Mandy's Mercurial Monologue

This morning I came by to visit this long-neglected blog. I saw the title of a draft post, "Can you afford $100 a month more?" This post was from 02/23/2013:  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While looking for the blog of a well-known neighbor... I came across this headline:  "Rising prices may cost you $100 a month" I've got to pay at least $100 more a month to survive when we've only got part time employment to live on? Thus, I made cheese last week when the milk went off. Then we set ourselves a goal of holding off on groceries until the end of the month, buying only what we need for the week ahead in the meantime. Today we used the last of the coffee and eggs and are out of milk. I've been coming across things which must be tossed and others that are questionable. Apricot and prune filling a year past expiration date. Theoretically they should be fine, bu...

John 18:10 (NASB) 10  Simon Peter then,  having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear; and the slave’s name was Malchus.   I once saw a documentary on the Hutterite Brethren. A family among them lost both parents and began to explore life outside their sect. Lo and behold, they went to a tent meeting and got saved. A “people group movement” began when they returned home. Folks who saw the difference between their own law-bound lives and the vibrant joy of these new Christians wanted to hear the gospel, liberated, as such, from Martin Luther’s  old German translation of the Bible. Amazingly, the secular documentarians recorded the preaching of the eldest brother. He was urging those who were sharing their faith to learn from the Apostle Peter’s mistake in the garden of Gethsemane . When Peter went on the attack, he cut off a man’s ear. How apt; when we share as if on offense, we cut off the ability of our liste...

8/14/2011  As I read the headlines this morning that foretell a likely downgrade of America's credit rating, I could see that image of the cartoon people from airline instruction cards, bracing themselves for impact. We all need to prepare for a bumpy, economic, emergency landing. So, what do we do? I've lived through more than one economic downturn in my life, the most extreme of which were overseas. I had the cushion of hard currency as an exchange student and as an international worker; the people around me had the cushion of having prepared, put by (horded), and using their means frugally. Let me say here that I really don't expect some post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario to materialize with people starving in their basements, having eaten their family pets, and killing their neighbors over stale croutons. What I do expect we could see is more unemployment, more uncertainty, inflation and possibly shortages of foods and durable goods. It is possible we could see...