07:31 – I dropped Barbara off with Bonnie yesterday about 11:15 a.m., so Day One without Barbara is drawing to a close. Only four more days. Colin and I shared a chicken casserole for dinner, which was actually pretty good. I’m missing Barbara, but I think Colin is missing her worse. He waited for her to come home last night, and finally gave up and went back to bed. We agreed to skip the wild women and parties–mainly because neither of us knows any wild women–and just watch Heartland re-runs instead. That, and play ball. So we watched the first five episodes of series seven last night. And played ball.
The traditional advice for preppers is to store stuff in every available nook and cranny, but I’m rethinking that as I find stuff upstairs that I’d almost forgotten we had, and wasn’t counting toward our long-term food stores. Two dozen cans of tuna. Sixteen cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans. A dozen Kraft Mac & Cheese dinners. A dozen cans of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli. Eight dozen single-serving cans of assorted Del Monte fruit. Four dozen cans of evaporated milk. Forty more pounds of rice and ten of oats. A case of canned corn and another of peas. A dozen bottles of beef bouillon and another dozen of chicken. And so on. We were originally short of shelving down in the basement, so I stuck a lot of stuff here and there upstairs, such as along the back walls of the cabinets under the kitchen counters. All in all, there’s probably a six person-month supply of food stuffed in those crannies. I’m getting it sorted and grouped together by type.