A Prepper's Guide to the Apocalypse

You might be a Prepper if..........

You have enough bags of rice and beans to make a makeshift bed for a guest.😁

You keep every plastic container, plastic bag, and rubber band you come across.😕

You wash disposable dishes.😒

You have a book called Herbal Drugstore and you know what herbs to plant in your yard to treat sickness.  "Don't forget the medicine of your ancestors".  I heard this on the radio recently, not bad advice.🌿

You learn all you can about essential oils.🍶

You know what vitamins are present in which foods and you have ample supply of those.🍎

You think about the way you use toilet paper.....Are you a crumpler or a folder!  No joking, when the toilet paper shortage hit I walked through the door and my husband said, "you might have to become a folder, hahahaha!"💩😮😂

You enjoy cooking classes that show you how to prepare your food storage food (Freeze dried and dehydrated foods).🍔

You know what freeze dried and dehydrated foods are. 🍜

You own a freeze dryer, dehydrator and/or vacuum packer. 😯

You can your own food every year. 🍑

You know how many calories your current food storage will provide per day and for how long.💪

When your regular life schedule is not disrupted much by a government recommended quarantine.😔

You always have cash on hand.💵💰

You invest in gold.🏆

You have something of worth buried in your backyard.📦🔐

You think ammunition will be the new currency.💸
You pay your chiropractor in precious metals🤑

You stock alcohol and cigarettes (you don't smoke or drink) in your food storage for bartering.🍺

You know what bartering is and have done it or tried to do it in your everyday life.😎

You have a whole room in your house full of supplies, food, equipment, etc.🍗

You would rather spend money on food storage and ammo than take a trip to Europe (who's laughing now, haha!).✈

You know what "living off the grid means" and you strive or wish to achieve it in your lifetime.😱

You always keep at least a half a tank of gas in your cars, just in case!🚗

You have extensively thought about alternatives to basic hygiene products in case they become unavailable.🛀

You know how to make tin foil hats.😂

You believe in big foot and other myths or legends.♏

You have a 72 hour kit in your car.🚙

You compost and know how to grow your own food.🌾🌽

You love food storage so much you take what other people get rid of no matter how old it is, haha!😲

You have an extra freezer stocked with meat. 🍤🍗

You have experimented with using your own urine as fertilizer. 😲😰😯😮 What the.......

You think of how living on your food storage during a crisis might be a great weightloss plan😅

You have your own chickens, goats, pigs or cows, just in case....🐄

You buy food in bulk on a regular basis even if you don't have teenagers in the house😉

You shower in cold water on a regular basis just to get used to it!🛀

Your kids ask if its tap water when you fill up their cup because they don't want to be poisoned, haha💀

You haul drinking water from a well or you only drink bottled, or filtered water.💦

Some funny observations from a recent trip to the store just to do my routine shopping. As I walked through the store I tried to really hone in on the mindset of the average panicked American to try and make sense of my observations. Not to make fun of or make light of the situation, but I had some funny thoughts, please HUMOR ME!😉Produce section: the produce section was pretty well stocked thankfully. It made sense, I guess, that the potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, onions, roots, and winter squash were gone without a trace, but bananas? 😯 From experience apples, oranges, and avocados have a longer shelf life out on the counter than do bananas, most of the time, all of which were fully stocked. Cucumbers, GONE, but Zucchinni plenty, fully stocked! What are you going to do with cucumbers? They last maybe a week in the fridge. Weird!🤔 This trip to the store was really telling as to the American diet and what's really important. People will pay the extra money for Organic milk, eggs, and yogurt, but the only thing left on the pizza aisle was organic pizza, haha!😂🤣 plenty of regular milk and yogurt, but nodda single organic thing available. The organic pizza looked so pathetic and lonesome! 😥

As I was grabbing some of the last deli meat available, a lady approached me and said she was grateful for seeing me grab some lunch meat, there was only one kind available, everything else was gone including all meats. She said "are people buying extra fridges and freezers too?" Good question, I pondered that for a moment. There was still plenty of healthy cereal, but none of the garbage cereal left, figures! The medicine aisle, completely bare, but the vitamins remained untouched🤣 let's not worry about boosting the immune system, but we will take any over the counter medicine for any ailement!! 😄 This was a little disturbing🥵🤢 Apparently we are okay with getting sick? Don't get me wrong, its smart to have medicines on hand in your storage, but vitamins should be just as important to your storage😉. Also plenty of protein bars and powders, which I would have thought were shoo-in for food storage, long shelf life and high in calories and protein. Canned food, women's hygiene products, gone, that was a given😱 Another disturbing observation, plenty of baby wipes, but no diapers🤔😯😳🤯 I'll just let you think about that one????? All adults will have clean bottoms, if you were lucky in your trip to the store, but maybe not the babies. I'm hoping they were just restocked, haha!

