Could you make one?

I don't think I'm a kook...an inauspicious way of starting a blog, I'm sure...but I have a lot of questions about how people would survive if something horrendous occurred in the world. Be it a major natural disaster or man made event or whatever...if things broke down...if a major societal change happened...how would people survive? Could civilization survive?

I'm not saying I expect any of these things to happen, but as I've thought about the possibilities, I've realized that I am not equipped to live in a world without the internet, without the supermarket, without all the niceties that I and my family have come to expect, to take for granted.  I am not a carpenter or a welder or a doctor or a farmer.  I cannot trap or hunt.  I cannot say what plants are necessarily good to eat, let alone which ones might have any kind of medicinal purposes.

This brings me to the old saying, "No man can make a pencil."

No one man can harvest the wood, mine the lead, somehow stick the lead into the wood...and don't even get me started on erasers...In other words, the world has become so intrinsically specialized that only a rare few will know how to survive in the kind of world many fear may come some day.

I work in IT, which I think has bred in me a constant desire to actually SEE some tangible evidence of having done real work every day. Resetting people's passwords and making sure filesystems don't get too full are not exactly noble enterprises in my book.

But sadly, it's the best paying job I can find and I have a wife and three kids to feed, not to mention an old house with a large payment and a lot that needs to be done with it...so I reset passwords....but...for those same reasons....I have to learn to be more independent, more...useful.

So on this site, named for the nickname given to our aging home, I will start to learn these things...cause I have lots of questions:

What plants are edible?
What plants have medicinal purposes?
How would I make rope?
What are the best ways to get clean water?
How do you make cloth for clothing?
How do you harvest yeast?
How would I make flour?
How would I make bread?
How do you brew beer or distill liquors?
How do you make a brick?
How would I make mortar so that I could build with bricks?
How do you make paper?
How do you clean a fish?  How do you clean an animal?
How do you set up snares and traps?
What is the most efficient way to build a fire?
Would it be worthwhile to explore solar, thermal, hydro or wind power?

And many, many more...all with an eye toward being self-sufficient, if not just downright "useful."  And not because I'm counting down to the end of the world, but more so that I can SEE the fruits of my labors and feel safe in my independence.

And I'll blog about what I've learned so that you can be too.