Umm....Prepared Woman (PW), paper isnt edible, you say....
You can save EVERYTHING you could possibly need or use, but unless you know HOW to use it, fix it, repair it, make it, grow it, cook it, preserve it, you are doomed. You need to add paper to your storage lists....more importantly, you need to add INFORMATION.
I know that Google is amazing and you can just about find anything out down to how many nose hairs you have, but if the grid goes down, if the Internet goes down, you are stuck. You need to have a hard copy of information you think you might need.
I LOVE BOOKS. Again, with Jefferson, but I so agree with him in this:
I cannot live without books.
Books were so important to him that he wanted to pass on this love to his grandkids. When he got a new book, he would have the kids draw straws. The longest straw got to read the book first, the shortest straw read the book last, but got to keep it. Thomas Jefferson's personal library was donated to our United States as the 1st Library of Congress.
You need to have manuals on your cars, on basic home repairs, on gardening, on preserving food, saving seeds, basic medical and home remedies, cookbooks, building, carpentry, animal husbandry, HISTORY (U.S. History), anything you think you could possibly need.
You also need fiction books, books to let you escape; books to entertain and educate your children; books that are just beautiful to look at (sorry for ending this in a preposition).
But PW, books are expensive.
They are....or more accurately, they can be... Even the big box bookstores have a cheap section where you could pick up at least 3 NEW books for less than $20. Books A Million has a library section where the books are $3.00 a piece. Speaking of the library, they regularly have sales of old books to raise monies and lets not forget our local used book dealer, Goodwill or thrift shop. I would even be willing to bet that you could find books in the dumpsters at the end of semesters at local universities.
To save money, check the book out of the local library that you are considering purchasing. If it stinks, no harm/no foul. If its great, you know that its a wise investment.
A really, really cheap option is to just print the information you want to keep and keep an organized binder. A ream of paper is $2.89 around here and you can go to town printing everything you want... I would suggest recipes using this method, but its your binder!
One more option is to buy CD's from magazines. Mother Earth News as well as Backwoods Home magazines offer entire collections of all issues on CD at a substantial reduction in cost. Not to mention you dont have to save all those magazines!
A list of books I LOVE to follow....but many preparedness blogs have lists as well as reviews...
As always, Pray, Praise, Prepare - JWE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
Posts
6 comments:
When you are printing out things, don't forget to include the cost of ink or toner. That gets expensive. Problem with getting CDs might be having something to access them, depending on your opinion of a worst case scenario. A source for cheap books is http://www.edwardrhamilton.com Postage is only $3.50 per order, no matter how many books you buy.
Yep - books *are* expensive. But don't forget your friendly neighborhood used book store. Or at least used books on Amazon. You can get darn near any book you're after, used on Amazon. (I love my personal library!!!) :)
When I find stuff that's invaluable (such as http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/device/devices1.html ) I "Print to PDF" in Firefox. About once a week I transfer all the pdfs to a DVD. Since many of the files I save are quite large to print (7-800 pages) I figure that as long as I have enough solar power to charge my laptop battery I'll be OK. Don't ask me what my plan is by the time my laptop dies ;) But I figure it'll give me several years at least.
So, at least for the resources that are there but are too numerous to physically print, I have some sort of backup.
Just a thought.
Same here on the electronic copies of books/manuals. I probably only have about 2 dozen real books (reference, repair, and medical mostly) in my collection, not including fiction. The rest is on CD like Meadowlark (tho I'm in still in the computing dark ages with only a CD burner). Thanks for the link too - was going to add another that I found recently, but the site is gone now... Lots of good books in torrent files, if you're into that. Take care.
Anon- excellent point and I am going to check out that book site!
Sneaux - I am with you on the personal library...There is just something about the feel of Your book in Your hands.
Meadow and Too - yall are just brilliant - excellent idea!
Cheap Books: Go to library sales,
Libraries are constantly getting rid of used books and holding fundraisers where they sell donated books.
In my part of the world that means 5$ a bag or box of whatever you'd like. But like most good deals the used book dealers move in like locusts, so be there whent he doors open.
Post a Comment