Old Crafts as New Careers

I recently met a wise 70 year old man from my hometowm who raises Oxen. He also builds log cabins… using no modern technology. To say that I was impressed is an understatement.

On a cold day recently we sat next to a fire in one of the log cabins on his property. The fireplace was made of stone. Each stone had been collected from the creek bed down the side of the mountain. He even told me about the large, sweeping headstone that ran across the top front of the fireplace. He said he spent months looking for the perfect stone and had almost given up hope when he was hiking the creek and it just popped out of him. If you saw this stone, you’d say it was a miracle. It is one continuous piece of long rock, with one flat side and one curved side that seems like it was made to fit this function.

The reason I tell this story is to make a point. Human beings receive a great deal of joy from working with their hands. From making things. From producing things. But many of the jobs in today’s economy leave people feeling dispirited and hopeless. They do not foster creativity or joy.

As I look to raise and shape my boys, I hope to encourage them to pursue a job not primarily for the money, but for the joy of learning a craft and making something wonderful. I want my boys to be able to look at their handiwork and feel a sense of pride.

Whether it’s being a farmer or being a gunsmith or a log cabin builder, the key is to find the right balance between effort and reward while minimizing stress. I believe that working the land or building something physical offers the greatest intangible rewards – but you do have to pay the bills too.

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Can Job Stress Kill?

This is one of my pet-peeves about modern American culture: most people live to work, rather than working to live. Everything is done in the name of the career, and very little is done in the name of physical and spiritual well-being.

I wonder if more people realized that their bodies are their most prized possessions and are more important than their careers, whether people would choose jobs for reasons other than just money. Especially if they knew that certain jobs can kill you through stress (See the infographic below from HR MBA). Part of the problem with our economy and society is that everything gets evaluated by the bottom line, the almighty dollar. So your value as a person is often equated with your career and the amount of money you make.

Start making choices for your quality of life!

From: HumanResourcesMBA.org

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Shakeup on the Solar Energy Front: Solyndra

Those of us homesteaders who have been hoping the cost of solar panels would continue to fall until we can finally afford them on our houses and outbuildings have been watching with some trepidation the news that solar start-up Solyndra has filed for bankruptcy. What does it mean in terms of the push to secure truly ‘green’ jobs here in the U.S., as well as our struggle to get our nation off filthy fossil fuels like coal and gas, and to phase out ill-conceived nuclear power generation before Megalopolis ends up a ‘dead zone’ for 300+ years.

The New York Times reports that Solyndra’s bankruptcy bodes ill for the entire solar industry. But does it really? While we can be sure King Coal and Big Nukes would dearly love that to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

Solyndra’s collapse marked the third time in as many weeks that a solar company declared bankruptcy. Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts and SpectraWatt of New York also filed for protection.

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Nuclear Energy: Florida Rate-Payers May Get a Break

Now that my terminally wrinkled fingers have finally recovered from the tomato harvest – two bushels dried and half-dried, a third bushel variously canned and frozen – I can get back to enjoying the break (finally!) in this summer’s all-time record heat wave that had us here in the mountains suffering 95º+ temperatures daily for two and a half long, long months. Back to more normal now with low to mid 80′s during the day, mid 60s at night. I love all the seasons for what they have to offer, but readily admit spring and fall are my favorites. Because by February I’m darned sick of ice and snow no matter how pretty it is, and by August I’m more than ready for fall’s crisp clarity and cool nights.

Homesteaders tend to make real sacrifices for as much self-sufficiency as possible even while our most major projects proceed over a period of years in a perpetual “work in progress.” We like to tread lightly on the earth, though as the temperatures steadily rise a lack of air conditioning certainly can make summer a miserable season. So thoughts of course turn toward more necessary projects for energy self-sufficiency that are bigger than just completely redoing the water system for a ram jet and gravity feed. Solar panels are still too expensive for my family at this time, but I have discovered some nifty wind projects we could build on-site without the multi-thousands of dollars it takes to even think about solar.

That of course being a big project for sometime down the road (still working on the water), but please do check out the Homemade Wind Turbine Plans site to get yourselves dreaming in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s good news for Florida utility customers this week, which may even end up helping out utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina as well.

If you’ve driven cross-country in the past year you may have noticed that the vast American Midwest is sprouting windmills at a fast pace. Given this year’s nuclear horror at Fukushima – and associated nuclear unease across the entire planet – you may be happy to know that it became official over the past year that renewable energy sources now produce more electrical generation capacity in the U.S. than nuclear. The statistics are that wind, small-scale hydro, solar and biomass energy production came to 381 gigawatts of capacity, compared to nuclear’s 375 gigawatts.

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Choosing a Degree Wisely Should Maximize Job Opportunity

Most people make the mistake of thinking that all they need is a college degree and they will have no problem finding a job. But in today’s economy, having just any old bachelor’s degree is not sufficient. In fact, many people suggest that there is a bachelor degree bubble.

Choosing a degree wisely amounts to choosing a degree that will train with the knowledge and skills you need to fill a high-demand job. So it’s important to have an idea of what sort of jobs are in high-demand and which degrees will prepare you to fill those jobs.

So how do you make this important decision?

Thankfully there are several helpful resources.

The first one is put out by the Federal Government and is called The Occupational Outlook Handbook. It provides lots of information on the sort of occupations that will need to be filled in the coming decades.

Employing the data in The Occupational Outlook Handbook, a new 18,000+ word report has been released titled The Top 51 Degrees for Getting a Job and Making Money. This report lists the degrees in terms of a metric they call “job opportunity”

One interesting fact we noticed when looking through this report is that you can get great job opportunity with only a 2 year degree. Obviously, some jobs will require 4 year degrees or even graduate education. But the important thing is to realize that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there are great opportunities with only 2 year associate degrees. Many students could save a lot of money if they realize this.

Here are some examples of good paying jobs with high-demand job markets:

- Associate’s Degree in Respiratory Therapy
- Associate’s Degree in Occupational Therapy Assistant
- Associate’s Degree in Physical Therapist Assistant
- Associate’s Degree in Biomedical Equipment Technology
- Associate’s Degree in Health Information Technology
- Associate’s Degree in Veterinary Technology
- Associate’s Degree in Dental Hygiene
- Associate’s Degree in Mortuary Science

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