39 Simple Preparedness for Everyday Life | What a Weekend Without Power Reminded Our Family

What do you do if your power goes out for a few days?

In this episode of Handmade Happiness, Jessica and Thomas share stories from a weekend at the lake after a severe storm left them without electricity or running water. What could have been a frustrating experience became an opportunity to slow down, adapt, and appreciate the value of being prepared for life's unexpected interruptions.

Rather than talking about extreme survival scenarios, this conversation focuses on simple, practical preparedness, the everyday habits and supplies that can make power outages, storms, and other temporary disruptions much easier to navigate.

In this episode, we discuss:

⚡ What we learned from spending a weekend without electricity

🏕️ Why shifting our mindset to "camping mode" changed the experience

🫙 Keeping shelf-stable foods on hand for emergencies

🔥 Using propane camp stoves and outdoor cooking when the power is out

💧 Storing water for unexpected situations

🕯️ Candles, flashlights, and oil lamps for simple lighting

🔋 Generators and keeping essential household systems running

🎲 Finding joy through board games, porch conversations, and slowing down

Preparedness doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Sometimes it's as simple as having a few supplies on hand, a flexible attitude, and the ability to make the best of an unexpected situation.

Visit The Lark Life for more resources on homesteading, from-scratch living, gardening, quilting, and practical family skills.

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Until next time, may you find joy in the simple things and beauty in the work of your hands.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi there and welcome to the Handmade Happiness Podcast. I'm Jessica.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

And I'm Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

And welcome in for another conversation with us this week.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Um 4th of July last weekend.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Yeah. It was a good time.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

We didn't die in the big storm.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

It was a plus.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Yeah. So we were invited to uh some friends of ours have a lake house at Lake of the Ozarks, and so we were invited to go spend a few days with them for the Fourth of July weekend.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

It was really nice.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

And it was really nice. But they had a crazy storm come out of nowhere, like power outage and trees down and Yeah, we had no power for like 12 hours. It despite all the things, we still had a great weekend. Um, but that kind of also sparked our topic of conversation for tonight, which I almost even hate to say what we're talking about because so many people automatically like go to a specific place in their brain, and that's not really what we're talking about. But I'm gonna say it anyway. So we're gonna be talking about preparedness.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Um specifically, and again, this weekend being without power, anytime you have some sort of storm or a situation where the routine kind of gets thrown off and you don't have your normal amenities at home.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

It gets weird, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

It makes you think about like you know, how how are we able to function? Are are we able to function when those things happen?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

It makes me grateful that I wasn't born in a time where electric things didn't exist, right? Where there was no grid, and you know, that just um we there are so many things in our lives that are electrified, and we just don't even think about it until it's not there.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Um but so to touch on what you said earlier, we're not talking about being preppers.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

No.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Um no offense if you are a prepper, that's you know, you do you. But um, we're talking about finding ways to smooth out the bumps that life sends you, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

When your power goes out for 12 hours, how do you deal with that, right? Just having resources and reserves and you know, all the little things that help you, so when life throws you curveballs, they can be inconveniences instead of like traumas, right? Right. Uh our friends, one of the things that she commented on was that when the power went out, our kids took it all really well, like in stride. And she was just saying how they didn't freak out, they didn't complain about, oh, it's the lights and there's nothing to do. You know, they just it was totally like normal to them. And we've talked about this on the podcast before that we do lamp time, right? Where we shut off all the lights and we just have oil lamps, and we do that as a way to kind of recenter and and de-stress. Um, but also because we live in the country, when it's dark outside, it's dark outside, right? Yeah, uh, there's no there's virtually no street lights once you get off the property and right, because we're out outside of the city limits.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

So when we did live in a subdivision, it was never dark. Because all of the house lights, you know, from your neighbors and all of the street lights, it it was never dark.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Here, when the sun goes down, it's dark, it gets dark because we don't have all the street lights and you mentioned like when we were in Texas how you never really noticed the phases of the moon. No, because there was always so many streets. Because it always looks the same outside. But here, like you said, when it's a full moon, it's almost like daylight outside. You can see everything all the way down across our property. But when it's a new moon, you can't see anything. But again, our kids are used to that cycle and going down to the barn in near dark um to close it up or you know, put the animals and our lamp time and stuff. So that's not something it's not foreign to them. So when we were just lighting candles and sitting outside on the porch because that's where most of the light was, that was totally normal for them. And so that got us that whole thing is what got us thinking about this topic. And um, so what are the for you? What's the biggest thing like when the power goes out?

