Surviving the Zombie Apocolypse with Justin
Ann:
Hi you guys welcome back to Simple Home City Life podcast, I am Ann and Justin is back with me, and I am surprised that you guys have enjoyed his company quite so much and we’ve actually had requests. He just looks at me.
This m4a audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
We’ve actually had bitcoin. We’ve actually had requests as to when he is going to be back. Initially, I do releases on Friday, but our schedule and his schedule has been a bit crazy. He did have to work this weekend, so we are just now getting around to recording a second episode with my husband Justin. And it’s kind of fun to have him because you get to see a partial glimpse of our relationship and how it really is.
Surviving the Zombie Apocolypse on the Homestead
Today we’re going to talk about something a little fun. I thought for the sake of having Justin on, we keep it as light as possible, but we do want to educate you on some of the things that he does around the homestead. But this episode, I’m just still trying to, you know, get his feet wet a little bit and things like that. So we’re going to talk about whether or not we can survive the zombie apocalypse or not.
Now he doesn’t know the questions I’m about to ask, which I thought would be a lot funnier, but I hope that you guys stick around to hear what it would take for us to survive the zombie apocalypse and his take on the whole thing. Ok. Say, hi, hi, hi. All right, so the first question is, is basic and simple, do you think we will survive the zombie apocalypse?
Justin:
The metaphorical zombie apocalypse or the real Samuel zombie apocalypse, you know?
Ann:
Ok, so let’s just talk the metaphorical zombie apocalypse with the real zombies in there and things like that and people, you know, kind of like what we just watched. I am Legend again. It’s one of my favorite shows. And so we just watched it with the kids and two of the kids had never seen it before. So let’s talk about that zombie apocalypse from I am legend. Do you think we will survive that aspect of it?
Justin:
I think we do better than most, for sure.
Would We Allow Others Onto Our Homestead?
Ann:
So just so, you know, any time I joke around about the zombie apocalypse with friends and stuff like that, we’re told that, well, we’re coming to your compound. And I have this very legitimate question. And the question always is what can you contribute to coming to our compound? So. So the first question to you is what do we look for if we’re going to allow anybody to our compound? I guess we would allow family right when we allow family to come to our compound.
Justin:
I mean, not if they’re dead weight.
Justin:
I guess I’m Ted Pete. Do you mean they have to have a skill? Is that what you’re saying?
Justin:
Just want eaters.
Ann:
No, we don’t want eaters. Ok, so so we would allow family, obviously. So, what skills do we want to come into this whole thing?
Justin:
You know, I would say the most important things to have in a situation like that are food. And water and shelter know what skills. Yes, so those skills have to be geared toward that. So food, you’re going to run out of canned food eventually, right? So you’re going to need people that can forage. You’re going to need people that can hunt. You need people that have. Firearms or no other means of hunting. So I’d say those are the basic requirements, and then as for shelter, you need people that can build, you know.
Ann:
So so you’re basically looking for like construction, foraging skills, hunting skills, and firearm skills. You said nothing. What else? Those are the three necessities, right? You got it.
Justin:
You’ve got to have water. You’ve got to have food. You’ve got to have shelter.
Could We Do the Amazing Race Together?
Ann:
Ok, OK. That’s what you need. Ok, so you need someone who’s willing to do the dirty work and get into it and stuff like that. So, OK, so he thinks about things like that. I think about the overall, OK, we’re in this knee-deep. We’re like five years in now. Think about The Walking Dead. So if you don’t, you don’t see the trend in which we like to watch The Walking Dead. I am Legend, you know, kind of surviving shows like that. I mean, we used to joke around when we first met 16 years ago that we could do The Amazing Race together. And what do you think? Can we do The Amazing Race together?
Justin:
We’re too old now.
Ann:
Ok, 16 years ago, come on, 16 years and
Justin:
16 years ago, we could have done pretty good,
Ann:
Wrong. We would not have survived The Amazing Race together. I mean, we would not. We have type A personality and then we have Justin. I’m Typekit, and that’s Justin. So I don’t think we would have survived because we would probably kill each other. Boy, episode three, maybe four. In truth, because this is me and I’m going to tell you, and please correct me if I’m wrong, honey, this is me. This is what we need to do and we need to do it now. Stop looking at your phone. Let’s get it done. Come on. Just do it. Just do it. And what? What are you? What would you say to me?
Justin:
I would say ask nicely, and maybe I will.
