Sunday, February 28, 2010

What do You Need for Long Power Outages?

Have you ever read those emergency supply lists that the utility company sends out each fall with one of your bills and think that it won't apply to you? We have, and it turns out that we need to make one of our own lists for supplies that apply to us. For example,
  1. Lamp oil which always seems to clog the shelves at Micheals was sold out yesterday, we had enough for one more night. 
  2. Plastic cat litter containers- I know not green to have those big containers, but they came in handy for water from our neighbor for toilets.
  3. Paper Plates - we only ate two meals in, but still had to deal with the dishes. Thankfully we had melting snow on the roof, so my husband rinsed them that way.
  4. Drinking water- was down to three bottles. We had been trying to keep that purchase down to a minimum.
50 hours without power was not the end of the world, we had no structural damage, everyone was okay and the library was a fun place to hang out at for 3 hours while my son did homework. Luckily, it was at the end of the week, so there wasn't a lot of food in the refrigerator and I did not open the freezer, food lost is minimal. We had fun playing UNO, Racko, and cribbage. My feelings aren't too hurt that they wouldn't play Scrabble.

What supplies would you need that aren't on the list from the Utility company if you were without power for long than a day?
And for showers- Luckily, my husband's company has showers in their restrooms, very nice ones and my neighbor had a generator which meant my teenager got his shower in yesterday. No shower in the morgue needed!

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:52 AM

    I'm glad you survived the power outage. I read about your awful storm over there. When my husband I first moved to Washington state we had a bad windstorm that knocked the power out for a night and a day. It was then that we realized we were naive for not buying a house with a woodburning stove like everyone else up here has. And everything we have is on electricity even our well pump so it was bad! We're better prepared now but the irony is the power company has improved the lines and service out where we live so we haven't had a bad power outage like that since. *knock on wood*

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  2. Love Scrabble!!!!!! Glad things worked out for you. Looks like you did not ge to watch the Olympics on television tho.

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  3. I love how your husband washed dishes with the melting snow from the roof! How resourceful! You guys are my heroes!

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Any thoughts or musings of your own to add?