Community is Important - Guest Patrice Lewis of Rural Revolution - Ep27

Today, we are having a conversation with Patrice Lewis of Rural Revolution. Join us as we discuss the importance of community in preparedness and the process of moving a homestead. We covered so many topics in episode 27.

You can find Patrice on her blog http://www.rural-revolution.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome. Today, I am so incredibly excited to have another guest episode for you. And we are welcoming Patrice Lewis, who is a blogger and author, and in my opinion, one of the founding inspirational women in crapping. So welcome, Patrice.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

I am so glad to have you. Why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself, your family, you know, anything someone who might not know who you are would want to know?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Well, uh, as you say, um my name is Patrice Lewis. I've been married for 32 years. My wonderful husband, Don, is just my my rock in life. We have two daughters, uh, one is 27, one is 24. The older uh trained and became a certified nanny. Uh she worked in New Jersey as a living nanny for four years, and then she came back to Idaho. Uh, original idea was to um come, she was she came back just before the holidays. She was going to spend Christmas with us and then look for work in Seattle, and that's that's just about when the pandemic lockdowns hit. And then Seattle just imploded, so that was totally out of the question. So she ended up um uh moving out into her own apartment, getting a job in a nearby town, and then she recently moved back in with us, and she is taking over uh the woodcraft business that we've had for 30 years and making it her own. So that's kind of exciting to see this pass from from father to son, father to daughter, so to speak. And then we have another daughter who's 24, and she is serving in the Navy, uh stationed out of Japan, deployed at the moment. So she actually re-upped and will be serving um short some shore duty for another few years. So we've got two wonderful kids that we're very proud of.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Can you share with us a little bit about where your prepping and or homesteading journey started?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

It goes back quite a ways. We were married in 1990 and living in Sacramento, and uh it was actually a very, very bad traffic jam that just kind of catapulted us into reality, saying this is not the kind of life we want to lead. We just have this very deep-seated urge to move to the country uh and to raise any future children that we had uh in a rural atmosphere. So we left California, we just kind of up and left and abandoned two very well-paying jobs. We found out later that was a mistake. And uh we we purchased a little fixer-upper on four acres in southwest Oregon, uh, just north of Medford. And that little place uh we we later called it our start, our starter homestead, and we learned the rudiments of gardening and canning and keeping chickens, and we got cows, and we were milking and fencing and home repair, and this is where our daughters were born. I mean, we did everything in this little starter homestead. And then in 2003, um, we left uh Oregon for Idaho and we ended up buying a 20-acre, again, a fixer-upper. And basically, then that's when we sort of moved full bore into um homesteading. And we're we were just you know on a mission to become as self-sufficient as possible, and that was kind of our our goal for rural living. But before that, when we were still in Oregon, um kind of meshing in with the the whole homesteading interest was when Y2K hit. And our girls at the time were just, I mean, babies and toddlers. And it's funny, I remember a very defining moment. I had been wanting chickens. This is when we lived in Oregon, before, you know, just when the kids were very young. I'd I'd had chickens when I was a kid, and it's something I really wanted to get. And my husband, we were very, very, very strapped for cash, and I'll go more into that later. Um, and so my husband was was very much resistant. You know, we had the startup woodcraft business, we were desperately trying to make ends meet, and chickens were just not on the equation. So one day I remember our our second daughter was just a newborn, and I was lying on the bed nursing her, and my husband came in and his voice was shaking. And he said, What do we need to do to get chickens? And I looked at him, I, you know, I was just what? Just completely out of the blue. And he said, What do we need to do to get chickens? And he tossed a magazine onto the bed where I was nursing our daughter, and the front of the magazine, it was Countryside Magazine, had something called the Y2K countdown. And it was the first time I'd even heard of Y2K. This is probably '98. And he he suddenly understood we were vulnerable. We had tiny babies. We had an infant, a newborn, and we had a toddler, and we were vulnerable. And it scared him. And so we went into full bore, holy cow, we got to do something. Um, and we had an advantage, we were already rural, we had the four acres, so we put in a garden, we got cows, we got chickens, we put in fencing, we built a small barn. I mean, we just went crazy with what we could on an absolute poverty shoestring budget. And uh we we did pretty well, all things considered. Now, of course, Y2K, because of a lot of background work that nobody was really aware of, came and went uh without um much of an interruption in societal uh goods and services and all of that. Um but it it did two things for us. One is it made us realize how vulnerable society can be to a takedown without doing anything that, you know, things can happen. And the other is we really got addicted to this whole idea of homesteading. It was a it was a thrill to be able to harvest our own milk and harvest our own fruits and vegetables and make cheese and can up fruits and vegetables from the garden and all this kind of stuff. And of course the kids were getting involved as they got older, and it was a really addictive process uh as we got more and more into homesteading. So that's kind of how we became preppers. Uh a lot of it was feeling that that vulnerability when our kids were babies. Um, but it was the the fun of homesteading that kept us in it.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Can you talk a little bit more about prepping versus homesteading? So many, I think if you asked 10 people, you'd get 10 different answers. Um, but can you kind of maybe define those from your perspective?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Though there's a lot of difference, I think, between preparedness and self-sufficiency. Anyone can be prepared. You can live in a city apartment and have your food and water stashed away and your security, security implements in place and whatever, however, you interpret this. But you can't be self-sufficient in an apartment or in an urban setting. Um, so there is a difference. So the way we interpret it is we like the idea of self-reliance, we like the idea of being food self-sufficient, um, and because we never no one can ever go it alone, you know, that this lone wolf prepper is nothing but a myth. Uh, we also like the idea of having neighbors who are kind of like-minded. And both both the last two or three situations where we've lived, we've been blessed with neighbors who are very uh very much on the similar mindset. So to us, we like the idea of self-sufficiency, and that's kind of the direction we're taking it. Others feel differently, and they've got, you know, bristling arsenal of firearms and and you know, this lone wolf mentality where they're holed up on a mountaintop and all that, and that's not us.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

