Chapter 7

The next week or so was spent in “improving our foxhole” as the Army would call it. A cattle trailer was acquired without too much difficulty (central Texas after all) and the start of our own herd of cows. As we had talked about a mix or some we could use for milking, some for beef, and some with the sole intent of keeping a breeding line going. I had to admit that was a thought I liked: planning ahead for a future generation, even if it was just a first generation of cows.

One other idea was a related idea from the cows: chickens. We gave it some time on that. I first started prep work on making a chicken coop. While I wasn’t a carpenter or woodworker by profession, I did have my workshop with a few tools that would make that easy. The table saw and miter saw stations were a definite help in getting the wood cut to lengths that I needed. Also a few careful trips into town at Lowes or Home Depot showed that there weren’t many people interested in scavenging home improvement items. Chickens went similar to the cows and in the same type of area - lets face it, the type of person to have numerous cows is also the type to potentially have chickens. After a few days we had a herd of about 15 cows and 30 chickens. Some of each were ear marked for eating, otherwise more like 5 chickens would have been sufficient for egg layers. I noticed the chickens didn’t really fight too much. They had come to known humans equaled provider of food, after all.

After one stop in particular I started researching for better sources in the long term: the regional supply areas that stores got their items from. I also started stocking up on additives to the gas tank to increase the lifetime of what gas I did have. I had to face the likelihood that eventually even that wouldn’t be workable. We would either need to adapt to live without gasoline dependency or figure out a way to refine our own. That would most likely mean taking over a facility to do the work, but for now I started looking harder for the best ways to make the fuel I had last and to acquire better storage for doing the same.

That was one way I could see similarities to the old Mad Max movies: people willing to fight over fuel like Mad Max 2 or finding alternative fuel sources like the pig fuel from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

That’s right, I was a movie nerd. It was something that came to be an advantage now. Evenings as the day wound down were often spent watching a movie or two. In addition to the Blu-ray movies I had or we acquired I also had what I called Ryanflix. It was a networked hard drive full of thousands of movies. While I may not have had the internet anymore, the drive did still work very well on the home wifi network. That gave us access to movies on any device or room of the cabin.