Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.

Miguel de Cervantes

The hubs is out in the wild putting his manly hunting and gathering skills to the test so I thought I’d try an experiment here. There’s no point in doing all this prepping for a “worst case scenario” if I don’t put it to the test, right?

Since I don’t want to wait for an actual emergency to find out the hard way that I’m woefully unprepared despite my best efforts, I figure the best thing to do is pretend there’s an emergency and see how I do.

Now I have to point out that living next to a super volcano, the “worst case scenario” for us is if Yellowstone blows and there’s really no preparing for that. Well, except for bending over and… you know the rest. 😄

We are at very low risk of earthquakes, flooding or wildfires. No hurricanes, nuclear meltdowns, tornadoes or alien invasions to really worry about here, either.

Well, maybe the last one but again, can you really prepare for that?

So really, the only thing that I can think of that would be a true emergency here would be an extended power failure. Maybe a blizzard or a wind storm like the one we had last night could knock us off the grid for a few days. Could we survive it? Could I survive it alone?

I’d like to think I would but honestly I don’t know. I’ve been pretty spoiled my whole life and have never had to go without any of life’s luxuries for more than a few hours, unless you count the times we’ve been camping but that’s hardly the same. We’ve had a camper for most of our married life and before that we only tent camped a few times and even then I was pretty spoiled and had a manly man there with me to do all the hard stuff.

All that changes as soon as I post this and turn off the computer. Then I’m going to turn off the breakers and the water main. I had the hubs show me exactly what to do so I’m pretty confident I can do that without a problem.

The temperature is supposed to drop down into the 20s overnight the next couple of nights and the daytime highs are supposed to be around 40F so it’s a perfect time to find out if I am equipped to deal with the cold using just the things I’ve put away *just in case*.

Now, in all fairness, if the power went out for real for an extended period of time, I would first head out to the RV and fire up the generator and still have most of my creature comforts for a few days before running out of fuel. But I’m going to pretend I’ve already exhausted my supply out there and have no way to refill the gas and propane tanks so I have to make a go of it in the house.

I’ll be relying on a few key things like candles, oil lamps, solar lights, a rocket stove and my emergency food and water to survive. I’m shooting for 24 hours which shouldn’t be too hard and I might extend it for up to 72 hours if I feel up to the challenge. I’ll update here how it goes when the power (wink) comes back on and I can fire up the computer again. I mean, I could use my phone, but I am going to treat it as an emergency-only tool, and I’m going to try using my solar phone charger as I would in a real emergency to keep the battery full. No phone calls, no texting and no surfing the interwebs.

Unless of course the hubs calls to tell me he shot a big buck or something. 🙂

So here I go. This should be fun. Unless I freeze to death. That wouldn’t be fun at all.

Either way, see you on the other side!