That is not us either. Um, you touched on the concept of community, and that is something that I talk about a lot online with others. Can you share just a little bit about how you go about fostering community?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

It's a dicey thing because, of course, uh preparedness is just intertwined to a really strong degree with OPSEC, operational security. So the whole idea is that nobody knows that you've got you know beans and rice in the pantry kind of thing. Um so uh I've always said that preparedness is a three-legged stool. So one side is what everybody focuses on, one leg, which is all the supplies, all the goodies, all the you know, the nifty gadgets and all this kind of stuff. So that's the one leg. But the second and the third legs are what people tend to pay less attention to. The second leg is community, and the third leg is skills and knowledge. So looking at this leg of community, by the way, a three-legged stool, of course, is is three points define a plane in geometry. So if you take away one point, the stool the stool collapses. If you take away one leg, the stool is gone. So if you take away community, your support structure is gone. So that's just something to keep in mind. Um but yeah, it's it's a difficult thing, and it kind of depends on where you are. So one of the first things I would recommend is if you have an option of moving, to move to a place where people are more likely to be like-minded. So uh that starts getting into the politics of things. I don't want to go there, but it is just something to be aware of to move to a place where your neighbors are likely to be a little bit more on the same page. And after that, it takes a cut, it's it takes a while to get into things. Like our last location, we were there for 17 years, and we had lovely neighbors. We were blessed with just the best neighbors, and somehow we fell into having weekly potlucks that grew and grew and grew, and we had these potlucks going weekly for 12 years. And you know, it started with with just our neighbors across the road from us, and then a third family came in, and then a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, and it just grew and grew, and it was a very fluid and dynamic group, and neighbors and friends, and relatives, and visitors, everybody's always welcome. And uh we we just kind of alternated who hosted, and we had that potluck going for 12 years until the pandemic interrupted it, and then we moved. But um it it was absolutely the most wonderful blessing I think I've ever had with neighbors. It was incredible. We got to know everyone so well, and we were all such good friends, and it made it easy if we needed help with something. Like I remember one time my husband was away, the girls were away too, and a cow got out, uh a bull, a little bull calf got out, and I could not get that bull calf where back where he was supposed to go because it was just me. And neighbors on all sides were gone, and so I started calling neighbors farther afield, and they said, Yeah, you bet we'll be right there, and they were there in five minutes, and we got this little bull calf rounded up and put back where he was supposed to go. And I remember thinking to myself, what a blessing these people are. Um, so good neighbors and a strong community like that is just endless benefits. You know, we're we were always there for each other. You know, if somebody was sick or had uh surgery, we were there to cover their livestock help or bring them food or whatever needed to be done. Um, you know, we celebrated each other's uh milestones and we mourned each other's losses. It was just an amazing thing. So anyway, we up and moved for a variety of reasons I can go into later. And so here we are in a new location and we're just getting to know our neighbors. Uh we've been here uh not quite two years yet, about a year and a half, and so far we have liked everyone we've met, and they all seem to be on the same page, but we don't have quite that bond of community yet. But if the bleep were to hit the fan, I really think we would. I really think we would have um a lot of people getting together and saying, okay, the bleep has hit the fan, we need to all bind together. Uh, because we're all kind of on the same page. And that was a little bit orchestrated on our part. We knew about where we wanted to go, where we were likely to meet people of like mind, and fortunately we were correct. So we don't quite have that same strength as we had it in our last location, but then we were there for 17 years at our last place, so it makes a difference. Actually, we were there 18 years now that I think of it. So anyway, uh, but community, it's it's definitely, first of all, you know, you're not gonna have that same same bond if you're with people who are of very, very different suasions. But get out and make an attempt to be friendly. Don't be, don't think you can be the lone wolf. That doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

I remember the first time I read your blog post where you talked about that three-legged stool. And um, and I think I started reading your blog, I don't know, four or maybe five years ago. And uh I like dug in, like you would never believe. And I don't know how many weeks it's a week, but I went through like every single one of your blog posts. Like if I had quiet reading time, yeah, you do. If I had some, you know, 10 minutes of quiet reading time, I just kept the tab open on my the place I left off and just kept getting back. And that's in school was just an amazing post. And I will link it in my show notes for others to find it because um yeah, it was just great.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Well, I I should add that I did not make that up. I saw that online one time uh years and years ago, and it made absolute perfect sense. So I can't take credit for it, but I've certainly taken the idea and run with it because uh whoever came up with that was brilliant. Uh it was it's a very apt description.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Yes. Do you have anything that you would share? Um, I mean, I think there's a very different, there's a huge difference for people who are living rurally versus people who are in the city and building community and um and especially for women. I feel like our society has kind of closed women off from one another. And you know, think back years and years and years ago when grandmothers taught mothers and mothers taught daughters, and there's just this generational um thing within womanhood that no longer exists. Do you have anything that you would share or just anything about that for women who are maybe not rural and struggling?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

