A lot of people are worried and are now "preppers" in one form or another? Are you joining the trend?
I’ve been living a “prepared” lifestyle most of my adult life. Just kind of fell into it living far from stores, preferring home raised food, and having the essentials like generators, chainsaws, etc. anyway because of my business. Covid was a good test of how it works. Didn’t ever HAVE to go anywhere unless I wanted to. Didn’t have to deal with closures, one way aisles, toilet paper panics or any of that. The only real screw up was not having a large multi year supply of canning lids. Fixed that. It’s nice to not have to worry. I highly recommend being prepared. Especially for the most likely “disasters” like losing a job or the power going out for a few days. Then build from there.
I get the impression that "prepping" has been stigmatized in a lot of circles and that's unfortunate because it's probably dissuaded a lot of people from preparing themselves for life's unpleasant surprises, such as being knocked off the electrical grid by an ice storm for 9 days in the middle of winter, as we were in February 2021. There's no shame in "practical prepping", and one thing I've learned over the years is that it's a good idea to have backups for your backups. For example, we have a whole home generator, but we also have a large portable generator that can serve in its place if the whole home generator breaks down or if you want to give it a break (which is a good idea). We also have an alternative source of heat - a wood burning fireplace - to back up our HVAC unit (and portable heaters), as well, and the fireplace throws a lot more heat than any of them. Of course, you also have to have food and water stored and an alternative source of water is always an excellent idea - this year we're going to get an old well on our property back up and running and we're putting a manual pump on it so we don't have to rely on electricity to draw water out of it. Having a good first-aid kit on hand is also a must. Most of this is common sense stuff. My recommendation to newbies is to start with a generator and expand from there.
