The previous owners left us a gift...

So if you’re following the story, you know that my family … well, extended family … has ended up with a slew of land. Honestly speaking it’s more land than we need. So what is the point of all of this, and why did we buy as much as we did?

The obvious reasons

Well, for one, it was available at the right price. It was hard to pass it up. As they say, land is the one thing they’re not making any more of. So considering that it was there, picking it up was pretty much a no brainer.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we didn’t buy it all at once. We bought it in more than one step and each purchase had a specific reason. It was fantastic how we got the opportunity to pick up contiguous land in more than one chunk like that.

The real reason

But the real reason why we bought as much as we did was to provide a future blessing to our families. This bears a bit more explanation I think.

While we all aren’t necessarily of the same mind preparedness wise, we all certainly have some commonly held beliefs and goals. One of those is to provide our children with a specific kind of life style that can’t come from a city or a suburban area.

We certainly can’t guarantee how our kids will grow up and what they’ll believe or want for their families but one of the key things we want to allow for is to be able to split off parcels of the land for our kids to have if they so desire. I can speak for all of my family when I say that we would love to have our kids and grand kids decide to follow in our footsteps.

Some people say this sounds like a compound or something, which I guess it technically could be. But more than anything, it is a family coming together and choosing to live near each other. Independent yet together.

Summing it all up

I personally can’t see a better situation for my kids than to be living close enough to walk to their grandparents and their cousins, aunts, and uncles. What could be better than that?

We looked in four or five different states, and looked at countless pieces of land.  This one was too small, this one was too close to town, this one had no timber, this one was on a hillside.  Until my little sister managed to find something that sounded interesting.

Enter the Mafia Loan

There was a gentleman who had moved into the area and bought a huge chunk of land that he intended to split with his brother.  This guy bought about 400 acres of land in a timber/pasture mix.  The land he purchased was an old homestead that had been lying vacant for years.

Well, unfortunately for him his brother backed out and decided not to move out there.  Leaving our poor land holder with a mafia style loan that he needed to get out from under.  That’s where we came in!

A hidden diamond

Turkey and Deer are all over ... apparantly so are bears!

We went out and took a look at it.  It looked pretty good, though there were a few question marks about it.  My dad and I walked the place with a local realtor who happened to also be on the county fish and wildlife board.  Turns out that this land is what he called ‘a hidden diamond’ and if we didn’t buy it, he might!

Long story short, we ended up buying a big chunk of the land, and some long time family friends bought another bit of it adjacent to ours.  The guy we bought it from offered a final 20 acre plot for sale a few months later.  We decided to buy that as well as it secured our access rights.

Now there was no part of land that still had easement rights through our land so we could completely control access as we saw fit.  All in all we’ve ended up with just short of 200 acres between all of us.

But what about the criteria?

Water:  The place has a seasonal stream, a pond, and well water is available, though deep.   We’ve had to dig a couple wells to 200ft in order to get a high flow rate.  In the years since we’ve purchased the place, we’ve since found an artesian well that supplies far more water than we all need, and are in the process of developing that and putting a water distribution system into place.

Mixed Timber and Meadow:  Most of the land is timber and sparse timber/meadow mix.  There is about 40 acres of pasture land that needs significant rehabilitation work.  There’s another 30 or so acres of dense timber which is marketable if we want.  Most of the rest was thinned out 15-20 years ago but remains good timber land.

Utilities:  We’ve brought power and telephone in at surprisingly low cost.  And we’re even on the edge of the range for DSL access so we can get high speed internet access.  Extra bonus points!

Seclusion:  We’re half an hour from the two closest towns and about an hour from the closest major city.  We’re off the beaten path and a few miles down a dirt road.  Generally speaking we’re pretty much completely out of the way.  Our land is surrounded by other large holdings, farms, and ranches, and there’s also state land and timber company land nearby.  Overall, we don’t expect development to come our way any time soon.

Sounds great!  How are you going to get out there?

