In 2010 I decided to update the site so that it used the same format as the sites that I had created in the previous year or so. I used some of the same materials. The old articles were listed as oldies but goodies.

In 1999 I gathered a stock of food that I hoped would last two people about three months just in case the world as we knew it came to an end. We know that this did not happen but it was good experience. Very little if any of that food was wasted because it was well organised. Yes it was challenging finding places to put it all but it was invaluable experience.

I know what it is like to put these principles into practise. Whether my choices would have sustained the household during stressful times cannot be proved. What can be said s that if the worst had happened then we would have been in a better situation than most people.

The things that I learnt were written up into a textbook that could be used for a course on food storage but I did go on to develop the course itself.  Since then technology has moved on and it is now possible to off the same material in an online format.

I started to do this but them prevaricated over putting the finishing touches to it. The rumours of possible problems ahead kept on getting stronger and stronger.  In the end they became so loud that I stopped putting off the day when I added the finishing touches to the course and finally spent a couple of hours making sure that everything was as it should be.

Of course it would be far better if we pulled together such a plan and did not have to depend on going to the shops every day or even every week. In fact I once saw a headline that said “9 meals from anarchy”. Article went on to explain that the food distribution system in the UK, and in a large part of the developed world is such that there is only 3 days supply in the shops and warehouses that supply the shops. If for some reason the food distribution system breaks down there is a risk of severe problems after just 3 days. That’s scary.

If you believe that your family should have a greater level of security than that it is up to you to do something about it. You have to take responsibility for making sure that your family is safe and protected if something goes wrong.  It could be that there is a blizzard and you are stranded at home for a few days or there is a temporary medical situation that makes it hard for you to get to the shops.

Another Or do you want to be ready in case hyperinflation makes life so difficult that you would rather not have to buy anything for a few months or even a year or two until the situation was brought under control.

should have a greater supply of food and other essential items available if something happens then it is up to you to take the responsibility of looking after you and your family. In other words,  you need to set up a food storage plan to help keep them safe in an emergency.

On the other hand following this system of thinking through your plan you will be able to keep the amount of food wasted to a minimum so helping everyone including yourself.

I had started to prepare this course but I needed to put some finishing touches to it. Hearing that TV programme made me realise that it was essential to make this material available as quickly as possible. I spent Saturday making sure that it was all set up properly and released the course. At least that way if things do wrong in the future I will have done what I can to help people prepare for the future.

It is available here.

If you think it will cost you a fortune then you will be pleasantly surprised. The price has been set as a ridiculously low £5. In fact most people will find that they will be able to save more money by taking the advice on this site than the cost of getting access to it.

Looking at the TV pictures some shops lost their entire stock in minutes as they were looted. There were vehicles and buildings that were damaged.  Then there are reports that phones and social media have been used to share information about meetings points etc. Of course once such tactics have worked in one area the fear is others will copy them especially as there are reports that the courts and prison services cannot cope so they will not be punished.

I have only been in that kind of situation once and that was in a fight after the pubs closed one night. The fighters spread out across the road and the police were on hand to handle the situation. The biggest problem that I had was that to get home I would have to walk through the crowds. The answer to this was to take my fish supper to someone else’s house and wait until it was safe to go home.  Thankfully, there was little if no damage to cars or buildings in this incident and the relatively small number of people were soon dispersed.

Have you thought through your plans? Some people who have been expecting urban unrest of various kinds have decided to move out of city centres into quieter areas. The die hard survivalists often speak of moving into the countryside where they think it will be safer. There is also the issue of insurance to think about. Or how to cope with members of the household who may be tempted to join the unrest or others who are very frightened. If you are in the city do you have an evacuation plan.

P.S. Oops I thought I had posted this last week.

That does not sound like a problem but the leader had bought some yarn but had not thought about bringing any scissors. Typical Susan, I had a bag full of bits and pieces including my pencil case. In my pencil case was a pair of scissors. That was the equipment that we needed. My pencil case had another use. I wrapped some wool around it and then cut through the yarn on one side of the pencil case so that I had a number of strands of the same length. Why was that an obvious thing to do? It was one of those things that I learnt from making tassels for crochet items.  An unusual transferable skill if ever there was one.

OK maybe this is not the type of preparedness that immediately springs to mind. Yet when I was presented with an unusual situation I was prepared in terms of having the equipment needed. Not only that I had the experience of using a technique that was helpful. However it is an example of how it is easier to carry out a task if you have access to the right equipment and have experience of using it.

The question is what things do you need to be prepared for? Are you ready for any worsening of the financial situation? Are you ready for worsening weather conditions? Are you ready for too much rain (i.e. floods) or too little rain (i.e. drought)? Time you sat and thought a while and did a risk assessment.

