Still running air filters

I’ve been running a couple air filters in my house. There’s plenty of pollen in the air and we also have a woodsy hint of burning Canadian forest. The filters help quite a bit. 

They would take some modification to be useful during a radioactive fallout event. The idea is to flood a room or a house with clean filtered air. The trick is to have the indoor space at a higher air pressure than the outside. 

It’s similar to the way self contained breathing apparatus works in the Fire Service. The old ones worked like a scuba mask. As you drew in breath a diaphragm would trip a valve allowing air to flow from the tank. The downside: if the mask did not fit perfectly you could draw in toxic smoke through the gaps. The newer ones kinda work like that but with one extra feature. The mask is under a constant pressure, like a cpap, so that any gaps in the mask fit would cause air to blow out the gaps. Sure beats sucking in nasty stuff.

So here your room or house is like the inside of the firefighter’s mask. It’s at a higher pressure than the outside. Any gaps or cracks in the room would blow the radioactive particles out. If your structure is close to air tight a simple one way valve would exhaust the stale air allowing it to be replaced with fresh. 

Back in the 70’s there were some pretty simple designs for air filters. One used toilet paper rolls, big metal juice cans and a fan. 

Of course, the trick is to some way to power your air filter, which is a whole ‘nother subject.

-Sixbears

Bunkers of the rich and famous

Sales of luxury doomsday bunkers are up. One of the big trends is to turn decommissioned missile silos into hideaways for the rich and famous. Interesting how those who’ve screwed things up for the rest of us are buying bolt holes for hard times. Should society collapse they plan on escaping to their bunkers with media rooms, swimming pools and fine wines.

Frankly, I’d rather take my chances on the outside with the radioactive zombies.

Take a number of rich highly entitled people who are used to getting their way. Now cram them all together in an underground bunker. No matter how big it is, it won’t be big enough to contain all those massive egos. Their skill sets and favorite pastimes involve stabbing people in the back to get ahead. Everyone will be striving to be the Alpha Wolf. That’s going to be fun, I’m sure.

Will they have their security people with them? What’s to prevent the elite from being eliminated by their own Praetorian Guard? Just like the Roman Emperors of old, their biggest threat will be very people trusted to protect them.

If they survive the bunker, then what? At some point they plan on returning to the surface. How will that work out? Any idea how the survivors will treat them? They will have to face people who’ve been strong enough and clever enough to survive. (Perhaps ruthless enough?) There are always survivors. How do think that reunion will play out? Are you going to bet on the hardened survivors or the pasty cave dwellers?

What’s to keep the people outside from sealing the exits and plugging the air vents? Maybe the elite should put more effort into fixing the problems they caused than trying to run away from the consequences.

-Sixbears

Everything’s the same

Until it isn’t. People forget how fast their lives can change. One day, everything is fine. The next, disaster strikes. It could be anything: fire, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, injury, layoff, or one day you come home to a note that the wife has run off with the pool boy.

Stuff happens.

In a long enough life, it will happen to you. It will be bad. How you cope with it will have some bearing on how bad.

Those of us who are preppers try and foresee likely disasters. We prepare for those events we think might happen. Often our preps help us in ways we don’t forsee. We might have food and water stored up because we expect blizzards. Instead, we get fall floods that take out the roads and isolate us. No problem, we can still eat and drink. Basic preparedness: food, water, medicine, energy backups, and so on, work in a wide variety of situations.

There are some situations so big that your preps reach their limit. It can be dramatic and affect millions: like the massive tsunami that flattened Sumatra. (you thought I was going to say Japan, right? Current disasters push out earlier ones) It can be personal: suddenly getting laid off from a job you thought secure.

A sudden disaster can wipe out all your preparations. They may be washed out to sea, at the bottom of a sink hole, scattered across the countryside by a tornado, or too radioactive to use. However, time itself may be the enemy. The disaster, while not too hard to deal with at first, goes on way too long. Time eats away at your preps.

