(Continued from Part 2. This concludes the article.)

Our prepping will be easier, and we’ll be more comfortable if the S ever hits the F, if we use all the resources available to us. When stocking up on necessities, we’ll refer to books, articles, YouTubes, and prepping and self-reliance groups. Visiting places like Jamestown, Old Plymouth Colony, and Sturbridge Village, or attending festivals where things are done as they were in pre-technology days, can be fun activities and educational, as well. They not only teach us things and open our minds to the possibilities, but can also inspire some to get excited about learning some of these skills.

When I hear preppers talk about bartering, instead of whiskey and whatnots, I consider what skills I have that would allow me to barter my services for items I want. Something as simple as using my solar panels to recharge cordless items and batteries for my neighbors should be in demand. As a barter item, how about someone with a short-wave radio providing news and hope to the neighborhood? A lot of other skills we have or can develop, could have an equal benefit so it’s a good prepping strategy to learn as many skills as we can.

PREPPING IS ABOUT SURVIVING TEOTWAWKI

High on the list of big mistakes novice Scrabble players make is thinking they should be scoring the highest possible points on each play. To win at Scrabble, you have to get the highest number of points per game, not per play. This means reserving the best tiles, the Blank and the S, and the bingo-stem letters, to increase the chances we can make a bingo with its 50-point bonus on the next turn. We can’t waste them on a word that will get us only a few more points in the current turn rather than planning for the long-term.

The same applies when prepping for the long haul. We don’t want to prep for TEOTWAWKI by buying equipment that’s good enough for the short term but won’t hold up for the long term. We want to survive TEOTWAWKI until we get to the New Normal, not just the first week or few months. We can’t eat all the best food first, then spend nine months eating nothing but beans and rice. Don’t have a nebulous plan for living day by day if the S hits the F, have a well-thought-out plan for the long term.

TRADING BAD FOR GOOD

Sometimes in Scrabble, your rack of letters causes you weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. You’ll never be able to make a halfway decent word score but you’re stuck with the letters. Except that you’re not stuck with them. The rules allow you to suck it up, lose a turn, and exchange the bad letters in your rack for new letters out of the bag. You keep the good letters in your rack and hope the new tiles you pull will increase your chances of making a high-scoring play or better yet, a bingo on your next turn.

Some players can’t grasp that losing a turn is far better than keeping a bad rack and making only short, low-scoring words on the next few turns. That’s a losing strategy.

Likewise, in prepping, a bad strategy is to hold onto something after we realize it won’t work for the long haul. Later on, we’ll regret keeping an item that’s not built well enough, or buying something like brown rice because it’s healthier but won’t store for the long term. Instead of keeping those items, it is pertinent to admit we made a mistake, get past the fact that we wasted money, and then buy what we should have gotten in the first place.

All of us are going to make mistakes in this department. It’s baked into the pudding. Prepping should be a process of constantly learning. As we learn and grow, we’ll sometimes discover that what we thought was good when we were newbie preppers wasn’t good enough. As we make these discoveries, we’ll have to make things right by trading them in for something better to increase the chances we’ll survive a SHTF event in the best way possible. Those with a multi-tool instead of a real tool set will discover they have the wrong equipment when they try to remove the radiator from their ‘72 Plymouth Duster so they can repurpose it into a solar water heater. That backpacking stove in their preps will become useless when the butane canisters run out. And if it’s all they have when canning season rolls around, they’ll be weeping and wailing on a whole new level.

Trade in those preps if you realize they won’t cut the mustard for the long term. We don’t want to be berating ourselves for all of TEOTWAWKI for having been so overly frugal on something so important. Speaking from too much personal experience, this is sage advice applies to the things in our everyday lives as well.

TESTING, LOOKING AT THE OPTIONS

Can you imagine having seven tiles in your Scrabble rack and not moving them around to different positions to see if you can find a word? Not even the newest Scrabble players would fail to test their letters that way.

Likewise, can you imagine buying so much stuff for prepping and then not testing it out to see if it will actually work the way we wanted it to? I did a simulated 10-day grid-down situation to test my preps and boy was it an eye opener! I made some “oh my heck” discoveries, some “how could I have been so dumb,” and even some “holy cow, I didn’t know it had that capability!” discoveries.

Rather than cover the lessons learned in that preps-testing experience, I’ll refer the reader to the 2022 article, My Ten-Day Test-My-Preps Adventure Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Suffice it to say that I never would have guessed I’d learn so many crucial things during the test. Everything from the psychological phases we go through in the first hours after the grid disappears, to the importance of having inexpensive backup parts for a generator, and how exciting a grid-down experience can be for those of us who enjoy the adventure of testing out our problem-solving skills.

It can’t possibly be overstated the importance of testing our preps. We want the discoveries, surprises, disappointments, and good stuff to come now, not after the SHTF. There’s no other way to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly while there’s still time to replace or improve it.

And finally, if you’re a Scrabble aficionado, don’t forget to stock up on extra sets of tiles. The letters do wear off after a while and a Sharpie doesn’t quite do the job of restoring them. Be sure to get the real tiles, not the cheap imitations made for crafters.

ONCE WE’RE DONE, WE’RE DONE

In Scrabble, there are often minor complaints from players such as, “Oh man, why do I always get the V?” Then there are the serious regrets, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that!” “Nuts, I forgot to do a trade.” “@&$*#! I missed that bingo!” All too often, these mistakes can cost us the game. An important rule of Scrabble is that once the play is scored, it’s scored, and a player’s turn is over. No tiles can be traded even though it was realized three seconds after the play was scored. A big play that would have scored a lot more points but was just overlooked, cannot be fixed once it’s been scored. There’s no turning back once it’s over.

If that doesn’t apply to prepping I don’t know what does. Once the feces hit the fan, our turn is over. There’s no more time, what’s done is done. There’s no changing anything that we overlooked, no fixing a bad play, no substituting our bad preps for better ones. It’s over. There’s no more prepping. The worst part will be realizing we overlooked the obvious that we should have seen staring us in the face, or even worse, knowing about it but just never getting around to it.

Once our prepping time is over, it’s over. “I can’t believe we missed that,” will leave us stuck using an outhouse for eternity instead of testing to see if an indoor composting toilet would work. We didn’t test to see if cooking over a campfire on an extended basis would be as romantic as it is in the movies. We forgot to consider the smoke in our eyes, burns on our hands, rain, constantly bending over, freezing weather, and soot, soot, soot. Now it’s too late to buy a woodstove that can double for cooking on, and perhaps we’ll lack the materials or knowledge to make a rocket cook stove. When we see our post-SHTF neighbor working miracles with her tiny 25-watt solar panel, we can kick ourselves all we want but there’ll be no way for us to get one.

CONCLUSION

Once the grid goes down, it is what it is. Our turn is over, our prepping time is gone, and hopefully it won’t cost us the game.

With world events today being what they are, perhaps it’s time to step up the prepping pace or get started in the first place. Hopefully, when it’s all over we’ll have higher prepping scores than those around us. We looked ahead to what was possibly coming, we planned accordingly, played by the prepping rules, and came out the winners in the end.

Keep prepping or get started prepping. And don’t forget the Scrabble board!