Good points - travel with more of your needs -- esp if going by car.

Yes

After what happened I have easily decided to multiply the emergency cash in the GHB/BOB (always with me) by a factor of five. But other decisions are not that easy, especially stuff to be stored there.

For example.
I'll add some nicer clothes, but there is no guarantee that next emergency will require nicer clothes. May require something else. Also, they may be needed too far in the future when I am fatter or thinner (planning to lose weight).

An old Nokia phone was abandoned at home . It is the basic model that has a "flashlight", or torch, at the top. I took it as an emergency phone. charged it 3 months ago, SHUT IT OFF, and put it in my GHB/BOB

Today, I switched it on , and it read FULL battery.

Great little gadget for emergencies

Caution there: I tried this with an older phone (Razr) on the Verizon network and found that the phone can not be booted up if it has been inactivated (which was the case, since I migrated to another phone). Verizon confirmed that once the phone was deactivated by them it was a brick unless I wanted to have it reactivated (at a cost... of course). So in MY case this idea won't work. YMMV

Eagle Creek, Solo, Timbuk2, Briggs and Reily, Manhatten Portage, and a number of other brands all have "convertible" laptop backpacks. They're adaquate as both a backpack and a briefcase, but don't really shine as one or the other. Business oriented backpacks, like Samsonite, have become fairly common.

For laptop security, every laptop and desktop I have ever been issued came with a cable lock, automatic backup, and hard drive encryption. One particularly security concious (paranoid) employer issued cable alarms. If you made it 20 feet before all he11 broke loose, you were doing better then most.

I don't think to call a person out on something is inherently a bad thing. The real question is, what are you going to do with it? To sit and pout and say, "it's that person's fault" will get you nowhere.

I think football would be a good illustration. A person on your team catches the football and is going for a touchdown. You run alongside him. The teammate lets the ball slip from his hands. Will you stop in your tracks and yell at him? "Dummy! You should have held onto the ball." Or will you grab the ball before it touched the ground and go for the touchdown?

Someone else may have fumbled the ball; so what? You grab that ball before it can touch the ground and go for the touchdown.

Jeanette Isabelle

WOW !!!
Jeanette, I have even forgotten about this thread
You resurrected it from deep under.

Thanks

I have nothing to blog about today, except that my knee problem has taught me so many things. For example, my home office (aka man cave) is in the upper floor of the house, and it has suddenly become inaccessible for approximately two months. This has made me think about so many things. One of them is how to beef up my bag to somehow compensate me when my own den is inaccessible. I have to make sure that most of my important stuff is in the companion bag and laptop.

I understand the importance of maintaining a journal. In your case, a blog. There are also times where (even if you have material from your life) you can't get it down on paper. It frustrates you because you want to record what happened; you are somehow unable and don't know why. It's not just me. I have seen this same thing happen to another person I know.

Jeanette Isabelle

We have psychological experts who can tell us why . But in any case, we do not tell the world every bit of our lives. No one is interested to know why I did this or didn't do that. So, we write a little bit that maybe, just maybe, interesting to some prepper folks in a prepper forum, or a few handyman stories in a handyman forum, or share very old pictures with those interested in old pictures, and so on.