Category: news

08:21 – Winston-Salem had our first Ferguson protest yesterday. It was peaceful and uneventful, although protesters did block a couple of downtown streets for a short time. There was no violence and no property damage. Protesters ignored police orders to clear the streets and move to the sidewalks, but no arrests were made. As Barbara said, the protesters were simply exercising their Constitutional right to peaceable assembly. I do wish they wouldn’t block streets. The Constitution guarantees them the right to protest; it doesn’t give them the right to force anyone else to listen, and it certainly doesn’t give them the right to inconvenience others.

I did a Google search yesterday for local prepping groups. There’s apparently a fair amount of activity. One meet-up group based in Walkertown, just down the road from us, has 225 members. Since preppers tend not to be joiners, that tells me there must be many thousands of active preppers locally.

Interestingly, a year ago a local TV station tried to get members of that group to agree to be interviewed on camera. All but one of them declined, and the one that did volunteer to be interviewed didn’t give away any details of his own preps during the interview. So they did a short interview with him, and then talked with a business owner over in High Point who sells $80,000 steel bunkers designed to be buried 20 feet underground. At one point, they asked her what her customers looked like and how they dressed, apparently expecting her to say that they all wore body armor and camo BDUs and carried assault rifles. She said they wore jeans and t-shirts and drove normal SUVs and minivans, just like anyone else.

10:04 – The morning paper reports that another car full of teenagers wrecked, this time in Greensboro, which is about half an hour east of us. Four kids in the car. The driver was 15 years old and had no license. The car was going 95 MPH in a 35 zone. Three kids dead, one in critical condition. I’m not sure why this is happening so frequently lately. I understand that teenage boys drive like maniacs. It’s not cultural; it’s biology. High testosterone levels, little driving experience, and a sense of immortality. I grew up in an area with lots of Amish, and I remember the Amish teenage boys holding drag races in their buggies. I’m sure Roman boys 2,000 years ago took similar risks, and Cro Magnon boys 20,000 years ago. But we sure have had a run of these tragedies lately.

There’s probably nothing to be done. When I was that age, our schools regularly showed gory movies like Signal 30, showing mangled cars and mangled people. I’ll never forget the images of Jayne Mansfield with her face ripped off and her head impaled by a piece of pipe. But I’d be willing to bet that not a single kid who ever sat through those movies actually believed it could ever happen to him. It was always someone else.

Barbara will be happy to know that I’m now reasonably happy with our level of preparation for emergencies. As is only proper for anyone who’s writing a prepping book, we’re now better-prepared than probably 99.99% of the population, in terms of both supplies and knowledge. I still want to relocate away from the city, or at least buy a weekend/vacation home up in the mountains that we could relocate to permanently if necessary, but otherwise we’re in pretty good shape. I’ll keep buying small items and more food but nearly all of the major purchases are complete.

Our Amazon Prime membership expires Saturday, and I’m not going to bother to renew it. We haven’t watched any Prime video in months, and none of the other benefits are of any interest to us other than free 2-day shipping. And that’s not worth $99/year, despite the fact that I’ve placed 52 orders with Amazon in the last six months. I won’t have a problem reaching the $35 minimum for free SuperSaver shipping, and in my experience with it before I (re)joined Prime, it usually doesn’t take much longer than Prime shipping to arrive.