October prepping

I'm not sure if anyone outside Australia and NZ have chippies, but they are a small narrow woodstove with a hot water jacket. They are only a foot wide and normal height and have one hot plate on the top but no oven. They are thrown away as rubbish here. Mine cost $100 from a scrap metal dealer (they are very heavy, enamelled cast iron). Very useful as they are very efficient at heating water as the hot water jacket goes around 3 sides of the firebox. A very small amount of wood will heat alot of water and cook at the same time. 

My Rayburn was also second hand as they cost $12.000 new! Mine was $2600. It has 2 ovens and 2 hot plates. It is the best purchase we've ever made.

Anyway, I have not forgotten you. I have a button on my bookmarks bar and I visit several times a week - more frequently recently. I have kept up on what is going on here and I hope you all do well with whatever is to come.

So to answer your question on this thread...

Yes I have stepped up my prepping. Yesterday I took out my list and updated it. Did an inventory of what I have then determined what I still need. Next I split the list into what I would buy if I went shopping every two weeks for the next six months. That was just to determine that it would fit into my six month budget. Then I re-wrote the list so that it was ordered by what store each item will come from. I went to WalMart yesterday and got everything from the list that I would get from that store. Today I do the second part of the list. Part three should be done soon. I should have six months worth of preps. It's not perfect but I did not want to let that stop me from doing something. If we need to SIP the kids and I can do that with little problems. Guess we will just have to home school. The hardest part will be my wife's job as they may expect her to go to work and we are dependent on her income.

I learned that I had let my prepping go. I also learned that I did still have at least half of the total.

The hardest part was making sure that I had the funds to do it all at once like this. To do that I withdrew a lump sum from my emergency account. Then put it into envelopes - one for each month. The envelopes represent the amount I normally spend on groceries each month. As long as I could buy food I would normally buy with the money I normally use I knew the budget would work.

I even have money left over. And the way I see it I will either eat the food and spend the money with no need to worry about any sort of disaster or I will be glad I did it and the money is better sitting at home than in the bank. 

Lets pray that the US healthcare response gets better and this never becomes a large outbreak here.

I'm using it to make a hard rosemary soap. I figure you can never have too much soap can you?

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I found this in the Detroit Craigslistings:

http://detroit.craigslist.org/wyn/hab/4720551232.html

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