with your fresh clean sheets.
I just mention this because I used to hike for a week at a time hauling everything I needed on my back except for water. I could live out of my old Jeep for over a week easily with another friend.

My water heater decided to shoot craps a few days back. Inconvenient so I had to heat water on the stove to do a bird bath at the kitchen sink. Also known as a P&T, pits and tits bath.
I was close to firing up the water heater in the motor home, Oh, yeah, It needs a propane refill and flushing out all of the pink stuff I put in for the winter...
Some friends were doing a remodel on a house up in the hills so their water heater was out. Shirley was the head nurse at a hospital in Ft. Collins. She did a cold shower every morning before work, the shower head was strapped to a pine tree between 2 of their buildings. I was warned and stayed on the other side of the house talking to her husband until she was done.
I have sat here reading from a Coleman lantern, heat and light. Oh, computer isn't going to work so well as the modem is out.

I could add a lot to your narrative about the old days. I'm just shy of 60 years old and I still live out in the sticks, dirt road, 40 miles from work. I own a small farm and grow my own food and raise and breed my own cattle. I can everything I raise or grow including beef and chicken and turkey. Some of my friends think I'm a little nuts for living the way I do. But my girl and I have lived out here without power for weeks at a time (mostly during winter storms) and we survive, but I must admit, I will hook up the generator to power the well pump for showers now and then. We still have a Quaker Ideal wood stove the will not only cook your meals, but also has an oven for baking. We store water in milk jugs for flushing the toilets and water in cranberry jugs for drinking. I'm good with all of this, because if the poop ever does hit the preverbal fan, I'm blowing back. Your not odd in my book, but kind of normal, at least in my wacky level of looking at things.

Things happen. In the middle of the winter some friends were without power for several hours in the middle of the night. She had a dog to cuddle up with and Pat fired up his wood stove. I thought about this and dug around in my shed and brought in a catalytic heater and my Coleman lantern. Sure enough, a few weeks later my power went out. I could read with the lantern and they do put out a fair amount of heat.