Their site won’t let me email them because I live in Canada, so I shall call them.

I was also able to stock up for my parents — and idea they’d been resisting for a long time — a combination of where would we put it and ‘In England, during the war, we didn’t horde’ — but I told them I’d set up the storage for them and just ignored the latter. (I’ve been ignoring for a while, truth to tell, including them in my stores at home, but I feel better if they have something in the house that will feed the longer than a week.)

However, I didn’t have to set up the area. My 11 year old did that afterschool for them. She empty the bags in the kitchen, sorted everthing into catagories, then made up boxes (the cases that girls scout cookies come in — not to big to handle) either of things like spices or matches or organized my meals — i.e. some corn, some tuna, some ground Parmesan (which she, a cooking show watched, calls Parmigiano-Reggiano, some pasta. The meal boxes were her idea, and she wrote on the outside how many meals she expected each to make, either for 2 or 6-7 people. (That is my parents, my parents plus our household, or as she also noted, you could make up a 2 and a 6-7 meal and have enough for everyone (which is my parents, our household and my brother, wife and baby) or 2 of the 6-7 meal and feed everyone plus the grown up cousins (my SIL grown children).) The amount of math done by my little math phobic was amazing.

And then she lugged everything downstairs to the dry basement, arranged it on a table, and and made a ‘map.’ She now wants to get them a dutch oven so they can cook in the fireplace, just in case.

They say children learn what the live. She’s certainly pick up a good bit about food storage, and while she was happy to be gettign reading “just in case” she wasn’t worried about what the “just in case” might entail.

Oh, and she also swapped there water storage bottles and commented that 5 gallons each wasn’t going to get them very far.

Lot’s of credit here to Sharon who got my off the let’s just throw some rice in the basement and hope school of prepareness and in to the lets organize the rice and and get some beans and a few spices while we’re at it.

MEA

The big advantage to this was that it made donating easy, and most people can afford a couple of cans of something. But there was a subtler advantage as well: Our food pantry has to toss a lot of their food donations because they are expired; apparently people donate when they are cleaning out their pantries. Having the food drive at the store eliminated that problem.

The supermarkets were happy to support it, of course, because it meant extra sales for them. And an impressive number of people came out with a small bag and a big bag—and handed us the big bag.

Our food pantry does buy marked-down food from a local food bank, but the selection there seems to be limited, so food drives like this make a big difference. We also have a city-wide peanut butter drive near Valentine’s day, as that’s the food most in demand; one year we brought in 1,000 jars of PB.

Fire safety! Yes, we need a new second floor escape ladder and I had forgotten all about it. Thank you.

If the zombies are to get me, I’m going out with a glow.

And odd food storage story.

At work, about 10 mins before my lunch break, by dad called to suggest I go to the local Acme on the way home as it was closing to make way for a Kings (which I gather is a more upscale market). And everything was marked way down.

I broke my rule about not driving home in the day short of a real emergency, and was glad I did. I had only 20 mins, and managed to spend $240 on dried beans, enriched rice, peanut butter, ginger and black pepper, organic dried stock, dried peas, tuna in cans, corn in cans, pasta (in honking big bags), parmason cheese, and (sorry to say) 4 boxes of the prepared stuffing mix that is my younger daughter’s fav food, as well as kitty litter, cat food, and soap. And olive oil and 2 gallons of vinigar.

With more time I could have made better choices, but it was interesting to see what I chose. There was no poporn to buy (sad to say.)

What was amazing was that in the hour or so since the sign when up in front of the store, and I checked, a lot of the shelves were stripped — the lines were getting very long (I’d been lucky and hadn’t had to wait more than 5 mins) and checked out quickly since I can do my own bagging and I could say, I’m buying 20 of those and the cashier could just push a couple of buttons in stead of swiping like made. What was moving most quickly were the generic and other cheap brands of staples, plastic nappies and “feminine products,” health and beauty, and snacks.

I wish I brought cream of tatar, herbal teas, and first aid supplies.

MEA