Video Of Me Doing Prep

Kidding, of course. But awesome, nonetheless. This is EXACTLY how I picture the post-apocalypse to be.

Ordering Guns

I have had for some time a hunting rifle on order, chambered in .308 Winchester. It is a custom job, left handed because I am left handed. It has been almost 90 days since it was ordered, and I am getting antsy.

The same manufacturer makes a .22, left handed, that is very similar in design. Talking to my gun guy, he says they are in stock and would be available in a day or so on placing the order.

I think of my long gun needs as being threefold -- a shotgun for home defense and bird hunting (the Remington 870 Combo Express with both deer and bird barrels was the answer to this need); a hunting rifle chambered in .308 (more than big enough for deer), and a .22 for small game and varmints. If I had infinite money I'd also put into this list a 20 gauge, a rifle chambered in .223, and probably a cheaper AK variant.

The beauty of ordering a .22 from the same manufacturer as my .308 with a very similar design has its advantages -- it will be easy to train my wife on the .22 and have her move up to the .308. I took the same approach with pistols -- her 9mm and my 9mm are similar in design, and both are similar to my .45. Should we take other people into our refuge after the TEOTWAWKI event, it will be easy to train them as well.

This Week's Prep

Did some cleaning out of my cellar. I am in need of doing quite a bit more of this, in order to fit all the prep I have in mind.

Added to my food inventory. This included some canned goods and liquor (barter item, sterilizing agent, and poor man's anesthetic. Plus, who wants to go through the apocalypse sober? If I'm surrounded in my bunker by mutant vampires like Heston in The Omega Man, you can better believe that like him, between bursts of gunfire, I'm going to have a martini or two). I also added some spices (my salt and sugar supplies are growing). I have enough bread flour and peanut butter to last at least 6 months.

I also added to my ammunition, and now have enough 12 gauge ammo that turkey hunting becomes an inevitability.

Also added to my silver hoard, and now have 43 oz. I am considering buying a kit to do my own handloading of ammunition. I figure with the silver supply, I can make a few dozen silver bullets if things turn lycanthropic.

I also rotated some of my stored fuel, putting older stuff (with Sta-bil added, of course) in my gas tank and buying some new gas.

Added some ponchos to my bug-out bag.

I continue to research retreat land; my eventual bugout location will probably be in Northern Vermont, where the wife has family. My own home, though I am doing what I can to make it viable, is in too high a population density area to last for long before I am burned out by Mad Max style biker gangs. Put simply, it would be a simple matter of tossing a Molotov cocktail from the street to my roof to burn me out; my house is pleasant enough for ordinary life, but tactically indefensible against a determined attack. My house also has all kinds of blind spots and dead space; I'd never try to defend in place -- more likely if a gang approaches, I'd just simply beat feet and try to make it to Vermont. Looking at a map, Maine is to me the ultimate New England bugout location -- all that empty land owned by timber companies who would be no more powerful than ghosts after something like an EMP attack. Think of the hunting. Land up there is (by Massachusetts standards) dirt cheap, too. But for now, the plan is Vermont.

Book Review: Eternity Road

Eternity Road, by Jack McDevitt

Eternity Road is not a typical post-apocalyptic novel in that it is not set in the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic event, but rather, like A Canticle for Leibowitz, it is set some hundreds of years in the future after the collapse of civilization (due to plague), and considers the problems of the restoration of science and our civilization. In McDevitt's Illyria, a city state in the Mississippi valley built near what we realize are the ruins of Memphis, the only technology that has been maintained are the guns. Almost all other traces of our civilization have been lost, except for a handful of books (the collapse occurs in the 2070s, so most books were on computer, and the intervening several hundred years of barbarism has meant that few books survived). There is legend of a place called Haven, where numerous books were stored before the collapse. An adventure to find Haven ended in failure -- or so we believe, until a young woman inherits an extremely rare artifact from the only survivor of the quest -- a copy of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This spurs a new quest to find Haven.

The book is a quest story, with a party of adventurers setting out to find Haven. They wander throughout the Midwest, eventually making their way to the Great Lakes and eventually, to the Atlantic. They have some encounters along the way with some surprising artifacts that survived the collapse, and learn a lot about our technology. I won't ruin the story for you.