It's um in urban areas or suburban areas, you're less likely to share a lot of similarities with your neighbors. You don't know who they are oftentimes. Um, so it's not like you know, in a rural area where I we go down the street and there's Bill with his track hoe and we call him up to do some you know heavy, heavy jobs for us. That just doesn't really exist in an urban environment. Um, so especially for women, uh this is where the internet has come in very, very handy. This is where you start connecting with locals who have similar interests. Um, like I've got a friend down in Sacramento, and uh she's very active in a church, and that's a huge source of uh friends for her. Um she also likes morning walks, and so she actually posted something about okay, I live in this general vicinity and I really like doing morning walks early in the morning before work starts. Uh is there anybody who'd like to join me? And darn if she didn't get five or six women walking every single freaking day, rain or shine, and they've become very good friends with her. Um so this is the kind of thing where reaching out to those with similar interests uh is a huge part of it. So either through church connections or through um social media groups that have, you know, there's social media groups for everything these days, um that's the kind of thing that you probably want to work toward. And then you start getting to know people better, you know, whether it's a knitting group or a walking group or a dance group or I don't know, pick something that you can start knowing them well enough to know are these people that you can share hard times with? Who is trustworthy under difficult conditions? And some people are and some people aren't, and that's what you got to figure out. Uh but yeah, I would say start by getting involved in your own hobbies, your own passions, your own interests. Uh, even if these people that you meet up with are not next door, you can still develop community with others right there in your earth right there in your region, your city or your suburb.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Do you want to tell us a little bit about uh your move from Oregon to Idaho? And then again, from one place in Idaho to another place in Idaho. I mean, moving a homestead is not an easy feat.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

And I know it wasn't. Yeah, our our move to Oregon or from Oregon to Idaho is interesting. We um my husband came home from an errand one time. Uh our girls were probably three and five at the time, and he said, Hey, do you want to move? And like he's very good at throwing these things out, just out of the blue. And apparently he was uh he had gone into Medford, uh, which is the biggest town of Southwest Oregon, uh to do some errands, and I guess he just hit too many traffic lights. Uh, he does not like traffic lights, he gets very impatient with them. And I said, Yeah, you know, the house, our how the house that we lived in was 800 square feet, and we had two small kids, and we were planning on homeschooling, and we had a woodcraft business that's spilled into the house all the time, and we had a small farm. It was a lot to cram into a little tiny house. So we thought, yeah, let's let's look in around uh to move. And so we started, we decided we liked Oregon, so we were gonna stay there. The homeschooling laws were pretty decent. And so we started looking around Oregon. We must have looked for two or three years, and really didn't find much that was within our price range and our our bucket list of requirements. I remember there's this one house that we absolutely fell in love with. It's on 40 acres. It was a little pricier than we were comfortable with on a woodcrafter's income. Um, but we made an offer and we were outbid by 50,000 within about 15 minutes, and we thought, okay, well, that's so I think that was probably the deciding factor in moving uh looking further afield. So we decided to look into Washington, Idaho, and Montana. We weren't really familiar with those states. We'd never really been there, but what the heck, let's look around. And this by this point, the internet was getting a little bit um better. This is about 2001, and so we were able to look at some properties online, things like this. And what was the deciding factor for for settling us in Idaho, believe it or not, was the homeschooling laws, because Idaho's homeschooling laws were very good in our in our opinion. So we focused on Idaho, and when the girls were three and no, five and seven, um, I came up and spent a week with some realtors in the North Idaho area, and we must have oh, we looked at dozens of properties, and I narrowed it down to about two or three. And then I came home and my husband followed up. Okay, I stay home with the girls, and my husband followed up um a couple weeks later, and he looked over the properties with a fine-tooth comb. He used to do home inspections, so he's very good at this, and uh narrowed it down to two, and uh we we decided on the one that we did, and we absolutely at first I was dismayed. It was one of those things where I'd only seen the house once for you know 10 minutes of looking through it. And when we first moved in, I I looked around and said, What have we done? You know, we left this beautiful little house eight that was built in 1874 in Oregon, and we moved to this piece of cr piece of junk, and it grew on me and grew on me and grew on me, and we absolutely loved that place. 20 acres, we had room to spread out, we had room for a huge garden and for livestock and all the things that we'd been talking about. And then, like I said, the neighbors turned out to be just uh blessings, and so we were very happy there for 17 years, 18 years, and then um the girls grew up and they moved out, and suddenly we're in this great big house all by ourselves, and we're going, you know, this is just a little big for us. So we moved for three reasons. One, we wanted to downsize, we did not need that big a house. Um, and two is we wanted to buy a place for cash outright, so we did not have to have a mortgage. That was our second goal. And the third is we were kind of up for a little adventure, you know. We I just hit 60, my husband just hit 65, and we thought we've got room in our lives for one more grand adventure, let's go for it. And so, and that of course that coincided with the pandemic, and there was lots of drama involved with that. But uh, but we ended up buying a smaller house, much smaller house on eight acres. So we have to reconfigure our homesteading plans to a much smaller property, but we really like our new location, and the neighbors seem extremely nice, and we just we really like it here. We're we have no regrets about moving, so that's how we ended up moving to our new spot. That was uh a little over a year and a half ago. It was December of 2020 that we moved in.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Um, I remember as you your moving progressed, and you were sharing on your blog about that feeling just like a kinship with you because we moved at the exact same time you did. Um my husband is self-employed, and so the process for us moving with COVID and all of the banking things that were changing just made it this incredibly long, drawn out process. And so we ended up um not closing until December, even though we had made our offer. Um, I think it was the beginning of July. It it was Oh wow. It was the realtor said this is the longest closing I have ever had in my entire career.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

So my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Such a stressful process. I do not do not envy, you know, anyone who is moving a homestead and all of the things that go along with it.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

Well, if nothing else, it it was an interesting time to decide, especially since our house is a great bit smaller than our last place, to decide what we need and what we don't need. So I guess it was a good weeding out process.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Yeah. Um, I would love to hear a little bit more about what prepping specifically looks like for you. I mean, you shared that it started in Y2K, um, and just that feeling of vulnerability with young children. Um, what like that's where it started? What has that progressed into? Um, and how did that process happen?

