All right, we're looking at serious numbers now. By now, you have to be wondering: What can I do to prepare since the Pollution Goblins pulled a raid on my local supply store and bought all the masks and hand sanitizer and now my poorfag ass is sitting here wondering when it's gonna be my turn to the fuck midget?
I adjusted the amount of food/supplies because I forgot to take into account a simple thing: I double up on everything and prepare for worst case scenarios but hope for the best, so my supplies assume that 50% of my supplies will be destroyed in whatever disaster goes down. (This is due to the volcanic ash getting into everything and ruining food stocks because the microfine particles seeped through the older seal types and the earthquake destroying about a third of my stocks the other time. Since then I learned to double-up sealing and make sure the supplies are tied down to the shelves and the shelves are properly secured)
First of all, you have to know the 3/3/3 theory. Now, the exact numbers vary, but anything beyond those numbers and either you're in excellent shape with plenty of reserves and have done deprivation training or you're fucked.
Three minutes without air
Three days without water
Three weeks without food
Yes, you can survive longer than that without air or water, but not without problems.
The second thing is how long your isolation can last.
Repeat after Uncle Johnny: Nobody is going to come save you. Nobody is coming to help. You are on your own.
So, make sure you have water. Recommended is 2 liters of water a day. You can go shorter if you don't move much, but if you are mobile and active, two is a safe bet.When I was in the Gulf I once had to make a canteen last three days. Spoiler, I drank my own piss on Day Three. Why? Because I wanted to fucking live, just like you do now, so let's avoid having to drink out own piss, shall we, boys?
You need 8, 8oz bottles per day. Let's go with:
Wal-Mart
That's a 40 pack of 16 oz bottles. That gives you 4 per day, for 10 days. You need 3 per person in your family if you go bare bones. (I personally would go 6, but I'm a turbo-sped about this plus you can use it for cooking, which is something EVERYONE seems to forget when doing their water consumption estimates)
It's cheap.
NOW, you should also take all the 1-gallon milk-jugs you have, fill it with water, add a single cap of bleach. Write "NON-POTABLE" on the cartoon. This water is also essential. You should have 2 containers per week per person. This is for bathing, washing clothing, wiping down surfaces, all that good stuff. You can bypass this if you want, but remember, the less strain you put on your immune system the more it can fight Corona-Chan in a battle to the death winner take all royal rumble!
I also recommend, if you have the money for it, the following:
Lemon Concentrate (Adds flavor to water and can be used in cooking)
Mio/Extracts (Flavored water/Popsicles)
Lime concentrate (Adds flavor AND avoids scurvy)
Coffee (Tastes great AND has caffeine, also a good trade good to soldiers)
All right, that takes care of drinking. Believe it or not, I usually have a case of beer in my stocks. Not because I drink, but just in case. I once had the novel experience of being in a flood with two alcoholics who were trapped with us. They went through the DT's, making them useless and worse. The beer in my stocks is to ease them off it rather than cold turkey if it ever happens again.
Let's move onto food. Some people have asked: Why FORTY-FIVE POUNDS of rice for 30 days for one person? Well, to be honest: Shit happens. The meal gets burnt. Insects get in it. It gets spilled. Caloric intake requirements increase. Most of all, to be honest, is in case I end up having to shelter more than just myself or my family due to loyalty and obligation to my fellow man. I prepare for the absolute worst and hope for the best, and in my case, the worst is taking care of some of my neighbors who helped me when I needed it. It's the same reason I stock baby formula and diapers for infants (and a pack for premies). I gotta live with myself when it's all over.
Anyway, enough maudlin bullshit.
Let's get to food.
Now, you CAN live off of: Potatoes, butter, milk, rice, and a mutivitamin, but you'll be fucking useless for any type of high caloric needs. You might get sick, Corona-Chan might take her dancing fat midget self and rub her ass all over your face, meaning you're trying to keep your metabolic furnace running to burn her out. That's the other reason for lots of water. Anyone with you you're caring for is going to be THIRSTY, and unless you're prepared to go out and filter water from mud-puddles for them (And if you run out of water, you WILL get that thirsty) you're gonna need extra water.
Starve a cold (of cold) feed a fever (food and heat).
Bare minimum, I'm poor supplies, without Crazy Uncle Johnny's Bonus Math.
8 oz potatoes per day per person
6 oz rice per day per person
1/4 can of tuna-fish per day per person (Share this, don't eat it three days after you opened it)
1/4 can of chicken per day per person (replace tuna with this for variation)
1/8 oz of butter per person per day
1/5 can of vegetable per person per day (Get a bunch of different 50 cents a can vegetables to give you variety)
Ranch dressing (1 bottle per week, remember, you're going to calories and dense fatty shit)
Ketchup, 1 bottle per week per 3 person. (Trace micronutrients will help)
Mustard. 1 bottle per week per 3 person. (Taste, yo. Gotta vary that shit up)
1 Multivitamin per day
1 prenatal vitamin per day
Congrats. You'll survive, have enough variation to prevent your guts from atrophying and the micronutrients and all that good shit. Best of all, you can even get it all with food stamps/SNAP if you're REALLY fucking poor, and eat it later.
