To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those –or excerpts thereof — in this column, in the Odds ‘n Sods Column, and in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
I’ve been getting a lot of exercise while traveling. Along with some calisthenics, I’ve been taking bike rides every morning. These have varied between 14 and 21 miles.
Deo Volente, I’ll be back at the Rawles Ranch on July 2nd.
Presently, the folks at Make Ready Arms are helping me create a new version of the Elk Creek Company web site, with our pricing denominated in pre-1965 U.S. silver coinage. I’m taking a bit of my own advice. There will be an option provided for paying in Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) via cash, money order, or check, using a multiplier. The multiplier will start out somewhere near 22.8 times face value. That is based on the current market price of a $1,000 face value bag: $22,800. That makes pre-1965 silver worth 22.8 x face. Thus, an antique gun that I’d price at $650 in FRNs will instead be priced at +/-$28.50 in silver, payable in 1964-or-earlier dimes, quarters, or half-dollars.
I should also mention that anyone who pays in silver dollar coins (Morgan or Peace Silver Dollars) will also receive a special bonus–above and beyond the bonuses that we include with every order. These bonus items have really delighted our customers.
Because of this website re-work, it may soon disappear for a few days. But it should be back up and ready to take your orders around July 1st. Thanks for your patience.
And now, Lily has the news from the ranch…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
This week has been a mixed bag for weather. We had rain and thundershowers, a day in the high eighties and other days clear and sunny in the low seventies to low eighties.
This week for various reasons, I had to run to town(s) three days in a row, therefore not as much gardening took place those days as I would have liked.
Lots of the usual cleaning, cooking, organizing, and laundry took place, as usual.
At the end of the week, I finally, put up the trellis-ing for the tomatoes on the black underlayment that I had laid out over a section of the garden to keep the weeds down, I blow-torched holes and planted over eighty seedlings. Also in that black layment area, I planted seedlings of cantaloupe, spaghetti squash, watermelon, and about eight left-over pepper plants that I didn’t have room for in the greenhouse.
I rototilled the last bed in the garden in which to plant beans and squashes, next week.
I also rototilled between all of the rows of the Main garden to keep the weeds down. I don’t know why I didn’t do this in previous years? It makes weeding so much easier…I had mulched with straw and the weeds grew up through the straw…
I, finally, though much earlier than last year, powerwashed all of the seedling pots and trays that were being stored in my one empty bed in the greenhouse. Once they were cleaned out and put away, that bed–from which I kept taking soil from all spring for my planter pots, bussing trays, and seedlings–was watered turned over and I delivered new composted manure and the well-aged kitchen compost to it and turned it over in preparation to plant more veggies, though I have yet to decide what. The Honeydew Melon or Sweet potatoes, perhaps?
I weeded the cabbage, broccoli, leeks, onions, celery, Delicata squash and zuchinni squash in the Main garden.
I cleaned up some manure in the horse corral.
We live in a river valley where we have an abundance of rocks, that we toss out of the gardens and corrals and they hence line the fences. I even tossed some rocks this week, while weeding. For the past two weeks, I have been collecting these rocks while waiting for water troughs to refill and bringing them to a designated rock pile. This is to clean up the fence lines to make them easier to walk along and there is less of a chance for twisted ankles or injured hooves.
I mowed the paths of the garden early in the week and the girls mowed them at the end of the week. Miss Violet declared that she really likes our non-motorized push mower!
Critter/Vermin story. We have been fighting mosquitoes as per usual for this time of the year. It is so bad in the house, they come in on the cats and sneak in through tiny cracks in the window screens and in through the garage door, that I and Miss Eloise have set up our two-man tents to sleep in at night. I put my tent up on our bed and Miss Eloise is sleeping in hers on the Great room floor since she doesn’t have a lot of space in her bedroom floor and has a bunk bed, therefore there isn’t enough height for the height of a tent. We do have mosquito netting, but there are always a few mozzies that sneak through it somehow. Miss Violet has a blanket blocking the door crack at the floor of her bedroom, and she likes to have a fan blasting in her face at night, which keeps the mosquitoes away from her. So she is fine in her room. I don’t like air blowing on me or the noise fans make when trying to sleep.
We also have had mosquito-killing parties, just before bed, walking through the house with a straw broom and a headlamp, shining it all over the walls, into all the nook and crannies, wall corners of the house and whacking every mosquito we can find. I’ll tell you: We are a sight. You know it’s bad when the kitties sit at the door asking to come in and there is a huge cloud of them buzzing them and they’re constantly flicking their ears.
Once this week, for entertainment, I took the zapper out and sat on the floor of the porch and just zapped away for fifteen minutes. Snap, snap, snap, sizzle pop. Snap snap snap sizzle pop. Mmm, Mmm! The smell of roasted mosquitoes. 😉 Just teasin! I really don’t like that smell and usually hold my breath or cover my nose with my shirt.
Even after fifteen minutes, when I stop for ten seconds, I’d be surrounded again.
At the sound of the zapper, M. our female kitty, gives us one low indignant meow of protest and walks quickly, but deliberately away. She made me laugh the first time, I saw her do that! She doesn’t like it. She isn’t terrified of it, she just doesn’t like it.
