I missed writing to you last week because I was away doing some training with my friend, Greg Ellifritz, of Active Response Training. My friend and I took a defensive knife course and a Tactical First Aid and Systems Collapse Medicine course at Blackwing Shooting Center in Delaware, Ohio. If you ever get a chance to visit that facility, it's amazing. I was able to load up on 9mm ammo at a fraction of the price I was paying at home and spent the weekend learning an incredible amount in just two days.

It was a spectacular weekend for an autumn drive. I really enjoyed being out on the road again, if only for a few days. The colors going through West Virginia and Ohio were spectacular. There's nothing like loud music, an espresso frappuccino, and the wind in my hair to make me feel like I've left all my cares behind.

I took the courses with a friend who I met at Selco's survival course for women in Croatia. That course was only a week-long but was truly pivotal in my life. I learned so much but even more than that, I made lifelong friends who are family of the heart. Spending time with them is a joy every single time. We went a day early so we could hang out and spend some extra time together.

I ate carpaccio for the first time while I was in Ohio. My friend had brought it up on a phone call when we were both deep into a bottle of wine and I drunkenly enthusiastically agreed that it sounded like a fabulous idea. I tried to back out of it but she wouldn't let me.

I'm glad though. It was actually delicious. You'd think I would have eaten something exotic like raw, ultra-thin-sliced beef someplace more exotic than Ohio, right? Yet, there we were. Please note we ate this at Happy Hour prices. I nearly died when I saw the $140 steak on the dinner menu.

It was an awesome weekend. More about what I learned in the prepping section of the newsletter.

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Honestly, it's kind of unsettling to see how differently people perceive the verdict and brings again the question: can people with philosophies this diverse actually be united as one country? Here's a video with some more thoughts on the verdict.

What does it make you think when the FDA wants 55 YEARS to process a Freedom of Information Act request about vaccine data? That means the information about current vaccines won’t be available to the public until 2076. I’m not okay with that. Are you?

Celebration of Kamala Harris’ trip as ‘gaffe-free’....Ummm, shouldn’t it be news that there IS a "gaffe", not that the Vice President of the United States survived 5 days in a foreign country without making a fool of herself? And people thought Trump was embarrassing?

More Stuff to Read and Watch

Are you going to be over in the chat during the Survival Preppers Livestream tonight? I'll see you there at 7:30 eastern. Be sure to go here and set your reminder and say hi! They'll be talking about Food Shortages and the World Economic Game Plan and it promises to be very interesting.

As mentioned above, I traveled to Ohio to take two courses.

One was a defensive knife course. Just like most of you, I love guns, but they aren't an option everywhere I go. Knives can go far more places. Learning to protect myself using a knife is a skill that I learn more of every chance I get. The other thing to remember is that once you learn knife basics, you can use all kinds of sharp pointy things to protect yourself. It's a skill that transfers broadly and can be used to turn all sorts of things into improvised weapons.

I also took a disaster medic course. A few things have changed since my last first aid certification 10 years ago when I was an official first responder for an automotive shop where I worked. It was good to update those skills and then take them further.

Because this course focused on disaster medicine, it was not about simply stabilizing a person until the ambulance arrived. It was about longer-term care for traumatic injuries. We learned to suture, insert a pharyngeal nasal airway, treat a sucking chest wound, treat a drug overdose, stop bleeding, and much more. I feel pretty comfortable with all of these things.

We also learned a few things I'd be quite hesitant to try unless I was certain my patient was likely to die without my intervention, like a cricothyrotomy and decompressing a tension pneumothorax.

Knowledge is power and it weighs absolutely nothing. I strongly encourage you to learn every skill you can over the next period of time. You never know when it might become necessary to save your own life, the life of a loved one, or even the life of a stranger.