Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I was at REI a few weeks ago and they had some small windup radios on sale. I’ve been wanting a small radio for my everyday bag. The particular one I picked up was a Eton FR150. Its your typical Baygen-style windup radio with AM/FM, weather band and an LED flashlight. Its about the size of an AR mag, although a little thicker. Sound quality is about what you expect..a little tinny…but its information, and information in a time of crisis is always valuable. I think this thing was marked down 50% to about $15. In addition to the handcrank, theres a small solar panel on the radio. These sorts of things will work on sunlight but the catch is that you have to keep the energy demand as low as possible. That means if youre going to sit this thing in the sun and listen to it you need to keep the volume as low as possible to keep the power requirements down. The optimum arrangement is to use an earpiece so you can keep the volume down yet still hear things clearly. Under what circumstances does this sort of thing come in handy? Well, you don’t have to be too imaginative to figure that out. An unexpected power outage is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s good to be able to check the local radio stations and see if things are just localized to a couple of blocks or is something more dramatic. I remember reading about people who died in the World Trade Center when they were trapped in the elevators and, not knowing what was going on, waited patiently for rescue until the buildings collapse around them. (This does not mean that they were without recourse. Another survivor story from that incident recounts how the elevator occupants forced the doors open and found themselves facing the wall of the elevator shaft. As fate would have it, one of the people in the elevator was involved in the construction of the building and knew that the wall was simply sheetrock. They punched a hole in the wall and found themselves in an empty washroom. They escaped to tell the tale.) I think that if the occupants of those elevators had known what was going on they might have been spurred to more dramatic ‘self-rescue’, as the term is now called.) There are smaller radios out there..the folks at CountyComm have one that I’d very much like to have but it runs on AA batts and I rather like the notion of not having to worry about batteries. On the other hand, a smaller, lighter, radio that provides the same functions would be nice to have. Still, for fifteen bucks I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
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It seems pretty hard to look at the current political wrangling going on and not think that battle lines are being drawn. What I mean is, the national health care debate, such as it is, seems to be galvanizing the public into choosing sides and those sides are getting pretty unfriendly in their attitudes towards their opponents. Personally, I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This new trend towards unambiguous partisanship is clearing the fencelines and people are choosing the camp they want to be in. This is good. When your opponent comes out and states clearly that he opposes you, regards you as the enemy, and will work actively and purposefully against the things that are important to you…rejoice! He has made your decisions easier. The ambiguity and grey areas are swept away. You now know who your enemy is and can move on to the battle. It’s much easier to deal with people who you know are against you than it is to deal with people whose sympathies and loyalties are unclear or murky.
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My peppers are coming along nicely. I’m something of a fan of container gardening and used two different size containers this year. For some plants, I used regular 10” flower pots. For a few others I used old 5-gallon buckets salvaged from the trash. The plants growing in the buckets are growing bigger than the ones in the flower pots. What I like about the buckets is that I can move them in/out of the sun as needed and by leaving a few inches of space at the top of the bucket watering the plant is simply fill to the top of the bucket. The water doesn’t spread out, it has nowhere to go except to percolate its way down through the bucket.

I think next year I’ll be doing almost everything in 5-gallon buckets. It’ll be especially nice for the tomatoes since I can just screw some scrap lumber onto the side of the bucket to form a cage/trellis for the tomatoes. Plus, if the weather turns sour I can always move them to a more sheltered location.

My basil, by the by, is doing exceptionally well. It’s a huge bush-like mound of greenery that can easily be thinned down to make pesto (or pistou) and still have an abundance of leaves.