 
Dear Diary: Apocalypse Much?

Diary for the end of the world. With recipes.

Shaundi Lee Chic

Published by Shaundi Lee Chic at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Shaundi Lee Chic

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September 13, 2013

Sweeties, I'm emailing you this diary-how-to kind of thing that I've been working on for a few years; it spells out our researches on getting through a crisis, including actual recipes. I think we're getting to the point where the news is scaring everybody a bit, not just me. Husband says if the worst happens, it's still aways away, so there'd be time to act on some of these ideas. I'd advise printing it all out, but having it on your phone is easy enough; it's short. I guess at some level I had you guys in mind while writing all this up.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: 2011

Chapter 2: 2012

Chapter 3: 2013

## Chapter 1: 2011

September 13, 2011

Mom calls it "soap opera brain." I always think of it as English Major Brain, but it means the same thing – certain personalities, confronted with certain situations, mentally spin cotton-candy-gobs of possible succeeding scenarios, most of them awful.

So when husband introduced me to apocalyptic fiction in the form of _Alas, Babylon_ , he started a process that no power on earth can stop or slow – my brain working on preparing for the end of days.

A few months ago, my poor back-of-brain began obsessing, demanding I go to Costco and buy a 20 lb bag of pinto beans. My front-of-brain kept dismissing it as silly, but obsession will out, and I bought the bag, a good plastic tub to put it in, and put it in the big closet.

I'm an old-ish woman now, and my brain's got enormous amounts of data gleaned from many many books and many many years of living. I'm capable of spinning out intricate, complex scenarios of a multitude of apocalypses, and now I'm in the mode of preparing for each of them.

September 15, 2011

" _Sustain my innocents_." Hafta admit, sometimes at work I read inmate letters more thoroughly than is really necessary for the job: the colorful language and misspellings are often entertaining; the legal arguments are often intriguing.

Today came across this great phrase – he meant, obviously, to say something along the lines of proving up his innocence. Unintentional irony, as it's probable he is the father of innocents that he is failing to provide sustenance for. But anyway, a great phrase for its actual meaning.

And as we all know, it's usually up to the womenfolk to do the really important sustaining.

I guess it's a good idea to write up everything I'm learning from my crazed, obsessive end of the world researches – I may forget things – I may _certainly_ forget things, and it'd also be good to have a document that would cross-train husband if something happened to me. Plus, it's marginally better than just talking to myself.

September 20, 2011

Came across the really quite satisfying fact today that there is wild yeast in the air all around us. I'd often wondered about how people leavened bread before you could go to the store and buy yeast, and now I know – you create a sourdough starter with just flour and water, and those two things collect up yeast from the ether, and you use that to make bread. Or, in my case, you buy starter online.

September 22, 2011

Husband had a nasty boo-boo on his leg – got worse over the weekend, and we didn't want to go to the hospital, so we tried something we read in one of our prepper books: a garlic clove grated up and mixed with ¾ cup red wine, which you let steep for 15-20 minutes, and then soak it in a cloth and apply to the wound. We did this a couple of times over the weekend, for 20 minutes or so at a time, and the boo-boo got substantially better; we'd originally planned to take him to the doctor first thing Monday morning, and we wound up just letting it continue to heal on its own. The book said this recipe was used during the civil war on the battlefield.

In one of the prepper faux documentaries we saw, the main character eventually dies from an infection from a small cut on his hand because there were no antibiotics – they probably had garlic and wine.

I still need to research why Europeans don't use an article with hospital.

October 20, 2011

Okay – I've put together a bugout bag for work. I actually kind of like the idea of sheltering in place, but bugging out I find terrifying. Hurricane, wildfire, flood, volcano, zombies, every movie, every tv show has scenes of people stuck in their car on highways trying to get away, just stuck there with only the resources available in their car, competing with kajillions of other people for food and water along the route. And then later in the show, people limping by the side of the road, dehydrated, sick, wishing for death.

A work bugout bag is fairly simple – a lightweight backpack with good tennis shoes (my good velcro tennies), socks, bottle of water, flashlight, face mask in case hafta run through smoke or fumes, maybe I should put in a package of crackers or squeezie fruit. Can't help but remember the pictures of New Yorkers having to walk home on 9/11 – those who had tennis shoes and water ready were substantially better off.

Doesn't apply to us at the moment, but thought it was a great tip from the class I took -- when you have kids, it's a good idea to have a recent picture in your bugout bag of you and your kids so that you can prove they are your kids. In the kind of emergency where you hafta bugout, your kids may be bugged out from wherever they are, and you might need to retrieve them from a shelter – it's a good thing; you don't want anybody to be able to just grab your kid and go.

I'm also practicing on the elliptical machine to try to get to the point where I can sprint half a mile – half a mile from work should get me far away from most disaster events. . Plus, you always see news footage of people running away in an inelegant manner; I'd want to look graceful for online news posterity. In most disasters, I'd have to abandon the car in the parking garage; hate parking garages, wouldn't want my last minutes of life to be in one; it'd be better just to hike a half a mile away and wait till an all-clear, or hike home and deal with the car later.

That's another big reason an EMP strike would be so awful – no cars would work, anyway, or most cars. No cell phones, either, so in the retrieving-kids scenario, you wouldn't want to rely on cell pics.

So we made a detailed bugout list for home –what would we grab if we had just 10 minutes' notice, then what would be on the list if we had an hour, then several hours or a day. I went back through the lists and put some of the stuff in a nice box in the car to stay there all the time – a thief would be really bummed if he stole the box and found it only had water, masks, first aid, maps, blankets, flashlights, inexpensive water purifier, hand-held mister fan that the kids took to camp, stuff like that. Rope. A Bible. A deck of cards. Adult diapers. Seriously, if you get stuck on the road in extreme traffic, moving a mile an hour, tinkling would become a major issue, especially for us old ladies.

In books and movies there's always the _secondary bugout_ , where you hafta abandon your car, so everybody in the car would need his own backpack to carry supplies.

Bugout scenarios are insanely compelling to the English major brain – you hafta survive on what's in your car – I mean, really, those kind of situations are strong magnets to a writer's entire existence. You know how every detail in a short story has to have a purpose: an English major will think, as she loads up groceries, "Little did she realize that the box of saltines would be all that stood between her and starvation in the days to come..." That's what life is like in our heads.

October 22, 2011

Bugging out in the digital age -- for all disasters except an EMP strike -- an external battery backup would be about the smartest purchase you could make. If everybody in the car could re-charge their phones and devices, you have a far better shot at safety and sanity. Need to talk the husband into buying one for each device.

November 1, 2011

One thing about this obsession – it adds layers to daily living; I mean, I already live with a certain layers-sense, keeping in mind eternity, but keeping a continual, live plan for the day's events, plus the day's events if an apocalyptic event should occur, sets me much more of a challenge, and challenge is ever so much better than boredom.

December 6, 2011

Read Stephen King's _The Stand_ and am convinced ever-after that I am the old lady who knows company's coming. She prepares a lovely feast for travellers she hasn't met yet, and I keep feeling compelled to do the same. No, really: I have menus.

The scene that keeps presenting itself to my poor, tortured brain is a houseful of people, stuck here because of a weather event. So. I keep on hand giant bags of local tortilla chips – they last till the end of time, really, just hafta be crisped up in the oven a few minutes – cans of refried beans, bags of dried refried beans, jarred queso and canned salsa. All these things last for years and are tasty but additionally have the sorta aura of fun and homeliness – can it really be the end of the world if we're eating nachos? I also have bags of rice and can always make a big pot of rice to go with the nachos if need be. When the canned and jarred things get closer to their use by date I'll just take them to a party. I try to keep chocolate chip cookie dough in the big freezer always, so hot cookies, and to bed.

The houseful of people scenario isn't really that far-fetched – we live close to downtown, and we know a lot of people who live out in the suburbs and beyond; if a freak weather event happened on a business day, people might manage to make it here but not further. Husband could walk from work and might bring friends home.

We have DVD's of every episode of: _The Dick Van Dyke Show_ , _Gilligan's Island_ , _The Man From Uncle_ ; we've got old B movies that I downloaded for free from archive.org that we can stream to the television or transfer to devices. MP3 players loaded up with audio books and old radio shows downloaded for free, also from archive.org. All stuff that's new to most people; more engaging than watching something you've already seen a million times.

If the power goes, we have flashlights, books, cards, dominoes, checkers/chess, a possibly unhealthy number of Rubik's Cubes, and books and more books. Maybe shouldn't throw away the old boom box. Power Outage Boom Box Dance Party.

In the scene that keeps returning, (most of the reason I'm writing all this down is to stop it revolving in my brain) I call a "house meeting," and, among other things, say that two nights from now we will have talent night and that if nobody volunteers we will spend the evening with husband lecturing about famous battles of history and me reading aloud from John Donne's sermons just like we were characters from a Jane Austen novel.

And in case people want to volunteer but don't know what to do, I've got a variety of published movie scripts – people can get together and act out a scene or two from _Pulp Fiction_ , or _Roxanne_ , or _When Harry Met Sally_ (no, not _that_ scene, please). Also the plays in the old college Shakespeare anthologies.

Boredom and worry lead to crankiness and worse, so keeping people busy and forward-thinking will give us the best shot at getting through my imaginary crisis.

So the first night is nachos, and that night before I go to bed I make a sponge with the sourdough starter for tomorrow's dough that will be pizza by lunchtime. But need to be ready to make pizza with yeast the first night, just in case:

Recipe: Pizza Dough

1 package active dry yeast

1 tablespoon sugar

3 cups flour

2 tablespoons olive oil, or vegetable oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup warm water – 110 ten degrees, very warm to the touch

Mix the yeast, sugar, and water, let sit while you collect the other ingredients.

Mix all together, knead a bit.

You can roll it out onto an oiled pan and start your pizza right away, or let it rise an hour and then roll out. I usually bake the crust at 375 for ten minutes or so by itself, then add the other pizza toppings.

If there's pizza sauce around, use that, if not, I heat up tomato sauce or tomato paste from a tube with grated garlic, basil, oregano, fennel seed, parmesan; herbs can be dried or fresh – just keep tasting to see how you like it.

Pizza is a good way to use up leftovers in the fridge, anyway; how do you think the world got barbequed chicken pizza?

If there's no toppings and no sauce, just knead some herbs into the dough, call it focaccia, and dip it in olive oil or honey.

Recipe: Flatbread/Pizza on the Grill

Oil the grill, slide small-ish pizza dough round onto it; close cover and cook for two minutes or so. Then flip the dough, add light ingredients -- don't put too many or it'll be soggy and fall off -- lower the heat if you can, close the lid and cook a few minutes until it's pizza.

I bet this would work on a hibachi, though haven't tried it.

I always keep a couple big blocks of mozzarella in the fridge – the big blocks last a long time; if they get moldy it's just around the edges and can be cut off. I keep a case of tomato sauce cans around always, and I have Italian spices, plus there are herbs in the garden.

So on pizza night I soak a big bunch of pinto beans overnight, and the next day is a big pot of beans –

Recipe: Pot O'Pinto Beans

1 package pinto beans, or about 4 cups

Water to cover

1-2 teaspoons salt

Optional but tasty: ham hock, onion, garlic, chili powder, red bell peppers

My mother always soaked beans overnight, but opinions vary on this. Pour beans in pot, cover with water, throw away any beans that float.

Next morning, throw out soaking water, looking for small rocks as you do so. Then cover with fresh water, any other ingredients from that list that you want, and cook for 2 hours. Test for doneness and flavor, make adjustments and keep cooking slowly, half an hour or until done. If you put a ham hock in there, take it out, let it cool a bit, shred the meat and put it back in.

Follow package directions for rice, serve the beans over rice, and your family is full. It's not that hard to store enough dry beans and rice to feed everybody in a crisis for a week or so. Rice _and_ beans will keep you alive longer than either one by itself, note.

The cast iron dutch oven we bought ensures that we could make beans, even if we have to dig a hole in the back yard and cook the beans over coals.

Hafta buy coals.

I always keep a ham hock in the freezer, plus a few small canned hams around, so a bit of ham for punch, and probably a bunch of cornbread muffins. Actually, should probably use the eggs and milk while it's all still good to make a lot of cornbread and other muffins, because if the power goes the milk won't last that long, and stale cornbread is still pretty good crumbled up into beans; could bake it in a cast iron skillet atop a campfire or the dutch oven.

Also pretty sure you could make pancakes/corncakes by flipping the lid of the dutch oven and using it as a griddle.

Recipe: Griddle Corn Cakes

1 1/4 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

3/4 cup cornmeal

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup milk

1 tablespoon honey or sugar

1/4 cup oil

1 egg

Pre-heat and oil the griddle.

Mix the dry ingredients; make a well in the center. Pour in the wet ingredients that you've mixed separately and mix -- don't overmix.

Prepare as you do pancakes. Pour about a quarter cup on the griddle -- watch until there are bubbles in the middle, then flip.

The corn pairs up with your pot o'beans to make a healthy, filling meal. Corn and beans will keep you alive longer than corn or beans. Some people prefer a higher corn to flour ratio in the recipe.

December 9, 2011

Figured out best way to find great old free, public domain movies online to download is to go to Google and type in this exact search: **site:imdb.com archive.org public domain MPEG4**

MPEG4 formatted movies can be put inside your iTunes movie folder on the computer, imported into iTunes, and from there transferred onto iDevices. Great for bugging out _and_ for sheltering.

December 10, 2011

We were thinking about teaching a class on apocalyptic science fiction, and so we made a list of apocalyptic categories beloved in fiction: War, Nuclear War, Plague, Bio-Terrorism, Alien Invasion, Space Object Hits Earth, EMP Strike, etc.

