You Might Be a Survivalist If… | The Survival Mom You have a cookbook all about Spam. You consider your extra large ham radio antenna as “broadband”. You know how to cook leather. You’ve ever been on a Soviet “Potential Threat” list. SWAT has ever asked to borrow a few of your guns. Your new girlfriend comes over for the first time, and when she walks into the living room, the first thing she sees is your CHL regulation Man sized target with 50 holes in the chest area. Your dog has more Emergency Rations than 95% of the U.S. population. You’re the first person at the gun range on Dec 26th to try out your new toys, and the clerk knows you by your first name The local supermarket manager knows to go ahead and open up the back dock doors when he sees you on a shopping trip. Your home and property are more secure and better lit than Fort Knox or Area 51. All the local restaurants know to save you all their 5-gallon buckets on Mondays and Thursdays. None of your vehicles have electronic ignition or pollution control. You know the tail numbers of all the helicopters in your area. The magazines on your coffee table include American Survival Guide, Guns and Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, American Rifleman, Shotgun News and 4 -Wheeler. You welcome a “mild” El Nino storm because you know its going to fill your cistern. The power fails in your local movie theater, and you pull your flashlight from your belt and show yourself the way out. You use your Gerber Tool to cut your steak at a fine dining establishment. Your knife collection has its own footlocker. When people ask about all those colorful maps on your walls, you tell them that you are planning a “Fishing Expedition”. You can recognize the sound of a generator from four blocks away, but you also can tell the brand, horsepower and kilowatts per hour that it is putting out. You have to kill a snake in your front yard, but then you skin and eat it. You stock up on kerosene and firewood in 102 degree summer heat. Your homeschooled children score in the 99 percentile on their SAT’s. Your To Do list includes changing the batteries on the seismic ground sensors surrounding your home. Your shopping list includes numbered items like .22, .308., .357 and 7.62 Your shopping list includes body armor. Your scanner includes the frequencies of every law enforcement agency within 100 miles, including the ones that don’t officially exist. Those maps on your wall have every bridge marked in red, with an alternate path marked around it. Your paper boy throws the paper into the barbed wire just for the heck of it. You have a key fob that says, “What Would John Wayne Do?” Your fence posts double as range markers. The window shutters have firing ports included in their design. You have “ammo” on your Christmas list. You’re on a first name basis with every vendor at a gun show. You can’t put your groceries in the trunk of the car because its already jammed full with emergency kits, first aid supplies, and fully-stocked BOBs. You have emergency rations for your pets, and view your pets as potential emergency rations. You know the news three days before it hits the mass media. You have back-up plans for your back-up plans. You’re convinced you’ve been exposed to so many chemical-trails, you consider it a form of birth control. You’ve ever bought antibiotics for human use through a vet or grains for human consumption through a feed store. You’ve got more than one grain mill. You’ve ever wondered how you might filter the used water from your washing machine to make it fit for human consumption. You have a kerosene lamp in every room. Your living room coffee table is actually a board with pretty cloth over it to disguise your food storage underneath. Your box springs are Rubber Maid containers filled with rice and beans. You save dryer lint to make fire starters. Your most commonly sed fuel additive is Stabil, instead of Gum-out. You automatically choose the heavy duty flatbed cart upon entering Sam’s or Costco. You know the shelf life of tuna fish, but don’t know how long you’ve had that open jar of mayo in the fridge. Your basement walls are insulated with crates of toilet paper, from floor to ceiling, all the way around. Other people are saving money for new furniture or vacations, but you are desperately saving to get solar panels put on your house. You were excited beyond all reason when they came out with cheddar cheese in a can. You’ve ever served MREs at a dinner party. You can engage in a spirited debate on chemical vs. sawdust toilets for hours on end. You’ve ever considered digging an escape tunnel from your basement to the nearest stand of trees. You know how to use a vacuum cleaner in reverse to filter air in your designated bio-chem attack safe room. You’ve ever considered buying an above-ground pool for water storage purposes. You know what things like ‘TSHTF’, ‘BOB’ and ‘TEOTWAWKI’ mean. You have different grades of BOB’s. And re-stock them twice a year. You know the names, family histories, locations, and degree of readiness of over a thousand fellow doomers on the internet, but you’ve never met your neighbors. The best radio in the house is a wind-up. You have better items in storage than you use everyday. If the SHTF, you would eat better than you eat now. Your significant other gave you a sleeping bag rated at -15 degrees for Christmas, and