Overloaded: Keep Prepping In Balance

One of the hardest (and most expensive) lessons I have learned in my prepping journey is keeping our prepping proportionately in balance. 

When I started prepping, I went WAY overboard buying guns and ammo. Why? Because guns and ammo are fun. 

Next? I went way overboard in buying long term storage food. Why? Well, you know why.

Years later that I actually matured as a prepper and concentrated on the things I should have started with in the first place, stuff like water collection and treatment, medical supplies, clothing for all seasons, a prepper library, skills development, etc.

I don’t know a single prepper (Spice and I included) who does as good of a job at balancing our preps as we need to… let me give you an example…

Broken Ankle: Thankfully I had 10,000 rounds of 9mm nearby

As I have mentioned before, last month I slipped on some ice on my front porch steps, fell down the steps onto the concrete and in the process broke my ankle and skinned myself up pretty good. 

As I was laying there, on the sidewalk in the 30-degree air (without a coat, I might add) I knew I shouldn’t get up, I’d felt the bone pop. What should I do? 

Of all the things I considered as I was sprawled out bleeding and in pain on the ice-cold concrete, the fact that I have 10,000 rounds of 9mm ammo in storage within 150 feet of where I was never once crossed my mind.

The handguns I have? The years worth of food? None of that would help my current situation one bit. 

If the SHTF and all I had was guns and ammo, well… wouldn’t I be in a real pickle?

The fact that my cell phone was in my pocket and that I had a friend to call to help me out… THAT mattered.

The Stuff Had Not Hit The Fan (SHTF)

Here’s the thing about my accident… since it was on a “normal” day, an “everyday” day where medical help is readily available, I was able to go to the emergency room and get the treatment process started.

But what would have happened had we been in a SHTF situation?

Enough Medical Supplies To Deal With A Serious Injury

We have a SIGNIFICANT first aid kit in Salty & Spiceland, one that includes ways to immobilize just about any broken bone that we personally can treat. We don’t have a backboard, but other than that, we can splint just about anything… and we know how to use the splints.

Spice wrote an article about SAM Splints which we carry with us pretty much at all times via our car packs.

My leg required surgery to “fix it right” but since it was non-displaced, I could have “gotten by” if we were forced to treat it all by ourselves. It’s much better with actual medical care, but we could have splinted it so that it basically worked (it just wouldn’t have been nearly as stable as it will be now).

Understanding Overload

As humans, we have a comfort zone, we all know that… and we like to stay within our comfort zones (even if we don’t realize that’s what we are doing).

Ammo and guns… those are my comfort zones…

With Spice, it’s all things natural & organic, including gardening and seeds.

But here’s the thing. Let’s say the SHTF, what good are guns if you can’t feed yourself? What good is a fantastic garden if you can’t defend it and keep people from robbing you blind? We need balance.

Synchronicity

We need to be in sync with our prepping, keeping balance, which is why we need to develop and have a prepping plan, and follow it.

Prepping plans and lists are something we are going to be concentrating a lot on here over the next 6 months at 3BY, but in the mean time you could do far worse than concentrating on our main core mission.

Beans

Bullets

Bandages

You

The Hard Part Is

The hard part is, of course, even with a plan we still tend to gravitate towards what we know and what we like.

Frankly, figuring out what type of bleeding control compression bandages we should stock in our medical supplies is not nearly as fun to me as testing and evaluating what type of personal defense rounds we should stock going forward.

Determining how effective three different types of water filters are so that we can stock the best one for our needs does not interest me nearly as much as which type of night vision / infrared gear we should buy.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what “interests” me, we have a job we need to get done, and we don’t have anybody else that’s going to do it for us. 

We need to put on our big-boy or big-girl pants, make the lists, check them twice, then get to it.