Preparing Your Family

A reader recently emailed me and asked about choosing a generator. She in particular wanted to understand the differences in fuel types. So I thought instead of just sending her a reply directly I’d post my response here so everyone benefits!The broad answer is that there are two main thi...

The previous owners left us a gift...So if you’re following the story, you know that my family … well, extended family … has ended up with a slew of land. Honestly speaking it’s more land than we need. So what is the point of all of this, and why did we buy as much as we did?The obv...

If you recall, I was writing the other day about how we started looking for land to park our extended family on.  We were looking high and low, and as you probably know if you’ve done this before, it’s tough to find just the right spot for just the right price.We looked in four or fiv...

When I was growing up my family lived on a small farm in the woods. This was a larger plot of land that had been subdivided between our family, my aunt and uncle’s family, and a third family we all were close to. It was a fantastic way to grow up, and even though we haven’t lived th...

You might manage if you live here...I hate to burst your bubble but you can’t survive alone. Chances are you can’t even survive as a family. This assumes of course that a major event has occurred, something akin to the end of the world for all intents and purposes. If you’re ...

Thanks everyone for being patient with me during my unplanned hiatus. My grandfather passed away after a brief illness and was surrounded by family and friends. Thanks again for all of your thoughts and prayers. I will be returning to my normal daily posting schedule today.We are blessed by th...

Sorry guys but I’ve been spending a bunch of time at the hospital with my grandfather who has fallen terminally ill and will most likely not make it out of the week.  I’ll resume my regular posting schedule when I’m able to.  Your thoughts and prayers for my family would be grea...

Wheat. The cornerstone of life. The centerpiece of any long term food storage solution and something that should be included in everyone’s plans. But do you know how to take care of it, to properly store it, to keep it safe and ready to be consumed?I’ll assume that you’ve rea...

This week’s featured blog is ‘Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest‘ and is a team effort from two guys named Ryan and a third guy named Chad.  This site has a bunch of interesting information and commentary and is a daily read for me.  Go check it out!Here’s the ‘A...

No, not like Chuck Yeager. This has nothing to do with test pilots and airplanes. My question is around your home first aid and trauma kits. Do you know that your kits have what need to be in them or did you just buy them off the shelf somewhere and throw them under the sink for safe keeping?...

I just wanted to throw a quick post out there in addition to my normal morning post to address something I’ve touched on a bit in most of my gear related posts but deserves a post of it’s own.Every Prepper needs to understand the art of redundancy and how to apply it to your planning ...

Extra bonus points if you’ve figured out what important items I didn’t mention in my initial armory post! There’s a couple key things that I left out for a bit of a more in depth talk. They’re things that are unfortunately commonly overlooked or not really thought about ...

Today as the final featured post from The Survival Mom, I want you to go read Is Your Spouse Survival Minded or a Skeptic? and share your thoughts.  She approaches the topic in a clear fashion, though of course from a woman’s point of view.  She has a number of good suggestions on how to co...

Are you ready for this to happen in your front yard?The first drilldown in my post series on the proper contents of a survival armory will address emergency lights.  If you haven’t read it, click here for the summary post.  Read it and come back for the rest!  Great, glad you’re back....

Try to avoid being like this guy!Sorry that today’s featured article is running late … it’s been a busy day at work and I didn’t have time to kick back and write this up!  Anyhow, today I’m featuring a post called Are Preppers Crazy or is it Crazy Not to Prep?In this...

Stress is a killer.  Ask any medical professional and they will tell  you that stress can take years off your life.  Not only that but stress can seriously impact your judgment and decision making abilities.  None of these are particularly healthy things to have around.The hidden secret is that w...

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?Today’s featured post is called Oblivion, the 51st State.  This post is a good look into the mindset of your average person who doesn’t see any reason to prepare.  The Survival Mom talks about an interview she recently did with Newsweek, in particular a qu...

Today I’m going to share with you my thoughts on a book I got for Christmas last year called ‘Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game‘ written by John Mettler.  In short, this is a book that deserves a place on every preppers bookshelf.  Overall it’s one of the best works I...

Today’s featured post is from the Survival Mom and is called Divide and Conquer Your Clutter. It has some great tips on dealing with the clutter and detritus of life.We occasionally suffer from excess clutter as well!  With as many kids as we have things quickly pile up between little rinky...

No, not real zombies.  Despite my obsession with the shambling hordes I don’t actually believe that zombies will show up.  However zombies make a nice drop in replacement for roving gangs, violent thugs, and all sorts of things that you may need to protect yourself from.  And you as a paren...

Read The Survival Mom or this could be you!I’m starting a new weekly series where I take a preparedness or survival oriented blog I read and highlight posts that I particularly like.  I want you, my faithful reader, to be exposed to the other great content that is out there in the preparedn...

I know this is a hot topic because I’ve gotten several emails and a few Twitter messages about ways to guard against the continually eroding dollar.  The thought of ending up with paper money worth no more than the paper that it’s printed on is a bit scary to say the least.As you know...

Yes, you heard me.  Your survival library and all those blogs you read will get you killed.  You can have all the preparedness books and food storage cookbooks and you still won’t survive any type of mid to longer term emergency, or even a short term emergency of significant impact to the t...

Here’s Rudys provocative question of the day.  Are you prepared for all of these scenarios?  Do you have enough food, water, supplies, and everything else you might need to weather the emergency in comfort?  Read these five disaster scenarios and tell me in the comments what you’ve do...

I wrote last week about the historical economic collapse of the Weimar Republic due to hyperinflation.  Today I want to write about another collapse that is more recent but also very different in root cause.  The core of the collapse remains hyperinflation, but in the case if Zimbabwe the causes ...

Today we’ll talk about inflation!  I’m hoping you’ve read my article on deflation and depression and my primer on currency.  If you haven’t read those two posts, go read them and then come back and continue here!In the deflation article we established that deflation is an ...

So I’m not all that up on social networking and whatnot, but I figured I’d join Twitter and actually join Facebook instead of letting an early reader run the fan page (Thanks for doing that, by the way!) …  So, if you want to connect with me there, feel free!Facebook Profile:  h...