The Big One

My kids (and me too) like watching the Penguins of Madagascar.  One of the episodes questions the foursome, "Are you ready for The Big One?"

After this week, we are asking ourselves the same question.  Are we ready for The Big One?

What is The Big One?

For us it has been emergency planning.  Due to unusually cold weather in this part of the country, the electric company can't handle the demands.  We've had to endure rolling blackouts.  In three days we've had 5.  I expect there will be more today.  It's not that bad.  We haven't minded it at all.  They only last for an hour.  We can certainly endure an hour without power.  We've had fun with it and it's forced family time without electronics.  We've played games and told stories.

However, it has caused us to take a look at ourselves and ask the question of the day, "Are we ready for The Big One?"  What if these power outages lasted for an entire day?  An entire week?  Could we survive?

We realized a few things:
1.  We don't have as many candles as we thought.  Actually, we might have a lot more in a large bucket in the garage.  Unfortunately, when the power goes out, we can't find that bucket.  Those candles aren't helping us.  We don't have any extra batteries either for the flashlights.
2.  We don't have more than two candle holders.  That's a problem when you can only use two candles at a time because you don't have a way to hold more.  It's silly, but I had never thought about that before.  We took care of that with a little innovation:  Hubby drilled holes in several pieces of wood.  They hold candles!  Problem solved!
3.  Water.  We thought we were doing pretty well with our water.  After all, we have two huge containers in the garage of water. Well, with temps being in the single digits this week, the water in those containers aren't much use to us.  This delima was really thrown at us when we had a water pipe burst and we had to shut down our water for several hours.  We survived, but it wasn't pretty.  We're still working on that.
4.  Cooking.  Actually, this is where we are most prepared.  We've got a BBQ grill and a camp grill.  Extra charcoal would be good.  I know how to cook just about anything on an open flame, so we are OK.
5.  Heat.  We've kept the thermostat pretty low so it is quite cool in the house.  The kids are still running around without socks and in short sleeves.  Some are even wearing shorts.  So, if we loose heat for a longer amount of time we'll just put on better clothes and wrap up in the many blankets we've got stashed all over the house.

Are we ready for The Big One?  Not quite, but, we aren't too bad off.  There is certainly room for improvement, but we are happy with the progress we've made thus far.