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Well, a lot of it was, as you say, that this that sense of vulnerability we had with the children being so young. Um, and it it just dovetails so much into the the homesteading interest that we had anyway. So this this idea, this goal of saying, all right, could we be cut off? This this was the question that we We were cutting we were asking ourselves, could we be cut off from all services and still be able to live a comfortable lifestyle? So if we had no power, if we had no uh outside services, uh, if we couldn't make it to the grocery store, could we still be okay? And that's what those questions took a long time to answer because uh no, we couldn't at the time. So we that's where we started getting into the livestock, and I started learning how to you know make cheese and and um butter and yogurt and all this kind of stuff, and and caring caring for livestock, you know, we had to learn how to dehorn and how to castrate and things like that. I learned how to butcher chickens, I've never liked butchering chickens. Um now that never it never took off to the point where we were determined to conquer everything. For example, we thought about butchering our own uh steers, and we quickly realized this was a specialty job. So we ended up bringing in mobile butchers that do the deed for us. Um, and so that's something that you know you could call that a failure. We've just never did learn how to how to butcher. But having watched them butcher, that's a big job, and you need some specialized equipment we didn't have, and we were trying to do everything on a shoestring budget. Uh so anyway, the food self-sufficiency was our biggest motivator. We really wanted to be uh as food self-sufficient as possible. Um, but that question, could we still live comfortably if services were cut off, especially electricity, that's still something we're answering because we uh we had to make a deliberate decision not to go off-grid. Um, and a lot of that decision was based on the fact that we have a woodcraft business, and so we needed sufficient power to run our power tools. And so we've never been off-grid, and it's never something we've really entertained on a uh serious level, uh, in part because the the upfront costs are so high. What we decided to do instead is go low-tech. So having hand-powered versions of everything we needed. So a hand pump for the well, should we need to transform to that? Um, you know, hand lighting, i.e. kerosene lamps or battery operated or solar operated lamps, things that were low tech versus you know the high-tech fancy windmills or power or solar systems or anything like that. So that's we're we're trying to stay low-tech in everything that we do, to have hand-powered versions of everything we do, and that's sort of the approach that we've taken. Others take different approaches, they like the you know the solar systems and things of that nature. We just never had the funds for that, and so we've never gone into it. Um, another aspect, too, is it's important to handle whatever natural disasters are particular to anyone's region. So if you are, our area, for example, is prone to wildfires. So we always try to keep bug-out bags packed, but you can't relocate a homestead if there's a fire bearing down, all you can do is flee. Um, others have you know, tornadoes or hurricanes or blizzards or earthquakes or you know, whatever natural disaster you can anticipate. It's important to have contingencies set up to handle those, whether it's fleeing, whether it's hunkering down, uh, whatever the situation is, it's important to make sure that your family will be safe uh in that. So those are uh two things that I think every prepper should should keep in mind.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Those are great. Thank you. Um looking back at your homesteading and your prepping journey, um what would you do differently, if anything, or what was like a very large morning experience for you?

SPEAKER_01 25:34

It's it's interesting. When we first leaped out of the city back in '92, uh left Sacramento and moved to Southwest Oregon. We left behind these very two well-paying jobs, and we launched ourselves blind into rural living, and we bought this little fixer up, or it could it could literally have been called a shack. And I'm not exaggerating when I say we bought the four acres and they threw the house in for free because everyone expected us to knock it down. And it was this charming little house built in 1874. We wouldn't even dream of knocking it down. It was livable mostly. And uh so we spent 10 years fixing it up and we had to jack it up and pour a foundation and do all kinds of you know really radical uh changes to it, but it was a beautiful little house. Um uh but anyway, we we left these two well-paying jobs and we were very confident that we could find well-paying jobs in Oregon. And that confidence, as it turned out, was very misplaced. I was back in school full-time, I was in grad school at that point. Um, my husband had started the woodcraft business, and I was helping with that uh between studying and classes and everything like that. And we plunged, I kid you not, from two very well-paid salaries to zero income. Zero. I cannot emphasize how zero that zero was. It was quite startling. So um at first we had a little bit of savings that we brought with us. Um so we were living on that savings and that didn't last long, and uh, then we were living on student loans and that didn't uh last long, and we were living on very little income, a very sporadic income that we were earning as this woodcraft business got off its feet, and we were just scratching for money. We were we just it was absolutely desperate poverty. I can't even begin to describe that. And um and it it lasted a period of time, and but the the unusual thing is two things happened. One is that it brought my husband and I closer together. You know, debts and and poverty and things like that, money issues can can drive some people apart, and it brought us together very, very tight. We were we were unified with this goal that no matter what happened, we were staying rural, we were not going back to the city. And that really brought us very close together. And the second is that we learned the art of frugality, and it really is an art form. And I became fascinated with it, and it's never left me. I've always been fascinated by the idea of how little can you get, can you live on? And so we flirted with that up and down. The downside, what you were saying, is is what would you do differently? Is we went into debt just to survive, and we weren't buying anything frivolous, but the house needed some serious repairs, the roof leaked like a sieve, you know, things like this. Um, and sometimes we just used credit cards to buy groceries because we were very strapped for cash. And that debt lasted a long time. It took a long time to get out of it. And so as a result, this at this point in my life, I have something approaching a pathological fear of debt. I just cannot say how how how battering it is, how emotionally battering it is. Um, so that's probably what we would do differently. Don't leap into the unknown like we did. Make sure you've got some sort of source of income. Um, but it all worked out. It gave us that that powerful motivation to get our woodcraft business uh up and running, and that business survived uh uh supported us for decades, you know, helped us raise both our girls and and you know kept us going. Uh but we were always careful to live within our means, not to purchase a house with a mortgage that a woodcrafter's income couldn't cover, things like that. We were very, very careful. Uh but yeah, just avoiding debt. Oh man, just don't don't ever go there.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yeah, we have a very similar um my husband is Joe, and we have a very similar story. You know, it's like we we were married very young and he was in school with we had young children and we weren't homesteading yet, but we were not smart with our funds, and we spent many years paying off the debt that we incurred while he was in school. Um just trying to survive. Um and yeah, paying cash now is like one of our biggest goals. Can we pay cash for that?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Yes, yeah, we do the same thing. We have um we transition to an all-cash lifestyle or as much as you can. Um, oh gosh, it's been five or six years now, and boy, we never look back. It's like, where has this been all our life? Is this the smartest thing we ever did? Um so yeah, I even I forget we have a credit card. We do have a credit card. And sometimes if I'm out shopping and I run out of cash, I forget I have a credit card, which is actually a good thing. Um so yeah, we we actually all cash is a there's a lot to be said for an old cash lifestyle.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Mm-hmm. Definitely. Um, I would love it if you would share us maybe some frugal tips or uh I don't know if you have a top couple that you know are ones that you really implement on a regular basis, just you know, with the state of the economy right now, with inflation, with everything that is going on in our supply chain um budget stuff is so high on people's radars, and people are changing how they stop and how they cook and they're learning new skills. Um what are your like top frugal tips for people?

