Near 90 degrees and I'm planning for the freeze

[bill_schubert]

I'm not sure what kicked it off but I started thinking again about preparing for this winter.  No reason to believe it will follow last year's pattern but it would be nice to be a little more prepared.  So it is near 90 (32) degrees out and I'm preparing for a frozen power outage.  Makes sense.

It is funny to zoom around the sites looking at end of the world prep.  Fortunately there are some sensible sites (including a decent discussion on the Univ of Georgia site) including FEMA.  Who would have thought they might have a plan?  "Brownie's doing a great job."

So easy to fall into the prepare for a month, have supplies for a year, end of the world!!  What a great money maker.

Ultimately I'm packing in a bunch of water.  I'm storing four 2.5 gallon containers of water and a field filter.  That was the biggest issue we had.  Soon as electric goes down the water is no good.  But 10 gallons plus a way to make more is pretty good.  Five days worth and the ability to make more.  

And I'm going to shop for canned stuff we will actually eat once it is time to cycle it and renew the stash.  And jerky.  And peanut butter.  And crackers.  Oatmeal and long storage milk.  

I've got my eye on a camp stove even though we had gas.  They are cheap and easy to store and use and it would really suck to not have coffee because I hadn't spent the $50 for one.  

But what fun finding stuff I don't need.  There is so much of it. 

Comments

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Very good idea planning for winter when everyone else isn't.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

I hate this phone. I meant to add that when it comes to preparedness the thing I am always desperately tempted by, but is always just too expensive, is a generator. One that's big enough to be actually useful would be a couple of thousand dollars here, and I can never justify that for the offchance, especially as it's not cold enough here to ever worry about freezing to death.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we used to have an RV so I once had a generator during a hurricane blackout. It was kind of fun but all the neighbors could hear it so I was a little embarrassed to use it.

I'd get a kerosene heater I guess, if I was really worried. I may regret not having done that this winter. We'll see.

[amw.livejournal.com]

You should try the Saskatchewan farmer approach for making coffee in a power outage - "just use the propane torch"!

In seriousness, cold instant coffee has served me well if you get a halfway decent instant, although obviously hot is nicer. Oatmeal and peanut butter are the best. If you make sure you always have an extra bag of tortillas that's great for no-electricity carbs and seems to last better than fresh bread. Although i met a hobo who had a loaf of Wonderbread going for a couple weeks, which makes me wonder what's in it. Dried fruits are also worth it, sort of the sweet version of jerky. But if you've got heat you could have potatoes, rice, anything! How long was it out last year?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

We lost power only intermittently last year. They tried to keep it at four hour blackouts then it would come back up. So we'd quick make anything we wanted to have hot before it went back out. I'm preparing for four days plus whatever we have in the house at the time it goes out. So maybe a week. I think planning for longer than that would be overkill.

So not too hard. And I've got charcoal and a grill if we happen to have any meat to cook.

[sleepybadger.livejournal.com]

Always good to be prepared, especially with stuff that you'll actually eat. We loaded up a bit on soups and stuff back in the early days of the pandemic and worked our way through them over time but we kinda kept adding to it.

My mom has a backup generator that runs on natural gas. Would that be an option for you?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I think a generator would be an overkill for us. I might think about a kerosene heater but as I remember last year it was not too bad.