LET CLASS WIN
L
E
T
C
L
A
S
S
W
I
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L – Lodging
E – Eating, at home and away
T - Transportation
C - Communication
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
S - Simplification
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
I - Inventions to be prepared
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
L – Lodging
We use one of the many abandoned large warehouses in the cities and turn it into a shelter-lodging. Persons pay $350 a month and get a place to sleep, a shared big living room, a large kitchen set up for groups making meals, multiple places called offices that can be used for the day or week for working out of the flow of traffic, workshops for making paper, generators, clothing or other items, laundry and mail service. Some of the buildings would have enough space for stores and cafes. We’d have paid persons called lodgemasters to watch over things. This provides a place to be ‘home’ for a year or for many years. Persons who grow old would be able to stay with government workers coming in to assist with needs, just as if they went to an assisted living home but they are not confined to a living room with the television blaring all day and no place “in house” to go for a different atmosphere. We would want to have also disabled as it is perfect for normal life and they can learn the simple patterns which would be consistent from lodging to lodging. (ie. Breakfast is ready from likely 6 to 9:30 a.m. Sack lunches in the refrigerator with excellent sandwiches, a serving of vegetables in a baggie (SO tasty that they look forward to more), maybe a milk, and fruit. Laundry done easily. Workshops would be located on the building map, as is the garage to ask the mechanic to drive your car and listen to the dog howling in the back seat (just kidding), likely a second hand store (which is also our clothing room for those who need immediate or replacement clothing items) and a few fun places. Everyone gets a tour with the map in their hand. We might make the tour self-done with a requirement to pick up something like a bookmark from the different places so they are confident in their ability to find each place and we have a nice surprise for a reward when they return.)
Recap of "Lodgings" -
Unused buildings remade into lodgings. Start with one a city, change to more, people can move to another city with it prearranged so they know there is room. They can go for three weeks for vacation and be able to afford it. Places can have from 30 to 2000 persons with the same consistent good rules and standards. Mail, a bed, meals available, ‘offices’ for a day to rent (maybe $5? Maybe nothing)(some looking like fairy tale, some like a cave, some look modern and to clean it, we simply hit the button that says “flush.”)
Other housing options- Using connexes stacked in groups of eight and making eight homes out of them, living room/kitchens on one end, full of windows and maybe with a balcony, bedroom on the back end with a good window, bathroom by the kitchen plumbing, and a thin bedroom that is still wonderful for the baby or for the teens on bunkbeds. Don’t sneer. It is absolute luxury compared to what many have now. One idea is to equip the kitchen and bathroom with the sink, stove, refrigerator, toilet, taken from the mobile homes of America and we sue anyone who makes any more. Indians in the American Southwest have had temperatures of 110° F. inside. Alaskans have tried to heat theirs, made with 1.5” of insulation, but ice is three inches thick on the windows, and mold and ice are in the closets.
Another housing option – For hot and cold climates.
What I’d like to do in the American Southwest – replace homes with “underground homes” – one side or half of the house has all windows and the rest is tucked into the earth for its stabilizing temperatures (and NO wind leaking through). Not needed but nice would be a culvert or a connex up to the back door with a hill on top so the back door leads into the (culvert/connex) shed which has a good aisle, shelves on both sides, and a door with (doublepane) windows built in on the end. Cool in the desert temperatures and a good place to work on things. Maybe a few 'pipe' windows with three layers of windows for natural daylight to be overall.
And- I’d like to see the same in Alaska’s climate. The homes maybe built in a half-circle so the moms can see the little kids playing nice in the half-circle play area with picnic benches and tables. A dome of sorts built over it? Or even if not, I still like the connexes attached at the backside to the houses (and, YES, covered with dirt) so the residual heat keeps them almost or totally comfortable and the firewood and the storage is kept in them. And, if tundra is a lot like the peat bogs of Ireland, can we get wet-use chainsaws and cut out tundra to dry it in 8” blocks in summertimes to stick into the woodstove to smolder and heat the place and hold the fire ready to re-light in the morning?
About weatherstripping –
If the homes in America were weatherstripped, we would have no energy so-called crises, we would not need oil from the Middle East, and we pretty much don’t need it now. What is weatherstripping? It is looking for and solving the problem of that pesky “weather” sneaking in around windows and under doors giving us a draft of cold air into the house.
E – Eating, at home and away
Restaurants – We don’t need 115 or 45 options on the menu. What if each restaurant made three dishes each night, posted it on the door and online, and the customers choose one main dish, one vegetable, of the three options? Further, in an aside, I mention that the Asian restaurants and the businesses that start with “FU” are not accidental. It is deliberate sabotage of the American people’s good cleancut minds. (If we have any left. And we do.) One example, among many, is “Fu Kung Chinese Restaurant” – It is NOT a language accidental slip. “Oh, my!” they chortle and widen their eyes. Perverts.
Back to OUR idea of restaurants – If we had a simpler menu choice, and it changes each night, then we can stop having to have elegant cuisine made in complexity for each and every person who is eating, causing the cook to come up with eighty or a hundred fancy dishes in one night. If we have Internet, we can post it on a SIMPLE one-page website for persons to check before they come. But, if we go to a friend’s house for dinner, it is expected that you eat what is put before you, even if you don’t adore spaghetti. You don’t order her to go fix you something else. Don’t come.