I think back to when I got hurt at work. Usually these claims get settled within a year. I can do a year standing on my head. There were some preps in the house. Our living costs weren’t too extravagant. I made my last car payment with my last paycheck. I even had a supplemental insurance for the first year. Year one, from a financial standpoint, was easy. Year two was a bit tougher. The insurance ran out. The car needed repairs. Preps ran out. Still, we got by. Year 3 was bad, really bad. The car died completely. Debt piled up. Legal expenses exhausted my credit. Year four was insane. That’s when the house was scheduled to go up for auction for non-payment of taxes. At the last minute, my case was settled and we kept the house.

Time wears you down. There are a lot of people that have been in bad shape the last few years. In a way, I was lucky. My problems hit in the mid-90s, when there was still a functioning economy. There are people who’ve been in tight financial straights for years. Unlike me, the economy looks to get worse before it gets better. It will never be the way it was. Many people are in the same boat, fighting for dwindling resources.

When the basic underpinnings of your life changes, you need to draw on your most important prep: mental preparation. You need to take a clear headed look at the situation and deal with it. Don’t dwell on how this is not the way things are supposed to be. Don’t complain that life is unfair. Waste no time waiting for the miracle cure. Look at where you and try to find a path to where you want to be. That might require adjusting your wants.

It’s Okay to grieve, maybe even healthy. Take the time you need to honor the fact that the old way is dead. Get it out of your system.

Then roll up your sleeves and get to work.

-Sixbears

My Doomsday is better than your Doomsday

Happy Doomsday! By now most of you have heard about today's scheduled return of Christ. Normally I don't mock other people's beliefs. Today, I think I will. A select handful are supposed to be raptured, taken up into heaven, to avoid the tribulations ahead. Good luck with that. Never mind that the whole rapture thing is on shaky theological grounds in the first place. Never mind that the Bible clearly states that the end will come like "A thief in the night." I'm not going to argue the Bible with people, so don't even start.

Let's talk about some real Doomsdays.

September 11, 2001, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. When that happened, I knew it was the doom of life as we know it. It was the end of the peace and the acceleration of a police state, with the loss of our freedoms.

How about 2005 - 2006, Peak Oil? Conventional liquid fuels are in decline. Energy production in general is in decline. This Doomsday is ongoing.

2008? The financial collapse. It was the doom of the financial system as we know it. Things have been patched together to keep things going, but it's a zombie economy -walking dead.

Now if you live in Japan and your hometown had an earthquake, a tsunami, and is radioactive, that's as doomy as it gets. Plenty of people getting flooded out are experiencing their own doom. If your house was rubbed out by a tornado, that's doom enough for anyone. There are always disasters that are total doom for the people involved. Unless people are personally affected, those things are soon forgotten. Remember the horrible mud slides in Brazil? Didn't think so.

2012? Sure, there will be doom then. Every year Doomsday comes to individuals, families, and communities. There is actually a heightened threat from solar flares. My source isn't the Bible, but astronomy. Theoretically, it could zap a good chunk of the world's electrical grid. Call it the potential Doomsday of our electrical civilization.

Today's doom doesn't impress me all that much, in the grand scheme of things.

Now if you are a true believer, there's not much I can do for you except offer my sympathy. Sunday morning comes and you aren't raptured. Now either your belief was wrong, or you are one of the damned. Either way you look at it, it's going to be uncomfortable. Don't let that be a personal Doomsday for you. Learn to deal with the world we've got, along with the rest of us. That'll take some commitment to actually making things better, since your get out of jail free card apparently isn't working.

-Sixbears

Eating low on the food chain

Food's going up in price, what can you do? Eat low on the food chain. Rice, wheat, and beans, that's your food foundation. The western diet has a lot more meat in it, but it's not necessary for good health. To the basics, add some fat. I'm fond of those big gallon cans of olive oil. Use it on a regular basis and stock rotation keeps it from going bad.

