09:38 – We have a mixed day scheduled today. We’ll be doing kit stuff as well as making up cookie and bread dough this afternoon.
Email from Brittany. She finished her Walmart ordering, and is now just waiting for the stuff to be delivered. Yesterday afternoon, she and her husband drove his pickup down to the supermarket and picked up a bunch of sugar, flour, egg noodles, salt, vegetable oil, and other bulk staples as well as large jars of spices, several pounds of yeast, and other cooking/baking essentials. Brittany figures that once the stuff from Walmart is delivered, she has at least a 3-month supply of food for her family. She’s pleased that they got this done in one day, although they still have a lot of repackaging to do. They don’t drink much soda, so she ordered a pack of 250 one-gallon foil/Mylar bags and a couple hundred oxygen absorbers from LDS on-line. They’ll use those with an old clothes iron for packing their bulk staples. I told Brittany she doesn’t need to use oxygen absorbers in the sugar bags.
Email from Dave, who posted a comment yesterday that he thought needed to be featured where people can find it:
Prepping doesn’t have to be expensive. For less than $30 at Sam’s Club, I got 75 pounds of rice ready to be transferred to 2 liter bottles. I got some oxygen absorbers from Amazon. Now I just have to wash, sanitize and dry the bottles and then fill them. I picked up a thing of chicken bouillon and beef bouillon. For about $50 we have enough food to eat rice until we’re sick of it. We need other foods, but we’re better off than we were.
I literally started our in car emergency kits with pocket change. I took a big jar half full of change to a Coinstar machine, bought an Amazon gift certificate, and came home and ordered cheap backpacks, flashlights, water purification tablets, multi tools, magnesium fire starters and space blankets.
The current first aid kits that I added to our emergency kits were literally purchased for $20 at the dollar store including the quart zip top bags they are in. I still need to add to them, but we are better off than we were when we had nothing. They’re also much more useful than two $10 first aid kits from Amazon, and possibly better than two $20 first aid kits.
If you’ve only got $5 to prep, pick up a couple of 12 packs of Ramen
noodles at Walmart. That’s a very small start, but it beats sitting at home hungrily staring at a five dollar bill in an emergency.