Smugness

I'm feeling particularly smug today. I'm trying to be humble about it, but I'm going to be rather self-congratulatory here on my own blog.

One of my favorite blogs to read is Suburban Turmoil. This time, her blog was all about disaster preparedness. Some of you may know that I'm all about preparedness. I have to watch myself to make sure I don't cross the line into nut-job, which seems to be an ever-moving line. I am forever planning for some nameless disaster. While I think it would be really cool to have a whole bomb shelter with 3 months worth of food at all times, the reality is that we haven't even scraped money together for a generator yet. Somehow a new stove seems like it should be the first priority. Other things that we've thought of purchasing for disaster preparedness might seem to have trampled over the nut-job line, so I'll just keep those to myself. Little by little, however we've collected quite a nice stash of useful items though.

During this current disaster, I spent most of my day off glued to the TV, watching my son try to learn to crawl, and fielding calls from long lost friends to say "yes we're high and dry". We personally didn't have a disaster. But I was extremely confident in saying that we had everything we needed at our house to hole up there for a couple weeks at least.

Going through Suburban Turmoil's list was fun for me:
1. car cell phone charger - check!
2. Flashlights with extra batteries - check! One of the two I keep in my trunk is kept in a gallon plastic bag with the batteries outside of the flashlight. I had way too many batteries go dead because the flashlight got jiggled to ON at some point.
3. First aid kit - check, check, check! We have a first aid kit in each car plus our own medicine kit. Our car first aid kits are stocked with our typical OTC medicines and prescriptions as well.
4. A car power converter - check! Sure it might take us a few minutes to actually locate it in one of our cars, but we've got one!
5. weather radio and/or battery operated AM/FM radio - check! I'm even a big nerd and have one of those gizmos that has AM/FM radio, flash light, battery, solar, or crank powered!
6. water - check! We keep at least part of a case of water in each car (I had 1.5 cases last Monday) and have several gallon jugs in the garage. I did some further water hoarding on Monday as well.
7.Firewood - check! I even have the ability (with only a smidgen of know-how) to cook over an open fire. More likely, though, we'd cook with our gas grill if necessary.
8. appropriate food - CHECK! We keep extra dry goods in the garage.
9. Stay informed - check! I watched so much live local news on Monday that I gave myself heartburn
10. cash - check! We keep extra cash at the house. Do you realize that if the banking system looses power, you will have no proof that you have money? Makes you re-think only getting electronic statements.

Lindsey lamented in her blog that "I was totally unprepared for a disaster. We were out of milk (a calamity in itself, as far as my 3-year-old is concerned) had no working flashlights, and my cell phone was dead. Worst of all, I had just one diaper left.ONE DIAPER."

While we had a half gallon or less of milk on Monday, my child doesn't drink cow's milk yet. And we have a box of powdered milk in the freezer for us adults. I sometimes feel kind of dumb for keeping so many diapers in the house, but it eliminates one brand of stress from my life. I had 2 large boxes, one small package, and another probably 40 diapers stacked around the house. Diapers.com does the math for you to show you the best value in each brand of diaper. And if you spend more than $50, they deliver for free. FREE! DELIVERY! So I can even avoid ill-timed trips to the store AND buy a ton at once AND avoid lugging them back. This seems like a triple-win to me. And when my daycare lets me know that I'm nearly out of diapers, it's only a matter of remembering to put them in the car. Much less stress.

If our power had gone out, I would have been really bored. I would have burned more candles and dug out that old oil lantern I've got. My baby is not mobile quite yet, so candles around him wouldn't have been too dangerous. I would have had plenty to eat that didn't need cooking. I had my cell phone handy. We have a land line phone and at least one phone that isn't cordless and therefore doesn't need electricity. I would have worried a bit about my huge stock of frozen breast milk, but would have gotten over it if I'd lost it. I stockpiled some extra water. We were nearly out of cookies and cheetos, but these are not actually necessary in life, believe it or not.

I even had galoshes for my husband's ginormous size 14 feet!

So my preparedness allowed me to sit back on Monday, while the world flooded around me, and know that if need be, we could hole up in our house for a week or two in that specific situation. And today, I'm feeling rather smug.