Discussions
Reply to: Prepping books Posted January 5, 2021

I can recommend “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why” by Amanda Ripley. I bought the audiobook about a week ago. Very good narrator and very interesting content. I have listened to it twice now, and it’s definitely a keeper for me. Should be great to have in a printed version. Also, for anyone out there with an Audible subscription, I was able to download for free “Deep Survival: True Stories of Miraculous Endurance and Sudden Death” by Lawrence Gonzales. This is a book that is on the recommended books page on The Prepared and I look forward to listening to it. Comparing my bookshelf to yours, I might recommend “Bushcraft: Outdoor Skills and Wilderness Survival” by Mors Kochanski. It has a great combination of illustrations and text so should be equally interesting to you and your grandkids. (I love the illustrations.) Another entertaining book is “Survival Wisdom & Know-How.” Only downside to this one is that it’s a huge book (same size as my National Geographic World Atlas!) One more idea I have is a supplement to your canning books. A couple years ago, a friend gifted me a book called “The Joy of Pickling” by Linda Ziedrich. It’s my reference book for times when I have a lot of vegetables and eggs; it might contain some useful recipes for you too.

Reply to: Preparation resources for Asian Americans? Posted September 17, 2020

This is an interesting topic that is hard to talk about. In general, I think emergency preparedness is universal. It’s not limited to a particular gender or race. As an example of preparedness literature in other countries, here is a link to “Disaster Preparedness Tokyo Guide.” Some people might find it interesting to see the similarities to guides in North America and to see a few cultural differences too. (It’s a series of PDFs.) I don’t seek out prepping info geared towards my gender and ethnicity particularly, though I am concerned with parts of Japan where my relatives live. (They have to contend with typhoons, earthquakes, active volcanoes, heat waves.) Despite the universality of disaster prep, I see what you are getting at when you mention that someone who is a minority has to also prepare for being a target of hostility. You might be trying to research prepping and come across content by people buying arms to protect themselves from external threats; it’s disturbing to think that they may consider you as one of the external threats based solely on your race. Someone mentioned that smiling goes a long way to ease relations. Before the pandemic, I hadn’t realized how much I depended on smiling at people to express appreciation or to express friendliness. The mask has taken away this tool from me, and now the only thing I have left is to wave at people or place my hands together in gratitude. Attempts at friendly hand gestures may be better than expecting people to read me from looking at my eyes, but not much better. Regarding evacuation plans, I think it’s a good idea to get a physical map and see where the safe destinations are located and how you might get there. The destinations can include designated evacuation centers, homes of friends, an office space, a place where you are a member and might have member privileges, things along this line. You can also put on the map known hazards: Locations of protests, locations where you might run into angry citizens. You can plan out escape routes. And although we do the thought experiment of living in a post-apocalyptic world where there are no cars, no cell phone, and no friend in the world, plan A should be to not suffer unnecessarily if you can avoid it. First choice would be to try to get to safety as quickly and as easily as possible. So before thinking of walking through the countryside, risking an encounter with a nervous and armed homeowner thinking you might be up to no good, the priority would be to find an easier way to get to safety. That means making sure you always have a cell phone and battery backup for the phone, a fueled up car or cash to pay for a taxi/uber/public transit, funds to cover a motel room (homeowner or renter insurance might reimburse this later if you are under an evacuation order), a list of phone numbers of friends and family, a small supply of extra masks, hand sanitizers, gloves, etc. The goal would be to try avoid encounters with scared/angry people. And if possible, try to be around kind people when you come across them. In an emergency, you might be surprised that some people will go out of their way to be helpful, it’s not always doom and gloom. When my neighborhood was evacuating, everyone seemed to be on the same page emotionally. There can be a camaraderie in times of crisis. You might find yourself helping someone out and someone might be offering to help you out too. In these instances, follow your gut and act accordingly. Of course there are hostile people in the world and they dominate the news. You’re more likely to see a news report about an unprovoked verbal attack on a random asian family at a restaurant (maybe being blamed for the pandemic or maybe just for not being caucasian), than a news report about how many asians managed to get through the day without such an encounter. So I was afraid I might be targeted too. It doesn’t matter that I was born and raised in the U.S., to some I will always look “foreign.” So far, people have left me alone but it’s something that I worry about. The restaurant incident I mention above happened very close to me, in my county. It was so disturbing. However a brave restaurant server ordered the verbal attacker to leave which gave me a bit of hope. Regarding how to “blend in” during an evacuation, one thing that I sometimes think about is to try not to dress too casually most of the time. When my area went into mandatory evacuation, I left in an hour wearing what I happened to choose to wear that morning, and I didn’t bring much additional clothes with me. There might be a temptation to dress down for an evacuation, but I think it’s better to try to look sort of pulled together most of the time, so that if you are going to be leaving at a moment’s notice, you will look okay. You don’t want to look too poor or too rich either. But regardless of what you happen to be wearing when you evacuate, it’s good to have practical clothing in good condition in the go bag. If you can help it, you don’t want to look like an evacuee when you go to the store to pick up those items that you didn’t bring with you when you fled your home. I think it’s good to try to look clean and tidy. During emergencies, I go so far as to sleep in regular clothes, in case I have to leave in the middle of the night under power outage conditions. I hope some of these thoughts help.

