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News From The Homefront...In Wyoming
Things are looking better EVERYDAY!
By Richard A. Fleetwood - October 2001
Attack On America
The world knows by now of the attack at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. The fear and worry nationwide of more and wider attacks affecting metro areas coast to coast has caused anguish and concern, in areas that until the day of the attack, were in the back of every ones mind...now, they are at the forefront. Hundreds of personal emails from around the world asking about shelter, gas masks, safe rooms, nbc protection, and more....I knew it would come someday...just sorry to see it actually happening and threats of more coming everyday from several levels and areas of government. I will continue to share what I can in all areas I am familiar with. Email if you need specific need, and I will see what I can do to assist.
The Latest News...
The past few months have literally been the hardest of my life. Loss of hope for a time, depression, unemployment, homelessness, and even welfare. For real. Read my STARTING OVER page for how it got to that point, why it happened, and how low our lives sunk, from what was supposed to be the high points of my family's lives. Understand that yes, there were certain things I should have done that would have avoided the meteoric crash to the bottom of a seemingly endless pit, but that my good intentions shaded my better judgement.
Know that my experience in getting thru this has made me so much stronger than before, and given me views and knowledge that will really help direct my attention into even more diverse areas of preparedness than ever. In other words, it was a bad thing for my family and I...for a while...but it will be a good thing for you and the world to learn by in many unique ways, both subtle and obvious.
This NEWS UPDATE brings you some news in several areas, including my current situation, current website status, upcoming functions, site changes, some interesting tidbits of VERY useful information in survival and preparedness areas, and a request for folks who would like to REALLY help others, in any of several ways.
My Current Situation
After losing my trucking job, a place for my family and I to live, and having sunk my postal thrift savings of over $20,000 into the trucking business from September of 2000 until April of this year, my family and I spent several weeks in a 3 bed motel room, while I spent hours a day looking for a new job. My so-called friend I quit my job to come help in his RV park and with his off-season camper/RV delivery business, left us high and dry in a very small town, across the country from our old home and relatives, and with his scheming and behind the scene phone calls, managed to have my last paycheck from the leasing company we drove for cut in half...for what reason I'll never know. We took our last few hundred dollars, paid for several weeks in this motel, and proceeded to start our lives over from scratch. After looking thru all my possible options, I reworked my resume and proceeded to hit the streets looking for a job in line with my technical qualifications. Only problem, being a very small town meant finding a job with ANY company that needed computer geekage...and nearly all possible ones I applied for or heard about were with very small companies, many family owned, and with low pay.
After several weeks, I came to the conclusion I needed ANY income, and sucked it up and applied at the local McDonalds. I got hired on the spot, as a simple crew person (read burger flipper), and believe it or not, after only one month I was in management. I never figured I would wind up in this position, but working for an international corporation and having the possibility to move all the way up thru management to my own store in a year or two, will actually be a great outcome. Currently I am the closing manager, managing a crew of a dozen, closing the days books, and enjoying meeting face to face lots of new folks, making new friends, and becoming a lot more comfortable after the tenseness and stress of the past few months. We got an apartment in June, after the 40 foot bus we had purchased from this friend, ($1700 out of $2000...being purchased for the intent of making it into a cozy RV home on wheels) was sold to someone else after we were unable to get insurance or tags to drive it off the property (read the STARTING OVER page about how the sheriff was called out when we tried to take it to our storage unit)...our friend kept the money. Nice, huh?
To get to this point, from that point, meant having to seek help with rent, groceries, and medical expenses. For the ONLY time in my life we had to get foodstamps. Our local ward of our church helped us tremendously thru the toughest spots, helping us get into the apartment we now have. How unsettling...and how embarrassing...with all my previous planning, study, and work, I was at rock bottom, and I had my family looking to me to solve the problem created by a lying, cheating, gambling ex-friend who I suspect knew what was going to happen a long time before it did. A person who I thought I knew, who I thought was a true friend, turned the situation into the worst abuse of a friendship I have ever heard about in my life, and I was on the losing side.
