The City Mouse in the Country

This blog was started because I had lived most of my life as an urban dweller; I wanted to record my adventures as I tried my hands at different things and I never pictured this blog would become what it did. Country life suits me in some ways.   I'm at a point in my life where I can appreciate looking up into the night sky and seeing thousands of stars, just like I did as a kid.   I just love how the moonlight bathes my beautiful sleeping wife in a creme colored light.   Country life is more peaceful and a lot more hard work than I would have ever expected.  While my neighbors and I may not agree politically or philosophically, my new lifestyle has given me insights on how they view the world. This brings me to my main point.   Here in rural America we simply don't have public transportation, nor do we have a lot of manufacturing or diversity or hospitals or even great education...and if we are going to move forward with a brighter greener future that we all want then we canno

  I am not that creative of a person.  Yes, I write and have written some fiction and such but I have more of an analytic mind.  I like to deal with facts, numbers and hard data.  The conclusions that I've reached are driven by columns of pluses and minuses. I'm not going to lie, much of my belief system and philosophical views are based on rational and scientific thinking.   Most, if not all of the the work that I've done all my life was driven by data and information.  When you understand what the data tells you, it affects your world view in a lot of different ways. For example, data from the FBI and other sources state that the most violent city in America is not Chicago or New York; but the tiny city of Bessemer, Alabama.  For a city of only 26,000 people, the chance of you being a victim of a violent crime is 1 in 30.    In a place like New York city, the chances of you being a victim of a violent crime is only 1 in 192.   The reason is because of population density.

Even though we are nearly two weeks away from the New Year, I've decided to try and write what has traditionally been the last post of the year now.  For me it's always been a brief review of what I've covered, accomplished and achieved in the past year.   Like the above meme says....I made it through. Maybe it's due to seasonal depression, maybe it's due to my writing this blog for slightly over three years and my audience is still in the hundreds, not the thousands like previous blogs have been but I think this blog may be coming to an end. Although the low readership that I have could be due to the blogging platform I use, which is neither supported by nor promoted by Google anymore.  However I love the ease and simplicity of this particular platform and see no reason to change it at this time. This lack of comments and low readership are making me wonder if it's worth it.  Plus, if I'm being honest with myself, this blog has lacked focus as I seem to be

  I t's easy to think that we are living in the proverbial end times.  Smoke pours across our borders from unchecked Canadian wildfires, across the world the temperatures continue to rise and records are broken daily.  Deaths due to heat related issues are reported in monotone voices by our news anchors.   Nearly everyone admits that climate change is real and that we are experiencing it.  You have many that think it's to late, and see no reason to change their lives.  I used too be one of them.  Change however is inevitable and our species has a knack of getting itself into trouble only to find a way out of that trouble. For example in this week alone we learned of reclaimed coal mining land where 1 acre is feeding 2000 people , while it is certainly a green washing piece for the company - I'm going to concentrate on the positive.  The fact that 1 acre of land is feeding 2000 people and that restoration is occurring at all.   There was a time when the open pit of a mine w

 To be honest I don't consider myself a homesteader or even a gardener. To be blunt about it I could have easily spent the rest of my life in Florida with a small container garden on our back porch.  I would have been happy to have had a few beers at my favorite bar, enjoyed good food at my favorite restaurant and fade into the background as the fat and happy hedonist I am. The One with glasses does look like me Life had other things in store for me.   Now I find myself; perhaps not in the proverbial boondocks but with enough distance and space to force the "City Mouse" into considering how to do things differently...and not really having a clue about how to do it. Living in the country does change your viewpoint and your habits.  It's very easy to fall into cliche's and all cliche's have a kernel of truth to them...but country life does change you. Don't misunderstand me, I'm always had an interest in things like permaculture and self sufficient liv

  I never expected to live out in the country.    I never expected to enjoy it.    I never expected to plant my own food, or do much of the day to day “manual” labor that living out in the country requires.   I was a city boy, I had come to enjoy the distractions that a city offered. I never expected to love where I live, I love the quiet.   I love the stars at night.    I even love the deer that nibbled at my garden, or the wild turkey and foxes that live around me.    Which got me thinking, what can I do to improve the community around me?   Other than what I already do with the Odd Fellows ? Basically we live in an area of three closely knit towns, and despite the title of the blog – it’s not considered the “boondocks” but it is rural.    I live in the small town of Stoneboro, close to the small towns of Jackson Center and Sandy Lake.     Small communities that are all knitted together by country roads and a local high school.   We are 70 minutes from Pittsburgh, 100 minutes