TIme for you to play with my poll……
Whaddya think you spend on average per year on stuff to advance your level of preparedness?’On average’…so if you bought a BOV this year, thats not really part of the average unless you buy one every year, capice? And we’re talking items specifically towards your level of preparedness. ‘Dual use’ stuff doesn’t count…think of it this way, it’s specifically an item you bought for preparedness if you wouuldn’t have bought it otherwise.
[yop_poll id=”6″]
‘Tis Patriots Day!
You know what to do, you know where to do it! Get out there!
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It is also the 25th anniversary of the ATFE burning down a building full of women and kids in Waco Texas. This utterly inexcusable atrocity was the impetus for ‘militia movement’ that the 90’s was known for. To this day there are still a lot of unanswered questions from Waco. It continues to serve as an excellent reminder of what government can do when it wants to. As a result of this incident, and the Oklahoma City Bombing several years later, April 19 is a day of extra caution in some government agencies.
I had the weirdest dream last night (brought to me by some spicy chicken and rice, no doubt). I dreamed (or dreamt, I guess) that I was visiting a fellow survivalists place and he said i could stay in the guest house out back. Problem was, the place was lousy with grizzly bears and I thought ‘No problem, I have this handy PTR-91 in .308. I’ll just do a mag dump into the first one that gets in my way.’ And then I discovered that the magazine was empty. Awkward. After that it was hide-n-seek with three amazingly large grizzly bears.
This is the first dream I’ve ever had involving the usual gun problem (gun not working, bullets not having an effect, etc.) and the threat being an animal, instead of zombies or people.
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There are several problems for those of us who want to live the preparedness/survivalist lifestyle. One of the biggest is the often-at-odds-with-each-other desire to live someplace remote and quiet but still have a job/career to pay for it. Succinctly, the classic survivalist dilema is how do you live far enough out to have the security and privacy you want while still living close enough in to have a job?
Virtually all the survivalists I know who live in the ‘perfect’ locations are all either a) retired, b) made enough money to live off investments, or c) live a life of desperate poverty.
I’m far from being able to retire, my investments don’t provide enough to live on, and I’ve gotten rather used to hot water on demand and not crapping in a compost toilet. As a result, for the time being, I live in an environment that is not 100% conducive to The Lifestyle..the big deficiency being that I live in a fairly large population center. Oh, compared to San Francisco or Chicago it’s darn near a podunk small town, but it’s still too many rats in one cage for my taste.
Telecommuting? Well, thats wonderfully attractive but those sorts of gigs are few and far between. And, its something of a risk since if you lose your job you are now sitting in the middle of nowhere with no job and a greatly reduced prospect of finding another one given your remote location.
Alternatives? Well, I suppose the first thing is to lower your expectations. Don’t think that youre going to live at the end of a five mile gated road in the middle of nowhere and make $50,000 a year doing engineering consulting over the internet. After that, it seems the best compromise is to live in an area where you’re close enough to the smallest population center that will still provide you a living, but still small-townish enough to give you the isolation you’re after.
Let me give you an example of what I mean… in the town I live in, someone doing, say, a welding or diesel repair gig for a large company in this town can knock back around $40k. But…you have to live fairly close by to keep your commute realistic…as a result, you live in a populous place and your cost of living is commensurately higher. SO, you pack up the kids and move to some ‘Northern Exposure‘ type of small town. Your earning potential takes a heavy hit of 35-50%, but your cost of living offsets a bit of that since the expenses are a little cheaper. But an AR15 is still about $750 no matter if you live in the big city or the small town, so you’re going to have to lower your expectations of your purchasing power, or you’re going to have to work twice as hard to earn the same as if you’d remained in Big City.
There is another alternative I’ve seen where you have someone from someplace like California, New York, Chicago, Denver, etc, sell their home(s) and move out here. They usually wind up getting the same size home or bigger for about half the money and then use the other half to either set themselves up in a business, or invest it and live off the dividends. That has usually worked out fairly well in the instances I’ve come across it.
And, finally, I’ve met at least two people who did it the old-fashioned way – they worked like mules in The Big City for as much as possible, sucked it up for a few years, and then hit the EJECT button and relocated here.
I suspect at some point in the future I’ll be in the group of ‘moved to smaller town and earns less but improves quality of life’. In a perfect world I’d stick a million bucks in the bank, live off the dividends and interest, and have my quiet little place out in the sticks. But if you’re going to try for that sort of thing, you need to have started much, much more earlier than I have.
Some people like them for the ‘intimidation factor’…the idea that the bad guy sees the little red dot sitting on his sternum and he suddenly decides it’s time for a career change. Others say its a crutch for poor marksmanship. And some day it’s just another gimmicky geegaw that’ll go Tango uniform when you need it most.
Assuming we are talking about daytime visible lasers (‘Red dot”) rather than IR lasers that are used with night vision.
What say you, hive mind?
