What to do after Y2K or What do I do with all this stuff?

Russ (Bigdog) has asked me to explain what I have been doing in the New England area so that maybe we can foster this and spread it across the country.

I like many of you had spent years getting ready for Y2K. I had relocated to a rural area (partially for Y2K, partially for my own well being), bought grains, beans, canned goods, chickens, hand tools, wood stoves, etc all in preparation for a possible decent to an earlier 1900s lifestyle. I had spent long hours getting involved as my community Y2K representative and making sure that my community would be prepared for a serious outcome if it arrived.

Well rollover came and went (as you all know) and I found myself in the basement one day, looking over my preps and wondering, What do I do with all this stuff? I then started to ask myself some questions.

Is Y2K over? Probably not, more than likely we have gotten a reprieve.

Do you want to just dump all this stuff? No, I kind of like not having to go to the grocery store, and besides see question 1.

What about the chickens, wool spinning, solar energy, wood heating and cooking, gardening, bread making and all that other stuff? Well someone from the TB2000 list should start a training group for learning all these skills.

I looked around and nobody seemed to be starting a group, so I figured I would, and with that FuturePrep was born.

As a part of my Y2K work I had been coordinating a Y2K dinner group in the greater Boston area. I felt that this would be the perfect jumping off point for a new group based on making good use of what we had prepped. I started sending a group e-mail around asking the current dinner group members if they were interested in joining this new group and then posted a general message asking for interested parties from TB2000 and TNS2000 and a couple of other boards.

Next I went to Onelist (www.onelist.com) and created a community area for this new group (FuturePrep). This would give the group a web home base along with an e-mail list, and a calendar to help organize the activities I was planning. I then invited all the members of the previous group along with everyone else who was interested to join the e-list.

While I was handling the above items, I was going over in my mind what kinds of topic areas this group could offer training in. I am pretty knowledgeable in firearms handling, I have a wood cook stove which I am fairly proficient at cooking on, I am raising chickens, I heat my home with wood primarily, these gave me areas to start with. In our group we have a gardening expert, a farmer and a food storage expert and I also have access to several teachers with expertise in several areas like spinning and weaving wool, off grid living, knife sharpening, etc. Between all of us I felt that we could provide a fairly complete selection of study topics, and any other topics the members were interested in we could learn together as a group.

My next task was to send out a message to the group and get a feeling of what topics they were interested in. In my message I listed a few and I suggested they give me their top three choices for topics that they wanted to learn about. That way, I didnt waste time on topics that no one was interested in.

After sending out the message I selected a restaurant for the first meeting. I planned for a lunch meeting on a Saturday as some people would be coming from further away and would need to have time to get home while it was still light. I felt that a restaurant was a good place to get to know each other, a kind of a relaxing atmosphere. Most of the other meetings would be training sessions/pot lucks  to keep the costs down. I laid out the classes as hands on - get a little dirty doing it - type of training session. This is usually the best way for people to retain this type of skill information. My next steps will be to set up a web page for the group, layout the training schedules for the first couple of classes and write directions for each meeting location.

If you are interested in setting up a group in your area and would like some help, send me an e-mail to yinadral@hotmail.com. If you would like to be part of this group, send me an e-mail and I will send you the community invitation e-mail.

-- ExCop (yinadral@hotmail.com), January 19, 2000

Answers

I admire your initiative, ExCop. I wonder if anyone in the Dee Cee area would also like to form such a club.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), January 19, 2000.

Thanks so much, ExCop. Wish I lived back in New England, as I've told you in an e-mail, because I'd be there "with bells on." You have apparently put a lot of time and thought into forming this group and launching it exactly the right way. I wish you every success. This is what I have been wishing for...a community of people sharing skills and learning from one another. I have learned lots this year, but have lots and lots more to learn.

Stan, you can count me in if such a group grows in the DC area.

-- Elaine Seavey (Gods1sheep@aol.com), January 19, 2000.

The best reason for doing this is the simplest: it's fun and you meet great people as well as learn skills that expand your own sense of who you can be.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), January 20, 2000.

Is the FuturePrep group on OneList open to anyone? If so, how do we access it? Some of us in other parts of the country might like to see what is going on with the group. I would recommend to anyone in the midwest that they think about attending the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, to be held in Madison, WI this year (all other years it was at Amherst, WI) around the 18th of June, I think. Lots of self-sfficiency stuff in addition to anything you want to know about alternative energy (wind, solar, methane, steam, etc.).

-- Jim (jiminwis@yahoo.com), January 20, 2000.

Here are the addresses: It is open to everyone.

Community email addresses: Post message: futureprep@onelist.com Subscribe: futureprep-subscribe@onelist.com Unsubscribe: futureprep-unsubscribe@onelist.com List owner: futureprep-owner@onelist.com

Shortcut URL to this page: http://www.onelist.com/community/futureprep

-- ExCop (Yinadral@hotmail.com), January 21, 2000.