A dry road

I've been pretty quiet lately - mostly because how many times can I find a different way to say "be prepared"?  Be prepared for what?  For whatever:  bad weather, no power, lack of potable water, bad people and/or any combination of the above along with some surprise additives.  And I sure as hell am not going to touch on politics!

All of this definitely limits the subject matter for this blog (what does blog even mean?).

So this morning I realized that in the moment all I really want is a dry road.

With the conviction that all dogs want and need to walk outside, every morning I take mine and we're off to see what we can see.

Mostly all I really want to see is a dry road.

One not covered in slush and salt.

One that doesn't just look dry while cleverly hiding patches of black ice.

One that invites confident strides and a heads up approach to the day.

One that does not look like this - with not even enough snow for decent traction!

Or one that could look almost good but not really like this one does:

A slippery road causes you to take those damn mincing steps where you try to keep both feet directly in line with your body at all times - thus reducing the chance of slippage.  You look and walk like an old person.  Which makes you feel like an old person which makes you consider just going home and having a nice cup of tea - or something- tequila would be good.

There is something so friendly about a dry road:  it inspires confidence that we can walk even further today than yesterday.  It fosters the belief that all worries about slipping and falling are just figments of an overactive imagination.

Even if it's not paved, a dry road is something to trust:

A dry road lets you walk with your hands in your pockets - a slippery road demands that you keep your hands free to aid balance in case you start to fall.

A dry road is your friend - a wet, icy, slippery, nasty, ugly....well, you get my drift - that road is not your friend.

This is short and sweet but the message is that I wish you all dry roads and confident approaches to the days of your lives.

All I really want myself is that dry road!

Pssst....look!

Just in case you thought that all my rantings about empty grocery shelves were a nasty rumor, take a look at these:

These pictures are as current as it gets.  The storm that hit the south eastern states was well forecasted  - everyone knew it was coming.  So, I ask you, why are the shelves virtually bare in one day?  Because people do not keep any supplies in case of an emergency - weather related or otherwise.  Now just visualize a situation where the supply chain is totally screwed up (technical term) and there is no one coming to refill these shelves and all the other empty ones around the area.

It's not rocket science to realize that if you don't have anything in your home to get you by for at least a few days there isn't going to be anything available after that first rush.

Please, kids, lay in some "stuff" in case....yeah, just in case!  It doesn't have to be fancy Wise Food long term kits.  It can be as simple as staples from the grocery store that will keep a long time without spoiling.

I'd love to keep on reminding you (it's not really nagging!) but I need to go out and shovel!  It's totally up to you whether your family can sit back and enjoy a storm or if it's a cause for total panic about your food supplies!

Three shot glasses

I'm betting we all have certain rituals or habits that we build our days around.  Things we do to remind ourselves of what we need to do and things we do that make it easier to remember where we are in the day.  And things that are just plain habits.

For instance, I always set up the next morning's coffee the day before - well, almost always. Occasionally I wonder what that smell is and why there's no coffee in the pot just in time to realize that yesterday didn't go quite as planned!

Another ritual involves three shot glasses:

Yup, shot glasses - commonly used as illustrated above as vessels for alcohol.  However,that's not what I use them for.  I used to think that I was using them as a depository for the various vitamins and calcium and cranberry pills and so forth that I take every morning.  Put the pills in them three days at a time and then all you have to do is take them and not fiddle around with them every day.

Recently I realized that actually those three glasses are counting down my life.

It dawned on me that I was filling them up every time I turned around - or at least that's what it seemed like.  How can they already be empty?  Didn't I just put the pills in them?  Has it really been three whole days?  But...but....it's only been......yeah, three days.

How could that be?  What have I done in these past three days that let them slip by practically unnoticed.

#did laundry

#walked the dog

#shipped my brother and his wife a DVD

#is that all I can remember?

My mother used to ask me what I had done on any given day to "justify my existence".  I rarely had an answer but I was left with a lifelong feeling that every day I had to do something worthwhile or else I hadn't, in fact, justified my existence!

My point this time now that I'm finally rolling around to getting to it is that life just passes by.  You fill up three pill containers (thank goodness I don't use those ones with seven sections so you do a week at a time) and, voila!  they are empty again and three days of your life have vanished.

It's not particularly original of me to say we all need to pay attention as our life unrolls - more eloquent writers than I have put it many different ways to probably greater effect.  They've said things like "stop and smell the roses" and "don't blink or you'll miss it".

So all I'm saying is pay attention - you don't actually have to do something momentous to "justify your existence" on any given day - but do something.  Make the phone call to a friend, let someone go ahead of you in line, finally send that e mail you've been promising you would send....your choice.