Reply to: Looking for evacuation advice and resources (especially during COVID-19) Posted September 6, 2020

Hello Jonnie, I hope you have avoided having to evacuate from the fires. I was caring for a parent who had lost the ability to use her legs and arms over a period of a few years and I often thought about how we’d deal with a disaster, especially when her health had reached a point where even a trip to family became too difficult. My personal decision was to concentrate on emergency preps that would allow for sheltering in place as the house had modifications that made things easier for me—bed at customized height, bars set up in strategic locations, many supplies. For sure, in the event of a natural disaster I would have asked for extra help, but I would have chosen to do it from our own home. Shelter-in-place was Plan A. Plan B would have been to go to a family member’s house. Plan C would be to find a motel. Under no circumstances would an evacuation shelter been acceptable, as getting my mother up off the floor or up from a cot would have been impossible for me. Also, going to a communal restroom would not have been doable either and an imposition on other evacuees. An evacuation center would have been a nightmare scenario for us, given my mother’s condition. My mother passed away a year before COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. but I continue to think about how things would have been if we had faced 2020 together. For this reason, I have wondered about how things are for you, but I have been interrupted in commenting by my own evacuation from a California wildfire. I have a sibling and I had always thought that we would be each other’s emergency backup plan. In a sense we were and continue to be, but in our first big test it turned out that we had to evacuate simultaneously; we couldn’t fall back on riding out the crisis in the other’s home. But ultimately, it was a tremendous support that we could face this together. Having homes and supplies is very important, but so are family and friends. While we were evacuated and contemplating losing our homes, my personal feeling was that the homes were strangely not so important compared to the thought of losing family and friends. The first night, we evacuated to an empty office space. We had a complicating issue of having pets. It was mid-afternoon when we left our homes and we needed some time to consider next steps. Local SPCA was an option as they were accepting the animal evacuees. It wasn’t our first choice for emotional reasons, but it would have been a logical choice. One thing that concerned us was the location of the local SPCA. Our concern was not unjustified—the local SPCA evacuated a few days after we did. However the animals would have been safe in their care. SPCA evacuated voluntarily in advance of an order to ensure the safety of the animals in their care. The SPCA animals were a little traumatized by the unusual circumstances, but better off than fending for themselves out in the fire. I have heard many stories of dogs and cats running off in the chaos of evacuation. Compared to that, taking the pets early to a shelter so that they are safe before you deal with your own evacuation would be a good move. This is assuming you have time. Sometimes there isn’t enough time. I don’t know if you have pets, but if you do, you will have to accept that they are a liability in an evacuation scenario. They instantly reduce your options. You aren’t going to be able to go to most evacuation centers. You’ll be reduced to finding pet friendly motels, accepting the charity of friends, or turning to animal shelters. I’d recommend that your pets be current on their vaccinations. In the end, we turned to our friends for helping shelter our pets but if my mother had been alive, my pets would have been taken to SPCA for temporary shelter immediately to free myself up to concentrating on my mother. But I’m digressing from my reason for writing here which is not the pet considerations. I’m writing because of your mom and her condition. If you are not accustomed to taking care of your mother’s daily mundane care, I would not recommend that you take that on for the first time in the midst of an evacuation. If your mother is in the care of a facility already, ask about their plans in the event of an evacuation. If it’s unacceptable to you, you can consider taking on caring for her yourself. But if there’s any way possible, do not take on the two challenges at the same time because it will be overwhelming. If you do not have the option of parsing it out in this way, definitely call upon any resources you can, especially family and friends with caregiving experiences. People with caregiving experiences can be a tremendous resource to you; they can provide a lot of practical and emotional support to you if you reach out to them. I’m sorry if my comments come too late to be useful to you, but I felt compelled to post. I haven’t addressed your COVID-19 concerns—that could be another long post. Really, what I wanted to say is having to learn to take care of someone with mobility issues simultaneously with planning their own evacuation is a truly difficult situation and I sympathize with you. Take care.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 27, 2020

