I have been experiencing an enforced lull in my prepping activities, on both the research and practical fronts.  Work pressure and planning a significant home development have both pushed my prepping to the back burner.  This is not something I am happy about, particularly as I enjoy updating When The Fires Burn with research, projects or news.

I think any prepper experiences ‘waves’ of activity depending upon a number of factors.  The first, and I am only putting it first because it is the one affecting me personally at the moment, is simple availability of time.  Prepping does not mean putting life on hold waiting for bad things to happen.  Life is for living and sometimes it fills to the point where prepping activities just don’t fit into it as easily as they used to.  Even so, my lack of prepping activity is nagging at me.

The second factor affecting the urgency of prepping is that of threat analysis.  We all get a feeling about how any threats to our well-being are stacking up, either personally, locally or globally and whether they are more or less likely at the time.  It is then obvious that when the risks rise, we automatically put more emphasis on both checking our existing preps and improving them where we can. When we see the risks as lower, the urgency will ease off and other things naturally push in front of it.

The final factor is that of reaching a natural plateau whereby the preps you have in place already satisfy the requirements of the incidents you are prepping for and apart from some rotation of food and water stocks, there is less improvement required or even possible.  This of course completely ignores the fact that most preppers are gear-whores and are always on the lookout for equipment ‘upgrades’ even if that upgrade is that the new gear is shiner than the old gear or has a higher lumens output!

Time is passing by and despite my continued enthusiasm I feel like my preps and this blog are still in their infancy and starting to feel neglected by my lack of attention.   Having acknowledged my lack of activity, I am looking to make more time to continue with my prepping.  It’s not as though I have been doing it for long enough for my threat analysis to have changed much and nowhere near long enough for my prepping to have reached anything like a ‘that’s enough’ level.  I currently have a couple of prepping projects on the go and will hopefully be updating the blog soon with some progress reports.