Happy New Year!

Not actually Erin.

Picture by KJ Photography

& is used with permission.

As we get into the swing of things with a new year (don't forget to sign all of your papers with 2016 instead of 2015!), I'm going to begin with a basic post to handle some bookkeeping and administrative tasks.

Resolve to Test Your Preps
This New Year's Eve I went camping with a friend of mine specifically to test some of my preps. Some of them worked very well, others not as much, and I also left some at home. While unpacking at camp, I realized that while my BOB organization was good for saving space, it also made it rather difficult to get to certain needed items without first removing a bunch of other things.

While the lessons that I learned will be the subject for another post, the message I want to impart is The best way to find out if your preps work is to test them. Camping, hunting and fishing trips are some of the easiest ways to perform these tests, so at least once in 2016 please take your Bug-Out preps into the field and test them!

We're a "Prepper Diamond"
I'm several months in noticing this, but Happy to Survive listed us as one of their Best 250 Prepper Websites! I'm very pleased to have received this award as it's the first that Blue Collar Prepping has been given. Not bad for a website that isn't yet two years old!

We're Still Looking for a Monday Contributor
If you have an area of expertise that isn't covered by our regular authors and can write one post a week, we'd love to have you join our staff. Send me an email with a sample article and a description of the niche you'd like to fill (such as "primitive skills prepper"or "MacGuyver prepper") and I'll see if you'd be a good fit for us.

Please Consider Supporting Us
Unless you're a writer you may not know how much time and effort it takes to produce quality blog content. A 500-1000 word post can take several hours to write, and that doesn't include time spent doing research to make sure our information is correct. Nor does it include the time I spend proofreading and editing each post for grammar and comprehension and formatting text and pictures for ease of reading. What this means is that I end up spending a LOT of time on this blog making sure the posts are of the highest quality possible, and that time spent is time that I am not using to write other things.

On top of that, we want to provide you with interesting and entertaining information that is unencumbered by lots of advertisements (Yes, we have some,  and I go to great pains to make them as inoffensive as possible), which means that this blog is mainly a labor of love for us.

It would therefore be a big help to me -- and therefore, a big help to the rest of my co-authors -- for everyone who enjoys this blog to donate one dollar a month to help with costs and time spent. That's essentially 5 cents per post, and far less than you spend on a daily newspaper.

To make a $1/month pledge via Patreon:

1. Click on this Patreon link. 
2. Enter $1 in the "per Blog Post" field and click the "Become a Patron" button. Do not panic. You will not actually be charged $1 per blog post.
3. You will see "No reward, I just want to support." Click Continue. Remain unpanicked.
4. You will see your pledge as "$1 per blog post" and under that is a check box which says "Optional: Set a monthly max on your pledge". Check that box and write in 1 for the number of times you wish to support per month. 
5. Fill out all other fields (Paypal, etc) and then hit "Confirm". you have now pledged one and only one dollar per month!

Regardless of whether or not you donate, please know that your readership is appreciated. Thank you, and have a wonderful 2015 2016!