09:16 – It was 60.7F (16C) when I took Colin out at 0635, mostly clear and breezy.
That link I posted the other day listed several prepping sites I’d never heard of. It’s always interesting to get a different point of view, so I took a quick look at several of the new-to-me sites. Most of them were nothing special, but I did find one that held my interest enough that I jumped around the site looking at different articles.
That site, More Than Just Surviving, is run by a young married couple, Elise and Thomas Xavier. They’re Millennials–she was born in 1989–and they’ve been preppers the entire five years or so that they’ve been together. She comes by it honestly. Her parents and grandparents were serious preppers, so she’s been immersed in prepping as long as she can remember.
At first, I assumed they were US-based, but then I noticed that one of the pictures she’d posted of their LTS pantry had canned goods from Waitrose. UK then. But not just UK. She’s actually from the Toronto, Canada area, where she and Thomas lived until a couple years ago. He’s originally from the UK.
They decided to do a major relocation. I’d have expected them to move west, out to Alberta or BC. Instead, they moved east, to the UK, where they bought a flat in Bournemouth. Talk about frying pan/fire.
They’ve been prepping for years, but I’d still consider them newbies. For example, in one article she reports on how they lived through a major power failure while they were still living in Canada. Electric power was down for five days and four nights, with outside temperatures well below freezing. At one point, it was 25F inside their house.
They were pretty much unprepared for such an event, which seems an odd thing not to be prepared for, given where they were living. They ended up spending days in their neighbors’ garage, which was equipped with a woodstove. At night, they returned to their sub-freezing home to sleep, which again seems odd.
But I’ve read quite a few of their articles, many of which are interesting. The site is worth a visit.
Here’s yet another cheap prepping item you might want to stock: Epsom Salts, at $5.43 for an 8-pound bag.
In a prepping sense, it’s primarily useful as a gentle saline laxative. That 8-pound bag is about 250 doses, at about two cents per dose.
We keep a lot of this in stock because we use it in large amounts in science kits. But, like a lot of the stuff we stock in quantity for science kits (iodine, potassium iodide, antibiotics, etc. etc.) it’s also a very useful prepping item.