Weekly Preppers' Thread

11/9/12 | Kartographer

[Kartographer]

Weekly Preppers'Thread to post progress, good buys, DIY projects, advice and ideas.

[thackney]

Would you (or other Freepers) recommend any books of instruction in basic life skills without modern tools/appliances similar to the Foxfire series?

http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx

For those unfamiliar with FoxFire, Volume 1:

The Foxfire Book

Price: $19.95
This volume, the original anthology, celebrates the home life and creative history of Appalachia, featuring sections on hog dressing, log cabin building, soap making, basket weaving, planting by the signs, preserving foods, making butter, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, and moonshining.

Table of Contents:

“This is the way I was raised up”
Aunt Arie
Wood
Tools and Skills
Building a Log Cabin
Chimney Building
White Oak Splits
Making a Hamper out of White Oak Splits
Making a Basket out of White Oak Splits
An Old Chair Maker Shows How
Rope, Straw, and Feathers are to Sleep on
A Quilt is Something Human
Soapmaking
Cooking on a Fireplace, Dutch Oven, and Wood Stove
Daniel Manous
Mountain Recipes
Preserving Vegetables
Preserving Fruit
Churning Your Own Butter
Slaughtering Hogs
Curing and Smoking Hog
Recipes for Hog
Weather Signs
Planting by the Signs
The Buzzard and the Dog
Home Remedies
Hunting
Dressing and Cooking Wild Animal Foods
Hunting Tales
Snake Lore
Moonshining as a Fine Art
Faith Healing
Hillard Green

[Old Sarge]

Cookie, “combat parking” means backing into a parking space, or parking the car with the nose out. That way, you just stuff the car in forward and gas it.

Nose-in parking can get you trapped by enterprising looters with a vehicle that parks you in...

[thackney]

This is also useful when several cars are trying to quickly leave at the same time. I’ve worked at some oil/gas facilities where this was required as a safety issue.

[listenhillary]

Carla Emery started writing The Encyclopedia of Country Living in 1969 during the back-to-the-land movement of that time. She continued to add content and refine the information over the years, and the book went from a self-published mimeographed document to a book of 928 pages. This 40th Anniversary Edition reflects the most up-to-date resource information and the most personal version of the book that became Carla Emery’s life work. It is the original manual of basic country skills that have proved essential and necessary for people living in the country, the city, and everywhere in between.

The practical advice in this exhaustive reference tool includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more.

This is the essential resource for country living, modern homesteading, growing and preserving foods, and cooking from scratch. Carla Emery’s The Encyclopedia of Country Living contains 1,000,000 words, 2,000+ recipes, and 1,500+ mail-order sources (for everything she tells you how to do, she also tells you where to get the supplies to do it).

This book is so basic, so thorough, so reliable, that it deserves a place in every home.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1570618402/

[thackney]

Thank you. I added that to my purchases today.

[redinIllinois]

“By the 3rd year of the zombie attack, I’ll probably have run out of ammunition and will be a zombie anyway.”

“If you had bacon to offer, you could hire guards with their own ammunition…”

You could even be prepared for Muslim zombies, by using the bacon as ammunition :)

[bgill]

Bookmarked the canned bacon link. Thanks.

This week’s preps - a neighbor was clearing out a shed and gave me a ton of flower pots and a nearly new electric lawnmower. Hey, use the electric mower now and save wear and tear my gas one. I’m not into container gardening but it may come to that if we’re forced to bring such activities inside. I tried to talk to the neighbor into keeping useful things what with the direction the country is headed but as usual it went over his head.

[goosie]

I have tried the Yoder’s Bacon. It is good. I cook it in a non stick pan and there is enough grease (though not much) left to cook eggs and give some flavor. It is very thinly sliced so there are many pieces in the can and I have to freeze some of the can to preserve it.

[ChocChipCookie]

LOL I call that, “Man-style parking”. My husband does that all the time. I suppose I should work on getting better at backing into parking spaces.

[holymoly]

One item to check out is their anti-diarrheal (under the "Quality Plus" brand). For 88 cents you get 12 caplets that contain the SAME medicine as Immodium (Loperamide HCL 2 mg!

Thanks for the tip.

BTW I would also recommend a product similar to Kaopectate.

IIRC Loperamide (Immodium) works by reducing bowel contractions. Thus, if your diarrhea is caused by food poisoning (and the body is trying to rid itself of toxins), the diarrhea may return, after the Immodium wears off. (I've experienced this.)

Koapectate bonds with the stool, thickening it. While it isn't as fast acting as Immodium, the chance of possibly prolonging the diarrhea is much less.

Which is why I keep both in stock.

Also, in a pinch, apple vinegar can help reduce the symptoms of diarrhea. (As I learned, when I once had the runs, was out of immodium/kaopectate, and didn't DARE risk going to the store.)

[Old Sarge]

My dear, would you kindly add me to whatever pinglist you got?

[bt_dooftlook]

If you have a prepper ping list, can you add me to it? Thanks!

[Vermont Lt]

It’s funny. I tell my sister that when the zombies come that she is so ill prepared that she should just walk into the middle of the street and lay down.

[bgill]

See Consumer Reports testing of non-rechargable AA batteries and founding Energizer Ultimate Lithiums lasted the longest:

http://shopping.yahoo.com/news/consumer-reports-tests-aa-batteries.html

[Vermont Lt]

That is a bad idea. If you are so cheap you cannot tip, stay home and use that money to prep. A lot of folks work for tips. Your idea will simply force them out of a job and onto the public dole. They ARE working for God’s sake.

[Kartographer]

I have used it for camping for years! And it’s very good and handy and better yet my KIDS loved it!!!

[Kartographer]

Pasta, tobasco sauces and what ever you find laying out in the road that morning and Dinner is served!

[stuartcr]

I didn’t think zombies were capable of religious beliefs, besides, there probably won’t be any freezers that work so I couldn’t make pork bullets. I suppose I go Lady Gaga on them and wear bacon clothing.

[djf]

Bought a used UPS at Goodwill this week.
Took some cleanup and a new battery, right now it’s plugged into my DSL modem because if my house power goes off, the modem usually stays on.

Added benny! In case of widespread power outage, one good use would be to re-charge cell phones. Not alot of drain from a cell phone charger.

[stuartcr]

On the plus side...zombies don’t really have anything to worry about. All they want to do is eat, and everyone has to die sometime, besides, I doubt they even know that they are zombies. It’s win-win for them, they either are eating or looking for food, and if they get shot in the head, they probably don’t know that either.