azurelunatic | Preparedness as a way of life

minakochan visited recently, and commented in pleased surprise that our apartment actually had food. That reminded me of how it had been in the beginning...

votania and I come from utterly different backgrounds. She was raised here in Arizona, in a working class/poor family. I come from Alaska, and my family was upper-middle-class. Given the weather, and the nature of things, we could expect that we could wind up with the power and phone out for a day or so in the event of a bad storm, and if things were really bad, the roads would remain unplowed or the car could break down. And if it was -60 or lower, no way was anyone going anywhere -- too dangerous in the event of a breakdown. So FatherSir always kept the house stocked with enough in the way of staple food items (and spare other things as well) to be able to weather these things with no problem.

Having only enough food on hand for a week panics me. While we were first moving in, I was very nervous.

votania was fine, but I saw that we had virtually no flour, no sugar, no beans, no rice, no powdered milk... barely even ramen! We got what she thought was enough, and I was still spooked.

So when we became slightly less broke, I made sure to have enough stuff on hand. I may be lousy at cooking basic things like bread, but there are such things as recipes, and I can follow them. (Mostly.)

So if the refrigerator is starting to look barren, and there's not a shopping trip budgeted immediately, I don't have to worry. I just make rice, throw together some soup, or make chili, and everybody's happy. (Only I've gotten used to cooking for a small army now, and generally I make a little too much. Only we don't have

digitalambience or

ralmathon over enough to soak up the excess, which means too many leftovers.)

So when people are getting all hot and bothered over preparedness, and having enough food to last a week, I really can't get my mind around what the big deal is. In my mind, everybody keeps a 50-lb bag of flour on hand, and as much rice. That's a minimum.

It's not because I'm paranoid that someone's going to attack Phoenix. It's not because we're not going to be using the car until gas prices go down (we aren't). It's because it's the way I was raised, and it makes it more convenient. I don't believe in the "just in time" system when there are so many things that can go wrong.

Next on the equipment list? A bread machine. Mmm. I want to make my own bread like FatherSir started doing, but I don't have the patience to deal with dough.

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that's how I grew up to too. People thought my parents were Mormon because we kept so much stuff on hand in stock. My mother gardened and canned and pickled and preserved (dear got, all the dill pickles I've eaten in a life!!) and they always kept basics on hand. With them I think it stemmed from she grew up so far out in the country she was raised in a one room, no electric/no plumbing house and attended a one room school house. (I have seen said schoolhouse, wow.)We're talking freaking Little House on The Prarie crap...and she and my Dad both lived through the Great Depression at a crucial time in thier lives, just as they were getting out on thier own and in their late teens early 20's. Definitely made an impact on them. It wasn't just food you kept stocked well ahead either, since we had a basement, it was not unheard of for my mother to see a REALLY good sale on toliet paper and buy a whole year's worth in one shot. Also paper towels, kleenax, etc. There were many times when finances were bad for others that my Mom would take stuff to them saying "We're got so much in storage and I'm afraid this will go bad, I thought you all might be able to do something with it." My mom kept our whole neighborhood fed at one point. A poor family down the street and two of the elderly people on our block who couldn't fend well for themselves with meals. She just fixed extra and sent over plates.

My mom is a pretty specatacular woman. I miss her.

She sounds cool.

I grew up one room/no plumbing for a while. Then we moved to the big house (FatherSir had to finish building it, you see) and it was habitable, but it got plumbed later. So until I was 9, no indoor toilet. Shower came later.

I consider myself well-stocked if I have food to last the next couple of days...

I /do/ try to stockpile clothes, though. My goal is to have enough t-shirts, boxers, socks, and jeans so that I don't have to do any laundry for at least six weeks.

Yaagh.

I try to keep clothing so that I won't have to wash laundry for one week. This applies to either dressing up or dressing down, so I have at least two weeks' clothing if I do both.

I like to also be able to wear the same basic outfit every day without washing laundry and without re-using any one item. So I have at least five black cotton long-sleeved pullover shirts... boring, but I like them.