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Oh I'm just sitting here racking my brains, where do I start? Um that's a whole thing that came to mind. Yeah, it is, it truly is. The first thing that came to mind is this is some one of the first frugal things that we learned to do, or that I learned to do was to hang laundry. Um I haven't used a dryer in decades. Um and back when we lived in Oregon, stopping using the dryer, this is when our girls were in diapers, literally cut our power bill in half.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

And uh that to me was the first eye-opening, how changes like that, a relatively small change, can make such a big difference. Now that's uh a dryer bill is less of a proportion of our electricity bill than it is, but you know, whatever, it's complicated. Um so anyway, yeah, things like that. You know, look look for ways you can cut daily expenses. Um because we spent so many years being so frugal, we learned never to eat out and never to purchase pre-packaged foods and meals and takeouts and delis and things like that. We were just that's not even on our radar. So restaurant meals, not done. So learning to cook from scratch is enormously helpful in a frugal lifestyle. Um I'm not an enthusiastic cook. I just, it's not one of those things I really enjoy doing, but you you gotta do what you gotta do, especially when you've got little kids. And so learning, you know, a two weeks worth of repertoire of meals that the whole family likes, and everybody will will develop those kinds of recipes and then just keep those ingredients in stock. Um, purchasing ingredients in bulk is very helpful. For example, my husband is a sandwich guy, and uh so he would just, you know, this this guy could eat sandwiches the rest of his life and nothing else, and he'd be happy as a clam. So I was making bread and bread and bread and bread, and I went out to the thrift store and I got a bread machine, and that was one of the best purchases I've ever made. Um, I probably make three to four loaves of bread a week just using this bread machine, um, and he's happy as a clam. Um other things like a slow cooker, a crock pot type thing, uh, can be very, very help helpful in scratch cooking. Um, and then along those lines too, buying in bulk, for example, we pick up 50 pounds of flour at a time since he does like his bread. And uh if you go to say restaurant supply stores or Costco or something of that nature, you can pick up 50-pound sacks of rice beans, flour, you know, whatever. So that's very helpful. And of course, being able to store it. You not everybody has room to store uh lots of things like that. But probably the single biggest uh thing that that I could recommend, and this does take a while, so it's not something you can just transition to tomorrow, we for for f financial reasons, for frugality reasons, we weaned ourselves off anything disposable and switched to washables and renewables, and that included everything from feminine hygiene up to paper towels, to you know, you name it. Uh, we we transitioned over, and it took took a couple of years to kind of see what it was that we were doing, um that the things that we threw away and realizing, I think I read a statistic once that the average family spends five thousand dollars a year on disposable products, uh, like paper towels and paper plates and plastic cutlery and all this kind of stuff. And we were never quite that bad, but for example, we um we don't use Kleenex facial tissues, we use bandanas, and you know, we have stacks of these things, and we use them constantly, constantly, constantly. Um the girls and I switched to washable feminine hygiene products. I'm sorry to get indelicate, but it's you know, we're all women audience here, and we never look back. It's like where have you been all our life kind of thing. It's it's marvelous how much money you save, not having to spend money on monthly issues. Um we switch to um uh uh just dish towels instead of uh paper towels. A paper uh a roll of paper towels. I do have a roll, it lasts about a year. Actually, my last roll lasted almost two years, and we keep them for really nasty jobs like you know, dog vomit or spilt paint or whatever. Um we just uh what I do is at Costco they have uh bales of what they call shop rags, like they come, I think 60 to a bale or something like that, and they're just white terry cloth shop rags, and that's what we use for kitchen towels, and we use them constantly. So things like this, if you can transition to reusable or washable products, it saves a tremendous amount of money and it gives you a certain amount of peace of mind because you don't have to, in an emergency like that time of the month, run to the store in the middle of a blizzard to get some necessities. That's never an issue, you always have them. So that would probably be my one of my biggest frugal tips. Some of the costs are higher up front, there's no question about it, but then those costs are amortized over the following months and years as you don't have to purchase replacements. So that is a hugely helpful uh frugal tip. I would recommend everybody start transitioning to washable grains.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Those are great tips, thank you. Um I get a question a lot online, and I'm not sure if you have an answer or even want to answer this one. Um, but I'm gonna throw it out there. So a lot of times um women will send me a message and say, you know, I I want to prep for my family, but my husband thinks I'm crazy or my husband doesn't agree. And I am always very hesitant to weigh in on this one. So I feel a little bad that now I'm throwing it out at you. But um, do you have any suggestions? I mean you guys have been married for such a long time, on starting prepping when a spouse doesn't agree.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

