Strategy is a nice way to sum up “Have a plan, and a backup plan, and another backup plan, and make sure they work.”. This article basically tells you how and why to test those plans.
One of those ways to test things is also my favorite: wargame it. If you think youve got the perfect mix of gear in case you get stuck ten miles from home….go on that ten mile walk. That sorta thing.
Excellent article about a story I’d almost forgotten about. H/T to Claire Wolfe
Wonderful article. A fast take away: a spare loaded mag mounted on the gun is always not-a-bad-idea.
I keep a stack of various mags (AK,AR,HK,Glock) loaded and ready to go sitting on a shelf near the gun safe. If I need to grab an extra loaded mag in a hurry…theyre there.
I’m not going to Monday morning quarterback anything this guy did because I wasnt there, it wasnt me, and I don’t know if I’d have had the presence of mind to do anything differently. Oh, I like to think I might have…but I dont really know and neither do you. Fact is, this guy saw the elephant and performed well. I am especially impressed with his humility. Pretty much all the qualities you look for in good person…they do the job that needs doing, get it done well, and don’t make a fuss about it.
Good article. Worth a read.
Living in a college town during Halloween means you get to sample heavily the best part about Halloween: college girls in slutty costumes. Naughty nurse, wicked catwoman, adulterous county attorney, hot teacher, etc. I don’t know why these chicks feel like they can’t dress like that the rest of the year. Who’d complain? Not me.
But, over at the post office, where they have to keep a modicum of decency, there’s a guy who, every year, goes the step further to really put in some effort at his costumes. This year? ’70s Disco Man:
To be frank, could be Disco Man, could be John Holmes…..tough to tell without getting a lot closer than i care to. But, I salute the effort. The interesting part? He already had all these clothes. Thats the really scary part.
I don’t have the foresight to plan ahead for a good costume, but perhaps one of the years…. For now, when people ask where my costume is, I give them that famous reply from Wednesday Addams:
One of the things in the Bag Of Tricks? This monster:
It’s really just a sharpened crowbar with a handle. I have it expressly for the purpose of cutting, chipping, prying, hacking, hammering my way out of or through whatever is between me and safety. Prying open doors, busting windows out of frames, hinge pins out of doors, and all that sort of thing. I have a more ‘regular’ knife or two in my bag as well, but this is the big kahuna for when something needs to be destroyed.
It’s made by Becker Knife & Tool which is now a part of Ka-Bar. Made in the USA although the sheath is made overseas. I’ve been a fan of he BK&T products for years…they have a brute ruggedness that meshes nicely with my ideas about the qualities I look for in just-in-case-the-world-ends gear. Not cheap, and you could probably get similar results with something cheaper… but I like BK&T and I don’t mind paying a bit extra for something that I might someday need in a very, very bad way.
This thing sits in its scabbard at the bottom of my bag, and it’s my first choice for deconstruction of my surroundings. Of course, it also can cut things but it’s main function, as I said, is for breaking things. Never know when you’re going to need to break down a door or window for a quick getaway, y’know?
Kinda makes you all warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? They may(!) not be reading your mail, but they’re logging where it came from and where it went.
These clowns can scan over a billion packages a year but they can’t get my Priority Mail packages across town in three days. :::eyeroll:::
Whats really annoying is that The Powers That Be will point to the recent bombing suspect’s arrest and use that to validate what is, to any reasonable standard, a rather intrusive policy that kicks the spirit of the right to privacy right in the sac.
Pizza before bed. What was I thinking?
In the dream I was away from my house, and trying to get back to it. For some reason I didn’t have my vehicle and, for an equally unexplained reason, my Bag O’ Tricks was in that missing vehicle. So..there I am…trying to walk back to my house which, in this dream, is a good distance away and requires me to walk through a city.
In the dream, people are kicking in doors to other peoples houses to steal food, nowhere is safe, and there’s a general feeling of ‘every man for himself’. There’s one particularly nailbiting scene where I have to traverse a tunnel under a river as people drive through it at hellish speed, hauling trailers of belongings, and swerving all over the place.
The whole time I’m thinking that if I can get back to the house I’ll have everything I need. But…I have to get there first. I also recall thinking “why didnt I hide a gun and ammo somewhere out here?”
I finally get to a roadblock manned by someone I know. They let me pass, and then I wake up.
This is the first dream like this I’ve had in a while. But, it follows the trend of how these things usually go. I’m not inclined to believe that dreams are prescient , but I do believe that our unconscious mind can observe details in our day-to-day that our conscious mind doesn’t pick up and puts them together….thus giving us that ‘funny feeling’ we have about something.
So, first thing, I need to go through my Bag Of Tricks and make sure everything is cool. It would be a bit of a stretch to call it a GHB or something equally corny. It’s basically just a buncha gear that would come in handy in pretty much any unpleasant circumstance….everything from zip ties and batteries to multitool and Glock. It’s just something to tilt the odds back in my favor a little bit. But, it has come in handy a time or two.
No idea what the particular apocalypse was that kicked off the dream…there was one scene where a local power plant exploded in a cloud of black smoke and dust so I’m guessing it was something a little man-made but , really, it doesn’t matter.
