Sunday, November 9, 2008

how to prepare for an economic downturn

1. Move into a house that you find on the side of the road. Strike a deal with the owner that you will be nice to the house in exchange for taking comfort in the house.

2. During the first couple of months at the house, boil water on a camp stove to heat the bath water that was filled from the hose into the tub on the front porch, because you have not yet treated the house to a working bathroom. Hang your children's giant, multicolor parachute in front of the tub so that the rare passing car doesn't see you naked in a tub on your porch.

3. Spit your toothpaste off the side of the porch during those first couple of months, too.

4. Again on the front porch, wash your dishes in a different tub and dry them on a rack. You do not need the parachute for this. It is okay for rare passing cars to see this. They will just think you are a bit strange. But you're pretty sure they already thought that.

5. Send your children to public school. This has the added benefit of authenticating your belief that the government should provide decent public education for all children, and inspiring you to become actively involved in that cause, because you are now privy to the actual budget.

6. Get free food from yours and your neighbors' gardens.

7. Sleep with your family in a tent inside your house because of the spiders. When you finally overtake the spiders and create actual bedrooms, you don't take them for granted. And you know that you could go back to sleeping in a tent if you had to.

8. Save up for a wood burning stove. In advance of your purchase, be sure you have acquired a husband who will become obsessed with scavenging free wood from the side of the road.

9. Come by your other big ticket items in curious ways. For instance, rather than purchasing a television set, get one for free from your husband's brother's anarchist friend who found it necessary to flee to Canada all of sudden.

10. Eat rice. A lot of rice.

4 comments:

Julia said...

And the chickens, don't forget the chickens!!

We are listening to a series of lectures on the Great Depression. The prof said that before the 30s, most economic downturns did not see a lot of recorded unemployment as people out of jobs in the city would go generally home to their families in the country and try to make themselves useful mucking out the barn. So, the obvious next question would be...do you guys have a barn ;-).

countrypeapie said...

Ah yes -- the chickens. We are re-thinking their freedom at the moment. I think we're about to go Bush on them. I'll have to post about that.

While we don't have a barn, we do have the coop, and it will definitely need mucking come spring....

Julia said...

We can have a mucking out party when we come home this February! Sort of like a barn raising, but smellier.

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