08:07 – Barbara got home around 8:15 last night. Colin and I are delighted.
Email from Jen yesterday. She and her husband spent an evening with another couple who are good friends of theirs, and the subject of prepping came up. Jen’s group is made up of her husband and her, Jen’s brother, his wife, and their two teenagers. The other couple also has six in their group; the two of them, two sons in their early 20’s who still live at home, and a third, older, son and his wife, who live nearby. The other couple lives about 30 miles from Jen, in an area equally suitable to hunkering down, and are prepared at about the same level as Jen and her family, which is to say high.
Apparently, the discussion went from the general to the specific pretty quickly. Jen’s husband mentioned that they’d considered and rejected the idea of buying a place up at the lake, just in case they needed a refuge other than their home. The other couple also intends to hunker down at home, but has concerns about what they’ll do if they do need to evacuate. They eventually came to the obvious conclusion; that each family could serve as the evacuation destination for the other. They all know and like each other, and both families have homes large enough to easily accommodate another half dozen people in an emergency.
Which raised the issue of supplies. Enough food to keep six people fed for a year is enough to keep 12 people fed for only six months. Obviously, if one or the other family needed to evacuate they’d try to haul as much of their supplies and gear along as possible, but there are no guarantees. So both families decided that it made sense to boost their long-term food storage by adding enough bulk staples to support additional people. They both have the storage space available, and the relatively small cost of a couple grand for six person-years of flour, sugar, beans, oil, etc. isn’t a big issue for either. And, as Jen said, even if neither family needs to evacuate that just means they’ll both have what they need to feed themselves for another year, which is no bad thing.
I also had an interesting conversation with Linda, whose daughter and her husband live next door. We stood there talking for half an hour or so. Linda and Danny are maybe five or eight years older than Barbara and me. They’re just regular country people who’ve worked all their lives to get by, and Linda says she’s really worried and disgusted by what’s happening. She volunteered that she and Danny own only one firearm, a .22 that she bought for Danny soon after they were married, and that she thinks they need more guns. Things have really gotten bad when there are nice 60-something church ladies like Linda contemplating shooting people to defend themselves.
11:45 – Yet another email from Jen. Her brother, Jim, and his wife Claire visit Jen frequently, and about half the time they make a Sam’s Club or Costco run on their way over. Jen says the four of them start the visit by hauling stuff from Jim and Claire’s SUV down to the basement, where they stack it to deal with it later. Jen never knows what they’ll bring along. Last time, it was a couple 50 pound bags of flour, 50 more pounds of pasta, a dozen #10 cans of assorted fruit, vegetables, and baked beans, two dozen cans of chicken, and four cases of water. Jen says quite a bit of stuff has accumulated, enough that they need to have another weekend repackaging party, but she needs to order more Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers from LDS on-line before they can do that.