be prepared

I feel like I’m more prepared now than I was a month ago. It took the H1N1 virus to get my butt in motion, but we are better prepared for an emergency that we have ever been. If something were to happen I think we would be OK for at least a couple of weeks.

I’ve been buying a few things here and there that we need. I noticed a bunch of little things that would have been helpful when we were without power. Next time I will be more prepared.

Just last week we had a huge ice storm and were without power for 7 days. I realized how unprepared we really are. DH and I spent several days hopping from hotels to people’s couches. It was just too cold to stay at home. We sent DS with his grandmother to stay with family out of town. We should not have had to scatter like that in an emergency. The last few days we couldn’t stand it any more and braved the cold of the house to sleep at home. I now know that we should have a generator. We had plenty of food, but no way to cook it. We couldn’t even find a camp stove at Walmart. That’s how bad it was around here.

With food and gas prices going up everyday, I guess I should have stocked up on food stuff sooner. I’m starting to buy extra canned goods when they are on sale, but MIL keeeps insisting that I cannot store things like rice for long periods. I need to look up on the web about storing food.

My DH got an emergency radio for Christmas. It’s great. It has phone chargers, a flashlight, weather-band radio, AM/FM, TV-band, and a hand crank to keep it cahrged up. No batteries needed. It will be so handy in a power outage.

I was talking to my MIL the other day and she said that she was worried about a major recession happening soon and said it wouldn’t hurt to stock up a bit in case times get tough. I’m glad that somebody finally is thinking kind of the way I do.

I set up a new aquarium today and bought several gallons of water for the tank. I still have a couple left over and these will be going into the closet for an emergency.

about this a lot lately. Every once in awhile my anxiety disorder gets the best of me and I start worrying about crazy stuff like disasters and pandemics and even zombie invasion. Well, when I get like this I like to try to prepare for the worst. It usually doesn’t last long enough for me to get much accomplished, but a little at a time and one of these days I will be prepared for anything. Today I was working on my Amazon wish list for Christmas and added a few survival books. They weren’t too overboard, just basic survival guides that would be good to have in case of a real emergency. My DH thinks I’m crazy, but when the zombies attack who’s going to be thanking me then. :)

I bought a plastic storage box yesterday along with items to go into a first aid kit. Right now its just your basic stuff like bandaids, alcohol, and peroxide…, but I plan to add more as I go along. At least I will have all of the stuff together from noe on and will not have to search all over the house to find something.

I need to make some lists of things that I would need for emergency kits. I want one for the car, one for home, and a first aid kit for each.