At home – Meal making could be made SO much simpler. It is not a big thing to cook for an hour for a family’s meal but the meal could be made in record time. If we plan ahead for the month, and don’t use the book that has the meat choices that your family can’t afford, then we can pre-prepare. I want the children to start learning to do this in first or second grade. Mommy helps them check off the meal choices that have the price next to them. They take it back to school and the school has two people work for one week or less, for an hour a day, to have the ingredients purchased in bulk and divided. For an example, flour costs $11 for a 50-pound bag, $5.79 for a five-pound bag, $1.90 for a one-pound bag. Beef is $3.70 to $8 per pound. But if the bulk buy is for a whole cow, it is $1.25 per pound. The school does not take the savings, the student’s families get it. Then mom (often) goes to school on the planned day and she and student-child work at a cafeteria table for the day, dividing and marking the baggies of food. They finish before the ice melts in their cooler, take it home, and put it in the freezer, the cupboard, and the refrigerator. Dinner for the entire month is half done and not a stress. If a family has three children in school, then since each child is doing it, three separate months are done at school and they can choose to do it on the other months of the year or not. Older students, such as Sixth Graders, can do fancier things such as making little pastry berry pies. So can Second Graders.
Plan Two – Grocery stores. I want (boring) grocery stores. I call it boring so the big chains don’t worry about us boring folks. I want grocery stores with under 200 items. The average big-marketplace store has four thousand items. Nah. I listed the groceries that I wanted the most and the food came up to 115 items. Milk is always whole milk, no two percent or nonfat (It DOES NOT matter for a diet and you are avoiding healthy fat and eat four ounces of oil sludge. You need the satisfaction of the good milk.) The sizes are Gallon, Half-Gal, Quart, and Pint so you can buy for a family or just a serving for your bountiful, not meager, lunch. That is four items. Vegetables and Fruit in three ways – fresh, frozen, and canned. Meat – beef, chicken, pork and bacon, and (frozen) fish (Fish have fins and scales). No shellfish or groundfish. Bread, only wholegrain (?) and great for you. Grains and herbs and spices in bulk, premeasured in ounce or pound bags.
Then, at the store, we have bags of the glorious good, pre-planned dishes. The ingredients are measured and assembled and ready for you to dump and mix, set the stove timer, and stay close enough to hear the timer. Dinner is done. The family cook can make a meal of two or three special dishes with five minutes of work. We could even have, at the store, a drill that you use to drill a hole in the rutabaga to make it cook faster. (Rutabaga is very hard to peel until after it is cooked but it is sweet and tasty and goes very well along with potatoes.) We need a good variety of plant foods and with the right assortment, you can live up to twenty years longer.
That kind of grocery store would be nice to have as ‘the store with the gas station just outside.’ It would not have the oil-sludge and yuck-fat chips or the chemically-made sodas and coffees but, never fear, LOTS of places long for you to come buy that stuff from them. Give them your business if you want those things. With the food items that I figured being 115 items, there is room for other items of practical normal use, and we would still be able to stay under 200 items. Notebooks, cigarette lighters, matches, flint-and-steel lighters, seeds, simple use items such as plates, cups, bowls, and such.
Now for what is ‘crazy,’ I want a mail outlet often there or in the lodgings and people who don't live there can buy a box and have good mail service. NOT $35 a month but $50 a year and the customer low on money can work it off with simple tasks such as sweeping, mopping, helping to unload a truck. We create a mail system that is either boxes with keys or slots behind the counter and the customer can see if there is something in his mail slot by the crossing colors on the wall (“My mail slot is near where the green and the yellow cross.) Thirty slots high by fifty slots wide is 1500 slots. A bench below them lets the counter person step up higher if needed and the purpose of the bench is to hold packages or large envelopes. If a person gets such, a colored card goes into their mail slot and the counter person knows to look for the item below the slot. The mail items sold would be envelopes (NOT the post office’s price of $7 for the small envelope and the mailing of it, but FIVE or TEN cents and the price of the stamp for the mailing.) Simple NICE postage stamps (not with desperate crying things like breast cancer or prostate cancer or aren’t-you-dead-yet stamps but maybe flowers) for one ounce and the extra-ounce stamp. There would be a postage scale ON THE COUNTER for easy use instead of standing in a line because you don’t know if it is two ounces. And there would be no 14 questions per item but a poster can say “Can’t mail loaded cocked guns, so take those to the regular post office.” We MIGHT have two questions: Airplane or boat? And have the prices listed.
And, one good idea for the grocery store is something new, for us. In the Netherlands, in small towns, the customer asks for the fresh food items and the cashier wraps them up. Nice but a bit too much service maybe for us. What if we try having a list of the 200 items in the store, the customer checks off what they want, and the store person assembles the list? They have clean hands. We keep it simple, such as the notebooks have a blue or a yellow cover and that is your choice. The customer pays for it and puts it in their bag to take home. I’d like to start a small store like that. Probably serve coffee on the side. And sandwiches for $4 just because. Have a counter with a sink handy.