What food storage we had got used the past year, as income from the trucking turned negative fairly quickly, as no matter how hard I worked, breakdowns, and very low backloads from my company sapped everything else we had. In short, we have come full circle...from a wonderful career with the postal service, down the ramp into the pit of despair and desparation, and up the far side back into the bright sunlight. We are again self sufficient, paying our bills, and still together as a whole family.
Our only other loss besides the monetary and emotional toll, was of three of our pets...dogs we had for years who were very special members of our family. We had brought them with us from Alabama. One died in the RV park we were staying at, a victim of accidental strangulation, we think. Another, my old friend "Bob" my bird dog buddy of 5 years, was put to sleep at the local animal shelter after no one would adopt him, and the last one, Molly, my youngest son's dog, was adopted by a family in the nearby town of Riverton. The dogs came with us as part of our decision to move up to Wyoming, but since we couldn't have any pets in our new apartment, we had to let them go...a very harsh and difficult decision. All three were very protective, and were trusted family with unconditional love for us, after taking all three in as strays. This was the saddest part of this episode to me, as our whole family lost loved ones here. We take great peace knowing that these pets will always have a connection to us, and that they were able to have love and care in their short lives while taking part in ours.
How could we have avoided this terrible turn of events? How could we have been so blind to a false friendship? How could we have let ourselves suffer such painful and ugly events as transpired this past year? I know some of the answers, but they only bring more questions. My ex-friend showed some signs of suffering some symptoms of a bipolar personality over the years before this move. Up close and personal interaction the past year on and off the road showed quite obvious defects in his emotional makeup. His decision processes, noticed by me in many tense and sometimes scary situations, showed marked areas of high dysfunction in handling stressful situations.
I hadn't seen these things over the years, since our friendship over the years had been sporadic with long spaces of time, of months or a couple of years of no contact, as he moved around the country, before settling down in this town with a new wife ten years his senior. His selfishness to his wife, his addiction to gambling ( many trips thru ALL parts of Nevada in cross country trips let me see this up close and personal ), his lack of mentioning certain facts about the trucking business he did the year before I came up ( like he didn't even break even financially last year, and he had NO family to support on that income, unlike me ), his misrepresenting the facts of care of the Dodge truck I took over payments on ( no warranty on certain things, missed mechanical checks at required warranty periods, and other similar things), and an unhealthy case of extremely poor self esteem leading into chronic depression for which he took no action to correct medically in any way.
You will notice I don't mention his name, nor his business name, nor his other associated businesses he runs (actually his wife runs, having invested her life's savings from her deceased first husbands estate in trying to get their entire business empire to profit, which it probably won't because of both their bigoted and unbusiness like mannerisms we saw first hand day in and day out.) After I began at McDonalds, my wife and kids had to take a few items back to the park that had been offloaded off the bus while we were moving our belongings to our new apartment. This guy walked up to her and greeted her like nothing had happened, with a grin on his face, and truly expecting us to not hold any grudges for the turns of events. She told him not to try contacting me, especially at work, since he had found out that I was working there after seeing my car there for days in a row.
Once he heard this, he demanded they get off the property with the threat of police involvement IMMEDIATELY, going from friend to tyrant in less then 30 nanoseconds. He never let my boys get their weights for their weight bench which probably still lie in his back yard. He then had the utter gall to call McDonalds NATIONAL CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS to file a complaint against ME, claiming I told him to stay off McDonalds property, knowing full well it might cost me my recently acquired job. I will also mention the fact that the owner of the franchise McDonalds here and in three other locations is a "friend" of this friend, as I heard from my boss the next day. This friend of mine still claims, even as of last week when he came into the store YET AGAIN looking for me, that he still considers me his very best friend, after not speaking with me since April 24th, when the sheriffs were involved regarding the bus.
All the above is absolute truth, told exactly as circumstances occurred, with only the NAMES removed to avoid libel and slander that this friend would probably attempt to take advantage of. I gave him my word when I decided to take the opportunity that I would help him and his wife 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make the trucking venture successful. I fullfilled my promise for most of a year, while all the time they were changing originally agreed to promises and requirements.
