THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

[Deleted User]

Thunderstorm and torrential rain here right now.

Sadly, as far as lightening flashes are concerned, it's a case of "Just the one Mrs. Wembley."

emmwri

GreyQueen wrote: »

If it helps, try this for a mental exercise (one of my pals had this IRL); go to your ATM to draw on your wages/ try to use your debit card and find they're not there. Find out shortly afterwards your employer has gone t*ts up and that the law considers you to be a non-proprity creditor. You never ever see the money you earned for that month. Yup, you're now unemployed, with no warning and no redundancy and you're several weeks' away from getting any social benefits, if you're entitled to any at all. With universal credit, you're looking at about 6 weeks with no state support.

How will you eat? Have you got cash outside the banking system you can use to cover your bills? At least 3 months' worth of living expenses is the minimum recommended by financial planners.

Tried this today! The boys are in on it, I've told them we are playing a survival game lol and they think it's all very exciting! They want to see how long we can last before we run out of money! Counted the change we had in the house £8.80 but had to spend £4.44 today on bread, milk, potatoes and cabbage.
For breakfast, DS1 had used all the milk for cereal so DS2 had toasted crust and honey and OH and I had a quorn sausage between us that I found in the freezer, fried red onion and a tin of plum tomatoes.
Lentil soup for lunch using store cupboard stuff plus milk bought earlier, eaten with some pumpkin seed bread rolls I baked using a mix I found in the back of the cupboard. Baked some biscuits from a boxed mix at same time as baked rolls and ate those as snacks. Bread rolls, crisps and fresh pineapple for tea.
I found some bits I need to return to Asda tomorrow which will give me £24 to spend after the refund, I need to think carefully about what to buy to stretch it as far as I can! I need loo roll and washing powder though so I think that is going to eat up a lot of our survival money. Once I've done this exercise, I plan to try prepping properly and then do the exercise again another time and see if I last longer.

GreyQueen

Glad you're having fun with the exercise, emmwri.

Roll it out a bit beyond house-keeping, if you like. IRL, my pal lost a month's earnings. As a single woman. She lost her rent money and her council tax money and her utility account money as well as her grocery spends. She couldn't travel back in time and quickly get another job for that month, it was a dead loss, and she then had several more weeks before she was employed again.

If you need to go to the State for Universal Credit you'll be looking at at least 6 weeks with no financial support whatsoever. Possibly longer.

Have you go enough money to hand, even if it's in savings accounts rather than your purse, to cover those costs? Do you have a rent liability or a mortgage? Are you a sole earner in your household or are you part of a dual-income household? One family I know, with two kids under 10, and both parents working, suffered four redundancies (two each) in a ten year period. If these redundancies had overlapped, they'd've lost their mortgaged home, as it was, as fast as they boot-strapped themselves up again, they got smacked back down.

Re post-SHTF, we would be a salvage culture for several generations, living on the leavings of the industrial age. No one is going to be smelting metals and retting flax for linen, there will be a lot of materiel around to salvage. Clothes and blankets last decades and cooking pots for generations. Sensible people would be searching for these items and stock-piling them for individual and/or community use.

The smart community would be gathering together a library of useful books on how to do these things, and working hard to ensure their youngsters were literate enough to use them, when the need came. The worst disaster would be if literacy were lost, and both our history and the huge bulk of practical knowledge we're transmitting down the generations were to fall silent in chunks of printed paper which no one could use.

Re attitudes, I deal with thousands of strangers each and every year, from persons pushing their century to the under twenties. I don't feel it's a generalisation to say that there are stark differences in attitudes between the generations in terms of their expectations and the level of emotional upset when things do not go smoothly.

Yes, there are exceptions, but the sub-pensioner cohorts, particularly the under-thirties, are very discombolutated if things do not work smoothly (i.e. they might have to wait 1-2 days for a non-essential repair) and there is a misunderstanding of the word 'emergency'. Being slightly-inconvenienced is not to be suffering from an emergency, but the emotional upset and yes, even the disbelief and anger some manifest, makes me concerned about emotional resilience in the face of a crisis.

Of course, we're all essentially like teabags, in that we can't tell how strong we are until we're in hot water, but flying off the handle over trivia doesn't bode well, imo anyway.

jk0

You guys may remember a few months ago, I mentioned that I was only able to get £10 notes from the local cashpoints whatever the sum I asked for.

Last week I used all my spare cash stash to buy a second hand car, and had to take out a further £500 to go with it. I am allowed to withdraw £500 per day, but the machine would only give me £300 in £10 notes, and then £200 in £10 notes when I reinserted my card.

This week I went to take out £200, and received £160 in £10 notes and £40 in fivers!

Very handy for change, but my cash stash is going to need more space. I wonder if that is the idea?

thriftwizard

Re post-SHTF, we would be a salvage culture for several generations, living on the leavings of the industrial age. No one is going to be smelting metals and retting flax for linen, there will be a lot of materiel around to salvage. Clothes and blankets last decades and cooking pots for generations. Sensible people would be searching for these items and stock-piling them for individual and/or community use.