T - Transportation
I want a simple car, not something with a spaghetti mess of wires under the hood, the oil filter not accessible, and the car talking to you. Nah. I want someone to make a car with a push-button radio, bench seats, and a motor that can be worked on. I want fenders that unbolt easily, can be ordered and replaced for a MODERATE sum of money, and NOT 8000 colors but maybe ten. I don't worship you more because you have a different color on your car. Stop asking. I want my life to be more than boasting about such things. I want my friends to be higher quality than those who boast about such trivial stuff. Save yourself the cost of the $80,000 car and jump in with me and we can have a car-team that sets up the deal with the car makers. Such like.
C - Communication - hmm, I am not thrilled with the persons who live with their faces tipped to their little idol screens. There is a frenzy which has filled our lives. The FCC has failed and is hopefully trying again in several of their appointed areas. The learning of Morse Code would be good. I don't know it yet. I know that I feel that we as a people are saying to our government: . . . - - - . . .
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
First, the adults. I want classes offered for adults who want more for their life.
One) A language test that tests several areas and shows the adult, on their own, what goes wrong. I am a great example: I speak English at a A minus level. I recognize more words than I know how to use in normal speech. I have started to misspell words that I once spelled easily. I pronounce about two words in regular speech incorrectly. When I was a child, I could not pronounce the difference between "shoulders" and "soldiers." My tongue got mixed up.
Two) Classes in ballroom dancing, country dancing, line dancing. Workshops in how to sew; how to build houses, septic systems, great farms, and generators small or mid-sized to light and power your own house or your own light in a room. How to cook for a month and you do it there. How to preserve food, garden, and do Morse Code. How to check your car out, how to drive, how to drive a boat, how to back a trailer (without the husband screaming in anger and the wife in tears).
Second, the children.
One) Yeah, yeah, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I noticed, after I grew up and looked more at languages, that the areas that I flubbed as a gradeschooler could have been explained a LOT better, but the teacher was following the textbook which was not written well. I flunked an upper algebra class but it was not the teacher's fault. He chose to do things in a way that allowed us to chose to start being like adults making choices. I flunked. (I repeated the class.)
Two) Can we have P.E. be less competitive? Can we do things which are exercise but not humiliations, as were the picking of teams by the best players? I was on the list at the bottom almost. Elaine Rook and I were usually chosen last and it was done in such a way as to mortify us. Are competitive sports the natural outcome of exercise?
Three) I want to crowd out the silly stuff. I want to put in, YES, in six hours of the day, more. Classes in real life aspects that are a heck of a lot better than home ec was. I wanted "shop class" and the adviser said, "Oh, no, you need to be in a foreign language." It was either/or, there was not a system that allowed for both. (And it was good - I LOVED being in a foreign language class and it didn't matter if I was perfect or not. It helped lead me on to going to Europe as an international exchange student and such things shape the framework of a life.) The limited lives we are graduating are too tight and narrow in too many ways. Ask a high school graduate to make a meal. The lower lip drops and she stares befuddled. And speaking of textbooks, I have found contradictory errors and downright invented things. What if we do not have to memorize the dates of wars and battles but need to know how to find ore, what it looks like, how to make a furnace be it for metal, cement, glass, or ceramics, and how to recognize the major plants and their uses?
(Note on the current information source crises - I believe "advisor" is spelled with an 'o' but the spell check insists on an "e." I have found some words definitively spelled incorrectly in our dictionaries and I have found about five words that are MISSING. As if someone in a "web spider" crawling changed the information across the board. Not my concern right now, just a comment.)
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
So much to say, I am going to jump to the easiest. In California, I watched field after field being sprayed with water from sprinklers. The mist of water rose into the hot air and 30% was gone instantly, and the rest barely made it the named "ONE INCH DEEP" that was recommended. What if we instead had water put INTO the ground in different ways depending on the crop. Such as for the trees, we put a pipe (with side holes) straight down about ten feet, with a wax plug at four feet. We water the smaller tree at the two or four foot level and when it is larger, we punch through the wax and let the watering be as deep as the ten foot level. The trees grow roots downward, instead of running them along the ground. Instead of "mopping" the trees with 45 gallons per tree with a trickle line that puts an inch puddle on top of their roots, we give them five gallons at the deep depth and the trees rejoice. And, we give them a solution of baking soda and vinegar twice a year to strengthen them. There are several other things which would make their fruit more nutritious and would make us live longer, things that are not oil-sludge fertilizers.
(I have seen dead fields with the poisonous weed killer and fertilizer so strong that few corn stalks grew at the lower elevation. The ponds as the lower end of the fields were thick with gross slime and the little ducklings were on their way to a slow death. It is said that ONE corn cob from the few corn stalks in the concentrated dosage area is enough to give a man prostate cancer. One. They are scooped up and thrown into the for-sale bin.)
For the opposite, aiming for good, let me give two surprising examples: compost water and electromagnetic light.
