Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I’m looking for some wool shirts. If anyone has a link, preferably to some affordable milsurp ones, I wouldnt mind hearing about it. I was pricing new commercial wool shirts (not Merino, or any other wool variant but regular wool) and the prices were, to put it mildly, a bit off-putting. I mean, I like Pendleton as much as the next guy but if Im paying more than $100 for a shirt it better be delivered by hookers and have the pockets stuffed with blow.
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I have a buddy in the precious metals business. Obviously, in a crunch, his inventory can become his own personal stash. He may be the most uniquely prepared individual I know of in this economy, except possibly for some Class III dealers. I’ve read a lot about the years before and after World War II and how economies fared and how the people survived (or didnt) as their economies underwent massive changes and scarcity of resources became the norm. Plenty of stories about people picking up cigarette butts from the gutter to get a few puffs out of them, living on potatoes for months at a time, burning furniture for warmth, that sort of thing. One thing that is consistent throughout is that there are a handful of businesses/industries/skills that, regardless of country, put the practitioner in a position of tremendous advantage over most other folks. Those were: food, medicine, sex, entertainment and weapons. I suppose ‘energy’ would be a category as well in contemporary times, but in what I read, which covers mostly the 1930’s to the 1950’s, those were the five catgeories that seemed to serve everyone quite well.

Nowadays Id say that list is still pretty close to accurate…entertainment may not be so important when the average person can entertain themselves indefinitely with a supply of DVD and .mpgs in their laptop. However the guy who can provide medical treatment, food (and booze), armaments or strippers is probably not going to suffer in the economy, no matter how bad it gets, as much as the next guy who isnt in that line of work.
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As the year comes to a close I usually take stock of what did and did not get used up from our stockpiles. I think this year we were exceptionally easy on the ammo supply. If I had to guess, I’d say that, at most, we burned up maybe four bricks of .22, a couple hundred 9mm, less than a hundred .38/.357, no .45, no 7.62×39, about 300 rounds of .308, and amaybe a hundred rounds of .223. :::shrug::: just didnt get out much this year. Managed to swap out about half the stored gasoline, didnt use any of the stored kerosene or propane, and added a gas grill to the alternative cooking checklist…so theres now a 20# barbecue bomb sitting outside.

I normally only keep a running inventory of food but I think thats gonna change this year. I think I’ll expand it to include toiletries, batteries, cleaning supplies and a couple other things. Normalyy I dont inventory them because they are used at a slower rate than food and tend to last longer. Howver, this months episode of getting caught woefully short on dish detergent has me thinking it might be time to change the policies on what gets inventoried and what doesnt.