What does this have to do with preparedness? The updated version of WordPress looked as though it would solve the problem that I had when zooming in. I then tried testing it and realised that there was a problem. One of the issues with preparedness is that you might think that you have a way of dealing with an issue but it is only when you test it that you can be sure that your idea works. Often it is only when something does not work that we realise that something needs to be done. 

Problem is often that is too late to do something. There are stories of people who put food aside to use in an emergency but when the emergency happens they find that the use by date on the tins is long past. They have a choice. Do they eat food that could do them harm or do they just not eat?  That is why one of the principles on our food storage planning course is rotation. 

This course is a bargain at £10 for lifetime access. Click here to find out more and to sign up for this course.

Today I tried using Google Chrome and enlarged the screen but this time there were no problems with part of the text box becoming covered by the menu from the side. Brilliant all I have to do is hold the ctrl key down as I press + and the screen gets bigger. I now have the text box so big that it fits the screen. I have adjusted the scroll bar that appeared and now I can read what I am typing in more easily. Yes it is bigger than I need at the moment but why struggle with small text when you can have it so big that you can read it easily. It has helped me catch a few spelling mistakes I might have missed otherwise. If I want to make it smaller again all I have to do is press ctrl and – at the same time. If you have a computer running windows it should work on your computer as well. Try it and see. 

What does this have to do with being a Prepared Home? Being prepared is about being able to solve problems. It means knowing what to do when things are not going well. It means being prepared to cope in difficult circumstances. One of the old articles on the original Prepared Home web site was written while I was struggling with an injured arm and found that using the computer was one of the easiest challenges I deal with. It was a struggle using a pen, cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry etc because I had to learn new ways of carrying out those tasks. However I already knew how to use a computer without a mouse and how to use the keys that make a computer more accessible. This meant that I did not have to learn another way to do what I wanted to do. I had already practised the techniques I needed in the new circumstances. 

That is just one example of how being prepared can be helpful. Now what sort of situation do you think that you could face in your own home that would be easier if had thought about how you could do the same thing in another way. Is your home in an area that one day might flood so you might need to evacuate in a hurry? If so have you thought about what you would want to take and how best to protect the things that you cannot take e.g. what will you move as far up away from the water as possible and how will you do it.  

What sort of situation could you face more easily if you learnt how to do things before you had to do them yourself?  One example of this was a college course for those who wanted to learn to cook before they went to university. I suspect that it would help anyone moving into a new home and who needed to feed themselves on a budget. 

The basis of the Surviving a Household Emergency course is to help you answer questions like that. A start has been made on updating it and the new version will be released before the end of 2011. 

We might not get earthquakes like those that have caused such severe problems for those who live in Japan or New Zealand but we still see the effects of earthquakes overseas. There was an occasion when an earthquake at the other side of the world led to a financial collapse in London.. You may remember the collapse of Barings Bank. The activities of at least one of their traders left them vulnerable and when an earthquake hit Japan it led to a series of events that included the collapse of a bank in London.

One of the things with earthquakes is that often it is possible to predict them. What sort of predictions are we hearing about financial matters? There are people who say that there are warning signs of a financial collapse ahead. They are predicting hyperinflation and even the possibility that the dollar will collapse and become worthless. Of course there are always people predicting gloom and doom but rarely have I heard so many voices from so many different sources predicting the same things. The collapse of the dollar would bring a financial earthquake to the UK. Oil and other raw materials are priced in dollars. Companies and banks trade in dollars. Some financial commentators are just waiting for the big one in terms of a currency collapse in the same way as some people are waiting for the big one in terms of an earthquake in California.

In terms of earthquakes people are looking forwards with strategies to help them survive. It is best to shelter at the base of strong walls because when a wall falls the base normally stays upright and the upper parts fall a little way away from the wall. It is also a good idea to stay way from books or other heavy items that could fall from high shelves. Another good idea is to keep 3 days supply of food and water on hand so that you can survive until the emergency services arrive. However, some times these sorts of tactics do not prevent serious problems.

If the financial world was shaken by the collapse of the dollar would you have any idea how you were going to survive? What about growing more of your own food? Some people say that buying gold and silver is a good idea just in case things go wrong, one reason why the price of gold and silver is going up and up and up. Others are preparing to survive food shortages, power cuts or even a shortage of every day items like cooking utensils. Just because you are many miles away there is no guarantee.that it will not cause you problems.

