It’s a fan­tas­tic evening here in NJ, with the excep­tion of my aller­gies kick­ing up, which reminds me. Time to stock up a few sea­sons worth of Zyrtec or some oth­er anti-hys­timine.  As long as they as stored cor­rect­ly, they should last for sev­er­al years with­out wor­ry­ing they go bad.  I think it is going to be a bad aller­gy sea­son.  They hit me pret­ty hard a few days ago, and as I sit here on my deck, enjoy­ing the evening writ­ing this post, there is cer­tain­ly pollen in the air.  Aller­gies were nev­er a real prep con­sid­er­a­tion until this evening when I was hit with the pollen in my eyes and nose.

I’ve been doing as much read­ing as I can about the econ­o­my, Japan, infla­tion, oil, spend­ing, unrest in the mid­dle east, etc.  It all seems quite cycli­cal at the moment, and one issue does not exclude the oth­er.  It’s quite frankly dis­con­cert­ing and scary.  When is the ham­mer going to drop? Is the ham­mer going to drop? Are the peo­ple pre­dict­ing infla­tion cor­rect?  Who’s pulling the strings, really,and why?  All these ques­tions, and what I am see­ing are say­ing a cou­ple things to me.  Feel free to call me out on it if you like, but I feel like I am indi­rect­ly being told to accel­er­ate my prep­ping, find more ample stor­age, and stock up faster.  I am feel­ing like I need to build a bet­ter “mile­stone plan.”  Mile­stone plan, you ask?  Sure.  Every project, emer­gency, sit­u­a­tion has bumps that are mini changes in the sig­nif­i­cance of the sit­u­a­tion that can make it bet­ter or worse depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion.  In this case, I feel like I need to revis­it Bug Out plans, Bug In plans, the goals, and what the mile­stones in between should be.  Thoughts of the chick­en and egg seem to be in my head, chas­ing each oth­er.

  1. How much more food do I buy?
  2. What kind of foods?
  3. When was the last time I did a food inven­to­ry?
  4. Where do I store it?
  5. Do I place a large online order? Where would I store that?
  6. Do I get a stor­age unit?  Do I want to spend the mon­ey on a stor­age unit?
  7. Do I bring some to a fam­i­ly home that is slat­ed as a fall back/Bug Out Loca­tion?
  8. What oth­er gear do I still need to acquire?
  9. Who else is going to be with me?  Any­one? (the lin­ger­ing ques­tion)
  10. What do I explain to the woman I just start­ed dat­ing if she finds all this new “stuff” in my apart­ment (not that she has been here yet, but try and explain away #10 cans of freeze dried and dehy­drat­ed foods when you want to keep your prep­ping pri­vate for a while).
  11. Is it time to move to a larg­er place with more stor­age space? Do I want to spend the mon­ey to move to a new place with more stor­age and spend more mon­ey every month?
  12. Do I just buy anoth­er mon­th’s sup­ply of food from one of those com­pa­nies that have it in the pack­et and is freeze dried? That is a lit­tle expen­sive.
  13. Do I accel­er­ate buy­ing anoth­er rifle, ammo, and traps for food?
  14. Should I cache some or all of this stuff? How long will it take me to pick out Cache loca­tions? How long would it take me to pre­pare the Cache and the Cache loca­tions while work­ing a demand­ing job?
  15. Do I invest in more vod­ka, beer, com­fort foods, etc. that can be used for barter, fuel, and oth­er pur­pos­es?
  16. Oh, and how the hell much is this all going to cost me if I accel­er­ate the process?

Then ques­tions like this pop into my head:

  1. What would I do if some­thing hap­pened right now?
  2. What would I do if prices on all items spiked in the next 48 hours?
  3. What would I do if sud­den­ly oil import­ing were shut down?
  4. EMP? Nat­ur­al Dis­as­ter (Earth Quake, etc… )?

The list can go on and on and on and does.  One thing is cer­tain, peo­ple would come west even­tu­al­ly.  Anoth­er thing is cer­tain, my preps have a finite end date on them if I were to stay here. Mean­ing, even­tu­al­ly food and water would run out if the water stopped run­ning and food could not get to the gro­cery store.  Not good. I need more seeds.  I need bet­ter plans…  They say most emer­gency sit­u­a­tions have a 72 hour lifes­pan. Look­ing around recent­ly it looks more like a 365+ day life span.  At a min­i­mum 100 times longer than the State of NJ is pre­pared for in an unfore­seen event, man made or nat­ur­al.

One day this week­end is going to be ded­i­cat­ed to preps, re-eval­u­at­ing my Bug Out Bag, again, as well as putting some addi­tion­al plans on paper, and men­tal­ly run­ning through drills in my head.  With luck, I can run some of this by one or two of the oth­er prep­pers I know.  Seems I just ran it by you too… What do you think?  What are your thoughts on the econ­o­my, dis­as­ter, etc.  Please feel free to let me know.

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