PowerSwitch

I went into an antique shop today, and as I was leaving, realised with horror that I can gone round the shop thinking - ah, now that looks useful!!!!!

Most people go around them and think - how quaint - and want to put things on display........!!!
I saw an old iron, a clothes wringer, a coffee grinder, tools, wow, great shop!
I wonder how many antique shops are going to be selling out of useful things when folk realise!

Have you had any scary moments when you realised you were doing something 'odd'?

Hehehehe. I'm EXACTLY the same in reclamation yards etc.


Ohhhhh, a twisty and drilll.... that will be usefull etc etc....

Milk churners, bellows, seed drillers, flails etc etc. I've got my eye on all of em!

Tracy Pepler wrote:
Have you had any scary moments when you realised you were doing something 'odd'?

Have I just?? How many times I've looked at those wretched bits of "low-maintenance" landscaping you always see round ugly buildings and thought "You could plant something edible there..."

RenewableCandy wrote:

Tracy Pepler wrote:
Have you had any scary moments when you realised you were doing something 'odd'?

Have I just?? How many times I've looked at those wretched bits of "low-maintenance" landscaping you always see round ugly buildings and thought "You could plant something edible there..."

That makes two of us,

I've got to get down the rec yard more often. I need to find a battered leather sofa so I can strip the leather off it for a re-enactment shield I'm currently making and have a nosey around to see what else I can find that might be usefull.

a while ago I was looking at clothes possers like a pole with a plunger on the end at a bootsale and the guy selling them explained to me what they were and with a sort of laugh thats what people used to wash clothes with in the past
and I said I know what they are, thats what I use to wash my clothes I like the one with the t handle it would be easy to swirl clothes with one of those great idea .
I said I have a crank washing machine but these are just as quick really , oh and a mangle always had a mangle .....anyway I got the sort of expression you might get if you said oh I live in a cave and dress in mammoth skins

Ive been doing this sort of thing most of my life my mother stopped using electricity when I was in school and we lived like that for years , all the cooking was done on a rayburn, washing done with a mangle and crank washing machines .
I had a selection of axes when I was about 8 for cutting all the firewood , we had mostly candles for lighting some parafin lamps, we lived like this in a small town mostly, also we grew a lot of our own food .

jonny2mad wrote: <snip>
.....anyway I got the sort of expression you might get if you said oh I live in a cave and dress in mammoth skins

<snip>

Don't you just love it when that happens?

yup I do .
what I generally do is explain why the other persons lifestyle is going to radically change whether they like it or not , they usually bluster and say something like well it wont happen in my lifetime , then I explain to them how it will happen in their lifetime .

things to say include how lots of countrys have already gone through peak exports of oil ,
how if there is so much oil why are we looking for it in differcult places like deep oceans or the arctic .
how alternatives like hydrogen wont work
how consumptions going therough the roof .
how most things are made with oil including food and most of our goods are actually made out of oil .
then you could go on to resource wars ,

I did this once to a poor women I got talking to at a bus stop, pretty much gave her the entire doomer outlook, and she looked like someone had just shown her that zombie armys were going to kill her on next tuesday

Tracy Pepler wrote:Have you had any scary moments when you realised you were doing something 'odd'?

Hehe! It's a completely integrated part of my life nowdays, but I remember the first time I bought 20 kg of sugar and 20 kg of salt for tucking away - I felt *really* odd among all the other shoppers who were going about their daily routines. "If they had known what I'm thinking and doing...."

MacG wrote:

Tracy Pepler wrote:Have you had any scary moments when you realised you were doing something 'odd'?

I remember the first time I bought 20 kg of sugar and 20 kg of salt for tucking away - I felt *really* odd among all the other shoppers who were going about their daily routines.

Now that's really odd! They probably though you were some poor bloke planning to adventure into the kitchen and cook a meal for the first time, maybe as a surprise dinner for his wife, but hadn't quite calculated the ingredients and measurements correctly!!

I had a scary moment the other day: We inherited some furniture which is going to take up space and I don't even like it much, but well, it has sentimental value to my in-laws so it has to stay . I just looked at it with a grin on my face and thought... "emergency firewood!".

Thanks guys, I don't feel so weird now! or at least not alone and weird!

Johnny2 mad- why did your mum stop using electricity?

Erik wrote: I just looked at it with a grin on my face and thought... "emergency firewood!".

In Spain? Are you taking a punt on a new Ice Age ??

RenewableCandy wrote:

Erik wrote: I just looked at it with a grin on my face and thought... "emergency firewood!".

In Spain? Are you taking a punt on a new Ice Age ??

Actually, we're well over 600m above sea level here, and about 25 miles from mountains which reach up to over 2000m... so we get snowfall once or twice a year, and night time temperatures certainly drop below 0?C quite often during the winter.

Perhaps not quite cold enough to justify getting a wood stove, but I would certainly enjoy chopping up the offensive furniture bit by bit to burn in a kelly kettle!

Not really sure she stopped in the 1970s, lots of people at the end of the 60s and early seventies were heading for the hills because of worries over fuel and the way things were going then .
She nearly bought a double Decker bus on top of a mountain in Wales with its own commune but it got sold to someone else first, and we viewed a number of smallholdings in Wales, we used to spend a lot of time working in a porthcawl fairground in the late 60s then gradually we spent more time in Somerset.
We had quite a normal house the gardens big but mum kept a pair of goats, my sister had a horse.

Anyway one day she got a electricity bill and she looked at it and said right we shall stop using electricity, and out she went and got some oil lamps and candles and we stopped using electricity.
we used to gather a lot of wild food so it was normal to eat nettles or seaweed ect they were just part of the diet, she also had quite a survivalist outlook she did karate till she was nearly 80, and so as a small child I learned how to throw knives, skin rabbits, do sas type escape and evasion ect ect

she would do things like attack you with a kendo sword to see that your reactions were good, aspects of my childhood were similar to that of John Conner in the terminator.

Anyway she was a lot of fun if eccentric

In Spain? Are you taking a punt on a new Ice Age ??

Spain is a cold country with a hot sun!

Tracy Pepler wrote:I went into an antique shop today, and as I was leaving, realised with horror that I can gone round the shop thinking - ah, now that looks useful!!!!!

I have just ordered a new drive belt to get a 1933 sewing machine back on the road.

s.