If you have a pet, stock up on their food.
Otherwise, you will become their food.
Now, you're going to need something. We're assuming 45-60 days of "I'm from the government, I'm not here to help" going down. We'll also need to consider power, water, sewage, cable, internet failing.
First of all: Read a book read a book, read a motherfucking book.
If you can afford it, a chemical toilet. If not, well, listen close to Crazy Uncle Johnny. First of all, your prep.
Decide your "waste storage area". It should b e across the house from food preperation and sleeping area and able to be isolated. If things go bad and the power goes out and your fridge is empty, consider moving the fridge there.
Buy a couple bottles of porta-potty treatment fluid.
When your faucets start spitting and smelling weird: Fill your bathtub. Start saving that non-potable water. It's going to go out soon.
Empty the toilet of water (Put it in your non-potable) and get out your duct tape. Take a plastic garbage bag, tape it to the sides of the toilet with the majority of the bag in the toilet bowl. Close the seat. You can now shit there without causing problems down the line. After taking a shit, pour a quarter to half cup of the treatment fluid into it. Oh, you have to piss? Piss in the goddamn sink, you fucking mong. This is fucking survival. You aren't (hopefully) going to need to reprocess your feces for night-soil use in a garden, so if worse comes to worse you can just close the bag, duct-tape it shut, double-bag it, put it on the back porch or wherever. A field expedient after the power is gone and the fridge is empty is to use the fridge to store these bags. The seal will keep the smell from wrecking you up.
Another thing you're going to want is small plastic tubs from Walmart, a clothesline, and clothespins. This will let you hand-wash your clothing and hang it up to dry. Use the old borax style laundry soap, more modern soaps take too much effort to remove from the clothing. Borax and/or baking soda is easier to remove.
KEEP CLEAN! IT CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE!
Now, YOU shouldn't be leaving your home unless ordered out at gunpoint by the military or raiders and hopefully we aren't looking at a raider scenario.
Let's get a little further. I know, this is going to sound over the top, but believe me, it's not.
Plastic sheeting time.
This isn't just to try to keep Corona-Chan from coming into your frontroom and dancing because it's your turn to fuck the midget. There is going to be all kinds of reason to pull P1 on your own house. The smell is one. Backed up sewage, garbage piling up, and, god forbid, dead bodies. That can carry disease AND smells bad. The second one, is that you might get industrial fires and the like, this will keep fumes and ash from entering your home.
So, PLASTIC ME UP, DOCTOR PURR!
Many of you live in rentals, so you aren't going to be able to do all of this. You'll skip the nails and move to just duct tape instead, unless you think the banks are going to fail and your landlord will end up taking a turn with Corona-Chan and not make it.
First of all, you need NON-PERMEABLE plastic sheeting, at least 8 mil. If it's permeable, you just wasted your time. You can actually buy it at Walmart or the other big box stores.
Duct tape
Box cutter
1"x1/8" wooden strips
Cut the sheeting with an extra three inches per side. Cut your wooden strips to mach the dimensions of your windows and doors + 1/2 inch, that'll give you some buffer.
Put up sheeting. Attach to wall with wooden strips. Put duct tape over the wooden strip. (This will give you a field expedient seal). Put second layer over top. Nail down. A new layer of duct tape over those nails. Duct-tape shut the edges. Stand back and admire your work. Congrats! Only 20 more windows to go!
For doors,
you plan on using, you don't do the bottom as normal. You leave the bottom loose, then cut the plastic from 2" from top all the way through the bottom edge, in 3" wide strips, with an additional layer that is only attached at the top over that. That provides you with the ability to leave your house without too much coming back in. If it gets bad, you CAN build an "airlock" but that requires actual work in building a frame, hooking up a vacuum cleaner or shop-vac, and a lot of plastic. If it worked well enough to keep volcanic dust from getting in the house it'll work just fine for this.
All right, you're wondering about how you're going to cook.
Buy the old "home on the range" percolating tin coffee pot. Buy 2. Also buy coffee filters, because you can use them to filter water from debris (not chemical contamination) and works good for rainwater.
Buy a cast iron skillet or three. Buy a cast iron pot with lid.
Buy a camping stove. One that uses either fuel tabs and can also use charcoal/wood.
I know a lot of people will suggest natural gas ones. If you've never done this shit and haven't handled natural gas before, just get one that runs on pellets because otherwise you're going to fucking kill yourself and everyone else when you don't do the fucking valve right and everyone chokes to death on propane.
