Prep School

Well hello, world; long time no blog. I wish I could say I’ve been ignoring you because I’ve been doing all kinds of fantastically cool stuff, but that’d be a lie. If I had been doing all kinds of fantastically cool stuff, the blog wouldn’t have lay (laid? lain? fuck it) fallow lo these many months.

I am, however, doing some moderately neat stuff, so may as well share.

Everybody has their thing; that certain something that just trips their trigger. For me, it’s camping gadgets. If you’ve read my stuff before, you know I like thinking about survival situations. Psychologists would say that it’s a reaction to the somewhat adverse situation I am now in, but they’d be wrong. I’ve been fascinated by tiny useful things ever since I saw my first combination salt & pepper shaker in the Boy Scout section of my local Sears.

Oh yeah…I was a Scout. I took the “Be Prepared” motto to heart. I carry a Swiss Army knife, and have used it for something every day since I got it, no exaggeration. I like reading blogs, sites, and Instructables concerning gear and prep supplies, and I’m constantly tinkering with my kits. Hence, today’s blog.

September is National Preparedness Month, and I’m in the process of putting together the Winter supplies to supplement the usual kit I keep in the car. I’m also going camping in October, so I had to start gathering stuff for that. I found that I was duplicating items with each group I created, making them all bulkier than they needed to be. Redundancy is all well and good, but you don’t really need five knives. At least, that’s what I have to keep telling myself.

So I sat down and really gave some thought as to what survival-type situations we were likely to encounter, and to what severity. Our main threat is a power outage brought on by severe weather. Secondly, a stuck car – whether by weather or accident. A distant third is my getting lost on a day hike, and fourth is being in a public or business setting and need some quick repair.

Once I had these identified, I listed the supplies I would want for each situation, then categorized them as essential or as nice-to-have-if-it-fits. I leaned heavily on the Rule of Threes and the Ten Essentials, plus guides such as FEMA’s Emergency Kit Checklist. Once those lists were complete, I removed duplicate items, keeping them on the lowest tier I could (more on the tiers below).

With my lists in hand, I began assembling kits. I conceptualized them as part of a tier system, where the smallest kit fit into the next larger, which fit into the next larger, etc. The somewhat crappy photos below illustrate this concept.

So, first tier, the Urban Survival Kit. Small enough to fit into a suit coat pocket, with those odds and ends useful for temporary repairs to prevent permanent embarrassment.

In this kit, I have (left to right): rubber bands and two sizes of cord, matches, post-its and pencil, sewing kit, a pouch with single doses of common OTC medications, safety pins and buttons, sticks for collar stays or splints, toothpicks, nail clippers, several sizes of band-aids, and alcohol wipes. In the unlikely event this was the only kit available to me in an emergency, I could use the safety pins and cord as a fishing rig, light a fire using the alcohol wipes and toothpicks as tinder, and cook in the Altoids tin. Ridiculous? Sure. But I wouldn’t just give up, either.

The next kit I consider a bare-minimum “crap-I’m-going-to-have-to-spend-the-night-out-here” kit.

Here’s the case:

Here’s everything in it:

That may be a little hard to make out, so here’s the breakdown:

Leatherman multi-tool with bit-driver and precision screwdrivers.

Light carabiner, snaplock ring, 12” airplane cable keyring, small measuring tape.

Thermal blanket.

My favorite ring o’ gear: 6” airplane cable ring, mini LED light, tweezers, P-51 can opener, mini pry bar, magnesium fire striker, pocket scalpel, pocket saw, pea-less rescue whistle.

Flexible key ring, magnifying glass, knife sharpener, signal mirror, OTC meds & sucrose tablets, compass.

The Altoids tin from above fits in the front pocket with the compass and mirror.

And that case can, in turn, be tossed into:

which contains:

No individual pics on this one, so, from left to right:

Tarp, work gloves, towel, poncho, LED flashlight, change of clothes, tent stakes, rope, food pouch with tuna, breakfast mix, hot chocolate, oatmeal and a few other odds and ends, emergency candles, canteen, cook kit with spork, various plastic bags, Velcro strips, crank-powered flashlight, Boy Scout handbook for reference, bag of dryer lint for tinder, pack of cards, pencils and notecards (one pencil has several yards of duct tape wrapped around it). Not shown is the first aid kit and cleanup supplies that stay in the car full-time, which will also fit in the bag if they need to be carried out.

The tier beyond this one includes all of the standard camping gear – tents, gas cookers, sleeping bags, etc – which we could either use inside if we lost power, or throw in the car if we had to evacuate. I’m in the process of making personal backpack kits for each of the pride, so everyone has what they need for a few days, and we won’t have to worry about forgetting anything if we have to boogie out fast.

So there we are. I like being prepared and having cool gadgets. Obviously, I hope I’m carrying all this stuff around for no reason, but it’s one less thing we have to worry about in case something does happen. At the very least, it keeps me in the garage and out of Mrs. Cat’s hair, and that’s good, too.