The news these days is chock full of dramatized street theater as the “haves” fight about ridiculous things like super-bonuses for AIG grifters, amazing world-class ponzi money-laundering schemes, and how we on the low end of the totem pole get to pay through the nose (as usual) to bail these crooks out. At this point it’s not even a partisan fight, it’s just rich versus poor. As usual. We who have been actually harmed by these interminable games of economic Risk are just trying to survive with the basics – food, clothing and shelter.

While I hope that anyone who regularly reads this blog has already bought their seeds and planted their ‘taters, there are things we usually have to purchase – or trade for – because we don’t produce our own at home. Sure, it doesn’t take more than a quarter acre of yard to keep a fresh milk goat or half a dozen chickens who give us eggs for free, but often people will be unable to even do that much. Keeping that goat fresh requires breeding once a year, and then you’ve got to either deal with a smelly billy goat or transport to where the smelly billy goat is standing stud. And what about the kid? That’s something my family could never quite conscience (these youngsters, if not also female, are usually slaughtered for meat). And don’t let anybody fool you. Those chickens CAN fly (sorta). At least to get over the fence into your neighbor’s yard.

If you are lucky enough to still have a roof over your family’s heads, there are ways to save a great deal on foods you can’t produce in your garden but need to keep everyone healthy and satisfied. Nothing makes us feel wealthier than a truly fine and healthy diet. Plus, that alone can save us multi-thousands in chronic diseases we really don’t have to get in the first place. The first of these is to join a local CSA. With this membership, which is critical to purchase right now if you can, you get a portion of the crops and products of local farmers near your home. Even if you garden, this can help fill out the take so you’ve got more to work with. Buying local directly supports your local farmers, and helps them to purchase the seeds and equipment they need to keep on producing.

Even better, many CSAs also keep bees for honey, cows and/or goats for dairy, chickens for free range eggs plus poultry, and some even raise pigs and steers for later slaughter so you can purchase a “share” of those as well. When I was young – it was a large family – my mother always purchased a half a steer every year to freeze in the chest freezer, along with as many chickens as she could get locally. Not only are these animals raised humanely and fed on pasture and hay that they’re naturally designed to consume for maximum health, they were always locally slaughtered so that even the ground beef came from just those steers raised on that farm. Nowadays when ground meat from the supermarket may contain the remains of as many as 100 animals, some of whom were no doubt very sick when they went in, this is vastly preferable.

But what I want to talk about in this post is dairy. Not just milk, but also cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream and other dairy products we use on an almost daily basis to add protein to our diets and keep the kids happy. The reason to avoid store-bought dairy is more than just the fact that big dairy farms often pollute their milk with genetically engineered hormones and such, it also avoids the mass mixing of milk from farms far and wide that must be mass-pasteurized and have much of its useful ingredients neutralized. So that you end up paying $4 or more for a pound of butter, $2 or more for a few ounces of yogurt or sour cream, etc. We can save a great deal of money – and learn a lot about how food works – if we do this sort of thing for ourselves.

If you’ve a CSA with a dairy division, or a local dairy farm, you can often purchase raw milk on the sly (the government is trying hard to close this loophole). This gives you the raw material to work with to produce your own high-protein and full-fat food ingredients. My family once had a friend up the road who got a fresh goat in payment of a debt, a guy who didn’t drink much milk. That goat gave 2 gallons a day, so I did the calligraphy for his craft catalog in exchange for a gallon a day of fresh goats milk. Which he delivered! Now, you need a mechanical separator to get cream out of naturally homogenized goat milk, and I didn’t have one, so we just drank it. Cow’s milk is much easier to work with…

Raw cow’s milk naturally separates just by being left to separate. Cream rises to the top, the regular milk settles below. You should always pasteurize what you have, meaning that before you drink or use it, go ahead and boil for 5 full minutes. This can destroy some of the natural caesins in the milk or cream, but is definitely worth it to avoid any sicknesses that might result from raw. Just separate the cream first, and what’s left after pasteurization makes fine butter, sour cream and rich cheese. If you’re working with goat’s milk and don’t have a separator, make the butter first since this will serve to separate. Just keep it refrigerated or frozen for longer term storage.

