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 [1], 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:
On Friday, I had a little unexpected cleanup in our cool food storage room. I discovered a mess when I went down there to get a 10-pound sack of sugar, for mixing hummingbird food. On a 2 ft. x 4 ft. shelf marked “Sweeteners”, I discovered that a 1/2-gallon mason jar full of honey had shattered. This created a huge sticky mess. Thankfully, the honey mess was all contained on one shelf. I felt like W.C. Fields, in the movie “It’s A Gift”. (Closed, On Account of Molasses. See the still photo, above.) It took me a full hour to clean up. I first carefully scooped up the molasses with a large putty knife. That went into a plastic bin, to feed our bees. The broken jar and lid went in the trash, a cardboard jar box and the paper towels that I used to clean the bottoms of the many other containers on the shelf (full of honey, molasses, maple syrup, coconut sugar, et cetera) went into the burn barrel. Thankfully, I had a spare particle board shelf board. (The sticky one went right onto one of our slash piles, to burn next fall.)
Next, I had to tote all of the other jars and jugs from that shelf into their house in laundry baskets, to properly wash their bottoms. Then, return trips to the shop. Those round trips consumed almost another hour. What a mess! And all that rigamarole was for just one broken jar. I’m glad that I have all of our rivet shelves screwed to the room’s plywood walls, and bungee cord retainer straps on the fronts of nearly every shelf. God forbid we ever have a major earthquake here.
This week, we did some more berry picking, gathering Huckleberries, Service Berries, and a few Thimble berries.
I got back to my firewood cutting yesterday. I am now nearly done cross-cutting, splitting, and stacking this year’s self-imposed quota. Yes, we have lots of tarped firewood in reserve, but I like to be sure that I cut, split, and safely stacked under cover enough for a full year, every year. And for the first time this year, I’m adding a separate tarped pile near out outdoor firepit/barbeque area, so that I don’t have to filch any from our household woodshed/piles.
Today I began construction of our “just-in-case” outhouse for the Rawles Ranch. The goal is to have a fully functional outhouse just in case of a grid-down collapse, and failure of our backup power system. It will measure 4 feet x 4 feet x 8 feet tall in the front and 6-feet-6″ tall in the back. I built it on 6×6 treated skids and it already has some massive eye bolts at its base for towing it from place-to place, if need be. It is presently 175 feet away from our house, tucked into the edge of the woods. I’ll provide more details on that project in this column, next week.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
This week had some very warm weather with a high of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit and lows of fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Some local fires developed after the thunderstorms last week. Therefore, we had light smoke roll through most days this week with an increase to moderate smoke on Saturday. I hope that the Forest Service can put out the smaller fires quickly. It is very unpleasant to have the late summer ruined by smoke.
I only went swimming once this week. We were pretty busy this week, and then Jim accidentally over-chlorinated the Redneck Pool and we had to wait for it to dissipate.
The Hummingbirds are still here.
The deep washing of our house and bedding last week took care of the fleas. No one has been bitten since. Thank God. This week we also washed everything once more and vacuumed again, just to be sure.
This week was all about berry picking once again. We went after Hucks, Serviceberries, and Thimbleberries. I’ve also harvested several gallons of our own raspberries. The last batch of Serviceberries, I washed, mashed, and dehydrated into cakes, similar to what the Native Americans would do. I love snacking on those. The Hucks were washed, some went into homemade ice cream from store-bought cream, while the rest were frozen.
From the winnowing of all the berries, we had a lot of smaller, old, dehydrated, moldy, or small hard berries, that I had sorted out from the good plump berries. These discarded berries were taken up into the National Forest and dispersed with hopes of them growing into new plants for the future. That was a three mile hike.
Our sheep are recovering from their ailment. I am so glad about that. We don’t know what they had yet. We should know in about two weeks, after a lab test.
I am reading the book for the first time ever, “Northwest Passage” by Kenneth Roberts. It is semi-fictional and is about the history of America from 1755 and the near culmination of the French and Indian wars up to the Revolutionary war. I haven’t yet finished the book. It’s about a young artist named Langdon Towne who meets and serves in Major Robert Roger’s Rangers during the French and Indian wars. Towne was present as Roger’s scribe during the sacking of the town of St. Francis in Quebec and survived the nearly month long starvation march back to civilization of Number 4 and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There is a lot of history of New England, my birthplace, in this book and it mentions famous historical political and artistic figures. Langdon rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Franklin in London, for example. Also, something really neat for me, a figure with my maiden name appeared predominately in the narrative in the beginning of the story. I’d like to say that I was related, but my forebearers did not arrive to these shores until a hundred years later. So it must have been another branch. There are at least three branches of our name in New England and we’re not related. It has been a good read and I have enjoyed the reading about the descriptions of some of my old stomping grounds.
Our Bible study went back into Ezekiel this week. We read the last four or five chapters starting in Chapter 43. Then we went back over Romans 9, 10, and 11. Israel has not been completely rejected only for a season until the fullness of the gentiles comes in. God’s promises will stand forever, for his name’s sake. He will fulfill his promises to the remnant. Other important scriptures: Hebrews 6:13-20, Luke 1:30-33, Jeremiah 31:31-34, Galatians 3:6-12, Deuteronomy 21:22–23, Galatians 3:13-29, Psalm 58:3, John 3:18.
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.