DIY Hydration Bladder for just $12

While the Dog Days of August may be behind us, full-on Autumn has not yet arrived, so for folks involved in protest actions around the country, hydration is still fundamental for maintaining your operational efficiency during direct actions in the streets.

This project was originally inspired because my partner and I are in the preliminary stages of planning an Appalachian Trail thru-hike next summer, and years of experience in historic trekking have taught me that canteens, pouches, belt gear, etc. which swing around and aren’t kept close to the body can be a major pain in the arse on the trail. I may be a late convert to the hydration bladder scene, but I get the thinking behind it! I don’t want to have to reach for, unclip, and unscrew a water bottle hanging off my pack every time I need a drink…but my new backpack put a big dent in my trail budget, so I would prefer to not shell out $35-50 for a proper CamelBak bladder.
Luckily, I’m thrifty and crafty as hell, and came up with a solid solution that fulfills all my needs, and can be used by anyone who wants to stay hydrated (mostly) hands-free, on the cheap.

Midsummer Foraging Fun with Garlic Mustard!

[Editor’s note: I originally wrote (and promptly forgot about) this back in June. Ah well, better late than never!]

If you’re not involved in invasive species control, you might not be very familiar with garlic mustard. Which is too bad, because everybody should know about it—this European plant is a major problem in North America these days. Luckily, unlike a lot of the nastier (usually Asian) imports, this one is at least good for something!
In fact, g.m. is one of the oldest known cooking spices—its use dates back all the way to the Old European Neolithic!

Since we’ve just passed the summer solstice, now is the perfect time to get out in the woods and kill two birds with one stone—help rehabilitate our local environment, as well as harvest a tasty seasoning! Earlier in the spring, g.m. can be gathered fresh and the leaves used to flavor dishes, but by now most of the plant has died back, leaving the seed pods for easy identification.

I took a quick barefoot woods-walk this afternoon, and in about twenty minutes managed to gather a good bundle of dried stalks:

Because the delicate dried pods (or “siliques” for all you botanists out there) that contain the seeds will break open if you look at them the wrong way—and since we’d also like to prevent the spread of g.m.—it’s best to take extreme care while you pull the plant up by the roots to keep the seeds from shooting everywhere.

Once you have your bundle of plants, you can ‘shuck’ or strip the pods off the stalks; from here, it’s a simple matter of agitating the pods to release the seeds (I ground them around in this stone mortar before rolling bundles between my hands, and then winnowed away the chaff:
Now that I’m left with an ounce or so of pure seeds, I’m going to experiment and keep some plain and roast some others (to facilitate easier grinding), and then do some living history and season some venison with it. The seeds by themselves smell deliciously savory, with a hint of horseradish!

Doomsday Preppers: David Nash

Our other Tennessee prepper this episode is David Nash, who is also concerned about the likelihood of a modern New Madrid earthquake.
David explains how he and his wife Genny have “chosen careers that fulfill us but don’t necessarily leave us with much in the bank”, ergo he is DIY all the way! Which is great—less is more! I like it!
He starts off by showing Genny his homemade ‘saline converter’ to turn saltwater to bleach, which he could then add to contaminated water to make potable.
I’m not totally sold on the chemistry(NaCl+H2O -> NaOH + Cl ->bleach?), but if it checks out, that’s not a bad little system!
And because David thinks ahead, he DIY’s himself a stringtrimmer motor/wood-burning steam engine contraption to charge the battery he’ll use to run his bleach-maker. I’m not sure how all that comes together—I have little mechanical knowledge of anything more complex than a forge-bellows, but if he can indeed charge a battery by burning sticks and small wood, that’s a winner.

After that, David reveals his build project: a geodesic dome shelter to resist the shaking expected in an earthquake.
He cuts the aluminum pipe framework pieces in his shop, assembles them with his dad’s help in the woods, and then drapes it with a big heavy-duty piece of signage tarp. The dome gets draped in three kinds of wire mesh (probably could have gotten by without the chickenwire), and is coated by sprayed concrete and then given a camouflage paintjob. It looks solid, if a bit melty organic, but to make sure they give us another requisite DP tannerite explosion test, with dad inside! (the shelter appears to survive).

