When all of this Kung Flu hit the fan, I stepped things up a bit and did a few things that, at the time, seemed prudent against threats that seemed reasonably possible. How’d that work out?
Cash – I pulled out a couple grand in cash to keep in the gun safe against the banks closing. As it turns out, the bank lobbies were closed, opened briefly, and closed again. ATM’s were always accessible but they limit your daily withdrawals. However, the drive-through lanes never closed so you could always get your money that way. So…was it necessary to pull out the cash and stuff it in the safe? No.
Gas – I beefed up the amount of gasoline I normally keep on hand. Again, this was under the threat of gas stations closing or fuel deliveries being disrupted due to quarantine, sick drivers, etc, etc. Best I can tell, no gas station was closed or was short on product. I did, however, beat the fifty-cents-per-gallon difference between then and now. So…gas stockpiling…unnecessary.
Consumables – I considerably ramped up the storage of food and other consumables, most notably cleaning supplies. Although there were initial shortages, and in some places there still are, the grocery shelves quickly were refilled. So, was it absolutely necessary to ‘go long’ on some things? No.
There’s three big things I did at the beginning of this pandemic that turned out to be unnecessary. Thus far. Do I feel I made any mistakes by doing those things? Do I wish I had not done them? Do I think I wasted resources?
Heck no.
Does anyone ever truly regret this sort of thing? (Stock photo)
Here’s why: this ain’t over. And even if the Kung Flu finally dies down and people stop wearing face masks and bathing in hand sanitizer I will be positioned exceptionally well for whatever comes next. Just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t .
At the time I did the things I did, no one knew what was coming down the pike. As a result, I erred (if you want to call it an error) on the side of caution. And I have zero regrets about it. None. Nada. Because when the next Big Thing comes along, I will be even more prepared than I already was. This stuff is like any other form of insurance – if you get it and don’t use it was it a waste? No, it was not. Because the insurance did exactly what it was supposed to do – it transferred the risk elsewhere.
My risk of being hungry? Gone My risk of being unable to fuel my vehicle? Gone. My risk of having to wipe my butt with leaves? Gone My risk of having to meekly hand over my things to some horde of thugs? Way, way gone. My risk of not having access to the cash needed in an emergency? Gone.
When your spouse starts giving you crap about how you ‘wasted all that money’ on ‘all that crap you have sitting in the garage/basement’ because ‘nothing happened’, ask them if they felt better knowing that stuff was there just in case. If so, then it was not a waste. And, by and large, a lot of the stuff you and I put back is good for years and years, if not decades.
So don’t second guess yourself if you took all sorts of preparations at the beginning of this event and feel like they were unnecessary and unneeded.Keep doing what you’re doing. The day ain’t over yet.
One of the things I point out in my classes is “when you get your permit, carry your damn gun.” I then ask who in the class owns a car.
Everyone.
I then ask who in the class with a car has one that came with a spare tire in the trunk.
Everyone.
I then ask who leaves that spare tire at home because they don’t think they’ll get a flat that day.
No one.
Not maintaining supplies for future need when stuff is available to stock up with is just like selling that spare tire for a few bucks to spend on a party weekend.
Clearly you have not bought a car recently! It’s now an add on option with a lot of car dealers concerning a spare tire. lol
just know that every time an officer or deputy runs your tag or operator license number, dispatch will id you as a CCW holder, even if expired. grey man not so much.
In Texas it’s tied to your driver license, not the license plate of your car. So, if you’re stopped and they run your DL it will show up.
California has a database of those who hold a permit in other states, and this info is available to traffic cops. In the early 00’s, a non-resident permit from Utah was big in CA. (BTW, CA does not recognize any non-CA permits.) Santa Clara County (San Jose area) had over 6000 Utah permits issued. It was so popular, that by the late 00’s, a lot of states decided to stop recognizing a Utah permit.
Are those unused gas cans on the bottom left?
The picture still gets classified as GOALS.
Steelheart
Looks like laundry detergent
Sage advice. Summer has a way of making it feel like “the worst is behind us”. Could be true – might not be. Right now just about anything could happen.
November guarantees a certain level of chaos. But imagine if California gets their ‘big one’ (8.0 or greater). Or India/Chine goes ‘hot’. Frankly, it wouldn’t take a whole lot at this point, to push us over the edge.
caption: “Does anyone ever truly regret this sort of thing?”