The smart community would be gathering together a library of useful books on how to do these things, and working hard to ensure their youngsters were literate enough to use them, when the need came. The worst disaster would be if literacy were lost, and both our history and the huge bulk of practical knowledge we're transmitting down the generations were to fall silent in chunks of printed paper which no one could use.

Totally agreeing, as one who is already a salvager! However, it's one thing reading about how to, say, card & spin wool. It's quite another thing actually doing it... there's an initial knack to getting going, then it develops into a real skill as you learn to produce the actual yarn you want, none of which can be learnt by anything other than hands-on experience & practice. That's where nutcases like me come in, keeping skills alive that people like to goggle and even laugh at. I absolutely agree that reading (and writing, in fact!) is the most essential skill, which opens up a galaxy of potential, but there is a gap between what your mind can imagine doing and what your fingers can actually do which, for most people, can only be filled by learning how to do it from & alongside people who are already doing it. If that makes sense! Spinning & weaving particularly have a rhythm to them which you almost have to pick up by osmosis; you have to fall into it working alongside others, initially. As almost everyone would have done at a very young age, a couple of centuries ago, and people elsewhere in the world still do.

To put it in gardening terms, you can watch as many programmes & read as many books & magazines as you like, but none of it will help you really get to grips with your own immediate patch, with it's own individual problems & advantages. That feel for the composition of the soil, being able to "read" the weather & tell what's a weed and what isn't when they're only a centimetre high, comes with doing; a gardening calendar or a planting schedule can only guide you.

[Deleted User]

I'm a kinaesthetic learner and I actually NEED to physically do whatever I'm trying to do a minimum of 6 times before my brain picks up the 'how to', even with recipes I have to go back and back to the book until I'm so familiar with them I can do them from memory. Reading is the way to learning and being shown how to by practical 'doing' is the way to retaining skills (at least for me it is!).

emmwri

GreyQueen wrote: »

Glad you're having fun with the exercise, emmwri.

Roll it out a bit beyond house-keeping, if you like. IRL, my pal lost a month's earnings. As a single woman. She lost her rent money and her council tax money and her utility account money as well as her grocery spends. She couldn't travel back in time and quickly get another job for that month, it was a dead loss, and she then had several more weeks before she was employed again.

If you need to go to the State for Universal Credit you'll be looking at at least 6 weeks with no financial support whatsoever. Possibly longer.

Have you go enough money to hand, even if it's in savings accounts rather than your purse, to cover those costs? Do you have a rent liability or a mortgage? Are you a sole earner in your household or are you part of a dual-income household? One family I know, with two kids under 10, and both parents working, suffered four redundancies (two each) in a ten year period. If these redundancies had overlapped, they'd've lost their mortgaged home, as it was, as fast as they boot-strapped themselves up again, they got smacked back down.

How awful for those people GQ, well we wouldn't last 5 minutes if our wages didn't come through or one of us lost our job. We live in our overdraft and sometimes go over that if something unexpected comes up. Hence being on the site, to try and get our debts sorted. The boys think it's a game, but for me I think it's about pushing myself a little to try cooking and eating different combinations of things and making sure I use food already in and not forget it in the back of a cupboard. Well, that and buying things we don't really need. We are not particularly frivolous but even things for pennies add up don't they.
Next thing I need to look at is energy saving measures around the house to cut the bills.
I want to clear our debts and feel we have a bit of a buffer if things did go wrong!

Karmacat

I've been away for a bit (Norfolk! Yay!) Due to go offline for a bit again, laptop needs specialised help - I'll catch up on the rest of the thread on my kindle, but just wanted to chip in ...

mardatha wrote: »

Plus everybody can see when you eat a jellybaby and they all want one.

Ah, pedestals! Terrible things especially when they put jellybabies at risk.

GreyQueen wrote: »

Re post-SHTF, we would be a salvage culture for several generations, living on the leavings of the industrial age. No one is going to be smelting metals and retting flax for linen, there will be a lot of materiel around to salvage. Clothes and blankets last decades and cooking pots for generations. Sensible people would be searching for these items and stock-piling them for individual and/or community use.

The smart community would be gathering together a library of useful books on how to do these things, and working hard to ensure their youngsters were literate enough to use them, when the need came. The worst disaster would be if literacy were lost, and both our history and the huge bulk of practical knowledge we're transmitting down the generations were to fall silent in chunks of printed paper which no one could use.

I've been doing this over the years. Some books, I already had - DIY, gardening, whatnot. But now I have some specialised books, plus first aid, cooking, foraging, all sorts of things. If I fall off my perch, my niece and nephews might need that information, and I hope my brother and sister would be keeping those books as a family asset.

Learning though - yes, seeing and doing is really the way to hardwire the knowledge into your brain. Its why I want to download whatever I can in terms of videos, though thats a new plan.

