Emergency Preparedness, redux

This blog started in December 2008, but its roots go much farther back.

Heading to Australia and New Zealand for a month in September of 2008, I lost my job and the economy crashed. There was so much happening politically and I had so much travel to write about that I created a travel blog in addition to the main blog.

At the same time, I was doing an emergency preparedness newsletter. It was not the first time I had done so, but I realized that with all of the time I spent writing the newsletters, there was no easy way for people to find them. I started going through old letters and posting them on the blog, then adding new content.

I had been writing the preparedness newsletters because I was the ward emergency preparedness coordinator and that seemed like a good way of getting information to people. 

Then I got called to stake emergency preparedness, so I started a letter for that. Some time later they changed the stake boundaries, where our ward was in a different stake. I was released on the stake level and they snapped me back up at the ward level. Back to the ward letter. Those are the letters that I started posting on this blog.

Going even further back, what led to me being called to ward emergency preparedness the first time was that I was volunteering at the Hillsboro Farmer's Market, answering questions about food safety and storage. One of the bishopric counselors saw me there and was perhaps impressed by my knowledge.

I was there because I had taken a Master Food Preservers class through the OSU Extension Services. It was expected to do some kind of service after that. 

I did that training in 1998. Lots of people were getting more interested because Y2K was coming up, and there had been a slew of natural disasters that were pretty close to each other. People worried.

I have always wanted to take care of people and help them; taking additional training and passing on the information was always a very natural fit for me.

This will be my 578th published post on this Provident Living blog. 

There are many on food storage, emergency kits, power outages, and earthquakes, but emergency preparedness is just one aspect of provident living. There is also the state of your mind and body and spirit. They are all important. 

If they weren't, I would never have spent so much time on dominator culture. I have no regrets about that, except that it didn't influence the election.

Right now having emergency supplies on hand seems very pertinent, and it is something that I am thinking about. However, the most important thing is the state of your soul. Where is your heart? How is your resilience?

Remember, the thing that helps me and the thing that burdens me is that -- for me -- everything is important.

This blog seems to be combining with the main blog a lot more. The travel blog is still its own thing, I guess, except that there are now evaluations of COVID risk and accessibility issues on every post. That is probably a sign of me becoming more radical.

Still no regrets.

Anyway, deciding what to post about is hard, because I am not sure what will be important soonest, and how long will it take to get through certain material. 

Remember that there is a lot of information that is already out there.

For your perusal, here is the very first post on this blog, posted here at the end of 2008 but originally written in September 2007.

Prices have changed.

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2008/12/september-2007-getting-started.html