Survival:Beyond the Bug-Out Bag
We all agree that being prepared for an emergency is important. That's why preparing a "Bug Out Bag" that will allow you can grab and go can be a lifesaver. So I began posting information here over 6 years ago, and I'm updating that information regularly. I've also gone beyond the traditional products. Because creating "the bag" is just the first step to being prepared, not the final product. We now know we each need to have at least 30 days of essential supplies like food water and medicine. We must be our own first responders.
I cover topics like:
*Products I both use and trust.
*Often forgotten items you need to have in your bag.
*Psychological and Emotional planning for the family
*Planning for Kids and Seniors
*What to do when Plan "A" fails?
This includes a curated list of links from a variety of sources too. I'll be sharing and updating links to sites I buy from and products I use. So we are clear, I have no sponsors, so the opinions, both good and bad, are my own.
Join me as I begin the 7th year/6th season of productions in an ongoing series of podcasts for you and your family to use and to share with others as you build a community. Is this fun or what?
Survival:Beyond the Bug-Out Bag
When Everyday Incidents Become Survival Lessons
When a car crashed into the loading dock of a restaurant while I was having lunch, it sparked an important realization—I'd forgotten to check the exits when I walked in. This simple oversight highlights how easily we neglect situational awareness in our daily routines.
Preparedness isn't just about stockpiling supplies; it's about developing habits that keep you safe in any environment. Whether entering a restaurant, grocery store, or public space, take a moment to observe who's there, what they're doing, where the exits are, and what resources might be available. Are people behaving normally? Is security unusually tight? These environmental cues provide valuable information about potential risks and should influence your decisions.
The grocery store landscape has changed dramatically in recent months—emptier shelves, modified hours, items locked behind cases, and increased security presence. These shifts reflect our changing society and underscore the importance of having both supplies and skills. Do you know how to cook rice from scratch? Can you bake bread without a recipe? Many younger people lack these fundamental survival skills, leaving them vulnerable during extended emergencies. The time to develop these abilities is now, when resources are available and you have time to practice, not during a crisis when internet tutorials are inaccessible.
Your homework is twofold: evaluate your situational awareness practices and assess your emergency preparedness, both in supplies and knowledge. Include your entire family in this process—everyone needs basic skills and understanding. Whether you're a seasoned prepper or just starting out, remember that awareness and preparation are ongoing practices, not one-time events. Want to enhance your preparedness skills? Come check out our range classes covering everything from non-ballistic self-defense to advanced tactical training. Your future self will thank you for the time invested today.
Class Information: Refuse to be a Victim Personal ProtectionTraining
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Simple things that happen in everyday life can prove to have a valuable lesson when it comes to being prepared. Come on in and let's talk about it. Well, hi everybody. I'm Bill Bateman, part of the team at Refuse to be a Victim Personal Protection Training, located in the Medford-White City area of Southern Oregon, and this is Survival Beyond the Bug-Out Bag, and I want to use this time this week to talk about how simple things that happen in day-to-day life can spur thoughts, can be useful and can guide you down some good paths, and I'm going to give you a perfect example.
Speaker 1:I was out having lunch, I was in a restaurant and I heard a really loud, odd, banging, crashing noise. It was more than somebody dropping a rack of dishes. It sounded like somebody had run into the rear of the restaurant. Well, that's exactly what had happened. Somebody had smashed into the loading dock. Everybody came about three feet out of their seats and only then and I'm remiss, I'm telling a story on myself I was looking for the exits. I was looking for the exits.
Speaker 1:Being prepared, being situationally aware, has multiple facets and multiple levels. Now there is full alert where you think you may be in a dangerous situation, and you're on full alert, scanning for exits, you're scanning for possible cover as well as concealment. There's a lot of things that happen when you're at full alert, but most of us in fact, very few of us move at full alert all the time. So if you're out having a sandwich, having your club sandwich and rearranging the bacon for optimum flavor when something happens, you should have, as you come in the door, taken a read of the room. And this is what I want to talk about this week, because I see a lot of folks that spend too much time on their phone and actually are not spending any time checking things out, and I was guilty of that.