The only regrets i have ever heard of re food stockpiling is from:
1- those that didnt store things properly and the food spoiled and
2- the heirs who saw all that food as a diminished inheritance.
Commander Z, how do you keep the cereal from going stale? Mine goes relatively quickly. It makes great bird food, but the wife gets upset on that one?
That’s just a stock photo.
I take mine and place it in a jar. Then I use a food saver machine to suck the air out. When I moved from Florida to Mississippi, I got into some because we didn’t have much money left. Wife walked in and said “What are you eating?” I said “Cereal.” Her reply was that is some fresh cereal. It was two years old at that time.
This is exactly how we store crackers and cereal when the boys were here. Lasts at least 5 years if the seal is tight. Ball mason jar, with lid, use the food saver vacuum with attachment, suck the air out, check the seal, rim up, label & store.
Don’t regret improving my position one little bit. My wife was greatly pleased by the availability of daily use items (especially toilet paper) during the recent panic, which cleared the store shelves in my local area. Now that shelves are stocked I am back filling the stores expended to prepare for the next emergency/panic to rear its ugly head.
Damn , thats some serious fire code violations you got there , and thats on top of the food safety violations. And i dont think you like green beans as much as this picture says you do. 😂
Like you, I stocked up some in February – food, oil change stuff (I didn’t expect to be working from home for going on 4 months), first aid supplies, and some cash.
By the end of February, we KNEW that this disease wouldn’t be that bad and I guessed correctly that the response to it would be worse than it itself… I wish I hadn’t been right.
I was actually expecting any restrictions to be much, much tighter – these restrictions seem to have been designed to be as annoying as possible without actually doing anything health-wise. I would not be surprised to see more lockdowns coming as the goal keeps changing through the summer (and as people increasingly ignore what is already in place).
yeah guys, it aint over by a long shot. i think November is going to be a shitfest whoever wins. I may be wrong on this, and i often am on these things. but I’m not taking any chances. ill still have my supplies even if I don’t have to use them.
hurricane season is upon us and who knows what could happen with that.
good luck guys
Good points, its like the people that return the generators the buy after big storms as if it could never happen again. My biggest worry is not getting used to this SHTF event and making assumptions that the next one will be just like it. Let’s say its even COVID again, call it wave 2, it could look very different. For example what if it got bad enough that line workers and power plant workers couldn’t keep the grid up 100% of the time. Nothing we faced this time but grid down situations are always a possibility.
Also am I the only one that read the caption that said “stock photo” and realized this wasn’t a picture of his actual setup?
I could easily see this experience causing unions to demand all sorts of pandemic ‘danger pay’ and expensive/prohibitive protections that would exacerbate the situation by creating labor issues. Linemen refusing to work, drivers refsing to drive, etc.
I’m union and no such thing has happened, not that it couldn’t. Our company has fared very well and I have no complaints. I make them a shit ton of money every day and as a result the CEO’s and officers are all millionaires.
The google machine says 99.2% of the worlds population makes less than 100k so we are doing well.
That means 99.2% of the world wants what you have.
heck even the other .8% want what you have, morals in short supply. go team America.
“By the end of February, we KNEW that this disease wouldn’t be that bad”
Um, not trying to start a conflict, but WHO knew? And how? China was still welding people into their apartments, and blocking roads in and out of plague towns with tons of rock. Cases hadn’t even started to climb in the US yet. It was mid-March before it even took off here, going exponential shortly there after.
There is evidence that china had hundreds of thousands of deaths that they didn’t report or acknowledge, that’s pretty bad…
In early March we were just starting to get info from more reliable countries, and it was far too early to draw any conclusions until we had more data from first world countries.
It’s still very far from being a nothingburger, all over the world. We (the US) have fared pretty well, and would have been markedly better if not for the actions of a few people, mostly in NY. That doesn’t mean it’s not killing people or destroying national economies. It just means it isn’t the apocalypse it could have been.
I’m with the Cmdr on this one, buy in early, react as if it was really bad until proven otherwise. No irrevocable changes to my life, but definitely accelerated some things in the last weeks before the shutdown. Disaster after disaster has shown me that by the time most people think it’s time to act, it’s too late to be effective. Even jumping early, there was plenty of evidence that others had jumped even earlier. Had this gone another way, all the slow movers would have had a very hard time.
