FYL'z Brainz

As we all know, the U.S. economy has seen better days. With the exception of building weapons systems, there just isn't that much manufacturing going on in the U.S. Most of the economy seems to be related to importing, managing and selling things that are imported from China. Ideas to do some useful things like make health care available to everyone get labeled as some left-wing plot to bankrupt the U.S. and any alternative energy ideas turn into corporate welfare. Well, I just thought of something that might actually combine doing something useful with not getting labeled as welfare.

I have a lot of guava trees and, thus, a lot of guavas. I like them but I wanted to do something other than just eat bags of them. I decided bread what the right thing.

I went searching and found an amazing assortment of recipes for guava "stuff" and, generally, a lot of sugar. By guava stuff I mean nectar, paste and such. In other words, cans of stuff. I wanted to use guavas. That's the way we do things in Nicaragua.

Lacking a good answer, I decided to be creative.

I am a usano (person from the U.S.) living in Nicaragua. This article is about how you can move to Nicaragua today, live comfortably and move yourself up the economic ladder. Don't wait until you are too old to have fun–you can move today.

What does that mean? It means you don't have to wait to retire, built a nest egg or anything else. If you are ready for what Nicaragua has to offer, there are ways you can make that transition today.

While I would look at http://NarcoNews.com at times, it was never my primary source of "news" until the 28 June 2009 coup in Honduras. Since then, NarcoNews has provided a lot of insight. It was always clear that it was representing "the people" rather than what we have gotten all too used to in what we think of as the media.

Reading more and even corresponding with its creator, Al Giordano, I now better understand what happened to the media and what real journalism is all about.

Those who know me know I live in Nicaragua in, well, the middle of nowhere. Ok, almost 30 minutes by private car from the nearest place with a paved cross-street and 45 minutes from the nearest town of any size. (Adjust the travel times appropriately for walking, horseback or bus.)

With the number of things the medical profession doesn't know about how bodies work, I tend to be skeptical of each new "wonder drug" we hear about—particularly if there is big profit potential for some drug company. Vaccines have always been on my "is the treatment worse than the disease" list with flu shots, because of their "yearly revision" being at the top.

Eighteen Reasons Why You Should NOT Vaccinate Your Children Against The Flu This Season offers some good information to support my position.

Recently Tea Tree Oil has gone from something I like to have around to the top item on my essential first aid kit. I'm not going to write a detailed usage guide here as such things exist all over the Internet. Wikipedia is a good place to start for a description and links to use. I have used it for toenail fungus (expect to have to use it regularly 2 or 3 times a day for quite a while) and most recently an ear infection. A person I know used it on a gunshot wound.

I was just asked about how to build a low-cost solar water heater. It's actually the subject for a planned how-to article but let me toss out two basic design ideas. If you are creative you should be able to construct either one. Solar water heaters used to be inexpensive but, today, they seem to have out of control prices. It just makes no sense why someone would be expected to spend $1000 or more when they are such simple devices. The two ideas I will present are a "box heater" and a "plastic pipe" heater.

I remember when Cascadian Farms was a relatively small company with some nice organic products. And I remember when Gardenburger became the vegetarian alternative to cow-burger that people has heard of. Well, today, Gardenburger is owned by Kellog's and Cascadian Farms is owned (indirectly) by General Mills.

I'm just not sure if that is good or bad. If the products are still the same, this should just mean greater exposure to "good food" over the usual corporate factory farm products. But, does it? And what about the goals of the parent companies?

I was recently pointed to another Spanish learning site called Notes in Spanish. It is run by a couple in Spain. Marina is Spanish and Ben is English. Their classes combine their skills to offer some very nice learning tools. The approach—both in how they do the training and in what is available for free— is different than the norm. If you are serious about learning Spanish, I highly recommend adding their material to your toolkit.