Silly thread but also curious if there are any Preppers here? I am listening to a Zombie book and it makes me want to start hoarding food in my garage.
I know when I finish the book I will calm down -but right now I am having trouble not going to buy a case of spam right now. LOL
Anyone else feel this way when listening or reading to a Post Apocalyptic type book?
I read One Second After and it gave me the same reaction. After thinking about it, I think I’d rather not survive such a situation. I really enjoy the modern amenities such as air conditioning, hot showers, etc. I think having enough to live through a natural disaster or loss of power is one thing, thinking I’m going to live for a year on freeze dried venison while I set up water desalinization is another.
I haven’t thought about it like that. We had an ice storm a few years ago and didn’t have power for 4 days and I almost lost it. I am of to google One Second After -did you enjoy it?
I bought a book at Goodwill not realizing that it was a young adult book, or that it was part of a series. The plot was the explosion of the “supervolcano” in Yellowstone. I had to finally stop reading it because there were almost no bright spots in it, little hope, and someone died in almost every chapter. I wanted to drink or something after I put it down.
I don’t get the way you describe. I remember the hysteria over Y2K and people who were otherwise sane actually prepping as if we were all going to die. And then the calendar changed and we all got up and wet to work like anything other day, airplanes didn’t fall from the sky and stores weren’t looted and baby formula was still available (perhaps the silliest “prep” I read was someone offering to store her breast milk to help when stores all closed and babies on formula would starve.
And I don’t believe in zombies, but teenage boys sure have fun planning for the zombie apocalypse.
I have thought about this and spent some time planning for the apocalypse. If we stay in our rural retreat, all I really need is plenty of alcohol to barter with my wonderful neighbors, and I have that covered. If we go on the road, I plan to scavenge as I go along. But I’m wearing good walking shoes and bringing an excellent all weather coat. And silk long johns. I need to be warm and dry.
Fun thread. On one of the last zombie threads I believe it was Hunt who suggested just getting bit at the beginning and then feeding on the neighbors. Sounded like a plan as well.
End times bother me practically not at all now my kids are grown and better off without me in a crisis situation.
Not a “head for the hills build a fortress stockpile guns and ammo” prepper, but I often think it would be wise to have a 1 week or 1 month supply of canned food and water. When you seriously consider how fragile the supply chain is and how quickly stores can run out of food, it is foolish not to have supplies on hand. An impending blizzard is the easiest clue, so if there is some other less obvious form of disruption you could be without basics for quite a while.
Also, many years ago wife and I lived in Oakland CA. I don’t think I was being paranoid or overly alarmist when I worried about a major earthquake that could leave us totally cut off and on our own. No phone to summon police for help. Not unreasonable to imagine roving gangs of looters in that situation. I decided it would be totally pollyanna- head in the sand to ignore that possibility, so basic home and personal safety required some protection.
Where I live, big snowstorms in April are very common. Once we had a storm that dropped 5-6 feet of snow. We were stuck in our neighborhood for a week before they plowed our streets.
We keep a weeks worth of food now on hand.
People should at least think what could possibility happen in their neck of the woods and plan for it.
My son works with a full-on prepper. He even has a donkey should he need transportation. But I do have a home in a place where we are often without power for days after snowstorms and sometimes high winds and rain in non-snow seasons…which means no water (no electricity for the well pump), no lights, no heat, no water so no toilets, etc. so I am always “prepared” for at least a week or so. The lack of water is the most annoying…we have rainbarrels off our gutters that can keep us going and I fill all the tubs if I think the weather is going to be horrible and we are going to remain there.
I definitely have those thoughts when I read those books & I adore those end of the world as we know it books, not freaked out, but intrigued by what I would have that I would need. Like the others, I like to have food etc on hand such that if we could not go anywhere for a week or two, it would be fine. Heck, maybe I just don’t want to go anywhere for a week or two!
@sseamom did you finish the series?
@momofthreeboys Donkeys can live a long time! That is a real commitment
Does anyone buy “special food” MREs or other foods designed for a long shelf life? I was one the Walmart website looking for something (not food) and they had a "top sellers list. One of the things on it was a cheese powder. I clicked on it and there was a whole line of dehydrated foods including 30 day “kits”
My dh reads various zombie books, but he relies on me to do any prepping. I only stock up for the type of minor disasters we’ve actually encountered (power outages due to storms, heavily iced roads preventing access to our neighborhood, etc.) and not for long term survival alone. We used to live in an area where hurricanes were a threat, so we kept the house well stocked plus we had bug-out bags in case we had to evacuate. Now we keep enough on hand for just two weeks.