I had a friend in the UP who built a shack along similar lines some years back—except he used steel cattle panels and reclaimed plastic sheeting and old carpeting, all bermed with soil, to make a sort of ‘longhouse’. Apparently it was pretty much invisible once the woods grew up around it.

Oh, and for lighting inside his dome, David installs a two-liter ‘light bottle’—a really genius DIY lighting system—and some DIY gutters for water catchment.

Anyway, geodesic domes (yay, Buckminster Fuller!) are always awesome, and I love the use of the reclaimed billboard tarp. For a non-mobile DIY bugout shelter in the woods, the sprayed concrete shell is probably pretty hard to beat (I wonder if their concrete sprayer would be compatible with any of the alternative ’cretes—something with more solar mass for passive heating/cooling?)

After watching this episode and about the same time coming across this art exhibit, I got to thinking about the utility of combining modern materials like David’s tarp (which already exist in great numbers) with traditional indigenous building shapes and materials. I can pretty easily imagine a band of neotribal folks walking or riding (horses—no Ancient Sunlight Juice for these sustainables) across the post-Long Emergency landscape (or even the Right Now landscape, if you can imagine such a thing!), towing their travois loaded with a couple of these waterproof billboards (emblazoned with images of golden arches or sports mascots or other similar logos that must have once held great significance to the old ‘uns of the Fourth World, but are now no more than mysterious runes) and a bundle of tentpoles, all ready to set up camp at the next watering hole.
Just something to think about, it’s always fun to combine ‘new’ and ‘old’ and imagine different ways of doing thing. After all, there is no One Right Way to Live!

Doomsday Preppers: David Mays

Alright, folks. It would seem DP has finally jumped the shark—or at the very least, hit peak media oversaturation, and exhausted its fifteen minutes as a rating$ juggernaut—and stopped producing new episodes, which mean there are only two I have left to cover this season…and I really couldn’t be happier. It’ll be a big weight lifted off my shoulders when I won’t have to subject myself to watching this program (one which, in the big picture, turned out to be pretty sensationalist, exploitative, and generally detestable) for the bigger purpose of uncooling its message.

It’s not 2012 anymore, and I think folks are kinda sick of ‘reality’ shows about midlife-crisis, middle-class white guys with more money than sense, delusions of grandeur, and hard-ons for ‘tactical’ weaponry and foodbuckets. Don’t worry, they’re still out there; but the media landscape has (unsurprisingly) shifted over the past two years to the point where Prepperdom isn’t such a hot commodity anymore. Which is fine by me, because while it means a little less blog traffic for this page, it also means less toxic, deluded, status quo-y notions being broadcast into the public mindspace.

Anyway, episode ‘Nobody Will Be Ready’ cuts between the two Davids from Tennesseee; both guys are supposedly (but not unreasonably) preparing for a quake along the New Madrid fault line.
First up is David Mays:

Transparency clause: David and his wife Holly run an essential oils business (remember, this show has almost always been about ‘preppers’ using their appearance as publicity for their own enterprises).
Even though they live in a tract of burbland, their family seems to be taking some good first steps to increase their self-reliance by raising silkie chickens in the backyard, and growing aeroponic vegetables in a vertical garden tower.

But David’s main hobby, it seems, is flying drones!
Huh.
While the military-capitalist-corporate-industrial hegemons rain down remote-piloted death and destruction on foreign civilians of colour, here at home the basic technology has trickled down to the prosumer level, allowing armchair hobbyists to tinker about and remote-pilot their own camera-equipped drones around their pre-apocalyptic suburban wastelands! Isn’t our modern age great?

David’s plan post-quake is apparently to use his ‘drone army’ to ‘patrol’ his neighborhood, and equip them with various payloads—like one of those GoPro cameras that are all the rage right now, or a disposable camera-turned-improvised taser, or an ultralight silver parachute of medical supplies.
I dunno, I feel like it might just be easier and more productive/rewarding for David and/or the family to get out in the neighborhood on foot, meet their neighbors face-to-face, and start turning their subdivision into an actual community. Get a couple more families in the cul-de-sac on the chickens-and-gardening bandwagon and they could have the seeds of a nice little self-reliant network. Just a suggestion.

