I have to admit there's an insane part of me that actually hopes the power will go out. Very late last night I heard a strange sound, and looked outside, where I didn't know it had snowed yet, and was surprised to find it had. Just a few inches, but I couldn't open the screen door without difficulty.



Fredo's post made me think about the survival mode people love to go into whenever a storm is predicted. I do it myself. But mostly because it's something I like to do, not because I'm panicking. Ideally I would have several grades of water:

-- purchased bottles of drinking water;
-- rainwater collected in the back yard, which I plan to use for watering plants whenever I start some, or for flushing a toilet if the water went off (I really need a rain barrel);
-- frozen bottles of water which stay in the freezer all the time to keep it colder; (a friend started me doing that, and it did help last summer)
-- and when a bad storm hits I try to fill up more receptacles with tap water, because you can never have enough.

I haven't done the same kind of extensive collecting for flashlights, radios, batteries, candles, and matches. And dry food. But I should. And of course supplies have to be maintained and rotated for expiration dates.

Therein lies a difficulty. I am lazy about doing that. I do it with the water but I don't check the other things. I recently cleaned out an old cupboard of canned items, and found 2 burst because they were over 5 years old. Imported cans of fruit were the ones that burst, not Campbell's soup or the usual things. I had to scrub and bleach out the cabinet.

So now I keep very few cans and they're all newish. No powdered foods right now except some flour and sugar. I have read those warnings about microbes that love to grow in pancake mix, and so forth.

I guess what I'd love to do is start cooking in my fireplace, a little bit. Or to buy one of those Wood-gas portable stoves you can carry when you go camping. I could cook in the back yard with that.

***
Another thing that interests me is purifying water. Someday I'm going to get me a Fresnel lens and make a stand for it, so I can boil water in the sun without any fuel. I only began reading about this about 6 months ago, and it fascinates me. Do-it-yourselfers are getting these out of broken big LED/LCD HD TVs and making videos of distilling water with them.