I don’t know if it’s having a new addition to our family or some other combination of life events, but I have been thinking a lot as of late about how would we handle a minor disaster and whatnot.
I remember hearing adds from the Red Cross advising people to have two weeks worth of food and water on hand. A quick check confirms that this is still their advice. The Red Cross isn’t exactly doomsday prepper propaganda, so I was starting to think maybe they had a good goal. The problem was I had no idea how to access if we were close to that. We try to keep our pantry, such as it is, more or less stocked, making me think we might be close but I wasn’t sure.
Then, a few weeks ago I saw this article in Popular Mechanics and realized something that should have been obvious a long time ago! Two things actually… One everything in our pantry has the caloric content posted on it, and two thanks to the fitness push we did last year we have a pretty good idea how many calories we consume per day. Fudging the numbers up a little to account for Hannah, and we basically arrive at 4000 calories per day.
A few minutes with a pen and paper digging through the cupboards and then a few more minutes working up an Excel spreadsheet (no project is complete without one!) and I can happily say that we have sufficient stores to eat for two weeks! Granted, the menu might be a bit bland, but post blizzard or whatever other scenario one could dream up I don’t imagine we would complain much.
What attentive readers may have noticed is that I didn’t address water at all. The Red Cross guidelines call for one gallon per day per person, putting us near 50 gallons if you wanted to round up a little. I have some ideas how one might address that challenge, but really no solution as of yet… its just an overwhelming amount of bulk to store.
I guess we will hope it’s a blizzard and we have snow to melt 😉
-Jordan
Nelsons 
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that recently too. Granted I probably should of started thinking about that a few years ago. Considering we have to deal with the potential for earthquakes, typhoon, tsunamis, and North Koreans oh my! Ok, not so much the North Koreans, but you get the picture. Check this out for an idea for water storage AquaPodKit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egF1oIZhdB8&feature=share&list=SPuiBx681uVkkR-BU83okIvgqKJiLeRKHR
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That looks like a good option! Granted you have to sort of know you need it a an hour before the water supply goes bad, but I can imagine it might help.
Long time residents of Des Moines will tell you stories of the roughly two weeks they didn’t have safe water after flooding knocked out the water treatment plant that supplies the city. It sounded awful, and the sort of thing that would make you want to avoid being caught like that again.
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