ribbit

You are in a tough position. If you divorce your wife to improve your situation your daughter will pay for it with her own happiness. She will always know she was not important to her father. My advice would be tactical: Tearfully tell your wife you love her but you are desperately afraid she is going to divorce YOU because she is so obviously unhappy. Refuse to believe she can be happy without a sex life. This is the only way to make her understand it is incomprehensible to you that anyone could be happy without a sex life. If you come at this as wanting to make her happy - with all the tools at your disposal - and that you refuse to bring any more children into an unhappy marriage - unhappy as defined by her lack of interest sexually - I bet she will come around. Do NOT have unprotected sex with this woman until progress is made. You must protect the child you have but also do not risk future children. (It is also your leverage to get her to work on the marriage. She wants children. You want children - but only in a viable marriage. Work with that.) IF you divorce her - I think it is the wrong thing to do but I understand how compelling it is to just walk away - you must not marry or have any other children until this one is grown. You must live next door to her so she will have access to you when she needs you and you will be on site for important parenting decisions. If your wife moves, you move along with her and do whatever it takes to be next door and both physically and emotionally available to your daughter. You do this and she will worship you. If you do not prove to her - a child is very demanding and needy - that she is important to you then one day soon you won't be important to her. I was your daughter and you loved me - but not enough to be there when I needed you. And now I don't care. Please don't be my father.

We all judge each other all the time. I think it is how we determine how we want to be and - when on the receiving end - what we ought not be doing. Is it wrong to judge pedophiles? Rapists? Murderers? Neglectful parents? Terrorists? If we do not judge others how will we know when to act? If our attitude is always to accept others no matter what then why ever would we intervene? An adulterer is not only harming themselves, nor is an alcoholic. I am sitting here trying to think of something we know is wrong which only harms the individual 'doing' the act. Even drinking coffee, in a community where coffee drinking is a sin, will set an example to others that this particular sin is really okay, in your opinion. This is why children of smokers are many times more likely to smoke. What we do matters and not just to ourselves but to all the rest of us. It is very true that showing disgust at someone can inspire rebellion (more rebellion). They are defensive and their pride is pricked - proving that they are not operating from a position of strength. A position of strength is when you know you are doing right. When you are doing nothing you think, on any level, might be wrong - it doesn't matter when others judge you, you can smile and wave. It may be annoying but it really doesn't matter.

All excellent suggestions. I did email my extension agent, asked about local people already doing this stuff. He's been helpful to me in the past. I am excited to find local classes, that would be the best! I always seem to be doing things out of books and I am never sure I 'get it right'. I don't want to 'get it wrong' when I am trying to put back food for emergencies! Is anyone else storing eggs? I read that a coat of mineral oil will preserve them for nine months. I just used my hands and popped them right back in the cartons.

good advice - thank you!

I can't seem to find people locally to help me learn. I like to learn by doing and by observation and I'm reading manuals and booklets.

I got on this site to hopefully find people who were already canning, dehydrating, preserving foods, setting up water filtration for $ instead of $$$, etc. Is there somewhere else I can go? My local Mormon church doesn't answer the phone! I need help with this stuff and could really use the companionship on this journey, too.

Yeah, that's like saying you can sleep with all the women you want as long as the women you sleep with is your wife.

Oh, boy, have I been there. At nineteen I had really long silky dark ash brown hair. Did I say long? I moved the tail of it to sit down. I went to a hair salon and let some guy apply color or henna, I don't remember which. It was supposed to give me a slight change in color. I walked out of there with a bright orange cap on top of my head (the orange 'took' from the roots to about six inches in length) and no where else. I wore a scarf for a couple of weeks until we figured out how to fix it and I don't remember how. I know you cannot use color after henna. I know people with hidden red (where your dark color covers a tendency to go red) can go red pretty strongly if their color is lightened at all). Try applying a baking soda/water paste and letting it sit for half an hour. I think this will reduce the effect. Also use a good conditioner as baking soda is a terrific shampoo but tends to be a little drying - though it took me using it for a couple of months before I realized this. It may not be drying in a few days use. Good Luck!

I slept on the floor the first six months I was independent. I ate a lot of beans and rice! This is what life is all about - it takes time - and lots of help! - to accumulate everything - it takes time! And accept the help when it is there! Giving someone a gift of something they need makes you feel good, doesn't it? Give someone the gift of accepting what you need from them and understand that one day you will be the giver.

At least half the time government gets involved - it makes things worse. Intentions notwithstanding. Science is now admitting that DDT isn't so bad as was once supposed. And yet people are still dying of malaria (which DDT once did a fair job of controlling) because POLITICAL types cannot let go of the notion that DDT is that bad (A funny related story is that my husband, as a child, lived on Guam for a few years, on the Air Force base. The kids would run to the DDT spray truck and walk behind it in the cloud of pesticide. They said everyone thought it was funny to see all these little feet and legs walking under this cloud of stuff. ha ha. Anyway, he and his brothers are still going strong in their fifties. I wouldn't recommend this, I'm just saying...) We personally pay to keep five homes air conditioned. Federal regulations disallow the use of Freon in air conditioners. Air conditioners have had to undergo serious re-engineering in order to use other stuff. Which still doesn't work as well. We've given up. The cost got ridiculous. We've paid so much money to repair/replace these stupid, less effective air conditioning units that it makes much more sense to replace our large whole house ac units with cheap window units because it is MUCH cheaper to just throw the ugly little suckers out and buy new ones. How environmentally sound is THAT? Science is now discovering that the NEW gas they replaced freon with is, in fact, worse than Freon.... When can we expect government to come around and change the regs? um.... Government, it turns out, isn't run by scientists, it's run by politicians. And politicians are driven by dogma, ideology and bureaucracy. Not that government should be run by scientists. Scientists are as prone to be political as anyone else, frankly. Government, all government, all the time, is anti-freedom, anti-individual, anti-choice. Government is fundamentally committed to growing bigger and anything else is secondary to that. WE citizens must limit it to a bearable level, confine government intervention to the realms we want help with and prize their sticky fingers off everything else. Buy whatever lightbulbs you want. Let everyone do the same! I have some CFLs in areas where I am pretty confident a mercury spill is less likely and people don't sit there all the time inhaling, in places where replacing a bulb is more likely to end in a broken bulb or where people spend a lot of time I use incandescents.

I wish I could remember but I seem to remember that the government is reconsidering. At this point they are planning on phasing out certain sizes. The issue is how free we are. Are we free to spend more money on our energy use for our own reasons? I, too, am afraid of mercury. I did not find the cleanup instructions 'easy' and while one broken bulb might be a minor issue - we break quite a few over time. But setting aside safe/unsafe issues - the more the government tells us what to do the less power we have over ourselves. I originally got on this thread because I hoped it was about preservation of foodstuffs! Can we change it to THAT? I need serious help!

My dehydrator/er gets here in two days and I have a fuzzy notion what to do with it. I understand that dehydrated apples can last up to 30 years - and I like apples - so I'm starting there. I also want to can MEATS so I need help there, too. Any advice on where to get things like - er - a pressure canner, maybe just a 16 quarter, and gloves to keep my food clean and oxygen absorbers and what kind of vacuum sealer works well and won't break the bank? Thanks for any tips you can give me!!