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How the California Drought Has Tightened Up my Prepping

June 11, 2015 May 28, 2020 / 7 Comments

In all my years of preparing to work in Emergency Management, it never occurred to me that one of my biggest personal challenges would be a California drought. I was in Sacramento for the Yuba County floods of 1997, when flood waters caused 80,000 people to evacuate. In 2010, I was working in Orange County when the floods came, warranting a Presidential Disaster Declaration. Drought was something that happened overseas somewhere. We usually had much more water than we knew …

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30 Uses for Phone Books

February 27, 2015 May 30, 2020 / 4 Comments

We all get them dropped off one (or more) times every year — big, thick phone books. But what to do with them now that we just look up phone numbers on Google or we have them stored in our cell phones? Here are some creative uses for phone books our readers came up with for phone books – actual, paper phone books. In the House Emergency toilet paper (Note: may not be the best for your pipes or septic system.) …

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Getting Started Dumpster Diving

June 6, 2013 May 28, 2020 / 34 Comments

Sometime back in the early nineties I was between jobs, having been laid off and was trying to broker some printing jobs in Denver. During the course of my attempts to sell printing I drove by a large bookstore, and being the bibliophile I am, I had to stop in and do some browsing. In the very large self-sufficiency section I came across The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman. Just a few seconds of flipping pages convinced …

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