Then on tv, prepper people talk about things I haven't even considered – the earth's magnetic poles go wonky, stock market crashes and everybody overreacts, the volcano under Old Faithful blows, cyber-terrorists destroy the grid, rioting and unrest for whatever reason, trucker's strike shuts down commerce, the Mississippi floods and somehow leads to mass starvation. Zombies.

Zombies are mostly a metaphor, but (and only one of the books I've read addressed this – _Day of the Triffids_ ) a really alarming number of people are on anti-depressants, and during an extended crisis people are going to run out of them – just at the time when high demands are being made on their patience and sanity. And when you consider my houseful of people scenario, where there's a freak weather event and people are stranded in my house straight from work, well, argh.

I'm going to start making it a habit to keep vitamin and herb depression remedies on hand in bulk – many aren't that expensive and have extended best-by dates. I found inositol in powder form, valerian tea, gaba in mint form, and tryptophan, which is basically like eating large amounts of turkey to go to sleep, like the _Seinfeld_ episode. And gingko biloba – it's not a depression remedy, but it's a mind-clearing thing, and I get depressed when my brain doesn't work. I keep a good supply of that anyway, but I'm going to start keeping it in the alcohol tincture form – the use by dates on those are generally five years.

Luckily – well, not luckily, exactly; we are to be congratulated on the fact that we've paid attention to our health and aren't on any prescription drugs at all; if we were we'd hafta always make sure we had a month or two of everything in readiness.

NPR reported October 20, 2011:

We really are Prozac Nation now. About 11 percent of people in the U.S. are taking antidepressants according to fresh figures out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Antidepressant use has surged almost 400 percent, when you compare the figures from the three-year period ending in 2008 to the six years ending in 1994, the year the eye-opening memoir Prozac Nation was published. If that's not startling enough for you, consider a few more details. More than 1 in 5 women ages 40-59 are taking an antidepressant, the highest rate for any group. Overall, women and adolescent girls are 2 1/2 times more likely than men and adolescent boys to be taking one of the pills.

December 16, 2011

When I try to envision myself in apocalyptic crisis, I first consider myself in crisis Monday, and I find that the most important component of survival is coffee. My brain simply doesn't work well without it. In a crisis, at the very pinnacle point that I'd need it the most, the coffeemaker would just sit there being ineffectually pretty.

So I'm going oldschool. Back in college, early college, I had a stovetop percolator, and I got an old fashioned one for Christmas a while back, but I'm experimenting with a camping one that I'm calling my cowboy coffeepot. You always see these in cowboy movies, over the campfire, and in _Who Shot Liberty Valance_ it's chugging away there in the kitchen scenes. This way in the end of the world I could if necessary build a fire in the backyard and brew up ambrosia.

I'm going to keep a lookout at estate sales for the old-fashioned coffee grinders as well.

The other thing necessary to my functioning at a reasonable level is clean hair, which requires running hot water, so I'll hafta start working on that.

December 18, 2011

Getting the house ready for company for the holidays, all of a sudden I'm realizing that a quite large volume of bedclothes have assembled themselves in my house, reminiscent of dancing household creatures in _Beauty and the Beast_. Part of this is due to a relation who is always giving us pillows and adorable little throw-sized blankets and things, but then we are always buying sturdy king-size covers to protect furniture from the dog, and we will almost always buy good wool blankets and nice quilts at estate sales when they're at a good price.

I really think that if the government quartered soldiers in our house at this point, we would have sufficient bedclothes to cover every inch of the place.

Speaking of warmth and government, a quick rant on the city telling me that I can't use my built-in gas furnace thing in the bathroom because I might burn the house down. This house has been here since the forties, lots of houses in this city have been here for decades with those heaters without somebody being stupid with them. My house has a cheap, efficient, energy-saving way of warming the bathroom and bedroom sufficiently without turning on the whole house heater, and it's illegal to use it. In a crisis we could do pretty well for heat with no electricity, but we're not allowed to. Idiots will always find a way to burn their house down; I don't see why I should suffer, rant, rant. Rant.

## Chapter 2: 2012

January 2, 2012

So we've had a trial run of my house-ful of people scenario, with the house full of people for the holidays. It was supposed to have been just two people, but accommodations failed somehow, so we had every bed and couch full.

Lessons learned? Big one is that I can't indulge and eat sugar – it wrecks my brain and patience. Also, it's not that unreasonable to have an unreasonable number of blankets; they will come in handy. Also, in a real crisis I'd really have to insist that people pitch in, even on boring things like helping with the dishes or taking out the trash, when they'd rather be playing with their cell phones.

I've noticed it before: either it's getting worse or I'm getting closer to the crotchety old lady who is my destiny, but some of the friends/relations, even when we're at a really nice restaurant, even when we've all gone to a lot of trouble to spend time together, focus primarily on the cell phone. Several times in the past weeks of the holiday season, the husband and I wind up just sitting and kinda staring at each other while our dining companions all play on the phone; apparently every other person and every other place in the universe is more important than the people sitting in front of them.

It's an addition to the zombie metaphor as well – people walking slowly, head down, oblivious.

But just think what would happen in a really serious crisis to people who are addicted to their phone – you can see how panicky they get just when not enough people are clicking like on their latest Instagram, much less when the battery runs out, horrors. In a serious crisis, cell towers are completely down; the internet may be down; electricity may be out for days or weeks or, in theory, forever. We are careful to always have at least one land-line phone that doesn't require electricity; even that is a rarity nowadays.

That reminds me – I think it was Egypt, but somewhere, anyway, the government tried to shut down the internet – if you typed in, say, cnn.com it wouldn't work, but if you put in the IP address it did work. At this exact moment it's: http://157.166.226.25.

To find IP addresses from home on a PC computer, directions are:

1. Click Start

2. Click Run

3. Type "CMD" and press enter

4. DOS window comes up

5. Type "ping yahoo.com" without the quotation marks and press enter

6. It will ping and give a string of numbers – the number in the brackets is the IP

This only works when the internet is functioning but bad guys are screwing with it somehow. At this point, there may even be a pinging app; I'll check.

January 4, 2012

So in a real crisis with a houseful of people we'd have to have lots of lists. Good thing I have lots of clipboards – and paper. Even hard core prep sites usually forget to specify to have lots of pads of paper and pens for a crisis; you'll need lists and you may need big signs to put on the front door – Need Help, or Quarantined, or whatever, (so big markers as well as pens, note) and at some point the only way to get a message out would be a regular ole note, hand-carried somewhere.

So you'd need a chore chart: cooking, guard duty, washing dishes, washing clothes, grinding up things with the mortar and pestle, sweeping, tending to the compost, tending to the sprouting seeds, gathering herbs, digging holes and burying waste, etc. Judging from recent experience, you'd have to specify that everyone would be responsible for making their own bed, folding up the covers and putting them out of the way so that everybody can use the couches during the day.

And you'd need a chart of what foods people are actually allergic to, what meds people take, and then you'd have to do research on what vitamins and herbs might help through the crisis. You'd need a chart of what special skills people have, what training – particularly engineering and medical skills.

You might have to, well, I might have to, actually create and post menus for what is to be cooked and served – we have food enough for maybe a whole month for a few extra people, but it'd be possible to make enough mistakes about food to mess this all up, particularly when people are panicked and confused.

_In general, the rule for power outages is_ **:** eat everything in the refrigerator (everything that has to be refrigerated, obviously, you could go slow on pickles and ketchup) first, then everything in the freezer \-- smaller and less dense first, bigger and more dense last, then on to the dried and canned things. You don't want to have a situation where you've got hungry people but you're throwing away good food because it's spoiled.

So I might have to revise the menus I put in before – at first, you would try to cook everything in the refrigerator – probably whatever leftovers were there, mixed with a white sauce over a big pot of rice -- that could be made with a big battery (we've got a Duracell PowerPack 600, but there are probably others) and a hotplate or crockpot. OR the leftovers in white sauce made into **Power Outage Casserole** with biscuits on top -- With a cast-iron skillet it could be made in the fireplace, or on the outdoor grill.

With a cast iron skillet and a fireplace, you could use up the mayonnaise: 1 cup mayo, 1 cup parmesan for a cheese dip -- traditionally this is made with a can of artichoke hearts, drained and chopped, but the cheese sauce will work with a lot of different leftovers.

Recipe: Basic White Sauce

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1 cup milk

Melt butter over low heat. Stir in flour, salt and pepper. It's best to use a whisk if you have one.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is smooth and bubbly; remove from heat.

Gradually stir in milk. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; boil and stir 1 minute.

You can add cheese, or curry powder, or other herbs; this is a basic sauce.

White sauce is what housewives used to make before there was canned cream of mushroom soup.

James Beard's famous Cream Biscuits are easy and use up the perishable cream:

Recipe: Cream Biscuits

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

3/4 cup heavy cream or half and half

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

Sift dry ingredients together.

Fold in cream until it makes a soft dough that can be easily handled. (You may need to add up to a full cup of cream).

Turn on to a floured board and knead for about one minute, or knead right in the bowl.

I make these as drop biscuits: Take an egg size bit of dough, shape it into a biscuit, and dip into melted butter. Bake at 425 for 15-18 minutes.

Recipe: Power Outage Casserole

Make the White Sauce, adding shredded cheese or spices if you like, then stir in chopped leftovers, put in dutch oven or cast iron skillet, top with James Beard Cream biscuits (uncooked) and cook it all in a gas oven, fireplace, out-door oven.

Then later in the crisis, you move on to using canned chicken and canned peas and rice with white sauce to make a casserole. Canned onion rings or chow mein noodles or potato chips on top.

Another early-on dinner would require baking hotdog buns in my new hotdog bun pan for the many many wienies we usually have on hand

Hot Dog Bun Recipe, from King Arthur:

3 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

2 teaspoons instant yeast

2 tablespoons sugar

1/4 cup Baker's Special Dry Milk or nonfat dry milk

1/4 cup (1 1/2 ounces) potato flour or 2/3 cup instant mashed potato flakes

2 tablespoons King Arthur Cake Enhancer, optional, for enhanced freshness

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons soft butter

1 large egg

7/8 cup to 1 1/8 cups lukewarm water*

*Use the greater amount in winter or in a dry climate; the lesser amount in summer or a humid climate.

1) Mix and knead together all of the ingredients (using 1 cup of the water) to make a shiny, elastic dough, about 10 minutes by hand, 5 or more by mixer. Add the additional water if necessary to make a smooth, soft dough.

2) Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl, and allow it to rise for 1 to 2 hours, until it's puffy.

3) Lightly grease your New England hotdog bun pan.

4) Gently deflate the dough, and stretch it in your hands till it's about 15" long and 6" wide, more or less; don't make yourself crazy being exact. Place the dough into the bun pan, stretching it to the edges as best you can.

5) Cover the pan with plastic wrap, and let the dough rest for 15 minutes. Remove the plastic wrap, and push it all the way into the corners of the pan, leveling the top surface as best you can. Re-cover the pan.

6) Let the buns rise for 45 to 60 minutes, until they've come to within 1/2" of the rim of the pan. While the dough is rising, preheat your oven to 375°F.

Cook 15-18 minutes and cool. You can do the whole thing of putting a cookie sheet on top, weighting it down, to get perfectly square buns, but I never do.

Better print out the hotdog bun recipe. Better serve wienies sliced in half. Better keep yeast in the freezer at all times.

Note: interestingly, eggs can be unrefrigerated for a week or so, out on the counter unless the house is really hot.

The big rule about food would have to be – don't throw food away! Come to think about it, one reason to get a list of what people are allergic to in the early part of a crisis would be to get them on the record as to what makes them _actually sick_ as opposed to what they don't really like much.

Picky eaters are an infuriating, mommy-spoils-her-darling-boo-boo-bunny because she loves her so much she makes her unfit to survive in the real world phenomenon in the best of times; in the best of times I have to hold myself seriously in check to keep from sternly reprimanding in my cranky old lady fashion someone who puts a bunch of food on a plate and then throws most of it away, but in a crisis this kind of wah-wah everything in the universe is only about me behavior can cause real suffering to real people.

I guess in a real crisis I'd have to come up with a speech that conveys the information that there is plenty of food so long as it's not wasted, that there is plenty of food but very possibly not food that you're in the mood for at that particular moment, or that is your favorite food of all time, that there is plenty of food to keep you full and healthy, but you will have to eat what's put in front of you – all of it. Picky eaters can't get special consideration in an apocalypse; if you won't eat what's there you can starve, which is what boo-boo's mommy should have said years and years ago; it's what my mother said to me.

The speech would also have to work in somewhere that Mommy is the food czar – all cooking and serving decisions have to go through me, that it's great to help out by cooking and serving but that good intentions can cause problems – like making a giant ham and cheese omelet that feeds people one meal, when using eggs to make cornbread and muffins and pancakes, and ham to add protein to beans and soups, and saving the cheese to be protein for other meals would keep more people full far longer.

January 5, 2012

Before I forget, remember to stock up on Woolite – people in the house who didn't plan on being away are going to need clean underwear, the power might be out so no washing machine, and I don't see any way we can stock up on every conceivable undie size.

January 6, 2012

Pandemic. We read a whole book on the 1918 flu pandemic, and it was pretty scary. People got on the trolley alive and were sick and dead by the end of the line. A pandemic is probably the most likely looming crisis – they usually pop up every 100 years, and it's been about 100 years.

It's the kind of crisis, though, that calls for sheltering in place, which I don't mind thinking about, as I am working on an eventual full blown agoraphobia.

