Tag Archives: experience

Book Review: Survival: How a Culture of Preparedness can Save You and Your Family From Disasters by Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore

I recently read Survival: How a Culture of Preparedness Can Save You and Your Family from Disasters by Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore.

First, I should note that it seems the publishers have attempted to sell it will all different sorts of subtitles.  The same book is also listed on Amazon as Survival: How Being Prepared Can Keep You and Your Family Safe.  I don’t know why it has all these different subtitles.

Went I picked up the book to begin reading, I had a sense of foreboding about it once I noticed the the quote on the cover promoting the book was from Anderson Cooper.  Still, I decided to give the book a try.  How I wish I hadn’t.

Continue reading


Wishful Wednesday: AR Build

AR-15 Lower Receiver - Source: http://bit.ly/FQ8duF

Yes, this week’s Wishful Wednesday came early. I’m just too excited about this new development to make you wait to read how its progressing!

One thing Martha and I appreciate most about our move from California to Virginia was the huge increase in our gun rights. California is a bastion of gun control and a perfect example of gun control’s racist and prejudicial history and its utter failure to reduce crime and improve public safety. I could probably write a book about how useless gun control laws are, but I don’t have to because its already been done. While Virginia is nowhere near perfect in terms of respecting our self-defense rights, its much better than what we had before and we do appreciate it!

Part of our appreciation of our newly found rights and freedoms is a desire to exercise these rights and expand the choices we have for personal protection in our firearm collection. In California we limited ourselves to handguns due to space restrictions in our old place of residence. However, since settling in our new homestead we have expanded our collection with long-guns (and more handguns of course), but we don’t yet have an AR-15 style rifle. I won’t go into the details of why we have settled on the AR-15 platform for this project, but for the purposes of this post, a major reason is the AR-15 platform’s ability to be heavily customized and completely assembled from parts by ourselves.

Excellent Manufactured AR-15 Options - Source: http://bit.ly/JnjVCh

What better way to expand our firearm collection and skill set, than by building a versatile self-defense and hunting rifle in the AR-15 platform? Yes, doing this build may not get us the AR-15 the cheapest way and yes there are lots of great local AR-15 manufacturers near us. But for our first AR-15 I want to be able to really appreciate and understand as much about the firearm system as possible. Building also allows us to realize much more customizations in the firearm since we won’t be paying for a gunsmith to make the modifications. While we may certainly purchase fully assembled AR-15s in the future, we want this first one to be OURS!

I look forward to our journey selecting the components and assembling our first AR-15 and will be sharing our progress with you in future posts!

If you have had any experiences with your own builds you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about them!


Building Our Top Bar Hives

Assembling Barrel Top Bar Hives

Martha and I would like to share with you our experience building our own Barrel Top Bar Hives (TBH). This is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial, but rather a general overview of the steps we took and lessons learned during the process,. There are plenty of excellent step-by-step tutorials out on the internet you can follow if you need that level of help. You’re also welcome to post questions here and we’ll happily answer them to assist you in your process!

Original 55-Gallon Barrel

The largest component in a barrel TBH is obviously the barrel. Lots of people from what we read online said they had cheap to free access to 55-gallon food grade barrels but we had to buy ours. If you live in the Northern Virginia area we highly recommend NOVA Barrel. They have a great selection of barrels and very reasonable prices. We were able to get a food grade 55-gallon barrel from NOVA Barrel for just $35. One thing that was really nice about the model they had was the top rim completely snapped off when we were cutting the barrel in half which provided a flatter surface and eliminated the need to cut the rim off (a step shown in the earlier referenced tutorial).

Continue reading