To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
This week, I was very busy packing and mailing almost 30 Elk Creek Company mail orders. I had just cataloged a lot of FN FAL and HK91 magazines, and I started a big sale on almost all of our antique gun inventory. (I described the legalities and the logic of my strategy in my recent blog article: Firearms Ownership Privacy: The Pre-1899 Solution.) I expect to be packing even more orders next week. Busy, busy, busy! Hopefully, things will slow down before deer and elk hunting season begins.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
After receiving three tenths of an inch rain over the weekend and into Monday, we had another gorgeous summer-like week here in the American Redoubt with temperatures up to the high seventies in our valley. The sun felt so good.
On Saturday night, Jim pulled the circulating hose out of the pool and we drained it overnight. On Sunday, a cloudy-ish day, we scrubbed it clean and took all of the flotsam and jetsom out, sprayed it down, and emptied out the sump hole Then I wiped it out with my hands and immediately put the hose back in and began filling it. I measured the water temperature coming out from the hose and it was forty-eight degrees. We had rain overnight and by morning the pool was overflowing. The temperature was fifty degrees. I was hoping it would warm up this week with all of the sunshine and temps in the seventies, but our nights got as low as thirty-nine degrees. As of Friday, the water temps have only gotten up to sixty-five degrees, too cold to swim but warm enough to wade to skim the pine cone flakes out. After Saturday, our temperatures are going to drop down to around the highs of sixty degrees Fahrenheit. So I think my outdoor swimming for this season has just ended this past week.
However, this week, we bought a three foot by eight foot by two foot deep oval galvanized steel water stock tank to use as a “Hot tub/kicking pool”. So I can continue exercising in water for a longer time, maybe even through this winter. It holds 300 gallons of water. We are now on the lookout for an Immersion water heater. But in the meantime, we can run a hose from the laundry sink to fill it with hot water from our 75-gallon hot water tank. That water is 130 degrees so seventy five gallons of 130 degrees will need at least another fifty to cool it down. Plus we can heat up water on our wood stoves. Anyhow, we shall see. More about this, later.
This week for prepping, I picked 125 pounds of small round purple plums from our plum tree that seems to produce fruit only once every four years. It was crazy abundant, this year. I am dehydrating and freezing them thusfar, but I have plans to make a plum juice, not prune juice! I’ll get back to you on that, too.
I’ve started harvesting some of our apples. They are mostly going into cool room-storage, since we really like eating fresh apples.
I picked many more elderberry branches with ripe elderberries. They are going into the freezer until I have time to make more syrups.
I filled ten Bussing Totes with composted manure soil and planted more greens in the Greenhouse. This is the most containers I have ever planted with greens for winter salads. We shall see how well they grow.
This week, I checked on our two bee hives. One of them had seemed kinda quiet during the past three weeks. It turns out that the hive had swarmed away. There were definite queen and drone cells in the hives. I missed it. But maybe I’ll find their bee tree next summer, now that I know how to track bees from that book I told you about earlier in the summer- “Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting” By Thomas Seeley. The other hive has two Supers on the main base. The top Super has a Queen separator between it and the first Super that is above the base hive. The Top Super is chock full of beautiful honey. I still need to see what the second super below looks like. I wanted the Queen to have plenty of room to raise her broods, etc. Jim and I will be insulating the hive with foam and raw wool fleeces sometime in the next few weeks to get them situated for the winter.
We have some new neighbors a few miles from us. We spent some time with this past week. They super nice folks and are on our page. We had a wonderful time with them. So glad to have more people in our “neighborhood” who believe and think like us.
This week I rode my bike a few times for exercise.
I went back to copying the book of Matthew this week and finished copying chapters 16 and 17. And now I’ve started Chapter 18.
I stongly suggest that you listen to Matt Beall’s interview with Ben Davidson of Space Weather.com (Formerly called Suspicious Observers.) He is now saying that with the “on-going speeding up of the pole shift, it could accelerate to 100% tomorrow. If it does, it’s all over by 2030.” and our weakening magnetic field, with the Sun’s unpredictabilty during the next few years, the last few years of this solar cycle, that we could have a catastrophic event like a Carrington Event, really any day now. His timeline is for the 2030s but it just became unpredictable with a release of a new study a few weeks ago. This interview is three hours long, but it teaches you the nitty-gritty of what is happening.
Given that our Bible study has a timeline that indicates that we are already in the first three and half years of the tribulation, by this April 2026, and that by next spring we should see the Abomination of Desolation occurring, and being that the talk is of an economic collapse any day now, World War III any day now, and given that Ben Davidson’s time line for earth catastrophe, which we think occurs during the Seventh Seal of God’s Wrath. Perhaps we are there.
The Great Tribulation will begin at the Abomination of Desolation. The economic collapse and the World War Three going kinetic and then persecution follows right quick. It is time to wake up and get right with The Father through His Son, Jesus. We are at the door. I believe that these are the very last days of relative peace.
Currently, we are in the Ten Days of Awe, spoken of in Leviticus 23. It is the time frame between The Day of Blowing/Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah, and The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. This is a time of deep reflection, searching our hearts for sins and confessing them to Jesus and asking for his forgiveness and turning completely away from those sins. It is a time to make sure that we are found in the Book of Life. It is a time of deep intercession for others and for the various ,world situations.
It is a time I feel, for this year to be ready ourselves to give our lives for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We need to be in deep prayer and fasting. We need to be strengthened for what is coming to be the witness to others, despite the threats that will be coming towards us very, very shortly. We need to know and remember all of Jesus’s promises and we need to know the miracles that Jesus did and to be able to call on Him to perform them again for our behalf and as a witness to others. He will heal us! He will multiply food for us to eat! He will provide clean water for us to drink! He will shelter us. He will sustain us! He will hide us and keep us safe until the time he chooses to take us home while we are busy doing His work of preaching the gospel and teaching others His word.
We need to pray and believe in those instances when we might find ourselves with those needs in the very near future. We need to know those scriptures in our hearts to remind the Father of His miracles and provisions! We need to learn to hear His voice even more clearly so we can navigate the dangerous days ahead. The acceptance of Jesus in this country is wearing very thin. When Trump is taken out (according to some prophesies), or is not re-elected, the ones that come into leadership will persecute Christ-followers worse than in any other time in history. Ready yourselves and do not fear. If the timeline is correct, then there is less than three years left before Jesus returns….
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We want to hear from you.
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