Ahhh, agoraphobia; wouldn't it be loverly.

The primary lessons from the 1918 book were: stay away from crowds, stay inside, self-quarantine if at all possible, wear face masks and gloves, get plenty of rest and fluids, and _when you feel like you're completely fine, stay in bed at least another week_. Wear gloves when you shop for supplies; wear gloves when you handle mail delivered to your house. Have a decontamination room where you wash up before you come to the main house if you've been out. _Throw the gloves away before you come in to the main house._

People who were nursed at home had better luck than people who went to the hospital. Hospitals quickly became overcrowded, doctors and nurses got sick themselves and were soon unavailable; lots of people died alone on a gurney in a hospital hallway.

There have been several movies lately with the theme of pandemic crisis; after reading the nonfiction book on the 1918 flu, hafta say the fictional versions were nowhere near the awfulness of the reality.

A general common-sense lesson for crisis from a modern pandemic book is: be very careful with your vacation and sick days from work – if things really start to look like pandemic, you won't feel as panicked about staying home, just in case.

In pandemic stories, whether real or fictional, families who were alert to the possibility of a problem and basically self-quarantined early, who kept kids home from school before the schools were forced to close, who were prepared to shelter in place for a month, came through the problem absolutely fine -- nobody got sick, nobody died, nobody starved to death in the house.

We prepared for pandemic by buying several boxes of sterile gloves at Costo, face masks – both cheap ones at the drugstore and better ones online, lots of vitamin C, plus olive leaf oil, Cryptolepis, licorice tincture, monolauren, propolis. Those tinctures last years, and Atkins says these have been shown to kill viruses.

The thought of high fever in a child when doctors are unavailable is a terrifying one. Cryptolepis tea is said to be very effective at reducing fever, as is sida, goldenseal, yarrow tea, yarrow baths for very young children. My _Herbal Antibiotics_ book says about bidens:

The plant also has a strong antipyretic effect, comparable to acetaminophen. It is specific for lowering fever during acute infections.

Cool baths, cool cloths, fluids, popsicles.

Humanity managed to flourish for millennia before pharmaceuticals; my philosophy is that God gives us what we need; He doesn't require us to mangle molecules to get medicine that will heal us.

I know that when we were both sick with flu a few years ago, I did the vitamin/herb route: insane amounts of vitamin C (I was on 18 grams a day for several days without it affecting my bowels), garlic, monolaurin, olive leaf, etc., and I got better in a few days but the spouse took the doctor –recommended route and took Tamiflu and was sick for three weeks. I didn't do every single thing recommended in the book, but the C and anti virals really seemed to do the trick.

Here's what Dr. Atkins says to take when it's just trying to start, and then after awhile you go to maintenance dose, the second set of numbers -- next step is to print this out and paste on the inside of the medicine cabinet.

Vitamin A: 40,000-80,000 IU; 10,000- 20,000 IU

Beta-carotene: 60,000-120,000 IU' 15,000-30,000 IU

B complex; 100 mg; 25-50 mg

Vitamin C: 10-20 grams; 2-4 grams

Garlic: 2,400-3,200 mg; 2,400-3,200 mg

Zinc: 200-400 mg; 50-100 mg

And here's what to take when the illness is full blown

Olive leaf extract 500-2,000 mg

Oil of oregano 2-4 drops

Glycerol monolaurate 1,200-2,400 mg

Echinacea 1-2 capsules

Goldenseal 1-2 capsules

Pantethine 600-1,200 mg

Quercetin 900-1,800 mg

Selenium 200-400 mcg

Vitamin E 400-1,200 IU

In our experience, olive leaf will kill almost all bad guys – you have to start slow with it, because it's such an effective killer that the die-off of dead bacteria makes you seem even sicker, so start slow and work up to a full dose. It comes in a tincture form that lasts for years; no reason not to have a bottle in the med cabinet.

Note -- now that the Atkins book on vitamins is available as a searchable e-book, need to buy it for family. Ditto _Herbal Antibiotics_ by the Buhner guy.

January 9, 2012

When your English-major brain is hypothesizing on the apocalypse, two big questions arise: how much to give away, and how far would you go.

The husband's default position has been that our preparations are for ourselves and family and nobody else: we can't possibly supply enough to feed the whole city, and why should we suffer for people who didn't think ahead. My idea is that we should plan at least to help the ever-changing set of college kids who live next door in the rental – college kids often live hand-to-mouth; they move a lot; they can't really be expected to have a month's worth of extra supplies on hand – I certainly didn't at that age.

In one of the prepper-y books we read, there's a pandemic, and the main character lives on a relatively isolated cul-de-sac; there was some notice that a crisis loomed, and most neighbors were prepared for it, but one of the neighbors prepared by planning to mooch off the preparedness guy. The main character refused point blank to give out anything; the guy had notice and should have prepared, and eventually there was literally battle, and people got killed.

I say, in what was very likely to be a short-term crisis, the prep guy should have said something along the lines of, we will give you a family-sized meal every other day for two weeks and re-negotiate then; maybe you can make the same deal with another neighbor. That way, then, at least if the neighbor was hugely unreasonable and still attacked, you wouldn't feel as bad taking very strong action.

So I occasionally buy good thermal coffee cups with lids and am building up a supply of them – they won't go bad, they're not particularly expensive, and I can put soup or rice and beans in them and give them away to the kids next door. In a crisis we may need the strength and endurance of a young person to help us with something, and this way we would buy ourselves some support without putting our own supplies that much at risk.

Maybe the deal could be – a meal every other day and on off days a filling snack (it's really hard to deny my innate impulse to feed everyone in the world). We bought a vintage stove-top popcorn maker on ebay; even if the power goes, so long as the gas still works we can have popcorn, and if that goes I suppose we could still build a fire in the yard and cook the popcorn over that. We bought a big tub of popcorn kernels from an emergency supply store, so we've got enough popcorn to help out, not the neighborhood, but a house or two, probably, for a short-term crisis. I bought some powdered cheese for popcorn, and maybe I'll work on mixing a little butter with some cheap coconut oil, pouring that on the popcorn and then mixing in some of the powdered cheese \-- that would actually be pretty filling and tasty.

Recipe: Stovetop Popcorn with Cheese

3 tablespoons peanut oil

½ cup popcorn kernels

I cook this in our stovetop popcorn maker, the kind with a twisty handle on top. Alton Brown has directions on how to pop corn with just a big metal bowl and tongs.

Then, mix ½ cup of cheddar cheese powder with 3 tablespoons of melted butter, or a butter/coconut oil/ghee combination, adding a shake of cayenne if you're in the mood for it, and mix it all up. Husband likes fresh ground pepper on top as well.

Popcorn is so way cool in that it increases fourfold in volume, and it's easy to store. Also, apparently, it can be ground up with my good mortar and pestle into cornmeal. Gotta make sure we've got seeds to plant okra – with fried okra, the apocalypse wouldn't be that bad.

January 10, 2012

Before I forget – best bugout tip from the class I took is to start considering your car's gas tank empty when it hits halfway – always refill it before it hits halfway; if that's your habit you will almost always have at least half a tank of gas, and that can save your life in a crisis. Except that I'm not leaving, she said, stamping her foot, forgetting that the pout that was cute when she was twenty is not that attractive anymore -- I will almost inevitably shelter in place. Second best bugout tip is to have a process that keeps your cell charged up most of the time – I also hafta remember to set up a process to make sure the external battery recharger for the cell is kept charged so it will work in a crisis – maybe re-charge it every month on the first day of the month.

And special girlie bugout tip, something I have been doing all my life and never understood why everybody didn't -- always have a pair of sturdy shoes – if you go somewhere fancy and hafta wear fancy shoes, take a pair of good walking shoes with you – in the car, in your purse. How many fancy-dancy characters in movies wind up in bad situations because they can't run away from the zombies in their silly 4-inch heels.

January 12, 2012

Love Alton Brown; recently saw a show where he talked about lentils -- lentils have the third-highest level of protein, by weight, of any legume or nut, after soybeans and hemp, which I didn't know until Alton told me. (Also, note, the website said that when sprouted, lentils have all the amino acids you need.)

Alton has a Lentil Cookie recipe that's loaded up with protein – the dried fruit would give you an extra energy pop, and lentils are cheap and easy to store. The recipe gets great reviews on his website – also, people suggest lots of variations; good to know that it's flexible. Also, note that you can pound up lentils and make flour with them.

In my houseful of people scenario, there might be a situation where people from downtown come here first and eventually walk 20 miles or more home; I'd make these to send along with people hiking home. Probably use coconut oil for butter; probably at some point would have to.

I also try to have shelf-stable bottled coffee around for the same purpose – to send along with people if they have to hike a couple of days home. Trader Joe's has shelf stable coffee in plastic bottles that has a shelf life of about a year, so I try to pick some up occasionally. Also fruit for toddlers in squeeze container thingies, for the same reason – around here, chances are you'd be hiking in the heat, and a quick fruit snack would sound better than salty jerky.

January 13, 2012

While I'm thinking about nutritionally dense food, should consider all the possibilities for the "birdseed porridge" recipe that I eat for breakfast most days. Found the original basic recipe online, when searching for how to make hot flax seed cereal not be so enormously awful, but I gave it the fun name.

Recipe: Birdseed Porridge

1-2 tbs flax seed

1 tbs sunflower seed

1 tbs pumpkin seed

1 tbs sesame seed

Grind up in coffee grinder. Mix with one cup or so of water, 2 tbs or more of butter (or coconut oil or other oil or even peanut butter). Cook it on the stove until it's thick, or can cook in the microwave for a minute or two, depending upon microwave's power. Watch to make sure it doesn't overflow – stir carefully in case the hot oil wants to splash out. Treat it like oatmeal – put in raisins or fruit or top with brown sugar; whatever you usually do to oatmeal.

The original recipe talked about how it provides a great, balanced amount of Omega 3, 6, and 9 fats. But also those seeds have lots of vitamins and minerals; this is far healthier than plain oatmeal. And you can always add oat bran to it to make it taste more like oatmeal; it's still low carb since oat bran is all fiber. Since you're making it from scratch, you can make adjustments to it – maybe you prefer the seeds salted, maybe not; maybe you'd prefer it if the seeds were toasted first.

I've found over the years that the "flour" that you wind up with when you grind it up can be used, at least in part, in recipes to replace flour. It's very high fiber and very low carb and, like I said, nutritionally dense. Eventually you adjust to the taste and even come to like it.

The seeds can be stored for months at a time, but over a period of years they get rancid, so I keep a lot in stock but rotate the stock, using the oldest first. I've tried making it without the coffee grinder, using my nice marble mortar and pestle, and it works great, so I could make it off the grid. I really think that the flour canister I store my birdseed seeds in would make enough gruel to keep the two of us alive for several weeks, even if everything else ran out. More gruel? Sure!

January 22, 2012

So the other big issue to be thought out ahead of time is, how far would you go – meaning, would you turn away a lady with a small child who came to your door if feeding them would cut into your own supplies too much, or would you actually kill someone to keep them from stealing everything you'd worked on for years. Would you turn away orphans who might be contagious with a killer flu to keep them from possibly infecting your own kids?

Would you betray your country? Would you deny your religion?

For the feeding people issue, I'm trying to prepare sufficiently so that if said lady and small child appear, we've got something to offer them – a hot cup of soup, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a baggie of lentil cookies.

I'm thinking if I say, "We prepared for ourselves and we prepared to have some things to give out in a crisis, and this is what we've set aside to give away" and then when that supply is gone, say, "We prepared for ourselves and we prepared to have some things to give out in a crisis, but we've given away everything that we set aside to give away" – something like that.

Crazy old lady English majors spend a lot of time inventing imaginary dialogues.

A character in one of the apocalypse books makes a speech along the lines of – say we actually did have enough food for four people for six months, which we don't, but even if we did, that's 2 meals a day for 4 people, or 8 meals times 182, which is roughly 1400 meals. There are 200 people just within a block or two of us, which would mean we could feed those people for one week. In a crisis likely to last several months, one week of meals for just these two blocks isn't really going to be that helpful, anyway.

Argh – when you actually look at the numbers you can see that it's really impossible to give out much help to people who aren't prepared. We are prepared for a crisis of medium-length, just for ourselves and family but without building a 5-story climate controlled warehouse in the back yard, there's no way to feed even a tiny fraction of even this small neighborhood. And that's just thinking food, if you consider how much water a whole neighborhood would need, well, argh again.

Could probably set up a tent in the backyard for the orphans.

How far, how far -- there's an enormous difference between the situation of a desperate father trying to feed his family and a pack of bad guys who just want to steal. We have no plans to just meekly hand everything over to bad guys.

In the end-of-the-world books and movies there's _always_ a gang of bad guys who are like, "whoa, no rules, we're going to be mean like we always wanted to be," and the good guys always try at first to be reasonable, and then the gang rapes and kills and steals and wastes supplies, and then the good guys have to _seriously restrict_ them, anyway, after innocent people have been raped and murdered and supplies wasted. So bad guys who try to break in and steal at this house will be strongly opposed... which is why we need the goodwill of the young, healthy neighbors, because if it comes to burying the bad guys, that will be really hard work.

January 25, 2012

Got a really great copper kettle at an estate sale – we have, I think, two hot water bottles; we need more. Always think of going to estate sales like going to museums – you get a look into the way people lived, you see what they never wanted to part with. Lately, seems like the estate sales are for people who seemed to have been in bad shape but aren't that old –you can tell those two things by the condition of the house and the kind of stuff that's there. I think we're seeing the end of life scenes of the people who decided in the sixties that they weren't going to follow anyone's rules.

