*Stepping back and looking at my preps*
My wife bought me a piece of survival equipment for my birthday that I have wanted for a while but never found the time to get. It is an inventory program that allows you to enter your food and other goods into categories and track many aspects of your survival preparations. Although this article is not about this program I will give Food Storage Planner version 5 a big heads up after spending quite a lot of time working with it... I know that MANY Rubicon Members use some version of this software, and Now I know WHY!
The point of this article is what I realized when entering my inventory into the program. I am not as prepared as I thought I was. This is not a thing that is easy for me to admit because I though I was pretty well off. After entering my inventory into the program over the course of several days my wife and I sat down to evaluate what we were missing and what we needed/wanted more of to feel confident in our preps. Let me tell you this. It took us several late nights and a lot of notebook paper. The list of what we are missing seemed to be endless. I kept finding myself wondering how could this be I have been at this for over 8+ years. I have spent a lot of money (no numbers cause the wife would kill me) and time to ensure we had what we will need. I am constantly updating my lists to include things that I find will serve me better or make life more comfortable if TSHTF. So what was I doing wrong for all these years? Was I just wasting my time, with no hope of ever being prepared enough?
We took some time off of working on the project to think it over. About a day later while driving down the road it hit me like a ton of bricks. The thing that was wrong with my preps was me or more specifically that "I" was doing it. The thing that got me to reevaluate and reconsider my preparations was another view on them. It wasn’t that what I was doing previously was wrong and it would have put me light years ahead of the sheeple, but I was not knowledgeable enough about the whole picture to know just what was needed in the day to day lives of my family to make a good list of what was needed on my own. Like most families I know there are certain things that are my job to do and there are certain things that are my wife’s job. I just didn’t have the needed info. So now I had to make a plan to make this right.
What we decided to do next was take our daily tasks and each create lists of what we needed to perform them in good times for a one month period. We then turned our lists over to the other to see if we could catch any items that would be needed to complete these tasks that the other person might have overlooked. Well to say we found some would be a gross understatement to say the least! Two examples of what we found are.
These two things do not seem to be much in of themselves, but when you can each find things that are lacking from a lot of the tasks that you will need to perform then you might be in trouble. Some of the things may seem insignificant on their own but if multiple things relate to one area of your preparations it can put a huge strain on the available resources available after TSHTF. So we are now taking our evaluation even further to ensure that we are ready for the long haul by keeping track of the things that we need to do and will need to do if disaster strikes making our lists and checking them against each others. Hopefully this will get us back up to where we want to be before we need what we have stored! It will also aid us in a disaster to be able to better understand the impact of certain tasks on our supplies so we can decide accordingly.
The final thing that we decided we are going to do each year is to set a weekend (New Years for us) and evaluate our level of preparedness on a large scale level to ensure that this type of hole does not develop again. Although our evaluation was quite humbling. I am glad that we realized the shortcomings while there is time to do something about them.
Brian
www.alpharubicon.com
All materials at this site not otherwise credited are Copyright © 1996 - 2007 Trip Williams. All rights reserved. May be reproduced for personal use only. Use of any material contained herein is subject to stated terms or written permission.