Hello Annie, I wasn’t dehydrating meats out of concern of a potential nationwide shortage; I didn’t anticipate anything like what is happening this year. All my disaster preparedness books have chapters on pandemics and I’d read them, but the main disaster on my mind had been earthquakes. It still is on my mind, actually. I just happen to like jerky type snacks, ever since I was a child. Not just beef jerky, but also Asian condiment such as dried cuttlefish, squid, fish. I didn’t eat these things all the time, but it was a treat. So it made some sense to consider making my own jerky. But it was my freezer breakdown that motivated me to just go ahead and try as I was trying to rescue my freezer items. My mother’s comment about not having a fridge as a child also was playing on my mind and I started to think I should learn more about the old food skills. Even if I don’t put it into practice, I wanted to at least understand the principles. According to my mother, the point of dehydrating their vegetables wasn’t merely for food preservation, but because it tasted good for it’s own sake. The flavor would be transformed in the process. But they weren’t making jerkys so I had to do google searches for instructions and do some experimentation. Jerky is kind of a classic way to make meats last longer, and I do love the fact that it weighs a lot less in this form. With the shortage of meat this year, I was resigned about it and announced to a family member who picks up jerky from me that I wouldn’t be able to make any more for a while. But I think they were missing the jerky and started to pick up meat for me if they spotted something on their shopping trips so that I could keep making it. So now I am keeping an eye out too. But I anticipate that there will continue to be a shortage. Thankfully, it’s not really necessary for survival, it is a luxury item. I did worry about the lack of eggs though. For a while, there was a six egg limit at the local grocery store which I found kind of alarming.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 26, 2020

Hello John, I am sure that it’s better to have a real dehydrator, but I have been resisting buying any new kitchen appliances so I use my regular gas oven. The lowest that I can set the temperature is 170 F. I have dried things at 170 F to try to approximate a dehydrator temp, and also have tried out higher temps such as 225 F and even 250 F but I think 200 F works out fine for most meat and fish. I have also experimented with using a rack vs using parchment paper and generally use parchment paper because it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the finished product. I do have to turn over everything in the final 60 to 90 minutes. If I were using a rack, it wouldn’t be necessary to flip everything over. I don’t even limit myself to dehydrating raw meats. When there are local fundraisers where people sell cooked tri-tip, I will buy it to support their causes, and I slice up quite a bit of it, season it up with salt and pepper and dehydrate that too. Tri-tip is a little too fatty to be an ideal jerky meat, but it tastes pretty good (ironically because it is fatty.) Today, I happened to be making pork jerky from some tenderloin. I expected that I wouldn’t be doing this for some time to come because of the shortages, but I recently found this at Costco so I picked up a couple packages. To go from semi-frozen sliced pork to finished product takes about 4-5 hours of oven time depending on how thick my slices are, and I do three sheets at once to try to save a bit on energy. This is what the baking sheet looks like at the 3rd hour just before I flip everything over.   This is the finished product, cooling off before I store it. It might seem unconventional to do this with pork, but it’s a tasty snack item.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 26, 2020