January 27, 2012

Knew I was forgetting something – if you can grind up popcorn in the mortar and pestle to make corn meal, you can make corn mush, but wouldn't it be cool to make the corn dodgers that the characters ate in the _True Grit_ book? Quickly found the recipe online – really going to miss the internet when it's gone....

Recipe: Corn Dodgers

2 cups cornmeal

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups boiling water

Bacon Grease for frying

In a large skillet heat the Bacon Grease slowly over medium heat to approximately 375 degrees.

Mix the cornmeal and salt in a medium bowl. To this, stir in the boiling water, a little at a time, until the mixture forms a thick mush.

Scoop approximately a palm-sized amount of mixture into your hands and form into balls.

Fry, rolling in the skillet until golden brown.

This recipe can be made with scraps of stuff out of the pantry. We have chives growing in the garden, which would help with the flavor some.

Makes me think of a scene from a childhood favorite book, _The Witch of Blackbird Pond_ – the girl is told to slowly add the meal to the water and stir, she gets bored and dumps it all in, and everybody has to eat gross, lumpy gruel that day.

January 29, 2012

So having recently had a houseful of people, realize that toilet paper would be a problem sheltering in place – it's cheap and doesn't spoil, and in all the end of the world books it's one of the most barter-able items, but it does take up a lot of room. Maybe put in some shelves high-up in the mud room? Remember the old "putting up a shelf" jokes from _3's Company_?

February 3, 2012

The crisis genre that scares me the most is an EMP strike, where all the electronics get fried. In most of the end-of-the-world events, a lot of people get killed outright, so that there are at least somewhat fewer people to be fed and housed, but an EMP strike only kills the people who get in car wrecks or plane wrecks in the first few minutes, or are on some kind of life support requiring electricity, so what you have is the whole populace, who freak out if the internet is down for half an hour, suddenly facing a world with no electricity, and nothing that has electronic components – most cars, nowadays, computers, televisions, cell phones, tablets, diabetes monitors. No air conditioning – for a lot of people, no stoves, certainly no microwaves or lights.

With the modern system of just-in-time shipping for almost everything people use, no delivery trucks working, the city would run out of almost everything almost instantly. It would be a back-to-the-stone-age crisis but with modern population levels.

Our house was designed to function without air conditioning; unfortunately the gas burner thingies don't function now, so with no power we would have problems in cold weather. I think the gas would work at least for awhile, so we could cook and have some heat in the kitchen. I want one of those freestanding fireplaces.

February 5, 2012

More, since I'm thinking of it, on "just in time" – it's not just for commercial facilities --- it's the way we think, nowadays. When we need information on a topic, we just Google it, take the top hit or so and then run. First, that's a bad policy in that the first hit is just evidence that the site holder is good at Search Engine Optimization (it's a real thing; look it up) not necessarily veracity; online information doesn't go through the kind of editorial process that traditional publishing always has. But in the wider picture, in a context of the kind of crisis where the grid is down, that mindset would leave many of us with no information _what-so-ever_. Not only no current info, but no reference information; in other words, if it's not in your brain, it's got to be available in printed form somehow.

Could I really remember everybody's phone numbers if I couldn't just tell Siri to call them? Maps; GPS might not be around – do modern kids even know how to read a map? The generation I raised got confused by hand can-openers; it must all be so much worse now.

So we have how-to books on topics that we're likely to need – actually, _we_ have sufficient how-to books to rebuild civilization back from a stone-age crisis, but everyone should probably have some books on basic household repair, emergency medicine, gardening. Just-in-time is great for a lot of things, but I'm working hard to remember that if something seems really necessary, to print it out or get a real book. Think I am going to start giving a hard-copy, old fashioned standard cookbook as wedding present to this new generation – every house should have one, and I bet lots of them don't

I got the 1963 _Joy of Cooking_ because Alton Brown said it had recipes and information on how to clean and cook squirrel. And it does, with pictures, noting that one should always use gloves when cleaning wild game. Obviously, we would never hurt a cute little squirrel, but apparently it has been done.

Squirrel Recipe from Joy of Cooking, 1963:

We are advised to use squirrel in the recipe for **Brunswick Stew** :

Saute squirrel in ¼ cup butter or drippings

Remove from pan, then brown in fat ½ cup chopped onion

Place in large stewing pan the squirrel, onions and ½ to 2 cups peeled seeded quartered roma tomatoes, 3 cups fresh lima beans, 1 cup boiling water, bit of cayenne, 2 cloves garlic.

Simmer until tender. Add 3 cups corn, 2 teaspoons Worcestershire, 1 cup toasted bread crumbs.

This edition of _Joy of Cooking_ also has a whole section on wild game: rabbit, possum, bear, raccoon, muskrat, woodchuck, beaver, venison, peccary, and wild boar, which you are to prepare as for a suckling pig. Starting to store chili powder and buffalo wing sauce in hopes the strong flavors would cover up the gamey-ness of game, if it comes to that.

February 6, 2012

Garlic – got a book on antibiotic herbal remedies which explained why bacteria are outwitting modern antibiotics – the modern, man-made ones generally have one active ingredient. Garlic has 35. So the tiny buggers have to outwit 35 active things to keep garlic from protecting you but only have to work-around one to keep penicillin from protecting you.

We've got garlic planted in the garden; still need to check on when and how to harvest it, but I feel better with it there; next year I'm going to buy twice as many plants.

For potential tummy issues, we also have ginger growing – it's dividing itself, which is cool. Got a nice ginger beer recipe – yum.

How to Make Ginger Beer

GINGER SYRUP

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup water

2 tbsp grated fresh ginger

GINGER BEER INGREDIENTS

1/8 teaspoon active dry yeast

Ginger syrup

3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

7 cups water

Clean 2-liter plastic soda bottle, funnel

Make the syrup: grate the ginger into the water and sugar; bring to a simmer, then cover and let steep for an hour. Strain it and let it cool – this syrup can be combined with water or club soda to make really good ginger ale.

To make ginger beer, you have to ferment it:

Pour the water into the plastic bottle, using a funnel. Sprinkle the yeast in, followed by the syrup, lemon juice, and water. Put the cap on, shake it to make sure the yeast is dissolved, then store it out of direct sunlight for 2 or 3 days, until it starts to fizz, then store in refrigerator.

Say, if there were a nuclear thing in that big city south of us, it's possible that some of our relations, that enormous numbers of refugees might wind up here, and we would need to be able to help them with radiation sickness.

February 7, 2012

Better put it down before I forget it – information included as a kind of aside in a book about fermented foods – story from a doctor who treated radiation patients in Japan after a bomb – his team ate miso soup every day while in the midst of radiation and never got sick. Apparently miso has an alkaloid, dipicolinic acid, that binds with metals and moves them out of your body. Seaweed does some of the same, so miso soup with seaweed would be helpful in a radiation crisis. In general, fermented foods with live probiotics boost up your immune system.

Miso has to be refrigerated but lasts a year or more. UPDATE: found some shelf-stable miso that has to be refrigerated after opening, and I also found dry miso soup mixes that have a shelf life of two years.

Miso soup doesn't taste exotic or strange; it's actually very comforting stuff. The recipe is extremely forgiving...

My Gringo Miso Soup Recipe

2 cups water or stock

Handful of greens, any kind

Dash of garlic olive oil

I boil this until the greens are bright green, then add

2 tablespoons miso

2 tablespoons tahini

Then I take it off the heat – never boil the miso – and hit it with the stick blender until the greens are blended down. Then the husband adds lime juice to his, and I add cayenne to mine.

Some miso recipes call for dashi, the Japanese boullion, seaweed, kelp, sesame oil, tofu, scallions; as I said, it's a very forgiving recipe.

February 10, 2012

One of the recurring plot elements in the apocalyptic books is the spoiled, disobedient child. In a normal day to day, a spoiled child is a pain; in a real crisis, he can get everyone killed.

The fictional instance that comes immediately to mind is one where food is extremely limited, and the family is saving bouillon cubes for health emergencies. When one of the party gets sick and needs extra nutrition, they find all the cubes are gone – the spoiled kid had sat down and eaten them all in one sitting – he liked the way they crunched. Can't remember, but I think the author killed off the sick guy, just to make his dramatic point.

What happens to the kid who has all his life gotten whatever he wants if he throws a big enough tantrum when mommy can't spoil him anymore?

In _Alas, Babylon_ the little boy learned at school in nuclear-fright class that at the beginning of the crisis, you fill all available containers with water, just in case, and so they do. When they notice the water supply is dwindling too fast, it turns out the sweet little girl, fastidious despite instructions, keeps washing her hands all day, wasting what they need to survive. For the most part, tho, the kids in that book step up to the crisis and contribute: cooking, farming, hauling, fishing, guard duty. It was the fifties.

In _Lucifer's Hammer_ , one of the kids keeps throwing tantrums because he can't watch t.v.; there is no t.v.; his parents can't give him what he wants to shut him up. That was the seventies. Nowadays it would be exponentially worse -- how many kids are on antidepressants and ritalin and continuous online gaming to shut them up instead of the dreadfully old fashioned method of disciplining them, getting them exercise and limiting their sugar. (Okay, I guess I have arrived at cranky old lady status.)

Once the drugs and electronic games are gone, the kids who have no resources of self-discipline will potentially be an enormous liability. [If I were to create a how-to-raise-children program it would involve liberal use of the _Cops!_ and _Bait Car_ television shows, to demonstrate what happens when you raise spoiled, self -indulgent children with no impulse control, that when you let them get away with lying, they assume they can go through the world lying and getting away with it, and they wind up on _Cops_.]

Modern kids spend a lot of time lounging – with a game console, tablet, phone, in front of a t.v. – what happens when everyone's survival depends upon the sulky, spoiled kid standing up and getting stuff done: digging a sanitation hole. Next time you go to the mall, take a look at the teens you see, try to imagine any of them digging a sanitation hole, and you'll see my point. Hmm, may have said that out loud; my connection to sanity does seem to fade back and forth a bit.

We shouldn't have to deal with kids here, but we do have plenty of games and our childhood books and toys; I've got kids how-to-draw books that I used to use in classes. We've got model kits for tanks and planes that husband is in theory going to put together at some point.

We have lots of batteries, plus a couple of those big, heavy duty batteries that will run a couple of lamps for a couple of weeks; I guess we should consider keeping those under some sort of lock and key if we have extra people in the house, to make sure the last bit of emergency power isn't used to play _Angry Birds_ on a hand-held gaming thingie.

February 12, 2012

Water – it's better to always have a few days' worth of water in the house if at all possible – drinking bottles, big glug-glug tanks, rain barrels. In even short-term weather situations, you always see news footage of grocery store shelves emptied of water bottles – it's really not that much trouble to just keep some extra water around so that you're not desperately at the grocery store fighting over water and other stuff. We were able to hide several glug-glug tanks just behind furniture, no problem at all. I keep a six-pack of plastic water bottles in the car at all times. In a crisis you'd almost certainly be better off just filling containers at home (like the kid from _Alas, Babylon_ ) with water, anyway – pitchers, giant baggies, water bags bought for the purpose at camping supply places. I'm going to make a point of also storing juice and chicken stock. Canned ginger ale.

Those water-filtration thingies you can get at the camping store – sheltering in place you might wind up wanting to drink water from the pool or nearby creek. Maybe should have a funnel -- one place said that the National Guard water tank truck water dispenser is too wide for bleach jugs or pop bottle mouths. Husband says should have lots of funnels, anyway.

Okay, say missiles are headed this way, and we're going to shelter here and take our chances. Could grab the water, pop, and juice bottles ( _not_ milk) out of the recycling, wash very thoroughly with hot soapy water, rinse. Then soak the bottles in a sink of hot water with a cup of bleach, soaking the caps in a smaller, higher proportion bleach solution. For several hours at least.

Fill with water, adding two drops of bleach for each big bottle. If water is stored for awhile, you can improve the taste by pouring it back and forth from one container to another, getting oxygen back in it.

February 13, 2012

Teeth. In a back to the stone age scenario, toothpaste would run out. Here's a basic homemade toothpaste recipe:

Recipe: Toothpaste

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 drop of essential oil – peppermint, probably

Couple drops of water

I've also tried chewing licorice root – got busy and forgot all about it – need to buy more of the sticks and keep working on that – word is that licorice works far better than brushes and paste, anyway. The Internet Says that it will actually cure cavities; I'm reserving judgment. Also spent like $3 on a 6-pack of toothbrushes at the store, just to have, for emergency company, and I save the little gift bags the dentist gives out.

February 15, 2012

Another thing that would probably drive me crazy in a real crisis would be the smells—garbage would pile up, and everything outside would stink – remember the _Monk_ episode where there was a garbage strike, and his brain just shut down. Read in one of the prepper books that after the toilets stop working you can just put a plastic garbage bag inside the potty so that you're tinkling and pooping into the bag, and then you bury the bag, which doesn't sound like much fun but maybe less awful than alternatives. Is there something household-y that could be put into the giant poo bag to ease the smell? Hafta research.

But maybe now with the new composter, at least we'll be able to avoid some of the smells – we can put veggie scraps, eggshells, coffee grinds into the kitchen composter and then into the outside one, with leaves, and instead of stinkiness we'll get compost for the garden. That leaves far less smelly trash to worry about.

February 17, 2012

A tip I've tried that works is to fill a giant baggie with water and freeze it, then if the power does go, you put the giant block of ice in the refrigerator section, to give it a pretty solid boost.

Recipe ideas for a three day power outage – what can be made with no electricity and no gas.

