One of the things I miss most about my brief time in the military is wearing a uniform. I don’t mean getting all spiffed up in dress blues or anything like that, and I certainly don’t mean being recognized as a military member. Much more simply, I just miss never having to think about what to wear to work. Today I’m going to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart: clothing as EDC, and creating your own individual “uniform.”
2020 Goals: 3,660 Minutes of Dry Practice
Last year, on one of my other blogs, I documented my (successful) attempt to do 3,650 minutes of dry practice in 2019. I learned a tremendous amount during that exercise, and one of those lessons was that putting some social pressure on myself through the blog helped me tremendously. This year I’m going to do a similar thing here.
Book Excerpt: “Digital Self-Defense”
Most of you probably don’t know that my day job is an instructor of digital security tools, techniques, and procedures. The company I work for provides training to a variety of military and intelligence activities. I am extremely lucky to have my job because I absolutely love what I do. I love teaching, and I love the topics that I teach.
Micro-Preparedness: Store Your Gear in Ready Condition
I have gotten a ton of good feedback on my last Micro-Preparedness post about staging your clothing. Today’s post is along the same lines, and comes to you courtesy of cutting some firewood.
Getting Friends and Family (Slightly) More Prepared
As I mentioned in my article on building rapport with your neighbors, I have recently become interested in making those around me – especially my friends and family – better prepared. After this article they’ll only be slightly better prepared, but that’s a heck of a lot better than nothing. And maybe it’s the start of something bigger…
Micro-Preparedness: Staging Your Clothing
This post is going to launch what (I hope) will become a recurring series on “micro-preparedness”. Micro-preparedness refers to very small processes that incur little to no time or financial penalty, but that may have a large impact on your overall level of preparedness. Today’s step is going to cover staging your clothing and belongings before you go to bed at night.
The Joys of Composting, or Start a Damn Compost Pile!
I totally lucked into composting. When I bought my first house, I had a huge pile of leaves in the woods. Since I moved in in summer, I had a ton of grass clippings that had to get dealt with, so they went on the leaf pile. For some reason I turned the grass into the leaves, and some interesting things started happening. I began to see worms out there. The pile would steam sometimes. I probably didn’t know it but I was making compost.
Pictorial Post: Building a Hearth Pad
A few weeks ago I wrote about sustainable, long-term heating and cooling considerations. In the interest of practicing what I preach, I recently had a wood stove installed in our home. I built the hearth and hearth pad for the stove. For the hearth, I used a product called AirStone. Using this stuff requires very little skill. The hearth pad was a bit more involved, however. Below is a more or less step-by-step photo series of my creation.
Building Rapport With Your Outer Cordon (aka Neighbors)
A human support system is important in day-to-day life and absolutely imperative for surviving any sort of adverse, long-term event. When we first moved into our house, we didn’t know a single person in town. We worked really hard initially to fix that, and we’ve continued to work to maintain it. I think you should, too. This post is going to talk about how to get your neighbors on board with you, and quickly. First, I’ll talk about why you’ll want to do that.
Ten OPSEC Principles
There are several lists of OPSEC rules and commandments our there on the internet. Some of them are quite good but I wanted to write my own set of Ten OPSEC Principles.