That's your bare-bones "I'm poor but goddamn it, I'm gonna make it" prep without all the bells and whistles like "Put your rice in coffee cans and/or twist-top jars you've cleaned out well" and all that.
If Corona-Chan has gone exponential on us, and if nobody paid attention to keeping the Pollution Goblins in their own hives, she might be coming to a strip club near you.
Besides, it's good to have this shit. Most people have less than 72 hours worth the food in their houses. Funnily enough, that's only for the Middle Class and 1%.
Us poor people? We buy all our food for the fucking MONTH at the beginning of the month, so we've got 30+ days of food.
And remember, when dealing with Methican Americans, two to the dome and bloody foam. They're notoriously hard to kill.
PS: Do yourself and everyone else a favor...
Go to the little place where you can get dogtags made. Put the following:
Name
Birthday
Blood Type
If you have allergies or take medications, make a second one, a RED one, and list:
Allergies
LIFE SAVING medications
Keep a sealed ziploc bag in your pocket containing a list of your normal medications.
Do everyone a favor, including some dipshit like me who wants to help you when I find you passed out in the fucking ditch from hunger with a goddamn dog bite.
EDIT TWO:
I almost forgot!
OK, you have to go out. The infection rate in your area is nearing 10% and who knows how many motherfuckers are wandering around with Corona-Chan's nastiness all over themselves. So you don't want to take any risks for yourself or for the people sheltering with you, and you HAVE To go to the store/FEMA Supply Point/Military Supply Point/Loot houses because everyone's dead.
But the Pollution Goblins sent the masks back to China and roving bands of Karens with their husband's credit cards bought all the fucking masks. Great.
OK, there's a few things I could go into, full "End of the World, baby!" stuff with full containment suits and one-way masks, but let's bypass that right now.
First thing is, wear a raincoat or other plastic covering. If you have to, you can make it out of the same sheeting you covered your windows with. If a fucking inbred 500AD bitch could make pants and a shirt by candle-light, you can make it with double-layered duct tape, fishing line, and plastic sheeting. Sure, you'll look dumb as fuck at the FEMA point, but you'll be the stupid looking motherfucker who doesn't die when some stupid asshole sneezes on your back.
Next thing is: Head/neck protection.
You can go full "Rubberbandits" and make a headmask out of tape and plastic grocery bags. It looks dumb, but people's spit won't get on you and you'll be the dumb looking motherfucker who ISN'T infected. You can also make yourself a cool looking executioner's hood.
You should have goggles. Rubber sealant edges are best, but if you're desperate, foam edges swimming/safety goggles work too. That'll keep ash, pollutants, smoke, debris, and Corona-Chan from raping your eyeballs.
Next, your mask.
But Johnny, you say, me and Dr. Purr checked everywhere, there aren't any!
Well, it's arts and crafts time with Crazy Uncle Johnny.
First of all, get some HVAC filters. The big ones. You know, two or three feet high, a foot or two wide, a half-inch thick. Highest rating you can afford/find. If it's gone full Mad Max then pull one from the wall and beat it with your hand till the dust all falls out.
Get your handy dandy knife (You better have one, you fucking mong), and carefully cut a piece from it an inch wider on each side than your mouth that covers an inch under your chin to the top of your cheekbones. Take your duct tape and put a 1/4" edging on the front and back of your piece of HVAC filter. Take your non-permeable plastic scraps you have left over from your window projects and cut a piece a half inch bigger than your filter. Slice it from an inch from the sides to a quarter inch from the middle, then a half inch from that to an inch from the edge, so you've got two slices. Do that from 1 inch from the top to one inch from the bottom with 1/2" spaces. Do the same for another piece (I'd put a quarter inch offset, but that's just me). Carefully tape the edges of the filter to the inside of the first piece. Set the second piece on top. Tape together.
Now for the part where 80% of people make their mistake.
Do NOT put a hole in it for the sidebands. That's fucking dumb. and you've just killed yourself, you fucking tard.
Instead, run a piece of duct tape folded in half along the top and the bottom, extending out an inch beyond the plastic. Drill your hole in the ouside, a 1/2 inch from the plastic and the far edge of the tape. You can use dental floss if you have to for your straps.
Ta-dah! One field expedient mask. Works for everything from volcanic ash to wildfire ash to excessive smoke/smog.
It looks dumb, and it's a bare bone one without the inhale/exhale one-way valve system for advanced arts and crafts, but it works.
Come back next week when Crazy Uncle Johnny will teach you to build an airlock decon entryway using plastic sheeting, 2x4's or PVC pipe, duct tape, and garden hose.
Eagerly awaiting the "Jesus fucking Christ, old man, what the fuck is wrong with you?" ratings.