When I was a kid, there was an older guy who lived in a house on my route home from school who was slowly turning his house into a fall-out shelter for when we were attacked by nuclear warheads or zombies. He'd planted large shrubs around his property line so that we couldn't see in, not that we really tried, because he'd scream obscenities at us as we dared to walk past on the public sidewalks. Eventually we learned to cross the road.

But the idea of preparing to be able to survive while the rest of the population was snuffed out always stuck with me. Because while most of us know how to open our computers and peck out a blog post or an email, I'm not sure how well most of us would do without electricity. I feel pretty lost without my computer.

While I am an avid gardener and I can grow my own food, there are many other survivalist skills I simply don't have right now. But as I languish in a pile of my own ineptness, there's a small portion of the population that has begun to prepare for the worst. They call themselves "preppers" and unlike my neighbor, they're not hiding in bunkers, convinced 2012 is the end of the world. They're modern-day survivalists and they live life just like you and I do.

Only, when the end of days come, I want to be next to them.

They're the people who are stockpiling emergency supplies and canned goods and learning to hunt in the event that something catastrophic happens and relearning the skills that so many of us haven't learned. Because we haven't needed to. Why bother learning to sew our own clothes when buying them is easier?

I'll probably never become a full-fledged prepper, but I have to admit that learning a bit more about the old ways of doing things might not be a bad idea.