Compost: We intentionally gather from restaurants and other cooking places such as homes the food debris such as cobs and peelings, mix it with farm manure from livestock, put it in a roller bin to save the hassle of digging it by hand. We make a point of adding 1) dark colored berries such as grapes, blackberries, cranberries, things with that "zing" to them. (More are implied). And 2) we gather seaweed at the beaches and put it in as well for the minerals and beloved ingredients from the sea. You can spread the joy by soaking the compost with water, draining the water and giving it to the trees once or at most twice a year.
Light: We add some ingredients that we cannot name. We put a tanning bed on a truck with mirrors that spray the light over the field and let it light the field for four hours. We have an electric arc welder emitting its zappy different kind of light and the mirrors spray the light outwards. A welder can work on a project on the truck for ten minutes and it is enough. We have blue lights on the field at night for a few nights. We do the same with a black light. And this is fun, we give it radio-waves light with 1) we play music for the field about three times. I recommend Rhapsody in Blue and Hillbilly music. And, 2) we take an antennae of any size and aim it at the stars, attach it with wires to a satellite light-ray gathering dish - at the center receiving point - and aim the dish at the field. If we do these things, the nutritional content of the food will increase to the point that we can live for decades more.
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
I believe. I believe that we can clean up poisoned areas with good remediation that is not "more acid." I believe in splashing bathrooms such as the gas station and such as the hospital with a solution of water with baking soda, vinegar, a slug (not a ton) of bleach (as not much is needed with the baking soda and vinegar neutralizing the bacteria). Add a white flower for faith. Then we have a squeegee and pull the excess water down the drain and leave it to air dry.
S - Simplification
I kept my material and my tools even when I didn't need them. Do you relate? I want to have warehouses with eighty-five tables and huge windows for daylight. (We bring our not-needed material there and get credit for it.) The material is sorted into the eighty-five tables. The solid colors and black and white at the back row, the main color with one other at the next row, such as in the blue row, the next table is blue as the predominant color and red is the secondary color. Then blue with orange, then blue with yellow, then blue with green, and so on. The further sets of tables are for three colors or more mixtures. A person could bring in a fabric and match the shades and tints perfectly. AND, I would recommend that we make material that is not so many shades for better matching. Not yellow with 70 variations but yellow with maybe five variations. We actually don't see it after a little bit. But when colors jar, it is not as good. And, I shall mention here, that asian material makers have deliberately made material with ugly prints, often drawings of children and childish things as if it didn't matter. It is called "f you" material. I am in favor of throwing it away.
Tools - Do you, men, have 'one of everything'? I did. I needed a sledge hammer for two summers and about 14 other things, such as putting my second ground rod into the earth. And then it sat for twenty years. My neighbor needed a wheelbarrow and I had a very stout concrete one, clean, so I would come home and find it borrowed for a few days. It was returned with a sheepish, "Hey, I didn't think you'd mind. Thanks." Another neighbor borrowed a shovel with my knowledge and permission for "one day" and forgot it was mine. It was my only pointy dirt-digging one. I could NOT remember where it could be and bought another. When in Modesto, California, I was at the library and across the parking lot was a place that CHECKED OUT TOOLS. Like the library checked out books. A person maybe paid $10 or $15 to be on the list and they could come and pick up a tool for two days or a week or so. What if we had workshops equipped with tools and tables so persons could come make things? Maybe such could be at the lodgings, and a few people would work for four hours a day to watch over the place and help as useful. Such as if grade school girls are there to make a dollhouse that is good for a bird too and the worker there shows them a book with ideas and after they mark the wood, he cuts the wood for them on the big band saw until the girls are mature, maybe twelve years old, and instructed in safety. (Mom and Dad would have to give permission.) Daddy let us girls use tools in his shop and we girls pounded in nails and put boards together. The items maybe were not glorious BUT that was my practice for building a house. It worked.
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
The money discussion is on another page and can be looked at with your own life in mind. The basic concept is that a young man cannot hardly hope to have a job that gives him time to have a life and money sufficient to pay for a house and a family. Yes, dearie girls, there is more than guys to life, I, after all, am a female and I built a house, but am I allowed to say that when you were little, reading about princesses in fairy tales, you did not dream of working in a roasting kitchen with sweat dripping and people yelling in order to come home and have the husband tell you what happened on the soap opera that day and to complain that his bon bon supply was low?
I - Inventions
Being able to make things is right and good. I want kids in school and adults at home able to assemble a simple generator with five parts that you can find possibly in your junk drawer and, voila, you have a lit lightbulb. If the grid goes out, if the power goes out, you can have the luxury of light and appliances, heat and transportation. More on this to follow.
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
We can change things in the travel industry to make traveling the world not only for the rich. We could adjust things slightly to make it possible for the foreign resorts to be able to afford a less rich clientele. There are several ways to do this and the job would not be difficult.
