I asked for guest bloggers to contribute some articles while I’m away on vacation. Dan wrote volunteering his and saying he has an extensive background in the medical field and as an EMT. Medical preparations I feel are some of the most important ones to get training in. I was ecstatic to get a medical article and when I did I have to admit to being blown away by the quality and content. You can find Dan on Facebook at SEMO Preparedness Network. Huge thanks to Dan and please stop by and give him a like on Facebook.
Hello, my name’s Dan and I’m a Paramedic. Sounds like an admission for a 12 step recovery program and for some of the things I have seen over the last 14 years in Emergency Medical Services I probably need counseling. Over the years spent working on the ambulance and on the fire department I have learned a secret that many never learn and some have down to an art. Being prepared saves lives. Seems like a no brainer right? The Paramedics are always prepared right? Short answer, no. The most successful Paramedics, the ones people turn to when things get chaotic, have a plan. That plan might not cover every contingency but it beats the hell out of flying by the seat of your pants when lives are at stake.
While I’m off enjoying a road trip to New Orleans my good friend Emily from the Myfatego blog volunteered a guest post for me. Thank you Emily and enjoy!
Here I am about a mile into the hike on day one. Holding the wire so the back pack does not topple me.
My pap, jack of all trades, says sometimes you only know enough to get yourself hurt. A few years ago, on my first backpacking trip, I knew enough to nearly kill myself. I’ve been camping as long as I can remember. My mom is a real enthusiast. Camping meant tents and sleeping bags; no air mattress for us, we were too extreme. No electricity either, so you can leave the portable television at home. It was just us, nature, a deck of cards, and a cooler for the hot dogs and S’mores chocolate. Now that I have a few slightly more primitive campouts under my belt, I realize camping with my mom was not so rustic as I once imagined. Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t in the back yard. We were at campgrounds though. There were usually sites with picnic tables and a fire ring, and down a ways would be potable water and a shower house. Back then I would carry my cosmetic bag up to the showers and stop to shake my head condescendingly at the people in the R.V.’s. That is not real camping, I would think smugly. I am a real camper. Oh sweet naive baby Emily. Flash forward a decade or so to 22 year old Emily. At the time I had recently had a baby, and I was fat. I was really fat. Probably around 240 pounds. One day as I was wallowing around the house, probably covered in spit up and cookie crumbs, I happened to stumble across an advertisement for an organization called fat-packing. Basically they take a bunch of big boys and girls on a long hike, and when they come out of the woods BOOM! They’re skinny. This was very intriguing to me. I’d been tossing around the idea of a backpacking trip for awhile. I didn’t have the billion dollars it cost to go on their full-service fat-camp style trip, but who needed them? I didn’t want the watered down champagne safari. I wanted the legit experience. I’m a real camper after all. Dammit. I wrangled my best friend Teresa into coming with me. She’d never been in the wild before (neither had I), but she was willing. So begins my comedy of errors. I did what I considered to be enough research. I chose the location and called the ranger to make sure they were open and the back country camping was free-yup! We were going to Savage Gulf in South TN. Sounds like a friendly place, right? Next I looked up what we should bring and made my list: clothes, food, water purifier…then I got bored, and I decided I already knew what I needed. My first serious mistake was my choice of water purification. Savage Gulf has natural running water sources at different points along the trail. Some of these points are over 5 miles away from one another. I brought one 32 oz water bottle with me, and because obviously I needed to clean the water somehow, the bottle I brought was a bobble. For those of you who don’t know, the bobble’s mouthpiece is a built in water filter. Basically it is the equivalent to pouring lake water into a Brita pitcher. Had we ever made it to the first water source on the hike, I’m sure we both would have gotten ecoli and died. My second biggest mistake was my choice of food. I had started Atkins before the trip, and I really wanted to watch my carb intake. Hiking all day, and eating little to no carbohydrates? Lord. I did pack about 8 cans of meat, half a dozen Atkins bars, a jar of peanut butter, a box of precooked bacon, and then another half dozen cans of black beans and veggies. The food alone weighed a ton. It was so stupidly heavy I couldn’t even tie it up in a tree because I was too weak to hoist it up there. I walked about 10 yards from camp and “hid” it under some foliage. Of course, by that point I was hoping a bear would come and eat me. My back pack itself was a disaster. It weighed about 60 pounds. I had a full size tent hanging off of it by a carabineer, and I had in general packed a lot of non-necessities. Besides my collection of canned goods, I had a queen sized pillow, multiple changes of clothes, 2 books for pleasure reading, a notebook for journaling, and of course a deck of cards. This was on top of all the stuff you actually need to camp. However, that wasn’t even the worst part. The backpack I was using was a really high quality bag I had borrowed without permission from my mom. Unbeknownst to me, she had separated the bag from the support frame. I didn’t even know the bag had a support frame that went with it! I was carrying 60 pounds of poorly distributed weight right against my spine. Imagine tying sacks of potatoes to