I don't think you could ever have too much of that...

I recently attended a food storage presentation, but due to conflicts in schedule, I was very late and only caught part of it. When I came in, the speaker was asking about how many in attendance had toilet paper in their storage. I turned to the person next to me, and said, (yeah, you guessed it) "I don't think you could ever have too much of that in storage..."

This is true for me on at least a couple of levels--for one, even if you were to meet a goal of, say, a year's supply of toilet paper, it is the kind of resource that is in constant rotation, and it would be difficult to keep it at that level if/when an emergency hit. But there is also the fact (as I think I mentioned to my neighbor) that it has the potential to be a great barter item. In an idea that is not original to me, (thank you, whoever put this on their blog) you should never barter a supply that the person you are bartering with could use against you--a good example of which might be ammunition. So, in my opinion, it can never hurt to have a little (extra?) toilet paper around.

I was also reminded earlier this summer that it would be difficult indeed to store too much water, especially depending on weather conditions (except, of course, when it's raining... :). I was at an amusement park out of state, and we were doing the rounds of rides, when I went on one that didn't quite agree with me. Something to do with spinning around at relatively high speeds, most likely, but in any case, when I got off the ride, I was very overheated and not very happy about it. We had water and we had ice, but it didn't seem to help much. I did not feel very good, and after seeing myself in a mirror and my red-dark red-purplish hue, I was kind of concerned. A person who saw this (who herself looked like she had just arrived at the park fresh from an air-conditioned atmosphere) commented on the heat, and I said, "It looks like you are handling it better than I am." She replied that they (I'm assuming her family/group) had been hitting the water rides. I told her that was probably where we were going next. Then I had a better idea.

Somewhere near the middle of said amusement park, there are a bunch of fountains that spurt up at random times, and people stand in the middle to get a soaking. It appears that usually this activity is pretty much enjoyed by a younger crowd, (i.e. children) but I felt that getting soaked immediately would beat standing in line in the blazing sun some more before getting an unspecified amount of wet, so the square with the fountains was most definitely my best option. I talked to my husband, and off we went. As I said, the fountains appear to be random, but they're very effective, and I was soon pretty soaked. And as a result, I was soon pretty much feeling a lot better. (No matter that the majority of the other people enjoying the fountains seemed to be three and under, or something.... :)

Yeah, it's pretty much a no-brainer that getting wet will cool you off in hot weather, but what was striking to me was the fact that it took a lot more than drinking water and eating ice to cool off in this scenario. In an emergency situation, it seems likely that water would be monitored very carefully, and there wouldn't be fountains to cool off in. Any "extra" water that can be put aside to just cool off in this manner would be much appreciated in a hot-weather scenario, and might be needed even in places that are not known for being hot climates. So, yeah, using water to get soaked with might not be the first choice for use of the storage, but if it's needed, it would be hard to imagine a case where you felt like you had stored too much...

Food would obviously also be something that it would be hard to have too much of, considering that there will likely always be people that you could share it with if you didn't need it yourself, but what else comes to mind for you when you think of emergency preparedness? Is there anything you store or something else that comes to mind when you hear, "I don't think you could ever have too much of that..."? You never know how many people you may help with your ideas...
Hope you are enjoying your summer!

Back to school...as in sales

Yeah, amazingly overdue post, but it gets busy around here in the summer, as I am sure it does for most people. One of the reasons is that school's out, but imagine my surprise when Sunday's paper had ads for back-to-school sales already. Thing is, if you are the kind to be diligent about rebates, you can buy a ream of paper for a penny after rebate (limit 2 rebates) at Staples if you shop by tomorrow, because that particular sale is for Sunday-Wednesday only. (I would imagine that the rebate deal is good nationwide, but you may want to call your local store to make sure they're participating if you're not sure--would hate for someone to waste gas/time/money for no reason...) There were also back-to-school specials at Shopko, complete with the school supply lists available all neat and convenient for everyone, and pocket folders for $.15 apiece, for one example. Picked up a couple of things and will keep the lists so I can hopefully be as frugal as possible when other sales come up, as I hope they will. Even if you don't want the supplies for school, it's a good idea to have paper, etc., around in the case of an emergency-- for entertainment if nothing else.


I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer--I had been planning on posting some pictures of the garden, but the last time I could locate the camera it was being temperamental and uncooperative, so it will have to wait. There is greenery in the garden area, but it remains to be seen whether we will get anything edible out of it this year. We have gotten a few strawberries, and there are plenty of green raspberries that the children are monitoring, so I hope they will ripen nicely and we get to them before birds/varmints do.

I am about to put this same link over on my other blog, but feel that it is important enough to include in both places. You may have already read the article, "Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning", but I only received it in an e-mail at the beginning of this month. It's better to prevent an emergency than have one, obviously, but you need to recognize it for what it is--stay safe!!

Check your Spaghetti-Os

Just saw this article about a Spaghetti-Os recall. If they are your canned comfort food spaghetti of choice, you may want to see if your stored cans are among those affected. It won't be much of a comfort food if it makes you sick in an emergency....