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_00 4:34

What's your biggest inconvenience? And then how do we how do we address it?

SPEAKER_01 4:38

So before I answer that question, I also just wanted to mention um and I totally lost my train of thought. That's okay. I'll come back to it. It'll come back to me. So I'm going back to answer your question now, because I can't remember what I was gonna say. Um oh, I remember now. All the things that we're gonna be talking about on this episode, um, the things that like we have in place or that we're thinking about doing or whatever, whatever those things may be, these are all things that are very um, they just fit very naturally into everything in your life. Like we didn't have to do a lot of above and beyond extra stuff.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

These are things that we kind of already have for that they serve multiple purposes. So things that we're utilizing, not just when the power is out, but we're utilizing them for other purposes. But because we have them, when the power does go out, we're so I just wanted to kind of clarify that. We're not talking about like there's so many people that they have this whole stash of stuff um specifically for For like an imagined apocalypse. When Right. And that's not what we're talking about, but we are gonna be talking about some things that we have found to be very helpful for us when we have found ourselves in situations when there's a snowstorm and the roads are closed, or the power goes out, or you know, whatever whatever the circumstance may be, uh the trucks can't get in, so the grocery stores and gas stations are empty. Like what supply chains are what do we do um in those circumstances? And again, n these are things that help us um in those circumstances, but they're not things that we do specifically for that. It's stuff that just is part of our everyday life. So for me to go back to your question, the biggest thing is a mom with a family to feed. They're constantly asking me what the next like we will finish a meal and then. How am I gonna feed them? Because so, first of all, just the food itself, and then the second part is the actual cooking of said food. Um, that's been kind of the biggest thing for me. And so we have a few different things that we do that really help mitigate that so that when those circumstances come up, we have a plan that we can just roll with and and go to.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

I think one of the biggest things on that front is having somewhere where you can burn. Yes, right, how do you think burning wood or charcoal, yeah, creating you know, cooking the old-fashioned way before there was electricity for thousands of years, people have cooked on fire.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Um, and you can do that with charcoal, you can do that with wood, um, you can do that with propane, right? Which kind of leads into the city.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

And we've done we've done that for a couple, so several years ago, there was a crazy bad winter storm when we were in Texas.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

In Texas.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Um every like the whole state of Texas almost was without power for a while.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

It was mostly bad because Texas doesn't get those kind of storms. Right. That's what made it bad, is no one had any clue what to do or how to be prepared for it. And the houses aren't even built to tolerate the streets.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

The houses aren't built for it, the power grid wasn't built for it, the above-ground lines that got weighed down with ice and just totally broke and trees falling over.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

I mean, it was just here we would call it like early December.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Right. But it was a massive disruption there. Um, and we had things in our freezer. We had dried beans and rice and things like that. And so I just went and made a fire out on the barbecue pit. We had a big cast iron pot, and I literally just took some of our sausage and some beans and some of the stuff that we had in the pantry and threw together this big pot, let it cook over the the fire, yeah, and we had a delicious, nutritious, hot meal.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Even though we had no power to cook with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