you were moved beyond words. You’ve sewn secret mini-BOBs into the bottom of your children’s school backpacks. Local food pantries have come to depend on donations from your larder when you rotate stock in the spring and fall. You’re still using up your Y2K supplies. You have enough army surplus equipment to open a store. The local army surplus store owner knows you by your first name. When you fill up when your gas tank, it’s already 3/4 full. You call Rubber Maid for wholesale prices. You have several cases of baby wipes and your kids are all grown. You carry a pocket survival kit, a sturdy folding knife, a SureFire flashlight and a small concealed handgun to church every Sunday. You start panicking when you are down to 50 rolls of toilet paper. You keep a small notebook to write down any edible plants you happen to see along the road. You shop yard sales, store sales, and markdown racks for bartering goods . You own a hand-operated clothes washer and a non-electric carpet sweeper. You have at least two of every size of Dutch oven (the ones with the legs on the bottom), and 20 bags of charcoal, although you have a gas grill. You have rain barrels at each corner of your house although you have a city water hookup, and a Big Berkey to purify the water. You have sapphire lights, survival whistle, and a Swiss Army knife on every family member’s keychain. The people in line at Costco ask if you run a store or restaurant. You require a shovel to rotate all your preps properly. You no longer go to the doctor’s because you can either fix it yourself, make it at home, or know and understand the physicians desk reference better than he does, and can get the goods at the vets or pet store for MUCH less money anyway. You know that GPS has nothing to do with the economy. You track your preps on a computer spreadsheet for easy reordering, but have hard copies in a 3-ring binder, ‘just in case’. You’ve thought about where the hordes can be stopped before entering town. You start evaluating people according to ‘skill sets’. You view the nearest conservation area as a potential grocery store if TSHTF. You know *all* the ways out the building where you work. You have enough pasta stockpiled in your basement to carbo-load all the runners in the New York marathon. You know that you have 36 gallons of extra drinking water in the hot water tank and your 2 toilet tanks. You know which bugs are edible. You have a hand pump on your well. You have #10 cans of ‘stuff’ that the labels fell off of, but you won’t throw it out or open it because it, ‘may be needed later’, even though you haven’t a clue as to the contents. You know where the best defensive positions and lines of fire are on your property. You’ve made a range card for your neighborhood. Your toenail clipper is a K-BAR. The Ranger Handbook is your favorite self-help book. You’ve numbered the deer romping in the yard by their order of consumption. You must move 50 cases of food for the plumber to get to that leaky pipe, and you have your own hand truck in the basement to do it. You own more pairs of hiking boots than casual and dress shoes combined. You have more 55 gallon blue water drums than family members. You have a backup generator for your backup generator, which is a backup for your solar energy system. You go to McDonalds and ask for one order of fries with 25 packs of ketchup and mustard. You have ever given SPAM as a serious gift. You’ve had your eye out for a good deal for a stainless steel handgun to conceal in the bottom of the magazine rack next to the toilet. You are single male over 40, but you still have an emergency childbirth kit, just in case you have to deal with that possibility. You have two water heaters installed in your basement, but one is a dummy that’s been converted to a hideaway safe. You’ve made bug-out cargo packs for your dogs. You have a walking stick with all sorts of gadgets hidden inside. You’re a substitute scoutmaster, and you taught your son’s troop to set mantraps and punji pits, and haven’t been asked to stand in since. You’re on your fifth vacuum sealer, but you keep at least one of the worn out ones because you can still seal up plastic bags with it. You haven’t bought dried fruit in years, but you buy fresh bananas, apples, peaches and pears by the case and have three dehydrators. Your UPS man hates you because of all the cases of ammo he’s had to lug from his truck to your front door. You have duplicates of all your electronics gear, solar panels and generator parts in your EMP-shielded fallout shelter. You have set aside space for your live chickens in the fallout shelter. When the power goes out in your neighborhood, all the neighbor’s kids come over to your place to watch TV on generator power. You must open the door to your pantry very carefully for fear of a canned goods avalanche. You have a ‘Volcano’, you know you can cook anything, and you cast evil glances at your neighbor’s annoying, yappy poodle, muttering, “Your day will come, hotdog”. You’ve learned to make twine from plant fibers to be used for snares because you fear that all of your preps and hard work will be confiscated by FEMA troops or destroyed by earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear blasts, ravening hordes of feral sheeple or reptiloids from ‘Planet X’ The Police Chief calls you to find out what guns to buy for their officers.