Speaker 1:I tended to get involved in a project I was working on and normally when I come into any place to eat, I kind of read the room who's there, what are they wearing? How many people are there? What does it look like? Is it mom and pop and the kids? Or is a bunch of folks who look like they're driving through? They may have the vacation vibe going on, maybe a group of locals? It could be a group of potentially problem people, and this is where you got to be careful not to judge people too strongly, but you do have to get an idea. How are they acting? How are the people in the room acting? How are they acting? How are the people in the room acting? How are they dressed, how are they moving, what is their voice like and is there any eye contact? Eye contact gives you a lot of good information. This helps me determine actions to take up to and including turning around and walking out, because avoiding a problem is the best way to deal with it.
Speaker 1:When you go into any restaurant, when you go into any store, when you go into any large public area, keep your eyes out of your phone and keep your eyes on the people around you. That doesn't mean you're eyeballing everybody like you're ready to throw down that's exactly the worst thing to do but that does mean learning to read the room and being aware of the situations around you. Now this goes beyond simple going out. In a social situation. I have found that not only people can be read, but physical situations like going into the grocery store, and I talked a little bit about this last week. Going into the grocery store now is much different than it was six months ago. The shelves are becoming vacant, the stores are becoming less crowded, especially if you go in late and the store employees are definitely throwing a different vibe. It used to be they were wandering around putting the peaches on the shelves and restocking and doing all the things store employees do. Now they're all huddled around the self-checkout. This is kind of an interesting situation.
Speaker 1:Read into it what you will, but I know that our store the place we have been shopping since we moved to the area here one of the entrances is closed and blocked after it gets dark, and this was during began when it got dark earlier, before daylight stavings time. You would find that store employees, as I mentioned, were huddled around the front. More and more things are locked up. I wanted to get batteries and I had to get someone to unlock the battery section so I could buy a set of alkali batteries. I noticed that there more and we will call them shoppers or store security. These are people who make Jack Reacher look bulimic, walking around with a box of Triscuits in their shopping bag, and they're watching people. I personally have been followed around the store and I don't fit many profiles, except old guy shopping with his wife. But be that as it may, they like to follow people around. Now make sure you're not sticking a bag of Cheetos or something down your pants and this is a read when you are in a situation, be it the people in the area, consider the facility in the area. I'm not faulting the grocery stores because I know they get a lot of theft and they actually have people coming in grabbing things and running out and I know employees have been attacked or assaulted or gotten into fights with folks over theft and shoplifting. So I'm not putting the grocery store down. I am putting down the way it's being handled. It becomes almost confrontational and we, quite frankly, have stopped going into that store after dark, which has got to be great for business, for everybody.
Speaker 1:Look at when you're staying aware. It's more than just high alert situational awareness. Evaluate what you are doing. That's your homework for this week. Evaluate what you are doing to stay alert and stay focused on the events happening around you, both the people. How are they dressed? How are they acting? Where there's a spatial awareness, when I get somebody who's moving in real close to me, my alarm goes off and I move from regular mode to high alert. If somebody I don't know and who looks a little sketchy is moving in, they may be going to ask me for a dollar. They may be going to try and club me and take my wallet. Be alert, make good choices based on good situational awareness and use the information around you to make those choices.
Speaker 1:Another thing we talked about, since we're in the grocery store and I did this, I believe, last week or the week before talking about 37 foods you should hang on to, you should stock up on when things get a little strange. Yeah, I reiterate that. I think it's a good idea, and I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine talking about things you need versus things you want, and this is really important. When you're talking long-term grocery shopping prepping for emergencies, prepping for long-term survival Look at things that have a durable shelf life. Obviously. Look at things that you are going to eat. A huge package of quinoa is not going to be used at my house until we're considering that, or eating the dog. I mean, let's quite. There are some certain things that I don't eat, period, and that's one of them, so a big box of that is not going to be much value to me.
Speaker 1:Then you have to get into things that you want to have. You'd ideally want to have canned meat and you'd want to have the kind of liquids that you like, the fruit juices, the clear waters, the things like that and the things you need, because I have to face the fact that someday I may be faced with nothing else but a big bag of quinoa. Things you need are always, most certainly going to be different than things you want. Things you want are candy You're going to want to have meat, potatoes, carrots, gravy, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Things you need are protein, and it could be as simple as a protein bar or beans or rice, and you have to know how to cook that. I was stunned talking to a younger person earlier this week and I said when you cook rice and the conversation kind of fell apart right there they didn't know how to cook raw rice. If it wasn't Uncle Ben's, they couldn't do it. Cooking beans can be a little challenging. If you've never done it before, I can't believe that, but apparently that is true. So if you need protein and you're going to use beans and rice, have the facility, the pans, the cookers, the items and make sure you can do it over an open fire or just at least on an electric stove. You don't have to have a fancy rice cooker. You should know how to do that on your own.
