Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

I'm sorry you had that experience, karmacat. Hope the feller didn't come to lasting harm and learned his lesson.

Another pal who was a psychiatric nurse all her working life lived in horror of speed. She'd seen people in permanant in-patient psychiatric care due to one episode of taking it. We're talking brains permanantly fried. I think there's a lot of complacency around the so-called soft drugs.

My neighbourhood is quite funky and there are two places within 2 mins walk selling legal highs. And the uphot of that is that some of their customers come into the Towers with their purchases to take them. It's not at all uncommon to walk around a corner, or to go up a flight of stairs, and find bodies flaked out semi-conscious or completely unconsious and with the tell-tale packets of the products nearby. And the police have got the shops which sell them on a warning re selling to certain named and photographed indviduals, including certain residents of the Towers. As in, you sell to these people and you will be in trouble with us, legal highs be damned.

What horrifies me about cannabis is the amount of times I smell it wafting from passing cars, or from people brazenly walking around the city centre in broad daylight. Two days ago, my allotment was passed by what looked like a picturebook young family; mum and dad and tot in a pushchair, and both parents toking on their spliffs as they got ready to push the buggy across a busy road...............! And my neighbours with the 2 month old baby are smoking both tobacco and weed, and having their friends around doing likewise.

ETA; it's OK now, jk0, that particular address got raided and they're lying low.

Karmacat

Thanks GQ - no lasting harm from *that* one, but cumulatively his brain was fried, and he downgraded from squats where he actually lived very well to rough sleeping in the countryside ... I've no idea if he's even still alive as we've said here in a different context, the mortality is very high without the proper equipment.

PS - good to hear about the raid and the solution to your problems!

[Deleted User]

Thanks very much for the tip on hanging the solar showers HAPPYDAYS much appreciated and taken on board, I think I'll get He Who Knows to fix a frame of wood onto the roof of the summerhouse so I can sit the solar shower bag into it and not use the hanging handle at all, I think that should work, Lyn xxx.

GreyQueen

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Thanks very much for the tip on hanging the solar showers HAPPYDAYS much appreciated and taken on board, I think I'll get He Who Knows to fix a frame of wood onto the roof of the summerhouse so I can sit the solar shower bag into it and not use the hanging handle at all, I think that should work, Lyn xxx.

It's good to have these things pre-considered and pre-installed, isn't it, rather than wait until they're needed in earnest and to find out that there is a problem with the installation then. HWK is a handy man to have about.

I'm pootling at the homestead, attending to some chores and adding my bargainous tuna into the cache. Have to make sure that the inventory is kept up-tp-date as stuff moves each month from deep storage, into kitchen cupboard, into my tum, and others move from shop to deep storage. It's just like playing shops...........:rotfl:

Nellie_the_Viking

Having used a solar shower whilst in Africa, if its going on the summer house roof I wouldn't worry about hanging it at all unless it won't stay up there by itself - it should happily lay there as long as the pitch isn't too steep (which it shouldn't be, and the felt will give decent grip) absorbing heat - there should then be enough vertical drop from the hose to run all the water out from the roof. I got the best results when the reservoir was able to lay flat rather than hanging - for some reason, the water heated a lot faster that way.

[Deleted User]

Thank you NELLIE!

thriftwizard

I'm covered in pollen & nettle stings! I've been out scrumping elderflowers & have started a batch of elderflower champagne & two batches of cordial. I'm now out of things to cool/brew stuff in and there are still quite a few flowers - and I've only been to one of my three regular foraging haunts so far. I shall need to scrounge some extra bottles from my long-suffering but well-fed neighbours...

As it happens strawberries & raspberries are as cheap as chips on the market at the moment, so I can feel a batch of strawberry, raspberry & elderflower jam a-brewing; that'll use up some of the 56 brand-new jam jars & lids I found at the Tip a few weeks back. But not this evening, I can hardly move now; too full of mango & honey mousse, as ripe mangoes were 3 for a pound but needed using up fast.

Had a very interesting discussion with the Education Officer down at the Tip this afternoon; she was under the impression that our diet was very limited back in the 50s/60s as "interesting stuff just wasn't available"... I had to say that although it may well have been the case in cities, that wasn't my experience as a rural youngster. Although we only had a small village grocery/greengrocers shop & a couple of visiting vans (fishmonger & butcher/cheesemonger, both twice a week on different days) thinking about the range of things we grew, foraged, preserved & ate, I wouldn't be surprised if we actually ate more widely, albeit also more seasonally & locally. Bananas were a rarity & satsumas only happened at Christmas, and I don't think I had pasteurised milk until we moved into the city, just fresh gold top from my uncle's "pet" Guernseys.

