A New Day, A New Dawn

(Gardening has been updated; Debt has been updated; Prepping has been updated)

Wow. Didn't realize it had been 3 weeks since I last wrote. It's been a long three weeks. I've had pneumonia, had a bad reaction to Levaquin (the antibiotic), my husband lost his job, 2nd oldest daughter received her EAD for the AirForce, and it's baseball season !! I know, most of the world revolves around the common seasons Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer. We only know two seasons: Baseball, and the Rain-y season.

You may have figured out that we are Preppers. We're not like those extreme preppers you see on NatGeo, but we have taken the time and effort to stockpile food and household/personal hygiene items. Not enough to feed the world, but enough that it takes the panic out of something unexpected like a job loss. 

That's a good thing, because I've learned already that "help" in the form of government assistance (i.e., unemployment), takes about 30-60 days to kick in. Wow. We are prepared to cover that, but it made me realize and wonder: what does the average person do? Answer: they panic, they face eviction, they go hungry. 

It's such a simple thing really. I've taught classes on it for years. I don't even do the "traditional storage thing" (someone else called it Siege-er prepping) and store the traditional Wheat-only, oil-only, shortening-only, sugar-only, salt-only stuff. Can you imagine living on just that for 8 weeks? Yikes. Ok, it's better than starving, but not by much.

So back to RealFood Storage. Seriously. Spaghetti sauce was on sale last week for .69 a can. I went out and bought 100 cans (that's $69 for you math folks). When pasta was on sale for .49 a package (this was months ago), I bought 100 of those too ($49). If we had spaghetti every day, I had enough on hand to feed my family for basically two months. Personally, I'd rather eat spaghetti every single day, than wheat-tina. But that's just me, and your mileage may vary.

Is it more expensive than 50# of wheat for $24? Absolutely. But I've experienced wheat fatigue, and you do get to a point quickly where you cannot eat one more spoonful. Fortunately (thank you Dad!) we're a RICE family, so we can largely avoid WF, but you get my point. 

You don't need to be me and buy "a 100 of" one thing. But you really do need to change the mindset. The spaghetti sauce sale limited you to 10 cans at a time. REALLY??? BUY THE 10 CANS !! (yes, I heard from people who were like, "but I only need 2 cans for dinner this week.") Buy the 10 cans. Stick them in the pantry. Look, now you have enough for 5-10 meals for crying out loud depending on if you use 1 can of sauce or 2 per meal. That's like, at least a weeks' worth of sauce, maybe close to two ! And if I have to, I can grind the white wheat berries (or red, sigh) into flour, and make pasta from scratch (yes, I really can do that, I'm not just saying it.)

Now if I just had a three month supply of toilet paper.....