Always the hard part, right?  At the moment we have a trailer out there that we spend vacation type time in during the summer months.  My folks have just finished their place and will be moving out there next year.

Next year my wife and Ihope to begin building a home with the intent of moving out there full time within the next couple of years.  I’ll certainly chronicle our adventures here.  One of the biggest things that we’re worried about is income.  As my career is technical in nature it tends to keep me in the urban areas I despise.  I’m working on that too, and if alternate income generation is of interest to folks, let me know and I can post about that a bit too!

You might manage if you live here...

I hate to burst your bubble but you can’t survive alone. Chances are you can’t even survive as a family. This assumes of course that a major event has occurred, something akin to the end of the world for all intents and purposes. If you’re alone, you won’t survive. Sorry!

No way! I can keep my family safe!

Sure you can. You’ll sit up in the upstairs window with your rifle, shooting at the zombie horde. Until it’s time to sleep. Or eat. Or forage. Or tend the garden. And what if the zombies can fire back?

The cold hard truth is that you can’t do it alone. Even if you have a big family your chances aren’t all that great.

You’ll do fine if you’re talking about a relatively low impact disaster. But if you’re dealing with anything at all that involves significant societal impact, you have to have more help than you currently have in your family.

So now what?

Band together. This can take a variety of forms. You can go join a commune with a bunch of like minded people. You can talk to your neighbors and get to know them. You can build a big house and double up. You can make plans to join up with another family if the balloon goes up.

Please plan ahead

You need to think about this. I know I’m thinking about it and have made plans around this. The benefits don’t only kick in if the world comes to an end. By making friends and banding together with like minded individuals you can leverage the skill-sets of everyone involved. You might be a great mechanic and your buddy is a doctor. The potential benefits there should be clear!

Food for thought

I hope this gives you something to think about. Don’t approach it in fear, don’t approach it with panic, but approach it realistically and make your plans.  This post is a kickoff post for a new series I’ll be doing that outlines my approach and will hopefully give you some good ideas!

Oh, and for the record, the likelihood of you being in your upstairs window plinking at zombie skulls is pretty minimal, but you never know…

This is all great until the computer isn’t available anymore.  If your food storage records are all on the now useless hunk of metal after the EMP hits, you can forget about it.  Go do a new inventory by hand.  Those plans for building a chicken coop?  Whoops, better wing it!  Obviously having everything or even most things on the computer is a bad plan.

So how do you protect yourself and ensure availability of your important records and information?  Redundancy!  You may have heard the meme around the survival community that ‘Two is One and One is None’ when it comes to redundancy of any given item.  The theory here is that you can count on having one of something available if you have two copies of it.  The nice thing about electronic storage is that it’s really easy to make copies!

There are three main scenarios to consider when backing up digital information:  Data Loss,  Computer is Temporarily Inaccessible, and Computer is Permanently Inaccessible.

Generic Data Loss - You accidentally reformat your hard drive.  You have a virus that wipes out your files.  You manage to accidentally delete all of your files.  You get the idea.

Computer is Temporarily Inaccessible - For whatever reason you can’t use your computer.  Maybe the power is out, or your motherboard is fried.  Perhaps the cat chewed through the power cable and short circuited the computer’s power supply.

Computer is Permanently Inaccessible - Think EMP, major disaster, that sort of thing.  This is the scenario where you won’t be seeing a computer any time soon, if ever.

Now that you have these scenarios in mind, take a look at these steps to secure your important information!

1 – Triage Your Data

The first step is the most important.  You need to look at what you have stored online and assess whether you’ll need it under the scenarios we laid out.  You’ll probably want to have access to most important records, but that e-book you scanned from an 1890 book on steam engines is probably only useful if society is imploding and taking the power grid with it.

Rudy’s Tip: Don’t forget scanned copies of birth and marriage certificates, resumes, deeds, insurance cards, etc.  Super important to have that stuff available!

