I don't have much time to write this as the batteries need to be powering the fridge, not my laptop. My other posts were lost the last and final time we were burglarized and the PC was stolen. We have finally given up hope in our southern city and moved to our mountain home. Thank goodness we had bought this place when we did, back in the 1990's. It was meant to be a summer get away that our kids could enjoy, but now we are forced to live here full time.
After the last break-in my wife and I agreed that we had to enter bug out mode. We had been planning on this since reading Roscoe Hughes's great delivery to Congress about Peak Oil. We had hoped it would not come to this, but the rampant break-ins by desperate people looking for anything to sell just to get food has driven us out of town.
All the Urban planning professionals said that cities is where one should be WSHTF, but they didn't factor in that to the thieves, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Who could sleep at night when one heard the rustling of thieves out in the garden at night, hoping to get whatever they could. Dogs? Yeah, well good plan, but my dog was poisoned two weeks ago along with most of the neighborhood's mutts. Dogs are at a premium, and who can afford $1800 for a dog?
The stress of the break-ins, the threats and the pan-handlers constantly presses down until something has to give.
So we bugged out two days ago, and we fled with all we could pack in our small but thirsty Subaru. To think of all the "American Dreams" that are being lost. Our home will be taken over and picked clean. Or burned by vagabonds. We pulled our kids from their posh school, and now will probably have to home school them. Or cabin is too wooded to have a great garden, and will have to form an ad hoc cooperative with some nearby Amish families.
What a mess. I don't know why only a few people saw this coming and the great majority just kept buying and spending, buying and spending, thinking that the world's resources will hold out forever.
I have to go, my wife is glaring at me with one of those, "Where are your priorities?!?!" looks.
Maybe we will meet someday in passing or in barter. I guess those that know how to adapt will survive. God this feels like a Stephen King novel.
Til later,

Jim