Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

With an air rifle isn't.

:huh: Baffled me now (but then it doesn't take much these days) - I was talking about bow hunting being illegal not air rifles. Mind you, the weekend warrior in full camo gear shooting squirrels up the trees (and missing) near my folks' place was a bit of a worry........:rotfl:

Been gubbling around in the dirt on the allotment and catching up with one of my allotment pals, one not seen for 6 months and had a good ole gossip. Networking is the stuff that makes the world go around.

Well, in addition to chocolate. Went into Liddly and purchased a few more of those passata cartons. I have moved on from the tinned tomato, darlings; they are so last year. The passata are 29p for 500g and the tinned tommies are 31p for 400g. And, being packets, they stand so neatly.

I am quite possibly bonkers but, in addition to looking at best-befores, I find myself assessing packaging for stackability. Inspired by my recently purchased tips and wrinkles book, I am repackaging some cleaning materials into 4 pint milk jugs.

Currently it's just the dry good like soda crystals, which have an annoying habit of setting like bricks in their packaging, but I shall move on to other items, including corralling small fiddly things into milk jugs, trimmed down just above the handle. If the fairly-inevitable undersink leak happens, they'll all be sitting in their little plastic havens. I have a wee strip of leccy tape on each with the contents on.

These trimmed jugs are excellent foraging aids for those of us who rummage in the undergrowth for edibles.

The blackthorn and the wild plums are now flowering in this part of Englandshire. Great time to take a few walks and identify their whereabouts, much easier than looking for them with the fruit on them. It's good to know your surroundings.

2tonsils

The mentions of cross bows on here brought on my tale of Greek logic at its best. The hunting/fishing shops here used to sell a huge range of different cross bows from very expensive ones to special 15 euro ones, big , small , decorated, you name it.

Then when they thought there might be a civilian uprising (lol) they removed them all from sale. Then they changed the law on what weapons you can buy legally here. I will put them in sections according to needs:

Tazer gun, rubber bullet gun, rubber bullets, long bow with arrows, catapult.......no licence or registration needed. You can also buy bird scarer fireworks which are made with dynamite. (Some of the old fishermen still fish using dynamite in a coffee tin- it stuns the fish and they float on the surface to be collected).

Powerful air rifle and hand pistol which fires up to 18 pellets...registration only. Cross between an air rifle and shotgun......registration only. Dum dum pellets that flatten as they hit the target....can be bought everywhere for a couple of euros with no restrictions.

Only weapons like shotguns and semi automatics need a licence....and the huge hunting knives are sold everywhere but you can't carry one unless you might need to use it....for instance, hunting or fishing.

Oh, you can also have a spear gun which works on compressed air!
You can have a powerful air rifle or gun but scopes are banned as are laser range finders, although many people fasten on a laser pointer with a bit of tape. You are not allowed to use a sight unless it is the traditional kind. You can carry a gun without a case slung over your shoulder by a strap and no one will bat an eyelid.

It makes you wonder why they bothered to restrict cross bows when you have so many other options....

GreyQueen

Hey, 2tonsils, are Corfu's roadsigns full of bullet holes like they are in the mountains of Crete?

I was talking to a Dutch guy who was working the season there a few years ago. He was invited up into the mountains by a local feller to play around with some guns, for fun. He was thinking possibly air-rifles.......mebbe a pistol.

The guy opened the boot of his car to reveal a small armoury inc an AK47.:rotfl:Crete's been invaded a lot over the centuries, so I'm not surprised that they have a certain fondness for things which go bang.

2tonsils

Yes, in the winter there are shot gun cartridges everywhere as well. When we went to America we brought back some bullet hole stickers and put them on the car. The Greeks were absolutely fascinated by them...I wish we had brought a suitcase full of them to sell, we would have been rich in no time!

When I went to the gun shop to pick my air rifle, the owner was telling me how powerful the guns were....he picked one up and aimed it and said it would kill a cat at thirty meters.....when I pointed out I wouldn't dream of pointing it at a cat.....he said a politician instead LOL. I noticed that he also sold bullet proof vests in there, should you ever need one.

ginnyknit

we have a stab vest from OH's days in high securty and the damn thing is so heavy (pre keflar days) that he used to come home and hang it over a dining chair and the chair would fall over. I think you would die of exhaustion before you got knifed!

Thank you GQ am off to make a lot of little jugs to line up under the sink with stuff that I dont want to get wet in them - excellent idea And maybe a few in the pantry to corrall the packs of soup that get in the way :j ooh ans my thin packs of stock cubes...off to empty the re-cycling bin of milk bottles....