The final toll of this horrible episode may not be known for quite a while...however, I keep these things fresh in my mind, laying awake for hours some nights reliving some of the things that happened, trying to figure out how any or all of the bad things could have been avoided. The seething anger and rage I felt towards him have abated somewhat the past month, to be replaced by pity, sorrow, some emptiness for a friendship gone sour, and a personal fight within to avoid taking him and his wife to court for misrepresentation, outright theft, broken verbal contracts, and a very nasty, very public court fight to try to recoup our losses based on their actions.
At this point, I think the personal fight within will stay within, with no outwards cause and effect. IF at some point in the future they attempt any further incursions into the lives of my family, action WILL be taken at the local county courthouse, a mere 5 blocks away, and suit will be brought as needed, when needed. Sadly, I don't ever want it to come to this...but as long as the threat from them hangs out there, the action will be waiting in the wings ... just in case.
Now, you may ask this question after reading down this far..."What does ANY of the above have to do with ME, my interest in PREPAREDNESS, or absolutely ANYTHING to do with SURVIVAL?." In other words, why share all the verbiage above on THIS website? Think about it for a moment. Ask yourself...could ANY of these things ever happen to YOU? Could a trusted friend you've known for YEARS, that you thought was stable, caring, thoughtful, and reliable, actually take YOU and your FAMILY to the edge of total ruin, destroying dreams and careers, hopes and needs, with a very sinister and very selfish reason behind it all? Would you truly give your heart and soul, blood and sweat and tears, and your last dying breath to help someone YOU wanted to help? Do YOU trust your closest friend or friends enough to give up almost everything you have to help them? Do YOU totally, absolutely, and completely have the faith in them to be willing to give your life for them...if need be? Now...put THEM in your shoes. Would THEY do it for YOU?
Yes, it does come down to survival...deciding when to cut the rope to save them...or save yourself (or your family), when the edge of reality of possible total loss is staring you in the face. The rope holding the lives and memories of years of relationship...frayed and near collapse because of the strain and wear and tear on that same edge...and true fear and threat of everything lost starkly contrasted on the scales of justice, or of life or death, imagined or real.
I went to the edge...to try to save a friendship, and my friend let go of his end of the rope, with my family and I hanging on for dear life, dangling over the abyss of despair, and we fell into the darkness of the unknown. Because we held together, my wife, my children, and I...we saved ourselves. We made it through the darkness, and found hope and understanding amongst ourselves in the toughest stretch of our lives. We made it back to the world we knew we would see again...one without the threats hanging over us as before the fall into the abyss...and one with a very strong message of love and trust that together, the FAMILY will always prevail over peril at its worst.
What can you learn from this experience? What do you really need to think about in regards to TRUST in others, family...friend...neighbors...or strangers? How can you stay out of an abyss like we fell into? Know yourself first. Know that even without a possesion in the world, you can still survive. Know that in the worst of times, TRUE friendship, or lack thereof, will plainly make itself visible and utterly obvious. Know that TRUE love and caring, concern and real thoughtfulness, will always make the difference to those who may be on the ends of their very own ropes in similar circumstances.
Know that even the smallest gesture of kindness or goodwill will be remembered for a lifetime by those who truly need it, and receive it at the most needed time. Know that YOU taking a moment of your life to help another human being in dire straits, just because you can, can actually save a life, or a family, somewhere down the road. And know this above all else....that YOU, a thoughtful, considerate, loving, and honest human being, who really does care about other people enough to take action to help....are one of the TRUE miracles of creation, of God, and of this universe.
I cannot fathom this moment how I will ever repay all those that helped us out in this time of hardship, other than to let them, and you, know that I will ALWAYS look for opportunities to assist others when the need arises. I will always continue to research more and more, and share what I learn thru this, and other, media channels when it comes to life saving information in ANY circumstance. And I also ask that you, noble reader of this article and of my website, will try to follow the same path and try to make a difference whenever you can in someone else's life...somewhere down the road.