your arms, slinging them over your shoulder, and then climbing up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. Did I have the right shoes? No. Socks? No. Bug spray? No. I had not planned on how I would dispose of our trash or do dishes since I had never been at a place that didn’t offer amenities like rubbish bins and water pumps. I did have an iPod, Thank God. If I turned it up loud enough I could drown out the sound of my friend’s complaining. Bless her heart though; she did have it worse than me. 10 minutes into the trip, before we even knew what we were in for, she twisted her ankle. By the time we laid down to sleep, she had manifested pink eye. Not to mention she signed up for this trip with my reassurance that she was in the safe hands of an true outdoors(wo)man. We had planned to hike a 32 mile loop in 4 days. Instead we hiked 5 excruciating miles in, camped, and walked 5 painstaking miles back out. We were dehydrated, sore, and ready to kill each other. I vowed never to camp again. I hate camping. After we drove home, I went straight to bed. The next morning I went ahead and checked on my weight. BOOM! I had lost 5 lbs. I had lost 5 lbs in 2 days. I LOVE camping. My pap, a terribly sage man, also says you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It took me nearly a year before I was willing to take on another backpacking trip, but I was so much more ready for it. I have two pieces of advice. First, research everything you can before you go. Read books, read the survival punk blog, talk to people who have hiked the area you’re going to, make friends with the park ranger, watch the movie Without a Paddle. Knowledge is power. Second, invest in some good gear. The right shoes can make a world of difference. The wrong water bottle could kill you. Be a good boy (or girl) scout and be prepared.
Up Today I have a guest post from my new friend Scary Dad from the ScaryDad Blog. Where he brings all the best Halloween, horror, and DIY projects from his own brains and from all around the web.
DIY
Why DIY?
When I was a little kid my bike started making a weird noise. I took it apart and set everything out so I would remember how to put it back together. But something happened- I missed a step or lost a piece and I just couldn’t get it back together again. My dad didn’t know what I had done or what I might have done wrong, so he couldn’t help me. I had to take it to the bike shop and spend money on getting it fixed. And I felt so helpless for it. I hated the feeling that I had actively messed up something I depended on and couldn’t fix it.
My mom offered that I was “not mechanically inclined,” suggesting a lack of innate talent rather than failure. I think it was so that I wouldn’t feel bad for having failed, but that made it worse. I wanted to be mechanically inclined. I wanted to be able to fix my bike if it broke. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of the shop mechanic who, even at nine years old I was sure was telling me and charging me whatever he wanted because he knew I didn’t know enough to argue.
So, time passed and I’m a grownup now and I know how to fix my own bike. I also know how to fix a lot of other stuff. Whether from lack of funds, boredom, or just stupid circumstances I have repaired, rebuilt, restored, repurposed, or remodeled all kinds of things over the years. And I still do it even if financially I don’t have to.
There is a sense of both accomplishment and independence associated with DIY. When you can create, improve, or repair something it makes you just that little bit less dependent on “the grid.” Not that the grid is a bad thing in and of itself, but being 100% dependent on anything is not a good way to be. In today’s world a little self-reliance goes a long way.
If you learn to do things for yourself you no longer rely on contractors or repairmen, especially for small jobs (that they charge more for because they have to make it worth their time).You truly do become more self-reliant and self-sufficient. And after a while you want to apply the DIY ethic to other aspects of your life. Survival Punk and Scarydad exist for this very reason.
More than a few times, as I’ve pondered a pile of reclaimed wood or some yellow-pad blueprint for something or other, I’ve thought to myself, “Dude, why don’t you just buy/have someone make/install/deliver one of those? Wouldn’t it be easier?”
And in a lot of cases the answer is Yes.
And yet I spend my weekends in my garage; barking knuckles, drilling holes, staring at pieces that just don’t quite fit and figuring out how to make them fit…
So why do I do it? Why do I insist on taking the extra time (and sometimes extra money) to make something instead of just running over to China-Mart and buying some low, low-priced piece of plastic crap?
Brody the Shark
His name is Brody, and he is my 2-year-old daughter’s favorite toy.
I finally got enough questions in to do another Q&A post. If you would like your question to be answered on the blog just send me an email to James@survivalpunk.com. Since mail volume is still slow you are nearly guaranteed to have your question answered. This week most the questions came in from Facebook, which is also ok if you prefer that way. I have a good selection of question for you this week on wide selection of topics. So lets get down to it!
I can not express my jealousy to all of you with land and big beautiful gardens. That is by far one of the biggest reason I can’t wait to move out and have land. Until then there is no reason I can not try my hand at growing a few things. I have found that the biggest bang for my buck has been growing salad greens and herbs. Both are much better and cheaper by growing yourself. I had let gone a while without having a window garden but after buying fresh basil recently and paying the ridiculous prices for a few leaves I decided it was time to plant. Lets get our hands dirty and get planting.