Ann:
And that is true. But to me, it’s like, OK, think, can’t you see this big image picture of what I’m saying to you right now, and you just kind of like, looks at me and goes, No, you’re not making any sense at all. Am I wrong? No, no. So with that said, I’m The Amazing Race isn’t something that we could have survived, and probably would not be together now if we had done The Amazing Race at the very beginning of our relationship. We’ve learned a lot. Don’t get us wrong. We’ve learned a lot.
Bartering Skills and Goods
Ann:
Ok, now back to the zombie apocalypse. So basically, forging skills and hunting skills are a necessity. Absolutely. Those are just traits that I would say that almost every homestead should either know how to do or if they don’t know how to do it, they should be able to barter for it, right? So you have to have some sort of skill. In order to achieve what you can’t have. Don’t you think? Yeah. Do you want to elaborate on your Yap? Remind me he doesn’t have any idea what I’m asking him, or what I’m going to bring up, but obviously, he’s just kind of going along for the ride right now.
Justin:
I just got home from work, so you’re going to have to bear with me a little bit.
Ann:
Ok, so the OK, so if you can’t make your own beer and you want beer, but you have something else to trade, are you willing to trade it for beer?
Justin:
Yes, I am willing to trade.
Justin:
Ok. So if you are not a hunter right or forager, are you willing to barter your skills for something like that?
Justin:
Of course.
Ann:
Ok. That’s the point I was trying to get.
Justin:
Luckily, I’ve got skills.
Firearms on the Homestead
Ann:
That’s good. He’s got skills. Ok. So we talked about the whole firearm aspect of it. Some of you guys don’t keep firearms, but we do on our property. We really teach our children the safety of it and also how to shoot as well as our daughter. Lola, who’s 12 years old, has been shooting since she was held,
Justin:
They started on bb guns when she was, oh yeah, that’s right. Four or five?
Ann:
Oh yeah. B.b. Guns. And she was really good back then. And then we brought her to the range and we were shot. We were shot
Justin:
And then she just wants bigger guns.
Ann:
So we were shocked. I was shocked. I didn’t go with them the first time they went into the range and he came back and showed me her mark and I just thought she was like five feet away from them. And he was like, No, how far was she at that time?
Justin:
20 30 feet, probably 30 feet?
Ann:
Yeah, 30 feet. And so she has only gotten progressively better since her first time out there. So yes, firearms are a big thing on our property. You know, those of you who are listening from other countries that I know firearms are really frowned upon or, you know, you guys don’t have them.
We are in the U.S. and we do homestead, and we wouldn’t be able to protect our property from the predators that are here like the cougars and the bobcats and the coyotes, which Washington state deems predatory nuisance animals and bears as well, too.
So they do encourage if they are doing destruction to your livestock and property that you know we could take matters into our own hands as long as we can prove that they are doing destruction. So with that said, construction, we talk about this all the time on the property.
Construction is a necessity, just surviving the zombie apocalypse because someone’s got to build the wall, right? Someone’s got to build a fence that keeps them out. Yes. And maintain a shelter. Or even just be able to dig trenches to bring in water as well to right.
Justin:
Yes.
Ann:
So I’m sitting here looking at him and he’s looking outside the window and I’m like, Well, we should not have done this today. And so, OK, so those are the skills and the key elements we said we would bring our families on. Some of them. Some of some. Ok. See that here.
Justin:
Anyways, I’m not. I’m not naming names.
Ann:
Ok, so some of them were bringing some of them we would not bring. And so barter with them, though we barter with them, we probably help them set up their own compound. I think at this point, yeah. So it is a skill. And then I think about our children and whether or not our adult children could contribute to this and they probably be mad. So we’re not going to single them out as our adult children. But there are a handful of our adult children where I would say, Oh yes, you need to come, you need to come and stay with us and the other ones. I would say, go stay with your in-laws and we will help you as much as possible.
Justin:
Listen to this.
Foraging and Hunting
Ann:
No, no. But anyways, we do love our children. Of course, our children or grandchildren would come. We’re just joking. Ok, so basically. In order to get through this and in order to do what we do, I mean, we would have to start from basically ground zero in being able to get seed-safe seeds, right and things like that.
And I think we’re in a pretty good situation to be able to do so. And I think the area that we reside in, we could probably much forage. It would definitely be the hunter-gatherer diet in that sense. And we have this amazing forage book for the Pacific Northwest. So if you do not have a foraging book for your location and where you reside, find one. Lola and I, when she was younger, she used to bring it out all the time and walk the property and try to find things. And there were things that I would never have thought about consuming that we could actually consume. And I think it was funny because one of them what we call a horse tail grass, is that what it’s called that thing. And he was like, That’s such a nuisance. And it’s. And I was like, But you can eat that.
