08:59 – Friday the 13th falls on a Thursday this month.
It was 75.1F (23C) when I took Colin out at 0715, cloudless and bright.
The downstairs is finished enough that we can get to work on getting stuff back where it belongs. Today and tomorrow we’ll work on the den, getting pictures hung and the furniture dusted, lemon-oiled, and back in position. Then the bedrooms. The guest room, which Frances and Al use when they’re here, won’t take much work, mainly just moving some boxes out. They could sleep in it tonight, if they were here. The food/prepping storage area is going to take more work. There’s still stuff stacked on the floor and every horizontal surface, although Barbara did manage to clear footpaths a few days ago. Still, it’ll be a massive amount of work to finish reorganizing that. There’s still stuff stacked in there that hasn’t been moved since we moved into the house in December, 2015. But we’ll get it all straightened up and organized.
Then there’s the unfinished area. A lot of that will be cleaned up automatically, as we move furniture, books, and boxes out of there and into the finished area. But there’ll still be a lot to be done.
I’ve commented on this before, but one thing that strikes me over and over again is that when a woman contacts me about prepping, she wants to talk mostly about food. When a guy contacts me, he generally wants to talk about guns.
It’s not exclusive either way, of course. Women also want to talk about guns and guys about food, but the difference in focus is pretty obvious. Again, as I’ve said before, everything comes down to biology. Women and men are both the products of a couple million years of evolution, which has adapted them for different tasks. Women, and there is nothing sexist about this statement, are gatherers, adapted to bear and raise children, care for the home, and establish social links with others in their family/clan/tribe/community. Men are hunters, adapted to track down and kill food and to defend their family/clan/tribe/community.
That’s not to say that each can’t do the other’s job, with obvious exceptions, and do it well. But the essence of a successful community is that all members focus on their own strengths, doing what they do best. Modern civilization hasn’t changed that underlying reality, nor the evolved instincts that support it.
So it’s not really surprising that women preppers tend to focus strongly on traditional women’s responsibilities and men preppers on traditional men’s responsibilities. The foundation of marriage is that a man and a woman combined are more than the sum of the parts.
What disturbs me is that, at age 64, I am no longer physically suited to take on the traditional male role, at least that for young men. I am, of course, suited to take on the traditional role for older men in the clan; serving as a font of knowledge and experience. That’s why older men and women have traditionally been highly valued by their clans. So that’s what I focus on. That, and food. Just like a girl.