One idea – mayonnaise only has to be refrigerated after it's open, so you can buy small jars of it, enough to make one meal: canned chicken, canned potatoes, canned peas, jarred pickles all become chicken salad and potato salad and pea salad, nice enough meal.

•First night: Bring home the cold roast chicken the store always has, boiled eggs, cheese, salad, bread

•Lentil salad - drain can of lentils, add salad dressing, chopped green onions, canned turkey, canned corn, cherry tomatoes, serve with pita chips

•Ambrosia -- canned, drained fruit: mandarin oranges, pineapple, fruit cocktail, jar cherries, dried coconut. Mix with Cool Whip that's thawed overnight. Serve with canned brown bread or store-bought banana bread.

•Canned chicken mixed with cream cheese, salsa, spices, with tortilla chips, then a snack later with a little of the cream cheese mixed with frozen berries and sugar, smushed together, with cookies to dip it out with)

•Tuna in oil with shaved parmesan in tomato half, dill from the garden, potato chips

•Hard sausage, cheese, rye bread, pickles, canned asparagus spears

•P-butter & shelf stable bacon sandwich, apples

•Cold soup – either Chicken stock with lime and chopped cilantro/mint, or canned cold potato soup, bread, butter, velveeta

•Canned ham, fresh pineapple, rye bread and butter

Snacks

•Cereal, raisins, dried milk made with vanilla

•Pbutter, spicy pepper paste, on celery

•Spray cheese in a can, crackers, pretzels

•Nuts and Mexican coke with good quality vanilla

•Bananas rolled in p-butter, sprinkled with nuts and glazed with chocolate syrup

•Storebought pizza crust dipped in olive oil with spices and shaved parmesan; mixed olives

•P-butter, graham crackers, apples & raisins, lemonade

•Cookies and fresh pineapple

•Tortillas, corn and bean salsa

•Bread and honey

February 18, 2012

A second cast iron dutch oven wouldn't be a bad investment. You can cook over a grill or fire or in the fireplace or dig a pit, put in hot coals, put your ol' beans and rice in the dutch oven in the pit, cover for four hours.

And, really, everybody should know how to make a couple of simple bread recipes from scratch – notice the media never show how the flour aisle is empty when people stock up for a crisis, never a slow panning shot to show all the yeast packets are gone. Of course, not everybody has a gas oven, but still. But still in the crazed grocery run people should always buy packets of yeast \-- maybe the neighbor has a gas oven or fireplace or outdoor oven.

Here's a recipe making the online rounds that claims to be simple and fabulous;

Recipe: No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread

1/4 teaspoon yeast

1 1/2 cups warm water

3 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoon salt

Cornmeal

Dissolve yeast in the water; add flour and salt, stir; it'll be sticky. Cover with plastic wrap, let it sit there overnight – at least 8 hours, up to 18 or so in a warm room. It's ready when it's bubbly – so this is a sort of sourdough recipe, really. Do a modified knead on it, just fold it a couple of times, with extra flour if you need it; cover again, rest again 15 minutes or so. Shape into a ball, using more flour if you need it, roll it in a bowl with some cornmeal to coat it, cover with towel and let rise a couple more hours – it's ready when the time-tested test of poking it and it doesn't spring back works.

Preheat oven to 475, pre-heat your dutch oven. Carefully put the dough in, cover and cook for 30 minutes. Uncover and cook another 15-20 minutes, till it's as brown as you like. Let it cool before you serve, if that's possible.

Great food that's basically yeast, flour, water, salt, and your time. This could be done on a campfire, with coals underneath and on top, for about half an hour – low fire, so the bottom doesn't burn.

February 19, 2012

When water is iffy:

Recipe for Clean Water From government website:

-Household bleach – 5 drops to 1 quart water; 10 drops to ½ gallon; ¼ tsp to one gallon – mix thoroughly and let stand for an hour before drinking.

Obviously, filter out crud first. Coffee filters are cheap and easy to store.

Caution: Bleach will not kill some disease-causing organisms commonly found in surface water. Bleach will not remove chemical pollutants.

-Can also use iodine, 5-10 drops for a quart of water. Apparently, if water is cold might need to let it sit longer than half an hour to make sure it works.

-Also, grapefruit seed extract – 10 drops per gallon.

-Boil water for a minute or two, let cool.

-SODIS method – water in sturdy baggies or clear plastic bottles sitting in full sun for at least six hours will clean the water for drinking – Google SODIS for more on this...

Hafta make it a habit to always have a couple gallons of bleach in the house. Plain ol' bleach, without fragrances or thickeners or fancy crap. Remember, can rinse the bleach jugs when they're empty and store water in them pretty safely.

February 20, 2012

Found out some redeeming info on an EMP strike problem: you can "harden" electronics, and they won't fry. Saw a movie where a guy had turned his apartment into a "Farraday Cage" – basically, when electronics are surrounded by metal but not touching metal, they won't get fried. Turned out, we had been buying good, solid heavy metal boxes at estate sales all along – they were cheap, usually, and it just seemed a heavy metal paper filing box thing would be a good thing to have – some of them had keys, some were actually fireproof – they were the kind of things that people in earlier generations just basically always had in the house, like oil lamps for emergencies. That generation always had meat grinders, too; apparently housewives used to always grind their own hamburger.

Kinda a fun thought that my iPad might be saved by being in a metal box that somebody bought in the fifties to protect important paper. So now we just have these boxes in roughly the same places that we keep electronics; if we should have notice of an EMP or a crippling solar flare, we'd just get the electronics in the boxes, making sure they don't actually touch the metal, so wrapped in cloth or something.

And it's apparently very possible that electronics that are way underground and/or way inside concrete wouldn't get fried, so we've been keeping an eye out in town for places that have deep level parking garages. I've actually timed how long it takes to get to the closest one from home – I could just barely make it in 8 minutes if I had notice of the solar flare heading this way, and I have an app that would give me eight minutes' notice; it's just whether you'd happen to see it instantly.

Of course, in a situation where most of the cars in the city are fried, and I, meek old lady, have a working car that I'm trying to drive back home from the parking garage, I would very likely be killed and the car stolen before I could get it home, but there's not much to be done about that. If I perish, I perish...

Esther 4

King James Version (KJV)

4

10 Again Esther spake unto Hatach, and gave him commandment unto Mordecai;

11 All the king's servants, and the people of the king's provinces, do know, that whosoever, whether man or women, shall come unto the king into the inner court, who is not called, there is one law of his to put him to death, except such to whom the king shall hold out the golden sceptre, that he may live: but I have not been called to come in unto the king these thirty days.

12 And they told to Mordecai Esther's words.

13 Then Mordecai commanded to answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews.

14 For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and **who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?**

15 Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer,

16 Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

March 1, 2012

Ode to bouillon: the little cubes pack trace amounts of this and that; their real value in a crisis is to make plain food a little more palatable. In a crisis, protein would be hard to come by and would be rationed; bouillon would be a useful gastronomic ruse.

It's inexpensive, easy to store, and if it doesn't last until the end of time, it comes pretty darn close.

In a crisis, your whole mindset about food would have to shift, which would be hard for me, because my mindset already had to shift once – from fat is bad to fat is good. In a crisis, you'd be looking for high calorie content, high carb content, because you'd be trying to keep people alive.

Most apocalyptic authors agree that post-apocalypse, people would actually eat better – you'd wind up eating mostly vegetables and protein, with occasional fruit in season, nuts, probably; you'd drink mostly water.

March 3, 2012

When I think about a back-to-the-stone-age thing, I remember that big storm several years ago when we lost one tree, so many limbs that we couldn't get the cars out of the driveway, and we were out of power for 2 full days. For the most part I loved those two days – the weather was nice, we just opened some windows and had a couple of battery-operated fans. The gas stove worked, so I cooked up stuff out of the refrigerator, including some muffin batter that happened to be left over, and I made coffee on the stovetop with the percolator. I sat outside in the nice warm sun—it was so quiet with no electrical things running \-- and read an actual book and drank coffee and ate fresh muffins – of course, I also spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get workmen to come out and set us up new windows, which wasn't fun; it was good to know that keeping one non-electric landline phone around was worth the trouble, tho.

March 12, 2012

Still need to do an off-grid test run – weather will be nice soon, so. We've got a Duracell Powerpack 600, a large backup battery with several AC outlets, and we've got a hotplate. Need to see how many times we could use the hotplate off the giant battery in a crisis – to heat soup, boil water; anyway, it would be more times than we could boil water with hopes and wishes, but still need to get a pad of paper, a pen, and start testing.

March 15, 2012

So did a search for how to build a solar oven, and scrounged through and finally chose one made with one of those metallic windshield reflector thingies (though cardboard covered in aluminum foil would also presumably work). All you do is first, paint the outside of an old saucepan with good black paint. Then, when the food is in it, wrap it up in a turkey oven cooking bag (very cheap and re-usable), get a box or bucket to be the base, make a funnel with the windshield thing, use a cake rack or something so that the pot sits up in the funnel and doesn't fall into the bucket, and point the funnel at the sun.

Oops – just found a great modification; we can use one of the giant metal bowls we bought when the restaurant across the way was closing out – even easier – just put the pot in the big metal bowl, get the windshield reflector to wrap around it – the guy in the sample has buckets with rocks set on either side to make sure it doesn't fly away – wow, that would be really easy. So I need to print out the instructions, gather the supplies, and put all that in one place so that it'll be available if we ever need it.

Solar cooking has the obvious advantage of not requiring materials to burn; but also if you were trying to hide from bad guys, smoke from a fire would give you away. Doesn't mean I still don't want a giant, built-in brick outdoor pizza oven, tho.

NOTE: one of the pages about solar ovens said that they used the oven at night to gather ice – just set it up and point it to an empty area of the sky and put water in the pot. The site said that they would get ice when the night temps were as high as 75 degrees – hafta try that. In some of the apocalypse books people die when their meds that require refrigeration stop working. Sometimes if you can just stay alive a few more days, help will come -- at least in fiction, probably in reality, too.

March 17, 2012

The big herb garden that I planted the first year we moved here is doing really well: rosemary, thyme, chives, parsley, mint, lots of oregano. Did a search online and found this info:

A team of British and Indian researchers reported that the essential oil of Himalayan oregano has strong antibacterial properties that can even kill the hospital superbug MRSA. Professor Vyv Salisbury, who was part of the research, said: 'We have done a few preliminary tests and have found that the essential oil from the oregano kills MRSA at a dilution 1 to 1,000. The tests show that the oil kills MRSA both as a liquid and as a vapor and its antimicrobial activity is not diminished by heating in boiling water.'

We usually have oil of oregano around for cold season – husband will drop a couple drops on a saline snorter and snort it directly upinthenose – it's almost painful, but very effective – Dad tried it and got rid of a sinus infection that all the doctor's prescription meds hadn't made a dent in.

Also found

Recipe: Cough Remedy:

Steep a few oregano leaves in boiling water for three minutes, then squeeze the leaves into a spoon, adding lime juice – author says it's the best cough medicine around;

We've also got a small lime tree in back, so renewable cough medicine, comforting thought.

Rosemary is apparently good for your brain and eyes. Parsley is said to be a natural diuretic and useful to treat UTI's. Also aloe vera really just abounds in the backyard, which is good for burns and skin issues.

So I guess if we were in a back to the stone age situation, the herb garden would be a help beyond just revving up plain rice, which is mostly what I had originally thought we'd use it for, apocalyptically.

March 19, 2012

So, my other big apocalypse Monday type of problem is that it's hard for me to think when my hair is dirty – in school, I would always have to brush my hair before a test; watching super-heroines on tv with lovely locks flowing in the breeze I always think that in the real world they would pull their hair into a pony tail; how could you fight crime with hair in your eyes; anyway, one of our prepper books advised using a 3 gallon handheld sprayer – the kind of thing people use in the garden to spray insecticide, but Don't Put Insecticide In It; you put water in it and hand-pump it and then you have a forceful stream of water to use as a shower.

We got one at one of those big box stores, and now we find that it works! Our hot water heater died. So we hauled out the sprayer, filled it with water, let it sit in the sun all afternoon, and boom goes the dynamite, we've got warm water. It wound up being a two-person thing – I stood in the tub and husband directed the water at me, but I was able to wash my hair in water warmed by the sun. The tank was already black, so it absorbed the sun more readily – in fact, it was kinda hot to the touch. It wound up being pretty fun to have husband spray me with water; the dog thought we were nuts.

March 22, 2012

Fat, fat, fat. I was around before everybody decided all at once that fat made you fat, which assumes that the astronomically complex human digestive process is roughly equivalent to something a third grader could create in an hour in science class; assuming as well that for thousands and thousands of years every single human on the planet was eating wrong and only now have we reached a level of scientific accuracy to finally understand that what the body really requires for health is fat-free processed faux food saturated with high fructose corn syrup.

Rant, old lady, rant.

Anyway, the body requires fat to function, and in terms of storing up food for the end of times, it's the most difficult one – you can store high quality seeds to grow fruit and vegetables, which we've done, you can have processes to obtain protein from the earth, which we've done, but if you want fat you have to have a cow, man, or a goat, to get full-fat milk and butter and cheese, or I guess a coconut tree. That's hard to do in a downtown neighborhood. So I always have lots of butter and cream in the fridge; butter will actually do fine at room temperature for long periods, and cream can be diluted with water to make milk to stretch out the last of it and feed more people. I also keep canned ghee around, which has a pretty long shelf life.

Luckily, coconut oil is kind of in vogue right now and widely available – that stuff is not only really good for you – it even helps prevent flu – it can be used in many many ways – we make homemade vapor rub with it, and face scrubs and use it for moisturizer and hair conditioner.

