apocalypse « Robin Writes

With the start of the school year, we’ve changed to only working at the farm on weekends; that means approximately 48 days, weather depending, to get everything ready for the spring move.

Last weekend, we spent the entire time—except for a little gardening and a little shopping—inside the house.

The gardening resulted in fewer weeds, cucumber and yellow squash harvesting, a little burning, and one less damn copperhead.

The shopping nearly filled our supply unit and added some drywall to our collection.

And then we worked our butts off.

The living room/kitchen dividing wall frame has been drywalled and painted! Actually, we finished the second coat on the ceiling in that half of the house and almost all the painting.

We still need to get paint for the doors on that side, which is the same for the bedroom/office/bath-side walls, and we need to hang the door to the lean-to. And of course, the kitchen remodel/rearrange/additions.

But this coming weekend, we’ll be moving the bedroom/office into the living room and finishing drywall, ceiling repair, and more painting.

After, of course, the skim coating. Ick. So tired of that, but the alternative is worse . . .

And yes, we’ve started moving. To a point.

Originally, I wanted to wait to move just about everything so we wouldn’t have to do it twice, once to the barn and then again to the house. In light of certain economic issues—the world, not ours—we’ve started the process a little early.

Pretty much anything that we won’t need or use between now and spring is headed out the door.

Extreme? Perhaps. But it needs to be done sooner or later and I hate to drive a few hours down there with an empty truck. And we have to LIAH, there would be items that I couldn’t take but would miss.

As I said last week, there’s lots of talk online and on news channels about “something big” coming in September. Sure, it could just be rumor, but I, for one, don’t want to wait and find out too late.

The market is going down, down, down. If you—like me—aren’t an investor, why should you be worried? Well, I don’t pretend to know all the ramifications, but you can Google it; the main reason, though, is that this is an indicator of economic health.

You know, economics: prices and value and cost. Hey, give me a break; I’m trying to keep it simple. Also, I don’t have enough coffee in me yet to make a lot of sense of this.

The point is that, sooner or later, this effects the prices you’re charged for goods like food, gas, and other products.

Now would be a good time to step your prepping.

And that’s exactly what we did this past weekend: convenience foods, staples, water, etc. And gasoline. Probably a few more things this coming week.

You all know we’re planning to GOOD next spring. We’ve changed the timetable for that too . . .

I decided there were some things that I didn’t want to leave behind, if it came to that, and so I started packing. We’ve gone through two rooms so far, packing and moving things that we likely won’t need between now and spring—so if we have to GOOD sooner, we won’t have such a loss.

But keep in mind a few things:

We’re moving just a few hours away;

We have a place to go to;

It’s not like we could never return, if we needed to or wanted to do so.

I’m not expecting a major apocalyptic event that levels our house or burns down the metro area, although I guess things could get very scary here. I’m not expecting to have to LIAH, but if we did, we’d be pretty well set as far as clothes and personal items and so forth.

Remember, if you have to LIAH, you’re going to be limited in what you can take with you. In our case, we’d grab all the food we could, important papers and cash, phones, wallets, and pets. Not necessarily in that order, in case you’re worried about Fido.

The other thing that has me concerned is, again, the market. Falling shares could mean a run on banks or a banking system snafu. Or credit cards shutting down. It’s been suggested that one withdraw cash in the next couple days, just in case.

That is, after all, what preppers do—look at the just-in-case scenarios.