I attended our Stake’s preparedness fair today for about an hour and a half, and I can say with a resounding NO, that I am not prepared. I went to the class on alternate sources of heat for cooking and heating the home with no electicity. We basically don’t have a way to heat our home in the case of a power outage, as we discovered about a month ago when we woke up to a cold house and no clocks. The power was out for about 6 hours, but it felt like longer.
The coolest thing I learned was how to make an emergency heat source out of a roll of toilet paper, a quart size paint can (new), and alcohol. There’s instructions here if you are curious. They were selling the cans, tp and alcohol there, but I just bought some cans and we’re going to make one or two in FHE this week. Fun! If you don’t put the alcohol in until you need it, it will keep the can from rusting and getting gross, so you can just keep the bottle of alcohol by the can. I’m sure the pyros (boys) in our family will love it!
After our little checking of our 72 hour kits this week, I realized that we need to redo those things, too. Nothing with weevels would be a good start. Plus, I don’t know if the garage is the best place to keep them. Although convenient, it has such temperature extremes that all our snacks melted and cooked. I guess that’s why they tell you to restock those things every year.
So, I’d rather just keep hoping that if “the big one” comes, we’ll just all be killed instantly, because it would really just be easier.
And on an unrelated note, here’s a picture of the paint color in the laundry room, just in case you cared.
So can I just say, I am right there with you. PLEASE LET ME BE DEAD IN AN EMERGENCY SITUATION! I have all the stuff for 72 hour kits sitting in a box next to the backpacks because I haven’t got around to putting them together yet. I also went down to put stuff away in my food storage and found a case worth of various types of soups, etc that were expired, some more than a year. Hello! So the bottom line is, if a crisis hits, we have water in the big blue barrels and a bunch of cold cereal and dry pasta that is probably going stale too, and a bunch of toothpaste. I am soooooo not ready. And what about this wonderful, huge freezer with almost a full cow in it? A lot of good it does me with no electricity. Guess the first few days of a crisis we will be eating ice cream, popcicles, and having a huge barbeque! Can you cook a frozen pizza in a dutch oven?