To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both 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 the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
I made a gun show trip last weekend to Butte, Montana. I rented five tables there, where I squeezed in about 80% of my Elk Creek Company inventory. I sent a lot of buyers home happy with their newly-acquired pre-1899 treasures. Not surprisingly, most of my sales at the show were handguns, because all of our pistol and revolver inventory is presently on sale. (That sale ends tonight.)
Just across the aisle from me at the gun show were the tables of Mike Keck, the proprietor of Wilderness Survival Systems. He assembles some top-quality yet reasonably priced field medical kits. I was so impressed with their design that I bought two of them. Mike also stocks Mora knives from Sweden, firestarters, backpacks, compasses, and a variety of other field gear. Take a look at his site, and you’ll see the quality.
Our family had great fun picking huckleberries and serviceberries (saskatoons) in the past week. Because I was traveling, Lily did more picking than I did. Lily will fill you in on the details, in her part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We had a very warm summer’s week, temperatures as high as eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Low Temperatures of fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit. We had a series of two thunderstorms with incredible lightning that dropped a total of a half an inch or water. Our fields and gardens were very thankful for it. After the last round of thunderstorms, Jim and I went back out to sleep in the tent until this new round came through.
The Morning bird chorus ended during this past week. It’s always sad when the birds stop singing their morning chorus during mid-summer. This means that they have raised their young and are preparing to head south. Summer is beginning to wane. I’ve been feeding about fifty hummingbirds during the past three weeks. I expect within the next two weeks they will be heading south. Wildfire season is beginning in our region. This week we had very light smoke haze roll through. May it not come thick here this year. Please Father…We’re supposed to have some more come through this week…
The swimming pool water temperature hit eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit this week. We have been having great swims once or twice a day. I am back into swimming laps full throttle. It feels really good.
This week has been all about berry picking and processing, and deep cleaning.
It seems that the bears, birds, and people have been very ravenous for the Service Berries and Huckleberries. My usual places that I pick Service Berries and huckleberries have been decimated. Thankfully, I found a few other areas that they had not found and thus far have picked nine pounds of them.
Service Berries are one of my favorite berries. They have very many names: Amelanchier also known as shadbush, shadwood or shadblow, serviceberry or sarvisberry (or just sarvis), juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, wild-plum, or chuckley pear.
The Hucks that I usually pick closest to our home were wiped out by a grizzly bear family that was hanging around here three weeks ago. I went up this week to check on them. I wish I had gone up two weeks ago, because they were just all gone. There were no traces of human gathering, so it had to have been the bears.
I picked about four gallons of our Red and Golden raspberries.
We let the beasties graze too long in the orchard this early spring through early summer. They harmed my Black raspberry canes for this year, so we’ll be lucky to get a quart from them this year. Note to self, keep the beasties out of the orchard after April. Also each year our fruit trees alternate between fruitful and not so fruitful years. Last year everything produced wonderfully, this year… no plums, maybe a handful of our tart cherries, no Blueberries. But the apples appear to be doing well.
We have been dealing with pests and illness, thus doing a lot of deep cleaning, this week.
We have had the moths that like to eat wool in the house for years. I had thought that in the past two years that I had put all my wool clothing in zippered plastic bags and that there were none left in the armoire. But since I kept seeing one here and there, I decided to empty out the armor to deep clean it. I had never done that before. I took every stitch of clothing out of it and washed or put them through the dryer to kill eggs and larvae. I took out all shoes and sports equipment and wiped them. I found that I had a wool hat and wool slipper socks and wool slipper shoes that I had forgot about in there. That was the source of the moths. They were pretty well chewed up. I then washed down the whole armoire and it’s drawers and shelves with bleached water, aired it out, then replaced my washed and dried clothes, shoes and sports gear. Now all wool items are out of the armoire and are in sealed bags that I have easy access to. We also put aromatic cedar blocks into the every drawer and shelf in the armoire to ward of clothes eating critters.
Also this week, when Jim was packing up for the gun show, he emptied our bedroom of his inventory, leaving a shelving unit that many of the antique long gun casess hang from. This opened it up for me to organize. Please buy these quality antique guns. We have too many in inventory in our bedroom! 😉 Our bedroom is also Jim’s man cave, I’d like to change that up a bit more. 😉 Jim had a lot of loose packing materials on three shelves. I sorted it all out into plastic bags: bubble wrap, paper, foam sheets, cardboard etc. I packed a total of eleven plastic garbage bags with that stuff. Later, after Jim came home, he moved most of that packing material out to the shop. And because I cleaned it up, Jim found seven more Chilean Mauser rifles from an estate purchase that had been buried under the packing materials that he had misplaced for nearly two years. Over the next couple of weeks, he will be listing them in the Elk Creek Company online catalog. Please check them out. After organizing the packing materials, our whole bedroom received a thorough vacuuming and under the shelving units, too.