Of course, we're all essentially like teabags, in that we can't tell how strong we are until we're in hot water, but flying off the handle over trivia doesn't bode well, imo anyway.

I *love* the teabag thing :j

Save

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

fuddle wrote: »

I don't think it's just about not having the actual physical skills right now, I think it's becoming apparent that my generation and younger are losing the wherewithal socially.

Growing up we were all very insular in that families knew each other for generations and there was always someone who knew someone 'who could do that'.

Now, as a society I feel we're chasing work where we can get it, education and opportunity has given us a chance to move elsewhere to the point that has seen a watering down in family ties. We now may not even know our neighbour. Some of us are lucky to get a smile and a hello.

With that comes the issue of trust and that insular instinct of having family, friends and neighbours who can help you out and take on the world has seen us become insular in our approach to life as individuals. I wouldn't say I have the 'I'm alright Jack mentality' but I can see that I have the 'I have to make sure I'm as-alright-as-I-can-be Jack' and do it alone because everyone else has their heads down, looking after themselves.

I have to say that it isn't like that where I live now but only because it's an ageing population who have lived in this smaller place all their lives but further into the town, where I lived last year, it's very different.

[pokes head over parapet]

Over the time I've been working, I've realised that my main strength is making those links - so, because I've spent time wandering over to see them, rather than chucking a badly phrased email in their direction or a snippy phonecall, I know x does something in their spare time and y used to do something else and z started work as a ..... and they've got a positive attitude towards me because I've actually got to know them as a person/do favours for them/etc.

The trouble is that, as the work environment has changed, I'm in a position where people (and yes, they do tend towards the younger half of the spectrum, being 35 and below), particularly where they've sprinted up the greasy pole of management, don't appreciate those skills. They will simply bark instructions, but then get cross because they think somebody is being lazy and talking to another member of staff instead of working - having no concept of that talking is leading to explanations or offers to help to make sure those instructions are followed and achieved properly. Having been told on several occasions to save my 'chat' for breaks, I'm now at the point where I send back emails asking for instructions on how to complete the particular tasks, querying replies at least three times until it either never gets done or they're so sick of questions that they have absolutely no idea how to answer, they leave me alone to go and chat to x, y and z again.


I'm not particularly brilliant at making friends, I suspect I'm rather an acquired taste for some (although the OH claims that everybody he knows absolutely loves me), but I'm really good at finding out what skills people have and what might motivate them/put them in combinations that work well. Got told by one of my old bosses that she loved how diplomatic I could be. She went on to expand on this - I can, apparently, tell somebody to get lost and leave me the hell alone because they are an utter moron with the people skills of Idi Amin in a way that means they think they've just shown me who was boss & feeling that they're so wonderful, smart and clever because they've just told me to do exactly what I wanted to do in the first place, whilst making changes to ensure they never bother me about those things ever again because I'm now running it my way.


Do you think if the SHTF, we'll still need PITAs like me?

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

Mind you, something else has occurred to me today. Well, this minute, actually, which is potentially quite important.

Physical ability. If you ain't got it, you are going to have to either get it, or find somebody else willing to provide it for you.


I've been clearing Ragwort for the last couple of days. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, just glorified flower picking in a meadow, but it involves walking, standing, bending, pulling, lifting and carrying. And avoiding cross bees on tussocky surfaces littered with rabbit holes as you take their nectar source away. If somebody keeps animals, that's a very important job, particularly as Ragwort's most dangerous when browsing material is in short supply or when making hay. If somebody were to become dependent upon livestock, they're going to have to deal with it, and most likely without herbicides whether they like it or not.

Now, whilst I can do some and elicit assistance from others (as per ^^^^^^^ ), it makes sense to be as physically fit and strong as you can be so at the very least, you look as though you're doing your bit, even if it turns out that what you're actually doing is a bit of the physical work and then spending the rest of the time making coffee and talking to people/making them feel appreciated. It's not going full steam ahead and sprinting - Adrenaline will take care of that when necessary, it's the ability to keep going for hours in repetitive tasks at a percentage of full effort, thereby avoiding sudden injury without creating repetitive strains.

This means movements that we don't customarily use in modern life - and muscles that don't see much in the way of work. I can tell that I have a lot of strength, comparatively speaking, in my lower legs, front thighs, the stomach muscles that keep me standing straight and , but I do very little work involving the muscles of my behind/backs of thighs, twisting or that require a good grip strength on both hands.


The way I'd describe the effort I mean to build strength is, rather than leisurely wiping a countertop, getting some cleaning product and scrubbing in circles because it has to be done right now so you can sit down and have a cuppa before it gets cold, not doing it as though you hate the countertops and are trying to wear holes in it so you don't have to clean it ever again.

Whatever that level of effort means for everybody, the relative amount of energy/strength used would mean they see an increase in functional strength. Which must be a good thing.


I think.