A few thoughts come to mind. Um, one is obviously it's a whole lot easier if you're unified because every couple brings separate strengths to a relationship. Um my husband's my husband has so many skills it's crazy, it's it's scary. I mean, this guy can do every carpentry, you know, woodworking is his his biggest skill, of course. But he can turn his hand to plumbing and to wiring and to construction and to you know you name it, he can do it. It's just amazing. So he's he's very much the project guy. Um my skills are in what he calls quartermastering. Uh so when it comes to stocking the pantry, when it comes to food preservation, when it comes to animal husbandry, those are my skills. So we each bring separate separate skills to the table. So being able to unify toward a prepping goal is obviously an ideal situation, but it doesn't, as you say, it doesn't always happen. Um the first thing that comes to mind when answering that question is you don't, unless you've got serious other issues, you don't want to do something that is going to jeopardize your marital vows. So in other words, if you're if you're so insistent on prepping that you end up getting divorced, is that an advantage? You know, in other words, have you won anything? Now, obviously a divorce may be necessary if there's other issues going on, but if prepping is the only issue in which you disagree, then you're you've took it you've taken vows to your your spouse, your husband, um, and those really supersede everything else unless there's insurmountable other problems. Um so a lot of it depends on how hostile the other party is. If somebody is absolutely against it, well then you need to find out why. Is it because you're on too tight of a budget? That's a legitimate concern. Is it because he thinks it's stupid? Is it because he doesn't think there's anything wrong that's gonna happen that could ever happen? You know, whatever. So it might be worthwhile addressing the concerns rather than jamming forward your own agenda, if that makes any sense. Um and again, it depends on how you can how much you can talk to your to your spouse. I mean, some people have very good communication skills and say, okay, well, tell me what your fears or your concerns are, let's work through them. Others say, you know, I can't talk to my husband because he's just irrational. You know, there's there's there's a lot of subtleties in there. Um but if for whatever reason your husband is not likely to get involved in this at all, then again you can gauge how serious it is to say, can I just do it all myself, in which case sky's the limit, have that. Other times it's you know what, I'm picking up a new hobby, and this hobby is canning or dehydrating or whatever. You really can't object to a hobby, especially one that is so helpful for the family. In other words, see if you can just quietly pick up skills, pick up knowledge that will help you toward a goal, a preparedness goal. And it never hurts to have you know extra things in the pantry and things like this. But it is important to figure out why the husband would not be on board. There might be some very strong issues, like my mother, for example, um, grew up in extreme poverty, I mean starvation poverty on the Bayos of Louisiana. This is back in the 1930s during the Depression. Um, as a result, she has an irrational fear. Now, my mom just turned 91, so it's you know, she's getting up there in years, but she has this absolute fear of another depression with un with good reason. I mean, she witnessed the literal starvation that she had as a child as a result of this. So the thought, if I if I were to pitch to somebody with that kind of philosophy the idea of preparedness, they would freak out. I actually kind of did one time to my mom, and she pretty much freaked out because no, no, it'll never happen, it'll never happen again, kind of thing. Just absolute denial because of that fear that she had of starvation when she was a child. So that that's a legitimate fear. That's a legitimate concern. And so that's the kind of thing where, you know, if your spouse has a certain fear, concern, um, whatever, see if it can be addressed. But trying to bulldoze over the other person's feeling is only going to lead to marital discord, and you really need to ask yourself, is it worth it? Uh, because you know, you took you took vows with your spouse, and I'm I'm of the belief that vows mean something, uh, unless the other person has broken those vows through you know adultery or whatever. That's a whole different issue. But um, but yeah, you need to ask yourself if your marriage itself will be jeopardized if you insist on your following through on your agenda of prepping.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

So I hope that's not too convoluted answer, but I think this question is a very hard one to answer because it is a very hard one, yeah. Like I I don't have a picture, and you don't have a picture into someone else's marriage in their life. And Exactly no one right answer.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Yeah, there it truly isn't. Every circumstance is different. I mean, if the other party, if if the this the other spouse is just saying, I don't care, whatever, you know, I'm not gonna get involved that I'm not gonna stop you, that's actually not a bad thing. Then you can set in motion what you think needs to be done. Um, but if they're hostile to it, that's what you need to figure out. Why are they hostile? Don't don't run over their feelings, don't run over bulldoze over their their emotions. That's not the right thing to do because that just makes them dig their heels in harder. Um you need to find out why. What's what's the issue, what's the baseline issue. With my mother, for example, I know what the issue is. She she lived through the depression and they nearly starved to death. So that's not you know something to trifle with or dismiss. So, you know, see if you can get to the the base of it and figure out why. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Yeah, and I love what you said about you know, learning skills, because that is a huge part of prepping and learning canning or whatever food storage method is only going to benefit someone's family.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

