Preparedness for when

Wills106

Just wanted to say Hi to everyone.
I have been a long time lurker for over a year now but thought it was about time I said Hi.

This thread and the Winter Prep ones are where I will live the most as I love Winter and find outdoors survival interesting so SHTF kinda suits really.

I am still looking up rules etc so not sure what sites we can link to. Is it ok to link to ebay sales / Aliexpress etc?

Just that I have bought a new wood gas stove you guys might be interested in!
Basically you shove twigs, pine cones, animal poop in etc. You have these little vents in the stove that super heats the air / unburnt gas which in turn gives you a much more efficient burn and a more complete burn (More heat for same wood basicaly).

Anyway prior to buying this stove I was looking at a specific one here in the UK priced at £49.95, but I was reading through Buscraft forums and found that people have imported their exact own copy of the stoves from China directly. I got mine for £13.24 posted. To give you an idea on how long it took get here I ordered on 8th July and got it this Sat just (26th)

elaine241

Hello all from Wales renound for its dry and sunny weather!!:) Well it has been for the last couple of weeks, all the hay and silage baled and in! Just the straw to go!

The Bee Inspector turned up to inspect my freebie hive. Its good and bad news, the bees don't have any serious notifiable diseases but they do have Veroa mite and a fungal disease that is weakening their ability to produce young bees. The result is a weakened colony with not enough honey stored to get through the winter . I have to get a local bee keeper to bring treatments for the diseases and then feed them about 8 kilos is sugar via sugar water. Then its crossed fingers that they make it through the winter, if they do I can become a fully fledged bee keeper and get about 50lbs of honey! Funny thing is I'm not that keen on it LOL but the oh and kids are!

I hope the predicted awful weather doesn't materialise, we could all do with some predictable summer weather, preferably sunny, I'd even settle for boring! Anyhow I'm well set up for candles and I have been squirreling oil lamps for the last few months ( plus paraffin) , stay safe everyon, Elaine

ALIBOBSY

DD1 has been attending a summer school induction at her new high school and each day we get a little letter covering what they have done that day.

Now one of the teachers has to be a secret prepper as today they had a session where "there has been a major event and the whole of the UK as we know it is wiped out, with only £1200 design a new civillisation for your group of survivors."

Prepper lessons at school cool :T

The whole thing is a fab way for the kids to get to know each other, the school and the teachers so they don't have the overwelming scary first day at big school.

Ali x

lobbyludd

we had a similar "airplane crash on an isolated frozen plateau" exercise when I were a lass. Being 11 we all earnestly decided that the very first thing we'd do is bury the dead in the permafrost - to keep them fresh for eating.

The teachers tried to persuade us that in reality we wouldn't, but we were all adamant.

GreyQueen

lobbyludd wrote: »

we had a similar "airplane crash on an isolated frozen plateau" exercise when I were a lass. Being 11 we all earnestly decided that the very first thing we'd do is bury the dead in the permafrost - to keep them fresh for eating.

The teachers tried to persuade us that in reality we wouldn't, but we were all adamant.

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Kids can worry the carp outta teachers with a certain brutal pragmatism. Still, at least you'd taken food hygiene lessons on board.

I reckon if you went back far enough in history, we're all descended from people who've survived by dining on 'long pig'.

Me, I prefer lasagne, but I have a freshly-slaughtered one of those in the fridge atm.

VJsmum

Hello all

Well, well, what do you know, but I have first hand knowledge

Last week I was in northern Italy and I am writing this from Lake Bled, Slovenia - so slap bang in the middle of that weather warning. Tomorrow I am off to Ljubljana.

The weather in Italy last week was mixed. We were just south of Vicenza / Verona, about 60 - 70 miles from venice. Mostly we had warm sunshine, with rain and some storms in the evening.

But last Saturday. :eek::eek:

DD was flying home from venice. We dropped her at the airport and decided to get a water bus into the centre as we were getting a train this way. The storm hit as we entered the lagoon, and it was like something out of a film. Water was lashing up the front Windows of the boat, visibility was nil (we witnessed a near collision), and thunder and lightning were all around. It was the ride of my life and such a thrill . but really was something to behold. Many on the boat were terrified, but for some strange reason I wasn't. The whole day was torrential downpours, thunder and lightning like I have never seen - one bolt seemed a bit too close for comfort :eek: I do know that if you ever got struck by lightning, you wouldn't know a thing about it - I decided that if I heard and saw it, it hadn't got me :rotfl:

Many flights were delayed / diverted. DD got out two hours late.

