Winter is definitely approaching. The evenings and mornings are cold, and the days, even the sunny ones, are getting cooler. Which always reminds me of this:
It is getting nigh upon time to break out the Filson.
In addition to getting the wool outta storage, it’s also time to make sure all the Plan B gear is ready to roll… alternate heat sources, generator ready, fuel laid in, etc, etc. We seldom get power failures here in town that last more than a couple hours, but there’s always the chance that a Black Swan Swan Of Color event will come along and throw a curve ball that no one expected. ( / North Carolina has entered the chat ).
Every region has it’s own particular set of threat potential. Prepping for a hurricane in Iowa makes about as much sense as prepping for wildfire in Manhattan or a 7.0 earthquake in Nebraska. Statistically, the odds are close to zero. (But…never actually zero.)
But even then, stuff comes out of nowhere that virtually no one foresaw. No one in Manhattan thought they’d ever have to walk off the island because things were shut down on 9/11. I’m sure the folks in Hawaii never thought there’d be a wildfire that turned parts of Maui into a moonscape. And there’s equally as unprecedented and unexpected stuff still out there. We prepare against the likely but sometimes life throws a curve ball that no one could have reasonably expected.
All of these things do have common denominators, though…various forms of infrastructure failure, transport and mobility problems, supply disruptions, etc. Maybe you can’t prepare for every event, but you can prepare for the consequences that they all have in common.
It’s easy to get complacent when it comes to preparedness. You get comfy…cocky even. And then something happens that shocks you back to the mindset that “maybe I’m not as ready as I think’. I suspect this last batch of hurricanes is doing that for a lot of people.
As I said, winter is coming here in Montana and while I’ve always thought Im more than ready for some blizzard-induced winter drama, I’m starting to think that I need to change my thinking a bit and be open to some of the more unlikely-but-not-impossible scenarios that may arise.
So..back to list-making and inventory-taking.
CZ, it’s the human condition for the Normalcy Bias (it has never happened, so it won’t happen) to control the behavior of most people. Most people share Scarlett O’Hara’s attitude after Rhett Butler walked out the door and told her he “didn’t give a damn,” “I can’t think about this now. I’ll go crazy if I do. I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
Here’s some useful info from Wikipedia: “The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist. The expression was used until around 1697 when Dutch mariners saw them in Australia. After this, the term was reinterpreted to mean an unforeseen and consequential event.[1]
Keep up the good work!
How about a leak from the Rocky Mountain laboratories in Hamilton?
You may be upwind but also downstream.
I woke up this morning, looked at my weather station and saw that it was 34 degrees, here in South Carolina. I obviously had not paid any attention to the forecast. But I have full rain barrels and the 34 degrees kind of shook me up because I wasn’t expecting it. Not that water is going to freeze at 34, but it was just closer to freezing than I was expecting in mid-October. It looks like it’s going to warm back up next week and then we might be done with the extremely pleasant fall weather we’re accustomed to having.
I remember the British Petroleum Horizon oil spill and remember the surprise even from the preparedness community of the sudden calamity in the Gulf of Mexico. Some were talking of having mass migrations from the edge due to contaminated rain falls for several hundred miles inland (imagine the number of people displaced by peoples leaving Texas / Louisiana / Alabama / Mississippi /Florida along that perimeter – ALL AT THE SAME TIME). The oil rigs (in the hundreds at the time) are still there.
I wonder if we learned something from that. I don’t hear much about it any more, yet a terrorist group or foreign government could decide to do a repeat on several rigs simultaneously and cause chaos.
Winter weather being a regular seasonal event that comes on a schedule is fairly easy to prep for. Just as farmer brown has all of those seasonal routines or chores to prepare for winter and close out the summer/ fall, we can punchlist take care of tasks in preparation for that regular climate change cycle. I prefer winter (fema region 3, usually @8 month winters) because it clears the outdoor terrain of most human activities except for those people doing necessary work or necessary commuting, and it also tamps down those jogger and interloper behaviors somewhat. As we have learned it is what the .gov and ngos are doing to your communities that will have a bigger effect on you, more so than weather or typical prepper manuals incidents occuring. As those “Forward Observer” Intel shop boys advise, do area studies for those Intel crumbs that can become or are problem points or issues for you or your area. Doing table top assessments and paperwork collating is good administratively, but a good prep also involves getting out there and doing your own recon and scrutiny of your areas. Get some hot coffee and take the dog for a drive and actually look out those side windows of your vehicle at things, begin noticing. Stage up somewhere as an OP/LP and observe things, you may pick up on things that are important data points that are overlooked in our rush from point a to point b, or with a longer study you observe evidentiary info puzzle pieces of something larger that is a concern for you. Bundle up to stay warm, but it is not an “off season” to get portly and postpone preps or training till next spring. Spicy can occur in the winter time as well, stay frosty.
Was pleasantly surprised that the Cannery Row district of Monterey CA is apparently cold enough to rate a retail Pendleton store (unlike most of Califrutopia further south), so added another 100% wool shirt to the wardrobe without having to wait upon the wizards of Amazon or FedEx to enjoy my purchase.
(Note to Pendleton: If you’d just make available for retail purchase all sizes of the M1950 OD green military wool shirt and trousers, indefinitely, you’d probably sell all you could manufacture, forever, and drive Canadian makers of such goods back up across the border for good.)
Agree – old military surplus wool shirts and pants were the shizzle. Remember those SI Swedish 100% wool pants that practically stood up by themselves because of fabric thickness ? They laughed at Old Man Winter. And priced at about $10 a piece. Quality stuff.
I still have some of those military surplus pants, very heavy material and fine workmanship. They have seemed to fit tighter lately. Don’t know that I’ll ever need them, mid-October and still over 100 degrees here every day. May cool off soon but still hot.
I feel like the guys in “Cabin in the Woods.”
“Who had violent Venezuelan gangs taking over parts of the city and the police doing little or nothing?”
I literally live a few miles from this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/texas/article-13958241/texas-gang-tren-aragua-apartment-complex-raid.html
The cops raided one complex and cleared some 300 units, according to the reports in the left-wing media, but they’ve done nothing so far about three more(!!!) complexes. I don’t step out of my front door to take the trash out without at least a .38 revolver or 9mm pistol on me. I’m keeping heavier hardware close by. I welcome fall, as now I can carry a Glock 19 or a .44 Special while doing yard work, instead of just a pocket .38 snubby. It ain’t paranoia when the gangs murdered a guy in front of local Walmart in the midst of an aborted car jacking by a 13-year-old!
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/04/08/13-year-old-boy-admits-to-shooting-killing-man-during-attempted-carjacking-sapd-says/
Keep your powder dry!
Bob
Those Maui “wildfires” that were videoed ,bursting everything up one side of the street then down the other side in order except if it was a blue car or had a blue roof. Still no word of the school busses of kids that are still missing and the busses were found on another island. Has all the property been bought up by Oprah and Bezos to expand their compounds yet? Any word on the Water Dept official that prevented the Fire Dept from fighting the fires and killing people?