Strangely what also caught my eye were two bus shelters. In the UK the local council works with the bus company to provide a service to the community. There are a number of things to consider such as what routes the buses will take and where people will get on and off the buses. From time to time the route changes and new signs need to be put up. In addition to the signs sometimes they do things to make it more pleasant to wait for the bus. Some years ago in this area it was common for the council to build a bus shelter from bricks and to add a sloping roof to it. Many were built to the same basic design of three walls with a roof over the top so that they were a bit like a man made cave.

The idea was of course to provide shelter for anyone waiting for a bus so that if it was wet or windy they would have some protection. i looked at these shelters and wondered if buses still came past them. There were no bus stop signs next to them. In fact they looked too clean to be used very often. No rubbish no disinfectant to counter the urine from drunken men on the way home.

I looked at them more closely and I realised that if they were going to serve their purpose of protecting people they needed to be maintained. Because they were not well used they were not given priority terms of maintenance. When I looked inside, the roof of both the shelters I looked at had been damaged. This kind of roof construction is quite vulnerable as those intent on destruction or mischief can reach up inside and damage it or climb on top and damage it. The council were doing their best to provide these shelters for the community nearby but they have literally hundreds of these kind of shelters to care for scattered over many miles and limited resources to maintain them. They have to prioritize and use these resources to help the maximum number of people. Bus shelters that are rarely, if ever, used will obviously at the bottom of the list for attention. 

The point I am trying to make is this. Those like the council who provide services for the community can only do so much. If you need help such as shelter from bad weather they may have been able to do something in the past such as build a bus shelter. Those shelters may still be in place but these days their resources are so stretched that they may not be able to maintain them. When you are waiting for a bus you may need to go out better prepared to face the weather such as wearing more effective waterproof clothing so you can provide your own protection from the weather.

Remember in the UK your local council is there to support the community in a variety of ways including if there is s civil emergency such as flooding. When the council has to make choices about where it spends its limited resources it will prioritize them. Recently this has got even harder as they have less money to spend. If people are screaming at them to not to reduce the help they give to the elderly and disadvantaged today then they will struggle to put money aside in case of a civil emergency happens tomorrow. In other words, if something happens they will be less well prepared to help the community. Not only that but any supplies that they do have to turn a community centre into an emergency shelter will be getting older and less fit for the purpose intended because it will  be harder to replace them.

Another comparison is that just as bus routes can change so that some bus shelters are no longer used and there is a need to provide new bus stops. The are changes in what emergencies will occur. There could be changes in what facilities are available in a community if for example a community building the planners once relied on is no longer available. Their plans could go out of date which would make it harder to provide support for the community. 

In other words they have good reasons for being less able to support people in need in an emergency. That will not stop people complaining if something did go wrong. However, rather than complaining and blaming others for your difficult circumstances why not take responsibility yourself now and be better prepared for an emergency. .

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Ok it is a house that looks as though it is wrapped up in something that looks like a yellow scarf. But why a scarf? Well that story goes back to the early 1970s. Yes I am old enough to have been a child then.

I can clearly remember a television advert for an insurance company that ended with a cartoon. The cartoon showed a family who had a insurance policy. The insurance policy was seen as being a rolled up piece of paper. This piece of paper unrolled itself and then wrapped itself around the family. Once around the family it changed into something that looked more like a stone tower that could defend the family. The power of that advert was that that image has stuck in my mind for literally decades, problem is I cannot remember the insurance company’s name.

The Prepared Home logo is a house that is wrapped up to protect it from the things that are going on around it. After creating this logo I realised that there was another metaphor for being protected that I really liked. This one comes from the bible. There, in Psalm 91, it talks about people who are friendly terms with God being kept safe as if they were under the wings of a parent bird. I find this a very reassuring picture. To be kept safe like that takes a decision from both the juvenile bird and the adult bird. It may be a bit of a stretch but possibly that scarf might be also be seen like wings wrapped being around your home keeping it safe. Of course to take advantage of that arrangement you would have to be on friendly terms with God. (Here are some ideas to help you find out more about this friendship.)

What does this mean for you? How will you benefit from the materials developed under the banner of The Prepared Home? Would like to do things now that will add that kind of layer of protection to your home? If you are prepared if something does wrong you will recover from the problem more easily and not suffer as much in the process. Your household will become more resilient and better able to bounce back after problems arise. If you are really careful with your planning you will find yourself in the situation whereby you are able to deal with everyday situations more easily. You may be the ones who others turn to for help you know the parents who provide practical support for their children or the children who have become responsible for providing practical support for their parents. If you are better prepared to cope in an emergency then you will be better able to support them. It is time that you stopped to think about how you can be better prepared to protect your loved ones. Stop prevaricating and start preparing.