I'm betting there is something that you can do today that'll make it a day you will notice before it's in the rear view!

At the very least it was yesterday

Weather reports in this day and age are amazing - and amazingly correct a lot of the time.  I know everyone claims the weather man is the only guy (gal) who can be wrong most of the time and still get paid, but by and large they are mostly correct.

That being said I know that most who read this blog don't know about a new post until the day after I publish it.  So since it's now "tomorrow" as you're reading this you should have been getting ready for our next predicted storm "yesterday".

I suspect that some are now immune to the reminders (call it nagging or whatever - you pick your own name for it) and turn a blind eye/ear to the concept of proactively staging your home and family in advance of oncoming bad weather.

But at the very least yesterday was the day to be preparing for today.  The day that the storm is supposed to arrive.  Really with the warning we get these days there is no excuse not to be ready days ahead of the storm's arrival.

And, remember, this isn't the end of the world (that's later) so you don't need 25 loaves of bread and 10 gallons of milk.  You do need a vehicle that is gassed up and ready for whatever and a pantry (does anyone even have a pantry any more?) that contains at the very least 3 or 4 days worth of staples and meals.

Perhaps some things that if you lose power you could eat them without cooking.

But I can assure you that today (yesterday) would have been the day to lay in some supplies if you don't keep a stock.

The only thing wrong with the above picture is it lacks the other 100 folks also standing around staring at the empty shelves!

Okay, it might be a slight overstatement but the point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't take very long to suck all the food out of any grocery store.  And a storm bad enough to disrupt deliveries would (notice I don't say "could") lead to the above situation is astonishingly short order.

If you don't want to be "that guy/gal" get ready for bad weather ahead of time.  At the very least yesterday was the day.

PS  If you did see this today then it's today and not yesterday to get ready.

Because I turned right

When I started writing this blog I really had no agenda - which was probably painfully obvious.  I swing from promoting preparedness for everything from a short power outage to some unidentified apocalyptic event and then flip over to one written because someone hurt my feelings.  Most of the things I write about just pop into my head - a memory, a scent, a song - anything can kick off a subject.

I have a nephew, Peter Greene, who is arguably a famous educational blogger and his daughter, Barbara Alfeo, on a hell bent mission to save the planet and with her ambition and smarts she just might make it.  Remember the "straw" rant?  But I am nowhere near as organized or focused.

Take today for instance.  I needed some stuff from the drug store so I girded up my metaphorical loins and headed out.  And turned right at the end of my road instead of left as I normally do thinking that perhaps that direction had less utility construction (no) and would be easier to navigate.

And then the memories kicked in:

The route took me past a pond where we used to ice skate as kids.  Back then the platform and sluice for cutting and moving ice blocks for summer storage was still there.  I vividly remember tripping on one of those uprights that was sticking up out of the ice when skating there -  painful to say the least.  It's all cabled off now - complete with No Trespassing signs - probably in fear of an accident and a lawsuit.

Up the road a bit is the little pond - more like a puddle - where I used to catch polliwogs (tadpoles) in the spring. If I was really lucky and it was early enough in the year I could find the actual frog eggs.  Take them home in a jar and watch them morph from eggs to polliwogs and eventually into frogs...it was really cool and I can still smell the funky odor of the marsh around the pond.  It's still there but I don't know if anyone even knows what a polliwog is any more.

Around the next corner on the left is the farmhouse that my parents rented while they were building their house back in the 1930s.  It's still there and still in the same family - although a couple generations down.  On the right is the farm that was owned by the brother - I believe it also is still in the same family.  I can remember going down there to watch Aunt Marion (not really my aunt - it was more of a respectful title) skim the cream off the great big flat settling pans of milk produced by their cows.

She would run the skimmer across the top of the pan just barely under the surface - any milk that got caught drained off through the holes but the cream was so darn thick it would sit there until she scraped it off into another container.

She would do this out in the "shed" between the house and the barn because it was cooler - and if it was winter or fall we would go back into the kitchen and stand around the wood burning cook stove and the warmth would just enfold you.  There would always be cookies or a snack and a feeling of belonging.

And if we were lucky we got to spend some time in the barn jumping from the haymow into the piles of extra hay.

Another farm on the left was where we would go to watch "Unkie" milk the cows by hand.  There would be a ring of barn cats sitting around him.  They knew he would squirt some milk on them if they waited long enough and we knew he'd do the same to us if we didn't duck fast enough!  We thought it great fun and so did the cats.