Starches, protein, and fat. That'll keep you going a long time. It's the foundation of many an emergency food storage plan. Many people make the mistake of buying those inexpensive stables and the checking off little box in their emergency preps next to food. Then, on a day to day basis, they never eat that food.

That's a big mistake. Get used to eating your stored food now, before that's all you have. Learn how to make tasty meals from basic ingredients. Save money at the same time. Most of us save things like rice and beans because they store well and are cheap. Don't just store them, eat them.
One of the things you discover is holes in your preps. Take a simple bag of assorted beans sold as a soup mix. It's just a bag of 15 types of beans. Now you could cook them in a pressure cooker or crock pot and make something edible. Add rice, and now it's a bean and rice soup -and also a more complete protein. Fine, but that's still boring as can be. Throw in a can of tomato paste, an onion and a few spices, and then it's a darn yummy meal. It's something that you'd look forward to eating on a regular basis.

Then it occurs to you. Perhaps some tomato ingredients should be stored with your preps. Onions don't keep forever, but dehydrated onions do. If you are from the south, better store up some bottles of your favorite hot sauce. These things might not occur to someone who doesn't make meals from their stored food.

Baking bread from whole wheat berries takes practice. My loaves still come out a bit on the heavy side unless I cut them with a little white flour. (So I keep some in stock) . Pancakes, waffles, bagels, and dinner rolls I've got down cold. I also have all the baking supplies to make a variety of pastry goods. Now it's possible to soak wheat berries overnight and cook them up like porridge. How long do you think it'd take before that got boring? Sure, it'd keep you alive -if you could keep shoveling it down. To me, it's not quite as tasty as wall paper paste. I'd much rather be able to grind up a nice light pastry flour and make a whole wheat cinnamon bun.

The basic ingredients are cheap and store well. The addition of spices and a sprinkling of other foods transform survival food into good eating. It might be low on the food chain, but as long as it's high on taste, so what? I'd much rather have a well prepared beans and rice dish than a poorly prepared steak.

Use what's available. If you have a garden, learn to combine your fresh veggies with your stored food. If nothing else, you could take your basic beans and rice dish, add a bunch of veggies, and roll the whole thing in a wrap. It's easy. Making a soup? That's a great place for those garden veggies, or even wild gathered plants. Edible weeds pop up long before my cultivated plants do. They find a place in my dishes.

Now some people say they don't have the time to cook that way. It seems a man could starve to death waiting for a bag of dried beans to be turned into something edible. It certainly helps if you can plan. If you know you'll be around to cook a meal on Saturday, remember to soak the beans Friday. What? Forget again? No problem. I like to keep a few cans of already cooked black beans around. That way, I can whip a beans and rice dish together in a half hour if I have to. Sure, the beans are a bit more expensive in the can, but still a whole lot cheaper than most everything else.

I like to prepare a pound of beans at a time, cook them, and freeze the remainder in small containers. That way, it's easy to cook something at the last minute.

When times are tight, it's good to be able to eat from your preps. Then when you grocery shop, it's for a lot fewer items as your basic food needs are covered. You shop for things to augment what you've already got. If you do buy meat, you can use a lot less and not feel deprived. Instead of everyone getting a steak, you might buy one and use it in a stir fry.

This is all pretty basic stuff. There are benefits you might not have thought of before. They do weird things to meats these days: meat glue, pink slime, hormones, preservatives, and who knows what else? Now we have radiation to worry about. Radioactive compounds, like many other toxic materials, gets bio accumulated. A plant might have a tiny amount, but that amount gets concentrated when it's fed to an animal. Don't eat the animal and you only get tiny toxin exposure from eating veggies. Better yet, I know all my stored food was harvested before the disasters at the nuke plants in Japan.

Learn to eat low on the food chain. It's low in price and low in toxins.

-Sixbears