I ran across a case study in complacency this morning, and I’m compelled to share it with you. It comes from a self-described “usually a very prepared guy” who lives in central Maine, where locals often say they get “nine months of winter and three months of damn poor sleddin’.”
(The old chestnut hints at Maine’s infamous “mud season.”)
Yesterday brought an early season storm that dumped over ten inches of wet, heavy snow on inland areas of the state. The “very prepared guy” says that it “hit hard and fast and did a ton of damage.”
“I got caught this time,” he confessed. “I’ve been busy.”
He hadn’t yet mounted the plow blade on his pickup. The weight of the snow brought a big tree down on the truck, and in the bed was his only generator, which he’d been meaning to drop off for repairs (but hadn’t).
Naturally, the storm knocked out power to his home.
While trying to clear the fallen tree, his chainsaw broke a chain. (No spare.) A second saw refused to run.
Bein’ a Mainah with a tractah, however, he managed to free his truck. He drove it down his unplowed road in four-wheel drive and borrowed a generator from his workplace. So he made it through the night with power, at least.
This morning, he offered this simple advice.
“If it’s broke, fix it — don’t wait. If you’re out of it, get some.”
Readiness is no more complicated than that.
I talk a lot on this blog about prepping, about staying ahead of the game, about planning and contingencies and backups to backups. Recently I admitted to paying “the price of procrastinating,” although in that case it cost me nothing but time.
There’s a reason I do that. Scroll on by if you want, but one of these days you might just “get caught” because you went to sleep on your preps.
Wise up. Be ready.
To save on electricity, I unplugged the space heaters in the camper’s basement around 9:30am this morning. The mercury had inched above freezing by that point and there was no sense running them all day long.
I’ll connect them again tonight before turning in.
A lot of ashes accumulated in the woodstove over the last couple of days, reaching a level that began to interfere with fresh-air intake. Despite there still being live coals in the mix, I employed our secondhand ash bucket and shovel, scooped out the firebox and carried the hot stuff out to the driveway. A while later, having judged the November wind to be behaving itself today, I dumped the contents of the bucket in the nearby fire ring.
It’s worth mentioning here that the 36-hour Thanksgiving burn we just completed demonstrated that this woodstove can’t heat our uninsulated cabin effectively (when temperatures outside fall below 30°F and stay there) unless we keep it running full-bore — on the verge of over-firing, risking a “runaway” — and around the clock. That’d consume a shit-ton of wood and would demand constant attention.
Don’t get me wrong, this Hearthstone is a great stove for us. It was the right choice and works perfectly. In fact, it’ll probably try to run us out of the cabin once we get everything buttoned up.
We simply have more work to do.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB