Azimuth Check

I have stolen this title from Lizard Farmer who runs an excellent newish blog that focuses on retreat/ farm/ ranch defense. His post was more a check on how folks thought his blog was doing. I will head in a different direction. My azimuth check is more about the direction from where my/ your overall situation was to where we want it to be. I will break it into a few categories.

Finances:
How is your debt situation? Do you have any debt with an adjustable or otherwise particularly high interest rate?

Do you have some savings for if something happens?

Do you have some money accessible to buy things if there is an event that interupts normal banking (this means cash on hand)?

If you can afford it have you considered putting some money into precious metals? There isn't a right or wrong answer to this one. Folks differ widely on this topic.

Health:
Are you and your family of a reasonably healthy body weight? If not are you making tangible progress towards getting there?

Do you have any health/ medical/ dental issues that could be improved but have not been? Maybe you need an elective surgery or have been putting off dental work or need to get into physical therapy to get something worked out. Bringing us back to the last question it is utterly amazing how many medical issues decrease or go away if you get to a reasonably healthy body weight.

If applicable do you keep a stash of essential perscription meds on hand? Keeping 30 days on hand is ok, 90 days is pretty decent and will cover a lot of issues but of course more is better. It may mean paying out of pocket but consider the alternative which is, to varying degrees, very ugly.

If applicable do you have at least a pair of spare glasses in your current perscription (two or three would be better)?


How are your chompers doing?

How are you doing at physical fitness? Can you walk long distances with a load? Run fast for short periods and slower for longer ones? Control your body weight through a variety of tasks and obstacles? Lift heavy things or carry another person?

Skills and Training:

Can you make a fire? At night? Can you do it when it has been raining for a week strait?

Can you find your way around with a compass and a map?

Can you make or improvise some sort of shelter to be as comfortable as possible in a variety of situations?

Can you turn basic staples like flour, rice or wheat into a decent or even tasty meal?

Can you grow or raise your own food?

Can you find or gather food from fishing, hunting, plant gathering or something else really cool I have never heard of?

Can you fix stuff? Mechanical things? Small arms? Brick and mortar? Wood? Plumbing? Electrical?

Can you engage targets with personal weapons in realistic circumstances?

Can you organize a defense be it at home or in some sort of hasty situation?

If the Chinese invade or whateveer can you plan and execute small unit Red Dawn/ partisan/ G style offensive operations?

Stockpile and Equipment:

How is your food storage doing?

Do you have personal weapons as well as the stuff needed to use them? Do you have some spare parts, cleaning stuff and ammunition to keep your guns running without a trip to Wally World or the local gun shop?

How are you doing at storing all of the other stuff like medical supplies, batteries, fuel, cleaning and hygiene stuff, spare parts, etc all to keep on keeping on as well as you can without outside assistance?

Is the stuff you have put together into kits or packages or systems that will meet your needs on short notice?

I am sure there are some good questions that I missed. This covers a ton of ground so do not be ashamed if there are some areas where you fall short. My goal is to give you some areas to think about and see where you are at. Every one of these questions is not equally applicable to all situations. Like many things you would be well advised look at these questions with brutal honesty, action what is applicable and disregard what is not.

Hope you all had a great weekend!

Wanna Get Depressed?

John Galt talks about how a collapse is the easy part.

Patriot Nurse talks about who will die first if SHTF.

Somebody Smiled On Me

Since having kiddo we make sure to get out of the house as much as we can on weekends. When we don't have anything going on or need to go shopping we go for walks or just do get out and do something local. One of the things we do is to drive around and see if anybody has tossed anything good by the garbage, yeah  real classy I know. It is PCS season and folks have been putting out some pretty decent stuff lately. Also the kid needed to be out of the house.

Anyway we were doing out usual dumpster dive recon today. I saw something shiny out of the corner of my eye. I looked and it was an aluminum briefcase. Needless to say I grabbed it. Once we were home I checked it out. It turned out to be a genuine Halliburton and in used but good condition. After some fiddling I got the combination reset. I went to lock it and it didn't lock. Mild annoyance ensued. A combination of WD-40 and aimless tinkering got it to work. So I now have a functional halliburton case.

In every action/ adventure movie folks use them to carry around all manner of cool stuff like cash, diamonds, jewels, high tech gadgets or guns. At least in the movie world there is a 100% chance something really awesome is inside one of these. For some dumb boyish reason I have always wanted one. I never got one because deep down I knew it was sort of stupid. Also I didn't own anything cool enough to merit purchasing one.