As it is, I’ve switched back from using preps to accumulating preps. Bad times are just getting started, whether that’s hurricane season, economic troubles, wuflu wave 2, or the Boogaloo, everything is better with enough bacon and butter.
n
The study of disease spread on the cruise ship Diamond Princess was out by then and it showed how little the threat was in a population older and sicker than the general public. About 1% of those who got sick died, and of the general population 0.1 population died, with no distancing or quarantining. That translates to a max of 600,000 deaths in the US if the US was older and sicker than it is, with no isolation, quarantining, distancing, schools open, etc.
You don’t think 600K American lives are a big deal?
How about all the people who survive but with lifelong diminished lung function, increased deaths due to clotting and heart attacks?
It’s far from the apocalypse, in its current expression, but it’s also far from being trivial.
nick
(And they did try to quarantine the passengers, they just did a poor job of it, while ALSO removing the known sick people from the population, which likely had an effect on the total number of infected. In other words, it wasn’t quite the uncontrolled experiment you make it sound.)
The issues have been argued back and forth in plenty of forums, not much point in doing so here. I’m only noting that at the time we had a very limited data set, and one that was mostly known to be probable lies on the one hand, vs the actual actions taken by the chinese which implied that it was very serious indeed, far more serious than their reported numbers would have suggested.
If we dodged a bullet this time, be thankful, and remedy any deficiency in your preps. There will be a next time.
amazing how death by other causes dropped by 40 to 70% isn’t it. can you say greatly inflated death rate? thought you could. now go look at the cdc CONFIRMED case numbers vs. the media. then consider that maybe china didn’t under report, but the media wagged the dog on us. i fell for it at first but i found out i had already had it. caught it from my neighbor who got it from german engineers at his factory. then i went to nurses i know. they were laid off. even when they went back they have yet to see a covid patient with active symptoms. this is in a city of 84,000 on the east coast. hmmm. add in the college i work has large contingent of chinese students who brought an “unknown respiratory infection” back from Thanksgiving break. it ran rampant thru the place in december thru march. nobody died, and though they interact with the small town nobody died/ on vents there either and only a handful of cases. sweden didn’t do anything at all and they are past it now.
nick:
this virus has an affinity for Asians, so it spread VERY quickly in the Wuhan area. They also knew it was genengineered, and that scared them. It was an early version that got loose, so not ready for prime time, fortunately. They quickly added a LOT of additional crematory capacity, and in some cases may have been burning bodies that hadn’t quite stopped breathing yet. They had a max capacity of 4200/24hr to start with, and added multiples of that. Yes, they lied about the numbers. They’re communists, that’s what commies do.
The biggest thing I added when this all started was more fresh meat for the freezers. Reinforced a couple of additional consumable categories, stocked up on no ethanol gas (it was REALLY cheap), added a little PM at a good price before the premiums went crazy and that’s about it. Built one more AR pistol out of bits and pieces. all I needed was another pistol lower. Had everything else.
None of its going to waste and life continues…
Regards
We too ramped up our preps starting in November. Do I regret it – not one bit. We just got closer to our goal(s) sooner. We took on no additional debt. Whatever “Phase II” is going to look like, we are better prepared than we were for “Phase I”. “Phase I” did wake some people up, but it appears that they hit the “snooze button”. Many are now asking if they should get ***. I usually say yes, and get it now! Some will, most won’t.
Just saw this on Instapundit:
THE HOUSMAN EFFECT: Researchers find fans of apocalyptic movies may be coping with pandemic better. A.E. Housman argued that thinking about bad things was prophylactic, like Mithridates of Pontus’ habit of dosing himself with small doses of arsenic to protect against being poisoned: “Mithridates, he died old.”
That’s Glenn Reynolds saying that.
The study, according to the research blog he’s linking to, says:
The researchers found that people who had recently watched what they describe as “prepper” movies showed signs of higher levels of resilience to the real-world pandemic. They suggest exposure to certain scenes in a movie psychologically prepared viewers for some of the events that unfolded as the real pandemic got underway. They further note that people watching generic horror movies also reported higher levels of coping abilities during the early days of the real pandemic. The researchers suggest such movies allow viewers to practice coping skills, which they apparently put to use if a real need arises.