I suspect that children today might think that watching someone skim cream was boring and that hanging around in a barn a few times a week on the off chance we could outwit the milker would be smelly and not the fun we thought it was.

Yeah, it was smelly - it smelled like cows for crying out loud...we were in their house!  It smelled of cow poop and urine and hay and there were little bits of hay that would stick to your socks (if you had shoes on) and wiggle through and stab you later.

I'm fortunate, I suppose, to be able to see that at least some of the places I remember as a child are relatively unchanged - even if crowded in between these giant houses that everyone seems to build today.  But the changes that have come over the last 70 years or so are sometimes overwhelming and depressing.  They tend to make me feel as if the world I grew up in is so long gone no one will even remember it.  That it slipped by when I turned my head and somehow disappeared in the rear view.

That no one will remember putting frogs eggs in a jar of water and waiting for the miracle of polliwogs and frogs to appear!

Dry gas -

Or gas line antifreeze or Heet or whatever they are calling it these days.

Get some

Put it in the gas tank of your car or truck

Fill up the gas tank with fuel

As the clothes soap ad says after the guy washes his little girl's princess dress - "you are now free to go"

This additive is actually worth the money (and it's short money) and will keep any moisture in your gas from freezing the gas lines.  I don't know if it drives the moisture out or just keeps it from freezing and I don't really care - I just know it works.

We do not commonly have temperatures as cold as today and the promised ones for tomorrow.

Gas line antifreeze (I grew up calling it dry gas) does just that - it prevents your gas lines from freezing up in the really low winter temperatures.  When they freeze up, the car stops.  No matter where you are.  No matter how much you want to keep driving.  And no matter how cold you get inside the car!

I meant to write this earlier to give you a chance to get it today.  But, better late than never, so if you are out tomorrow, please pick some up and use it.  Any automotive store has it and probably Wally World does also.   The temperatures that are going to be around deserve to be treated with respect and we have a whole entire winter before us.

Potty training anyone?

Last time around I asked you how far you'd get on the gas/fuel currently in your car/truck/SUV.  I'm sure that after reading that deathless piece of prose (not to call it nagging) everyone rushed out and made sure they had at least half a tank of fuel.  Also made a solemn promise to never let the gas gauge fall below that bench mark.

No one wants to be "that guy" sitting by the side of the road in an emergency!

Next up on the agenda is water.

I never can remember exactly how long a person can exist without potable drinking water before they run into serious physical problems like dehydration, confusion and, eventually, death.  I do know it's not nearly as long as you might think depending on physical condition, ambient temperature and so forth and so on.

Most of us now depend on electricity to get our water.  Whether it's from a private well or a public water system, eventually it all comes down to electricity.

So what do you have for water right now?  No peaking, what do you have in your house for usable water?

There are a ton of things that we use water for other than drinking:  sanitation (that would be toilet flushing), dish washing, hand washing, tooth brushing, showering, hair washing, cooking (and that includes coffee making!).  You probably notice a pattern here.  Mainly we use water to keep healthy, inside and out, as well as fed and comfortable.  I read once that one of the greatest advances in health was the invention of indoor plumbing.  Which, by the way, isn't much use without the aforementioned water!

Sure, in a pinch we could go back to the outdoor outhouse - I had one at camp for many years.  They have a bundle of drawbacks:  location (especially at 3 am in the winter), other occupants in residence (spiders, ants, bees!) and lack of sanitation - no running water!

Better than having to run outside (face it - we aren't going to have time to build an outhouse when the power goes out - never mind stock it with a cowboy!) is a plan ahead approach.  If you don't want to lay in a supply of big plastic bags and a five gallon can with a toilet seat balanced on top of it, how about just some water?

It doesn't have to be a fancy "system" to store water - I showed a whole bunch of potential containers way back in March.  Your storage can be as simple as using the big juice containers when you are done drinking the juice or maybe gallon containers that came with vinegar or anything else that, when you empty them, you fill with tap water.  A lot of the modern toilets don't take much more than a couple gallons of water to do an efficient flush.

If it's raining and you lose power you can put dish pans or big buckets outside under the drip line of the house and fill them in an amazingly short time.  I did that a couple years ago in a power outage and felt so smart I could hardly stand it!

Obviously toilet flushing isn't the only thing we need to have a water supply for but, as that obnoxious toilet paper ad says, "we all go, so why not enjoy the go".  And, believe you me, running outside in the middle of the night or in bad weather is NOT the way to enjoy that go!

And, P.S., none of the toilet water has to be potable (clean and drinkable) so think on that!