So and this is this is one of the things that I kind of object to, people who um focus on that one leg of the three-legged stool, which is supplies. You can't really buy yourself into preparedness. That's part of it, yes. I mean, every it's nice to have extra supplies laid in and what have you, but that's why I don't really have a lot of patience with all what I call the whiz-bang um high-tech stuff associated with preparedness, because you're trying to buy your way into preparedness and it doesn't work. Um, but being able to gracefully handle things that are thrown your way because you've thought them through and you've acquired the skills and the equipment as like a pressure canner or whatever to um to take care of things, I think is a is a better approach in the long term.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

Yes, I absolutely agree.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Um I In other words, in other words, everybody could have everybody could have could buy garden seeds, for example, but if you don't have the skills to garden, yeah, you're gonna be in trouble.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Um you would mention But you know, your husband's skills and your skills respond very nicely. And uh we call me the keeper of the foods because that is just kind of where all of my stuff lies and what I do with gardening and canning and preserving. Um and I enjoy it. So yeah, I think so. That's so important. Um, I would love to just do you have anything else that you're like, I really want to talk about this. This is an important topic.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

Or I think a lot of it is um for for people who are just starting out on this path. I think one of the things I would recommend is not biting off more than you can chew. Because the whole preparedness thing, just like the whole homesteading thing, can just be overwhelming. You have to do this and you have to do this and you have to do this, and you'll die if you don't. And well, that's no. I mean, maybe, you know, it depends on if a wildfire is heading your way, but you know what I mean. Um, but you get these people who are there to push an agenda, and if you start listening to two, too, uh, to too many of them, it becomes overwhelming, and then you lock up and you don't do anything.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

Um, so probably my my you know, for people who are just getting into this, it's to pick something and learn it. Pick a food preservation method, whether it's dehydrating or canning or freeze drying or what have you. Pick gardening or pick uh chickens or pick something. But just, you know, something and develop it, learn it, figure it out, and then when you're comfortable with it, pick something else and start, you know, you know, in that direction. Because not everybody can have cows and chickens and whatever if you live in the city, that's just not gonna work. But nothing stops you from learning how to food uh preserve food, for example. Um so there's there's just so many things that you can learn. And so my my thought was don't get overwhelmed, just pick something, pick one thing. And often it can dovetail into an interest that you already have. Let's say you're uh uh you're an expert in the needle arts. I'm just making something up. Learn how to knit socks, or learn how to knit uh uh something that's gonna be useful in a difficult situation. What are people gonna be asking for or demanding or looking for if uh if things get tough? Socks would be pretty important, you know, that kind of thing. So if you have a skill, develop it toward uh with a preparedness goal in mind. If you've always wanted to learn a skill, now's your chance. You know, I I picked up canning, my husband and I had just gotten married. Um we were newlyweds, and I had built this little, we were liv we were renting a little crackerback house in a really bad part of town, and I started this little tiny postage stamp-sized garden. It was probably four by eight feet. And I had six corn plants and two tomato plants, I think. And I don't know what was going on with those tomatoes, but I ended up with more tomatoes than I knew how to, you know, knew what to do with. And I remember picking like two full grocery bags, paper grocery bags full of tomatoes and bringing them into the kitchen and looking and going, what do I do with these? And somewhere in the back of my mind, um, I'd heard about canning, but my mother never canned. I I knew didn't know anybody who canned. This is long before the internet. What do I do with this? But it was just somewhere in the back of my mind I'd heard of it. So I went to the library and I got some books on canning and I canned these tomatoes. And I remember pulling them out of the water, the the the water bath and putting them on a towel on the counter and looking at them, and I realized something very dangerous had happened. I was hooked. It was like it I mean, I was serious, like taking a drug. I looked at this and said, Whoa, I think I'm in love. And I have always loved canning. It's like pulling jewels out of the canner when I'm done with tomatoes or carrots or whatever it is. And I taught myself how to can and I never looked back. And that's a powerful prepping tool, as you can imagine. You know, I ended up getting a pressure canner and acquiring jars and rings and lids and all everything I needed. Um, and it just became a hobby that was all just happened to be a very useful hobby. So it's one of those things where if you can take your hobbies and turn them into something very useful and preparedness related, it can be extremely helpful. But pick one thing at a time. Don't think that you have to do everything. That's that's you know, we've seen so many people move to the country and then move back to the city because they try to do everything all at once and it just doesn't work. You've got to be patient, you've got to be easy on yourself. And uh, you know, pick something and get good at it. And then something else and get good at it.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

I love that. Um, I too love canning and like the sound of the peeing of the jar.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

It's just like um, oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

Is there anything else that you would want to share before we uh just kind of close for this morning? Um anything I just I don't know enough about you to ask.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

I think I I would have to suggest people not be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to make mistakes because it's the only way you can figure out how things go wrong. Um because if you do fail, if you do make a mistake, something doesn't work, try it again in a different way. Um it it's one of those things where a lot of people get frustrated if something doesn't go right the first time. And you know, gardening. I wasn't raised gardening, it was an uphill battle forever. Um it took us nine years to realize that this isn't our last place in in um that we moved, that we couldn't garden in the soil. The soil was just rock hard clay. It just didn't work. And it took us nine slipping years to figure that out. And so we finally had to stop and say, okay, we are failing too much, and the definition is of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. This isn't working. What else can we do? And that's how we developed a tire garden, gardening and tractor tires. And I did all the research, and the whole idea that tires will poison you is a myth. I got hold of the original researcher from which that originated, and he said, no, I was misquoted, it was a long story. So we started gardening in tires and went from zero to sixty in you know 1.5 miles or however however the saying goes. We went from almost nothing to almost complete food self-sufficiency with fruits and vegetables within two years by by trying something different. We had to look outside the box and figure out what worked. Um, so that's the kind of thing, don't let failure discourage you. Just figure it out. Figure out what went wrong and why, and then address it. Sometimes you have to do really crazy things like look outside the box and garden entires, which you did that because they were free, by the way. Um So that's the kind of thing. If you're you know your first batch of of uh carrots from the pressure can or every last can failed, every last jar failed to seal, then you have to figure out why. Don't just throw up your hands and say, I can't can. I can't preserve. Um figure out why. What did you do wrong? And then try it again, and then try it again, and then try it again. So probably don't let failure discourage you. We have met people who just get so frustrated by failure that they're not perfect the first time that they throw up their hands in dismay and le and you know move back to the city or whatever they're gonna do. Don't let failure discourage you. Just figure out what went wrong and do it again. No one's an expert just out of the gate.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

