Urban Survival Secrets

Duck and Cover

Hey gang,

Remember the old duck and cover drills we did in school (if you are old enough to remember the ol nuke threat from commie soviets!)

Well, I am gonna do a duck and cover for a bit in the next couple of days. Yup, I am disapperaring for a while. In my absence, you will have a new author who will be takin over. You will enjoy his views and he is very capable in taking over – moreover, he has my full confidence.

So, why is this happening? Well, I am not going to post the specifics.

Just remember, our country will never be free until we have restored the country to a republic form of government where the central government is less powerful and respects states rights. Where democracy and the free market economy are properly practiced as the founding fathers envisioned it and set forth in the Constitution. Where the puppet masters do not reign but are reigned in and tried like the criminals they are.

Until that time, get yourself prepared. Get your supplies in place, practice buggin out and keep plenty of cash on hand. Be sure to watch the metals prices of Gold and silver. Buy some silver as a hedge as gold is not in most peoples budget. And look out for the liberals who want everyone to be sheople. The goal of the progressives is to take over cuz us bunkins are too dumb to run out lives, so we need to be takin care if – poor little guys. And ALWAYS think for yourself. Don’t let anyone form an opinion for you, not Rush, Beck, Hannity, Levin, Soros (ha ha) or even me. Most of all – watch out for the liberal/progressive media.

Until we meet again, I hope for the best

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

A Rising Tide Raises All Ships

We have all heard this colloquialism at least once in the last year or so. Heck, even the President has said it.

But what does it mean when used in the terms of the world economy?

After thinking about this, I believe that it does not mean that if we get a few people moving up, the rest will follow. Not one bit. What it means in terms of the World Economy is this, when the US economy is doing well, we are the tide. When the US economy is doing well, then other nations prosper since we are a net importer of stuff.

How did China get so wealthy? It was US consumers who lead the charge for less expensive stuff, which in turn created the demand. And then China filled the void. They took it from other third world countries since they have three things most other countries do not: Cheap labor, communism and habits. Since there are so many people over in China, the can throw bodies at problems for cheap (kind of like what occurred here not very long ago.)

But how does communism fit in? Think repressed wages for the masses. Let me ask you a question: Why does China not want to have a fluid currency value? Reason is, and then they would have to deal with increasing wages as inflation crept up. This in turn would increased prices on stuff produced in China, which would eventually lead to production moving to somewhere else – India? Africa?

Now what is the habit that was previously mentioned that is different in China over the US? Because of repression, the Chinese have always been forced to save due to incessant shortages. A typical communist issue In America, we buy stuff to flaunt our wealth and do not reinvest our money in companies/stocks/precious metals. So while the Chinese has an emerging middle class, ours is declining.

Then to top it off, you should see what the tax rate is for the Chinese

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China

Which is pretty reasonable when you have billions of people?

The fact is, low taxes, coupled with high productivity, you have wealth.

This takes me back to the original premise. Even with the Chinese doing well, it will not help the world economy except in a few areas of natural resources. When the US does well, the rest of the world does well. We are the tide.
So what can you do? Buy American (or local) and keep Americans employed. When you do, then Americans buy stuff that is manufactured worldwide. When we Americans are consuming, the rest of the world is producing, which keeps them employed.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Another Food Storage Thought

Here in the mighty US of A, we have Thanksgiving coming up. Thanksgiving was a celebration that the settlers had with the natives as part of the harvest. They did not eat turkey, but many fine things like fish, squashes and venison.

I know that hunting season is upon many areas and some of our lucky friends will have some venison. If you can talk them into parting with a couple pound backstrap, you could really make a fine meal. On the Next Iron Chef, venison was used by both of the chefs. Check the recipes out on the food network dot com.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program – Food Storage.

With all of the food festivities coming up, you may want to take advantage of the food sales, especially canned goods. Plenty of stuff like pumpkin, beans and what not. The trick here is to store it properly and have a date clearly written on the label. Be sure to rotate your stock and use it however you can. Last but not least, only buy stuff that you will eat. As a friend once told me, yeah, I could eat grubs to survive, but why if there is other things that are more appetizing? Point well taken.

Lastly, with your cooked food – especially meats, be sure to practice good hygiene. Nothing like getting food poisoning from a piece of meat which had set out for more than a few hours. But hey, we are Urban survivalists – we know better. Maybe tell your enemies that doing that ages the meat and tenderizes it! Thats it, thats the ticket!