L
E
T
C
L
A
S
S
W
I
N
L – Lodging
E – Eating, at home and away
T - Transportation
C - Communication
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
S - Simplification
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
I - Inventions to be prepared
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
E
T
C
L
A
S
S
W
I
N
L – Lodging
E – Eating, at home and away
T - Transportation
C - Communication
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
S - Simplification
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
I - Inventions to be prepared
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
L – Lodging
We use one of the many abandoned large warehouses in the cities and turn it into a shelter-lodging. Persons pay $350 a month and get a place to sleep, a shared big living room, a large kitchen set up for groups making meals, multiple places called offices that can be used for the day or week for working out of the flow of traffic, workshops for making paper, generators, clothing or other items, laundry and mail service. Some of the buildings would have enough space for stores and cafes. We’d have paid persons called lodgemasters to watch over things. This provides a place to be ‘home’ for a year or for many years. Persons who grow old would be able to stay with government workers coming in to assist with needs, just as if they went to an assisted living home but they are not confined to a living room with the television blaring all day and no place “in house” to go for a different atmosphere. We would want to have also disabled as it is perfect for normal life and they can learn the simple patterns which would be consistent from lodging to lodging. (ie. Breakfast is ready from likely 6 to 9:30 a.m. Sack lunches in the refrigerator with excellent sandwiches, a serving of vegetables in a baggie (SO tasty that they look forward to more), maybe a milk, and fruit. Laundry done easily. Workshops would be located on the building map, as is the garage to ask the mechanic to drive your car and listen to the dog howling in the back seat (just kidding), likely a second hand store (which is also our clothing room for those who need immediate or replacement clothing items) and a few fun places. Everyone gets a tour with the map in their hand. We might make the tour self-done with a requirement to pick up something like a bookmark from the different places so they are confident in their ability to find each place and we have a nice surprise for a reward when they return.)
Recap of "Lodgings" -
Unused buildings remade into lodgings. Start with one a city, change to more, people can move to another city with it prearranged so they know there is room. They can go for three weeks for vacation and be able to afford it. Places can have from 30 to 2000 persons with the same consistent good rules and standards. Mail, a bed, meals available, ‘offices’ for a day to rent (maybe $5? Maybe nothing)(some looking like fairy tale, some like a cave, some look modern and to clean it, we simply hit the button that says “flush.”)
Other housing options- Using connexes stacked in groups of eight and making eight homes out of them, living room/kitchens on one end, full of windows and maybe with a balcony, bedroom on the back end with a good window, bathroom by the kitchen plumbing, and a thin bedroom that is still wonderful for the baby or for the teens on bunkbeds. Don’t sneer. It is absolute luxury compared to what many have now. One idea is to equip the kitchen and bathroom with the sink, stove, refrigerator, toilet, taken from the mobile homes of America and we sue anyone who makes any more. Indians in the American Southwest have had temperatures of 110° F. inside. Alaskans have tried to heat theirs, made with 1.5” of insulation, but ice is three inches thick on the windows, and mold and ice are in the closets.
Another housing option – For hot and cold climates.
What I’d like to do in the American Southwest – replace homes with “underground homes” – one side or half of the house has all windows and the rest is tucked into the earth for its stabilizing temperatures (and NO wind leaking through). Not needed but nice would be a culvert or a connex up to the back door with a hill on top so the back door leads into the (culvert/connex) shed which has a good aisle, shelves on both sides, and a door with (doublepane) windows built in on the end. Cool in the desert temperatures and a good place to work on things. Maybe a few 'pipe' windows with three layers of windows for natural daylight to be overall.
And- I’d like to see the same in Alaska’s climate. The homes maybe built in a half-circle so the moms can see the little kids playing nice in the half-circle play area with picnic benches and tables. A dome of sorts built over it? Or even if not, I still like the connexes attached at the backside to the houses (and, YES, covered with dirt) so the residual heat keeps them almost or totally comfortable and the firewood and the storage is kept in them. And, if tundra is a lot like the peat bogs of Ireland, can we get wet-use chainsaws and cut out tundra to dry it in 8” blocks in summertimes to stick into the woodstove to smolder and heat the place and hold the fire ready to re-light in the morning?
About weatherstripping –
If the homes in America were weatherstripped, we would have no energy so-called crises, we would not need oil from the Middle East, and we pretty much don’t need it now. What is weatherstripping? It is looking for and solving the problem of that pesky “weather” sneaking in around windows and under doors giving us a draft of cold air into the house.
E – Eating, at home and away
Restaurants – We don’t need 115 or 45 options on the menu. What if each restaurant made three dishes each night, posted it on the door and online, and the customers choose one main dish, one vegetable, of the three options? Further, in an aside, I mention that the Asian restaurants and the businesses that start with “FU” are not accidental. It is deliberate sabotage of the American people’s good cleancut minds. (If we have any left. And we do.) One example, among many, is “Fu Kung Chinese Restaurant” – It is NOT a language accidental slip. “Oh, my!” they chortle and widen their eyes. Perverts.
Back to OUR idea of restaurants – If we had a simpler menu choice, and it changes each night, then we can stop having to have elegant cuisine made in complexity for each and every person who is eating, causing the cook to come up with eighty or a hundred fancy dishes in one night. If we have Internet, we can post it on a SIMPLE one-page website for persons to check before they come. But, if we go to a friend’s house for dinner, it is expected that you eat what is put before you, even if you don’t adore spaghetti. You don’t order her to go fix you something else. Don’t come.
