bur·row (bûr, br)So if you have been living under a rock or somewhere without electricity or Turner Network Television, you may not know about the movie "The Shawshank Redemption."

In it's essence, Shawshank is a prison-break movie. Although, the hopeful tale takes twenty some years in the telling, it is still about a man, who changed how he lived, despite his horrid circumstances, and over twenty years, through incredibly patience, he tunnels his way out of the prison. He does this by nightly tapping away at his cell wall with a tiny rock hammer...this way he manages to tunnel through twenty feet of rock over twenty years...

I love this idea. This is my concept of how I'm going to dig my basement...only faster. Hopefully, it'll only take a couple of years...and I won't have to worry about that pesky warden or the other prisoners putting me in solitary or violating me in ways I don't want to discuss.

This idea seems really simple--and, I'll admit, pretty crazy--but it is wrought with potential problems I'll have to thoroughly understand before I make any real headway on it. Some of the considerations include.

1. How do I keep the house from shaking, shifting or just generally falling down and crushing me?
2. How do I keep out water? I imagine the answer to this is a sump pump, which my house already has, but I may need a supplementary one.
3. What do I do with all the dirt? My initial idea was to use all the dirt as extra insulation on the outer walls of my crawl space...I'm also beginning to wonder, if we have a lot of clay in our soil, if I can't use it to make bricks which I can then use to build walls, etc...I've got a lot to learn on this one.
4. What do I do if I run into large underground rocks? Because I'm not dynamiting anything under my house.
5. Geothermal heating? How does that work? Could I use that to my advantage as I get down deeper? So many questions? There used to be a company around here that did it?

We currently do have a Michigan basement, which for those of you who don't live in Michigan, is more of a hole in the ground under the house that used to be used to store preserves or...bodies, maybe. My family is scared of our basement...but not as scared as they are of the crawlspace... Currently we keep our freezer, furnace and water heater down there and that's about all the room there is. I'd like to eventually have enough room to move our washer and dryer down there, but more importantly, I'd like there to eventually be some real living space down there...

But that's just crazy me...me and my patience and my bucket and hand trowel...maybe someday a pick...who knows...

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.