GreyQueen

ginnyknit wrote: »

we have a stab vest from OH's days in high securty and the damn thing is so heavy (pre keflar days) that he used to come home and hang it over a dining chair and the chair would fall over. I think you would die of exhaustion before you got knifed!

Thank you GQ am off to make a lot of little jugs to line up under the sink with stuff that I dont want to get wet in them - excellent idea And maybe a few in the pantry to corrall the packs of soup that get in the way :j ooh ans my thin packs of stock cubes...off to empty the re-cycling bin of milk bottles....

A tip shared is twice as pleasurable.

I have cut down 4 pinters in the wall cupboard holding various bits and bobs which otherwise wander all over; sachets of custard powder, stock cubes (one each for vegetable, chicken and beef) and one for the tommie puree tubes.

I am itching to get my hands on more of them and really sort out the undersink area. I book a lot of repairs on council houses and leaks under the sink are commonplace. Often, they are slow leaks and undetected for some time. And have caused considerable damage to your stuff before you found the problem.

A few months ago, I figured that writing the BB date on the tops of tins would aid me in stock rotation, and for interest I add the purchase date and price and shop, unless its obvious because it is an own-brand.

I went to a stationery dept in a large store and asked for a pen which would write on metal and plastic and got me uniPosca www.posca.com.

Being as I am a saddo, I have to say it's one of my most favouritist pens ever, and writes nicely on plastic milk bottles, too. I have the 0.7 mm black one. I have also just used it to write the expiry date on some paracetamol cartons. It is shown on the carton but in the form of impressed letters which are harder to see than print.

Rotation is critical for a lot of things exc foodstuffs, and its a good idea to develop systems for storing stuff, rotating stuff, and policing stuff. My underbed storage larder is a busy area, as I reload the kitchen cupboards from it, then restock it when a good deal comes up. Tins move over to the kitchen in batches of 6 at a time. I also have a row of cooking oil 1 litre bottles like little soldiers around the sides and back of my base unit saucepan cupboard. They are taken from the left, and added to the end of the queue on the right.

I was thinking about food price inflation today when I was in Liddly. 4-packs of tuna are now £5, same as in Hasda. I stocked up on mine at £3. Likewise 4-packs of Branston baked beans, now £2, but come around periodically at £1 which is when I stock up.

It's these little tricks which help the budget s-t-r-e-t-c-h as well as avoiding that last minute dash to the shops because you forgot some crucial ingredient for that night's supper.

I see preparedness as a form of good housekeeping with knobs on. Whether the crisis is particular to your life, or community wide, being on top of things at the homestead can only help.

Morganarla

Evening all!

Hope you've all enjoyed the good weather! Sadly me and OH have been stuck indoors doing stressful, but very necessary paperwork all day Pretty much all done now though.

We have found a lovely old little cottage in the (relative, compared to the capital city!) countryside which we should be moving into in the next 2-3weeks, WAHOO!!!! It hs a real, open fire like my parents at home, and although I worry about how to maintain it and how much it will cost, oh I am SO looking forward to having an open fire again.

In prep for the move, I got a load of boxes out of storage and started sorting through them and chucking away any crap. I went through the human first aid box, and had to throw awy so much stuff because it was long OOD:( I have made a list of the entire contents (still extensive, joy of being in the medical profession, albeit for the four legged among us..) as well as the expiry dates, so hopefully can keep on top of it. There's some things I need to add to it, particulary thermometers and plasters, so need to make another list for that. I HATE lists!!

The pet first aid box - I left in storage by accident, gah. So I have to do that also.

Have started making up another box of small camping/survival gear, but most of it is still in storage.

Only problem is with new house, very little storage space Guess I will just have to be creative!


GQ - I look for stackability too! Plus weight. Tins or bottles of passata are way too heavy to transport if needed.

EDIT: Home Bargains are doing tuna in oil 4 tins for £2.99 atm. sadly we can onnly go to Home Bargains when oop norf visting me Ma as they don't seem to have them down here, only Family Bargains which seems to be the same kind of idea but not the same and certainly not as cheap...!

Love to all xx

nuatha

daz378 wrote: »

killing wood pigeons for food fine..... but wouldnt it be dangerous to shoot and eat ordinary pigeons, full of disease etc ? and for shooting wildlife isnt it humane to make sure the weapon is powerful enough to take the animal out in one go?

