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Thanks for this.

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Field pennycress, Thlaspi arvense.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 6 days ago by  Redcap.

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I’m not sure I see a problem. It seems to separate home schools from FPEs in terms of what kind of funding they can receive. Is there another distinction or restriction I’m missing?

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You can still use a credit card and just pay a 3% credit card fee. You just have to re-enter the info though as they dumped all the stored credit card info.

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We made a charcoal, gravel, sand filter. And we have extra supplies put by in case we want to make more.

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I have also decided to add that I had a weird run-in with Azure Standard this past ordering cycle. I ordered some chicken feed, got the confirmation email and order number, and then realized I had plenty, so a few days before the cut-off date, I cancelled the order. No problem.

Then the day of the cut-off, I got a new email with a new order number for the same chicken feed, but I had NOT ordered it a second time. Unfortunately, the order went through on their end just before the close of the cycle and I had no opportunity to cancel it. I was at work and didn’t see the email until I got home. (I don’t have a cell phone.) My laptop was at home. No one could have placed the order.

I called them and customer service told me it was too bad for me because the order had come from my IP address. But I kept telling them I didn’t place the re-order and there’s no one in my house who would have. My husband doesn’t touch my laptop and there’s no one else. I also said, I would not be picking up the order and so I expected a refund to my credit card. They said they’d get back to me and never did. I was charged on my credit card.

I disputed the charge with my bank (with whom I have the credit card). On the delivery day (it’s one where you meet the truck), a local woman I know happened to have ordered so she messaged me and asked if I was picking up my order. I wasn’t there and she thought maybe I’d forgotten about it. I explained that I didn’t order it and wasn’t picking up so she told me the truck driver just reloaded it and left.

Two days later, I got a call from the same woman from AS who said that even though the order came from my IP address (yes, please keep calling me a liar!), AS was going to provide a refund and then restated it as a refund “or a customer credit” and never really specified which one she was going to do so I had to ask if she was going to actually credit my card. She said, “IF that’s what you prefer.” OMGoodness! I had never said anything about getting a credit; I had always said I should have the card refunded. It’s been a week and I still haven’t received a refund.

So I’m not real happy with them right now, although I expect to order in future when I need something.

Last time I ordered, I got a sealed box with some smaller items and there was stuff I didn’t order that was supposed to have been refrigerated all that time (including a package of sliced cheese). It wasn’t on my invoice and I wasn’t being charged for it, but it clearly belonged to someone else. I always check my order before I leave and I gave it to the coordinator in case it belonged to someone else there.

Every month, my account shows an open order with an order number. Mine currently says 0 items and $0 because I haven’t ordered anything this cycle, but I don’t see how having an open order isn’t inviting some computer glitch to happen. I didn’t realize there was ALWAYS an open order. I would just have liked to not have it implied to my face that I was lying. That just seems terribly rude. I’ve done shipping and receiving. I know it’s a pain, but it’s not a fourth grade drama with attitude.

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I really started thinking that way and started getting extra household things and emergency cooking and lighting and such stuff and it just got stupid at some point. Yeah, I’m fine with a good supply of duct tape and OTC meds and homemade medicines and matches and such, but we just don’t have the room to become our own Costco. And it also hit me: and what happens when you run out of what you have back-stocked? How will you live if you’re still relying on manufactured items?

So now we got rid of and donated a whole lot of extra stuff and went back to my roots of how my family survived the wars and Great Depression and even a great-grandmother who talked about the Hard Winter of 1880!

We have shelter, a couple of years of wood for heat, water and ways to collect it, simple food to get by for a good year (a hearty stew once a day and another small meal of eggs and grain), and our clothes, soap, rags, and some back up lighting.

We figured we can go to bed when it gets dark instead of trying to reproduce modern life and light up our house with boxes and boxes of candles we don’t have room to store. We can eat nettles and dandelion every day if we need to along with our eggs and small meat animals or fish. Humans have no “essential” carbohydrate requirements nutritionally although I’m not saying cut out carbs. Just saying plants and meats give us more than breads and pots full of cornmeal. And there is NO nutritional benefit to white flour and white rice at all. The hardest food to get during the wars and Depression was meat. Better put that by now because when the feds start handing out food, it will be empty simple carbs, just like last time.