To make butter, just fill a sterilized quart jar half full of whole milk or cream and shake it. This will take some time, but is definitely worth it. The cream component will tend to coagulate and this is what you want. It also floats atop whole milk so is easily scooped out. Accumulate a pound or so of this thick butter, fold in a little salt, and it can be used immediately or frozen in wax and plastic for later. It won’t be yellow, but that’s just another coal-tar dye. Who needs it?

To make yogurt, a spoonful of ‘live’ yogurt is added to a jar of milk and well-shaken, allow it to set overnight (shaking occasionally). By morning it should be thick, stir again and refrigerate. Add sugar, honey, spices, flavorings, whatever, and spoon in liberally on your burritos or use it as dip for pita (which is also easy to make). Yogurt is a bit like sourdough, in that your refrigerated starter can last for years. A single purchase, you can turn it into whatever you like! It freezes fairly well, so you can make a lot when you get your local milk and it’ll last a long time.

Cheese is a bit more labor intensive, but worth it if your family gets most of its animal protein from milk products. There are both natural and genetically engineered rennets on the market, go for the natural if you can. These can also be salvaged from commercial, natural cheeses and added. Cream makes the best strong cheeses, but this takes some time. The internet has sources for the necessary ingredients, or perhaps your CSA can help you with that as well. Be choosy – local food is a growing movement as things in the dollar-based global economy fall apart, be on the forefront of making sure you can do as much for yourself as possible!

This sort of knowledge – how to grow, preserve, obtain and stretch food for your family – is not knowledge that ever really “goes out of style.” Who knows what will happen to those jet-setters and politicians who whine endlessly about pieces of paper or mere bits and bytes of information that grant their wealth – so much greater than We the People who are just trying to survive? Do we really care? If we can do for ourselves, they don’t seem so important anymore, and our personal worlds expand locally to include all the things we really need.

Perhaps in the end that would be the greatest lesson any of us could ever teach our children as well as our erstwhile ‘masters’. We’ll be okay, thanks. When you’re hungry, we’ll talk about it…

So get busy, folks! Find out where your CSAs are, start making some friends in the farming community, see if you can turn that shed into a goat barn, and figure out how many chickens you can host in your back yard without compromising the garden. We can live through this, maybe come out the other side more confident than ever that we’ll never be helpless again!

Links:

Local Harvest: CSA
Dairy CSA
Cook for Good: Yogurt
Homemade Cheese
Cheese Making & Supplies
What’s Cooking: Homemade Cheese

The election is now over, the Neocons and their operatives at Treasury and the Fed are doing their best to loot the nation completely before power changes hands, and the citizens are collectively holding their breath, wondering just how bad it will get, thousands of jobs disappearing every week. The Grinch may well have succeeded in stealing Christmas this year – looks like we won’t have Circuit City to kick around anymore.

As the economy falls (for everyone but the oil companies, who are enjoying record profits as usual), the prices of just about everything keep going up. The most primal of our needs is food, and how we will survive the depression without sacrificing our health, our weight or our taste buds is a question many families are beginning to struggle with.

By next spring we can expect the number of home ‘Victory Gardens’ to explode as patches of lawn are tilled under and favorite veggies are planted. Depending on where you live – thus how long your growing season is and whether you get two a year – a family can produce a significant chunk of its annual consumption of fresh greens, tomatoes, peas, peppers, and various specialty items like melons, squash, eggplant, artichokes and tasty herbs. In a well-managed yard garden of no more than 12×20 feet and a clever porch container garden.

In the meantime, here are some basics for making the most out of short food dollars while getting the most nutrition and least amount of excess fat from your day to day diet.

1. Eat More Soups and Stews

Basic one-pot meals can be hearty, tasty, nutritious and extremely satisfying. If you don’t have a crock pot, consider one as your Gift Wish this year. You can start a soup or stew you prepped the night before when you make your morning coffee, it will be ready to eat when you get home from work.

For these you can use cheaper dry legumes and grains, bullion stocks and storage veggies like potatoes, onions and carrots. If you’re meat eaters, a ham hock in the pot adds a lot of flavor. Cheaper cuts of beef make for fine stews, and chicken is a perennial favorite. Can be purchased in tuna-size cans (same aisle), will make tasty chicken-rice or chicken noodle or chicken n’ dumplings. A good pot of hearty soup or stew can last a couple of nights, or provide easily microwaveable lunches the next day. Every time you don’t buy prepared food you’re saving real money for better tasting and more nutritious home-cooked meals.

