Mary Ellen Feinberg - Member

Reply to: Emergency food prep in urban, apartment living? Posted July 7, 2020

In addition to the options mentioned (tea lights, Jet Boil, etc.), I’d add Sterno. I have a cheap folding camp stove that uses Sterno, and I’m pretty sure it’s sufficient to boil the cup or so of water needed to cook freeze-dried, backpacker-type meals (or heat a can of soup), especially if using a small, thin-walled pot with a lid. I’ve been making a bunch of backpacker meals, and I bought the Mylar bags to put them in (with food-grade oxygen absorbers). You can add the boiling water directly to the Mylar bag and let it soak for 10 minutes or so. I also saw a video of a thru-hiker who made her own “pot cozy” out of reflectix insulating material. That way she’d just boil water, add the food, and put the pot in the cozy to finish cooking, saving a lot of fuel. In an over-abundance of caution, I’d still crack a window and make sure my CO detector’s batteries were good. I had to come up with something because my prewar NYC apartment building has been without gas for cooking for a YEAR (finally getting that fixed after being postponed by COVID). So I’ve been cooking with a hot plate, slow cooker, and microwave. If the electricity went out, I was definitely screwed, especially if the food supply chain got wonky at the same time. That’s what turned me into a prepper!

Reply to: Advice/suggestions on tents? Posted July 2, 2020

Thanks! I will definitely test those seams. I’ve been checking out Harriman a lot online, and I joined up with the NY/NJ chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club and a couple of hiking meetup groups. Unfortunately I have to have surgery, and I’ll find out next week if I can have the laparoscopic version or the old school one that will pretty much put me out of hiking for the rest of the summer. But whenever, I’ll be ready. (And hopefully by then I’ll get over the fact that a young woman was just recently airlifted out of Harriman by special ops helicopter after being bitten by a rattlesnake. Yikes!) The parks are pretty much opening up, with social distancing, so we’ll see if it stays that way. I know in the city people are getting very slack with their mask-wearing.

Reply to: Advice/suggestions on tents? Posted June 30, 2020

That’s good to hear. It did seem like a good deal. I’ve never been backpacking, but have been wanting to start. (So far I am a big walker, sometime hiker.) The backpacking and prepping pursuits are kind of proceeding in tandem. I had been taking care of my mother for many years, who had Alzheimer’s. She passed in October, and between now having the freedom I didn’t have and COVID taking away any desire to travel/stay in hotels/go to cultural events, and the fact that I live in NYC, the idea of backpacking sounds perfect. Not to mention being able to practice all those bugout skills!!

Reply to: Advice/suggestions on tents? Posted June 29, 2020

REI is having a sale, and I just purchased their “backpacking bundle” of a Passage 2-person tent with ground cover, sleeping bag, and sleeping pad, for 192.00. The bundle usually goes for about $270, and separately would go for $328. (I think the fact that they bundle 1 sleeping bag/pad with the 2-person tent kind of reinforces the n-1 idea below as far as comfort.) Got it yesterday, and quite happy so far, to the extent that testing it out for five minutes in my living room counts.

