i know I have been pretty quiet, nursing at the keyboard leaves
me picking and pecking one handed. I am not a good typist any way. I just
thought I’d tell you what we have been up to preparedness wise.
First of all water wise, last year when the pressure tank
went out on our well it was the last piece and we have officially replaced
every part of the well since moving here. Wayne took the old pressure tank and
put it into our master bathroom adding an additional 50 gallons to our water
storage. In addition to that we were told by the women who grew up on our
property that they had had to dig a new well and that is why the well is so far
from the well house. The old well was located in the well house and Wayne was
delighted to find there was water at about 17 feet. So he researched on line
and made from scratch a hand pump so in case of emergency power outage or well
breakage or even a juicy frog jumping on the pressure switch electrocuting itself
and messing with our connection, we will still have water!
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/Nov23082.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/Nov23079.jpg[/IMG]
We are feeling extremely inspired to finish up our food
storage. However we have quite a bit of food we are not used to eating.
Included in that category are, wheat berries, lentils, split peas, and some of
us eat oat meal. A whole ‘nother issue is the stuff we could grow easily if we
wanted to eat them, this would be the rabbit and duck type things.
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/100_7808.jpg[/IMG]
Our HT bless his heart gave us some commercial rabbit frozen
in a box. Mind you we have raised rabbit but never felt inclined to actually
eat one. I confess that I am extremely bad about trying new foods especially
cooking them. I promised my husband that we would try the rabbit and train
ourselves to consume them. So I scoured the internet and came up with a recipe
that looked promising and I cooked it up tonight. It turned out great tender, flavorful…
but I have a hang up. I like “clean” meat no bones nothing to make me think
this thing I am eating was once alive. Anyway I had tried to remove the bones
to help it look better. However this didn’t help my stupid issue and I could
hardly eat it.
Wayne butchered our three ducks and we had cooked one for
Thanksgiving. Again not my idea of a good meat as I like boneless skinless
chicken breast and duck is so not like that at all. However again I had a great
recipe and I am assured it turned out great. Scarlett was only minimally traumatized
by daddy butchering the ducks.
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/100_7728.jpg[/IMG]
We had bought 8 chickens last spring thinking that would
cover our egg needs. Since Wayne is allergic to eggs we are very light on the
egg use as it make him nauseous to be around scrambled and such finally our
hens have started to lay we are getting at least one egg a day sometimes two!
Which is very exciting to us and we are teaching Scarlett to collect the eggs
and feed the chickens. She loves them and picks them up and carries them around.
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/100_7725.jpg[/IMG]
We are trying to get our kids to eat oatmeal. So I found a
recipe chocolate banana oatmeal. I made it this morning. It did not magically
make them eat oatmeal, but I figured I better start while we have the means to
sugarcoat them. Plus we don’t have bananas in food storage, but if we use baby
food bananas that will store well and we have a recipe for them. I also used a
Hershey bar easy to measure easy to store and great for hyping the three year
old to eat candy bar oatmeal.
Another issue we have not really had to deal with at all is
the electricity being off, but sometimes people in our area lose their lights
for up to 10 days at a time. That is
worst case scenario so I told Wayne I wanted enough electricity to run light at
least. So he jimmy rigged a prototype electric storage device. Basically it
provides us with enough energy to have light in case of emergency it can have
my fridges or freezer plugged into it. This doohickey thing can be hooked up
and recharged by the car, but usually is charged by the wall outlet just
storing the energy up. Like I said this is a prototype and not very strong when
we get some money we are going to make the real one. In theory this should look
like a normal end table until needed.
[IMG]http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s68/azbrat0526/100_6562-1.jpg[/IMG]
So as cute as the electric storage device is electricity is a
bad way of making heat and even though it can technically run the hot plate it
was a no go which leaves us to how to cook in an emergency situation. Since we
have a fire place and 20 acres of trees that one was a no brainer except
seriously who wants to go out lumberjacking? Not me! So Again Wayne hit YouTube
and came up with a solution. In our fireplace he tried to build a rocket stove,
but it didn’t work so we ended up with more of a Hobo stove out of bricks in
the fireplace instead. He has messed around with it a bit, but seriously like a
Hobo Stove it uses kindling not logs. Our experiment was making ramin noodles.
It took 20 minutes starting from a cold fire place to have three packages of
ramin cooked. Since he has already done all the math on every electrical thing in
our house he knows that cooking the ramin over the fire instead of individually
cooking three bowl of ramin in the microwave saved us enough electricity to run
one light bulb for 12 hours.
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So with Tessa I was kind of sad that we didn’t buy much for
her. We bought a piggy bank and I finally got a moby wrap, no toys no clothes
but seriously she didn’t/doesn’t need anything. But I wanted something special
so Wayne build her a new cradle.
[img]https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/381232_299270706763743_100000424490546_1045195_335593710_n.jpg[img]
So needless to say even though Wayne still hasn’t found work
he has managed to keep himself busy! *brag alert* Wayne finally quit smoking
and is 6 weeks cigarette free, he quit when Tessa was born and today is
starting to give up his caffeine addiction.
