I remember when this site was a little bitty thing. My it sure had grown!
As I placed in my profile, one of my interests is continuing education (actually, come to think of it, I might have put "continuous education" - that would be a typo. I have a predilection for typos.) Anyway, this is continuing education for me.
I recently received the survival issue of Backpacker magazine and that pulled "survival" up to the top of my registers and so I figured I'd check out my old favorite survival webpage and here I am.
My philosophy is that you enjoy life until you die so survival is, in fact, fun and games. It's a challenge. You might not have chosen it but it choses you and you might as well make the best of it and learn new things. I live in Selma, Alabama so survival is an ongoing thing for me. I never know when I set out for work in the morning whether someone will run a stop sign and t-bone me (something we're famous for here in Selma), or the street will open up and swallow my van whole with me in it (Don't think I'm joking.)
I've had quite a lot of experience. I've lost count of the hurricanes (onshore and offshore) that I've ridden out. I love weather and have been exposed to most of it (never been hit by a hailstone, though, and can't say I'll go out of my way to do it). I love wild food. You haven't lived until you've cooked up and eaten a mess of wild mustard greens with sausage. I also host the longest running and, at times, largest Howl in the US, which places me in the woods at least once a year for 9 days and keeps me on the road visiting other Howls and hikes. Most of my experience is nontechnical, though. I like to place myself in randomized learning situations - that way I force myself to learn and experience things I wouldn't have ordinarily exposed myself to.
To have something to write on my LiveJournal, I've been commenting on the Backpacker issue in respect to my past experience. Bear Grylls mentioned that the number of times he'd been in the situation, "This is it. This time I'm gonna die," was too many to count, so I figured I'd list the number of times I've been there - I figured it couldn't be that many (count 'em on one hand; two at the most), so I started and when I got to the lay barge, I lost count. God really does watch out for children, drunks, and fools.
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