Hey, ho!

My name is Rena. I have dived headlong into this forum, and I guess an introduction is in order now that I have come up for air.

When I was being brought up, my mother was a Coper and my father was a Survivalist. Combining the two, and having my own experiences along the way, the concept of the Survival Gene came to me.

Briefly, everyone who is alive has a form of the Survival Gene. People who strap jet engines to the tops of cars in the salt flats obviously do not.

A few years ago, I decided to journal what was happening in my life, the different aspects of urban, suburban and rural life as I knew it. That is how the website SurvivalGene.com came to be. It is primarily just my own articles, but there are reader’s responces and their own stories. Many days, I am too busy to put in things I see, do and am aware of. This makes me sad. Some days, I add or update too many pages. This makes me tired...

Those out there who believe they are experts at surviving are right - for them. I am not the end all and know all of survival information. Learning about other’s experiences always is important to me, though sharing what I have done lets me experience a little thrill, too. Living my life, I know that there are Other People’s Lives that are so extraordinarilly different that I wonder if I would ‘survive’ the situation.

If you want to visit my website to get to know the cluttered thing I call my life, please do!

Thank you for your time.

Rena
SurvivalGene

Nice to find another woman so beneficially influenced by her mother. My folks spent formative years during the Great Depression and so I was raised to live frugally, waste nothing and squirrel away useful things like aluminum foil and plastic margarine tubs. Rarely was anything "too broken" in my house to be thrown away.

We lived far and away from everything in a rural area outside of Los Angeles. Food scraps were thrown out for the wildlife. Trash was burned. Bottles were washed and stored away. Cans were taken to the scrap metal center.

The youngest, my siblings were grown and gone by the time I was old enough to understand who they were, so I spent a lot of time alone wandering the countryside. Mom is a nutritionalist, and if this were a different time and place, would have been considered a Wise Woman and healer.

The path from there to here was an interesting one, and I have learned so much, mostly from my husband. He and I are alike in so many ways, it's spooky. There are so many stories to tell...

It sounds like we both had interesting childhoods. It will be fun to share experiences. Glad you found us!

~Sarah

It's a Mackie mixer you got there? Better suited for stage work, certainly more "pro" than a plain dj mixer.

dBu24

Hey! Poeple actually are going to the site... Thank you!

Actually, it is an old Bi-Amp. I got it at a second hand store for $20. I have since changed to a smaller Gemini for traveling and the biamp stays in the studio along with the MOTU and computer. There is an unfortuneate groundig hum in the bi-amp, but the next round of maintenence with the soldering iron should fix it.

I love technology. It is a current survival skill I emerse myself in.

Rena