No dish soap, cleared out, sorry! Body wash and soap, plenty. So we will have enough soap to wash all of our dishes, but not ourselves, we have hand sanitizer for that!?! "We are clearly not thinking things through", I thought as I saw plenty of paper plates, and disposable dishes, haha! Rest assured in the apocalypse everyone will have clean dishes and a surplus of hand sanitizer that will slowly lose it's effectiveness as bugs become resistant to it!! I ordered some soap on Bath and Body Works last night and I was surprised they weren't at least low on hand soap. Everyone has increased their hand washing policies and emphasized it, but we still have plenty of soap, but no hand sanitizer! I don't think people are listening here! Yesterday I posted a satirical article about drug cartels getting into the hand sanitizer business, that's funny! How many times have we heard WASH YOUR HANDS?? 🤣 that does not mean with hand sanitizer! Hand sanitizer is good to have on hand for camping and in between hand washes. I work in a medical laboratory and there are hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere, but if you told your boss you were only using that you would get a big frown, a "that's not enough", followed by an "eww, gross", seriously! If I were to get some toxic chemical or patient sample on my skin, the procedure is to wash with soap and water for 10-15 min, not put my exposed body part in a bucket of hand sanitizer! 😩 How many bottles of hand sanitizer would it take to bathe every member of your household, vs. Just soap?? I'd like to take this opportunity now to point out it's called HAND sanitizer, not body sanitizer!! So I was thinking, "what are people thinking? Either they believe our situation is so dire that running water will not be available soon, thus the hand sanitizer craze, or they are truly lazy about the hand washing thing!" Hand washing is more effective than hand sanitizer! I don't know about you, but if things get that dire where we have no water I'll be packing up MY BODY SOAP and hoofing it to the nearest lake, spring, or creek to bathe with my BODY SOAP! While we are on the topic of water, as I went to check out I was in line behind a guy with about 15 2 liter bottles of coke, "what? no water, juice, or Gatorade, which are all good essentials for food storage", I thought. Nope, "who needs water when I've got my coke?" I guess it can be used as an industrial cleaner, so, hey, killed two birds with one stone, haha! By the way all cleaning products cleaned out!! Haha🤣🤣🤣🤣

I was able to get some sugar. It looked like the store was just starting to restock items. The store associate was restocking sugar as I was there. After contacting family in Virginia and Nevada, I realized how well Utah has fared through this panic, in some ways. Many items were still stocked. Nevada and Virginia, according to my family had almost no food available and shelves were bare. In Nevada people walking around with gas masks and in Virginia police presence at all stores breaking up fights. My brother was worried that looting and shooting in the streets was not a faraway possibility. A few days later my brother reported that there had been shootings and stabbings over toilet paper. Well, I'm very grateful for food storage a prophets council and civilized people that can keep their heads in situations like this.

As if COVID-19 wasn't enough to stir people into a frenzy, Wednesday March 18th everyone in Northern Utah awoke to a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, followed by over 100 aftershocks in 24 hours and over 200 aftershocks in 3 days. It hit at about 7:10 am, I was still asleep. I am not an early riser on my off weeks. Of course it woke me up and I had no idea what was happening at first. I just layed in bed for a second in total confusion and fear, then it came to me, it was an earthquake. I made my way out of the room and into the hallway where I met my husband and daughter running out toward the back door. My son was still asleep on the couch. Just as we were headed out of the house it stopped. Many things in my house were now on the floor. No major damage was done, for which I am grateful. As I sat at my kitchen table soon after and I starred at the hanging light above my front door as it swung back and forth, I was reminded why these are so scary. They are unexpected, no warnings available, they can do tremendous amounts of damage, and for some reason they leave behind this eerie kind of feeling. All day after the earthquake I felt something eerie and I felt like there was a nonstop earthquake in my heart.

Something invisible, unseen, and unpredictable passes across the land, despite knowing what is happening beneath the earth's surface. There are no signs, no smell of smoke, heat, appearance of smoke or flames like with fire. There are no funnel clouds like a tornado. There are no heavy wind, storms and 3D pictures like there are for hurricanes. In seconds entire towns can just be leveled. I get that 5.7 magnitude is considered moderate and does not leave behind a lot of damage. I also get the terror and anxiety this scare has caused for many. I've grown tired of hearing my house shake and creek for the last 5 days. Growing up in Utah, we have all been told that a very large earthquake will hit us one day. We do have some fault lines in our state, which cause many little earthquakes, many are not felt, however, big earthquakes are not very common here. We always have had earthquake drills and emergency preparedness in the event of a large earthquake.

Hopefully all of us can be more prepared in the future. This has made me re-evaluate my family's needs. It never hurts to be more prepared. We should not fear, but look to the future with faith and hope, but also be prepared.

"The revelation to store food may be as essential to our temporal salvation today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah.” Ezra Taft Benson – Prepare Ye – Ensign, Jan. 1974, 69