Recession Ponderings - Confessions of a recovering Yuppie

I awoke this morning to find we had no water. Having someone come in and check the well pump is on the Priority List... fixing the Buick caused it and a few other items to drop in their priority. It has now gone to the top of the list.

Thankfully, my husband had people he could call for advice and we did a few things we had done in the past when it didn't start. About an hour later the water suddenly started up again and we're still not sure what the problem was or how it was "fixed". However, it was good to have people in place we could go to for plumbing advice.

As I've said before, hubby and I are recovering Yuppies. My original goal may have been moving to North Carolina and living off the land but once I entered the corporate world (where my husband already worked), I fell for the Yuppie world hook, line, and the proverbial sinker. It took years of financial trials to bring us back to reality. We were educated to be consumers and pay other people to do things like fix well pumps.

Suddenly the skills we gained through the years were not those that would help us when our financial world fell apart. We were better off than some people since hubby worked building houses and refinishing furniture while he was in college. However, we didn't have a lot of basic skills necessary for survival in economic downturns... and the skills are completely different than finding the best plumber to do the job.

We each entered this learning process according to our personality. Hubby has annoyed more repairmen through the years by getting in their face and seeing how they did their job (when someone had to be called). Most were nice about it, though... the guy who put in a new thermostat and checked our furnace in October was a natural born teacher who took the time to show my husband to do both. He even went slow enough for my husband to write down everything he was doing while checking (and fixing a little gas leak) in the furnace. Hubby now has many files and 3-ring binders full of information.

As for me... being a book person and all... I have spent many years now developing a reference library all about emergency preparedness, cooking, decorating, canning, gardening, living off the land (even though we don't, the books still have great info), and homeschooling. We both are always needing to learn something new to be able to live life with little money.

Just this afternoon I spent an hour choosing new inexpensive recipes to try from my More With Less cookbook and perusing (for the hundredth time it seems) one of Emilie Barne's budget decorating books.

When we were in the middle of our homeschooling years, I would head directly to the kid's nonfiction books at library sales... then to history and biography... making my way eventually to cooking and gardening. In the past few years, the cooking, decorating, and gardening section has been my first stop.

I also use the Amazon credit I receive for such books (this month I had two months worth built up so I bought a book about gardening, another a recipe book about showing hospitality, as well as my granddaughter's birthday book... all from used book dealers).

We are both at different stages of learning. He's better at building things and house repairs than he is at plumbing. I don't let him near the electrical wires, even if his dad was an electrician (some skills are not inherited). I am good at cooking and decorating but a newcomer at gardening.

The other important aspect of living in difficult times... we need each other. Neither of us have many family members left and none who could help in an emergency. However, through a network of people we know at our church and in our old neighborhood, we have people who are usually available to help and to teach. Perhaps not immediately but in the long run.

We grew up expecting a world like The Jetson's... it turns out what we need is more like Little House on the Prairie or The Walton's.