(no subject)

[mousme]

 Those of you who are more recent arrivals to this LJ (i.e. less than ten years ago, ahem) may not know that I actually have crazy nutbar prepper tendencies at heart. One of the reasons I've always wanted a hobby farm is to be more self-sufficient. I don't have any delusions about rugged homesteading and becoming 100% self-sufficient, because that's just not feasible, no matter what the Libertarians would have you believe. ;) Nonetheless, being less reliant on The System(TM) has always been an aspiration of mine.

 

For the past five or so years, I kind of let that dream die a little. I didn't have the money to put down on a property, and after the Saga of Cruella de Froot Loops (named thusly by blackmare, actually), I kind of went into a bit of a tailspin about everything from finances to keeping the house clean to being organized about anything at all. I was a bit of a trash fire for a few years, although I did mostly keep myself from completely falling apart. During this time I stopped all of the "emergency prep" I used to engage in, and actually made my way through my stash of food *right before* the pandemic hit, because of course. The one time I could have used an emergency stash. I had to laugh about that one, because the irony was THICK. I also didn't engage in any kind of gardening, because my yard is tiny and it's mostly just been where the dogs go to do their business. I kept telling myself that where I was living was "temporary" and that I'd be buying a house "soon," and here we are five years later, and I am still renting the house I had to move into in a rush and which still doesn't really feel like home.

 

I was hoping to purchase a small property in 2020, and we all know how that turned out. I have a small hope that maybe this year will be the year I can do it, but it will depend a lot on whether the housing market will have calmed down enough that I can afford what I want. I have only my income to depend on for a mortgage, plus the down payment I've been saving for (which is okay but not as much as I'd like it to be), and while my salary is decent (more than many, but rather less than the median salary in Canada), the price of real estate is far outstripping the buying power of a single salary these days. If I were a much handier person, it might be worth buying a fixer-upper and putting some sweat equity, but I don't exactly have the skills for that at this point, and my plans at the beginning of 2020 to learn all about carpentry and home renovation got scuttled HARD by the pandemic). I'd likely be biting off more than I can chew, given that I have pretty limited amounts of energy on my days off work, and I don't think KK would enjoy living in a house that's one giant reno project.

 

This whole subject is never far from my mind, but it has been weighing on me especially heavily since the pandemic hit. I have been acutely aware of how vulnerable we are, especially in urban centres. I have no energy alternatives other than the grid. I am pretty much entirely reliant on the current supply chain for everything from toilet paper to dog food to clothing to fresh vegetables. I have a single rain barrel in my back yard which is currently frozen solid, so no reliable water source other than city plumbing.

 

I have been watching the beginnings of the Omicron variant wave with mild alarm, is the short version. We've already seen in two years what the waves can do to the supply chain, and because Omicron appears to be so much more contagious than anything we've seen to date, I am pretty confident that we're going to see some pretty massive disruptions in the coming weeks and months. We haven't yet hit the two-week mark from the Christmas holidays, which is when we're going to see the fallout from everyone getting together in other people's homes and sharing turkey, potatoes, and viruses. Even before this fallout, the medical system is straining under the weight of Omicron, and it's likely going to break down in a significant way once the numbers really start to climb. I don't mean that it's all going to just collapse in a heap, but I do anticipate that it will be next to impossible to get emergency medical care because all the emergency rooms and all the ICU beds and all the ventilators will be taken up by COVID-19 patients.

 

I think if you break your leg, you will be waiting for upwards of 48 hours on a gurney in a hallway because half the doctors and nurses are out with COVID-19 or because their family members have it and they have to quarantine, and then you are very likely going to catch it yourself from breathing in the same air as the doctors and nurses who were ordered to come into work even though they're symptomatic (it's already happening in Québec), or the other patients all around you who might be masked and vaccinated but are still coughing not ten feet away from you because the ER is so crowded. I think if you have a heart attack there may not be enough paramedics to get an ambulance to you in time, or if they do get to you in time there may not be room in the ER for you, or you may not get a much-needed ICU bed.

 

If you have a life-threatening condition that's not an emergency, you are a lot more likely to die. An underreported statistic has been the number of dialysis patients who died during the pandemic because they couldn't go to the hospital for their treatments, or they got COVID-19 and died from those complications. If you need chemotherapy or radiation therapy, you will be told to wait because the risk of infection is so much worse than the risk of waiting a few more weeks. But sometimes cancer only needs a few more weeks to do its worst. Everything will be about risk management: do I risk getting COVID-19 in order to get treated for my life-threatening condition and risk dying anyway?

 

For those of us fortunate enough to not have chronic conditions and fortunate enough to not sustain an acute injury or become acutely ill with something unrelated to the pandemic, we have other things to worry about. Omicron is so contagious that it's all but guaranteed to run rampant through all of the employees considered to be in "essential services." That means that every single "essential" business is going to be facing even worse staffing shortages than before, and that means a massive disruption to both goods and services. The people making the things won't be making them--they will be sick, or quarantining with sick loved ones. The people packaging and shipping the things will also not be doing that. There will be fewer people to transport the things, fewer people to put the things on the shelves, fewer people to ring them up at the cash register or deliver them to your door. There will be far fewer people to fix things when they go wrong: plumbing, electricity, basic emergency repair. There will be fewer people running electricity plants (hydro, nuclear, coal, whatever), fewer people running oil rigs, fewer people doing maintenance on city infrastructure like roads and pipes and cell phone towers.

 

Society isn't going to collapse all in a heap, but I think it's not beyond reason to imagine that we are in for a rough first half of the year. I think we're going to have power outages (a day here, two or three days there), issues with potable water, and shelves in the stores that are a lot more bare than what we've seen even to date. I think that the timing is especially terrible, since January and February are by far the coldest and most unforgiving months of the year where I live.

 

So I'm going back to my old prepper roots. I've been stocking up on staples, and putting emergency supplies aside in case we lose power. I haven't stocked up on potable water yet, but that's my next step. I have a small stash of shelf-stable food which I'm adding to with every paycheck, and backup batteries, and about four months' worth of dog food (there's already been shortages a couple of times). I am pretty confident that we can heat the living room if we need to, and if worse comes to worst we have friends who have offered refuge at their little farm about an hour away from here (with available wood stove for heating and the ability to "survive" off-grid for a while).

 

I want to be wrong about this. In six months' time I want to come back to this post and point and laugh about how paranoid I was, and to have all of my friends make fun of me and never let me live it down.

 

Like the title of my post says, it's not all doom and gloom. In spite of the above rant, I am actually cautiously optimistic about this coming year. I have plans to try to pay down my debt, maybe finally buy the property I've always wanted, and to learn new skills. I want to learn to spin (wool, not the exercise), and some basic carpentry, and to start thinking about planting a vegetable garden again (although I keep hesitating about starting seeds, because what if I move in the summer and have to leave it half done?). I take great delight in my dogs (although KK informs me that Pixie peed in her car on the way home from doggie daycare today, oops), and am really looking forward to doing more training with them this year.

 

I think that we're mostly going to make it through all of this terribleness, although not all of us will, and not all of us will come out unscathed even if we do make it. I worry about my friends and my family, and I worry about society at large, too. In all the scenarios I had envisioned in the past, it honestly never occurred to me that I would have to keep going to the office during the apocalypse. ;)

 

It kind of reminds me of this: 

 

 

On that note, dear friends, I will leave you for tonight. In the words of R.E.M.: The world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs. Be well. <3