Justin:
It doesn’t taste good.
Ann:
It doesn’t taste good. Well, you have to buy it when it’s yeah, you have to buy it. You have to harvest it. When it’s young, forage for it. When it’s young. That chute is supposed to apparently taste like asparagus, almost in a sense. There are a lot of things I made him eat that he doesn’t like the shot. The other thing that I made him try was stinging nettles. Stinging nettles actually taste like spinach when you harvest them young. I enjoyed it. He kind of got freaked out by it. Yeah, he kind of freaked out by it a little bit.
Justin:
I’d eat it if I needed it to survive on it.
Ann:
Yeah. And the other thing? What else do we do? We had the berries. We have salmon berries and blackberries all over the place here, dandelions for salad and tea, and things like that. So we had a blast playing around with our fortune books. So again, find a foraging book for your area and location. And if you can find a mushroom identification for your area as well too, that’ll be excellent because that’s a great source of, you know, you know, food intake that’s going to fill you immediately on something like that.
Clean Water
Ann:
The other thing is water, right? We talk about water. I mean, our water here is exceptional.
Justin:
Yeah, we’re lucky as far as water goes where we’re at and it just comes down the hillside right to us
Ann:
And it’s a natural spring and it’s clean water. We get our well tested twice a year and it’s just it’s clean. It’s clean like you can literally take your hand, cup our water and drink it, and it would be amazingly clean. Justin:
However, if you are, you know, going about, we talk about this all the time, I talk about getting a Britta, is that what you call it, a brought princi? What do you call that thing? The Burkey? Sort of the Burkey.
There is a. Right. That’s yeah, that’s the thing, you know what, the big one, the big stainless steel one, the one that costs like three hundred dollars that we don’t own, by the way.
Ann:
Yeah. So that one is it’s got a charcoal filtration system in it, and it’s really a good system to have. If you can have it, you just have to be able to replace it.
What Should Be in the Go-Bag?
Ann:
Of course, if you’re on the go, it’s sometimes you’ve got to run from the zombie apocalypse and you would want, you know, charcoal-filled straws. Right. What else? What else do you think would be on that? We’ve talked about this numerous times getting a first aid hour situation together. If we had an evac, you have twenty-five pounds to carry on your back for each individual. So what? What would you take? Luckily, you know, the freeze-dried. You can pack as much food as you wanted in there, and that would be pretty light.
Justin:
Well, the first thing I’m grabbing is a firearm and as much as I can carry. Yeah, but you need something to start fires with, whether that’s lighters, matches, or flints.
Ann:
Yeah, we saw that one time I bought matches and it wasn’t a strike anywhere match. I was like thinking I was being this great individual and I bought like five boxes of five hundred in a box.
Justin:
We just finished them.
Ann:
We just finished and we bought them like years ago. And Justin looks at them because I was like, Oh my gosh, babe, look, I bought matches and he’s like, Oh, that’s great. He reads the Boston because what are these? And I’m like, They’re matches he goes. Honey, they’re not strike-anywhere matches. And I was like, So and he goes, You can only use them with this box. One of the boxes got wet. I remember that and I had to transform it into a Ziploc bag to use them for a new box. It was, it was a mess. It was a big mess.
What else? What else do you think you can carry? Twenty-five pounds in a zombie apocalypse because it matches charcoal filtration straws and freeze-dried foods. If you guys don’t know, we own a food dryer, we own a harvest, right? Freeze dryer as a matter of fact, and I’m going to give you the link to it.
We actually enjoy it. When he was working at a town for a year, we used the ice to send stuff up with a ham salsa, just a whole bunch of canned foods, and stuff like that. They would take to cut the expense of it. And I got to play with the Freeze dryer while he was gone immensely. I think I freeze-dried. Our favorite was avocado. Oh, he loved the strawberries. Yeah, well, the kids like the apples. He likes the strawberries.
But the avocados were great because with lime water, we reconstituted it for guacamole and he had ham that he made into fried rice when he got up there. It was. It’s a great tool to have. I mean, it’s an expense, but it’s a great tool to have. And I’ll put that link in the description for you. So food. Anything first aid is important for that birthday.
Justin:
We’re always lacking on first. We’re always scrambling. Yes. Somebody gets a cut or
Ann:
We’re horrible, for starters. Yeah, we got it better. We had it up that game.
Justin:
We do. We need to have something that’s ready to go.
Ann:
And I think with the ready-to-go bit of it is, is that you know, having your home equipped is better than nothing but having something to take with you. I mean, again, twenty-five pounds, you guys. So what are you going to take? I think that’s a deeper episode that I can go into with you guys later about what we have in a pack and why we have it. But keep in mind, those are other things.