[yop_poll id=”5″]
It is, approximately, the 15 year birthday of the blog today. Fifteen years is a long time. The natural impulse is to look back but there’s a lot in there I’d just as soon not dwell on. Oh, sure, good and bad….but but it’s never an even mix. People..good and bad, experiences…good and bad.
Initially the blog was simply a space on LiveJournal that I had for posting about preparedness. Then, for a very short while, I tried HTML’ing my own website that incorporated the blog. Then I switched to WordPress and it’s been that way ever since. While WordPress has been a pretty stable platform over the years (knock on wood), I cannot say as much about some of the hosting services I’ve used. (The moral of that story, by the way, is that if you have a blog that you’re fond of running….back that sucker up frequently.)
Originally, the blog wasn’t about disseminating preparedness info, rather it was about what I was doing in my life for my own preparedness. Notes to myself about things I needed to get, or my impressions of various gear and guns that I’d picked up. From day one, the blog was really just a sort of journal to keep track of my experiences and thoughts on preparedness. Things evolve and while it still is mostly about me and my efforts, there’s also a strong undercurrent of ‘hey, you should take a look at this.’
One fascinating aspect of having been doing this for this long is that I can glean interesting info..I can see how prices of things (as well as availability) have changed over time and, most importantly, how forecasts of things (gun laws, metals prices, political changes, etc.) have turned out. There aren’t many actual blogs on preparedness I’ve found that have the same length of time at it as I do. That’s not to say there aren’t any, just that I haven’t run across them. However, in the time the blog has been kicking around I have visited hundreds, if not thousands, of other preparedness blogs…some interesting, some not…some ran for quite a while, some disappeared quickly….but a few have had legs and are still around (and I read them daily). [Most notably ,Rawles’ SurvivalBlog which popped up about two years after I opened this place….I knew I should have registered that domain name!]
It’s been interesting to see how things have held up over time..for example, I have posts where I mention putting some food away for long term storage and then ten years later I have a post about opening it up and using it. Thats kind of a rare thing in the blogosphere.
Expenses? Well, I figure it’s been a couple grand for hosting, bandwidth, domain registration, etc, over the last fifteen years. Spread it out over 180 months and it doesn’t seem so painful, but when I look back on it as one lump sum..well…thats a few AR15’s that never were. (And if you’d like to kick in a few bucks for housekeeping expenses around the blog, there’s a link right here…
Every dollar you spend does not go to a starving child in Africa, a baby seal rescue organization, or to a GoFundMe for some kid with cancer. Instead it goes to a blogger in Montana who uses it to pay for website expenses, .223 ammo, freeze drieds, and lap dances from morally-challenged and financially-illiterate coeds. (Well, mostly the first three things.) Ah, but seriously….I try to not put the arm on folks more than once every several years. But, some folks want to help keep the lights on and I appreciate that greatly. Some folks take it up a notch and actually make a repeating monthly donation (sort of a subscription) and for that I’m really grateful. And thats the end of the infomercial part of todays post.
The advent of cool stuff in those fifteen years? First and foremost is the expiration of the assault weapons ban…that annoying bit of Clinton legacy that gave us things like this: 
Many of you are too young to remember, but there was a time when the M4gery you paid $600 for today brought $1500. And your $12 PMAG was worth about $50. Second mortgages were the order of the day if you wanted something like a Beta 100-rd drum. Fortunately that nonsense expired in 2004, one year after the blog opened for business.
Gas prices ran the gamut from $1.75 to darn near $4, silver bounced between $6 and near-$50, and we all somehow managed to make it past half a dozen end-of-the-world scenarios including but not limited to: 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, Peak Oil, Birld Flu, SARS, Ebola, Anthrax scares, and a few others that escaped me. Still no sign of Xenu, zombies, assorted religious returns, UN troops, alien overlords, or space Nazis.
Gunwise there have been some pretty forward movements…most notably the ‘arm brace’ fad, the somewhat-mainstreaming of the non-NFA 14″ not-a-shotguns, and the massive post-2016-election gun market slump that saw factory AR’s as low as $400 and AR mags cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. We also saw at least a half dozen panic buying episodes that we never really fully recovered from (if $15 bricks of Federal .22 are anything to go by. [or go buy]).
I suppose a very valid question is: how long can you keep blogging about a topic before you’ve exhausted every possible idea worthy of posting? Beats me…life has a bizarre way of throwing a curve ball (right at your head, usually) when you get to feeling complacent. I’ll keep blogging as long as I have internet and a pulse, I suppose. If the traffic dropped to near nothing I’d still blog…it’s something I really do for my own enjoyment rather than for the accolades and attention. (Although it’d be disingenuous for me to say that I haven’t enjoyed the very small level of notoriety that sometimes comes from these posts.) I suppose there’s never really a shortage of grass to graze on when it comes to preparedness topics. There will always be a hurricane, earthquake, riot, pandemic, or what have you, somewhere in the world that makes us re-examine the survivability of our existing systems.