Yeah, I absolutely agree. Like, I think over the last 20 years we have had so many experiences and and we tend to we call them learning experiences, not failures. They are. They are seriously, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:48

They are seriously nothing but learning experiences. It's sad when sometimes like we had this one situation, gosh, years ago, where we had a piece of of sheet that we just had on the ground and we knew where it was, and it just was there. You know, we did we were lazy, we didn't pick it up. And um our big mistake is not picking it up because we had a cow that happened to jump the fence at that one spot. And so one day I go out and I see this cow standing on three legs on the wrong side of the fence. Uh, what's wrong with you? And I I go up to the cow and she had blood on her leg, the leg that was lifted up. Turned out she cut her Achilles tendon on that piece of sheet metal. I can't tell you how I felt because I love animals. You know, we raise them for meat, yes, but we care for our animals, and I felt like absolute trash. I should have picked up that sheet metal, I knew that's where she jumped, and I never did. And so we had to butcher her. And it's something I have never forgotten and never took for granted, and never, you know, made that mistake again. But everybody makes mistakes, and I learned from it. It was a brutal mistake, it was a nasty mistake. Um, and I I hate seeing animals in pain. Um and that was my that was something I should have known better. But anyway, it was a mistake I learned from it. We never let sheet metal uh lie around again. So that's the kind of thing, don't let it get you down. You know, sometimes you have to cry, sometimes you have to beat yourself up, but don't let it get you down. You you you learn from it.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Yes, absolutely. Um, why don't you tell us a little bit about where people can find you online? You are an author, you write books, you have a blog, um, you write a column over at WND every week. Um, tell us a little bit about all that.

SPEAKER_01 53:43

I I have I don't do social media. I've never felt comfortable doing social media, so don't look for me on Facebook or anything like that. Um, I do have a website, which is just patricelewis.com. All that is is kind of an oversight. Uh, it's not really uh very comprehensive, and I I seldom make changes to it. My most active online presence is, as you say, my blog, and that is rural-revolution.com. Make sure there's a dash because if you don't put the dash in there, it takes you to like a real estate company in Canada or something. So it's rural rural-revolution.com is my blog, and I blog there several times a week. Um, and it's just a a chit-chatty, you know, this is how we live our life. We we are actually, since we're still developing our new homestead here, um, it's I'll summarize projects as we go, but there's less day-to-day stuff on livestock because we don't have any at the moment, and I don't have a garden yet, and you know, lots of things we have to do yet. Uh, but it's just kind of a chit-chat about our life, and that's probably the most active uh presence I have online.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

All right. And would you like to share about your books?

SPEAKER_01 54:49

Which one?

SPEAKER_00 54:51

Any of them.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

Um well, my first book was The Simplicity Primer, and I think it's out of print. Uh, so you might be able to find some used copies online. But um recently, as in the last couple of years, I got picked up writing uh inspirational romance uh romance through Harlequin. So this is uh Amish inspirational romances are my my latest thing. And I work, I've got I just got a six-book contract, so I'm really doing a lot of writing on that. Uh and those links can be found, they can be found on my website. I guess I had to put a permanent link on my blog. I'm really bad at marketing. Um so yeah, I should do that. Yes, what a concept, you know. Um and then uh on the blog also I have a list of links to various magazines that I write for almost every rural themed magazine that's out there. Um I just got an article accepted to Mother Earth News, and that's kind of an exciting thing. So um, but I write for uh Backwoods Home and Self-Reliance, they're the same uh umbrella organization. I've been writing for them for years, delightful people. Uh and then Countryside and Goat Journal and Backyard Poultry and Backyard Beekeeping and all the countryside umbrella event of uh magazines. And like I said, Mother Earth News just picked up my first article. Um so I do a lot of of magazine articles, rural themed magazine articles. Uh so but yeah, the the romance books are kind of my latest, and they're they're just a hoot to write. I really enjoy those.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

Well, I'm not much of a romance reader, um, so I have to admit I have not read them, but um, I do enjoy like when you post the covers and the titles, and I'm always like, oh, that one sounds kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 56:33

So if I ever Yeah, you know, it's it's funny. It's funny because they it took a while to admit that I was writing these because most people associate romances with the the 1980s bodice rippers. Um, but these are Amish inspirational, which means that it means they are absolute squeaky clean. Your grandmother can read them without blushing. In fact, my my characters can't even use the bathroom, as I found out. The editorial standards are really, really strict.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

Oh wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 57:00

So yeah, they're very clean.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

Well, listeners, I will link Patrice's website and her blog in the show notes so you can go there to find her. And thank you so much for being my guest on the podcast today, Patrice. It was just a blessing.

SPEAKER_01 57:19

It was my pleasure. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. All right, listeners, thanks for listening.