On that note, having, and some of this depends on how many people are in your household. If it's you plus one, then it's a lot that looks a lot different. Preparedness looks a lot different than if it's like six of us, or I grew up, I was the oldest of nine, so eleven people in a house, preparedness looks a lot different, right? But what you were saying about cooking, having cookware that you can multitask in an oven or on a gas stove or on a propane or on a charcoal over a charcoal fire, like a big heavy cast iron skillet, or we have a giant uh Dutch oven that you could bake bread in, you can make stew in it for 20 people. You know, it's a huge thing, but it's a very versatile piece of equipment. That and a good spoon or spatula or tongs kind of a set, like a barbecue set, um, that goes a long way towards you being able to make a variety of dishes. You can fry, you can bake, you can broil, you can boil, you can stew, you can do all those things.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yeah. And another thing that we have that we are able to use is when we like to camp with the kids. Um obviously when you go camping, but the way we go camping, we go camping in a tent on the ground. Um, we don't have an RV, we don't hook up to electricity, we don't take things with us. We don't have a lamp. Um so we invested in a camp stove that hooks up to propane so that for those circumstances. Most of the time when we camp, we cook everything over a fire. But there are some times when having that propane cooktop is really helpful so that you can throw something together really quick when you're camping. Um so we have that, which we can also pull out and use for cooking. I use it when we can stuff. I mean, we we have we have lots of different times that we are able to use that.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Um I liked something you said a minute ago when you said when we go camping, right? And I think that's a good mindset to use when you're being when you're talking about being prepared.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Is like if we had to camp for a week, yeah, what would that look like, right? What kind of pieces of equipment would we use? Yeah. Um, and so like you said, the the propane cook stove, it's great. You could cook on that indefinitely as long as you had a supply of propane, but it's more convenient, it's cleaner, it's a little less of a thing than having an open pit fire.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

So you turn the knob, light the burner, turn it off. It's a little more efficient too, because you're not burning up fuel.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Once you start the fire, the fire is kind of going.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Right. And there's some things like if you just need to, you know, quickly heat up a link of sausage, you don't want to have to light a whole big thing. Yeah, you don't want to build a whole stupid fire, yeah. Or you know, you just want to heat this can of soup. You don't necessarily want to have a huge fire when you can do that in a couple minutes over a propane cooktop.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

And one of the advantages of canning is that we have a reserve of food, not for that purpose, but it becomes that for that purpose when the time calls for it, right? Right. And like you mentioned, um if the power went out and we were not able to get our generator cranked up, and we'll talk about generators in a second, but if we couldn't get a generator going, worst case scenario, you could fire up the propane or the or the cook pot, and you could literally can all of the food that was thawing out in the freezer.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Um and and most of it would manage to get salvaged.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Uh now it might be weird, it might it might not be exactly what we would have done if we had to do it intentionally, but it wouldn't be wasted. It wouldn't be wasted. Um we have a couple of deep freezers, we have a couple of fridges, we store a lot of food. Um fridge freezers, if you're not aware, deep freezers will stay cold for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

A long time.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

If you don't open them, yeah, if you don't open them, they will stay frozen solid for days, right? Yeah. Um they're better than a cooler, there's so much mass in there that's frozen. If it's good and cold like a deep freezer should, you've got several hundred pounds of food frozen to 20 below zero. All of that stuff should stay below freezing for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Several days. Yeah. Um in most situations that we have been out of power, um, with the exception of Hurricane Katrina. With most with most of the things that we have to do. You that's enough. We we generally have our power back within a day or two. Um and so our freezers generally are okay. But in those circumstances where it's just it's gonna be a while, and you're not gonna, you know, if we weren't able to get fuel and weren't able to run the generator and weren't able to do things, sure. The food is not gonna go to waste. We there are ways that we can save it.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Yeah. And we've talked about generators. Having a generator is such an easy thing to do. I mean, yeah, okay, it's a few hundred bucks, right? But it's so versatile in that you can use it. If you have a little pop-up stand that you run, you can power your stuff with it. If you're going camping, you can power your stuff with it. If your power goes down, you can keep your fridges and freezers alive much, much longer than they would have, like even during Katrina. At some point after a few days, we were able to get a gallon or two of gas. Right. Right? Somebody's gonna have some gas that you can put your hands on and you can use it to run those critical systems, not your window units, unless you have that luxury, but your fridges, your freezers, you know, critical systems in your house that will enable you to span that that length of time much more comfortably and easily.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

So since we're talking about generators, we ended up the the year we got married, months after we were married, um, we lived in South Mississippi where Hurricane Katrina hit.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