The book is somewhat anti-religious, and McDevitt does not come to the conclusion that Walter Miller does in Leibowitz, which is that the Catholic church would survive the fall and act as a catalyst to a new civilization (I happen to believe that it would). In this sense, it is "A Canticle for Leibowitz for Atheists". But this did not ruin the story for me -- the problem of reestablishing civilization from a handful of books is a compelling one, and McDevitt has many good insights.

Recommended.

Book Review: The Coming Dark Age

In reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's post-apocalyptic Lucifer's Hammer, I found they made, in their chapter headings, a few references to a hard-to-find book by an Italian computer scientist called Roberto Vacca. I was able to buy an old used copy of it on Amazon, and found it to be a pretty interesting read:


The Coming Dark Age, by Roberto Vacca

The book was written around 1970, and Vacca expressed fears about Western civilization arising out its dependence on highly complex systems in order to function -- electricity, the phone networks, the traffic grid. While Vacca foresaw a collapse coming around 1995, he also saw the rise of computer systems as something that could, at least, temporarily forestall a collapse. And yet, in the long run, adding computers adds another degree of complexity to the equation. Certainly with things like the Y2K scenario, one can envision a problem in the world of highly networked computers could be a cause of the end of civilization as we know it. Vacca's book theorizes that some untoward event of sufficient size, even a "big enough" New York city traffic jam, could cause the end. While the end hasn't come yet, certainly if you look at the effects of an event like 9/11, one could see everything coming to a screeching halt very quickly.

I myself have often worried about the complexity of systems -- I work with computers, and am aware of both a) how fragile they are, and b) how much we depend upon them. It takes little imagination to envision a multi-system collapse today; it takes far more imagination to see the problem in 1970, which Vacca did. Even then, he understood that we are far too dependent on technology.

The book occasionally strays way too far out on speculative limbs -- for instance, he envisions Sweden surviving a general European collapse and having colonial governors in New York and London by 2000 -- but it is, nonetheless, an entertaining read, and Vacca never fails to be interesting. He has one of those relentless minds that pushes toward inevitable conclusions, and he states the problem oh highly complex systems very well. Although his predicted collapse has not occurred, one takes small comfort in looking at the systems problem today, especially considering scenarios like EMP, dirty bombs, or large scale computer viruses which weren't thought of in 1970. We have been very fortunate, indeed.

Faith

I think it is important to have faith in God. But faith does not mean a simple sense that "everything will turn out alright." Faith means that one has to endure and persevere on the path God has set. That that path may not be an easy one is apparent, to a Christian like me, in the path that Christ had to walk. God undoubtedly loved his Son, but Christ's life was full of purpose, and what He had to endure was the most difficult path of all, the via crucis.

God loves us. But that does not mean there might not be crosses in our future. In all my preparations, I sense the hand of God; there is a purpose to all of it that I do not fully understand. It may be that the supplies I put in my basement are never used; it may be that I get hit by a truck tomorrow and all my preparations are meant for someone else. I know I need to prepare for a period of tribulation. I do not know the shape it will take, or if all of this is just a simple exercise by God to teach me the value of things.

I know I need a year of food in my basement, a good water supply, a hunting rifle, and some money put aside. I do not know why I need these things, but as I add to the inventory I feel better. It will either be revealed to me in time, or I will never know why. Maybe a friend or neighbor or relative who sees my well stocked domain will suddenly get the urge to prepare also; maybe I am simply here as an example. The message I hear consistently is "prepare as if you mean it, and pray that you never need it."

I think God's ways are so far above ours that it is pointless to speculate beyond a certain point.

Random Thought

It would be great to have an entire interior room set up as a Faraday cage and to keep a few spare radios and laptops in there.

Lists

Prepping begins with a list. You look at what you need and then look at what you have. Anything you need that you don't have, you put on the list.

When I started building my list, I very quickly got to about 80 items. I realized that I couldn't do it all at once, so I went through the list and prioritized it. I keep my lists in Excel (and then print a copy) for easy maintenance, sorting, etc.

I then budgeted a portion of my pay (roughly 2.5%) and put it in a separate account. Each item on the list gets researched on the web to find the best price and quality I can reasonably afford, and then gets bought in order. As time goes on, I plan to devote more of my pay to prepping, and to saving in gold and silver.

My master list gets updated, and I keep track of all the things that I've bought for prep. It gives me a real sense of accomplishment to see that list of tools, food, and items grow, knowing that I've removed a little bit of insecurity from my life.

Granted, you can't plan for everything. But having a plan gives you a degree of flexibility.