Ice

A few months ago we had snow. We hadn't had much to be worthy of causing trouble previously but the day after it snowed it rained and everything froze. I had to pay rent a few days later. In order to the climb the little hill up to the landlord's front door I had to use a garden hoe to break through the ice to create places for my feet to go. Needless to say I realized a few things that week. The most important was that I was not prepared to handle our driveway.

The day before the storm I had been shopping. I eyed the bags of ice-melting product and shrugged off the thought to buy one. I regretted my thought. Ice stayed on our drive way well past the de-icing of the roads. I had even tried to make up for my mistake and go to the store to buy some. As I was searching the store I heard another shopper ask a worker if they had any de-icer left. His response was, "no".

One of the other things I learned from this winter is that the stores put out a ton of de-icing product right before a storm. They will never have any left after. So, the next projected storm I went and bought some of those bags so as not to be left behind this time. Turns out I didn't need them, but they have now become a part of my storage.

24/48/72 hour kits

The time approached to redo the emergency kits. At this point I'd say they are more toward 24 hour kits but my goal is to them to sustain us in an emergency for 72 hours. It might take some time, or maybe not. I need actually figure out how much more I need, but I do have inventory on what we have now.









The last time I did kits I had all the food in one kit and the baby stuff in the other. This time around I evened things out a bit. There is food in each kit along with a different source of how to cook. Each bag has supplies for one adult and enough for at least one child. I tried to get it where if each adult had a child and we somehow got separated no one would be without. My daughter is getting big enough to help out in the area of her kit so currently she has a backpack with a small food item, first aid kit, and personal hygiene kit...oh and a flashlight. At some point a book and toy will be added to the child bag.

Mylar Baggin'

I've mentioned before about my FoodSaver. I love it more than I thought I would. It has been coming in handy and I finally tried what I wanted to do for awhile now. I sealed some things in mylar bags using my FoodSaver.

I started with 25lbs bags of food, mylar bags, and oxygen absorbers. I put whatever food I wanted to use right away in other easily accessible containers and the remaining food ended up being packed in the mylar bags.




The process wasn't difficult. the only hard part is finding places for the full bags to go. I don't have much room for things, or rather, I don't have good places yet for things to go but I did have some empty buckets I had picked up from a bakery of which I put some of the bags in after I sealed them. They worked great.

Since I did these mylar bags I have come to realize that I am not left with enough food out of them before I need more. So, next time I'll pick up more containers when I get more food and then end up with a lot more of certain foods out of the mylar bags and ready to use right away. As it is, I did this a few months ago and have opened up three mylar bags. One sugar and two potato flakes. I could try and prevent such a need of needing to get into the bags, but I cannot afford to go to the store for these 25lbs bags very often. I am in the works to it with the help of other but that may take awhile. In the meantime, I've learned a bit about how much I need to keep out and how much is good to put up.