Hello Matt, This may be kind of obvious and not very helpful, but my strategy for reducing my reliance on the freezer is to experiment with dehydrating food. A few years ago, I was in a panic when I realized my freezer was no longer functioning, and I was trying to save the contents while waiting for a service appointment. My mother was somewhat amused by my panic, commenting that when she was young, they didn’t even have a fridge. She said when she was young summer vegetables were dehydrated or pickled for the winter, fish was either available fresh or could be purchased already preserved. It was just a way of life. I did eventually buy a new fridge/freezer but the experience made me decide that I wanted to reduce my reliance on refrigeration in the event of a natural disaster such as an earthquake that could lead to prolonged blackout. I still love my freezer, but I have done a lot of experimentation dehydrating pork, beef, fish, seafood, vegetables, even tofu or random leftovers just to see how it would turn out. I don’t have a dehydrator, so I use my oven. My favorite meat to dehydrate is pork because it is less expensive than other meats. I set my oven to 200 F for meats and seafood which is higher than what a dehydrator does, so you could argue that my jerkys are actually “cooked” and not just dehydrated, but I don’t think it hurts the outcome and gives me some small reassurance that pathogens won’t survive after the moisture is driven off and after being at that temperature for a long time. I’ve experimented a bit with marinades, but favor keeping things simple and rely mainly on salt and pepper. I still store my dehydrated meat and seafood in the freezer to be extra careful, but they will fare better in a power down situation than if they were kept raw and frozen. Another advantage of dehydrated food besides shelf life in an emergency is that they take up up much less space and weigh much less, which is helpful if you need to take it somewhere. And apart from the preservation aspect, meat and fish jerkys taste pretty good!

Reply to: Single female prepper resources? Posted June 24, 2020

My mother was suffering recurring UTI and her urologist was concerned about antibiotic resistance. She suggested taking 1000 mg D-Mannose twice a day and it was very effective at keeping this at bay. It does not require a prescription. It is worth considering if UTI is recurring and of benefit to reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance setting in. My mother was at high risk for UTI because she was suffering paralysis and required straight catheter several times a day. I think if the D-Mannose was working for her, it is even better for someone in good health and would not have to be taken daily as she did. But the bottle will have to be stored well to prevent moisture getting in (desiccant is helpful) because it does appear to be hydrophilic. I realize this is purely anecdotal account, but thought I’d mention this as an alternative to antibiotics and cranberry for people who have chronic recurring UTI. (Having cranberry is fine too if that worked for you.) Seeing how this thread is evolving into toileting discussion, it reminds me of an issue of women in car trip and camping situations where we are a little more concerned about when and where we will go than men tend to be; unconsciously we may tend not to drink enough water to avoid having to go. I should know better, but I do this myself if I know there aren’t going to be facilities for a while. But being well hydrated is very important for our kidneys. I hope that you are feeling better now!

Reply to: Single female prepper resources? Posted May 28, 2020

I agree, Daisy Luther at OrganicPrepper is good reading. If you expand the search to women who don’t declare if they are married or not, or if you don’t mind that they are married, I have a few suggestions. There is a YouTube channel by an Austrian woman, Survival Lily at https://www.youtube.com/user/alonewolverine1984 you might check out. I have learned a lot from her channel. She is making shelters, practicing archery and slingshot, honing her skills with primitive equipment while also knowing her way around modern woodworking tools. She also has a gardening channel. She’s not in the U.S. so she’s operating under a different society, but even that is very interesting to me. There is another link you can take a look at on Canadian Prepper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0juVc9_ypM     On this link he interviewed a variety of women; you can see if any one of them resonates with you. ApartmentPrepper (https://apartmentprepper.com) is a longtime blog that you might like. (She is married also, but it doesn’t make the blog any less useful.)  Prepping may seem like a male dominated genre, but I think prepping is universal. It’s even possible that women have been prepping under the radar for ages and they are just not being recognized for it. If you look beyond the prepper genre and look at the homesteading genre, you may find someone who you can connect to there. Whether you are single or married, women do tend to do a lot of the caregiving duties in society, and that requires a lot of grit and organizational skills.  By the way, I hope you keep an open mind and not tune out the male preppers. All of them have mothers, some have sisters, daughters, nieces. My guess is that given the opportunity, they do want to share their knowledge and would be very interested in your knowledge and experience too. I think that on a one-on-one level, people do want to understand one another. At least, I very much hope so.

