Rantings of a Lunatic

So something snapped in me recently. I can’t say what it was, or even if it was in me for sure. Rather I know something is different, and my outlook on the world is definately different than it was 6 months ago. I have started to think about some things that I haven’t thought about in a long time, and I have started to act in a manner that I acted when I was a kid. When I was young, I was very active in the Boy Scouts, which I credit a lot of my current self to. I could never be a boy scout now, but I got my eagle when it was an appropriate time for me to do it. I am a different person now than I would have been if I hadn’t had that training. I think it was when I started using Google Reader that I stumbled across a blog that caught my interest. It was a survival preparedness blog, and I have been reading it ever since. If I remember correctly it was the blog “Bear Ridge Project”. It is a blog of a guy who is setting up a cabin on Bear Ridge, and attempting to live in an off-grid manner. I have thought about that sort of lifestyle quite at bit since I was a kid, even going so far as to research earth ships and the like fairly thoroughly. I think the passive nature of the earth ships is one of the really appealing things to me, but that is a separate post.
Anyway, as I continued to read the Bear Ridge Project, I came across more blogs that while they might not be the same topic, they are at least similar. I have included a list below of blogs that I do read, more accurately an export of my “Survival” feed folder in Google Reader. I don’t always agree with all of them, and some of them I don’t agree with anything they write, but I do read them. Even if I don’t agree with them, they all have at least some little bit of information in them which it is possible for me to glean. In addition, I have started to do some long term survival preparation that I have been meaning to do for a long time. Its the sort of things that I have had nagging at me all through living in Wisconsin, and also now that I am back here. Things like storing a supply of water for in case something happens with the water lines. I am fairly confident that no matter how I prepare I will never be at the point where I can say I am no longer unprepared. I do know that after a few more months I will feel good about where we are at, and will not be worried as much as I am right now about preparing for what I consider to be the eventual collapse of our society.
I am in a difficult spot at the moment, because I feel very strongly that I need to do more to ensure our survival in the future, but at the same time, I also have to be cautious with what I do and purchase, because while Kelly is tolerating it now I am not sure she will think its “cute” forever. I don’t mean to imply that she thinks I am crazy, but I know that she feels that some of the money could be put to other uses rather than buying food designed to be left in a closet for 20 years. At this point I do not have any plans to purchase any guns, a point that I somewhat disagree with most of the survival bloggers about, but I am considering getting a concealed handgun license. I know that Kelly will not be happy if I come home with a gun, because she really hates them. I go back and forth on the issue of guns though. Somedays I prefer not to have the liability of them in the house, but at other times I view them from the perspective of our second amendment to the bill of rights, and think that if you don’t act on your rights, then you don’t have or deserve those rights. I am not a hunter, its just not something I ever got into as a kid, and I don’t mind. I know that with a rifle I could hunt and bring down game if I needed to, but at the current point of society I have no need to go and hunt for meat. I don’t know if I would be any good as a bow hunter, though I do know that as an archer I have always been really good at target practice. I don’t have a bow, but I also don’t see a lot of value in one, they just don’t fit in with our society very well. Though I was at Sportsman’s Mountain, or whatever the store is called, and they had a set of bow fishing accessories, which might be interesting, though a little less than practical in a survival based scenario.
Back to the topic at hand, I have been reading a lot of survival based blogs, and in the near future, I will be cataloging what I have been picking up, and for the most part I will be detailing how prepared I feel I am. I probably won’t be leaving all of the details about it up here, because not everyone needs to know where I have stored what, but I will be putting up the things that I think are important, and hopefully they may spur others into a similar grasp of what I think is necessary for the not too distant future.

• Be A Survivor
• BearRidgeProject
• bison survival blog
• DestinySurvival.com
• Dirt Cheap Dirt
• Down In The Hills Survivalist Blog
• kaiservontexas’ musings
• Keep It Simple Survival!
• Scoutinlife’s Homestead and Prepardness Blog
• Something Wicked Comes
• Suburban Preparedness and Suburban Survival
• Survival Acres Blog
• Survival Gear | Survival Equipment
• Survival Knife - The Edge of Preparedness
• TEOTWAWKIAIFF
• Teotwawkian
• The Local Malcontent
• The Urban Survivalist
• Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest

I am sure there are more but these are the links I had a few days ago.