Then a couple of days later, three nights in a row, one night out in the tent and two nights back in the house, I was bit by something that caused huge welts. Anyway, the last night we were out in the tent before the latest round of thunderstorms came through, I had let our male kitty into the tent for all of three minutes, while I did a quick organization. Then I took him out when I left. I suspect that he is a flea palace, just now. Well it was that night that I started to get bit while in the tent. The thunderstorms were coming, so the next day we brought everything into the house. Jim put my sleeping bag on our bed, as well as a wool blanket. The next two nights, in the house, I was bit up even more. Suddenly, I suspected fleas. I had thought it might be a new species mosquitoes that I was now reacting to. I am always being bitten by them when out in the garden. But now I suspected fleas, or God forbid, bed bugs! But no one has traveled or stayed in a hotel for months and months. Jim stealth camps in the vehicle during gun shows.
I went on a rampage in our bedroom, stripping the bed, putting everything through the laundry. Then bleaching our bedroom vinyl floor and laying down diatomaceaous earth along the edges and sliding glass doors and door to the hallway. I also vacuumed our whole house and bleached all tile floors in the Main part of the house. The next two nights, for me, thus far, no more bites. However on the very next day, Miss Violet, who lets the cats and dog sleep in her room on her bed, who never in the past had flea bites, a true wonder to me since I am always bit if they’re around, suddenly came to me and showed me her belly which was covered in bites. We immediately stripped her bed and put everything through the laundry, vacuumed her bedroom and bleached her floor.
The animals are banned from her room for the time being. We don’t believe in using pharmaceutical flea stuff on the animals. It is a poison that hurts our animals and us. Anyway, this is flea season and they will just go outside and pick them up immediately again even if I do bathe them. So we will keep them out of our bedrooms and I will keep the house extra clean and periodically bleach the floors and keep diatomaceous earth around the edges. I also usually put pans of soapy water around the house for them to jump into and die in, but currently all the trays are being used for freezing raspberries. So, later.
Sadly our matriarch sixteen year old kitty, went out one night and never came back. I spent eight days looking for her and calling for her to, no avail. I suspect she went off to die. She gave several indications that something wasn’t right and I was too occupied to really take notice. She had been in the house for about three straight weeks. She was sometimes finicky about food, so I somewhat noticed that she wasn’t eating as much at feeding time. She rarely begged, but for a few nights at dinner she was begging me for salmon, specifically, and some beef while I was eating it. The last night, she gave two little cries, I looked at her and asked what was up, she just looked at me and didn’t make another sound. It was night-time and I was heading off to bed. I told her that I loved her and wished her a good night. Miss Violet let the cat out later in the night and she didn’t return. She is the kind of cat that goes semi-feral when she goes out and rarely lets anyone approach her when she is outside, especially in the summertime. But she loves us and usually would come in for meals and to sleeping the house. So I thought she would come back soon. Or that I would at least see her for a bit. But after two days — and now ten days — of not seeing hide nor tail, we think she has passed away. We think If she had not been let out, I might have really noticed something in the AM and done something about it. Sad 🙁 She had a very good life with us. She had been born in our guest room closet about three weeks after Jim and I married. She had been a barn cat for four years before we became friends. She was a real sweetheart.
For the past two weeks, we have also had an illness run through the two sheep flocks. We had to treat with antibiotics to save the flocks. I will talk about that at another time. Suffice it to say, I am no longer milking at all, just now. Just trying to keep two ewes in milk by holding them down for their two nearly grown lambs, each ewe had a bummer. So they can nurse from them.
It has been a summer thus far of one thing after another. Never a dull moment! Spiritual attacks?
On Sunday night I picked up the book from off our shelves and began to reread, “The Silver Chalice” by Thomas B. Costain. It is a classic!
Yesterday, I defrosted and deep-cleaned our kitchen refrigerator-freezer, which is propane.
I have been swimming, bike riding and went for a four mile hike this week. I am also doing sit ups, planks and jumping on the rebounder, not to mention also raking and shoveling out animal domiciles.
I read Revelation again this week, and got back to writing out Isaiah. I finished chapter eight and am working on chapter nine. Our Shabbat Bible Study went over our timeline for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ using the Jubilee cycles, and we went back into studying Ezekiel. Ezekiel is a very important book to understand God’s plan for Israel in these last days. It is for the physical land of Israel and the Israel that is still lost among the nations, not necessarily for the people who call themselves Israel in the land of Israel today, or at least not their leadership who I suspect are not Israel. God will sort it out. He promises to do so in the book of Ezekiel. Very important book. Study it deeply and compare it with Revelation.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
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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.