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Reply to: Prepping books Posted January 5, 2021

I can recommend “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why” by Amanda Ripley. I bought the audiobook about a week ago. Very good narrator and very interesting content. I have listened to it twice now, and it’s definitely a keeper for me. Should be great to have in a printed version. Also, for anyone out there with an Audible subscription, I was able to download for free “Deep Survival: True Stories of Miraculous Endurance and Sudden Death” by Lawrence Gonzales. This is a book that is on the recommended books page on The Prepared and I look forward to listening to it. Comparing my bookshelf to yours, I might recommend “Bushcraft: Outdoor Skills and Wilderness Survival” by Mors Kochanski. It has a great combination of illustrations and text so should be equally interesting to you and your grandkids. (I love the illustrations.) Another entertaining book is “Survival Wisdom & Know-How.” Only downside to this one is that it’s a huge book (same size as my National Geographic World Atlas!) One more idea I have is a supplement to your canning books. A couple years ago, a friend gifted me a book called “The Joy of Pickling” by Linda Ziedrich. It’s my reference book for times when I have a lot of vegetables and eggs; it might contain some useful recipes for you too.

Reply to: Preparation resources for Asian Americans? Posted September 17, 2020

This is an interesting topic that is hard to talk about. In general, I think emergency preparedness is universal. It’s not limited to a particular gender or race. As an example of preparedness literature in other countries, here is a link to “Disaster Preparedness Tokyo Guide.” Some people might find it interesting to see the similarities to guides in North America and to see a few cultural differences too. (It’s a series of PDFs.) I don’t seek out prepping info geared towards my gender and ethnicity particularly, though I am concerned with parts of Japan where my relatives live. (They have to contend with typhoons, earthquakes, active volcanoes, heat waves.) Despite the universality of disaster prep, I see what you are getting at when you mention that someone who is a minority has to also prepare for being a target of hostility. You might be trying to research prepping and come across content by people buying arms to protect themselves from external threats; it’s disturbing to think that they may consider you as one of the external threats based solely on your race. Someone mentioned that smiling goes a long way to ease relations. Before the pandemic, I hadn’t realized how much I depended on smiling at people to express appreciation or to express friendliness. The mask has taken away this tool from me, and now the only thing I have left is to wave at people or place my hands together in gratitude. Attempts at friendly hand gestures may be better than expecting people to read me from looking at my eyes, but not much better. Regarding evacuation plans, I think it’s a good idea to get a physical map and see where the safe destinations are located and how you might get there. The destinations can include designated evacuation centers, homes of friends, an office space, a place where you are a member and might have member privileges, things along this line. You can also put on the map known hazards: Locations of protests, locations where you might run into angry citizens. You can plan out escape routes. And although we do the thought experiment of living in a post-apocalyptic world where there are no cars, no cell phone, and no friend in the world, plan A should be to not suffer unnecessarily if you can avoid it. First choice would be to try to get to safety as quickly and as easily as possible. So before thinking of walking through the countryside, risking an encounter with a nervous and armed homeowner thinking you might be up to no good, the priority would be to find an easier way to get to safety. That means making sure you always have a cell phone and battery backup for the phone, a fueled up car or cash to pay for a taxi/uber/public transit, funds to cover a motel room (homeowner or renter insurance might reimburse this later if you are under an evacuation order), a list of phone numbers of friends and family, a small supply of extra masks, hand sanitizers, gloves, etc. The goal would be to try avoid encounters with scared/angry people. And if possible, try to be around kind people when you come across them. In an emergency, you might be surprised that some people will go out of their way to be helpful, it’s not always doom and gloom. When my neighborhood was evacuating, everyone seemed to be on the same page emotionally. There can be a camaraderie in times of crisis. You might find yourself helping someone out and someone might be offering to help you out too. In these instances, follow your gut and act accordingly. Of course there are hostile people in the world and they dominate the news. You’re more likely to see a news report about an unprovoked verbal attack on a random asian family at a restaurant (maybe being blamed for the pandemic or maybe just for not being caucasian), than a news report about how many asians managed to get through the day without such an encounter. So I was afraid I might be targeted too. It doesn’t matter that I was born and raised in the U.S., to some I will always look “foreign.” So far, people have left me alone but it’s something that I worry about. The restaurant incident I mention above happened very close to me, in my county. It was so disturbing. However a brave restaurant server ordered the verbal attacker to leave which gave me a bit of hope. Regarding how to “blend in” during an evacuation, one thing that I sometimes think about is to try not to dress too casually most of the time. When my area went into mandatory evacuation, I left in an hour wearing what I happened to choose to wear that morning, and I didn’t bring much additional clothes with me. There might be a temptation to dress down for an evacuation, but I think it’s better to try to look sort of pulled together most of the time, so that if you are going to be leaving at a moment’s notice, you will look okay. You don’t want to look too poor or too rich either. But regardless of what you happen to be wearing when you evacuate, it’s good to have practical clothing in good condition in the go bag. If you can help it, you don’t want to look like an evacuee when you go to the store to pick up those items that you didn’t bring with you when you fled your home. I think it’s good to try to look clean and tidy. During emergencies, I go so far as to sleep in regular clothes, in case I have to leave in the middle of the night under power outage conditions. I hope some of these thoughts help.

