Summer Cleaning and a Few More Survivalist Thoughts

If you have ever seen my home you would probably wonder how in the world I managed to put so much junk in such little space, well in all honesty , it isn’t easy. Being a survivalist for so many years it is shocking to discover just how much “stuff” one tends to collect. The worse part is that many of them are duplicates and doubles. Two cook stove, at least two dozen lanterns of various shapes and sizes, abundance of miscellaneous survival supplies and of course the food.

A glance at my garage will reveal everything from camping tables to automotive consoles which house television sets and VCR’s. After all, my long time logic has always been “you never known when you will need it”. A multitude of sleeping bags are safely stored in those vacuum bags and positioned neatly on a shelf awaiting someone’s use. There are spare gasoline cans for which only one would ever be needed so the remainder sits at home useless. I have several CB radios sitting there that have never been hooked up along with a couple of police scanners and a box full of various flashlights of who knows condition. And this is merely those things that are in plain site.

Now when we go to the 10 by 12 food room things get even more hairy. As we enter the room we initially see all the various shelves that are in place and filled to capacity. There is an abundance of canned foods and boxes upon boxes of pastas, cakes and various quick to make dishes that would be extremely useful in an emergency. There is a water cooler which holds up to five gallons of water and sits comfortably in the food room for any sort of emergency. One shelf holds the plastic sheeting and the duct tape necessary for any sort of gas attack while another holds an excessive supply of first aid equipment.

I mention all this because most of the items are not really necessary. I sat down and had a serious thinking session the other evening and realized that in the event that my family and I had to bug out we would be supplying the local looters with many supplies simply because we could not take them with us. How many other survivalists fill their emergency cabinets and shelves with what they consider necessary items only to have to leave them behind when it is necessary to “Get out of Dodge”?

With this thought in mind I decided it was time to do some serious summer cleaning. I started with most of the useless paper work that I have accumulated. Since I did not want my personal paperwork to be placed into the regular trash, it has to be either shredded or burned. I decided to incinerate the documents to ensure that they are disposed of completely. I might add that I had a pretty decent bond fire going with my old documentation.

My objective is to eliminate as many items within my home as I possibly can without reverting to living the life of a hermit. I have concluded that all unnecessary items will be either sold at a yard sale, given to charity or just plan old tossed in the trash.

I have too much survival gear as well and much of that will find its way into the yard sales. My point here is to condense. As it stands now I can not possibly fit all the survival supplies in my vehicle.

Next as for the food room, I plan to slowly use up the normal cans of food and as I do replace them with the number 10 dehydrated equivalents. They last longer then the normal cans of food and take up less space.

My e-books also need to be cleaned up and properly sorted. There are many duplicate on my terabyte drive and they need to be eliminated. That will take a considerable amount of time. There are also many early survival e-books sitting on the various CD’s found in my food room so those too need to be placed on and sorted for the terabyte as well.

In the end I hope my pockets have q bit of change in them and I leave little to nothing for the looters should the time come.

Copyright @ 2009 Joseph Parish