And don’t forget about pot pies – a great way to stretch a good hearty stew when there’s lots left over, they freeze well and can be made in single-serve portions when you’ve got time!

One Dish Crockpot Meals
All Crockpot Recipes

2. Learn All About Quick-Breads

To go with those hearty soups and stews you’ll want to whip up some good side-breads. A 5-pound bag of cornmeal (self rising) can make a lot of cornbread either for dunking or crumbling or just munching. There are good recipes for various quick wheat breads using leavening agents that don’t require as much work as yeast. Crackers are another side that doesn’t take long to whip up and can be as hearty as you like with sesame, caraway or flax seeds, some herb flavorings and maybe some additional flours (rye, oat, etc.) to the usual wheat.

Homegrown Evolution: Quick Breads
6,718 Quick Bread Recipes

3. Window Box, Porch & House Plant Gardening

Salad greens – your basic variety of leaf lettuces, spinach, etc. – love cool weather. Even if you live in an all-winter-freeze environment, if you’ve a sunny window you can attach plastic weather sheeting in such a way to enclose a window box, which will then pick up enough heat from the house through the window to allow growing salad greens. If you can water and harvest from inside the house, even better!

These boxes need not be deeper than 3-4″ of good potting soil and compost, lettuce and spinach have very shallow roots. If you sow the mixed leaf seed, don’t worry about separating the plants. Just cut the leaves when they get to be about 3″ tall with a pair of scissors, they’ll keep growing back. Spinach should have a bit of room, harvest outside leaves and let the center keep producing more.

Dark green leafies like kale and collards can easily be grown in well-insulated pots on the porch, so long as your porch gets sun. They’ll grow right through snow cover, but you have to keep the pot from “ground-freeze.” Harvest these the same way as spinach (though the leaves are much bigger) – outside first, let the central plant keep producing rather than just cut the whole thing down. I have collard and kale plants in my garden that are two years old, their multi-harvested stems several feet long, still producing fine greens.

And peppers (chili or bell) can grow indoors all year long in a good size pot if it gets sun. They even have seeds for ‘ornamental’ pepper plants just for houseplant use, though the peppers are indeed edible. And like avacado and citrus trees, they’ll live forever if you take care of them.

Container Gardening: Vegetables
Vegetable Gardening in Containers

The market news reports that consumer spending is up again this month. The problem is that this is not as a sign of possible economic recovery from the deepening recession we find ourselves in. It’s a reflection of the fact that people must spend more on basics like fuel and food – prices for both rising much faster than regular people can keep up with – thus must spend less on all that consumer junk our capitalistic system expects us to buy with our overrated “disposable income.”

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re like me – I have no “disposable income” because all the income we have must go to simply pay for the necessities of life, and there’s hardly enough even cutting corners. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities. I have previously posted about the clothing thing, as I haven’t actually purchased new clothing for at least a decade. Used clothing is good enough – even suits and formal clothing – though I don’t dress up much. But the mortgage is what it is. Gas prices are what they are, they cannot be bargained down. And as the price of fuel rises, so does the cost of food and electricity. Thus more of our money must be spent on necessities, even if we never had any left over for junk in the first place!

It’s spring, my tiller should come back from the shop Saturday, and all my garden terraces will be put into production this season. Of course that also means I must purchase seed and starts that I haven’t grown in flats, but all that will pay off as the food comes in. Spinach, lettuce, collards, kale and peas are all up, the asparagus (a perennial) is coming in rushes, and the strawberries will ripen if the nights ever stop dipping into the 30s.

Even if you live in a cramped apartment, you can grow a few tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in pots on the patio or porch. Buy into a CSA for fresh produce as your share of a local farmer’s crops, or plan a weekly visit to your area farmer’s market and buy fresh produce in bulk. That supports local farmers, lets you get to know the people who can keep you from starving, and saves real money over the whole supermarket system where locally grown tomatoes compete with tomatoes grown in Mexico or Guatemala and they all cost way too much.

A series in the Washington Post examines the issues in depth and is worth a read. The final installment appeared today (May 1) and deals with the American consumer’s issues. Clipping, Scrimping, Saving takes a look at how people are coping with the rising price of food.