Pre-Y2K, a group of people we’d been socializing with became very end-times focused and it was made clear to me that we were judged pretty harshly for not stockpiling food, water, clothes, weapons, cash and gold in quantities sufficient for a year or longer. I read a couple of the books that these folks insisted would change my mind about prepping. They were a bit nightmare inducing (dh was traveling a lot for work in those days and I was pretty sleep deprived), but in the light of day they weren’t hard to dismiss.
@veruca no, I didn’t even buy the other 3. The first one was so depressing I couldn’t stand the thought of 3 more books full of conflict, death and starvation, etc. The summaries made it sound like the main characters find a new normal but I wasn’t willing to suffer through three more books to get there.
I’ve seen those MRE’s at our local Walmart, and I think either Costco or Sam’s Club. Aren’t Mormons required to keep a supply of food and water like that for some reason? I’m assuming that’s the Walmart market rather than preppers here in Seattle, but you never know.
D went to a summer camp for gifted kids one year and all the boys were talking incessantly about how to survive the zombie apocalypse. It drove her crazy. Her older brother said you’d want to get to an island because zombies can’t swim. It was a strange conversation.
I like reading and watching apocalyptic books and movies but if the situation got ugly, I wouldn’t want to be around at that point. Don’t consider myself much of a survivor if it comes to that point.
I’ve always joked that there are two types of people you need to befriend to survive an apocalypse: mormons because of their food stores and those hippie permaculture folk who can grow food anywhere and can build earthen houses and composting toilets. I guess gun hoarders would come in handy as well but I’d rather not hang around with that group.
Yeah, teenage boys like zombie talk and their strategies depend on exactly what kind of zombie - the fast kind, the slow kind, etc.
If zombies eat brains shouldn’t someone just invent zombie repellent hair gel?
I read The Stand by Stephen King back in the late 1970’s when it first came out. It was the first apocalyptic sort of book I had ever read, and I decided back then that I’d rather be one of the first to die than be a survivor. The chapters about people trying to get out of New York through the tunnels stuck with me. So did the daunting size of our country when modern communications and travel are removed. It was a great read for a college kid back then.
I had a random “The Stand” sort of moment a month or so ago as I was cleaning out a linen closet, and had a fleeting thought that, “Maybe I should keep this huge white linen table cloth just in case I ever need to make a shroud to bury a loved one in the back yard after a “Captain Trips” apocalypse.” (Captain Trips was what the deadly virus was called in the book.)
Such a completely morbid thought, I know. That book has stuck in my core.
I remember reading Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song as an undergrad and finding it kinda freaky, but maybe that’s because it was at least as much a horror novel as a postapocalyptic one. My parents did raise me on lots of 20-minutes-into-the-future dystopia, though (from The Time Machine and We and Soylent Green to more self-aware stuff like 1984 and Cat’s Cradle and It Couldn’t Happen Here to lighter fare like Logan’s Run and Max Headroom), and I think that gives me a different sort of view, where I see it as all part of the same thing, trying to figure out where the importance of it all (if there is any) is centered.
In practical terms, though, I live in Alaska, where a single barge up from the lower 48 getting delayed (as seems to happen about once a year) results in store shelves starting to go bare nearly immediately, and a good earthquake could very, very easily disrupt the whole transportation (and therefore food distribution) network. Therefore, my family has a solid month’s worth of freeze-dried food and about 5–7 days worth of water in our garage, which I think puts us in a decent spot—it would give us a few days to decide whether we needed to shelter in place or get out.
I haven’t read any of those books but I do watch The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. The thought did occur to me, albeit humorously, to start stockpiling. The problem is that you not only need an endless supply of food and water but more importantly, as has been shown on both shows multiple times, you need a safe accommodation that is protected from the zombies. And even the most elaborate and supposedly safe compounds never stand up to roving waves of zombies.
Clearly, he isn’t worried about zombies because a donkey would be virtually useless in a zombie world!
What does donkey meat taste like? 
Nope I doubt he’s worried about zombies. I think he’s afraid of our government…but then these days aren’t we all LOL?