The "magic" of creation.
And the question of destroying your creation - is it worth maintaining? does it serve a purpose worth the cost of maintenance? Or is updating and modifying it for a different use worth the cost?
I grew up with parents who were both creators - it was almost magical what they could produce from raw materials. My parents produced art or functional things with paint, pottery, fabric, metal, and even words - poetry and personalized story books for us kids. My mom was a good baker of bread and goodies, and we always had home-made cake. Storebought cakes for a birthday or celebration was never a thing at my home (and they are kind of gross, sorry to inform you, compared to home-baked, unless you go to a gourmet bakery that isn’t using commercial mixes).
My parents continually amazed me with the neat things they created, seemingly from not much more than raw materials.
Kids who grow up with everything being purchased ready-made may not understand the possibilities in imagining and creating your own version of something, or of creating something totally unique.
Trial-and-error is involved as the first attempt might not be as good as later attempts, and failing and trying again IS typically part of the creation process - a lesson children need to learn. Success is not an easy street to find, you have to wander around lost a bit first.
My mom was a farm girl who taught her children how to bake fresh bread, make cakes and pies and even home-made ice cream. We gardened and picked fresh produce, green beans, strawberries, blueberries and other fruit at U-pick farms. Walking through the field or orchard with peck baskets, and later canned or froze the produce, or made jam.
Mom was also a seamstress and made a lot of our clothes for us, and sewed a tipi cover for the tipi my dad made. He went out and cut pine trees and hand removed the bark from 16 tall pine trees.
Smaller trees became interior poles to hold up a liner that provided more privacy and warmth when the interior was lit with a campfire at night. From the darkness outside, anyone walking around inside a lit tipi can be seen as a shadow figure. Over the years, my mother hand carved vining flower and other patterns on the interior poles and painted the interior lining cloth with decorations I don’t really remember. My dad gave the tipi to his muzzleloading club and the set it up permanently which it wasn’t meant to withstand a full winter. It rotted and I am a little sad that their combined creation is no more.
On the other hand, it was muslin fabric from 40 or more years ago, so would it really still be functional now? Probably not.
Reaching my point… spit-balling random ideas about a topic is part of the preliminary steps of “magically” creating something.
To clarify on my quick post about windmills - hemp fiberglass is used in cars, like part of the metal — so my idea about a spinning funnel like wind turbine, with some sort of filter, would likely need to be in two pieces. One more metallic/plastic sturdy ‘fiberglass’ outer funnel and an organically grown/clean changeable insert would be needed that was more like paper for air filtering.
How to keep plastic bags or leaves from blocking the entrance? How to keep the funnel from clogging? a screen would be needed along with a shape that tended to cause larger objects to blow over it rather than being sucked in.
Moisture, rain, snow, icing… all would be trouble shooting factors too.
“Magically” creating something is possible, but it takes tweaking the original idea and testing various parts of the idea to see if they “sink or swim.”
If you noticed that my posts seem to have changed topic lately, I have been copying material from an old website that I planned to close. It has a more expensive annual cost to host it, doubled - and I have two hosted by that company. I get contacted occasionally with other site’s links, with a request to include it - business people like getting their links on other people’s sites. But the earth-ocean.info site is not active and is really not my field.
My peace-is-happy.org site is hosted by the same company and has a forum that is kind of active by small business ‘spammers’ it seems. People want to get their links on other sites as it makes a site look more active to the search engines to have more links, so they become members of the forum and add comments with a link - flattering, a lot of the links are to college essay writing sites and even graduate dissertation writing sites. My spammers seem to be telling me something :-) Making me wonder if I should modify direction of that site towards small business to business, or submit a dissertation somewhere…
The forum section Peace is a Good Job, is the busy one although I haven’t approved all of the not ‘peace’ related posts. The trauma related Peace is the Freedom to Love has gotten some heartfelt appreciation for my posts on gaslighting or recovery but I wasn’t actively moderating the site and most of the comments were spam. I recently cleaned it up a bit… but new members are adding themselves? more spam? Or do people really want more peaceful happiness?
In looking at my earth-ocean.info site again, there was another request to add a link and the link was reasonable, so I added it to the suggested page…. and somehow managed to delete the entire blog from the site. It is my least used site and only has 43 posts, and around that in monthly visitors, but ouch. I deleted my own blog! At first, I was thinking, “Why are you updating a page on a site that you decided to close? Maybe you shouldn’t close it?” and then the blog was accidentally deleted… “Maybe I am meant to close this site.”
I have 7 or 8 sites or maybe more when my old podcast or Substack are included. That is not sensible, nor user friendly for myself or my readers. Here is the messed-up website, earth-ocean.info, feasibly it could be fixed and I started trying… but why? What is my purpose in keeping it up? I built a tipi and have left it standing for a few years now, but I haven’t really camped in it much at all. There are site visitors though, 3 more today. Maybe what I need is a manager… of my work? ???
The blog articles are still in the admin access area, and I have been copying them to a document and have posted some of the better bits here.
… I got my blog showing again, and somehow I had made the updated page disappear too.
On the site is an imaginary “IT Co.” with pages about how hiring an Intelligence Technology company could help your small business.
The email liked that I was highlighting disaster preparedness and asked me to add a link; the new link is the last one:
Disaster Recovery…. is a reason to hire an IT company to help your small business. (earth-ocean.info)
Disaster isn't something we expect but planning ahead can make the unexpected easier to recover from in some cases. Back up the back ups - sensible but who remembers to do that everyday? The IT team that's who. Systems can be set up that automatically make back ups of critical data on whatever schedule that is planned. Back ups can be made to internal storage within the on-site network and/or to an offsite cloud network storage facility. Copies can be helpful for recovery after physical breakdowns or virtual virus or human error causes loss of data.
Trouble shooting for problems with hardware or software and guidance about the possibility of repair versus replacement are skills an IT service professional can provide. IT Coordinated Networking can help with engineering needs as well. Telecommunication tower construction and maintenance can be provided for new or replacement structures. If storm damage occurs lines can be replaced or repaired.
For more information:
IT Disaster Recovery Plan, ready.gov.
Top 4 Types of Disaster Recovery Plans, solutionsreview.com.
Disaster recovery vs. security recovery plans: Why you need separate strategies, CSO from IDG, csoonline.com.
The IT Disaster Recovery Program, Cybersecurity at Yale, free, cybersecurity.yale.edu.
WizCase.com provides a nice overview of the main types of disasters and action steps and tools that might be needed. The individual homeowner is a focus, but the guide is applicable to small or large businesses as well. When it storms...we all get wet.
Natural Disasters Guide and Resources, a recovery/planning guide with infographic summaries of the sections. (wizcase.com)
Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health care guidance.