There are some good hints and resources in the Post series. But there is another issue that people who really are having trouble making ends meet must consider as even more important. The diet for poor people in this country consists of worse than junk. We all saw the class divisions during the Katrina crisis, and understand that the shape of poverty in America is obese. I know it’s hard to think that people are actually hungry who weigh twice or three times what a healthy person weighs, but it’s true. They’re hungry for real food, but limited to eating worse-than-garbage.

We could be smug and say that rising food prices might cure that obesity epidemic, but it won’t. The fake grain paste and high fructose corn syrup diet is designed to pack on pounds even as it starves the body of necessary nutrients and energy. The result is crippling obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and a host of cancers. It’s a “killing diet,” not a basic level of necessary nourishment.

Given the even worse health care crisis in this country, we who live on shoestring budgets cannot afford to get fat and unhealthy. If the best thing I could offer my readers is the advice to pay attention to nourishment – buy fresh food, I offer it now. Sam’s Club and coupon-cutting will save you money on junk food, but it won’t help you stay healthy and fit. Do not be fooled – take the time and trouble to seek out healthy food, don’t give in to cheap obesity.

Links and Resources:

WP: Global Food Crisis Series
NYT: As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise
Food Crisis Hits America
Disappearing Amber Waves of Grain
Where Every Meal Is a Sacrifice

NYC Bread Line

Installment three of this series of 20 ways to live on little-to-nothing. In these we’ll look at some basics about food, using all of your abilities, and taking honest stock of exactly what you need to do in your life to get through the hard times. If you get hit hard by what’s happening – and cutting back on luxuries just won’t fix the problems – you’ll need to learn to rely on yourself.

11. Taking Honest Stock

If you don’t want to go all Gypsy (and have a family to support), you can still take control of your situation. Keep a careful record of where the money goes over a month. Examine your ‘necessary’ expenses (home, utilities, car, insurance, food, gas, any other fixed expenses). If the ‘necessary’ expenses are larger than net income, it’s time to get out from under the big ones and take a good look at less expensive ways to live. You can live through hard times, but first you have to acknowledge you’re in hard times.

Housing markets are bust right now, so it’s difficult to sell your house even if you were willing to take an equity loss. Same is true for cars and light trucks. It can be the best option to make a clean break and declare bankruptcy, which can allow you to start fresh with a whole different way of approaching life.

12. Put Your Skills to Good Use

Incorporating your skills into your life so you don’t have to pay someone else to do things for you is a way NOT to spend on such things. If your vehicle needs an oil change, new plugs or new brake pads, do it yourself if you know how. Use the opportunity to teach skills to the kids. Quality time with the young’uns as well as not spending $100 or more for something you did for yourself!

And keep in mind that your various skills and talents are themselves valuable. Someone always needs what you can do, and if you play your cards right, you can get a lot (besides cash) in return.

13. Grow Your Own

It’s nearly impossible for any one person to grow all the food they eat. Though there are good ways to barter for things you don’t grow, if you grow a lot of what you do grow (or can trade services). Some good information about community food cooperatives and exchanges is available on the web, through organizations like Local Harvest and Eat Wild.

You’ll inevitably have to spend money on food, but you can spend a lot less by a number of means. And even if you don’t have much land, you can still have a little plot of tomatoes, peppers, salad greens and such. Those can also grow in pots and flats on a sunny patio. Grow heirloom varieties and you can save seeds, too.

14. Make What You Eat

People these days are way too accustomed to eating out. Cooking up a cup of rice and adding some chopped veggies (or canned) to fry makes about 4 servings of fine fried rice for a buck or less, that you’d have to pay $10 or more for at the Chinese Take-Out. Really. Every time you DON’T eat out you’ve saved a chunk of change, done your body a nutritional service, and not contributed to the overabundance of styrofoam garbage that never rots.

One-pot meals (soups, stews, pasta and rice dishes) are not difficult and can go quite far. If you’re cooking for one, try cooking for two and that’s a whole other meal you don’t have to cook another day!

