Ok, it's been a looooong time since my last entry. Thought I'd bring you all up to date on what we've been doing. We are moving again. This time it is just done the road. Our land lady kicked us out cause she needed to move back in to her home after breaking up with her boyfriend. My brother in law is letting us rent his old farm house from him. It's got 8 acres and a couple of barns and it abutts Abby's uncles 50 acres which is for us to use anytime we want. So the apple trees will be used for apple cider and we get to snow shoe the hills this winter. It is also where our garden all ready is which is nice. We are already planning chickens for next spring. We hope to buy it if we can ever get a mortgage. I'll have pictures soon.

On the mortgage front I've been trying to get a job at the local hospital in the sleep lab which basically tests people for serious sleep problems. It's been 3 months and 5 interviews. It's really getting old and today I was suppose to find out if it was me or another lady that they picked and no one called. So that sucks. If I get that job we may just eck out a mortgage but without it they'd have to go on my business income but I don't have enough business history so that won't work.What a pain in the neck.

As far as the business goes I've been busy recently just having signed another big client for $3,600 but I just had some odds and ends work this summer. Summer is a very slow time. Next year I may not even look for clients in the summer and just get another job if I'm not working already. So far I've been doing the business for 11 months and I've grossed (counting my new client) about $22,000 and have about $1,000,000 under management. Assuming I keep all of the big clients for the next year that's about $5,000 of residgual income for next year. Obvious a $1,000,000 sounds like a lot but you need 10 times that amount to really be making even a baseline living with all your expenses and stuff .But eventually I beleive it's almost inevitable that I'll get there. It's just a matter of time.

I know I should have been in contact with some of you and frankly, I've just been lazy. My fault and I'll try and call some of you soon.

Well, as far as the business goes, I haven't been finding good people to sit infront of. It takes a very specific type of person to see the value in my business and there just aren't a lot of them around. For instance, young couples with kids look at what I can do for them and then at the price and come to the conclusion that they can do it for themselves and though it may not have the same quality they will save my costs and that will make up the difference. I've run into this about half a dozen times. I quoted one couple $1400 and showed them how I'd save them $4,000 this year and they said no. Essentially saying no to $2600 pulse all the long term planning. 

I need older people making decent money and with money in the market. There is no way they can even do a poor imitation of what I can do for them. They must have my services but the problem is most of them have a financial guy already. Even if he is some two bit hack you've got to get infront of them to show them that.

So, to pay the bills I'm working on getting a job with a local hospital in their sleep center where you watch people sleep with all sorts of wires connected to them and then the test tell them whats wrong with them.

I do beleive I've landed another $5,000 account but it's going to be a few weeks before I know for sure. The guy said yes but he can't sign until straighting out a sitution with his ex-wife. Hopeful that works out.

I'm so fat I sold some of my stuff on ebay to buy a pair of running sneakers.  That actually happened. Those of you who knew me after college remember when I started running and lost a bunch of weight. While now I'm planning on doing something like that again. I'll keep you posted. Current weight 200Lbs

So I'm watching this show Jericho online. All the back episodes. It's about a Kansas town that survives a major nuclear attack on the US. It got me interested in if nuclear attacks which led me to look up such things as geiger counters and fall out shelters and radiation. And what I've discovered is that nuclear war would be a very survivable event for those who took a few simple steps including not being in a city that gets nuked. The biggest nukes that I can find anyone talking about online only distroy a radius of about 30 miles from the center of the strike. It is everything beyond that that is at threat of radiation and it is that radiation that is very survivable.

Even the worst of the radiation has a fairly short half life. Some of it loses half it's strength every hour or so. So a human body can only absorb just so many Rads of radiation. 1000 Rads will kill you in a few days, 500 will kill you in a couple of weeks, 250 will kill you in a month with out serious medical care, 100 will make you sick but you can recover from it, 20-50 Rads will have very little short term effect, like lowered immunity, though you may see long term problems. Those numbers aren't exact but they are close to the numbers I remember reading.

So there was a nuclear explosion a hundred miles west of you and the radiation was coming right at you and you had an hour to do something about it, you could survive by getting into your basement and in the corner of you basement creating a shelter from a heavy table or perhaps a door across two desks. Then piling on top of that desk everything with any real mass. This would include books, fire wood, anything metal. Then covering the door area the same way. You'd need water and some food and you'd need to seal the windows to the basement so the radioactive dust (which is the problem) doesn't get in. Four feet of dirt will reduce the strength of radiation down to almost nothing, at least nothing that can do serious damage to you. So the two walls of the basement create the half of your protection and the pile of stuff creates the other half. You're goal is to minimize the total amount of Rads you absorb total. You're going to get some but you want to keep it really low. Like less then 25.

Now this is where I thought the story ends because I wondered how long you would have to stay there. Obviously you can't make this situation work for long. Maybe a few weeks if you are ready to seriously sacrifice and you had enough food and what at which point I always thought you either died of starvation, dehydration or you went out into the world and died of radiation poisoning. But from what I've read the half life of the radiation makes all the difference. In the first hour you may be dealing with 1000 Rads. Enough to kill anything exposed to it for even 20 minutes but at the end of hour one you're down to 500 Rads. Still enought to kill you but half as much radiation as an hour before. Hour three you are down to 250 Rads. If you spent 4 hours outside in this you'd absorb 1000 Rads and surely die. But that's not how it works because by hour 4 your down to 125 Rads then  63 Rads, then 31 Rads, then 15 Rads then 7.5 Rads, then 3.5 Rads, then 1.75 Rads , then .85 Rads an hour and so on and so forth.

There are two keys here. One to survive at first and one to comprehend for the future. The first is that the Rads accumulate in your body permenently going forward. You have to minimize there total accumulation. They are strongest in the first few hours and if you are protected during that first day from absorbing much radiation your probably going to survive longterm. But the second thing is that the radiation will never totally disappear. Just like the ancient riddle of the man who tried to cross the road, each time reducing his step by half the distance of the last step and ultimatly never reaching the other side of the road. The radiation will never be gone and it will accumulate over the course of the rest of your life but if you can keep it fairly low in the first few hours then who cares if you absorbed .000000000001 Rad of radiation in year 30. It is the first few hours and days when you can absorb amounts like 500 Rads, this is the time that you are inserious danger that reduces, literrally in half every hour.

So after a few days it will be safe to go get more water, as long as it was covered and doesn't have radioactive dust in it. You can come back to the shelter and let the radiation continue to reduce. After a few weeks you can come out for hours at a time, perhaps only sleeping in your shelter. It is at this time that you'll have to deal with the new challeges of a post nuclear world but frankly I didn't think surviving that long was even a possbility. Now I'm trying to figure out how to make a bomb shelter.