Three Prepper Fails To Learn From

Experience is the best teacher … but is she really anyone’s favorite?  Here’s your chance to learn from my mistakes, three prepper fails I made.

 Also, if you’re generous in the comments, to wring more good out of your own fails by letting someone else learn from yours.  Also provided is Plan B (or C, or D) that worked better.

Three Prepper Fails #1: From the It Looked Great on the Internet department:  

To make small, compact fire-starters, just pack a bit of drinking straw with petroleum-jelly-filled cotton and heat seal the segments at both ends!  

So… I meticulously pack the sections you see below, operate with tweezers and candle to get them what appears to be watertight, and then spend a bit of quality time with the tweezers removing melted plastic, because clean tools are important, y’know.

And for that I get….(drum roll)…. Something that is harder to light and burns not as long as my previous solution!  Now I just mush up the petroleum jelly with the cotton and stuff twists of it into a pill bottle.  

Both these types of containers keep petroleum-jellied cotton twists dry for excellent firestarting. The item on the *right* is not a total pain in the tail to pack.

Three Prepper Fails #2: From the Interpreting Ad-Speak department:

The label on the sleeping bag said it was good to 40 F.  The forecast was for 45 F, and I had a wind-tight cabin to sleep in.  No problem, right?  Well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I keep an emergency blanket in the car.  

I read “to 40 F” as “comfortable down to 40 F”.  Sleeping bag companies apparently mean “You won’t quite die of hypothermia if it’s above 40 F” or “comfortable down to 40 F if your run a fever or have hot flashes 27 times a night”.  

My brother, a much more experienced outdoorsman, laughed when I told the story and let me know all sleeping bag manufacturers do that, sort of like vanity sizing for sleeping bags.  A better plan:  get a bag rated to much colder than you expect to need.

It felt ok as I fell asleep, but of course body temperature drops when you’re sleeping, so I woke up four hours later curled into a tight ball and still so cold to the touch a careless coroner might have thought me dead.

Three Prepper Fails #3: Cars Get Hot department:

Gel cap medications are really fast-acting and so can be really handy.  Other meds are supplied in high-melting-point oil-based creams for surface application.  

Point one:  In a Missouri summer, cars get hotter than the melting point of either.  Hey, I could still cut off a dose from my new pancake of diarrhea meds if the trots struck, right?

Further tip: The foil containers that are supposed to contain individual doses look as if they wouldn’t leak unless they were obviously torn up.  

The slippery surface of every other container in the med kit told another story.  Better idea?  Solid pills are slower, but they don’t melt. (They do degrade faster in heat, so swap out doses pretty often.) Tubes with screw-caps Did prove leak-proof.

Good thing there’s a knife in the bag so I can cut one dose free from the next. By the way, don’t laugh at the purpose of the meds….ok, laugh away, but pack some.  Switching suddenly to a low fiber diet and trying to drink less to conserve will stop a body up.