Reply to: Looking for evacuation advice and resources (especially during COVID-19) Posted September 6, 2020

Hello Jonnie, I hope you have avoided having to evacuate from the fires. I was caring for a parent who had lost the ability to use her legs and arms over a period of a few years and I often thought about how we’d deal with a disaster, especially when her health had reached a point where even a trip to family became too difficult. My personal decision was to concentrate on emergency preps that would allow for sheltering in place as the house had modifications that made things easier for me—bed at customized height, bars set up in strategic locations, many supplies. For sure, in the event of a natural disaster I would have asked for extra help, but I would have chosen to do it from our own home. Shelter-in-place was Plan A. Plan B would have been to go to a family member’s house. Plan C would be to find a motel. Under no circumstances would an evacuation shelter been acceptable, as getting my mother up off the floor or up from a cot would have been impossible for me. Also, going to a communal restroom would not have been doable either and an imposition on other evacuees. An evacuation center would have been a nightmare scenario for us, given my mother’s condition. My mother passed away a year before COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. but I continue to think about how things would have been if we had faced 2020 together. For this reason, I have wondered about how things are for you, but I have been interrupted in commenting by my own evacuation from a California wildfire. I have a sibling and I had always thought that we would be each other’s emergency backup plan. In a sense we were and continue to be, but in our first big test it turned out that we had to evacuate simultaneously; we couldn’t fall back on riding out the crisis in the other’s home. But ultimately, it was a tremendous support that we could face this together. Having homes and supplies is very important, but so are family and friends. While we were evacuated and contemplating losing our homes, my personal feeling was that the homes were strangely not so important compared to the thought of losing family and friends. The first night, we evacuated to an empty office space. We had a complicating issue of having pets. It was mid-afternoon when we left our homes and we needed some time to consider next steps. Local SPCA was an option as they were accepting the animal evacuees. It wasn’t our first choice for emotional reasons, but it would have been a logical choice. One thing that concerned us was the location of the local SPCA. Our concern was not unjustified—the local SPCA evacuated a few days after we did. However the animals would have been safe in their care. SPCA evacuated voluntarily in advance of an order to ensure the safety of the animals in their care. The SPCA animals were a little traumatized by the unusual circumstances, but better off than fending for themselves out in the fire. I have heard many stories of dogs and cats running off in the chaos of evacuation. Compared to that, taking the pets early to a shelter so that they are safe before you deal with your own evacuation would be a good move. This is assuming you have time. Sometimes there isn’t enough time. I don’t know if you have pets, but if you do, you will have to accept that they are a liability in an evacuation scenario. They instantly reduce your options. You aren’t going to be able to go to most evacuation centers. You’ll be reduced to finding pet friendly motels, accepting the charity of friends, or turning to animal shelters. I’d recommend that your pets be current on their vaccinations. In the end, we turned to our friends for helping shelter our pets but if my mother had been alive, my pets would have been taken to SPCA for temporary shelter immediately to free myself up to concentrating on my mother. But I’m digressing from my reason for writing here which is not the pet considerations. I’m writing because of your mom and her condition. If you are not accustomed to taking care of your mother’s daily mundane care, I would not recommend that you take that on for the first time in the midst of an evacuation. If your mother is in the care of a facility already, ask about their plans in the event of an evacuation. If it’s unacceptable to you, you can consider taking on caring for her yourself. But if there’s any way possible, do not take on the two challenges at the same time because it will be overwhelming. If you do not have the option of parsing it out in this way, definitely call upon any resources you can, especially family and friends with caregiving experiences. People with caregiving experiences can be a tremendous resource to you; they can provide a lot of practical and emotional support to you if you reach out to them. I’m sorry if my comments come too late to be useful to you, but I felt compelled to post. I haven’t addressed your COVID-19 concerns—that could be another long post. Really, what I wanted to say is having to learn to take care of someone with mobility issues simultaneously with planning their own evacuation is a truly difficult situation and I sympathize with you. Take care.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 27, 2020