2 – Backup your Data

You need to back up all important data to multiple locations.  You should have on site backups and offsite backups.  I personally use an online backup solution as well as local backup to hard drives.  I also leverage USB drives for important data.  These backups will protect you against the first scenario, generic data loss.  It doesn’t do a ton for the other ones.

Rudy’s Tip: An important takeaway here is to have a USB thumb drive (or three) that have copies of critical documentation on them.  They’re easy to transport and hold lots of data.  Keep copies of these drives in your Go Bags (Break Out Bags) and at work.

3 – Print Out Good Stuff

In the first step you decided when you’d need to access different kinds of data.  Print outs are important for making sure you have that information available when you need it regardless of whether your computer is available.  These are important files, e-books, how-tos, etc.  This is the step that can really save your life in a serious disaster.  Invest in a good laser printer or spend a bunch of time at Kinkos.

Rudy’s Tip: I store all of this stuff in three ring binders.  You can get them cheap (or free if you have a FreeCycle group in your area) and they fit great into a bookshelf.  I have all sorts of information that will be useful in different disaster scenarios printed out and ready to go.  Some of this stuff I even have other copies offsite just in case!

4 – The Bonus Step

Ok, so I lied.  There’s four ways, not three!  I keep an old laptop lying around with a portable hard drive just in case of emergency.  It has copies of the important stuff on it and I can also use the USB drives from my Go Bag for the critical stuff.  If I wanted to I could even store this in a faraday cage with a solar charger for the battery and have an EMP Proof data storage.  Worth considering!

In Closing

No system is fool proof.  Make sure you have adequate redundancy for information as well as your general preparation supplies.  It would really ruin your day to be in a disaster and not have all that important information at hand.  I don’t even want to think about re-creating my resume if my house burned down and took my computer with it.  Yuck.

Some of you have been asking me to show you how to put together a long term storage plan in more detail. After thinking about it a bit and discussing it with my wife, we’ve realized that this is a huge undertaking and one that needs to be thought through.  Advising folks on how to do this isn’t always easy!

After much consideration, I’ve decided to start a weekly food storage school. Once you sign up for it I will send you an email every Monday with a food storage goal for the next week. I may occasionally send you some other hints, tips, or recommendations throughout the week, but the lessons will come out on Monday. You can join at any time and I’ll start you with week one and we’ll go from there.

My approach will be a bit different than some. I won’t be going whole hog all at once, trying to put a year’s worth of everything away all at once. Instead, we’ll take it slowly, putting together the basics and then begin to turn that into a longer term plan.

Look for a post in the next day or two telling you how to sign up for the class.  Don’t miss it!  Tell all your friends and neighbors!  Invite the family dog!

It’s a good idea to make sure your generator is running.  You do have a generator, right?  Make sure that you have enough fuel stored on site to run the generator for a few hours a day for several days.  You never know how long your power will be out.  Don’t forget to change the oil and verify that your big heavy duty extension cords are in the right spot!

Owning a chainsaw is also worth considering if you live in an area with lots of trees.  It gets pretty darn windy here and trees blowing over is inevitable.  It’s nice to be able to cut those up and get rid of them or put them up for firewood if you have a wood stove.  Being able to help out a neighbor in need is valuable too.

Winter time is the time to be prepared for interruptions to your natural life.  At least in our area it is!  We aren’t faced with being cut off from civilization for months at a time but for us it’s reasonable to expect to be house bound for several days.  Don’t let your fresh food stocks get too low, make sure your vehicular maintenance is up to date, and be jealous of your old high school buddy who lives in Arizona.

I mentioned up above that now is also the time to get a head start on next summer.  At the end of summer retailers are trying to dump summer items cheap.  Now is the time to take advantage of those sales, get the things you need for next year or things you’ve been procrastinating on.  Craigslist and other sites will often have summer centric items for cheap once fall and winter hit, so keep an eye out there too.

