I recall watching Frontier House on PBS a year or two ago. I was particularly struck by one snippet of info: the experts who rated how well each family had prepared for the winter unanimously and uniformly felt that none of the families had stored up enough wood. They even warned all of them at the start with a line like "If you don't have some other chore to do, you should be chopping wood."
It takes a lot of wood to get through a winter without heat, especially if you're in the midwest or north. This is a good axe with a strong handle, though the replacement guarantee might not do you any good if the local Home Depot has been looted.
Fiskars Pro Chopping Axe, available from Amazon.

Technorati Tags: Survival, tools

I sure hope this article is correct. Solar power holds out the hope of decentralized power. As John Robb points out, big centralized networks are very very easy to disrupt.

Of course, at this moment, we face the early adopter's dilemma. Do we pay high prices now for tech that isn't very efficent, or wait a few years and get more for less. Reminds me of a small publishing company I know that jumped whole hog into computers in 1983, embracing the terrible IBM compatible standard. 18 months later they realized they really wanted Macs.

Technorati Tags: Solar Power