Living in a cold climate where there is snow on the ground for about five months of the year, heating is an important factor to be able to control. When I bought and moved into my house in the middle of January, the heating system that was installed was an oil furnace. It didn't take long to realize that with rising oil prices (at the time), I didn't want to keep paying large sums of money to fill up the tank a few times a year. So before the next winter came along, I had a wood stove put in. That was six years ago.

I am new but at the same time, not new to prepping. By that I mean that even before I came across the prepper community, I was often thinking about how to be prepared for times when society didn't function as well as it does now. Maybe it was all the science fiction I read as a teenager.

But most of the preparations I did were mental though, as in acquiring skills and increasing my knowledge. I didn't start doing any physical preparations until I bought my first house however. That was a few years ago, and so I've gotten a few things ready and performed many tests to see what worked and what didn't work for me and my family.

So in this first post about my preps, there are a number of items that I can cover but I decided to start with two basic things that should be the starting point of any prepper. One will be a physical preparation, and the other a mental preparation.