Remembering some of the wonderful tastes of things back then - rose petal jam, fuchsia jam, honey fresh from the comb - is what makes me grow, forage, cook from scratch, brew & preserve now. Yet this lass - who in every other way is lovely! - is going round telling school kids how awful it was back then and how much better off we are now we have supermarkets!

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

I wouldn't become too complacent about cannabis; pal works in an acute psychiatric unit and they have regular admissions of people who are addicted to cannabis, despite it triggering psychosis. They get brought in under section, the unit spends about 3 days straightening them out, they are discharged, go back to their usual circle, smoke some more, and have another psychotic episode, are sectioned.

Some of these nitwits are going in and out of the unit every 4-5 days. Gawd knows what permanant damage these psychotic episodes are doing them and how much these fools are costing the NHS.

I've also known, from birth to adulthood, several young people who grew up in cannabis-friendly households, surrounded by the weed and smoking it regularly themselves from early teens. What you end up with all too often is a young person in their twenties with severe psychiatric disorders, unable to work or manage themselves in day-to-day life without professional support workers.

The chief drug at Shoebox Towers is alcohol, closely followed by weed, and other substances are rarer. But cannabis can cause serious side-effects in passive smokers inhaling their neighbours' weed smoke, including hospitalisation in some cases.

And I guess you'd share the outrage of parents such as those whom I've spoken to in the course of my work, who enter their baby or child's bedroom and find it reeking of weed coming through from the conjoined house or flat. It is possible to take on board enough secondhand smoke to fail a drugs test. I loathe cannabis because it triggers a lot of rowdy and thoughtless behaviour and the secondhand smoke gives me heart palpitations and a splitting headache.

Plus I'm pretty sure the late-night callers doing a special rat-a-ta-tat door knock on my door late at night think they're at the drug dealer's gaff nearby..........another of those late last night.

Yes but these problems all are a consequence of much stronger cannabis strains, where they have increased the levels of THC and also reduced the antidote that used to be within the cannabis plants. This is a result of the war on drugs. The stronger varieties of cannabis should be banned but the milder varieties are not the problem. I have known people on cannabis for decades and they have no episodes but then they have not migrated to skunk like the younger generation.

Also the risks of psychotic episodes are a result of an unregulated drug being out there where kids who are most vulnerable to problems from it can get it. Cannabis has been used for thousands of years with no risks of psychotic episodes. These are a result of breeding programs to increase the strength of cannabis, which is a consequence of the war on drugs.

daz378

just popping in to say hello.....kinda stalled on prepping with all the works going on..... except for default prepping via my dad who now gives me 3 tins of meat a week.... had my bloods done last week.... just started watching HUMANS on C4 synthetic home helps.....just what stephen hawking is worried about. 2 day course this week behavior awareness and day2 breakaway training and we have to pass a test on the course

take care

moneyistooshorttomention

I didn't have the nerve to sit and watch that "Humans" thing on tv yesterday - I've read one more thing than I'm comfortable with about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and recall a couple of films I watched years back that were all too prescient of how things are now (still cant recall the name of that one about the hordes of people pouring across Africa/the continent using it as a land bridge to get to the West). It scared me then in case it happened - and it is happening now.

I feel the same threat is there from AI - and its just as well we are warned about it in this fictionalised form. If someone like Stephen Hawking is warning about it - with a brain as good as he's got...then...whoops (speaking as an astonished admirer of him - for continuing to live in a body as ill as that - as I wouldn't have the courage to do so).

On that note - well...I've summoned up a bit more nerve - so guess I'll get my breakfast ready now and call "Humans" up on Iplayer and watch it. It aint going to go away by burying my head in the sand - so its as well to do so...

***********

On a different tack of prepping I do have control over - I'm currently doing a major amount of work on my garden (so that I can grow food better in it). Am just hoping I'm not too late to get some of my planned perennial plants in there for this year.

Am I in time to get myself things like rhubarb, blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes in this year? If so, what's the chances I would be able to harvest anything from them this year?