15. Eat What You Make

Eat leftovers for lunch the next day. People tend to roll their eyes at this, but think about it – if it was good enough for dinner, it’s good enough for lunch. That’s money you won’t be spending, food you won’t be throwing away. If you take a morning’s worth of coffee in a thermos, fill it with cold water from the fountain or cooler as soon as it’s empty, you’ve an afternoon’s worth of refreshment available. Buying bottled or fountain drinks adds up quickly.

Every scrap of edible food is valuable nutrition you won’t want to waste. Adding something fresh to the rice or something meaty to the mac and cheese makes a whole new meal. If it goes into your body instead of into the trash or compost pile, you’ve done yourself and your food budget a big favor.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Items 1-5
Part 2: Items 6-10
Part 3: Items 11-15
Part 4: Items 16-20

My last post offered some Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop, mostly in the context of getting out of the usual “girls’ day out” type of expensive, mall-hopping, credit card fueled frenzy that way too many people in the modern world view as entertainment. At least, until the bills come due. Sad statistics demonstrate that if medical costs from an accident or illness in the family don’t lead to bankruptcy, credit card debt will. These are the two biggest contributors to middle class bankruptcies in the U.S. at this time, and as the mortgage crisis becomes ever worse, it’s not going to get any better.

In this post I’m going to offer some ways of thinking that can become habitual without too much trouble, that will help keep you out of debt by not going into debt in the first place. Not everyone can put these to good use, but those who can will find that their shoestring budgets go a lot farther in covering necessities.

• First and foremost, get rid of the credit cards. Even if you just pay the minimum every month, all that covers is interest and fees. Nothing you bought with the cards gets paid for, and your debt never goes down. I know this can be difficult when you receive a dozen “Great Credit Card Offers!” every week in the mail, but you can ignore them if you try. There are no “great credit card offers,” there are just financiers trying to profit from your spending habits. If you can start thinking of them in those terms it’s a lot easier to resist.

And don’t be fooled into believing you HAVE to have a credit card in order to purchase anything on-line. Your debit card from the bank usually comes with a particular card option stamped somewhere that allows you to indicate what kind of card you’re using, even though the transaction works just like regular bank account debit. If you don’t have enough money in your account to buy that nice watch you saw advertised on the Shopping Channel, you shouldn’t be buying it. It’s not that hard to find out what time it is, and most grocery stores sell $5 watches right there in the checkout line anyway. They work fine.

• Another way to save money – while at the same time doing wonders for your family’s nutritional health – is to learn how to cook from scratch. I have a sister who hasn’t had a working stove/oven for the last 15 years, and never bothered to get one because she doesn’t cook and neither does her husband. The family, which includes three children, lives on fast food. Wendy’s gristleburgers, MacDonald’s big macs and Happy Meals, most any highly fattening, nutritionally deficient fast food or processed junk they can buy. Not only is this outrageously expensive, it leads directly to health problems, obesity and chronic depression. For which my sister takes drugs she doesn’t really need. My best advice on this is to sit down and watch – really watch, paying attention – the movie “Supersize Me.” It’ll scare the heck out of you, and maybe scare the junk food out of you too!

It’s just not that hard to heat up some frozen vegetables or open a can of beans, cook up a roast or even try your hand at some cool vegetarian alternatives. Get a few cookbooks at a used book store, read through them, see if there aren’t some recipes that make your mouth water. I’m betting there are, and your family will thank you for it.

• You can also purchase food and home products like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc. in bulk when on sale. Prices are not coming down at the grocery and drug stores any time in the future, as increasing energy costs translate directly into higher prices for everything. If your local store is having a week-long 2-for-1 sale on canned and boxed goods and TP, paper towels, garbage bags, etc., take advantage of it! You’re going to use these items in the course of your daily life regardless. Might as well double up at half the price.

• Another idea if you’ve got the time and energy is to make your own household products and beauty items. These projects can be great fun for families to work on together during at-home weekends, and many who do this find that their products earn serious fans among the extended family visitors and friends who end up using them at your house. Or get them as gifts, since they make such good gifts. There’s some good information and recipes out there, such as Making Your Own Natural Designer Soaps. The web is a very useful tool, with sites devoted exclusively to recipes, projects, crafts and basics that you can make at home for not much money. Do some surfing!

