"Preppers"? are you one?

dont worry. I'll do my homework.

 

In that case, I'm a prepper.

I agree. I'm not interested in living in a wold of sh!t, but I'll do what I can to to ensure my kids do. I guess there is some selfishness in that.

 

Same here, but it would be nice to be able to make it until the dust settles and then decide whether it's worth it to stick around.

 

well judging is calling me out for not being able to to 'make it in your circle' when you know none of my credentials. not about to get into it with you, but you listed some key readiness items and IMO you are certainly prepared for events that you may unwillingly find yourself in. norky that goes for you too. its not to be taken as a bad thing. the chicken little types are extreme preppers, and i tihnk most of us here are more down to earth than that. 'prepper" i view as a general term and its not just people with spider holes and surplus food items. im sure our grandparents were preppers long before that was a word. you have a plan and you can adapt. its amazing how society can break down when creature comforts are taken away. here, after superstrom sandy, people who are accustomed to always having lights go on when you flick the switch where without power for an extended period of time. after a few days people where stealing generators by pulling up a running lawnmower and rolling the geny away. now the clowns you see on TV are a bunch of putzes whos paranoia has let them slip away from reality. the reason most of us came here was wood burning, correct? thats a part of self-sufficency in itself. whats the 3-year plan? 5-year? in addition, i see survivalists and more attributes of like-minded people that have a heightened sense of situational aweness. i have an article somewhere about not being paranoid, but being ready for the unknown or unpredictable or something like that. i will have to dig it up to share.

 

Well after reading some more, I guess my idea of prepping is;

moving to an island in the Caribbean Sea called St Croix. If the SHTF no one will want the little island anyway. plenty of seafood too.

 

No. That's the neighborhood where the asteroid is going to hit creating the big tsunami that wipes out the east coast. (I saw it in a movie AND read it on the Internet. So it's got to be true.)

 

I think i missed that movie, wonder if the wave will make it this far into land. That would be cool to have an ocean front view and mountains behind us after this big event.

 

I saw that movie. Since true, I'll only have to hike about 20 miles to get to the beach. Always wanted to try surfing......
"Golden Colorado La Playa", sounds catchy .

 

Agreed. And they'll come empty handed, if at all. Ski season traffic is bad enough, just imagine if Denver emptied out and headed for the hills. It'd take them 3-4 days to hike to my place if not longer. Anything they started out with would be gone by then.

 

I have a 4 year old propane stove in the basement. I do my canning down there so all the heat and humidity doesn't send the AC into overdrive. I can light the burners with a match but not the oven or broiler. There is some sort of sensor in there that needs to heat up before the stove allows the gas to start flowing. I haven't figured out how to get around that one.

Prepper?

To a degree. Like someone else said, we live in the sticks. The closest store is 20 minutes away. The basement is well stocked. There's enough down there to keep us going for quite a while. I like watching the news the day before a snowstorm. I see people running around and clearing the shelves of bread, milk and eggs and know that I won't ever have to deal with that nonsense. I keep a small 20 gallon drum of gas for the genny if it's needed. Every summer I dump it in one of the cars and refill it with fresh.

Solar landscape lights work great for emergency lighting. Folks will throw them away when they stop working. They don't realize that the only thing wrong with them is the battery has exhausted it's life of charge/discharge cycles. Pop a new battery in there and there ready to go to work again. Some of the newer lights are actually quite bright; enough that you can read with them.

But unlike those TV shows, I will never have an underground bunker and I'll never go off grid; unless it's not by my choosing.

But I do believe the possibility of economic collapse is very real. We have an $18 trillion debt that can never be paid off. I can envision The Fed deciding to revalue the currency like the government did in Venezuela some years back and that is going to pi$$ off a lot of people, possibly to the point of civil unrest.

So I like having some "extra" around; just in case.

 

I occasionally troll dead threads and see if I get any bites....this one hooked me, especially with the last statement with Venezuela. Not to go into politics and religion-PLEASE! With what you see going on in the world-country-your life since this thread went dark almost 4 years ago, have you maintained/added to/backed off/or are new to prepping? Being out in Dakota Territory and the nearest chain-mart is 45 miles one way for me, by necessity we tend to bulk buy and know if we don't have it we can't just run up the street and have everything at any time of day in minutes. I'm not exactly a prepper but a plan aheader.

 

Same. We downsized the pantry last year (needed the room for a new furnace), but still keep it stocked.
Nearest Wally/Meijer is about 45 minutes away, but we have a local grocery less than a mile from us. One of the bars in town has the best pizza anywhere, so we're gooder.
A lot of stuff going on now has also gone on in the past. Seems we as humans still can't figure out how to not hurt one another over some stupid/perceived little thing that probably happened eons ago.
Only the technology used has changed.

 

I can relate to this sentiment. Anyone old enough to have lived through a couple economic downturns, especially the last one, should have learned enough to be prepared for the next one that is sure to come. For me being prepared means growing, catching, hunting, and preserving as much our food as possible. I figure this is as close to printing money that I will ever get. We buy in bulk too, for things we use a lot. We also try to stay fit and work hard at our jobs and save as much as we can.

 

When we lived in a community that was an hour from any store, I used to do a lot of canning and freezing. We didn't have a woodstove because we were in a double wide trailer and the insurance was sky high but when we went with out power for a couple of days campinspecter did a "red green" job on a kitchen trash burner we had in a small cabin and made it fit in the family room beside our sliding door. Since moving to "town", we have a genny for the heating system, some food stocked away to last a couple of weeks and a few bottles of propane for the camp stove. We have had more power outages here in town that we did in the other communities.

 

We have a mini-pantry. Pretty much canned goods although there is about 5 pounds of rice in there. Powdered milk, instant mashed potato, that sort of thing. I take it all out every year or two to get the old stuff to the front to use it and replace it before it gets too old and there's about 6 milk crates of stuff. We could probably hole up for about two weeks before we'd have to start stripping bark off of trees to stem starvation. Or walk or drive to the store.

 

Preppier no. I did buy a surplus tank though, I will take whatever I need.

Unless you happen to own an A-10 warthog

 

Just read this thread.. I don't see myself as a prepper.. I see myself as a boy scout. Be prepared!!
MRE yes I got them, can I hunt .. Sure.. My propane stove works with a match.. Went 21 days without power last thanksgiving.. I am more prepared if it happens again!! Living without the FHC that would be bad!!

 

Prepper, no... but if the power goes out, I won't need to go looting to survive through the end of the month.

 

I have water purification tablets so we could drink the swimming pool, and iodine tablets in case of fallout. Some n95 facemasks in case of pandemic. I once ran across an interesting article about the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One thing that stuck was, you can trade booze for almost anything else you need. As far as food goes, not much. Some Tang for Vitamin C. Lots of salsa. Oh well.

 

Yes, I think the preppers are those who are confident that a specific thing will cause the collapse. They all have their own ideas of what it will be, and they obsess over the certainty of it. It’s good business. I chatted with a retailer SHOT who added prepper items to his business, and t expanded like a field afire

Seems like most of those who replied here, are just judicious in the event they will need to fend for a while. Which can happen, though most likely it will be from a weather event.