The big problem that this presents is probably obvious.  Money.  How does someone like me go from what I do today to a rural setting where my current occupation is nowhere near as desirable or sought after?  Yes, if we live a reasonably self sufficient life style that will reduce overhead costs but you can never completely eliminate it.  You have to have some sort of income to be able to live.

I certainly have a few ideas for my situation but you will have to look at your own individual situation and come up with a plan on your own.  The core of this process is to take a hard look at your skill sets and see how you can apply them in a creative way.  For me, by example, I have people and project management skills.  Despite those skills being primarily focused on technology today, I can take them into new areas if I needed to.  This allows me to be more flexible when I am looking for gainful employment in an area that lacks demand for my primary occupation.  Most of you will have similar skills that are broadly applicable.

Personally, I am finding that part of being self sufficient is not being tied down to a certain job.  I work for a corporation that I do not own.  I am employed at the whims of that corporation, despite the fantastic work I perform for them day in and day out.  I believe strongly that in order to be truly self sufficient and prepared for anything I must take ownership of my income and not be tied down to a specific job and more importantly not be tied down to a specific location.

I have a number of ideas around that topic that I’ll be sharing with you over the coming days.  These are personal goals and personal plans that I will be sharing so they are highly applicable to my personal situation.  They may not work for you!  But I hope that by opening up and sharing my plans with you, faithful readers, that you will be inspired and can maybe leverage some of what I’ve done for yourselves and your own preparation efforts.

Card Games

Several decks of cards are an important and inexpensive addition to your family game closet.  Most of you probably have them lying around already.  In my mind this is one of those things you can’t have too many of.  Be sure to have pads of paper or notebooks for keeping score.  A copy of Hoyle’s Rules is a good idea too.  Aside from a standard deck of cards you should also consider owning copies of individual card games such as Uno, Phase Ten (a favorite in the Kearney household), etc.  The more variety you have the better.

Rudy’s Frugal Idea: To get cheap (FREE!) decks of cards, go to your local casino.  Preferably smaller ones.  Most gaming regulations require casinos to swap out decks on a regular basis and those decks can no longer be reused.  Many casinos give them away to anyone who wants them for free instead of throwing them away.  It’s a good PR move for them and a free source of card decks for us!

Board Games

Board games range widely in complexity and age range from Candy Land to Axis and Allies.  Nonetheless they are a core part of any game closet.  Keep a good variety of games around so they don’t get stale.  We find it valuable to have simple games as well as longer term complex games around.  That way you are more likely to find something that fits your mood.  Very important!

Artistic Supplies

Think crayons, coloring books, origami paper and instruction booklets, paper airplane books … that sort of thing.  Add playdough and cookie cutters to the mix and you’ve got things for all ages to do.  One of my daughters loves to make bead jewelry for example.  She rarely finishes it but she enjoys the process anyways!  You will know best what your family likes to do so make sure you’re stocked at all times!

Rudy’s Frugal Idea: One extremely popular source of things to color in our home are internet sites that let you download and print things off.  One of our sons will sit down with a stack of the Star Wars Death Star coloring pages and go at it for hours.  Having a good stash of these preprinted is a big hit around here.  A Google search for ‘Free Coloring Pages’ works great.  I often cheat and do an image search so I can quickly find what I’m looking for!

Other Active Toys

Our kids love things like legos, Bionicles, GeoTrax, Lincoln Logs and so on.  The key here is to avoid the ‘fluff’ like McDonalds toys and opt for things that are active and encourage imaginative and creative play.  Things that can be reconfigured in different ways are important and if they’re battery powered that’s just gravy on top!

Wrapping It All Up

Many games can be found cheaply at sales or thrift stores.  Often little hole in the wall shops have sales on a regular basis.  The most important thing is to integrate these activities in normal daily life.  Just like eating from your food storage as an integral part of your diet prevents shock to the body, being used to playing games will make it easier when the power goes out and you have no choice but to stick with non electronic options.  Besides, game night is a great family bonding experience!