At home – Meal making could be made SO much simpler. It is not a big thing to cook for an hour for a family’s meal but the meal could be made in record time. If we plan ahead for the month, and don’t use the book that has the meat choices that your family can’t afford, then we can pre-prepare. I want the children to start learning to do this in first or second grade. Mommy helps them check off the meal choices that have the price next to them. They take it back to school and the school has two people work for one week or less, for an hour a day, to have the ingredients purchased in bulk and divided. For an example, flour costs $11 for a 50-pound bag, $5.79 for a five-pound bag, $1.90 for a one-pound bag. Beef is $3.70 to $8 per pound. But if the bulk buy is for a whole cow, it is $1.25 per pound. The school does not take the savings, the student’s families get it. Then mom (often) goes to school on the planned day and she and student-child work at a cafeteria table for the day, dividing and marking the baggies of food. They finish before the ice melts in their cooler, take it home, and put it in the freezer, the cupboard, and the refrigerator. Dinner for the entire month is half done and not a stress. If a family has three children in school, then since each child is doing it, three separate months are done at school and they can choose to do it on the other months of the year or not. Older students, such as Sixth Graders, can do fancier things such as making little pastry berry pies. So can Second Graders.
Plan Two – Grocery stores. I want (boring) grocery stores. I call it boring so the big chains don’t worry about us boring folks. I want grocery stores with under 200 items. The average big-marketplace store has four thousand items. Nah. I listed the groceries that I wanted the most and the food came up to 115 items. Milk is always whole milk, no two percent or nonfat (It DOES NOT matter for a diet and you are avoiding healthy fat and eat four ounces of oil sludge. You need the satisfaction of the good milk.) The sizes are Gallon, Half-Gal, Quart, and Pint so you can buy for a family or just a serving for your bountiful, not meager, lunch. That is four items. Vegetables and Fruit in three ways – fresh, frozen, and canned. Meat – beef, chicken, pork and bacon, and (frozen) fish (Fish have fins and scales). No shellfish or groundfish. Bread, only wholegrain (?) and great for you. Grains and herbs and spices in bulk, premeasured in ounce or pound bags.
Then, at the store, we have bags of the glorious good, pre-planned dishes. The ingredients are measured and assembled and ready for you to dump and mix, set the stove timer, and stay close enough to hear the timer. Dinner is done. The family cook can make a meal of two or three special dishes with five minutes of work. We could even have, at the store, a drill that you use to drill a hole in the rutabaga to make it cook faster. (Rutabaga is very hard to peel until after it is cooked but it is sweet and tasty and goes very well along with potatoes.) We need a good variety of plant foods and with the right assortment, you can live up to twenty years longer.
That kind of grocery store would be nice to have as ‘the store with the gas station just outside.’ It would not have the oil-sludge and yuck-fat chips or the chemically-made sodas and coffees but, never fear, LOTS of places long for you to come buy that stuff from them. Give them your business if you want those things. With the food items that I figured being 115 items, there is room for other items of practical normal use, and we would still be able to stay under 200 items. Notebooks, cigarette lighters, matches, flint-and-steel lighters, seeds, simple use items such as plates, cups, bowls, and such.
Now for what is ‘crazy,’ I want a mail outlet often there or in the lodgings and people who don't live there can buy a box and have good mail service. NOT $35 a month but $50 a year and the customer low on money can work it off with simple tasks such as sweeping, mopping, helping to unload a truck. We create a mail system that is either boxes with keys or slots behind the counter and the customer can see if there is something in his mail slot by the crossing colors on the wall (“My mail slot is near where the green and the yellow cross.) Thirty slots high by fifty slots wide is 1500 slots. A bench below them lets the counter person step up higher if needed and the purpose of the bench is to hold packages or large envelopes. If a person gets such, a colored card goes into their mail slot and the counter person knows to look for the item below the slot. The mail items sold would be envelopes (NOT the post office’s price of $7 for the small envelope and the mailing of it, but FIVE or TEN cents and the price of the stamp for the mailing.) Simple NICE postage stamps (not with desperate crying things like breast cancer or prostate cancer or aren’t-you-dead-yet stamps but maybe flowers) for one ounce and the extra-ounce stamp. There would be a postage scale ON THE COUNTER for easy use instead of standing in a line because you don’t know if it is two ounces. And there would be no 14 questions per item but a poster can say “Can’t mail loaded cocked guns, so take those to the regular post office.” We MIGHT have two questions: Airplane or boat? And have the prices listed.
And, one good idea for the grocery store is something new, for us. In the Netherlands, in small towns, the customer asks for the fresh food items and the cashier wraps them up. Nice but a bit too much service maybe for us. What if we try having a list of the 200 items in the store, the customer checks off what they want, and the store person assembles the list? They have clean hands. We keep it simple, such as the notebooks have a blue or a yellow cover and that is your choice. The customer pays for it and puts it in their bag to take home. I’d like to start a small store like that. Probably serve coffee on the side. And sandwiches for $4 just because. Have a counter with a sink handy.