• If you have school age children, get them a nice lunchbox and make their lunches. Not only will their lunch be more nutritious and useful than the junk that passes for food at most school cafeterias, you’ll save a significant amount of money. Buy dried fruit (roll-ups, raisins, mixed fruits, etc.) in bulk, have single-serving zip-locks handy to divvy it up into a week’s worth of lunch. If you make your own real good bread (with a machine or the old fashioned way), it can give peanut butter and jelly a whole new meaning!

I make sourdough bread, which my family thinks is the best bread anywhere. It’s quick because sourdough doesn’t have to be kneaded to death and doesn’t require hours’ worth of rising time. I usually use half unbleached all-purpose and half whole wheat, sometimes adding rye, barley or soy flour plus sunflower seeds, flax seeds, even chopped walnuts to make a slice a meal. A chunk of good cheese and a thermos (or purchase a carton) of milk and a baggie full of celery and carrot sticks makes a highly nutritious lunch that will stick with your child through the rest of the day and maybe even help them do better in school because they’re not falling asleep from sugar-crash during their afternoon classes.

• Home gardening saves a lot on truck vegetables now getting so expensive at the store than many can’t afford them at all any more. Things like bell peppers and tomatoes can be easily grown in containers on a sunny porch. Use a lot of compost in the soil mix (these are heavy feeders) and water them with compost tea regularly. My grandchildren eat raw peppers and tomatoes just like apples, and can never seem to get enough. I do sometimes include apples in their lunches, but if there’s a home grown, super-sweet handful of cherry tomatoes or a fist-sized home grown purple bell pepper they’re thrilled – and the envy of all their friends at school!

There will be more money-saving ideas forthcoming in future posts, and if any of my readers have good ideas please send ‘em in! Putting our heads together can help all of us better weather the coming recession, maybe even help us learn to live on less while enjoying our lives much more. Happy thrifting!

Deborah over at Simply Thrifty blog offered a great humorous post not long ago entitled 6 Uses for Your Old Bathtub, which speaks creatively for the wonderful world of recycling. Having remodeled and expanded our bathroom not too many years ago and installing a low-flow toilet, it occurs to me that some ideas for recycling your old toilet and sink are in order.

You could make a tub sofa or a nice fish and lily pond for your garden or patio, or just do what we did with our old clawfoot tub – we put it out at the edge of the back yard’s campfire, barbecue, campground and horseshoe area to serve as the 9th hole for the top-nine of our disc golf course. It does double duty for icing down kegs, sodas and juice during our annual extended family gatherings.

Toilets are a little trickier to recycle as yard art without upsetting the neighbors (we don’t have any neighbors, so the old toilet that serves as the 11th and 17th hole of the bottom nine doesn’t cause any uproar), but it can be done tastefully. Depending, of course, on your taste and your neighbors’ appreciation thereof.

Of course, some clever toilet art can spur some great opportunities to plot minor rebellion and civil disobedience with like-minded neighbors, just for the fun of it. The notorious Anderson Township Toilet Planter Protest managed to get just a bit out of hand when people weren’t satisfied just putting plastic flowers in the bowls and political bumper stickers on the tanks, but started planting their toilet brushes too. The teenagers enjoyed it and the protest enjoyed some lively press coverage.

It’s an idea that seems to be catching on in other places too. The BBC recently reported on the infamous Italian Toilet Art Row, and the Eugene [Oregon] Weekly reports about toilets being The Jewels of Junk.

Of course, you could make a nice combination planter-birdbath as a centerpiece to your yard, or just a plain planter as part of a nicely arranged living still life. You could even recycle the old toilet inside the house with a nifty new invention for a Hydroponic Planter Box…

The invention provides a hydroponic planter which doubles as a cover for a common toilet tank. The planter includes reservoir for holding plants supported in a hydroponic growth medium. The reservoir has several openings through which wicks extend to bring water from the toilet tank to the interior of the reservoir. The openings are arranged so that the wicks do not interfere with the flush mechanism of the toilet tank.

Clever, eh? Alternet has a fun list of nifty uses for used toilets in When Good Toilets Do Bad Things. What interesting, clever, artsy or in-your-face things have you done with your old toilets? I’d sure love to hear some ideas, so submit away!

Links:

Hydroponic Planter Box

Protest fence made from toilets (and toilet brushes)

Anderson Township Toilet Planter Protest

When Good Toilets Do Bad Things