The weather here in Slovenia is mixed - sunshine and rain, but no storms, the rain is not torrential. I do know that storms have been forecast for the next few days however. I shall keep you posted.

Oh, and our taxi driver the other day said the summer has been awful - he said "I think we had one good week in June" :cool:

twiglet98

Oh no, DD is off to Sorrento on holiday next week!

Various minor SHTF incidents last week: first, my main computer froze up and when switched back on, will not boot. It's an ex-office machine which has been a spare for several employees, there is no boot CD, and I'll have to put its hard drive into my caddy to read from another computer and copy as much as I can. It runs XP and I use Firefox as a browser, Outlook Express (I know, I know...) for email, and MS Office - Outlook calendar and contacts, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets. I know where to find most of what I'll want to move to the laptop I'm using to type this, but I don't know if my many Firefox bookmarks are saved in an accessible folder somewhere. If anyone has had to do this with Firefox and knows where I'd need to look, I'd be very grateful for some tips!

The day after the computer failed, the combine harvester in the field in front of the house broke the phone cable running across the corner of the field from the telegraph pole out on the lane. BT repaired it within 24 hours, to their credit, and I'm hoping I won't be charged. For my DD to have no broadband was her personal SHTF scenario, but life goes on without tweeting. In fact my neighbour is happy for us to connect to his wi-fi, the cable to his house comes off the next telegraph pole so his wasn't cut off.

The previous week the water board said there was a leak on the main and we MAY be subject to a charge for repairing it. The main comes up the lane just to our cottages but my neighbour happened to remember that there was a temporary military camp in the field out front during the war, and they probably had a water supply - we have a borehole and pump in the garden, and the mains was only put on to the cottages in the 1960s. The water engineers came and started digging up the road where it was wet. My neighbour told them the main pipe runs under the verge, not under the road. The dug up the road anyway, found no pipe, and then dug up the verge to expose a T junction, a branch leading to the cottages and a branch leading into the field, with a significant leak on the field part! We don't expect to be charged for that repair as we now have photographic proof that the leak was not on our pipe.

I keep 50 litres or so in the house anyway, a 45 litre Aquaroll, four rainwater butts and a 'clean' butt into which I empty the indoor water bottles when I rinse and refill them on rotation. DD and I can shower elsewhere if necessary but with poultry and livestock it's an awful prospect to be without water for any length of time. I don't think driving the ducks down to the village pond is beyond the realms of possibility though!

Having had issues with two of the utilities, I quipped that the electricity would be next. Sure enough, on Friday a notice was dropped through the door saying our power will be off between 0900 and 1700 this Thursday as they are carrying out essential maintenance. The chest freezer is old and the seal is poor, the lid is weighted down with 5 litre bottles. The fridge-freezer in the kitchen is also over 20 years old and struggles anyway in hot weather. I am freezing some 2 litre bottles of water to put in the fridges for the day and wonder if a layer of bubble wrap under the lid of the chest freezer would help protect its contents, the usual mix of meat (mince, chops and joints, and pet food), fish (whole salmon and trout, plus cod fillets), masses of last year's home grown fruit and vegetables, plus bread and milk. Should I leave the whole fish and joints at the bottom, or put them at the top as they'd defrost slower than bags of prepped fruit and vegetables? I know if the doors aren't opened it should all be fine just for a day, hopefully it won't be quite so hot!

GreyQueen

VJsmum wrote: »

The weather here in Slovenia is mixed - sunshine and rain, but no storms, the rain is not torrential. I do know that storms have been forecast for the next few days however. I shall keep you posted.

Oh, and our taxi driver the other day said the summer has been awful - he said "I think we had one good week in June" :cool:

Oooh, envy, envy, I went to Sloevenia a few years ago, staying near Lake Bohinj and toddling around in the mountains. Lovely country. We met some Austrians who come across the border for holibobs because, as they phrased it It's just like Austria but 30 % cheaper and the beer is good. I'd highly-recommend it but we were very lucky with the weather and it was glorious in June.

Weather here in southern England is gorgeous and long may it continue.

greenbee

It's sunny in Warsaw at the moment too :-)

2tonsils

LATEST UPDATES PEEPS Becoming Much More Unsettled for Most - Rest of the Week / weekend.
Irl / N. Irl - http://wp.me/p3nqlE-1ou
Eng, Scot. & Wales - http://wp.me/p3nqlE-1oE
Not looking good on the weather front but I guess we can't moan. We've been spoilt really again this summer, compared to previous summer's last year and this year have been really good. As the saying goes all good thing's must come to a end lol.....let's just hope it's a short lived ending

Report by reality weather. I will post the updates as I get them