Showing posts with label To-Do Lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label To-Do Lists. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

An Emergency Preparedness To-Do List

If you don't have an Emergency Survival To-Do List, maybe it's time to think about writing one up. Figure out what you've done and what you still need to do to prepare for an emergency situation. 


What food have you stockpiled? What do you still need in the way of food for one year?


What about water? 


What about weapons?


What about gathering and storing firewood ahead of time? 


These are all things you need to think about as a Prepper.


This is not the same thing as your Emergency Survival Plan.  Your Emergency Preparedness Plan is what you create first. It's your overall plan of how you and your family and friends plan to survive a catastrophe. 


The To-Do list is what you're going to focus on in the next few months or during this year. For example our To-Do list includes the following:


* Buy more oats. We plan on breakfasts of Oatmeal each day and for a year's worth of such breakfasts we need a specific amount of oats. This year's focus is to reach our goal for enough oats for one year for 6 people. 
* Buy more corn - need to reach our goal of enough for one year for 6 people
* Buy more dried beans - need to reach our goal of enough for one year for 6 people
* Make a manual pump for our drilled well. The time to build this is now, not after a disaster. We need more than one.
* Cut and store firewood. Firewood takes time to cure and it takes time, effort and gas to power a chain saw to cut trees. The time to do this is now
* Make a root cellar. We have a work weekend coming up in July. Both my step-sons are coming up to help me dig out under the mudroom to make a small root cellar. We need it now so that not only is it done and ready but my wife and I can experiment with how best to use it to keep our vegetables and fruits for prolonged periods of time
* Buy more baking powder - this is something my wife has worked out that she needs to bake one Irish Soda Bread loaf for 365 days for 6 adults. 
* Extend the herb garden and rhubarb patch
* Plant squash and pumpkin this year in addition to last year's vegetables (zucchini, onions, peppers)
* Organize our available storage areas and figure out what items need to be kept in each. We have some climate controlled areas but we also have some with extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity so we are starting to create a  list of what items can go where.  I'll go into detail on this in another blog post.


What's on your To-Do list? 





Friday, June 1, 2012

Doomsday Preppers - An Interesting Show

Are any of you watching Doomsday Preppers on TV? There are some good ideas and tips on Emergency Preparedness from some of the preppers. I have to say that some of them come across as total nutcases but that's just my opinion. Others are just regular folks, like you and me, who want to be prepared for any emergency survival situations.

I've been thinking about how the one guy made his own bows out of wood from the forest, and another made his own tomahawks. Both items can be used for hunting food or as weapons for defending your home and emergency food supplies.

One thing I hadn't thought about was cutting and preparing my firewood ahead of time. I've been pretty busy in other areas of emergency preparedness but need to get working on this. I'd like to have something that saws my cut and downed trees into logs a lot faster than me with a chainsaw though!

We've got other items on our To-Do list and my wife has a list in her Food Storage Inventory book of foods she needs to stockpile this year.

A To-Do list is a really helpful tool in preparing for emergency survival. I'll share ours in another post.

My step-son came up and took a one day Trauma Course which he shared with us as best he could afterwards. My other step-son is in the military and he's going to come up this July and teach us some radical first aid techniques that he's learned.  It's important to have a good First Aid kit on hand and to know how to use it. I don't just mean some peroxide and bandaids, I'm talking about being able to treat more serious medical problems. But that's another blog post!