We the eye of Hurricane Katrina went right over the top of us. We were about th what half an hour from New Orleans? Yeah, and it went right over the top of us.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Our area that we lived in, there was no power. I mean, I remember that was my first year teaching. We didn't have school for weeks because there was no power and nobody was there. All the people that had evacuated had, you know. Um during that time, we were fortunate enough to get a generator.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

And we've had one ever since. Um now we don't have the same exact one, they've been replaced over the years.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

But I think we gave ours away and got another one, and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

We have only needed to use it a handful of times, but even more so than that, I think we have probably loaned it to other people who needed it even more than we have used it ourselves. For sure. Um, and that has been amazing to be able to say, like, yeah, we have this thing that can help you and your family be a little more comfortable right now. Um, and so I would absolutely always 100% have a generator around. Oh, yeah. Um, because whether you we need it ourselves or whether we have the opportunity to help somebody else out with that, it's been one of those things that's been um it's invaluable when you find yourself in those situations where there is no power for an extended amount of time.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Yeah, because your neighbors need a generator too. And so that's one of those things where if it's a great easy way for you to be a resource and an asset for your community. You can protect people around you and help them out just by having that generator. I'm not gonna get into the weeds of what generator you should get. My opinion is generally speaking, the bigger the better, up to like 12 or 15 kw. Um, do your research. If you want a really quiet one, you're gonna pay a lot of money for it in a survival type of situation or in a like again, like a grid is down kind of a way. Park that sucker behind the house, it's gonna be noisy. Just get over it. Get uh again a 10 or 12,000 uh size generator that'll be big enough to run all of your coolers and freezers and things, and and maybe a a good size air conditioner depending on what you've got going on. But you can run a bunch of power cords off of it, and you can power fans when you're sleeping at night. You can run one to the neighbor's house to keep their fridge cool so that they can have cold drinks and food not go bad. It's it's really just a an easy asset, and they're pretty fuel efficient too. I think we fill our tank up, um, even the ones we used to use for events at the church, we fill that gas tank up and run it for four hours straight and wouldn't burn, you know.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Oh, yeah. No, they're they're very efficient. They would uh underload, so and something that we so we have one of just a small portable generator.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Right, we have like a 12.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

We have also talked about at some point in the future, it would be nice to be able to have one of those whole home generators that you have hooked up to natural gas or have a big propane tank or whatever, you know, that something where you have a very readily available source of fuel for this generator that kind of runs your whole house automatically.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Yeah, we're on propane, so we could, in theory, we could just get it hooked up to the propane and uh that would that's again now that's an investment. That's a pretty significant uh chunk to put down, but it's a good option if you can afford it.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about food, a little bit about like power generators. Uh what else is something kind of important?

SPEAKER_00 18:32

I think because we live in America, access to fresh water is so it's it's like a given. Oh, yeah. Right? Um unless you live in Flint Creek, but that's a different conversation.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

You turn it on and there it is.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Yeah, you do you turn on the we turn the knob and there's the water, right? But um this weekend when we were at our friend's lake house, the power went down, they're on a well, and so when the power went down, so did the water. The toilet doesn't flush when the power's not on, right? Which is kind of ironic. Yeah, yeah. But so one of the things that we've talked about doing, we don't have that yet, but one of the things we've talked about doing is there are manual pumps that you can have installed at your well so that you have the option to manually bring up water from that well. Um, that's a great backup plan for when the water goes out. That also puts some weight on again having a generator, even if it's just big enough to run your well, that's gonna be a big improvement on your quality of life for however long the power's out.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Um, because being able to draw that water up and minimally draw a bucket of water and be able to wash and drink and you know this.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Be able to cook and wash.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Ideally, having your water system running, yeah. Where it's getting filtered and getting to the toilets, and you can get maybe hot water, like we have propane hot water. So again, having that's another big system that with a little bit of input you can kind of add a redundancy there to where you can make sure you've got water flowing.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

And because that's a that was that was, I think for us was the hardest part of the power being out. Was it like, well, I guess we'll go to the store and we went y'all ended up going to the neighbor's house, right? We went to the neighbor's the neighbor's house. That way the kids could still, you know, use the bathroom and that kind of caught us off guard, I think. And we were like, oh wait, we can't.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

