Although there's nothing wrong with that if it's what you prefer.
I'm no expert, but I'm willing to share what I know and hope you'll do the same.
The time to figure out you're missing some preps is not once TSHTF. You need some practice runs.
Power outages or other utility failures can provide practice, but these days those are fairly rare in most places.
An alternative is to have scheduled shutdowns.
Pick an evening or a weekend and turn off your main breaker and shut off the water. (Make sure to "safe" everything ahead of time.) You could shut off the gas, too, but remember pilot lights if you do. Or you could just turn off one utility to test your preparedness in that area.
You should probably warn family members ahead of time unless you want them calling the utilities in a panic-- it would be a better test if they were caught off-guard, but that might not be safe for you.
These little practice runs can show you what you forgot and areas you need to address.
The "officials" kept spinning dire warnings about the water situation, so I took it upon myself to do a daily visual check of the water levels in the water tanks I could check. Three out of four have a gauge on the outside. The fourth is a water sphere that, as far as I can tell, has no way for a member of the public to check the water levels. This is disturbing.
What my visual check showed me was that we're in better shape than the "officials" wanted us to believe.
I've been posting photos of the gauges every day on social media, and suddenly, at least the newspaper editor, who is very much in the pockets of the local politicians, admitted that the tanks are nearly full.
I'm not sure he would have admitted this without my intervention, but perhaps.
I also wrote a letter to the editor, which got a lot of pre-publication pushback from the editor. He has his preferred solution, which just so happens to align with the local politicians. He didn't like what I said and tried to make me feel ...
My local town (population ~1400) is in a water crisis. It's always having a low-grade water crisis, but this time, government incompetence brought it to a head.
The guy who visually checks the water levels daily was on vacation. The sensor that keeps the water towers full stopped working. One tower was empty, and the other was half empty before anyone noticed. Now it's everyone's problem.
Consequently, we're under some pretty harsh water restrictions- and they've been getting more severe each day for the past 3 days.
Fortunately, I have quite a bit of water stored. As much as I can fit in the nooks and crannies of my house, anyway. Just last week I got fussed at for doing this. That tune changed quickly.
I've also stocked up on bottled water.
I would catch rainwater, but a lack thereof is the root of the problem.
I wish I lived near a water source, but there are none in this region. I wish I had a well, but of course that would be "illegal" in town. I wish I had a long-term ...
I know it's probably shocking, but it's true.
In all my years of doing things in the woods, I never needed a feather stick. I never needed a 90° spine on the back of my knife. I never batoned a stick the way I see people do it in bushcraft videos, by beating my knife with a small log.
Most bushcraft seems to me to be doing unnecessary things that make life more complicated so that you look like an expert to people who haven't been there.
You don't need to waste time making the perfect feather stick if you understand kindling.
You don't need a 90° spine on your knife if you know that a ferro rod can be scraped with a sharp rock (or the bit of steel that often comes with them) to make sparks.
And, why risk your good camp knife by beating it with a log to split wood? I will use my Bowie knife for that (using the weight of the knife, not a club) to split big sticks. You can also hit the stick on a rock to split it along its natural cracks. If I need to split them at all.
You don't ...