Posted in First Aide | No Comments »

Outdoor Oven Update

Well, yesterday I was on the oven doing some cleanup work when I had a battle with gravity – and yes, I lost. I may either have a badly sprained wrist or a fractured radius – will have it checked out Monday. oh well!

Here are a few images of the updated build. The arch had to removed and the bricks cut after I forgot to mill them for a door – a real “duh” move.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The outside oven

For those who have come to know me, I enjoy eating (as evidenced by the weight gain in the last few years!)

In a previous post, I showed a cobb oven made from mud in the land down under.

Now, I am going at an oven on my own property. It was planned for whilst building the Tuscan camo’d bunker. I set up the base and pured the concrete floor over a year ago. I poured the insulating vermiculite layer earlier this year. This week, I scored some almost 100 year old fire brick from work (tested out as non-hazardous), borrowed a harbor freight tile saw from a friend and started in earnest!

The oven diameter is about 41.5 inches and will have a finished interior height of about 19.5 inches. As one of the readers asked, are you going to cook a whole dear in it? The answer is – maybe

The goal is to get this thing completed by this Thursday/Friday so that I can get a fire in it and have a pizza on Thanksgiving with the family – we will see. I ran into a few problems due to breakage of tools and my anal retentive engineering behavior. Top it of with my slave/child labor rebelling (at first) and you get a union style work stoppage. That came to a quick halt!

As for the mortar recipe – 1 part fire clay, 1 part lime, 1 part Portland cement and 3 parts silica sand (fine/30 grit). Thoroughly mix and the stuff is sticky!

I have finished the first two rows (a soldier course and the first chain.) The soldier course has a 20 degree angle put in it. Each chain will be subsequently steeper. The trick right now is for me to get the opening completed before I get too much higher on the dome.

Keep your eyes peeled and be sure to wear your personal protective equipment – I blew through 4 sets of gloves and still have a few lime burns.

Posted in Education, Food, General Info | No Comments »

Water – can we live without?

This morning I had my irrigation come in for the back pasture. As I am sitting and watching my allotment flowign across the back field (ok, my yard), I started thinking about water storage. You are probably wondering about how water coming out of a 10 inch pipe could lead to that? Well dear reader, it is because I am me and treat all topics like eggs ready to be scrambled (it helps keep you mentally sharp like a crossword puzzle!) Enough philosophy.

After opening the valve and checking to make sure my berms were up and the gophers were ready to be flooded (add maniacal evil genius laugh track here) I slipped off the mucker boots and wet socks and came in side to check my water inventory/ water storage. I know that we live on less than 1 gallon a day per person in my house. But for planning, I like to have an excess. So, 5 people, 110 gallons. 22 days of water. pretty simple. However, we also have the critters to consider. 3 dingo’s (aussie shepard/queensland healer mix) – need to have about 1 gallon a day for the dogs based on past experience = So water is now I have 18 days of water.

In either event, I am short water. We should have 30 days of water on hand. So I need 180 gallons which is 3 drums (165 gallons) plus 15 gallons of water bottles.

Here is my trick on water bottles. I get a few of the neighbors to save me 2 liter soda bottles. I wash with hot soapy water – for soap, I use simple green! Then I rinse 3 times with 1 cup of water per rinse. Then 1 ounce of hydrogen peroxide in the water swished around. and with the bottle cap on and upside down until filling time.

Then drain the peroxide, fill the bottle with Reverse Osmosis water (which I have in the kitchen) and treat with chlorine bleach. Please note, that for every 5 drops of chlorine, I add 1 drop ammonia to form a chloramine solution which is very stable in comparison to chlorine alone. Though, some people are sensitive to chloramine, so tread wisely.

To do the chloramine route, take your water, add the chlorine, close and shake the water bottle then add the ammonia. Do not mix the chlorine and ammonia together as you will probably get a reaction you do not like (and burns your lungs!)

A couple things about chlorine:
-Chlorine bleach has a shelf life of about 6 months, depending on temperature
-You should use the unscented stuff
-do not used any of the powdered stuff

As for the ammonia, please be sure to buy the unscented stuff – usually costs a buck for a half gallon at Wally World – one of the few places that carry it in my neck of the desert.

Please be sure to rotate your water supply! A friend of mine accidentally did not rotate his water and found out during a multiple day power outage that one drum of water resembled a duck pond! Fortunately, he had several others that were within date.

Setting up a rotation with drums is quite simple – go out and buy large labels from the office supply store, Put an expiration date on them and stick them on your drums. Then be sure you at least once a month you check your supplies.

