Should I grab my Horowitz and Hill off the bookshelf <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

As for omeone else commenting on living in NYC, he'd have a bad feeling every day - yeah, I can understand that, and have spent, oh, 10 years trying to convince my wife to move out. NOT happening - sigh

I'm prepared everyday - I carry WAY more gear with me on public transit than most folks keep in their car - and you don't want to see the back of my truck. I have caches at home, work, parents, friends, local, distant etc. WAY more gear than I really want to think about, particularly when those folks are like minded, and some of them are multi generational family friends that are "family" in all but blood - you know when you dad and their dad started hunting together before WWII - and kept it up until one of them died, and now we hunt together, their grandson has joined us - my son is too young....

Anyway - back on topic, I stay prepared constantly - but sometimes the "hairs on the neck" feel worse than usual - and that's when you go up a level or two. As much as I like Jeff Coopers "white, yellow, orange,red" - it's not subtile enough for disaster preps

Let's say we have
0 - unprepared - way too many people here
1- minimally prepared
2- basic preps ready
3- call it 2 plus - probably where most of us are - "batteries charged", aware of what is going on, a long term maintainable state
4- hightened preps - when you put stuff that is NOT maintainable into gear - carry extra gear, storing perishable gear, etc - aka a higher op tempo - a non long term maintainable state
5-disaster ops

wehn I say "I have a bad feeling" - it's time to go from a 2 or 3 to a 4. I'd say right now, I'm back down between a 2 and a 3 - I have to replace, and/or repack some gear I used last week - clean the water bladders, dry and store, replace canned/dried food that went into the truck, rotate truck water supply, move some gear from their "immediate use" locations back to "stored" locations - aka, back to op tempo 3