Saturday, September 2, 2017

Be Prepared

Whether I'm at work or at home, I like to have enough food on hand to ride out any disruption in supply.

 At work, I'm not as diligent about this as I should be. I'm sure I could survive just fine with what we have on hand for a few weeks, but as I'm not far out at sea pretty much ever, these days, I like to have a lot of fresh green stuff on hand. I find salad dull after a while, but I do eat a lot of it.
 
     At home it's a different story. You'd think that Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife would be the food storage cheerleader in the house, coming from the 3rd world, but this is not so. Her parent culture has a definite preference for every-other-day market visits, and that's about it. Shopping day is entertainment.

 As I am still a relative newcomer to Florida, I've been blessed in that we've only had to shutter the house and hunker down for a hurricane just once so far, and it missed us, thankfully. Even so, while I was here on the HQ at the time, my wife got to watch the utter shit show that happens when there's a run on food, water and gasoline.It gets ugly, FAST.

       Peter Grant has a great post on prepping and being prepared for disruptions for the exact purpose of not having to take part in the angry mob that forms when gas, water and bread gets scarce. 


We keep a minumum of about a week's worth of drinking water for my family on hand, plus plenty of dry stored food and a spare propane tank. And ammo. Of course.

      We're all watching Hurricane Irma closely. At the present moment, it doesn't look to be heading for my neighborhood, but that can change easily. The damn thing formed up so fast and so far out to sea that anything could happen, and she looks to be a monster. Whatever happens, stay safe.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

As long as your house is higher than your neighbors, and your neighborhood is higher than the surrounding area, then you'll be okay.

Your house should have been built to exceed the requirements after Hurricane Andrew way back when, so as long as your windows are covered, no problemo.

Just one question, got a generator? If you can swing it, one of those whole house thingies are the bomb, but even just enough to keep a couple fans or a room a/c and the refrigerator/freezer running is good.

Good luck to your family, but so far the tracks are showing you're at more threat up in NYC than they are in South Florida. So you need to stock up and get ready to 'hunker down' as the Weather Channel says.

STxAR said...

You, too. Harvey blew up into a mess almost overnight. Monday he wasn't even news. I thought it would go into the Rio Grande Valley. But it came close to home. We didn't get much of anything out of it. Computer models were seriously lacking on the dry side. Forecast 20+ inches, got 1.5 inches over 3 days. Beautiful weather for us. I couldn't believe it. My bud in Victoria got power yesterday. Whew!

Andrew said...

Well, carp. Looks like my skills at precognition totally suck.

Please, please take a sudden hook north. Please...

Hope your family stays high and dry.

Good luck, and batten down the hatches.

Anonymous said...

Having stores is a good idea even deep inland. I live up north and only 5 miles from a major highway. Back a couple years ago we had a heavy winter storm. The highway was impassible because the winds caused drifts 8feet tall in places and bare other places. The storm was predicted for 2 days in advance and they were telling people to not go out during the storm.

There were people calling 911 because the got stock on the highway. The cop cars couldn't get to them so they started askibg locals with snowmobiles to gelp rescue these idiots. Once we got to them it was originally planned to toss them on the back of the snowmobile and bring them to the community center to the roads got cleared.

Problem was most of these people were wearing sneakers, light jackets and had no hats or mitts. Who goes out in a car during a storm with out even gloves?

Exile1981