In other news of the more local (to me) variety, we finally had to resort to the more expensive option of internet service, and for now it is working well. Nice to have the internet work and work quickly at that. Yeah, the smile is there. :)

On the garden front, it is finally planted. Still looks pretty bleak out there, and that's not really a surprise, considering that there was a frost warning for last night and 42 degrees out the night before. For plants that like warmth, not much of an incentive to come out and check what's going on... And we insisted on planting corn again, because we're basically optimistic about things like that--can't see it being knee-high by the 4th of July, but hey, if it is, I'll take pictures! :)

Hope your garden is going well--our biggest producer at this point is rhubarb, which grows like a (very large and unruly) weed. Planning to hit the Farmers' Market tomorrow and may try to grow even more things. You don't know until you try.....

It's not for lack of trying....

Well, we have made an attempt to change internet providers so that we would stop having so many instances of "Internet not able to display webpage" or the like coming up. Twice, in fact. Come to find out that there are just too many trees in the way, and in both cases the installers didn't know until the day of installation that they weren't able to get service in our area. So our current providers came out and raised the antennae, and so far, a lot better internet connection. The only other options are a lot more expensive, so here's hoping....

Anyway, if you are interested in giveaways, you might want to check out:

-- The opportunity to enter to win a free Bosch mixer over at Deals to Meals. That contest closes June 30th.
--The opportunity to enter to win a variety of food storage items over at Preparedness Pro. That contest closes June 15th.

Yeah, I don't expect to win, but if you do, I would love to hear about it... :)

When it comes to gardening, my husband has now partially rototilled the garden, and some lovely little seed potatoes that I picked up at the farmers' market are going to make their way into the ground soon. Hope that we get them in soon enough that they will have a long enough growing season this year. Am also thinking about picking up some jalapeno pepper plants next time I'm at the farmers' market, but really have no idea about how well they do around here. The other seeds we are holding onto because winter is still around quite a bit--it snowed last Saturday (reminds of me of the joke that there are four seasons in Idaho--winter, winter, almost winter, and construction :) and though it was pretty nice yesterday, hard to know what it will be tomorrow. Need to get the planting going soon, though, if we want to eat anything out of the garden this year.

Hope all is going well with everyone, and if all goes well with the internet service, am planning to do more posts more often...thanks for coming back to read!

Thank you

Thank you to all those who have served and who are serving in the military, and thank you to their families. Memorial Day is the designated day to remember, but regardless of the day, we will never forget.

"Pizza bombs"--version 2

Well, you may recall that we had "pizza bombs"--a dish in which you flatten two pieces of dough and place pizza toppings on one piece and then pinch the second piece on top of it to seal the toppings in, and then bake--because I wrote about it here. Well, the dough from my regular bread recipe was kind of heavy, so I went looking for the pizza dough recipe in my family recipe book. (Thanks, Mom!) Here it is:

Pizza Dough
Let stand 5 minutes:
1 cup warm water
1 package yeast
1 tsp sugar

Then add:
1/4 cup salad oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups flour

Dough may be sticky. Spread with floured hands in greased pan. Add toppings. Bake @ 425 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

It worked well, and it was wonderful not to have to wait for it to rise, etc. like I do for my regular bread recipe. I used olive oil, because that was what was in my cupboard. I also just messed around with the dough like I usually have to, adding a little water, and then a little flour, etc., until it was the consistency that I wanted. Seems like I almost always (if not always ) have to do that--must be me.....

Anyway, I ended up making them too big, and there was some leaking of spaghetti sauce, but they were well-received. And hey, even if you don't want to make "pizza bombs", now you have a really easy recipe for pizza dough that uses pretty much all staple foods. Gotta love something else you can do with the flour, oil, salt, combination. :) If I put some effort into thinking about different topping combinations, I could end up with more variety--any ideas?

Farmers' Market and thinking about the garden

It's been awhile, in large part because our computer is having issues. Sometimes it will log on to the internet, and sometimes it won't. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) the wind is blowing here, so perhaps the connection problems are weather-related. We have considered changing providers, but have not yet. It's easy to keep the same service when it's working.... :)

I have also been thinking about starting the garden, but when the children are still wearing their winter coats to school in the morning, and we have to fire up the woodstove a lot of the time, I am not quite ready to put any seeds/bulbs/starts in the ground yet. That didn't stop me from visiting the Farmers' Market that was held for the first time of the season on Saturday. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about it and got there when most of the people were packing up. There were flowers out, but I am more of a "if I'm going to plant it, I probably want to eat it" person, so I stopped at one stand that was selling vegetable seeds. They were a good price--I asked if they were non-hybrid, but the gentleman there indicated that they were most likely hybrid. There was also a spot on the table for Walla-Walla onion bulbs, but alas, it was empty. I want in the worst (or is it best?) way to be successful growing onions--but have had no edible results from my garden as of yet. Learned something interesting about Walla-Walla onions, though--they are not really storage onions. They need to be eaten within a couple of weeks of harvesting them, I guess. I'll most likely check back this week to see if there are any Walla-Walla onion bulbs (hope that is the right term) to be had, but I also want to get some onions growing that will store well.

Have you started your gardens yet? It seems like here it is always a line to be walked between starting too early and having your plants freeze (or perhaps get snowed on) and not giving the plants long enough to get anywhere because they are planted too late. Ah, well, we'll do our best....