Posted in Education, Food | No Comments »

Web Hosting

I have been asked by a few readers who I use for my web hosting. To let you know, I am someone who does not want to spend in excess of $100 to host a blog. Nor do I use a free blog site as that just helps whoever owns the site. Thus, I use Dot5Hosting. Plus, it is run in America, by Americans and not some psudo-socialist dot com company located in the Left Coast (you know who I am talking about!)

They have been doing a great job with my accounts over the past few years!. And their customer service beats the hell out of most, if not all of the others.

Best of all, the Hosting special going on right now is $3.96/month with a 2 year subscription! The guys over at some of the other hosts are charging more than that for 1 year. And do not worry about the link stuff – that gives you a rate better than mine as a new client!

Plus, using these folks, I was able to get onto Google’s first page within a few months (if that is important to you!)

Check them out at

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

US Money Redesign

If the looney left has not gone over the edge in the past, they sure have now. The freaks at the Huffington Post – poseur journalists at best – have posted a redesign of the US currency. And get this, they have the fool Obama on the one dollar bill and FDR on the $100! Lets see, two people who have run the country into the ground with debt in a short period of time – now that is progressivism for you.

So, I am asking you to go to the rag of a website and vote all the crap down. We do not need our currency looking like that of a third world nation printing bills like nuts with phoney leaders on the face. Do I smell rebellion in the air?

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Sunday is Cheese Day

Yesterday at the fortress of survival (or my UrbansurvivalSecrets.com bunker as my neighbors call it), I worked on my cheese making skills. With my wifes questioning eye on me, the watched as I doped the milk, let the cultures do their magic, then coagulate and transform into a pot of milk colored jello on the stove top. I think she had thoughts of Young Frankenstein running though her head with me running around like Gene Wilder yelling – “it’s alive!”

The biggest pain in the ass was to find the rennet. I checked the local health food store, wal-mart and then Kroeger/Fry’s/Smith’s/Ralley’s… and found it at the last spot in the jello section.

After making mozzarella three times, I got used to just doping the milk with the rennet at prescribed levels and coagulating – however no one told me about the need to mix the damn rennet in for 1 minutes instead of dump it in and stir briefly. The resultant curds are so much better. Also from my experimenting, I found that using calcium chloride in the store bought milk does help as well.

I made mozzarella because it is a make and eat cheese with immediate results – a good one for practicing on! Yesterday, I decided on making a Farmers Caerphilly cheese. Aging two weeks, it is a pretty easy cheese to make and store. The goal of course is to get milk into a stable state for storage purposes and provide high nutrition when SHTF day comes. You see, I have a neighbor who owns a dairy around the corner. I have worked out a plan with him so all will be good.

In cheese making, you use a culture after warming up the milk to room temperature. In my case, I used a double boiler set up to stabilize the temp around 80 degrees. I have some cultured buttermilk which I added (1 oz per gallon milk.) To culture your buttermilk, get some fresh stuff, crack the lid and leave it on the counter over night – It should be really thick then. After culturing the milk for 1 hour, I added the rennet (1/4 teaspoon of vegetable rennet/gallon) stirred and let it sit for about 90 minutes. I cut the curd, stirred and let it sit for another hour, stirring at the beginning for about 5 minutes. The curds were cut into 1/2 inch cubes. I then drained the whey (fed it to the dogs who loved it) three times and added 4 grams of salt to help de-whey the curds further. Then I put the curds into a cheesecloth lined plastic bowl that I drilled holes into. I took the lid and cut it down to fit inside the bowl. I then pressed the cheese for several hours (1 movie) to get my hockey puck.

The Hockey puck was soaked in a brine solution (20% salt in water) for 12 hours – be sure to flip several times.) I let it dry and have stored it in my warm fridge – set at 50 F. So now we will see the results soon.

I have developed a cheese cooker using normal stuff around the house and a harbor freight mini submersible pump ($12). This rig is used to ensure the best quality temp control out there at a pretty reasonable price. I will be testing the rig soon as I have a few other projects to deal with.

Remember – September in the US is preparedness month.

Posted in Food | No Comments »

Upcoming Episodes

Being sick of the Washington Govt, I will be refocusing on Survival Stuff.

So beware, that I have dusted off some food documents and other thngs.

As to the pres – See my June 19 Post (could not help myself – we will be needing our survival skills sooner than you think with this train wreck operating the govt.)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »