Fire Drill and Prep talk with Army daughter

This morning Army daughter came into my library just to have a chat.  I'm trying to work but it's always worth taking a break when one of my kids wants to have a real conversation.  She was asking questions about prepping.  After living here for the last ten months and seeing everything that we do, or at least as much as she can digest, she decided that she wanted to start prepping once they got to their new home.  She wants to put up a lot of food and other supplies. 


For some reason she is worried about an EMP.  She read the book One Second After.  She is so out of touch with what's going on in the world she didn't even realize that Southern California had that big power outage last week.  So it lasted a day.  They really weren't put out too much.  Although there wasn't electricity, the natural gas and water companies were still able to provide their commodities.  There wasn't much suffering.  What if it lasted a week or a month? 


She then brought up the question about what if things really got bad.  She would expect that all my kids would show up at my door with their families.  I told her that they'd have to come with their arms full.  I expect that they'd provide food, other supplies, and some sort of skill set.  She agreed and said that perhaps some things should be bought and left here.  She also said that she doesn't have many skills.  After thinking about it for a while she realized she does have skills.  She's good at hand to hand combat!  She can shoot.  She can cook...(although I'd tend to disagree!).  And she will do hard labor. 


I handed her my autographed Patriots book (runner up writer a while back) and told her to read it.  I explained that it's an exciting story but also a how to handbook.  Yes there are some parts that are a bit over the top like the extensive detail on covering up the windows and doors and having ultralight planes to fly supplies to the new bug-out place, but overall, it's worth reading.  And yes, I'll read Rawles's new book that's coming out next month. 


We had another good dinner tonight.  Yes, I did the cooking.  It was made mostly from storage foods and fresh foods.  Chicken enchiladas with refried beans and home grown tomatoes.  The chicken was Costco canned chicken at $2 per can.  I used two cans.  I used 25 corn tortillas.  I have the ability to make them by hand but today I got them out of the freezer.  Enchilada sauce made out of home made tomato sauce, some home grown seasonings and some from Winco.  Refried beans from dried pinto beans, oil, salt, and onion powder.   The only thing that didn't come from the dry food storage, although I do have 20 pounds of cheese in the freezer, was the shredded cheese.  I still haven't bought freeze dried canned shredded cheese.  That is a future purchase though because I couldn't imagine no cheese and I don't have the skills at the moment to make anything other than soft cream cheese type cheese.  We had two extra for dinner tonight and even the baby ate an entire enchilada.  Total the dinner cost about six dollars for three adults and five kids.  Not bad.


Two extra grand kids are here today.  The four year old called the other day and asked if he could spend the night.  He promised to bring his little brother too.  Sure how about Friday.  About two hours after the older ones got home from school I was in the living room just hanging out watching the baby.  All of a sudden I scooped her up and yelled FIRE!!!!!  I opened the back door and ran to the garden fence.  Granddaughter was playing in her room and she scooped up the two year old and ran out to the fence too.  Grandson and grandson were in the yard stuffing themselves with pears.  They heard the fire call and ran to the back fence as well.  There wasn't a fire.  It was just a fire drill.  They did a great job.


I never did make it to the office today.  Work got 176 hours out of me in the last two weeks.  Working at home today makes us even.