I buy the big jugs of peanut oil, and I have a big jar that I use to filter used oil so I can re-use it. I don't really like doing that, but I figure if I have a process set up it would be simpler in a crisis. It'd be nice to be able to make homemade donuts, and a standard croquette recipe stretches leftovers – bit of leftover chicken, potatoes or rice, one egg, flour or crushed crackers, make into balls and deep fry.

Recipe: Homemade Sourdough Donuts:

Note: use a tuna can to cut donut, bottle cap for donut hole

1/2 cup sourdough starter

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbsps shortening

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking power

1 egg

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup sour milk or buttermilk

Sift dry ingredients, stir into the wet ingredients, roll out and cut. Let rise until puffy.

Heat oil to 390 degeee and fry. The temperature of the oil is very important when making donuts.

Note: make buttermilk substitute: 1 cup milk, add tablespoon of lemon juice OR vinegar OR 3/4 tsp of cream of tartar. Let it sit 5-10 minutes. If you have a good, standard old-fashioned cookbook, it will have a whole section on substitutes like this.

I've started saving bacon grease in jars; that stuff will last till the end of time, and at some point biscuits and bacon gravy made with bacon grease and powdered milk will sound better than it does now. Really, our great grandmothers always saved bacon grease -- you can buy vintage bacon grease cans on eBay. Oh, and several months into a crisis could still make hash browns from the dehydrated hash browns you can get at the regular store, fried up in bacon grease, yum.

Disquieting to think if we died in a car wreck, people cleaning out the house would find my sad pathetic jars of bacon grease and wonder what in the world. Sigh.

March 26, 2012

Items to barter? We're actually doing pretty well on storing stuff we'd need to survive; maybe we should start thinking about what to keep for bartering. In apocalypse books there are always scenes of barter areas in town squares – sometimes bad guys have taken all the good stuff and you have to barter with them, and sometimes people just gather in hopes of exchange, but most end of the world authors think this is what would happen. I remember in one book the guy with beehives could get anything he wanted; everyone craved sweets, and it was renewable. Coffee and whiskey and cigarettes are also items high on everybody's list. Toilet paper. Sewing kit. Heavy duty trash bags and baggies. Eventually decks of cards and dominoes and chess sets would be really valuable to people long accustomed to unending streams of entertainment.

I need to practice making ginger beer – from what I've read, the stuff is very very mildly alcoholic and bubbly, which in the end of days should get you almost anything you want. One of the books on fermentation has a couple of recipes that could be done fairly easily – liquor from bread, like they've done in Russia forever. Oh! also, we could make cough syrup.

If we had bees and a lime tree and ginger in the garden and water, we could make gingerbeer in a fairly renewable way – not on a huge scale, but for occasional fun or trade.

March 30, 2012

Some of the health food type stores sell seed mixtures to sprout – I've read that some sprouted seeds have lots of vitamins in them, sometimes more than the full grown guys. Make a note to occasionally buy sprout packets at those stores – it seems as if, even in a nuclear winter, you could sprout seeds inside for vitamins.

Lentils have the third-highest level of protein, by weight, of any legume or nut, after soybeans and hemp. (Also, note, the website said that when sprouted, lentils have all the amino acids you need.) Another website claims that sailors would sprout lentils to keep scurvy at bay on long voyages.

How to sprout lentils:

1. Put the dry lentils in a Mason jar, or even a colander. Add water, roughly 2:1 water to lentils and let sit overnight. Remember that the lentils will eventually almost triple in size so be sure your container is big enough. Use cheesecloth or tea towel held down by the mason jar lid.

2. Drain the water out of the jar, replace the cloth. Every 12 hours, add water to the jar, swish it around and then drain it out again. The idea is to keep them moist.

3. Keep going for 2-4 days until they are long enough.

You can make a fun salad with the sprouted lentils; add chopped whatever's in the garden -- tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, herbs; also nuts, couscous, rice, then put salad dressing on top. Lentil sprouts need refrigeration, so at the end of the world you'd hafta eat them pretty quick. Seems as if you could mix the sprouts with cooked lentils, add a bit of tomato sauce and taco spices and get something like taco filling.

Recipe: Basic Salad Dressing

3 Tablespoons Oil; 2 Tablespoons Vinegar, Salt & Pepper

Shake or whisk. Add herbs to taste.

April 5, 2012

Defense? Saw on a television show a lady just threw cayenne pepper in a guy's face; that worked. Try to remember to look online for pepper spray recipes -- wonder if it could be made at home.

April 10, 2012

Never remembered to put down the bugout lists.

The same class where I learned how to put together a work bugout bag said to have another, more complete, bugout bag at home, and we've got just one pretty good one, on the way out the door, with socks and underwear and non-perishable eats; plus I keep several sturdy, empty bags in that vicinity, to use in scooping up stuff quickly on the way out.

Really, I'm not crazy; it's not that much trouble to store this kind of stuff.

I think we've decided that in bugging out, I'd drive and husband and dog would be in the backseat doing guard duty. Also hafta remember to put on an adult diaper before leaving. Here's the list:

Ten Minute Drill

Bible

Security supplies, Quick food (Nuts-Peanut Butter Crackers)

Special box with knives and Water Filter & Radio

Vitamins-Advil , Plastic cups

Dog food, leashes, family phone numbers

Flashlights, Chocolate Bars, Cellphones, Backup battery, Watches

Boots, rain jackets, Binocs, Blue blankets, Batteries

Wallets $$$, Tool box, Eye Glasses (extra), Water jug, big battery

Twenty minute drill

_Add_ :

Rice beans, Toilet paper-

Can opener, Iodine-Alcohol-cotton pads, powdered Gatorade

Sleeping bag, Extra Maps, Bricks, Radios, Liquor, Percolator Coffee pot & Coffee, Compass

Towels, Cast iron skillet

Work Gloves, Matches, Tent, Pillows, Clothes-more extensive, Bandages, Food pantry-quick-tea, Backpack

Knives-forks, ice chest

One hour

_Add_ :

How-to books, Soap, Shampoo

Pens & paper, Bleach, Vinegar, Umbrellas

Trash bags, Thermometer, Sunscreen, Scissors, Ziplock bags, Battery Fan

Four hour

_Add_ :

Salt, Mortar & Pestle, Candles, Hatchet, Cooler, Magnifying glass

April 17, 2012

Of course, in a bugout situation, the ideal vehicle would be from the seventies, to make sure it isn't dependent upon electronics to run – electronics that would fry in an EMP event. It would have 4-wheel drive; might even be diesel. It would have an extra storage compartment on the roof. It would have a mobile ham radio. It would have a husband ready to protect you.

Re-reading _Lucifer's Hammer_ , noticed that four wheel drive was the difference between life and death; dramatic scenes of just making it up the hill before the dam breaks, while people in luxury sedans spun out and were crushed under tons of mud and water.

Still think it'd be cool to have a big, ugly old van that has been retrofitted to have decent living space inside, including potty facilities. A nice vehicle that obviously has living space would likely get you killed on the road, but something that looked like a pile of junk would be safe and so cool.

April 21, 2012

Dessert at the end of the world. Good news is that unsweetened chocolate and cocoa have long shelf lives; it's the added sugar that goes rancid, so I'm making every effort to keep baking chocolate and good cocoa in stock. Also simple hard candies.

Prob'ly one reason sheltering in place is almost appealing – we don't do dessert much at present, but at the end of days, gee, what choice would we have?

We keep a giant bag of chocolate chips in the freezer, along with pre-made chocolate chip cookie dough. Should probably put a cheesecake in there as well, or an ice cream cake. Ice Cream Cake presents a time-sensitive dessert-imperative -- guys, we have to eat this NOW!

Plan is to grab a bag or two of apples in an end-of-the-world-grocery-run – apple pie, apple crisp, apple dumpling, Homer Simpson noise.

Just realized what a great excuse the apocalypse is to store good liqueurs – a little Grand Marnier would be a very cheering thing.

Our grandmothers could whip up fab desserts from just the stuff in the pantry because they knew the chemistry of how recipes work and could substitute and guess. I can do that a little, but printing out recipes can't hurt:

Here's a classic recipe for Apple Crisp -- would also work with canned fruit, like peaches, (with canned fruit wouldn't need the water in the recipe) or re-hydrated dried fruit \-- just put dried fruit in bowl, cover with boiling water, let sit 20 minutes. Nothing here requires refrigeration, all but the butter is stored in the pantry, and you can use canned ghee if it comes to that.

Recipe: Apple Crisp

Ingredients

Original recipe makes 1 9x13-inch pan

10 cups all-purpose apples, peeled, cored and sliced

1 cup white sugar

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup water

1 cup quick-cooking oats

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degree C).

Place the sliced apples in a 9x13 inch pan. Mix the white sugar, 1 tablespoon flour and ground cinnamon together, and sprinkle over apples. Pour water evenly over all.

Combine the oats, 1 cup flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda and melted butter together. Crumble evenly over the apple mixture.

Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for about 45 minutes.

Recipe: Pantry Cookie Bars

1 cup dried fruit, chopped fine

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

1 tablespoon lemon juice (what -- you don't take home lemon juice packets from restaurants?)

1 tablespoon grated lemon rind, if you have lemons

1 cup flour

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp salt

8 tablespoons butter -- or ghee in a can

1 1/2 cups quick oatmeal

3 tablespoons milk (made from dried or canned)

All from the pantry if you store ghee for butter and lemon juice in jars or packets. Ah! use the Grand Marnier for the lemon juice.

Cook the fruit and water until thick, add lemon juice & rind and let cool.

Mix flour, brown sugar and salt. Cut in shortening with pastry cutter or two knives like scissors. Add oatmeal and mix, then add milk.

Put half the dough in a greased 8-inch pan, spread fruit on top, then cover with the rest of the dough. Bake 40 minutes at 350F, cut into bars.

May 5, 2012

Recipe: Sourdough starter from scratch

One envelope of yeast, 2 cups water, 2 cups flour, in a non-metal container, loosely covered for 2-4 days, until it bubbles.

When you use it, you feed it back 1 cup flour and 1 cup water.

I originally used one I bought online but made my own recently, and it worked fine. Nice to know I could make a new one if severe heat killed the existing one. Sourdough biscuits are so addictively good and are basically just flour and water and salt. And nowadays there's such a thing as shelf-stable bacon....

Recipe: Sourdough Trail Biscuits

1 1/2 cups starter

1 1/2 teaspoons honey or sugar or other sweetener

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 tablespoon butter or other oil or bacon grease

Mix and knead to make a soft dough. I heat the butter in a cast iron skillet, then break up the dough into egg size portions, flip in the melted butter, cover the skilled and let it all rise for half an hour or more, then cook in 375 oven for about 15 minutes.

May 12, 2012

Got a great deal on a vintage fondue pot! These were a big deal in the fifties, and then later, if memory serves, in the seventies; anyway, this one was only used maybe once, and it still had its original recipe book in it. Fondue pots are great for power outages – you can make omelets, welsh rarebit, queso, bananas foster, all with just a small sterno fuel thingie you can buy at the grocery store.

I double-checked on ebay, and you can get these things pretty darn cheap. Also need to make a note to buy good metal skewers when we see them at garage sales.

So gotta stock up on fondue cheese; at this house, as long as the gas is on, could have homemade sourdough french bread and fondue; how very continental and romantic. Come to think of it, stuff out of the fridge, stuck on sticks, dipped in cheese is a good way to eat up the perishables. And husband always says, "I'll eat dirt if you put cheese on it" so there you go.

Recipe: Cheese Fondue

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup dry white wine

1/2 pound shredded Swiss cheese

1/2 pound shredded Gruyere cheese

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

DIRECTIONS:

Simmer wine in fondue pot. Add Swiss cheese, Gruyere cheese, 1/4 pound at a time. Whisk after each addition of cheese until melted. Stir in flour. When all the cheese has melted, stir in salt and nutmeg. Serve with cut-up French bread. Try tossing the cheese with the flour before adding it in to ease clump problem.

You can also buy fondue cheese in a box at some stores and just follow directions on the box.

This is my go-to recipe for bread and pizza -- for pizza, just use the one rising. A lot of people think they're allergic to gluten when they're really allergic to fructan -- sourdough rising kills the fructan.

Recipe: Sourdough French bread

1 cup sourdough starter

2 cups warm water

4 cups flour

2 tsp salt

2 tsp sugar

4 cups flour

Mix 1st three, cover and let sit overnight -- it's called a sponge.

Next day mix in the salt and sugar and enough flour to make a dough; cover and let sit for 20 minutes. Then knead, adding enough flour to make a good dough. If you don't know how to knead, go right now and check YouTube for a video demonstration. Let rise until doubled, shape into two loaves. Let rise until doubled again. Brush loaves with water, bake 450 for half an hour or so.

May 22, 2012

Saw movie with forced, unexpected shelter in place scenario, with several hapless idiots and one friend who goes certified maniac in the crisis. That could so happen -- you wouldn't want to actually hurt someone who's something of a friend, but you can't let the one crazy run so far amuck that relatively innocent people die, and you really don't want to even throw the maniac out and hope the zombies don't eat him – solution would be the zip ties that you can buy at the hardware store. Cops on real life cop shows use them as handcuffs, so they must be viable – might be a solution if someone was just freaking out – just to keep him in one place and unable to hurt himself or other people just until he calms down – to keep him from pouring a gallon of water over his head because it would be funny, or from taking a whole loaf of bread to feed the birds because they look sad or from "comforting" the pretty young girl who has sought shelter with the group.

