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It seems Anna T yearns for the life of the Ingalls


YPestis

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The ingalls also embraced modern changes. Pa used to harvest his crops manually but then he would hire a guy who came out with a giant machine (sorry details slipping my mind). Made life a lot easier. The books are fascinating, to the point where it's on my bucket list to visit the places in them, but all one has to do is read The Long Winter to know it was a brutal life a lot of the time.

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Does she realize how many lives things like window screens have saved? Just by keeping the majority of wild animals/bugs out of our bedrooms with simple woven wires, we have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths by communicable diseases such as rabies. Modern plumbing might seem like a drag, but cholera and black plague were far worse.

Modern day people do not realize just how lucky they have it. It's especially troubling to people like me, the chronically disabled. I use a Swiffer Sweeper because a regular broom and dustpan are too hard, so I know darn well that 19th Century homesteading would have killed me before my 25th birthday, and that's to say nothing of the infections, cured by penicillin that would have killed me before my first birthday.

Must be nice to be so healthy that such things are a pain, not a blessing.

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Leaving aside the ridculousness of wanting to live in the 1800s, it seems Anna T needs a lesson in economics...

The idea of everyone being given their own plot of land without having to pay for it sounds dangerously like Communism :o You see, Anna T, the way capitalism works is people own things other people want so they charge them a fee to get them. If you want the piece of land that I own, you're going to have to pay me for it. And, because of supply and demand, that land is quite costly. Most people can't afford to pay for it so they ask other people to lend them money (that's a mortgage). A mortgage allows you to buy (and live in) a house that you would otherwise not be able to afford. And unless you've got a predatory lender or are living beyond your means, it's a pretty good way to accumulate some wealth over time.

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You know, it is perfectly possible to just go pick out a patch of land and live on it. That's called "squatting." The people who actually own the land are free to respond with an ancient practice of their own, known as "eviction."

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Maybe she's watching the Little House TV series and getting caught up in the anachronisms....the perfect wind-swept 1970s hair, telephones in houses, bathing more than once a month...

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Someone needs to tell Anna that nostalgia is a dangerous drug. Taken in large enough doses, it can make you believe in things that never existed.

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Ah, yes it seems to be such a lovely life where one bad storm, too much rain or a drought during the summer meant no food in the barns = family and farm animals will starve. There were no foodbanks to save people in the 1800's. And Anna T wouldn't have been able to take a nap every afternoon.

The dreaded gummint wulfurr titty got started because tens of thousands of hard-working people in an area that sprawled over multiple state borders began starving to death and there was no way for most of them to get food. None. The few people who did have jobs that would do more than just feed their families (jobs mostly provided by the gummint wulfurr titty, BTW) could not possibly feed the rest. This on farmland that had provided huge crops just a few years previously.

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Little House on the Prairie inspired me to try and make butter by hand when I was 10, and it was fucking exhausting. So much work for so little butter!

I was 10 and in 5th grade when the nun made me make butter by hand. Someone got a little pissy because the sweet and adorable child that I was always shot spitballs at her.

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I hope you'll also enjoy the company of the rats and mice in your cozy little hut Anna! My husband grew up on a farm in the 1980's and no matter how clean and tidy the house was there were problems with pests.

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Laura was still alive when the 'modern' world we know began. Something tells me that she wouldn't have wanted to travel back to a time when even heating up a stove was hard work.

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I was 10 and in 5th grade when the nun made me make butter by hand. Someone got a little pissy because the sweet and adorable child that I was always shot spitballs at her.

That is one inventive punishment. :lol:

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Laura loved the modern world and kind of had a problem with eating when she got older, due to so much starvation as a child. I was on a kick reading about her for a long time and she essentially lived in near starvation for most of her childhood, the whole family nearly died from malaria, they lost her infant brother and she lost her infant son, it was literally a huge struggle just to live. I don't get people who romanticize that way of life. It was so rough and hard most people died really young.

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My family has been on our land, land myself and my Mother still live on, since 1868. I have hundreds if not thousands of pictures of my grandma/great grandma and great great grandma and a few of my ggg Grandma, and their lives were HARD, very very hard. My Grandma had it best of course, well next to Mother and I, by the 1940's she didn't have to wash laundry in the big fire heated pot (that we still have planted full of flowers) once a week, nor did she have to sew all her own clothes, she did churn her own butter in the early years when we still had dairy cows, it took all f'ing day! Until my Grandma's generation, all my great and greater grandmas looked in the pictures 10 to 15 years older than my Grandpas! Everyone worked, full TIME, from sunrise to well past sunset! My Grandpa worked 7 days a week on our farm from the time he was 7 or 8 until he died, same with his father, and his Grandfather.

No running water, no indoor toilets, no electricity, they still used an outhouse until my own Mother was five years old and she is only 71 years old, no central heat the upstairs bedrooms were freezing in the winter, certainly no A/C!

Crops, gardens, chickens, ducks, geese, cows, pigs, horses (for work not pleasure), cooking three meals a day, along with canning, baking your own bread three times a week, caring for small children, laundry, sanitation (i.e. chamber pots and outhouses) takes WORK, all day work, work this blogger I am sure couldn't handle for a DAY. Heck even these days with our two big gardens, the chickens and the two cows during the spring through fall season my Mother and I work our butts off!

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What is so all fired horrible about having a mortgage? I think it's great to aspire to limit debt (no credit cards, pay for vehicles, etc.) as much as possible but it's unrealistic for most people to assume they can own a home without having a mortgage.

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Miss M, good point about the women looking older than their husbands. You can see it now in the hardcore Quiverfullers who think it's Godly to grind their own wheat by hand and so on on top of draining their physical reserves with a child a year. Speaking of that, here's another benefit of the olde tyme godlye lyfestyle: losing a tooth for every child.

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Miss M, good point about the women looking older than their husbands. You can see it now in the hardcore Quiverfullers who think it's Godly to grind their own wheat by hand and so on on top of draining their physical reserves with a child a year. Speaking of that, here's another benefit of the olde tyme godlye lyfestyle: losing a tooth for every child.

Throwing out some anthro major facts: Women have worse teeth because...

1) Babies suck the nutrients out of you.

2) Female hormones during your period/pregnancy cause a decrease in saliva which leads to an increase in cavities!

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thank goodness there are electric grinders for wheat berries these days.I don't see how grinding by hand could be considered Godly,any more than washing clothes by hand.

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