Patriot Express Newsletter Edition #98
Fellow Patriots,
Greetings and welcome to the PENL Edition #98. Thanks for stopping by for a few to check out this weeks PENL #98. I know your time is valuable so having you here on the Hope for Survival website means a great deal.
It has been a beautiful week here in North Alabama. Today was a sunny 73 and a great time to step out and shake out some mental cob webs from weeks of teleworking and being behind a keyboard. I still want to go cold weather tent camping this year and I'm sure I will get my chance before spring. Ms. Lucy says I'm crazy and I say I'm just motivated.
If you are a guest or newcomer to the HFS journey, please check out this link for additional information offered through HFS. https://www.hopeforsurvival.com/post/guest-and-newcomers-information-page
Thursday Zoom Rallies – We had Zoom Rally #43 as HFS continues the Thursday night series discussing preparedness related topics like gardening, building preparedness groups and leadership to name a few. This week we had two guest speakers, JJ, A.K.A. Squirrel provided an excellent training class on basic care and cleaning of fire arms. Mr. Bill from Carolina Readiness Supply (CRS) provided a class on food preparedness and dry packing resources in Mylar bags and plastic tanks for long term storage. I drug Festus on to the carpet and we had a good discussion on the recent article on the 15 Lessons Learned from the Texas Deep Freeze. We provided examples where Hope for Survival resources provided guidance and information that would have prevented all 15 of the identified lessons learned. We continue moving forward on group building in multiple states and regions. If you wish to attend a Zoom Rally monitor the website for each weekly notification for the upcoming meeting.
Heritage Life Skills will be held May 21-23, 2021 and registration will begin March 1, 2021. More information is provided below under My thoughts for the week. Check it out.
Communications: You can now follow HFS social media on the following outlets:
Facebook – Hope for Survival
YouTube Channel – Hope for Survival
MeWe: - //mewe.com/p/hopeforsurvival2
You can watch the most recent HFS YouTube video, HFS February 2021 Update, posted recently at https://youtu.be/YWEb88JLkfQ
Connect and give me a shout. Share with family and friends.
Moving along …
We must make this brief public announcement to protect the innocent.
Ding, Ding, Ding....Attention HFS readers..... Opinions shared in this newsletter are just that, opinions, and nothing more. Read at your own risk. The owner and author of this site is not responsible for hurt feelings or thin-skinned readers. I do my best to show restraint and respect to the best extent possible. I take as many precautions as possible and try to remain as nonpolitical as possible, however, there are times when I just can't help but point certain things out. Occasionally I use words only Patriots recognize and understand. It's not personal against any non-Patriot. It's just the truth. Sometimes we must pull up our spenders and suck it up. Just saying. Stay the course, read what you want, and avoid the rest. Avoid fear porn as much as possible and the day will be okay. When all else fails… Keep the faith and always have Hope.
As HFS continues to grow, I believe it's important to remind everyone respect and honor is important to the HFS family and mission. We welcome everyone aboard and hope you find a comfortable place to hang around and learn preparedness. I know you will find the HFS family offers some amazing people. With multiple platforms (Zoom, Signal, and Comment section in articles) to interact with other HFS members, I remind everyone to treat one another with respect. We all come from different backgrounds, ages, experiences, and desires. Disrespecting, demeaning or intimidating comments will not be tolerated on any account.
Let’s move along and get to some thoughts...
Thoughts for the week –
The sun has been blasting through the cold ice and gloomy skies to shine bright. Just like our hope and spirits should be daily. Here is a great way to get your weekend started. If you are not a believer I encourage you to listen to the message shared about our history and today. Powerful stuff. (Thanks Festus for sharing this with me to start my week. Great stuff)
Next....
As we age in life we hopefully continue building upon past training, lessons learned, mentors, and skills obtained. Hopefully this means an up trend for most of us to set better goals and achieve goals while setting up our life for success and a joyful future retirement. We cross paths with people who impact who we are and how we think. As I have previously shared, I was very blessed in my military career with quality people, leaders, and supervisors.