And then we were like, oh wait, we're on a well.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

We can't wash hands. Yeah, we can't wash our hands, we can't go to the restroom, we can't get a drink, you know, the faucet. They can't do dishes, so uh so we went out for dinner, right? Yeah, but the point is that you can't always go out for dinner.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Um, depending on what the situation is, the scenario, like again with Hurricane Katrina, we couldn't go anywhere. Like physically, you couldn't get out. There were trees on every road in the city, and so um having access to fresh water now, the other option is you can store fresh water. I've had friends who store 50-gallon drums of fresh water and that just lives on their property behind their shed, uh, and then they can filter it and and you know clean it up. Don't store water long term without properly taking care of it and treating it. Boil for safety, right? Boil for safety. But um, but the point is if you have the water, you can boil it for safety and drink it, right? So um that is an option if you have that infrastructure available, if you have the space, the time, if that's what you want to do. Um for me, it makes more sense to just own a generator. Yeah, right. Um, so again, you can feed yourself, you can have water to drink. Your house probably hasn't gone anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah. And again, going back to something you said earlier, we kind of put ourselves in the frame of mind of. Like we're camping out, yeah. So um it's summertime, so it's warm, but we just opened up the windows and they had screens on everything, screen porch, so we would sit outside, and it was thankfully the storm actually kind of brought the temperatures down, so it really wasn't terrible. We've been in situations where we were without power before and it was cold outside, and um that can be a problem. When that happened when we were in South Texas, there There are no fireplace. We did not have no, nobody had a fireplace. We did not have an option to bring warmth into our house. So when we moved here, knowing that we would have significantly colder winters and that there was a likelihood of there not being power, one of the things that we looked for in a house was having a fireplace. And so just having that, we know we can have a little bit of warmth so that even if we're days and days without being able to run our heating system, we're not all gonna be freezing in our house. We're gonna be able to be a little bit more comfortable.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Yeah, well, in our house is pretty snug, um, especially in the wintertime. We we're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

When the basement always pretty much stays a constant temperature, yeah, it's nice, it doesn't get as cold as I thought it's a long time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Um, so it's kind of a heat sink for everything. But then also, um we run our heater pretty low in the wintertime, lower than a lot of people would. But by the time you get up and you bake some bread and make a fire in the fireplace, the house is really warm, like toasty sometimes. And that's pretty easy to regulate. So, like you said, just having that fireplace, worst case scenario, we could all throw sleeping bags in here in front of the fireplace, and we would not die. Yeah, might be colder than we wanted it to be, but we would not die. Um, and and that's again, you may not have that option, right? You may not have a fireplace. Um I hate to keep coming back to the generator, but if you have a generator, you can run a space heater and you can keep at least one bedroom of your house at a livable temperature where you're not gonna die. Um, heat is a big one, especially if you live the further north you live. That may be a real big issue for you. Um, my recommendation is again fireplace or a wood burner. Some people have wood burner um heat for their house. Gas heat is a big plus because it's a lot cheaper depending on where you live. And um again, when the power goes out, the heat will still work, maybe. Depends on depending on your unit, which you have your thermostat and stuff. Hot water, right? Propane, having gas, hot water, um, it's more efficient and sure is nice to take a hot shower when you've been out cutting trees off the f off the freeway all day. Ask me how I know that. Um so again, I this is not a I don't think this is a prepper episode by any s any means because we're not. We're not that. No, um, we're not preparing for some imagined apocalypse. We are simply just living our best life.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

And but some of the things that we're doing already happen to bleed over into themselves to us being protection to handle situations a little bit better, yeah. And I think really it it just comes down to taking a minute to think about again, not what would I do if I could never have electricity again or I could never have gasoline again or not goes down. Not if not those kind of situations, but what can I do to make sure that life continues running pretty smoothly in the event that I am cut off from all the things for a few days for a week? Like what do I already have in place? What are some of the things that we can do? So again, for us.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