Current Website Status
Because of the WTC attack, SurvivalRing was DIRECTLY affected and lost a large section of the site. Amazing how a terrorist act across the other side of the nation, can affect a simple average person like myself in the middle of nowhere. After the attack, there was a tremendous surge in access and downloads of my free fallout shelter plans, hosted on a free busines server run by Hypermart.net. Free accounts on this service are allowed 50 megs of storage, and 500 megs of data transfer a MONTH. The bandwidth was exceeded within 6 days, and the entire account on this server was deleted without notice, and a generic boilerplate email message sent saying SORRY. I was given no recourse, no notice, no nothing. The world lost access to pages that had been online in this account for YEARS.
In response to this turn of events, I decided to go allout with the site. I sent out an email asking for donations and assistance to help with webspace, and within a few days, had the full site back online again. The new host, HostRocket.com, offers MANY new features that I needed, 350 megs of storage space and 15 gigabytes of data transfer a month...which allows 500 megabytes A DAY of transfer...in other words, HUGE infrastructure improvement. My thanks to Rick, Karl, Terei, and those others. More help is needed and will be used to grow ALL aspects of the site.
Some sections of the site still need some tweaking, particularly some of the CGI programs that used DIRECT data paths, and some pages need simple updates. Another big change to the site was the loss of the LISTBOT email service, which shut down the first week in August. All lists have been replaced with new lists of the same name on the Topica.com email hosting service. I currently am working on a CGI program that lets me run FULL mailing lists DIRECTLY from my site, without any third party service needed. I hope this particular project works out. It would be a tremendous asset. Yet another new function is the dropdown navigation jump bar as seen on the homepage. This feature will soon be on EVERY page of the site, to ease travel and access to all sections of the site. Yahoo webring maintenance has also begun...170 sites checked out of 735, more work to come as time is avaiable. The Ringlink CGI I added a few months ago seems to be working fine, and will grow as more folks become aware of it.
Upcoming Site Functions
SURVIVALRING EZINE is about to be a reality. Not really any out there that I know of, except those run by commercial organizations and companies. Mine will be STRICTLY individual and personal in nature...with lots of good stuff I promise you. The site design of SurvivalRing will change a little bit in the coming months, mostly to allow all areas of unlimited growth, and to speed up site access and loading time. The template used to create most pages will be slightly modified, but will allow more usage and greater flexibility to all. One of the current features, HUMANCLICK, that allowed site visitors to know when I was online, and vice versa, shut down yesterday, asking $249 a year for the same function that used to be free. In responce to that I will be adding an ONSITE chat room, to allow visitors to talk and share with each other, and me when I have the time.
Site Changes
I will be adding several affiliate functions to offer new services to visitors, users, webmasters. A new feature that I have been working on will allow those with little experience to learn how to put info online to share any knowledge they have in areas of their expertise. It will be a webmaster section, with help and assistance in many areas. Tips, ideas, links and more will get more survival and preparedness info online than ever before.
SO MUCH TO SHARE...SO MUCH TO LEARN...for everyone. Visit the site often, join the mailing lists, and stay aware of those things that NEED to be in the back of your mind these days...there is no better place then here.
Request For Volunteers
I am still seeking volunteers for the following...
Scanning in Docs for CD
Articles on your areas of expertise....
SurvivalRing THINKTANK...develop FAQS for global use
If you can help, please let me know how, when and where. It is not just for me...it is for ALL mankind. Really.
Richard
Saturday, September 29, 2001
Previous Update - March 2001
Or at least as close as I can be while driving cross country for weeks at a time. Woe is me to have been gone these past few months, as many things have changed beyond my control that were waiting to wreck my dreams when I got back. Mostly these have to do with OTHER online services that I depended on for smooth, dependable, UNCHANGING operations.