T - Transportation
I want a simple car, not something with a spaghetti mess of wires under the hood, the oil filter not accessible, and the car talking to you. Nah. I want someone to make a car with a push-button radio, bench seats, and a motor that can be worked on. I want fenders that unbolt easily, can be ordered and replaced for a MODERATE sum of money, and NOT 8000 colors but maybe ten. I don't worship you more because you have a different color on your car. Stop asking. I want my life to be more than boasting about such things. I want my friends to be higher quality than those who boast about such trivial stuff. Save yourself the cost of the $80,000 car and jump in with me and we can have a car-team that sets up the deal with the car makers. Such like.
C - Communication - hmm, I am not thrilled with the persons who live with their faces tipped to their little idol screens. There is a frenzy which has filled our lives. The FCC has failed and is hopefully trying again in several of their appointed areas. The learning of Morse Code would be good. I don't know it yet. I know that I feel that we as a people are saying to our government: . . . - - - . . .
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
First, the adults. I want classes offered for adults who want more for their life.
One) A language test that tests several areas and shows the adult, on their own, what goes wrong. I am a great example: I speak English at a A minus level. I recognize more words than I know how to use in normal speech. I have started to misspell words that I once spelled easily. I pronounce about two words in regular speech incorrectly. When I was a child, I could not pronounce the difference between "shoulders" and "soldiers." My tongue got mixed up.
Two) Classes in ballroom dancing, country dancing, line dancing. Workshops in how to sew; how to build houses, septic systems, great farms, and generators small or mid-sized to light and power your own house or your own light in a room. How to cook for a month and you do it there. How to preserve food, garden, and do Morse Code. How to check your car out, how to drive, how to drive a boat, how to back a trailer (without the husband screaming in anger and the wife in tears).
Second, the children.
One) Yeah, yeah, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I noticed, after I grew up and looked more at languages, that the areas that I flubbed as a gradeschooler could have been explained a LOT better, but the teacher was following the textbook which was not written well. I flunked an upper algebra class but it was not the teacher's fault. He chose to do things in a way that allowed us to chose to start being like adults making choices. I flunked. (I repeated the class.)
Two) Can we have P.E. be less competitive? Can we do things which are exercise but not humiliations, as were the picking of teams by the best players? I was on the list at the bottom almost. Elaine Rook and I were usually chosen last and it was done in such a way as to mortify us. Are competitive sports the natural outcome of exercise?
Three) I want to crowd out the silly stuff. I want to put in, YES, in six hours of the day, more. Classes in real life aspects that are a heck of a lot better than home ec was. I wanted "shop class" and the adviser said, "Oh, no, you need to be in a foreign language." It was either/or, there was not a system that allowed for both. (And it was good - I LOVED being in a foreign language class and it didn't matter if I was perfect or not. It helped lead me on to going to Europe as an international exchange student and such things shape the framework of a life.) The limited lives we are graduating are too tight and narrow in too many ways. Ask a high school graduate to make a meal. The lower lip drops and she stares befuddled. And speaking of textbooks, I have found contradictory errors and downright invented things. What if we do not have to memorize the dates of wars and battles but need to know how to find ore, what it looks like, how to make a furnace be it for metal, cement, glass, or ceramics, and how to recognize the major plants and their uses?
(Note on the current information source crises - I believe "advisor" is spelled with an 'o' but the spell check insists on an "e." I have found some words definitively spelled incorrectly in our dictionaries and I have found about five words that are MISSING. As if someone in a "web spider" crawling changed the information across the board. Not my concern right now, just a comment.)
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
So much to say, I am going to jump to the easiest. In California, I watched field after field being sprayed with water from sprinklers. The mist of water rose into the hot air and 30% was gone instantly, and the rest barely made it the named "ONE INCH DEEP" that was recommended. What if we instead had water put INTO the ground in different ways depending on the crop. Such as for the trees, we put a pipe (with side holes) straight down about ten feet, with a wax plug at four feet. We water the smaller tree at the two or four foot level and when it is larger, we punch through the wax and let the watering be as deep as the ten foot level. The trees grow roots downward, instead of running them along the ground. Instead of "mopping" the trees with 45 gallons per tree with a trickle line that puts an inch puddle on top of their roots, we give them five gallons at the deep depth and the trees rejoice. And, we give them a solution of baking soda and vinegar twice a year to strengthen them. There are several other things which would make their fruit more nutritious and would make us live longer, things that are not oil-sludge fertilizers.
(I have seen dead fields with the poisonous weed killer and fertilizer so strong that few corn stalks grew at the lower elevation. The ponds as the lower end of the fields were thick with gross slime and the little ducklings were on their way to a slow death. It is said that ONE corn cob from the few corn stalks in the concentrated dosage area is enough to give a man prostate cancer. One. They are scooped up and thrown into the for-sale bin.)
For the opposite, aiming for good, let me give two surprising examples: compost water and electromagnetic light.
