I was wondering if making the most time move off grid/offline was going to be doable as far as sanity goes. It's getting hard to listen to the radio as the cut in NPR funding has resulted in a dramatic loss of radio signal for me.

I've increased the quality of my radios, spent a couple hundreds bucks on a few different things, but the signal quality is just deteriorating. You have to maintain and upgrade equipment. I used to get all four public radio stations that hit the mountains, Tri-cities, BPR, WUOT and WUTC (Johnson City to Asheville to Murphy to Chattanooga). Generally, there would have been routine issues with one or two stations, anymore, I'm lucky to pick up anything.

But here's the thing. The more news I get, the less I want. I wondered what it was like to live in one of those shithole third world nations under siege and underground all my life. It's not that bad. You'd be surprised. We talk about stream flows and compare rain gauge measurements. We match up the chapters in Al Gore's old book to specific weather events and trends that we're seeing. We work on our foundations and build seawalls in a probably futile attempt to combat the forces of nature. We're vigilant and keep an eye on people we don't care for. We have common interests. It's way better than I thought it would be.

Point being, I was always of the mindset that the worse it got down here, the worse it would get in the mountains as well, and it seems to be working just the opposite. The point being, this is an easy collapse to prepare for. If you can garden and barter, and your back isn't broke with debt, and you're willing to work a little extra to eat, you'll be okay. But old school food storage techniques have cut spoilage out of my food budget, so I just go to the Mennonite farm. After three years of figuring it out, it's starting to get easy. It's easy to live a hard life nowadays.