Preparation for the End of the World Part 2. Essential Items for basic preparation

Now, you may be the type to not prepare for anything. A simple doctor’s appointment or a holiday dinner you were supposed to provide the stuffing for. You now seemingly are finding yourself thinking about what you would do in certain situations. What would you do in those situations? Do you have ANY sort of plan? Can you at least care for minor injuries? This is what we will talk about today; the absolute basics of preparing for disaster.



First and foremost, before you buy or prepare anything, you MUST have a first-aid kit. Without one, you can find yourself in plenty of trouble even with minor scrapes. Infection is a nasty word, and a nasty thing to have in any injury. A minor scrape untreated in an unclean environment can turn deadly in a matter of days. Sepsis, a bacterial infection which has spread to the blood, will kill you if left untreated. It spreads from organ to organ shutting them down along the way. A minor scrap you may get that becomes infected will only get worse if your white blood cells cannot fight it off. It will cause you severe pain, nasty discharges, and eventually lowering your blood pressure enough to bring you into a state of shock.

What if this was you in that situation? If only you would have had a first-aid kit with a few essential items, right? Exactly.

Basic Items you should have in your First-Aid Kit:

-Bandages (of all different shapes and sizes)
-Ace Wraps or Sticky Wraps
-Sterile Dressings (Packaged Gauze)
-NSAIDS (Tylenol, Aspirin, Ibuprofen, etc..)
-Hydrogen Peroxide
-Rubbing Alcohol
-Sharp Clothing Scissors
-Sterile Tweezers
-Triple anti-biotic ointment (Neosporin, Bacitracin, etc…)
-Antiseptic cleansing wipes
-Burn cream packs
-Butterfly Bandages
-VINYL Gloves (Vinyl due to possible Latex reactions)
-Sterile Cotton tip applicators

Even if you have no idea what any of this stuff is when it is needed, it’s not very hard to figure out. Just remember to CLEAN the wound (to get all those nasties out), and bandage the wound (to prevent the nasties from getting in). If you remember those 2 things, then you should be ok. At least for a while anyway.

First-aid kits can be pieced together and designed from scratch, or bought as an entire kit. The latter is by far the easiest if you have no first-aid experience. Some great places to buy first-aid kits online are:

www.firstaidkitbags.com
www.FirstAid-Supply.com
www.1staidsupplies.com

It’s also not hard to research basic first-aid on Google, and print a few pages to throw into your kit as well.



The next item you will want to have is a flashlight. This is absolutely dire in a no-power situation. Having multiple flashlights throughout your house and car like I do, is a huge plus but if you can only afford one, then at least get the one. A flashlight helps you navigate not only your own house, but outside as well. If you have to leave on foot (more on that in a different segment) then you will need this fine tool to guide you through wherever you need to be guided through in the dark.

In the house, candles are a great way for continuous light illumination but a bright beam from a flashlight can help you with any type of work you need to do where bright light is required. Actually, candles are a great preparation for no-power situations, simply for the fact that you can save tons of battery energy when you burn candles. If you keep candles, which you should, always remember to pack waterproof matches in a safe location.

Flashlights can also be used as a self-defense weapon. Regardless of the shape or size, a flashlight will always be hard and rigid. That characteristic alone is great to have when defending yourself. There are also flashlights on the market that have such a bright beam that they have a stunning affect on a human attacker. A bright enough flashing strobe will debilitate an attacker for a few seconds turning a defensive situation into an offensive situation. A great manufacturer of self-defense flashlights is Surefire (http://www.surefire.com). They not only make bright debilitating strobes, but they also make lights with sharpened beveled edges. Now, surefire is one of the best manufacturers on the market so expect to pay a pretty penny for these outstanding lights.

Another item that is essential is an all-weather emergency radio. There are tons of these in the disaster preparation market. Simply put, any emergency radio will do. All radios built for emergencies have a weather report option and a lot of them have a crank option. A crank lets you turn a crank to charge the internal battery leaving you with more batteries for that flashlight you’re going to buy. In any emergency situation, reports and updates will always be given over the radio (Unless zombies or invaders have killed everyone but you, then your screwed). Being in the know will help you plan more efficiently and effectively.

The last item on our basic essentials list is BATTERIES. STOCK STOCK STOCK AND STOCK. Always have batteries readily available. If your radio needs 9 volts, then stock a bunch of 9 volts. If your flashlight takes D’s, stock a bunch of D’s. You don’t want to be caught in Zombieland at 3am when it’s so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face now do you?

In my next blog, we will discuss specific situations and how to prepare for them.

Preparation for the End of the World Part 1. The Intro

Now, the world is going to end at some POINT. Whether that point is tomorrow, 2012, or 4590, NO ONE REALLY KNOWS.

However, a lot of these thoughts of End of Days come from our own imaginative processes. Thoughts we automatically have in our brain from other people's creative works. I.e Movies, Tabloids, Worldwide paranoia, and religion. Yes, I said it... religion. In particular, I'll bring up Christianity. No other chapter has more pursuading force on worldwide society than that of the Bible's "Revelation". It is THE HOLY GRAIL (Excuse my pun) of End of days literature. It has by far, at least in this country, created more paranoia and end of world speculation than any other piece ofwork. It has led society to create thousands of books and articles, handfuls of movies, and worldwide news coverage about when our world as we know it will end. If you aren't familiar, think of world wide battles of good. vs. evil, judgement day, pits of fire, demons walking the streets, 666, mark of the beast, etc... Yea, it's an entertaining story.

So all of our thought on this comes from other thought that was created through life-suckling fictional works of other people's thoughts. Make sense? Not really.

Regardless, we are merely a micron of an atom in the face of time and we will vanish and this world will cease to exist.... eventually. We have no way, at least currently, of peering behind the curtain of the future and actually predicting a viable date of when this all will happen. SO... all we can do is prepare ourselves. You may think that end of world preparation is a little over the top and irrelevant, but I am here to tell you that it is 100% completely relevant.

Because at any moment of any day, any number of events could happen that could displace you, shut down your government, or leave you completely and utterly alone (Think I am legend). Zombies, Natural disasters, major asteroids, worldwide disease, WAR, Alien Invasion, Solar Flares, Climate shift, blah blah blah blah blah I could go on all day, can happen at any moment. Some of these may seem a little far fetched but I assure you they are not. Any one of these things could happen whether you think so or not. As you well know, the earth was believed to be flat at one point in time and you couldn't convince anyone otherwise. SO with that said... In my posts to follow I will begin to teach you how to prepare yourselves for ANYTHING. From skeleton preparation for common occurences, to being prepared for a full out alien invasion. These articles and blogs will be very interesting to say the least, but in the end you will at least know how to kill zombies....

So, it's been a while

So, I see that I haven't posted in well over a year. Reading Seguin's self plugging antics on twitter made me see if my blog was even still here. Well, it is. So I mine as well keep it going. A lot has happened in my life in the last year. A marriage, and now a baby on the way. We found out Melanie was pregnant about 3 weeks before our wedding. That was a big BIG surprise. We have a due date of May 13th so that puts her at about 11 weeks and 6 days. Lot's and lot's of planning. This totally has rearranged my 2010. We did have plans to go to uruguay with the Sibils' but now we have to postpone until 2012. Which just happens to be.... wait for it....... THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. So what better place to spend the end of the world, than in beautiful Playa Verde, Uruguay.