One interesting thing about the internet is that, once in a while, people you haven’t heard from in a long, long time may suddenly pop up in your email box with a “Hey, I dont know if you remember me but….”
I’ve had that happen a couple times. I just had it happen last week with someone I last saw about 32 years ago. He emailed to say he had been in this neck of the woods looking to relocate with his family. Why the relocation? To be away from the Bad Places when the eventual Greece-style rioting starts as the economy implodes. And, by the way, we are studying hunting, gardening, off-grid living and homeschooling.
This is so odd….people I recall from childhood, whom I have not seen in decades, when they find, turn out to be very Like Minded on their outlook. I wonder how that comes to be.
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I hvae the convenience of living fairly close to where I work. Really, its about a twenty minute brisk walk or a six-minute bicycle ride. The notion of needing a ‘Get Home Bag (GHB)’ for such a short distance is pretty unlikely. Worst case, all I’d really need is foul weather gear, a flashlight and a pistol….But, you never know what kind of curve ball fate is going to throw. Even if I dont have to “Omega Man” my way back to the house, there’s always the mundane headaches. One thing I’ve been wanting to do was keep a complete change of clothes at the shop in case I get caught in the rain, I destroy/damage a shirt or pair of pants over the course of the day, the dog throws up all over me, etc, etc. I took one of the handy-dandy Hardigg cases and decided it would keep all my emergency incidentals in one place at the shop. Now, while these things have a good amount of room for that sort of thing, I figured why not go a step further. So, I vacuum-sealed a complete change of clothes. Not only does it cut the amount of space down considerably, each clothing component enjoys a redundant layer of preotection – individually sealed and stored in a disaster-proof Hardigg case. Suspenders-and-a-belt, folks! (Actually, I need to pack a belt in there too….) So…when you vacuum-seal a pair of jeans, socks, t-shirt, underwear, and heavy outer shirt this is what the space difference looks like:
To be fair, that stack on the right should be shorter because as the packages shrink down they sometimes ‘buckle’ or warp and that makes them a bit taller than they would otherwise be when you stack ‘em. Once all that is tucked into the box, theres still plenty o’ room for other ‘just in case’ sundries.
Plenty of room left for a spare field jacket, boots, Maglite, batteries, radio, ammo, couple bottles of water, backapack, and all the other little geegaws and odds-n-ends that separate the victims from the victors. I’ll add in some winter gear for those infrequent trips where the day started nicely and ended with 9″ of snow, add a sleep system (packed separately) in case I have to spend the night at the shop and we should be good to go.
for my .44, a set of 
I’ve been lusting after, and a 
.
