What's Next?

“What’s Next?”  I’ve heard this week.  In fact, I’ve heard a LOT of that this week.

Well, I’ve been pondering that for quite a while now, with various things coming to the surface over the five years that I have been putting the Drummond clan through various trials and tribulations.

I’m wondering though, where you would like to see things go next.  Here, in July 2010, there are many more resources available on the ‘net than there were five years ago, many of them excellent, some not.   Various preparedness sites have extensive libraries and reference sections that are vast wealths of information.  Download liberally if you are allowed to…pesky copyrights being in place and all.

When I first started Deep Winter, it was intended to be the what became the first chapter of the book, and that’s it. It was a counter for people who’d been stating they were prepared for anything, that there was no surprise that they weren’t ready for.

So I picked what in my world would have been one of the worst case scenarios that has a plausible survivability to it: A Great Quake in the depths of winter cold.  That ‘story’ was intended to get people to think about what would happen to their own families should they find themselves tossed out of bed in the middle of the night.

For me, it kickstarted my thinking and preparedness work.  Everyone thought that this was a story. For me, it was a learning (and eventually a teaching) process.  When Rick was putting his slow sand filter together, I was learning about it as well, as I had it on my list of things to do, but hadn’t done it at that point. When I looked in detail about how much food we had on hand, versus the number of meals it actually takes (and the caloric intake) to thrive (not just survive) under adverse conditions (like lots of manual labor) it was an eye opener.

Ditto on the stuff I needed to have on hand for equipment maintenance. How often do you need to change oil in your generator? What kind does it take? Do you have spare plugs? A carb kit? Can you make gaskets? Do you have hour meters on your small engines and maintain them frequently?  I learned a lot there, too. As much about having the stuff on hand as….finding it when you need it, which is a real problem around here. 

One other aspect (perhaps the most important one for me) is that writing this story deepened my faith in God and made stronger my belief in Christ. Salvation is the first and most important prep.  Without that, well, everything else is sort of pointless.

Some of the ideas that have come up from readers include posts of several of the recipes referenced in the stories and others that were alluded to; someone wanted a play list of the music referred to (do-able by listing the songs, but not by having them available for download); the ‘primitive skills’ info referred to several times in each book, etc.

So, there’s a ‘poll’ added to the blog on this topic.  If you don’t see anything that appeals to you, shoot me an email at deepwinter2007@comcast.net, and we’ll see what we can do.