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Tanada wrote: My parents lived through the Great Depression and throwing away something you might someday have a use for was a terrible thing to do. If you had a tangle of old fencing wire and you were in a hurry you might use new wire, but when you had all your chores done you would go back and untangle that wire so the next time there was a break you would have it ready to use. I speak from experience having helped repair the electric fence that kept the cattle and horses from wandering off many times growing up.

Been there ,Done that. Run a new reel of barbed wire (eighty rods) and staple it as the top strand and take the old top strand to patch up the lower two using some mending wire to make the splices. Every spring before you let the stock out into the pasture as the first thing they were going to do was jog around the whole perimeter and inspect all your work.

vtsnowedin wrote:

Tanada wrote: My parents lived through the Great Depression and throwing away something you might someday have a use for was a terrible thing to do. If you had a tangle of old fencing wire and you were in a hurry you might use new wire, but when you had all your chores done you would go back and untangle that wire so the next time there was a break you would have it ready to use. I speak from experience having helped repair the electric fence that kept the cattle and horses from wandering off many times growing up.

Been there ,Done that. Run a new reel of barbed wire (eighty rods) and staple it as the top strand and take the old top strand to patch up the lower two using some mending wire to make the splices. Every spring before you let the stock out into the pasture as the first thing they were going to do was jog around the whole perimeter and inspect all your work.

The back of the farm had/has a lovely patch of woods with an Artesian spring that delivers cold clear wonderful tasting water that travels a mile or so down a natural stream to join the local river eventually flowing into Lake Erie. Saved us a ton of work having to place a stock tank out there and keeping it filled.

Our greatest fencing problem would be teen age kids with their dates that did not understand how to open the electric fence gates (they were spring loaded plastic hand holds that kept the current flowing unless you opened the connection to drive through). Instead of figuring out how to open the gate in the wire to sneak back and neck with the girls in the woods they would simply drive through the wire with their 4x4 trucks and when they were finished they would drive out the same way but once they broke the connection the juice stopped flowing around the pasture. The charging unit had a warning light on it so when you went out to turn the cattle out of the barn you would see the warning that the fence was dead and we would all have to roam the fence. Frequently it was just the gate section that was driven through but on occasion the teens would get lost in the woods and drive out the wrong way breaking through the fence in a second spot to get onto one of the roads along the back of the farm. Once in a while a smart one would open the gate to drive in and out but not bother closing it when they left, closing the gate fixed that in about 20 minutes because the far gate was that far of a jog from the barn and back and we didn't have radios. Of course sometimes it was a natural ground fault from a wind dropped tree, or someone not doing a good job keeping the weeds down below the wire, but mostly it was drivers.

vtsnowedin wrote:

Tanada wrote: My parents lived through the Great Depression and throwing away something you might someday have a use for was a terrible thing to do. If you had a tangle of old fencing wire and you were in a hurry you might use new wire, but when you had all your chores done you would go back and untangle that wire so the next time there was a break you would have it ready to use. I speak from experience having helped repair the electric fence that kept the cattle and horses from wandering off many times growing up.

Yup. It's just amazing the way a few generations changes things. My paternal grandfather floated over on the boat from Germany with only an eighth grade education. My dad was born in '22 and he hated to waste ANYTHING. I'm sure things were very tight for his family during the depression, but he didn't like to talk about it. Until he got too old to work on much stuff himself (past about 75) old worn out underwear became rags. Short chunks of rusty old pipe were stored in cans for some potential plumbing repair job. And on and on.

Now if many people can't have the current model of iphone, live in a house with the "right" molding and furniture, drive the "right" cars, and on and on, they're convinced they're deprived.

I suppose it's good for the GDP, but it seems kind of crazy to see, compared to "reality" when I grew up (60's and 70's). We had the food, clothing, medical care, etc. we NEEDED, but waste, including leaving any food on your plate, was basically a cardinal sin.

Apparently today's heavy spending "works" as long as the economy is relatively good and nothing big goes wrong. I thought many folks would change spending and saving habits quite a bit from the 2008-2009 shock, but that was apparently mostly forgotten after about 5 years.