More information: Coltan Scrivner et al. Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic, (2020). DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/4c7af
No, they’re not saying watching a disaster movie is a substitute for training and preparation, they’re saying that people who’ve thought about disasters enought to be called “Morbidly Curious” are probably going to be better off than people who have been determined never to give this one moment’s thought.
My wife once asked me why I spent so much time reading about aviation disasters and plane wrecks. I told her that as a pilot, I could not afford to make the mistakes the pilots in those wrecks did. And I fully recognize that those pilots were probably far sharper and better pilots than I could ever hope to be. “Old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.”
I’ve read a lot of “pockyclips” sci-fi over the years too, and there are always tidbits of real information to be had even among the fictional dreck. “Once Second After” was not a great novel, but it seemed every page was a theme to be thought out and thought through.
I suspect the real merit of the exposure to apocalypse/horror movies/literature isn’t hat it offers practical tips or that sort of thing, rather I suspect the advantage is that it helps minimize normalcy bias when things finally do go wrong. When the mushroom cloud appears on the horizon and everyone is staring slack-jawed and stunned, you’ll be more able to roll with the punches because the whole concept isn’t the unthinkable foreign idea that it is to those people. You’ve thought about this sort of thing before so you can ‘wrap your head around it’ and not be gobsmacked into inaction when it happens.
Exactly, that is why the Army encourages “Call of Duty” or other first person shooter video games while deployed. (or even at base).
Thanks CZ; there’s a lot of insight in what you say. I have often said that prepping isn’t so much about “stuff” as it is about what’s between your ears. I learned early on as a pilot that in any crisis situation to focus like a laser beam on my priorities, do the most important thing first, and let all else fade to peripheral vision–you “Fly the plane first”, whether it’s on fire or a passenger is barfing down your neck. I’ve always had a pretty good head in a crisis, whether as a pilot, or in my job (blood bank in a medical center lab).
In prepping, as Cody Lundin teaches, the more skills you have, the less stuff you need. Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
This could easily be a case of self selection. Do you think people who rate prepping as important are more or less likely to watch apocalyptic movies or read similarly themed books?
Having thought through and prepared for something should for certain make things less panic inducing when it arrives.
I hope they didn’t spend a lot of money on that study.
Never any regrets on prepping here,
as it’s a lifestyle rather than a hobby.
Being self employed makes one dive
into the prep mind set, as the uncertainty
of the next project coming along when
you need it to. Over the years, one learns
to refine their methods, as well as learning
how to prioritize. It’s always good to observe
how others have managed their process, in
order to minimize mistakes.
I guess based on some of the comments, they missed the fact that you noted it’s a “stock photo”. Hope their situational awareness is better than their reading!!!! lol
TO be fair, I didn’t have that on there at first. I just assumed most people wold figure that it wasn’t my own picture.
CZ, I figured it wasn’t yours as that’s a finished room while the previous pictures you’ve posted of your shelving shows a more traditional basement.
Steelheart
Speaking of stock photos, I’ve been curious – where do the disaster drawings in your banner up top come from?
“End of the world’ in Google and search under images. If I see anything interesting, I snag it.
Roger that!!
i’m still stacking. this is just the beginning. media already hawking bubonic plague, or dengue fever or china virus de jour not to mention the blm/antifa theatre show. yes, its a show. wag the dog. its all a show put on to convince us resistance is futile, give up and get on the boxcars. sadly we’re buying it. so i’m still stacking food, tp, anything i found lacking during the lockdown. i had plenty but was surprised by the folks i know that didn’t. kinda pissed me off actually, they knew better. and likely they’ll use up what i gave them and have one role in the house next time too. must be a .mil thing but tp goes EVERYWHERE i go, lol.
The funny thing about the bubonic plague is that it’s been circulating in the US since like 1910 or so. The praire dog population spreads it. Strangely, it hasn’t wiped us out. If you go to Yosemite, they have signs telling you not to feed the rodents, because of The Plague. At least they did a few years ago.
Yeah, every so often you read about some woodtick out in Arizona or New Mexico who caught it skinning a coyote or bobcat.