Good morning folks,
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It's Friday! That means absolutely nothing to those who have to work on the weekends but for those of us that do the regular Monday to Friday 9-5 day job, Friday is a spectacular day! That coupled with the fact that my mother may be making the trek up to visit only makes the day better.
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As we near the end of week two for Roll-up-the-Rim, I'm starting to lose faith in winning the huge prize. You see, I know people who work for Tim Horton's and they have opened my eyes to the contest and how it works. Did you know that all the major prizes for the Roll-up-the-Rim contest are predestined? That means, when you hear about someone winning a grand prize (car, $10,000, etc.) it was determined before the contest started where those winning cups would show up. It sort of ruins the whole randomness of it in my opinion. While the winning of any prize is a random thing, it is determined well before I even go into any Tim's for a coffee whether I will be able to win a big prize from that store. Hell, there are even some Tim's that have nothing in the way of big prizes. I could be wasting my time going to the Tim Horton's I go to daily.
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This is all besides the point of my musing today. As my title would suggest I want to talk to you all about the bare necessities. Monday night we had a fairly nasty ice storm here. As a result, we lost power sometime around 5pm Monday evening. I worked from home all day that day so thankfully we didn't lose power until after I was finished working. We had no power until approximately 9:30pm that evening, well after the kids fell asleep and the fire in our fireplace started to go out. It was a quiet relaxing evening sitting in our living room upstairs and staring at the glow coming from the fireplace while the sound of rain and ice pelted the roof and side of the house. We all sat around and made a list of things that were useless without electricity. The list was staggering.
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I won't write the list down here, but you can go through your own houses and make your own list of things that require electricity. Things like Stoves, Refrigerators and lights that we take for granted every single day. I made a comment to my kids after they started complaining an hour after the power went out about how people in the olden days didn't have electricity at all. In fact, they had no form of power, even batteries. The look of fear on their faces as their hands tightly gripped their flash lights was priceless. My thoughts began to wander to what life would have truly been like back then. People most likely went to bed shortly after the sun went down and woke when the sun came up. Why waste candles to light the place when there wasn't much to do? Families lived off their land and were pretty much self sustained. They didn't pay utilities for things like water, electricity and sewage removal as they had everything they needed.
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What would it be like today to live like that? Could most people survive? Has the world changed so much that living like that would be impossible today? What would happen if the world suffered a major disaster (natural or otherwise) and people were forced to live off the land again without electricity or municipal services? Only the strong would survive I think and those who couldn't would kill, steal and whatever else they could do to get by. In a way, it wouldn't be much different than life today.
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Living without electricity also brought another issue to light for me; no heat. Since our house is heated by an oil furnace heating water that run through pipes in our house, we had no heat because the furnace had no power. Thankfully we had some wood in the house for the fireplace and we had a nice little fire going which put out a little bit of heat. We were never in any danger of freezing (lots of blankets) but what if it had been REALLY cold outside and we didn't have any wood for the fireplace?
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Anyway folks, I urge you all to spend a few minutes today thinking about what you now consider the bare necessities. This will change with each individual and I'd be interested to hear what you think. As society progresses and moves forward, these bare necessities become more and more reliant on other things. Our computers, for example, are pretty much useless these days without the internet. I guess you could sit there and play Solitaire or some single player games, but where would you be without the internet? You wouldn't be reading this for starters. Spend a few minutes today and really ponder what you can and can't live without. I think you will be very surprised.
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I'm out for now, check back every day for a new musing during the Roll-up-the-Rim contest!
Cheers,
Al
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