Someday, though, I’d like to be able to make a post about how I’m sitting on the front porch of my little concrete hacienda out in boonies, watching the clouds drift by, listening to the creek, and occasionally popping off some ammo at whatever target of opportunity happens to pass by. Hey..it could happen.
At this point of introspection, the blogger would usually make some sort of comment like “I couldn’t have done it without you, the readers…and for that I am grateful.” Well, that sounds nice but it really isn’t true. Even if not a single person read this blog, it would still be here today and probably just as good (or bad) as it is now. But…the readers do make me enjoy blogging more than if it were just me yelling into the emptiness. So…theres that. I like to think that people who have hung around here a while have enjoyed the postings and in some way have felt a bit of a connection. That’s probably the biggest enjoyment I get from blogging – the connection. You see, back in the old days, before the interweb, we survivalists could very easily think that we were the only ones. We never really met other survivalists, or had a efficient way to communicate and meet with other like-minded individuals, so it was very easy to think that you were unique and possibly a little weird in your outlook. Over the years, through the blog, I’ve had the immense satisfaction of encountering other people who had the same darn outlook.. and that sort of reinforcement is really useful at times. So…if nothing else, I hope I’ve helped to make some folks feel like they weren’t alone in their concerns and interests.
Thats about it, I guess. Back to our regularly scheduled brain droppings.
Sceptre military-style water cans? Best I can find is at Lexington Container but I was hoping for something closer to Montana to save on shipping. Clarification: Scepter..not ‘just like Scepter’ or ‘private labelled but made by Sceptre’ or ‘better than Sceptre’.
Always interesting when someone does this sort of thing. They seem to miss that the point of this food isn’t to replicate your pre-collapse culinary habits, but rather to keep you alive.
Was up at the local chain outdoors shop and saw, stacked high, bricks of Federal .22 for the first time in what seems like quite a while. $24.99, which, if you do the math, comes out to $0.0476 per round. I just picked up about 50,000 rounds for $0.0410 per round, so, on a brick of ammo, the difference is about $3 a brick. Multiply that by..uhm…100 bricks…and you get a savings of about $300. I can live with that.
I’m the first to admit that I do not get out into the stores as much as I’d like, so perhaps the availability has been high lately and I simply haven’t noticed, but I actually cannot recall the last time I saw bricks of bulk Federal sitting on the shelf with no limits on purchase.
Did I buy some? Yes, actually. One brick just for some recreational shooting. Yes, I just bought 50,000 rounds but thats Deep Sleeper ammo. It’s for that Really Bad Decade..not for busting rocks at the range. (Well…it might also be used for barter purposes with hungry, desperate, short-sighted coeds who were woefully unprepared for the end of the world.)
Even though I have a bunch of .22 ammo sittinghere, there’s still a part of my lizard brain that has been conditioned over the last several years to grab all the bricks whenever I see them. I have to remind myself “It’s cool..it’s cool…you’ve got plenty.”
But..but…bricks!
I cannot imagine how having a gun in your glove compartment counts as being concealed, but I guess thats a job for the appeals court to figure out. I suppose the argument might be that although the gun isnt on the person it is ‘readily accessible’.
I don’t know what I ate last night but, man, it was some weird dreams last night. I dreamt that I lived in a coastal city, surrounded by mountains, and the whole city had been evacuated because of a tsunami warning. I, for some reason, had remained behind and was contentedly wandering through an empty CostCo wondering how long the produce would last before I could get around to eating it all…and wondering if the power would stay on. Next thing you know, I’m on a ridge overlooking the city and I see the Hollywood-style wave slam through the city, obliterating everything and…heading right up the side of the mountains where I’m standing. I make a dash down the opposite slope of the ridge hoping the ridge will channel all the water. Nope. The wave comes up behind me, picks me up and hurls me to certain doom. My final thought before I’m slammed into the ground, and presumably killed, is for my loved one. And then I wake up.
I recall, in the dream, watching the city get washed away and thinking “Man, I shouldn’t have left all my gear down there.” Live and learn, I guess.
Definitely a change from the usual zombie dreams.
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Interesting that I had that dream and then today was pointed to a fascinating article about the likelihood of a massive earthquake (and it’s consequences) in this region.
Interesting article. We had a bit of an earthquake here last summer and it underscored that, for the entire time I’ve lived in Montana, I had seriously underestimated the likelihood of seismic-related events. I’ve been thinking about it on and off since then (which is worthless without actually doing any followup) and figure that there are a few things I really need to bump up the priority list…most notably, I need to get the second water heater secured and have flexible couplings installed. I also need to get a couple gas shutoff wrenches and chain one to the gas meter out back. And, of course, reposition a certain amount of gear and supplies someplace where they’ll still be useful and accessible if a house falls on top of them.
ETA: Followup article
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I was going through blog email and discovered a couple email notices that a couple folks very generously sent a few bucks my way. Darn nice of ’em. Next week when the blog has its’ fifteen-year birthday I’ll probably lean on everyone for offerings to the bandwidth gods, but for those who jumped the gun a little early…much thanks.
