Or possibly your Tuesday, since I'm posting this so late.
1. I had a very eventful trip to California for a family event and lost the brakes in my Explorer on the way home. GOD IS GRACIOUS and we got back to the house alive--the brakes died in a slow, gentle fashion instead of failing on one of the numerous hills between here and Tonapah, Nevada. So I got to experience the great local tow-truck service and the equally great local Les Schwab Tire. Thanks tow-truck guy and brake guy at Les Schwab! But, of course, most of all thank You, Lord.
Here's the thing; the reason that the brakes were failing was that somehow we nicked the brake line while crossing the desert, and the fluid was leaking out. Through God's grace we chose a different route than we had on the trip down to California--one that took us through a town; otherwise there would have been nothing for 300 miles between Tonapah and Carlin, NV.
By the grace of God we wound up coming home through Battle Mountain, which meant that we were able to stop in the eensy weensy little town of Austin NV and buy brake fluid, which we just kept putting in until we got home.
BUT the situation would have been simpler if we had taken a can of brake fluid with us in a car emergency kit. (I even thought to myself before we took off, "should I put together a car emergency kit?" but then decided to content myself with some bottles of water and a first-aid box.)
So the takeaway from my spooky brake experience is this: keep a can of brake fluid, a bottle of power steering fluid, a bottle of antifreeze, and any other fluids your car might need in a box in the trunk, along with a shovel, a blanket, and any other emergency supplies. If you never have to use them, awesome. But they MAY someday save you from having to walk to a call box to call for a tow in the cell-phone-service-deathtrap that is the desert between Tonapah and Battle Mountain. Also, God is great.
2. Interesting things are happening in Cyprus.
Even NPR thinks so, and they are not generally known for being a bastion of preparedness.
Now, I don't want you to go buy silver or gold, or stuff all your money into a mattress, or anything like that. But I do think that it's a good idea ANYWAY at ANY time to have a few hundred bucks in cash put away in a safe place--or several different safe places--in your house. It's not impossible for a bank holiday to be declared here; it's happened before.
You already know that I think you should have a couple of weeks of food on hand. If you look on my sidebar, you'll see the Tang-Heavy Food Storage plan link. This is a very inexpensive, easy, albeit plain and Tang-heavy, way to get a small stockpile. I think you should not be without this, or a healthier equivalent if you have the cash and time to upgrade the stuff on that list. (Personally I can't abide the canned mustard greens. I had some, we made casserole with cream sauce and French's fried onions on top, and they were still only marginal. Instead I store canned green beans and dehydrated peas, which reconstitute to be as good as fresh peas.) All the same thought processes apply to water--I think you ought to have a filter and some bottled water put aside, minimum. You can find much, much, much more on both of these topics with Google.
3. But possibly more important than Stuff to have on hand are Skills--now is the time to make sure you know how to do what you need to do. I was trying to think of a basic List of Necessary Skills a while back. At the moment I'm shaped by recent experiences, so here's a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head list of things that you might want to know about in the weeks and months ahead:
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Homemaking skills like cooking and baking, mending, and simple repairs. They take more practice than you might think. Practice now, while you can still order a pizza if the quiche goes bad.
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Basic automotive knowledge--I didn't really understand there WAS such a thing as a brake line filled with fluid until ours failed, and I've even been trying to learn about cars...I don't know hardly anything, and I don't like it. However, did you know there's usually a little sheet with your car's manual that has a list of all the things you're supposed to do, in an ideal world, to maintain the vehicle? It's useful, and makes you go Google things like "what's a rear differential do?" (Answer: it differentiates. Really. Things on a car have mind-numbingly simple names sometimes. Like a transmission? Transmits. An alternator? Alternates. For serious.)
There are also some good books on the subject that I need to
study more.
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Basic first-aid knowledge and CPR. This is something every adult should have, in my opinion, no exceptions. It's very simple,
a class is about $30, and you could save a life (or several).
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A rudimentary (I do mean rudimentary, because the subject is huge)
knowledge of how economies and financial markets work. This doesn't get into whether you like Adam Smith or not, just how the different markets affect each other. For instance, do you know what "
sovereign debt crisis" means? No? Maybe you want to.
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Math. Can you balance your checkbook? Do you understand your own financial situation? Who owns your mortgage--is it your local bank or another company? What's your interest rate? How much would making double payments save you? Do you get interest on your bank accounts? How much? Have food prices gone up in your neighborhood? By how much? Look at your electricity, water, and natural gas/oil/propane usage. Has your usage increased or decreased since last year? (There's usually a little graph on the bill.) How does it compare to national average? Can you get your usages down at all? Which of your appliances/applications use the most water or power? (My dishwasher uses 3 gallons per load, and my washing machine uses 5 gallons. A bathtub half full of water is about 12 gallons. The biggest energy hog in my house is easily the air conditioner, followed, interestingly, by the flat-screen, which continues to draw power even when it's off unless we turn off the power strip at the wall.) You have to be comfortable enough with percentages and other basic math to
track all these things and make adjustments in your use, or you might get nasty surprises down the road.
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How to localize. This is where I cross paths with hippie-dippies, although I have different motivations. I really don't have a huge beef with The Man (as represented by Walmart and McDonald's), but the problem with big multinational corporations is that when they fail, all their locations shut down. (See: Borders, and many other retail chains--probably J.C. Penny by the end of the year.) Then, because generally a multinational corporation can outperform a local shop, we wind up with neither the local shops nor the big corporations. Note once again that I don't have a problem with corporations as such. They are not evil for existing. They serve a useful function.
I sort of am a middle-of-the-road person on this subject. We eat fast food when we travel and I still buy some things from Walmart and Amazon that I can't find anywhere else. (There are not a lot of places in town that sell kid clothes, for instance.) But I try to buy things from local businesses if I can. So, for instance, I try to check the local hardware place before I go to Home Depot. When the puppy got ahold of my black Roper clogs, I took them to the local boot and shoe repair guy (who only charged me $5 to fix them!) instead of buying a new pair. We get our eggs from a neighbor and will be buying our beef from his aunt. There's a small indie bookstore that I'm trying to check before I buy on Amazon. We would rather patronize the local cafe than the national fast food chains.
These are small steps. I'm not suggesting you never ever buy from a big corporation--I like many things big corporations produce, and for one more repetition: corporations are not inherently evil just because they are big. What I am suggesting is that you diversify, not that you adhere to dogma about this.
That's my bossy rant for the day. What are your thoughts?
Cheers,
Breanna
