It's Been a While...

It's been a while since I last posted.  I've been kind of discouraged with hubby's insistence on being generous to someone who doesn't deserve it.  Come to find out his dead-beat sister has been doing drugs (again) and that's why she was so broke and starving. 

And he gave her stuff and lied to me about it, like I can't tell when something has gone missing.  So, he's just not going to know about or have access to my food storage.  And yes, I mean "my".  As I've mentioned before, he's decided if the poo hits the fan, he'll be one of the first to die, and his thinking stops there.  Apparently, if he's dead, nothing else matters.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  Maybe yes, maybe no.

Operational Security - Breached

Well, I started doing an inventory of the stuff I have put by in the pantry, and I was not really pleased.  Seems there's a discrepancy between what I purchased and what I actually have.  It seems hubby has been very generous.  The grasshopper shows his true colours.  It seems his dead-beat sister has been visiting and he's been giving her my preps.  And all the dehydrated strawberries are pretty much eaten up.

There's a lot of "seems to be" going on. 

I've read quite a bit about opsec, but there's no real guidance for when your spouse is the biggest threat to your preps.  Any suggestions would be welcome.

Computer Woes and Strawberries

Well, hubby was bored last week, and decided to help me out by cleaning my computer for me.  He took it apart, used compressed air to blow out the dust, and then got distracted and it was still open and lying in pieces when I got home from work.  I started to put it back together, but he insisted on doing seeing that he took it apart.

Long story short, it's back together, but some of the functions have suddenly gone missing.  For example, my front mounted usb hub/card reader is not working.  Next time he goes fishing, I'll have to take it back apart and check all the connections. 

Then my ancient router finally decided that it just wasn't going to connect anymore, so I purchased a replacement.  Hubby insisted on hooking everything up, but we weren't able to get connected to the internet.  So I called for technical support, and lo and behold, the router was not hooked up to the modem.  Sigh!~  Apparently, it must have "fallen out".

Anyhow, I wasn't able to load in the pictures I took of my beautiful dehydrated strawberries and baby carrots.  The strawberries are delicious dehydrated, and hubby suddenly thinks that dehydrating stuff is really cool!  So he actually started a couple of trays of strawberries all on his own!  Be still, O my heart!

Knowledge Storage

A lot of prepper blogs out there talk about storing information in such a fashion that you can access it easily during an emergency.  One aspect of this is by printing out information from websites, blogs, etc. and keeping it in a binder.  I have been doing that myself, and I discovered a wonderful browser application that helps me save the meat of a website, and eliminate the useless chaff (advertising).

Check out PrintFriendly.  I find that it works for about 95% of the pages I want to be able to save.  It creates a printable PDF of the page with the option to remove items.  The one thing I don't care for is that on blog pages, it doesn't capture comments.

In any case, with this app I have PDF's on my computer.  When I have enough articles on a particular topic to be worth printing out, I collate information into a Word document so that I can eliminate duplication, and reduce the size of the print to save space.  Two sided printing also helps me save space.

My topics?

1.  Clothing, and textiles (including laundry)
2.  Communications
3.  Food: Finding Food (foraging, hunting), Growing Food, Preserving Food, Storing Food, Preparing Food
4.  Hazards, and security (include defense)
5.  Health (including sanitation)
6.  Heat, Fuel, Power
7.  Income, Skills and Home Industry
8.  Shelter (including bugging in)
9.  Travel, Transportation (including bugging out)
10.  Water

Where do I draw information from?  Aside from the many blogs and information sites available out there, I also use the Internet Archive's Text Section to find information on how it used to be done.  Currently, the archive houses digital copies of books published up to the early 50s. Another source of info is Scribd.  There are a few uploaders who have collated a lot of useful information and posted it there, as well as posting the cream of the crop from the Internet Archive. I also visit thrift stores, and second-hand book stores and find treasures in print, and have scanned many of my own books so that if I can't take the paper copy with me, I still can have my library with me.