Be prepared tips you may not have heard before

hello everyone

This month has brought lots to think about.

Japan, Australia, and many European countries have told their citizens to be prepared To take care of their selves for several days.  

I wondered about the reason why so I did a little research.

The BBC feature story I watched said citizen should be prepared in case a major weather event shut down utilities, damaged the grid, things like that.  The second reason they gave was in case a country that did not like them tried to do them harm.  BBC listed Iran, Russia, and China as countries who may wish harm on them.  

As far as I know, our US government has not issued any warnings like that except for military bases who are starting to prepare to be self-sufficient for 90 days.  

Pretty much for all of my married life, as much as our finances allowed, I have tried to stay as stocked up as we could.  

I did it in the early years because we had several children close together, and my husband was a Marine who was gone more than he was home. 

There was no grocery delivery or pickup back then.  

so when Covid hit, I was fairly stocked up and was not one of the frantic people trying to find toilet paper.  

And ever since that settled down, I have continued to try to keep ahead on anything we could need

Now onto a few few tips, you may not have heard.  

we have rain barrels full of water in our backyard and we have a traditional hot water tank that is full of water.

But I wanted to stock up on some drinking water.

If you buy gallons of water,  I really prefer the gallons that comes with a handle.  They are much easier to move around with the handle than without.  

At my store, the handle bottles cost the same as the no handle bottles

This may  sound weird to people in other countries, but in the USA it is quite common for homes to have more than one refrigerator and a deep freezer or several deep freezers.  

We have a full-size refrigerator and a slightly smaller refrigerator.  

We do have an alternative energy supply if our electric power is shut off, but it’s not going to run everything forever.  

If the power goes off, my goal would be to keep one refrigerator running.

So I separated our food, and put all the more expensive frozen meat and protein sources into the Freezer section of the big refrigerator.  

Our smaller refrigerator now holds things like chicken broth, already cooked things like taco meat, a whole lot of frozen peaches, popsicles, etc.

in this photo, it doesn’t look like I know how to stack. But all of these meat packages are different sizes and shapes, and they are in there and not going to fall out, it was just the best I could do even if it does look crazy. 

This past week in Oklahoma, we have had a lot of rain and one day we had very high chances of tornadoes.

Sometimes tornadoes destroy houses, but it’s more than likely they will cause power outages then they will actually destroy property.  

Weather events are usually forecast in Oklahoma. We have warning when we are going to have ice or tornadoes or high winds..  

At those times, I always try to especially keep things done up in our house- Meaning I keep all the dishes washed, I make sure as much laundry is done as possible, trash is taken out, etc.

If we have to live without power for a day or two, after a weather event, I’d prefer to not start with the sink full of dirty dishes or all our clothes dirty.  

This could also apply to taking baths, washing your hair, anything like that that you don’t really want to wait a long time to do.   

in the storm shelter, I swept it out and wiped off all the chairs as they had gotten rather dusty.



And I found this chalk writing on one of the walls.  

It says “ And God promised to never flood the earth  again”

It’s not the exact Bible verse, but I think it’s very sweet. One of our grandchildren did it several years ago, I’m not exactly sure which one.

I showed it to my husband and he liked it so much, he sprayed it with a clear sealer so it will stay on the wall forever.

try to be prepared, but don’t worry about it too much

Just do what you can

❤️Rhonda 

a week of homemaking

Hello friends

I didn’t mean to not blog for so long.  Some days have been busy and some days I just didn’t do much 

The second quilt is finished and on the bed.   I really like seeing them when I walk past this room.  

Before my husband retired,  I always kept breakfast sandwiches in the freezer.  He liked being able to heat them and eat them at morning break time.  

When our daughter’s family lived with us for a year,  I kept them on hand too.  

Lately,  I am not always hungry at breakfast so I made a batch for him to heat up when he is hungry but I am not.  

For these,  I always use Grands biscuits or a similar store brand and 1 pound of sausage cut into 8 pieces,  then flattened into a thinner patties.  

When these went in a lunch box,  I put them in sandwich bags.  But since these would all be eaten at home,  I put some in a plastic container to keep in the fridge,  and the rest in to 1 big zip bag for the freezer.  

I restocked our pantry with homemade taco seasoning and the spice mixture that goes on meat before my husband smokes it.  

This makes a quart full-  I made just a half recipe this week.  

One day we drove to Oklahoma City.  Walmart now has a joint membership with Walmart Plus and now Sam’s Plus.  

Walmart Plus works great for us.  I’m a big fan of their free shipping.  Because I recently renewed our Walmart membership,  I was able to add a year of Sam’s plus for about $13.  

So we went to check out Sam’s as we had not been in at least 10 years.   

Sam’s has good prices on some things but some things are just so large,  they didn’t seem practical for us.  

Then we had lunch at a restaurant we like and we drove over to air force base.  

I read online  they had Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage for about $2.50.  

I was very surprised to see they were so well stocked on it and we bought about a dozen rolls.  

I also wanted to get just a couple roast beefs.  I looked at them and they were about $20 each.  

Then we saw the big meat boxes than we’ve bought before.  

We didn’t need this much beef but It was $57 and contained 4 roasts,  3 stew meat and 4 rolls of 80% ground beef.  

It seemed silly not to get a box.  

I added up the labels and if I’d purchased them individually, it would have been $93.  

You all know for several reasons,  beef is just expensive right now!  

Before I froze them,  I rewrapped them all we probably won’t need any of them for a while.  

Now I need to go do some homemaking in my kitchen.  I’m making porcupine meatballs and apple crisp for our late lunch/early supper.  

Hope you’re all have a nice weekend 

❤️ Rhonda