The biggest return on investment, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Right. So for us, again, we're able to we can open our windows or we can heat the house. We can run a generator to keep a freezer going if it's gonna be more than a few days. We can run a generator so that we can pump water from our well if we need to. We um have ways to cook food outside over fire or over propane stove so that we're able to continue doing all the things, and then we have tons of candles and flashlights and gas oil lamps and all the things so that in the evening time we can have lights and and we have the food to cook, and we have food on our shelves to cook, yeah. And that's coming back to that. So I heard somebody, another homesteader this week, and it's kind of a common thing that happens around this time of year. People that are growing their own food, for whatever reason that they grow their own food, but people that grow their own food, a lot of times this is the time of year that they're harvesting everything and they're preserving everything. So you end up with these videos being shared or photos being shared of people's pantries where they have hundreds of jars of food.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Here's where the food is.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Um, and something that happens a lot is that uh people who live week to week going to the grocery store a couple times a week, you're just buying food kind of as you need it. Um sometimes that can look strange. And it can look like somebody's hoarding food because they have hundreds of jars. And what this person they they made the comment, they were like, somebody said something to me about this is terrible that I'm hoarding all this food and I should be sharing it with my community. I could be giving it away. And she was like, What they don't understand is that our family of six people, this is like this isn't even enough food to feed us until our gardens are in next year. Like this food is yes, I it looks like I have a ton of food, but that's because my plan is for this food that I grew to carry us until the gardens make us more food. Right. Like, I'm not gonna just run to the store and grab some. I mean, she she was like, we can, but the point of me putting this food away is so that it carries us until the next garden season. And I think that's something that used to be so normal because everybody grew their own food, everybody was storing barrels and bags of grains, and you I mean I think back to even um Laura Ingalls, the farmer boy books and them talking about um going to the cellar and all the carrots and the apples and you know, all the things that they had stored down in the cellar that you would just go and get the foods that you needed. Um, it was totally normal for people to have under to have that. And because it's so convenient now to just run out to the store every day if you need to, um, it's not normal, and again, it can look strange to people, but it's not a bad idea to have, even if you don't grow your own food, yeah, to have cans of food on your shelf that you can pull from to make meals from and things that you use, that if you weren't able to get food for a couple weeks, you still have food that you can feed your family.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Well, the other thing that I think that, and this may be a little bit of a hot take, and I don't mean this I don't mean to offend anybody, but people who say things like that, like, oh, you're hoarding all that food, you should give it to your community. Those are people who think food comes from a grocery store.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

That's like the that would be like me saying that the grocery store is hoarding food.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Right, right. That's their mindset is well, if you have all this abundance, you should be giving it away and helping people. I'm not disagreeing with that statement, but what they don't realize is that I don't go to the grocery store every day like they do. Right. Right? I don't source my food through the capitalism system. Right. We do go to the grocery store all the time, right? But the point is, they they can't think of a world without grocery stores.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

They're like, well, but that's where food comes from. And why did you get all that food and just keep it and not do, you know, that's not what's happening here. We're literally just we have a cycle of food, right? You can it all in the summer and then you eat it all winter, and then you can it all summer. It has nothing to do with hoarding. It has to do with this is how people fed themselves before someone else fed them.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Right? And so uh what I would say to that person is like maybe get outside of your bubble of food is always at this place where I just go trade money for food and start seeing food as part of one of those rhythms of life, right? Like as part of the cycle.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Um you know, you you don't put 20 gallons of gas in your gas tank and say, Oh, I'm hoarding gas.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Well, that gas will last you all week. You don't need that, just go get three dollars worth and then gas up again tomorrow. You know, like that that that's it's nonsensical when you think about it in those terms, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:14

But um And again, I think it's just because we've gotten so far away from where our food comes from.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

Also, that person will be the first one knocking on your door when the break goes down when the grocery store is closed. Like, hey, do you still have any of that food? Yeah, you mean that food that I hoarded all the way there? Yeah, I still have some come on in, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Yeah. Um, yeah, anyway, so any other um thoughts on preparedness? I mean, there's a lot that we didn't even get into because again, we're not talking about being prepared to do that.