Justin:
And not only that, when you travel, you should have something like that in your car, in the trunk of your car.
Ann:
Absolutely. A friend gave us probably almost 15 years ago, a small, tiny bag for Christmas. It was tiny. I was like, What the heck is in this bag that’s going to keep us alive? A couple of granola bars? Let’s see. Space blankets, space blankets. That was good. That was good. Hand warmers were in there and then a water, she had water in there as well, too. And then she had some Tylenol. There was Tylenol in there.
Yeah, there was Tylenol in there and just a couple of other things that were just pretty much, if you know, it looked like we were prepared for a snowstorm if we should hit the road. But we don’t get enough snow here to have that. But no, every once in a blue moon and stuff like that.
Off-Grid Preparations
Ok, so in a sense of something like this, you know, you heard my episode before this was episode three, and I talked about a little bit of time, my personal experience of living off-grid, and what I felt about the whole thing. And I gave you a quick little recap of what Justin had said about this time. And I will tell you, and I’m going to have him talk about it for a little bit of a second I will repeat it again. I enjoyed it. It was work, but I enjoyed it. I really did. I had a newfound awakening of what skills I need to really hone in on, and one of them was, I’ve got to get better at cooking over the wood stove.
That was one thing. I mean, making stews and soups was really easy. And then on top of that, going ahead and cooking foods like red meat and meat as a whole was, you know, really great. We had our stove that had propane, but. When that’s out, what do we do at that point? You know, that was my contribution to something like that. What do you think about your experience? Like we had to keep the wood stove going the whole day?
Justin:
Yeah. And it would be really nice to come up with a way to take a hot shower in a situation like that which. Yeah.
Ann:
Well, every day we can’t
Justin:
Even take a cold shower with there’s no power to the pump house because the generator died.
Ann:
Yeah, that was a bit tough. That was a bit tough. And so we were just when we finally got the roads cleared, we sent everybody to our friend’s house across the way and who had power through their generator. Now our generator was only running only runs, our freezers, everything else. We were black, we were completely black out on that and then candles, lanterns, camp stove, and then the wood stove. And that was about it.
Justin:
Yeah. So so in a complete societal collapse,
Ann:
We like hot showers.
Justin:
We are definitely going to have to figure out the hot shower thing,
Ann:
You know, other than the boiling, the water and stuff like that, you know, our neighbor read actually, oh my gosh, this is brilliant. I totally forgot about this. Reed has an old stove, an old wood stove that he took from a construction. He does contract work as a private contractor, and then he hooked up. A galvanized big tub. And a pipe into it, and he lit the wood stove really well, and it was hot water, warm water, so that might be something that they would look for another stove. You might have to look for another stove, something warm. It was cold. It was cold. So, you know, is there anything else besides the hot? It’s like a hot shower for you that you think that we could have improved on in our skills?
Justin:
You know, it’d be nice to figure out a way to get water closer to the house instead of having to cross the road to go to the pond or
Ann:
Like 15 steps. Seriously, OK,
Justin:
Well, it’s across the driveway.
Ann:
Oh no. But then we have. Ok, that’s our pond. Across the driveway is our pond. That’s we would pull up water from that to flush the toilets and things like that. But water for like the animals and whatnot. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw us hauling water from the creek.
Justin:
Yeah, I think I would divert the creek to go through the middle of the yard in that.
Ann:
Oh, OK, you’re talking about a zombie apocalypse.
Justin:
Isn’t that what we’re talking about?
Ann:
Yes. For a minute there, I got scared. No, not
Justin:
Not like, not like tomorrow or anything. Ok, but in a situation where we regularly need to get water outside of the home, yeah, I would. I would bring the creek closer to the house.
Ann:
So yeah, OK, that I can understand that in the eye. You know, reverting back to like dishwashing was really hard. It was really weird because camping, I can wash dishes like a pro, but for some reason at home in that sense, because I didn’t have our whole camping setup like I have this whole table, that’s a foldable table that I had these big buckets, right?
These big bins that I would put water through, filter through wash and go through it. That way, I was stupid, I think, for not setting that up to make it easier for me. It real. I, I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking on that.
Justin:
I don’t know that we’d be worrying too much about dishes in an apocalypse. Well, how are you going to eat?
Ann:
What are you going to eat on?
Justin:
I guess, out of your hands?