Reply to: Weird pandemic coping mechanisms? Posted May 22, 2020

Well, for me, honestly, it has been becoming a prepper! And the first step down this (in a good way) rabbit hole was that New York Times article that referred to this site. Okay, I admit, I had to overcome associating the word “prepper” with camo-wearing conspiracy theorist a bit, but the rationale for prepping had been building for a long time. One, I’ve lived in NYC for about 14 years and was here through Hurricane Sandy. I was lucky in that I live uptown and it didn’t affect me too much, but it sure could have been different. Secondly, I live in an old brownstone coop. In January of ’18, in the middle of an extreme cold spell, our boiler gave out, and it took a good three weeks to get a new one installed and up and running, so that was three weeks without heat or hot water. My mother was then alive and living with me. She was 91 and with advanced dementia. Luckily, she was then in a rehab facility for a few weeks after a short hospital stay. Had it happened while she was at home, it would have been truly awful. After hovering around space heaters and sleeping under a zillion blankets and showering at the gym for a week or so and nothing being resolved, I was able to take off for my sons’ place for a bit. It could have been worse. THEN, last summer, there was a gas leak, and our building was red-flagged by Con Edison, and the gas shut off. So now no hot water, heat, OR cooking. Months and months of permits, repairs, inspections, more repairs, and we finally got the hot water and heat back in October, just in time to not have to pull out the space heaters again. We STILL don’t have the cooking back. We were just about to get that done when COVID hit and shut us down. So I’ve been cooking on an electric hot plate and slow cooker and microwave. Until we got the hot water back, I was heating water on the hot plate and in the microwave, putting it in a plastic watering can with shower-type spout and a replenishment pot, sitting on a shower chair in the tub, and giving myself a “shower” (no way I was going to do cold showers). I mean, I think of myself as a very resilient problem-solving kind of person, but once COVID came it started occurring to me that problem-solving on the fly wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to be prepared! NYC was frankly behind the curve, and it took a while in the beginning for grocery stores to even do minimal capacity control, social distancing, and no one was wearing a mask. Since I’m 65, I wasn’t keen on going into the stores, but getting a delivery slot was really difficult. It has all gotten better, but it sure ain’t hard for my mind to start thinking — well, what if the food supply chain does get really messed up? And what if, say, the electricity goes out, and then I don’t have either gas or electric cooking, and the stuff in my fridge starts going bad. I’m screwed! So with the help of this friendly rabbit hole, I started putting together something of a plan. I ordered a 2-week emergency food bucket (which I’m still waiting on because, duh, they’re incredibly backed up). In the meantime, I completely cleaned out and organized my pantry, taking stock of what I had and starting to stock up. I started dehyrating foods — cooked noodles, cooked beans, fruit, veggies, cooked rice. I got oxygen absorbers, desiccants, mylar bags. I already had a vacuum sealer. And I started scouring the web for backpacking type meals, as well as making meal kits with canned and dried foods. I found half a dozen enhanced ramen-based meals (ditch the “flavor” pack for some PB, soy sauce, rice vinegar, Srichacha, some freeze-dried veggies, and some chicken…). So now I have at least two weeks worth of more-or-less shelf-stable meals that pretty much only require boiling a cup or so of water. Oh, and I got a little folding sterno stove with sterno, which should be able to accomplish that, and I plan on getting a little backpacking stove and some propane (which I will only use by a cracked-open window) that I can put into my bugout bag. And I got my 15 gallons of stored water. I mean, I love to cook, so this has been mostly play time. It feels good. But, yeah, definitely my COVID stress reliever. But I don’t think it’s weird!

Reply to: How do you feel about “we care” COVID advertisements? Posted May 22, 2020

If they really want to convince us of their humanitarian warmth and fuzziness, they should start by convincing us that they treat their own employees as “family” in “these unprecedented times.” That would make more of an impression.

Reply to: Urban preps for the concrete jungle: what are your hacks? Posted May 22, 2020

I’m in NYC also. One challenge many of us city dwellers have when sheltering in place in a pandemic compared to suburbanites is getting laundry done. I don’t have laundry facilities in my building, so I usually go to a laundromat, but self-service ones are closed now. Drop-off or pick up/delivery (contactless) are available, but that gets to be expensive just when finances are tight. So, I found on eBay a used “Wonder Wash,” a portable, hand-operated washing “machine.” It’s basically a drum you rotate by hand to agitate the clothes for a couple of minutes, then it drains into the tub. It’s surprisingly effective. I also got some no-rinse detergent which makes things easier, and I just ring everything out and put it on a drying rack. I’ve also seen a portable clothes agitator that basically looks like a plunger that you can use in the bathtub or in a bucket. Anyway, I do very small loads every couple of days, and then I don’t have to send laundry out that often. Laundry doesn’t seem to make it too often into prepping discussions. Obviously you can always just wash things by hand, this just makes it a lot easier.

Reply to: (Official discussion) Emergency preparedness checklist: Prepping for beginners Posted May 22, 2020

Oh, good. I was going to ask the same question. I’m in NYC and don’t have a car, but have a much-used folding bike. I’m focusing on shelter-in-place and then sort of short-term, on-foot bugout, but I think the bike would be a great option for more serious bugging out. Look forward to your content. In the meantime, do you know of good resources (on the sane, commonsense corner of the Internet)?

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