SPEAKER_00 31:44

We're talking about survival and like firearms and weapons and medicines and all these things. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Like, again, when you face those minor little hiccups, um, does life come crashing down, or can you still kind of function and operate as normally? And again, this weekend we saw, for the most part, we were able to just kind of just write it out operate as normal, and the kids were fine.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Um Yeah, so I didn't I don't think that I'm I don't think either one of us meant for this episode to be a plug for generators. But but I mean honestly, if you could have one thing that would make your life a whole lot easier for a week of downtime, a generator is it, man. If you can put some gas in a generator, you've got power, you've got air conditioning, you've got water, you've got entertainment, you've got internet. God, don't get me started on what happens when the internet's down for a week. You can't charge your phone. But that also is a factor. Can you communicate without your battery-powered phone that needs to be charged, right? So um one thing we didn't talk about is solar. We don't have uh solar to speak of right now. Uh definitely something that we're looking into because again, the sun shines most of the time in a lot of places, and that can be a great backup source of heat and and energy. Um I mean, I I think that's I think that covers the basis. If you got a little food put back, a little water put back, maybe get a 40-pack of water from Walmart and put it in your basement, it'll get you, you know, that'll last you a pretty good long time. Uh without now, you don't want to flush your toilet with it, but it'll keep you hydrated.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Yeah. So no, and then um I guess the last, and it kind of seems silly, but just the um dynamics that we have in our house, like on a normal day when all the electricity is functioning properly, we still sit around and talk with our kids and play games and read books and do things that don't require internet or a screen that's tied to electricity. Like, so when those things were down and not working, it's not weird for them. Nobody was like, Oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? We just sat around and talked, and we played a game, and we we just I mean, it was no power, no toilets, no nothing, and we were like, Oh, let's go out on the kayaks because that sounds fun and we can cool off in the water and have fun, and so we just took off and there we went and had a great time for hours, and nobody was worried about the power while we were out on the water, like it was you know, life life goes on.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

And the power was on when we when we woke up in the morning, so yeah, um, yeah, and again, it's it's really just about putting in place some things that are easy to do, don't take a lot of room, don't take a lot of effort or money, but they can really smooth out the bumps. Now, would those systems, would those things that we talked about, if the power grid was like down, like cooked, yeah, six months to a year at least without power, would those things be sufficient? Probably not, right? That would be something that we would have to immediately begin addressing is like, how do we get gas for this generator, right? Where can we source solar panels that don't take gasoline? Um, and again, if that's something that you're concerned about, you might want to answer those questions before it comes up. Um it's not something that we're terribly concerned about dealing with, but um you never know. So maybe one day I'll be knocking on your door asking to use your solar panels to charge my phone. But but in the meantime, again, just having some common sense and doing a few things to make sure that uh a speed bump doesn't become a roadblock for your life. And I la my last thought on that is like you said, conditioning your family to accept those com those conditions and to deal with them. If your kids are used to going out in the dark, if your kids are used to turning off their devices and going outside and throwing a ball or getting on the kayaks, um normalizing life without convenience. Do they know how to drink out of the water house? Right? Um have they ever eaten food from a can? Right? Yeah, or or you know, can of food.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

Have they ever And so maybe like a really easy and fun first step would just be to like plan a camping trip for one weekend and see how it works. And again, because we have done those things and because we have so many positive memories as a family built around those kind of times, yeah, um, it was really easy for the kids to just go right there. Yeah, yeah. But if we had never ever had to sleep without air conditioning, and we had never ever had to go without, you know, taking a shower or you know, any of those kind of things that we were without, um it probably would have rocked their world a whole lot harder.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Yeah, yeah, that's really the the the final key is toughen up a little bit, right? Toughen up your kids, toughen up yourself. Yeah, learn to roll with the punches, yeah, be flexible, yeah, be resilient.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Sorry to sound like a bluey episode. Yeah, so that's all I've got for the kids.

SPEAKER_01 37:25

Okay, well, I guess that'll do it for this time, and then we'll catch you in the next one. Subscribe now to handmade happiness so you never miss an episode. And let's find the joy in making one handmade moment at a time.