I don't keep storm-rations, this being SoCal. Instead I keep earthquake-rations. That means stuff that needs no preparation (so flour and rice are out and ramen is even iffy, as fires to heat water are a bad idea if there could be broken gas mains), but you don't need more than one or two meals, generally.

But I've never in my life had to use them except for being too lazy to cook food.

Silly.

When I was visiting Guide Dog Aunt back in 2000/1, she had to give one of the cousins an earthquake kit for school. It had to include a "reassuring note". Guide Dog Aunt wasn't very good at reassuring, so we wrote something that went like this:

"Since you're reading this, you're obviously alive and you have your earthquake kit, so things aren't as bad as they could be. I'm not very good at writing reassuring notes, but if things are so that you need your earthquake kit, you are probably in need of cheering up. So. Here are some jokes."

And then we searched the net and came up with the funniest jokes we could find, about three pages of them.

The cousin heard us snickering at the jokes, and wanted to know what was so funny, but we told him no, so he'd be surprised with the jokes if there was an earthquake. We told him he could read the note at the end of the school year if he hadn't had to use the earthquake kit.

I totally do this.

*has two full bags of pasta, a thing of lasagna noodles, a full tube and a half of oatmeal, two half cheeses and an unopened one, two small bags of rice, scads of beans both canned and dry, a thing of frozen cranberry cocktail extract, a bunch of sugar, salt, vinegar, honey, butter, oil, etc . . . and is living alone*

Because, you know, what if you're broke all of a sudden? There's still stuff to eat.

Yep! I've had several-day broke periods where I'm all like, "more macaroni & cheese today. Yum."

And I also have scads of tea and dollar-store coffee so I don't go into caffeine withdrawal.

It's not because we're not going to be using the car until gas prices go down (we aren't).

Oh, would that we could. Regrettably, Chris works deep in the heart of Arlington, where no bus dares to enter!! (Arlington has *no* public transportation.)

Oh, ow.

Since we've been mostly without a car for the longest time, I've been mastering the art of getting around without one, which is not so much of a pain as it is in Fairbanks.

You can get nearly anywhere in the metroplex by train and bus nowadays. That's a new thing - the trains are really cool, and have only been around here for a few years. However, it used to be that if you were stuck in the mid-cities, you were just plain STUCK - you needed a CAR. Now, if you live close enough to the TRE line to walk to it (as I do), you can get into civilization and take buses...but Arlington, and its surrounding mid-cities, Hurst-Euless-Bedford, and most of Grand Prairie, have NO bus lines. The buses do not cross the Arlington city limits, and therefore they don't come very far into any of the other cities near Arlington, either. I think Arlington refused to pay DART the money they required to service their city.

Yaaaagh.

D/FW is a *sprawling* metroplex in *Texas*, where they pretty much ASSUMED everyone would have a car, when they were building the place up over the course of the last half-century. Texas. Oil country. Of *course* you have a car here.

If you are calculating *just* from the circle freeways (820 and 635) that go around Ft. Worth and Dallas, respectively, going in a *straight* line, east-west, at their widest spot (I-30) is almost 60 miles. But the metroplex goes much farther than those freeways, of course, and it especially goes much farther NORTH than 635.

90 miles east-west is a more realistic number. It's 80 miles north-south from outside McKinney to past DeSoto. And northeast-southwest? 100 miles from McKinney to Benbrook. Most people don't actually go *all over* the metroplex...but a lot of us do. A *lot*. I work in Dallas, smack dab in the middle...and my co-workers are from all over the metroplex. Far west, far north, far south...everywhere *but* Dallas, of course, because who wants to live in Dallas? :)

My kids live in Garland, 30 miles away from me. It's 40 minutes to their place...if we DRIVE. It's an hour and a half by train & bus. Sometimes two hours, depending on the trains you catch.

Oh, and did I mention that most of the buses don't run on weekends? And the TRE doesn't run on Sunday. *sigh*

Yaagh.

Phoenix is somewhat better about it. The whole area's covered by the bus grid.

But then, I'm not sure how big, side to side, the area is...

Preparedness as a way of life

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