Compost: We intentionally gather from restaurants and other cooking places such as homes the food debris such as cobs and peelings, mix it with farm manure from livestock, put it in a roller bin to save the hassle of digging it by hand. We make a point of adding 1) dark colored berries such as grapes, blackberries, cranberries, things with that "zing" to them. (More are implied). And 2) we gather seaweed at the beaches and put it in as well for the minerals and beloved ingredients from the sea. You can spread the joy by soaking the compost with water, draining the water and giving it to the trees once or at most twice a year.
Light: We add some ingredients that we cannot name. We put a tanning bed on a truck with mirrors that spray the light over the field and let it light the field for four hours. We have an electric arc welder emitting its zappy different kind of light and the mirrors spray the light outwards. A welder can work on a project on the truck for ten minutes and it is enough. We have blue lights on the field at night for a few nights. We do the same with a black light. And this is fun, we give it radio-waves light with 1) we play music for the field about three times. I recommend Rhapsody in Blue and Hillbilly music. And, 2) we take an antennae of any size and aim it at the stars, attach it with wires to a satellite light-ray gathering dish - at the center receiving point - and aim the dish at the field. If we do these things, the nutritional content of the food will increase to the point that we can live for decades more.
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
I believe. I believe that we can clean up poisoned areas with good remediation that is not "more acid." I believe in splashing bathrooms such as the gas station and such as the hospital with a solution of water with baking soda, vinegar, a slug (not a ton) of bleach (as not much is needed with the baking soda and vinegar neutralizing the bacteria). Add a white flower for faith. Then we have a squeegee and pull the excess water down the drain and leave it to air dry.
S - Simplification
I kept my material and my tools even when I didn't need them. Do you relate? I want to have warehouses with eighty-five tables and huge windows for daylight. (We bring our not-needed material there and get credit for it.) The material is sorted into the eighty-five tables. The solid colors and black and white at the back row, the main color with one other at the next row, such as in the blue row, the next table is blue as the predominant color and red is the secondary color. Then blue with orange, then blue with yellow, then blue with green, and so on. The further sets of tables are for three colors or more mixtures. A person could bring in a fabric and match the shades and tints perfectly. AND, I would recommend that we make material that is not so many shades for better matching. Not yellow with 70 variations but yellow with maybe five variations. We actually don't see it after a little bit. But when colors jar, it is not as good. And, I shall mention here, that asian material makers have deliberately made material with ugly prints, often drawings of children and childish things as if it didn't matter. It is called "f you" material. I am in favor of throwing it away.
Tools - Do you, men, have 'one of everything'? I did. I needed a sledge hammer for two summers and about 14 other things, such as putting my second ground rod into the earth. And then it sat for twenty years. My neighbor needed a wheelbarrow and I had a very stout concrete one, clean, so I would come home and find it borrowed for a few days. It was returned with a sheepish, "Hey, I didn't think you'd mind. Thanks." Another neighbor borrowed a shovel with my knowledge and permission for "one day" and forgot it was mine. It was my only pointy dirt-digging one. I could NOT remember where it could be and bought another. When in Modesto, California, I was at the library and across the parking lot was a place that CHECKED OUT TOOLS. Like the library checked out books. A person maybe paid $10 or $15 to be on the list and they could come and pick up a tool for two days or a week or so. What if we had workshops equipped with tools and tables so persons could come make things? Maybe such could be at the lodgings, and a few people would work for four hours a day to watch over the place and help as useful. Such as if grade school girls are there to make a dollhouse that is good for a bird too and the worker there shows them a book with ideas and after they mark the wood, he cuts the wood for them on the big band saw until the girls are mature, maybe twelve years old, and instructed in safety. (Mom and Dad would have to give permission.) Daddy let us girls use tools in his shop and we girls pounded in nails and put boards together. The items maybe were not glorious BUT that was my practice for building a house. It worked.
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
The money discussion is on another page and can be looked at with your own life in mind. The basic concept is that a young man cannot hardly hope to have a job that gives him time to have a life and money sufficient to pay for a house and a family. Yes, dearie girls, there is more than guys to life, I, after all, am a female and I built a house, but am I allowed to say that when you were little, reading about princesses in fairy tales, you did not dream of working in a roasting kitchen with sweat dripping and people yelling in order to come home and have the husband tell you what happened on the soap opera that day and to complain that his bon bon supply was low?
I - Inventions
Being able to make things is right and good. I want kids in school and adults at home able to assemble a simple generator with five parts that you can find possibly in your junk drawer and, voila, you have a lit lightbulb. If the grid goes out, if the power goes out, you can have the luxury of light and appliances, heat and transportation. More on this to follow.
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
We can change things in the travel industry to make traveling the world not only for the rich. We could adjust things slightly to make it possible for the foreign resorts to be able to afford a less rich clientele. There are several ways to do this and the job would not be difficult.
L
E
T
C
L
A
S
S
W
I
N
L – Lodging
E – Eating, at home and away
T - Transportation
C - Communication
L – Learning (aka Education) - A wider variety of subjects to meet life's challenges
A – Animals, Plants, Planet – our natural world
S - Sanitization- Haz Mat cleanup, better cleaning practices
S - Simplification
W – Work (changed to not a drudgery)
I - Inventions to be prepared
N – New (community feasts, dancing classes, letter writing, paths wandering, world traveling)