The most heartbreaking loss for me at this point is WEBRING. The absolute core and beginnings of SurvivalRing were based on creating one of the FIRST Survival webrings online, which was quickly duplicated (and in some cases my very words and verbiage were stolen). In the past year, Yahoo! bought out Webring, and in so doing completely gutted the entire webring system, removing practically ALL the owner management functions, destabilizing ring workings, and finally turning off the webring links as originally set up by the original (pre-Yahoo) ringmasters, meaning ANY ring member website with ring links to a particular webring now has dead links (meaning literally tens of thousands of websites are affected), unless they upgraded to the NEW Yahoo branded version of ring html code with NO LINKAGE whatsoever to the OWNERS site, and no way to customize by the owner. While this is a definite turn for the worse, it is NOT the end of the SurvivalRing webring.
SurvivalRing has matured into a HUGE site and quite interesting virtual community, with scads of features letting hundreds of folks stay in daily contact via email lists, club areas, BBS boards, and chat. The webring area became but ONE portion of a fully functioning online entity. Thanks to many great programmers, there are ALTERNATIVES to Yahoos! webring mess. I am currently working on a CGI version of webring code that will actually run off MY website, no outside influence, control, or destruction required. It is called RINGLINK and is free. Once I get it set up, and get original SurvivalRing website members notified, I will phase OUT the Yahoo! version completely. It may take a little time, but time *I* got.
In other areas, I have cleaned up and removed most banners from the site, tried to make link areas more visible, and am refining sections of the entire website to make it all easier to use. A new template system, refined editing software, and some neat things coming up will all equal much more content, better usability, and enhanced browsing experience.
One of the toughest parts of starting a new job in an entirely new field, in an entirely new state, and with some of the toughest conditions I've ever faced, is NOT being able to do what I had been doing the past few years...which was being able to get online every single day, for a few hours a day. While driving cross country as a Hotshot Delivery Over The Road Truck Driver ( delivering 10 to 25k $ campers and 80 to 130k $ Motorhomes coast to coast ). Check out these links to see what I've been MOSTLY hauling hither and yon...
Lance Campers
Chinook RVs
I have NOT had more then a few tens of hours of ONLINE time total in the past 6 months. Of course, this should be obvious by the lack of updates and my postings to my email lists. I have MOST of the hardware and ALL of the software needed to return to at least SEMI daily online access .... from anywhere. Lots of content to post and things to share, images to send, and news to report...from the real world to you in the safety and comfort of your own home. My current hardware as of this moment is a HP N5000 notebook computer (600mh, 96meg ram, 10 gig drive, 56k modem), an Audiovox CDM 9000 trimode cellular phone (digital and web enabled), a mini Intel Digital Camera (the little egg-shaped one) and a cheap Pentax 35mm camera. To use my system online from ANYWHERE all I need is a $60 data cable, and I'm there. I also intend to get a small footprint USB color flat bed scanner (about $60 also) and a cheap, small color printer, for a full fledged portable system for doing EVERYTHING I once was. Last but not least is a request to my wife of a cheap pocket sized digital camera ( such as the Polaroid PDS-640) to complete my planned ability to share the incredible things I am seeing with the rest of my friends around the world.
Because of the past 6 months and all that has happened, I have MUCH to share with you, especially in the areas of safety, survival, and preparedness...from my own personal experiences. For example, the MOVE of my family and all our belongings from Alabama to Wyoming was fraught with peril, near death, broken bones, and a wee bit too much anxiety. Read about it here...."The Move From Hell, or How We Nearly Bought The Farm Without Getting to See It First." Then, after you've had a handfull of tranquilizers or a couple quarts of your favorite tonic, read about "Driving My Life Away...or How I Spent My Winter Vacation". Finally, grab your favorite blanket, a cup of warm milk and some cookies, and read my LATEST edition of the SURVIVALRING newsletter, available online at SurvivalRing Winter/Spring 2001 Newsletter, with all the rest of my fun, thrills, spills, and chills, as well as news YOU SHOULD know about. Previous issues can also be read from this page.
Thanks, as always, for your support.
Richard
Founder - SurvivalRing
Updated Mar-10-2001 - © 2001 By Richard A. Fleetwood |
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