How will I heat my home? Wood, obviously.
How do I provide light and electricity? Candles or kerosene lamps...a solar panel to charge batteries and to power the ventilation fan to exchange the air in your (hopefully) earth-sheltered home.
What do I have to offer others? That won't be a concern for quite awhile, assuming you live that long.
How do I pay for this? Your problem. No time like the present to start planning.
Granpappy has good info:
How to Start Preparing for Hard Times
on a Very Modest Budget:
Part One
http://www.grandpappy.info/hstart.htm
I don’t know if this is possible, but if a person could negotiate with their mortgage-holder to transfer the next two months of mortgage to the end of the mortgage then that might free up some much-needed $$$ to purchase essentials.
ping for later...not much later.
bttt
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If you are just starting and have a limited budget - begin at the beginning. I grocery shop once a week, using a list of the things we need.
But my eyes are open to those other things not on the list.
A canned chicken (expiration 2014), a bag of rice, a gallon of drinking water, a dental repair kit, a pack of band-aids or rubbing alcohol on sale. I toss these extras into my cart. It does not inflate the grocery bill by more than a few dollars.
Do this and soon enough you will have the essentials.
That “little voice” seldom speaks without giving you the time to respond - even minimally.
We’ve kicked the can so far down the road that we are running out of road and the can which was once the size of a soda can is now the size of an oil drum (Try kicking that!)
For those who are just starting or are old hands at prepping you may find my Preparedness Manual helpfull. You can download it at:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf
NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, a extra couple changes of oil and filters for your car, tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Or as the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.
NIV Proverbs 22:3
Lastly this for the doubters and the scoffers.
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger.
Underestimation can be fatal.”
Preppers’ PING!
If you have not read it yet, check out the book Earth Abides by George Stewart.
This book should be a guide to what you can expect as a “new” prepper.
BUMP!
Two things I’ve been thinking about -
black construction trash bags, to put over the windows from the inside so no one can see your lights,
small, portable car starter type battery setups. I have a larger one, and a smaller one, the small one, when fully charged will run a 75 watt florescent (hooked up to a 225 W inverter) for over 12 hours.
Silent lights.
They can then be charged during the day when the generator is running.
Online survival fiction
"The Union Creek Journal - A Chronicle of Survival"
http://unioncreekjournal.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/the-new-normal-november-2-2014/
Sample:
November 2, 2014: The New NormalI’m looking out the window and the first snow of the season is falling. The flakes are nearly as large as the tip of my thumb; they’re slushy and coming down hard and fast. It’s early November and the snow bespeaks the promise of a long, hard winter. The Farmer’s Almanac on my kitchen table suggests as much – a winter colder and wetter than average.
The one thing the Farmer’s Almanac didn’t predict is probably the single-most important thing in our lives these days – the fact that this will be the first winter in modern history where hundreds of thousands or millions of people could literally freeze to death in their homes. I know that may sound strange. Given all of the modern conveniences of the twenty-first century, how in the world could the majority of citizens of the northernUnited Statesbe at risk of freezing to death?
Technically, I suppose it’s not just the citizens of the United States that are at risk. I’m pretty sure that nearly anyone who lives anywhere in the world where the temperatures drop to freezing or below is at risk as well. I have to assume, though, as we really don’t have much contact with the world outside of North America. For that matter, we really don’t have much contact with people, period. Air travel, automotive travel – travel over any significant distance at all – is pretty much out of the question. Electronic communication is all but gone too, with the exception of a few short-wave radios and Ham operators. We’re living in a virtual stone age. The skeletons of modern conveniences are a constant reminder of what used to be. The harsh reality is that the world has devolved to a point on par with the early nineteenth century in many ways.
Ping for later.
Not entirely accurate. One person could equal an entire household.
The author asked about the problem of the definite smell of woodsmoke from his chimney making him a target.
There are a couple of wood burning configurations that minimize the smell and smoke, because they burn the smoke, and leave an exhaust temp at less than 200 degrees.
The “rocket stove” (see permies.com) and the masonry heater (mha-net.org) both use the same principles of high draft, high temperature burns to get huge efficiency out of the wood (low smoke), then the flue gases are routed through heat absorbing material and exits cool.