Hello Annie, I wasn’t dehydrating meats out of concern of a potential nationwide shortage; I didn’t anticipate anything like what is happening this year. All my disaster preparedness books have chapters on pandemics and I’d read them, but the main disaster on my mind had been earthquakes. It still is on my mind, actually. I just happen to like jerky type snacks, ever since I was a child. Not just beef jerky, but also Asian condiment such as dried cuttlefish, squid, fish. I didn’t eat these things all the time, but it was a treat. So it made some sense to consider making my own jerky. But it was my freezer breakdown that motivated me to just go ahead and try as I was trying to rescue my freezer items. My mother’s comment about not having a fridge as a child also was playing on my mind and I started to think I should learn more about the old food skills. Even if I don’t put it into practice, I wanted to at least understand the principles. According to my mother, the point of dehydrating their vegetables wasn’t merely for food preservation, but because it tasted good for it’s own sake. The flavor would be transformed in the process. But they weren’t making jerkys so I had to do google searches for instructions and do some experimentation. Jerky is kind of a classic way to make meats last longer, and I do love the fact that it weighs a lot less in this form. With the shortage of meat this year, I was resigned about it and announced to a family member who picks up jerky from me that I wouldn’t be able to make any more for a while. But I think they were missing the jerky and started to pick up meat for me if they spotted something on their shopping trips so that I could keep making it. So now I am keeping an eye out too. But I anticipate that there will continue to be a shortage. Thankfully, it’s not really necessary for survival, it is a luxury item. I did worry about the lack of eggs though. For a while, there was a six egg limit at the local grocery store which I found kind of alarming.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 26, 2020

Hello John, I am sure that it’s better to have a real dehydrator, but I have been resisting buying any new kitchen appliances so I use my regular gas oven. The lowest that I can set the temperature is 170 F. I have dried things at 170 F to try to approximate a dehydrator temp, and also have tried out higher temps such as 225 F and even 250 F but I think 200 F works out fine for most meat and fish. I have also experimented with using a rack vs using parchment paper and generally use parchment paper because it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the finished product. I do have to turn over everything in the final 60 to 90 minutes. If I were using a rack, it wouldn’t be necessary to flip everything over. I don’t even limit myself to dehydrating raw meats. When there are local fundraisers where people sell cooked tri-tip, I will buy it to support their causes, and I slice up quite a bit of it, season it up with salt and pepper and dehydrate that too. Tri-tip is a little too fatty to be an ideal jerky meat, but it tastes pretty good (ironically because it is fatty.) Today, I happened to be making pork jerky from some tenderloin. I expected that I wouldn’t be doing this for some time to come because of the shortages, but I recently found this at Costco so I picked up a couple packages. To go from semi-frozen sliced pork to finished product takes about 4-5 hours of oven time depending on how thick my slices are, and I do three sheets at once to try to save a bit on energy. This is what the baking sheet looks like at the 3rd hour just before I flip everything over.   This is the finished product, cooling off before I store it. It might seem unconventional to do this with pork, but it’s a tasty snack item.