May 30, 2012

Here's what I'm thinking of as the last meal kind of recipe – made with the last scraps of stuff from the pantry – flour, bit of sugar, shortening, and a cup of molasses. Makes 2 pies. You can also make pie crust with sugar and cinnamon or jam and call it pie dough cookies; it's better with butter but okay without if it's the end of the world.

Recipe: End of the World Pie

Pastry for 2 crust pie

2 cups sifted flour

½ cup sugar

½ tsp baking soda

¼ cup shortening

1 cup light molasses or cane syrup

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup hot water

line 2 8" pie pans with pastry, flute edges

combine flour, sugar,1/2 tsp baking soda and shortening and mix to make crumbs. divide crumbs evenly between 2 pastry lined pie pans and spread in smooth layers

combine molasses, 1 tsp baking soda and hot water. pour over crumbs in pie pans

bake in moderate oven 375 40 minutes. Work fast -- once you combine the baking soda and hot water so you won't lose the leavening properties before the pie reaches the oven.

**Recipe: Pie Pastry** :

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 cup shortening

1/2 cup water

In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Cut in shortening with two knives scissor-style or a pastry cutter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in water until mixture forms a ball. Divide dough in half, and shape into balls. Roll out in circle and put in pie pans.

Recipe: End of the World Cake

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 1/4 cups plus 2 tsp water

1/3 cup shortening

2 cups raisins

1/2 tsp nutmeg

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon cloves

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

Cook on the stove the sugar, water, shortening, raisins and spices. Boil 3 minutes, then cool.

Dissolve the salt and baking soda in 2 tsp of water. Add to the cooled mixture, then blend in the flour and baking powder. Bake in greased and floured 8-inch pan for 50 minutes at 325F.

Notes: mix 2 tablespoons molasses with white sugar to make brown sugar. The spices can be adapted to what you have, but the raisins aren't optional in this recipe -- I'd guess that two cups of any dried fruit would work, but I haven't tested it.

June 3, 2012

Psalm 91 is called "the Psalm of Protection." There are stories stretching back to Civil War times, of people praying this psalm and being protected from devastating situations.

It describes apocalyptic situations and promises that God will protect you if you call on Him:

•the snare of the fowler, or traps set by bad guys

•pestilence – or disease, pandemics

•terror by night, includes all the evils that come through man: kidnapping, robbery, rape, murder, terrorism, and wars

•the arrow that flies by day – wars

•the destruction that lays waste at noon – natural disasters

I probably should buy this book for everybody I love – from Peggy Joyce Ruth's _Psalm 91_ book:

Did you know that every evil known to man will fall into one of these four categories we have named in chapters 6 through 9 (verses 5–6 of Psalm 91): terror, arrows, pestilence, or destruction? And the amazing thing is that God has offered us deliverance from them all.

God has said in His Word that we will not be afraid of terror, arrows, pestilence, or destruction... these things will not approach us—if we dwell in His shelter and abide in His shadow. This psalm is not filled with exceptions or vague conditions as if trying to give God an out or an excuse to fail to fulfill the promises. Rather, it is a bold statement of what He wants to do for us.

Psalm 91

King James Version (KJV)

91 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

9 Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation;

10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.

June 5, 2012

In any event, it's always seemed to me, people of faith are more likely to survive, because the idea of death, while scary, doesn't produce blanked-out panic. I might die today \-- I'll get to see grandma! But I also might not; let's see what we can do to keep everybody safe.

June 15, 2012

Another reoccurring scenario in books is the "are-you-valuable-enough-to-keep" scene; sponge-worthy, food- and shelter-worthy. You are bugging out along the road, find a community of people who are doing well and ask to stay. They ask: what skills do you have? If you're an engineer or a doctor, you're pretty much in.

Alcoholic middle-managers, bleached blonde divorcees with superior yoga skills and keen fashion sense, pale, spindly-limbed computer programmers, and such as this aren't going to find much of a welcome anywhere. One character in _Lucifer's Hammer_ gets an in because he comes with books that tell how to do things people two centuries ago all knew how to do – farm, make soap, build a wagon, fix a plow.

Books would have to be our salvation – at some point, though, a sourdough cook would be valuable, wouldn't she? And someone who knew how to treat sickness with herbs and stuff? I guess being a good shot with a crossbow would help, especially if you had your own crossbow. Mechanical and construction skills.

Poets probably not so much.

July 2, 2012

Reflecting lately how we've gradually come to the point that much of our food intake is actually medicine –green soup, green miso soup, kefir, birdseed porridge made with coconut oil, kombucha, golden milk, licorice tea, sauerkraut with live probiotics, ditto pickles, ditto milk.

Nourishing your body with probiotics strengthens your immune system.

Neither of us has actually taken that many antibiotics in our life, but somewhere along the line my tummy got messed up somehow – a few years back had the life changing experience of drinking low-temp pasteurized milk – I'd heard it had probiotics in it. The Very Next Morning, woke up, took a couple of gingko pills and waited for the inevitable, uncomfortable belching that always accompanied taking any pill of any kind, when all of a sudden my tummy started gurgling, happily digesting away.

Husband drank fresh milk at his grandparents' farm when he was little; his tummy has always worked fine. My father reports that after being raised on a farm, the first time he had city milk, pasteurized milk, he spat it out, thinking something was wrong with it. Anyway, happy enough with the low-temp pasteurized milk I can get a couple of places in the city – almost never have the belch, belch, belch, yuch that I had come to accept as my lot in life.

Recipe: Golden Milk

1 cup of milk

about 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric paste

1 teaspoon sweetener (honey, maple syrup or agave syrup or stevia)l

1/2 teaspoon of sweet almond oil (make sure it's the edible kind)

Spices: I use ginger, cardamom, and sometimes cinnamon

Good dash of black pepper -- to substantially increase the absorption of the turmeric

Heat the milk with the spices, including the pepper, until very hot but not boiling. Then add the tumeric paste, turn off the heat and whisk until very well dissolved.

**Recipe: Turmeric Paste**

This makes a turmeric paste that you can store in the refrigerator .

Instructions: Take 1/4 cup turmeric powder, mix with 1/2 cup pure water and simmer over medium-high heat for at least 7 minutes, stirring constantly. Sometimes I add cardamom pods and fresh ground black pepper. You will notice a thick paste form. If it gets too dry while cooking you can add additional water. Once cooled, put into a glass jar and put in fridge. This is good for a few weeks to one month.

July 6, 2012

Shopping at big box store, found good solid, heavy pipe about 4 feet long; joked to husband – this is what they should have on _Walking Dead_ – a zombie-poker to keep them a couple feet away before you can get to them. Husband made the purchase; I guess he's as crazy as I am at this point.

If you can joke about being crazy, that means you're not crazy, right?

July 30, 2012

Youngest niece bday – got her one of those really big flashlights for her car – she figured it out instantly –not only a light, but a weapon! Even before we were in apocalypse-prep mode, we always gave emergency radios to the youngsters when they went away to school – radio with AM-FM, weather, and a light that all works with a wind-up handle after the battery dies.

August 22, 2012

Hot here.

I've found powdered Gatorade and got that in storage, because we don't drink sugared drinks as a rule here; also found out that coconut water will work much the same way as commercial electrolyte drinks, so we've got some of those as well.

Thinking that in a crisis family might have to hike here in the hot weather and be in a mess upon their arrival, so need to have rehydration stuff available.

Then here's a recipe for homemade version:

Recipe: Rehydration solution

½ teaspoon salt; ½ teaspoon baking soda; 3 tablespoons sugar; one quart/liter of water

August 28, 2012

Did a Google Earth search of this neighborhood and took a screen shot – now we have a map to the houses around here that have pools. Useful in the one specific situation where zombies are afoot, and we need to make a fast, coordinated run for water.

September 13, 2012

_Alas, Babylon!_ is one of the few books that makes a big deal about the need for salt; remember, an old Trivial Pursuit question is what have the most wars been fought over, and the answer isn't land or water, it's salt.

In the book, when they run out of salt, people start getting tired easily and sick more quickly, and it's all because the human body needs salt, especially human bodies having to engage in physical activity to stay alive. In that book, they find ancient salt fields or something; around here, that seems pretty unlikely, so we are storing it. Whole Foods has cool, funky salts in bulk, which are fun; Costco has big brown bags of regular salt.

## Chapter 3: January, 2013

January 7, 2013

When thinking of feeding a crowd with limited resources, you start to understand soup.

At this moment, if the world shut down, we'd have one large broccoli plant in the back garden – if we had to try to get Vitamin C into a large group of people, it would have to become broccoli soup; probably broccoli-cheese soup, light on the cheese. Ditto the kale plant. I've started storing potato flakes, which could become potato soup, again, light on the cheese – and the chives in the garden would come in handy there. Peanut butter soup – broth, garlic, ginger, cumin, sesame oil, greens, tomatoes, peanut butter, bit of rice – that's stretching the peanut butter further than it'd go for sandwiches. Canned asparagus would have to become soup at some point. I also try to store canned unsweetened milk and cream, to make asparagus soup bit more palatable.

Probably need to buy a good quality masher, since wouldn't have a blender.

If the girls are reading this someday, just want to point out -- first, that I pray the Psalm of Protection over you every day -- second, that in recipes there are things that can be left out in special circumstances -- if you don't have Worcestershire, or onion or celery, it doesn't mean you can't make the soup. If you don't have chicken stock but you do have bouillon cubes, use one or two of those in the same volume of water. If you don't have milk but you have dry milk powder and water, it's okay to follow the directions to get milk from those two things. It's okay to leave some things out, usually. It's okay to use substitutes. It's okay to use common sense.

Recipe: EASY POTATO SOUP

This easy recipe uses the potato flakes as a base.

2 cups Milk

2 cups 1/4 Water

1/2 cup Onion, chopped

1/3 cup Celery, chopped

2 Tb Butter

1 tsp Salt

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

1 drop Worcestershire Sauce

1 cup Potato Flakes

Directions

Heat (do not boil) the milk and water in a saucepan. Stir in the chopped onion, celery, butter, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce and potato flakes. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Serve hot or chilled topped with chives. Makes 4 servings.

Recipe: Asparagus Soup

1 can asparagus

1/2 cup chopped onion

1 (14.5 ounce) can chicken broth

1 teaspoon salt

1 pinch ground black pepper

Herbs from the garden.

1 cup some form of dairy -- canned cream, canned milk

1 teaspoon lemon juice

In a large saucepan, combine asparagus, chopped onion, and chicken broth. Cover, and bring to a boil over high heat. Use a potato masher to mash it all up well.

Add the dairy and heat until hot but not boiling. It's actually pretty good stuff, though way probable that the picky eaters would whine and moan on Asparagus Soup Day.

Recipe: Peanut butter Soup

2 cups chicken broth

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup dairy

Fresh or ground ginger

Fresh cilantro or parsley from the garden

Whisk together, heat, serve. If you're trying to feed a lot of people in a real crisis, you'd use a larger broth-to-pbutter ratio, or even add several cups of plain water.

March, 2013

Really irritated at the local cable company; I mean, who isn't, but ran across the information that HD television signals flow free in the air, and all you need is an HD antennae to pick 'em up. Did some research, bot one, and now we can get basic, local channels for free even when cable goes out, which is more often than is really reasonable. The whole thing is a weird amalgam of old and new – we get just networks and PBS, just like when I was a kid, but we get them in crazy gorgeous HD on the fancy TV, and you have to be present to watch.

March 23, 2013

So making every effort to keep the following in stock in the fridge, several deep: wienies, bacon, local, probiotic sauerkraut, cream cheese blocks, big blocks of mozzarella cheese, big block of cheddar cheese, box of fondue cheese, boxes of butter. Those things last for months and months, and we do use them, so it's not wasteful. Also try to keep three dozen eggs in the house all the time; that way almost always will have two dozen available. Also buy one of those small, $10 hams that are good for months; basically always have one in the fridge – close to its use by date use it up, then buy another. Always have a good stock of yeast, both the little envelopes and the big bags – there's one big bag in the freeze right now and one in the fridge.

April 5, 2013

So husband wants to get a generator – my idea is that would be signing our death warrant. Here so close to the city, if we had power when nobody else did, somebody would just kill us for the house. But maybe if we just ran it very occasionally, just to keep the refrigerator running? Hafta think about it.

I think it'd be better just to get the house into the kind of shape where you could survive off grid – screens on windows, windows that open, a wood burning fireplace, maybe a root cellar, maybe a screened-in porch, since the problem in this area is more staying alive through intense heat than anything else.

April 6, 2013

No eggs in apocalypse. Generally, online recommendations are to use ¼ cup pureed fruit or veggie per egg to replace, or avocado, or condensed soup. Smushed prunes. Google vegan recipes -- they don't use milk or eggs.

Eggless Brownies

1 cup flour

1 cup white sugar

¼ cup and 2 tbsp cocoa powder,

½ tsp baking powder,

½ tsp salt

½ cup water

¼ cup veg. oil

¼ cup applesauce

½ tspn vanilla extract (

Bake in a 8x8 square baking dish for 25 min at 350F

Eggless Cornbread Muffins

1 And 1/2 Cups All Purpose Flour

3/4 Cup Cornmeal

3/4 Cup Sugar

3 Teaspoons Baking Powder

1 Teaspoon Baking Soda

1/4 Teaspoon Salt

1 And 1/4 Cups Dairy

1 Tablespoon Apple Cider Vinegar

1/4 Cup Oil

1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract

Preheat oven to 400F/200C for 15 minutes. Grease or line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners.

Mix together the dairy and vinegar; set aside for a couple of minutes until it curdles.

In a large bowl combine together the dry ingredients.

In another bowl whisk together the curdled milk mixture, oil and vanilla extract.

