Where ya been, Tom?

Busy summer, to put it mildly.   Running the company (six employees), balancing project commitments within hundreds of miles of home base plus a few off-shore obligations, spending some time with the kids as they're home from college, working on the garden, working on some construction work here at the house, church obligations...and a slew of medical appointments (nothing wrong at all--everything checked out this year is considered preventative maintenance done while we still have something that resembles first-world care).   None of the aforementioned translates to more than about ten minutes of free time per day.

It's winding down a bit, writing will be more frequent starting in another couple of weeks as daughter returns to school, projects wind down for the fall, and some of the insanity of my schedule wraps up.

In my infrequent spare time (mostly while camping in western Montana, sitting in airport concourses, waiting in doctors' offices, but also occasionally during the wee hours after frequent thunderstorms), I've been reading through a couple of older books, including The Fourth Turning (which had been on my list for many years, as it was published in the mid 1990's).  I'd advise you to pick up a copy and read the online information that you can find on the subject matter.  The book, although older, has played out pretty much as the authors predicted, and in terms of 'preps', figure that you have less than two to ten years to a major war (meaning total, global war). I figure that we're on the lower end of that number. Figure, 2015.

Reading the generational archetypes (big words! yikes!) in that book, it was a little disturbing to see me described so well, as well as those on neighboring generational journeys. It'll help me in the future, work with my clients and folks around me, but there was some comfort in the mysterious ways that people 'act' and 'behave' over the generations. Now that that mystery has been stripped away, and I can see why people 'are' the way they are (within a certain framework at least),

A friend passed on some interesting links to Paul Craig Roberts' site today, including numerous illustrations of our current leadership (.gov, .mil, NGO's) gently guiding us into a confrontational stance with China. You won't find this in the standard media. You might find in in media sourced from the U.K., and while I used to regards PCR as a bit extreme, he's been spot on in his observations, despite my skepticism.

Read him. Prepare accordingly.

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Years ago, when I had wrapped up 'Deep Winter' and was in the midst of 'Shatter', numerous events within the storylines played out in the real world.  Over the years, it seems to readers more than myself sometimes, that this pattern continues--I don't really keep track. Events in 'Remnant' however, did in fact play out in the real world before I uploaded very similar events in the book, causing a major re-direct, changing the last half of that book.   'Distance' might see events happen in the real world not reflected in DW/SH/REM that I'll have to work around, we'll just have to see.

Seven more chapters to go in Distance, where we will see a little clearer from a higher vantage point, looking across a very difficult future.

TCS