Anyway now I have one. Good times.

Skill Saturday- Skill Development

skill/skil/

Noun:

The ability to do something well; expertise. A particular ability

 I decided to start paying more attention to skills here. Starting by talking about what skills are and different ways you can develop them seemed like as good of a place as any. To me skills differ from education or knowledge in that they relate so some sort of a specific action or end product. A mechanic could show his skill by fixing a vehicle or a chef by making a tasty meal.

Broadly speaking skills tend to be more difficult to develop on you own than knowledge. A guy who reads the right shelf of books and has a decent memory could learn a lot about history for example. It would be much harder to learn to fix engines from a shelf of books.

Thankfully over the last couple decades between how to tapes and DVD's, the internet, reasonably priced recording equipment and youtube there are some readily accessible individual options other than trying to figure things out from a small black and white picture in a book. Being able to read about something and see another person do it goes a long way towards making it actually work. Assuming we are talking about a reasonably simple skill and you are a moderately intelligent person this is often enough to get started.

The upsides of this self guided at home type learning are that you can do it whenever and almost wherever you want. You can learn skills that are uncommon in your area or you don't want to advertise pursueing for whatever reason. The downsides are that it is seriously limited in what you can learn. Complex skills with multiple things going on at once (shooting, hand to hand combat, complicated auto repair, etc) do not typically work well with this style of learning.

 In many cases the easiest way to develop a skill is to find somebody who has that skill and get them to show you how to do it. This is a good place to start for most skills. Look at people in and around your family/ friends/ work circles. Somebody probably knows how to do basic auto maintenance, another guy might know how to do tile or plumbing or shoot a gun. Typically folks are willing to help you out. Just about everybody likes an excuse to practice their hobby so if the skill falls into that area you are probably good to go. If it is something a guy does for a living like auto repair or construction it is a bit harder. Offering to help them work on a project of theirs vs offering to let them do their job outside of work and fix your car/ toilet/ whatever for free is something I have seen work well.

The upsides of this style of learning are that it is convenient, comfortable and cheap. All of these are good things.

The downsides however are noteable. Sometimes free training is worth exactly what you paid. Jimbo the gun guy or Bob the shade tree mechanic might be completely uncapable or even dangerous. Unfortunately folks with no experience in an area are often not capable of assessing an individuals skill or ability at instruction.  Often instruction in this style is limited by time and effort by both parties. If your 65 year old retired neighbor shot high power for 4 decades and is lonely he might teach you almost everything he knows over a few years of Sundays at the range but if your 30 year old cousin who casually target shoots takes you to the range once the amount of skills you get will be pretty minimal.

Also different groups vary but it is my observation that often skills tend to cluster in groups based on region/ socioeconomic/ cultural leanings. The odds that a rural Wyoming community has folks who can teach you to shoot or hunt are a lot higher than in Manhattan. On the other hand Jim the rancher probably can't do the paperwork to set up a dummy corp incorporate your small business in 20 minutes during a Saturday BBQ. Sometimes skills you need do not exist inside of your social group.

As with anything in life, you get what you pay for.

The next option is looking to local groups or clubs. Join an outdoors or orienteering club or whatever. This may cost a little bit of money but if paying a $20 membership fee and doing some stupid meetings lets you get a skill that you need it is a good investment. The upside is that you can pursue specific skills in this way. The downside would be that it really only applies to certain hobby type skills.

The last option is getting professional training in the area(s) you are weak in. If you really want to learn how to do something getting quality training from an expert is a hard option to beat. For specific skills which have a high level of technical complication that you really want to get good at this is probably the best way to go. Unless your good buddy is an MMA fighter or a tactical marksmenship instructor who is willing to teach you for weeks or years for free this is really the only viable options. One thing to consider is how much time and money you would need to spend to reach a given skill level. Lots of schools can teach you to be a decent defensive handgun shooter in a weekend for a few hundred bucks. Spending 2 years going full time to a technical school to learn to fix engines is a lot harder to pull off. The only real downside of this plan is that it is expensive. The old addage about trading time and convenience for money probably applies here.

Anyway while not exclusive the ways we talk about developing skills are pretty representative of the available options.

Thoughts?

Finally Friday!

It is Friday and thank goodness for that. Work was quiet today so I got a bunch of various stuff which has been waiting forever done. The kind of things that you need to do but always linger slightly below more pressing matter. That was nice.

