The current climate in the United States is jaw dropping. It's amazing how our every day life can turn on a dime. The Corona Virus and the restrictions that came along with it really caught me off guard. Now, we have legitimate protests across the country being co-opted by the extreme left and opportunists to cause havoc that has resulted in the military being activated to back up local law enforcement in multiple cities across the U.S.
The swiftness of the above events have really motivated me to tighten up emergency preparations for my family. I would consider myself a "prepper"; It's one of the main reasons why I live in the country and am working on homesteading. But 2020 has given me that bad feeling in my stomach and I know I need to really tighten the clamp on what I can personally do to take care of my family.
So, that's where I have been the last few days. Taking inventory of my preps.
We bought a new shelf to accommodate more food. It's not the ideal food I would want(i.e canned food), but if we truly had to live off these preparations it would be about calories. Eventually, this food will be rotated with canned goods from the garden and meat off the homestead.
We do have many staples like sugar,flour, salt, dried lagoons, and rice stored in Mylar bags with de-oxidizers, but I have been wanting a better way to store them. My wife and I finally found the gamma lids for buckets at our local Tractor Supply! This will serve as double protection for the staples inside the Mylar but will also keep bags from being ripped when we have to move the food during rotation. I would hate to need a staple and realize it is low quality due to oxygen exposure! The gamma lids will also allow the food that is opened to have a level of protection against the elements because it creates an airtight seal.
A solid inventory was also a goal of mine. It took a few hours to design a spreadsheet and a few more to inventory food goods. The goal is to keep the food rotated and the printed spreadsheet will allow us to track what food we use, which food we need to incorporate more into meals, and how much more food we need to add to reach our ultimate food goal.
I also did something I haven't done in a very very very long time. The weapons were brought out of storage. We have enough weapons and have for a long time but they have been under lock and key. I'm not a big fan of being around them because they give me a lot of flashbacks but I knew I needed to get my wife and son's hands on them to re-familiarize themselves on loading, unloading, malfunctions, and most importantly WEAPON SAFETY.
My son shoots with his Pa quite a bit but he doesn't have much experience with the weapons in storage. My wife hasn't shot in a few years and I knew she really needed some hands on time.
It was a good time to take inventory of ammo but I knew there was something else I needed to do for the rifles and shotguns...add a shell holder to the butt stocks. It wouldn't be helpful to need one in case of emergency and fiddling with finding a round in an ammo box. That's a lot of wasted time and this should help solve that. Ultimately, it is my hope and prayer that these would only be needed for hunting in an unimaginable time in history.
I don't feel like I am being overboard. I like to think of this as insurance. Hopefully, it's insurance I will never need. This year has made me realize how quickly our comfortable American way of life can change faster than I ever thought imaginable. Ultimately, we want to obtain a level of self sufficiency by living off the land. We are actively working on that mid to long term goal as a family. However, I do need to focus on the current and now feel a lot better about where we are at the moment and will continue to improve.
It gives us a teaching to be prepare for more worst. Nothing is granted for sure.
Hopefully a positive outcome of the COVID-19 situation is that people begin to realize that supply chain disruption is a real phenomenon, and that it can happen for a multitude of reasons. Being prepared is not paranoia. We can’t all have a homestead, but, for a few hundred dollars, we can have several tubs of shelf-stable foods and the means of producing clean water. It doesn’t necessarily mean being prepared for years of living in a bunker. One to three months worth of food for your family can either wholly supply or supplement the food available to you.
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Awesome! Thanks a bunch.