Whats interesting is that, being a dream, the same emotions are instilled in you because you think whats happening is real. (Dreams are, after all, the first virtual reality environment ever made.) So if you wonder what that frantic, panicked feeling as you realize its The End will feel like…well, there you go.
I dont regret these kinds of dreams, they usually serve as a swift kick in the khakis to get me off my butt on preparedness things I may have been putting off. In fact, that may be why I had the dream…my subconscious may have been worrying about my lack of activity in that regard.
Any moral of the story for me to be aware of? Hmm..probably that if I think my Bag Of Tricks is useful enough to keep nearby it’s probably useful enough to clone and keep at an offsite location on one of my major travel pathways. I’ll have to think about that, but that really just falls into what another blogger would call ‘an operational cache’… which might be worth thinking about.
Also, no pizza after 9pm.
I’ve mentioned it before, but, man, that complacency thing….it’s tough to get past sometimes. You let your foot off the gas, you feel less of a sense of urgency, and then -wham- something happens that makes you wish you had stuck with things.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve sort of shifted my preparedness efforts towards getting the finances squared away now that 90% of everything else is within an acceptable level of readiness. But that financial stuff…thats the hardest to keep on track with. I mean, when you’re working on your food storage you can see those shelves getting fuller and fuller, you can see the gun safe getting fuller and fuller, that sort of thing. But getting your financial preparedness taken care of? Numbers on paper. You don’t really feel it because there’s no real visual metric other than numbers on a statement.
Of course, just because you don’t feel your financial preps getting squared away like you do your physical ones…well…thats no excuse no to do it, right?
My motivation has been focusing on the opportunities that will be afforded to me once I get things like the house paid off. Thats a rather large chunk of money every month that can now go to…whatever I want it to. Silver? Gold? Ammo? Roth? Vehicle? Land? Savings? Six hours with Jennifer Lawrence? Anything I want. But…to do that, I gotta get these stupid financial obligations taken care of.
The unsexy parts of survivalism suck, but they tend to be the most practical ones, it seems.
Hunting season opens this weekend. I just don’t have the time or resources to go. As much as I would love to spend the day tromping around in the woods, the practical side of me knows, with utter certainty, that the opportunity cost and the expenses involved make just going to Diamond Bar Meats and buying half a steer a much more economic option.
But, honestly, I don’t hunt for the meat… I hunt because I like the experience. The meat is just the bonus part. Its been a long time since I needed to hunt. I suppose I could say one of the reasons my basement looks like a Walmart grocery center is so that I don’t have to worry about hunting.
Still, I do miss the experience but I have to be practical – there are things to do and as a grownup you sometimes have to do the unfun things.
But, for those of you going out this weekend, I wish you luck! Tell Bambi I said hi!
So Trump was in town today. He pointedly did not invite any Democrat politicians, which I thought was a nice touch, and he had nice things to say about Gianforte roughing up a reporter. Sounds like a good time. There was the usual protesting from the college lefties…I guess they were protesting lower taxes, high employment numbers, or something….
Anyway, I listened to the police scanner off and on throughout the day and it was, to my surprise, far less disruptive than I was expecting. Which is good. The last thing I want is to have to sit in traffic because some road-blocking patchouli-scented waste of skin thinks his right to protest somehow includes the right to inhibit my ability to travel freely.
In other news, it was a great day for it…… the weather was absolutely beautiful. Cold nights, warm days….nice fall weather. Gotta enjoy it while it lasts because, y’know, winter is coming.
Todays “Lets See What Happens” episode is a six year old can of corned beef hash. Nominal ‘best by’ date was three years ago. So….how is it?
Fine. Of course.
Properly canned food lasts pretty much indefinitely. This can features the pre-scored ‘pop top’ feature that don’t really like in canned goods. If you drop the can or pressure is applied against the pre-scored region the can will fail more often than if it were not pre-scored. But, unfortauntely, these small single-serve cans were not available without the pop-top features. But…they held up just fine.
Storage conditions? Just sitting in the back of my kitchen cabinet for six years. Nothing special.
And that’s sort of the point. While I fully appreciate the nitrogen sealed, ceramic lined #10 cans filled with freeeze dried meats that will last longer than I will…..I also appreciate that modern food canning processes, by first world companies, do an awesome job of creating a product that will last a long time. Sometimes there is a need for a $40 can of freeze-dried pork chops, but sometimes you’ll get along just fine with a case of Kirkland canned pulled pork. It just depends on a few other things like if you plan to transport it, what the storage conditions will be, etc. I love me some long-term food but, really, you can put together a very reasonably long-term food supply without breaking the bank on ‘survival food’.
I bet the folks in whats left of Florida would be happy to have some hash and eggs for breakfast after a long evening of clearing debris and unblocking roads. A case of this stuff, a #10 can of powdered eggs, a case of instant oatmeal, a case of fruit cocktail cups, a jar of Tang, instant coffee, some hash browns, and you’ve pretty much got a breakfast that’ll last five-ten years.
As I’ve mentioned, around this house the food storage paradigm is short-, mid-, and long-term storage. This stuff counts as ‘mid-term’ storage….it’ll be good for more than a year or two but probably not out at the twenty year mark. I wish I had written the price down, I’d be curious to see where the price went.
