Food Storage Inventory

Last night in the city near us a fire was raging. Over 1200 homes were evacuated. My thoughts and prayers went out to the people in those areas. My thoughts were also heavy on my 72 hour kits and how our home is situated for emergency visitors. I do not know if this last challenge was written before now. I suspect it was, but I find the timing of it very appropriate. Here is the last challenge for the 7 day challenge.

Your family and friends are starting to figure out that you have a great food storage. Your mother-in-law (or friend, or grandma, or fill-in-the-blank) just called you this morning and asked if she could come by later today and check out your preps. She is interested to learn how much you have, and how you rotate it all. She even hints that she might want to purchase some food for you for a gift.

Once you organize, tidy, and inventory your food storage you are DONE the challenge and can celebrate however you choose, whether it be with a dunford donut (Julie) or a big gulp (Jodi). You may just want to go out and get cracking on your “To-Buy” list now that you have determined what preps and food you still need.

Daily Limitations and Tasks

Today’s Tasks:

• Organize your kitchen pantry and any food storage areas in your home
• Evaluate where your appliances are in your home to make cooking with food storage easier
• Move some of your long term food storage up to your kitchen area to encourage you to use it more
• Check your water supplies, refill any empty containers
• Inventory your long term food storage items (you may use our calculator)
• Inventory your three month supply items (you may use our worksheet)
• Look at your Disaster Kits, do you need to swap clothes out? Rotate food? Do what you can now and make a list of anything you may need to buy

Today’s Limitations:

• For this day, and ALL days of the challenge: no spending money, no going to stores, and no restaurants … UNTIL YOU ARE FINISHED!

Advanced Tasks:

• Make cute labels for your buckets, shelves, etc. (label tutorial | bucket labels)
• Make a complete list of what you still need to buy (long term AND three month supply) so that your guest can purchase some of it for you for a gift.
• Review all of your week’s report cards and compile them into one list of future things to do/buy

Weeping and Wailing

Taking great liberties with Jeremiah chapter 9:

19 For a voice of wailing is heard out of Patty's house, How are we spoiled! we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the water storage, because our body odor has made us cast out.

20 Yet hear the word of the Lord, O Patty, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth, and teach your children of emergency wailing, and every one her body hygiene.

Yes, in our house there was great wailing as the children came home and I don't blame my children. This wasn't a fun challenge, but it was even less fun than it could have been. See, I had not adequately prepared my family. I never even thought of telling them this challenge was coming up. My mind was wrapped up in other things and obviously the challenge would affect me more than them so why worry. Besides they had done so well when we lived for a month on our food storage.

I've been reading Counseling with Our Councils. Most of it applies to ward councils, presidency meetings etc., but part of it applies to families and you could even apply it to work settings.

So as the afternoon wore on I realized that we would have to have a family counsel. Over dinner we sat and talked. One child refused to come to the table at first. We talked about what we had learned about the challenge so far. We talked about how things would be different if this was a real emergency. Then we talked about what happened when we lived on our food storage last spring. Boy were my eyes opened! Why had we never sat down as a family and discussed that? Oh, we said things to each other here and there, but never had a discussion specifically about what we liked, didn't like and what was learned.

By then it seemed everyone had calmed down about things. So we took a vote. Would we continue on with the challenge? Or would we quit the challenge and work on some things that we had been negligent on? There was not a single vote to continue with the challenge and all supported in helping me get things prepared.

So what do we need to do?

• Buy and fill more 5 gallon water containers. Having 55 gallon drums is nice. It stores a lot of water well, but even with the pump it isn't the easiest thing to use. By having more 5 gallon containers we can scatter them throughout the house better.
  
  
• Get a disposable toilet. There are several to choose from. You can get a seat that goes on a 5 gallon bucket. There are cardboard toilets. And camping toilets you can buy from the store. You line these with bags and have chemicals of some sort to take care of odor etc. Why get them? Because even if you are trying to conserve by not flushing for liquids you will go through a lot of water just for toilet needs. Your basic 2 week supply isn't going to last 2 weeks.

• Update our 72 hour kits. It's time to change when my 15yo can get into his change of clothes and find that it will fit my 9yo. It's certainly time to change when you realize that can of chili has been in there for 5 years! Our new goal, ok well, our old goal that never got done, was to change out things at conference time. We have renewed motivation this time.

• Now that we have chickens we have to remember water storage for them as well.

• We also need to figure out a system that works for us for filtering fresh water found in canals, rivers and lakes.

So our goal is to have this done by conference in a few weeks.