Speaker 1:Your homework was to evaluate how you keep aware in different situations. Your second assignment is a double assignment. I haven't given homework in a while and things are kind of getting to the point. We really need to do this. So evaluate your security awareness and how you evaluate a room, how you evaluate a facility when you go into it, finding the exits, looking for potential problem spots. Do you see an AED? Do you see a fire extinguisher? You don't have to run around and do a safety check, although if I'm going to be in a room for any amount of time, I do kind of like to do that kind of stuff. Where are the other exits, both emergency exits and getting out through the back? These are all important.
Speaker 1:And then let's look at our pantries. Let's look at what we've got right now, and this always goes back to the question I have every week what would you do if an emergency happened right now? How are you for supplies? Do you have water? Do you have enough sustainable food? What do you have that's going to last only a day or two if the power goes out? What do you have that's going to last a week or two, if the power is continuing, what do you got in the freezer? And then, what have you got? Long term Things you can add to the rice or the beans that you can cut up and you can cook. Keep in mind you're going to need to have supplies that are going to last beyond a short-term interruption, and that could be a couple days shipping slowdown. It's going to be inconvenient, but it's not the end of the world. When you run out of the stuff in the freezer and you have to start eating your emergency foods, what do you have in the pantry? How long is it going to last? I was amazed to hear about the beans and rice issue, people not being certain how to cook it.
Speaker 1:Another thing is do you know how to make bread? Bread's kind of an important staple. It's a carbohydrate you're going to want to have with your meals. Now you're not going to be making fancy loaves of artisan bread, but making a basic loaf of bread. I can do it. It's not that hard. There are some skills involved. There is some practice involved. Do you have flour? Do you have yeast? Do you have salt? Okay, do you know how to do it? Do you know how to let a bread proof or rise. These are all things not everybody in the house is going to need to do, but it's really nice to have at least two people who know how to put a meal together.
Speaker 1:Also, it gets to the point where you're going to have to track down something. If you get a rabbit, do you know how to tell if that rabbit is edible, if it's got rabies or if it's got some sort of disease? What is the source of game in this area? These are all the little things. You start at one point and you start moving down. So your homework is to get an idea of where you are on the preparedness chain. Could you cook something you caught and killed? Would you have the knowledge? If you don't, that's okay, but you might want to find somebody who does, or start learning.
Speaker 1:You've got time now and folks, I can't stress this enough when do you have time to prepare? When you have time to learn? When you have time to research, when you have time to stock up. You are going to bless the time you spent doing that when a bad thing happens, versus trying to learn on the fly. Internet's probably going to be down. You're not going to YouTube and that fancy how to bake bread video. The time to learn this, the time to write down your instructions, the time to get the books you need is today. After you're done listening, go on Amazon or go down to your local bookstore and get the books you're going to need, or open a cookbook and find out what you're going to need to bake your bread or other things you're going to need to be cooking.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of people now. I was blessed. I was raised in the restaurant business. From the time I was 10. I was in a kitchen, so I have no problem at all rattling the pots and pans and cooking a meal. Not everybody is so gifted. There's a lot of people who don't cook or who can't cook or who don't want to cook, and the deli is going to be closed. So what are you going to do? These are the questions I want you.
Speaker 1:That's your homework for this week a good overall evaluation of both your situational awareness and your personal preparedness. Where are you on the prep-o-meter? Because things are moving right now as we sit here. Things are happening. You need to be prepared. I urge you to do it. I also urge you to come on by and check into our classes out here at the range. We've got a lot of good things happening, everything from non-ballistic self-defense all the way up to and including advanced tactical training.
Speaker 1:So make preparedness a part of your life and include your family in it. That would include your significant other, your husband, your wife, and if there's young ones in the family, or especially teens, they definitely need to be a part of the prepping program, because it's a team effort. The whole family has to be able to work together. So, with that said, thank you very much. Have a good week. I will be back shortly and we will have more thoughts, and I'm going to check your homework. There will be detention signed if you don't. So have a good week and take care. The preceding program was a presentation of Retired Guy Productions.
