Poor Richard's and Mama Donna's Prepping for Plain Folks

  WE WELCOME ALL OUR NEW READERS, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO HAVEN’T PREPPED YET OR MAY HAVE JUST STARTED THINKING ABOUT IT. If you are reading this page for the first time please read our ABOUT section to avoid any confusion. Here’s the short version. If you are looking for babes with guns, camo commandos, zombie hunters, political rants, racial hate ideas, or quasi-religious doomsday stories:   LOOK ELSEWARE!         We put together plain, simple information on how to prep for storms, disasters and other possible threats so the average Ann and Andy can prepare with the least cost in time, space, effort and money. TWO-FERS OR HOW TO PREP BUT NOT LOOK LIKE YOU ARE DOING IT. Mama Donna got us some nice battery powered, remote controlled candles to go in the living and dining rooms. As we use them every night in a decorative way, we buy packs of dollar store batteries for them. Now a visitor might see them and think of them only as a nice...

            With all the new folks discovering us, I thought it would be a good time to introduce Syd the Cynic. I chose Syd because this is the type of time and situation both locally for us and nationwide that he may bring out his comments.             Syd sneers an anything that even sounds like prepping. To him, no storm or situation would even knock you off the grid long enough to be a problem and that individuals shouldn’t try to take care of themselves. They should trust their government to rush to their aid.             Right now, Syd is laughing at anyone that was in the path of the tropical storm and did any kind of prepping. See, he sneers, nothing happened.             Syd is why we stress two ideas, especially to new preppers. First, don’t talk about...

            It’s 7:30 AM and the tropical storm is to the south of us here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. At its current track it will arrive in this area around 2 PM. The only question now is if it will stay on the projected path and be somewhat to the east of us, or will it shift by about 5-10 miles to the west and hit us harder? If it stays on track we will get some wind and rain. If it veers we could get high winds and heavier rain.             The winds are the first question as we have trees around us that could come down on the house. Al we can do about that is pray and be ready with tarps, ropes and saws in case they do.             The most probable effect will be the loss of power. This morning I will make up more bags of ice cubes to go in the freezers and into small foam coolers I have. Of the power goes dow...

The thoughts and prayers of Mama Donna and I go out to everyone caught up in the tropical storm. Nothing we say here should be taken as any kind of “blaming the victim”. There are many, many good reasons why people could not prep in time to face these storm emergencies. We present the following only in hopes it can help others to be ready. A storm like this is what we refer to as a “slow moving train wreck”, that is something you can see coming, as opposed to an earthquake that comes as “A bolt out of the blue” , or with no warning. Also this type of event has an area that gets the direct hit, such as the flooding, and the areas around it that lose various forms of the grid, which we call the RAGE Relative Area of Grid Effects. The cynic will tell you that no amount of prepping could help those whose homes were in the path of the flood. Wrong. Prepping wouldn’t help the house, but it would give the people in it a plan of where to go, how to get there, what to have with them and...

I see by the news that the tropical storm will skirt the east coast and bring drenching rain starting on Wednesday. While the I-95 corridor looks like a safe bet to get a good hit, we here at the foot of the mountain may or may not get a shot depending on a different front holding the storm more to the south and east of us. But since there is a reasonable possibility of the storms hitting us, the question is, what do I do now as a prepper? Actually we don’t have much to do. Our gear and plans are fairly well together for this type of situation.   Here’s how it looks for us. First off, we are too far above the river to be directly affected by flooding, and we have no streams near us. We could get cut off by flash floods covering the roads leading to where we are. High winds could bring down limbs or trees that could damage the house. We have ropes, tarps and saws ready to deal with that if it happens. More likely we’d be somewhat affected by the secondary results as follow...

Despite what the cynics and mainstream media will tell you, most preppers are just plain folks who want to be ready if something comes along to mess up their day. They are not looking to fight zombies or anyone else. They would, however, prefer not to freeze their butts off or have to listen to children crying because it is cold and dark, and there is nothing hot to eat. To help readers out there to see how this works, we will use the hurricane/tropical storm that is hitting Florida to illustrate what happens before, during and ,if necessary, after the storm comes through. The storm has to have at least enough of a creditable prediction of disrupting power and travel to be of concern. And that’s where things start for us, with a creditable prediction by the weather people of a storm of such a level. That’s where we are today. The tropical storm is hitting Florida and will head up the East Coast all week. We here in Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) are expected to see it by Thursd...

WE WELCOME ALL OUR NEW READERS, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO HAVEN’T PREPPED YET OR MAY HAVE JUST STARTED THINKING ABOUT IT. If you are reading this page for the first time please read our ABOUT section to avoid any confusion. Here’s the short version. If you are looking for babes with guns, camo commandos, zombie hunters, political rants, racial hate ideas, or quasi-religious doomsday stories: LOOK ELSEWARE!         We put together plain, simple information on how to prep for storms, disasters and other possible threats so the average Ann and Andy can prepare with the least cost in time, space, effort and money.   BAGS PACKED AND READY TO GO!!!! This edition will be about bags. Whether you call them GO Bags, GOOD ( Get Out of Dodge) Bags, BOB’s (Bug Out Bags) or 3B’s (Bounce Back Bags), their goal is the same. It is to provide you with the “Seven Sisters of Survival” for some period of time to get you to or away from a given point. For thos...