So we decided to change our stocking up to learning to live historically without modern needs. Yes, we do need extra screws and nails and such. Can’t have the house falling apart! But I can’t imagine trying to have everything we have now and trying to live a “normal” life if or when the clock turns back to 1930 or 1730 for that matter.

Now if it’s a zombie apocalypse, then husband and I are done anyway. We’re too old to fight hordes. LOL But live through another Depression? That we can do and with very little stuff.

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I liked where Heidi showed the cabinet full of jars and said a goal is to fill the jars. That’s kind of what I did. Figured out how many half gallon jars I’d need of a few really emergency items: potatoes, cabbage, veg, and leafy greens, mushrooms, etc. for a big pot of emergency cooking soup/stew to have for the week if there was nothing else OR we just can’t buy stuff (financial crisis at home) OR we get sick or injured and it’s just an easy thing to make once and eat all week. Plus some other things I want for long term storage in these big jars and I just bought all the jars and lined them up on a couple of Ikea metal shelves I had and started filling them up. I can look at the shelf and know how many more I need to fill up. Or if we’re using anything I’m buying, like nuts, what to replace.

That visual simplicity is what I need. Because we don’t need to right now, I don’t dehydrate for daily use and rotate. This is mainly my long-term storage for the next couple of years. We figure we won’t really feel the need to start using it regularly and rotating it until maybe next year when I think it might have been on the shelf awhile – and that’s mostly the cabbage because it’s getting more light brown as it sits in the jars even though it’s a dark room with no windows and it’s all vacuum-sealed.

It was a good talk about the milk, too, because we haven’t had the funds to put by powdered milk. But I did the math and it would cost about $10-$12 per gallon once reconstituted. I get organic whole milk for about $7, but the trays would have to hold such a small amount of milk, that by the time I dehydrated a gallon, it would take forever and cost a fortune in electricity.

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Absolutely. Getting enough D, A, and both fats Omegas 3 and 6 are crucial.

My husband was wrongly diagnosed with diabetes at one point and given Metformin which he took even though I told him not to and he was in bed unable to get up for the entire 8 months he took it. He was also still taking anti-depressants for “clinical depression” he had been misdiagnosed with for 10 years. That doctor moved away, he went in for a check-up and the new doctor said he never had diabetes.

He had chronic fatigue. Got him properly diagnosed, dumped all meds, and now he has his bad days, but we use only nutritive foods and plant medicines and he can’t work but he does wood work, yard work, builds my chicken coops, puts up fences, built the neighbor a deer blind…..That metformin is poison as far as I’m concerned. I have never heard of anyone who has taken it and felt better or got better and if they did, it was likely the dietary changes they made.

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Bank transfer (ACH here) is extremely common in Australia and that’s how people pay each other or send money to each other ALL the time. But there aren’t as many crooks there as here in the US so giving someone your bank details isn’t as terrifying. And by that, I mean, you could sell something to a friend and they might pay you by bank transfer. But that means giving them your name, bank, routing number (BSB it’s called there), and account number. You do that here and expect to be robbed! LOL

But I am glad to see it being used by businesses. It’s like bill pay only you don’t pay a bill, you pay in advance.

Net10 is a payment businesses use between themselves and suppliers. It means you have applied for credit terms with the actual company and have to pay your bill within 10 days of date of invoice.

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Then who is saying it says homeschools will be labeled as schools.

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I asked about that – products being in stock when you order them and then not in stock when it ships. They told me that, yes, that’s an “approximate” amount in stock, but until YOUR delivery date, that’s being shipped out to others, so it’s not lowering the amount by the orders for it. Just saying what they think they have in the warehouse at the time. Weird.

I did get a refund btw.

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Told them that and they said everyone had an open order every month with an associated order number even if nothing was in the cart. This is today’s screenshot. I clicked on My Account and then Orders.

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That happened to me. I had chicken soup cans and didn’t get sick for so long, they were out of date when I went to clean out the store bought cans in the pantry. Hahaha! Now my husband makes me chicken bone broth by cooking it down and then actually grinding up everything including the bones so it’s thick but still totally liquid. He freezes it now, but next Tim, I’d like to try to dehydrate some, if he’ll let me take some.

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I really like the cabbage growing you’re doing. Can you point me to the method you’re using? I’m not a big grain person or bread but we do have a lot of cornmeal and oats put by along with a lot of dehydrated potato. Those are our main starches.