Gently fold in the wet ingredients into the dry mixture.

Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the muffin comes out clean.

Transfer to a wire rack and let it cool for at least 5 minutes before removing from the pan.

Is there such a thing as a cast-iron muffin pan? Better check.

Recipe: Pantry Pumpkin Muffins -- Eggless

1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix

1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 12 cup muffin pan or line with paper liners.

In a large bowl, mix together the cake mix, pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves until smooth. Spoon equal amounts of batter into the prepared muffin cups.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, until a toothpick inserted in the center of one comes out clean.

April 8, 2013

Husband looked this document over and said, "fire extinguishers."

Really, we know tons of people; we are related to tons of people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on gorgeous houses and forget to spend twenty dollars on a fire extinguisher to protect it all.

Baking soda for kitchen grease fires. You can buy a giant box of baking soda, put it in your kitchen and forget about it -- until you need it for a grease fire.

I'm getting to be an expert on estate sales – practically every single estate sale, by the last day will have baggies of good candles for a dollar or less; we've got a good supply for almost no money. Husband never lets me burn candles, but at some point in the end of days you'd have to. He's got lots of rules for candles – try to always have them, if you have to use them, inside a glass container that's not easily knocked over, that's not in a situation where a fluffy dog can brush by and catch on fire.

At the end of days you won't be able to call the fire department.

April 12, 2013

Googled "uses for bandanas" – remembered a mention in one of the prepper books and couldn't find the book. If you have 2-3 bandanas in the car, you can use them for: head cover, slings, face mask like a cowboy, strain water for drinking, as a signal, tied at the ends to make a pouch to carry things, tie that to a stick for a standard hobo bag. In theory you could braid them together and make a rope. Tie together for emergency panties. So those are on order to put in the car and tie to outside of bugout bags; take up negligible room and are pretty cheap.

April 28, 2013

In a comet-strikes the earth, volcano in Yellowstone, or nuclear winter scenario, the air would be full of muck, and the sun wouldn't get through for months or years, so agriculture would be in bad shape; water would be full of crud. Argh.

So decided to store bottles of cod liver oil; small amounts are really sufficient to keep up Vitamin D supplies, which you can usually get plenty of by just standing in the sun for awhile. Also canned salmon, which we don't really like that much, but it's easy to find and not super-expensive. Mixed with dill from the garden and lemon zest and juice, it'd be okay with rice or couscous.

Also bought tinkle pads for the dog – if had to stay indoors because of nuclear fallout, dog would still have to potty, wouldn't she?

May 1, 2013

In one of the nuclear winter books they discussed using heavy duty trash bags and a staple gun and duct tape to make a house somewhat air tight to keep out nuclear fallout. Nowadays you can also buy rubber in a spray can at the big box stores.

When you see the giant flash, drop and cover yourself with something heavy, but something, at least. Read a book about survivors of the Japanese bombings -- people with dark and light patterned clothing had burns where the dark part of the pattern was. So even a white sheet would help some.

May 14, 2013

Read somewhere that in desperate times people can starve to death when there's ample food just because they are so bored of the limits of food choices – at any rate, people do get bored and cranky with limited food choices.

Realized that I'm already growing or storing garlic, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, so if I store garbanzo beans, I could always make a quick hummus, and it's easy to store and cook couscous. [In fact, if I were a nice single girl in an apartment, I would have a vintage fondue pot and store a fair amount of couscous – just boil water, add couscous and salt and let sit -- you could probably do that half a dozen times or more with one sterno -- then make hummus from canned beans]. I've got stuff to make crackers; got recipes to make naan and pita, tho haven't tried it yet; so there's an easy break from a diet that would quickly become beans and rice. Need to start planting bell pepper plants every spring; by the time they turn red they've absorbed lots of sun, and they're good to use to dip the hummus.

.

Recipe Sourdough BirdSeed crackers

1/2 cup starter

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup bs porridge flour (obviously can use regular flour)

1/4 cup sesame seeds (or other seeds - flax, poppy)

Mix it up, except for the seeds. Knead it all together, kneading in the seeds. Roll out to about 1/6 of an inch, poke cute holes with a fork. I use a pizza cutter to cut into cracker size pieces. Carefully put on cookie sheet and cook for about 7 minutes in a 400 oven. Watch it pretty carefully.

June 1, 2013

Finally remembered to buy a big ol' plastic storage thingie to keep large amounts of Epsom salts. In the day to day, hot Epsom salt baths are great for relaxation, getting magnesium into your system, and keeping skin soft. Magnesium is one of the best remedies for migraines, and taking it by way of a hot bath, letting your skin absorb what you need is a very nice way to relax for bedtime. Said to be helpful for autistic children. In the end of the world it's great for cleaning tiny boo boos and helping them to heal more quickly and as a laxative if you take it internally –directions are on the box.

August 2, 2013

Watching old movies with a different understanding lately – Vivien Leigh meeting the boy in an underground shelter during a bomb raid, families grabbing all their possessions and bugging out along the roads in _Fiddler on the Roof_ , Scarlett and Melanie dealing with the renegade soldier trying to steal from and rape them.

Also, read recently one of my free e-books that I downloaded where a real person wrote up her real experiences a century ago and self-published in a small printing but is now available to everybody in the world via the glories of gutenberg.org. The one I read was an upper-class mother writing about living in caves during the battles of Vicksburg – all the nice neighborhoods were being shelled, and they wound up living in caves that the army dug for them. I've always tended to forget that real people had basically these experiences, not really too many decades ago. She wrote of the best day ever – they found wild sassafras root growing in one of the caves and were able to make sassafras tea. Can you make root beer at home?

I need to remember to read the e-books that nurses wrote – probably some helpful real info in them.

July 30, 2013

Honey. Sometimes it'll have a use by date on it, but the real word is, apparently, honey will last forever. They found some in Egyptian tombs and ate it, and it was fine. It may sugar over a bit, but it could be re-heated. High quality is expensive, but I buy a small jar every once in a while to store.

August 13, 2013

See below – it's gotten worse in the past couple of years. Note – there are always scenes of scrounging from neighboring houses in apocalyptic books, particularly in the kind of crisis where large numbers of people die early on. One thing to remember to scrounge would be antidepressants.

August 12, 2013, from The New York Times:

Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four.

Wish more people knew that, even if they are on antidepressants, taking folic acid, a homey little B vitamin, can help the effectiveness of the prescription -- from a _Psychology Today_ article:

L-methylfolate has been shown in several studies to enhance the efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), two commonly prescribed classes of antidepressants.

Antidepressants help with the uptake of serotonin, but if there's no serotonin there, no uptick. Folic acid helps with serotonin levels. In general, high quality B vitamins can do a lot; possibly even taking the place of prescription antidepressants. Unfortunately, many prescription drugs, including birth control pills, drain B vitamins out of your system.

Need to remind the girls that if there's the slightest possibility of getting pregnant, should be taking folic acid -- low levels of it lead to horrendous birth defects, and the baby needs it before you know you're pregnant.

August 23, 2013

So bought several sets of blackout curtains on sale – enough for the windows in the rooms that face the street. If you want people to leave you alone, it probably helps if they don't think you're there. We're just barely urban enough that urban unrest might run screaming down our street.

September 2, 2013

Reading all this apocalyptic fiction, one of the "best laid plans" aspects of being prepared for the end of the world is that you can fill up your property with supplies but then if you happen to not be at your house when an unexpected crisis hits, bad guys sweep through and steal everything.

Like in the comet hits the earth book _Lucifer's Hammer_ , when a character has stocked a big van with mostly barter-able things, like liquor and spices but also homemade dried jerky, but by the time he gets home looters have killed his wife and stolen the van, got drunk on the contents and crashed the van, which burns to a crisp because of all the alcohol. Another character in the book has a fabulous end of the world retreat, but when he gets there the caretaker won't let him in -- who's gonna make him?

Anyway, we live pretty close in to the center of town, which as of recently is full of people living in high rise condos -- downtown would run out of food for this high density population in about five minutes, and our house is walkable in theory.

So we'd be early on the list for low-class looters and rich-executive guy scroungers, hungry and limping in their Bruno Malis: what if I'm here and looters break in and I'm hiding in the master bathroom, with the giant wardrobe blocking the door and police don't come, and looters go through and take all our stuff, what then, my love? So I decided to store some food in unlikely places so that bad guys in a hurry to steal don't take it.

English major brain – or insanity? Common-sense preparedness, or old lady craziness. Determinedly striving for good against evil, or obsessively-compulsively slouching toward the looney bin. Ye pays your money, and ye takes yer chances.

I'm thinking there are two variations of me-barricaded: one, if society hasn't broken down, I barricade and call the cops – we have a standard drill for a standard house invasion scenario, And We Practice It – and two, if cops aren't likely to come, I defend us at the front door.

September 5, 2013

Haven't been here in awhile; very exciting news: I've got my ham radio license! Took a class from the church group in town and managed to pass, feel I am due a bit of self-congratulatory narcissism -- it's the kind of stuff I've never ever studied before: physics and electricity and Ohm's law and electronic schematics and all kinds of math-nerd things.

Ham communication is the ultimate resource in an emergency – even when cell towers are down, even if the internet has been shut down by bad guys, this old-school method will get emergency messages through. Turns out, anybody can listen to ham communications, but you have to have a license to broadcast, and now I do.

September 9, 2013

We've always had code words in our family – a code word for kids for when we send someone to pick them up unexpectedly, so they know that the person really was sent by us – porcupine bingo – something odd. We have a code word for the situation where bad guys are holding me hostage and make me call the husband to make him do something, so _he_ knows I'm in trouble but the bad guys don't know that he knows.

We have agreed-upon places to meet up if we can't get to the house – two places, one closer and one slightly farther out.

The whole reason the _Alas, Babylon_ book has that title is that it was the secret code between the brothers in that book that gave the warning for nuclear disaster.

Revelation 18:10

King James Version (KJV)

10 Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

So we've worked out a code that always starts alas, babylon but then has a suffix qualifier – alas, babylon, emp; alas, babylon, nuclear war, etc.

Different emergencies have different essential actions – sometimes you are supposed to stay home or run home and stay; sometimes you're supposed to run home and pack the car; sometimes you're supposed to run to the store, sometimes you're supposed to try to get the car underground and all the electronics in metal boxes.

In theory, seconds count in a real emergency, so having a quick family code is a good plan.

September 13, 2013

Here's a draft of an **End of the World Shopping List** – when I hear "Alas, Babylon! Store!" here's what I'll rush to the store to buy:

Sacks: potatoes, onions, apples, oranges, grapefruit, garlic

Fruit that stays unrefrigerated for a long time: watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple, green bananas

Lettuce with roots, if there is any; spaghetti squash; cabbage; green avocados, gourds, whole coconuts

Big handful of ginger root

Miso, sauerkraut

Sweet: molasses, maple syrup, brown sugar, honey

Fat: ghee, jarred queso, canned milk and cream, coco oil, giant olive oil can, chocolate chips; parmesan cheese does okay unrefrigerated

raisins, apricots, granola bars, apple sauce, lemon juice, juice concentrates

muffin mixes that don't require eggs, yeast packets, baking powder

Dry cereal that also works as snacks – oat squares kind of thing

yellow cake mix (for the eggless pumpkin muffin recipe)

Canned: fruit, pumpkin puree, veggies, jam

Vitamins: B, C, multi, fish oils, zinc, tryptophan; tinctures of probably anything, but licorice, goldenseal, oregano, grapefruit seed, olive leaf, gingko, propolis if they have it

Canned dog food, rawhides

Ice, Charcoal briquettes

We already store: water and rice and beans and lentils and flour and yeast and dried soup and canned meats and veggies and wine and chicken broth and lemon juice and dried milk and shelf stable milk and bouillon cubes and peanut butter and big jugs of peanut oil and coffee and tea and sugar and toilet paper and matches and batteries, so I wouldn't be competing with most people at the store, who would only then be buying staples, and even then only staples that don't require any actual knowledge of cooking.

Need to print out a copy of the final and put in both cars, in case we're out and about when crisis hits.

There is a scene in _Alas, Babylon_ , where the main character, having advance knowledge of the crisis, goes to the grocery store and buys four grocery carts full – but he buys lots of meat that he puts in the freezer, not thinking that the first thing that's going to happen is the power going out. There's a scene in _Lucifer's Hammer_ where the clueless gal buys extra mascara and blush and curlers and frozen dinners to prepare for the end of days.

Managed to convince husband that just storing prepper-style ready to eat MRE mixes is a bad idea – read and heard several places of people running a test weekend and only eating that stuff and several family members ending up in the hospital – it would be too rough a switch on the body. So we're storing actual real food as much as possible – we don't eat much sugar or dried fruit or granola bars or potatoes because we're lo-carb mostly, so a lot of that stuff would hafta be bought at the last minute.

Looking back through this, it sounds as if my house looks like an episode of _Hoarders_ ; it doesn't. It's storing pre-packaged food that takes up huge amounts of room, not basic staples.

I'm a nosey old lady; I've seen people's pantries -- they're full of two-liter soft drinks and potato chips and cheap kitchen gadgets that broke but she never threw away, and pre-made microwave macaroni dinners and boxes of stale crackers that should have been put in a cracker tin so they wouldn't go stale, and one lonely package of quinoa that she thought she'd learn how to make and never did, and giant sugar-cereal boxes and giant bags of pre-popped popcorn -- apparently even _microwaving_ popcorn is too much trouble for the modern housewife, and

Oh, argh - my phone has been flashing push alerts for several minutes now; should check to see what CNN is so desperate to tell me.

