Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >No James, it isn't a deal.  I think that you know I have a life;

I know no such thing.

I have observes a curious phenomenon on this list over the 14 years or so 
I've been reading it.  There is a very different point of view from the 
homestead.  It has been observed, especially when a newcomer remonstrates 
that this 
list often talks about everything BUT homesteading, that this is more a list 
of 
homesteaders rather than a list about homesteading per se.

And well it should be, there's plenty of nuts and bolts lists out there that 
forbid or discourage any subjects except cabbages and goats.  The most 
instructive thing I've found about this list is that a few times (alas all 
too few) 
there will be someone participating on the list who is NOT on a homestead but 
after a few years or so they manage to get there.    The timbre and nature of 
their posts change radically when they are made from that different 
perspective.  

So I have always found the value of this list to be a source of points of 
view from the homestead, from the corn patch, from the woodpile, from 
stretching 
fence wire from the far flung rural corners.  Views and opinions on the news, 
books, movies, music, life the unvierse and everything is different when it 
comes from a homestead.

While people who are not homesteading have always had things to contribute to 
this list.  Most of them have been in the nature of inquiries and analyses 
into this homesteading mindset.    I would be much surprized if most of the 
hardscrabble folk here don't automatically muse when hearing pronouncements 
from 
outside the world of homesteading, "I wonder what they'd think if they were 
here, seeing things from this point of view?"

I bring this up, Bob, against a background that scanning back over the last 
few months of this list with some dozen to score of regular posters, more 
than 
four out of every ten posts are from Bob.  On a list where I (and perhaps 
others, who knows?) come to express and read what the world looks like from 
the 
vantage point of the homestead life, pushing toward half the total volume of 
posts are from another view point entirely.  In some e-circles that borders 
on 
trollish behavior.

The practical upshot is that I've been having to delete whole threads (and it 
doesn't help that we have the bad habit of preserving the subject line 
althought the subject might change seven times in a long thread) because of 
the 
volume of the list.  It's getting harder and harder to know what to read and 
what 
to delete in order to keep the focus on how things in the world look from the 
homesteading mindset.

So, Bob, I'm on this is to examine and experience what the world looks like 
from the point of view and mindset of the homestead.  That will include a 
great 
many diverse subjects, literature, religion, medicine, science, food, 
philosophy, and all and sundry.  The common thread among them being what do 
all those 
things look like from a homesteading mindset.

A person doesn't, I'd think, even have to BE on a homestead to have that 
mindset.  

But the general black-helicopter consipracy, 'they're out to get me', sort of 
thing is NOT the homestead mindset I am refering to.  

A good humorous comeback is a good thing.  To go fishing from a totally 
unrelated thread for a crude quip is boorish and yet easily overlooked .... 
if it 
weren't for the sheer volume of such.  

So you have a life, Bob. Pray, do tell us about it and how it relates to 
homesteading.  Getting a thrill out of imagining that there is some paramount 
importance in peeking into your windows and rifling through your credit card 
receipts that would provoke "them" to want to do it to you continuously is 
not, 
says I, in any way related to homesteading.



James