Home front: micro-farm

I thought I'd take a slightly different tack today, being a sunny (but with storms looming) Saturday here,  and give you a look at some of what we do here to not only ease the family budget (which lets me buy toys) but also to supplement our dinner table with fresh-as-can-be produce and teach us all some preparedness skills.  I live in a quite well-to-do suburb, in a run-down but happy shared, rental property. We are an anomaly in our street, not only for the company we keep, the age of our house, but also the way we utilize it. Water tanks and grey-water diversion were an early step as was planning usage of the land we have to work with. 

What have we got?

Review: SARGlobalTool Moon-Glow

Here's a fun little piece that i picked up earlier this year. The SARGlobalTool Moon-Glow. 

What is it is a disk of glow-in-the-dark plastic, with a secondary disk on each side, one of SOLAS 3M high intensity reflective tape, the other of mirror-polished stainless steel. A split ring lets you feed it through a necklace to lay flat. It comes with a bead-chain, but I put mine onto one of the boot-lace cords i wear with my other do-dads and gateaus around my neck. 

How does it work?

Review: Surefire 6PX

I killed my last set of boots at the beginning of last winter, and the good folks at Platatac had a boot-and-flashlight deal, which I jumped on, and came away with one of these beauties, the Surefire 6PX. At first I felt pretty flippant about it. Sure, its a pretty hard-looking piece of kit. Machined and anodized. Then I noticed a couple of things. The bezel had a line of beading around the lip, spacers, and a warning on the insert said that it gets HOT. It also said something to the effect that the flash was sufficient to act as an emergency weapon.

Well. colour me impressed. My very own photonic-blaster. 

What does it do?

Review: CRKT K.I.S.S. knife

A number of years ago I decided that I needed a new pocket knife. I have had innumerate Swiss Army Knives, but since starting to carry a multitool, their functionality had been somewhat supplanted. I wanted something rugged and robust, yet compact and unobtrusive. There are some "don't carry knives" laws where I live, and I wanted to be within the scope of "lawful reason" for carrying a blade on my person.

This little guy fit the bill perfectly. Colorado River Knife & Tool's, Ed Halligan designed 420J2 stainless steel K.I.S.S. in "combination" style. This is a great knife, the tanto tip makes short work of any holes I've needed to punch in cans, bottles, leather, what-have-you and the frame-spring lock has never given me pause to worry about it failing and accidental self-amputation of a finger. 

Whats special about it?

Review: keychain tools

Here's a review of the various keychain tools i keep on my primary set of keys. (Yes, I have -two- sets of keys that i carry around, one is day-to-day use, the other is for occasional, once-a-month use, no sense having a jailers fistful all the time). Ive been slowly adding and refining what goes on my primary set for some time, and even what it sits on.

Car, house and partners house keys, no brainers there. The red carabiner and tape loop were a promotional give-away from a vendor at a conference. Not climbing-rated, but great for accessories. 

SO whats on it?

Review: Crumpler Laptop Messenger Bag

I thought i'd start my reviews with a piece of kit that is near and dear to me. My circa-1999 Laptop-Messenger Bag from Crumpler..

I believe it is a Considerable Embarrassment but time and use have made it hard to tell. This is a great bag. Roomy, many pockets, rugged. Its been carry-on, a day-pack, pillow, lunch-box, and part of my EDC almost every day since it was gifted to me, Xmas 1999 ( I think) . This bag has taken some pretty serious abuse over the years, and is still going strong. Not only does it hold my rather ludicrous swag of gadgets and disaster supplies, (which i'll get to in due time) but it also regularly carries my lunch, my document folder and iPad, my kendo clothes and other assorted needfuls. 

So whats inside?

A testbed, a collection, a lifestyle

Welcome to Apocalypse Equipped! 

This is a place for me to write about one of my passions: acquiring, using and carrying hardy and rugged gear that I feel will keep me prepared for disaster, if and when it strikes. 

What kinds of disaster? 

There are many tropes in the media which come to mind when we mention "apocalypse" and "disaster". I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores of what constitutes a disaster, or apocalypse, except to say that there are many possible sources of disaster that we will be exposed to in our lifetimes that we could well stand to prepare for: fire, famine, flood, earthquake, all manner of storms, crashes and explosions, toxic spills, war, terrorism and plagues. 

These are every-day occurrences that we see on the news, or experience in some way, all the time. I'm going to take the next step and expand these, in the case of an "apocalypse" to be simply orders of magnitude larger, longer, more widespread or severe. 

World-changing, Hollywood-blockbuster events like super-volcanos, zombie plagues, astronomical-body impacts, alien invasions, thermonuclear war, divine-intervention, axial-shift, rapid Ice-Age, super-viruses or whatever. We all know the tropes. The concept is this: Everything is broken. Society as we knew it is gone. Nations have collapsed. Governments have failed. Global connectedness is over. Near-extinction population loss. Realistically, it seems very unlikely that we will -ever- experience an apocalypse in any form. It's an academic and intellectual exercise. Probably.  I want to be equipped. 

Disasters, we're far more likely to encounter. I want to be ready. 

A little about me: