January prepping

We're still in summer here so i'm bottling some fruit. I'm about to kill and process 20 geese and about 20 chickens (not all at once!!!!). I'm going to bottle the geese in goose fat. I think it's called confit.

A few years ago I had a strange sort of premonition that the Alpine Fault would rupture. I was reading about the fault and sort of said to myself - in my head - I wonder when it will go off and I very clearly heard a voice say "April 16". I'm not the type to have weird premonitions or anything similar, and I'm sure it'll amount to nothing but still it's playing in the back of my mind that maybe it will rupture then. The thing is I don't know if that means April 16th (in any year) or April in the year 2016. Anyway, just in case, I'm going to stock up on cat and dog food as we're just fine for everything else.

I have a book on the memories of people who were children at the time of huge Napier earthquake in 1931, and one man remembers coming home from school as soon as he could after the earthquake to find his mother in tears in the kitchen. His father was grim faced as he pushed the wheelbarrow straight in through the back door and then started shovelling all the broken jars out of the pantry. The quake happened in Feb, which is late summer, early autumn, and his mother had put up hundreds of jars of bottled fruit. The broken mess was over a foot deep. He also remembered how their tea cups used to hang in a row from hooks, and all that was left were the handles hanging in a row.

I generally keep things that won't break on the top shelves and and heavy items and breakables lower down, behind the straps. 

Here in NZ you have to strap certain items to the structure of your house. So our hot water cylinder, woodstoves and cooker are strapped to the wall frames. We've also strapped our fridge and large bits of furniture like the dresser and sideboard. I had a picture fall off of the wall and land on my head in the 7.1 Sept 10 earthquake.