Search Results for: label/cats/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

919 results

Moonshine

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Fermentation, Food
...preferably from a source that will lend itself to a pretty picture on the label — bottle it, and you’re in the vodka business.” As it turns out there is an art to good homemade moonshine — a far cry from the soulless mouthwash Archer-Daniels-Midlands turns out. Here’s some excerpts from an interview of ex-moonshiner John Bowman conducted by the Coal River Folklife Project from “Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia...

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How to Organize a Small Workshop

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Design
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...to go a lot more smoothly. In the past few months I’ve decided to focus on making my tiny workshop both useful and pleasant. The challenge has been that our 1920s garage is tiny–sized for two Model-Ts–and must also accommodate our Honda Fit. At the risk of seeming like I’ve come down from the mountaintop with stone tablets, permit me to share a few things I’ve learned about tiny workshop design: Put everything on wheels. Get some locking wheels at...

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Zombies!

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Thoughtstylings
...evision viewing. What’s the cure? In short, we think it’s the exciting new urban homesteading lifestyle. What’s the strategy to overcome zombieism? We are no fan of the Unabomber, but he may be right about this one – just substitute the word “zombie” for “American” – which is perhaps redundant, anyways: . . . it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for the habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be...

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Is Ham Radio Useful?

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Preparedness
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...work of people who could help me and my neighbors in a real emergency. The cats? Not so useful. It took about a half hour for them to emerge from their hiding spaces. In an emergency it’s a good idea to have a radio and know how to use it. And you don’t have to be a Ham to listen to Ham frequencies. Thanks to cheap imported electronics you can now get a radio that receives and transmits on Ham bands, works as a scanner and even transmits on FRS (f...

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An Overdue Update on Phoebe

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Animals, Cats
16 Comments
...eractive as our other two cats, but she beats up Buck, the youngest of our cats, every morning like clockwork, loves to savage the fishing pole toy, and is diligently destroying the underside of our sofa. The sofa is her great work, an evolving art piece about the nature of entropy. She will have a short lifespan, though. The drugs just buy her a little time. Dr. Zimmerman told us the oldest cat she knew with Phoebe’s rare condition made it to fou...

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