Getting off work at a decent time set things off to a good start. Wifey made enchiladas and spanish rice which was great. There is beer in the fridge, scotch in the cabinet and ice in the freezer so that front is covered.

We do not have any big plans for this weekend. We will probably take Walker for a ride in his wagon both days. He really likes it, a comfortable seat but freedom to move around a bit, a place to put his milk and Dad doing all the work, what is not to like. It is also a pretty good activity to get out of the house when we don't have anything we need to do. Maybe we will go out to lunch or something. The last few things for my Get Home Bag came in this week so I am going to try and get it all put together. You will see a post on that sooner or later.  There are some various blog admin things I would like to do.

Anyway my weekend is off to a pretty darn good start. I hope yours is also.

Got a Box in the Mail

Tomahawk or Hatchet?

I have seen a few folks having hawks as a part of a survival kit/ BOB or whatever. At least one of them is a person who knows his stuff and whose opinion I value. I did some looking and got to wondering. I fiddled around online looking at reasons folks choose them. One of the biggest reasons was that they are 'lighter' than a hatchet. I got to looking and the weight didn't seem to measure up to that claim at least on the models I compared.

I know hawks are cool and a lot of folks own them. Some folks like them for defense or fighting or whatever. That is a reasonable point however I am not really concerned about it. First any situation where I would have a hawk I would have a pistol and probably a rifle. Secondly yes, Rogers Rangers carried hawks as backups but they didn't have 30 rd mags for rifles and 17 rd mags in pistols. Third I wouldn't exactly want to get hit with a hatchet anyway.

My questions are as follows:

Does anybody uses a hawk for practical woods stuff like chopping a few limbs to make a shelter, cutting firewood, etc?

If so how does it compare to a hatchet for these purposes?

Other than the cool and theoretical tactical factor what makes a hawk better than a hatchet?

Input would be appreciated.

Quote of the Day

"Windage and elevation, Mrs. Langdon. Windage and elevation…" — John Wayne

Problem Admiration-Embrace it then Kick it to the Curb

Problem Admiration is where you find a problem and just stop and look at it. You think about (admire) all if it's issues and facets and such. This can be particularly challenging with complex problems that have numerous second and third order affects. The issue with problem admiration is that it can make a person act like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Obviously that is bad.

How much time you can allow yourself to admire a problem varies. A 6'5" 280 pound naked Goblin with an erection and a butcher knife coming out of an alley does not lend itself to a lot of problem admiration. On the other hand if your income will vastly change in 4 years when you are forcibly retired from a successful career you can think about for awhile. Both are significant problems but the urgency and timeline vary considerably.

Problem Admiration can be sort of a good thing in that it lets you think your way around the different pieces of a problem. On the other hand you aren't figuring out how to deal with it, or starting to deal with it. Figuring out a specific amount of time (minutes, hours, maybe even days) that you will allow yourself to admire the beauty of this issue you have to deal with is a good way to go.

Folks can get into admiring the various problems involved in survivalism and preparedness.
The real way to get out of problem admiration is to figure out a solution and start executing it. A good check is to see if you are closer to solving the problem than you were an hour ago or yesterday.

Don't just study preparedness or admire problems. Get out and do stuff. Learn and practics skills, acquire necessary tools, equipment and foodstuffs. Do something to be more prepared today than you were yesterday.

Read and Think

TEOTWAWKI Blog did a good post on 5 Tips for Avoiding Violence. My thoughts on it are as follows:

#1 Nothing good happens after 11 o'clock. We could debate exact times but the principle is sound.

#2 It is about choices. You can choose to pay a bit more in rent or have a slightly more modest place to live in a safer area. Maybe you can drive a bit further or in an extreme case choose to relocate to another city or region.

#5 In some situations harsh commands will let you separate a odd guy or somebody with mental problems/ whatever from a more probably threat. If you tell somebody to "Get the F back" and they keep coming, well at least you know there is a problem.

My bonus #6 would be to not be under heavy influence of drugs/ alcohol in public. I am not talking about a couple beers with dinner or a few drinks over the course of an evening. Being under heavy influence of anything makes you far more likely to miss the signs that a problem is coming or let yourself get into stupid situations. I am not judging as I enjoy some drinks myself. The point is that if you are going to tilt the bottle a little harder than usual keep it at home, or a buddy's place or whatever.

Anyway those are my thoughts on a great post.