The Survival Weekly Dispatch - Volume 10, Issue 43
Winter is coming
Hey folks, thanks for checking out the newsletter this week. Also, thank you to all who checked in with me last week about my surgery. But it was rescheduled at the last minute. I’d developed a head cold and didn’t feel comfortable going into a procedure that was going to leave me with an incision in my abdomen when I’d be coughing and sneezing for a while. So, we’ll be doing it at the end of the month.
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I’m thrilled to announce that we’re adding two new magazines to the lineup for 2024! The first one is tentatively titled Natural Disasters and will talk about how to prepare for things like hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and floods. That issue will be out in Spring 2024.
The other is our first annual Gear Guide issue, covering everything from shelter to knives, tools to clothing. The Gear Guide will be out in Fall 2024, just in time to add things to your holiday wish list.
Natural Disasters will fall under the Prepper Survival Guide banner and the Gear Guide will be under Backwoods Survival Guide.
Our writers are already at work on their articles for these issues. I’ve seen some of the articles so far, and they’re pretty damn good, I have to say.
[Note – these are special editions and will not be included with any subscriptions.]
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Prepper Tip -- Should the worst come to pass someday, we might have to forage for supplies in the urban and suburban landscape. Here’s something to keep in mind as you do so. Most large businesses, as well as schools and factories, will have some sort of janitorial supply closet somewhere on the property.
It might take a little searching to find it, but it’ll be worth the trouble. Inside, you’ll find all kinds of goodies, such as:
· Toilet paper
· Paper towel
· Cleaning supplies
· Tools
· Rags
If these items aren’t all stored in that small room, odds are they’ll be in another storage room nearby.
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I’m toying with an idea, but I’m not sure if it has legs yet or not. Horror fiction has the Stoker Award. Romance has the RITA. There’s the World Fantasy Awards and the Hugo. The list goes on and on. I think there should be an award for prepper fiction and non-fiction. Call it the Ahern, perhaps, after Jerry and Sharon Ahern, authors of the classic series, The Survivalist.
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Hypothermia is a very real risk outdoors, even in what we might consider mild temperatures. Get caught in a sudden rainstorm, then the wind picks up a bit and you could be in for some serious issues. Cold, like darkness, isn’t really a thing. It is the absence of heat energy. Darkness is the absence of light, of course. When too much heat leaves our bodies and isn’t replenished, that’s when we could be in trouble.
There are several ways our bodies can lose heat. Protect against all of them as best you can in cold weather.
Conduction is loss through direct contact. Sit directly on the ground and you’ll soon notice your backside is getting cooler. The same thing happens if you sit on a large rock. Heat energy tends to want to find a balance so it travels from a warm surface to a cool one. You can help prevent this heat transmission by placing some sort of insulating material between you and the ground, such as a blanket, a foam pad, or even piles of grass or pine branches.
Most of our body heat is lost through radiation. We constantly give off heat, some people more than others. If this heat isn’t at least somewhat trapped by thick clothing, jackets, and hats, it will just drift away.
As our bodies radiate heat, a thin layer around us is warmed. Water or air can disturb or remove this layer of warmth. We call that heat loss convection. Avoiding wind and staying out of bodies of water will help reduce this loss.
Evaporation is a cooling process. That’s actually why we sweat. The body is trying to cool down by secreting moisture that will evaporate. In cold weather, sweating too much can be deadly. Layer clothing so you can loosen or remove things to help moderate your temperature as you are working.
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By the way, for those of you who are starting your holiday shopping early, I wear a size 40-acre homestead.
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A few weeks ago, I received an email from an author who was bragging about how he’d used AI to write a bestselling preparedness book. He put in a few keywords and let the program do the rest.
Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. We’re not going to go to the trouble of actually doing research and testing, we’ll just let the computer puke out a manuscript on its own and publish it.
I’m appalled and sickened. Seriously, this is all sorts of messed up. Not only is this a horrible way to make money, given that these AI program basically just plagiarize from other published books and magazines, but with no oversight, there’s no way to know whether the information is even accurate once it is all crammed together.
My advice – before buying a preparedness book, do a quick search to see if the author even exists.
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We had great weather for our hike this weekend, so we wanted to go somewhere that had cool views and that we’d not visited in a while. We succeeded on both counts.
Survival Tip – The Home Cache
Typically, when we talk about a cache, we’re referring to a curated collection of gear and supplies that is placed into a nearly impervious container and then buried or otherwise hidden. PVC tubes are commonly used for this purpose and various “experts” suggest burying caches along your planned evacuation routes.
It isn’t the worst idea in the world, provided you bear in mind a few caveats:
1) Don’t put anything into a cache that you’re not comfortable potentially losing forever. This isn’t the place to hide cherished family heirlooms.
2) Burying anything on property to which you do not have any legal title or permission to be on could prove problematic, today during more or less normal times as well as in the wake of a major disaster. More specifically, showing up with a shovel on some farmer’s land in the middle of the night might not go well for you.
3) The harder it will be to unbury your cache, the harder it’ll be to detect, but that also means you might be there a while trying to get it yourself.
Today’s topic isn’t really about buried caches, though. Rather, this a different project, though there are a few similarities.
If you have a shed or other outbuilding on your property, consider getting a plastic tote or other container and storing in it a few things that you might find good to have in the event that you’re driven from your home. Think house fire or something else along those lines. You need to get out with a quickness, with only the clothes on your back, and you might not be able to get back inside anytime soon.
Here are some suggestions as to what you could keep in this home cache.
· Change of clothes for each family member
· Pair of shoes for each person
· Jacket or coat for each person
· Spare set of keys to vehicles
· Small amount of cash, enough for one night at local motel, plus some food
· List of important phone numbers – local family members and friends, insurance company, employer(s), physician (in case you need to request an emergency refill for prescriptions)
The idea here is to have a stash of things you might truly need if you’re essentially cut off from your home supplies. Sure, most of us have bug out bags and/or get home bags, but this is an extra layer of protection, so to speak. All of this is stuff you likely already have on hand, right? The only thing you might have to purchase would be the tote or other container to store it all. If your family is large, you might need more than one, of course.
Store this in a shed, detached garage, or other outbuilding. Depending on your relationship with your neighbors, you could go so far as to ask them if you could put it in their garage or something (and offer to reciprocate). You want it away from your house, so it is less likely to get damaged in the fire or whatever, but close enough that you can access it very easily when needed.
Use a container that’s fairly sturdy and that won’t easily allow vermin or other pests to get inside. A good quality plastic tote can work well, or a five-gallon pail with a Gamma lid.
Like most of our preps, we put things like this together hoping we never truly need to use them.
Prepper Survival Guide and Backwoods Survival Guide
For those new to my little corner of the Internet, I am the Editor in Chief for both Prepper Survival Guide and Backwoods Survival Guide magazines. Here are the covers for the current issues that are available in stores right now.
You can find them just about anywhere magazines are sold, including:
Walmart
Sam's Club
Costco
Publix
Walgreens
Rite Aid
CVS
Tractor Supply
Fleet Farm
Barnes & Noble
Subscriptions to both titles are available here.
Questions, Comments, Complaints, Concerns?
I am always just an email away - jim@survivalweekly.com.