Author: Jayce

I’m a Software Engineer that grew in the Pacific Northwest. I moved to Utah for a job in 98 and have stuck around ever since. I’ve always been preparedness-minded, since my family always had that as a focus. I love the great outdoors, enjoying the dichotomy of the split from regular gadget driven life to back country minimalist experiences. An avid scouter, and camper. No farm now, but grew up running an aviary, and logging to earn money.
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Losing your storage to disaster

Haitians Retrieve Deceased from Collapsed Building by United Nations Photo.
Photo Via Flickr User un_photo

Recently we had a reader ‘Lonnie’ write in with the following excellent question, that I’ve heard asked in other forms too;

Was thinking about the earthquake in Haiti, and if that happened along the wasatch front. I live in Utah county in a 2 story home with a basement. My food storage is in my basement. What if the earthquake totally destroys my house and my food storage is buried under the rubble of what was my house? It won’t do me any good when I can’t GET TO IT! Any suggestions on mitigating that problem?

Well Lonnie, it looks like I’m finally going to get around to addressing your question, and hopefully in a helpful manner. Continue reading “Losing your storage to disaster”

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Social Preppers

Interested in a little more discussion with the preppers here, and elsewhere?  In our association with the American Preppers Network, you now have several ways to interact with other people that like to talk preparedness.

Forum

For people interested in forum discussions, we have two available places to talk.  The APN forums will allow you communicate with the other utahpreppers, as well as other state prepper groups.  Also available is the new LDS Preppers, a similar concept but geared for the LDS readers.  By keeping with the rest of the groups, you can participate not only in the Utah discussions, but also any other regions, or specialty topics you wish.  It’s a great resource to communicate with other preppers, without having having to come out of your well-stocked mountain retreat (ok, a little humor there).  If you need to understand a little bit more about what a forum is, check out the wikipedia description.

Chat

If you like real time discussions, you can now join us in our chat rooms.  These chats are accessible to computer novice, as well as the geeks among us.  For the novice, you can easily go HERE and join the chat rooms in your browser (no software to install).  Just click the link, and you will be prompted for a nickname to use, then it’ll log you in and you will have a page to  There are several rooms available, the most important ones being the #preppers, and the #utahpreppers rooms.  Chat rooms are an ‘always-open’ type of room where you can go in and interact in real-time.  Just clicking that link will open a page with a small bar on the top that lists which rooms you can listen in (just click on one to see the activity in that room).  On the right hand side will be a list of people currently in the room, and at the bottom, you can type in a message, and just hit enter for everyone to get it.

For the Geeks, we’re all using the rizon IRC network, and you may use any IRC client (such as XChat, WeeChat, or others) to connect.

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Crossroads Gun Show: January Meetup

Yes, it’s time again for a Crossroads of the West gun show (Saturday January 9, 2010), and I know several authors andCrossroads Logo readers here were planning on going.  With that in mind, I figured it’s a great time to have another meetup.  With this I think we should set two times, one earlier in the show to meet up inside, for those that want to discuss things in the show, and a second time, meeting for lunch. Continue reading “Crossroads Gun Show: January Meetup”

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Wrapping Up, With Blankets

As snowflakes begin to frequently drift down, my wife begins her odd seasonal transformation from warm, to cold-blooded being.  I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with this process, but it is the true mark of seasonal change around my home.  Appendages seem to have ice permanently on them, and thus have an odd habit of always finding their way to me, which is cause to no small amount of distress.

With that in mind, we have discussed what else we can do in my family to increase our ability to stay warm inside (because my wife sure doesn’t want to go out).  Beyond just comfort in the dark months, my southern CA native wife is petrified of the idea of being without power/heat, and our ability to deal with that. Continue reading “Wrapping Up, With Blankets”

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Book Bomb – How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It

This is a little reminder for those that might have already heard, or a great intro for those that haven’t.  James Wesley Rawles, Author of the renowned survivalblog, as well as the novel Patriots (which we reviewed here before) has a new book coming out shortly.  It’s been available for pre-order for a little bit now, but everybody was requested to wait until today (9/25/09) to actually place pre-orders.  This makes a big difference to companies such as amazon, which use the purchase velocity in their rankings. Continue reading “Book Bomb – How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It”

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Liquid or Powdered Pectin

This year has been a big experiment in new canning recipes, and foods.  In doing that, my wife especially has been learning a lot as she has stretched beyond some of the basic recipes we’ve used in previous years.

Well, over on her own blog, my wife made a comment about something she’s learned this year.  Go check out what she’s learned on the difference between liquid and powdered pectin.

And boy has she been using that a lot this year.  I’ve been grabbing pictures to post up here, hopefully I can get to it soon.

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Shelf Reliance: Free On Friday

Our friends over at Shelf Reliance are having a giveaway that they would like people to know about.  Now I am slightly loathe to tell folks about it, since hey, I want to win.  But it’s only fair to share right?  So over on the Shelf Reliance blog they have a post with all the details, some of which I’ll copy here:

“Shelf Reliance is giving away a Harvest 72″ food rotation system! Visit the Shelf Reliance blog at http://www.shelfreliance.com/blog/ to enter. The Harvest 72″ is valued at $459.99 and can hold up to 600 cans, making it perfect for a healthy food storage supply. The winner will be announced on Friday, June 26th, so hurry to the blog for your chance to win!” Continue reading “Shelf Reliance: Free On Friday”

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Gardening In Utah

Recently I had a small message in my inbox that came in via the contact form here on the blog.  It was somebody named Alex mentioning that he had a blog we might be interested in.  A quick check showed that he was right, VegeNag is a blog about vegetable gardening in Utah.  I know I’m always looking for all the help I can get, so it’s nice to have somebody that can give advice that is local and knowledgeable about our specific soil conditions and other factors.

He is adding on quite a few useful articles on things he is doing to help plants grow around here, and has many useful links directly to useful locations such as the Utah State Extensions which provide very useful on agriculture, horticulture, insects, in short everything you might need to know about growing anything in your own county.

It looks like in the future he is planning on expanding his blog to also give alerts for when you need to take certain actions in your garden according to our climate.  And if we’ve learned anything this spring, it’s that a little help in knowing the real planting/safe dates can really help (I still can’t believe I got snow again today!)

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Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide

Since we haven’t had a humor post recently (and boy do I need one), I decided to do a little review of one of my favorite books.zsg-cover The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks.  Now who among us hasn’t felt some joy in responding to the question, “What are you prepping for” with a glib reply of “For the oncoming Zombie Invasion”?  If you haven’t ever used that response, you should try it sometime, and feel the joy. Continue reading “Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide”

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TV Worth Watching

I’m not a big TV fan myself, as I expect many of the readers of this blog.  But last year I did stumble on a show I really liked, called “The Alaska Experiment“.  The show took a couple small groups (2-4 people) of “regular people”, and dropped them in backcountry Alaska, to survive into the winter.  Now, not only was this TV, but it was reality-tv, which by nature I detest.  And yet it drew me in like no other.  Why?  Because it showed just how little people knew, and just how difficult it was to survive, even with the large amount of help these people received.  They had minimal food supplies given, they had shelter, and constant checkups to make sure they weren’t in real harm.  And yet it was still *very* difficult.  Sure, at many points I would scream at people for what I saw as dumb decisions, but I have a better camping background than they.  I was also sitting in my nice chair at home, instead of in the middle of Winter in Alaska.

Well, season 2 is coming, albeit with a slightly different name.  “Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment”.  Go check out the preview on the Discovery Channel page.  This season changes things a bit by dropping folks off in the wild, and letting themselves find their way out.  I’m sure we’ll all see the dangers in that.