I wouldn't eat town pigeon under any circumstances, I shot and eaten wood pigeon (well away from towns) quite often. Mardartha is right, pigeon is highly susceptible to TB (as is rabbit).
The power of the weapon is rarely the guarantee of a clean kill, its the skill of the user, that skill comes with practice and not with being desperately hungry and trying to hunt for the first time.

nuatha

elaine241 wrote: »

Hello all

Well I'm a bit less maudlin today! On the survival issue I have decided that in a SHTF situation we would have very little control over what happened especially if it included a disease. To use the lambing analogly again it is always surprising who survives and who doesnt. For example last night there were two lambs struggling a reasonable strong one and a very weedy triplet whose other two siblings died. The triplet is up and about bouncing round my front room and the other really doesnt look like he will make it. If you were to bet on survival your money would have gone on the stronger male lamb every time.

In any crisis there are those who you'd think wouldn't have a hope who surprise folk and become towers of strength and those who do the opposite. The advantage of prepping being that having thought through possibilities and prepared for some possibilities, you are more likely to be able to get through the initial shock and start improving your chances for survival.
There are situations I have no interest in surviving - though if they come about, I suspect the survival instinct might well kick in and get me through.

I have treated myself to a kindle from Ebay (2nd hand) as I have downloaded loads of prepper free books to my computer and noticed some good reasonably cheap ones on Amazon.

Welcome to the world of the hand portable library.
Quite a few years back I decided for reasons of space used to exchange large parts of my physical library for electronic versions. As I love books and reading, I decided that the reference and general non fiction should be the ones to go. Over the last few years I've been reversing the trend, replacing key reference texts on the bookshelves and moving from physical to electronic versions of my fiction collection - though keeping favourite authors that I can read and reread regularly.
I also bought a solar charger to power the ereaders, I may not even notice the SHTF, due to having my nose in a book

GreyQueen

Nice to see you about again, nuatha, how is Herself? I think of you both from time to time, sending good wishes across the interweb.

I'm about 7 mins' walk from the Central Library, otherwise known as my second home, and spend a lot of time reading. Space being severely limited at the flat, I only keep books which are likely to be referred to again and again.

This has led to a few raised eyebrows over the years, as the bookshelf is all non-fictions and heavily weighted towards practical matters; gardening, outdoorsy stuff, maps, bushcraft, first aid manual, plant identification etc. Just part of my life, I tell people, the other books come and go.

I keep my eyes peeled for good quality books on a variety of subjects suitable for a prepperish life. I wouldn't personally make it more than a few months past as total SHFT event, due to requiring constant medication, but I would do my level best to manage as well as I could for as long as I could. And, if any looters of the preptastic nature came to my flat, they could wander off with a couple of bags of really useful books.:p

I spend some of my copious spare time wandering around the web and have to saythat I have found the most value from Ferfal's blog, http://ferfal.blogspot.co.uk/ For people who've not come across him before, he's an Argentine, now resident in N.Ireland, who writes very intelligently about living through years of a country which went through a total economic meltdown and still hasn't recovered, and what that means for everyday family life (he's a husband and father).

He's fairly scathing about the parts of the blogoshere which advocate rambo-ism/ retreating to some mountain fastness with your beans, bullets and band-aids. I haven't got all the way through his archives yet but am gaining much of interest from the experience.

A lot of what is written by and for North Americans isn't applicable to us here in the UK. The country is too small and too densely-populated, and the less-populous areas are like that for very good reasons; climate, poor soil, remoteness from resources etc etc.

Living slap bang in the centre of a modest-sized city, with a lottie in the 'burbs, is very convenient at the mo. I would have to think seriously about bugging out in the event of a prolonged breakdown in sewage and water services, which would lead to a high probability of disease. Or, if law and order broke down and stayed broken down, and it became too dangerous to stay as a lone female in the middle of town. Otherwise, no to bugging out.

Overall, I think the chief risks to our well-being are likely to be economic; the failure of the fractional reserve banking system, the political will to "do a Cyprus", inflation robbing our money of its spending power, looting of pension funds and similar.

I've seen a steady chip-chip-chipping away of quality of life in the past 25+ years and think that this trend will only accelerate.

elaine, a friend who was crippled up with arhritis from a young age said something to me once which I consider to be very astute; she commented that the people who survive aren't necessarily the strongest or fastest or toughest, the survivors are those who can take the most pain. Once the rubble had stopped bouncing, the survivors would be those who could face a new and unpleasant reality and roll up their sleeves and get on with building a new life under the new circumstances.