Depression x 2

In the couple of weeks since I have written a blog, several things have happened. The rate of foreclosures is still going up and the stock market has been very volatile. As I write this on the fourteenth of August the stock market closed today over two-hundred points lower for the day. Mattel, the countries largest toy company announced that it is making the second major recall of toys in the last two weeks. All of these toys are manufactured in China. Add these toys to the toothpaste, fish, pet food and other Chinese made items that have been recalled and you have some major companies taking a beating. They should have been smarter than to put all their eggs in one Chinese basket, so I cannot be to sorry for them. One thing I would like to advise all of you and that is to buy American as much as possible. I realize that it is virtually impossible to buy everything made in the USA, but many things can be had. While the big companies that moved all manufacturing to China may take a beating, I feel that we should all support any company that chose to stay in America. There is an excellent website that lists many American companies that chose to stay here and from whom you can purchase American made products. http://www.devy.com/made_inthe_usa.html. Try it, you just may find what you are looking for.

Now let us get back to what we are to do when things go down. This past weekend I had a chance to practice a couple of my survival skills. We had a bad wind storm which uprooted trees and took the power down for about sixteen hours. It went down in the middle of the night so I did not start getting things going until morning. The first thing I did was move my generator from the garage to the house and start it. I only plugged in the water pump and the refrigerator. I ran the generator for about an hour and then shut it down for an hour. In this way I could get the most out of my gasoline. This is the way I intend to handle a long term or permanent outage. I feel that by doing that I can get from fourteen to twenty hours of water and cooling from the seven gallon gas tank. Running the refrigerator every hour will keep it cool and controlling water usage will take care of that. Our freezer we just did not open. Next I went and brought in my two propane camping stoves. These are both two burner stoves and were the outage long enough they would be needed along with the three burner kerosene stove which I have. The reason for that is that if I believed that it was a permanent or long term outage, we would immediately begin to dry and can all of the perishable food from both the freezer and the refrigerator. As it was we determined it would be short term, so did not have to start that process. We also made sure that the battery radios and TV were all good to go and checked the kerosene in our several lamps and lanterns. We needed kerosene lamps in the bathrooms as they are very dark and I needed to shave and my wife needed to do her hair. All in all the sixteen hours went just about like any other sixteen hours of any normal day. I am more confident now that we are ready. This especially goes for my wife who was not a survivalist until she married me thirteen years ago and this is the first time we have had a actual trial run.

To pick up where we left 0ff last entry, let's look at another way to store things. Take an old refrigerator or freezer and bury it. Measure it, dig a hole that will allow you to lay it on its back and bury it with the door facing up. If you are just going to use it as a storage area, you can leave the door almost at ground level. If you really want to hide it and do not intend to get into it soon, bury it deeper. The way I would do it would be to bury it so that the door is about a foot to and foot and one-half below the surface of the surrounding ground. I would put three two-by-fours in front of the unit and three behind it. These would stick up six inches higher than the door of the refrigerator. I would cover the unit with a six-inch batting of insulation and put a sheet of plywood the exact size for the unit on the two-by-fours. The back of the plywood could be hinged to the three posts in back. Now you have space for six to twelve inches of dirt on top of the plywood, making it pretty hard for someone else to find.

This type of a hidden cache is excellent for anything that does not need air circulation. You can store guns, canned food, and just about anything that is vacuum sealed. Dried food and ammo should be in vacuum sealed bags along with other things such gold, silver or coins. You just need to use some common sense.

This is just one more way to be sure things are same from crooks and probably the government if martial law is declared. More on the subject next time.