Now, not to mention that we still don’t have hot water. Our on-demand water heater cannot be fixed until the end of July, because the plumbers are in such high demand with all of the new influx of people in the region building and fixing up their new homes. Therefore, we bought a traditional water tank heater, and that won’t come until the first week in July. Just in time for when Jim comes home to help install it. Obviously, we’re getting lots of practice heating up water on the kitchen stove for sponge bathing and dishes.
We did try the solar camp shower. The only problem with it is that it’s heavy to hang up and additionally, our guest shower door isn’t up high enough. It’s the only bathroom that has the ability/means in which to hang the heavy bag. Therefore, we have had to squat way low to have the shower work. I could cut the tube much shorter, but in another situation, it might not be long enough… I don’t want to ruin it. It was very awkward to squat. If it weren’t for the mosquitoes, I’d hang it up outside on a tree branch and shower outside…
There is another problem for Jim to fix when he returns home, (That Honey-Do list is getting longer, rapidly. I’m sorry Jim.) It developed this week related to the hot water heater. Jim called and asked me to turn off the propane valve going to the On-Demand water heater. We have two valves. While we talked on the phone, I told Jim that there were two valves, and I turned both off. In the middle of that night, Jim woke up with a start, thinking that I had probably turned off the valve for the gas feed to the propane freezer. He called me first thing in the AM and told me to check. Sure enough, the temperature in the freezer had risen a lot. I turned back on the propane valve to the Propane freezer and Jim talked me through the restarting process of the freezer. But for some reason, it didn’t restart. I tried about six times, during a seventy-two hour time frame. It’s not working and is consistently a few degrees above freezing.
So then, thankfully, the last time I cleaned out our upright electric freezer, I didn’t replace a lot of the food and had moved it to the other three freezers, so it had lots of room to take all of the propane freezer’s meat. I spent a half hour transferring all of the meat to it. Now I just pray that we don’t have a power outage. I should take the time and can up some of this meat, but we like freshly cooked meat from frozen, better than canned, and for me, it’s healthier not to have a lot of high histamine foods. All foods canned have higher histamine levels and are not as nutritious…
Hah! Well, we’re getting lots of practice for a grid down situation. Fun! Fun! Fun!
Honestly, I think YHWH is training us for what is coming very shortly…
Additionally this week, we had a predator come through while Miss Eloise’s chickies were outside during the day, when we were in town for a few hours. That predator took about twelve chickies. There was another attack that night, killing two birds of Miss Violet’s flock in the chicken run. We think it was either a lynx, a bobcat, or coyote, for the daytime raid and something smaller for the nighttime raid? We spent some time shoring up the bottom of the run and the bottom of the Chicken house. The chicken house floor wasn’t the issue for the nocturnal raid. However, there was evidence of some unsuccessful digging there.
Let’s back up for a minute, last week the bull (Bad boy!) lifted and pushed the chicken run around to get at the little bit of grain left there that the chickens hadn’t eaten yet, so the run had small gaps between the bottom of the fencing and the ground. I had fixed it some, but it wasn’t enough, and some critter was able to get in and/or reach it and tear up a chicken two nights in a row and drag it out bit by bit, The only telltale of the loss was the myriads of feathers trailing to our west and after the count one less each morning in the run. I have shored it up even more since then, and I now don’t think anything larger than a weasel can get in.
The bull, needless to say, has wreaked too much havoc around the ranch lately, so he is now confined to his very stout bull pen for a season of time… I don’t know what it is about the summertime when he seems to act up so badly. Maybe it’s because it’s “Summertime and the livin’ is easy” and he gets bored? He can see his girls and is in very close proximity to them, so isn’t complaining about his confinement.
Miss Eloise’s elderly pet rodent passed this week of old age. That was a bit sad!
We also had a different issue that required the vet and medicine this week but I won’t go into those details.
I have continued studying Psalms in Hebrew and am at Psalm 57. I did one Duo-Lingo Greek lesson.
All in all we’ve had a week! But, I’d say that this is just stuff that happens with life and on a ranch. Things break and have to be fixed, and/or we have to adapt to living without it. Sometimes we do things by mistake that causes problems. Animals get sick, old, hurt, some die, some are killed by predators, others are butchered to eat. There are plagues, mosquitoes, and pests to deal with. It’s just life in this sinful fallen world. But YHWH is on His throne! I will trust in Him. And through His son Jesus’ atoning blood, He will redeem all who call on His name and will restore all things that He created and will create a new heaven and a new earth where the redeemed will live with Him in peace and joy and there will be no more sin, no more death, and no more tears. I look forward to that day!
Make sure that you are redeemed in the blood of the Lamb this day, so that you can partake in the new heaven and the new earth. Call on the name of Jesus this day if you don’t know his salvation, get yourself saved in Jesus, so you won’t have to experience the wrath of God His father at the end of this age. That is rapidly approaching and I dare say is here now. The Mark of the Beast is almost here. Witness the COVID Vaccination Passport… Beware of the day when it is required to not just be on your cell phone, but also on your hand or forehead…Read the book of Revelation, it’s only 23 chapters long.
May you all have a very blessed and safe week.
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We want to hear from you.