One such person who was one of the top mentors to me at a very young stage of life passed away this week. He was 77 but lived an amazing life dedicated to our great nation, educating those coming up through the ranks and private education, as well as serving his community in North Carolina. He was known as Chief Bob. He was a burly man with a distinct deep voice one could recognize in any setting. When Chief Bob spoke, a respected silence covered the vicinity., Chief Bob had an earlobe that was partially green that was often a conversation piece. As Chief Bob's story went, while stationed in Turkey in the late 1960s he responded to a fight as a night shift law enforcement officer at the local Non-Commissioned Officers Club. At some point during the brawl, a drunken troop decided to take a bite out of Chief Bob's ear. It was later sewn back on and many years of stories followed. Chief Bob led his troops with an iron grip and we all knew and highly respected his leadership. He was fair, honest, and we knew if we told the truth he would stand by us and defend us to the end. Even when wrong, honesty was the key. It could be painful to be punished by Chief Bob but knowing he loved us like a child helped ease the pain.
I served under Chief Bob for my first four years in the Air Force before moving on to other duty locations. Chief maintained contact with me over my 20 year career and we often spoke about life, my next move, and our great nation. Chief was red, white, and blue, through and through.
I always wondered what people meant when they would comment "Chief is his own man." I heard this very often from the troops and superiors alike. I wanted to eventually go to work for the FBI in the Serial-Profiling specialty solving cases involving serial killers. To do this I was taking night classes to work on my four year degree .Chief Bob was often my instructor and in one particular class on Forensics and the importance of finger printing Chief was stressing how my finger print was the single DNA marker that separated me from all other humans. He said "this is what makes you your own man." I jokingly said "so this is what makes you your own man" and he smiled and said "you will make a good investigator." He elaborated further by saying to me "you have the single most impact on who you are and what will make you great, if you choose to do so. The only thing holding a person back is their own inability to choose paths of a better way to do something."
That was in 1985 and I have remembered it like a birthday. Sure we all encounter set backs and hurdles. It's not the hurdle that matters but what we choose to do after crossing the hurdle. We have the ability to change our own life and the life of others. We have the ability to share hope and abilities with others to make them better and us still learn from it. Our individual marker can make the difference in many others, if we choose to do so. Chief Bob told me "approaching life with this attitude will deliver outcomes to change those around me. Don't focus on accolades and being rewarded for doing good. Focus on being the single person who drives to change negatives to positives and the outcomes you see will be the accolades most valuable. : With agreements or disagreements should be respect because at the end of the day, we are all great Americans. I have to agree.
May Chief Bob rest in peace and continue to share his positive outlook and humor when he arrives to his new home. May we all take a piece of Chief Bob's advice in to each day to make our surrounding a better place. Thanks Chief Bob for the lessons you taught to me as a skinny young troop and throughout my life.
Next....
For those of you who didn't catch it, Carolina Readiness Supply in Waynesville, NC. will be hosting the annual Heritage Life Skills the weekend of May 21-23, 2021 at the Smokey Mountain Event Center in Waynesville, NC. Ms. Jan, Mr. Bill and the crew will set up this great event to host another great event and offer numerous classes on preparedness. If you have never attended, this is a must for the person or family who are preparedness minded. Registration for this event will start on March 1, 2021 and you can visit the Carolina Readiness Supply website to select your classes and register for the event. Here is the link you will need: Carolina Readiness: A Preparedness & Survival Store Click on the tab at the top titled Events to find the registration on or after March 1, 2021.
Ms. Jan and Mr. Bill are true Patriots and dear friends to me. I love stopping through Carolina Readiness Supply during my trips to Waynesville, NC to visit HFS Patriots in the region. Many of the HFS supporters I met at CRS or through CRS and HLS. These folks work very hard to keep the preparedness community supplied with needed resources and you can always expect a genuine smile and handshake. Okay, I get a hug from Ms. Jan. I'm very appreciative of these two and the fact they afforded me my first opportunity to teach preparedness in this region of the US of A at the HLS event several years ago. Thank you, to both of you.
Here is a short video recently put together by CRS showing how to package dry foods for long term storage in Mylar bags and storage tanks. This was shared with the HFS Thursday Night Zoom group in Rally #43 on Feb 25, 2021. No matter how long one has been doing preparedness, one can always learn from others. I learned something from this CRS video.