I posted this in a similar thread on a different site where everyone seems to think I'm crazy. They're probably right.
I know that it's kinda silly. Still, I have to confess to feeling the tiniest little pang of foreboding or anxiety lately. Whether there are reasons, other than the Mayan predictions that justify worrying about the future can be argued both ways I suppose. It does seem that there are a lot of people concerned about it to some degree.
Perhaps it's just that I'm getting older but I do find myself thinking more and more about how important it may someday become to be self sufficient and I've been taking steps in that direction.
I'm fortunate that I have my boat at my residence. I figure it can be my ace in the hole if the crap hits the fan. At the same time, I'm trying to utilize the land (house and yard) that I occupy to provide some sustenance. I've raised bees for years, and have decided to start raising worms next. I can't talk my wife into chickens or rabbits yet but I'm working on her.
Call me crazy, but I've heard that one of the biggest problems that people have when natural disasters hit is sanitation.
Water stops flowing and people don't know where to crap. So they do it all over the place. If the
water stops flowing to my house, I don't want to have to worry about having to make a major life adjustment. It's going to be bad enough dealing with my wife. But the truth is, I've been using a home made urine separating system ashore for the last couple of months and have discovered that it has many advantages. First is that for the first time in nearly 30 years of marriage, I have my own throne. There's also the fact that when in use the
toilet is pretty much air tight and therefore is less stinky than having your contribution floating around in a bowl of water with no static or negative air flow in relation to the space that your nose occupies. Then there's the compost. First it's composted in the normal manner where the heat from the process kills any pathogens and then that compost is fed to the worms. By the time it's done, it's just about as perfect a soil that exists.
It's a nasty subject, but I've realized that I don't feel good about using (I read this number somewhere) 7000 gallons of good
drinking water to flush my bodily wastes down the drain when it can be composted and returned to the soil. Here in
Florida, during the recent cold snap, the farmers had to use water to keep from losing their crops. They pumped so much water out of the ground that sink holes started appearing all over the place because they were draining the aquifer. Water shortages are a real concern in many places in the world much less this country. I've been collecting rain water in barrels for years but have been recently thinking seriously about building a cistern.
It's really hard to know how to plan for the future when you don't know if you are going to have to deal with a super volcano in Yellowstone or a comet of death that sends the world into the next ice age, or just a little earthquake or tsunami that submerges your state and turns masses of ordinary fellow citizens into mad swarming hordes of terror.