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:
My broken toe is gradually healing. I’m still hobbling around a bit, but I’m back to ‘light duty” here at the ranch. That included lighting slash piles, and then standing by with a shovel and a 4-gallon water fire extinguisher, as they burned down. That was a fairly easy project, as I can get to most places on the ranch on our UATV quad.
One smaller project was at our greenhouse. I used our air compressor walk-around tank to blow out the last of our shallow water lines. I do that each Autumn in anticipation of sub-freezing weather.
I installed a few replacement curtain rods, for Lily.
I cataloged another shotgun for Elk Creek Company. It is a particularly nice Parker Brothers 12 gauge made in 1891, with two barrel sets including a re-sleeved fluid steel set, that can shoot modern 2-3/4″ shotgun shells!
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
Please forgive me, I am doing a bit of complaining this week about the weather and the shorter day length. I guess as you read this you can read between the lines that the world situation is also playing a role in my struggles.
This week up until today was coldish, cloudy, and rainy. We received an inch and a half of rain. Rain is good. We need it. Our high temperatures were in the high forties and low fifties and were as low as twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at night. Our mountains received more dustings of snow. I’m already struggling with the clouds and shorter daylight days. I enjoy seeing fall colors in the trees, but I don’t enjoy seeing frost dead brown vegetation, and the cold dry feeling on sunny days. I don’t like artificial lighting during daylight hours. The combination of natural light and artificial light, especially on icy clear mornings, before the sun rises over the mountains, somehow irritates me. I like the house either lit up completely by natural light from outside, or completely closed up and artificial light for a short while. But, I also dislike super bright overhead lights at night and during the day. I am doing whatever I can to stay ahead of the feelings of gloom and oppression, I experience in late fall. One help is to eat dinner and get dishes done while it is still light out in the late afternoon.
I don’t like waking up at six in the morning in the pitch dark and having nearly two hours of dark before the light comes.
We went to town three times this week for errands and groceries. I enjoyed getting away from the ranch.
I’m working really hard to keep the house very clean and keeping it minimalistic looking in the Great Room, so I don’t have any clutter to look at. This helps me when I have cabin fever.
We just bought white blackout curtains, finally, for the living room part of the Great Room. Those windows, I don’t think, ever had curtains, only shades at one point. I like seeing out the picture windows, but I also like blocking the view sometimes. I think I like looking at the closed white curtains at night instead of the glass window with black behind it. It’s also nice sometimes not to see the weather outside and to be insulated in the house in a different world, a cozier space.
This week I spent quite a lot of time just walking the ranch and playing frisbee with our “pup”. I am walking early in the AM, midday, afternoon, and after dark at night. It really helps me to be outside. I almost always carry a pistol whenever I step off the porch. The house is too hot with the wood stove going. It quickly dehydrates me. Too much heat feels oppressive to me. It’s hard to regulate it. I open our windows and doors frequently to cool down the house and to let in fresh air, and I drink a lot of water and Switchel.
One of my walks was to meet our neighbor and her daughter on the county road as she walked to our house to get something she needed. She wanted exercise, too and to get out of their house. We met up and walked back to our house. Oh man, we saw a lot of litter along the road. We picked up some, but we didn’t have a bag to put it in. I said that I would get a trash bag and walk back home with her and pick up the trash. Then I would get to walk more and we could visit longer. So while in our home, I gave her what she needed for her kid’s homeschool experiments.
Then I took a trash bag and walked with them back to their home. We picked up all of the trash along one side of our county road. Jim and I usually do this about four times a year, on both sides of the road. It had been about two months since the last time we cleaned up trash along our property line. We filled a medium-sized trash bag with trash on the way to my neighbor’s house. She took the bag and put it her her trash and gave me a new empty plastic bag to fill on my way back home on the other side of the road. Goodness, I filled that bag too. What is it with people throwing their beverage cans outside their windows in National Forests? There were a lot of “Monster” cans, beer, wine chillers, and some soda cans. There were some wrappers of chips and snack foods, too. Also, there were pieces of plastic, exploded rubber tire treads, pieces of metal and an old door. I left the door and a huge piece of exploded tire tread to be picked up by us another time with the vehicle. We live in such a beautiful area that I hate to see the view from the roadside marred by trash. My neighbor’s husband teased me and said I had “Adopted a Highway”. 😉
I milked every day this week and had enough extra to make Jim and Miss Violet a Farmhouse Cheddar cheese wheel.
Jim sawed some big beef leg bones in half I boiled them down and made beef bone broth that I pressure canned. It yielded a dozen quarts thusfar. I also made us a beef bone broth vegetable soup. It was quite yummy. I still have a lot more bones in the freezer to process.
I’ve been chopping kindling. I really enjoy doing this chore. I clean out our wood stove fairly often and dump the ashes in the Main garden.
I’ve been harvesting Fall greens from the Main garden and from the greenhouse for salads this week. They are yummy. I harvested more broccoli this week. They have been growing very slowly since the colder weather set in.
I still need to get my garlic in the ground for next summer.
I’ve continued baking in our wood heating stove this week, in one of our Dutch ovens. At different times of course, I baked: Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Butternut Squash, and raspberry muffin bread. Yum and Fun!
Jim also replaced the broken glow bar igniter in the propane oven on Thursday. He bought two replacements, to be able to keep a spare on hand. (“Two is one…”) So I can go back to using the propane cookstove. Meh. I will still cook in the wood heating stove from time to time.
I cleaned the sheep shed and hen house once. I need to clean the cow shed on Sunday.
I’m still eating Sheep Milk yogurt. I pray every time I eat it. My body seems to be okay. Our current sheep are a meat and wool breed. So I am looking to add a milking breed to our flock which will also add a new color of wool, to our repertoire of wool colors. I spent a lot of time researching dairy sheep this week and contacting breeders. I haven’t had much luck, so far.
I am back to studying Hebrew. I like to listen to these short lessons in the morning. Currently, the teacher is presenting Deuteronomy 26:19. I like to listen to it first thing in the morning then I listen to Ben Davidson of Suspicious Observers. Then I check the news.
On Friday we had a day of sun. In the afternoon, I sat out in the garden and sunbathed, while listening to an Off Grid with Doug and Stacey video.
I’ve also been listening to and reading the Major and Minor prophets. I read Psalms 30-45 this week. I spent quite a bit of time in prayer and petition to our Father in heaven.
He answered one of our prayers for Miss Eloise this week. When I heard about her change/a delay in her plans (that we hope wouldn’t ever come to fruition) I was so relieved that when I got off the phone, I ran outside to our woods to my prayer sanctuary and burst into tears of relief and gratitude to our father who hears our prayers and orchestrates lives for His purposes. Please pray that the Father will lead her into His perfect will and destiny for her life. A destiny that is fitting for a young woman of God that will give Him all the glory in what He created her to be. We are so thankful! Thank You Father in Heaven for your care and mercy towards our daughter to hear you and do your will rather than what she thinks she wants.
Miss Violet has picked up her piano playing, again. It’s really wonderful to listen to her playing while doing chores. She also has taken up walking around the ranch outside for a few hours every day. Sometimes we walk together, but mostly we seem to like walking alone with our own thoughts and prayers.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– 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.