Reply to: Preserving meats with salt Posted June 26, 2020

Hello Matt, This may be kind of obvious and not very helpful, but my strategy for reducing my reliance on the freezer is to experiment with dehydrating food. A few years ago, I was in a panic when I realized my freezer was no longer functioning, and I was trying to save the contents while waiting for a service appointment. My mother was somewhat amused by my panic, commenting that when she was young, they didn’t even have a fridge. She said when she was young summer vegetables were dehydrated or pickled for the winter, fish was either available fresh or could be purchased already preserved. It was just a way of life. I did eventually buy a new fridge/freezer but the experience made me decide that I wanted to reduce my reliance on refrigeration in the event of a natural disaster such as an earthquake that could lead to prolonged blackout. I still love my freezer, but I have done a lot of experimentation dehydrating pork, beef, fish, seafood, vegetables, even tofu or random leftovers just to see how it would turn out. I don’t have a dehydrator, so I use my oven. My favorite meat to dehydrate is pork because it is less expensive than other meats. I set my oven to 200 F for meats and seafood which is higher than what a dehydrator does, so you could argue that my jerkys are actually “cooked” and not just dehydrated, but I don’t think it hurts the outcome and gives me some small reassurance that pathogens won’t survive after the moisture is driven off and after being at that temperature for a long time. I’ve experimented a bit with marinades, but favor keeping things simple and rely mainly on salt and pepper. I still store my dehydrated meat and seafood in the freezer to be extra careful, but they will fare better in a power down situation than if they were kept raw and frozen. Another advantage of dehydrated food besides shelf life in an emergency is that they take up up much less space and weigh much less, which is helpful if you need to take it somewhere. And apart from the preservation aspect, meat and fish jerkys taste pretty good!

Reply to: Single female prepper resources? Posted June 24, 2020

My mother was suffering recurring UTI and her urologist was concerned about antibiotic resistance. She suggested taking 1000 mg D-Mannose twice a day and it was very effective at keeping this at bay. It does not require a prescription. It is worth considering if UTI is recurring and of benefit to reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance setting in. My mother was at high risk for UTI because she was suffering paralysis and required straight catheter several times a day. I think if the D-Mannose was working for her, it is even better for someone in good health and would not have to be taken daily as she did. But the bottle will have to be stored well to prevent moisture getting in (desiccant is helpful) because it does appear to be hydrophilic. I realize this is purely anecdotal account, but thought I’d mention this as an alternative to antibiotics and cranberry for people who have chronic recurring UTI. (Having cranberry is fine too if that worked for you.) Seeing how this thread is evolving into toileting discussion, it reminds me of an issue of women in car trip and camping situations where we are a little more concerned about when and where we will go than men tend to be; unconsciously we may tend not to drink enough water to avoid having to go. I should know better, but I do this myself if I know there aren’t going to be facilities for a while. But being well hydrated is very important for our kidneys. I hope that you are feeling better now!

Reply to: Single female prepper resources? Posted May 28, 2020

I agree, Daisy Luther at OrganicPrepper is good reading. If you expand the search to women who don’t declare if they are married or not, or if you don’t mind that they are married, I have a few suggestions. There is a YouTube channel by an Austrian woman, Survival Lily at https://www.youtube.com/user/alonewolverine1984 you might check out. I have learned a lot from her channel. She is making shelters, practicing archery and slingshot, honing her skills with primitive equipment while also knowing her way around modern woodworking tools. She also has a gardening channel. She’s not in the U.S. so she’s operating under a different society, but even that is very interesting to me. There is another link you can take a look at on Canadian Prepper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0juVc9_ypM     On this link he interviewed a variety of women; you can see if any one of them resonates with you. ApartmentPrepper (https://apartmentprepper.com) is a longtime blog that you might like. (She is married also, but it doesn’t make the blog any less useful.)  Prepping may seem like a male dominated genre, but I think prepping is universal. It’s even possible that women have been prepping under the radar for ages and they are just not being recognized for it. If you look beyond the prepper genre and look at the homesteading genre, you may find someone who you can connect to there. Whether you are single or married, women do tend to do a lot of the caregiving duties in society, and that requires a lot of grit and organizational skills.  By the way, I hope you keep an open mind and not tune out the male preppers. All of them have mothers, some have sisters, daughters, nieces. My guess is that given the opportunity, they do want to share their knowledge and would be very interested in your knowledge and experience too. I think that on a one-on-one level, people do want to understand one another. At least, I very much hope so.