Doomsday Preppers: John Tucker

Man, the longer this show goes on, the least interesting it gets: I’d chalk it up to familiarity breeding contempt, and I’ve been writing these up for way too long to not notice the patterns everywhere.
Segment Breakdown:
John Tucker, family of six (yay, excessive procreation!), oil field technician (yay, fossil fuels!).
Supposed motivation: Category 5 hurricane (not unreasonable; it’s Texas, and weather’s only going to get worse).
Strategy: “I keep bees.”
Prior disaster experience: 49 days without electricity from Hurricane Ike!
The above ^ covered in the first six minutes. Rest of segment:

*Some drawn-out drama-stuff where John and his assistant get swarmed while trying to remove a hive of what we’re told are Africanized (‘killer’) bees from a house, without smoking them first, for some reason. Well, what did they expect was going to happen?

*John plans on bugging-out 350 miles, and wants to bring bees with him. But not all of them – just one hive (plus a dummy hive full of supplies)? As you should know by this point in the season, we’re going to spend the next fifteen minutes in a montage of sweaty folks welding (don’t forget the generic heavy metal music!), then adding weapons, followed by a testing stunt.

And why exactly—ignoring the fact that we’re talking reality tv here (nothing can be educational or even realistic!) and everything is sensational and for ratings—does John find it necessary to add a one-time-only, deployable car-caltrop and scythe wheels to his killer beehive trailer honey wagon?
Because he thinks people will see his beehive on the trailer (while they’re traveling down the road, apparently), recognize the many, many uses of honey/wax, and want it for themselves, therefore making him a target!
Y’know, when they first said they were worried about people taking their bees during a bug-out, I figured they meant people pulling combs out of the hives when they had parked somewhere. It’s pretty much only in the movies that somebody would try to steal something from your vehicle while you’re driving.
Ugh. At the end of the segment, John declares, “I’m not crazy, I’m a prepper!” Ha. Whoever said preppers weren’t paranoid…obviously doesn’t watch this show.

You know what I would do if I had bees to transport covertly? For starters, I’d make sure the trailer was big enough and sturdy enough to hold all of my hives—if you were to bug-out with a surplus of commodity with actual value (in this case, honey and wax), hey, you would have something to barter!
Plus, what with colony collapse all the rage these days, I’d want to make sure I had as many hives with me as possible! I thought preppers were all about redundancy—why does John only load up one hive??

Next, I’d make sure the trailer (which would probably need to be a double-axle for stability, not the dinky one John makes up) had low walls, for partial concealment, obviously. Finally, I’d just throw a blue plastic tarp over the top of everything, and nobody would be the wiser.
Of course, John and his crew realize this too, but it’s only after they’ve weaponized the trailer and given it a tacticool name, when they decide they could “put a net over the whole trailer, so they won’t even know what’s going down the road”. Right guys, except now you’re towing a redneck scythe chariot, which is probably gonna tip people off that you’ve got something worth taking.
And what they wind up throwing over the top isn’t something innocuous and commonplace like a blue tarp, as I’ve suggested (who doesn’t have one kicking around?), but some military camo netting, which definitely makes it look like they’re trying to hide something.

Oh, and of course they have to test it out! (Gotta have a stunt to get those ratings!) John tows the weaponized trailer while his cousin or whatever plays the role of honey-coveting marauder. They wind up pulling the front bumper off the car and flattening a tire or two. Whoo.

John closes by letting us know that he always makes sure he has extra stuff on hand so his family can eat. Dude, we’ve seen your vast array of sponsored foodbuckets, why not keep a little extra on hand to help your neighbors, maybe help build a more resilient, local community? Teach them about beekeeping, then you wouldn’t have to worry about people hypothetically taking yours? I dunno, I’ve just about had it up to *here* with redstate Takers preoccupied with keeping their Stuff from others and perpetuating the status quo, instead of engaging in actual solutions.