Ann:
No, we’re talking about if you’re living in a competition, you’re going to be whatever. You are going to wash dishes, you have to wash dishes. You can’t just like take your spoon, communal spoon and share it out of the communal pot. That’s gross. That’s how you get sick. Shut up. That’s yuck. Oh, that grosses me out. No, you have that.
Justin:
I’ll be out busy building the wall, the zombie.
Ann:
You have to make a big wall for zombies and a watch. Well, if you build walls for the I Am Legend, we’d be pretty much they scale those walls. Now, if you were walking dead zombies, then they could not really scale it unless the bodies, the zombie bodies build up and then they climb on top of that.
Justin:
Yeah, I’ve seen that one.
Ann:
Yeah. So see, see, this is where our mind goes. That’s how we think as a couple.
Justin:
I’m talking about figurative zombies. Not literal ones.
Can We Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?
Ann:
Oh my gosh. Ok. Yes. We just realized that we just talked for 18 minutes without even pausing to reclaim our thoughts on something. And he keeps touching my mask that I keep telling him, Don’t touch because it’s dirty. I have to wash it. I keep pulling it out of his hands. So we’re going to recap real quick. So basically, can we survive the zombie apocalypse?
Justin:
Yes. Yes.
Ann:
Do you think that we have the skill set to teach others if like, let’s just say some straggler comes walking up to the gate goes knock, knock knock, can we come in? You know, we would let them in. Of course, we will let them in and we would let them in.
And then from there, what we would do is teach them a skill that they don’t know. But let’s recap. Let’s just recap and wrap it up because we’re like already on like 30 minutes or what, and then our dogs are barking. Ok, so what skills? Tap skills? Give me five skills that you say that someone needs to have to be invited to our compound if we were to like, say, OK, if anything happens, you can come. You can come, you can come. What skills do they need to own?
Justin:
Well, said food. So along those lines, hunting, foraging. Firearm skills. You need shelter, so building skills and I mean, if you don’t necessarily have those skills as long as you’ve got a strong back and a willingness to learn and work your butt off, I guess that counts too.
Ann:
Yeah, definitely. Definitely on something like that. And that’s where you’re at. You have to be willing to survive it. I mean, we live on a fault line in Washington state like we live on the fault line. If there is a major earthquake where we’re at, we’re right on the fault line. And the likelihood of us getting off the fault line would be crazy crazy.
We would have to literally cross the mountain. To get down to the other side, and it’s a pretty big mountain, Tiger Mountain is pretty huge, and then from there we would have to go down and travel. From that point, we would not be able to drive out. There’s no way everything would be walking for us. So so knowing that if we had to reestablish and set up something new somewhere else, we would definitely have that skill to be able to do so.
And with the general knowledge of knowing how to evac properly with what’s going to go in your backpacks, and if you don’t have something a backpack ready for evac purposes, you definitely need to get that set up. And that’s something that we could talk about later as well, too on a different episode. So I wish Justin was a little bit more active today, but he did just get off work and I did leave a pile of stuff in the drive to have him put away before he came inside.
Justin:
She didn’t ask nicely, so it’s still there.
Ann:
Oh my gosh, you need to go put that stuff away. You need to put that stuff away. So anyways, so that’s our episode of Surviving Zombie Apocalypse and whether or not we can do it next week. This week, we’re going to have to this week because we wanted to really record one with Justin. But this Friday’s episode will still release as normal, and then we will have Justin back out in about
Justin:
Two weeks,
Ann:
Two weeks. Yeah, pushing him to do more
Justin:
Then put that on my schedule. Yeah.
Ann:
You mean I’ll put it on our schedule?
Justin:
And if you’re nice, then I’ll do it.
Ann:
Whatever catch your breath? All right, you guys. That’s what we have for today. I hope that you enjoyed it. Eventually, we’ll get to something a little bit deeper. But I thought just because this is new for him, it’s only his second episode. We keep it as light as possible, but there are a bunch of things that he does contribute to that we want to talk about in regards to homesteading as a whole.
And you know, a lot of us homestead with our spouses, while a lot of us do about 90 percent of the work ourselves and then the other spouse works full time. So we want to cover those bases, too. So yes, we do talk about doing this as a couple and we do joke around quite a bit.
But there’s a lot to be said about being able to homestead with your partner, your spouse or just a partner as a whole and getting the job done and running an efficient, sustainable homestead. So with that, we’re going to leave, we’re going to close out. So thanks for being on here.
Justin:
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Ann:
Yeah? Did you really?
Justin:
Of course.
Ann:
Ok, that’s enough to say, I think he’ll be back next time. So have a great day, you guys, and I’ll talk to you guys on Friday.
Justin:
Bye.
