Ice, sleet, snow and wood

Well, winters here with a vengeance. Yesterday my work closed the office at 3:30 so we could all get home before the worst part of the storm hit...it was almost too late. Traffic was going about 30 MPH or so in a 65 MPH zone, the news stations were reporting more accidents than they said that they could count. So I kicked the ole jeep into 4x4 (doesn't help much on ice, but every little bit helps I reckon. Made it to the homestead after a much longer drive, but got inside, poked up the fire, put some more wood on it, grabbed a cold coke and watched the ice storm come. It was a good evening. As I was watching the news yesterday evening, it showed people standing in lines at the local grocery store, walmart, heck, it even showed a couple of people at kmart it was that bad (LOL). It just struck me as funny that this is what the majority of sheeple feel as "prepping". "Honey, there is an ice storm coming and its starting to come down, I am going to go get prepared". I can't imagine what its going to be like if something real goes down. I can say one thing, I don't want to be within 5 miles of a store when it happens.

Getting the clan together

So over this past weekend, had to make a trip up to Ohio to pick up my wife from visiting some relatives as I stayed behind to keep an eye on the homestead and plugging away at my job.

One of my fellow preppers went with me and we talked about this and that on the way up there, but mainly about prepping. We have 4 total families that are in our prepping group. One live in the same small town that I do, another lives about 10 miles away, and the prepper that went went me lives about 25 miles away. One of the topics that we discussed was some serious plans about where to crash when everything else crashed. The good thing is that all of us live in very small towns (my farm is in the largest town with just over 1000 residents). This makes for some nice options, but all of my group feels that one of our residences is in a much better area to handle things if they end up going really south. This family lives on a small beef farm on about 300 acres, heavily wooded on at least half of it and pretty secluded. Of course when I use the term secluded, most people would probably say it is in the middle of BFE, but around here, that is just the norm.

The only problem is that their house is also the smallest. They can house one extra family, and take care of all the cooking, clothes washing etc, but thats it. Sure, they have plenty of outbuildings that could be converted (not easily) for semi-habitable human occupation, but our goal is the live as well as we can post-schumer, so we are prepping toward that end. So we will be having some work parties out at their place to get some sort of small (we discussed probably 20x20 or so) bunk-house type of structures to house the rest. Now granted, 400 square feet is not the largest place to stay, but if we are forced into this eventuality, we will probably not be taking our knick-knacks, extra couches, end tables, etc, etc. We will be looking to the necessities first, and a few extra's like the big screen to watch dvd's on after the work is done. One of the good things about a small structure like this will be the low requirements for heating and cooling, so there are some upsides.

Our workflow is already laid out with one family responsible mainly for the bulk food purchases, another family responsible for safety and security, one family responsible for power alternatives and one family responsible for medical and various other preparations.

I would urge everyone (anyone) reading this blog, if they haven't done so already, to get a group that they can trust, put down some firm plans, and work the plans.

Happy New Year!

And I am sure that it will be! Why? Because I will ensure that it is. It might not hold everything that I would want it to hold, it will certainly have some disappointments, its share of ups and downs (probably mostly downs), but there is very little that I can do about the situations or the circumstances that I will be faced with, but I can always control how I act when they occur and react to them. I can also control the tasks that I plan and complete as I attempt to mitigate the events that will occur. These tasks are to continue prepping so I can help myself, my family and others that might truly need and want help in desperate times ahead.

I am also committing myself to the few, but very important tasks that I outlines a few weeks ago in this blog. These tasks will be completed.